Kaveena

by Boubacar Boris Diop

  He had thought, as undoubtedly did the other spectators, that the young woman’s gesture was part of the ballet. Already for quite some time, that had been what was in style in the theater: the actors, sitting quietly among the public, rose suddenly at predetermined times to say their lines. Everyone would then turn to them as the display of lights tried to create who knows what effects. According to what Nikiema had understood, it was supposed to show the link between Life and Art, the Real and the Imaginary, etc., but perhaps he hadn’t understood anything, because he found this process a bit simplistic and frankly even dumb.

  As for me, this theater technique reminded me of one of those spicy anecdotes that make the daily papers in all dictatorships. The first time an actor stepped in from the room, our security guards immediately carted him off. It’s true that the guy’s remarks were a bit of a rant. Real calls for sedition! I didn’t hold an important position at the time, but I attended the interrogation. It was mostly decent, I must say. Shouting and threats at the beginning, but no violence. We quickly understood that it was a blunder. The actor was doing his job and we didn’t insist. Luckily, the director didn’t hassle us too much. He was a humorous guy and made people laugh by stating that the interpellation of his actor in the middle of the show was part of the play.

  It’s perhaps because of that incident that there was no attempt to arrest the young woman. When she planted herself in front of President Nikiema, he thought that she was going to start singing a song in his honor. Something about the Great Omniscient One, the Solar Giant of Mount Nimba, etc. There, in front of his peers, it would be a nice surprise for him. He was already relishing their resentment. You cannot imagine how much the presidents of the entire world hate each other. He then gave the dancer a fitting smile. But instead of dancing or singing, she remained immobile in front of him, an expression of mute reproach on her face. The drummers, visibly perplexed, stopped playing and the hall remained plunged in absolute silence. In a flash, Nikiema sensed profound contempt in the eyes of this woman unknown to him. And before he had the time to understand, she leaned over to his ear and spoke to him quickly. She spoke to him about her daughter. He muttered, “But what does this stranger want with me? What is this story about her daughter?” and then she slowly uttered the name he should have expected.

  Kaveena.

  The self-satisfied smile he was wearing on his face as a public figure froze. It was simple: he couldn’t wipe his smile off anymore. He was deeply troubled and there was such silence in the immense hall of the Congressional Palace that everyone heard him ask the young girl, in a tone he would have liked to be playful but which was bursting with irritation, “What? What are you talking about?”

  She leaned toward him again and calmly repeated Kaveena’s name. From this first contact, he understood that this dancer was a person who was out of the ordinary. And as she returned to the stage dancing backward, the drums playing slowly for her alone, Nikiema applauded her, nodding his head with conviction, for the sake of appearances. That immediately lessened the tension. Everyone understood that the dancer had just given a bit of a special compliment to her Beloved President and hurrahs and laughter burst forth in the hall.

  You could have taken a gun out of your pearl belt and fired at me. By the time people understood that it wasn’t theater, I’d have dropped dead. Your daughter Kaveena would be avenged, so to speak. And there was also that whole row of heads of state from I don’t know what countries anymore—you could have bumped them off while you were at it, seven brigands with sinister faces, such corrupt and cruel guys it’s unbelievable. That evening, Art lost its opportunity to do a little something for Africa. A whole lot of people on this continent would have been grateful to you! As for us others, the tyrants, we should be wary of certain theatrical innovations!

  Pierre Castaneda was seated just behind the seven presidents. He did everything afterward to find out what had really happened. Luckily for you, I always refused to reveal to him what was really going on between us. Just by instinct. You know, it happens that my kind and I lie without even knowing why. We lie by omission or maybe because Castaneda’s and my world is such that we never even know. Everything in our daily experience shows us to what extent the truth is dangerous. For example, that day I was saving both of our lives without knowing it. If Pierre Castaneda had known that you had uttered Kaveena’s name, you wouldn’t have had a chance. He would have said to himself, OK, this chick is clever, but Nikiema has little interest in women in the end. How come he let her live? He would have ended up finding out about our secret relationship, and to do so, he would have made your life impossible. You would have had cops around you all the time, and maybe one day, for one reason or another or even for no reason at all, he would have concocted a little fatal accident for you without anybody noticing. And Pierre Castaneda would have acted, surprising though it may seem, instinctively. Compared to my friend Pierre, I’m practically a choirboy. But let me tell you, what truly left me awestruck is that after slipping that threatening remark in my ear about your daughter Kaveena, you went back to dancing with your bells that made all that racket, your straw things, your tiger cat skins around your buttocks, back to wiggling and shouting praises to the Good Old President. You suddenly seemed so idiotic that I understood that very first evening that you had two personalities, one clearly distinct from the other.

  Remember, people in the country started gossiping. Once the first wave of astonishment passed, they made up whatever nonsense about that incident. That you had insulted the Mother of the Nation, that you wanted a date, that you were begging for a scholarship for your sister’s studies. A clandestine newspaper even reported that you had suggested giving me a blowjob, right there in front of everybody. Literally anything. Pierre Castaneda said nothing. His men had lost your trail and he was very angry with them. My staff had more luck. They managed to find you rather quickly. It’s true, I had a great asset: Colonel Asante Kroma. With that guy, you always win. He knows everything. He sees everything. And he only kills when you order him to.

  And I can tell you this now: for several weeks, your life was barely hanging by a thread. And that thread was in my hands. Colonel Kroma and his guys were merely waiting for a sign from me. It didn’t come. In general, those things don’t happen like one imagines they do. I wasn’t going to say to Colonel Kroma, “Bump off the young dancer from the Congressional Palace for me.” No, it would be a shame if we had to talk in such a vulgar way. Your name often came up at our meetings or even at meals. What audacity, that painter artist! Disguising herself as a dancer to come and coldly insult the president in front of his guests . . . that’s serious! People resented you in my little entourage. If in one of those conversations I had shrugged my shoulders a certain way, it would have been about you. Colonel Kroma would have known what remained for him to do. You were lucky. I never wanted anything to happen to you. And—believe it or not—I don’t regret it. You don’t like me very much, but I think I did well leaving you alive.

  Days earlier, my sweeping had missed a small piece of paper. Someone had scratched a few lines in red marker on it. I unfolded it and I immediately saw that the words weren’t in N’Zo Nikiema’s handwriting. Different from his, the writing was miniscule, angular, and slightly tilted.

  I read part of a sentence aloud: “It happens all too often these days. A sad and vain transformation.” On the back, a date: November 16. The year was illegible. On the paper was written, “This Thursday morning, at G’s. I love him. He also loves me, I know it. But we are not of the same world. His parents are scornful. A girl from the poor suburbs. Not chic enough. Father a taxi driver. Plus she’s a whore. Unwed mother at fourteen, they say to me. Violent, too, it seems. What do you want, my dear, they’re all like that, no time to educate their children—poverty is still no excuse for this free-for-all morality. Basically, if I stayed in Kisito, everything would be in order. A young girl came from the next-door neighbor’s to ask for some cardboard. A banal scene ye
t so difficult to describe if you want to render the profound truth of it. It was frightening. She said very little, but I saw everything, with terror and disgust: another person, very different from herself, had settled into her soul. The tone of her voice, her gestures, everything in her was saying, I am a young white girl, in spite of the color of my skin; I am not like the others. I thought: a reverse journey. The monkey is climbing back out of the Negro, under our eyes. It is so clear. . . . Everybody sees it and it’s as if no one could do anything. We’ve truly been beaten. There is no more hope. It’s perhaps even absurd to believe that it could improve in a thousand years.”

  I compared the writing with the signature on several of Mumbi Awele’s paintings. As I expected, she was the author of those enigmatic lines.

  Few people can boast about having really chosen their existence. I trust above all the wisdom of our neighboring people, where having a long nose literally means to live long. My fate too was determined behind my back. What does it mean to lead your life? No, it’s actually our life that leads us where it wants to, by the tip of our nose, precisely. Since yesterday, I’ve been trying to discover when mine went to hell. I want to talk to you about it. Simple as that.

  The same scene always comes to mind. Pierre Castaneda and I are sitting in the backyard of a restaurant. The place, modest and rather quiet, is called the Blue Lizard. It owes its name to the legend that you know well about Nimba’s foundation. Our small table is cluttered with Heineken and Premium Club bottles as usual. I see Pierre again sinking his teeth into a bloody leg of mutton. I am happy with a few cashew nuts, because I prefer going home and eating alone. Pierre swallows large quantities of meat in such haste that the fat oozes from everywhere. He wipes himself with the sleeve of his shirt, sniffling and blowing his nose loudly. I say to him, “Hey, take it easy, Pierrot, you’re eating like a pig.”

  Pierre shrugs his shoulders, as if to say, keep on talking, I’m starving.

  We are alone in a corner, right by the kitchen. It’s not far from the toilets—just a hole in the cement—from which a strong odor of urine emanates. Lizards are running noiselessly along the walls. I watch them stop, wave their flat heads all around, and then suddenly disappear.

  In my memory, this scene is in very bright tones, dominated by the yellow of the desert and the green of the trees. In fact it has rained all morning and it’s as if the leaves of the orange, mango, and papaya trees in the courtyard have been washed out.

  It’s all coming back to me, decades later. Perhaps you’ll understand me better if I compare this succession of images to one of your paintings. My afternoon with Pierre at the Blue Lizard, but also that whole time at Cogemin, the most important time in my political career, blur into one moment. I guess I’m trying to find a starting point for this crucial moment as Pierre and I are walking along Ndunga’s rutted streets to get to the Blue Lizard. It doesn’t make any sense. It would be even more absurd to associate that scene with earlier events, for example my first government’s antiguerrilla operations after independence. No, that scene is a block of time suspended in midair, laid bare to real life, with neither beginning nor end. In spite of its immobility, it is also the melting pot where the most diverse episodes of my existence come to be housed. It refers to the abundance of a life and not to particular realities; it refracts them all and transmutes them into colors and shapes.

  The Prieto da Souza affair is at the center of the canvas. Prieto da Souza: remember that name. Our very first crime.

  We must have talked about it for the first time at the Blue Lizard. Try to imagine the ambiance of a little shabby bar in a small mining town at that time. People were coming and going in the courtyard. Ta’Mim, the owner, whose real name was Émilienne Ganvi, was a strong woman, full of energy. She looked older than her forty-five years, because she’d worked her whole life the hard way. As far back as I can remember, I always saw her ordering her servers around, her face covered with sweat, a penetrating stare, a blue apron on her chest, and her right hand held out in front of her in an authoritative gesture. Émilienne Ganvi came from another country and there was a lot of talk about her. That she had stabbed her fickle husband and escaped from prison under incredible conditions, that a holy man passing through the town of Ndunga predicted her exceptional fate. For most people, that meant that she was going to become very rich, and they were all licking their chops, waiting for the fortune to be announced so they could partake. Ta’Mim, a fat woman who smoked a pipe and had reddened eyes due to lack of sleep, let people talk. I always thought she must despise these vain speculations. How can you take those drunkards seriously when they sit around all day long telling stupid lies about her instead of going out to work?

  In her early days, Ta’Mim was certainly deluded. She thought she’d be able to attract all of Cogemin’s workers and even some European executives to her restaurant. You could see in the decorations on the walls—naive paintings showing, among other things, a ram about to be put on a spit to roast—that she had set up her business with careful consideration. Several years later, the only things that remained of those dreams were a few hunting trophies hanging above the bar, along with the sullen faces of her three servers.

  I don’t recall how we ended up making Ta’Mim’s backyard our meeting place after office hours at Cogemin. In hindsight, I think that Pierre Castaneda and I chased away Ta’Mim’s clientele. The last thing the African mine workers wanted was to be at the same place as Pierre after their workday. They’d really have to be forced. And at the time, I already had a pretty bad reputation. Cop. Collaborator. Puppet. The Negro on staff. You know, the dirty kind.

  The bottles of Premium Club on the table were empty. Pierre forbade the servers at the Blue Lizard to touch them while he was there. It was one of his many quirks. Everyone ended up getting used to it. After joking about his piggishness, I said to him straight out, “You know what?”

  He wrinkled his brow nonchalantly but I sensed he was very attentive. He asked me, “So, any more news about those . . . ?” He wanted to talk about the fliers that had caused a stir among Cogemin’s European executives. When he uttered the word “fliers,” he stopped. He couldn’t stand to believe that he was disturbed by the fact that piles of these papers were found one morning on the tennis court at the Belvedere Complex. The Whites in the colony had seemed frightened by those fliers, which promised them all of hell’s suffering. But I suspected they were just trying to scare them a little. Life at the Belvedere Complex was profoundly boring and they liked the idea that something was finally happening to them. In the days that followed, I heard them joking among themselves. One of them said, pretending to be horrified, “Careful, it seems they’re going to throw us out to sea!” To which another replied, laughing, “That’s good—I never had time to go to the beach! Always busting my nuts for those layabouts.” The same day the fliers were found, I came across Jacques Estival, the head of financial services. My direct boss, in fact. He was a bitter, racist, aggressive type. He said to me with a mean smile, “So, just like that, those brothers of yours are having ideas! They want independence, huh? I’d give anything to see that, a bunch of monkeys with a country on their hands!”

  As for Pierre, he would talk about those fliers with guarded fury every time. He felt personally betrayed. At the time, none of this was clear to me. In the heat of the action, I didn’t have time to ask myself any questions. Today I realize that Pierre Castaneda backed himself further and further into a corner with a logic that was completely delirious: out of love for the blacks, he answered for them, he had protected them against the poor white settlers, and that’s how they were thanking him! For him, those first signs of the struggle for independence boiled down to one odd question: how am I going to be able to put up with the mocking stares of the people from the Belvedere Complex? In that sense—and this was utterly incredible to him—our people’s fight came down to a simple matter of self-respect. It never occurred to him that one day we could take our destiny in our
own hands. He believed he was teaching us how to walk: the best of us could become, after being patient for several centuries, full French citizens. Castaneda had a rather crude mind, and when I appeared to doubt his theories, he sniggered, “My dear Niko, we are friends, but look, you have had billions of years to handle things. Instead of doing that, when we arrived here you were still in your trees. What has happened here over the last billions of years? Can you tell me?”

  I did not answer. Of course, you’ll think it was out of cowardice. It’s possible: I had just been named assistant to Cogemin’s deputy accounting officer. You can only imagine the battles Castaneda had to go through against his own so I could get that promotion. But I must especially point out that I was pretty shy; I had some ideas, yes, but I was never sure that they were good ones. Deep down, I told myself that perhaps Pierre was right. Maybe we deserved our situation with all those Whites treating us like dogs.

  But what’s changed today, Mumbi? As I am writing these words to you from the bottom of my hole, Castaneda is running the country. He thinks that we did not know how to seize our chance. Over in the palace, as he watches Mwanke guzzle down whiskey and redden his teeth from chewing on cola nuts, he must be saying to himself, it’s no use burying our heads in the sand—all those damned independences brought them only misery and even more injustice. We’re going to have to start all over again.

  I’ll get back to those fliers found that morning on the tennis court at the Belvedere Complex. Castaneda had asked Commissioner Garnier to be personally in charge of the investigation. It seemed that the Cogemin mineworkers were implicated in the affair rather quickly. Finding the names still remained. And that was what I wanted to talk to Pierre about that day at the Blue Lizard.