When they arrived in front of the gate, he wanted to go home to his place. He shook his head. This was serious non-cooperation. She went round to the other side of the car and made him get out. She struggled against the weight of him, against gravity; she struggled against whatever force was holding him there, upright, unmoving, heavy, supported by the Earth and by hell, protesting in a language she didn’t understand; he was so much bigger than her, so much stronger than her. She heard sirens—how ridiculous, a breathalyser test right in front of her place? Blue and white lights flashing, spinning. Kouhouesso was pressed against the bonnet, the cops repeating the same question: ‘Is this man bothering you?’ She had no idea what was going on. Kouhouesso was yelling. She was terrified.
The concierge came to their rescue. He opened the gate, explained to the cops that the two of them were together and went back to his cupboard for the keys.
At two in the afternoon of their morning after, Kouhouesso woke up with a ‘hey’. On the television, thirty-nine high-school students had been killed with heavy weapons. By a boy: it was never by a girl. She wanted to get on a plane, put some space between her and America. She stroked his shoulder, but Kouhouesso shook himself, unhooked her hand as if it were an insect.
In an apocalyptic sunset, she took the car and fled to Olga’s. They talked all night long, girl talk. The next day she drove aimlessly around Los Angeles. Her tears flowed over the intensely blue sky, into the dust of that month of December. Her tears flowed over the hills, over their savannah dryness and the strip of green, the lush edge of the gardens. She drove to the sea. In tears, she handed her keys to a Venice Beach parking valet. She sat on the low wall in front of the stupid, sloshing, dirty-grey ocean. Surfers were settled on the surface like seagulls. Choking sobs rose and fell in her throat. There was a pop pop sound coming from behind her: the pelota players were hard at it, whacking their ball against the graffitied walls. It was like being in Biarritz in the off-season, when she was fifteen with no future. Except that life had moved on, and come to a stop here, on the edge of the Pacific.
She drove towards Topanga. The door opened: he was there. He had looked for her—where had she gone? Ted had called on behalf of George. A budget had been released to finance the storyboard. She guessed that George had footed the bill.
He took her out for dinner. They had lobster, baked oysters, Chablis, Saint-Julien. He was smiling again. He told her that she and he were tarred with the same brush: they thought only of themselves. Of their own personal advantage. It was all about being a black man and a white woman, not just a man and a woman: she had to get used to it; neither he nor she was to blame. The problem dated back to the round-ups in the forests. He thought her friends were unbearable. Hollywood legends, my arse. They were members of a club and they would never let him join. His experience proved to him that, because of their history, their cultural fluency, their sharp minds, Jews were definitely not the most racist among white people…She objected. He stopped her, she was too French, locked into her own prejudices, let him finish. As usual during those dinners, he found it difficult to single out one particular sentence that was truly racist—well, he had a hunch, but let’s not go there—it was everything, and it was done on purpose: you can never pass sentence on your enemy, he’s caught up inside his whole worldview, his top-dog/underdog ideology of dominance. It was the obstacle that wore him down, the wall they erected without even realising, their world that they took to be the universe. Universal Pictures presents! He knew it by heart. And if they’d added a white guy, whether he was Jewish or not, who cares, and if they’d added another fucking Hollywood legend or a fucking young producer, the wall would have grown higher, expanded, exponentially. He needed Jessie. He needed Favour. Favour Adebukola Moon: the black actress who stood out from the crowd. He needed George and he needed her, too; but—he laughed—he was wary. He was wary of everyone. Even Favour. He laughed again. She paid the bill.
BLACK LIKE ME
Jessie lent them his bungalow at Malibu: an eight-room villa on the beach. The storyboard guy came every day; they locked themselves away to sketch out, frame by frame, the film Kouhouesso envisioned. Once the guy left, late at night, Kouhouesso would open bottles of wine and sit in front of the laptop he’d just bought himself. She would go to bed alone. She ended up missing Jessie’s garrulous proselytism. Lloyd didn’t understand why she’d turned down ER. She didn’t dare tell him that she was waiting for the dates of an unlikely role in a dangerous film in an impossible country. In the Congo.
The rest of the time, Kouhouesso sat under the sunshade, facing the ocean, iPod in his ears or mobile phone on his knees. The film remained in the realm of the virtual; the storyboard drawings were more to reassure potential producers than to plan actual shots. She went walking along the beach at low tide; she would look at him, a seated figure behind the guardrail, stuck in a dream house, in his very own Congo, with a woman who was waiting only for him.
What’s he like, a man waiting? His head bent, heavy with alcohol and impatience. Consumed by the film shoot in his mind, by the images on paper. Rubbing his eyes with the flat of his hand, drawing on his immense weariness. She would hold out her hand, but he wouldn’t take it. It was never the right time. Or rather it was always just when she was finally thinking about something else, or getting ready to swim, walk, read, that he would come up to her and put his arms around her. And afterwards he never said much. She complained about his moods. He accused her of calling what wasn’t her business a mood: ‘If I stop believing in it, who will believe in it for me?’
‘George,’ she replied.
She went down to the beach every day, for the pleasure of the beach, right there below the house. If it weren’t for this film, this obsession, they would have been happy. She had begun cooking. She would have liked to have a dog to walk. She had got to know some of the locals in the area. You couldn’t really call the strip of luxury villas between the sea and the highway a neighbourhood. A lot of them had dogs (even though it was illegal), a lot of them smoked (ditto), and they were easy to talk to. There was a Ukrainian guy and a Chinese woman who had met in a psychiatric hospital and loved to talk about it; a bodysurfing grandmother who was always trying to get her granddaughters minded; a depressive architect who couldn’t stand his clients anymore; a mysterious Greek woman who sermonised in the dunes. The impoverished, who lived almost on the beach, and the super-wealthy, who also lived there, but differently.
A French couple recognised her, despite her hat and sunglasses. They had landed there for their retirement, on stilts, like herons. They were keen to invite her over for dinner; she smiled politely. She imagined Kouhouesso in their exquisite decor—in the end, only she could put up with him.
On the weekend the beach turned democratic: more people, more families, including the servants of the surrounding houses. As well as those venturing from the east side of the city, who had driven since morning in order to spend Sunday at Malibu. Black families armed with enormous rubber rings, Fritos, beach umbrellas, and grandmothers sitting on folding chairs. The boys (like Jessie but very different from Jessie) went swimming without taking off their gold chains, and most of the time without knowing how to swim, which made the lifeguards in their sentry box nervous. Without much of an idea how to, she wanted to make friends with these people. She complimented the grandmothers on their grandchildren. She shared chips with them and chatted about the weather, often unable to grasp their accent, whereas she understood Jessie and Kouhouesso, and Favour the Nigerian girl, and Lola from Suriname.
Being separated from Kouhouesso, even for a few hours, gave her the illusion, while she was with the black families, of somehow being with him. Yes, the familiarity was surprising. But perhaps it was not so much connected with Kouhouesso as with a déjà vu of her memories of the Basque Country, of her own adolescence. The fat grandmothers and the folding chairs. The ugly swimsuits, the towels that were not proper large beach towels but old rags from the bathroom cupboard.
She remembered those occasional beach days, an hour’s drive away, with her, say, boyfriend at the time, whom she was ashamed of, and the other girls on the beach, the—she thought about it, the white girls—the girls from Paris, the wealthy tourist girls; when she thought she was too fat and badly dressed, whereas—she knew now—she was the prettiest, the real princess. And she liked these girls at Malibu—a day out at Malibu—speaking too loudly to feel uncomfortable, with their ten-dollar Target swimsuits that were bad copies of expensive labels, and the enormous ice boxes, and the strollers in the sand. And the babies.
She had never held a black baby in her arms (‘a little prune’, her mother used to say if she saw one on the TV). She had never chatted about sunscreens with black girls, or even imagined that they, too, used protection against UV radiation. But she, too, had owned one good T-shirt that she kept for special occasions. Far from here, two oceans away.
Some older adolescents came to ask her if she was an actress. They flirted with her. It would never have happened in her previous life. Unimaginable. Until now, she had never spoken, either in Paris or Los Angeles, with one of those tall guys in hoodies. But she was no longer frightened. Anyway, she was old enough to be their mother.
In 1960, scarcely ten years before the heyday of Friedkin and Coppola, the journalist John H. Griffin, disguised as a black man for his memoir, Black Like Me, had been warned by his black friends: never look at a white woman, even a woman on a film poster. Asking for trouble. In California, the last lynching had taken place in 1947. The fellow had been caught on a ranch near Gazelle, and hanged in front of the only school in the area, in Callahan.
STORYBOARD IN MALIBU
And yet the film began to take shape, but as a cartoon strip. A crowded sketch: the forest, the shadows and the water, in black and white. The boat’s lantern made a cone of light on the black water and the rest of the vessel was like a whale surfacing, grey on black, among the islands and sandbanks. Tracks hacked out by machete, the glow of oil lamps, torches that left the black people in shadow and highlighted the ivory and gold, and the dazzling fires, and the night in the sacred caves. Marlow’s face on almost every page, a white patch, a halo, like a ghost: Kouhouesso did not want him to have any features. He was still hoping for Sean Penn. The first appearance of George as Kurtz was a close-up of his sweaty face, then a tracking shot of his long thin body. George said he was up for losing ten kilos; Kouhouesso joked about the efficacy of local dysentery.
The director of photography and the chief lighting engineer came to work in Malibu for the day. Over the sound of the waves, she heard incoherent bursts of shouting, Kouhouesso’s deep voice, brusque. When they came out of the study they barely acknowledged her and did not stay for dinner. There were pages of the storyboard, around the time Kurtz dies, where all the panels were black, with just a few white embers, and eyes, and teeth. Kouhouesso wanted to work with natural light, which meant the images would be not only dark but blurred, as only lightweight cameras were possible in the forest.
The sea rose, indifferent. High tides, waves breaking right onto the terrace; the noise was deafening under the stilts. He stayed inside, the shutters closed, in the dark, the sun outside exploding for no one at all.
Her country of choice was not the Congo but this beach, now so familiar, so Basque, with Los Angeles as a hazy background. She knew that at any moment she could join him: he was there, waiting, immobilised, in the house on stilts.
She chatted with the surfers. Most of them drove for hours to come searching for waves, sets not found anywhere else in the world. Then they stood on the dunes to get dry, among the empty cans and other bodies. Upright, like cormorants, gazing out at the waves they’d just left. She had already seen that look on some of the surfers in Biarritz: on adults, the ones whose lives were consumed by surfing. And she said to herself: perhaps that’s what it is. Perhaps that’s what I recognise. That burnt-out look, fixed eyes, blazing, obsessed by the horizon, in this impossible man, Kouhouesso, my love.
Only once did she manage to drag him onto the sand, at sunset, after the storyboard guy had left and after a few glasses of wine. She was tanned, happy. Life would run its course right here, far from the Congo. She was wearing her white dress, the one with the straps and the crocheted bodice, and her big straw hat and sun-bleached braids. He was smiling, like magic, out of the blue. Yes, she was funny, and lively, and irresistible, and he was in love—he had to be, or else? Or else, why was he here?
He stopped at the edge of the water, dipped his toes in. ‘Come on!’ she said, and pulled off her dress—bikini, I am Raquel Welch—and dived straight into the waves with a powerful freestyle. He raised his phone and took a photo of her: smile.
They would soon be celebrating six months together (he was amazed when she told him). And she had never managed to get him into the water, not the jacuzzi, not the pool, and definitely not the sea. He told her that salt damaged dreadlocks. He washed them once a week, ceremoniously, then spent a long time drying them: he worried about mould. Afterwards, the bathroom smelled of incense. He had travelled in India and Nepal; he must have brought back some kind of herbal ointment, or from God knows what African shop.
The storyboard draughtsman delivered the four last panels: windows, daytime, a side table, the town. A pale face, a black corseted dress, a tight bun: it was her. Bathed in an unearthly glow. The precise curve of her body, her small breasts, her long nose, high cheekbones and forehead: her exactly. She had the role. That’s how she found out.
Christmas was in three days. The only information she’d managed to glean from Kouhouesso was that on the day of her Air France flight he had a meeting with an assistant producer.
That morning she woke early. The smooth sea reflected the green sky, and the muzzles of two sea lions were bobbing in the wake of the waves. Without the sea lions it would have been difficult to know where exactly the sea was—or if the sky were not filling up the entire Pacific Ocean. She made herself a coffee on the terrace, sent a few text messages over there, to France. Then she rolled herself a joint and put on her sunglasses, staring eastwards, directly at the sun. Every minute, a plane took off from LAX, at the spot where the coast was flat, in the heart of the city. Up high they left long white streaks, lines of cocaine gradually crisscrossing the space in every direction. At 11.20 a.m., she watched a minuscule plane rising slowly, over there, without a sound; she knew that plane leaving without her was the 11.20 a.m. for Paris CDG, immediately followed by another plane, then another, none of which she was in, as though minute by minute she was being shot into the sky, virtually, while still clinging here like a mollusc on the stilts of the house.
Kouhouesso didn’t move all day.
The good news was that Oprah Winfrey might be interested. Production was starting up again.
ANGOLA IS A PARTY
The evening they returned to Topanga Canyon, they found the house completely lit up, thirty cars parked out the front, a gigantic pine tree erected on the edge of the swimming pool. Jessie, bare-chested, white beard and red boxer shorts, was greeting guests and handing out little bowls full of some sort of snow in which adorable dwarf pines were planted. The dwarf pines were made out of chocolate and the powder snow was intended for snorting. It took a few moments to decipher Alma’s outfit: a bra made out of grey fur, Playboy Bunny hotpants, Nubuck leather Timberland boots, and a leather muzzle with reins that Jessie cracked on her naked back, for fun. Perhaps the most disturbing thing was the strange headdress tied to her head: gold antlers, a Spike TV trophy for the prize she had just received: ‘Most Promising Sexy TV Star—Men’s Choice.’
‘She’s wearing a reindeer costume,’ Jessie explained, as if it was obvious. He pretended to straddle her. ‘Father Christmas is going down your chimney, my darling. He has a big present for you.’
They fled upstairs. Fortunately no one was hanging out in the loft, but the music from below was too loud. And it was freezing up there: so that he could have a roaring fire in the
fireplace, Jessie had turned the air conditioning on full bore all over the house.
They headed back to her place. Kouhouesso was silent, as he was every time he was annoyed by reality. She tried to stay quiet too, but she couldn’t. They had to face facts: when Jessie was there, it was tricky living together. The practical solution was for Kouhouesso to move in with her for good.
In the meantime, she placed two plane tickets for Paris under their Christmas tree. She had bought two more tickets, full-price business. They wouldn’t get there until the 26th. But now that her son was older, Christmas Day itself didn’t matter as much.
He gave her a peck on the lips. But he wasn’t sure: he really had to find time, before the shoot, to go and see his children.
In Luanda.
In Angola.
She had assumed he was born in Cameroon.
Twins. Who lived with their mother. Their stepfather was from Rio.
She made a quick adjustment to the world-map app in her head, skipping from one latitude to the next, leaving a large, blurry area over Angola. She pictured child soldiers, wearing dirty, oversized T-shirts, children from shanty towns, glue-sniffers, and prostitutes.
Hollywood–Angola, Los Angeles–Luanda, LAX–LAD: there was a plane every day. Direct. British Airways.
But, now that he thought of it, the twins would be in Lisbon for New Year. Their mother was Portuguese. And Lisbon was right next to Paris.
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