Suddenly, the silence was broken by a cacophony of sounds. Monkeys, bats, and all kinds of invisible insects called and responded to each other amid the tangle of branches. Celanire was not listening and not even looking at this strange landscape. She had not come to Africa to be a tourist and was lost in her daydreams. What was in store for her in the days to come? She went back over the years gone by. She had not liked Lyons, where her color signaled her presence like a beacon wherever she went, and she had constantly to be on her guard. She missed Paris. The convent of the Sisters of Charity was situated right on the rue de Vaugirard. Once she had closed behind her the heavy door studded with a cross, she found herself bang in the middle of the jungle of a big city — free to do whatever she liked. At night the cars roared and blinded passersby with their lights. Blacks in tuxedos lounged in piano bars. She had never revealed her secret escapades, and she became the Mother Superior’s favorite. She never raised her voice, quarreled, or said a wrong word. By no means meek, she abided by the rules. Once the classes in theology and general instruction were over, she took the nuns by surprise. They were expecting her to return straightaway to Guadeloupe. Instead of which she was going to take her time: revenge is a dish best eaten cold. She was sharpening her pretty pointed teeth one against the other.
Briefly passing through the light of a clearing, they plunged back into thick undergrowth. The trees were different. Gone were the ironwoods, the silk cotton kapok and rubber trees. You could sense the heavy hand of man on nature. Rows upon rows of oil palms followed one after the other, as rigid as soldiers marching. At the foot of the trees the carefully weeded soil was bleeding from its wounds. Then the sky reappeared, pricked with stars, and the porters began to run along a rough track.
Lights appeared in the distance, the sight of which seemed to put wings on their heels, and Adjame-Santey came into view. The tipoye began to jolt as if buffeted by the ocean’s waves. Indifferent to all this, Celanire sank into a semi-slumber until a commotion of excited voices awoke her. A troop of askaris, a comical sight with their legs swathed in strips of cotton fleece and tar-booshes askew, had almost collided with the porters. They were running in the opposite direction to announce some terrible news to the authorities in Grand-Bassam. Monsieur Desrussie, the director of the Home for Half-Castes, the very person Celanire had come to assist, had just passed from this life to the next. And how! He was about to make love to his new sixteen-year-old mistress when a giant spider hidden in the bedsheets had bitten him on his penis.
He had died on the spot!
People couldn’t get over it. Only the day before he had been roaming the streets of Adjame-Santey, leering at the teenage girls, his cane under his arm as was his habit. There was no doubt his wife, Rose, had had a hand in the matter, and was tired of wearing the horns. She must have finally found a good witch doctor. For there is no such thing as a natural death. Everything is the work of malicious spirits whom the artful know how to subjugate to their own advantage.
Celanire could not understand a word of what was going on around her. Yet she guessed that her destiny had just been given its first nudge in the right direction. She poured out her thanks to her Master.
Karamanlis the Greek was stunned. No later than yesterday morning he had sold three boxes of matches to Monsieur Desrussie. The latter had come in to shelter from the rain, in actual fact to complain about everything as he usually did, and Karamanlis had had to put up with yet another diatribe about the laziness of the Ebriés and their drunken habits.
He was about to mount his bicycle when he saw the porters come charging into town. Everyone knew who they were carrying and who was coming to live in Adjame-Santey. An oblate. In other words, a nun who was not quite a nun and had no right to be called “sister.” He craned his neck to get a glimpse of her and had this vision of a lovely face resting against a pillow of black silky hair. An emotion that he had not felt since leaving Athens stung his breast. It was as if the spider that had finished Monsieur Desrussie off had also attacked his heart. Pedaling awkwardly, he left what went by the name of town center, with its shops, the huts of the administrative services, the school, the church, and the bamboo buildings of the mission. He himself lived in a poto-poto neighborhood where cowpats looked as though they had been kneaded into huts. He had arrived in the Ivory Coast a few years earlier, drawn by stories of making a quick fortune from ivory and palm kernels that had replaced the slave traffic. Little did he know that the administration reserved its favors for the French companies, and there was no room for foreigners who massacred the language of Descartes. So he had done just about everything, even panning for gold in the kingdom of Assinie. In Adjame-Santey he made do with a small grocery store trading in dark leaf tobacco, loose sugar, sea salt, rock salt, and paraffin. He led a celibate life, since he did not have the means to contract a colonial marriage, lodging in his two rooms a friend who was even more destitute than he was, despite his attribution of “Mr. Philosophizer.” Jean Seydou, a monitor of native instruction at the mission, had forbidden any mention of the name Jean and, out of loathing for the French, claimed to be Muslim and renamed himself Hakim. He was very handsome, with his curly hair, the offspring of a Toukolor princess and a high-ranking white administrator of the colonies. One morning his father had left him in a home for half-castes before sailing back to Perigord. Such an act was especially cruel, since Jean, who was not yet Hakim, had accompanied him everywhere for eleven years, following him from post to post in every nook and cranny from Upper Senegal to Niger. Despite this cruel abandonment, Hakim managed to pass the native examination for elementary studies and was hired as a primary-school teacher by the mission in Bamako.
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.