Human Love

by Andrei Makine

  Castros voice broke in on this tumble of bitter thoughts. The orator was speaking with somewhat mournful sincerity, with vehement and at the same time melancholy conviction. The conviction of someone who no longer believes, but who wants at all costs to be believed, Elias would reflect years later.

  As for himself, he wanted to hold on to his faith at all costs. That ancient, still childlike hope of seeing a world where it would be impossible to leave a woman to die with a broken collarbone, or to gun a man down, almost absent-mindedly, between two drags on a cigarette.

  Toward the end of the speech he felt a light tickle on his back. A whisper brushed his ear: Til be waiting for you at my place. Try to get away” Louise had managed to insinuate herself in between the ranks of the soldiers. Without seeing her, Elias was aware of that great child’s gleeful excitement, her passion for clandestine adventures and secret rendezvous. He looked at his watch (Castro had been speaking for more than two hours) and noted that, in exalting the society of the future, at no point had the orator referred to the love between two human beings.

  That evening at Louise’s place he was back again in the masquerade of conspiracy, the falseness of which he now perceived so clearly. A warrior under threat (himself) meets up with his pasionaria (her) in the middle of a hostile country, in an unknown city. That must have been how Louise mythologized their nights together. She opened the door and flung her arms about him as if they had not seen one another for months, as if he had had to cross minefields and pass through bursts of gunfire. He wanted to tell her he had just strolled whistling out of the barracks, and the greatest danger he had been in during the past few months had been that of falling overboard from an inflatable craft during landing exercises. And in that neighborhood everyone was quietly getting on with frying fish … She knew all this but simply did not want to destroy the illusion.

  Wholly immersed in her role as a rebel on the run, she gave herself, enjoyed more intense pleasure than ever, thanks to this game, and grew bolder. It was the actress in her that drew him down onto the floor of her room, let herself be ravished there on the ground, amid cigarette ends and the scattered drafts of her articles. It was the make-believe revolutionary who clawed at his belly, moaning and biting her lip, flung herself onto her back in the posture of one crucified, feigning now the self-abasement of a submissive lover, now the mechanical stubbornness of a female slow to be satisfied.

  Until very recently these carnal games had flattered him. What he had beheld in the woman’s distraught look, her wild eye, was the reflection of his own virility, the black gleam of his sweating skin, the mark of his new status: he, the African, was servicing a well-known journalist, a white woman who was on close terms with the Cuban leaders and Castro himself.

  That evening these masks struck him as a hollow sham. But, to crown it all, he realized that it had been a hollow sham from the start.

  Louise stirred on the floor, stood up, still drugged with pleasure, and staggered toward the bed. Comically, a page of typescript clung to her right buttock. Elias stretched out his arm, detached the page, and by the light of a bulb suspended over a typewriter glimpsed this sentence: “Every revolution is at risk from two dangers: the gangrene of bureaucracy in its leaders and the recurrence of petty bourgeois instincts in the workers.” The sickly sweet smell of corn as well as that of fried fish, pungent and oily, floated in through the bedroom window. The alimentary instincts of the petty bourgeoisie, thought Elias, smiling in the dim light.

  And she did indeed start to talk about how the revolutionaries of twelve years ago were being visibly tempted today by the siren voices of Florida. “A lack of political consciousness … The American influence … The lure of the dollar …” The sense of her words should have called for brisk, severe tones. But the woman was torpid after her physical exertions and nestled up to the man with the abandon of any romantic young mistress.

  He already knew how the evening would go. The impassioned revolutionary, having become a languid lover, was going to mutate into a good Western tourist, with an expert knowledge of picturesque Havana. She would take him out to their “favorite” restaurant, order their “favorite” dishes, greet their “favorite” chef… She would have done the same in Provence, in China, in Senegal.

  A Frenchwoman who knows how to explore the local attractions. Revolutionary tourism, he thought, surprised, himself, by the aptness of the phrase.

  The dinner began as expected. Except that this time Elias was waiting for an opportunity at last to tell the truth. And this anticipation made the setting seem increasingly artificial: the sea breeze with its “faint whiff of iodine,” as Louise always remarked, the sugary strumming of a guitar, the momentary fire of the rum.

  He did not know where to start. Perhaps with the falsity of the parts they were playing — she a tourist in the zoo of revolution, he the symbolic negro breaking the shackles of slavery. Or should he talk to her about the “Che” he had known? Describe him as he had appeared in Africa, a real man still, with all his fears and weaknesses? Yes, tell her the story of just that night amid drunken soldiers laying siege to their “command post.” Tell her how Che and the Belgian woman had fled, frightened by the devastating chaos that prevailed in the bestiary of African revolutions. Say to her, “You’ll cut and run, too, when you’ve had enough. And I’ll end up in your notebook, among the other trophies, a brief episode in your tourist expedition. Yes, my negro’s head hung on the wall in your drawing room, between a Parisian anarchist and a Cuban barbudo

  The image of it struck him as comic. He smiled and noticed then that they had both been silent for a moment, casting wary glances at one another and knocking back their rum with equal wariness. Louise had a harsh, scornful grimace. He had a fervent desire to reclaim from this woman all that she had had from him: their nights together, his African body, which she had added to her collection … He again pictured his head as a hunting trophy and realized the extent to which all this was unimportant: his inveighing against the Westerners’ revolutionary safaris, his bouts with Louise in theatrical secrecy, the pleasure this big child had taken, having indeed come here in the hope of indulging in sex, spiced with battles and impassioned speeches … He felt so little involved in this vortex of words and deeds, of the ebb and flow of passions. The essential thing was still that child hiding a wounded bird inside his shirt, a child who found the world’s perfection in the fold of his mothers arm … If only he could tell her about that!

  He looked up and suddenly became aware that Louise was talking, or rather muttering, in inebriated but lucid tones, and that she was saying precisely what he had been preparing to declare. “Che s soon going to turn into a mascot, a caricature, a label … Do you think I don’t understand that? But people need something to believe in … Otherwise it’s, you know, Orwell, Kafka … Besides, who could replace him? Fidel? A man who goes on jabbering for hours in his sleep? Our European revolutionaries? They never venture farther afield than the last stop on the metro … Go ahead. Tell me, if that’s what you think. Tell me I’m just like them. A spoiled young bourgeoise. Cruising the world to get screwed by guys with ebony skins hung like stallions … You owe it to yourself to think that, don’t you? And what’s more, I’m this hooker who’s trying to get herself a CV to match the bare-breasted girl on the barricades.”

  Her tone began to waver, now aggressive, abusive of herself and others, now helpless and tender. She talked about a blind dog she had in Paris, confessed to having betrayed it by going away to make “her little revolution.” Then, without transition, declared: “But did you know the Cuban leaders are hiding the journal Che kept in the Congo? His notebooks. Not the notes that have been published … I’ve tried everything to get my hands on them. Its a state secret, you know! But I did find out from a Frenchman with contacts close to Castro that there was a fragment headed, ‘When Revolutions Die/ It sounds as if he was talking about the Cuban revolution. All those leaders. They’ve started to stink of rancid archives …” />
  She was almost shouting. Then, when Elias managed to take her out, to escort her home, she wept and babbled with the pitiful and touching incoherence of a drunken woman, whom one would like simultaneously to fold in one’s arms and to slap. She said her father had “the look of someone who’d been in the OAS;” that her mother’s life was “as lively as a barnacle;” that it was better “to be wrong with Sartre;” that her grandmother recited poetry to her flowers and was the only honest person in their family; that power grew “out of the barrel of a gun.” Finally, in a quavering avowal, she denounced the perfidy of a certain Jean-Yves, who had dumped her for a “fat German cow, a friend of Andreas Baader. But I’ll show him, that bastard. I’ll show him,” she gulped. “Here in Cuba, I’m going to …”

  Her voice drowned in a sob. Elias drew her to him, cradled the head racked with shudders against his shoulder. As the veil of sleep descended, Louise was still murmuring, calling someone. Her blind dog left in Paris, Elias guessed.

  That night was the only one where they felt truly close, liberated from the postures they had imposed on themselves. And for the first time Elias became aware of the paths that led human beings through revolutions and wars, through life. He grasped that within the most stubborn commitment to the most sublime cause could lie hidden the desire to punish a man who went off with a rival, the memory of an old woman who recited poetry to her window boxes, and pity for a dog.

  He slept little, listened to the plaintive breathing of the woman squeezed tight against his arm, studied the photos that seemed to meet his gaze in the phosphorescent glow of the nightlight. Hemingway as a boxer in a ring, the charmers smile directed at the photographer. Castro at the center of a crowd, in which, if you looked carefully, according to Louise, you could make her out. Malraux, elegant and ambiguous, like a croupier in a casino. And finally Che, with eyes ablaze and wild hair. And lower down a caricature: de Gaulle transformed into Hitler, with the S S insignia on his shoulder … They must all have had a blind dog in their lives, thought Elias.

  During the days that followed Louise avoided him, and when they ran into one another more or less by chance, he perceived that she had fully regained her self-possession. “Wow! That was a hell of a binge!” she exclaimed, very much at her ease. “I must have spouted a lot of crap at you …”

  She left Cuba a month later, without letting him know in advance. A note reached him the day after her departure. “I was frankly disappointed with the way the revolution was going,” she wrote. “And I never hid that from you.” She also mentioned that the Paris newspaper she had been working for was offering her a job.

  Two years later, by then in Moscow, Elias would learn of the publication of Louise Rimens’s book. The title would be a surprise and yet no surprise to him: When Revolutions Die.

  During the rest of his time in Havana he often tried to find a logic in this frenzy of human beings committed to what seemed like a monolith: History, the Revolution. A young woman taking her revenge on a faithless lover by falling in love with Che, wishing to set the whole world on fire, and recalling her grandmothers house with poignant nostalgia. A woman ready to sacrifice millions of human lives on the altar of an Idea but who wept when she thought about her blind dog …

  The contradictions of existence, he thought with a smile, recalling his studies in philosophy. Or perhaps quite simply a lack of professionalism on the part of these amateur revolutionaries?

  Then he thought about the USSR, the country his fathers’ friends used to give as an example of “a society of the future conceived along purely scientific lines,” In Cuba the Russians seemed to be accomplishing a task that was almost routine for them, that of constructing a world others could only dream about. On the facade of one of the factories they were erecting he had one day read: “Our tasks are resolved, our goals are clear! To work, comrades!” In this slogan, simplistic though it was, could be read an unshakable certainty that was lacking in the dilettantes of the liberation struggles.

  On the plane to Moscow he was thinking about the title of “professional revolutionary” that his father laid claim to, as did Ernesto — and that Lenin bore. Then he came to grasp the difference between amateurism and professionalism in revolution. The professional never asks himself the question, What’s the point? only by what means? since he has no life apart from the dream whose realization he is irresistibly and patiently engaged in.

  Seventeen years later, at the end of the 1980s, we met in Florida at Fort Lauderdale. It occurred to us that those Cubans who were bailing out from their island in distress might well be landing not very far from these shores. Still more obvious than Cuba’s pitching and tossing, however, was the impending shipwreck of that great ocean liner, the USSR. I had never questioned Elias so frankly about the blindness of those who, like him, sacrificed their lives to a cause. Tve often heard intellectuals declaring that thanks to such and such an event the scales had fallen from their eyes,” he replied. “That they had seen nothing blameworthy in a régime until all at once what had seemed magnificent the day before became contemptible. Yes, the USSR, Mao, and now Castro. Almost twenty years ago I knew a woman, a French journalist working in Havana. She wrote a book to explain how she had suddenly realized that the Cuban revolution was nothing but an appalling dictatorship. Well, you know, I never thought our struggle was perfect or that the people engaged in it were saints. But IVe always believed in the need for a different world. And I still believe in it.”

  This answer must then have struck him as too solemn and abstract, too bound up with the ideas of his youth. He inclined his head slightly: “You see that fellow over there, yes, the one in shorts. With a spotted shirt. The steak he s eating weighs at least a pound. His country America, defends this man’s right to eat that amount of meat with all its might. And especially his right not to give a good goddamn that on the opposite shore of the Atlantic children with amputated arms are chewing on bark to assuage their hunger before they die. And yet the two shores are one and the same world. You just need to take the long view, to stand up on tiptoe, like this, to see it.”

  He did just this, stood up in the middle of the restaurant terrace where we were sitting.

  This is one of the clearest images I shall retain of him: a man upright, straight as a blade, towering above the crowd of diners.

  2

  WHAT WAS HARDEST, AS ALWAYS, was steeling oneself to kill the children. The offspring of a tyrant, of course, the future élite of an oppressive regime. But once the door to their bedroom was smashed in, Elias turned away in spite of himself to avoid the gaze of the little boy trying to hide behind the curtain, the little girl clutching a big doll in a foam of lace …

  The airport had been taken an hour earlier, just after the crushing of the state guard and the occupation of the armory. Commandos held the railroad station, the principal roads, the main banks. The assault was delayed by unexpected resistance around the radio station. But the presidential palace was already reverberating with gunfire. The orders were clear: to liquidate the head of state as well as all the members of his family, without exception. Left alive, one of the sons could have become the rallying point for counterrevolution.

  Leading his unit, Elias reached the first floor, passed through the continuous fire of the bodyguard, assisted the engineer to blow in the door to the private apartments. The assault troops machine-gunned every nook and cranny, covering one another on the staircases and at the corners of corridors, threw grenades. And then came that children’s bedroom, the impulse to shoot without killing, keeping one’s eyes shut, or even to be killed before being able to kill … They informed him that the secret police defending the radio station had been dislodged. He had to leap into a jeep, force a way through the bursts of fire, and, once quickly installed in front of a microphone, read out the “Declaration by the Provisional Popular Government” he had drafted the day before: “Comrades! The heroic struggle of the Army of National Liberation has put an end to the bloody and corrupt dictat
orship of Marshal X. Power is in the hands of the people, represented by the patriotic forces of the ANL and the Socialist Party of Progress …”

  Highly professional work, from the first shots fired in the morning right through to this broadcast, in a studio still smelling of the acrid reek of gunpowder and the sweat of breathless men. Elias read in grave tones, his eyes sometimes straying from the typewritten lines; he knew the text by heart. At one moment, looking up, he noticed a large jar half filled with a cloudy liquid at the other end of the desk. He suppressed a smile: here in the heart of a third world country, right in the middle of a revolution, these marinated tomatoes with their label in Russian …

  Each time, in this final phase of seizing power, this jar would make its appearance; someone had left it behind in the building where the Soviet instructors taught the art of overthrowing dictatorships. And each time, moved at having addressed the population of a whole country, Elias would forget to throw away these tomatoes, steeped in their murky marinade.

  He had already taken part in a dozen revolutionary training exercises in that military camp close to Moscow. The scenario would vary: the enemy forces would become better armed and differently deployed, the pitfalls would multiply, the “population” (played by soldiers in civilian clothes) was sometimes cooperative, sometimes hostile. The city itself, an artificial city, a replica of a typical urban layout, with its railroad station, the residence of the head of state, the airport and the rest of the key locations, yes, even these prefabricated blocks, would be rearranged before the next revolution. This made the insurgents’ action more complicated: the station was transformed into a barracks, the secret police headquarters became the American embassy, the approaches to the airport were now protected by minefields … Inside the presidential palace the allocation of rooms was not constant either. The tyrants office could be recognized thanks to a large framed reproduction of The Battle of Borodino. And on the threshold of the children’s room they put that great plastic doll wrapped in grubby tulle, with one arm missing.