Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The African

How many times have I heard my mother tell that story? So many times I ended up believing it happened to me, confusing the ravenous river with the swarm of ants that attacked me. The churning movement of ants all around me is still there and I’m frozen in a dream, I listen to the silence, an acute, strident silence, more terrifying than any sound in the world. The silence of ants.

* * *

In Ogoja, there were insects everywhere. Day insects, night insects. Those that are repulsive to adults don’t have the same effect on children. It’s no strain of the imagination for me to conjure up again that nightly resurgence of armies of cockroaches — cancrelats — as my grandfather used to call them — the theme of one of those Mauritian riddles or sirandanes as they are called: kankarla, nabit napas kilot , cockroach got coattails, but got no drawers. They came out of the cracks in the floor, the planks of wood on the ceiling, they skittered around over by the kitchen. My father hated them. Every night, he’d roam around the house, flashlight in one hand, bedroom slipper in the other, for an endless and vain hunt. He was convinced that cockroaches were the cause of many diseases, even cancer. I remember hearing him say: “Brush your toenails well, or the cockroaches will come chew on them in the night!”

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 But every so often, in the morning, they had been replaced by a larger specimen of a yellowish white color, and we knew instinctively it was a variety that could be particularly venomous.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.

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.