Tropic Moon Read Free

reasons that didn’t apply, it was only to put off the moment when he’d get to the one that did.
    The reason was there, surrounding him, in the hotel. It was the hotel itself. It was …
    He’d been very taken by the sight of the hotel, a yellow edifice set some fifty yards back from the esplanade and its palm trees and surrounded by a dense growth of curious-looking plants.
    The main room was both a café and a restaurant. It had bright pastel walls that reminded him of Provence and a bar of polished mahogany. That and the high stools and the copper countertop added a touch of luxury.
    All the bachelors in Libreville took their meals there. Each one had his own table and napkin ring.
    Upstairs, the rooms were always available. Vacant, bare rooms, also in pastel, with beds draped in mosquito netting, and, here and there, an old pitcher, a cracked basin, an empty steamer trunk.
    Everywhere, upstairs and down, the drawn venetian blinds sliced up the sun. The whole house was filled with bands of shadow and light.
    Timar’s luggage was the luggage of a young man from a good family. It looked strange on the floor of the room. He wasn’t used to washing in a small basin. Above all, he wasn’t used to finding a bush to take care of his other needs.
    He wasn’t used to the teeming creatures: the unfamiliar flies, the flying scorpions, the hairy spiders.
    And that first attack of gnawing unease pursued him tenaciously, like a cloud of insects. At night, with his candle out, he could see the pale mosquito netting around him like a cage in the dark. Above, he sensed an immense void broken by rustlings, half-audible noises, fragile creatures—was it a scorpion, a mosquito, a spider?—that sometimes settled on the transparent gauze.
    And in the middle of that soft cage, he tried to keep track of the sounds, the quiverings in the air, to take note of the sudden silences.
    Abruptly he lifted himself up on his elbows. It was morning. The rays of sunlight were already there. The door had just opened. Smiling and sedate, the woman who ran the hotel was looking at him.
    Timar was naked. He realized it only then. His sweaty shoulders and chest emerged from the rumpled sheets. Why was he naked? He struggled to remember.
    He’d been very hot, sweating heavily. He’d searched in vain for matches. Creatures seemed to be crawling on his skin.
    That must have been it—no doubt sometime in the middle of the night—the moment when he’d taken off his pajamas. Now she could see his white skin, his exposed rib cage. She seemed extraordinarily self-possessed as she shut the door behind her. “Sleep well?” she asked.
    Timar’s pants lay on the floor. She lifted them, shook out the dust, and put them on a chair.
    Timar was afraid to get up. His bed stank of sweat. There was dirty water in the basin; the comb was missing several teeth.
    Still, he didn’t want her to leave—this woman in a black nightgown who was smiling at him very gently and a little ironically, too.
    â€œI came to ask you what you like to drink in the morning. Coffee? Tea? Cocoa? Did your mother used to wake you up back in Europe?”
    She’d pulled back the mosquito netting and was making fun of him. She was teasing him, smiling so broadly that he could see her teeth. Maybe she really did want to take a bite out of him.
    Because he was different from the colonials, lying there in bed with his look of well-groomed adolescence.
    She wasn’t being forward. She wasn’t being maternal, either. And yet there was something of both there—and, more than anything, a mute sensuality filling the ample flesh of this woman of thirty-some years.
    Was she naked under the black silk dress? In spite of his embarrassment, Timar asked himself the question.
    At the same time he felt a stab of desire that was reinforced by things that had nothing to do with it, like the bands of light and shadow, the animal