...of a faux pas

She felt her throat tighten, as if she might cry. She looked at the English officers around the table, so white; she sought Geoffroy's gaze. But no one was paying any attention to her, and the women continued to eat and to laugh. Gerald Simpson's gaze paused a moment upon her. There was a strange glint in his eyes, behind the lenses of his glasses. He wiped his little blond moustache with a napkin. Maou felt such hatred that she had to avert her gaze.
At the end of the garden, near the grille which acted as a fence, the black men were burning beneath the sun, sweat glistening on their backs, on their shoulders. And, always, the sound of their breathing, a hunh! of pain each time they struck the earth.
Suddenly, Maou got up, and in a voice trembling with anger, with her strange French and Italian accent in English, she said: "But you must give them something to eat and drink, look, these poor fellows, they are hungry and thirsty!" She used the word "fellow," the pidgin term.
There was a stunned silence. For a very long minute all the guests' faces turned towards her, staring at her, and she saw that even Geoffroy was stunned as he watched her, his face red, his mouth drooping at the corners, his closed fists pressing on the table.
Gerald Simpson was the first to regain his senses, saying, simply, "Ah yes, quite right, I suppose..."
He called the boy, he gave orders. In an instant the guards had led the convicts out of sight, behind the house. The D.O. then said, looking at Maou ironically, "Well, that's better now, isn't it, they were making a wretched noise, we shall have a bit of a rest ourselves now too."
The guests laughed halfheartedly. The men continued to speak, drink their coffee, and smoke their cigars, sitting in their wicker chairs at the end of the veranda. The women remained around the table, chattering with Mrs. Rally.
Then Geoffroy seized Maou by the arm and took her home in the V8, driving very quickly along the deserted track. He did not say a single word about the convicts. But after that he never again asked Maou to accompany him to the D.O.'s or to the Resident's. And whenever Gerald Simpson met Maou by chance, in the street or on the wharf, he greeted her very coldly, his steel blue gaze expressing nothing - as it should be - beyond a barely perceptible disdain.

[Onitsha, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]