Tropic Moon (3 page)

What was going on? Nothing, it seemed. It had been a mistake for Timar to drink so much. Suddenly all his little worries rose to the surface, all the bad impressions he'd formed about the last few days.

He wanted to say something to Adèle, no matter what, if only to make contact. He glanced around. He followed her with his eyes. He couldn't get her to look at him. Then she came by on her way to another table. She walked right past him, and he pricked up his courage, snagging her dress in his fingers.

A moment of stopped time. A look. A single sentence: “What are you waiting there for when you should be asking your boss's wife for a dance?”

He followed the inclination of her chin to a fat housewife in a pink dress sitting beside the
SACOVA
manager. Why had Adèle said that? And with such an edge? Was she jealous? He was afraid to hope for so much. In any case, he hadn't even looked at another woman.

She was talking to customers and smiling her usual smile. She returned to her cash register. She walked toward the back of the café, where the door opened out onto the courtyard. No one noticed except Timar, who unconsciously drained another glass.

“I'm such a fool! To think I was the only one!”

He would have given a lot, just then, to hold her in his arms, hot and sweaty, with her almost liquid flesh, her waist that, for an instant, had seemed so flexible it beggared belief.

How many minutes went by? Five? Ten? Adèle's husband, with his tragic look, cranked up the gramophone one more time. Timar noticed a bottle of mineral water beside him.

Adèle didn't come back. Eugène—perhaps aware of her absence —was looking around for someone.

Timar rose, then paused. He was astonished to feel so light-headed. Crossing the room lengthwise, he reached the little door, the courtyard, then another door leading outside. Someone ran into him with a crash. It was Adèle.

He stammered, “At last—”

“Get out of the way, you idiot!”

Total darkness; a few strains of music: the black dress disappeared. He was left standing there, lost, frustrated, and miserable.

The clock read three. Manuelo had long since finished dancing and was counting his money now. Dressed as a man again, he was drinking crème de menthe at one of the tables and talking about his successes in Casablanca, Dakar, and the Belgian Congo.

At the bar Adèle was refilling glasses, her forehead furrowed in concentration.

The prosecutor was sitting at the bar between the two Englishmen. He was drunk and sarcastic.

A lot of people had left. At two of the tables, loggers were drinking beer and eating sandwiches.

“Enough of that music!” one of them shouted. “Turn it off, Eugène, and come have a drink.”

Adèle's husband stood up, his lips strangely twisted. He looked at the mess in the café—the party streamers strewn on the floor, the empty glasses, the stained tablecloths—and his eyes shone feverishly. As he walked toward the door, he seemed dizzy. He kept going, muttering, “I'll be right back.”

Adèle was counting banknotes. She bundled them up and secured them with rubber bands.

Exhausted, drained, and distraught, Timar finished his bottle without thinking. Later no one could say for sure how long Adèle's husband had been gone.

When he did come back, he seemed bigger, bulkier. But he was so feeble that it was funny.

He stood in the doorway and called out, “Adèle!”

His wife looked at him, and kept counting money.

“Is the doctor gone? Call him back, quickly!”

A long silence. His voice again. “Where's Thomas? I don't see him.”

Timar looked around, like the others. There were only the two young boys who'd been hired for the party.

“You don't look so great,” ventured one of the loggers.

Adèle's husband gave him a look that could kill.

“Shut up!” he said slowly. “Got it? Bring the doctor, if he's not too drunk. I'm screwed anyway. Snail fever.”

Timar didn't understand, but the customers plainly did. Hurriedly they rose to their feet.

“Eugène, you—”

Eugène's voice was weary.

“All of you, get out. It's time to close the place.”

And he disappeared down the hall. A door slammed. There was a noise like someone kicking over a chair.

Looking pale, Adèle lifted her head. She was listening to a faint sound coming nearer and beginning to grow clear. A group of four or five blacks showed up at the door.

Timar didn't understand what they were saying. It was just a few words, squeezed out syllable by syllable from their mouths.

But he heard the one-eyed logger translating: “They just found Thomas's body. He's been shot and killed—two hundred yards from here.”

Upstairs there was the sound of someone pounding on the floor with a cane. Eugène was impatient. Finally, he climbed out of bed and opened his door to shout, “Adèle! Are you just going to let me die up here, for God's sake?”

T
HE MOSQUITO
net had fallen down, and Timar woke up with it knotted around him. The room was full of sunlight. It was always sunny here, but the sunlight was joyless.

Sitting on his bed, he listened to the household noises. During the night, half asleep, he'd heard comings and goings, whisperings, the sound of water splashing into a china pitcher.

When the doctor appeared, Adèle had told Timar to go upstairs and shooed away the others.

“If you need me …” he'd stammered foolishly.

“Okay! I hear you! Now go to bed!”

Was Adèle's husband dead, as he'd said he was sure to be? Someone was sweeping the café in any case. Opening his door a crack, Timar heard Adèle say, “There isn't any Gruyère left? And there's none at the store? So open up a can of green beans! Wait! For dessert, bananas and apricot—the right-hand row. Do you understand, you fool?”

She hadn't raised her voice. She wasn't in a bad mood. She always spoke to the blacks like that.

A few minutes later, unshaven, Timar went downstairs. He found Adèle at the cash register, sorting receipts. Around her everything was clean and in its usual order. Adèle was neatly dressed. Her black dress wasn't wrinkled. Her hair was combed.

“What time is it?” he asked, taken aback.

“Just past nine.”

And her husband's attack had started at four in the morning! The café had been a mess then. Adèle hadn't slept, and yet here she was asking about cheese and fruit, with the menu for lunch all prepared!

But she was paler than she normally was, and there were narrow rings under her eyes that changed her appearance. Under her dress, though, you could still make out her breasts. Timar blushed without knowing why.

“Is your husband feeling better?”

She looked at him in surprise, and seemed to recall that he'd only been in the colony for four days.

“He won't last out the day.”

“Where is he?”

She glanced at the ceiling. He was afraid to ask if the sick man was up there all alone, but she guessed his thoughts.

“He's starting to rave. He's no longer aware of anything. By the way, there's a note for you.”

She looked around on the counter and handed it to him: a small official note requesting the said Joseph Timar to present himself at the police station at his earliest convenience.

A black woman came in carrying a basket of eggs. Adèle shook her head no.

“You'd better go now, before it gets too hot.”

“What do you think they—”

“You'll find out soon enough.”

She wasn't worried. Like her, the café seemed no different from any other morning.

“Turn right after the pier; it's just before you get to United Shipping. Wait—your sun helmet!”

Maybe he was imagining things. Yet he could have sworn that the blacks were acting strangely that morning. At the market there was the usual chatter and rainbow array of loincloths. But suddenly someone in the crowd would fix him with a stare. Four or five of the natives would fall silent and turn to look.

Timar quickened his pace. He was beginning to sweat. He made a wrong turn and found himself in front of the governor's house. He retraced his steps until at last, at the end of a badly marked street, he saw a shack with a sign in front of it:
POLICE STATION
.

It was childishly written in white paint, and the “s” in “station” was reversed. Barefoot blacks in police uniforms were sitting on the steps of the veranda. A typewriter was clacking in the shady interior.

“The chief of police, please.”

“Your summons …”

Out on the veranda, Timar looked for the note while he stood waiting. Then he was called into an office where the venetian blinds were closed.

“Have a seat. You're Joseph Timar?”

In the dimness, he finally made out a red-faced man with bulging eyes.

“When did you come to Libreville? Have a seat!”

“I came on the last boat, Wednesday.”

“You aren't, by chance, related to Counselor General Timar?”

“He's my uncle.”

All of a sudden, the police chief rose. He pushed back his chair, reached out a soft hand, and, in an entirely different tone, repeated, “Have a seat. He still lives in Cognac? I was an inspector there for five years.”

Timar was relieved. In this dark and cluttered room, his initial impulse had been to feel outrage or dismay. There were some five hundred whites in Libreville—people who'd committed themselves to hard, sometimes dangerous lives, all for what in France was described, with particular emphasis, as “the exploitation of the colonies.”

But as for him, no sooner was he off the boat than he'd been summoned by the chief of police and treated like a tramp!

“Your uncle's a good man. He could be a senator anytime he wants. But what did you come here for?”

It was the police chief's turn to be astonished, so astonished that Timar was worried.

“I signed a contract with
SACOVA
.”

“The director's leaving?”

“Oh no. At least in theory, I'm meant to have the river posting, but—”

Now, instead of astonishment, it was stupefaction.

“Does your uncle know?”

“He was the one who got me the posting. One of his friends is the administrator of—”

Timar was still in his chair. The police chief walked around him and examined him with interest. When he crossed through a ray of sunlight, you could see that his upper lip was cleft. His face and profile were more rugged than they'd seemed at first.

“What a strange idea! Well, we'll talk about it again later. Did you know the Renauds before you arrived?”

“The Renauds?”

“The owners of the Central … speaking of which, has he died yet?”

“It seems he won't last out the afternoon.”

“Good heavens! And …”

Suddenly Timar realized what was bothering him about the police chief's manner, in spite of his cordiality. As he paced back and forth in the office, he kept looking at Timar the same way Adèle did.

Surprised, intrigued, even a little tenderly.

“Would you care for a whiskey?”

Without waiting for an answer, he ordered it from one of the boys out on the veranda.

“And, of course, you have no more idea what happened last night than any of the others.”

Timar blushed, and the police chief noticed. Timar blushed even more deeply. His interlocutor took the bottle of liquor from the black and filled two glasses, panting the whole time, as if overwhelmed by the heat.

“You're not unaware that someone killed a black no more than two hundred yards from the hotel. I've informed the governor. It's a nasty business, a very nasty business.”

Someone was still tapping away in the room next door. The door was open, and Timar noted that the typist was black.

“Cheers. You can't understand—but over the next few days you'll begin to. I'll have to have you in for questioning, like the others. Everyone will tell me the same thing, which is that they know nothing about it. A cigarette? No? You'll have to come over for lunch soon, and I'll introduce you to my wife. She's from Calvados, but she knew your uncle, too, in Cognac.”

Timar relaxed. Now he liked the dimness that he'd found so disturbing at first. The whiskey made him feel better yet. And the police chief was no longer staring: he'd gotten a good enough look. Timar ventured a question.

“The Renauds you mentioned before—who are they?”

“Fifteen years ago, Eugène Renaud was sent into administrative exile from France. For white slavery, mainly, but probably there were a few other reasons, too. There are others like him in Libreville.”

“And his wife?”

“Well, she's his wife! What else can I say? She was already with him back then. For the most part they worked around the Terns. Bottoms up!”

Timar drained his glass three times, maybe four. The police chief drank just as much. Soon he was chatty. If a phone call from the prosecutor about an urgent matter hadn't come, the conversation would have gone on a lot longer.

Timar left when the sun was at its height. It was so oppressive that after a hundred yards he felt scared. The nape of his neck was burning. The whiskey wasn't sitting too well with him, and he kept thinking about Eugène Renaud's snail fever and the other stories he'd just heard.

Most of all he was thinking about Adèle: when he was just seven years old she was already helping Renaud spirit girls off to South America. She'd followed Renaud to Gabon when there'd been nothing along the coast but wooden shacks. They'd gone into the jungle—the only whites for days and days in any direction by skiff. They'd started logging and sending the timber downriver.

Timar turned it all into naïve images—illustrations out of Jules Verne mixed up with bits and pieces of reality. He followed the long red dirt path by the shore; he could see the palm trees outlined against the sky and the lead gray of the sea. There were no waves and hardly a ripple—just one, like the curve of a lip, extending the length of the beach. Colorful loincloths and half-naked men surrounded the fishermen's skiffs that had just come in.