Andreï Makine: Human Love

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.