He therefore plucked up his courage. To accept Celanire’s offer was the last thing he wanted, but it was the only thing preventing him from descending into destitution.
With his mind made up, he set off for the Home one Sunday. Mass had just finished. The pupils, in freshly starched white uniforms edged in green, were filing out of the chapel, chaperoned by their monitors, now rid of their nurses’ garb and dressed in identical wrappers with identical motifs, for apparently Celanire liked her surroundings to be symmetrical. Hakim took the arm she offered him. What a chatterbox! She never stopped for one minute. Without waiting to get her breath back, she told him how she had trained a choir to sing the Beatus Vir and the Nulla in Mundo Pax Sincera by Vivaldi, her favorite composer. The choir had been invited to Grand-Bassam in a month’s time for the inception of the new bishop. Considering her four pupils, one of whom was a girl, had passed the native certificate for elementary studies and were preparing to become grade-five office clerks, she had every reason to be proud. Hakim remained silent. In Bingerville gossip had begun to circulate openly about the true nature of the Home. Some of the nurses whispered that once the children had been put to bed, they were paired off with those nice, gentle white officers and soldiers who gave them all sorts of presents and caresses. No comparison with those rough, lascivious Africans. Never an unkind word, a clout, or a thrashing! The first French words they learned therefore, were “cherí” or “mon amour.”
Celanire and Hakim entered a drawing room furnished in exquisite taste. There she whirled around to show off her costume. For she was dressed in a fashion he had never seen before. A full gown of rich, dark red silk was gathered at the waist over a white lace petticoat with three flounces. Her neck was encased in a collaret of frilled lawn similar to the ruffs portrayed in old engravings. Her hair was frizzed out, rolled into coquette bobs over her ears. She swamped him with explanations in her self-satisfaction. This Guadeloupean costume was called a matador gown. She had given it a personal touch by adding the collaret and leaving out the madras head tie. The traditional jewelry was also missing — the gold-bead choker and the earrings. Suddenly she stopped her hollow talk, and her face took on an expression of reproach. He had put off accepting her offer, and now Betti Bouah had let him down. Didn’t he realize that once the Africans had hoisted themselves up level with the whites, they would prove to be even more wicked? Envious, that’s what they were, only set on taking their masters’ place. Colonization would be followed by worse events, and the name neocolonialism would be invented to describe them. Hakim said his mea culpa. He now wanted to turn the page and start working for her as quickly as possible. What would she like him to do? At that moment he bravely turned to face her.
Celanire stared at him like a cat about to devour a mouse or a python about to swallow its prey, before uncoiling itself to digest it in voluptuous pleasure. She stretched out her arm and stroked his neck, winding a lock of his hair around one of her fingers. Hakim stammered out the terms of her letter as a reminder. She had promised him: no love, no sex. She laughed, revealing her white teeth and blue-black gums. And he had believed her? Only a fool would trust the words of a woman, especially if she were in love! She edged closer to him and whispered in his ear. She knew of his preferences, his desire for Kwame Aniedo. Nothing shocking about that. Everyone does what he likes with his body. She herself swung both ways, as the popular saying goes. But let her show him how she could get him to like other things than boys. Thereupon she grabbed his shirt and unbuttoned it. It was this offhand manner, this way of hers of treating him like a sex object, that infuriated Hakim. He shoved her away brutally and hammered her breasts. They rolled over on the floor. As agile as an eel, she climbed on top of him and pressed her mouth against his. Disgusted, he felt sucked in by this dank cavern. He reversed the situation, nailed her under him, and in his rage, grabbed her by the neck as if he wanted to strangle her. His fingers got caught in her collaret, ripped it off, and threw it away. She uttered a shriek and clasped her hands to her throat while her eyes dimmed, like a dampened firebrand. He remained speechless, stunned by what he had uncovered.
A monstrous scar.
A purplish, rubberlike tourniquet, thick as a roll of flesh, repoussé, stitched and pockmarked, wound around her neck. It was as if her neck had been slashed on both sides, then patched up and the flesh pulled together by force, oozing lumps all the way around.
While Celanire’s eyes sprang back to life and glowed wickedly, Hakim ran for the door without further ado. The recreation yard was deserted, since the pupils were back in the refectory and the garden.
For the remainder of the day Hakim stayed holed up in his room. So the superstition was true. Celanire was a “horse,” and her mark was hidden on her neck. It was this extraordinary scar he had seen with his own two eyes. Consequently, he was to be the next victim: his death was foretold. Would he too be stung by a mysterious spider? Devoured by man-eating lions? How would it happen? How? He sweated and shook with fright all over. When night fell, he could not stand its darkness. He imagined the circle of trees around the house to be the lair of mysterious creatures. He could hear them hiss, murmur, and shriek. He ran to Njiri’s, where they served palm wine and akpetseshie smuggled in from the Gold Coast. But nothing could deaden memory and conscience like the white man’s liquor: gin, brandy, and absinthe.
The following morning he was stumbling out of bed in a daze when the widow Desrussie knocked on his door again. A third letter from Celanire. The woman certainly had no sense of shame; once more she apologized. Could he really be angry with her? Wasn’t he flattered that a woman desired him so violently? But that wasn’t the point of her letter. He had discovered her painful secret. Her slashed throat. She begged him to come so that she could explain. Hakim thought he smelled a rat. Celanire was cajoling him the better to smother him. He tore the letter up into a thousand pieces and did not trouble to reply.
From that day on he lived on borrowed time. The yelp of a dog, the howl of a monkey, or the scurry of a rat would make him jump. At night, the rustle of an insect or a bat beating its wings as it tangled in the straw of the roof made him go crazy. On the surface it was the same routine. Every morning he watched the same sun rise above the greenery of Bingerville. Three days out of five he climbed into the same outboard, made the rounds of the same suppliers of palm oil and kernels, and loaded his booty onto the same dugouts. The remainder of the week was spent in one of the warehouses where the oil was extracted and poured into casks to be shipped to Grand-Bassam. When he returned home of an evening, he had to help Kwame Aniedo as well as overcome his fatigue and his nagging sexual desire. Yet these routine gestures were transformed by the fear that had wormed its way inside him, that had crept into every corner of his being and tainted every second of his life. The young man who once mocked superstition now seriously considered consulting a fetish priest. After the death of their sworn enemy, the Father Templar, Diamagaram and the others had reoccupied Felix Koffi’s compound as if nothing had happened. They continued to work against the French but could not prevent the king from giving the Home more land. Celanire had turned it into an experimental garden where she intended planting coffee and cacao, those new plants of which the French had great expectations.