Le Fonctionnaire

            Despite his long service in the colony, it could not be said of him that he was loved or even well-liked by most of the locals. Peau noire or peau blanche – those not from l’Hexagone, at least – were, if anything, colder and more reserved around him than when he first arrived all those many years ago. As compared to other metropolitans who found themselves marooned on this tiny, largely derelict demi-island outpost of the Republic, however, he had one inestimable advantage which rendered his social isolation tolerable, even pleasurable. You see, he knew the true reasons for the natives’ quiet hostility, or was sure to a degree that was as good as knowing. The blacks resented him for his position and his status as a representative of metropolitan authority; the whites, because his zealous energy and incorruptible adherence to rules and impersonal, impartial procedure reminded them that their languid, aristocratic ways could no longer compete in the world and would inevitably be soon relegated to the dustbin of history, along with their sugar estates and slurring Ancien Régime pronunciation. They all resented him because he was important; it was he who kept things running, who made the big decisions and yet they could neither beat him not convert him. In fact, they would have preferred the peaceful latter option…it worked with all the rest, after all. Alas, the climate, the women and the rum were queerly ineffectual against this stalwart soldier of the Service Civile. If anything, his moral and physical conquest through sheer plodding endurance gave him greater satisfaction than any of the more readily quantifiable accomplishments of his career – the kilometres of metalled roads, the increase in the number of motorcars imported and the corresponding decrease in the horse and mule populations, the percentage of felons apprehended, the land acquisitions for the State taken from outmoded feudal planters and grossly irrational peasants alike.   The Functionary mused on his upbringing, one of six children in the household of an honest, overworked pubic school teacher in an unremarkable arrondissement of tidy, uniform apartments inhabited by clerks and grocers, cookie-cutter images of themselves. He had moved onwards and upwards since those days of outwardly respectable penny-pinching and unstinting toil. He remembered how his mother would buy bread and lock it in the cupboard, only setting it on the table when it was stale, and would serve rancid butter because its pungent flavour meant one used less of it. Wine and butcher’s meat only appeared when coworkers of his father or extended family came to visit. He contrasted those hard yet edifying days of his childhood and youth with the situation of his table now. A local garcon in starched shirt and silk waistcoat to serve him, and, each dinner, when he dined at home, would have a bouillabaisse or a competently prepared bisque, a cutlet of beef or pork, or a roast chicken fresh from the hold of one of the new reefer ships (the scraggy creole ‘fowl’ being fit for gambling – but not dining – upon), accompanied by an astringently dry Bordeaux and baguettes of finest wheat flour – none of the stomach-clogging yams or maize paste the natives relished with their foetid salt cod. A junior clerk might balk at his grocer’s bill, but he was no junior clerk, and there were none who, invited to join him at his table, did not brag about the experience afterwards. There was method to his excess, for he was not a man for idle luxuries: it was often the stomach – he had observed several cases himself – where degeneracy first began.

            Yes, he was a man of significance in this insular little world. This was the main reason he eventually stopped returning ‘home’ to France on his annual holidays, even for major family events. The last time was, what, six or seven years ago? His old classmates, against whom he had measured himself for so long, had either faded into obscurity or occupied their own posts in distant corners of the Empire, lords of their own primitive fiefdoms, forgotten to Paris. His sisters had married men who would now be awkwardly beneath him socially, were they to meet, something the sisters’ apparently congenital hauteur would not permit them to suffer. His two brothers lay buried in the mud of Ypres and Verdun. Imperceptibly, he had got to the point where he had no friends left in the metropole. The place itself had become strange to him. The cafes and cabarets of his university days had vanished after the war – the loss of a couple million regular customers probably had something to do with it; the galleries and salons where he had once gone to feel like an erudite, cultured man of the world were now cluttered with the works of the Dadaists and Cubists, crude abortions on canvas which left him shuddering in disgust. The orderly checkerboard streets of the fashionably shabby sections of Baron Haussmann’s Paris with his pals now swarmed with furtive, scheming Annamites and sullen, tribal Berbers – foreign students and the lowest grade of menial workers…when they were not busy plotting the downfall of the Republic, that is. Traumatized into masochism by the War, the shattered, anchor-less remnants of France were committing a gay, absinthe-drunk suicide. There was more order and sanity out in the colonies. Hence, he chose to travel, when he got the time off, to other points in the Antilles, or even to Senegal and Cochinchine, which all seemed more familiar to him than ‘home’ now. He would not return to live out his days as a curmudgeonly pensioner, staring glumly out at the fast-decaying city beyond his narrow filmy windowpane. No, no, thrice no! Besides, what good would the modest savings from his civil servant’s salary, generous as it was by local standards, be to support him in that expensive city? Most of all, should he return to Paris, he would be a nobody from the moment he stepped off the quay, into the amorphous drab-coloured human sea. Here, resent him or not, there was none either black or white who could ignore his word on any matter of significance in the colony. Even the békés no longer openly vied with him for power and the governor’s favour, not after the War. Those relict nobles, led by the venerable but impoverished Signeur Desmonts, had been begging for yet more cash to prop up their backwards and inefficient sugar mills, salt pans and plantain groves. It would feed the workers, what with the war going on, so they said (not mentioning it would feed their own pocketbooks, at the metropolitan taxpayer’s expense). The Functionary had instead advocated the funds in question be allocated for a trade school and a factory making replacement parts for automobiles, so that the natives could learn discipline, modern manufacturing processes and use their wages to purchase a nutritionally superior diet from the stores in town. True, the factory collapsed and the natives seemed to prefer purchasing idleness with plantains and corn paste to purchasing meat and bread with work, but education might correct such habits in time…and the Functionary had triumphed over the békés. Hah!

            The Functionary wore a contented smile on his rosy, well-fed face. He was taking a stroll after dinner at the Blue Flower (he would have preferred it be called the Fleur Blue, but the French language was not as dominant as one would have hoped). The prices were a little high for the natives and the location a bad one for tourists, but one could get real, authentic Chinese food there, even many passably-prepared French dishes, and the best imported liqueurs sat on the bar shelf side by side with the most flammable local swill. Corn-chicken soup to start, prawn satay, then a plate of ginger beef paired with a fortifying brandy-and-soda. Ca, c’est bon! And it did not hurt that the place was run by two belles Tonkinoises, a mother and her young daughter, equally seductive in their own exotic ways. He never went beyond the most perfunctory flirtation, but the experience, for eyes, stomach and ego, was gratifying nonetheless. He felt so invigorated, in fact, that he dismissed his chauffeur, who had been waiting patiently outside for him as he dined. The doctors, they said that a bit of exercise was good for the circulation, not so? And the heat, one had to be on guard, as it thickened the blood – one reason, they also said, why men of good French stock grew so sluggish and listless after a few years out in the Antilles. The Functionary was a bit sceptical of this last theory, for he had not suffered such impairments himself in more than two decades. So many years of late hours behind a desk had rendered him heavier and slower than he once was, though. Time used to be, he would go riding past the old Desmonts property, along the Rue de Hollande, dressed in his best sporting clothes, gold pocketwatch chain dangling across his waist. It sparkled so bright in the equatorial sun that he had no doubt they could see if from the weather-scoured veranda of the Desmonts house – old man Desmonts and the exquisite and bewitching Yvette. That old fool! Why, his face sagged with worry just as his roof and balconies sagged from neglect and debt. And he stubbornly insisted on promising Yvette’s delicate milk-white hand to that young Hayot chap. And she would be won over by a handsome smile and a dashing Troupes Coloniales uniform, much as there was no rebellion in that. How some young women shackle themselves to pious tradition and others destroy themselves in blind revolt, with equal fervour! A pity how things went…it was from good sources that he had heard that a Lieutenant Hayot was missing in action in Flanders; it was standard procedure to add in the records a ‘presumed dead.’ And Hayot was such an uncommon name, it was not a great assumption. How was he to know she would go ahead and…why, it was against his own interests! Not that he was ever keen to marry her father’s debts…but in principle, why, it was just illogical!…The Functionary shook the unpleasant memory from his conscience. Ridiculous as it all seemed to him (what did he have to feel guilty for?), he did not pass the Desmonts farm anymore – in ruins though it was – except by car, and even then he preferred to take the roundabout way across the border, coming down over Orient Bay side.

            He was strolling along a narrow spit of land forming the northern rim of the Simpson Bay lagoon, unimaginatively referred to as ‘Sandy Ground.’ It was a picturesque, but easily traversable, spot. Not very valuable land, though, as the softness of the ground and the lack of space kept anyone from building hotels or warehouses on it. Even the indigent fishermen and conch divers whose irregular, tumbledown huts constituted the only human habitations knew not to demand of the thin soil support for more than the scattered clumps of salt-yellowed coconut palms and wind-flattened sea almonds. This very lack of prospects had the beneficent result of keeping the sand spit in its pristine state – if not wilderness, then ‘feral,’ one might say. Being on the western flank of the island with no higher ground beyond it, the blood-red sun sinking below the sea, the lurid, inky form of the mangrove woods in the foreground throbbing and shrieking with the cries of the frogs and strange night birds, some of which probably did not exist in any textbook….it was as close to the sublime as the Functionary cared to venture.

            He crossed over the bridge connecting the sand spit with the outskirts of the town. It was an unusually quiet night, but then, it was Monday, early in the month, and the improvident salt and sugar workers would understandably be short of cash for amusement. Still, he did not like to see the streets empty at such an early hour. It bespoke a lack of commerce; hinted at lurking crime. Such nights were rare, with the economy doing decently well, but he felt uneasy nonetheless. It was purely the residue of childish fancy, of course, but sometimes the skeletal acacia trees and the frowning mountains casting jagged shadows upon the largely electricity-less town acted in unhealthy ways on imaginations, even ones as atrophied as his. He arrived at the cemetery encircled by the Rue Charles Tondu and the Rue de Sandy Ground. A dramatic scenery, with its centuries-old stone walls and raised crypts in the old French Catholic style which seemed to be afflicted with an unfortunate tendency to veer into almost Pagan designs and decorations. Many years before, it had been a good journey from the centre of town, but with the expansion in hotels and the increasing number of workers migrating from other islands and the metropole, the edges of the town were swiftly flooding out past the spot which, due to its surrounding walls and perhaps too the superstitious trepidation its purpose inspired, gave the site a feeling of splendid isolation.

            At the roadside across from the main gate, an old crone, black as her costume was obscenely bright, stood at a ramshackle stand selling coconut flavoured iced cream, produced in situ with an archaic wooden barrel-churn. He wondered if she had a vendor’s permit and license from the sanitary inspector. He decided that she did not. Women like her were why fevers and parasites of the gut were so widespread among the populace. Weakened by a lifetime of such ailments, ingested with food that was not sustaining to behind with, was why the children could not concentrate on their studies and why, as adults, they found a fair day’s work beyond their bodies’ capacity. The shameless irresponsibility! He made a mental note to give an order to the sanitary inspector the next day.

            So much history, so much inheritance of darkness and squalor. The Mission Civilisatrice had its work cut out for it yet. He would take a walk through the cemetery. The rise in the price of land had meant some of the more respectable families in town now had plots here. The difficulty, during the War, of sending remains home to France through the U-boat blockade unavoidably led to a number of white metropolitans being interred, which in turn led to sturdier gates, better-vetted staff, and strict new legislation against the desecration of tombs in the service of certain unspeakable religious practices. Not that grave-robbing had been a problem on the island, but it was known that the voodoo cult had adherents among the natives, citoyens français though they might be on paper. Indeed, their number and zeal would only be augmented by the influx of migrants from Guadeloupe, Guiane, and above all Haiti, that eternal repository of gruesome antediluvian lore and, more practically significant, the knowledge of poisons and crimes that the houngan and bokor practice for the awe and silver of a credulous, benighted people under the guise of magic and sorcery. If there was one ministry which deserved a greater share of the Republic’s budget, it was the Ministry of Education! But that was why the colony needed a man like him. He studied the impressive brick and stonework tombs with satisfaction. Pristine, well cared for. The displays of emotive religious symbolism were a little rich for his secularist eyes, but it was reassuring to see that the sons and daughters of France were remembered and respected for their sacrifices far from home with a suitable expenditure of labour and materials. Here was a marble column indicating the resting place of a brilliant biologist whose studies of tropical insects, particularly the Lepidopterans, were cited in university textbooks in Paris itself. He had drowned when a storm caught the frail vessel he was sailing to Martinique in. They had shared many a drink and philosophic discussion. That was before the War. Goodness, the passage of time. There was Madame Saunier, a famous theatre actress, once. Her planter husband brought her out on what she thought would be a romantic adventure, largely to embellish his presence in society. The climate and her husband’s infidelity soon caused her to fade and wither, and that was the end of the illustrious Madame Saunier. Over there was a baroque sculpture and a plaque…The Functionary had forgotten the name for years; it was that rake son of a Breton count who had come down to forge a name for himself growing cacao and finding the lost pirate treasure which some ancestral manuscript would lead him to. A sad case, that one. A genuine scholar, fluent in many languages and competent in a few of the useful sciences to boot; just the sort of man France would need to rebuild itself. Only twenty-six years old. The head and liquor softened his morals, the women softened his wits. Killed in a duel of, of all the tragic wasteful ends a man could meet. A duel! In nineteen…twenty-one it must have been.

            There were others lying nearby, not as sensational perhaps but similar enough. Cirrhosis. Yellow fever. Syphilis. They came out from tired, routine lives in cities, stuffed to the gills with book-learning but with scant wisdom of the world. The freedom that island life allowed – enforced, really – upon their eager young psyches proved an incurable and invariably fatal poison. Mind, though, the Functionary reflected, if it had not been so…if the brighter talents and bolder personalities had not proved so uniformly subject to the dangers of colonial life, he, with his industrious mediocrity, would still be a low-level clerk, copying forms or listening to irate and incomprehensible natives demanding make-work jobs and adjudication of trivial quarrels. Quelle horreur! The spirit of the place may have favoured Romantics like them, but time and the iron laws of Fate favoured the Functionary. Eh-heh, there was the sepulchre, ornately carved but of cheap limestone, of the lovely Mademoiselle Desmonts, Yvette Desmonts. She was a creole belle of the classic sort. A modern-day Josephine, but not so petty and indecisive. White, at least by the standards of the place; the very likeness of one of Bouguereau’s Gypsy girls or jug-bearing Iberian maids. He had a most delightful time with her…she was the passionate Mediterranean temperament to the core, alternately fiery and tender as her starry black eyes and wild raven tresses. Mon Dieu! Quelle saveur!

            Of course, marriage was out of the question. With her dowry of antique fineries and jewellery would have come her family’s debts. The former had been dwindling and the latter accumulating since sugar was first squeezed from the curse’d beet and undoubtedly constituted a vastly greater sum than what the pitiful dregs of the Desmonts Estate could be mortgaged for. If, in fact, anyone could be found foolish enough to give a mortgage, let alone purchase, that wasteland, already half-swallowed by the pitiless bush. Despite putting on an appearance of nonchalance, it had bothered him a good deal when she died. And in such a tragic fashion, too! Her father must have pulled many strings with the village priest for him to have found that the young lady had drowned by misadventure while swimming. Swimming, by a rocky shore, at midnight? In a full satin ball gown? And then when the young Monsieur Hayot returned a month or so later, all covered in medals…well, who was he to blame? He had only relayed what he understood to be the facts of the situation. Those shells they were using over there could pulverise a body to atoms and it would remain ‘missing in action’ for a hundred years. That the man should then, having survived the gas and shells and machine guns, belatedly carried out the Hun’s work for him…really, it was too much for anyone to have predicted.

            Grim reflections in a melancholy location, most would say, but the Functionary was not the least disconcerted. Drama had little effect on him and his stolid, practical nature did not allow him to weep over the follies and extravagences of more fragile natures than his. Weighing things from a utilitarian perspective, he saw in these stone markers a kind of racing scoreboard, in a manner of speaking. Those poetic inscriptions, contorted cherubim and pensive saints in granite and marble; they were the symbol of his opponents’ defeat. He himself, from his smooth brogues (polished daily by his garcon), plain but well-made charcoal suit covering his hearty paunch, all the way to his placid, soft-featured face and balding, greying pate – he as he had made himself, unaided by connections or family name, or deeds of ribbon-decked butchery – was the symbol of his own victory.

            “They may have despised me, or hated me, as the case may be,” he mused; “But their sentiments were born of fear. They knew I would surpass them, as sure as Fate, oui. Or, they wanted me and knew I would not have them. C’est la vie, c’est la vie.” He drew out a cigar from his coat pocket, relishing the fragrance, the glow of the embers in the deepening twilight, the rhythmic the rush of the waves against the breakwater just beyond the wall. Magnificent. Suddenly, he perceived a harsh intrusion amid the twilight symphony, in the form of an alternating gravelly scraping and soft thudding. He turned around. How had he not noticed, walking down the path? He felt the embarrassment one always feels upon realizing one has been observed (even possibly observed) for a time without knowing it, regardless of how blameless one’s conduct might have been. It was a pair of labourers clad in ragged overalls and wide-brimmed hats of fraying straw that half-concealed their faces. They were busily engaged with pick and shovel. Tomb robbing? No, for they did not startle, and there was no monument, just a hole in the raw earth. They had evidently been at work for some time. The Functionary was surprised, even irritated – it was among his many responsibilities to sign off on all death certificates. What was more, this was a very respectable section of a respectable cemetery – one reserved, not legally of course, but through custom – for whites and those coloured folk who had distinguished themselves by their wealth or service to La Patrie. He had heard rumours of how family burial grounds were a magnet for occultists seeking skulls and bones for charms, burial finery, or even – not that he would permit the papers to publish a word of it – the raw material for the creation of the dreaded ‘zombi.’ It would be understandable that some fearful peasants whose loved one had died in unusual circumstances might feel insecure about burying him or her up there in the ragged hills where the light and the law did not yet reach. They would desire, perhaps at the cost of a substantial bribe to the watchman, to have their relative interred in a location safe from the witchdoctor’s diabolical arts. Understandable, oui, but not permissible. If someone wanted to die like a Frenchman, they would have to learn to live (and pay) like one.

            “Hey, garcon,” he shouted, though the youngest of the two men looked as old as he; “What are you doing here, at this hour? Explain yourself!”

            The labourers did not stir from their task. The knotted, coal-black arms heaved the damp clods over the edge of the grave with a rhythm that was uncannily machine-like. He realized he had inadvertently spoken in French, the French of France. To rustics like this, who had probably not completed even four years schooling – how absurd! Unfortunately, despite living the better part of his adult life in the Antilles, he knew almost no Créole and affected to know even less. As far as he was concerned, it was the purpose of the Mission Civilisatrice to educate, not to pander to people’s bad habits. However, now he was compelled to let the rules of propriety slide a bit. “What are you…Kisa w’ap fè? Who permitted….kis moun ki pèmèt ou fè sa a? Ehh, err, mwen…mwen rapote…bay jandams la!” He was satisfied he’d given a passable expression of his thoughts, at least enough so they ought to knew he, an official obviously above their own station and capable of making life very hard for them, wanted an account and now! The elder labourer glanced up briefly. The Functionary observed his weathered white-bearded face, a broad, insolent grin stretched across it. The old man mumbled something in thick Créole which the Functionary did not understand. The younger joined him a guttural chuckle. Their spades never paused in their monotonous work. The Functionary had read a report from a colleague in Guadeloupe that the Panama fever brought with returning workers was doing a number over there. He himself had voiced disapproval of the new policy of encouraging married civil servants to come with their families, so as to make the colonial service more attractive to a diminished pool of recruits. The fools in Paris had not seen with their own eyes how the unfamiliar climate played havoc upon the constitutions of white bourgeois women and children. Yes, that was it. He had noticed when he called on Plantard’s house the previous weekend – Plantard the newly-arrived marine engineer – their youngest daughter was fairing rather poorly. Ghastly pale; almost blue around the eyes. Maybe…but then, he should have heard the news at the office today. Plantard was cheerful and perfectly at ease. And that grave was not being dug for an infant. It was long and deep. He regretted this scenic stroll. He made his way to the gate and hailed the first taxi that came by.

            The Functionary was breathing heavily and glossy with sweat; he dug his fingers under his collar, straining to loosen it. He had the taxi take him back to the office, where a good portion of the staff were still at work. The Functionary’s eyes darted nervously about, till he spotted Lévesque. He dealt with the newspapers; he would know. Supressing his anxiety, the Functionary asked, “Hey, err, bon soir, Georges, did something happen to…who is being buried tomorrow, at the cemetery over Sandy Ground way?”

            Lévesque replied with a Gallic shrug; “Beats me. I didn’t know there was a funeral tomorrow, but, you know, I’ve been off island a lot lately.” The Functionary’s anxiety swelled. He clapped a sweaty palm on the shoulder of Mayotte, a black who the Sous Prefecture had doing typing and translation. Mayotte was poor and ambitious; whatever he thought privately, he would not question an…unusual…request coming from a superior, even if it kept him half an hour or so late. He sent Mayotte off in his chauffeur’s car to make inquiries at the cemetery. The Functionary tried to distract himself with some perfunctory paperwork in his office. Mayotte returned and with impeccable politeness let the Functionary know that the labourers he described – indeed, any labourers at all – were nowhere to be seen and, since he had encountered no one to inquire of, he had returned empty handed. The Functionary started to become angry. All events of any significance in the colony, any act or thing in being which left the faintest statistical trace; all were recorded in his files. Any act or thing not in his files either did not exist or could not be a phenomenon of any significance. So it had always been. That was the line between civilization and barbarism – the barbarian was things and acts per se; the civilized man was figures expressed as things and acts. The line could not be erased, or even be permitted to blur. He went to the telephone and asked the operator to ring up Doctor Hutard, who was also the coroner. Such a trifle as the death of a vagrant in a sewage gutter would not escape the Doctor’s methodical attentions. Doctor Hutard knew of no deaths, certainly not of anyone who would have funds sufficient for a plot in the town cemetery.

            “Yes, yes,” the Functionary growled into the mouthpiece; “Everyone has told me that. But no one can tell me why two men would be in the cemetery after sundown, digging a grave, when nobody has died to fill it.” He slammed down the receiver. He beat a tattoo with his fingers upon the desk. Aha! He picked up the phone again and had the operator connect to the gendarmerie building. He explained to the duty Sergeant that he had personally observed an attempted grave robbery in progress in the cemetery by Sandy Ground and gave descriptions of the ‘suspects.’ No doubt, he added, they intended to commit a breach of the statutes against the practice of witchcraft. Furthermore, the gendarmes were to bring the suspect to the Sous Prefecture so he could identify them. Since the Functionary stood as an official with more authority, at least outside of emergencies, than most of the gendarmes, he was sure his request would be obeyed. At least he would get some answers. In the interests of setting a good example to his subordinates, the Functionary made a point of keeping no alcohol of any kind in his office, going so far as to pass the lavish Second Empire liquor cabinet that came with the office onto Lévesque (who did not resent the imposition in the least). Now he forgot about those pretences as he hurried down the stairs to ask Lévesque if he had any of that Guavaberry liqueur he liked to buy on the Dutch Side. Lévesque was only too obliging to his plainly very distressed supervisor. The Functionary poured himself a neat tumblerful and walked back up the stairs. 

            Why had it so unnerved him to happen across those workmen digging that grave? There wasn’t anything peculiar about them or the hole they were digging that should make it in any way out of the ordinary. Still, he struggled to dash it all from his mind. A few warm gulps of the liqueur, a stack of documents reviewed and signed off, and his nerves cooled. He reclined on a settee, perusing the newspaper and listening to the crickets. Maybe a quarter of an hour or so and he would go back to the Blue Flower to have some drinks and shoot a few rounds of pool. First, though, he had to settle this perplexing matter. It was only a couple minutes before a pair of gendarmes entered the Sous Prefecture office with the head groundskeeper of the cemetery hunched and quivering between the two tall, well-armed officers.

            “Hmph! What were those men doing digging in the cemetery his evening?” the Functionary began interrogating the groundskeeper as soon as he was down the stairs. “The prefecture hires you to keep watch on things. There was nobody else there, eh? It’s not a big place. What, you get a cut for…for selling the bits and pieces of the dead for some mad charlatan to make fetishes and plant curses? Ah! But….” He continued without giving the groundskeeper the chance to say a word; “But, why dig a grave at all? None of the authorities – for whom I speak – know of any scheduled burial. Concealing a murder maybe? Hiding it in plain sight, heh?”

            “Awah! Mais non, monsieur!” the groundskeeper shook with fear but seemed genuine in his confusion. “I swear, oh bon Dieu, I let nobody dig any graves today, none. Nobody puts a spade in the ground unless I give permission…and I do not let anyone tamper with the records. No, I am honesty itself for these ten years. You can ask the governor himself!”

            “So, it is negligence in honest good faith then? Hmph! You were sleeping. Too much clairin on the job, maybe? The two labourers…I saw them myself…digging a grave, near the seaward wall, in the corner towards town.”

            The gendarmes leaned away from the suspect, hanging their heads and thrusting hands into pockets. Finally, one of them interjected: “Sir, I’m afraid…I don’t mean to be insubordinate or to question your judgement in any way but…” The other finished for him: “Sir, we both went into the cemetery with this fellow and…neither of us saw anything. There was no grave in the location you spoke of. No fresh graves anywhere in the cemetery tonight, actually.”

            The Functionary stammered a syllable of protest but caught himself before he invited further embarrassment. He had seen it with his own eyes; how could this be? The gendarmes and their temporary prisoner stared and shuffled in place, awaiting an escape from the awkward situation. The Functionary racked his brains trying to come up with something to say to prolong things until he could figure out how to get the answers he hungered for, but to no avail. “Ugh, yes, yes, fine then. Dismissed!” The gendarmes hastened out with palpable relief.

            The three visitors were barely out the door before the Functionary again went over to Lévesque’s desk. Lévesque had been packing up for the day but sat down again when he saw his boss’ appearance. “Everything alright, chief?” he asked. “You’ve been pushing yourself awful hard last few weeks. Ought to relax sometime. Maybe we can hit up some of the nightclubs on the Dutch Side, you know? If the missus will allow, hehe – keeps me on a tight leash, she does!” Lévesque’s trite attempt at humour went unnoticed. The Functionary was drawing on all his powers of concentration to steady his hand and pour the liqueur into the tumbler. He sucked back a neat two ounces and yanked his silk pocket square out of his coat, roughly towelling his clammy forehead with the fine paisley cloth. Damn it! He saw it with his own eyes! He’d spoken to the workmen, insolent as they were. The damp crunch of spade edge into soil; it was clear as the sound of the liquid passing down his own throat. He clacked the tumbler down, making Lévesque jump in his seat. How could a possibly meaningless occurrence have put him in such a dreadful funk? He had seen what he saw…was he mad? He did not drink to excess, used no narcotics, nor did he suffer from any loathsome disease such as might affect the faculties of reason and perception. As he rifled through the possible interpretations of the uncanny event, though, he rather preferred to assume madness, at least madness of some temporary and curable sort. He would go to the Blue Flower. If the leisure and social company did not calm his work-addled brain, he might as the woman who ran the joint if she could refer him to a good clinic practicing their traditional folk medicine. He had read magazine articles telling of the astounding things Chinese physicians could do with fine needles inserted at strategic nodes along the nervous system. And it would not carry the stigma that would attach were he to visit a Western doctor on account of ‘nerves.’

            The Blue Flower, at least, was its usual self. For some inexplicable reason, this surprised him. The regularity of it all was immensely soothing. In a small island, patronising the same haunts, one got to know the curious habits of the other patrons as well as people in the metropolis know those of their immediate family. There was the American rum runner, who told tales as sodden as his product of midnight runs, one hand on the wheel, the other gripping a Thompson gun; of boats lost to the Coast Guard and the legendary fêtes that followed a successful run. There was the university man in his neatly-pressed wool suit, studied in Paris, New York or somewhere, eyes behind steel-rimmed spectacles fuming with righteous rage against the colonialist, which he would spend the wee hours venting into a typewriter in his cramped rented garret, someday the philosophy of a tragic misfit or the prophet of a new nation. There was the jovial policeman grown heavy with bribes, full of easy tolerance and generous good cheer. The voluptuous Dominicana drawling cosily in her incomprehensible tongue and the lean, cat-eyed hostess rasping bad English, competitors in the arts of seduction. These and many other familiar characters, once maybe annoying, now put his heart at ease better than the liqueur could ever do. He had already exceeded the maximum recommended dose of the latter medicine. The booze, but more so the events of earlier in the day kept ruthlessly penetrating into his conscious thoughts, though. He would be playing a winning game, then miss shot after shot with only a couple balls left to sink. “Who were those men in the cemetery? Perhaps they filled the hole after I caught them…” Clack! “What was it the paper said that the cartman saw, beside the Holland road that October night…a woman in a long white dress? At midnight, wasn’t it? Rubbish…but then that gendarme said he saw it too….” Clack! The cue skimmed the top of the cue ball and he stumbled against the edge of the table. Patrons, from experience expecting the Functionary to trounce most of his opponents, had best heavily on the games and grumbled in disgust, while newbie challengers smiled at their good fortune.  The hostess practically hissed at him – at least he thought she did – when he hunched over the bar to pick up another drunk. Had something changed about him, something that was not present before?

            His head was swimming. He had to get out of there. As he stood waiting for the hostess to count up the change on his bill, he considered asking her about the Chinese folk medicine clinic, but the cold menace in her eyes made him feel ashamed, though precisely what rule of etiquette he had transgressed, he was not sure. As he staggered out the door, the unsettling thoughts clawed fiercer and fiercer; he could not beat them away. He demanded his chauffeur to drive him to the cemetery. He had to return and look again. If he was suffering from the heat or whatever affliction earlier in the day and simply imagined seeing things that weren’t there, well, he would not see them again. And he would have his chauffeur, a big powerful man, accompany him. They would force the groundskeeper to come along. If the grave was there after all, the man would get a hiding – aye, he would be left to starve in the gutter, and if any of his relatives had government jobs, they would lose those, too, should they dare to offer him assistance! The Functionary had enough pull for that and it wasn’t as though a groundskeeper was irreplaceable. When they arrived at the gatehouse of the cemetery, though, they found the groundskeeper had gone home. There was not a soul to be seen, in fact. The Functionary briefly mooted the idea of breaking in to have a look anyhow, but a cursory glance revealed that the very security precautions the Functionary had advocated for now made their accessing the cemetery impossible. A fist-sized padlock; an iron gate with inch-thick bars…the masonry walls, he surmised, would have broken glass embedded on their tops. The realization that there would be no chance at all of solving the mystery that night threw the Functionary into a state of paralysing enervation. It was barely 9:00 p.m. when he reached home. Fatigue, overwork, that is what had got him down, was playing games with his otherwise utterly reliable senses. He reflected that sleep would be impossible and he should go out again. All those drinks earlier had made him peckish for something salty and greasy. The night was young and he didn’t want those familiar faces – faces he needed to respect his authority if he was to perform his job smoothly – he could not have them thinking that the high-ranking civil servant in charge of so much on their little island had gone off his rocker, could he? A dish of red-cooked pork, some hot and sour soup and a few cups of tea later and he felt back to his old self. The clouds lifted as imperceptibly as they had fallen over him. Well, well…he would be more careful about adequate sleep and leisure in the future, definitely. He cleaned up at the pool table, schooling a couple of the strangers who’d falsely reckoned themselves pros earlier in the evening. Bam! He even sank a few trick shots on playful bets, proving to himself he was back to his normal tip-top form. After heading him well past eleven, sleep came swiftly.

            A couple hours later he woke with a start. He’d had a dream, a dream which chilled the marrow of his bones. The dream was of the cemetery and the two workmen digging as they mumbled some heathenish chant. It was a memory, not a hallucination. There was no possibility of it being otherwise. Then he heard the croaking scream of the ghoul-eyed potoo bird cutting through the fog of his thoughts, striking him with the cold reality of the night – so dark, so isolated and terrible. He was limp with sudden fear. Fear of the fathomless waters that prowled with unrecorded monstrosities a mere stone’s throw away and a thousand miles wide. Fear of the tangles of rude shacks and huts, leprous with rust and rot, brooding over nightmares that predate civilization and which could not be described in any European tongue. Fear of the ragged hills, clad in impenetrable thorn scrub; hills hose very forms were calculated like mathematical formulas to summon forth those lurking horrors out of the ether, seeding them into the souls of men. The briny reek of the étanges floating through the window tortured him. Fear, too, of the people. The grinning, threateningly indolent peasants; the stone-lipped market women in their obtuse vestments; the grand blancs with their seventeenth century faces frozen in time, arrogantly scoffing at the Enlightenment even to this day; the cunning, rat-eyed Chinese serving him spoiled food with treacherous pleasantries. They all glared at him, their venomous laughter ringing in his ears. What madness made him ever decide to ship out to this barren speck of saline dust halfway around the world? He had to leave, to leave now. He had to be among the warm press of bodies, of Men of Reason. He had served his time, served too much. What matter his pension? Fah! “Mon Dieu,” he wailed aloud; “I must be back home…home, in Paris!”

            He wanted…needed to be home. He could not die here. He could not be buried here, amid blacks and degenerate whites and all their manifold hybrid gradations, among those grotesque Pagan tombs. Not in that grave, so near that woman. It wasn’t his fault…there would be no woman waiting at the crossroads in Paris…he would be safe. So what if they thought he’d really lost it…been hiding a case of the…like all the libertines he condemned, the hypocrite! So what? What mattered was that he should flee to Paris while he still had the power.

            He sat down at his desk and wrote to the governor. He was sick, absolutely unfit for duty; it would only do to send him home and promote a replacement. They could choose Lévesque, even Mayotte would do. It didn’t matter. He had to leave within the fortnight. No, on the very next steamer.

            The governor read the resignation letter the following day, though not without a great deal of unease on his own part. For it still bore the marks from where it had been crumpled in the cold, stiff hand of its author, as he held it when they found him that morning.

終

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Copyright © 2017 by M.G. Warenycia