Martinique continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 51

siphon. 'No, sir, no, not mosquitoes or the trigonocéphales . I was referring to the blacks.' He pointed to
the old gardener, and a small boy who was hosing a flower bed. I thought the old man had looked up from
his weeds at this explosion, and hinted to the stranger that he ought to talk a little more quietly. His voice
went up several keys, and he almost shrieked, ' Quoi? Je m'en fous! Qu'ils m'entendent! '
He was a civil engineer from Lyons who had served many years in Martinique. He was so small as to
be almost a dwarf, and his rimless glasses and colourless toothbrush moustache gave him momentarily
the anodyne appearance of the Little Man so beloved by caricaturists. But when one looked closer and
observed the angry knot of wrinkles on his forehead, the hollow cheeks, the insane eyes and the ferocious
twist of the eyebrows, one saw that the first impression was entirely illusory. It was impossible to believe
that this tiny frame could harbour so much savagery and passion. He was soon embarked upon a hymn of
hate against the Negroes, saying not only how idle and stupid and wicked and dangerous they were, but
how absurd and ugly and smelly. His little fist, as he drove home his points, nearly smashed the flimsy
wicker table.
Our friend had called to take us for a drive to see the mineral water works at Didier, and this little mad-
man climbed in just before the car moved off, so that all the way through the forest and the dank, echoing
tunnels cut through the heart of the tufa the bitter philippic continued. At the factory we had a little respite
as we watched the water bubbling out of a rock in the side of the canyon. The jet was captured and steered
into a jungle of pipes and tanks and filters, and finally into a revolving fountain of steel that poured it,
as it turned, into bottles. Machine-like Negro girls removed and replaced them; belts carried them in an
endless file to another girl, who seized them and stuffed their necks into another piece of machinery that
sealed them with a capsule. They were then replaced at the end of a second procession which carried them
to another brisk automaton who equipped them with labels and piled them into crates. All these opera-
tions were performed at breakneck speed. Workmen in shifts hoisted the crates on to their shoulders and
loaded them on lorries which carried them clattering through the forest to the thirsty Martinicans all over
the island. It was a hallucinating spectacle; terribly slow, I was informed, and antiquated—'You should
see the Coca-Cola factory. They've really got things moving there….'
On our way back, after this pause, the civil engineer's passion came effervescing to the surface once
more. The momentary well-being promoted by the sight of the Negroes grinding away at their various
tasks had died down. To make a break in the continuity of this theme, attention was drawn to a grove of
giant bread-fruit trees. It had the reverse effect. A noise that was at the same time a bellow and a hiss
pierced the air. 'How can you talk so calmly,' he cried, 'about those accursed, those iniquitous trees?'
'Why don't you like them?'
He appeared to be on the brink of apoplexy.
'Like them? Like them?' The afternoon was filled with fine saliva, as though the speaker were a
watering-can on to which the rose had just been fitted. 'I'd like to see them all cut down, every one of
them, and burnt. It's the bloody bread-fruit that keeps the black alive without working. It lets them grow
fat without doing a hand's turn, takes away all their incentive to work. That's what puts them beyond our
control,' he held up two hands, with the fingers crooked like claws through which the whole of the Negro
world was slipping. 'And who's to blame for that? You , sir.' A claw was placed on one of my shoulders
in a conciliatory gesture. 'Not you directly, but your Bligg!'
Bligg? It took him some time to make it clear to us that the real villain of this disaster was the captain
of the Bounty , none other than Captain Bligh, who first brought the bread-fruit tree from the East Indies
and planted it in the Caribbean. ' Bligg est le coupable, messieurs, de tout ça. Ne me parlez pas de l'arbre