Journey to the End of the Night (22 page)

I'll long remember those ten days going up the river ... Huddled in the bottom of the canoe, watching out for muddy whirlpools, picking furtive passages between enormous drifting branches, nimbly avoided. A labor for convicts on the lam.

After every sundown we'd camp on a rocky promontory. Finally one morning we left that filthy native canoe and slipped into the forest by a hidden path that twined through the moist green gloom, lit only here and there by a ray of sunlight falling from the roof of that vast cathedral of leaves. Monstrous felled trees forced us to make frequent detours. Whole Metro trains could have maneuvered with ease in the hollows left by their roots. Suddenly the full light was on us again, we had come to a clearing and had to climb, an additional effort. The rise we had come to overlooked the endless forest, rolling over red, yellow, and green peaks, modeling and smoothing hill and dale, as monstrously spacious as the sea and the sky. I was given to understand by signs that the man whose habitation we were looking for lived just a little further on ... in another valley. And there he was waiting for us.

He had built a sort of hut between two big boulders, sheltered, as he informed me, from the eastern tornadoes, which were the worst, the most furious. That, I was willing to admit, was an advantage, but the hut itself definitely belonged to the lowest, most ramshackle category, an almost theoretical edifice, coming apart at every seam. I had foreseen something of the sort, but this surpassed all my expectations.

The man must have thought I looked downcast, because he addressed me rather brusquely, to shake me out of my thoughts. "Come off it, you'll be better off here than in the trenches!

Here at least you can worry along. The food is rotten, I can't deny it, and there's nothing to drink but pure mud, but you can sleep as much as you like ... There's no big guns here and no bullets! All in all, it's a bargain!" He talked something like the Director General, but he had pale eyes like Alcide's.

He must have been close to thirty, with a beard ... I hadn't taken a good look at him on arriving, because on arriving I'd been thrown off by the dilapidation of the setup he was supposed to bequeath me and which might possibly be my home for years ... But observing him later on, I found a distinctly adventurous face with sharply accentuated angles, one of those rebellious faces that plunge into life head-on instead of rolling with the waves, with a big round nose, and cheeks like coal barges, plashing against destiny with a soft babbling sound. That was an unhappy man.

"It's true," I said. "There's nothing worse than war." I thought we'd said enough for the moment. I had no desire to say any more. It was he who went on:

"Especially now that they make them so long. Well anyway, friend, you'll see that it's no joke here! There's nothing to do ... It's a sort of vacation ... Except who'd want to spend a vacation in a place like this? Well, maybe it's a matter of temperament. I wouldn't know ..."

"How about the water?" I asked. The water I saw in the cup I had poured myself had me worried, it was yellowish. I drank some, it was sickening and as warm as in Topo. A threeday sediment of mud.

"Is this the water?" The water torture was starting all over again.

"Yes, that's all there is, except rain water ... But when it starts raining, the shack won't last long. You see the condition it's in?"-I saw.

"The food," he went on, "is all canned. That's what I've been eating for a whole year ... It hasn't killed me. Convenient in a way, but it doesn't stick to the ribs ... The natives eat putrid manioc, that's their business, they like it ... For the last three months it's been running through me ... Diarrhea ... Maybe it's fever too, I've got both ... Around five o'clock I'm more lucid ... That's how I know I've got fever, because it's hard to feel hotter than you do already in this climate! ... Actually, it's probably the chills that tell you you've got a fever ... And not being quite so bored, maybe that's another sign ... but that's a matter of temperament too ... maybe a few drinks would cheer us up ... but I don't go for drink ... it doesn't agree with me ..."

He seemed to think very highly of what he called "temperament." Then while he was at it, he gave me a little more of his delightful information: "By day it's the heat, at night it's the noise that's hard to bear ... It's unbelievable . , , The animals go chasing round and round, to fuck or to kill each other, how do I know? ... Either way, you never heard such a hullabaloo! ... The loudest are the hyenas ... They come up close to the shack ... You'll hear them! ... You won't have any doubts ... It's nothing like the quinine music , . , Sometimes you can mistake birds or big flies for quinine ... It's conceivable ... But hyenas, the enormous way they laugh ... They're smelling your flesh ... That's what makes them laugh ... They're in a hurry to see you pass on! ... You can even see their eyes shining, so I'm told ... They feed on dead bodies ... I've never looked into their eyes ... I'm sorry in a way ..."

"Sounds delightful!" I said.

But he hadn't finished with the night life.

"Then there's the village," he went on ... "There aren't a hundred niggers in it, but they make enough rumpus for ten thousand. You'll tell me what you think of it! And man! If it's tomtoms you're after, you've come to the right place! ... If they're not beating them because the moon is out, they're beating them because the moon has gone by ... There's always some reason! ... The sons-of-bitches seem to be in cahoots with the animals to drive us crazy!

So help me, I'd shoot the whole lot of them if I weren't so tired ... As it is, I put cotton in my ears ... That's even better ... As long as I had vaseline in my medicine chest, I greased the cotton with it, now I use banana oil ... Banana oil does the trick ... That way they can gargle with thunderstorms if it makes them happy! It's no skin off my ass with my ears full of greased cotton! I don't hear a damned thing! These niggers are sick, they're perverts!

You'll see! ... All day long they squat on the ground, you wouldn't think them capable of moving as far as the nearest tree to piss against, but the minute it's dark, surprise! Vice!

Nerves! Hysteria! Chunks of the night gone hysterical! That's niggers for you, take it from me! Degenerate scum! ..."

"Do they often come and buy from you?"

"Buy? You're out of your mind! The trick is to rob them before they rob you! That's business! At night of course they do as they please ... with greased cotton in both ears! ... they'd be fools to stand on ceremony! ... Besides, as you see, my shack has no door ... so naturally they help themselves ... for them it's the good life ..."

"But what about your inventory?" I asked, utterly dismayed at what he had told me. "The Director General told me ... he made himself very clear ... to draw up a meticulous inventory the moment I got here ..."

"I have the honor," he replied with perfect calm, "of telling you that the Director can kiss my ass ..."

"But won't you have to see him on your way through Fort-Gono?"

"I will never see either Fort-Gono or the Director again ... It's a big forest, my young friend ..."

"But where will you go?"

"If anyone asks you, tell them you don't know. But since you seem eager to learn, let me give you some very good advice before it's too late! Don't worry about the company any more than the Company worries about you! If you can run as fast as the Company screws its employees, I can tell you right now that you're due to win the Grand Prix! ... So be thankful that I'm leaving you a little cash and ask no more! ... As for the stock, if it's true that the Director told you to take charge of it ... tell him there isn't any left, and that's that! ... If he won't believe you, who cares? ... They take us all for thieves anyway! So it won't make any difference to public opinion if for once we get a little something out of it ... And besides, don't worry, the Director knows more about financial monkey-shines than anybody, so why contradict him? That's my opinion! What's yours? Everybody knows that for a man to come here he has to be prepared to kill his father and mother! Am I right?" I wasn't so sure all he'd been telling me was true, but either way this predecessor of mine struck me as an out-and-out bandit.

I wasn't at all easy in my mind. "Another mess I've fallen into!" I said to myself with increasing conviction. I stopped talking with that thug. In one corner, stowed every which way, I found the merchandise he was leaving me, a few scraps of cotton goods ... But loincloths and shoes by the dozen, some boxes of pepper, several lamps, a douche can, a staggering quantity of canned "Cassoulet ŕ la Bordelaise," and lastly a picture post card of the Place Clichy.

"Next to the ridgepole you'll find the rubber and ivory I've bought from the niggers ... I worked hard at first ... And oh yes, here are three hundred francs ... That's what's coming to you ..."

Coming to me for what? I had no idea, but I didn't bother to ask him.

"You may still be able to manage a bit of barter," he said. "Because, you know, you'll have no use for money out here, only when you want to clear out ..." He started laughing. Not wanting to cross him at the moment, I did likewise, I chimed in as if everything were hunky-dory.

In spite of the extreme destitution in which he'd been living for many months, he had surrounded himself with an elaborate domestic staff, consisting mostly of young boys, who fell all over themselves in their eagerness to bring him the household's one and only spoon or the matchless cup, or to extract with consummate skill the classical and inevitable burrowing chiggers from the soles of his feet. In return, he would often oblige them with a kindly hand between their thighs. The only work I ever saw him do was scratching himself, but that, like the shopkeeper at Fort-Gono, he did with the marvelous agility that can be observed only in the colonies.

The chairs and tables he bequeathed me showed me what ingenuity can do with crushed soapboxes. That sinister individual also taught me how it is possible, for want of anything better to do, to propel those ungainly, caparisoned caterpillars which, quivering and foaming at the mouth, kept assailing our forest cabin, far into the distance with a short swift kick. God help you if you are clumsy enough to crush one. You'll be punished with an entire week of intense stench, which rises slowly from that unforgettable mash. He had read somewhere that those horrible monsters were the oldest animals in the world, dating, so he claimed, back to the second geological period! "When we've come as far as they have, my boy, won't we stink too?" His exact words.

The sunsets in that African hell proved to be fabulous. They never missed. As tragic every time as a monumental murder of the sun! But the marvel was too great for one man alone. For a whole hour the sky paraded in great delirious spurts of scarlet from end to end; after that the green of the trees exploded and rose up in quivering trails to meet the first stars. Then the whole horizon turned gray again and then red, but this time a tired red that didn't last long. That was the end. All the colors fell back down on the forest in tatters, like streamers after the hundredth performance. It happened every day at exactly six o'clock. Then the night set in with all its monsters and its thousands and thousands of croaking toads.

The forest is only waiting for their signal to start trembling, hissing, and roaring from its depths. An enormous, love-maddened, unlighted railway station, full to bursting. Whole trees bristling with living noisemakers, mutilated erections, horror. After a while we couldn't hear each other talk in the hut. I had to hoot across the table like a hoot owl for my companion to understand me. I was getting my money's worth. And remember, I didn't like the country.

"What's your name?" I asked him. "Did you say Robinson?" He had just been telling me that the natives in those parts suffered horribly from every conceivable disease and that the poor bastards were in no condition to engage in any kind of trade. While we were talking about the natives, so many flies and insects, so large and in such great numbers, dashed against the lamp in such dense squalls that we finally had to put it out.

Before dousing the lamp, I caught a glimpse of Robinson's face, veiled by a curtain of insects. That may be why his features impressed themselves more sharply on my memory, whereas before that they hadn't reminded me of anything in particular. He went on talking to me in the darkness, while I retraced the steps of my past with the sound of his voice as a charm with which to open the doors of the years and months and finally of my days, wondering where I could have run into this man. But I found nothing. No answer. You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It's frightening how many people and things there are in a man's past that have stopped moving. The living people we've lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all.

As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead. I was trying to identify this Robinson when gales of hideously exaggerated laughter, not far away in the night, made me jump.

Then they fell silent. It must have been the hyenas he'd told me about. And then there was nothing but the villagers and their tomtoms, those crazy drums made of hollow wood, termites of the wind.

The name Robinson gnawed at me more and more insistently. In the darkness we talked about Europe and the meals you can order if you've got the money, not to mention the drinks! so deliciously cool! Not a word about the next day, when I was to be left alone, for years perhaps, with all those cans of cassoulet ... Would war have been better? No, worse!

Definitely worse! ... He thought so too ... He'd been in the war himself ... And nevertheless he was getting out of here ... He was fed up with the forest, and that was that ... I tried to bring him back to the war ... But he wouldn't oblige ... Finally, as we were getting ready for bed, each in his corner of that shambles of leaves and partitions, he came right out with it: he preferred the risk of being haled into court for theft to living on cassoulet as he'd been doing for almost a year. Then I saw the lie of the land.