Tropic Moon (9 page)

And the worse he felt, the more furiously and passionately he threw himself on Adèle. When he gripped her in his embrace, he asked himself questions that had no answers. Did he love her? What sort of love could she feel for him? Was he wronging her? Would he wrong her one of these days? Why had she killed Thomas? Why …

He didn't ask Adèle any questions. He didn't dare. He was afraid of her answers. He was crazy about her. When he wandered along the esplanade, he'd think about her naked body under her dress and he was filled with hatred for other men.

What really disturbed him was her gaze. For a while now, she'd been watching him, and it was too much! Even in the darkness of the room, holding her in his arms, he could feel her eyes fixed on the white blur of his face. She watched him during meals from the counter where she sat. She watched him when he was playing belote or cards. And there was a judgment to her look, an indulgent one perhaps, but a judgment for all that.

What did she think of him? That was what he wanted to know.

“You shouldn't drink Pernod. It doesn't do you any good.”

But he drank it anyway. Because he was wrong and she was right!

They'd had to wait for official papers to come from Paris before all the legal formalities could be concluded. The papers had arrived by boat five days earlier. Timar hadn't wanted to go down to the pier to get them. From his room he'd spotted the steamship from France pulling into the outer harbor. He'd followed the course of the launch as it made its way to the shore.

“Since the hotel has been sold, there's nothing to keep us from leaving as soon as tomorrow,” Adèle had said. “Just a day by flatboat and we'll be at the concession.”

But they hadn't left that day, or the day after, because Timar had thrown up difficulties, always finding an excuse, always slowing down the preparations.

He was furious. Adèle's eyes were fixed on him and he knew all too well what she was thinking. She thought he was scared, that now that it was time to leave Libreville he'd fallen prey to irrational panic, that he was hanging on to the little habits that had become his whole life. It was true. The café—which had seemed so hostile to begin with, which he had hated so much—he looked at it now through different eyes. He knew every last detail. Silly things seemed touching to him, like the native mask that hung on the pearl-gray wall. The mask was a glaring white. The wall had been whitewashed. The relationship between the two tones was remarkably fine and delicate.

Only the polished brass bar made him feel safe, since it was just like the ones in any provincial café in France, with the same bottles, the same aperitifs and liqueurs.

He was safe, but only for the length of his morning walk, when he'd pass through the market and pause for a moment to watch the fishermen pulling their boats onto the sand.

Conversation went on humming around their table in the café. From time to time Adèle, motionless, replied to someone's question. She had her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands, and she was keeping a close watch on Timar, who was going through cigarette after cigarette, angrily puffing out clouds of smoke.

“Have you already got a load for the German cargo ship that comes in next month?”

“Maybe,” Adèle would say.

And she waved away the cloud of smoke that lay like a smudge over Timar's face.

Bouilloux joked around, accentuating the grotesqueness of his foot-high white toque. He'd decked it out with a tricolored cockade.

“Allow me, dear friend, to pour you a glass of ambrosia. And how much does it cost me, this ambrosia? When I was a customer, I paid eighty francs a bottle. But now?”

Everyone laughed. Bouilloux, encouraged, thought he'd risk something obscene.

“Will madame be sleeping here tonight? With this young man? Boy, escort the prince and princess to their hall of mirrors!”

Timar was the only one who didn't laugh. And yet his discomfort was physical instead of moral, as if he'd taken a breath of polluted air. Sweat streamed down his forehead. He'd noticed that he sweated more than the others did, and he was ashamed of it. It seemed like a defect. Sometimes Adèle leaned over him in bed and wiped his chest off with a towel.

“How hot you are!”

Her body was hot, too, but the heat didn't have the same intensity to it. And her skin was always smooth.

“You'll see—you'll get used to it. When we're there …”

“There” was deep in the jungle, but it wasn't the jungle that scared him. Since he'd been in Libreville, he'd learned that wild animals didn't attack men, especially not white men; that fewer people died of snakebites than from being hit by lightning; and that the blacks out in the brush, the savage-looking ones, were actually the most docile of the lot.

Leopards, elephants, gorillas, gazelles, and crocodiles: every day, or nearly every day, hunters came in with their skins. Even the insects, the tsetse flies he had seen in the town, no longer terrified him much, and when he gave a start, it was purely instinctive.

No, he wasn't scared. It was just that he was being forced to leave Libreville, the hotel, the room with its bands of light and shadow, the red earth of the esplanade, the sea edged with palm trees—everything he hated, when you got down to it, including the Pernod-soaked card games and the calvados-fueled belote. They'd ended up forming a comfortable environment where he moved without effort, trusting his reflexes.

That was what was so precious—because he'd grown lazy through and through. He no longer shaved more than twice a week. Sometimes he stayed in one place for hours on end, staring straight ahead, thinking about nothing.

He'd left La Rochelle, which he'd loved, without giving it a thought; only when the train lurched into motion and his relatives began waving handkerchiefs had he felt a pang. And yet he couldn't manage to tear himself away from Libreville. He was stuck there. Seeing the boat in the outer harbor hadn't even made him want to leave, though he'd been depressed for days.

Everything disgusted him—especially himself. But his disgust, his listlessness, was something he needed. That was why he got so irritated when Adèle prolonged her steady gaze. She knew—and what she didn't know, she guessed.

Then how come she loved him, or was pretending to?

“I'm going to bed,” he said, getting up.

He looked at the guests. They were all drunk. Today he didn't need to wait until closing time. Adèle was no longer the boss. It was Bouilloux who would shut down the generator, lock the doors and shutters, and go upstairs last, a candle in his hand.

“Good night, gentlemen.”

Adèle rose when he did, and for the first time that night he felt satisfied. She'd made it seem entirely natural.

“Good-bye, friends!”

“Well, can't you give us a kiss? We're not going to see you again after you take off in the morning.”

She made the rounds of the men gathered there, extending her cheek to each one. The one-eyed man was so excited he stroked her breast when he kissed her. She pretended not to notice.

“Coming?” she asked, walking up to Timar.

They went upstairs; the bursts of conversation went on behind them in the loud café. They were still in the same room, where Timar had slept on his first day in Africa.

“You were in some mood tonight. Not feeling well?”

“Me? I feel fine.”

The same sequence of movements as on every other occasion: first she opened the mosquito net, then she smoothed down the sheet and plumped the pillows, after making sure the bed was free of scorpions or small snakes. At last she took off her dress the way she always did.

“We'll have to be up at five to get there before nightfall.”

Timar took off his tie and looked at himself in the mirror. The mirror was dirty and the light from the candle weak. It was the puffiness around his eyes that made his reflection seem especially sinister.

He thought about Eugène, who'd been twice as strong as he was, and how he'd come down right in the middle of the party, his voice still not quite reduced to a croak, to say that snail fever was killing him.

He turned and saw Adèle naked. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, taking off her shoes.

“You're not getting undressed?”

At that precise moment, he thought, “Eugène is dead, but she's still here!”

He didn't draw any conclusions. It was better to leave things vague. He felt frightened and superstitious: he would go up there with her and, like Eugène, he would die; then, with someone else, maybe in this very room …

He took off his clothes and walked toward the bed.

“You're not going to put it out?”

He walked back to snuff out the candle.

“What time did you say?” he asked, making the bed frame creak.

“Five o'clock.”

“Did you set the alarm?”

He turned his back to her, sought out the familiar hollow in the pillow, felt Adèle's hot flesh against his. She didn't say anything. He didn't, either. Not wanting to be the first to speak, he pretended to be asleep, but his eyes were open and his senses alert. He knew that she wasn't sleeping anymore than he was, that she was lying on her back, staring at the grayish glow of the ceiling.

It went on for a long time, so long that he almost fell asleep. He was just nodding off when he heard her voice say, “Night, Joe.”

He didn't flinch, didn't move. It hadn't sounded exactly like Adèle's voice. Something had changed. Some three minutes passed before he felt the bed shake slightly, and suddenly he was awake again. He found himself sitting up, peering into the darkness.

“You're crying?”

She sobbed in response, as if he'd finally permitted her to show her feelings.

“Go to sleep,” she said through her tears. “Go on!”

She forced him to lie back down. She wrapped an arm around his chest and wept with tenderness as she said, “Why are you so mean?”

T
HE FLATBOAT
left the pier at first light. Bouilloux had brought Timar, Adèle, and their luggage in his little truck. The truck remained on the pier in the morning dusk, and Bouilloux waved as the vessel heaved over the first swell, righted itself, and disappeared again.

There it was—the ocean. To reach the mouth of the river, they had to cut through the waves. A black with an old sun helmet on his head was at the helm. He wore a cloth vest over black cotton bathing trunks, and it was hard to say why he didn't look ridiculous. He stared straight ahead, his face cryptic. His hands, which were paler than his body as a whole, held the steering wheel.

Adèle remained on her feet for as long as Bouilloux and his truck were visible, then went to sit in the stern. She was dressed just as she was every day, except that she had put on rubber boots to protect her legs against the mosquitoes.

This hour was the hardest to get through. They'd woken up too early, in the dark, and nervously packed their bags. Now the swell rocked them. It wasn't full daylight yet.

They didn't speak or look at each other. In spite of last night's scene, or maybe because of it, they seemed strangers. It was still painful to Timar. He couldn't have described what had happened, since he'd completely lost his self-control along with any sense of reality. That had been good.

“Why are you crying? Tell me why you're crying!”

As soon as he'd put the question to her, there'd been a shift. He'd been short with her, almost threatening, because he was sleepy and thought it was going to go on for a long time.

“Go to sleep! It's over!”

He had lit the candle, grown angry, accused Adèle of not understanding anything. He was the one who had a right to feel sad, not her! In the end he'd had a genuine fit, and, leaning over him, she had calmed him down. All this in the hot sheets, damp with tears and sweat. The end had been even more ridiculous: he had begged her to forgive him.

“No, Joe, sleep! You're going to toss and turn all night.”

Hurt, he fell asleep with his head on her breasts. In the morning everything was forgotten; there was nothing between them, not a trace of feeling, just a coldness.

Half a mile out, they were running parallel to the line of palms. Once they were past the mouth of the harbor, they saw the coastline. A few minutes later, they entered the river just as the sun was coming up.

It was the end of the night—of everything ridiculous and awkward that had come with it. Timar turned to Adèle with laughing eyes, his vision caressing the scenery.

“Not too shabby.”

“It's pretty.”

He lit a cigarette, and at that moment he was full of optimism. Adèle was smiling, too. She got up to come closer and to look at the landscape with him, while the black handled the wheel and stared without expression at the horizon.

A few native boats stood immobile in the current. As they passed, they could make out some blacks, as motionless as their boats, who were fishing. The calm was unreal. It lifted the spirits. You wanted to sing something slow and powerful like a hymn to drown out the noise of the sawmill and the droning of the flatboat.

Gradually they gnawed away at the distance, leaving long stripes on the water behind. You could hear the propeller striking the water. They passed one tree, then another.

After the first bend, they left the sea behind and the sawmill that had been on the left, and there were just the two riverbanks and the vegetation growing as close as a yard away, which they sometimes even brushed against. The jungle was filled with picturesque trees, mangroves whose roots rose out of the ground and reached the height of a man, pale kapok trees with triangular trunks that didn't bear leaves except at the very top. Everywhere there were lianas and reeds, and silence, too, that the unrelenting drone of the motor sliced through like a plow.

“Is it very deep?” Timar asked naïvely, like someone taking a Sunday walk along the Marne.