August, 1940
(In which Hercule starts to build the canal across Palm Deux; a vary large boat arrives on the plantation, pulled all the way up from the coast; Sylvie and Hercule start talking, and something starts happening between them; the racist oaf Valery is called on to help Hercule blow up something with dynamite; a mysterious animal dies in an accident; Hercule goes to Sylvie for advice. We start wondering, is love in the air?)
Palm Deux
30 August 1940
12 (1022 lbs.)
As long as the rain holds off, we dig. There are no oceans or lagoons to get in the way this time. It is simply a case of the natives doing what they’re used to doing – making trenches. Except it isn’t in between the rubber trees but beyond them, the biggest trench they’ve ever dug. The elevation and geobarric readings are fine. No fall in scale to worry about either, not even at this altitude. The progress so far is something I could only have dreamed of in Vridi.
The plan is simple: to follow the eastern edge of Zone C, next to the border of the forest. There might have to be one detour in order to skirt a rocky outcrop – a small hill, really – about a mile in from the river. Otherwise Zone C is the perfect site, practically virgin soil just waiting to be used. The only section that needed to be cleared before we began digging was fifty acres of Madame V-C’s park, which took a week to burn. That will leave the park bordered on two sides by water, the Plantain to the south, the canal to the east.
Until now we have managed several yards a day. If we kept going in a straight line, we’d eventually link up with the great Bandama, which winds all the way down to the coastal lagoons and then the Gulf of Guinea. But it is unlikely we will ever reach the river, for Monsieur V-C’s property doesn’t extend that far. And even if we had to dig day and night for the next six weeks, we wouldn’t get anywhere near the Bandama. Besides, the rains are sure to come before long. As it is, they’re already late.
Equipment to build the canal wasn’t easy to come by, but what I have found so far has been ridiculously cheap. Ever since armistice, people have been closing their houses, leaving for the Gold Coast, Liberia, or the south of the continent. As if they can escape the war the further away they go. They are selling off things for a fraction of what they’re worth. I bought two tractors, although a bulldozer would have been more suitable, and a sluice.
Monsieur V-C has come down to the site several times, stands up on the rocky hill, from where he can get the best view. With his hands resting on his cane, he looks quite impressed. He can see progress, the only progress, for that matter, in all his African operations. There is little tapping going on in the groves, although Mohammed stays behind there with several natives. Rubber prices are not bad, but ships to and from West Africa are infrequent. Our last shipment was destroyed – off Sierra Leone – when the Greek captain mistook local fishermen for pirates. Trying to escape them, he ran aground. Our coconut quota for the soap factory in Daloa is negligible. One of Monsieur V-C’s stores has closed down, so he hasn’t been traveling to La Cité so often. As for his boat … well, we have that now.
It is still hard to believe, an ocean-going vessel in the midst of a rubber plantation, but Monsieur V-C had it brought up from the coast. When I arrived back from Touba with the sluice, it was there, lying in the river, looking not unlike a barge which had lost its way and had then been discarded by its owners. It is no small thing either and must weigh about four thousand tons. He said the Commandant in La Cité organized a virtual flotilla of dugouts and natives to pull it up the Cavally and then the Plantain. I didn’t know you could get so far upriver. Other than the Niger, none of the rivers here are meant to be navigable for more than a hundred miles – not even the mighty Bandama – and then you hit sandbanks, shallows midstream, and sometimes even hippos. Perhaps the natives knew a special way.
What the boat is for exactly, or where it’s meant to go, I still have to find out. “We can use it for pleasure trips,” I overheard Madame V-C suggest one day. They were outside her kitchen, harvesting the first crop of tomatoes. I thought she was being silly but said nothing. Since the incident where she faced the elephant, I look at her with new eyes. I wouldn’t call it respect, but I tolerate her. I leave her alone. Besides, she has made no more demands about the running of Palm Deux.
Whatever the boat is for, it will have to be moved into the canal before the rains. The storms arrive suddenly and without warning, which make the waters of the Plantain rise so fast and violently that no mooring would be strong enough to hold a boat for long. It would be swept away in no time.
In contrast to the boat, the sluice is the most useful item I’ve found. I bought it from a man who once had hopes of irrigating an area around Touba. His only problem was that he could find no water in the Sahel, no matter how deep he dug. It is an engine-driven Ziebermann Cataract gate, thick, solid, twelve feet tall, and perfect for the entrance to the canal. It has already been put in place, and we have excavated part of the waterway either side of it. When the time comes, we will furrow to the Plantain and then detonate the last stretch. Monsieur V-C, in his sentimental way, has christened both the gate and the boat after her.
As for the canal itself, when he first proposed it I believed he was joking. The idea seemed so preposterous, just like the Commandant’s railroad to the Mediterranean. Or for that matter, just like someone bringing a cargo boat this far inland. A waterway that leads nowhere and irrigates nothing won’t make him money, nor will it serve any purpose. Even if we were to reach the Bandama – which is, as I said, very unlikely – the canal will be as useful as a cul de sac.
However, when I began to plot the canal’s route, it slowly dawned on me that it could be of one major advantage: the end of Hercule. The canal will put me out of a job, will effectively get rid of me. The way I have planned it, it will cut off direct access between most of Palm Deux and the forest. The elephants will no longer be so eager to trespass, what with a deep canal in their way. They will head in a new direction, and there will be no more reason to have a shooter here. Mohammed can take over. By then, I should also have made contact with the spy from Dakar.
So, things are finally working out in my favor. And when the time eventually comes for me to leave Africa, I will have completed a canal, even if it isn’t the one I came here for.
* * *
7 September
3 (210 lbs.)
I cut a curious tooth today, oblong in shape. From the side it looked almost like a heart. I have put it aside from the others in the collection in my cupboard.
I shoot whenever I can, which is usually during lunchtime, when we stop work on the canal. Zone B is right near us, so it isn’t far for me to go. I also began a third billiard ball several weeks ago. Come to think of it, I should have made a special entry for that.
* * *
15 September
6 (615 lbs.)
She has asked me to call her by her name. Sylvie. She came down to the canal several times the last few weeks, walked along our excavations, but kept her distance. The first day I only caught sight of the pink scarf tied to her hat. Last week she waved. And today she approached me.
Our conversation was uneasy at first, as I might have expected. We have spoken only once really, at the palm reading so many months ago. And we have never been alone before. We talked about the boat mostly. The vessel is in the canal now, propped up with several dozen tree trunks, like a grand old lady dressed in her most expensive clothes but unable to stand without the help of crutches. She’s so out of place too, surrounded not by water but by a towering forest one side, bare sand the other. Until the wooden deck for her is completed, one climbs up by a rope ladder.
I was embarrassed, maybe still a bit angry at her too. Searching for something to say, I told her the boat is a wharfer. She asked how I knew that, so I explained how I used to go down to the harbor at Joliette in Marseilles, seeing it was the only time my father and I saw each other or talked; how he would spend very little time at home between voyages, so I became his shadow, following him from the anchor-cable room to the propeller shaft, listening and watching; how I learned everything about the sea, could tell the wrong sound of an engine the same way a mother knows her baby is unwell, which kind of oil causes too much smoke, where the dangers of the Atlantic lie, from the smallest rock to a wind come by way of the Azores; and how, after ten years, I knew each davit, hawse-hole, and boomspar, and how to plot the course to places as obscure as Newfoundland.
“I have always wanted to know more about the sea,” she said afterward, “and now I can learn.” That is when she made her proposal. If I was prepared to teach her about the boat, she continued, maybe there was something she could teach me. I laughed. What could I learn from her, I asked. How to feed animals? How to treat hand wounds? I am an engineer. And as for reading palms!
“Then we can just talk,” she said.
I hesitated at first. But when she persisted, I agreed. It seems harmless enough. It’s such a long time since I got to talk about boats. We don’t have to discuss anything else, even though there are things which I am still curious about. Such as where she got her young animals from, where she hid them, and how she learned to get so close to the elephant she calls by my name. Such as where she comes from and what she is doing here. Then again, maybe I will stick to boats and the sea, for I can’t forget that we remain total opposites: the hunter and the animal lover.
I suggested to her that we start below. We headed for the engine room, me telling her that the vessel was driven by a diesel motor made by Stevenson-Roams of Aberdeen, Scotland.
“I can read that on the machinery,” she said, chuckling. “Now tell me something I cannot read.”
And so began our first lesson.
* * *
29 September
10 (917 lbs.)
I didn’t intend to ask questions of her. They simply happened. First one, then another, until they became quite simple. Now we talk about many things. It always begins with a person. People are the easiest to talk about. After two weeks, I have learned about practically everyone I can think of. All those faces I couldn’t identify at the luncheon and on my visits to Belleville now have names, and the ones I knew also have histories.
Monsieur Olivier, for instance, left behind a bankrupt pastry empire in France. Fearful of any forgotten creditor who should try to track him down, he chose a town far from the coast but, knowing his limits, not quite in the Sahel. The Maurys, who live near the shantytown, are assiduously planting bananas, which they believe to be the crop of the future. Madame Maury does all the work, while her husband stays indoors because he gets a heat rash. The two drunk planteurs I overheard talking at the Noix and who mistook the spy from Dakar for a fellow farmer, are apparently two Englishmen, although no one can tell them apart. They live together on the river, and there are stories about them. (Then again, there is also a story that Valery killed someone in Alsace, where he was working on a coal mine.) The doctor with the unruly gray hair, meanwhile, is named Gerard. He has been here for five years but will soon leave for France. He has not heard from his family for six months, and he is worried. Transport by sea being so erratic and dangerous, he has decided to drive back across the desert.
I thought of asking her about the woman I sat next to at her luncheon – I think her name was Eve, the one who said she looked after the African girls who fled to France – but something stopped me. Besides, there is no urgency. I can always ask her tomorrow.
My questions are simple next to hers. She wants to know everything about the boat, even when there is no point to it. We were on the bridge today. Why was it, she asked, that mariners made up new words like sabord and tribord, when left and right were perfectly fine for everyone else on land? And what was the purpose of a wheelhouse so far from the bridge? One might as well put a car’s steering wheel in the back with the luggage. And how was one expected to work out navigational charts on such a small desk? Why not, she suggested, combine the bridge and the wheelhouse to create more space? I couldn’t help smiling at that. In between questions, she called playfully down the blowhorn: “Full steam ahead, young man! Young man, where are you? Young man?!” She turned to me. “Sir, I think the driver has jumped overboard. Do you think he might have been taken by a tiger?”
As I sit here now and go over the day’s events, I find myself smiling once again at her antics. Suggesting that someone fall overboard and be taken by a tiger, no less! Maybe she was making fun of me. Anyone who knows anything about animals knows that tigers live not in Africa but in Asia. An animal lover would know that.
* * *
5 October
6 (515 lbs.)
It comes now that at four o’clock, I am waiting for her to arrive. I let the natives leave as soon as possible so that there will be silence to hear her coming. She will walk across the bare expanse of Zone C, her hair tied up, her pink-scarfed hat in one hand, taking wide sweeps of her arms when she walks, as if she were fighting the very air itself. It is a strong walk. I think she likes the quiet out here, likes to escape the native women, Yaaba especially.
When she came the other day, Mohammed was on board the boat with me, which is rare. He had wanted to brag about an elephant he had just killed. We still talk only about elephants. Conversations with her are so refreshing by comparison. It reminds me of what I have been missing. When Sylvie saw that I was standing with someone, she hesitated. She seemed embarrassed, if that’s possible, as if she had been caught doing something wrong. At first, I thought it was Mohammed she was trying to avoid, but she doesn’t know him. Maybe she is still not used to native men, seeing they are so large and some of them don’t bother to cover themselves as we do. Or maybe she still feels uncertain about our meetings. Only when Mohammed left did she approach. We went to the stern, although she has decided she prefers the English alternative I told her about, “the poop.”
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The blood on the page, I should add, is nothing fatal. It is only from my hand. See how seriously I take my carving!
* * *
6 October
Sylvie almost caught me red-handed with my gun today. The natives had headed off for lunch, and I had just retrieved my Rigby from the bridge to go hunting when I heard someone on the wooden deck and then footsteps on the metal stairs. She had a picnic basket and said that seeing it was cool today, we could combine the lesson about the boat with an outdoor lunch. She thought the coolness might mean rain later, but it is hot again tonight.
When we were at the stern – or as she’d say, on the poop – her laying out a blanket on the deck, she told me that Monsieur V-C had gone away for the day to sort out some business he had at the soap factory in Daloa. She said the dining table in the villa was too long for just one person. She has never spoken of him in front of me before.
Tonight he is back again. I know that, because I can hear his music echoing out over the river.
* * *
14 October
6 (468 lbs.)
Dynamite was something I’d wanted to avoid until the end, especially with the forest so near us. But a narrow vein of rock beginning in the hill ran right across the path of the canal and was deep enough to call for explosives. A deviation would not only have set us back by several weeks, but also would have added a sharp bend in the canal no engineer would be proud of.
Needing a second person to assist me, I called in the only other man in the area who has experience with dynamite. Unfortunately this happens to be the conservative oaf Valery, who claims to have once worked in a mine. I told the natives to clear off for the day, in case of flying debris. I also made sure that Mohammed was as far away as possible. I am convinced that the mere sight of him would still trigger memories of their fight outside the Noix – which would probably have set off another kind of explosion.
Valery arrived late, and I was sure he’d used the trip as an excuse to visit his mousso, so we only began after midday. His job was to set the charge, mine to calculate the direction of the blow. I kept telling him to keep it small. He knows as well as the rest of us how shallow the roots of the trees are here and that it doesn’t take much to fell a 150-foot pirrier. I did not want to risk several of them falling across the canal and impeding our work. Instead of paying attention to me, though, the fool was more interested in giving advice: “Why do you not dynamite the entire canal? You could finish it in a few days then and rid yourself of all these nègres. They take forever because you treat them too softly. Where are they today anyway? They should be here.”
His first three attempts failed, probably because he was sweating so profusely and wetting everything he touched. Besides it being midday and hotter than usual, you could tell from his odor that he’d just eaten a meal of chilies. The combination made rivulets pour from his brow and dampened his chubby hands. His fourth attempt, although it succeeded, almost killed me.
We were standing behind the hill, on the side closer the forest, when it appeared that the charge had failed once again. I started walking back to the site when it suddenly blew. A piece of rock narrowly missed me and came hurtling past like some antiquated cannonball. Several of these missiles flew into the forest, hitting trees and making several of them shake terribly. But only one fell toward the canal, causing minor damage. Much as I wanted to curse Valery, I stopped myself, for the job was done.
Before we left, I went to inspect the fallen tree and to see if any others threatened to topple our way. While I searched, Valery sat on the rocks, disinterested and drinking from a half-jack he had pulled from his overalls. He’d probably been drinking before the blast too.
I had not gone very far past the tree line when I came across the body of a dead animal. It had obviously been killed in the blast. At first I thought it might be from her park, an animal that had escaped when we burnt the channel for the canal. But I didn’t recognize it. Though it had a torso similar to a giraffe’s, it was much smaller than the one I’d bought, and it had other markings too, stripes rather than spots. It resembled none of the animals I’d bought in Belleville, and it was too big to be one of those that Sylvie had set free. Any further identification was impossible because one of the missiles had completely taken off the animal’s neck and head.
I was curious to find out what kind of animal it was, but the further into the forest I went, the darker it got and the more difficult it was to see anything. Night was fast approaching. All I could think was that the head might have been launched into a tree. If so, it would be taken by a civet or a hyrax. It will be gone before I can get back here again and discover what species it was.
* * *
17 October
1 (56 lbs.)
I told her of the discovery. If anyone would know its identity, I was sure she would. I had to describe the animal to her, for I was convinced none of the body would be left by the time I could show it to her. I didn’t explain why I wanted to know. How could I tell her that it is because I am a hunter? How could I say, “Well, after having shot practically everything there is to shoot from here all the way up to the Sahel, I have never even seen an animal like this one before”? Unable to tell her any of those things, I left my reasons vague.
She seemed embarrassed when I asked her, as if I was testing her, but finally she asked me to take her to the place where it had died. As we walked across the basin of the canal, around the rocky hill to the forest, I was aware of the silence. It reminded me of the silence that surrounds me whenever I am near an elephant, about to pull the trigger. On the boat we always talk, she constantly full of wild questions and playful banter, and there is hardly ever a quiet moment. Now the only sound in the whole of Zone C was the swish of her skirt. As we were stepping over the fallen tree, she tripped and I caught her. Helping her up, I am sure I saw something in her eyes.
Her attention was suddenly drawn away by something she spied on the ground – a lone hoof. It could have been from the dead animal, but I wasn’t sure. She didn’t know what species it came from but said she would take it home and check. I presume she has books of reference.
She came by a few hours ago, the first time she has ever been to my quarters. She never entered but only stayed long enough to tell me she had identified the animal. She mentioned two words that meant nothing to me; in fact, they sounded Italian or Latin. She added excitedly that it was also a very rare animal.
I didn’t know what to say as we stood there – the animal lover in the hunter’s lair – so I said that, in my opinion, a leopard is truly rare. It was a stupid thing to say to her, but I don’t think she understood what I meant anyway.
––––––––––
I cannot sleep. I have been carving a billiard ball, my sixth, but I suddenly smell something. It is strong enough to overpower the scent of coconuts and even the frangipani outside my windows. It is the smell I remember from the boat – not the sea, but her. I wonder if she ever tells him that she is coming down to see me or discusses what she has learned on the boat. What do they talk about over that long dinner table?
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