The African Read online

  For us kids, they were just insects like all the others. We hunted and captured them, probably to release them near our parents’ room. They were fat, brownish-red, very shiny. They took flight heavily.

  We discovered other playmates: scorpions. Rarer than cockroaches, but we had a good-sized reserve. My father, who dreaded our rambunctiousness, set up two trapezes made of bits of rope and old tool handles on the side of the roofed terrace farthest from his room. We used the trapezes for a special exercise: hanging upside down by our knees, we would carefully lift the straw mat my father had put down to cushion an eventual fall, and watch the scorpions freeze in a defensive position, claws raised and tails brandishing their stingers. The scorpions that lived under the mat were generally small, black ones, probably inoffensive. But every so often, in the morning, they had been replaced by a larger specimen of a yellowish white color, and we knew instinctively it was a variety that could be particularly venomous. The game consisted in teasing those creatures from up on the trapezes with a blade of grass or a twig and watching them pace, as if magnetized, around the hand that was aggressing them. They never stung the instrument, their steely eyes could distinguish between the object and the hand that held it. Thus, to make things more interesting, we had to drop the twig every now and again and move our hand closer, then hastily withdraw it just as the scorpion’s tail struck.

  Today it’s difficult for me to remember the feelings that motivated us. It seems that there was a good deal of respect involved in that ritual of the trapeze and the scorpions, respect that was obviously inspired by fear. Like the ants, the scorpions were the true inhabitants of the compound, we could be nothing more than unwanted and inevitable tenants, destined to leave some day. Colonists, in short.

  One day the scorpions were the center of a dramatic scene that, whenever I think of it, still makes my heart race today. My father (it must have been on a Sunday morning), had found a scorpion of the white variety in the cupboard. In fact, it was a female scorpion that was carrying her young on her back. My father could have squashed it with a slap of his dreaded slipper. But he didn’t. He went to get a bottle of rubbing alcohol from his medicine cabinet, he poured some over the scorpion and struck a match. For some strange reason, the fire began burning around the creature, forming a ring of blue flames, and the female scorpion struck a tragic stance, claws lifted skyward, body tensed, raising the clearly visible venomous hook at the end of her tail over her children. A second squirt of alcohol engulfed her entirely in flames. The incident could not have lasted more than a few seconds, and yet I have the impression that I sat there watching her die for a long time. The female scorpion pivoted several times, her tail waving spasmodically. Her offspring were already dead and fell shriveled from her back. Then she remained still, claws folded onto her chest in resignation, and the tall flames went out.

  Every night, in a sort of revenge of the animal world, the cabin was invaded by myriads of flying insects. Some evenings, before the rain, there was an army of them. My father closed the doors and the shutters (there were no glass panes in the few windows we had), let down the mosquito netting over the beds and hammocks. It was a hopeless battle. In the dining room, we hurriedly ate our peanut soup in order to find shelter under the mosquito nets. The insects came in waves, we could hear them knocking up against the shutters, drawn by the light of the oil lamp. They came in through the cracks in the shutters, under the doors. They whirled crazily through the room, around the lamp, singeing themselves on the glass. On the walls, in the reflections of light, the geckos let out soft squeals each time they swallowed one of their prey. I don’t know why, it seems to me that I’ve never had that close feeling of family, of being part of a unit, anywhere else. After the burning day of running through the savannah, after the storm and its lightning, that stifling room was like the cabin of a boat closed up tight against the night, while the world of insects raged outside. In there, I was truly safe, like being inside a cave. The odor of peanut soup, of foufou, of cassava bread, my father’s voice with its sing-songy accent relating anecdotes about his day at the hospital, and the feeling there was danger outside, the invisible host of moths batting against the shutters, the excited geckos, the hot, tense night, not a restful night of abandon like in the old days, but a feverish, trying night. And the taste of quinine in your mouth, that extraordinarily small and bitter pill you had to swallow with a glass of warm water dipped from the filter before bedtime to ward off malaria. Yes, I don’t think I’ve ever again experienced such moments of intimacy, such a mingling of ritual and familiarity. So far from my grandmother’s dining room, from the reassuring comfort of the old leather armchairs, of conversations that lulled one to sleep and of the steaming tureen, painted with a garland of holly.

  THE AFRICAN

  MY FATHER came to Africa in 1928, after having served two years as an itinerant doctor on the rivers in British Guiana*. He left it in the early 1950s when the army decided he had passed retirement age and could no longer be of service. For more than twenty years he lived in the bush (a word that was used back then, but is no longer today), the only doctor in territories as large as entire countries, in which he was responsible for the health of thousands of people.

  The man I met in 1948, the year I turned eight, was worn, prematurely aged by the equatorial climate. He’d become irritable due to the theophylline he took for his asthma, had grown bitter from loneliness, from having lived all the years of the war cut off from the rest of the world, not knowing what had become of his family, unable to leave his post to go to the aid of his wife and children or even to send them any money.

  The greatest demonstration of love he showed for his family was when he crossed the desert in the middle of the war to try and join his wife and children and bring them back to safety in Africa. He was stopped before he reached Algiers and had to return to Nigeria. It wasn’t until the end of the war that he was able to see his wife again and meet his children during a brief visit which I have no memory of whatsoever. Those long years of silence and of living in remote places, during which he pursued his career of practicing medicine in emergency situations, with no equipment, no medicine, while people were killing each other all over the world, must have been extremely difficult, must have been unbearable, filled with desperation. He never spoke of it. He never intimated that anything in his life had been exceptional. All I was able to learn about that period was what my mother told me or sometimes allowed to slip out in a sigh: “Those were hard years, during the war, separated from one another …” Even then, she wasn’t speaking of herself, she was referring to the anxiety of being a woman alone with two small children and no resources – trapped by the war. I imagine it must have been hard for many women in France, with their husbands imprisoned in Germany, or having disappeared without a trace. That is undoubtedly why that horrendous period seemed normal to me. There were no men, I was surrounded by nothing but women and very old people. It wasn’t until long afterward, when the selfishness that is natural to children had worn off, that I understood: due to the war, my mother – in living far from my father – was an example of humble heroism, not through rashness or resignation (even though her religious faith had been of great succor to her), but through the strength that such inhumanity inspired in her.

  Was it the war – that interminable silence – that had made my father into that pessimistic and cranky authoritative man whom we learned to fear rather than love? Was it Africa? Then which Africa? Certainly not the one we see today, in literature or in films, boisterous, unruly, juvenile, informal, with its villages run by matrons, its storytellers, the Africa in which one can constantly witness the admirable will to survive in conditions that would seem insurmountable to inhabitants of more privileged regions. That Africa already existed before the war, there’s no doubt about that. I try to imagine Douala, Port Harcourt, the streets packed with cars, the markets where children gleaming with sweat run, groups of women talking in the shade of the trees. The large cities,
Onitsha and its paperback book market, the rumbling of boats pushing logs upriver. Lagos, Ibadan, Cotonou, intermingling of all sorts, of people, of languages, the humorous, stereotypical side of colonial society, the businessmen dressed in suits and hats, impeccably folded umbrellas, the stifling salons where Englishwomen in low-cut dresses sit fanning themselves, the terraces of clubs where agents from Lloyd’s, from Glyn Mills, from Barclays smoke their cigars, exchanging comments about the weather – It’s a tough country, old chap – and the servants in tailcoats and white gloves silently make the rounds carrying cocktails on silver trays.

  My father told me one day how he had decided to go to the other end of the world when he’d finished his medical studies at Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Elephant and Castle, London. Since he’d received a government scholarship, he was expected to go to work for the community. He was therefore assigned to the tropical diseases ward at the Southampton Hospital. He takes the train, gets off at Southampton, rents a furnished room, a letter is awaiting him there, a very curt note from the head of the hospital saying, “Sir, I have yet to receive your calling card.” My father has the cards in question printed up (I still have one of them), just his name, no address, no title. And he asks to be transferred to the Ministry of the Colonies. A few days later he’s on board a boat heading for Georgetown, in Guiana. With the exception of a few short vacations, for his marriage and later for the birth of his children, he didn’t return to Europe until the end of his professional career.

  I tried to imagine what his life (and therefore mine) might have been if, instead of fleeing, he’d accepted the authority of the head of the Southampton Clinic and become a country doctor on the outskirts of London (just as my grandfather had been on the outskirts of Paris), in Richmond for example, or even in Scotland (a country he’d always loved). I don’t mean to evoke the changes it might have meant for his children (for being born here or there isn’t really of any importance in the end). But rather what it would have changed about the man himself, to have lived a more conventional, less solitary life. To have treated colds and constipation, rather than leprosy and malaria or lethargic encephalitis. To have learned to communicate, not in that singular fashion, with gestures, with interpreters, or in that rudimentary language known as pidgin English (nothing in common with the very refined, mystical Creole of Mauritius), but in everyday life, with completely ordinary people who make you one of them, who make you part of a city, of a neighborhood, of a community.

  He had chosen something else altogether. Out of pride probably, to flee the mediocrity of British society, out of a desire for adventure too. And there was a price to pay for that something else. It plunged you into a different world, swept you away to another life. It condemned you to exile when war broke out, caused you to lose your wife and children, and in a certain way, inevitably made a stranger out of you.

  The first time that I saw my father, in Ogoja, it seemed to me he was wearing a pince-nez. What makes me think that? The pince-nez was already rather old-fashioned in that day. Maybe a few old codgers in Nice had held on to that accessory, which – I believed – perfectly suited ex-officers of the Russian Imperial Army sporting mustaches and sideburns, or else the type of bankrupt inventors who were friends of my “aunts.” Why him? In reality, my father must have worn the type of glasses that were in style in the 1930s, steel-rimmed frames and round lenses that reflected the light. The same kind I see in portraits of men of his generation. Louis Jouvet or James Joyce (whom he slightly resembled for that matter). But an ordinary pair of glasses wasn’t enough for the image of that first meeting that stuck in my mind, his oddness, the hard look in his eyes, emphasized by the two vertical creases between his eyebrows. The English, or rather British aura about him, the stiffness of his dress, a sort of rigid armor that he’d donned once and for all.

  I believe that in the hours following my arrival in Nigeria – the long dirt road from Port Harcourt to Ogoja in the driving rain, sitting in the gigantic, futuristic Ford V8 that didn’t resemble any other known vehicle – it wasn’t Africa that had been a shock to me, but discovering that odd, unfamiliar, possibly dangerous father. Could my father, my real father have worn a pince-nez?

  His authoritativeness immediately posed a problem. My brother and I had lived in a sort of blissful anarchy almost totally devoid of discipline. The little authority we’d been confronted with came from my grandmother, a refined and generous old lady who was fundamentally opposed to all forms of corporal punishment for children, preferring instead to employ reason and gentleness. During his childhood in Mauritius, my maternal grandfather had been raised with stricter principles, but his advanced age, the love he bore my grandmother, and that sort of phlegmatic aloofness peculiar to heavy smokers kept him shut away in a small cubbyhole in which he’d lock himself to be able to smoke his Caporal in peace.

  As for my mother, she was full of imagination and charm. We loved her, and I suppose our mischievousness made her laugh. I don’t remember having ever heard her raise her voice. Consequently, we had carte blanche to establish a reign of infantile terror in the small apartment. In the years that preceded our departure for Africa we did things that, with the hindsight of age, actually seem pretty awful to me: one day, goaded on by my brother, I scaled the railing of the balcony (I can still see it, quite a bit over my head) to climb up on the gutter overlooking the whole neighborhood from six floors up. I think my mother and grandparents were so frightened that – once we’d consented to come back in – they forgot to punish us.

  I also remember being seized with temper tantrums because I’d been refused something, a sweet, a toy – in a word, for such trivial reasons I can’t even remember them. I would be filled with so much anger I would throw whatever I could get my hands on out the window, even furniture. At times like that, nothing and no one could calm me down. Sometimes I can call up the feelings of those fits of rage, I believe it’s something similar to being inebriated on ether (ether was given to children to inhale before extracting their tonsils). The complete loss of control, that feeling of floating, and at the same time of being extremely lucid. It was back in the days when I was also subject to violent headaches sometimes so unbearable that I had to hide under the furniture to escape the light. Where did those attacks come from? Today it seems to me that the only explanation would be the anxiety of the war years. A closed, dark, hopeless world. The wretched food – the black bread that people said was mixed with sawdust, and that almost caused my death at the age of three. The bombing of the harbor in Nice that flung me to the floor of my grandmother’s bathroom, that unforgettable feeling of the floor falling out from under my feet. Or still yet the ulcer on my grandmother’s leg, which had grown worse with the shortages and the lack of medicine; I’m in the mountain village where my mother has gone to hide due to my father being in the British army and the risk of her being deported. We are standing in line in front of the food store and I’m watching the flies alighting on the open wound on my grandmother’s leg.

  The journey to Africa brought all of that to an end. One radical change: upon instructions from my father, before departing, I was to cut my hair – which I had worn long until then, after the fashion of young boys from Brittany – which resulted in my getting an extraordinarily bad case of sunburn on my ears, and my being forced to enter the ranks of male normality. Never again did I have those horrendous migraines, never again would I be able to give free reign to the temper tantrums of my early childhood. To me, arriving in Africa meant entering the antechamber of the adult world.

  * * *

  * On the northern coast of South America (1814–1966), now Guyana.

  FROM GEORGETOWN TO VICTORIA

  AT THIRTY YEARS of age, my father left Southampton aboard a mixed cargo headed for Georgetown, in British Guiana. The rare pictures of him at the time depict a robust, athletic-looking man, elegantly dressed in a suit, a stiff-collared shirt, tie, vest, black leather shoes. It had been almost eight years since he’d left Mauritius
, after that fatal day in 1919 when his family had been evicted from the house in which he was born. In the small notebook where he’d jotted down the main events of the last days spent at Moka, he wrote: “I have only one desire now, to go far away from here and never to return.” British Guiana was in fact on the other side of the world, diametrically opposite to Mauritius.

  Did the tragedy of Moka justify his going to such a remote place? At the time of his departure, he was undoubtedly filled with such determination that it remained with him all of his life. He couldn’t be like other people. He couldn’t forget. He never spoke of the events which had led to the dispersion of all of the members of his family. Except every now and again, just to let out a burst of anger.

  For seven years he studied in London, first in an engineering school, then in medical school. His family had been ruined, and he had to rely entirely on a government grant. He couldn’t afford to fail. He specialized in tropical medicine. He already knew he wouldn’t have the means to set himself up in a private practice. The episode of the calling card that the head doctor of the Southampton hospital had demanded was only a pretext for cutting off ties with European society.

  At the time, the only pleasurable thing in his life was going to see his uncle in Paris, the passion he felt for his first cousin, my mother. The vacations he spent in France with them were an imaginary return to a past which no longer existed. My father was born in the same house as his uncle, they had grown up there each in turn, they were familiar with the same places, they had known the same secrets, the same hiding places, gone swimming in the same stream. My mother had never lived there (she was born in Milly), but she had always heard her father speak of it, it was part of her past, it felt like an inaccessible yet familiar dream to her (for back then, Mauritius was so far away, one could only dream of it). She and my father were united by that dream, they were drawn to one another as are exiles from an inaccessible land.