famished.”
“Where is M. Lefort?”
“I think we should just go ahead and sit down without him.”
“Be as ill-mannered as he is?”
“Who’s M. Lefort?” Jacques asked.
“The science master.”
“A bit of an odd duck.”
“Get’s caught up in his—oh, I don’t know, books and little experiments or whatever, and loses track of the time.”
“We should go ahead without him.”
“No, no, I simply can’t,” the headmaster’s wife said.
They waited. And waited some more.
Is there anything more depressing than a Sunday afternoon? Yes, a Sunday afternoon in a colonial outpost. The hangover from the previous night’s over-indulgence showed no signs of abating. The enforced indolence of the Sabbath brought about a raw confrontation with what lay on the other side of the weekdays’ hectic rush. One yearned to be returned to what one yesterday yearned to be released from. One had only the sure knowledge that it was the inevitable lot of our pathetic species to be discontent. There was no word for this feeling save “homesickness,” and that word, like everything else, was wanting.
“Ah, Melville,” the headmaster said, venturing into the female territory of the verandah. “I heard you’d arrived, a bit out of sorts. When the ladies are done with you, come and join us in the study.”
“I’ll come now,” he said, not even going through the expected ritual protests at being forced to leave behind the charming assemblage.
When he was just out of earshot, one of the women he had abandoned said: “A bit rude, if you ask me.”
“Ah, there’s more to him than meets the eye,” another woman murmured: if he had no secrets, she was not above creating some for him. (She would be one of those who later would spread the rumor that Jacques had a fatal disease—after all, the postmaster had told her that Melville received weekly letters from a Dr. S. Plutach—perhaps that was the surname, this doctor wrote with the scrawl notorious for his profession—at the Hôpital Necker in Paris.)
The louvers of the windows in the study were set aslant. Shafts of light divided the cigar smoke into bands as it curled up towards the ceiling where it gathered in a murky cloud. The icy drink the women had pressed into his hand was taken from him, replaced by a neat whisky.
“I keep telling the girls that those chilled drinks only make one hotter in the long run—”
“Yes, yes, you’ve explained this to us before. The body’s response to cold, etc.” The headmaster did little to hide his tetchiness.
“Ah, but M. Melville hasn’t heard this before, and it’s knowledge that will prove useful.”
“Our guest has only just arrived. Let him relax a bit before we offer our ‘Things the Newcomer Needs to Know’ lecture.” With this the headmaster put his hand on Jacques’ shoulder, adding, in a meant-to-be-overheard voice, “Some of your new colleagues over here I’d like you to meet,” and then, in a confidential whisper, “Didn’t want you to get stuck with that tiresome fellow…Perhaps I’m being harsh, we tend to know one another’s faults and foibles all too well.”
The circle the headmaster led him to opened all too eagerly to let him in. “Got bivouacked all right, I hope.” “Digs okay for you?” Jacques took note of their tendency to use slang which was slightly out-of-date—words and expressions that had been current in the year they had left France—and moreover to pronounce those words distinctly, with inverted commas around them.
“I remember my bachelor days, that single room chez Mme. Maurice. Fifteen years ago—where does the time go? Had a little spirit lamp, so I could brew my own coffee—an excellent landlady, Mme.
Maurice, but a bit of a penny-pincher, and I’ve always been most particular about my—”
“He won’t stay there long. When he’s got a semester or two under his belt, I’ll write to the Ministry, saying if we want to keep hold of this excellent man, we’d better increase his housing allowance.”
“Yes, and a man doesn’t stay a bachelor forever.”
“Our headmaster, by the way, has some very charming daughters.”
“Ah, come now, lads,” the headmaster said, “we mustn’t make poor Melville feel he’s being married off in his very first week.”
“Save it for the second week, shall we?”
Jacques discerned the pecking order of this place, as rigid a hierarchy as had existed amongst the hens in his mother’s backyard coop, albeit one enforced by verbal rather than physical jabs.
“Lefort! At last!” A rumpled man in his thirties, with a dark splotch on his suit jacket, arrived, bumbling apologies.
Jacques did not like to think of himself as a snob, but when he sat down to dinner he could not help noting that while the table was set with crystal and fine china, the cutlery gave itself away as being plate on account of its heft.
In Jacques’ boyhood home, there had been mismatched genuine silver, handed down by the ancestors who were from the petty nobility—his parents no more hid their existence than they did the other progenitors who had been shopkeepers. The door of his family home was open to anyone—even Jews and pieds noirs—with the sole proviso that after they left, a comment would be made, almost ritual in nature, fond and derisive at the same time, about the visitor’s tendency to remark on the price of objects or his distinctive accent.
The Oriental carpets on the floor of the headmaster’s house revealed themselves as parvenus by their garish colors, not muted as they should have been by decades of being walked upon, and the common rooms of the house seemed to have been cobbled together by someone who had studied photographs of drawing rooms in the homes of the prestigious. Back in France, with their mediocre exam results from provincial universities, the masters at this school would have been village school teachers, living in rented rooms, taking their meals in mean cafés where the landlord, taking pity on them for their worn suits and grateful for the effort they made with the town’s youths, would have poured them a glass of the house wine, gratis. The headmaster would have had at most a single servant, a woman who did the work of both laundress and cook, a char who came in once a week to do the heavy cleaning, while here the headmaster and his wife lorded over a whole staff.
A dish called coq au vin was served, made with guinea fowl rather than chicken, followed by a beouf en daube, made with meat from the zebu: he wished for something frankly foreign, rather than these dishes which, purporting to be French, only awoke his longing for home. Did the kitchen staff really add vanilla and chilies to these dishes or was it only that these odors, wafting through the air, found their way into everything?
(Later, he would learn the flesh of Malagasy women tasted of cloves and pili-pili.)
A
