“Do you think we’ll make it, Father?”
“Let’s give these poor people a little time. They will surely come back. They’re waiting to see what Ballay will do. You must not hold it against them. They are only human: cowardly in the face of danger and servile before kings.”
But the seasons came and went and no one but Pénelet, mosquitoes, and Negroes entered their home. They were invited neither on fishing trips nor to banquets. The military parades and Bastille Day balls were held without them. The ugliest rumors began to spread:
“Viscount? Don’t you know, my dear, that he stole his title?…The son of a Lyon industrialist? Do you really believe that? He comes from a family of coopers in Auvergne, that’s the truth!…And do you know what else? He’s a bandit wanted by all of Europe’s police forces…Well, now we know why he doesn’t want to leave.”
They were chased off the boules field and the grocer no longer accepted their business. At the caravanserai, only the Negroes deigned to speak to them. They had to rely on Pénelet to obtain sardines and oil, alcohol, and candles.
The ill winds of bad luck did not diminish over the months, coming down on the Sandervals’ home harder and harder, until finally their last link to the rest of the world was torn away.
Pénelet was enjoying a cold beer on his veranda after his afternoon nap, battling mosquitoes and heat with a fan, when a panther leaped out of nowhere and ripped open his throat.
“This is a sad day, Father, we have no one left.”
“You’ll see, my little Georges, they will come back. It’s impossible to hold on to hate after such a tragedy.”
Death brings sorrow and mourning, but it also serves as a chance for renewal and catharsis, he thought. Men take advantage of it to root out the evil, briefly rid themselves of anger and pettiness, forget their slights, and forgive grudges and debts to open themselves to another cycle of delight and heartache.
Not in this case.
The death of poor Pénelet did nothing to improve matters, nothing at all. At the same time that they dug his tomb, the grave diggers dug an unbridgeable trench between the Sandervals and the rest of the city. General hostility grew and the neighbors turned twice as fierce.
On the way to the church, the Sandervals walked to the left of the coffin. Everyone else stood far to the right. When the Sandervals opened their mouths to sing the hymns, everyone else was silent.
Pénelet’s service was the baleful peak from which the Sandervals’ agitated destiny began its inexorable decline. Every passing day added to their distress and wore away at the little they held on to.
The day after the funeral, Georges was bitten by a snake. A fire devastated their plantation in Kolenté. Six months later, a skeletal old man with a swollen belly came onto their property painfully holding his hips. He crossed the courtyard and went in without stopping, pulled up a chair, and sat down:
“Hello, Yémé!”
“What do you want from me, old man? If you want some change, go to the kitchen, the servant boys will give you some. If it’s for work, too late, they burned down my plantation. And given your condition…”
“I knew you wouldn’t recognize me, either.”
“Then hurry up and tell me who you are and what you want and then leave us alone. There is already too much misfortune in this home.”
“I am your faithful old Mangoné Niang and this is what life has made of me.”
“Mangoné! My poor Mangoné, don’t tell me this is you!”
“I have been sick for more than two years, Yémé. Some say it is my stomach, others the devil.”
“Oh, my good Mangoné…” A painful fit of coughing prevented Olivier from finishing his sentence. “What about our dear Fouta?”
“It isn’t doing any better than me, Yémé. Alpha Yaya* kept his promise, he has started a rebellion.”
The white man mumbled something and sank into a stupor. Georges coughed twice to rouse him. Mangoné searched for something in his bundle.
“Here, these are the last mangoes from your orchard, those I was able to save from the monkeys. Eat them, Yémé, they will remind you of Kahel.”
“You should have come to see me, my poor Mangoné! But it’s not too late, I’m going to make sure you get the proper treatment.”
“No, Yémé. I am going to Rufisque to die.”
“Then you’ll be treated there. I’m going to pay you, I owe you at least two years’ salary.”
“It isn’t worth it, Yémé. Just give me the boat fare.”
“What is man’s rank in the universe?” Olivier reread the sentence several times and spent the rest of the night solilo quizing.
After Mangoné Niang had gone to Rufisque to die, the Sandervals’ home grew more and more like a mausoleum. After the whites, the blacks! One by one, the cooks left them for their neighbors and the gardeners for the governor’s palace. The only one who refused to abandon them was an old Nalu who strained to bring the pot to a boil or clean the entrance because his eyes were bad and his legs deformed by rheumatism.
This was no longer a life, but an endless cycle of suffering and humiliation.
Anonymous letters and death threats came as often as the rains.
At night, people threw stones at their windows. Insults and professions of hatred were heard from behind the blinds. Monkey waste was left on their veranda, dead cats in their garden. Pénelet was no longer around to get their supplies at the grocer’s. They subsisted as in the good old days, on roots and tubers, game and wild berries, anything nature provided.
Unable to bear it any longer, Olivier de Sanderval resorted to his rifle to force the grocer to sell him a few crates of supplies. With this they held out for two more rainy seasons, then returned to the meager diet of the bush: berries, tubers, and occasionally the bland meat of a warthog or a porcupine.
With age and the brutal challenges he had so long endured, Olivier de Sanderval’s health took a dangerous turn for the worse.
The mysterious pain that he had fallen victim to in 1896 on the banks of the Konkouré burned through his poor chest: first once a month, then once a week, then once a day, and finally every hour. It began with a choking sensation, as if he had swallowed the wrong way. He would open his mouth wide and bring his hands to his chest, writhing in pain: “Air! Air! The…the…the win…dow! Open! O…pen!” But the window was never open wide enough, the veranda big enough, nor the beach windy enough. Sometimes he remained on the ground for a good half hour, bathed in sweat, gasping like an animal on the verge of death.
This went on for another couple of seasons before Georges reached the end of his rope. He forced himself to say the words that had stuck in his throat for so long and that his lips hadn’t dared to form:
“I think it’s time to go, Father.”
“Do you think so?” Olivier de Sanderval asked with the fiery but empty look of a warrior who could go no further.
“Yes. The odds are against us, given your condition.”
“But you, you will come back!”
“I promise, Father, I will come back.”
“You will continue the fight even if it lasts one hundred years.”
“Even if it lasts one hundred years, Father.”
“Swear it to me, Georges!”
“I swear, Father!”
On November 29, 1900, twenty-one years to the day after he boarded his first ship to Africa, Olivier de Sanderval was crossing the gate into the port when he heard someone call to him:
“I bet that white man walking ahead of me is called Yémé.”
He turned around and recognized Bôcar-Biro’s cousin, the very man who had poisoned him in Sokotoro.
“Is that you, Hâdy? What are you doing here?”
“I’m waiting for a ship to Tunis. I’ve decided to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. The world has been collapsing under the weight of sin since you arrived. And you, I assume you’re going on vacation?”
“Um…yes, yes…Yes, but…not for long!”<
br />
“When you return, don’t stay in Conakry. Go back to Fouta, that is your home. You are a Fula, never forget that.”
“You don’t seem to be the king of Sokotoro anymore.”
“I am a king in here, Yémé,” the man answered, loudly thumping his chest.
With that, he opened his sunshade and turned his back on Olivier with that lazy, hieratic gait unique to the Fulas.
While father and son walked toward the gangway, a group of colonists appeared from behind the great baobab:
“Goodbye, Viscount!…And bundle up!…Beware of glaciation!”
Olivier de Sanderval stoically ignored their laughter and boarded the ship supported by his son, his hand clutching his chest.
Soon the landscape blurred before his eyes. Conakry made him think of a chalkboard covered in pictures being erased one by one by a finicky child’s hand. The treetops and roofs sparkled briefly, then were extinguished like lightning bugs.
First, the curtain of bamboo and mangroves along the back of the island, then the majestic roof of the governor’s palace, then the harbor cranes and the branches of the mango trees…
The Loos Islands: Kassa, Fotoba, Tamara…Blanchel Island, Coral Island, Ile Poulet, Ile Fousset…
Leaf by leaf, one palm tree at a time, Africa slowly closed in on her secrets.
{ EPILOGUE }
BETWEEN JANUARY 16, 1901 and March 3, 1910, Olivier de Sanderval presented himself at the Ministry of the Colonies one hundred and forty-seven times. Despite his advanced age and poor health, he arrived in Paris one evening for his one hundred and forty-eighth attempt. The next day he decided to take advantage of the fine spring sun and walk to the ministry.
As he reached the Invalides, he had no idea he was just a few minutes from experiencing the seemingly insignificant incident that would permanently put an end to his dreams of kingdoms and Fouta Djallon.
He was in front of the gates to the ministry when he received a violent blow to the head. He spun around: it was nothing, just a ball that had slipped out of a young boy’s hands. The boy left the old woman accompanying him and ran over to reclaim his toy.
“Be careful, little warrior, you nearly knocked me out,” said Olivier de Sanderval. “You’re a cute one, aren’t you! Do you want a sweet? Here’s some chocolate, some Marquis!”
But the old woman’s unpleasant voice rang out:
“Come here, Jean-René. Leave the gentleman alone.” The boy picked up his ball and returned to the woman.
“Who is that, Grandma?”
“Hurry up, I told you. Let’s not hang around here. That’s…That’s the glaciation man,” she continued, dropping her voice.
He watched them disappear in the distance, overwhelmed by sadness. His legs went wobbly and his mind got muddled. He held on to the gate and let his defeated gaze wander over the entrance hall and the courtyard. But the dim picture of the constant comings and goings of officers and civil servants was soon replaced by a chaotic mix of images from his tormented life. He was seized by a profound feeling of disgust. He spat over the gate and left as quickly as a devout person flees a den of iniquity. He hurried to return to the hotel and asked for his bill, then hailed a taxi and boarded the first train available.
He never again set foot in Paris.
Old and ruined, he gradually retreated into writing The Absolute. But he was no longer content to expound on the Absolute—he wanted to work toward its accomplishment. Man’s mind was becoming worn out, he told himself, the world felt stuck, it needed a new religion. To this end, he created a new fraternal society, The Apostles of the Absolute. To head his society, he donned a red cape and adopted the solemn manner of a high priest and piercing insights of a scholar. All of Marseille’s mystics and so-called visionaries found their way to this strange congregation: amateur spiritualists, disappointed atheists and Christians, adepts of Zen and shamanism, inveterate rationalists, and lovers of Hindu philosophy. It was no longer a matter of belief, saddled with extravagant rituals and superstitions, but a matter of proof. In the early twentieth century, science had progressed far enough to prove through A+B that God existed. There was no longer any need to imagine the Absolute—the challenge now was to realize it.
The entire group went to work in the laboratory of the Clary farmhouse. They mixed fatty substances, boiled acids, and measured the variations in the density of tin based on an endless list of parameters. After this lab work, the high priest in the red cape would gather his followers in the library, where he had posted the following motto in plain view:
“The universe is not within the Absolute like a body in the void, it is part of the Absolute. The Relative is not in the void, it is in the Absolute; it exists, it lives, it dies based on the Absolute and through the Absolute: its movement, which is being, begins and ends in the Absolute. The Absolute continues itself, transformed into the Relative, into the Being that makes it up. No point can be empty of Absolute nor be anything other than Absolute, thus established would be less than that which imposes itself on our minds, to the Absolute of which we are already able to conceive higher than the Absolute one…”
In the first months, dozens of Apostles of the Absolute flocked to Clary. But the number of followers soon began to dwindle. Some gave up, weary of the concepts’ difficulty and the master’s behavior, while others were lost to the war. By 1918, only two remained: Monsieur Louvet, a spice merchant keen on Eastern philosophy who hoped to subject the complex metaphysics of Chinese and Buddhist wisdom to the light of reason, and Madame Naxara, the widow of a navy captain who had trouble occupying her long lonely days. Then Monsieur Louvet finally grew weary too.
This wasn’t enough to discourage Olivier:
“You’ll agree with me, Madame Naxara, that not everyone can attain the Absolute.”
“Of course, Monsieur de Sanderval, of course!”
“Good, now what were we talking about yesterday?…Yes, the dialectic of Relative and Absolute…You see, the Absolute has no quantity, nor volume nor weight…Nonetheless, if we accept that the Relative comes from the Absolute and returns to it, we could suppose that these measured qualities subsist in the Absolute, we could postulate that they are dominant in it. Do you understand, Madame Naxara?”
“I understand completely, Monsieur de Sanderval,” the poor woman would answer docilely, sniffling painfully and damp with sweat.
Every day he leaned on the windowsill in the library and watched for his only pupil. That morning, he watched for her until noon, but no one but the newsboy and the milkman came.
His chest pains and shortness of breath became more severe over the following months. The entire universe no longer held enough oxygen to satisfy his need for air. “Air! Air, please! Op…the win…!” They would open the windows as wide as possible but it was even worse than if they had left them closed. “It’s because of the chateau, the walls are too thick…It’s because of the living room, it is too narrow…” He had the living room extended to the first row of plane trees, then to the well, then to the fence surrounding the garden. It was no use: the good Lord’s oxygen had deserted those places too.
On the last day that he stuck his head outside, he leaned against the window, watched the birds frolicking in the plane trees, and grumbled the following between two painful wheezes:
“Progress is here, it will unavoidably make its way, nothing will be able to stop it. Too bad all that can continue without me!”
On March 24, 1919, between a short item announcing the suicide of a desperate man and another relating Bishop Lutoslawski’s motion before the Diet asking the Polish government for systematic action against Bolshevism, the Petit Marseillais published the following announcement:
“We are sorry to have learned of the passing of Monsieur Aimé Olivier, Count of Sanderval, in his chateau of Montredon. He was the son-in-law of Monsieur Jean-Baptiste Pastré, and though his advanced age had led him to retire from society some years ago, he remained a well-known figure in Marseille high societ
y. He was a scholar and with an E.C.P. engineering degree of the highest distinction. His explorations made him one of the most important pioneers of French influence. We owe him the peaceful conquest of Fouta Djallon, the initial drawing of treaties with indigenous chiefs, and the beginnings of the first black army…”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tierno Monénembo is the winner of France’s 2008 Prix Renaudot, which is awarded annually to the author of an outstanding original novel. He was honored with the prize for his book The King of Kahel. Born in 1947 in Guinea, Tierno Monénembo was exiled to Senegal and the Ivory Coast before moving to France in 1973 to pursue a doctorate in biochemistry. He is the author of nine books and one stage play.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Nicholas Elliott is a writer and translator based in New York and anywhere he accompanies his laptop. His background is in film, and he has done everything from writing and directing to ushering, and being thrown off a medieval castle by a deranged bloodsucker in the film Shadow of a Vampire. He is currently a New York correspondent for the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. As a translator, Nicholas specializes in film, photo, and art books. In 2007, he shared a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship with co-translator Elizabeth Williamson for their translation of Michel Azama’s play Vie et mort de Pier Paolo Pasolini (Life and Death of Pier Paolo Pasolini). The King of Kahel is his first translation of a work of fiction.
* We’ll call him thus from the start, though he was born Aimé Victor Olivier and only acquired the title Viscount de Sanderval much later.
* Pistachier: a clerk in a colonial trading post.
† Toubab: a Central and West African name for a person of European descent.
The King of Kahel Page 26