Kaveena

by Boubacar Boris Diop

  “. . . Or we fire into the crowd,” N’Zo Nikiema finished. That was our credo, he thought bitterly. Two real action men, unshakable and effective. “I know that that was our credo. And after that? This country is mine, Pierre.” However hard he tried, he couldn’t manage a hint of warmth in his voice or any conviction.

  “Get out of here and don’t talk about it anymore,” Castaneda went on, getting seriously infuriated. “Look at yourself! You’re at the end of your rope. You have a chance, take it. I won’t give you another one.”

  Night had fallen. The insects were circling around the streetlights. They stopped near a long gray building. Nikiema read a sign: “Test garden. Experimental station.” Huge metallic engines—plows, he thought—were scattered around. The odor of manure, right next to them, was bothering his nostrils. He turned to Castaneda. “This country is mine, Pierre, and I will fight until the end. And you want me to tell you? I am the strongest. You’ve never understood this: whatever you’re able to do, you are and you will always be a foreigner among us.”

  He couldn’t say where his strength suddenly came from. He saw Castaneda go pale. His cheekbones trembled as they did each time he got this angry. Nikiema had aimed accurately. He knew where to hit to make it hurt.

  “I am ashamed for you,” said Castaneda. “You think you can make this war with a videocassette? A little dead girl years ago, what’s that worth? What’s a little Negress worth, huh?”

  N’Zo Nikiema retorted sarcastically, “You’re the one talking about it. I haven’t uttered Kaveena’s name even once.”

  Castaneda let out a little nervous laugh. N’Zo Nikiema understood that everything had just ended between them at that very moment.

  Cheers rung out to their left. One of the teams must have just scored a goal. A brown insect—Nikiema wondered if it was a winged ant or a mosquito—stood still for a few seconds on Castaneda’s forehead. He swatted it away with his hand, then shot daggers from his eyes into N’Zo Nikiema’s. “Listen,” he said, “I knew that our meeting would be difficult. I’ve often wondered over these last days if we were going to behave like old accomplices who are a little mad or like two rams rubbing their horns together before battle. Neither of those two attitudes appealed to me. I’ve been telling myself, ‘Young people are going to die for us, and a few days before that we’re going to be laughing remembering the time when we were living it up at the Blue Lizard and elsewhere?’ That seemed obscene to me. On the other hand, you and I have passed the age when we’re all talk. And actually, that’s why I too was determined to see you.”

  Pierre Castaneda’s voice was unusually calm. Later, alone in the small house, N’Zo Nikiema thought about it again many times. The words that were coming out of Castaneda’s mouth were violent, vulgar, hateful even, but his voice was beyond anger, friendship, or any other human sentiment. Undoubtedly they’d never felt so naked face to face. In the end, all their old passions and all their crimes were for nothing. Before they even had their war, both of them were defeated. Pierre Castaneda was talking about a faraway world, without raising his voice even once: “I’m going to remind you of this: this country is yours, but for a long time I’ve been its master. It’s entirely up to me to be its president. I never changed nationalities. I am French. French from France, you hear me? But here, no one gives a damn. There may be some teeth-grinding among some, but believe me, people will quickly forget. Your philosophers will say, ‘It’s globalization, you see, anybody can be president of any country. Once again our great nation gives a lesson in tolerance to the rest of humanity, and may no one tell us that this man is white—careful, no racism, that’s what is written at the entrance to the Global Village.’ Bullshit. Blah, blah, blah, there you go. These people are my little dogs, Niko; I’ve always been the hand that feeds them. Yesterday Hortense Dupaquier was the Queen Mother of Nimba—she will become the First Lady. Everyone will fawn over her. Talk to me about a proud people, my dear Niko! They chase you out of every country on earth, they throw you in every ocean into the mouths of sharks so you are not even capable of saying, ‘We are at least our own masters at home!’ All those lusty fellows, turned away at all the borders in the world, insulted, treated like black locusts in Morocco, dirty Negroes in Spain, well, back in Maren they won’t hesitate to kneel down before a white woman and kiss her feet! And the white woman in question, my wife, is a real stupid cow, if you’ll allow me to reveal this distressing family secret. Hortense Dupaquier is a total imbecile!

  “Let me tell you something else, my dear N’Zo Nikiema. A few years back, your father made me the king of Nimba. I didn’t give a damn but it worked out well for my company. So I played the game. To the end. Former Pierre the First of Nimba, great reformer before the Everlasting! Sustainable development and all that. You must be joking. A few months later, I brought you to my little town, over in Haute-Savoie. You never knew anything about it, but for a long time after you left, people threatened unruly kids that they’d be served as food for the black at the Castanedas’! You understand?”

  Castaneda asked his question again, then paused momentarily, his eyes still fixed on N’Zo Nikiema. The latter thought for a moment that Castaneda was waiting for a reaction from him, but quickly understood it was nothing. No doubt it calmed Castaneda, in some way, to talk like that standing up as night fell. He didn’t even seem to be addressing him. In any case, what could Nikiema respond? He totally agreed with Pierre Castaneda. He recognized himself in each of his sentences. And he knew it too: if he had the urge to say his four truths to Castaneda, Castaneda could do nothing but listen to him in silence. In that, their complicity remained intact. And perhaps they’d never even been friends so deeply as they were at that moment.

  “Do you remember,” Castaneda went on, “that guy who came one night to Montparnasse, Belvedere’s cine-club, with his film under his arm? A real pistol no less, that highbrow so-called proletarian, with his pipe and his striped cap like Colonel Asante Kroma’s. He had demanded that our workers be present in the movie theater to see his film, otherwise we could go to hell. He had character anyway, yeah! Before the screening, he’d treated us like monstrous colonialists, he said we were going to be swept away by the wind of the revolution, et cetera. Fine, that was nothing. For me it was just talk. But at the end of his film, there’s a scene where all the beggars in the city surround the main character. The latter is a rich businessman. He’s completely naked, and the lepers, the clubfeet, the hunchbacks, the blind, all those people hurl heavy wads of spit and pus at him as they insult him profusely. His wife and two children are there, they watch it and can’t do anything. The director then explained, ‘It was a purification ritual—that man betrayed his people, so they had to humiliate him like that in order to cure him.’

  “Well, the character in question was a guy like you. He was sticking out his chest claiming to have kicked us out, us the colonizers, after a long heroic struggle. A real bastard, in fact. He had been all for us and continued to love us madly. He loved our great wines, the little shaded streets of Paris, de Gaulle’s Appeal on the eighteenth of June, and all the rest. A dirty pleasure-seeker, too. Beautiful women and whiskey. At the time, I’d been disgusted by the image of his nude body covered in vomit. But these last two years, when it started to heat up between you and me, that scene hasn’t ceased to haunt me. And today I believe that the filmmaker was right: those of you who’ve always been at the top in the African countries, you sell off your brothers cheaply to us, like old scrap iron. It’s as simple as that. And if I’ve understood correctly, you sell off your brothers to us out of pure hospitality. In the end, the foreigner mustn’t lack anything. One more lie.

  “You, for example, convinced yourself that we were friends and you put yourself at my disposal. I don’t know why, but you’ve always done everything I’ve wanted. That doesn’t make any sense. We can be friends, OK, fine. But to what extent? I have never lost sight of my country’s interests, nor those of my company. I could have taken you down a
t any moment if I sensed any threat to those interests. And I’d have done it as a friend—that goes without saying. That’s how life is, and I’m surprised that you seem to have had doubts about that. You have a serious problem in your head here! Do you even know what a merciless world we all live in? I’ve often wondered: so why are they like that? You’re always talking about the Global Village, but you’re ready to slit children’s throats from the neighboring villages under the most crazy pretexts. And when strangers come from far away, you lie down at their feet, you sing, you dance for them, and I play the drum for you and I throw you up in the air and I shout wild screams at you, things like, I am a black man, I’m not like anybody, I know a thing or two about rhythm, I’ve got plenty of it in my blood! You don’t see that we don’t have anything to do with your rhythm? Why should your brothers dance for me? I come from a place that’s called elsewhere. You hear, Niko? Elsewhere, that’s to say almost from nowhere, it’s so far and so different.

  “The truth is, my dear Niko, you are your father’s son. He had given us Whites all the land we wanted, for a few cases of bad alcohol. And you, ever since you moved into the palace, you confirmed that infamy with Nimba’s Protocol Two-Twelve. Didn’t you know what you were doing? You condemned your own people to starvation. The children of these people relied on you for their health and for their education, and you, you never thought of anything but your own personal comfort. You would do anything to maintain that power. You’re both sick, your father and you. Before, we used to call you the civilized ones. What’s your new name? Doesn’t matter. You dream of becoming Whites, you dream of our love, and no matter what you used to say, everything from your homeland brings you shame.

  “And since we will never see each other again, let me tell you a little story, Nikiema. Last October one of our little youth, fresh off the boat from Mulhouse, said to me, ‘This continent is an insane asylum.’ I replied to him, ‘Say what you want, but then it’s an upside-down asylum . . .’ He opened his eyes wide and asked me what I meant by that. Here’s what I said to him: ‘In this asylum, the only crazy ones are the psychiatrists! They wear white coats and thick glasses, they solemnly question the sick and prescribe medicine, but they are the only crazy ones!’ To listen to you, famine and corruption keep you from sleeping, you, the elites of this continent. In fact, the only problem is you. And that filmmaker, once again, was so right! You know, my dear Niko, we’ve killed many people together. But you don’t seem to have noticed: we’ve never killed a white man together, we’ve only killed your brothers. Abel Murigande. Prieto da Souza. The ten kids from Nimba who’d had enough of our disgraceful masquerade. The hundreds of millions of others massacred by our dogs of war and later by Colonel Asante Kroma. All those who refused to bow down. Now you treat me like a foreigner. Too easy. What can that really do to me? And the lame guy with the sunglasses, who found it shocking that you and your father made Fomba lie, maybe I wasn’t a stranger when you were smiling as you watched me strangle him on the banks of the Kartani? And then you slit his head open?”

  N’Zo Nikiema watched with amazement as Castaneda mimed the gesture of strangling someone with his hands, his jaw clenched, his face suddenly all red. That was the only time it had seemed to him that Castaneda had lost his cold-bloodedness.

  “I don’t have to answer you,” he said.

  “I know. But I wanted you to hear all that once and for all.”

  Pierre Castaneda followed him with his eyes in a gesture of defiance that seemed absurd to him and, maybe more than anything, uncalled for. For a few seconds, Nikiema could only pull at the skin of his neck, pinching it between the index finger and thumb of his right hand. That often happened to him when he didn’t know what to do or what to say.

  “I believe it’s time to go.”

  He’d almost said, “Well, then, adieu, Pierre.” That would’ve been quite theatrical. Luckily, he’d pulled himself together at the last moment.

  “About that little girl Kaveena . . . ,” Castaneda said.

  Nikiema was surprised to see that Castaneda was less and less able to control himself. That story troubles you terribly, my man, he thought.

  “Yes . . . ?”

  “You’ll have to manage to win the war.”

  He smiled reluctantly. “Of course. The little girl’s murderer is the only loser. Is that what you were going to say to me?”

  Castaneda didn’t respond.

  They said goodbye to one another with a quick wave and each went his own way. When he was about twenty yards away, Nikiema turned around and saw Castaneda slip onto a path that he hadn’t noticed before. Most probably a shortcut. For a few seconds Castaneda’s shirt shined in the light of the streetlamps among the orange and coconut trees, and then he disappeared.

  The big march on July 21 Boulevard happened a little while after their meeting in Ndunga. For Castaneda, the reader may recall, it was the opportunity for a real demonstration of force. By the following week, a little commando was launching an attack against Sereti’s barracks.

  That was the beginning of the civil war.

  Woke up with a bitter aftertaste in my mouth.

  All night long the same words resonated in my head. I can’t remember what the words were. “Mwashah” is on the radio. With my eyes half-closed, as if in a dream I see a caravan moving through the desert. Suddenly Hamza El Din’s voice stops. Someone says, “Dear listeners, stay tuned. We’ve just received some important news.”

  I hear my heart beating. Has someone discovered and surrounded the small house without my knowledge?

  It was nothing, really. Some workers uncovered a mass grave above the Satellite. Castaneda and President Mwanke went over to the site right away. They’re disturbed by what they’ve seen. Instruments of torture from another time. Heaps of corpses of women and children. Luckily, it’s a bygone age; the Tyrant has been rendered harmless. The Tyrant: me, N’Zo Nikiema. But I’m hardly concerned. The most trifling words push me, like so many discreet and powerful impulses, far from the present.

  Among a thousand flaccid memories, I search for anchorage points. But only insignificant details emerge, unexpectedly, from my past. For a man being hunted down like I am, the future doesn’t mean anything in the end.

  I asked him his name. The man’s eyes lit up but he didn’t answer. Then I understood he was waiting for me. The vagina of nothingness. I had the urge to repeat those four words. In vain. My strength was leaving me. It was too late. The history of nations is not a narrative full of fantasy and elegant swag. It is not written backward. It does not begin with the end.

  Mansare had told me that.

  Coming through the door of the small house, I’ve often found you listening to bossa nova. Almost always the same track: “The Girl from Ipanema.” In the beginning, I had a hunch that that melody expressed Kaveena’s pain. It made you more human. I thought, a little girl martyred. It’s happening in Brazil or not far from there. Although the song seemed so cheerful to me.

  As time progressed, I understood: a love story.

  In the end I reveled in the slightly airy melancholy. Little by little it had become the echo of my internal rhythms. I often wanted to ask you why you liked that song by Moraes so much. Is it a part of your life? I don’t know anything about bossa nova. I imagine a young man pacing up and down one of those long beaches suitable for more or less fatal passions. The women are so beautiful there. No doubt she’d wrapped up all her sensuality in a bikini with pink and blue flowers, perhaps also a pair of Ray-Bans with yellow frames that were curiously aggressive and chic resting delicately on her nose. Years earlier, a shadow had passed close by him, swaying her hips. And he’d been haunted day and night by the memory of a woman he’d never seen.

  My end is near. I reexamined my career and its holes with gaping shadows. A succession of abortions.

  My life has not been well lived after all. The ideal has passed me by: to have never lived. Yes, this would have been the best thing to happen to me: nothing. De
finitely the most beautiful of dreams.

  I’m surprised there are so few photos of Kaveena hanging on the walls. There are drafts of your portraits lying around all over your studio. You never told me this but I’m convinced that you became an artist so that you could paint your child. I imagine how far back in your memory you have to go. It’s far and painful.

  I was struck by the power of one of those unfinished paintings. Each time I stop in front of it, it opens up a vast emptiness underneath my feet. Kaveena dares me to face her. The oil drawing, placed on a chair, is covered in dust. It’s clear that it had been based on a photo. Yesterday I thought about bringing it down to the basement. I know I’ll never do it.

  You drew little Kaveena carefully, probably for months. She’s three years old with chubby cheeks. She’s lying on her stomach, her eyes closed. A light brown teddy bear with a black snout and red eyes is wrapped in a pagne tied to her little back. Kaveena fell asleep sucking her right thumb. You can see she was a pampered child. I imagine you photographing her while she was sleeping. You activate the flash with a triumphant little smile. There’s an indefinable glimmer in your eyes. You stay silent for a moment, as if fascinated by so much grace and innocence. A moment of affection stolen each time destiny played its dirty tricks.

  In Tomorrow’s Times’ very first articles, they referred to your daughter by her initials.

  Nothing then indicated that the Kaveena case would take on such magnitude. The reporter had written his text with a certain casualness. He was outraged and definitely wasn’t entirely putting on an act. It just seemed to me that his anger came more from a professional reflex than from an authentic human sentiment.

  It was a classic situation.

  People in high places commit a heinous crime, and a journalist talks about it in an outraged tone that is accepted in a democracy and promises that, according to his sources, the investigation will not stop there. And the investigation stops there. All the articles in Kaveena’s case had the ring of a sort of deaf resignation to injustice. The ends of the months must have been tough for the young reporter. In order to survive, he really had to forget Kaveena. Besides, our country has never been one where the murder of a six-year-old child can cause much trouble for a man as powerful as Pierre Castaneda.