Brazzaville Beach Read Free

desk where I worked. There, I poured myself a glass of scotch whisky and wrote up my field notes.
    My desk was set in front of a netting window in the canvas side wall, which I rolled up to let in as much breeze as possible. Through it I had a view of the back of Hauser and Toshiro’s cabin some eighty yards away, the matting sentry box of his latrine and the wooden shower stall that Hauser had personally constructed beneath a frangipani tree. The shower was an elementary contraption: the shower head was fed from an oil drum set higher in the tree, the flow controlled by a spigot. The only onerous task was the filling of the oil drum: buckets of water had to be lugged up to it by ladder, but that was a job Hauser was happy to leave to his houseboy, Fidel.
    As I watched, the door in the shower stall opened and Hauser himself appeared, naked and glossy. Clearly, he had forgotten to bring a towel. I watched him tread carefully across the prickly grass to his back door. The tight dome of his big belly gleamed and the little white stub of his penis waggled comically as he flinched his way to safety. Hauser did this quite often—that is, wander naked to and fro from shower stall to cabin. He had a full view of my tent with its windowed sides. It had crossed my mind several times that he might be deliberately exposing himself.
    The sight of Hauser’s little penis and the taste of the scotchcombined to cheer me up and it was with restored confidence that an hour later I walked down Main Street toward the canteen, lit now with the blurry glow of hurricane lamps. As I passed his cabin, Hauser emerged.
    â€œAh, Mrs. Clearwater. Such timing.”
    Hauser was bald and thickset—a strong fat man—and his eyes were dull and slightly hooded. In the months I had been at Grosso Arvore our relations had never advanced beyond mutual guardedness. I suspected that he didn’t like me. Certainly, I didn’t warm to him at all. As we walked together to the canteen I gave him the specimen bottle full of Clovis’s fecal matter.
    â€œCould you find out what this one’s eating?” I asked him. “I think he might have been ill.”
    â€œAn amuse gueule .” He inspected the bottle. “Chimp shit, my favorite.”
    â€œYou don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
    â€œBut this is what I’m here for, my dear young lady: handsomely paid haruspication.”
    This was exactly the sort of fake-donnish banter I couldn’t stand. I gave Hauser a look of what I hoped was candid pity and pointedly turned away from him as we entered the canteen. I collected my tray and knife and fork and the cook served me up with a plateful of boiled chicken and sweet potato. I went to the end of the long table and sat down beside Toshiro, who nodded hello. We were free to return to our own quarters with our food if we wished, but I invariably ate in the canteen because of the length of the journey back. One blessing was that there was no requirement, official or unofficial, to make conversation. With the members of the project so reduced it would have provoked unbearable tensions if we had felt obliged to indulge in small talk every time we met. Toshiro, taciturn at the best of times, munched on pragmatically. Hauser was arguing with the cook. No one else had arrived. I started my bland chicken with little enthusiasm.
    In due course the other members of the project drifted in. First came Ian Vail and his wife, Roberta. They said hello and then took their trays back to their cottage. Then Eugene Mallabar himself entered, collected his food and sat down opposite me.
    Even his most embittered enemy would have had to concede thatMallabar was a handsome man. He was in his late forties, tall and lean, with a kind, regular-featured face that seemed naturally to emanate all manner of potent abstract nouns: sincerity, integrity, single-mindedness. For some reason his too neatly trimmed warlock’s beard,