‘Down into the cave.’
‘Monsieur, you know very well the price of entry is five thousand francs.’
‘Ah! Dela. Black, beautiful and cruel.’
Now he was sitting crouched and trying to get a hand up her legs. Dela clamped them tight. She winked again.
‘Black, beautiful and cruel.’
‘C’est un con,’ she said definitely.
Jeb helped get the legionnaire back to his chair. There Dela pulled him and they were dancing. He loosened up and his legs flew. Then they closed and her hard belly burned through his pants, and he was pumped hard, and there were hot shivers up his back. Then they were in her room, he standing and she sitting on the bed, her quick fingers unzippering, and he praying, thinking of nothing and nobody else now, but praying it would come right. And then they were on the bed and clinching, and then she pushed him away and sat up.
‘I need a sandwich,’ she said. ‘You pay my sandwich.’
‘Oh! No. God. Not now.’
‘You pay my sandwich.’
‘I pay your sandwich.’
‘You pay my beer.’
‘I pay also your beer.’
He got up and took a note from his pocket. She put on a blue boubou and stalked out into the kitchen. She was back in five minutes munching a chicken sandwich and smacking her lips. Then she tied her hair in a bandana and was ready.
But Jeb was face down on the pillow, his head spinning from the whisky. She lay beside him and her hand felt him soft and limp.
‘Pederast,’ she snorted.
‘No. No.’ Jeb hit the pillow miserably. ‘No. No.’
‘All Americans are pederasts.’
She rolled over and began to snore, and her snores did not keep him from sleeping.
But in the morning it was different. From that morning he would never forget the white light and blowing curtains, and never stop thanking for the taut breasts; the hard mouth freely given; the powerful arms; the nails that raised red welts on his back; the soles of her feet sandpapering his thighs; again and again, two bodies floating and then heavy along the uneven line where the brown met white; and afterwards, when they were both tired together, her amused smile and her fingers gently disentangling his hair. He left her and walked across the terrace. Madame Gerda turned her face to the wall. Madame Annie was knitting a pink jumper. She looked over her spectacles and smiled.
‘You are even walking differently,’ she said.
1977
THE ATTRACTIONS OF FRANCE
THE JOURNEY UP
The men waited for the truck in a tight rectangle of shade under the blue wall. The sun was glaring bright and sucked the colour from the dusty red street. The men were squatting. They had pulled their blue cottons above their knees. Their legs were lean and brown and the soles of their feet were rough as sandpaper.
A boy was walking up the shadow of the wall scuffing the dust with his feet. His hair was red but it was the caked dust that coloured it. He put down a kitbag and sat by me.
‘You are going to Atar?’
‘You too?’
‘I am going to France.’
He was short and stocky, perhaps twenty. His hard thighs bulged through white jeans that were now ruddy pink from the dust. He had not washed for some time. He smelled strong and acrid though the smell was not objectionable. He had been chewing cola nuts and they had dyed his gums orange. His thin curling mouth showed off his Moorish blood. The Moors ignored him. He was very black.
‘What will you do in France?’
‘Continue my profession.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Installation sanitaire.’
‘You have a passport?
‘No I need one not. I am a sailor. I have a sailor’s paper.’
He squeezed his hand in his back pocket and with two fingers fished for a scrap of damp and crumpled paper.
The writing was in Spanish: ‘I, Don Hernando Ordoñez, certify that Patrice Diolé has worked as Seaman Third Class ...’
‘From Atar,’ he said, ‘I will go to Villa Cissneros. I will take a ship to Gran Canaria. I will go to France, to Yugoslavia, to China, and continue my profession.’
‘As sanitary engineer?’
‘No, Monsieur. As adventurer. I will see all the peoples and all the countries of the world.’
The truck came, almost filled up with sacks of sorghum and rice. The Senegalese and Moors climbed aboard. We followed. The trip to Atar was a bad trip, dust storm all the way. The Moors pulled down the folds of their blue turbans, covering their faces and leaving the narrowest horizontal strip through which their eyes glittered. The Senegalese wore a variety of head gear. One man wore his underpants. His nose, not his eyes, showed through the vertical slit.
The truck stopped at a police post. A gendarme climbed up and counted fifty-nine bodies lying in among the sacks. The law prohibited more than thirty. The gendarme was a Sarakolle from the river. He was not making his people move. The Moors were in their country now and they weren’t moving either. All fifty-nine went on into the dust and the night.
I had been squeezed against the sanitary engineer for twelve hours. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Have you seen the Indians?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s a village or what?’
‘It’s a big country with too many people. You should go see it.’
‘Tiens. I always thought it was a village.’
AT THE MINE
From the hill we looked down over the flat country, golden white and spotted black with flat-topped thorn trees; you could see why they once called it ‘leopard country’. Below us was the mine. There were grey spoil tips and the new American crushing plant, green with purple scaffolding, and the old French mine that went bust, because the copper was low-grade ore and they couldn’t ship it out economically. There were silver fuel tanks and shiny aluminium cabins and yellow cranes and bulldozers. Beyond we could see the town of mudbrick boxes, and shanties made of packing cases, and the tents of the nomads.
The Major pointed to a grey hill where he had shot gazelles.
‘Nice view,’ he said. ‘Thought you’d like it up here.’ He looked at his watch.
‘Sorry, I’m afraid we have to go. I’m on parade at lunch. You’ll see.’
The Major was a neat, sandy-haired man, greying at the temples. He wore khaki shorts, had a red face and red knees, and smiled with a humorous grin. He had been retired from the British Army and was working as personnel manager for the mine. The company was American, but the Government did not allow Americans to staff it, because of Israel. Most of the mining engineers were French. The Major had the unenviable job of keeping Frenchmen happy in the desert and keeping American shareholders happy by keeping the costs down.
‘Let me blind you with a statistic,’ he said. We were taking our trays in the canteen. ‘It costs six times less to keep an Englishman in the desert than a Frenchman, and three times less than a Yank.’
We helped ourselves to artichaut vinaigrette and filet de boeuf with mushrooms and a carafe of beaujolais nouveau. The month was December. There were Frenchmen eating at most tables. The Major and I both wore khaki shorts. The Frenchmen stared at our knees and raised their eyebrows, nodding.
‘The English like filthy food,’ I said.
‘Probably something to do with the war,’ said the Major.
‘Probably.’
‘I mean, Englishmen have had to make do.’
‘Not all of them,’ I said.
I had been eating goat and couscous for some days.
‘It’s delicious,’ I said.
‘You wait,’ the Major said. ‘They’ll soon come over and complain.’
‘There’s nothing to complain about.’
‘They’ll find something. If we got the Tour d’Argent to fly their meals out, they’d still complain.’
‘Only tourists go to the Tour d’Argent.’
‘You get in Vichy and they want Evian. You get Evian and the
y want Perrier. Can’t win. I suggested a complaints book so they could air specific grievances. They weren’t having it. Want to complain personally. It’s supposed to be a safety valve.’
‘Rough on you,’ I said.
‘Can’t get used to being a safety valve for French steam.’
‘It must be hard.’
‘I should put in for a change.’
By working abroad and avoiding the taxman, the Major was hoping to set aside a small capital sum to retire on. His wife had been out here. She had sat in the cabin with gardening catalogues. Planning her garden had kept her sane, but she couldn’t take the heat.
The Major and I ate the main course. Then a big man in blue jeans came over. He had a lock of black hair rat-tailing down his forehead. He held out his Camembert on a plate.
‘Monsieur, ce Camembert n’est pas mur.’
‘What’s he say?’
‘It’s not ripe.’
‘It’s cheese not fruit.’
‘C’est dur.’
‘It’s hard.’
‘I could tell him where to stuff it but I won’t.’
‘On ne met pas les bons fromages dans le frigo.’
‘You shouldn’t put good cheese in the icebox.’
‘We took ’em out last week,’ the Major said, ‘and they went orange.’
The man shrugged and went back to his table. He showed the Camembert to his friends and squeezed it with his thumb.
‘We’ll never understand the Frogs,’ said the Major. ‘Niggers are much less foreign to me than Frogs. I’ve lived with niggers all my life. Bright, some of ’em. Really bright.’
‘Very bright,’ I said.
‘Not like the Moors. Gimme a nigger any day over a Moor. Less stuck on religion.’
‘Much less stuck.’
‘You can work with niggers, but the Moors give an awful lot of bother.’
‘How’s that, Major?’
‘They won’t work and they don’t want anyone else to work. Government owns half this mine and doesn’t even want it to pay.’
‘Perhaps it’s something to do with their religion.’
‘Bloody religion.’
‘I read somewhere that Moors believe copper’s the property of the Devil.’
‘It is the property of the Devil. I could have told you that. All mining engineers are Devils. For sheer arrogance they beat the lot. Think they can blast through anywhere.’
‘They are tough,’ I said.
‘You know something?’ The Major returned to the Moors. ‘Moors remind me of Frogs. Same look. Both look at you as though you’re dirt.’
‘Don’t let them get you down.’
‘But I hate ’em. We had a welder here. A Belgian. Good boy. I used to cut his hair. Fell fifteen feet and broke his neck on a girder. And the Moor who was helping him stood by and laughed. Laughed! Stood there laughing. It makes you sick.’
In the evening it was windy and flights of swifts cut the green air. It was the third year of the drought. The nomads had lost most of their livestock and flocked to the fringes of the mining camp.
In the market a marabout was reciting the suras of the Koran. He was blind. His eyes were almonds of red veins and cloudy blue-white cataracts. His words came harsh and soaring as a drum solo. An old man kept time with one hand. He rested the other hand on the marabout’s shoulders. He was his father.
Some camel men were saddling up. The saddles were of red and yellow leather. The men hated the mine.
The Major hoped to get me a ride down on the company plane. He said we shouldn’t know until the last minute. He telephoned and got word that a Frenchman had cancelled.
‘Cheers!’ he called. ‘You’ve a seat.’
We drove to the airstrip but found another Frenchman who had taken his friend’s place. So we drove back into town and found a white pick-up ready to leave. They were waiting for one more passenger. I squeezed in behind the tailboard.
‘I’m awfully sorry about the plane,’ the Major said.
‘Don’t think about it.’
‘You look pretty uncomfortable.’
‘But will survive.’
‘It does seem awful after promising the plane.’
‘I said not to worry, Major.’
‘It’s a shame. Bloody Frogs.’
‘Don’t let them get you down.’
‘Easier said than done. No fun stuck in the desert witch a lot of Frogs.’
The engine started and the red rear light lit up the Major’s shorts and knees.
‘We’re off,’ I said. ‘Goodbye, Major, and thanks.’
‘Cheers!’ said the Major, looking miserable.
THE JOURNEY BACK
The boy lay on the floor of the pick-up. His long tapering hands held onto a cotton sheet. He was trying to keep the dust off his clothes. They were beautiful clothes, green pants, a yellow sweater and a scarf striped orange and white. He had worn them fresh to start the journey and now they were greasy and floury with sand.
He was the best-looking boy I ever saw. He had the kind of looks to make anyone feel ugly and inadequate. He was frightened and unhappy and kept rolling his huge black eyes and shivering.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Dakar.’
‘Home?’
‘They turned me back at the frontier. I had a passport and they turned me back.’
He was all broken up about being turned back.
‘Where were you going?’
‘Paris.’
‘To study?’
‘To continue my profession.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘I would.’
‘Non, Monsieur. Comprenez-pas. C’est un métier special.’
‘I know most occupations in France.’
‘But this métier, no.’
‘Say it.’
‘You will not understand. I am an ébéniste. I make bureaux-plats , Louis Quinze and Louis Seize.’
THE ESTATE OF MAXIMILIAN TOD
On 6 February 1975, Dr Estelle Neumann fell down a crevasse of the Belgrano Glacier in Chilean Patagonia.
Her death robbed Harvard University of the finest glaciologist at work in the United States; I lost a close ally and a good friend. I cannot think of Estelle without recalling her humour, her capacity for statistics and the blind, unreflecting courage that lacked the imagination to turn round.
Her work has continued, but in lesser hands; I could say treacherous hands. In February of last year, her research student Dr (now Professor) Helmut Leander, of the Institute of Glacial Studies at Kydd College, Minnesota, published a 103-page attack on her Glaciers of the Southern Hemisphere. Then in September, at the Symposium of World Climatology in Tel-Aviv, he described her findings as ‘irresponsible’. That evening, in the bar of the Hilton Hotel, I overheard shreds of his conversation explaining, in German and to an audience of West Germans, how the Neumann Theory was the product of its author’s incurable optimism. ‘Or else,’ he added in a whisper, ‘she was bought.’
I checked her figures. I double-checked them. The work took me six weeks: it left me red-eyed and exhausted. Estelle had scribbled her material over thirteen hip-pocket notebooks with black leatherette covers – equations, graphs and diagrams, which she alone could decipher, or someone as close to her as I. I was obliged to do it, as much for her memory as to reassure the organisations that had invested in our research. I found no fault with her data, her method or her conclusions.
Estelle’s work was bound to upset the catastrophists. She had proved beyond question that the injection of fossil fuels into the atmosphere had no effect whatever on the temperature of glaciers. The prospects of triggering off another Ice Age, at least within the next 10,000 years, were nil. And the pronouncements of Dr Leander and his colleagues merely reflected that bias for self-destruction now engrained in American academic circles. ‘Those dodos!’ she would sigh. ‘Those dodos!’
Estelle p
ublished her thesis in 1965 and from that year her work attracted the attention of the chemical, the petrochemical and aerospace industries. The Cliffhart Foundation (a subsidiary of Heartland Oil) financed our first project to the tune of $150,000. For five months we studied the structure of Tyndall Flowers, the six-petalled cavities which appear in parallel layers on the surface of melting ice and resemble the superimposed calligraphies of some Japanese Zen Master. (The other expert in the field, Dr Nonomura Hideyoshi, had retired to a monastery near Nara.)
Before we had finished, nineteen other foundations pressed us to accept whatever money we needed. No expense seemed unreasonable to their trustees: they only wished the work to continue.
On 9 October 1974, a luminous fall day whirling with scarlet leaves, Estelle and I lunched at the Harvard Faculty Club to discuss our expedition to the Belgrano ice-cap. Our Eggs Benedict were all but uneatable, our conversation drowned by the braying accents of five Oxford historians at the next table.
Estelle was forty-three, a handsome, masculine woman with black hair cropped short and worn in a fringe above her considerable eyebrows. Years of exposure to sun, wind and snow had burnished her skin the texture of shoe-leather; when not beaming with self-satisfaction, her crow’s-feet showed up white.
Her dress was simple and unaffected, a sweater and tweed skirt for the laboratory, hardly anything more elaborate for the cheese-fondue parties she gave in her Cambridge apartment. But she was addicted to ‘primitive’ jewellery of the worst kind – Navajo turquoise, African bangles, amber beads. That morning a golden eagle of the Veraguas Culture was flapping between her breasts; I did not have the heart to tell her it was a fake.
Over lunch Estelle gave me a critical resume of the literature on Patagonian glaciers. She could remember if a pamphlet was printed in Valdivia or Valparaiso in 1897 or 1899. She drew my attention to some new work by Dr Andrei Shirokogoff, of the Antarctic Institute in Novosibirsk, who explored the north face of Cordon Tannhäuser during the Allende years. But her conversation kept harping back to certain topographical details of the Belgrano Glacier.
She eyed me in a peculiar way. She asked a number of penetrating questions about our research fund—which was most unlike her. She even asked questions about our Swiss accounts. I can safely say that my face was a total blank until she gave up and reverted to her superior manner. She then spoke of Vaino Mustanoja’s Patagonian Researches, published in English, in Helsinki, in 1939.