The Sahara. Pierre Loti
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he seldom pondered, and when he was at her side he was intoxicated with love.
He, too, began to experiment with refinements of the toilet. He used scent, and tended his moustache and his brown hair. It seemed to him, as to all young lovers, that life had begun for him on the day when he first met his mistress, and that all his past existence counted for nothing.
IX
Cora loved him, too, but the heart had little to do with the sort of love she felt.
A mulatto of Bourbon, she had been brought up in the sensual idleness and luxury of wealthy creoles, but had been kept at arm’s length by white women with pitiless contempt, repulsed everywhere as a coloured woman. The same racial prejudice had pursued her to St. Louis; although she was the wife of one of the leading farmers of revenue on the river, she was left alone, an outcast.
In Paris she had had numbers of exquisites to love her; her ample means had enabled her to make a presentable appearance in France, to taste vice according to the most elegant standards of propriety.
At present she was tired of delicate gloved hands, the sickly affectations of dandies, and their romantic languid airs. She had chosen Jean because he was big and strong. In her way she loved this splendid, wild growing plant. She loved his rough, simple manners; she found attraction even in the coarse texture of his soldier’s shirt.
Cora’s dwelling was an immense brick building, with the somewhat Egyptian aspect common to the old parts of St. Louis, and white like an Arab caravanserai. Below, there were great courts, whither came camels and Moors of the desert to crouch upon the sand, and where swarmed a grotesque, motley crowd of cattle, dogs, ostriches, and black slaves.
Up above there were endless verandahs, supported by massive, square columns, like the terraces of Babylon.
The apartments were reached by means of outside staircases of white stone, monumental of aspect. All this was dilapidated and dreary, like everything else at St. Louis, that town which has already lived its life, that moribund colony of bygone days.
The drawing-room had a certain air of grandeur, with its lordly proportions and its furniture of the past century.
Blue lizards haunted it; cats, parrots, tame gazelles chased one another over the fine Guinea mats; negro women servants went dolefully backwards and forwards across the room, shuffling their sandals, diffusing pungent odours of soumaré and musk-scented amulets. The ensemble produced an indefinably melancholy atmosphere of exile and solitude. It was very dreary, all of it, especially in the evening, when the sounds of life ceased and gave place to the eternal complaint of the African breakers.
In Cora’s bedroom everything was gayer and more modern. The furniture and hangings, lately arrived from Paris, gave it an air of fresh elegance and comfort. One breathed there the perfume of the most fashionable essences bought at the scent shops on the boulevard.
It was there that Jean passed his hours of intoxication. This room seemed to him an enchanted palace, surpassing in luxury and charm all that his imagination could have pictured.
This woman had filled his life and had become his only happiness. With the refinement of a creature sated with pleasure, she had desired to possess Jean’s soul as well as body. With the feline guile of a creole she had acted for the benefit of this lover, who was younger than herself, an irresistible comedy of ingenuous love. She had succeeded; he belonged to her, body and soul.
XI
A very comical little negress, of whom Jean took no notice, lived in Cora’s house as a “captive.” This little girl was called Fatou-gaye.
She had been brought quite recently to St. Louis and sold as a slave by Douaïch Moors, who had captured her in one of their raids upon the territory of the Khassonkés.
Her extreme mischievousness and her fierce independence had caused her to be relegated to a very humble position in the household. She was looked upon as a little nuisance, a useless mouth, and an acquisition to be regretted.
Having not yet quite arrived at marriageable age, when the negresses of St. Louis deem it proper to clothe themselves, she generally went naked, with a necklet of grigris round her throat, and a few glass beads strung round her loins. Her head was very carefully shaven, except for five tiny locks of hair, knotted and stiffened with gum, five little rigid tails, arranged at regular intervals from the forehead to the nape of the neck. Each of these locks had a coral bead at the tip, except the middle one, which displayed a more precious ornament. This was a gold sequin of great antiquity, which must have been brought in old days from Algiers by caravan, after long and complicated wanderings through the Sahara.
Without this grotesque arrangement of hair, the regularity of Fatou-gaye’s features would have been striking. She was of the purest Khassonké type: a small delicate Grecian face, with a skin smooth and black as polished onyx; teeth of dazzlingly whiteness; eyes of extraordinary mobility, two large, jet black, restless orbs rolling left and right, with whites of a bluish tint, and black eyelids.
When Jean was leaving his mistress, he often used to meet this little creature.
As soon as she saw him she tucked a piece of blue cotton cloth around her waist—this was her festal garment—and came towards him smiling. With soft, caressing inflections in her small, shrill, piping negress’s voice, with hanging head and the mincing airs of an enamoured ouistiti, she would say,
May man coper, souma toubab. (Translated: Give me a copper, give me a sou, my white man.)
That was the refrain of all the little girls in St. Louis. Jean was used to it. When he was in a good temper and had a sou in his pocket, he would give it to Fatou-gaye.
But that was not the most curious feature of the incident. What was out of the ordinary was Fatou-gaye’s behaviour. Instead of buying herself a piece of sugar, as other girls might have done, she would go and hide herself in a corner and set to work to sew very carefully into the sachets of her amulets the sous that she received from the spahi.
XII
One night in February a suspicion crossed Jean’s mind.
Cora had asked him to leave at midnight, and just as he was going away, he thought he heard a sound of pacing in an adjoining room, as if someone were waiting there.
He left at midnight, and then he returned with stealthy tread, stepping noiselessly over the sand. He climbed over a wall and on to a balcony, and looked into Cora’s room through the half-opened door leading on to the terrace.
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