Ambiguous Adventure Read online

  “It is certain that their school is the better teacher of how to join wood to wood, and that men should learn how to construct dwelling houses that resist the weather.”

  “Even at the price of His Sacrifice?”

  “I know also that He must be saved. We must build solid dwellings for men, and within those dwellings we must save God. That I know. But do not ask me what should be done tomorrow morning, for that I do not know.”

  The conversation continued in this way, gloomy and interrupted by long silences. The Diallobé country, helpless, was turning around and around on itself like a thoroughbred horse caught in a fire.

  The teacher’s gaze had returned at intervals to Samba Diallo, who sat attentive and silent. Now he pointed to him with his finger and said to his father,

  “How old is he?”

  “Six years.”

  “In another year, according to the Law, he must begin his quest for our Lord. I should like to be his guide along that road. Will you allow me? Your son is, I know, of the seed from which the country of the Diallobé produces its masters.”

  After a pause, he added,

  “And the masters of the Diallobé were also the masters whom one-third of the continent chose as guides in the way of God, as well as in human affairs.”

  The three other men were plunged in meditation. The boy’s father spoke:

  “If it please God, teacher, I confide my son to you. I shall send him to you at the Glowing Hearth next year, when he will be of the proper age and I shall have prepared him.”

  So it happened that in the following year Samba Diallo, accompanied by his mother, went back to the teacher, who took possession of him, body and soul. Henceforth, and until he would have completed his classical studies, he belonged no longer to his family.

  2

  “THE PEACE OF GOD BE UPON THIS HOUSE. THE poor disciple is in quest of his daily pittance.”

  The sentences, plaintively spoken in a quavering voice by Samba Diallo, were repeated by his three companions. The four youths, shivering in their thin rags of clothing under the blast of the fresh morning wind, stood at the door of the Diallobé chief’s spacious dwelling.

  “Men of God, reflect upon your approaching death. Awake, Oh, awake! Azrael, Angel of death, is already breaking the earth for you. It is about to rise up at your feet. Men of God, death is not that sly creature it is believed to be, which comes when it is not expected, and conceals itself so well that when it has come there is no longer anyone there.”

  The three other disciples took up the refrain in chorus:

  “Who will feed the poor disciples today? Our fathers are alive, and we beg like orphans. In the name of God, give to those who beg for His Glory. Men who sleep, think of the disciples passing by!”

  They fell silent. Samba Diallo spoke alone:

  “Men of God, death is not that night which traitorously floods with darkness the innocent and lively ardor of a summer day. It warns, then it mows down in the full mid-day of the intelligence.”

  Again came the chorus from the other three:

  “Men and women who sleep, think of peopling by your benefactions the solitude which will inhabit your tombs. Feed the poor disciples!”

  “Men of God, you are warned,” Samba Diallo took up the theme again. “One dies lucidly, for death is violence in triumph, negation imposing itself. From now on, may death be familiar to your spirits …”

  Under the morning wind, Samba Diallo improvised edifying litanies, with interpolations by his comrades, at the closed door of his cousin, the chief of the Diallobé. The disciples would go about so, from door to door, until they had collected victuals enough for their day’s nourishment. Tomorrow the same quest would begin again. While seeking God, the disciples would know no other way of supporting life than by begging, whatever their parents’ wealth might be.

  At last the chief’s door opened, and one of his daughters appeared. She bestowed a smile on Samba Diallo, but his countenance remained expressionless. The girl set down on the ground a large plate containing the left-overs from the evening before. The disciples squatted in the dust and set to on their first meal of the day. When they had eaten enough to satisfy their hunger, they put the rest in their wooden bowls, against possible future need. With his bent index finger Samba Diallo thoroughly cleaned the plate, and put the little ball of food, thus recovered, into his mouth. Then he got up and handed the empty plate to his cousin.

  “Thank you, Samba Diallo. May you have a good day,” she said with a smile.

  Samba Diallo did not reply. But Mariam was accustomed to his taciturn and almost tragic humor. When she had turned her back, Demba, the oldest one of the four disciples in Samba Diallo’s group, clicked his tongue and burst out laughing, striving after vulgarity.

  “If I had a cousin with such dainty dimples,” he began.

  Then he interrupted himself, for Samba Diallo, who had already taken some steps toward the outer portal, had paused, and was fixing his calm gaze upon the other boy.

  “Listen, Samba Diallo,” said Demba now. “I know that if it weren’t for you my food for the day would be considerably reduced. No one among all the disciples in this countryside would know so well, by inspiring these worthy folk with a salutary fear of Azrael, how to wrest from their selfishness the alms on which we live. This morning, in particular, you have attained a peerless tragic art. I confess that I myself have been on the point of stripping myself of my rags to make you an offering of them.”

  The other disciples burst out laughing.

  “And so?” inquired Samba Diallo, in a voice which he controlled with considerable effort.

  “And so, you are the strongest of all the disciples, but you are also the saddest, assuredly. They smile at you after they have fed you, but you remain morose. What is more, you understand nothing of any joke …”

  “Demba, I have already told you that nothing keeps you here with me,” Samba Diallo replied. “You can go away with someone else. I shall not hold it against you.”

  “What magnanimity, my friends!” Demba spoke mockingly to the other disciples. “What magnanimity! Even when he dismisses me, he dismisses me nobly. ‘Go,’ he says to me, ‘Desert me. And if you die of hunger I shall not hold it against you.’ ”

  The group broke into loud laughter.

  “Good, good,” declared Demba. “It is understood, great chief. You shall be obeyed.”

  Samba Diallo gave a start. Demba was seeking a quarrel with him: he could no longer have any doubt of it. All the disciples knew how much it displeased him when anyone called attention to his patrician origin. Certainly he was the best born of all those at the Glowing Hearth, the household of the teacher of the Diallobé. When he begged his food, and, as this morning, went to all homes from the most humble to the most prosperous, everyone, in bringing him the half-spoiled remains of the family meals, would show by a sign or a gesture that under his rags the countryside recognized and was already saluting one of its future leaders. His noble origin weighed upon him: not as a burden he was afraid to carry, but in the manner of a diadem which was too cumbersome and too much in evidence. It was in the manner of an injustice also. He desired nobility, to be sure, but a nobility more discreet, more authentic: not something acquired without effort, but hard-won, and more spiritual than material. He had humiliated and mortified himself, as a means of exercise, and also to show plainly that he insisted on being placed at the same level as all his co-disciples. But nothing had come of this. It seemed, on the contrary, that his comrades bore him a grudge for what, in relation to themselves, they were not far from regarding as the pinnacle of pride. Not a day passed that someone did not remark on the nobility of his bearing or the elegance of his deportment, in spite of the rags in which he was clothed. It even happened that they held a grievance against him for his natural gestures of generosity, and his very frankness. The more he stood guard over himself, the more he was denounced. He was exasperated with it all.

  At least his
companions in the group had refrained up to the present from making disagreeable remarks. He was silently grateful to them for that, although he had no illusions as to what some of them actually thought. He knew that Demba, notably, was envious of him. This peasant’s son, patient and stubborn, harbored the ambition of a sturdy and uncompromising adolescent. “But at least,” Samba Diallo was thinking, “Demba has known how to keep quiet up to now. Why should he seek a quarrel with me this morning?”

  “Tell me, boys, which one among the other group leaders ought I to follow? Since I am receiving my dismissal from Samba Diallo, I should limit the resultant damage by making a good choice. Let us see …”

  “Be quiet, Demba; I beg of you, be quiet,” Samba Diallo cried.

  “Let us see,” Demba continued imperturbably. “It is sure, at any rate, that my new leader will not be able to get the best of Samba Diallo in the art of imprecation. For take notice,” he went on, always addressing the group, “your prince is not only a prince of the blood. Nothing is lacking to him. He is also a prince of the mind and spirit. What is more, the great teacher himself knows it. You have remarked that? He has a weakness for Samba Diallo.”

  “You are lying! Be still, Demba—you know very well that you are lying! The teacher cannot have any preference for me, and—”

  He broke off and shrugged his shoulders.

  He was a few steps away from Demba. The two boys were almost of the same height, but while Samba Diallo—who was now impatiently shifting from one foot to the other—was all long and sinewy lines, Demba was rather inclined to stoutness; he was now standing calm and motionless.

  Samba Diallo slowly turned around, walked again to the portal, and went out. In the little street he felt behind him the slow movement of his companions, who were following.

  “He has all the qualities, except only one: he is not courageous.”

  Samba Diallo stopped short, set his wooden bowl on the ground, and went back to Demba.

  “I’m not going to fight with you, Dembel,” he said.

  “No!” the other boy screamed. “Don’t call me Dembel. I want no familiarity.”

  “So be it, Demba. But I do not want to fight. Go or stay, but let us not talk any more about it.”

  As he spoke, Samba Diallo was standing guard over himself, bent on mastering that vibration which was coursing through his body, and on dissipating that odor of brush fire which was tickling his nostrils.

  “Go or stay,” he repeated slowly, as if he were speaking in a dream.

  Once more he turned his back on Demba and walked away. At this moment his foot struck an obstacle, like a trap set for him. He fell full length on the ground. Someone—he never knew who—had tripped him up.

  When he got up, none of those who were there had stirred, but he saw no other person than the one who, before him and still motionless, bore an outline which in a few moments came to represent Demba, but which at present was only the target which his body and all his being had chosen. He was no longer conscious of anything, except that his body, like a butting ram, had catapulted itself upon the target, that the knot of the two entwined bodies had fallen to the ground, and that there was under him something which was struggling and panting, and which he was hitting. His own body, now, was not vibrating any more, but, marvellously supple, was bending and unbending with the blows he was striking, and the mutiny of his body was calmed somewhat with every blow, as every blow restored a little clarity to his benumbed intelligence. Beneath him, the target continued to struggle and pant and was perhaps also striking, but he felt nothing, other than the mastery which his body was progressively imposing upon the target, the peace which the blows he was striking were bringing back to his body, the clarity which they were restoring to his mind. Suddenly the target ceased to move, the clarity was complete. Samba Diallo perceived that silence had fallen, and that two powerful arms had seized him and were forcing him to let his target go.

  When he raised his head, his gaze encountered a haughty and imposing visage, muffled in a light veil of white gauze.

  They called her the Most Royal Lady. She was sixty years old, and she would have been taken for scarcely forty. Nothing was to be seen of her except her face. The big blue boubou that she wore fell to the ground, and let nothing be seen except the pointed toes of her golden-yellow Turkish slippers, when she walked. The little gauze veil was wound around her throat, covered her head, passed again under her chin, and hung behind. The Most Royal Lady, who could well have been six feet tall, had lost none of her impressive bearing, in spite of her age.

  The little white gauze veil clung to the oval of a face of full contours. Samba Diallo had been fascinated by this countenance the first time he had beheld it: it was like a living page from the history of the Diallobé country. Everything that the country treasured of epic tradition could be read there. All the features were in long lines, on the axis of a slightly aquiline nose. The mouth was large and strong, without exaggeration. An extraordinarily luminous gaze bestowed a kind of imperious lustre upon this face. All the rest disappeared under the gauze, which, more than a coiffure would have done, took on here a distinct significance. Islam restrained the formidable turbulence of those features, in the same way that the little veil hemmed them in. Around the eyes and on the cheeks, over all this countenance, there was, as it were, the memory of a youth and a force upon which the rigid blast of an ardent breath was later brutally to blow.

  The Most Royal Lady was the older sister of the Diallobé chief. It was said that it was she, more than her brother, whom the countryside feared. If she had ceased her indefatigable excursions on horseback, the memory of her tall silhouette continued no less to hold in obedience the northern tribes who were renowned for their haughty arrogance. The chief of the Diallobé was by nature more inclined to be peaceable. Where he preferred to appeal to understanding, his sister would cut through on the path of authority.

  “My brother is not a prince,” she was in the habit of saying, “he is a sage.” Or, again, “The sovereign should never argue in the public light of day, and the people should not see his face in the night’s darkness.”

  She had pacified the North by her firmness. The tribes subjugated by her extraordinary personality had been kept in obedience by her prestige. It was the North that had given her the name “the Most Royal Lady.”

  Now there was complete silence among the disciples, turned to stone as if by the Gorgon’s head.

  “I have warned your great fool of a father that your place is not at the teacher’s hearth,” she said. “When you are not fighting like a yokel you are terrorizing all the region by your imprecations against life. The teacher is trying to kill the life in you. But I am going to put an end to all that. Go wait for me at the house …”

  Having spoken, she went on her way.

  When the teacher saw Samba Diallo come in that evening, covered with red spots and wearing new clothes, he fell into a terrible rage.

  “Come here,” he summoned, when he saw the boy still at a distance. “Approach, son of a prince. I swear I will reduce the arrogance of the Diallobé in you!”

  He took off his clothes as far as his belt and beat him slowly and furiously. Samba Diallo submitted, inert to the storm. Then the teacher called the poorest and most badly dressed of the boys at the Glowing Hearth, and ordered him to change his worn clothing for Samba Diallo’s new garments—which was done to the disciple’s great joy. Samba Diallo put on his comrade’s rags with indifference.

  All the disciples had come back. Each of them had taken his writing-tablet again and, in his proper place, had rejoined the large circle. The Word, intoned by all the immature voices, rose, sonorous and beneficent to the heart of the teacher, as he sat in the centre of the group. He considered Samba Diallo.

  The boy gave him complete satisfaction, save on one point. The old man’s piercing scrutiny had disclosed in this youth what seemed to him—unless combatted early—the misfortune of the Diallobé nobility, and through them
of the Diallobé country as a whole. The teacher believed profoundly that the adoration of God was not compatible with any exaltation of man. But, at the bottom of all nobility there is a basis of paganism. Nobility is the exaltation of man, faith is before all else humility, if not humiliation. The teacher thought that man had no reason to exalt himself, save definitely in the adoration of God. Now it was true—though he fought against the feeling—that he loved Samba Diallo as he had never loved any disciple. His harshness toward the boy was in ratio to his impatience to rid him of all his moral weaknesses, and to make him the masterpiece of his own long career. He had educated and developed numerous generations of adolescents, and he knew that he was now near death. But, at the same time as himself, he felt that the country of the Diallobé was dying from the assault of strangers come from beyond the sea. Before departing this life, the teacher would try to leave to the Diallobé such a man as the country’s great past had produced.

  The teacher recalled former years. In the time of his adolescence the children of the great families—of whom he was one—would still be living their time of youth far from the aristocratic milieu from which they had sprung, anonymous and poor among the people, and on this people’s alms.

  At the end of this period of companionship, they would return from their long peregrination among books and men, both learned and democratic, seasoned in body and clear of mind.

  The teacher lingered in meditation, reawakened to the memory of the vanished days when the country drew its sustenance from God and from the strong liquor of its traditions.

  That evening, as he was silently praying at the door of his little cabin, the teacher suddenly felt a presence near him. When he raised his eyes his gaze encountered “a noble and haughty countenance,” as men described her, “a woman’s head enveloped in a light little veil of white gauze.”

  “Does peace reign in your dwelling, teacher of the Diallobé?” the woman asked.