Human Love

by Andrei Makine

  … It is the moment of leavetaking on the terrace next door. The lovers arrange to meet tomorrow, to go dancing at the Nirvana, the best club in town, according to the artist. The woman, the organizer, has it all planned: “They’ll be reaching the end of their palaver about eight thirty. Once I’ve taken them to the restaurant, I’ll slip away….” “They” is us, a dozen writers, the cultural shop window for the international conference on sustainable development in Africa. And “their palaver” is our symposium tomorrow: “African Life Stories in Literature.” The lovers kiss, and the young man goes off, with a big portfolio under his arm. He had called to show her his drawings…. Appearances have been maintained.

  Only yesterday all this would have seemed totally insignificant to me. A white woman on the wrong side of forty takes advantage of a professional trip to Africa to embark on a not very demanding affair with a young African, sexually better endowed than her husband, Christian, with his honest, melancholy eyes. Being little given to moralizing, I might even have found it rather endearing, the gains won by feminism now taken for granted, modernity without complexes. I might have sustained the irony as far as to salute this “fair exchange,” the lady receiving her youth hormone therapy, the young stud support for some phony association he ran. Yes, I should have had thoughts along those lines, midway between amusement and indifference, and quickly forgotten them.

  But many things have happened since yesterday I have relived that night in Lunda Norte, I have recalled the sight of that youth in his gas mask, first of all the young braggart threatening us, then the child huddled up in a grave of red earth, pressed against a woman with a mutilated breast. I have remembered Elias s words the day he told me about the torture at Camp G-2: “They hung us from our wrists and twisted our bodies. At a certain moment the pain was such that you really felt as if wings were growing between your shoulder blades and they were ripping them off. Then you lost consciousness.”

  Yes, I had rediscovered Elias Almeida’s face and voice in my memory. For long years I had been in flight from this rediscovery, I dreaded it. Now his gaze rests on our life here — myself, the white woman and the black man who have just taken their pleasure and parted. The woman has showered, gone to bed, scribbled several lines in her notebook (no doubt she writes down the details of all these liaisons she has on her trips to Africa). The day before I should have laughed at it. Now, with Elias s eyes upon us, this I know: while she is dancing with her gigolo tomorrow night, they will be digging a grave to bury a woman with torn breasts and a nameless child. And at the same moment, in a cellar from which no cry escapes, a man hanging by his wrists from a hook will not even feel the burning of the cigarette end stubbed out on his neck by a soldier. Yes, at the same moment. For on this soil of Africa all this happens unremittingly. “African Life Stories in Literature …”

  To respond to Elias’s voice, one would have to be able to talk about this terrible synchronicity in human lives. To speak of that night in Lunda Norte, the nasty little granules of diamonds extracted from a woman’s mouth by a soldier just after she had been raped and shot; to speak of the asterisk on the soldiers cheek and the rather similar scar on the clean-shaven face of one of the fat-cat Africans outside the elevator this evening, and of the youth whose left hand, with its slender fingers, was the last thing to disappear beneath the shovelfuls of red earth; to speak of the white administrator who, in recognition of services rendered, will arrange an exhibition for her African lover, who draws smiling children; to speak of the six-year-old girl, little Delphinette, who does not yet know this aspect of her mother: a tousled head thrust between the thighs of a sweating male; to speak of a man whose shoulder blades are being twisted by the strappado till he loses consciousness, feeling he has wings … And to speak of that young Angolan in the railway compartment, never taking his eyes off a woman whose dress retains within its folds the fragrance of a forest deep in snow Speak of this man who loved.

  A week after our release, I saw Elias again at the Luanda airport. The colleague traveling with him addressed him by a name unknown to me — doubtless one of those names Elias had gone under during his life, or, rather, during his lives. When we were left alone, he clapped his hand to his brow and exclaimed: “There, you see. I’d completely forgotten…. Here. Its yours. Keep it. There’s ink in it now!”

  It was the fountain pen I had tried to steal from him. This pen would travel through twenty-five years of journeying and oblivion, would several times be confiscated, along with other personal possessions. But I would always succeed in recovering it.

  It is with Elias Almeida’s old fountain pen that I am currently writing these notes.

  2

  THE BIRD HE HAD BEEN CARING FOR managed to stay aloft, that day, then tumbled down awkwardly He picked it up and saw in the creature’s eye a reflection of the apprehensive joy he felt himself: soon this ball of feathers will go soaring up into the sky!

  In 1961 he was eleven. The uprising against the Portuguese had just been crushed. Did he understand what that meant? Did he know that villages had been burned with napalm and that the Americans had supplied the bombers? That impaled human heads were becoming mummified along the roadsides? That to reward the victorious army they had opened brothels into which young Angolan women were crammed, as in a cattle market?

  At the age of eleven does one know about or understand, and above all does one want to understand, such adult antics? Elias no longer remembered if the horrors of 1961 had been known to him at the time or recounted to him later by his fathers friends. He remembered the bird and its first, hesitant flight.

  At all events he knew that his father had fled to the Congo to fight alongside Lumumba, a black man who talked on equal terms with white men. He knew that his father was a hero because he wanted to liberate the contratados, the prisoners packed together in trucks covered in wire mesh, on roads scorched by the sun. His father fought so that black people should be able to come freely into the cities where the whites lived, like this city of Dondo, where Elias’s mother went to work, leaving at nightfall. After his father left they too had fled from the capital, Luanda, and after long wanderings had ended up in this rotten cluster of shacks on the banks of the Cuanza, at the edge of the whites’ city.

  His father was dedicated to the happiness of the people. Elias had heard this from the mouths of men who used to visit their home before the uprising. Less clear was the amount of unhappiness that this great future happiness brought with it. The corpses of Angolans left in the streets by the soldiers. His fathers flight. And one night this sobbing, the tears of his mother, she who was so strong and cheerful that he believed her incapable of weeping. The hard work in the textile warehouse where she sorted coupons — that was what she had told him. But one evening she came home earlier than usual, sat down on the threshold of their hut, and looked at her son as if he were an adult. Tve had enough of those white boozers, their drink, their bad teeth … she murmured, and at once, as if to correct herself, began talking about the days long ago on the island of Cazenga when she used to wait for the fishermen s return. Elias sensed a fault line of untruth in these happy recollections but could not detect what was wrong. His mother was a simple fisherman s daughter, he thought, and his father a man who could read and write and whose features were so fine that people used to think he was of mixed race. Perhaps that could explain it all. His father was fighting for the happiness of the people, and his mother was this people, ignorant and fearful … Elias felt an urgent longing to be among his fathers companions in arms, far away from this hovel with its smell of stagnant water.

  … Years later, having become a “professional revolutionary,” in the ideological jargon of the time, he would recall that moment when for the first time he had despised the people, with all the arrogance of one who seeks to build a paradise on earth for that very people. And he would reflect that all dictatorships are born of this lofty disdain.

  But that evening at Dondo he was too young to be aware of it.
Scraps of discordant notions jostled in his head: the flaw of untruth his mothers words had betrayed, the future happiness that demanded so many sacrifices, the time before the uprising, rather a gentle time (as he unwillingly recognized) in their house at Luanda … And that baker, a white man, who had one day given him a little bread roll sprinkled with poppy seeds. Elias did not want to count him among all those Portuguese who, according to his father, must be driven out or killed. And his mothers voice, too, now humming the lament generally sung by the contmtados caged in their trucks. How to unravel all that?

  He squatted down and hid his face in a place where all this world of confusion ceased to exist, in the warm, tender crook of his mothers arm. Life flowed on drowsily there, lulled by the pulsing of the blood, an utterly different life, without the grimaces of the dead by the roadsides, without untruth. In the smooth warmth of this arm a scented night reigned that enveloped him completely, his face, his body, his fears. He half opened his eyes and his eyelashes caressed his mothers skin and the folded arm shivered slightly beneath this caress. Happiness like this was simple and needed no explanation, like the coolness that arose from the Cuanza, like the long scattering of stars above the house. Elias sensed on his lips the phrases that would speak of this happiness and the love his face found in the sweetness of the crook of this arm, but words seemed pointless. Nothing expressed the joy of that moment better than the tiny stirrings of the bird hidden inside his shirt. Its wings moved softly, tickling him, and from time to time he could feel the minute staccato of its beak against his chest.

  Two days later he was already having to run to keep up with his birds flight. When he stopped, breathless, the bird landed too, then hopped toward him, nestling against his feet. Then he noticed they had crossed the frontier to the whites’ city This alarmed and also amused him: what mad freedom for that frail pair of wings! They would soon be soaring over the forbidden city, even over the river, beating the air of another country, the Congo perhaps…. Whereas in his case, a few more steps could cost him his life. The patrols shot first and asked questions afterward, especially at nightfall.

  To avoid them, he followed the course of the Cuanza and at one moment had to make his way around a long building resting on piles driven into the sand of the river bank. Portuguese voices, harsh laughter mingled with the clatter of frying pans, the fierce hissing of oil on overheated metal. The smell of fried fish awoke his hunger. Behind open windows men were eating, draining glasses of dark liquid, calling out to one another, picking their teeth. Mainly white, a few of mixed race, almost all dressed in uniform. Some of them in the company of black women who chuckled and licked fingers glistening with fat, adjusted their hair. There was not a single white woman.

  Suddenly Elias saw his mother.

  The man sitting next to her was a rather small and ugly Portuguese soldier. And this was incomprehensible, for whites are by nature handsome, elegant, and incomparably superior to blacks. Elias had never doubted this, as one does not doubt the brilliance of the sun, the currents in rivers. But now the ugliness of this man in his cups was plain for all to see: a crumpled uniform on a squat body, shapeless lips now pressed against the dirty glass, then stretched out into a smile, into a gabble of words … And his mothers smile that made her unrecognizable. Ugly … And the man s fingers, short, fleshy, gripping his mothers elbow, that thumb thrust into the crook of her arm!

  The bird, nestled inside his shirt, suddenly escaped, flitting between the piles that supported the building, settled, hidden behind a bush. Elias ran off in hot pursuit amid this petrified forest of timbers covered in algae, stumbled, grazed his forehead against a beam. In the darkness it seemed as if the bird were spying on him, teasing him. He heard its chirruping, moved forward, stooping, then flung himself toward a black ball that was detaching itself from one of the piles. His hands seized it and at once let go in disgust. It was a dead pigeon, half eaten by rats. He began running again, slithering on heaps offish scales, on swathes of rubbish. The piles surrounded him, closed in on him, barred his way. He fell and, as he got up, became aware that he was floundering in the waters of the Cuanza, with his feet slowly sinking into the slime. He also realized that he was no longer trying to catch his bird, for the creature had already returned and was obediently perched on his shoulder. No, in his breathless flight he had been trying to reach the row of windows that extended out over the riverbank on a wooden platform. That window, over there, whose support he reached, tugging his feet out of the clay A moment ago he had seen his mother and the soldier get up from the table, leave the main room, go out onto the balcony. Then a window had lit up …

  Now inside a little room with yellow walls there was a black woman seated on the bed. Naked and motionless, very upright. In front of her a man was hopping about angrily. The top half of his body was already undressed and he was struggling with his pants, in which one of his legs had become entangled. His face was very tanned, as were his neck and hands, but his chest and belly appeared white and crumpled. He was performing his leaping dance, hissing oaths. “Like a monkey” Elias reflected later, while observing that it was generally black people who attracted the comparison. At the time he had been incapable of thought, of understanding. He stared at the motionless woman who resembled a statue of smooth, black wood. She was not looking at the man tangled up in his clothing, nor at the walls of the room, nor the window. Her eyes saw what no one else could see. She did not smile. And her beauty obliterated the rest of the world.

  The man finally freed himself of his pants, stood up, naked on his short bowlegs. Hideous. Went up to the woman, seized her by the forearms, thrust her back onto the bed …

  The window slipped slowly upward. Elias felt his feet sinking into the cool mud, up to his ankles, over his ankles. The bird flew off from his shoulder, disappeared among the piles. A boat passed on the river, the voices sounded very close, other voices rang out in response, coming from the shore. The beams of electric flashlights sliced through the darkness. Footsteps squelched rapidly like suction pumps on the clay of the riverbank.

  He ran, fell, hid, noticing his shadow projected by a flashlight onto a wall, a bush. The frontier of the shanty-town was very close. He crossed it and collapsed behind a cob wall. In the distance gunshots pierced the night; then silence enveloped him, all he could hear was the beating of his own heart, which corresponded strangely to the rhythmic glittering of the stars above his head.

  In the morning he observed his mother and saw nothing that looked like that black wooden statue in the yellow room. Only her gaze, perhaps, which sometimes plumbed an abyss other people were unaware of.

  He lived through the days that followed in the feverish hope of plunging his face into the warm and tender crook of that arm and thus forgetting all he had seen, causing the building on piles and the hopping man-monkey to vanish.

  But hardly a week later a friend of his fathers came to see them with a message. From the whispering of the adults Elias learned that Lumumba was dead, his father was on the run, and above all, that they must escape from Dondo as fast as possible.

  The warning was late in coming. The next evening, on his return from fishing, Elias found their shack empty The police had arrested his mother in a street in the city.

  For a time his mothers footprints would remain visible in the powdery earth around their house. He would walk with extra care so as not to erase them. Then a shower of rain came and obliterated every trace.

  THE TRICK WAS TO WALK INTO THE CITY of the whites carrying an old birdcage. He had found it on a garbage dump and repaired it with strips of bamboo. The police finally got used to the sight of this young black who, when questioned, would reply: “Senhor Oliveira has told me to take his bird to the vet.”

  He walked past the shopping arcades, the Post Office building, and, hidden behind a tree, began watching the entrance to the prison. At nightfall, when passersby were few and far between, he climbed into the fork made by two huge branches, hung his birdcage amid the foliage,
and froze, his gaze hypnotized by the dense crowd behind the high enclosure.

  “So human beings can be killed without being deprived of life,” thought Elias, observing this mass of bodies, mea-gerly covered in rags. No need to drain them of their blood, to dismember them. It was sufficient to starve them, throw women and men, old and young, all in together, make them perform their functions in the presence of the others, keep them from washing, forbid them to speak. In fact, to eliminate every sign of their belonging to the human race. A corpse was more alive than them, for a dead man can still be recognized as a man.

  The indistinct mass of people moved slowly, trickling across from one wall of the courtyard to the other. If his mother had appeared at that moment, alone, separate from the cluster of bodies, if he had recognized her, he would have ceased to exist, burned to a cinder with grief. He would have become the cracked base of the tree, the great round stone he put his foot on to climb up … Fortunately distance transformed the prisoners into a lava of anonymous cells. And yet this was all he hoped for: to see his mother again.

  One evening he again collided with the unstable borderline of life. He ventured as far as the prison gates and through the railings saw a man lying in the courtyard. Still alive, for his arms moved occasionally, his hands slipping slowly across his body As if he were trying to ascertain on his bare skin the state of the wounds glistening under a restless crowd of insects. Worse than death, thought Elias, sensing in his own body, on his own skin, the fire of that swarming death agony. And he told himself he could not have lived for a moment with such vermin-infested wounds.