Jealousy and in the Labyrinth (14 page)

Its sound is plaintive, high-pitched, somewhat nasal. But its complexity permits it to have overtones at various levels. Of an absolute evenness, both muffled and shrill, it fills the night and the ears as if it came from nowhere.

Around the lamp, the circling of the insects is still the same. By examining it closely, however, the eye at last manages to make out some bodies that are larger than others. Yet this is not enough to determine their nature. Against the black background they form only bright points which become increasingly brilliant as they approach the light, turning black as soon as they pass in front of the lamp with the light behind them, then recovering all their brilliance whose intensity now decreases toward the tip of the orbit.

In the suddenness of its return toward the glass, the bright point violently plunges against it, producing a dry click. Fallen on the table, it has become a tiny reddish beetle with closed wing cases which slowly circles on the darker wood.

Other creatures similar to this one have already fallen on the table; they wander there, tracing uncertain paths with many detours and problematical goals. Suddenly raising its wing cases into a V with curved sides, one of them extends its filmy wings, takes off, and immediately returns to the swarm of flying bodies.

But it constitutes one of its heaviest, slowest elements, therefore less difficult for the eyes to follow. The whorls which it describes are also probably among the more capricious: they include loops, garlands, sudden ascents and brutal falls, changes of direction, abrupt retracings....

The duller sound has already lasted several seconds, or even several minutes now: a kind of growling, or rumble, or hum of a motor, the motor of an automobile on the highway rising toward the plateau. It fades for a moment, only to resume all the more clearly. This time it is certainly the sound of a car on the road.

It rises in pitch as it draws nearer. It fills the whole valley with its regular, monotonous throbbing, much louder than it seems in daylight. Its importance quickly surpasses what would normally be expected of a mere sedan.

The sound has now reached the point where the dirt road turns off the highway toward the plantation. Instead of slowing down to turn to the right, it continues its uniform progress, now reaching the ears from behind the house, toward the east gable-end. It has gone past the turn-off.

Having reached the flat section of the road, just below the rocky rim where the plateau comes to an end, the truck shifts gears and continues with a fainter rumble. Then the sound gradually fades away, as the truck drives east, its powerful headlights lighting up the clumps of stiff-leaved trees that dot the brush on the way to the next plantation, Franck's.

His car might have had engine trouble again. They should have been back long since.

Around the kerosene lamps the ellipses continue to turn, lengthening, shortening, moving off to the right or left, rising, falling, or swaying first to one side then the other, mingling in an increasingly tangled skein in which no autonomous curve remains identifiable.

A . . . should have been back long since.

Nevertheless there is no lack of probable reasons for the delay. Apart from an accident—never impossible—there are the two successive punctures that oblige the driver to repair one of the tires himself: take off the wheel, remove the inner tube, find the hole in the light from the headlights, etc. . . .; there is the severance of some electrical connection, due to a jolt that was too violent, which might cut the headlight wires, involving long investigations and a haphazard mending job by the poor light of a pocket flashlight. The road is in such bad condition that an important part of the car's engine might be damaged, if the car is going too fast: shock-absorber broken, axle bent, crank case split.... There is also the help that cannot be refused to another driver in difficulty. There are the various risks delaying the departure itself: unforeseen prolongation of some errand, excessive slowness of the waiter, invitation to dinner accepted at the last minute with a friend met by chance, etc., etc. . . . There is, last of all, the driver's fatigue which has made him postpone his return to the next day.

The sound of a truck coming up the road along the near slope of the valley fills the air again. It is moving east from one end of the auditory field to the other, reaching its maximum volume as it passes behind the house. It is moving just as fast as the preceding one, which for a moment might cause it to be confused with a touring car; but the sound is much too loud. The truck is apparently empty. They are the banana trucks returning, empty, from the port after leaving their stems in the sheds on the docks, where the "Cap Saint-Jean" is moored.

This is the picture on the post-office calendar hanging on the bedroom wall. The brand-new white ship is moored beside the long pier which juts out into the sea from the lower margin. The structure of the pier cannot be clearly discerned: apparently there is a wood (or iron) framework supporting a tar-paved roadway. While the pier is virtually at water level, the ship's sides rise far above it. The ship is shown head on, revealing the vertical line of its stem and its two smooth sides, of which only one is in sunlight.

The ship and the pier take up the center of the picture, the former to the left, the latter on the right. Around it, the sea is covered with canoes and rowboats: eight are clearly visible and three others suggested in the background. A less fragile craft, provided with a square wind-filled sail, is about to pass the end of the pier. The latter is covered with a brightly dressed crowd near a pile of bales, in front of the ship.

A little to one side, but in the foreground, turning his back to this confusion and to the great white ship which provokes it, someone in European clothes is looking toward the right side of the picture at some sort of flotsam whose vague mass is floating a few yards away from him. The surface of the water is faintly rippled with a short, regular swell which advances toward the man. The flotsam, half raised by the tide, seems to be an old piece of clothing or an empty sack.

The largest of the canoes is quite near it, but is moving away from it; all the attention of the two natives maneuvering it is occupied by the concussion of a little wave against the prow, falling back in a plume of foam caught in mid-air by the camera.

To the left of the pier, the sea is calmer. It is also a deeper green. Large patches of oil form blue-green stains at the foot of the pier. It is on this side that the "Cap Saint-Jean" is moored; toward it converges the interest of all the other people comprising the scene. Because of the position the ship occupies, its superstructures are somewhat vague, save for the forecastle, the bridge, the top of the smokestack, and the first loading mast with its oblique arm, pullies, cables and ropes.

At the top of the mast is perched a bird, not a sea bird, but a vulture with a naked neck. A second such bird soars in the sky, above and to the right; its wings are stretched straight across, widespread and strongly raked toward the top of the mast; the bird is executing a banked turn. Still higher runs a horizontal white margin half an inch wide, then a red border narrower by half.

Above the calendar, which is hanging from a tack by a red thread in the shape of a circumflex accent, the wooden wall is painted pale gray. Other tack holes show nearby. A larger hole to the left marks the location of a missing screw, or of a heavy nail.

Aside from these perforations, the paint in the bedroom is in good condition. The four walls, like those of the whole house, are covered with vertical laths two inches wide separated by a double groove. The depth of these grooves shows a deep shadow under the glare of the kerosene lamp.

This striped effect is reproduced on all four sides of the square bedroom—actually cubical, since it is as high as it is wide or long. The ceiling, moreover, is also covered by the same gray laths. As for the floor, it too is similarly constructed, as is evidenced by the clearly marked longitudinal interstices, hollowed out by the frequent washings that discolor the wood laths, and parallel to the grooves of the ceiling.

Thus the six interior surfaces of the cube are distinctly outlined by thin laths of constant dimensions, vertical on the four vertical surfaces, running east and west on the two horizontal surfaces. When the lamp sways a little at the end of an extended arm, all these lines with their short, moving shadows seem animated with a general swirling movement.

The outside walls of the house are made of planks set horizontally; they are also wider—about eight inches— and overlap each other on the outer edge. Their surface is therefore not contained within a single vertical plane, but in many parallel planes, inclined at several degrees' pitch and a plank's thickness from each other.

The windows are framed by a molding and topped by a pediment in the shape of a flattened triangle. The laths which compose these embellishments have been nailed above the imbricated boards constituting the walls, so that the two systems are in contact only at series of ridges (the inner edge of each board), between which exist considerable gaps.

Only the two horizontal moldings are fastened along their entire undersurface: the base of the pediment and the base of the frame beneath the window. From one corner of the window, a dark liquid has flowed down over the wood, crossing the boards one after another from ridge to ridge, then the concrete substructure, making an increasingly narrow streak which finally dwindles to a thread, and reaches the veranda floor in the middle of a flagstone, ending there in a little round spot.

The nearby flagstones are perfectly clean. They are frequently washed—as recently as this afternoon. The smooth stone has a dull, grayish surface, oily to the touch. The stones are large; starting from the round spot, following the wall, there are only five and a half until the doorstep into the hallway.

The door is also framed by a wooden molding and topped by a flattened triangular pediment. On the other side of the sill, the floor consists of tiles much smaller than the flagstones, half their size in each direction. Instead of being smooth like the veranda flagstones, they are crisscrossed in one or the other diagonal direction by shallow grooves; the grooved areas are as wide as the ribs, that is, a few fractions of an inch. Their arrangement alternates from one tile to the next, so that the floor is set in successive chevrons. This low relief, scarcely visible in daylight, is accentuated by artificial light, especially at a certain distance ahead of the lamp, and still more if the latter is set on the floor.

The slight swaying of the lamp advancing along the hallway animates the uninterrupted series of chevrons with a continual undulation like that of waves.

The same tiling continues, without any separation, in the living room-dining room. The area where the table and chairs are is covered with a fiber carpet; the shadow of their legs swirls quickly across it, counterclockwise.

Behind the table, in the center of the long sideboard, the native pitcher looks even larger: its bulging shape, made of unglazed red clay, casts a dense shadow which enlarges as the source of light draws nearer, a black disc surmounted by an isosceles trapezoid (whose base is at the top) and a thin curve which connects the circular side to one of the ends of the trapezoid.

The pantry door is closed. Between it and the doorway to the hall is the centipede. It is enormous: one of the largest to be found in this climate. With its long antennae and its huge legs spread on each side of its body, it covers the area of an ordinary dinner plate. The shadow of various appendages doubles their already considerable number on the light-colored paint.

The body is curved toward the bottom: its anterior part is twisted toward the baseboard, while the last joints keep their original orientation—that of a straight line cutting diagonally across the panel from the hall doorway to the corner of the ceiling above the closed pantry door.

The creature is motionless, alert, as if sensing danger. Only its antennae are alternately raised and lowered in a swaying movement, slow but continuous.

Suddenly the front part of the body begins moving, executing a rotation which turns the creature toward the bottom of the wall. And immediately, without having a chance to go any farther, the centipede falls on the tiles, half twisted and curling its long legs one after the other while its mandibles rapidly open and close in a reflex quiver. ... It is possible for an ear close enough to hear the faint crackling they produce.

The sound is that of the comb in the long hair. The tortoise-shell teeth pass again and again from top to bottom of the thick black mass with its reddish highlights, electrifying the tips and making the soft, freshly washed hair crackle during the entire descent of the delicate hand —the delicate hand with tapering fingers that gradually closes on the strands of hair.

The two long antennae accelerate their alternating swaying. The creature has stopped in the center of the wall, at eye level. The considerable development of the posterior legs identifies it unmistakably as the Scutigera or "spider- centipede." In the silence, from time to time, the characteristic buzzing can be heard, probably made by the buccal appendages.

Franck, without saying a word, stands up, wads his napkin into a ball as he cautiously approaches, and squashes the creature against the wall. Then, with his foot, he squashes it against the bedroom floor.

Then he comes back toward the bed and in passing hangs the towel on its metal rack near the washbowl.

The hand with the tapering fingers has clenched into a fist on the white sheet. The five widespread fingers have closed over the palm with such force that they have drawn the cloth with them: the latter shows five convergent creases. .. . But the mosquito-netting falls back all around the bed, interposing the opaque veil of its innumerable meshes where rectangular patches reinforce the torn places.

In his haste to reach his goal, Franck increases his speed. The jolts become more violent. Nevertheless he continues to drive faster. In the darkness, he has not seen the hole running halfway across the road. The car makes a leap, skids. . . . On this bad road the driver cannot straighten out in time. The blue sedan goes crashing into a roadside tree whose rigid foliage scarcely shivers under the impact, despite its violence.