Anatomy of Restlessness (6 page)

She was a Peul. She had a Peul woman's wonderful high cheekbones and chiselled lips, and long straight gleaming legs and a short body flexible as a hinge. She wore a tight pink dress in one piece. She put her elbows on the table and gazed in Jeb's direction. He felt her huge black eyes undressing him.

The men sang a song with a refrain ending ‘Annie et son whisky!' and Annie began a discussion on whether Adam forced the apple on Eve or Eve prostituted herself for the apple.

‘Why don't you drink?' the legionnaire called across. ‘What are you, some kind of Englishman?'

‘I'm an American.'

‘Ha! Ha! L‘Équipe CIA! Boom! Boom! Come and drink some whisky. Annie, give this young spy some whisky.'

‘I don't drink whisky,' Jeb said.

‘You must drink whisky,' Annie said. ‘For the bacterias. Whisky massacres bacterias. Osman.'

‘Madame.
'

‘Whisky for the young man.'

‘A very small one,' said Jeb.

‘You pour what you like. Osman does not like to pour whisky. He is a Mussulman and he hates the drink. One day I give him pastis for his throat and he is drunk. I do not think he forgives me.'

Osman fetched the bottle, holding it gingerly as a bomb. He passed it to Jeb, who poured out half an inch.

‘More,' said Annie. ‘More.'

She took the bottle and filled the glass over half. She kept her own Johnny Walker beside her on the table. She gave herself another and marked the level with a pencil.

‘I cannot live without whisky,' she said.

‘It's tea,' whispered Mamzelle Dela darkly. Jeb was troubled and excited when she looked at him.

‘This hotel is not my métier,' said Madame Annie. ‘Soon I shall retire to the bush. I shall take a pretty black boy. I shall build a hut and sell my jewels to pay for the whisky. Some people die in a convent and I shall die in the bush.'

Jeb agreed it was better than a convent.

‘I have seen many jungles,' she said, ‘and the worst jungle is a convent. Very unhealthy place. In a convent people hate each other all the time. In the jungle they hate each other sometimes but not always.'

‘Mon Dieu, que ce garçon est beau,' said Mamzelle Dela.

‘She says you are a beautiful boy.'

‘She's pretty nice herself.'

‘Et il est américain?'

‘American.'

‘Je l'adore.'

‘She says she loves you.'

‘I love her too.'

‘You never say you was American,' said Annie.

‘I thought you knew.'

‘I think you was English. Very hypocrite people, English. I was many times in England, in the war, after the war. Terrible! Once I was in English city. The name of this place is Hull. I am coming from Germany with my German lover. We go to a boarding house and the woman is so nice and polite and say how much she likes the Germans, which is not at all true because English hate Germans. She thinks we are Germans both, and she shows the room. Nice room. All flowers à la manière anglaise. Then she says with a charming, really a charming smile, “Of course you are married?” And I say, “Mais non, Madame. Certainement pas!” and this woman, which is smiling, is now smiling not, but screaming, “Out of my house. This is a nice house. You have not business here. Go to the bordel where you belong.”'

‘I never went to England,' Jeb said.

‘I tell you, my God, they are very hypocrite.'

‘I heard that.'

‘They are dirty and they think they are clean. Hull is bad, my dear, but Londres is worse than Hull. This German man and me, we go to a film. Un film cochon. I don't speak lies. Old people naked. Gens de soixante ans tous nus. Doing things you can't imagine. Then they invite us to sing a hymn to the Queen. And in Hyde Park, my God, under the trees! Feet, my God! Que des pieds!'

The men fed the juke-box and played Togolese rock. The legionnaire stumbled to his feet and dragged Mamzelle Dela by the arm and tried to dance. She put on a long-suffering look and winked at Jeb.

He winked back.

‘You have loved an Africaine?' asked Annie.

‘Never,' Jeb said in an even voice. He had never been to bed with a woman, but he did not want to show this.

‘You must go with Mamzelle Dela. She wants it.'

Jeb turned red and felt his self-confidence running away.

‘Listen,' she said protectively. ‘I speak with you as a mother. You are afraid to go with her because you have heard bad things. I tell you, African women are cleaner than white women. They are très pudique. And they are much more beautiful.'

‘You think I should?'

‘I know it.'

The legionnaire was too drunk to dance and stood with his arms round her buttocks. His head nuzzled her breasts, but he was slipping gradually to the floor.

‘Down,' he spluttered. ‘Down ... down ... down ... down ...'

‘Down where?'

‘Down into the cave.'

‘Monsieur, you know very well the price of entry is five thousand francs.'

‘Ah! Dela. Black, beautiful and cruel.'

Now he was sitting crouched and trying to get a hand up her legs. Dela clamped them tight. She winked again.

‘Black, beautiful and cruel.'

‘C'est un con,' she said definitely.

Jeb helped get the legionnaire back to his chair. There Dela pulled him and they were dancing. He loosened up and his legs flew. Then they closed and her hard belly burned through his pants, and he was pumped hard, and there were hot shivers up his back. Then they were in her room, he standing and she sitting on the bed, her quick fingers unzippering, and he praying, thinking of nothing and nobody else now, but praying it would come right. And then they were on the bed and clinching, and then she pushed him away and sat up.

‘I need a sandwich,' she said. ‘You pay my sandwich.'

‘Oh! No. God. Not now.'

‘You pay my sandwich.'

‘I pay your sandwich.'

‘You pay my beer.'

‘I pay also your beer.'

He got up and took a note from his pocket. She put on a blue boubou and stalked out into the kitchen. She was back in five minutes munching a chicken sandwich and smacking her lips. Then she tied her hair in a bandana and was ready.

But Jeb was face down on the pillow, his head spinning from the whisky. She lay beside him and her hand felt him soft and limp.

‘Pederast,' she snorted.

‘No. No.' Jeb hit the pillow miserably. ‘No. No.'

‘All Americans are pederasts.'

She rolled over and began to snore, and her snores did not keep him from sleeping.

But in the morning it was different. From that morning he would never forget the white light and blowing curtains, and never stop thanking for the taut breasts; the hard mouth freely given; the powerful arms; the nails that raised red welts on his back; the soles of her feet sandpapering his thighs; again and again, two bodies floating and then heavy along the uneven line where the brown met white; and afterwards, when they were both tired together, her amused smile and her fingers gently disentangling his hair. He left her and walked across the terrace. Madame Gerda turned her face to the wall. Madame Annie was knitting a pink jumper. She looked over her spectacles and smiled.

‘You are even walking differently,' she said.

 

The men waited for the truck in a tight rectangle of shade under the blue wall. The sun was glaring bright and sucked the colour from the dusty red street. The men were squatting. They had pulled their blue cottons above their knees. Their legs were lean and brown and the soles of their feet were rough as sandpaper.

A boy was walking up the shadow of the wall scuffing the dust with his feet. His hair was red but it was the caked dust that coloured it. He put down a kitbag and sat by me.

‘You are going to Atar?'

‘You too?'

‘I am going to France.'

He was short and stocky, perhaps twenty. His hard thighs bulged through white jeans that were now ruddy pink from the dust. He had not washed for some time. He smelled strong and acrid though the smell was not objectionable. He had been chewing cola nuts and they had dyed his gums orange. His thin curling mouth showed off his Moorish blood. The Moors ignored him. He was very black.

‘What will you do in France?'

‘Continue my profession.'

‘What's that?'

‘You have a passport?

‘No I need one not. I am a sailor. I have a sailor's paper.'

He squeezed his hand in his back pocket and with two fingers fished for a scrap of damp and crumpled paper.

The writing was in Spanish: ‘I, Don Hernando Ordoñez, certify that Patrice Diolé has worked as Seaman Third Class ...'

‘From Atar,' he said, ‘I will go to Villa Cissneros. I will take a ship to Gran Canaria. I will go to France, to Yugoslavia, to China, and continue my profession.'

‘As sanitary engineer?'

‘No, Monsieur. As adventurer. I will see all the peoples and all the countries of the world.'

The truck came, almost filled up with sacks of sorghum and rice. The Senegalese and Moors climbed aboard. We followed. The trip to Atar was a bad trip, dust storm all the way. The Moors pulled down the folds of their blue turbans, covering their faces and leaving the narrowest horizontal strip through which their eyes glittered. The Senegalese wore a variety of head gear. One man wore his underpants. His nose, not his eyes, showed through the vertical slit.

The truck stopped at a police post. A gendarme climbed up and counted fifty-nine bodies lying in among the sacks. The law prohibited more than thirty. The gendarme was a Sarakolle from the river. He was not making his people move. The Moors were in their country now and they weren't moving either. All fifty-nine went on into the dust and the night.

I had been squeezed against the sanitary engineer for twelve hours. ‘Tell me,' he said. ‘Have you seen the Indians?'

‘Yes.'

‘It's a village or what?'

‘It's a big country with too many people. You should go see it.'

‘
Tiens
. I always thought it was a village.'

From the hill we looked down over the flat country, golden white and spotted black with flat-topped thorn trees; you could see why they once called it ‘leopard country'. Below us was the mine. There were grey spoil tips and the new American crushing plant, green with purple scaffolding, and the old French mine that went bust, because the copper was low-grade ore and they couldn't ship it out economically. There were silver fuel tanks and shiny aluminium cabins and yellow cranes and bulldozers. Beyond we could see the town of mudbrick boxes, and shanties made of packing cases, and the tents of the nomads.

The Major pointed to a grey hill where he had shot gazelles.

‘Nice view,' he said. ‘Thought you'd like it up here.' He looked at his watch.

‘Sorry, I'm afraid we have to go. I'm on parade at lunch. You'll see.'

The Major was a neat, sandy-haired man, greying at the temples. He wore khaki shorts, had a red face and red knees, and smiled with a humorous grin. He had been retired from the British Army and was working as personnel manager for the mine. The company was American, but the Government did not allow Americans to staff it, because of Israel. Most of the mining engineers were French. The Major had the unenviable job of keeping Frenchmen happy in the desert and keeping American shareholders happy by keeping the costs down.

‘Let me blind you with a statistic,' he said. We were taking our trays in the canteen. ‘It costs six times less to keep an Englishman in the desert than a Frenchman, and three times less than a Yank.'

We helped ourselves to
artichaut vinaigrette
and
filet
de
boeuf
with mushrooms and a carafe of
beaujolais nouveau.
The month was December. There were Frenchmen eating at most tables. The Major and I both wore khaki shorts. The Frenchmen stared at our knees and raised their eyebrows, nodding.

‘The English like filthy food,' I said.

‘Probably something to do with the war,' said the Major.

‘Probably.'

‘I mean, Englishmen have had to make do.'

‘Not all of them,' I said.

I had been eating goat and couscous for some days.

‘It's delicious,' I said.

‘You wait,' the Major said. ‘They'll soon come over and complain.'

‘There's nothing to complain about.'

‘They'll find something. If we got the
Tour d'Argent
to fly their meals out, they'd still complain.'

‘Only tourists go to the
Tour d'Argent.'

‘You get in Vichy and they want Evian. You get Evian and they want Perrier. Can't win. I suggested a complaints book so they could air specific grievances. They weren't having it. Want to complain personally. It's supposed to be a safety valve.'

‘Rough on you,' I said.

‘Can't get used to being a safety valve for French steam.'

‘It must be hard.'

‘I should put in for a change.'

By working abroad and avoiding the taxman, the Major was hoping to set aside a small capital sum to retire on. His wife had been out here. She had sat in the cabin with gardening catalogues. Planning her garden had kept her sane, but she couldn't take the heat.