You know it too: I am introduced everywhere as Castaneda’s valet. You yourself have spit this accusation in my face. Be wary of these obvious facts—they only lay the groundwork for serious errors. I was not putty in his hands. Those who say that don’t know anything about the looks that Pierre and I exchanged in those days, sitting in front of our beers at the Blue Lizard.
We were genuine friends. The way two humans can be. If death leaves me the time, I will tell you all the little things that make me say this. Is it useful to come back to it? I’m not entirely sure. But on the other hand, with the life I’ve had, the remotest event only has meaning in relation to thousands of others, seemingly very far removed from it. In fact, you will only understand this confession if it leaves nothing in the dark.
When the time comes, I will inform you. I will know what to say to you and which words to let burst, like ridiculous little air bubbles, deep inside my guts.
With his finger N’Zo Nikiema pushed around the mangoes and bananas that were laid out on a red wooden boat-shaped tray. They were soft, blackened on some sides, and were giving off a sweetish smell. One of them was suppurating like an open wound. Not knowing where to throw them away, he put them in a small bag, closed it up carefully, and placed it in a corner. He was especially afraid that the rotten fruit would attract big green flies and red ants. His food withstood the basement’s heat and frequent blackouts better than expected. That was good.
He had hardly eaten anything for two days and was beginning to feel weak. Barely used to preparing his meals himself, he did not manage to have a good normal diet. No doubt all those canned goods—tuna, pilchards, country-style pâté, etc.—killed his appetite as well. He could have opened a bottle of wine for himself and crunched on a few dry crackers, just to be able to stand up on his legs. The fact is, he had absolutely no desire to. I don’t know if N’Zo Nikiema had decided to allow himself to die of hunger. He might not have been mad about this happening to him. I suspect he played a little, somewhat perversely, with the idea that he was a solitary ascetic, graceful and light, whirling around in the air like a kite, consumed slowly by profound and discreet suffering. Alone in the small house in Jinkoré, he was able to dream of a slow and noble agony.
He sat on the ground, his elbow resting on a leather-covered bench, legs stretched. He thought that he should do a little housekeeping at the end of the day because the dust had slowly built up on the rug. The latter had been made of four or five sheepskins sewn together. He’d brought it back for Mumbi the previous year from Chinguetti. For that matter, everywhere he’d gone on an official visit, he’d managed to get away from the security detail for a moment to go find a little gift for her. Naturally, he could have asked someone from his staff to do it. He wanted to take care of it himself.
He suddenly had a desire to devour the place with his eyes. Rattan armchairs were set on the rug, along with two crafted leather poufs bought at Ouaga’s “handicraft village.” On one of them, a bowl containing three enormous ostrich eggs from Zimbabwe was displayed prominently. His eyes took in the floor tiles—gray or a dirty white, he couldn’t really remember anymore. On the wall, just above the sofa, hung a tiny drum from Burundi decorated with yellow and black diamonds, bright originally but already a little dull now.
At the end of the room, a wood Venn table filled almost the entire space. It normally could have been used to receive a dozen dinner guests. But the small house had never been filled with the laughter of happy friends gathering together for an evening. The table, at once too heavy and too long, had never been used for anything. At one time, it seemed to Nikiema that Mumbi wanted to make it her office. Seated at her used Macintosh early in the morning, she would only stop typing around two in the afternoon. Nikiema never knew what she was working on with that look of unflinching concentration on her face. In any case, it didn’t last long. Now the Macintosh was out of service. From the printer, yellowed papers overflowed, also covered with dust.
Just in front of him, above the divan—which was where the sofa would usually have been—a painting attracted his attention. He had bought it for Mumbi, a few years back. He had to make a lot of effort to remember: Salvador da Bahia. The gaps in his memory, increasingly frequent, made him afraid. They meant that he had lost his bearings, that his past was also escaping him. He felt reassured by telling himself that this forgetfulness was normal: during that quick tour, he recalled, I had been in five or six countries in two weeks.
He remembered very well, however, why he’d been keen on going to Latin America that year. Kaveena’s story had come to light several months before and war had almost been declared between himself and Pierre Castaneda. Castaneda had gone away to Ndunga, where the Cogemin headquarters were. Almost each week, he would create a so-called liberation army with hundreds of thousands of men. On top of it, he distributed huge sums of money to gangsters so they could start private newspapers or human rights associations.
Nikiema couldn’t stand idly by. He traveled to Bogota, Lima, and other Latin American capitals to negotiate contracts of arms sales. Everywhere he went, he was received reluctantly by somnolent president-generals, their uniforms in bold colors, covered with decorations.
On the eve of his return, he went on an escapade in a popular neighborhood of Salvador da Bahia to look for the ritual gift for Mumbi. An old woman hanging out her window said something to him in an unfamiliar language; he stopped and shook his head to signal to her that he didn’t understand. She then started speaking Portuguese. He ended up agreeing to join her. As he went up the narrow stairway, he wondered if he was making a mistake. It was a place where someone could rob him, slit his throat, and throw his body next to one of those big ponds of dirty water he’d seen everywhere. And that murder would make more noise than usual. But it wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where one denounced the killers. In the end his casket draped with the national flag would be loaded onto the presidential airplane as military music played. In his country, he would be entitled to a grandiose funeral. The official word on his death would be a heart attack during fierce negotiations that lasted until late into the night with his hosts. Dead as he had lived: President Nikiema, in the service of the nation. But his enemies would start the rumor that he’d reached the next world in a despicable way, getting his private parts titillated, like such-and-such former president of Nigeria, by a dozen whores in some brothel in Salvador da Bahia or Montevideo.
Up close, the woman appeared less old. Despite some wrinkles crisscrossing her face, her skin seemed to have kept a certain firmness. She was barefoot and her white shirt was tied just above the waist of her garnet-red pants. She looked like a free swaggering intellectual and not at all like an old beggar. N’Zo Nikiema was entirely overcome by emotion, almost distressed, to learn that she was an artist, a painter. She seemed more concerned with explaining her work to the first person who came along—she really was talking nonstop—than with selling her paintings.
N’Zo Nikiema nodded his head in approval of everything she was saying, seeking to avoid that sort of naive amazement of a layperson that could have right away exposed his shortcomings. But all was in vain: the woman, of course, used to gauging the artistic sensibility of her interlocutors, knew right away that she was dealing with a total ignoramus. She communicated that to him through the ironic smile that lingered in her eyes during the entire visit to the studio.
“My wife is an artist and . . . ,” he began.
She interrupted him as he searched for his words. “An artist . . . ?”
“Yes,” said N’Zo Nikiema. “Like you. She paints.”
He was expecting an enthusiastic reaction from her. But it was quite the opposite, as if she’d been caught off guard, and she fell silent. Having only just met her for the first time, he decided it was useless to try to understand such an unexpected response.
“I want to buy a painting for her.”
She suggested one to him for $250. It was called The Little Butterfly Girl. This was
the painting that was now before his eyes, several years later.
Nikiema began to observe it as if he’d never seen it before. It appeared bland to him, probably due to its dominant pale yellow tones. That was, at least, his humble opinion—he, a fleeing ex–head of state little versed in art’s mysteries. In the center of the painting, a little girl in a long white dress was standing on the edge of a rock, just above a precipice. She was trying to catch butterflies that you could see gathering nectar and pollen on a rosebush. Fluttering capriciously around her, the butterflies didn’t seem like they were really fleeing from her but just having fun dodging her net. The little girl, meanwhile, lost her footing, her left leg hanging dangerously in the air.
“The whole painting,” the woman had explained to him, “is structured on this contrast between the candor of this little child and the cruelty of the world that surrounds her. One wrong step and she is going to plunge into the depths where a horrible death awaits her. Just underneath this charming scene that the painting portrays, a monster is waiting, thirsty for blood. He wants to devour this little girl. Do you see him? See how frightening he is, with his mouth open like he is calling out to the blood of the innocent child?”
Nikiema didn’t see anything at all but didn’t dare admit it. He merely nodded his head ambiguously.
The woman gave him an indulgent smile. “Of course, you cannot see this monster. . . . I drew it but it is not visible on this canvas. I painted it in black in the middle of the shadows. You understand that? Exactly like some of God’s creatures that remain forever invisible to us, mister. Only imbeciles believe that the artist’s work can be seen in its entirety by the naked eye.”
N’Zo Nikiema noted that she had said those last words in a tense voice that rung with a poorly contained rage. He guessed that more than him, she was addressing her own enemies, undoubtedly other painters and critics with reactionary views. She added that she had to thrust her brush very deep into the abyss in order to find the right colors and that, for her, it was a completely unique aesthetic experiment.
That day, something very bizarre had also happened to him. After she’d sold him The Little Butterfly Girl, the artist had shown him a photo on the wall, of a young woman with thick brown hair, and said, “That is Magdalena.”
“Who’s that?” asked N’Zo Nikiema. He was all the more astonished because the young woman in the photo was completely nude. Sitting on the ground, her two arms around her left leg raised up and spread wide, she was looking straight ahead of her, her very attractive face glowing softly, her lips full. Between her thighs, her bushy hair burst out in a heavy dark patch. Nikiema only saw that, and for him it was an almost unbearable sight.
“That’s my daughter. Magdalena acts in a café-theater down there.”
More and more disconcerted, he pointed to the photo. “What’s that?”
“It’s the play. That’s her acting in the play.”
At that moment, N’Zo Nikiema thought that the woman was a little crazy. “But what play are you taking about, madam?”
She looked at him as if he’d just fallen from the moon. Magdalena Robles, her daughter, played the main role in The Man Standing at His Window, the most successful play in the theater circuit. She had been putting on the play for two years, and now her daughter, as beautiful as she was ambitious, wanted to do something else. All the movie producers were fighting over her. “You must have heard of her,” she said, looking at him searchingly.
It was clear: she was starting to find him suspicious. He claimed to be interested in the art in this country and he didn’t even know the name Magdalena Robles?
I had the urge to tell her that I, too, wasn’t bad for my kind. The mean African dictator who’d come in search of weapons and to recruit mercenaries . . . she would have called for help. In the end, we are always someone’s artist on this earth.
I must, however, confess to you that since then I have often thought of the nudity of this person I never knew, Magdalena Robles’s nudity, as loaded with a completely terrifying violence. The conversation had piqued my curiosity and as soon as I left the studio, I bought Os Espectáculos in order to know more about The Man Standing at His Window. Os Espectáculos is the most famous literary journal there: novels, poetry, theater. . . . In it, they talk about all the things that make you tick. If you understood Portuguese, you would have loved it. In the play, the man of the title watched the young woman, Magdalena, for over an hour. Nothing else happened, as in all the avant-garde plays that everyone is supposed to find sublime. According to what I understood, she didn’t know that someone was observing her, in silence. She had just broken up with her boyfriend and was getting ready to put a bullet in her head.
I would have been able to go see her play the role that Friday; I wasn’t heading back to Maren until the following day. But instinctively, I denied myself this. Magdalena’s image was like a brief apparition in a bolt of lightning. On the stage, I would have only seen a woman’s body, in the flesh a little sad. I would have depleted my memory, and my heart wouldn’t beat so loudly each time I think of Magdalena Robles.
Upon his return from this unsuccessful trip to Latin America, he visited the house. Receiving the painting he had brought back for her, Mumbi thanked him coldly. She put it down—actually, she nearly threw it—into a corner of the studio.
It took more to hurt Nikiema. Had he been thin-skinned, he would have never accomplished anything in politics. Besides, he was in a rather teasing mood that day. At the risk of annoying Mumbi a little more, he repeated to her the explanation given to him by his distant sister from Salvador da Bahia. “It’s marvelous, isn’t it? The little girl on the canvas is risking her life on a noble quest for the Beautiful. That means that you artists are in the service of the Absolute.”
Her face remained expressionless. She looked, he thought, irritated and amused at the same time. She said sharply, “That is not true. Those stories are full of crap.”
“Oh yes!” N’Zo Nikiema insisted, suddenly coming alive. “The artist destroys her life in order to give others a little happiness—you are all generosity and sharing. You’re the ones who always say so, aren’t you? We should know!”
“Is that so?” Mumbi said with disdain.
Then their eyes met. She had once again put him in his place. When she burst into tears, he understood. He understood everything. And he was suddenly seized with sheer terror.
Kaveena.
I had brought back yellow and green ribbons mixed together for you from Salvador da Bahia, and here is what they really revealed, with a blinding clarity: the fate of your daughter Kaveena. I had been incapable of seeing that. My God, how my heart is hard . . .
I understood perfectly well what you wanted to say to me that day. The words did not come out of your mouth and yet I understood each and every one of them, one after the other, very distinctly: “When you’re done joking about art with me, you will go back to your palace and there you’re going to kill people who’ve done nothing to you.”
And you were right.
It was a particularly bloody period of my reign. Pierre Castaneda did so much and did it so well that I saw people everywhere plotting my overthrow. Funny vicious circle. I had to kill incessantly. Not out of wickedness or any perverse taste for blood. Nowhere do people like that exist. Or out of ten million individuals, there are three or four of them, no more. And those people are ill. Idi Amin Dada. Hitler. Videla. The latter shoved live mice up the vaginas of young left-wing students. And compared to the two Duvaliers or Comrade Pol Pot, I was almost a noble and benevolent president. I just did at times what was necessary. I bumped off all those guys because I couldn’t do otherwise, so to speak. For at least two reasons: One, I couldn’t leave them alive. It was them or me. Two, they were helping me pose a threat to the potential plotters paid by Pierre Castaneda. That guy had too much money and he was set on using it against me. So all his people had to die, in front of everyone, in agony. I didn’t have any other way to
discourage the subversive urges of one or the other of them. From his stronghold in Ndunga, well protected by his paid militias, the boss of Cogemin let out horrific cries at each execution. Was I then going to be left to kill all those in the country who dared to think?
You have surely seen that photo on the front page of all the newspapers: Pierre Castaneda holding the son of an opponent in his arms and bawling his eyes out. In between two sobs, he says that he can’t take these massive and repeated human rights violations anymore, that he is suffering personally because of them, setting aside any political considerations. He is asked, “Don’t you feel a little responsible all the same, Mr. Castaneda?” After a long sigh, the sigh of a wounded man, cruelly deceived, he states, his voice breaking, “You mean responsible for having helped? Listen, he wasn’t like that when I met him. I don’t know when President Nikiema became a monster but it’s a fact: he has nothing human left in him.”
The trap, which worked beautifully, was slowly closing in around me.
The month of May was coming to an end. How many days had he been locked up in the small house? Without a doubt, a little more than two months. Nikiema wanted to heat some water but some voices in the street caught his attention. They were so close he believed his end had arrived. Outside, someone shook the latch of the wooden gate. Nikiema rushed into the basement. He realized then that he could move around in there with relative ease. But even there, sheltered from any danger, he was still afraid. Not daring to either go back up to the living room or even close his eyes, he munched on crackers for a good part of the night. In the darkness, the words “hunger,” “food shortage,” “famine,” “dying of hunger and thirst” suddenly came into his head. He let them make their little rounds in his mind and he set out in search of food. The dried fruits and canned goods were luckily on a shelf near the ground. He wouldn’t have had the strength to climb onto a chair in order to reach them if he’d have put them away higher. That would not have been sensible: it was dark in the basement and everything could come crashing down around him. Nor was there any way to read labels. N’Zo Nikiema had to trust his own sense of smell in order to know whether the foods were spoiled or not. When a product seemed questionable to him, he would let a bit of it melt on his tongue, and depending on the outcome he would either throw the can in a corner or use his fingers to devour its contents.
Kaveena Page 11
