as her hands brushed against it or lifted it out of the way, but these erections were like those of an infant, before desire had an object, devoid of masculine assertion. She would laugh tenderly and say something in her native tongue. One night his fever was burning so bright, it seemed he could understand her, a sickroom Pentecost: In the midst of all this, our little soldier still stands at attention…or, perhaps, You see, life goes on, you’re not done for yet…The pain made him weep like a baby. She held his hand, and whispered a song to him in the language of the angels.
M. Lefort, sitting by his bedside with his hat in his hands, stared intently at Jacques.
Sometimes he was conscious enough to hear in the distance the call to prayer from the minarets of the mosques. Allahu Akbar. Ash-hadu alla ilaha illallah.
The words he had written to Sala hovered in the air about him: “We were carried on palanquins past the Dutchmen’s Graveyard: so many Dutch colonists were killed by native fevers that the Netherlands gave up their attempt to take this island.” They formed themselves into a long line and circled about him. He knew he had to catch his finger through one of the letters, snag it like a hook in the mouth of a fish and then he would be able to reel in the remainder of the sentence, gather those words in his arms, clutch them against his chest: if he were able to accomplish this, he would live.
His desire for life astonished him.
The priest came back. An anti-baptism was being carried out, Jacques’ nether regions rather than his head were being daubed, not with holy water but with the foul liquid that poured out of him—excrement, not Christian blood, was the sacred fluid of this religion.
The Malagasy woman continued to sing to him and clean up after him. The ghost-white faces loomed in the doorway, the priest—who was also sometimes a one-legged beggar he had seen on the street in Nîmes in his boyhood—spoke his garbled Latin. Jacques shouted at the priest to be silent, at the beggar that he had no money to give him, and, as he shouted, realized that all the words—the panhandler’s appeal, the priest’s chant—had been coming from his mouth.
In the distance, the call to prayer from the minarets of the mosque. Allahu Akbar. Ash-hadu alla ilaha illallah.
During this time when Jacques was in the grip of dysentery, Simone was a schoolgirl. In the heat of the summer, her thighs stuck to the wooden seat in her classroom, the sweat soaked through her garments so that when she walked home along the Chemin Raymond a damp ghost of her legs was visible on the back of her deep blue skirts.
Later, when she will be lying in bed in the dark next to Jacques he will say to her, “In Madagascar, I saw a crocodile for the first time. It was sunning itself on the bank of a river, so still that I would have stepped on it had it not been for the native who was with me, who grabbed my arm, called out. It opened a single eye, fixed it on me, not just with the implacable gaze of a member of a species who inhabited the earth long before our pitiful tribe even existed, who knows that it will endure long after our species has become extinct, but with that of a creature which had an atavistic knowledge of me.”
She will treasure the words that baffle her, repeating them over and over to herself, as if burnishing a piece of silver. Atavistic. Implacable. She would never look them up in a dictionary, not wanting to know their meanings.
