After two weeks it was obvious that Celanire couldn’t care less about the letter Koffi Ndizi had sent her. This was another pretext for deliberation and consultation. The queen mother was outraged. The elders lost their saliva. Some of them called for a punitive raid on the Home, just like in the good old days. But how would they go about it? Nobody knew. As for the fetish priests, they advised on caution as they could not understand who this oblate was. In order to clarify matters, shouldn’t they get her to undergo a trial by ordeal? If she passed the test and came out unscathed, they would know she was a normal person with nothing on her conscience. Okay, but how could they approach her?
Finally, Koffi Ndizi entrusted Hakim with a mission that was to be a last resort. This time he would go in person to the Home and plead on behalf of the kingdom. Hakim obeyed, with heavy heart.
When he arrived at the Home, Celanire was teaching in her classroom. Madame Desrussie showed him into an office on the second floor. The view was magical. Beneath the balcony the garden stretched away like a priceless carpet embellished with freshly planted Madagascar periwinkles, coral hibiscus, and oleander already in full bloom. The long rainy season was drawing to a close. The sky was losing its leaden color. If the place was in fact a bordello, it hid it well under its aspect of a Garden of Eden. When Celanire appeared, Hakim did not recognize her. She was wearing a dress of tiny blue-and-yellow squares, buttoned from top to bottom, with a buttercup-yellow neckerchief. Her hair had been braided into two plaits. Without makeup she looked eighteen at the most. She was no longer the sensual vamp, but poetically poignant. While they drank mint tea, she talked of her passion for Africa. In her opinion there was only one dark side to the beauty of its civilization: the treatment of women. Was he aware that the Africans mutilated the female genitals? They excised the clitoris and the labia. Then they sewed up the folds, leaving a narrow passage for the urine and the menstrual blood. Hakim’s imagination had seldom ventured into such places. Ill at ease, he stammered that this practice was the equivalent of male circumcision. But it was an intolerable aggression, she exclaimed indignantly, perpetrated against women in order to control their sexuality. Then she changed the subject and began to describe the great solitude of her life. She had never known her true parents and was nothing but a foster child. Oh, she had nothing against her foster parents, especially her papa. But it was tough not knowing the sperm that fathered her or the womb that carried her. At Adjame-Santey, she felt an outsider. Thomas de Brabant possessed her body but not her heart. Stunned by her candor, Hakim was rendered speechless. She then turned to interrogate him, and he heard himself confiding and revealing all his childhood troubles. He too felt an outsider in Adjame-Santey. Moreover, he had always felt an outsider in Africa. In short, one hour later, furious with himself, he was back on the path taking him home. Not only had he not breathed a word about the mission Koffi Ndizi had entrusted him with, but he had promised Celanire he would pay her many more visits.
Had she bewitched him?
3
The rains had let up now for two weeks. The hedges of croton bordering the houses of the Europeans could finally lift their heads. The clumps of guinea grass sprouted green along the embankments. Behind the fences of secco the animals frolicked for joy. Only Koffi Ndizi’s compound remained unaffected by this springlike revival. One night Tanella, a concubine of Mawourou, the king’s uncle on his mother’s side, had stuck a knife in his heart while he was asleep. Once the deed was done, she had fled.
Two years earlier Tanella had been one of the gifts, together with the fowl, dried fish, and richly woven wrappers, the village of Attonblan had offered Koffi Ndizi. She had never been much to his liking, and he had left her to Kwame Aniedo, who for a time had used her for his pleasure. One day, while she was pounding plantains in one of the courtyards, Mawourou had caught sight of her fifteen-year-old breasts. Mawourou had fathered a dozen sons, already fathers to sons themselves; but he was still so troubled by the desires of the flesh that he employed an army of fetish priests to concoct his aphrodisiacs. Tanella’s crime was only discovered the next morning when the blood that had trickled out under the doors of Mawourou’s hut coagulated into a red crust in the very middle of the courtyard. Murder was so rare an occurrence in the region that people first attributed the gaping hole in the old man’s heart to a fit of anger by the spirits. Then the truth became obvious. The evil deed had been caused by a human hand. Some women who had got up early recalled having seen Tanella running away in blood-soaked clothes and remembered she had complained of Mawourou on many occasions. His breath was fetid. He had trouble getting a hard-on; he beat her. They searched for her throughout the compound, in the vicinity of the lagoon, and even as far as the forest. A few men ran along the road to the village of Attonblan but came back empty-handed. Nobody had seen Tanella. At day’s end the rumor spread that she had found refuge at the Home for Half-Castes. So the widows, the children, and the friends of Mawourou, all those who had known him while he was alive and all those who had nothing better to do, assembled into a crowd and marched off to fetch her back from the Home.
The procession slowly wound its way through Adjame-Santey, where the population, struck with horror, commented on the terrible turn of events. Karamanlis watched from his store as he saw Hakim and his pupils bringing up the rear of the cortege. He eyed him scornfully. So there he was a “liberated” young man taking the side of a lascivious old man, abuser of young girls, who after all had only reaped what he sowed. On reaching the Palace of Justice (a fine name for a clay hut), the procession swelled with all the idle bystanders and onlookers who happened to be around. On the outskirts of Adjame-Santey the crowd quickened its pace without really knowing why, perhaps because night was approaching. The sky was growing dark. Soon the spirits would be on the prowl. In fact, much of the crowd did not really want Tanella to be put to death, the punishment for such a crime. They were marching with the others to demonstrate quite simply that it was time, high time, the French and their henchmen, governors, priests and oblates, left them to their customs and went home. Even the women who, deep in their hearts, were sympathetic toward Tanella, understandably tired of surrendering her youth night after night to the fantasies of an old man, were convinced that a shadowy past in its death throes was preferable to the future these foreigners had in store for them. When the crowd came in sight of the Home, they were surprised to find rows of militia from a neighboring camp pointing their guns at them. Why? The crowd hesitated and began to retreat in disorder. The fearful fled, predicting disaster. The more courageous began to throw rocks and stood their ground. With hackles up, the head of the militia barked a number of syllables that nobody could understand. He barked again. Then his men obeyed. And opened fire.
After the shots rang out, three bodies lay on the ground, including two of Hakim’s pupils, the ten-year-olds Senanou and Dabla. Plus a dozen wounded.