Journey to the End of the Night (16 page)

A sacrifice! And I was the victim. Things came to a head one evening after dinner, at which, ravaged by hunger, I had put in an appearance. I bent over my plate and didn't budge,

I didn't even dare to take out my handkerchief to wipe the sweat off my brow. Nobody had ever eaten his dinner more discreetly. From the engines a faint, continuous vibration rose up under my behind. My table companions must have known what sentence had been passed on me, for to my surprise they started talking to me freely and amiably about duels and stabbings, and asking me questions ... Just then the schoolteacher from the Congo, the one whose breath was so strong, appeared in the lounge. I had barely time to notice that she was wearing a sumptuous lace evening dress. With nervous haste she sat down at the piano and played, if you can call it playing, a number of pieces, always skipping the finale. The atmosphere became intensely furtive and strained.

I jumped up and ran, hoping to take refuge in my cabin. I had almost reached it when one of the colonial officers, the chestiest and most muscular of the lot, barred my way, without violence but firmly. "Suppose we go up on deck!" he enjoined me. We had only a few steps to go. For the occasion he was wearing his gold-braidiest cap, and he had buttoned his buttons from collar to fly, something he hadn't done since our departure. So this was to be a full-dress dramatic ceremony! A tight spot for me, my heart was pounding on a level with my belly button.

This preamble, this abnormal full dress made me foresee a slow and painful execution. That officer looked to me like a chunk of the war, obstinate, inexorable, murderous, which someone had suddenly plunked down in front of me.

Behind him, blocking the doorway, appeared four junior officers, vigilant in the extreme, the escort of Doom.

Flight was impossible. The speech that followed must have been carefully rehearsed. "Sir, you have before you Captain Frémizon[40] of the colonial army! In the name of my comrades in arms and of the passengers on this ship, who are justly indignant at your unspeakable behavior, I have the honor to demand an explanation! ... Certain remarks you have made about us since we left Marseille are intolerable! ... If you have any grievances, sir, the time has come to state them out loud! ... to proclaim audibly what you have been saying in a shameful undertone for the last twenty-one days! To tell us at last what you think! ..."

On hearing these words I was very much relieved. I had feared some sudden deathblow impossible to parry, but in talking, the major was offering me a way out. Any possibility of cowardice becomes a glowing hope if you're not a fool. That's my opinion. Never be picky and choosy about means of escaping disembowelment, or waste your time trying to find reasons for the persecution you're a victim of. Escape is good enough for the wise.

"Captain!" I replied, putting into my voice all the conviction of which I was capable under the circumstances. "What an extraordinary mistake you are in danger of making! You! Me!

How can you think me capable of such ignominious sentiments? How monstrously unjust!

Indeed it is more than I can bear! When only yesterday I was fighting for our beloved country! When over the years my blood has mingled with yours in innumerable battles!

Oh, Captain, sir, how could you think of crushing me beneath such an injustice?" Then, addressing the whole group:

"What abominable slander has abused you, gentlemen? Leading you to imagine that I, to all intents and purposes your brother, would dream of spreading foul calumnies about heroic officers! This is too much! Really too much!" And I went on: "Oh, for such a thing to happen at the very moment when these heroes, these incomparable heroes, are preparing to resume, with what courage I need not say, their sacred duty of safeguarding our immortal colonial empire! Where the most glorious soldiers of our race have covered themselves with eternal glory. The Mangins![41] the Faidherbes![42] the Gallienis![43] ... Oh, Captain! To suspect
me!
Of
this!
"

At that point I pulled up short. I hoped my silence would impress them. Luckily it did for a moment. Thereupon, without delay, taking advantage of the oratorical armistice, I went straight up to the captain and, in an access of emotion, gripped both his hands. With his hands enclosed in mine I felt fairly safe. Still clasping them, I continued, as volubly as ever, and while assuring him that he was right, a thousand times right, suggested that we make a fresh start, but get our signals straight this time. This unbelievable misunderstanding, I assured him, had been brought about by my stupid though natural timidity! I admitted that my behavior could reasonably have been interpreted as unconscionable disdain by the ladies and gentlemen present, these "heroes and charmers ... this providential conclave of astounding characters and talents ... Not forgetting the incomparably musical ladies, the ornaments of our good ship! ..." After making this profuse and elaborate apology, I implored them to admit me without delay or restriction to their joyous patriotic brotherhood ... in which I hoped, now and forever, to cut an admirable figure. And of course without releasing the major's hands, I redoubled my eloquence.

As long as a soldier isn't killing, he's a child and easily amused. Since he is not in the habit of thinking, it costs him a crushing effort to understand when spoken to. Captain Frémizon wasn't killing me, he wasn't drinking, and he wasn't doing anything with his hands or feet. He was only trying to think. For him that was much too much. In short, I'd caught him by the head.

Gradually, during this ordeal by humiliation, I felt my self-respect weakening, weakening a little more, seeping away, and finally abandoning me completely, officially as it were. Say what you please, that's a beautiful moment. After that incident I became infinitely light and free, morally speaking of course. Fear is probably, more often than not, the best means of getting you out of a tight spot. Since that day I've never felt the need of any other weapons, or virtues for that matter.

The captain couldn't make up his mind, and his friends, who had come there expressly to wipe up my blood and play knucklebones with my dispersed teeth, had to content themselves with catching words in mid-air. The civilians who had come rushing, tingling with eagerness at the news of an impending
corrida
were looking very dangerous. Since I didn't know exactly what I was talking about, but only that I'd better keep it lyrical at all costs, I held on to the captain's hands and stared at an imaginary point in the cottony fog through which the
Admiral Bragueton
was making its way, puffing and spitting from one turn of the propeller to the next. Finally, to wind up my harangue, I ventured to raise one arm above my head, releasing one of the captain's hands, but only one, and flung myself into my peroration: "Gentlemen: Aren't we all agreed that brave men will always come to an understanding in the end? So damn it all, Vive la France! Vive la France!" That was Sergeant Branledore's gimmick. And once again it worked. That was the only time France ever saved my life, otherwise the opposite has been closer to the truth. I observed a moment's hesitation in my audience?after all, it's hard for an officer, however ill-disposed, to strike a civilian who has just shouted "Vive la France!" as loud as I had. That hesitation saved me.

I reached into the group of officers, grabbed two arms at random, and invited everybody to come to the bar and drink to my health and our reconciliation. The heroes resisted for barely a minute, and then we drank for two hours. But the females, silent and increasingly disappointed, kept their eyes on us. Through the portholes of the bar I saw the obstinate schoolteacher-pianist prowling like a hyena, surrounded by other females. The bitches had a strong suspicion that I'd conned myself out of the trap, and were determined to nab me at the next turn. Meanwhile, men among men, we went on drinking under the useless but stupefying electric fan, which since the Canaries had been wearing itself out churning the tepid, cottony atmosphere. Still, I had to keep up my verve and spout the kind of talk ... nothing too difficult ... that would appeal to my new friends. For fear of putting my foot in it, I overflowed with patriotic admiration, and kept asking those heroes, one after another, for stories and more stories of colonial feats of arms. War stories, like dirty stories, appeal to the military of all countries. The best way to make a sort of peace, a fragile armistice to be sure, but precious all the same, with men, officers or not, is to let them bask and wallow in childish self-glorification. There's no such thing as intelligent vanity. It's an instinct. And you'll never find a man who is not first and foremost vain. The role of admiring doormat is about the only one that one man is glad to tolerate in another. With these soldiers I had no need to tax my imagination. It was enough to appear impressed. It's easy to ask for more and more war stories. Those boys were crammed full of them, It was like the good old hospital days. After each story I made sure to express my approbation, as Branledore had taught me, with a glowing phrase: "Splendid! Why, that deserves to go down in History!" There's a formula that can't be beat! Little by little, the group I had wormed my way into decided that I was all right. They started telling the same kind of cock-and-bull war stories as I had heard in the old days and later dished out myself in imagination contests with my pals in the hospital. Except their setting was different, their fairy tales happened in the jungles of the Congo instead of the Vosges or Flanders.

Once Captain Frémizon, the one who a moment before had volunteered to purge the ship of my putrid presence, perceived that I listened more attentively than anyone else, he began to give me credit for no end of delightful qualties. His arterial flux seemed attenuated by the effect of my original praises, his vision cleared, his bloodshot, alcoholic eyes even began to sparkle despite his besotted state, and the sprinkling of doubts about his own worth, which he had somehow conceived deep within him and which assailed him in times of extreme depression, were for a time adorably dissipated by the miraculous effect of my intelligent and pertinent comments.

No doubt about it, I was a creator of euphoria! I had them slapping their thighs for all they were worth! I alone knew how to make life worth living in spite of the agonizing humidity!

Wasn't I the most inspired of listeners?

As we were thus shooting the shit, the
Admiral Bragueton
began to slow down, she seemed to be making hardly any headway; not an atom of breeze around us, we must have been skirting the coast, moving as sluggishly as if the sea had been molasses. The sky above us was molasses too, a black, viscous mass that I eyed hungrily. I'd have liked best to get back into the night, even sweating and groaning, no matter how! Frémizon went on and on with his stories, I had the impression that land was near, but my plan for escape filled me with alarm ... Gradually our conversation ceased to be military and became first ribald, then frankly filthy, and in the end so incoherent that it was hard to keep it going. One after another of the company gave up and fell asleep, crushed under the weight of their snores, a nasty kind of sleep that scraped the caverns of their noses. That was the time to get away. One must never miss up on those remissions of cruelty that nature manages to impose on the most vicious and aggressive of this world's organisms. By then we were anchored a short distance from the coast. All we could see of the shore was some lanterns moving back and forth.

Very quickly a hundred bobbing canoes full of screeching black men came crowding around the ship. There were black men all over the decks, offering their services. In a few seconds I carried the few bundles I had done up in secret to the gangway and slipped down it behind one of the boatmen, whose features and movements were almost entirely hidden from me by the darkness. At the bottom of the steps, on a level with the plashing water, I wondered anxiously where we were going.

"Where are we?" I asked.

"At Bambola-Fort-Gono,"[44] the shadow answered.

We pushed off and paddled hard. To make us go faster I helped him.

I had time to get one last look at my menacing fellow passengers. In the light of the cabin lamps, laid low by apathy and gastritis, they grunted and fermented in their sleep. Bloated and sprawling, they all looked alike now, officers, civil servants, engineers, and traders, pimply, potbellied and swarthy, intermingled and more or less identical. Dogs look like wolves when they're asleep.

A few moments later I was back on land. Under the trees the night was thicker than ever, and behind the night lay all the complicities of silence.

In this colony of Bambola-Bragamance the Governor reigned triumphant over everybody. His soldiers and civil servants hardly dared breathe when he deigned to let his eyes fall on them.

Far below these notables, the resident traders seemed to thieve and thrive more easily than in Europe. Not one coconut, not one peanut in the entire colony evaded their brigandage. As fatigue and ill health overcame the civil servants, it began to dawn on them that they'd been had, that all they had gained by being sent out here was braid and forms to fill out and very little pay. So naturally they looked at the traders with a bilious eye. The military faction, even more dull witted than the other two, subsisted on a diet of colonial glory, washed down by quantities of quinine and miles of red tape.

Understandably, a life spent waiting for the thermometer to go down made everybody more and more cantankerous. The consequence was private and collective quarrels, preposterous and interminable, between the military and the administration, between the administration and the traders, between these two in temporary alliance and the military, between the whole lot of them and the black population, and finally between blacks and blacks. The little energy that hadn't been sapped by malaria, thirst, and the heat was consumed by hatred so fierce and deep seated that it wasn't uncommon for these colonials to drop dead on the spot, poisoned by themselves like scorpions.

Nevertheless, this virulent anarchy was held in check, like crabs in a basket, by a hermetic police structure. The civil servants griped in vain, for the Governor, to keep his colony in subjection, was able to recruit all the moth-eaten mercenaries he needed, impoverished blacks driven to the coast by debts, defeated by the law of supply and demand, and needful of something to eat. These recruits were taught the law and how to admire the Governor. The Governor seemed to wear all the gold in his treasury on his uniform ... in the blazing sunshine, it surpassed belief, even without the plumes.