Tropic Moon (10 page)

The black didn't think the question was addressed to him. Adèle answered. “Here it's about a hundred feet. Other places we'll be scraping the bottom.”

“Are there crocodiles?”

“You see them sometimes.”

There was just one word for this moment: “vacation.” Timar was on vacation—even the sun seemed happier than usual.

They saw the first black village: four or five huts set among the trees by the water where half a dozen native canoes were moored. Naked children watched the flatboat go by. A woman who was bathing sank down to her neck in the water and shouted.

“Are you hungry, Joe?”

“Not yet.”

He felt like a tourist. He examined the landscape closely, missing nothing.

“Show me an okume tree.”

She looked around. Finally she pointed out a tree.

“That's it? And it's worth a lot?”

“It's the only kind you can make plywood from. It's planed by machine. All the work's automated.”

“How about a mahogany?”

“There aren't any around here. We'll start seeing them in an hour or two.”

“And ebony?”

“Later on, too. Downstream all the valuable trees were cut down long ago.”

“But where we'll be, there's still ebony?”

It was the first time he'd said “we.”

“Ebony and mahogany, yes. Old Truffaut also gave me a pretty good idea. The concession is full of orchids. He gave me a book about them. Some of them sell for as much as fifty thousand francs each in Europe. And he found some that look just like the ones in the book.”

Why was it all so beautiful that morning? Everything was working out. The landscape was full of promise. Was it even as hot as it had been on other days? Timar didn't take any notice.

They had been on the water for two hours when the flatboat veered toward the right bank, its bow coming to rest on a sandbank. The black, impassive as ever, threw a line to a woman standing there; she was naked except for a bunch of dried grass that covered her sex. Timar had never seen breasts like hers—large, heavy, and sumptuously full.

“What's going on?” he asked.

The black turned to him.

“Cool down engine.”

There was a handful of native canoes, a village of maybe fifteen huts. Timar and Adèle leaped onto the bank while the black woman was laughing with the mechanic.

They were holding a market in the middle of a clearing. Five women, four of them very old, were squatting in front of the mats with some goods on display. Here, too, there was an absolute calm, while the natural hierarchy of things and beings, along with their natural proportions, seemed to have been reversed.

The trees were a hundred and fifty feet tall; at their feet, in middle of this limitless wilderness, a few handfuls of cassava, a couple of bananas, and five or six little smoked fish were displayed on mats. Two of the women were smoking a pipe. A third was breast-feeding a baby of about two, who from time to time turned to look curiously at the whites.

No contact between them and the natives, not even a greeting. Adèle went first, glancing at the little piles of merchandise and craning her neck to see into the huts. She leaned down and took a banana; she didn't bother to pay.

No hostility, either. They were whites, and they did whatever they wanted to—because they were whites.

Suddenly Adèle said, “Wait here for a second.”

She strode toward the largest of the huts, which was off to one side. She went in without hesitation, while Timar stayed behind, looking at what passed for a market.

Did she know someone here? What had gotten into her head?

Bored with looking at the old women and their miserable foodstuffs, he went back to the flatboat. The black had gone ashore. He stood silhouetted in the light shining through the leaves and vines. Beside him was the naked young woman. They were standing right next to each other, but only their fingertips touched. They were laughing. Deep, slow syllables rose out of them, expressing nothing, it seemed, but satisfaction.

Timar didn't want to disturb them, so he turned and retraced his steps. Adèle wasn't back yet. He was about to go join her in the hut, but he didn't dare. With nothing to do, he took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. A naked little boy made a begging face and stretched out his palm.

Three yards away, one of the old women stretched out her palm; he tossed her a cigarette and there was a mad scramble. All the black women crowded around, arms extended, bumping one another and quarreling over the tobacco. They shouted, laughed, pushed, and shoved, and dropped to their knees to look for the cigarette that had fallen on the ground. Adèle came up and smiled at the sight of Timar struggling with them.

“Let's go!” she said.

She took a second banana as she passed. It was only on board, when the engine had started back up, that he asked her where she'd gone.

“Don't worry about it.”

“You know somebody in the village?”

“It doesn't matter.”

The flatboat was making its way through air that had grown hotter and more humid. Timar felt a sudden unpleasant tightening in his chest.

“You're not going to tell me the truth?”

Her smile was sweet, submissive.

“I swear, it's nothing.”

Something he thought he'd forgotten came back to him—one of his first experiences with women. Why was that? He'd been seventeen. He'd spent three days in Paris, and one night he'd allowed a woman to take him to a hotel in the rue Lepic. When they were downstairs again, in the hall, the woman had said, just like Adèle, “Wait here for a second.”

She'd gone into the manager's office. He heard them murmuring, and when she'd come out again she was cheerful.

“Let's go.”

“What were you doing in there?”

“Don't worry about it. Women's business.”

It took him nearly three years to realize she'd gone in to collect her percentage of the price of the room.

What had made him think of that, here on the river? He couldn't say. Looking at Adèle, who was more animated than usual, he saw the other woman. He'd never learned her name.

“It was a black's place?”

“Of course! There aren't any whites here.”

And because he was frowning, “Don't be that way, Joe. I swear—it's nothing.”

Impassive as ever under his ragged, oily sun helmet, the black looked straight ahead. Every now and then, he gave a slight turn to the wheel.

Was the problem the incident at the hut? Exhaustion and the heat must have had done something to Timar's state of mind. The sun shone down overhead and the flatboat moved too slowly to make a cooling breeze. The unchanging landscape became oppressive.

He'd eaten a can of warm pâté and some stale bread. Already he'd had two shots of liquor.

It was his time for it. Around the middle of the afternoon, he'd get a hollow feeling in his chest. He only felt like himself after he'd had a touch of liquor.

Adèle was still in a good mood. Too good a mood—it seemed unnatural to Timar. Most of the time she didn't work so hard to make him happy. She was more direct than that—and more reserved.

What could she have been doing in the black man's hut? Why the smiles and playfulness now?

Finally, Timar sat down on the bottom of the boat, letting his gaze slip over the irregular treetops at the speed of the boat. His chest started to hurt again. “Hand me the bottle.”

“Joe!”

“What? I don't have a right to be thirsty?”

She looked resigned as she handed him the flask of whiskey. He almost didn't hear her murmur, “Watch out.”

“For what? Black women I can go visit in their huts?”

He knew he wasn't being fair. It had been happening a lot recently. He couldn't help himself.

At those moments, he was convinced that he was unhappy, that he was the one making all the sacrifices. It gave him the right to hate the whole world.

“You shouldn't gripe—you made a living getting people soused.”

A rifle lay in the bottom of the boat in case they spotted some game, but they hadn't seen anything except for a few birds. The air was teeming with flies, though. One hand was always busy waving them out of your face. Timar knew the river was infested with tsetses; every time an insect landed on him, he jumped.

He stood up suddenly, at the end of his tether. He took off his jacket. Under it was just a short-sleeved shirt.

“That's a mistake, Joe. You'll get sick.”

“So?”

It wasn't any cooler with his jacket off. On the contrary. But at least he didn't have that sticky sweaty feeling in his armpits and on his chest. It was a different sensation now—a feeling, almost voluptuous, of his flesh roasting through.

“Give me the bottle.”

“You've had enough to drink.”

“Give me the bottle, I said!”

And he insisted because he knew that the black, who seemed so impassive, was listening to everything and judging them both. He drank with greedy defiance, then lay down on the bench with his jacket rolled up under his head.

“Listen, Joe, the sun is strong and …”

He didn't even bother to answer. He was sleepy. He was crushed with exhaustion. He was ready to drop dead, if it came to that. He couldn't have gotten up if he'd wanted to.

For several hours, he sank into a strange stupor. He slept, openmouthed, and his body became a world of mysterious occurrences.

Was he a tree? A mountain? Two or three times, his eyelids parted and he saw Adèle trying to keep him in the shade.

Suddenly there was a catastrophic noise, a brutal, wrenching sensation that threw him under the bench. He picked himself up, haggard, with clenched fists and bulging eyes.

“What the hell is going on?”

The flatboat was leaning at an angle and the water was rushing madly past the gunwale. In a sort of semiconsciousness, Timar saw the black step over the rail. He thought he was coming to get him, that he'd been lured into an ambush, and he threw himself at the black man, knocking him into the water with a punch in the face.

“So that's what you want! We'll see about that!”

The water was no more than a foot and a half deep. The flatboat had drifted into some rapids. Painfully, the black climbed back into the boat. Timar was looking everywhere for the rifle he'd seen that morning.

“You bastard! You'll see …”

But he tripped over something, he wasn't sure what—the bench, maybe, or the gun he'd wanted. He stumbled. He fell and in a flash saw Adèle looking at him in horror, certainly in despair. His head struck something hard.

“Bastard!” he repeated.

And everything was spinning, everything moved, things flew up in the sky and the shadows came down from above.

Yet there were still moments of vague consciousness. One time, when he opened his eyes, he was sitting on the bottom of the boat; the black was holding him up while Adèle, struggling to lift his arms, was putting his jacket back on.

Another time, it was Adèle's face bent over him. He was lying down. His temples were a little cool and damp, while his hands, neck, and chest were roasting.

At last he was being carried. It wasn't just two people, but ten, a hundred! A multitude of blacks, their legs all moving at the height of his head.

They spoke a language he didn't recognize. Adèle was speaking it, too.

Through the black legs he could see trees, many trees, then a darkness from which a damp smell of compost rose.

H
E WAS
sitting on his bed, and what he noticed before anything else wasn't Adèle, who'd helped him up, but the walls. They were pale green. So he hadn't been dreaming. If one detail was real, everything was.

Timar frowned suspiciously. His mouth was set like a judge's.

“How long have I been here?”

He stared hard at Adèle, as if he wanted to catch her in a lie.

“Four days. Why are you looking at me that way?”

She was still putting him on. She laughed nervously, without meaning to.

“Give me a mirror!”

She went looking for it, and he ran his hand over his unshaved cheeks. He was thinner. He didn't recognize his eyes. And here he'd only made a few small gestures and was already tired.

“Where's Bouilloux?”

He knew he was upsetting her and the fact gave him pleasure. He guessed his feverish stare seemed threatening.

“Bouilloux? We're not in Libreville anymore. We're at home, at the concession.”

“Where's Bouilloux?”

He had lots and lots of other questions, too. Questions? More like a case to prosecute. Because while he'd been lying there with a fever of a hundred and five, he'd seen a lot and he'd heard a lot, too. And just as soon as he'd discovered that the room was green …

It was on the second day—in any case near the beginning—that Adèle, after settling them in, had looked at the walls with disgust. He heard her moving around downstairs, giving orders. Later on, she'd painted the partitions lime green.

She had no idea he'd seen her. His eyes had been wide open. She'd called someone else in to do the ceiling.

“What about Bouilloux?”

He wanted to get that question out of the way, because he had another waiting.

“He hasn't been here, Joe, I swear!”

So what? He'd see about Bouilloux later; he was almost positive he'd heard his voice from the first floor, that he'd even heard him say, “My poor little Adèle!”

Hadn't she opened the door a crack, at night, to let Bouilloux have a look at him?

“And the Greek?”

She couldn't lie because he was sure he'd seen that one, really seen him, and not once or twice but four or five times. A big fellow with greasy hair, a thin tanned face, and a tic: every few seconds he'd wink with his right eye.

“Constantinesco?”