Ambiguous Adventure (13 page)

“ ‘You are not fair to yourself,’ I said to him.

“ ‘What do you know about it?’ he retorted.

“ ‘It is not you yourself whom you should defend, but God.’

“ ‘What has He just been doing here? You see, it is yourself that I have been taking advantage of. God was my great treasure-trove. I suggested, by my attitude, that it was He whom I was defending. But, I ask you, can God be defended from man? Who can do that? Who has that right? To whom does God belong? Who has not the right to love Him or to scoff at Him? Think it over, chief of the Diallobé: the freedom to love God or hate Him is God’s ultimate gift, which no one can take from man.’

“ ‘Master,’ I said to him, ‘I am speaking of those men who live in the country of the Diallobé. In our eyes they are like children. We have the duty of taking their liberty from them, in order to use it to their advantage.’

“ ‘You,’ he responded, ‘of you, nothing could be more true. But not of me.’

“Then he was silent for a long time. When he spoke again, it was with an aftermath of sadness:

“ ‘I have thought this infamous thing: that God could be an obstacle to the happiness of men. How stupid that is, my God, how stupid I have been! The truth is, Oh, God, that there are always cunning men to make use of Thee. Offering Thee and refusing Thee, as if Thou hast belonged to them, with the aim of keeping other men in obedience to them! Chief of the Diallobé, reflect that the revolt of the multitude against these shysters may take on the significance of a revolt against God—when on the contrary it is the most holy of all the holy wars!’

“He talked to me in this vein for a long time, brushing away all my objections, weeping over his own base deeds. The fool, in his corner, had gone to sleep.”

Samba Diallo let the letter fall from his hand.

“No!” he thought. “What have their problems to do with me? I have the right to do as this old man has done: to withdraw from the arena of their confused desires, their weaknesses, their flesh, to retire within myself. After all, I am only myself. I have only me.”

He got up, undressed himself, and prepared for bed. Late in the night he realized that he had forgotten to make his evening prayer, and he had to disturb his rest to get up again and pray.

“My God, dost Thou not then remember me? I am that soul whom Thou hast made to weep in filling him with Thy grace. I beg Thee, do not allow me to become the utensil which I feel to be emptying itself already. I have not asked Thee to bring to flower that glow which,
one day, perceived that it was burning. Thou hast wanted me. Thou wouldst not know how to forget me like that. I would not agree, alone with us two, to suffer from Thy absence.…

“Remember, Lord, how Thou hast nourished my existence from Thine. So time is nourished by duration. I felt Thee to be the deep sea from which spreads out my thought and, at the same time, everything. Through Thee, I was the same wave as the whole.

“They say that the human being is quartered from nothingness, is an archipelago of which the islands do not remain underneath, drowned as they are by nothingness. They say that the sea, which is such that everything not itself floats there, is nothingness. They say that the truth is nothingness, and being, a multiple avatar.

“And Thou, Thou blessest their erring ways. Thou attachest success to man as one side of anything is attached to its reverse side. Under the flood of their spreading delusion fortune crystallizes its gems. Thy Truth no longer weighs very heavily upon us, my God.…”

Morning found Samba Diallo crouched, wide awake, on the prayer rug, his limbs stiff with pain.

He thought, “I must write to my father.”

JUNE WAS DRAWING TO A CLOSE, AND ALREADY the heat in Paris was oppressive.

Samba Diallo was walking slowly down the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Benumbed by the heat, he was walking half-asleep. A firm-spun thread of clear thought was filtering with some difficulty through the heavy down of his sensations, as a current of cool water courses through the inert mass of a tepid sea. Samba Diallo was forcing himself to concentrate what remained of his attention on the point where that slight gleam of thought came through.

“These streets are bare,” he was noticing. “No, they are not empty. One meets objects of flesh in them, as well as objects of metal. Apart from that, they are empty. Ah! One also encounters events. Their succession congests time, as the objects congest the street. Time is obstructed by their mechanical jumble. One does not perceive the background of time, and its slow current. I walk. One foot before, one foot behind, one foot before, one foot behind: one-two, one-two. No! I must not think: one-two, one-two. I must think of something else. One-two, one-two.… Malte Laurids Brigge.… Look! Yes—I am Malte Laurids Brigge. Like him, I am walking down the Boulevard Saint-Michel. There is nothing, nothing but me, nothing but my body, I mean to say. I touch it. Through the pocket of
my trousers I touch my thigh. I think of my right big toe. There is nothing but my right big toe. Otherwise, their street is empty, their time is encumbered, their soul is silted up down there, under my right big toe, and under the events and under the objects of flesh and the objects of metal—the objects of flesh and—”

Suddenly he was conscious of an obstacle, there in front of his body. He tried to turn aside. The obstacle was stubborn. Samba Diallo knew that his attention was being solicited.

“How do you do, Monsieur?” said the obstacle.

It was as if this voice were waking him. In front of Samba Diallo an old Negro was standing. In spite of his advanced age, which had not bent his body, he must have stood at the same height as the young man. He was wearing old clothes, and the collar of his shirt was of doubtful cleanliness. A black beret cut across his thatch of white hair, and its edges had thus the semblance of being buried in a skull-cap. He was carrying a white cane, and Samba Diallo fixed his attention on his eyes, to see if he was blind. No, the man was not blind, though the whole central surface of his left eye was covered by a white film. His right eye showed no abnormality, though it presented the stigmata of fatigue. As he smiled, his mouth disclosed old yellow teeth, far apart and out of line.

“How do you do, Monsieur?” Samba Diallo responded in his turn. He was wide awake now, and had a sense of great well-being.

“Excuse an old man for stopping you unceremoniously, like this. But we are compatriots, are we not? What country, then, do you come from?”

“From the country of the Diallobé.”

“Ah, Black Africa! I have known your people well, commencing with your first two Deputies, Blaise Diagne and Galandou Diouf, who were both Senegalese, I believe. But what would you think of our taking a table somewhere—that is, if you are not in a hurry?”

They settled themselves on the terrace of a café.

“My name is Pierre-Louis,” the old man said. “I have been a magistrate, and I have served to some extent in all parts of your country, over a period of twenty years. After that, at the appointed time, I retired. I was beginning to get sick and tired of the drawbacks of the bloody system. Then I stepped down from the bench to go to the other side of the bar. For twelve years I defended my compatriots, from Gabon and Cameroon, against the State and the French settlers. They’re a bad lot, those bloody settlers.”

“Where are you from, exactly?” Samba Diallo inquired.

“I do not know. My great-grandfather was called Mohammed Kati—yes, Kati, like the author of the
Tarikh El Fettâch
—and he was from the same region as his great namesake, the very heart of the old empire of the Mali. My great-grandfather was made a slave, and sent to the Islands, where he was rebaptised Pierre-Louis Kati. He dropped the name of Kati so as not to dishonor it, and called himself simply Pierre-Louis. What will you have to drink?” he asked Samba Diallo.

When the waiter had gone to fill their orders, Pierre-Louis turned back to Samba Diallo.

“What was I saying? Ah, yes, I was telling you that the settlers and the French State were living then off the poor folk of Cameroon and Gabon. Ha, ha, ha!”

The man laughed as if he were coughing, from the
depths of his chest, with his mouth open, and without the least participation from his face—either his lips or his eyes—in this hilarity. The laughter did not increase, and, without any diminution, it stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

“In Cameroon, all the litigations came from the French claim that they had inherited more rights than their German predecessors had actually possessed. Have you studied law, Monsieur?”

“No.”

“That is too bad. All the Blacks ought to study the law of the Whites—French, English, Spanish, the law of all the colonizing peoples, as well as their languages. You must have studied the French language—I mean to say, you must have made a profound study of it. What are you specializing in?”

“I am finishing work for a degree in philosophy.”

“Ah, excellent, my son. That is very good. For, you know, they are there, completely, in their law and their language. Their law, their language, constitute the very texture of their genius, in what is greatest in it and also what is most pernicious. Let us see, what was I saying? Oh, yes.… Then, the French, holding a mandate from the League of Nations, could not have been in possession of greater rights than the men who gave them the mandate. Now the League of Nations itself—do you know what it inherited from Germany, in the matter of Cameroon? It inherited a lawsuit! No more! Ha, ha, ha! I amaze you, eh? I have the documents at home. I will show them to you. You will see there that the Germans had signed treaties of friendship and the establishment of a protectorate with the sovereigns of Cameroon. The Kaiser negotiated with
the aforesaid sovereigns on terms of equality, and that is how it was that the princes of Cameroon were educated in the imperial court itself, with the sons of the German Empire.

“People have wanted us to believe,” the old man went on, “that the Germans were racists—fundamentally, more than the other white nations of the West. That is false. Hitler, yes, and his Nazis, as well as all the world’s Fascists, without doubt; but otherwise the Germans are no more racist than the civil or military settlers of all nationalities. Remember Kitchener at Khartoum, the French armies in the conquest of Algeria, Cortez in Mexico, and so on. What is true is that the Germans are metaphysicians. To convince them there must be arguments of pure transcendence, and their racists have understood that. Elsewhere, men are jurists, and they justify themselves by the Code. Elsewhere, again, they fight for God, and they justify themselves before Him in their purpose of straightening out His twisted creatures—or massacring them if they resist.… What was I saying? Oh, yes.… Then, all went well between the Germans and Cameroon, insofar as the treaties were observed. With the agreement of the princes, the Germans encouraged the cultivation of the export trade, in buying the Negroes’ products at a high price, and in kicking their behinds, without any racism, believe me, if they were not willing to work. The scuffle began when the Germans, under the pretext of I do not know what necessity for cleaning up the country, claimed the right to pillage the lands of the Cameroon people. The princes appointed a lawyer, in Germany itself, to defend their cause. German justice decided in favor of the Cameroons, and the German State left the matter in abeyance because of
the outbreak of war. The French replaced the Germans in Cameroon. I ask you, could they claim to have inherited more than a lawsuit?”

“If that is the case, obviously—” Samba Diallo began, but Pierre-Louis interrupted him:

“That is the case, Monsieur. I, in my turn, had the honor of taking over the assignment to defend the natural rights of the people of Cameroon over their land. I went as far as Geneva to acquit myself of this task. It is a lion that you have before you, Monsieur, a lion that roars and leaps forward every time a blow is struck at the sacred cause of liberty!”

In his frenzy the old man was indeed tossing a lion’s mane over the coffee cups. Within Samba Diallo a strong feeling of sympathy for the old Negro was rising like a warm wave.

“This very day,” the young man was thinking, as Pierre-Louis prattled on, “in these streets where I felt, in despair, that time was covered over by the ignoble sediment of event and object, here is the soul of the times, here is the passion of revolution, as well as its mad dreams, surging up before me. Beneath the mane of this old black lion there is the same breath which stirred Saint-Just, which continues to stir our kind. But in truth, from Saint-Just to this old lunatic Pierre-Louis, the succession has grown heavy, like ripening fruit. The French Revolution is the adolescence of revolution, so it is better embodied in an adolescent than in anyone else. Is it the great evening of revolution which is announced with the twentieth century? See how feverishly it barricades itself in the shade, behind the black skin of the last of the slaves, Pierre-Louis! Is that in order to wage his last fight?”

“You have not told me your name, Monsieur,” the old man said.

Samba Diallo gave a start as he answered:

“I am called Samba Diallo. I believe I have already told you that I am a student. Here is my address,” and he handed Pierre-Louis a card.

“Here is mine,” the latter responded. “I should like to have you at my house, one of these days. I will not bore you too much. Besides, my little family will look out for that, you shall see.”

They rose, and Pierre-Louis took leave of his new friend.

AS SOON AS HE ENTERED THE CAFÉ SAMBA Diallo caught sight of Lucienne’s raised hand, signalling to him. He made his way toward her and held out his own hand, smiling.

“ ‘The bird is not on the flower, balanced by the wind,

And the flower has no scent, and the bird does not sigh,

Except better to enchant the air breathed forth by your bosom.’ ”

With this declamation he sat down.

She withdrew her hand and made a gesture for him to shut his mouth.

“Idiot!” she said.

He dropped his head, pulled down the corners of his mouth, sniffled, and gave such a good imitation of a child in great chagrin that she burst out laughing.