Bruno spent two nights in the infirmary.
When they brought him back to the cell, they had to drag him. Blackmoon was holding him by the armpit, and another pirate by the waist; Joma followed behind, a revolver in his belt. They laid him down very carefully on his cloths. Bruno asked for something to quench his thirst; they helped him to lift his head and drink from the neck of his flask. The water gushed over his cracked lips and onto his shirt. After three gulps, he choked and fell back on his straw mattress.
The two porters took off his shoes and prepared to leave.
‘Thanks, Blackmoon,’ I said.
From the way he suddenly clenched his jaws, I realised I had made a blunder. Blackmoon gave me a look that was a mixture of annoyance and fear. I had simply wanted to thank him for Hans’s message; in my pressing need to resume my old habits in order to believe that I was still among human beings, I had forgotten to choose the right moment to express my gratitude. My fear grew all the greater when I noticed that Joma had also given a start.
Much to my relief, I realised that it wasn’t the ‘thanks’ but the name ‘Blackmoon’ that had caught Joma’s attention.
‘What did he call you?’ Joma asked his boy.
Blackmoon swallowed.
Joma gave him a shove. ‘What have you been telling this white man?’
‘I don’t know what he’s talking about,’ Blackmoon said in a small voice.
‘No kidding! So he can read your thoughts now, can he? You have a loose tongue, Chaolo. Make sure I don’t tear it out.’
The three men went out, leaving the door of our jail open.
I went to Bruno. He was in a terrible mess. A clumsy bandage had been tied around his head. His face was battered; one eye was closed thanks to a nasty wound above it; his lips were bleeding in places … He groaned when I touched him with my fingertips.
‘What possessed you to provoke that monster?’ I said.
He smiled at me through his wounds. His laughing eyes seemed to mock me. ‘Undress me,’ he said. ‘My body’s burning.’
‘You fool!’
I took off his shirt as if tearing off his skin. He clenched his teeth, but couldn’t stifle his groans. His chest was covered in marks and purplish scratches. His back had the same blue streaks, with darker patches on the shoulders and hips. I had to let him catch his breath before taking off his trousers. The skin of his knees was peeled, and his legs looked as if they had been attacked with a meat cleaver. There was a deep, suppurating cut on his left calf. The person working in the infirmary hadn’t done much, merely putting poultices over the wounds without disinfecting them and smearing antiseptic over the bruises.
Bruno pointed with his chin at the bag containing the ‘miracle powder’. ‘Put that on the open wounds … Then put the balm above my eye.’
Having nothing else to suggest, I did as I was told.
He watched me with a smile; every now and again, his smile turned to a grimace, then reappeared, enigmatic, absurd, disturbing.
‘He gave me quite a thrashing,’ he said with a hoarse laugh.
‘Where did it get you?’
‘It made a change from the general monotony, didn’t it?’
‘I don’t understand you. You’ve been telling me to be detached and keep a clear head ever since I got here, and now you go off the rails like that. He could have killed you.’
‘I did go a bit crazy,’ he admitted. ‘It happens to the toughest of us … Hans is the third hostage I’ve seen leave. It was as if a fuse blew inside me … I keep telling these sons of bitches that I’m not a hostage like the others, that I’ve been an African for forty years, that nobody in France knows what’s become of me and so no government would ask for me back, but the bastards just won’t listen to me. Even if anybody did ask for me back, I have no intention of leaving Africa. I’m an African, a wandering anchorite. I have no wife, no children, no money and no fixed abode, and my papers are years out of date … Who’s going to bother spending a small fortune on a ghost?’
‘That’s no reason to put yourself in danger.’
‘I’ve had enough,’ he said, out of breath, his smile disappearing to be replaced by an immense weariness. ‘I can’t stand it any more, I’ve had it up to here … I want to go back to the dusty roads, and walk and walk without any particular destination, walk until I pass out. These walls are blinding me.’ His voice was quivering now. ‘They’re stifling me, driving me crazy … I need wide open spaces and mirages and dromedaries. I want to stumble upon a hut in the middle of nowhere, share a shepherd’s meal and take my leave of him early in the morning; I want to turn the corner of a cathedral-shaped rock and run into an old acquaintance, walk with him a little way and lose sight of him at nightfall. I want to see my pilgrim stars again, my Great Bear and Little Bear, and my shooting stars crossing my skies like signs of destiny. And when I’m so hungry I’d take a grasshopper for a turkey, and so thirsty I could drink the sea, I’ll drop by a dive for reformed crooks and get as drunk as ten Poles, then, after spewing worse than a volcano, I’ll wipe my mouth on the whores’ petticoats and swear on their lives it won’t happen again and set off through the deserts, barely capable of staying upright, to visit the ancient tombs buried in the sand; I’ll bivouac at the foot of a rock and tell myself stories until I end up believing them more than anything in the world … That’s how it’s always been, Monsieur Krausmann, in my life and in my mind. I’m a puff of smoke blown about by contrary winds, my eyes are hunters of horizons and my heels are cut out of flying carpets …’
Broken, exhausted, moved by his own words, he huddled in his rags, brought his knees up to his stomach and made himself so small that his sobs almost drowned him.
Having wept all the tears he had in his body, he raised himself up on one elbow, turned to me and showed me his ruined teeth in a smile as tragic as a surrender.
‘My God, a bit of self-pity does you a power of good every now and again!’
In the afternoon, Captain Gerima came into our prison yard. He began by yelling at a guard, just to announce himself, then appeared in the doorway and cleared his throat. His hand on the door, he looked into the corners of the cell, and his gaze came to rest on Bruno, who had retreated beneath his mosquito net.
‘How is he?’ he asked me.
‘You almost blinded him in one eye,’ I said in disgust. I would have preferred not to speak to him at all, but it just came out.
He scratched the top of his head, embarrassed. It was obvious he’d had a bad night: he had bags under his eyes and his jowls hung flabby and formless over his jaws. To make himself look perkier, he had buttoned up his tunic, which he usually left half open over his big belly — a mark, in his opinion, of the panache befitting a rebel chief. ‘That’s a real pity!’ he said.
He was trying to be conciliatory, but as this was unusual in the life he had chosen for himself, the humility he was attempting to show struck me as pathetic and misplaced. There are people who are merely the expression of their misdeeds, vile because they have no scruples, ugly because their treachery makes them repulsive. Captain Gerima was one of them: if you held out a stick to help him up, he’d grab it to hit you with.