Who Slashed Celanire's Throat? (2 page)

Karamanlis found him lounging on his bed, buried in a magazine on India. The news did not interest him one bit. Monsieur Desrussie was dead? Good riddance! One bastard less! The oblate? She was lovely, was she? He was not attracted to women, in love with and secretly troubled by the bodies of his students and all those boys colonization had produced: kitchen boys, laundry boys, and tailor's apprentices.

Only once had he crossed the line. He had been a student in his last year at a home for half-castes. Bokar was also the son of a senior administrator and a Toukolor, Awa Tall. His father had left for France before he was born. His mother, remarried to a traditional chief, visited him from time to time, carrying on her head a calabash of
pastels
or a jar of
lakh
that sweetened the dull routine at the home. She always brought her other children, all perfectly black, who cast pitying looks at their illegitimate half-brother. Hakim's and Bokar's beds were next to each other. The inevitable had to happen. There followed months of wild, passionate happiness. Then the love nest was discovered. Either they gave the game away, or else the boys in the dormitory guessed something was going on. Hakim was dispatched to the recently pacified territory of Ivory Coast, while Bokar was left to languish in a school way out in the bush on the edge of the desert. It was here he was to commit suicide several years later. Hakim received the news of his death like a slap in the face. Ever since, there had never been a lack of opportunities—mainly French civil servants come to bury their youth under the sun in the colonies. But Hakim had never given in. He knew he would bring death to those who got too close. He cut short Karamanlis's shallow chatter by suggesting they go and listen to some music at the compound of King Koffi Ndizi.

Under the terms of a treaty signed two years earlier, the French had paid King Koffi Ndizi one hundred rolls of assorted fabrics, one hundred barrels of gunpowder, one hundred shotguns, two sacks of tobacco, six two-hundred-liter casks of brandy, five hats, a mirror, an organ, four cases of liqueurs, and three skeins of coral. In exchange for all that, they whittled down his power. Fortunately for Koffi Ndizi, his fetish continued to strike awe in his subjects, who, among other things, made him offerings of concubines, oxen, sheep, and fowl. His compound was a maze of courtyards and huts into which at least one hundred and fifty people were squeezed. Of an evening, his slaves served roast meat and carp fried in palm oil to almost a thousand admirers while his griots delighted the ear with music from
koras
and
balaphons
. On this particular evening nobody was in a mood to listen to them. Nor even badmouth the French, which was normally their favorite occupation. Two subjects dominated the conversation: the sudden death of Monsieur Desrussie and the arrival of the oblate. On the surface, the two events were unconnected. However, on second thought, who gained to profit from this death? Wasn't it the oblate who very likely would be appointed director of the Home? A woman, director of the Home, and a black woman into the bargain? Come now!

Exasperated, Hakim pushed his way to the royal dais. Koffi Ndizi was overweight, susceptible to inexplicable bouts of suffocation that alarmed him a lot. Like Hakim, he was in no mood to listen to the nonsense from his entourage. Three nights in a row, Zokpou, his senior fetish priest, had had dreams of ill-omen. The first night he had seen vultures swooping down on an impala and devouring it raw. On the second night an anthill over fifteen feet tall had suddenly crumbled into dust. On the third night the Ebrié lagoon was dyed red with blood. Zokpou had concluded that a succession of moons, portents of strange events, would be seen in the kingdom. But what would happen, he did not know. He did know, however, that for once it would not be the fault of the French. Besides, what more could they do? They had already turned Koffi Ndizi into a toothless, maneless lion.

Koffi Ndizi motioned to Hakim to approach. He liked the schoolteacher, always ready to run down his enemies, the French. He was well familiar with his tendencies, but was easygoing, having groped a good many boys in his youth. Together with incest, sodomy is a king's privilege. For two years he had been plotting unsuccessfully to overthrow Thomas de Brabant, the governor's deputy, a poker-faced individual who had two obsessions: building roads and railways. Next to the Romans, de Brabant would say, the French were the people who best realized the importance of roads. He was responsible for countless fathers being snatched from their homes to break stones under the sun. Koffi Ndizi and Hakim had tried to hide a mamba in a drawer of his desk and bribe his cook to poison his meals. Once they had buried a doll in his image in the entrails of a black cat. Nothing doing!

Hakim sat down on a corner of the mat he was offered and recounted his latest readings, for the king, however much a king, could neither read nor write. In India, the British did not attack the traditional authorities. They formed alliances and governed hand in hand with the local powers.

Why did the French have to put everything to the fire and the sword?

Alix Pol-Roger, the governor, had gone to negotiate a site for installing a French presence in the northern territories, and Thomas de Brabant had replaced him. Given his character, this suited him perfectly. He had the power to decide, resolve, and take the law into his own hands. Cases were no longer referred to the native courts. Thomas meddled in the most sordid family affairs and poked his nose into the most tangled legal issues of land ownership. That very morning he was struggling with a problem. What a piece of bad luck! Monsieur Desrussie was dead! He was an unsavory character. But useful. Who was going to look after the children in the Home now? The officials who had not yet taken their place in the graveyard were overloaded with work. Recruit a director from the
metropole?
Out of the question! The ministry refused to spend a cent on the new colony. He thought he ought to walk over to the Home and settle any remaining business. He donned his pith helmet, grabbed his umbrella, striped in the colors of his country's flag, and headed out.

Thomas de Brabant had been appointed to the Ivory Coast three years ago. Like the bulk of the administration, he had been transferred from Grand-Bassam to Adjame-Santey and missed the ocean breeze and the smell of salt of the former capital. The Ivory Coast had been his first posting on graduating third from the school for senior officials for France's overseas territories. Aged twenty-nine, he was married, but had had to leave his wife behind. The colonies, which are already hard on men, are lethal for women. The females of the species become dried, parched, and finally wilt. Charlotte, then, had remained on the fourth floor of a handsome building on the avenue Henri-Martin in Paris, the Brabant family being extremely well-to-do. During his annual leave, Thomas had returned to perform his conjugal duty, and ever since, with the faraway Charlotte and little Ludivine in his thoughts, he never forgot to take his quinine. His high position prevented him, so he thought, from having affairs with African women. As a result, he slept alone, eaten up with all kinds of desires, for the very women who were off-limits had a certain troubling effect on him.

It had been raining, of course, since morning. At four in the afternoon the sky skimmed so low, it was almost dark. A scarlet stream surged down the middle of the winding track, and Thomas had not walked more than a few yards before his high leather boots were covered in mud. A soaked flag wrapped around a bamboo mast signaled the school next to the church. Despite this patriotic rag, Thomas knew full well what was going on behind the hedge of seccos. His spies had informed him of what Hakim was teaching his older pupils, and the entire mission had him under surveillance. As soon as they had collected enough evidence against him, he would be shooed out! In one clean sweep! Never mind he was an administrator's bastard! At that very moment Hakim emerged from the school, surrounded by a group of young boys. With his jute bag folded into a hood over his head and his crumpled clothes, he looked anything but a scholar with a particular appreciation for the philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment. Thomas and Hakim avoided each other's gaze and continued on their way, one toward the Home, the other walking down to the lagoon and the king's compound.

The Home for Half-Castes on the plateau of Adjame-Santey was a one-story building in a sorry condition. Yet it had been built according to the plans of the famous architect Sebastien Depelchin, who had set an example by abandoning there a dozen of his café-au-lait offspring. Behind the main building stood the house of the late director and his widow, one of the few converted Ebriés. The living room, transformed into a mortuary, was deserted except for a group of officials' wives feigning affliction. The widow was sobbing noisily on the breast of a young stranger who was very black of skin and whose hair was not crinkled but straight, brushed into a chignon and twisted into a long braid as thick as your arm. Dressed in the European manner, a black silk polka-dot scarf was wrapped around her neck. Her full lips were painted mauve, her eyelids blue. Yet all this makeup was too garish, as if it had been smeared on by the hand of a novice. Thomas was wondering who she could be when she introduced herself: Celanire Pinceau, arrived the day before. He wasn't expecting anything like this. The oblate, who was the talk of Adjame-Santey, looked like a hetaera. She simpered in a French, perfumed here and there with an exotic accent and punctuated with unusual expressions. Anybody would have been struck by her color. For she came from a remote French colony, Guadeloupe. She had lost both her parents,
maman
and papa, when she was small. So she had been taken in by the Sisters of Charity and raised under their care in Paris. She owed her entire education to them: certificate of higher education; diploma for general and religious instruction. And so on. And so on. She had always been at a loss to understand why for three centuries the missionaries had passed Africa by, sailing around the continent, hardly stopping, on their way to the Indies, China, and Japan. Fortunately, the African Missionary Society had been founded and set up a women's branch. She had thus been able to fulfill her dream: to spread the Holy Name of God on this destitute continent. Thomas, doubting by
nature, wondered immediately what she could be hiding behind this inane speech. Her eyes, which were burning into him, contradicted the platitudes coming out of her mouth. She couldn't care less about Africa, evangelism, and her vocation! She had everything she needed to obtain whatever she wanted. Her voice turned beseeching: what was to become of her, now that her director had passed on so unfortunately? Was she going to be sent back to Paris? No, of course not, no, no, Thomas hastened to add. She would take over from Monsieur Desrussie. His mind was made up. He had not seen her references, but apparently they were impeccable. He would speak to the governor as soon as he got back. She could put her mind to rest!

Meanwhile, summoned by the king, Hakim was entering Koffi Ndizi's compound. Locked away in his private quarters, the latter was conversing through an interpreter with a man draped in a burnoose, a dress seldom seen in this coastal region: Diamagaram, a Muslim fetish priest, come down from Kong. When Hakim entered, Koffi Ndizi dismissed the interpreter, since the schoolteacher spoke perfect Malinke. Seated with the Holy Book open in front of him, Diamagaram had also made a cabalistic drawing in a tray filled with sand and was deep in concentration. He could see that evil spirits had recently set foot in Adjame-Santey, terribly malevolent spirits who had crossed over from the other side of the ocean. This was particularly surprising, since spirits never travel over water. They are frightened by this moving expanse inhabited by cold-blooded creatures, and you can hear their roars of anger and helplessness from the shore as they watch their prey escaping them. If they had set foot in Adjame-Santey, this meant they had mounted a “horse.” That's the word for a human who obeys their every wish and who can be recognized by a sign. The aim therefore is to discover this sign, to find this “horse” and stop it from causing any harm, not an easy task. Diamagaram confessed that he had chased a “horse” in Bondoukou for months bearing a tiny sign on the body: two toes joined together. Getting the better of a “horse” requires extraordinary sacrifices. Not your ordinary chickens. Neither sheep nor even oxen. No, we're talking albinos. Children born with a caul. Twins. Prepubescent girls. Koffi Ndizi made it known he would do anything. He stared at the fetish priest, visibly impressed by his gift of the gab, his heavy string of beads, and his thick Koran.

At that moment Kwame Aniedo, the heir to the throne, a magnificent sixteen-year-old specimen, crawled in on all fours, as was the custom. He begged forgiveness from his father for daring to disturb him. But this too was an urgent matter. Three royal concubines, one leaving behind her an infant still at her breast, had left the compound without the queen mother's permission. They had refused to say where they had spent the afternoon. How many whiplashes should they be given?

 

At six in the morning, before the sun had opened its lazy eyes, before the women had lit the wood fires and heated the water for the men to wash, a piece of news was flying from mouth to mouth. The oblate, whom Thomas de Brabant had just appointed director of the Home for Half-Castes while awaiting the governor's approval, was recruiting. There was nothing extraordinary about recruiting! The French never stopped. They recruited to build roads, bridges over rivers, railways, wharfs, sawmills, brick factories, and lighthouses. The surprising fact about this new case was that she was recruiting only girls, and what's more, she was paying them. She handed each of them a small sum of money on the spot—enough to buy wrappers and head ties at the CFAO company store, soap, perfume, and talcum powder at Karamanlis's.