Kaveena

by Boubacar Boris Diop

  It was on that day that N’Zo Nikiema was struck for the first time by the bad odor that was starting to emanate from the labyrinth. He would have liked to attribute it to the kilischi, the dried meat strips he had brought back a year earlier from Zinder, but he hated to lie to himself.

  The next day, he woke up midmorning, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. As often happens after a restless night, Nikiema had fallen deeply asleep at dawn. He stayed stretched out for several minutes, not really knowing what he was going to do with his day. As soon as he stood up, he listened all around. His fear from the previous night had disappeared but he was acting, childishly, like he believed he was still in danger. This way of being on alert especially helped him to conquer his boredom. The only things that bothered him—really what made him feel great shame and even a sense of moral degradation—were the dirtiness and the mess around him. Two open cans—one of sardines, the other of corned beef—were lying on the floor along with some bags of crackers. The garbage was full and he didn’t know anymore what to do with the food scraps that were piling up in the basement. His clothes and his mouth were stained with grease. The oil from the can of sardines traced a thin black trench on the floor that was going to disappear under the library. N’Zo Nikiema scattered little peanut seeds on the ground that were actually poison. He had noted their efficacy as much on the rodents as on the cockroaches. Only he didn’t know what to do with their bodies that stunk up the labyrinth a little more each day.

  In the living room, everything was in the same place as the night before. He put his gun back under the bowl of ostrich eggs from Zimbabwe and headed toward the fridge. The pineapple juice squeezed between pieces of frozen chicken gave him a wonderful feeling of freshness. With his eyes half-closed and raised toward the ceiling, he purred with pleasure as he let the juice flow down his throat. He immediately felt like he was at home in the living room, which all of a sudden seemed more welcoming to him than it had ever been. When he had left to take refuge in the underground, he began to miss some of his everyday activities.

  N’Zo Nikiema picked up a magazine from a pile of newspapers. It was Nubia. In his former life, he had had little time to read about art. Now, it allowed him to relieve his boredom. He went directly to his favorite section, In Parentheses. Each month, an artist was invited to, in a way, go off the deep end, and their delusions were reported in the newspaper. Nikiema read a title that made him smile: “Me, an African Artist? I couldn’t give a damn, good God!” The painter first talked about the planetary village and the highways in the sky, with words full of tenderness. Then, out of the blue, he started scattering his text with curse words and with “Oh! Awwww! Oh!” under the pretext of having major pain in his shoulders. “How is it in your shoulders?” asked the interviewer. Yes, for the whole time he was carrying Africa and its wars and epidemics he had these really terrible pains, achy and stiff all over, contusions and everything. He added, in an even more bizarre manner, “Listen, mama, don’t be afraid—I’m not gonna throw you into the trash like a bag of garbage. No. I have respect for the Ancestors, I do. I am going to lay you down gently on the ground and then . . . boom, a big kick in your big black ass and you’ll manage like everyone does on this earth! Stupid bitchy abusive mother, go on!” It took N’Zo Nikiema several readings to realize that the mother in question, so harshly berated, was Africa. In the photo, the artist, a little chubby-cheeked, had dreadlocks, a youthful face, and a glint of mockery in his eyes. Of course, N’Zo Nikiema didn’t have any opinion on what the young man was saying. It went over his head, all those celestial highways. But Mumbi’s colleague was funny anyway.

  N’Zo Nikiema leafed through a few dailies, too. He had fun guessing who had paid for which investigative piece, or even for a simple sentence fragment. The rates varied depending on the newspapers. However, such editorialists, moralizing and corrupt, had always seemed significantly overestimated. I gave him bags and bags of dough, that guy, Nikiema thought, and he couldn’t even bring down Pierre Castaneda for me. This perhaps explained how this guy had become, from the very first hours of the civil war, one of Castaneda’s most fervent partisans.

  It was also very funny to see, in hindsight, to what degree everyone, including himself, could get it all wrong. The press had made such a fuss about certain events. Each morning someone would announce that the country would collapse by the end of the week. A few months later, as seen from the small house, all that seemed to him rather pathetic.

  His photo was on the cover of all the abandoned newspapers in Mumbi’s living room, naturally. He was troubled when he came across an interview he’d given in Ebena, the country’s only fashion magazine. A businessman, who was also a notorious sexual pervert, had started the magazine as a shrewd way to attract young beauties to his bed. There were superb photos of models in Ebena and the guy said, enraptured, to whoever would listen, “As you see them, I screw them all, these little wonders!”

  On that particular point, I can only say N’Zo Nikiema was right. I know Ludovic Mabeya’s police files well—the boss of that luxurious colorful magazine. Each time I’ve seen information about him, I’ve asked myself how a person who is mentally ill—truly ill!—could have enough presence of mind to make so much money off public works or anything else. He was always talking about his female conquests and would almost always add, bursting into laughter, “It’s just that I have balls of steel!” It’s his expression. I bring it up merely for the sake of accuracy.

  The interview with Ebena’s journalist managed to relax N’Zo Nikiema. She had asked him questions that were totally surprising, at times a bit inappropriate: Do you go cycling on Sunday, Mr. President? And the number thirteen—does the number thirteen make you afraid? And do you sometimes bring the Mother of the Nation her butter croissants and coffee in bed in the morning? Have you ever struck her in a fit of anger? She’d hesitated before asking him that. And of course, in order to lessen the impact of her audacity, she had added at the end, “in a fit of anger.” A way of suggesting that a man like him, nearly perfect, could only behave in such a way if he precisely ceased being himself. The hand that ceases to obey its infallible brain and goes off on its own to smash the face of the Mother of the Nation! Dirty hand, I’m going to kill you! It was something to die laughing over, the goddamn stupid things that little journalist would do. But there you have it—in the past Nikiema had been admonished for a certain stiffness, even for his arrogance. So his advisors were keen to show the most human side of him. “Such bullshit,” he railed to himself as he entered into the spirit of their game. To have to prove that one is still human! Well . . . the country had truly changed without him knowing because N’Zo Nikiema couldn’t even imagine someone directing such questions at anyone. What was this, this story about butter croissants and coffee for the Mother of the Nation? Come on now! The Mother of the Nation! He had no idea they were still doing anything together, the Mother of the Nation and he.

  Lost in his thoughts, he hadn’t heard what the journalist had just said. “Excuse me, dear?”

  She detected N’Zo Nikiema’s irritation and repeated herself, her throat a little knotted. “Is there a day . . .”

  At that moment, the memory came back to him at once. “Ah yes! A day that changed my life, you said?”

  The young girl nodded her head, still just as intimidated. Her left hand was opening and closing nervously.

  After pretending to think about it for a moment, his voice full of profound emotion, he recalled his first election to the presidency of the republic. At the time, he was no longer working at Cogemin and was living in the Artillery, a semi-working-class neighborhood in Maren. He spoke about how, in the middle of watching the popular jubilation fireworks light up the June night sky from his balcony, he thought hard and with a heavy heart about his mother. She was no longer in this world and that brought a drop of bitterness to that glorious day. N’Zo Nikiema added that, despite his sadness, he was happy to see a new dawn breaking on the horizon. And standing n
ear him, Pierre Castaneda, his faithful friend, his old battle companion. . . . He and Pierre had overcome many hardships together! At every great moment in his life, he said gravely, he had felt the brotherly silent shadow of Pierre Castaneda by his side, this foreigner who was more patriotic than a lot of the natives of the country.

  As he spoke, N’Zo Nikiema saw that the journalist was restless. This was the part of the interview that obviously interested her the most. So what does this girl want me to say? Nikiema thought. He promised himself he would have her watched. This was perhaps a new act of deceit on Castaneda’s part, this interview. Their tiff was already public knowledge and all the newspapers were finding ways to throw oil on the fire. He paused for a moment, his eyes vacant, and he said, “After nearly thirty years, Pierre’s loyalty to me has been unfailing.”

  “There have never been any clouds hanging over your relationship with him, Mr. President?”

  N’Zo Nikiema easily guessed where she wanted to go with that. The same dirty tricks. Castaneda’s loyal dog story. The Little Stone Dog . . . that famous play where they made a fool of him. He forced a smile. “As we say where I come from, in your mouth, tongue and teeth live together, but that doesn’t keep them from getting tangled up once in a while.”

  “On what occasion, for instance, did that occur with Mr. Castaneda?” Clearly, she did not want to let it go.

  He managed to not let himself get flustered. “Listen, Pierre always protected me against myself.” After a studied pause, he added, “Yes, my dear, I am calm now, but when I was younger, I was an impulsive person. If you’d only known me back then! I hated above all taking the easy way out! I’d have been able to take my father’s place when he died and sit on the throne of Nimba. It was so much more relaxing! But I knew the colonial system inside out, thanks to Pierre. At Cogemin, I had lived inside the belly of the hideous beast, to borrow the great German poet’s words! I wanted radical change! The people weren’t moving fast enough for me and I loved this country too much to allow it to fail. We would fight about things, Pierre and I. I always wanted to rush at our adversary and he would say to me, ‘No, Niko, let’s be more shrewd than the enemy!’ And do you know who the enemy was? His own white brothers! Can you believe that?”

  He discerned a glimmer of admiration in the journalist’s eyes. Well played. She was going to write nonsense that would be very useful to him. Naturally, it was out of the question to stop now that he was doing so well. “It was a great day, the day we achieved independence, for the battle had been long and rough. We had just won back our freedom after centuries of humiliation under the merciless yoke of foreigners. It was, above all, a challenge. When I saw all those children running through the streets of the city in boisterous groups shouting my name and the party slogan . . . yes, it’s true, I could not hold back my tears.”

  Rereading this article in Ebena several years later, he couldn’t help but smile. That young journalist must have been quite naive. She had swallowed all his lines enthusiastically. She had written things like, President Nikiema is a man like you and me. Even though she had added, in order to leave herself a way out, that N’Zo Nikiema wasn’t completely like the others, that he had, rather, consented to reduce himself, with humility, to the level of his people. There were several pages of things like that.

  There were also a lot of photos. In one, he was an adolescent among his brothers, at the royal court of Nimba. All of them were wearing berets with pointed edges, knitted sailor tops, and short trousers. He looked at his knobby knees covered with the dust of his native bush. In another photo, he was with Salima and their three children in the palace’s vast verdant park. It was a beautiful Sunday and it looked like the presidential family had spent it together, finally happy and relaxed. But they were all only there for the photo. Over the years, Salima had become “Mother of the Nation” and their three kids the “Children of the Nation.” That meant that his son and two daughters no longer had a father and that they were fine with it. At least they were not arrogant. They did not intend to terrorize the ministers and the senior civil servants. On the contrary, they called everyone Uncle or Auntie, out of both pretense and bashfulness. Having grown up far from the country, they didn’t understand anything that was happening around them. Meanwhile, they literally siphoned the state coffers and put insane amounts into banks in the Cayman Islands, in Luxembourg, or in other such places. Their methodical and rational mindset at this game was a wonder. Nikiema realized that he didn’t even know where they had gone to take refuge when the civil war began. Besides, he couldn’t care less. They’d most certainly had enough of the country, not speaking even one of its languages, among other things. Nikiema imagined them changing their identities and perhaps even their faces so they could delight in reaping the fruits of their plunder in peace. This way, they would be back to square one. He had to admit, he’d messed up his children, too.

  He reread a few parts of the interview for a third time. All of it was now right under his eyes, written in black-and-white. Yes, he’d had a little fun giving whatever nonsense for an answer. However, he hadn’t lied to Ebena’s journalist about everything. About his mother, for example—that was true. He had gone to Nimba to spend some moments in silence at her graveside on the day after he took his oath. Back in Maren, he had realized that he’d forgotten to do the same for his father, who was buried a few meters away.

  The event that had changed his life . . . ? He thought that the answer would have been very different if he’d been asked the question there in his hideout, far from the splendor of the palace. He had lied so often—out of necessity much more than out of perversity—that he couldn’t even trust his own memories anymore. He believed nonetheless that he knew when it was that he’d experienced the most violent shock of his life. That was beyond a shadow of a doubt: everything became different for him the day when that young dancer came, right in the middle of an official ceremony, and whispered a few words in his ear. He relived that scene often, even at the most unexpected moments.

  It must have been a party like all the others at the Congressional Palace. Fire-eaters, acrobats, and rappers performed one after the other in order to distract Nikiema and a half-dozen heads of state seated in the front row. The rappers told the presidents what to do, as they always did. You’ve got to respect the people, my homies! Yeah! You shouldn’t hijack our billions! Yeah! They howled at Nikiema, and his guests practically delighted at him getting chewed out. As for the dancers, bells on their ankles and straw skirts around their hips, they mimed working in the fields, jumping in place. The drummers were circling around them, their eyes convulsing, imploring the sky to make the rain fall. According to the program, all those people were dancing the Adad, or the African Dance of Accelerated Development.

  All of that was rather astonishing, Mumbi. Were we intending to sort out the country by blowing shrill whistles? Watching that dance, I felt a mixture of shame and anger. It was pure farce. All those so-called artists with white diamonds, triangles, squares, and circles on their chests, drawn, it seemed, with ash. . . . And all those things they had on their heads, such complicated things, those tiger cat skins or other animal skins that no one has seen around here for a long time! There aren’t any more tiger cats where we’re from anymore, for Christ’s sake! Who can attest that this is authentic African culture? Would you be willing to swear on it? Nobody knows anything about it and that’s what’s rather tragic in the end. An old madman whose memory was destroyed by alcohol came up with some peculiar fables and made them valid over the centuries. We trust him because we don’t even know who we are anymore. If I’d been able to, I would have forbidden such antics. But people explained to me that had I done so, many fathers of families would be penniless.

  It’s always been like that. Each time I had the urge to tackle a problem, people told me the same thing: brave people will die of hunger. And when Pierre Castaneda’s men started to make their bullets rain on the palace, I thought that was the end, of course, b
ut especially that my days had been too short over the last years. But let’s let that go. I’d rather talk about you. About the first time we met. You were among that idiotic troupe of dancers that was performing the African Dance of Accelerated Development—you all were banging your feet on the wooden floor, calling everyone in the audience up onstage. I have to admit, your troupe did not cheat; it did everything to maintain its reputation. I was divided, because while I found your presentation pretty grotesque, I felt like your energy was lifting me off the ground. I even wondered how much you were being paid to go through all that trouble. Or was it enough for you to perform your number in front of so many heads of state? You would have been mistaken. They are a fine selection of stinking hyenas! If I told you the story of each of those guys, Mumbi, you’d vomit all night.

  One of the dancers moved away from the circle and headed toward him. As she walked down the seven red velvet steps, a million eyes were fixated on her long black legs. Her body was gleaming with sweat, there were pearls around her forehead, and she pulled off an attitude of sensuality that was chaste and dangerous at the same time. For Nikiema, the almost animal strength that emanated from her especially drove the intensity of the moment. Maren’s high society was there. Perfumed. Powdered. Repressed. There were also numerous officials, those people who live in the shadows of the heads of state and who panic at any little thing. All of them remained petrified, and in that instant she appeared to be, of all those in attendance, the only one who still had a breath of life. Also emanating from her bold harsh eyes was a deaf violence and an impression of total liberation.