* * *
There were still a few delicate tendrils of cool air threading themselves through downtown Libreville at eight the next morning, but I, once again a passenger in a rickshaw, could feel them being sipped quickly up by the sun. Soon the lustrous blue day would be shimmering—everywhere one looked, a mirage. I could just make out the dull thunder of the breakers against the seawall several blocks behind. The streets were alive with all manner of business going on, not simply food markets but also men in rumpled white suits making deals with one another.
“Those fellows are the ivory traders,” said my go-cart companion for the morning, Ral Conrath. Father rode behind us.
Farther down the block were three roughnecks in bush jackets and straw hats identified as “rubber men,” who argued with a monocled Frenchman smoking a fat cigar.
On the whole, Mr. Conrath had behaved himself on the ride into town, though he had annoyed me with his prattle about Mrs. Fournier, the kindest of hostesses. He took great delight in identifying the Englishwoman as a Parisian prostitute, “a high-class whore,” as he called her, who had serviced the richest men in Europe.
It was not Mrs. Fournier’s profession that disturbed me but Mr. Conrath’s offhanded insults and epithets. And he had, of course, made it clear that he himself had availed himself of the charms of “fallen women” in every port in which he had ever so briefly hung his hat. I was not interested. I’d endured his nonsense as long as I was able before telling him that Mrs. Fournier’s life was her own business and that if he wished to make himself useful to me he would point out the sights and explain the things I was seeing.
“Straight ahead, there’s the French consulate,” he said, sanguine about the rebuff.
The government offices of the Congo Français were where we were headed. I could see behind the gates a sprawling wooden house amid the most splendid garden. But as we approached, I could make out from between the shoulders of the rickshaw bearers a commotion just now erupting in front of the consulate gates.
A white-suited European was being taunted—more
besieged—
by a small gang of natives. I could see that he was standing tall, but fists were darting at him and a juju stick with feathers hanging from it was thrust in his face. He ducked from his attackers while never relinquishing his dignified posture.
“Goddamn Negroes!” Conrath shouted. “That’s my man, D’Arnot!”
Suddenly I found myself alone, as Conrath had leaped from the rickshaw and run straight toward the fracas. But before he could reach “his man,” a rock came flying at D’Arnot, striking him in the forehead. He went down in a heap. Conrath chased the natives, who had scattered in every direction.
I jumped down and ran to the stricken man’s side. He was unconscious and bleeding profusely. A moment later, and to my great relief, Father was kneeling beside us.
“Always lots of blood in head wounds,” he said. “Heavily vascularized, the skull. He’ll be all right.”
By the time Ral Conrath returned, breathless and furious that he’d not gotten his hands around the neck of even one of the attackers, the bleeding had stopped, and Father was helping the victim to sit up.
“He’ll be all right?” Ral said, full of concern.
“Sir, will you tell me your name?” Father asked the bloodied fellow.
“Paul D’Arnot,” he answered with no hesitation. He was a Frenchman.
“What day of the week is it?”
“Zee day I get my head bashed in outside zee consulate.” D’Arnot’s thick accent was the perfect complement to his dry sense of humor.
“There’s your answer, Mr. Conrath,” Father said.
“Good. We can’t have a translator whose brains are scrambled. These nice folks will look after you. They’re the Porters.”
D’Arnot, his face pale with the loss of blood and pinched with pain, looked up at Father. “You are the professor?” Every time he said “th,” my English ears heard “z.”
“The very one.”
“I have come here today to meet you,” D’Arnot replied.
“This is my daughter, Jane.”
“You are both very kind.”
“Why don’t you get him in?” Conrath said. “I’m off to get the ball rolling.”
Inside the consulate gates, I thought it odd that none of the many officials and clerks who had surely seen the incident had come running to assist the poor fellow. In fact, the employees’ expressions were blank and vapid or openly hostile.
What on earth could these people be thinking?
I wondered.
“It may be bold of me to ask, Monsieur D’Arnot…” I began.
Father chimed in, “You’ll get used to that phrase in short order, I can promise you, my friend.”
I grimaced at him, then continued more seriously, “Why did those men accost you? And why did none of your countrymen come to your aid?”
D’Arnot laughed morosely. “That is a long story. And a sad one. I will tell it to you on our safari, but suffice to say that until last year, I was an official in this consulate. The men who stood by and watched me attacked were, not so long ago,
mon amis.
”
I contained my instinct to question the man further. Certainly an interrogation would be rude, but I seethed with curiosity. My immediate impression of Monsieur D’Arnot had been overwhelmingly positive. Despite the telltale signs of a man who enjoyed his drink a bit too much, I liked him very much. Yet both natives as well as every one of his coworkers seemed to despise him.
Have my powers of judgment failed me again?
We found a peculiar scene in the main office. Mr. Conrath sat upright on a bench meant for petitioners, listening and watching very patiently—too patiently—as the party ahead of him spoke with two French officials in their native tongue.
For all my education, I had never learned the language very well. Neither did my father speak French.
“What are they saying?” I asked D’Arnot.
“They are Belgian. Engineers.”
The four men were well dressed, and their linen suits in different shades of white and cream were neat and unrumpled, even in the heat that had risen in the offices, refusing to be dispelled by the electrified overhead fans.
“Belgians? What do they want here?”
“They are in the service of His Majesty…” D’Arnot spoke the last words with contempt.
“Leopold?” The name was synonymous with murder on an unprecedented scale. The entire Belgian Congo was the
private property
of this monarch who plundered it for ivory, rubber, and gold.
D’Arnot continued, requiring no eavesdropping on the conversation for the intelligence he now imparted. It seemed that the Belgians were there seeking permission to enter the interior of Gabon and had been doing so for the last two years. At its far eastern edge, Congo Français shared a border with the Congo Free State. The Belgians were drowning in resources, but they were landlocked and needed a port—a trade route to the coast—and Gabon was the only way. D’Arnot said that the French government in Paris was against such a plan, even though the payment would be monumental.
D’Arnot fell silent and I was certain I saw anger simmering behind his eyes. “I will tell you that some in this office felt as I did. That such permission given would mean death, perhaps annihilation, to native tribes who came in contact with these murdering bastards. Many of these officials are gone, like me. There are others here who have no compunction about leaving the Gabonese at the mercy of Leopold’s legions.”
I knew then without being told that D’Arnot’s post at the consulate had been forfeited over the Belgian contretemps. My heart went out to this man of principle, yet I wondered again why the natives had attacked him. I refrained from pursuing the subject, but now my curiosity gave way to another mystery.
Why was the pathologically impatient Mr. Conrath sitting like a proper schoolboy as the French and Belgian conversation dragged on and on?
He should by now be demanding attention paid him. Instead he was listening.
But did he know French?
I didn’t think so.
When finally the four engineers turned to go, Ral Conrath stood up and saluted them with his fingers-to-the-forehead greeting and stepped forward to the counter. Then he beckoned to Father to join him.
I could hear that one of the French officials spoke English. I thought I saw his face darken at the sight of Conrath, but I must have been mistaken. Papers were passed across the counter and the business of our passage down the Gabonese coast and up the Ogowe River was begun.
* * *
The netted, broad-brimmed hat that Mrs. Fournier had provided me this day was a lifesaver. I was protected from not only the direct rays of the African sun, which my hostess insisted “fried the brain,” but also the persistent and sometimes immense bugs that constantly assailed me. Different as we were, Mrs. Fournier and I got on well, chattering like old friends from the moment we’d met. Mr. Conrath had been quite right about our hostess. She had been, in her day, a celebrated courtesan. When Cecily Willbury had seen the end of her Parisian heyday approaching, and with something of a fortune tucked away, she had accepted the proposal of the first of her customers to offer marriage. None of the stuffy Englishmen would have condescended, but the French diplomat Auguste Fournier, who had recently lost his wife of many years and whose duties of state were about to take him to a post in West Africa, conceived that he needed a genial female companion to accompany him there. He adored his still-beautiful English mistress—one of the belles of Paris—who had given him so much pleasure over the years. He was old enough, nearing sixty, to ignore all rumor and scandal that would certainly assail a diplomat with a prostitute for a wife. He also knew that they would be living at the ends of the earth. No one there would care, and if they did,
c’est la vie.
So the Frenchman had married her, and for fifteen years he had overseen consulates from Sudan to the Ivory Coast to the Congo Français. In every one of those postings his little wife had proved the perfect hostess, was altogether uncomplaining of the most wretched of circumstances, and continued to pleasure him delightfully till the day he died.
Finally laid low by yellow fever and knowing his time was coming, he had requested that Cecily satisfy him one last time. That he was able in his advanced condition to come forth with a tumescent member was a source of some pride. That she so readily complied allowed him to die a contented man happily spent, and knowing how wisely he had chosen a wife.
Of this romance I had been spared no detail. In fact, I found it fascinating in the extreme, and there was no question I might ask—no matter how lewd or personal—that Cecily Fournier would not answer. I took this opportunity to extract many details of a sexual nature, subjects that my own mother would have found excruciating to discuss with her daughter. Subjects that even married ladies of Cambridge society would never whisper about in the privacy of their bedrooms. Descriptions of various coital positions; the preferences of males of different cultural backgrounds; interesting and sometimes alarming sexual techniques, some of which I was quite certain I would have no cause to further investigate in my life.
But much of this venereal education more than piqued my interest. It excited me physically. Hearing Mrs. Fournier speak of such subjects provoked in me feelings not unlike the ones I had experienced during my early infatuation (and dreams) of Ral Conrath.
I wondered, however, if I would ever be called upon to use this education. If my mother was correct, every passing year took me farther from the prospects of marriage, and while I did not judge Cecily for her chosen profession, I hardly saw myself in the role of a man’s mistress. There was something not so much unsavory as degrading about it. I did not wish to be “kept” by a man any more than I wished to be married to a gentleman who bored me.
But what to think of the twinges and soft waves of sensuousness that more and more frequently assailed me? Was it the frank talk of Cecily Fournier, or was it the voluptuousness of Africa that elicited such untoward phenomena, morning and night?
There was so much nakedness around me. Shirtless and fantastically muscular Negro men. Grown women who thought nothing of a similar state of undress. I wondered how it would feel to move through the world with my own breasts exposed, swinging freely before me. Were men down here not in a constant state of arousal? I had asked Cecily.
“I wondered that myself,” she told me. “I asked Auguste, but he said”—Cecily smiled—“that no other woman than me excited him. He claimed to be inured to the pert bosoms of even the most beautiful native women. He may have been lying, but I chose to believe him. I was happily endowed with a very pretty bosom myself. And might I add,” she said to me, “so are you.”
“Do you think so?” I asked. No one had ever commented on my breasts, unless one counted the seamstresses who fitted me for my dresses and riding clothes.
“Very well shaped,” Cecily assured me. “A lovely size. Enough to please any man, but not overlarge. Such appendages can be exciting for your lovers while you are young, but gravity, my dear, is a woman’s greatest enemy. And the more prodigious the mammaries in youth, the more ghastly the ruin in later years.” She smiled approvingly. “I am happy to see you eschew stays and corsets. Wise. Very wise.”
* * *
This day Cecily had come into town for groceries. The sprawling open-air marketplace bustled with life, screaming with vibrant colors, sounds, and smells. Some of the more well-to-do vendors had simple shaded stalls, but most of the wares were spread upon the ground on blankets or rugs—piles of guava, soursop, sweet potato, and taut-skinned purple-black aubergine. I took special delight in the colorful piles of limes, oranges, alligator pears, tomatoes the size of marbles, and pawpaws—the latter reputed (and repeated ad nauseam) to be the balm for every sort of digestive malady.
Native women dominated the square, and their diversity was extraordinary. The fat were as beautiful as the slender, the old as well as the young, for their warm smiles and brilliant white teeth, sweet brown faces, sparkling black eyes with antimony-painted lids, and a vivid fresh flower tucked behind one ear made them, every one, attractive to my eye.