And Mumbi, where had she gone? He had no idea. A few weeks before his fall, he had come to see her and she had said goodbye with these words: “It’s time to leave.” By this she meant, it’s now or never. This was a country where you had to know when to leave. All of a sudden, you could be trapped, and in a single moment people could be reduced to powerlessly facilitating their own destruction.
Mumbi avoided his eyes as she gave him a set of keys. “I have a copy,” she said. He wanted to ask her why she did that, but he stopped himself. Both had understood from the very beginning, without discussing it, that at times they would be forced to talk through allusions. Given the position he was in, he had no choice, and on top of that, if Pierre Castaneda were to discover the relationship, the less she knew, the better it would be for her.
He glanced at his watch. Almost three in the morning. The Maren slums were completely ablaze. The rescuers were somehow trying to do their work. The fugitive imagined big red fire trucks arriving at a dead end. The driver braking to death in the middle of the street and then swearing loudly as he reversed. All the while the terrified cries of kids turned into live torches rose up into the sky. Most definitely too, the zealous, young state employees would make an anxious attempt to be the first on the scene of disaster. And there, in the middle of the flames that danced before their eyes, they would start to bark orders they had learned at Maren’s College of Administration. None of them had the faintest chance of escaping death. They were all condemned to burn alive.
He stood up and walked over to the fridge without knowing what he was looking for. Not really hungry, he took a few sips of lemonade and returned to lie on the couch. After his agitated night, and since it was so early in the morning, he wanted a strong cup of coffee. But it took him a few seconds to remember that he had to make it for himself.
In spite of the late hour, I continue my inspection of the underground bunker. I haven’t done anything else since I arrived here. I pick up the tiniest piece of paper from the ground, scrutinize it for a long while, and put it in one of the five binders I have opened. One must overlook nothing, even these little crumpled bits of paper covered in grease stains. I had learned, in my life up to that point, how useful they can be. All one needs is a little time to solve their secrets. And time I do have. It won’t weigh on my days, because I’m not lacking things to read. All the things I am discovering are astonishing to me. I didn’t know how poorly informed I was. Sometimes it’s a little vexing, I must admit. One can also see the good side of it: coming to terms with one’s ignorance makes you modest.
No one ever knew anything about Nikiema’s relationship with this young artist named Mumbi Awele. Only yesterday I became certain that she is the mother of Kaveena. Remember that this little girl’s murder triggered quite a storm. The newspapers held back their opinions about the case for several months. And that was only the beginning of the harassment, since we have continuously come back to it over the last fifteen years. At the time, journalists had called upon experts of all types, friends and neighbors of the family in the working-class district of Kisito, and a few distant relatives as well. My men and I were following all of it very closely. One thing had intrigued us: the father and mother of little Kaveena had never made a statement to the press. It seemed that one knew nothing of the father and that the mother was described as either a painter or a ballet dancer. At the time, I noticed there were a few nasty remarks regarding her corrupt sense of morals. According to some of our dailies, she was a young, heartless woman wholly indifferent to the death of her only daughter. What can you expect, one reputed columnist nearly came right out and said; the ordinary people of Kisito had seen so much of this, and in their merciless struggle to survive, “crying for the dead is practically a luxury.” That phrase then had, if one can say so, its hour of glory in the public debates. Other analysts, in contrast, maintained that Mumbi’s pain was so great that she had lost her voice and perhaps even a little of her sanity.
All this seemed quite muddled to me. In our line of work, we don’t like vagueness. I put one of my guys, Mike, in charge of a small investigation. A little while afterward, Mike came back to me. “Nothing to report, boss.”
I looked at him. “What does she do for a living?”
“She’s a whore.”
“Oh?”
“I did her.”
“For how much?” It’s kind of a bizarre question, I know. But I’ve always been successful working this way. These little factual details interest me the most.
Mike’s mouth curled up in disdain, which meant, almost nothing. He added, “She’s a horny broad, boss.”
When I think back to these sorts of discussions with Mike—that’s not his real name, by the way; he got it from an American TV show—I realize that of all of my agents, he was the most enigmatic. No one knew much about him. He didn’t get along well with his colleagues and he was the only one who felt pure pleasure when he was torturing. I always put him on the most difficult interrogations. The majority of the guys we grilled knew that after a few days we would either pity them or become disgusted at what we were doing. Generally, our customers weren’t your ordinary run-of-the-mill types. As they suffered, they were watching out for the first signs of our weakness. Well, with Mike that was always in vain. He didn’t stop crunching his roasted peanuts, one after the other and not the least bit hurriedly, all the while trying to get their confessions out of them. The sound of his jaws horrified them; they saw Mike take delight in their agony and sensed that the ordeal could last an eternity. It was too much all at once for them: in the end, they cracked.
“In the papers they say, though, that she’s an artist,” I noted.
“True. For about a year, she was in a dance troupe. She paints things, too, but in the art world hardly anyone knows her.”
“And what about her daughter?”
“Little Kaveena? She doesn’t care. Her grandfather, a man who goes by the name of N’Fumbang, was the one who took care of her.” Mike also told me about Kaveena’s father; he was killed in a brawl coming out of a bar in Kisito. “It seems Mumbi was there. Some say she fought like a lioness.”
“That sounds right to you?”
“No, frankly. I’m not saying in bed . . .”
“Fine.”
We continued to talk and in the end I felt relieved. There’s nothing more foul than the murder of a little girl. If the mother—especially the mother, her face apparently ravaged by silent suffering, her clenched lips and her melancholic eyes—decides to put pressure on you, you’re lost. I’ve seen governments spend enormous amounts in order to calm weeping widows and then one day they say, “OK, enough is enough, that’s it, we don’t have billions to hand out to you every month. Cry for your dearly departed and shut up!” Don’t talk to me about the grief suffered by the families. For us, the widow and the orphan are really pains in the neck.
I insisted anyway: “Are you sure she doesn’t care, Mike?”
“I got her to talk,” he said, with a look that said there was a subtext. Mike was convinced that once a woman was in bed with him, she could no longer hide anything from him. Funny guy. There were only two things in his life: refined torture and sexual tricks. And those two things served the same ends: to get information. But Mumbi proved him wrong—beautifully. I try to imagine the scene. In the shabby room of a pay-by-the hour hotel, the clever inspector tries to worm something out of the young woman. After all, she’s only a prostitute, who doesn’t have the “luxury” of mourning her little girl. Conceited Mike just didn’t know that he was facing such a challenge. Mumbi Awele treated him as if he were nothing, like an imbecile, which he deserved. It must have been child’s play for her. Naturally, little did I know at the time that she would be so present in my life now.
I don’t know how she did it, but she managed to get Nikiema to eat out of her hands. Right up till the end, he wrote very moving letters to her, though at times they were a bit bizarre and incoherent. Every day, I find tra
ces of them in the small house. They’re handwritten and often seem unfinished. For a short while, I believed that he had ripped them up when he sensed his end was near. But in the end, that didn’t seem plausible: N’Zo Nikiema liked talking to Mumbi Awele. He even liked talking to her about the afterlife.
Which makes me think that they aren’t love letters, even if at times some emotion shows through discreetly. In reality, N’Zo Nikiema’s only concern was to convince Mumbi of his innocence. All those letters can be summarized in one sentence: “Mumbi Awele, I did not kill your child.” I had the opportunity to read, for that matter, that very sentence in his hand.
I’m starting to think that my being present in this solitary place is a gift from God. I relish every discovery before it even happens.
I go back up to the living room. A little light shining through the window tells me that it’s dawn. And inside the house, the air is less dense. Soon I will no longer have to spend my nights in the studio. The smell of N’Zo Nikiema’s body is a lot less putrid. The maggots have disappeared after sucking the last drops of blood and pus. I delayed approaching it again for a long time. It didn’t scare me, but still, a corpse is repulsive. Now I am ready. In a few days, I’m going to be able to lift the pieces of faso danfani that are still stuck to his chest and legs. I’m going to disinfect the divan and transfer the body to Mumbi’s studio. He’ll no doubt feel his best in there. Perhaps I’ll do nothing with it. I don’t want to get involved in something that has nothing to do with me, after all.
Before going to bed, I take a nice shower and I brush my teeth for a long time. Banal gestures that give me the feeling I’ve finally settled into a place where nothing can ever happen to me.
N’Zo Nikiema had been lying down in the darkness for the last twenty minutes. He had no idea what time it was. All he knew was that it was night. The faint rays of light that flitted through all the cracks during the day had vanished discreetly. A few minutes earlier, he had watched them disappear one after the other, like so many stars losing their brilliance little by little.
He murmured, “So that’s how it all began. Or maybe that’s how everything ended. I’m really not sure.”
Ambiguous, uncertain words, little blows dealt by life, but so relentless, swirling around in the emptiness, then finding their place, one next to the other. Even if he’d had the strength to get up, he wouldn’t have been able to finally begin writing his letter to Mumbi. During these final days of the civil war, Jinkoré was, like most of Maren’s neighborhoods, without electricity. All he could do each night was to wait to feel tired. Luckily, it never took long. Anyway, he didn’t remember when he had ever slept so much in his entire life. In truth, it was impossible for him to do anything else but sleep and, as soon as it was dawn, jump out of bed, secretly exalted. Why he had this ephemeral happiness in the morning remained a mystery to him right up till the end. It didn’t mean that he was ready to fight. He didn’t say to himself, another good day, Castaneda will end up getting me, but I’ll demand a good price for my skin. No, he didn’t say that to himself. The game was lost and he knew it. All he had left to do was to let himself die. Maybe he was simply happy to be able to savor every second of his last moments of life on earth.
Once, he got the idea to light a candle and place it at the end of the room, next to Mumbi’s studio. He didn’t dare. The little flickering light would be enough to attract those groups of pillagers who were scouring Maren. For several days, the battles had been even more violent than usual around Jinkoré. At sunset, there was a vague ceasefire: it was then that each side gathered up its dead.
With a smile of amusement, tenderness, and contempt all at once, he thought, my army continues fighting out of habit. Out of pride, too, no doubt. These are well-trained soldiers and they cannot comprehend that militias have definitively defeated them. He knew, too, that some of his officers were refusing to disarm so that Castaneda would have to negotiate with them. But that wasn’t what he wanted to talk to Mumbi about. He imagined her next to him, like before, in the small house. Perhaps she would accept what he said and believe him, now that he was nothing. He was nothing anymore, he had nothing more to lose, nothing more to hide. N’Zo Nikiema was certain, however, that she would not come back. It just wasn’t possible anymore. “There are dozens of roadblocks in the city, maybe even hundreds, and heavily armed youth are patrolling as they throw back cans of beer. They continue to kill whomever they want.” He said this half out loud, and these words, resonating in the still of the night, seemed to have a surreal tone to him. The words bounced around the room before getting lost in the nearby street.
There was another truth, but he was afraid to face up to it. Mumbi could very well be dead, like so many other people in the country. After all, that’s what a war is for; it’s for people to die. Meanwhile, he found a way to reassure himself: I refuse to believe that you are dead. You are very strong. You are the kind who survives a war. Just like that. Because it’s you.
More out of boredom than out of necessity, he began mentally preparing the letter he intended to leave for her. Suddenly it seemed unexpectedly easier to write. The sentences took shape in his head with surprising ease. He could even repeat them, to hear the sound of his own voice, the way a musician plays his scales: “It wasn’t so simple, and I found out about that incident in the newspapers, like you did. Don’t forget the role fate plays. I was a powerful man at the time, that’s true. But do you believe I could hold the life of each citizen of this country in my hands for so long? No, only God . . .”
But as soon as he uttered the word “God,” he stopped. Reading this letter, Mumbi was going to foam at the mouth and her delicate facial features were going to tense up: How dare a man such as he mingle God’s name in his dirty business? You killed my daughter and then you come play the big game of betrayed innocence, she would say. It’s not me, he’d answer; it’s one of my overzealous supporters. Or it’s Castaneda. Castaneda, the white man who crossed the seas just to come kill all the Negroes around here! Castaneda, the bastard, right? A bit too easy.
When Mumbi was angry, she would say anything. She had entered his life not out of love but to know the truth about her daughter’s death. Each time she would ask him questions, he would force himself to answer patiently and honestly. In vain. It would always end badly. When they would make love, she would sometimes stand in front of him, gigantic, heinous, completely crazy, with a horsewhip in her hands, and whip him until he bled, calling him a murderer and a coward. Then he would cry. Balled up in a corner of the room with his hands on his head, he would sob with perverse joy.
I must pause to reflect a little more on Kaveena’s murder. This is the event that eventually came to exist at the core of N’Zo Nikiema’s life. It clarified the entire puzzle. I surprised myself when I discovered—through my random excavations around the small house—that the only thing that tormented this man, at once wealthy and complex, deceitful and violent, was a crime he did not commit. I almost wrote: the only crime he did not commit.
A few words on the Kaveena case.
This is what we remember without any uncertainties: Tomorrow’s Times was the first newspaper to report the story of a six-year-old girl who was raped and then brutally murdered. Despite its name, Tomorrow’s Times is a weekly newspaper. According to the article, the murderer had been taken by surprise in the Gindal Forest while cutting up the victim’s body and spreading it out in seven piles on an old mat. As he recounted later in an interview, he only had two more piles to make when the villagers emerged from the bushes and pounced on him, closing in on him from behind. His accomplices managed to escape. At the police station, the man had no difficulty making a confession. He only regretted having been captured at the last minute. The investigators noted that the murderer felt no remorse. His somewhat incoherent comments could be summed up like this: “It’s pretty stupid, huh? A few more seconds and everything would have been OK. I am really unlucky.” At no point did he seem aware of the gravity of
what he had done. It was as if he had missed scoring the winning goal at the last second in what had been a close game. Furthermore, though this was clearly a heinous crime, Tomorrow’s Times had reported the details more or less vaguely. The reporter was more focused on being witty than on actually relaying the facts about little Kaveena. In short, all the facts that surrounded this story were quickly forgotten. After all, in our world today, the murder of a young girl of humble origins can move sensitive souls for only a few days at best. Once this brief moment of compassion that preserves the value of an undeniable human tragedy has passed—even if she was from a poor family, a child like Kaveena is not an animal—the story of her death comes out in the press, and the press gradually strips away any sense of reality. A small body has disappeared from the face of the earth but everything is kind of the same. It’s unfortunate but true.
And if, in the end, this was not how it played out this time, it was because the Tomorrow’s Times reporter was a very smart fellow. Two observations had put him on the right track. First, there was the evidence that it was a ritual killing. He saw the proof of this in some of the gruesome details, and he logically deduced that a powerful person was behind this crime. Those who know our country well are aware that the services of witch doctors are quite costly. You want to get an important job? They will take you into a small dark room and without even deigning to look at you, they will tell you, here’s what you need to do and this is how much it costs. And what you’ve got to do is: at cockcrow you must kill an albino or a light-skinned six-year-old girl or a stray madman or any other person of your choice. They tell you how to proceed and you must listen carefully—these things are very complicated and these witch doctors, as you know, do not like to repeat themselves; if, for example, the victim’s right eye is gouged out before her left eye, everything will be screwed up and that’s too bad for you. That will cost you more. In short, only the strongmen, determined to make something of their lives, have the means to carry out such operations, which can be indefinitely renewed for whatever reason.
Kaveena Page 5
