III
Fatou never did any work. Jean had presented himself with a perfect odalisque.
She knew how to wash and mend her bou-bous and pagnes. She was always as spotless as a black cat, dressed in white, partly from an instinct of cleanliness, partly because she realised that Jean would not tolerate her otherwise. But apart from this care of her person, she was incapable of any work.
Since the poor old Peyrals were no longer able to send their son the small sums that little by little they had saved for him, since “nothing had gone well with them,” as old Françoise had written, so that they had even been obliged to have recourse to the spahi’s slender purse, Fatou’s budget was becoming very difficult to balance.
Fortunately, Fatou was a steady little person, whose mode of life was not extravagant.
Throughout the Soudan, woman is in a position of great inferiority as compared to man.
Several times in the course of her life she is bought and sold like a head of cattle, and at a price which is estimated at inverse ratio to her ugliness, defects, and increasing age.
One day Jean asked his friend Nyaor,
“What have you done with your wife Nokhoudounkhotillé, the one who was so good-looking?”
And Nyaor replied, with a quiet smile,
“Nokhoudounkhotillé talked too much, so I sold her. With the money I got for her I bought thirty sheep who never talk at all.”
The hardest work done by the negroes, the task of pounding millet for the kouss-kouss, devolves upon the women.
From morning till night, throughout Nubia, from Timbuctoo to the coast of Guinea, in all the thatched huts, under the burning sun, the negresses’ wooden pestles are noisily pounding in the mortars of khaya wood. Thousands of braceletted arms weary themselves at this task, and the chattering, quarrelsome workers mingle with this monotonous sound their chorus of shrill voices, which seem to come from the throats of monkeys.
The result is a very characteristic hubbub, audible from afar in the thickets and desert tracts leading to these African villages.
The result of this eternal pounding, which has been practised by the women for generations, is a coarse flour of millet, which is made into a flavourless kind of gruel called kouss-kouss.
Kouss-kouss is the basis of the nourishment of the black races.
Fatou evaded this traditional labour of the women of her race. Every evening she paid a visit to Coura n’diaye, the woman griot, the ancient poetess of King El Hadj.
In return for a small monthly payment Fatou had the right to sit among the little slaves of the old favourite around great calabashes, smoking with hot kouss-kouss, and to satisfy the appetite of her sixteen years.
From her raised position on her tara, where she lay upon fine mats of complicated design, the old cast-off favourite presided with imperturbable dignity.
Yet these repasts were uproarious scenes well worth witnessing. These small, naked creatures crouched on the ground around huge calabashes, all dipping their fingers at the same time into the Spartan brew. There were cries, wry faces, grimaces, tricks that would have made an ouistiti jealous, untimely invasions of great horned sheep; cats stealthily stretching their paws out and then slily dipping them in the gruel; intruding yellow dogs pushing their pointed noses into the dish, and then bursts of laughter, incredibly comic, displaying magnificent white teeth set in gums as red as peonies.
Jean had always to be back in barracks at four o’clock, but by the time he returned to his lodging after retreat had been sounded, Fatou was always dressed again, and her hands were clean. Beneath her towering headdress, which resembled that of an idol, she had assumed once more a serious, almost melancholy, expression. She was no longer the same person.
It was dreary at eventide in this desolate quarter, in this isolated corner of the dead-alive town.
Jean would often remain leaning on his elbow at the big window of his bare, white room.
The sea breeze fluttered the scraps of priests’ parchments which Fatou had hung by long threads from the ceiling, as a protection to them during their sleep.
Before him lay the wide landscape of Senegal—the Point of Barbary, an immense plain, with the heavy vapours of twilight brooding above it in the distance, the deep gateway to the desert.
Or else he would sit in the doorway of Samba-Hamet’s house, facing that characterless rectangle of ground, surrounded by old brick buildings in ruins, a kind of square, in the middle of which grew that meagre, yellow palm, of the thorny species, the only tree in the quarter.
Here he would sit smoking the cigarettes which he had taught Fatou to make for him.
Alas! even this form of distraction he would soon have to think of relinquishing for lack of funds.
He followed with his large, brown, lustreless eyes the coming and going of two or three little negro girls, who were chasing one another, gambolling wildly in the evening air, like moths in the dim half light.
Sunset in December almost invariably brought to St Louis fresh breezes and great curtains of clouds that suddenly darkened the sky, but never burst. They passed over, high above, and glided away. Never a drop of rain, never the slightest sensation of humidity; it was the dry season, and in all nature not one drop of water vapour could have been found. Still, it was possible to breathe on these December evenings; the penetrating coolness brought respite and a sensation of physical relief, but at the same time created an indefinable impression of deeper melancholy.
And when Jean was seated at nightfall in front of his lonely threshold, his thoughts travelled far afield.
These flights which his eyes, darting hither and thither like a bird, would make each day on the big geographical maps that hung on the walls of the spahi’s barracks, he would often resume again in spirit, especially of an evening, traversing a sort of panorama of the world, as it presented itself to his imagination.
First he must cross the great sombre desert, which began just behind his house.
It was this first part of the journey that his imagination was most slow in accomplishing. It would be delayed in an infinity of mysterious solitudes, where that interminable waste of sand impeded his progress.
Then he had to cross Algiers and the Mediterranean, reach the coast of France and ascend the valley of the Rhône, to arrive at last at that spot, marked on the map with little black shadings, which he envisaged as blue-tinged peaks, seen among the clouds: the Cevennes.
Mountains! His eyes had been so long accustomed to the lonely plains; it was so long since he had seen any mountains that he had almost forgotten what they were like.
And forests! The great chestnut woods of his country, moist and shadowy, where real streams of living water ran, where the soil was earth, carpeted with moss and delicate grasses.... He felt that it would be a relief merely to see a small clod of damp, mossy earth—instead of the dry sand blown about by the desert wind.
And his beloved village, which in his imaginary journey he beheld at first from above, as if he were hovering over it, the old church, which he pictured under snow, with its bell doubtless ringing the Angelus (it was seven in the evening), and close by, his cottage—the whole scene enveloped in a bluish haze, on a cold December evening, with rays of pale moonlight glancing upon it.
Was it possible? Somewhere all this actually existed; it was not a mere memory, a vision of the past; it existed; it was not even so very far away; actually at this moment people were living in that very spot, and it was possible to go there.
What were they doing, his poor old parents, at this very moment when he was thinking of them? Seated in a corner by the fire, no doubt, in front of the wide fireplace, by the cheerful blaze of branches gathered in the forest. He saw again all the objects familiar to him from childhood, the little lamp lighted on winter evenings, the pieces of old furniture; the cat curled up asleep on a stool. Among all these friendly things he sought to place the well-beloved owners of the cottage.
Nearly seven o’clock! He had the very picture before him. The evening meal was over; his parents were seated in a corner by the fire, grown older, no doubt; his aged father in his usual attitude, leaning on his hand his fine grey head—the head of an old cuirassier turned mountaineer again—and his mother probably knitting, moving her long needles very rapidly in her capable, quick, hard-working hands, or spinning, with her distaff of hemp held very upright.
And Jeanne—she was with them perhaps. His mother had written that she would often come and keep them company on winter evenings. What was she like now? “Changed and grown still prettier,” he had been told. What was that face like now, that face of the grown-up girl he had never seen?
By the side of the handsome spahi in his red jacket sat Fatou with her high headdress of amber and copper spangles.
Night had fallen, and in the lonely square the little negro girls continued to chase one another, flitting hither and thither in the dusk—one of them entirely nude—the other two looking like white bats with their long floating bou-bous.
The cold wind incited them to run; they were like kittens in our country, who feel an impulse to gambol wildly when the dry east wind is blowing, which brings us frost.