Translated from the French by Una MacLean
Camara Laye (1928–1980). An African writer born in French Guinea (now the République de Guinée). He studied in Conakry, the colonial capital, and moved to France at the age of nineteen to study engineering. Here he penned two of the earliest and most influential works in Francophone African literature, The African Child and The Radiance of the King. He returned to Guinea after its independence and held various posts in government, but conflicts with President Ahmed Sékou Touré and a brief incarceration forced him into exile. From 1964 until his death, Laye lived in Senegal, where he worked as a research fellow in Islamic studies at the University of Dakar.
She stopped walking for a moment – ever since she had set out, she had been feeling as though she had earned a moment’s rest – and she took stock of her surroundings. From the top of the hill on which she stood, she saw spread out before her a great expanse of country.
Far away in the distance was a town, or rather the remains of a town, for there was no trace of movement to be seen near it, none of the signs of activity that would suggest the presence of a town. Perhaps it was merely distance that hid from her sight all the comings and goings, and possibly once within the town, she would be borne along on the urgent flood of activity. Perhaps …
‘From this distance anything is possible,’ she was surprised to hear herself say aloud.
She mused on how, from such a vast distance, it seemed still as though anything could happen, and she fervently believed that if any changes were to take place, they would occur in the intervals when the town was hidden by the trees and undergrowth.
There had been many of these intervals and they were nearly always such very long intervals, so long that it was now by no means certain that she was approaching the town by the most direct route, for there was absolutely nothing to guide her and she had to struggle continually against the intertwining branches and tangled thorns and pick her way around a maze of swamps. She had tried very hard to cross the swamps, but all she had succeeded in doing was getting her shoes and the hem of her skirt soaking wet and she had been obliged to retrace her steps hurriedly, so treacherous was the surface of the ground.
She couldn’t really see the town and she wasn’t going straight towards it except for the rare moments when she topped a rise. There the ground was sparsely planted with broom and heath and she was far above the thickly wooded depths of the valleys. But no sooner had she finished scrambling up the hills than she had to plunge once more into the bushes and try to force her way through the impenetrable undergrowth where everything was in her way, cutting off her view and making her walk painful and dangerous again.
Perhaps I really ought to go back, she said to herself, and certainly that would have been the most sensible thing to do. But in fact she didn’t slacken her pace in the least, as though something away over there was calling to her, as though the distant town were calling. But how could an empty town summon her? A silent, deserted town!
For the closer she came to it, the more she felt that it must really be a deserted city, a ruined city in fact. The height of the bushes and the dense tangled undergrowth about her feet convinced her. If the town had still been inhabited, even by a few people, its surroundings would never have fallen into the confusion through which she had been wandering for hours; surely she would have found, instead of this tangled jungle, the orderly outskirts of which other towns could boast. But here there were neither roads nor paths; everything betokened disorder and decay.
Yet once more she wondered whatever forced her to continue her walk, but she could find no reply. She was following an irresistible urge. She would have been hard put to it to say how this impulse had arisen or indeed to decide just how long she had been obeying it. And perhaps it was the case that if only she followed the impulse for long enough, she would no longer be capable of defying it, although there was no denying that it was grossly irrational. At any rate the urge must have been there for a very long time, as she could tell from the tiredness of her limbs and moreover it was still very dose. Couldn’t she feel it brimming up within her, pressing on her breast with each eager breath she drew? Then all of a sudden she realized that she was face to face with it.
‘The urge is me,’ she cried.
She proclaimed it defiantly, but without knowing what she was defying, and triumphantly, although unaware of her opponent. Whom had she defied, and what could she be triumphing over? It was not simply that she was identifying herself with the strange compulsion in order to get to know more of it and of herself. She was obliged to admit that the urge was indefinable, as her own being for ever escaped definition.
After one final struggle with the branches and obstacles, and after skirting one more morass, she suddenly emerged in front of the city, or what remained of it. It was really only the traces of a town, no more than the traces, and in fact just what she had feared to find ever since she set out, but so sad, so desolate, she could never have imagined such desolation. Scarcely anything but rough heaps of walls remained. The porticoes were crumbling and most of the roofs had collapsed; only a column here or a fragment of a wall there proclaimed the former splendour of the peristyles. As for the remaining buildings, they seemed to waver uncertainly, as though on the very point of tumbling. Trees had thrust their branches through broken windows; great tufts of weeds pushed the blocks and the marble slabs upwards; the statues had fallen from their niches; all was ruined and burst asunder.
I wonder why these remains seem so different from the forests and bush I have come through already? she said to herself. There was no difference except for the desolation and loss, rendered all the more poignant by the contrast with what had once been. What am I searching for here? she asked herself once more. I ought never to have come.
‘Many people used to come here once,’ said an old man who appeared out of the ruins.
‘Many people?’ she said. ‘I have not seen a single soul.’
‘Nobody has been here for a very long time,’ said the old man. ‘But there was a time when crowds of people visited the ruins. Is that what you have come for?’
‘I was coming towards the city.’
‘It certainly was a great city once, but you have arrived too late. Surely you must have been delayed on the road.’
‘I should not have been so late but for my battles with the trees and undergrowth and all my detours around the swamps. If only they hadn’t held me back …’
‘You should have come by the direct route.’
‘The direct route?’ she exclaimed. ‘You cannot have any idea of the wilderness round this place.’
‘All right, all right,’ he said. ‘I do have some idea of it. As a matter of fact when I saw that people had stopped coming, I guessed how it was. Perhaps there isn’t any road left?’
‘There isn’t even a bush path!’
‘What a pity,’ he said. ‘It was such a fine town, the most beautiful city in all the continent.’
‘And now what is it?’ she said.
‘What is it?’ he replied dismally.
With his stick he began to mow down the nettles that rose thick and menacing about them.
‘Look at this,’ he said.
She saw, in the midst of the nettles, a fallen statue, green with moss, a humiliated statue. It cast upon her a dead, grey glance. Presently she became aware that the look was not really dead, only blind, as the eyes were without pupils, and it was in fact a living gaze, as alive as a look could be. A cry came from it, an appealing cry. Was the statue bewailing its loneliness and neglect? The lips drooped pitiably.
‘Who is it?’ she asked.
‘He was the ruler who lived in this place. His rooms can still be seen.’
‘Why don’t you set up the statue over there?’ she said. ‘It would be better there than among all these nettles,’
‘That is what I wanted to do. As soon as the statue fell from its alcove I wanted to put it back, but I simply hadn’t the strength. These stone sculptures are terribly heavy.’
‘I know,’ she replied, ‘and after all it is merely a stone sculpture.’
But was it merely carved stone? Could sculptured stone have cast upon her such a piercing glance? Perhaps, then, it wasn’t mere stone. And even if it were nothing more than mere stone, the fact remained that for all the nettles and moss and the vagaries of fortune that it had endured, this stone would still outlast man’s life. No, it could not be mere stone. And with this sort of distress in its look, this cry of distress …
‘Would you care to visit his rooms?’ asked the old man.
‘Yes, take me there,’ she answered.
‘Pay particular attention to the columns,’ he told her. ‘No doubt there is only one hall left here now, but when you consider the number of broken and fallen columns it does look as though there used to be at least ten halls.’
With the end of his stick he pointed out the marble stumps and debris of broken slabs buried in the grass.
‘This gateway must have been exceedingly high,’ he said, gazing upwards.
‘It can’t have been higher than the palace, surely,’ she said.
‘How can we tell? I haven’t seen it any more than you have. By the time I arrived here it had already fallen into the grass; but those who were here before my time declared that it was an astonishing entrance. If you could put all this debris together again, I dare say you would get a surprise. But who could tackle such a task?’
He shrugged his shoulders and continued, ‘You would need to be a giant, to have the hands and the strength of a giant.’
‘Do you really believe that a giant …?’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘Only the ruler himself, who had it erected, could do it. He could certainly manage it.’
She gazed at the niches where great tufts of grass had been bold enough to replace the statues. There was one space, larger than all the rest, where the weeds grew particularly ostentatiously, like a flaming torch.
‘That is the niche, over there, where he used to stand before his fall among the nettles,’ he remarked.
‘I see,’ she said. ‘But now there is nothing left but wild grass and the memory of his agony.’
‘He used to find this city and his palace trying enough. He personally supervised the building of the entire place. He intended his town to be the biggest and this palace the highest. He wanted them built to his own scale. Now he is dead, his heart utterly broken.’
‘But could he have died any other way?’
‘No, I suppose he carried his own death within him, like us all. But he had to carry the fate of a felled Goliath.’
By this time they had reached the foot of a staircase and he pointed out a little door at the end of the corridor on the left.
‘That is where I live,’ he told her. ‘It is the old porter’s lodge. I suppose I could have found somewhere a little more spacious and less damp, but after all, I am not much more than a caretaker. In fact, a guide is only a caretaker.’
So saying, he began to make his way painfully up the steps. He was a decrepit old man.
‘You are looking at me? I know I’m not much better than the palace! All this will crumble down one day. Soon all this will crumble down on my head and it won’t be a great loss! But perhaps I shall crumble before the palace.’
‘The palace is older,’ she said.
‘Yes, but it is more robust. They don’t build like that nowadays.’
‘What have you been saying?’ she demanded. ‘You are not stone! Why compare your body to a palace?’
‘Did I compare myself to a palace? I don’t think so. My body is certainly no palace, not even a ruined one. Perhaps it is like the porter’s lodge where I live, and perhaps I was wrong to call it damp and dark, perhaps I should have said nothing about it. But I must pause for breath. These stairs. At my age no one likes climbing stairs.’
And he wheezed noisily, pressing his hand over his heart as though to subdue its frantic beating.
‘Let us go,’ he said at last, ‘up the few remaining steps.’
They climbed a little higher and reached a landing with a great door opening off it, a door half wrenched from its hinges.
‘Here are the rooms,’ he said.
She saw an immense apartment, frightfully dilapidated. The roof had partly collapsed, leaving the rafters open to the sky. Daylight streamed in upon the debris of tiles and rubbish strewn upon the floor. But nothing could take from the chamber its harmonious proportions, with its marble panel, its tapestry and paintings, the bold surge of its columns, and the deep alcoves between them. It was still beautiful, in spite of being three-quarters ruined. The torn and rotten tapestries and the peeling paintings were still beautiful; so were the cracked stained-glass windows. And although the panelling was practically torn away, the grandeur of the original conception remained.
‘Why have you let everything deteriorate so far?’ she asked.
‘Why indeed? But now it is too late to do anything about it.’
‘Is it really too late?’
‘Now that the master is no longer here …’ He tapped the panels with his stick.
‘I don’t know how the walls are still standing,’ he said. ‘They may last a fair time yet. But the rain floods through the roof and windows and loosens the stones. And then when the winter storms come! It is those violent storms that destroy everything.’
He dislodged a scrap of mortar.
‘Just look, it’s no more than a bit of grey dust. I can’t think why the blocks don’t fall apart. The damp has destroyed everything.’
‘Was this the only room the master had?’ she asked.
‘He had hundreds of them and all of them richly furnished. I’ve pushed the movable stuff into one of the smaller rooms, which was less damaged.’
He opened a door concealed in the panelling.
‘Here is some of it,’ he said.
She beheld a jumble of carved furniture, ornaments, carpets and crockery.
‘Gold dishes, please note. The master would eat off nothing but gold. And look at this. Here he is in his robes of state.’ He pointed to a canvas where the face of the statue was portrayed.
The eyes were marvellously expressive. They were so even in the statue, although the sculptor had given them no pupils, but here they were infinitely more expressive and the look that they gave was one of anguish. ‘Is no one left near me?’ they seemed to ask. And the droop of the mouth replied, ‘No one.’ The man had known they would all forsake him; he had long foreseen it. Nevertheless she, she had come! She had fought through the bush and she had wandered around the swamps, she had felt fatigue and despair overwhelming her, but she had triumphed over all these obstacles and she had come, she had come at last. Had he not guessed she would come? Yet possibly this very foresight had but accentuated the bitter line of his set lips. ‘Yes,’ said those lips, ‘someone will come, when all the world has ceased to call. But someone who will be unable to soothe my distress.’
She swung round. This reproach was becoming unbearable, and not only this reproach, which made all her goodwill seem useless, but the cry of abandonment, the wild lonely appeal in his look.
‘We can do nothing, nothing at all for him,’ the old man declared.
And she replied, ‘Is there ever anything we can do?’ She sighed. In her innermost being she felt the anguish of this look; one might have thought it was she who cried, that the cry of loneliness welled up from her own lonely heart.
‘Perhaps you can do something,’ he said. ‘You are still young. Although you may not be able to do anything for yourself, you might perhaps help others.’
‘You know very well that I cannot even do that,’ she said.
She seemed overwhelmed, as though she bore the ruins on her own shoulders.
‘Are there still more rooms?’ she asked him.
‘Lots of them, but it is getting late; the sun is sinking.’
Daylight was fading fast. The light had become a soft, rosy glow, a light that was kinder to details, and in it the great room took on a new aspect. The paintings and panels regained a freshness that was far from theirs by right. This sudden glow was the gentlest of lights. But not even this light could calm a tormented heart.
‘Come along,’ called the old man.
‘Yes,’ she answered.
She imagined that once she went out of this hall and its adjoining storeroom, her heart would perhaps calm down. She thought that perhaps she might forget the great cry coming from the storeroom. Yes, if only she could get away from this palace, leave these ruins, surely she could forget it. But was not the cry inside herself?
‘The cry is within me,’ she exclaimed.
‘Stop thinking about it,’ advised the old man. ‘If you hear anything, it’s because the silence has got on your nerves. Tomorrow you will hear nothing.’
‘But it is a terrible cry.’
‘The swans have an awful cry too,’ he remarked.
‘Swans?’
‘Yes, the swans. To look at them gliding over the water you might never believe it. Have you ever happened to hear them cry? But of course not; you are scarcely more than a child, and, with less sense than one, you probably imagine that they sing. Listen, formerly there were lots of swans here; they were at the very gate of the palace. Sometimes the lake was covered with them like white blossoms. Visitors used to throw scraps to them. Once the tourists stopped coming, the swans died. No doubt they had lost the habit of searching for food themselves and so they died. Very well, never, do you hear me, never, did I hear a single song coming from the pond.’
‘Why do you have to tell me all this? Have I ever told you that I believe swans sing? You didn’t need to speak to me like that.’
‘No, maybe I shouldn’t have said it, or I should have said it less suddenly at least. I’m sorry. I even believed that swans sing myself once. You know how it is – I am old and lonely and I have got into the habit of talking to myself. I was talking to myself then. I once believed that the lord of this palace, before he died, sang a swan-song. But no, he cried out. He cried so loudly that—’
‘Please tell me no more,’ she begged.
‘All right. I suppose we shouldn’t think about all that. But let’s go.’
He carefully closed the storeroom door and they made their way towards the exit.
‘Did you mean to leave the door of the big room open?’ she asked once they had reached the landing.
‘It hasn’t been shut for a long time,’ he replied. ‘Besides, there is nothing to fear. No one comes here now.’
‘But I came.’
He glanced at her.
‘I keep wondering why you came,’ he said. ‘Why did you?’
‘How can I tell?’ she said.
Her visit was futile. She had crossed a desert of trees, and bush and swamps. And why? Had she come at the summoning of that anguished cry from the depth of the statue’s and the picture’s eyes? What way was there of finding out? And moreover it was an appeal to which she could not respond, an appeal beyond her power to satisfy. No, this impulse that had moved her to hasten towards the town had been mad from the start.
‘I don’t know why I came,’ she repeated.
‘You shouldn’t take things to heart like that. These painters and carvers are so crafty, you know, they can make you work out the portrait, for instance. Have you noticed the look in the eyes? We begin by wondering where they found such a look and eventually we realize they have taken it from ourselves, and these are the paradoxes they would be the first to laugh at. You should laugh too.’
‘But these paradoxes, as you call them, which come from the depth of our being, what if we cannot find them there?’
‘What do you find within yourself?’ he answered her.
‘I have already told you: unbearable loneliness.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there is something of that in each one of us.’
‘But in me …’
‘No, not more than in anyone else,’ he insisted. ‘Don’t imagine that others are any less alone. But who wants to admit that? All the same, it is not an unendurable state of affairs. It is quite bearable in fact. Solitude! Listen, solitude isn’t what you imagine. I don’t want to run away from my solitude. It is the last desirable thing left me; it is my only wealth, a great treasure, an ultimate good.’
Is he just saying that to comfort me? she wondered. But it is not consolation, a shared solitude can be no consolation. The sharing only makes the solitude doubly lonely.
Aloud she said, ‘That doesn’t console me in the least.’
‘I didn’t think it would,’ he replied. They had by now reached the foot of the staircase and the old man showed her the little corridor leading to his room.
‘My lodge is here.’
‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘You’ve told me already.’
‘But I haven’t told you everything: I didn’t say that my room is right beneath the staircase. When visitors used to climb up there in throngs, they were walking over my lodge. Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, you don’t understand at all; you don’t realize that they were marching on my head, wiping their feet on my hair. I had plenty of hair in those days.’
‘But they weren’t really wiping their feet,’ she said. ‘They—’
‘Don’t you think it was humiliating enough anyway?’
She did not know how to reply. The old man seemed slightly crazy: some of what he said was very sensible, but a lot of it was sheer nonsense. That solitude has gone to his head, she told herself, and she looked at him afresh. He was certainly very old. There must be times when age and loneliness together … Aloud she remarked, ‘I don’t know,’ and then, all of a sudden, ‘What made you say that solitude is an ultimate good?’
‘How very young you are,’ was his only reply. ‘You should never have come here.’ He made off towards his lodge, saying, ‘I’m going to prepare a meal.’
‘I shall rest here awhile,’ she said as she climbed the steps.
‘Yes, do have a rest. You’ve certainly earned one. I shall call you when the food is ready.’
She sat down and gazed at the evil weeds. The nettles were by far the most numerous and reminded her of the ocean. They were like a great green sea that surged around the palace trying to drown it, and ultimately they would completely engulf it. What could mere stones do against such a powerful wave? A wave with the deceptive smoothness of velvety leaves, a wave that hid its poisons and its sorcery beneath a velvet touch. It seemed to her fevered imagination that the wave was already rising. Or was it simply the darkness? Was it night, which was burying the lowest steps? No, it was really the wave of nettles, imperceptibly advancing in its assault upon the palace. A transient attack, no doubt. Probably this sea of nettles had tides like the ocean. And perhaps it wasn’t merely a simple tide. Perhaps …
She leaped to her feet. The tide was about her ankles. She climbed several steps and the tide rose as quickly.
‘Caretaker!’ she screamed.
But she could no longer see the porter’s lodge. Perhaps the sea had already entered the room while she was sitting down. She couldn’t be certain now whether it had a door that shut. Even suppose it did have, how could a door stop such a wave?
What is to become of me? she asked herself. She climbed a few more steps, but the tide continued to pursue her; it really was following her. She paused; perhaps if she stopped, the tide in its turn might stop rising. But instead it flowed right up to her, covering her shoes. Feverishly she resumed her upward flight and gained the landing opposite the doorway of the main hall. But to her horror she realized that the wave was there almost as soon. It was inches away. Must she drown in those horrible weeds?
She rushed to open the storeroom door, only to find that the sea had beaten her and had borne everything away, literally washed off the face of the earth. There was no longer any storeroom left! It had been engulfed beneath the flood of nettles, with its furniture and tapestries and dishes, and the portrait as well. Only the cry, the great cry of anguish remained, and it had become vaster and louder, more piercing and heart-rending than ever. It swelled to fill the whole earth! It seemed to her as though nothing could silence it any more and that whatever she did she could never escape. Her heart could never escape again. Yet at the same time she tried to bolt the door upon it as though in spite of all she knew she might evade it yet. But what could she escape to? There was no way of escape left open; it was either the cry or the flood. She was a prey to this cry and in no time she would be the victim of the flood. She was trapped between two floods, the one that swallowed up the storeroom and was lying in wait menacingly on its threshold, and the other one, which had pursued her step by step up the stairs and across the great hall. She had no choice but to cast herself into one of these two floods which were soon to merge. Placed as she was, she could neither advance nor retreat.
‘Caretaker!’ she cried.
But did she actually shriek? No sound came from her lips. Terror was throttling her. It had her by the throat. She only imagined she had shouted.
At the second attempt she could not even pretend to herself that she had shouted. She no longer even had the will to cry out. She realized that her terror was so extreme that she could never shout again. Nevertheless she continued to struggle hopelessly; she fought and struggled silently and in vain.
And meanwhile the flood was steadily rising beyond her ankles and up her legs. Confident of its power, it rose more rapidly than ever.
Then, while she was struggling and trying desperately to regain her voice, she suddenly caught sight of the statue. The sea of weeds had lifted it and was tossing it on its waves.
She stopped struggling to watch it and at once she could see that its eyes were looking at her just as they had done when the old man had first thrust aside the nettles. It was the same look, the same cry of distress and bitter loneliness.
She longed to awake from her nightmare and she tried once more to call for help, but in vain. Must she really die alone beneath the flood of weeds, all alone? She hid her face in her arms.
A little later she felt a blow on her forehead and she felt as if her skull were bursting.