Seven Houses in France

VI

ON THE FIRST Thursday in September, the steamship Roi du Congo brought eight letters for Lalande Biran. Donatien collected them from the Club Royal and took them and a pot of coffee to him at Government House.

‘Letters from your wife, Christine Saliat de Meilhan, and from your friend Armand Saint-Foix,’ he said, placing the two letters on the desk. ‘The others are official despatches from Brussels. I’ll leave them here on the tray.’

Donatien poured out some coffee and waited for Lalande Biran to make room for the cup on the desk crammed with papers, most of which bore only a few lines of writing, many crossings out and the odd sketch. There were ten cigarette ends in a saucer, which Donatien hastily removed.

‘Do you need anything else, Captain?’ asked Donatien when he returned with the clean and empty saucer.

Lalande Biran shook his head. He had put his wife’s letter on top of all the other papers and was reading it while he sipped his coffee.

Before leaving the room, Donatien picked up the crumpled sheets of paper lying on the floor and threw them into the waste basket. All bore the same title, written in capitals: ‘A DUEL BETWEEN KINGS’. From the door, Donatien said: ‘With your permission, sir, I’m going to do some work at the club storeroom. A lot of stuff came in on the Roi du Congo, and if I don’t move fast, the place will fill up with mice, and I’d hate them to get their teeth into the salami before we do.’

‘If you don’t leave this minute, I’ll banish you to the downstairs room for a whole week,’ threatened Lalande Biran. The ‘downstairs room’ was the name given to the dungeon in Government House.

Donatien saluted before vanishing again.

As in all the previous letters, Lalande Biran’s wife’s overriding concern were the houses, or, more specifically, the house she wanted to buy in St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. The letter was full of figures and, at the end, above her signature, were these words: ‘Essaie, mon chéri’ — ‘Do your best, my love’. They were written more boldly than the rest, as if Christine had dipped her pen deep in the inkwell before writing them.

He lit a cigarette. His wife’s insistence made him nervous.

‘Do you remember when we talked in the garden in Brussels, and how we chose 7 and 5 as magic numbers: 7 houses in 5 years?’ she wrote. He could hear his wife’s clear, crystalline voice behind the words. ‘As you know, Captain, the numbers have changed. You have been in Africa now for 6 years, and in order for us to buy the house in St-Jean, we need just two more batches, 10–500 and 10–500. Do your best, Captain. I ask you this on my behalf and on that of our friend Armand. It would mean, at most, one more year and then the numbers would coincide: 7 years, 7 houses. Van Thiegel will help you. Talk to him. I’m sure he’ll be prepared to put in a little extra effort.’

10–500 meant 10 elephant tusks and 500 mahogany trees. That was a lot. Lalande Biran raised his cigarette to his lips. Christine spoke of just two more batches, but that wouldn’t necessarily be easy. Sometimes, several days went by without them seeing a single elephant.

The mandrills were screeching in the jungle, agitated by the torrential rain. For once, the noise did not affect him. He was too preoccupied. A troubling thought prevented him from paying attention to anything else. He was wondering about the contents of the second letter on the desk. It was quite bulky and bore two seals, the Belgian royal seal and another from the consulate in Léopoldville. Toisonet’s round writing covered the whole envelope. Lalande Biran decided to open it, putting his wife’s letter to one side.

‘O triste, triste était mon âme, à cause d’une femme.’ — ‘Oh, sad, sad was my soul because of a woman.’

He interpreted the line of verse at the top of the letter as a bad omen, and so plunged instead into the body of the text, ignoring his friend’s initial digressions. When he reached the third page, he went into his bedroom, sat down on the edge of the bed and continued reading there. When he had finished, he swore violently.

Toisonet explained in his letter that as soon as he had learned of the King’s plans, he had spoken to the celebrated journalist Ferdinand Lassalle and then gone back to his own room feeling very happy. So happy, indeed, that he sat out on the terrace of his villa, smoking a cigar and laughing to himself.

‘The laughter emerged from my mouth very slowly, and I had the pleasant feeling that it was pouring out of my chest like foam. It was such a gloriously absurd idea, l’américaine in the middle of the Congo, wearing a crown and with the blue flag with its yellow star fluttering beside her. It would seem, however, that I was staking too much on the Other, who decided to snatch that winning card from my hand.’

In Toisonet’s lexicon, ‘the Other’ was God. The letter went on:

The thing is, the Rothschilds gave a party the following week, and the journalists all flocked to the marquee to ask

l’américaine

: ‘How do you feel about becoming the future queen of the Congo?’ She replied that she had absolutely no intention of going to the Congo. ‘But you gave your word to King Léopold II!’ said Ferdinand Lassalle reproachfully. Her delightful, memorable riposte, worthy of Parnassus’s finest, was this: ‘It wasn’t me talking, it was Widow Clicquot.’ That night, on the terrace, smoking my cigar, I laughed again, more loudly than the first time. I somehow didn’t mind losing that particular game.

On the final page of his letter, Toisonet mentioned the consequences of the dancer from Philadelphia’s change of heart. Obviously, the King would not now be going to the Congo either, but he, Toisonet, would come in his place. In fact, a journey was already being organised, its objective being to take a statue of the Virgin to the Stanley Falls, a statue in white marble commissioned by the King from ‘a new Michelangelo’. Mbula Matari would probably travel with them, for the great explorer, aware that he would not be making many more expeditions, wanted to revisit the land that had been the scene of his greatest adventures and to say goodbye to his beloved Africa. Naturally, the boat would stop in Yangambi, not in Kisangani, and they could then hunt that lion together. ‘Especially if you’ve given it a bit of morphine first,’ said Toisonet. ‘My spirit loves sleepy lions.’

Lalande Biran left the letter on the desk and, picking up his chicotte, strode out into the pouring rain and set about the trees in the garden. The rain, falling in torrents from the skies, lashed the man’s face and he, in turned, lashed the trees. Some of them, especially the young palm trees, showed marks and wounds on their bark; others, like the teak and the okoume, survived without a scratch.

He heard a shrill cry and looked up. Most of the jungle was cloaked in rain and mist. The river flowed muddily on, and its islands, usually so green, were black. He could see the equally black mandrills too, three on the beach and about ten near the Club Royal.

There was a short cut from Government House down to the beach. He started running in that direction. The screeches of those vile monkeys was the worst thing about Yangambi, the worst thing about the Congo and about Africa, and he wanted to flay them with his chicotte, to whip them to the bone. He bounded down the first stretch of the path, slithering in the mud, then gradually slowed to a halt. What he was about to do was utterly absurd. He couldn’t whip to death a whole troop of monkeys.

He had heard Donatien say that the monkeys, both chimpanzees and mandrills, recognised the smell of steam from the boat and the sound of its paddles, which was why they hung around on the beach and near the club storeroom, to see if they could make off with a crate or two of food. Apparently, they found the smell of salami particularly exciting. As he walked back up the path, Lalande Biran had to acknowledge that his orderly was quite right.

When he returned to Government House, it seemed to him that the garden was at peace again, and that even the young palm trees, which had borne the brunt of the beating, stood erect and serene. The rain had almost stopped. He could see the jungle again, and the mandrills’ screeching sounded a long way off, as if they had crossed to the other side of the river.

He changed out of his drenched clothes and went into his study to lie on the chaise longue. Gradually, as he calmed down, the images in his head took on a more definite shape. The mandrills he had seen next to the Club Royal appeared in the first image, a scene, he realised suddenly, looking up, almost identical to the one in the picture he had painted shortly after arriving in Yangambi. The second image contained the words with which Christine had finished her letter: ‘Do your best, my love.’ And in the third he saw the photo he had imagined would appear in the article about the royal visit.

He closed his eyes and started correcting the photo. He erased King Léopold and the dancer from Philadelphia and put Mbula Matari in the centre. He placed himself to the right of the explorer and Toisonet to his left. Behind them, as before, stood Chrysostome with his two rifles. And in the background, the journalists. Inevitably, given the changed circumstances, there would not be ten or twelve of them, as he had first imagined, but three or four, from Brussels and the Vatican. Moreover, the mission would consist in transporting the Virgin to the Stanley Falls, and there would be no time for lion-hunts.

The image did not last long. The letter had dealt him a hard blow and, metaphorically speaking, his spirit had been badly bruised. He still couldn’t quite absorb the news Toisonet had given him. And yet, however angry he got, however hard he beat the trees with his chicotte, nothing would change. Reality was what it was, and l’américaine’s refusal to come to the Congo condemned him to the reality of Yangambi.

‘Quand la pluie, étalent ses immense traînées, d’une vaste prison imite les barreaux …’ — ‘When the rain, flaunting its long, long train, imitates the bars of a vast prison cell’ — as the Master wrote in one of his poems. His feelings exactly. The days in Yangambi seemed very long to him, especially when the rains came. Sometimes, on Christine’s advice, he tried to find new things with which to occupy himself, but to no avail. He didn’t much like hunting, and drawing seemed an increasingly meaningless occupation. In his letter, Toisonet had made a joke about the Other. Wasn’t he himself the victim of a cruel joke that was condemning him to experience each line of the Master’s poem, word for word? ‘When the earth has become a dank dungeon, from which Hope like a bat flits away …’

He knew that feeling all too well. On many evenings and on many nights, in his dreams, he would see bats fluttering around the palm tree in the square. Doubtless one of them was Hope.

‘Do your best, my love,’ Christine urged, thinking about that house in St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. But it wouldn’t be easy to divert more mahogany and ivory. The elephants’ traditional route was a long way from Yangambi, at least three days’ march away. As for the mahogany, it grew abundantly near the River Lomami, but required a lot of manpower to fell and transport it, especially in the rainy season; besides, given that Cocó was in charge of the felling, he would have no option but to share the profits with him. That, however, was only part of the problem. The other part was that when he imagined himself in St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, arm in arm with Christine, he felt no joy at all. Hope wasn’t the only bat fluttering around the big palm tree.

Far off, in the jungle, the monkeys kept up their screeching. Whether they were mandrills or chimpanzees, he couldn’t tell.

‘The jungle swallows everything and gives back only the cries of monkeys.’ That could be the beginning of a poem, he thought, except that he didn’t know how to go on. Besides, it wasn’t true. The jungle also gave him money. A lot of money. At least 500,000 francs a year, 100,000 through the regular channels and about 400,000 through irregular ones.

He got up from the chaise longue and sat down at the desk with Christine’s letter in his hand. His wife’s handwriting sloped so exaggeratedly to the right that some words looked almost like straight lines and were very hard to read. Her ideas, on the other hand, could not be clearer: ‘… in order for us to buy the house in St-Jean, we need just two more batches, 10–500 and 10–500. Do your best, Captain. I ask you this on my behalf and on that of our friend Armand. It would mean, at most, one more year and then the numbers would coincide: 7 years, 7 houses. Van Thiegel will help you. Talk to him. I’m sure he’ll be prepared to put in a little extra effort.’

His wife’s proposal was probably worth considering. He was stuck in Yangambi, imprisoned there. Perhaps that was why he saw so many bats. He should do more physical exercise, although not in the way Cocó did. Cocó liked to work up a sweat felling mahogany in order to control his natural tendency to put on weight. Hunting for elephants might be fun. Besides, since that whole area of the French Riviera belonged almost exclusively to Léopold II, Toisonet might be able to help them buy a villa for a bargain price. Two batches, 10–500 and 10–500, one in the rainy season and another in the dry, and that would be that. And the following year, he could bid farewell for ever to Yangambi.