Human Love

by Andrei Makine

  Perhaps it was the expensiveness of their suits that caused me to take off. Whenever I find myself among these “fat-cat Africans of the international conference circuit,” I am truly amazed at the fine quality of their clothes. Just now outside the elevator it was the same astonishment, derived, no doubt, from the years of my own ragged youth long ago: What does it cost, a suit like that? A thousand dollars? More? My surprise was not new, but this time I sensed that a reaction was called for. I made for the back stairs.

  The theme of the conference they are taking part in is sustainable development in Africa (our symposium is no more than a free cultural sideshow tacked on to these weighty deliberations). They had spent the afternoon in polishing their terminology: when referring to famine should one speak of “extreme poverty” or “absolute poverty”? “Undernourishment” or “malnutrition”? A good question, because aid and budgets will hinge on which terms are used. Later on, following a protracted dinner, these experts went streaming toward the elevators, laughing with the sibilant and liquid resonance of tipsy African voices, slapping one another’s palms, as if congratulating one another on a good joke. I studied their suits, of the finest wool, and the backs of their heads, which sloped down, via rolls of flesh, onto thick necks. I knew that in Africa, more than anywhere else, real life loves the grotesque. “Malnutrition,” “absolute poverty,” and those necks! Even the most fiercely radical journalist would not have dared to invent such a shocking contrast. And yet … Imagining these gleaming necks all around me in the elevator, multiplied by the mirrors, I felt nauseated, I fled.

  And now I am punished, condemned to wait for a sexual act to come to fruition. From my hiding place I can just see the face of the woman crouching on all fours; her eyes are half closed, her lower jaw hangs down, revealing her tongue and teeth.

  The swift mosaic of memory suddenly brings back the past of twenty-five years ago. A woman raped by soldiers, myself a prisoner, unable to move, waiting … The kaleidoscope of life replicates that night long ago in northern Angola but transforms it into farce: a plump female, the organizer of the “cultural program,” is being serviced by a young painter from Kinshasa for whom she will mount an exhibition in Paris or Brussels. While I am held prisoner between two pots of bougainvillea. I try to find it funny History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Even our own petty personal histories do it …

  In the bed the woman is now lying on top of the man. She is the one doing the work; her legs can be seen heaving rhythmically. The panting grows louder; the moment of my release is at hand. I stand up, ready to leap. Then the telephone rings; the rules of vaudeville are observed right to the end. The bodies wriggling as they extricate themselves from their embrace, the woman gasping: “Sh!” Her slight cough as she tries to adopt a plausible tone of voice. Out of breath, she picks up the phone. “Hullo, Christian. Yes, it’s me. No, I haven’t been running. It’s just so hot here. You’ve no idea. Whew! Apart from that, nothing special to report, really We’re slaving away from dawn till dusk, and as usual, no one’s satisfied … Is Delphine all right? Put her on. It’s Mama, Delphinette … No, sweetheart, I haven’t seen any elephants yet. Next time. When you come here with Mama …”

  I ran into them at Roissy before the flight. Christian, the husband, who had driven his wife to the airport, reminded me of a certain photograph: a pale, thin man, an old soldier marching along a muddy road. There was an element of old-fashioned ingenuousness in his look, of resignation in that drooping mustache. He had their daughter with him, the six-year-old Delphine, and while waiting at the check-in, he had talked to me about this child, “a late arrival,” and their twenty-two-year-old son. His wife was rushing about in the throng of conference guests, checking tickets, making calls on her cell phone. “She works like crazy,” Christian said to me, looking at me with his gray, unbearably honest eyes. “I don’t know how she survives — all these trips to Africa!” The child, lost in a reverie, was setting out a row of little plastic figures on a bench. Her lips were whispering an inaudible rigmarole. She looked like a little girl from bygone days with her fair pigtail, her lace collar.

  “I love you, sweetheart. Night-night. Let me talk to Daddy…. Look, Christian, if they haven’t made the transfer by the fifteenth, send them a note by recorded delivery and let’s see what happens … Right. I’ll call you tomorrow. I’ve got a report to write now for the delegate general. Kiss, kiss. Sleep well.” She hangs up and remains sitting on the bed for a moment, scratching her shoulder and yawning repeatedly. The man starts fiddling with the remote control, selects a football match, then changes to videos of music with a strong beat. The woman presses against him, kisses his nipples, slides toward his belly. He changes channels.

  A concert. Handel, I think. The woman lifts her head, her mouth half open. The same mouth, I suddenly say to myself, that in a few days’ time will be kissing Delphinette, that little girl with the fair pigtail …

  It is hard for the lovemaking to get started again. Desire has run into the sand. The woman swings heavily off the bed, makes her way toward the bathroom. Her bulk had struck me earlier as reminiscent of mozzarella. No. More like soap, very white, very lardy. Or Turkish delight. Her thick, dyed hair is the color of beets. A round face, with little watchful eyes. She is a sow, plain and simple. And yet nothing is simple. Christian, Delphinette … The bathroom door closes. The man stands in front of the television. He has gone back to the videos, swaying in imitation of the dancers’ apelike antics. I get up, slither in between the thick branches of a shrub, stretch out on my own terrace.

  The southern sky. And there, above the harbor, that constellation, Lupus, the Wolf …

  For a long time now the only logic in my life has been the play of coincidence, sometimes tragic, sometimes comic. As just now, when that memory of twenty-five years ago, a night of great fear in the forests of Lunda Norte, suddenly found its farcical echo: this elegant hotel in an African capital and myself captive outside the French windows of a bedroom where a fat white administrator is getting herself seen to by a young black artist. He has just stepped outside for a smoke, and from my terrace I can see his figure silhouetted against the wall.

  In my youth I believed history was set in its path, and that our lives ought to be a committed response to this. I thought good and evil existed, and that the struggle between them in the modern world took the form of the class struggle. And that one should choose sides, help the weak and poor (which was precisely what I believed when, still a young man, I came to Angola), and that ones life, even if unhappy and painful, would then have a justification and follow a coherent course, structured from one phase to the next. Set down thus, all this seems somewhat naïve, and yet I lived for years guided by this naïveté. And I can no longer even remember at what moment, to put it pompously, I lost faith. The simple truth is that one day what I began to discern behind the great laws of history, the noble causes, the high-flown rhetoric, was the mischievous play of coincidence, a sly, mocking law. For this is the only logic there is: twenty-five years apart, a black woman raped by soldiers, a white woman screwed by a black man. And there outside the elevator another coincidence, a Congolese diplomat with the smooth trace of an ancient scar on his cheek, like the one on that sergeants face long ago.

  A still more distant recollection comes to mind, that very first image of Africa in a children’s book: a dismembered elephant, its enormous head trampled by a white hunters boot, the trunk, the feet, the torso, surrounded by smiling and almost naked black men. I remember the unease inspired in me by the thoroughly technical aspect of this butchery. Yes, a great body transformed into a pile of meat, from which everyone will carve himself a slice. Later on, Africa itself would often remind me of that great animal cut in pieces by human predators.

  “We’re launching a program of subsidy for African illustrators. Ill try to get you included in the project.” Now the two lovers are sitting on their terrace. The organizers voice is languid, lazy, that of
a woman physically gratified, eager to please the man who has fulfilled her. I feel the same nausea as earlier outside the elevator. And violent disgust, not with these two but with myself. During the session that afternoon I should have stood up and spoken about those suits of theirs, or at least the fat on their necks. Yes, I should simply have said: “There will be wars, famines, and epidemics on this soil of Africa, gentlemen, for as long as you have those rolls of fat on the backs of your necks.” And later I should have walked up to the room next door and said, “There is in this world, madame, a six-year-old child, Delphinette, your daughter, whom you will shortly be kissing with the very same lips that are now sucking on this erect black penis.”

  I smile bitterly. Twenty-five years ago I should have been capable of speaking like that. I still believed in the struggle between good and evil. Now this believer no longer exists. The tricks of coincidence are cruel, for they confront us with what we once were and make us realize how little of us is left. There is nothing left in me of the person who in darkness snapped the wires on the wrists of a man on the brink of death. Elias Almeida.

  Except, perhaps, this memory, twenty-five years old. At about two thirty in the morning, the noise around our hut fell away; the soldiers, weary of carousing, raping, and partying (I discovered then that war could be a party, too), turned in for the night. Elias stood up and invited me to step outside our prison, as if it had been a holiday villa. He addressed a few firm, calm, trenchant words to the guard pointing his submachine gun at us. And the scorn for death in his voice was such that the soldier lowered his gun and remained rooted to the spot. The moon cast a blue luminescence over a few empty crates, an old car wheel, and what I at first took to be a pile of rags. It was the body of the Zairean woman. By now I had learned why the soldiers were so intent on rummaging in her mouth.

  “You dont know the southern sky yet, my friend,” Elias said to me. “Look. Up there is my favorite constellation. The Wolf.”

  THE WOMAN HELD HER PEACE because she had had time to conceal in her mouth a handful of tiny diamonds, given to her by a digger. This traffic in these frontier zones of Lunda Norte is constant. But when the soldiers made to snatch her treasure from her after the rape, she resisted. They killed her, and the sergeant retrieved the granules, which were ugly, as rough diamonds often are, without any risk of being bitten.

  Ellas explained the scenario to me, but, thus demystified, did it become any less harsh, less absurd? Any easier to comprehend?

  Nothing was comprehensible that night. Not even the fear. That came later, when I relived those hours in cold blood, giving myself time to be terrified by the idea of one danger or another. And to punish the young man who had set out to strip a corpse, I would exaggerate my cowardice. The shame of having tried to steal that pen was to haunt me for years.

  Much more dangerous for us than the soldiers, if the truth be told, was that drunk and drugged youth who from time to time stuck his head in at the window of our hut and threatened us with his gun. He was not a boy soldier; it was at the start of the following decade that those juvenile warriors spread everywhere. No, he was just an orphan, adopted by the unit like a young stray animal. His show of being a little bully boy amused the fighting men. He had picked up an old gas mask, who knows where, and from time to time, as dusk fell, this hideous countenance would appear at our window. The glass in the mask was broken, and all that was left of the respirator was a short tube, a kind of sawn-off elephant’s trunk. We could see dark eyes, cloudy with alcohol and hemp, a grimace of hatred that would suddenly be transformed into the smile of a weary, sick child. He took aim at us, tossing his extraterrestrial’s head, targeting first one, then the other, and uttering a yell that faded away into a long drowsy whisper, then he disappeared. For a time we would hear his howls moving off among the trees. His voice bore a curious resemblance to the high-pitched and desperate tones of the Zairean woman. Two or three times I even thought she was coming back to life again, before realizing my mistake.

  For a while I kept an eye on the youth’s comings and goings through the camp. He was not there when the soldiers were poking about in the dead woman’s mouth. Perhaps he had collapsed somewhere under the trees. He came later, saw the motionless body, doubtless thought the woman was summoning up her strength after being violated or else sleeping. He shook his gun at her to frighten her and assaulted her, imitating the soldiers, grasped her breasts, parted her thighs. And got up again at once, peered at his fingers, holding them up to the light that came from the tents, then to the moon. From the doorway of our hut the soldier guarding us called out to him mockingly The youth knelt down and began rubbing his hands on the ground. A moment later, rigged out in his mask again, he returned to threaten us at the window more aggressively than before. I was engaged in biting through the rope that bound Elias s ankles. I felt him tensing, as if he had sensed that this time the youth might really shoot. He sat up and spoke very softly, as if remembering a forgotten story. The youth answered him, removed the mask. When he had gone, Elias murmured: “His father was executed two years ago — by our beloved president, Comrade Neto. Whose valiant and faithful servant I am. Youll see. Nothings simple here in Africa.”

  All through my life I have encountered Africa experts who could explain everything. I would listen to them, aware of my own ignorance. But the truth is, I have never been able to rid myself of the incomprehension that arose in me that night in Lunda Norte. Perhaps this confusion was also one way of understanding. At least it enabled me to purge my hatred of that drunken child who took aim at me, smiled at me, and was quite capable of shooting me, to silence the grief that dwelt in him.

  In twenty-five years I have found no place among our fine theories for that young human being, who had already raped and killed, and who often peers at me in my dreams through the broken window of his gas mask. No, I have never claimed to understand Africa.

  The taste of the wet rope still lingered on my tongue as Elias stood up, teetered, and made his way toward the door. I had just freed his ankles. Yes, the taste of the rope, the blood, the tormented flesh. With a few incisive words he waved aside the guard and, tilting his head back, murmured: Tve always felt this southern sky was very close to us. Perhaps because I was born beneath its stars. Look up there. That’s my favorite constellation: the Wolf.”

  He must have sensed that in my young head, shattered by Africa, the world was being reduced to the corpse of a woman engorged by the pleasuring of men.

  Having arrived during the night, the Cuban units attacked at the first gray light of dawn. At this drowsy and misty hour (as I was to observe one day in a firefight at Mavinga) the men who kill and those who are killed resemble ghosts; as they slip away into death, it seems less abrupt, a soft descent, a shape, a life, being rubbed out as if by an eraser.

  Excellent fighters, these Cubans! The cordon was watertight; the advance of small commando units, covering one another in turn, was rapid and controlled, like an attacking maneuver on a sports field. When their voices could be heard near our prison, Elias called out to them in Spanish, The military instructor, who had woken up, yelled in Russian. The door opened, and by the ashen light of dawn reality began to permeate the nights phantasmagoria. Two Soviet military advisers who had taken part in the assault came and joined us. Fresh water had the impact of an antidote. A doctor gave us injections redolent of the sterilized cleanliness of a hospital. The world of the living was reasserting itself, banishing the void. And among the trees the prisoners were burying the dead. The instructor spoke a comical Russo-Hispano-Portuguese lingo, to the amusement of the soldiers surrounding him. The spicy aroma of canned meat hung on the air and gave me a pleasant knot in my stomach.

  I saw Elias a little apart, where, under the supervision of a soldier, two prisoners, detailed as gravediggers, were busy I walked over, glanced into the grave they were filling. At the bottom of the same pit, a woman’s body in her torn clothes, one breast bared, riddled with bullets, and, pressed up against her,
lying on his side in a very lifelike pose of abandon, the youth, still wearing his gas mask. I was on the point of asking them to let me undo the rubber from his face, but the rhythmic fall of shovelfuls of reddish earth had already covered the two bodies almost completely. “It doesn’t matter,” murmured Elias, and drew me toward the camp. I thought his “doesn’t matter” was a rather hasty way of sparing me a pointless gesture, one pain too many. But as he walked along he added in more resolute tones: “If there’s nothing beyond all this, then men are no more than ants, chewing, copulating, and killing one another. In that case nothing matters. And they can bury this kid without removing his carnival toy. Yes. If there’s nothing beyond all this … To be certain a woman’s not just a lump of meat that’ll rot beneath the red earth, you need to love well.”

  It was perhaps the only time I ever heard the word love on his lips, love in the sense of falling in love, being head over heels in love. Some years later we met in Kinshasa, and that evening he told me again about the train that had carried them, him and his beloved, through endless white forests. He was already aware of all that separated them and all that threatened his own life, divided between wars, revolutions, and games of espionage. But his voice was serene, almost joyful. He said he would have given everything just for the scent of the cold that clung to the dress of the woman he loved. They were getting back onto the train after a halt in the taiga at night, and for a few moments, amid the warmth of the compartment, he could detect this fragrance of snow on the gray wool of her dress. “I would have gone through G-2 again for it,” he murmured, leaning closer and smiling at me. This was the Zairean detention camp where he had been horribly tortured. Men were generally broken there within a few weeks. It was then that I thought I understood the “beyond all this” he had spoken of beside the pit where they were burying the diamond carrier and the masked child. Understood, too, why it was love that made the world matter, without which we should be no more than insects hurrying to take our pleasures, masticate, and die.