As for Tanella, her life dragged on in sadness and came to an even sadder end. As she was one of the few “women of letters” of her time — let us not forget, this was the term for those who could read and write in the white man’s language — she was hired as a schoolmistress for the mission. This unusual status aroused the lust of Chief Bogui Yesso from the region of Abreby, who hastened to make her one of his wives. But he married her merely for the sake of adding a woman of letters to his harem. During the first year he paraded her around like an expensive piece of jewelry. Then he abandoned her in one of the huts of the women’s compound and neglected her to such an extent that she turned to Catholicism and became deeply religious. Catholicism in fact had spread like wildfire along the Alladian shores. It was conversion upon conversion, christening upon christening. The catechists were too many to be counted. Churches sprang up like mushrooms. At first modest buildings made of bamboo, they were now built of prefabricated materials shipped from France. Tanella, christened Marie-Pierre, died giving birth to her third daughter, for she could only produce babies of the vagina variety. In fact, she had stopped living many years before that — once Celanire had left her.
The day before Tanella’s death — when she was already in her death throes — a dog such as had never been seen before in Abreby, a black hound with gleaming jaws, as tall as a heifer, as muscular as a bull, appeared in the compound. It lay down in front of the dying woman’s hut and uttered the most frightful yelps, groans, and whines. Africans have no particular liking for dogs, that’s a fact, and this one received a hail of mortars and a volley of machetes. Yet nothing would make it budge. If it retreated a few feet, it was only to return to the attack a little later and reconquer lost ground. During the wake ceremony, the commotion it made almost outdid the wails of the professional mourners. It kept watch during the church ceremony. It followed the cortege to the cemetery and stretched out on the black-and-
white-tiled grave that Bogui Yesso, still enamored with prestige, had built for his family. It only vanished at nightfall as suddenly as it had arrived, and nobody ever saw it again.
The Alladian fetish priests concluded it must have been the messenger of a spirit — a spirit far away who was lamenting the death of Tanella.
The inhabitants of Bingerville have nothing good to say about Thomas de Brabant either. He is not credited with any accomplishment. What surprised everyone was that once he was married, he lost interest in everything, he who was so authoritarian, meddled in everything, laid down the law, pontificated and exasperated Africans and Europeans alike. He lost interest in the roads, the bridges, the wharfs, and the railroad. He let his wife wear the pants, as the rather vulgar saying goes. He only stopped by his office long enough to absentmindedly sign the papers his secretary presented to him. At the same time his appearance changed. The former dandy now dressed any old how. His skin grew flabby; he lost the thick black hair he had liked to oil and became potbellied. In short, from a dashing man of authority he turned into a fat stick-in-the-mud.
They discovered the key to this transformation when they found out he was imitating another Thomas, Thomas de Quincey, whose book Confessions of an English Opium-Eater Celanire had given him for his thirtieth birthday. Like him, he was drinking laudanum. Under the pretext of treating a toothache, he had vialsful shipped from Grand-Bassam.
Morning, noon, and night he gorged himself on this lovely, amaranthine tincture.
Cayenne: 1906
Hakim thought Guiana looked like the Ivory Coast. Same sweltering forests. Green and more green everywhere you looked. Rivers, now in slow motion, now suddenly raging torrents. Only the ocean was different, swamplike, without a line of breakers or rollers. Cayenne especially looked like Bingerville. The same smells of almond, mango, and palm trees. Here too seven months out of twelve the sky was like a wet rag oozing dirty water that overflowed the storm drains and soaked the streets. The houses of the administrators were identical. There were the same public buildings under their rusty roofs, the Governor’s Palace housed in an authentic Jesuit monastery, the bank and the transatlantic shipping company. In short, the same colonial ugliness encrusted amid the splendor of the forest like lice in a magnificent head of hair. The only difference: the buzzards, which ambled across the Place des Palmistes in Cayenne and perched on every available branch, were bigger and smellier than the African vultures. At first he couldn’t help comparing Cayenne to Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, where he had stayed weeks, perhaps months, perhaps years (it was all so muddled in his head) at the transportation camp. In contrast, Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni was a little jewel. The convicts had built such lovely little houses for the penitentiary administrators, they had christened it “Little Paris”! Men are such wonderful creatures! Even reduced to the scum of the earth, they continue to be artistic geniuses. They built magnificent edifices and designed and painted friezes, frescoes, and paneling. From the transportation camp Hakim should have been sent to the Ile Royale, one of the Iles du Salut. But the cells there were already overflowing. So they sent him to Cayenne, where he became, like so many others, a houseboy, a domestic. Houseboy to Monsieur Thénia, governor of the Banque de Guyane, who lived on the promontory at Saint-François. He did not know exactly when he began forgetting the charm of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni and started liking the wilder, rougher city of Cayenne. He knew the city inside out, from its mangrove swamps and grassy squares to its streets cluttered with handcarts and its magnificent clapboard facades. He wallowed in its few corners of sunlight, soaked up its trails of shadows, and got drunk on its stench. In short, he became attached to its atmosphere of gloom. The town only came to life at carnival time, but the gaiety didn’t suit it. Its smiles looked more like grimaces. Its bursts of laughter rang out like moans.
A few months after arriving in town, he was referred to a certain Papa Doc for a nagging dysentery. Papa Doc was doing time for rape of a minor, and his ten-year sentence had been commuted to life. He had built a shack made out of planks and corrugated iron within the prohibited zone along the seashore, but the authorities had turned a blind eye, since his reputation was known from Saint-Jean-du-Maroni to Mana, and from Ira-coubo to Organabo and Sinnamary. He was the living proof that saints ended up in the penal colony. On Devil’s Island he had treated the lepers. At Saint-Joseph he had cared for the insane. At Charvein he had saved the wardens and prisoners from epidemics of scurvy, yellow fever, and yellow jack. At the New Camp he had put the bedridden and the crippled back on their feet again and comforted the dying on their final journey. He cured every form of gut ache, even ankylostomiasis, which tears the intestines to shreds. And all that with remedies of his own invention. When he was on the Ile Royale they let him roam freely around the penitentiary, examining the plants with a makeshift magnifying glass, plucking and stuffing them into the bag he kept tied around his neck. He captured anacondas with his hands and made ointments out of their grease. Sometimes he could be seen braving the wrath of the ocean, defying the sharks, always lurking, attracted to the smell of meat from the slaughterhouse, and catching manta rays he would eviscerate on the spot. Then he would dry them, grind them, and pound them to make unguents, lotions, and poultices. At Cayenne he had not wanted to live like the former convicts who banded together out of common misery, pilfered by day, and slept in the marketplaces by night, where they quarreled, hurled insults at each other, and squabbled. He had continued to invent remedies and treat the “Creoles,” as the descendants of slaves were called, now free, yet worse off than they were during slavery, as was everyone else. Even the Indians and the Maroons, the Boshs, the Bonis, the Djukas, and the Saramakas came down from their villages to consult him. All of them put their trust in the power of his hands. He meted out his treatment free of charge or almost, in exchange for the joy of a little wild honey, a slice of grouper, an agouti, turtle eggs, or a gourd of cassava kwak. So from five in the morning the sick, dressed in identical rags, with skins of every hue, lined up in front of his door.