Kaveena

by Boubacar Boris Diop

  It was hard for him to believe that this was one of Pierre Castaneda’s Lil Boys right before his eyes. Everyone referred to those adolescents’ cruelty in a fearful, hushed tone. They weren’t the only ones: each camp had such kids in their ranks. They liked to make their victims’ hearts and livers throb in the palms of their hands.

  The difference with the Lil Boys was that they weren’t very good fighters. The one he was watching come and go along Blériot that morning, a red Walkman stuck on his ears, hadn’t smeared his face with blood. Nor was he wearing his victims’ bones around his neck. He moved laterally around the ridge with a certain grace and one could sense how happy he was that the country was being ransacked and pillaged. Chaos suited him quite well. There was all-out lawlessness and, unlike him, the powerful of yesterday were afraid of death. Pressing his heels into the cobblestones, he swiveled his waist around, like a rock n’ roll dancer. His black baseball cap, too big for him, made it hard to see his eyes and face. N’Zo Nikiema could only make out the outline of his jaw. It was somber and square. Although the boy was rather weak, his whole body exuded strength and wild energy. He felt like the master of the universe. In that posh neighborhood, dozens of people kept their eyes fixed on him, too frightened to even think of hating him. Guys who wanted to live for a long time because for them life before was good. And plump or thin women, nonchalant and wearing perfume, who were so desirable.

  N’Zo Nikiema nodded his head slowly. He almost understood the Lil Boy: when all this is over, he’ll have to run after those ladies outside the supermarket to push their carts full of nice things. Then they’ll distractedly throw him a few of their measly leftover coins. N’Zo Nikiema thought with a mean smile that the kid had definitely made the same comment as him: in times of peace, the rich outside the supermarket are often distracted, they don’t look at anybody, they never see the kids crawling around them like maggots on a piece of fruit.

  The cartridge cases across the boy’s chest glimmered in the morning light. Having reached the altitude where N’Zo Nikiema was, he stooped down and pretended to unload his Kalash on the palace windows.

  N’Zo Nikiema returned to his office, where he began sorting documents. His ministers and some senior civil servants were waiting for him in his council chamber for a meeting. “No doubt the last,” he muttered.

  His last meeting with Pierre Castaneda.

  He had tried to negotiate and Castaneda had said to his emissary, “Go tell your boss that I will receive him at Cogemin.”

  “The . . . the head of state is coming . . . here?” For the emissary, a completely ingenuous young man, President Nikiema was a god. He asked his question again, utterly stupefied. It was unthinkable to him.

  “Don’t worry, sir,” Castaneda said softly. “He will come.”

  Nikiema didn’t have a choice: it was the rule of the game. With a little luck, he would save what he still could. After all, he and Castaneda had lived through very intense moments together. And that creates connections.

  Castaneda made him wait for thirty minutes at Lil Black’s, the most frequented bar in the Belvedere Complex. Although it was the middle of January, the air was warm and dry. Alone at his table, he had a view of the park and the pool, a few yards away. Except for the boys dressed in yellow and brown livery, N’Zo Nikiema was the only African in the café. One of the waiters noticed him and nearly dropped his tray, he was so shocked. N’Zo Nikiema had known the young man’s father back in the day when he himself was Cogemin’s deputy accounting officer. He said hello with a friendly wave. The waiter wanted to wave back at him but couldn’t manage to, which troubled him. Nikiema could easily guess the questions that were jumbled in his head. How could it be that President Nikiema was sitting there all alone, like any other customer, at a table in Lil Black’s? In the newspapers, people would sometimes say that the war between him and Castaneda would erupt in a matter of days—what could the head of the enemy army be doing there? Nikiema turned his eyes toward the park to give the server an opportunity to disappear. He didn’t need to be coaxed.

  The Belvedere Complex hadn’t changed much. True, some new buildings had been put up. Shiny new SUV Troopers or Pajeros had replaced the old two-cylinder cars and the black Peugeot 203s from the 1950s, but it seemed to him that the spirit of the place hadn’t changed. Three young French women, half-naked with slender bodies, passed in front of him without looking at him. In any case, there was little chance they’d already seen him on TV. Him: a motionless shadow above the chasm. An old warlord already defeated. Them: the movement and carefree attitude of ripe fruits in the sun. The joie de vivre. They were living in the same country, but on different planets.

  Behind the bar, the servers couldn’t take their eyes off him. He thought they would talk about this scene for the rest of their lives. I saw him. He was alone. He stayed sitting by the pool for two hours, he didn’t seem proud—yeah, it was a little before the war. They’re all the same, yeah. They’re so afraid of the Whites. He stole our billions and then left to have an easy time of it, and with all this, people want the country to develop. Development, my foot.

  N’Zo Nikiema saw an old man coming in his direction. He was walking with difficulty, one step after the other, leaning on a cane. Right away he recognized Jacques Estival. Having reached him, Estival stopped in front of him and came out with, “People told me you were here. I couldn’t miss it. Schmuck.”

  Estival was always so spiteful. He was once a young, ambitious, energetic man, ready to commit any despicable act to pass from the B1 category to the C3 class. He was said to have come from a good family, and his tall stature, unruly hair, and blue shirts with open collars gave him a domineering look. He boasted, in a play on words, about fixing his sights high and having a critical eye. But already at that time, N’Zo Nikiema knew that Jacques Estival would be a lonely and bitter old man. He was one of those people who wear the marks of decrepitude on their faces from very early on. Nikiema was happy to see he had not been wrong. Jacques Estival was all out of sorts: mentally unbalanced, out of breath, disconnected and a little crazed. “And you don’t even have any teeth left, you dirty son of a bitch!” he uttered under his breath, his heart full of hate. Dribble, all white, accumulated on Jacques Estival’s swollen lips, and he was incapable of being articulate; his words ended up being a continuous inaudible buzz. To hide his anger, N’Zo Nikiema forced himself to appear contemptuous. Estival shook his head, and as he moved away, he said, “Well . . . Well!”

  The day N’Zo Nikiema had come for an interview at Cogemin, Jacques Estival had been in charge of receiving him. How many years had it been? He tried to count and gave up very quickly. Jean-Luc Dardenne was the boss of Cogemin at that time. Pierre Castaneda, one of the advisors that he most listened to, compensated for his lack of education with his taste for action and his familiarity with the African cultural milieu. Nikiema had just come out of adolescence. A happy and protected childhood at the royal court of Nimba. Until that day, he’d seen only fear and respect in the eyes of men and women. For the first time in his life, he was left to his own devices. He had been sent from office to office with a sullen tone. In Cogemin’s dusty hallways, he had crossed slovenly Whites who sometimes stank of alcohol.

  Jacques Estival seemed uncomfortable with the meeting. He was supposed to address an indigene like a normal human being and he had never done that before. Anyway, the test was only a formality. Everything had been arranged with Jean-Luc Dardenne and Nikiema’s father, the king of Nimba. Estival asked him simple questions, though at times rather disconcerting ones. The number of wives his father had. What he had heard around him about Cogemin. The period of France’s history that interested him the most. If, in his opinion, the Africans had a civilization. What he thought about friendship. If he believed men and women were equal. Did a leader, according to him, have the right to kill to make people obey him.

  As he tried his best to answer, Jacques Estival’s colleagues came and just planted themselves in
the middle of the office, observing him with a pensive air, and then went on their way without any comment.

  Nothing about that shocked him. All he knew about life was what old Mansare had taught him. But that world, the one of the French of Cogemin, was totally foreign to Mansare.

  He was going to get up when, as he turned his head, he saw a man with a massive face and olive skin standing at the window, a pencil stuck behind his left ear and a Gauloise between his lips. He must have been there for several minutes and he was watching him and Estival, much more than he was listening to them. N’Zo Nikiema recognized Pierre Castaneda. He had come a few days earlier to visit his father, accompanied by Jean-Luc Dardenne.

  Nikiema said hello with a little wave. He knew, however, that that wasn’t done.

  Later, Castaneda had to admit to him, “I liked your nerve, but the others found you quite arrogant. Some of them were furious. The boss had to use his weight so that you were taken in spite of it.”

  Thinking about that several decades later, he was still staggered by the foreigners’ arrogance. After their long occupation of the country, they had more or less gone back home. But before they left they’d forgotten to explain why it was such a grave offense to greet them from afar, even politely.

  Another question whose answer I’ll never know, he said to himself, following Estival with his eyes. The latter headed toward one of his compatriots, who was playing ping-pong with a boy about ten years old—clearly his son. Estival said a few words to him and both turned toward Nikiema. The man, tan like all the Whites in the company, in his paunchy fifties, didn’t appear very interested in Jacques Estival’s words and went back to his ping-pong game. One of the young slender women, an orange towel around her waist, went to join the two players. The sunglasses resting on her forehead gave her a very chic look. She must have seen that in a fashion magazine, thought N’Zo Nikiema. She played ball girl and each time she bent down, you could clearly see the outline of her black panties on her tight buttocks for a few seconds. He saw right through everything that was false in the gestures of the woman in the orange towel. As often happens with people on vacation in the tropics, forcing her laughter and jumping around like a little girl, she attempted to convince herself that she was enjoying wonderful family time among half-savage people who had no history, far from the dullness of her country. They stopped the game from time to time to talk low enough that he couldn’t even hear the timbre of their voices. Their lips formed words. Just like on TV sometimes, when you watch a film and decide to mute the sound.

  Pierre Castaneda sat down across from him. They observed one another in silence, no doubt to size each other up, but maybe above all out of curiosity. They were a little intimidated, like couples who see each other after many years of divorce, each one trying to guess how the other had lived without them. Castaneda’s face was impenetrable and he had the same prying eyes. N’Zo Nikiema was nevertheless reassured that he didn’t sense any aggressiveness in him. Having to wait alone for him at Lil Black’s was humiliation enough. He was not in favor of putting up with more.

  “You see, nothing has changed,” said Castaneda, running his fingers across the table’s surface.

  N’Zo Nikiema kept quiet, annoyed. He didn’t want to pretend he’d come to the Belvedere Complex for a banal visit just to be courteous. “I’d like us to get right to the point,” he said. His voice was a little more distant than he’d have liked.

  Castaneda seemed to reflect for a long time and then shook his head. “Do you know why I asked you to come here?”

  “That’s not important anymore, Pierre. I’m here, that’s all.”

  At that moment, N’Zo Nikiema sensed just how much he despised himself. He was tense, his voice lacked confidence, and he was avoiding Castaneda’s eyes. His coffee was getting cold and he didn’t dare touch it for fear of seeing his hand tremble.

  “We can sort things out,” Castaneda said suddenly. “You can avoid war in your country.”

  He felt a little shock in his chest. What was Castaneda cooking up? “I came to see you to hear out your proposals.”

  “You came to see me because everything is lost, Niko,” Castaneda said dryly.

  He was struck by Castaneda’s tone, suddenly colder, more insolent. Swallowing all his pride, Nikiema declared, “This country needs us both.”

  Castaneda threw himself back, his arms crossed. “You wouldn’t have spoken like that if your little dealings had worked out in Latin America. You wanted weapons, but you didn’t have anything more to pay with. Your coffers have been empty for a long time.”

  Cutting to the quick, N’Zo Nikiema suddenly said forcefully, “No one has the right to speak to me like that.”

  A few clients turned toward them. Nikiema’s eyes met those of the young server, who was bringing a little bottle of Marwa for Castaneda, and he lowered his head.

  Castaneda looked sorry and after a moment said, “It would be a shame to tear each other apart in public. Time to finish our drinks and we’ll discuss as we walk. That work for you?”

  He acquiesced discreetly. Castaneda was throwing him a line, anyway. He was the head of state and making a spectacle of himself wouldn’t earn him anything. He wasn’t wrong, however: that magnanimity was that of the victor.

  They were both pretty good actors and they managed to speak with ease about this and that. They reminisced about the Blue Lizard together. Ta’Mim had died a few years earlier, bedridden and penniless. Castaneda informed him that he had quit smoking and drinking but sometimes treated himself and got majorly plastered. Nikiema was about to tease him: “Yeah, you’ve always thought that alcohol would help you get your whores.” He didn’t, though. Both of them knew very well that this final meeting came at a very bad time and that certain lines could not be crossed. They brought up the Kingdom of Nimba in an almost relaxed way. A little while after independence, they’d done away with all the government positions known to be traditional. Each of them, without too many regrets, had thus accepted losing his royal title.

  “It’s been a long time since you’ve been in Nimba,” Castaneda said.

  “Much too long, yes.”

  Actually, N’Zo Nikiema was almost forbidden to stay in Nimba. Both of them knew it was a delicate subject and they stood up to start walking.

  It was nearly dusk, and it started getting a little cool. They moved into a large sandy alley lined with fruit trees—mandarin, pomegranate, orange, and so on—as far as the eye could see. Their foliage, a somber green, was in some cases covered in red sand. A large part of the complex had become an orchard, making Belvedere an oasis of peace and happiness.

  “It’s a real passion now, and I’m trying all sorts of crossbreeding with fruits from the Antilles or even Australia.”

  “And it works?” Nikiema asked, incredulous.

  “Not really. But we just hired a young agronomist engineer. A hyperintelligent guy. He’s going make a little miracle, I can feel it.”

  Cars were forbidden in the area, and the two men almost didn’t meet any other living soul. At the other end of the long alley, about a hundred yards away, they could only see the Cogemin workers going back home or watching an evening soccer match. Most of the young executives behind the wheels of cars with the black eagle were Africans. He made a comment about it to Castaneda, who proudly gave him the example of the financial services. “You remember, in your time you were the only black guy over there. Today, out of more than a hundred positions, there are only about fifty French guys.”

  “Things happened very quickly,” Nikiema admitted.

  For a moment, Nikiema might have felt that he was a normal head of state getting overzealous explanations from a factory director in a town deep inside the country. Castaneda insisted on clarifying, however: “I am sure that you know there are fewer expatriates in the company, but they hold the most important positions. I know my Africans too well; I’m not going to trust them with the keys to the safe! Who’s that crazy, right? As our Ivoria
n friends say.”

  He had always heard Castaneda happily accept that type of racist talk. In the palace, when he was angry, he treated his collaborators like monkeys with glasses. Nikiema was surprised to notice that he himself had never taken offense at such insults. Now he couldn’t even react. Castaneda would have simply shrugged his shoulders. Nikiema couldn’t hide it from himself: his whole life, he’d behaved like a flunky with Castaneda. It wasn’t the time to put on airs and graces. It was time to pay.

  “Now that we’re alone,” said Castaneda, “I’m going to talk to you.”

  “What are you expecting from me, Pierre? For a while now, I’ve been trying to figure out what’s in your head . . .”

  “I advise you to disappear. That’s all.”

  His voice trembling, not out of anger but out of fear, Nikiema said, “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s simple. One morning, people wake up and the president is no longer there. I can give you some time to prepare yourself. Three weeks. A month. Maybe two . . .”

  Nikiema found the strength to forge a slight smile. “What happens then?”

  “Nothing. I’ll be able to help you out from time to time. I’m not promising anything.”

  He almost managed to be ironic. “Really? You don’t want to promise anything, is that right? Not even one or two billion?”

  “You’re wrong to joke about it. Listen to me: it’s about knowing who’s the strongest. And it’s me. Remember what we used to say: only imbeciles go through the trouble of thinking things over. The two of us were too smart to take the time to think. Do you remember?” He waved his finger around, toward an imaginary point in front of them. “There are obstacles ahead of us: we jump over them or we walk around them . . .”