Colony

by Hugo Wilcken

  ‘Your room’s ready now.’

  The mulatto woman was standing in the doorway at the back of the café, holding a key.

  ‘Thank you. Do you have a safe, somewhere I could leave valuables?’

  The woman looked at him as if she hadn’t understood the word. ‘Don’t worry. It is safe here. Very safe. Many police, many soldiers. They come and drink here. There is no trouble here.’

  As he took the key from her, she said: ‘I am free, all afternoon. If you want, I am in the bar. I will arrange anything.’

  It was hard to follow her Creole French, and he wasn’t sure if she was offering herself, or some other woman. Her face was pleasant and pretty enough; her rounded figure wavered somewhere between voluptuous and plump. Manne imagined kissing her, undressing her, taking her to bed. The sex would be brisk, matter-of-fact, enjoyable. It was a fantasy that lasted no more than a split second, and yet it was enough to sate him.

  ‘Thank you, I’ll be fine.’

  A washbasin and mirror, a table and chair, a bed with a mosquito net – much the same as last night’s room in Moengo. Manne flopped down on the bed, still thinking of the mulatto woman, of sex. The last time he’d slept with a woman was in Caracas. He’d briefly kept a mistress there. She’d actually been a prostitute – it had been several years since he’d slept with any other kind of woman. But she’d played along with enough humour and grace, and he remembered with affection her face, her conversation, the look and feel of her body. He’d take her out to lunch or dinner a few nights a week, would delight in buying her clothes and jewellery, paid rent on a room for her in a nice part of town. The liaison had lasted around a month. It was a pattern that had played out in many of the ports and cities he’d stayed in for any length of time. And it was always at that point, about a month in, when the purity of the commerce would start to feel corrupted, and one or the other would put an end to it.

  Now he threw off his clothes, washed himself as well as he could at the basin. Always greasy with sweat in this climate, impossible to feel crisp and dry and clean. He stared at himself in the mirror, examined his face carefully for the first time in days or weeks. The handsome boyishness was still there. The sculpted bone structure, the thick lick of hair – bleached blond in the tropical sun – made him look at least a decade younger than his forty-two years. It was only when he looked very closely that he could make out the minuscule lines running through his face, under his eyes, like a thousand hairline cracks in a Chinese vase.

  A few books spilled out of his suitcase. He’d ordered them from the Librairie Française in Caracas – the memoirs of a convict, a guard, a doctor who’d served their time in the Colony. Their stories took on an air of fiction now that he was actually in Saint-Laurent. The novel he’d started on the boat seemed more real. He lay down on the bed to continue reading it, but quickly drifted off into an uneasy sleep. Dreams came to him again: some grotesque, some sexual, some about the novel, some about Edouard.

  The rain woke him up – a pummelling tropical shower that made the ceiling shudder. By the time he’d got dressed, the rain had stopped, abruptly, as though someone had turned it off with a switch. Outside, a humid, fetid odour rose from the streets swept clean by the savagery of the downpour. The water hadn’t really refreshed the atmosphere, hadn’t brought relief from the heat, either.

  On his noonday walk, Manne had already located the botanical gardens – ‘the most beautiful in South America,’ a woman on the boat had insisted. Past the large iron gate was a sweeping expanse of gravel, with rows of what looked like horse chestnuts on each side. At a cursory glance, it could have been a large municipal park anywhere in France, and it made Manne realise why he felt so strange in Saint-Laurent. It wasn’t the tropical setting, or the convicts in the street, or the Creole families, or the camp de la transportation. No, it was the fact that, despite all that, he was back in France, for the first time since the war. The same unease he’d felt on the boat, with its little microcosm of Gallic life revolving around the captain’s table. It was France that felt exotic to him now – its boredom, its rituals, dangers – rather than the gargantuan river and forest that surrounded him here.

  He tried to see himself in the faces of the convicts who tended the gardens. Had Manne been caught and arrested after the war, he might well have ended up among them. Theoretically, he still could. Or had there been an amnesty in the intervening years? The only thing he knew for certain was that he’d been declared missing in action, presumed dead, back in 1917: months afterwards, in Geneva, he’d seen his name on a list in a French newspaper.

  Someone was clipping at a bush, his back turned to Manne. He was tall for a convict, and for an electric moment, Manne thought it was Edouard. But when the man turned around, he could see it wasn’t. The convict stared, as if it were Manne who was the bizarre creature, then lifted his straw hat slowly and bowed with exaggerated courtesy.

  ‘I’m looking for someone who works here, in the gardens. By the name of Edouard. Do you know where I can find him?’

  The man shook his head solemnly. ‘No Edouard working here, sir. But I’ve only been in the gardens a few months. Best ask old Xavier. Been here for years.’

  The convict indicated where to find him, in a corner by a shed, beyond the gravel and rows of trees. Here, a different kind of vegetation was bursting out of myriad little pots – a riot of purples, reds and yellows, with the familiar wiry stems and drooping petals of orchids. Manne recognised most of them, but there were some he’d never seen before, and instinctively he found himself mentally noting dimensions, colours, symmetries.

  The man was sitting on a stool, contemplating the orchids, even talking to them, since his mouth was silently moving. Shrivelled and toothless, he looked impossibly old.

  ‘I knew Edouard,’ he said after a long pause. ‘Liked him well enough. He was here a year or two. Think he was waiting for someone. Maybe you? But he’s not here any more.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He got moved.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Camp down the river. An old scam. They move a man down the river. Then his lover, he has to bribe the bookkeeper to get moved up there too.’

  ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about … I just want to know where I can find Edouard.’

  ‘I saw him not so long ago. Maybe … two months ago. Sneaked back in here one day. Just like that. On the run, I’d say. Took some of these roots here. Took his drawings, too. He’d left them in the nursery office.’

  ‘Where did he go?’

  The man waved vaguely towards the river. ‘Took off with Bonifacio’s gang, so they say. Didn’t get far, by all accounts. They got Bonifacio. Skulking around, up near Renée.’

  ‘What’s Renée?’

  ‘Camp up north.’

  ‘What about Edouard?’

  The man shrugged his shoulders. ‘Who knows? Probably hiding out up that way, too.’

  ‘This other man. Bonifacio. Where can I find him?’

  ‘Ah! Too late for that now. The bell. Didn’t you hear the bell?’

  In the twilight, the town felt different, somehow more sinister. Convicts made their way back to barracks; Creole women scurried through the streets as though they too were under curfew. Manne wandered slowly back through the gardens and along the boulevard in a daze of thought.

  The mulatto woman looked up as he walked into the café. ‘Letter for you.’ Manne ripped it open – an invitation to a cocktail reception at the governor’s residence, tomorrow evening. A tedious, dangerous night of colonial small talk, no doubt. Was there any way to get out of it? No, he could hardly refuse. He ordered a beer, drank it down quickly, ordered another. A small crowd of men stood at the bar. Next to Manne, two uniformed men were drinking rum, shot after shot, bottle on the bar top. Manne could tell that one of them was watching him warily out of the corner of his eye. Maybe strangers – of Manne’s sort, anyway – weren’t so common in this town.

  ‘What a b
usiness,’ the other one was saying, ‘what a business!’

  ‘Only wish I could’ve been there.’

  ‘I’ll give him this. He didn’t start blubbing, like most of ’em do.’

  ‘Know what someone told me? He’d had “CUT HERE” tattooed around his neck.’

  ‘I couldn’t see well enough for that. It was over in a minute. Frogmarched him straight to the block. Practically carried him there. Didn’t want to give him a chance to try anything on.’

  ‘No last words, then?’

  ‘He did shout something. Just as they were about to strap him under. I couldn’t make it out. Antoine thought it was “Je suis le bagne.” That’s what he heard it as.’

  ‘Doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘They don’t tend to make much sense, by then.’

  The man who’d been eyeing Manne now turned to him. ‘Well, sir. You and I both seem to have missed the big show today.’

  Only now did Manne recognise him: the fat, surly officer who’d questioned him at the Customs House. The drink seemed to have loosened him up.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘You didn’t hear the bell?’

  ‘I heard a bell … I thought it was the Angelus.’

  The man laughed. ‘They ring the bell when there’s an execution. Famous killer, this time around. Name of Bonifacio. Expect you’ve heard of him.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Surely you’ve heard of the Bonifacio gang? The heists in the Place Vendôme? Caused quite a hullabaloo at the time.’

  ‘I don’t recall.’

  ‘Well … anyway, he killed a guard, not so long ago. The guard killers … we always get them in the end. Don’t we, François?’

  ‘Like to think we do,’ said the other man uncertainly. He was in colonial whites, a large pistol holstered at his hip. There was a silence for a minute or two as the men drank.

  ‘I’m curious,’ said Manne eventually. ‘How often are these executions?’

  ‘Oh, not too often,’ replied the customs officer. ‘Depends. Some years, there’s only a couple. Others, a dozen or more. Bonifacio’s the fourth this year, I think.’

  The man with the pistol downed the rest of his drink, made to go. ‘Can’t sit here getting drunk all night. Tomorrow’s the big day.’

  ‘Why, what’s happening?’

  The man raised an eyebrow. ‘You don’t know? New convoy’s coming in. You should go down to the pier and take a look. It’s quite the carnival. The only type you’ll get in Saint-Laurent, at any rate.’

  After a dinner of rice and meat, Manne went back to his room and took off his clothes. He threw himself onto the bed, confused and exhausted by the events of the day. The news about Edouard was still sinking in, making him feel giddy. The toothless convict in the gardens had been a touch senile … or had he been toying with Manne? One thing seemed certain enough. Edouard really had been here, in Saint-Laurent. The old man could hardly have been making it all up, not with that detail about Edouard’s drawings.

  Had Manne acted as soon as he’d received Edouard’s letter, everything would have been so straightforward. He’d have come to Saint-Laurent and found Edouard still at the Botanical Gardens. Instead, he’d spent a few months dithering, moving from town to town in Colombia, through the jungle. Then on to Venezuela, where finally he’d decided. He’d been a couple of weeks in Caracas, ample time for the city to no longer feel new or different. And still he’d had to wait out another month there while he assembled the forged documents, the visas, the permits, the bank transfers, before he could finally get out, move on.

  The roof leaked, he couldn’t see from where, but the walls were damp, as if they too were sweating. Under his mosquito net, Manne felt like a caged animal. He remembered the words he’d written in his journal only a few hours before: I’m not depressed. They worked on him like a reverse spell. A vision of the convicts he’d passed in the street came back to him, with their tatty, striped uniforms. The blankness of the gaze, which spoke of lives worn smooth through repetition. It made some sort of sense that Edouard had ended up here after all.

  As usual, the heat woke him early. Manne sat in the bar for an hour or so drinking bad coffee, wondering what to do with the hours that stretched out before him. Years ago, a day without duties had been a thing to be savoured; now it felt like a constraint. He wandered along the main avenue for a while, his mind eternally drifting back to Edouard. No longer in Saint-Laurent, but somewhere north of here, hiding out. In which case, there was a good enough chance of finding him – if he wanted to be found. No doubt he could survive for weeks or even months in the jungle. After all, most orchid hunters ended up getting lost at some stage, forced to live off the jungle until they found their way back to civilisation.

  Manne wandered back to the botanical gardens. There was no one around except a few convict gardeners, desultorily clipping or digging. He recognised the tall man he’d almost mistaken for Edouard, and walked up to him. ‘I’m looking for the old man I talked to yesterday. Where can I find him?’

  ‘He’s not here today. Took ill in the night. I think he’s at the hospital.’

  Manne wandered back out again, somehow unsurprised at the old convict’s absence. Saint-Laurent’s few streets were filling up with people. They were all heading in the same direction, towards the pier. Without anything better to do, Manne followed them down to the river.

  A whistle blast pierced the air. As Manne got closer, a huge grey ship came into view, almost the size of an ocean liner. It had just docked at the pier. Even given the width of the Maroni, it was disconcerting to see anything this big so far up a river, by the jetty of such a small town. Quite a crowd had formed by the foreshore: Creole men in suits and hats with their women in multicoloured dresses and headscarves; half-naked native boatmen; dozens of guards, too, pistols glistening at their hips. Faces bobbed at the thick glass plate of the ship’s portholes.

  Sailors lowered the gangplanks; slowly, the convicts began to disembark. Again, Manne was struck by how short most of them seemed, how young, too. He watched as two prisoners clumsily carried a third down one of the gangplanks. Once they’d set the man down on the pier, it was clear that he’d lost the use of his legs, that he was a paralytic.

  ‘Mais c’est un cadavre!’ exclaimed a bemused official who was overseeing the disembarkation. ‘What’s the use of sending me men like this?’

  The official was one of several who were standing about, in their spotless whites and pith helmets, chatting to the guards on the pier. A number of their wives were there, too, shading themselves under parasols as they stared at the disembarking convicts. The younger ones were bare armed and in elegant summer frocks; they looked wildly out of place – more like flapper girls from the chic quarters of Paris. One of them turned to Manne. ‘Which one’s Boppe?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Boppe!’

  ‘Sorry, but I don’t know who that is.’

  ‘Oh, you must have heard of him! That millionaire who killed his wife.’

  ‘Afraid not.’

  She looked at him oddly, then turned back to the convicts, peering at them through opera glasses as they lined up on the pier, ready to be marched to the camp de la transportation. Manne turned the other way, pushing back through the crowds. The sight of hundreds of convicts standing to attention under the sun made him feel light-headed. He’d read in a book that a third of them – or was it half? – usually died within the year.

  Back past Customs House, the statue, the pretty hôtel de ville … but when he got to the hospital he stopped. Even here, doctors and orderlies loitered outside its impressive façade, waiting to see the new convoy marched along the boulevard.

  Manne climbed the stairs to the entrance, and then through to a high-ceilinged atrium. Beyond, he could see a large hall with men lying on long rows of beds, panting in the heat. There didn’t seem to be any guards about.

  ‘Yes?’

  A bored-looking man in a white smock was sittin
g behind a desk.

  ‘I want to see a patient. Not sure of his last name, his first name’s Xavier. An old man. He works in the botanical gardens. He was taken in during the night.’

  ‘Couldn’t have been during the night, could it?’

  ‘Why not?’

  The man looked up in surprise. ‘They lock the barracks. Then they don’t open them till morning.’

  He was consulting some sort of cahier, flicking back through the pages. He hadn’t bothered to ask Manne who he was or why he wanted to see the convict patient. The man’s arms were covered in tattoos – so he, too, was a convict.

  ‘Bonnefoi, Xavier, age sixty-three, brought here at six this morning.’

  ‘Must be him. Could I see him?’

  ‘If you go to the bamboos.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You don’t know the bamboos? Where they bury the convicts.’

  ‘Oh … you mean he died.’

  The man nodded. ‘Probably dead when they brought him here.’

  Manne made his excuses, then ducked down an alley back to the café, back to his room. Already tired from the heat, he was thinking about the conversation he’d had with the customs officer the night before. About executions. About the guillotining of the gangster, Bonifacio. The man Edouard had escaped with, if the old convict was to be believed. Now the convict was dead, too, only hours after their conversation. Everything was tenuous – the faint traces of Edouard’s existence in the Colony already fading under the sun and rain. He felt angry at the old man for dying like that, for not waiting to explain himself more clearly. Absurd, of course. It’s what old men do, after all. They die.

  Once again, Manne couldn’t escape the feeling that Edouard was playing a trick on him, an elaborate game of seduction. He remembered an expedition up near the Panamanian border, several years ago. He’d stopped at an Indian encampment for supplies and water, only to be told that another team had passed that way just three days before. Led by a tall European, dark hair, strange eyes. Almost immediately, Manne had set out once again, taking with him a couple of local Indians. He’d abandoned his planned itinerary and set the Indians to track Edouard. One morning a couple of days later, they saw plumes of smoke rising on the horizon. It wasn’t until the late afternoon that they’d got to the area: a whole swathe of forest had been burnt out. Edouard had discovered something there – something valuable. Not only that, he’d also known that Manne was in the vicinity, and had burnt out the area to destroy any other specimens. For weeks, Manne had continued to track Edouard. On one occasion he’d even come across a campsite with still-warm ashes from the night fire. It had been around then that Manne’s health had started to fail. His feet had swollen up and a malarial fever had laid him low for a week or two. Still he’d pressed on. During the endless drudgery of the journey, he’d often wondered just what he’d do should he find Edouard out here in the jungle. Rob him, or threaten him, or murder him, or offer to team up with him? Maybe he’d got it the wrong way round, it had once occurred to him. Maybe it was Edouard who was following him.