Tropic Moon (2 page)

Anyway, properly speaking, it wasn't anxiety. He couldn't have pointed to the precise moment when he'd been gripped by this dread, this feeling of unease born of some imperceptible disequilibrium.

Not when he'd left Europe, in any case. On the contrary, Joseph Timar had set out in excellent spirits, flush with enthusiasm.

Was it when he'd gone ashore in Libreville, at his first contact with Gabon? The ship had anchored at the mouth of the harbor, so far offshore that all there was to see of the land was a white streak—the sand—with a streak of dark vegetation above it. Great gray swells lifted the launch and drove it crashing against the ship's lifeboat. Timar was alone at the bottom of the ship's ladder, the water beneath his feet, staring at the dinghy, which rose toward him only to be washed away again a second later.

A naked arm, a black arm, had seized him. Then he'd set off with the black, bounding over the wave crests. Some fifteen minutes later—perhaps more—they reached a jetty of jumbled concrete blocks. The ship was already sounding its whistle.

There wasn't even a black waiting there. No one. Just Timar in the middle of all his baggage.

That wasn't when he'd started to worry, though. He'd flagged down a passing truck that brought him to the Central, Libreville's only hotel.

What a sight! This was the real Africa! In the café with the African masks on the wall, Timar cranked up the old gramophone. He felt like a real colonial.

As for the great event, that had been more funny than dramatic. Talk about colonial! But Timar had been taken with everything that was colonial.

Thanks to an uncle, he'd landed a job with
SACOVA
. In France the head of the company had told him that he'd be living in the middle of the jungle, somewhere not far from Libreville, logging timber and selling cheap goods to the natives.

No sooner had Timar arrived than he hurried off to the run-down factory building with
SACOVA
on it. With his right hand extended, he approached someone who was either depressed or disgusted, and who looked at Timar's hand without taking it.

“You're the director? Pleased to meet you—I'm your new employee.”

“Employed by what? Who employed you? For what? What are you doing here? I don't need anybody.”

Timar hadn't flinched. It was the director who was astonished. Behind his glasses his round eyes grew enormous, and he became almost polite. There was something confidential in his manner of speaking.

The same old story once again! The head office in France meddling in the colony's business! As to the post Timar had been promised? That was all the way upriver, ten days' journey by flatboat. But for one thing, the flatboat's hull was staved in and wouldn't be ready for at least a month. For another, the post was occupied by a crazy old man who'd promised to shoot the first replacement sent his way.

“Work it out for yourself. It's none of my business.”

There'd been four days of it, all four days that Joseph Timar had been in Africa. He knew Libreville better than La Rochelle, where he'd been born: a long esplanade covered in red dust and bordered by palms; the open-air native market; small factory buildings every hundred yards; farther back in the vegetation, a few large villas.

He'd seen the flatboat with the broken hull. Nobody was working on it. Nobody'd been told what to do. Timar, the newcomer and something of a fifth wheel, didn't dare issue any orders himself.

He was twenty-three years old with the manners of a well-brought-up young man. Even the boys who waited tables laughed.

No reason to be anxious? Yes, there was, and he knew what it was. And if he kept going over all these reasons that didn't apply, it was only to put off the moment when he'd get to the one that did.

The reason was there, surrounding him, in the hotel. It was the hotel itself. It was …

He'd been very taken by the sight of the hotel, a yellow edifice set some fifty yards back from the esplanade and its palm trees and surrounded by a dense growth of curious-looking plants.

The main room was both a café and a restaurant. It had bright pastel walls that reminded him of Provence and a bar of polished mahogany. That and the high stools and the copper countertop added a touch of luxury.

All the bachelors in Libreville took their meals there. Each one had his own table and napkin ring.

Upstairs, the rooms were always available. Vacant, bare rooms, also in pastel, with beds draped in mosquito netting, and, here and there, an old pitcher, a cracked basin, an empty steamer trunk.

Everywhere, upstairs and down, the drawn venetian blinds sliced up the sun. The whole house was filled with bands of shadow and light.

Timar's luggage was the luggage of a young man from a good family. It looked strange on the floor of the room. He wasn't used to washing in a small basin. Above all, he wasn't used to finding a bush to take care of his other needs.

He wasn't used to the teeming creatures: the unfamiliar flies, the flying scorpions, the hairy spiders.

And that first attack of gnawing unease pursued him tenaciously, like a cloud of insects. At night, with his candle out, he could see the pale mosquito netting around him like a cage in the dark. Above, he sensed an immense void broken by rustlings, half-audible noises, fragile creatures—was it a scorpion, a mosquito, a spider?—that sometimes settled on the transparent gauze.

And in the middle of that soft cage, he tried to keep track of the sounds, the quiverings in the air, to take note of the sudden silences.

Abruptly he lifted himself up on his elbows. It was morning. The rays of sunlight were already there. The door had just opened. Smiling and sedate, the woman who ran the hotel was looking at him.

Timar was naked. He realized it only then. His sweaty shoulders and chest emerged from the rumpled sheets. Why was he naked? He struggled to remember.

He'd been very hot, sweating heavily. He'd searched in vain for matches. Creatures seemed to be crawling on his skin.

That must have been it—no doubt sometime in the middle of the night—the moment when he'd taken off his pajamas. Now she could see his white skin, his exposed rib cage. She seemed extraordinarily self-possessed as she shut the door behind her. “Sleep well?” she asked.

Timar's pants lay on the floor. She lifted them, shook out the dust, and put them on a chair.

Timar was afraid to get up. His bed stank of sweat. There was dirty water in the basin; the comb was missing several teeth.

Still, he didn't want her to leave—this woman in a black nightgown who was smiling at him very gently and a little ironically, too.

“I came to ask you what you like to drink in the morning. Coffee? Tea? Cocoa? Did your mother used to wake you up back in Europe?”

She'd pulled back the mosquito netting and was making fun of him. She was teasing him, smiling so broadly that he could see her teeth. Maybe she really did want to take a bite out of him.

Because he was different from the colonials, lying there in bed with his look of well-groomed adolescence.

She wasn't being forward. She wasn't being maternal, either. And yet there was something of both there—and, more than anything, a mute sensuality filling the ample flesh of this woman of thirty-some years.

Was she naked under the black silk dress? In spite of his embarrassment, Timar asked himself the question.

At the same time he felt a stab of desire that was reinforced by things that had nothing to do with it, like the bands of light and shadow, the animal clamminess of the sheets, even the restless night he'd endured, with its unknown terrors, its gropings in the dark.

“Look! You've been bitten.”

Sitting on the edge of the bed, she placed a finger on his naked breast, touching a little red smudge. She looked Timar in the eyes.

That was what happened. The rest was too quick and too clumsy, marked by awkwardness and mess. She had seemed as surprised as he was, and he'd been completely astonished. Arranging her hair in front of the mirror, she said, “Thomas will bring you your coffee.”

Thomas was the boy. For Timar, he was just a black. He was still too new to Africa to tell one black from another.

An hour later, when he went downstairs, she was managing the hotel from behind the bar, crocheting something out of vulgar rose-colored silk. Every trace of their violent, frenzied intimacy had disappeared. She was calm and serene. As always, she was smiling.

“When would you like to have lunch?”

He didn't even know her name! He didn't know what to do with himself. He could barely remember it, above all the feeling of soft skin, of flesh that was not too firm but that he'd savored. A little black woman brought fish to her, and without a word she picked out the best ones. She threw a few coins in the basket.

Her husband's head emerged from the cellar, followed by his powerful body. And yet he seemed tired. He was a giant, but his gestures were feeble, his mouth was twisted with disgust, his eyes were angry.

“You're still here?”

And like an idiot Timar blushed.

This had been going on for three days now. Only she no longer came to his room in the morning. From his bed, he could hear her coming and going in the big room, issuing orders to Thomas, buying provisions from the blacks at the door.

From dawn until dusk she wore the same silk dress. He knew she was naked underneath. It disturbed him so much that he often had to look away.

There was nothing for him to go out and do. He stayed there all day long, almost, drinking whatever there was to drink, reading three-week-old newspapers, playing billiards by himself.

She crocheted and served the people who stopped in for a moment at the bar. Her husband busied himself with the beer and the bottles and with straightening up the tables, sometimes sending Timar to sit in another corner. He looked at him like something that was in the way.

There was a feeling of exasperation and irritability, a sense of darkness in spite of the sun, and the feeling was most intense when it was hottest, when just lifting an arm made you break out in a sweat.

At noon and in the evening, the regulars came to eat dinner and play billiards. Timar didn't know them. They looked at him curiously, without showing goodwill or dislike. He was afraid to say a single word to them.

At last it was time for the party, a roaring party. In less than an hour, everyone was drunk—even Timar, who sat sipping his champagne all alone.

A dancer called Manuelo provided the entertainment. He must have arrived at the hotel while Timar was out or asleep. Timar ran into him around eleven in the morning—smiling, friendly, seemingly right at home, Manuelo pasted up posters in the bar proclaiming himself to be the greatest Spanish dancer in the world.

He was a small man, lithe and charming. He already got along very well with the woman, not the way men get along with women but the way women do with one another.

By noon, the tables had been rearranged to make room for Manuelo's dances. The room was garlanded with colored paper; the gramophone had been tested.

Up in his room the Spaniard had been practicing his act for hours, stomping loudly on the shaking floor.

Perhaps Timar was annoyed because the usual rhythm of his day had been upset. In spite of the sun, he went out. Under his sun helmet he could feel his head heating up. The black women looked at him and laughed.

The regulars had eaten earlier than usual because of the party. Then outsiders had started to arrive, white men Timar had never seen before, white men and white women—the women in evening gowns—along with two Englishmen in dinner jackets.

Bottles of champagne invaded the tables. Outside in the dark, behind the doors and windows, hundreds of silent blacks suddenly appeared.

Manuelo danced, a dance so feminine that it made him appear all the more epicene. The woman was behind the counter of the bar. Timar knew her name now—Adèle. Everyone called her that and most of them used the familiar “tu.” He was probably the only one who addressed her as “madame.” Wearing her black silk dress, as always, and naked under it, she'd come up to him.

“Champagne? Will Pieper be good enough for you? I only have a few bottles of Mumm's left and the Englishmen won't have anything else.”

That had made him happy; he'd even been touched. So why did he look so down only a few minutes later? Manuelo had danced a few numbers. Adèle's husband—he was also “tu,” or Eugène, to everyone—went and sat down by the gramophone in a corner. He looked surlier than ever. From there he could see and hear everything, calling out to the boys, “Don't you see, idiot, they want drinks over there?”

Then, with unaccustomed care, he lifted the needle on the record. Timar had also been straining to hear, picking up bits and pieces of conversation, trying to make sense of them. But it was nearly impossible. The people at the next table were talking to a large young man, hardly a distinguished figure, who looked like a college student and was on his tenth whiskey. They kept calling him “Mr. Prosecutor.” Some loggers were saying: “As long as you make sure not to leave any evidence, you're in the clear. And it's easy—just spread a wet handkerchief on his back. After that, you can let him have it. The whip doesn't leave a trace.”

They meant the back of a black man, of course!

Had Timar already drained an entire bottle? He'd been given another and his glass was full again. He could see partway into the kitchen. Just then Adèle hit Thomas in the face with her fist. What? The black didn't flinch; he took the blow without moving, his eyes staring straight ahead.

They played the same tunes ten times over. A few couples danced. Most people had taken their jackets off.

Outside the silent throng of blacks went on watching the whites at play.

Adèle's husband sat by the gramophone. His features were drawn. His stare was so hard that his face looked like a tragic mask.