Without this grotesque arrangement of hair, the regularity of Fatou-gaye’s features would have been striking. She was of the purest Khassonké type: a small delicate Grecian face, with a skin smooth and black as polished onyx; teeth of dazzlingly whiteness; eyes of extraordinary mobility, two large, jet black, restless orbs rolling left and right, with whites of a bluish tint, and black eyelids.
When Jean was leaving his mistress, he often used to meet this little creature.
As soon as she saw him she tucked a piece of blue cotton cloth around her waist—this was her festal garment—and came towards him smiling. With soft, caressing inflections in her small, shrill, piping negress’s voice, with hanging head and the mincing airs of an enamoured ouistiti, she would say,
May man coper, souma toubab. (Translated: Give me a copper, give me a sou, my white man.)
That was the refrain of all the little girls in St Louis. Jean was used to it. When he was in a good temper and had a sou in his pocket, he would give it to Fatou-gaye.
But that was not the most curious feature of the incident. What was out of the ordinary was Fatou-gaye’s behaviour. Instead of buying herself a piece of sugar, as other girls might have done, she would go and hide herself in a corner and set to work to sew very carefully into the sachets of her amulets the sous that she received from the spahi.
XII
One night in February a suspicion crossed Jean’s mind.
Cora had asked him to leave at midnight, and just as he was going away, he thought he heard a sound of pacing in an adjoining room, as if someone were waiting there.