Anatomy of Restlessness by Bruce Chatwin Read Free Book Online

bed you must go to the campement . There is a white woman in the campement .’
    Jeb walked between mud walls to the edge of town, and then up an alley of acacias, now black and leafless in the dry season. On a hill was a low whitewashed building with rounded arches. Once it had been the legionaires’ mess. There was a tennis court, now cracked and pitted, with the net frayed off. The white woman was hanging her laundry on the wire. She had red hair out of a bottle and her eyelids were painted black and green. Her skin hung loosely in a collar round the base of her neck. Jeb thought she looked a bit like a goldfish.
    â€˜Madame Annie?’
    â€˜Oui.’ She stared coldly, without surprise or welcome.
    â€˜Est-ce que vous avez une chambre?’ he said slowly.
    â€˜I have a room,’ she replied in English. ‘Come this way please.’
    Under the arches were metal chairs and tables covered in green plastic. He followed her into the courtyard where there was an aviary with doves and a caged monkey. Some bougainvillaea straggled over a trellis. She called, ‘Osman. Key for number five,’ and an old Touareg shuffled over. She unlocked a green door. The room was bare but for a cot bed and tattered mosquito net hanging from the ceiling. The whitewash was peeling and there were pale geckos on the walls.
    â€˜A thousand francs a day,’ she said. ‘Service included.’
    â€˜Have you anything cheaper?’
    â€˜The cheapest,’ she said unhelpfully.
    The room was expensive but he was tired and took it. He had slept three nights by the roadside.
    Jeb stripped. He stepped out of his pants and left them in a heap on the floor. The red dust had caked on his skin. He lay naked on the bed. A cooler wind came in off the desert and through the shutters. He felt the sweat drying on his parts.
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    It was dark when he woke. He dressed and walked under the arches to the pissoir. Passing Madame Annie’s room he heard creaking springs and the sighs and whimperings of love. The blind was not fully drawn and he caught sight of a sinuous black body laid over a pile of pink flesh.
    He washed and went out onto the terrace. Insects were whining round a single electric bulb. Another white woman sat drinking. She was very thin and tragic-looking. Her blonde hair hung in rat-tails, and her face was lopsided from a broken jaw. One arm was in a sling. The monkey had bitten her hand.
    â€˜The Madame is sleeping,’ she said.
    â€˜Not sleeping exactly,’ Jeb said.
    â€˜Is disgusting,’ she said. ‘She makes love with Africans so they will not call her racist. Her husband leave her when she go with Africans. Now I think she hates white men.’
    The woman’s name was Gerda. She came from Alsace and was stranded without money. Once she had worked as a journalist and had exposed French atrocities in the Algerian War. She had great sympathy for Arabs and great hatred for blacks and Jews. She said France was overrun by Jews. Even de Gaulle was a Jew. Jeb knew about anti-Semitism but he had not heard the words ‘pestilence’, ‘bacillus’, ‘infection’ and ‘cancer’ used for people.
    She said Madame Annie treated her as a servant. She got no reply to her letters for help. She had called the postmaster a dirty drunk and he had called her a Nazi Imperialist. She suspected him of burning her mail.
    The door of Annie’s room opened and a boy in bright blue jeans trod limberly across the yard. He nodded to Madame Gerda who ignored him.
    â€˜Is disgusting,’ she said.
    Madame Annie followed the boy out, composed and undishevelled in a tartan skirt. She asked Jeb if he wanted dinner and called to Osman to roast a pintade. Madame Gerda sat pretending to read a newspaper.
    The pintade was tough and the Algerian wine went to Jeb’s head. Later some of Annie’s regulars came up to drink her whisky. It was the only whisky in town. There were