Tropic Moon (11 page)

Yes! After the walls were painted, she'd called for him to hold the ladder while she did the high bits. He had seen him clearly.

“What's he doing here?”

“He's the overseer. He's worked on the concession before, so I hired him. You've got to rest, Joe. You're soaked in sweat.”

He needed to speak, to question her, to be cruel. There were certain things that he remembered with horror.

For instance, he'd been colder than he could ever have imagined in his life. And yet he was drenched in sweat, his teeth were chattering, and he'd cried out, “For God's sake, bring me some blankets! Somebody light a fire!”

Adèle had replied gently, “You already have four blankets.”

“That's not true! I'm freezing to death! Where's the doctor? How come the doctor hasn't been called?”

He'd had hallucinations and nightmares. In the next bed, Timar saw Eugène looking at him with his dull stare.

“You're not used to it yet, kid. But you'll get there. I've already gone through it, you see.”

Gone through it? How? Timar got angry, screamed, called out for Adèle. She was beside him.

If only he could have killed her! But he didn't have a gun. She was making fun of him. With Constantinesco, who came in on tiptoe, whispering, “Still a hundred and five?”

Now he'd get to the bottom of it all! He didn't have a fever anymore. He could see things clearly. He blinked to make sure he was seeing straight.

“I had snail fever, didn't I?”

“No, Joe. It wasn't snail fever at all. You had a bout of dengue fever, like everyone when they first get to the colonies. It isn't serious.”

So it wasn't even serious!

“You must have been bitten by a fly on the river, and the sun helped to give you a violent fever. It shoots straight up to a hundred and five, but no one's ever died of it.”

He tried to see if she'd changed. Was she wearing her boots? He leaned over to look. There they were on her feet.

“Why are you wearing those?”

“I have to go supervise the work site sometimes.”

“What work site?”

“We're fixing the machines.”

“Who?”

And that “who” was a threat.

“Constantinesco. He's a mechanic.”

“Who else?”

“We have two hundred native workers who are busy building huts for themselves.”

“We? Who's ‘we'?”

“The two of us, Joe. You and me.”

“Oh. Good.”

He'd thought she meant her and Constantinesco. Timar was already worn out. The sweat on his body turned cold. Adèle was holding one of his hands and looking at him without sadness, with a hint of irony even, the way you look at a naughty child.

“Listen, Joe, you've got to try and rest. Tomorrow you can get up. Dengue fever knocks you down like that, but it goes away just as quickly. Tomorrow we'll have a nice long talk about the business. Everything's going well.”

“Lie down beside me.”

For a second she hesitated, for less than a second. He was ashamed because he knew that his bed reeked of sickness.

“Closer.”

His eyes were half closed. He saw her through his eyelashes—a blur. He slid his hand down her legs.

“Don't tire yourself out, Joe.”

Too bad! He needed to make sure she was his and he did, damp, trembling, with a surly look on his face. When he fell back onto his pillow, exhausted, his whole body coursing with anxiety, she got up calmly and adjusted her dress. Without any anger, she said, “You silly creature. You're just a boy, a great big boy …”

He could no longer hear her. All he could hear was his beating heart, the blood pulsing through his temples.

The following day, Adèle and Constantinesco helped him move down to the big room on the first floor. The Greek was slender, his hair was still black, and from a distance he looked young. Close up, however, his face turned out to be covered with wrinkles, its features irregular and unattractive. He was respectful, even fawning. When he spoke, he seemed to be fishing for Timar's approval.

The house was empty. They'd had to throw out practically everything they'd found there, the furniture and the other things, too, making a junk pile outside that they'd set on fire. They'd only kept a few things that were indispensable, tables, chairs, two beds. Even these had had to be disinfected.

They put Timar in a kind of sofa-cum-hammock. His room was enormous. It opened onto the veranda on three sides, and the red-brick walls inside gave it a very colonial look. Outside, the land descended steeply to the river, where a hundred and fifty blacks were busy building huts. On the other three sides of the house, less than five hundred yards away, there was jungle.

“Where does Constantinesco sleep?” he asked with a trace of feeling.

“In a hut like the natives. It's out behind the shed.”

“Who does he eat with?”

“He keeps a black woman. They live together.”

He had a hard time suppressing a smile; he turned his head because he was sure Adèle had noticed.

“You see, Joe, it's just like I told you: the house is solid and practical, and the concession—I've been all around it—is the best in Gabon. I've already found workers. Now you rest for a couple of days. Constantinesco can handle the work.”

“Yes.”

Still, he was depressed. He knew he'd need more than a couple of days of rest to work like the others. He saw them coming and going under the sun, while just the thought of going out onto the veranda, with its reflected glare, made him physically ill.

What good was he, then? Adèle was so relaxed, so straightforward in her black silk dress, with her white sun helmet and rubber boots. She strolled freely among the blacks, speaking their dialect and giving orders as if she'd been doing it all her life. She'd found a few mildewed books among the things old Truffaut left behind: a Maupassant, a Loti, and a chemistry textbook.

He wasn't up to reading the novels. In Europe, he'd have devoured them. Here, he had to wonder why people bothered to print so many words.

When Adèle rejoined him, she found him deep in the chemistry book.

The days passed. To Timar they all seemed alike. In the morning he came downstairs, alone or leaning on Adèle's arm. He settled down in the big room. Every once in a while he got up and took a couple of steps.

All around him people were already at work. Constantinesco had sounded the bell at six. He showed up in boots, horsewhip in hand, to make his report to Adèle. She didn't ask him to sit down and treated him like a stranger.

“I left twenty men to finish the huts. I sent the rest of them into the woods. The tables for the house will be finished tonight. And I sent the hunter out for a buffalo to feed the blacks.”

Timar was amazed at all the work that had been done while he was sick. And yet, to the best of his recollection, each time he opened his eyes Adèle had been sitting at the head of his bed. That hadn't prevented her from organizing and directing everything. It was true that she looked paler, that the circles under her eyes were darker.

“We should build a shed for the flatboat; if we don't, the motor won't work when we need it.”

“I thought of that. Two men are digging postholes to the left of the workers' camp.”

Now Adèle and Timar were alone. She went on talking.

“You'll see, Joe, you'll get used to it. This is one of the healthiest parts of the country. In three years, we'll return to France with our million.”

That was exactly what horrified Timar. He didn't want to go back to France. To do what? Where would he settle down? Would he go back to his family? Would he leave Adèle?

The two novels he'd tried to read had made it clear to him that there was no longer a place for him anywhere. He'd never be able to go back to La Rochelle and spend hours with his friends on the terrace of the Café de la Paix.

Live in Paris with Adèle? But Adèle, in France …

No—best not to think about it. He'd see. Meanwhile, he tried to acclimatize himself, to develop regular habits, to familiarize himself with the land. In a few days he'd be able to go out. He would oversee the blacks he saw milling around down by the water. He'd go into the jungle and pick out the trees for cutting.

He still felt all too drained. Just walking for ten minutes around the room—the floor was red brick like the walls—made him so dizzy that he had to sit down.

“Are you sure Bouilloux wasn't here when I was sick?”

“Why do you ask?” She laughed—the same laugh as when he'd asked her about her visit to the black man's hut. So much the same, that he was left suspended between relief and suspicion, hatred and love.

When she wasn't around he worried. He'd drag himself out to the veranda a hundred times to see if she was back. What really calmed him was when he spotted Constantinesco off in the distance in a direction opposite from the one in which she'd gone.

On the third day he felt genuine joy. Ignoring Adèle's advice, he left the house. Sixty blacks, lashed to an enormous log of okume wood, were dragging it on rollers to the river.

The first tree! His first tree! His legs shaky, he prowled around the almost-naked black workers, smelling their pungent odor. Constantinesco, in his boots as always, hurled orders in dialect from behind. The log inched forward. Bodies glistened with sweat. The workers panted.

“How much is that worth?” Timar asked Adèle when she came back.

“About eight hundred francs a ton, but shipping's three hundred a ton. That log represents a profit of two thousand francs.”

He was surprised that such a huge block of wood wasn't worth more.

“What if it was mahogany?”

She didn't answer; she was listening to something.

He heard it, too: the distant drone of an engine.

“A flatboat!”

The log was still descending toward the riverbank and some men had waded into the water to haul it down. It was evening; in half an hour it would be night. Constantinesco, who'd been in Gabon for twenty years, had long since taken off his sun helmet.

The log, solidly tethered like a huge captured beast, began to float. Just then a flatboat rounded the bend and ran up onto the sand.

The boat contained two blacks and a white man, who jumped on shore and shook Adèle's hand.

“All settled in?”

It was the provisions. Each month the same flatboat came upriver to serve all the little outposts, bringing mail and necessities to the loggers.

“You must be thirsty. Come on up to the house.”

The young man drank a whiskey first, then pulled a letter for Timar out of his bag. It bore a French stamp. The handwriting was his sister's. After reading a few lines he shoved it into his pocket.

“Anything for me?” asked Adèle.

“No. Oh—yes. Can you imagine? Bouilloux's engine gave out as he was headed back downriver. He had to spend the night in a village.”

Timar turned quickly to Adèle. She was unfazed and didn't blush.

“Oh,” she said noncommittally.

But now her gaiety seemed forced.

“What are they saying down there?”

“Not much.”

They were in the big red-brick room, where there were only three deck chairs and a table. Down by the river, the black workers who had dragged the okume log were laughing and sponging themselves off. Constantinesco was walking over to the bell with which he signaled the beginning and the end of the workday.

“As to the Thomas business …”

The young man paused before speaking. He seemed a decent fellow, a little awkward and shy. He spent three weeks a month in the flatboat with two blacks, going upriver and then coming back down, spending his nights under a tent in the jungle. In France he'd been a traveling salesman specializing in remote villages, where he sold complete trousseaux on the installment plan. In Gabon, he practiced his trade with the same awkwardness, the same bluff humor that he'd displayed in the hamlets of Normandy and Brittany.

“They caught the murderer. A black guy, naturally.”

Adèle didn't move a muscle. She was quite calm. She glanced from Timar to the traveler.

“He was arrested two days after you left. I mean the chief of his village turned him in. Since then it's been nothing but talk, talk, talk, day in and day out. The chief brought witnesses.”

Timar, leaning toward the young man, was breathing hard.

“And then?”

“The black played dumb. He swore he didn't know anything about it. Since everything has to be translated in these cases, things don't move quickly—even after they found the pistol buried in his hut. The witnesses do say that the accused was after the same woman as Thomas.

“By the way, what can I offer you? I have some excellent canned lobster. If you need gas, I have twenty cans.”

Timar was no longer listening. He looked at Adèle, who said, “Get the twenty cans. And two sacks of rice for our workers. Do you have any cigarettes? I can sell them for three francs a pack.”

“I'll give you a thousand for a zinc franc.”

Night fell. You could hardly see the river. Constantinesco started the electric generator, and the lights glowed red, then yellow.

“With five or six zincs …”

“Tell me! The man they arrested, what village was he from?”

“Joe! Enough!”

“I've got a right to—”

“A little village downstream.”

Timar got up and went to sit on the veranda. He could just make out the silhouette of the log floating like a ship at anchor. The blacks had lit a fire in the middle of their circle of huts. Around the house the jungle was black as ink, except for the white trunk of a kapok tree soaring straight up to the sky.