Exile and the Kingdom, Page 3

  THE RENEGADE

  WHAT A JUMBLE! What a jumble! I must tidy up my mind. Since they cut out my tongue, another tongue, it seems, has been con­stantly wagging somewhere in my skull, something has been talking, or someone, that suddenly falls si­lent and then it all begins again—oh, I hear too many things I never utter, what a jumble, and if I open my mouth it’s like pebbles rattling together. Order and method, the tongue says, and then goes on talking of other matters simultaneously—yes, I always longed for order. At least one thing is cer­tain, I am waiting for the missionary who is to come and take my place. Here I am on the trail, an hour away from Taghâsa, hidden in a pile of rocks, [35] sitting on my old rifle. Day is breaking over the desert, it’s still very cold, soon it will be too hot, this country drives men mad and I’ve been here I don’t know how many years. . . . No, just a lit­tle longer. The missionary is to come this morning, or this evening. I’ve heard he’ll come with a guide, perhaps they’ll have but one camel between them. I’ll wait, I am waiting, it’s only the cold making me shiver. Just be patient a little longer, lousy slave!

  But I have been patient for so long. When I was home on that high plateau of the Massif Central, my coarse father, my boorish mother, the wine, the pork soup every day, the wine above all, sour and cold, and the long winter, the frigid wind, the snowdrifts, the revolting bracken—oh, I wanted to get away, leave them all at once and be­gin to live at last, in the sunlight, with fresh water. I believed the priest, he spoke to me of the semi­nary, he tutored me daily, he had plenty of time in that Protestant region, where he used to hug the walls as he crossed the village. He told me of the future and of the sun, Catholicism is the sun, he used to say, and he would get me to read, he beat Latin into my hard head (‘The kid’s bright but he’s pig-headed’), my head was so hard that, despite all [36] my falls, it has never once bled in my life: ‘Bull­headed,’ my pig of a father used to say. At the sem­inary they were proud as punch, a recruit from the Protestant region was a victory, they greeted me like the sun at Austerlitz. The sun was pale and feeble, to be sure, because of the alcohol, they have drunk sour wine and the children’s teeth are set on edge, gra gra, one really ought to kill one’s father, but after all there’s no danger that he’ll hurl him­self into missionary work since he’s now long dead, the tart wine eventually cut through his stomach, so there’s nothing left but to kill the missionary.

  I have something to settle with him and with his teachers, with my teachers who deceived me, with the whole of lousy Europe, everybody de­ceived me. Missionary work, that’s all they could say, go out to the savages and tell them: ‘Here is my Lord, just look at him, he never strikes or kills, he issues his orders in a low voice, he turns the other cheek, he’s the greatest of masters, choose him, just see how much better he’s made me, of­fend me and you will see.’ Yes, I believed, gra gra, and I felt better, I had put on weight, I was almost handsome, I wanted to be offended. When we would walk out in tight black rows, in summer, under Grenoble’s hot sun and would meet girls in [37] cotton dresses, I didn’t look away, I despised them, I waited for them to offend me, and sometimes they would laugh. At such times I would think: ‘Let them strike me and spit in my face,’ but their laughter, to tell the truth, came to the same thing, bristling with teeth and quips that tore me to shreds, the offense and the suffering were sweet to me! My confessor couldn’t understand when I used to heap accusations on myself: ‘No, no, there’s good in you!’ Good! There was nothing but sour wine in me, and that was all for the best, how can a man become better if he’s not bad, I had grasped that in everything they taught me. That’s the only thing I did grasp, a single idea, and, pig-headed bright boy, I carried it to its logical conclusion, I went out of my way for punishments, I groused at the normal, in short I too wanted to be an example in order to be noticed and so that after noticing me people would give credit to what had made me better, through me praise my Lord.

  Fierce sun! It’s rising, the desert is changing, it has lost its mountain-cyclamen color, O my moun­tain, and the snow, the soft enveloping snow, no, it’s a rather grayish yellow, the ugly moment be­fore the great resplendence. Nothing, still nothing from here to the horizon over yonder where the [38] plateau disappears in a circle of still soft colors. Behind me, the trail climbs to the dune hiding Taghâsa, whose iron name has been beating in my head for so many years. The first to mention it to me was the half-blind old priest who had retired to our monastery, but why do I say the first, he was the only one, and it wasn’t the city of salt, the white walls under the blinding sun, that struck me in his account but the cruelty of the savage inhab­itants and the town closed to all outsiders, only one of those who had tried to get in, one alone, to his knowledge, had lived to relate what he had seen. They had whipped him and driven him out into the desert after having put salt on his wounds and in his mouth, he had met nomads who for once were compassionate, a stroke of luck, and since then I had been dreaming about his tale, about the fire of the salt and the sky, about the House of the Fetish and his slaves, could anything more barba­rous, more exciting be imagined, yes, that was my mission and I had to go and reveal to them my Lord.

  They all expatiated on the subject at the semi­nary to discourage me, pointing out the necessity of waiting, that it was not missionary country, that I wasn’t ready yet, I had to prepare myself [39] specially, know who I was, and even then I had to go through tests, then they would see! But go on waiting, ah, no!—yes, if they insisted, for the spe­cial preparation and the tryouts because they took place at Algiers and brought me closer, but for all the rest I shook my pig-head and repeated the same thing, to get among the most barbarous and live as they did, to show them at home, and even in the House of the Fetish, through example, that my Lord’s truth would prevail. They would offend me, of course, but I was not afraid of offenses, they were essential to the demonstration, and as a result of the way I endured them I’d get the upper hand of those savages like a strong sun. Strong, yes, that was the word I constantly had on the tip of my tongue, I dreamed of absolute power, the kind that makes people kneel down, that forces the adver­sary to capitulate, converts him in short, and the blinder, the crueler he is, the more he’s sure of himself, mired in his own conviction, the more his consent establishes the royalty of whoever brought about his collapse. Converting good folk who had strayed somewhat was the shabby ideal of our priests, I despised them for daring so little when they could do so much, they lacked faith and I had it, I wanted to be acknowledged by the torturers [40] themselves, to fling them on their knees and make them say: ‘O Lord, here is thy victory,’ to rule in short by the sheer force of words over an army of the wicked. Oh, I was sure of reasoning logically on that subject, never quite sure of myself other­wise, but once I get an idea I don’t let go of it, that’s my strong point, yes the strong point of the fellow they all pitied!

  The sun has risen higher, my forehead is begin­ning to burn. Around me the stones are beginning to crack open with a dull sound, the only cool thing is the rifle’s barrel, cool as the fields, as the evening rain long ago when the soup was simmer­ing, they would wait for me, my father and mother who would occasionally smile at me, per­haps I loved them. But that’s all in the past, a film of heat is beginning to rise from the trail, come on, missionary, I’m waiting for you, now I know how to answer the message, my new masters taught me, and I know they are right, you have to settle ac­counts with that question of love. When I fled the seminary in Algiers I had a different idea of the savages and only one detail of my imaginings was true, they are cruel. I had robbed the treasurer’s office, cast off my habit, crossed the Atlas, the up­per plateaus and the desert, the bus-driver of the [41] Trans-Sahara line made fun of me: ‘Don’t go there,’ he too, what had got into them all, and the gusts of sand for hundreds of wind-blown kilome­ters, progressing and backing in the face of the wind, then the mountains again made up of black peaks and ridges sharp as steel, and after them it took a guide to go out on the endless sea
of brown pebbles, screaming with heat, burning with the fires of a thousand mirrors, to the spot on the con­fines of the white country and the land of the blacks where stands the city of salt. And the money the guide stole from me, ever naïve I had shown it to him, but he left me on the trail—just about here, it so happens—after having struck me: ‘Dog, there’s the way, the honor’s all mine, go ahead, go on, they’ll show you,’ and they did show me, oh yes, they’re like the sun that never stops, except at night, beating sharply and proudly, that is beating me hard at this moment, too hard, with a multitude of lances burst from the ground, oh shelter, yes shelter, under the big rock, before everything gets muddled.

  The shade here is good. How can anyone live in the city of salt, in the hollow of that basin full of dazzling heat? On each of the sharp right-angle walls cut out with a pickax and coarsely planed, [42] the gashes left by the pickax bristle with blinding scales, pale scattered sand yellows them somewhat except when the wind dusts the upright walls and terraces, then everything shines with dazzling whiteness under a sky likewise dusted even to its blue rind. I was going blind during those days when the stationary fire would crackle for hours on the surface of the white terraces that all seemed to meet as if, in the remote past, they had all to­gether tackled a mountain of salt, flattened it first, and then had hollowed out streets, the insides of houses and windows directly in the mass, or as if—yes, this is more like it, they had cut out their white, burning hell with a powerful jet of boiling water just to show that they could live where no one ever could, thirty days’ travel from any living thing, in this hollow in the middle of the desert where the heat of day prevents any contact among creatures, separates them by a portcullis of invisi­ble flames and of searing crystals, where without transition the cold of night congeals them individ­ually in their rock-salt shells, nocturnal dwellers in a dried-up icefloe, black Eskimos suddenly shiver­ing in their cubical igloos. Black because they wear long black garments, and the salt that collects even under their nails, that they continue tasting bitterly [43] and swallowing during the sleep of those polar nights, the salt they drink in the water from the only spring in the hollow of a dazzling groove, of­ten spots their dark garments with something like the trail of snails after a rain.

  Rain, O Lord, just one real rain, long and hard, rain from your heaven! Then at last the hideous city, gradually eaten away, would slowly and ir­resistibly cave in and, utterly melted in a slimy tor­rent, would carry off its savage inhabitants toward the sands. Just one rain, Lord! But what do I mean, what Lord, they are the lords and masters! They rule over their sterile homes, over their black slaves that they work to death in the mines and each slab of salt that is cut out is worth a man in the region to the south, they pass by, silent, wearing their mourning veils in the mineral whiteness of the streets, and at night, when the whole town looks like a milky phantom, they stoop down and enter the shade of their homes, where the salt walls shine dimly. They sleep with a weightless sleep and, as soon as they wake, they give orders, they strike, they say they are a united people, that their god is the true god, and that one must obey. They are my masters, they are ignorant of pity and, like masters, they want to be alone, to progress alone, [44] to rule alone, because they alone had the daring to build in the salt and the sands a cold torrid city. And I...

  What a jumble when the heat rises, I’m sweating, they never do, now the shade itself is heating up, I feel the sun on the stone above me, it’s striking, striking like a hammer on all the stones and it’s the music, the vast music of noon, air and stones vi­brating over hundreds of kilometers, gra, I hear the silence as I did once before. Yes, it was the same silence, years ago, that greeted me when the guards led me to them, in the sunlight, in the cen­ter of the square, whence the concentric terraces rose gradually toward the lid of hard blue sky sit­ting on the edge of the basin. There I was, thrown on my knees in the hollow of that white shield, my eyes corroded by the swords of salt and fire issu­ing from all the walls, pale with fatigue, my ear bleeding from the blow given by my guide, and they, tall and black, looked at me without saying a word. The day was at its midcourse. Under the blows of the iron sun the sky resounded at length, a sheet of white-hot tin, it was the same silence, and they stared at me, time passed, they kept on staring at me, and I couldn’t face their stares, I panted more and more violently, eventually I [45] wept, and suddenly they turned their backs on me in silence and all together went off in the same di­rection. On my knees, all I could see, in the red­-and-black sandals, was their feet sparkling with salt as they raised the long black gowns, the tip ris­ing somewhat, the heel striking the ground lightly, and when the square was empty I was dragged to the House of the Fetish.

  Squatting, as I am today in the shelter of the rock and the fire above my head pierces the rock’s thickness, I spent several days within the dark of the House of the Fetish, somewhat higher than the others, surrounded by a wall of salt, but without windows, full of a sparkling night. Several days, and I was given a basin of brackish water and some grain that was thrown before me the way chickens are fed, I picked it up. By day the door remained closed and yet the darkness became less oppressive, as if the irresistible sun managed to flow through the masses of salt. No lamp, but by feeling my way along the walls I touched garlands of dried palms decorating the walls and, at the end, a small door, coarsely fitted, of which I could make out the bolt with my fingertips. Several days, long after—I couldn’t count the days or the hours, but my hand­ful of grain had been thrown me some ten times [46] and I had dug out a hole for my excrements that I covered up in vain, the stench of an animal den hung on anyway—long after, yes, the door opened wide and they came in.

  One of them came toward me where I was squatting in a corner. I felt the burning salt against my cheek, I smelled the dusty scent of the palms, I watched him approach. He stopped a yard away from me, he stared at me in silence, a signal, and I stood up, he stared at me with his metallic eyes that shone without expression in his brown horse­-face, then he raised his hand. Still impassive, he seized me by the lower lip, which he twisted slowly until he tore my flesh and, without letting go, made me turn around and back up to the center of the room, he pulled on my lip to make me fall on my knees there, mad with pain and my mouth bleeding, then he turned away to join the others standing against the walls. They watched me moaning in the unbearable heat of the unbroken daylight that came in the wide-open door, and in that light suddenly appeared the Sorcerer with his raffia hair, his chest covered with a breastplate of pearls, his legs bare under a straw skirt, wearing a mask of reeds and wire with two square openings for the eyes. He was followed by musicians and [47] women wearing heavy motley gowns that revealed nothing of their bodies. They danced in front of the door at the end, but a coarse, scarcely rhythmi­cal dance, they just barely moved, and finally the Sorcerer opened the little door behind me, the mas­ters did not stir, they were watching me, I turned around and saw the Fetish, his double ax-head, his iron nose twisted like a snake.

  I was carried before him, to the foot of the ped­estal, I was made to drink a black, bitter, bitter wa­ter, and at once my head began to burn, I was laughing, that’s the offense, I have been offended. They undressed me, shaved my head and body, washed me in oil, beat my face with cords dipped in water and salt, and I laughed and turned my head away, but each time two women would take me by the ears and offer my face to the Sorcerer’s blows while I could see only his square eyes, I was still laughing, covered with blood. They stopped, no one spoke but me, the jumble was beginning in my head, then they lifted me up and forced me to raise my eyes toward the Fetish, I had ceased laughing. I knew that I was now consecrated to him to serve him, adore him, no, I was not laugh­ing any more, fear and pain stifled me. And there, in that white house, between those walls that the [48] sun was assiduously burning on the outside, my face taut, my memory exhausted, yes, I tried to pray to the Fetish, he was all there was and even his horrible face was less horrible than the rest of the w
orld. Then it was that my ankles were tied with a cord that permitted just one step, they danced again, but this time in front of the Fetish, the masters went out one by one.

  The door once closed behind them, the music again, and the Sorcerer lighted a bark fire around which he pranced, his long silhouette broke on the angles of the white walls, fluttered on the flat sur­faces, filled the room with dancing shadows. He traced a rectangle in a corner to which the women dragged me, I felt their dry and gentle hands, they set before me a bowl of water and a little pile of grain and pointed to the Fetish, I grasped that I was to keep my eyes fixed on him. Then the Sor­cerer called them one after the other over to the fire, he beat some of them who moaned and who then went and prostrated themselves before the Fetish my god, while the Sorcerer kept on dancing and he made them all leave the room until only one was left, quite young, squatting near the mu­sicians and not yet beaten. He held her by a shock of hair which he kept twisting around his wrist, she [49] dropped backward with eyes popping until she fi­nally fell on her back. Dropping her, the Sorcerer screamed, the musicians turned to the wall, while behind the square-eyed mask the scream rose to an impossible pitch, and the woman rolled on the ground in a sort of fit and, at last on all fours, her head hidden in her locked arms, she too screamed, but with a hollow, muffled sound, and in this posi­tion, without ceasing to scream and to look at the Fetish, the Sorcerer took her nimbly and nastily, without the woman’s face being visible, for it was covered with the heavy folds of her garment. And, wild as a result of the solitude, I screamed too, yes, howled with fright toward the Fetish until a kick hurled me against the wall, biting the salt as I am biting this rock today with my tongueless mouth, while waiting for the man I must kill.