Colony

by Hugo Wilcken

  ‘Oh good. What do you make of his grand plans? I’m persuaded he thinks he’s a latter-day pharaoh.’

  The commandant gave a nervous ‘Ha ha!’ – whether out of embarrassment or pleasure it was hard to tell. His wife, on the other hand, looked supremely self-possessed, smiling, staring at Manne straight in the eyes.

  ‘Very impressive. Seems like an ambitious, courageous project.’

  ‘Thank you, thank you!’ said the commandant.

  ‘I’m glad you had an interesting afternoon,’ continued his wife. ‘I trust you had an equally interesting morning?’

  ‘Why … not quite as interesting. I was taking notes in my bedroom. Then I went for a walk in the garden.’

  ‘Garden’s rather gone to seed, I’m afraid. But there are some nice walks down along the river. You didn’t pass by the folly, did you?’

  ‘I don’t think so …’

  ‘A stone hut, down a path, at the other end of the garden. My husband had it built for me, didn’t you, dear? It’s rather delightful!’

  ‘I’ll certainly take a look tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, do. I like to imagine it to be the place of romantic trysts. The runaway convict and his guard’s wife, perhaps.’

  ‘You do have a vivid imagination, my dear.’

  The butler interrupted the flow of conversation as he served the entrée. Then as they started eating, the woman continued with her interrogation: ‘Now tell me, Monsieur Hartfeld – and please forgive me if I seem to be prying, it’s just that we have so few guests here – I was wondering whether you were married.’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Not married? Well, I must say I’m surprised. Handsome fellow like you.’

  ‘Now, Renée, really!’ the commandant said. ‘I’m sure you don’t want to embarrass our guest.’

  ‘It’s perfectly all right,’ Manne said. ‘No, I suppose I’ve always travelled a lot, and been very involved in my work, so the married life wouldn’t really suit me.’

  ‘Well, Monsieur Hartfeld. I wouldn’t have put you down as a confirmed bachelor. Not much use for women, then?’

  ‘On the contrary. I’m always charmed by their company.’

  ‘I’m sure the sentiment is reciprocated.’

  ‘Renée! Really!’ Manne could feel the commandant searching for a good-natured tone for his remonstrance, anxious to avoid a repeat of the night before.

  ‘Oh, he doesn’t mind my idle prying, do you, Monsieur Hartfeld?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Yes, I can well imagine how you went down with those society ladies of Saint-Laurent.’

  There was a natural silence for a minute or two as they ate. It wasn’t so difficult to keep up the urbane exterior, but Manne could feel his heart thumping against his ribcage. He wondered how far she’d go with the barbed flirting, and whether she was leading up to a denunciation. He looked for a hint of hysteria in her, or hostility, or even complicity. But there was nothing.

  ‘Tell us something about the project you’re working on here, Mr Hartfeld,’ the woman said.

  ‘It’s not at the project stage yet. We’re considering a botanical survey of this stretch of the Maroni. I’m here to make an initial feasibility report.’

  ‘What’s of special interest on this particular stretch of the river?’

  ‘It’s an area that’s never been properly surveyed.’

  ‘I mean, wouldn’t it be a lot easier to survey the Dutch side, and avoid the problem of working in the penal territories?’

  ‘Well, we’re hoping to sell the report to the French government.’

  ‘Surely one side of the river isn’t going to be much different from the other?’

  ‘Well … these reports …’

  The commandant came to his rescue. ‘I’m sure all parties concerned have their reasons. Isn’t that right, Monsieur Hartfeld?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  His feeble response hung in the air as they continued eating. With people like the commandant or Leblanc, Manne knew he could hold his own, under any circumstances. But he struggled to think of something to say now, a way of shepherding the conversation to safer ground. Before he could formulate anything, the commandant’s wife had cut in again.

  ‘Perhaps you could have my friend seconded to you.’

  ‘Your friend?’

  ‘You remember the man I was telling you about. Yesterday at dinner. Pierre Boppe.’

  ‘Ah yes. The convict.’

  ‘He may well be the only other botanist in the Colony. He could be of some help to you.’

  ‘That’s certainly an idea. Although I don’t expect to be here very long.’

  ‘Worth a thought, in any case.’

  ‘Yes. I’ll think it over.’

  ‘You know, his is a strange story indeed.’

  ‘I can only imagine it is.’

  ‘He claimed his wife had been unfaithful to him. With a house guest.’

  Manne glanced at the commandant. His bonhomie had evaporated, and he was now looking rattled. But it was clear that he wasn’t going to try to stop his wife saying whatever she wanted.

  ‘So, do you know what he did?’ she continued. ‘He shot her while she slept. Only she didn’t die straight away. She even managed to sit up and look at herself in the mirror.’

  Her eyes flickered away from Manne to her husband, to gauge how far she might go.

  ‘Apparently, she said something like: “Pierre, did you do this?” And he replied yes. Then she said: “But what will you tell the children?” And he said: “I’ll tell them you killed yourself.” Then finally she said: “I’d like to see a priest before I die.” And he replied: “What do you need a priest for? You went to Confession only yesterday.” That’s how he told it to the police, in any case.’

  The commandant was looking down at his plate. A disconcerting silence had invaded the room. To break it, Manne said: ‘What a very bizarre story.’

  ‘Isn’t it? Especially when it’s about someone you know.’

  She was staring directly into his eyes. Suddenly she broke out into a smile.

  ‘But as my husband always says, mustn’t linger on the morbid. Now I wonder what Charles has managed for dessert?’

  The rest of the dinner dissipated in harmless small talk, although the story of the Boppe murder left a peculiar aftertaste. Just before coffee was served, the woman rose and said: ‘If you’ll excuse me, Monsieur Hartfeld, I think I’ll retire for the evening. I’m feeling quite tired tonight, for some reason.’

  ‘Not at all. I might well follow you shortly.’

  ‘Oh, come now, Hartfeld,’ said the commandant. ‘Stay at least for a digestif, I beg of you!’

  There was something pitiable about the commandant’s pleading. Manne had seen it often enough in the colonies – educated men drowning in a backwater, desperate for talk, for any sort of conversation with a peer.

  ‘All right, then. Do you have cognac?’

  ‘Of course.’

  As they waited for coffee and drinks, the commandant said: ‘You must forgive my wife. She can be rather direct about everything. She’s not so used to being in society, and I …’

  ‘There’s nothing to forgive. I find her perfectly charming.’

  ‘Oh, she can be charming, all right.’ Manne caught a look in the commandant’s eye that he didn’t know how to interpret. ‘I don’t know what nonsense she was talking about that convict, Boppe. It’s extremely unlikely he’ll end up in this camp. They’ll find something easy for him to do in Saint-Laurent. Until his pardon comes through. As it no doubt will.’

  ‘Why do you think he’ll be pardoned?’

  ‘People of his sort rarely get transported. When they do, they generally only serve a year. Then they’re quietly pardoned, once all the press interest has died down.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘People with education, with real skills, with leadership abilities, with ingenuity, with any quality at all, we don’t get them here. N
ot in the convict population, not in the Administration, either. The ones needed to build a new country are precisely those who are weeded out. It’s hopeless.’

  ‘Well, you at least seem to be making headway with your building projects.’

  ‘To be frank with you, Hartfeld, I’ve pumped a lot of my own money into this enterprise. It’d have been fruitless to ask the Administration for funds; they wouldn’t have been interested.’

  ‘Why not?’

  The commandant sighed. ‘There’s no will to make anything of the Colony. Almost all the officials are corrupt. The convicts are no help, either. I was naive when I first got out here. I looked at what the British managed in Australia last century. I thought, why not here? Give convicts land to cultivate, and an opportunity to make something of their lives.’

  ‘Makes sense, I suppose.’

  The cognac had arrived. The commandant drank his down quickly and poured himself another.

  ‘I thought so, at first. But the convicts come from the lowest rungs of society. They can certainly escape, and many of them do. But they can’t escape their mentality. They’ve no imagination. They can’t understand what’s best for them. They’re doomed. Even when they don’t start out that way, the convict culture dooms them.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well … take that gardener fellow I was telling you about earlier. I thought, now here’s a young man who has a skill, who has some wits about him. Here’s someone who could help build a new sort of Colony. And whom the Colony in turn could help. But no, it turns out he preferred petty thieving and escape fantasies, just like all the others.’

  ‘What was his original crime, this gardener?’

  ‘Was he the chap who strangled his fiancée? I can’t remember.’ The commandant dismissed the gardener with a theatrical wave of his hand. ‘Anyway, after he ran off, I changed my mind about things. It’s pointless trying to make citizens out of convicts. No, what interests me now is a community of free settlers. It’s the only way to exploit the possibilities here. After all, who’s getting the most out of the Colony right now? Not France, not the Creole population. No, it’s foreign traders, the Chinese, the Brazilians. We need to attract a free French population interested in commercial enterprise.’

  ‘Where do the convicts fit in?’

  ‘For a while I thought we’d be better off without them. Close down the penal colony. What the do-gooders back in France want to do. Now I’m not so sure. If you look more closely at what the British did in Australia, they had migrants. Free settlers. Who rented the convicts from the government, as cheap labour. Almost like slaves. That’s how they built the country. Not by government decree. But by free enterprise and forced labour.’

  The commandant leant forward, his eyes gleaming with alcohol.

  ‘Now, the difficult part is to morally justify such a system. But that’s the beauty of the convicts. Because they’re actually here to be punished. That’s their purpose in the scheme of things. Let them be punished, then!’

  ‘So it doesn’t matter what happens to them?’

  ‘I aim to treat the convicts as humanely as possible. But beyond that … these men are already dead. There’s no hope for them. Even if they finish their sentence, they’re still not allowed to return to France. The very idea of redemption is a legal nonsense.’

  The commandant had been talking excitedly, but went quiet as the butler came in to serve more drinks. Manne had noticed the phenomenon before – as if the free men were under surveillance from the convicts. Then as soon as the butler left, the commandant started up again. But Manne wasn’t listening to the commandant’s peculiar theories any more. The cognac was going to his head, after the heat and exertions of the afternoon. He felt detached from the situation. The impression was that he was watching himself sitting there, as though it were someone else entirely. In a sense, it was. Hartfeld, not Manne, was talking and listening to the commandant. Hartfeld, who hadn’t existed a short while ago, but whose character was becoming ever more sharply defined with each passing day. And it was Hartfeld, too, who had met the commandant’s wife in her ‘folly’, and had ordered her to undress.

  The commandant was talking about his construction plans, about the giant penitentiary he was building. In his mind’s eye, Manne saw the clearing again, bathed in its powerful, unsubtle tropical light. It reminded him, he now realised, of the night patrols in Belgium, out in no-man’s-land. At some point, he or someone in his scouting party would send up a flare to illuminate the scene. For a split second, everything would explode into light, a grey light, and the endless devastation would be apparent: the blasted-out foxholes, the bodies, the barbed wire, the sculptural wreckage of a shot-down reconnaissance plane. That was what the clearing had looked like, with its chaos of mud, tree stumps and gnarled roots, its hundreds of semi-naked men, and the stone slabs piled up like sandbags.

  VI

  He’d heard rustling; had wondered whether there was a mouse or rat in the room; had wondered also whether he’d dreamt it; and had then dozed off again, despite the dawn light streaming in through the window. When he’d got up an hour later, a cream envelope, with its slip of folded paper inside, was by the door. It simply read: ‘Meet me at eleven.’ Immediately, he’d thrown on some clothes, gone across the landing and tapped on the woman’s door. No answer.

  By the time he’d got down to breakfast, the commandant had already left the table. Just as well, since Manne was in no mood for yet more stilted conversation. An unsettled night, troubled by dreams, had exhausted him before the day had even started. In one of them, he recalled now, he’d been with his mistress in Caracas. They’d been in bed, her back towards him – they’d just had sex. But when she’d turned around, she’d transformed into the commandant’s wife. The fog of that dream had yet to clear. He could see her now, across the table, in the low-cut top she’d worn at dinner. The well-defined bone structure of her face struck him again. Like the androgyny of a classical statue. The staring eyes were those of Coptic portraits he’d once seen at the British Museum. The dark hair, with its photographic play of shadows across the face … he wasn’t really reminded of a woman, but of a dozen representations of them.

  Music came from the commandant’s office. It jolted Manne out of his daydreaming – or pushed him deeper into it. It was one of Schubert’s Lieder, something Manne himself used to play as a boy. His mother had sung, while he’d accompanied. He hadn’t heard those songs since then, but he’d completely internalised them. He could still recite the Heine poems they’d been set to. The memory of this music had an extraordinary force, maybe even more powerful than the trench hallucinations that struck him when feverish.

  Mechanically, he rose from the breakfast table and went back upstairs. He should be out pretending to survey the area. But he hadn’t the head for it now. All he could think about was the meeting with the woman. Nor could he even plan for that in any meaningful way, because he had no idea what she would say to him. He was pacing the room, working himself up into a feverish state again.

  Eventually he managed to sit down at the desk. He opened his journal and forced himself to write something, anything:

  The music from the commandant’s office. A memory that hasn’t been distorted or polished over time, lying there undisturbed, like an object in a pharaoh’s tomb. And yet the next time I hear that music, it will have lost its power over me.

  The idea refused to go any further. He put his pen down for a moment, before continuing with a different theme:

  Vera Cruz orchid. This is what I know about the Vera Cruz orchid. Found across the Amazon region. First so named by Jesuit missionaries, I think. Flowers every few years; no foliage. When not flowering is simply a mass of roots, indistinguishable from certain tree roots. Figured in various 16th & 17th c. treatises on the teleological argument. Considered lucky; dried flowers used as talismans. Extensively harvested in 19th c., now rare. Pollination requirements unknown.

  He’d learnt all that o
ne afternoon at the Biblioteca Nacional in Caracas, the day after he’d received Edouard’s letter. There were other details he remembered now, such as the theory that the orchid ultimately killed its host tree by strangling its roots. He’d note that down another time. The concentration involved in writing had calmed him.

  For a while he sat studying the manual on the riverside lingua franca that he’d borrowed from the commandant. At one point the sound of a door slamming echoed through the house. Manne looked through the window to see the commandant making his way up to the path that led to the camp. He glanced at his watch: a quarter to eleven. He flicked through his notebook – the vocabulary list he’d been working on stretched back four or five pages. Somehow, the hours had passed.

  Outside, the sunlight struck his face with a violence. Manne walked slowly towards the folly, past the abandoned construction that he took to be the orchid house the commandant had mentioned. Once again it reminded Manne of his great-uncle, and of that other orchid house that had grown and grown until it had swallowed up most of the garden. He remembered now that at one stage his great-uncle had even set up a bed and table in a corner of it, and had had his house-keeper serve his meals there. It was the kind of behaviour that had set relatives talking, that had led to Manne being reclaimed by his father and returned to France. Looking back now, though, Manne thought he understood his great-uncle’s actions perfectly. Moving the bed to the greenhouse had been a kind of journey, an internal emigration.

  Manne stood by the door of the folly for a minute or two, staring at it, trying to compose himself. Noiselessly it swung open. She was in a simple summer frock and sandals, as though just off for a walk in the park. Everything inside was the same as before. A blanket, a lamp, one or two other objects on the floor. Nothing to sit on.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘Are you going to help me? Are you going to help me?

  Her bluntness had thrown him off balance again. He’d been rehearsing different apologies in his mind; now he realised that it didn’t matter any more. She was already ahead of him.