Human Love

by Andrei Makine

  I quickly understood the extent to which I had been mistaken in my choice of text, so to speak. I had not been back to Africa for fifteen years …

  Now at the reception where all the participants are gathered, I try to grasp in what way modes of thought and behavior have changed. Above all to grasp what it is that makes those few notes on Elias completely anachronistic to these people drinking, smiling at one another, kissing, exchanging cards. At the center of the room can be seen a nucleus formed by the dark suits of the “fat-cat Africans of the international conference circuit,” here to debate sustainable development. They are protected by a swirling mass of secretaries and press attachés. Two cameras from a television crew cut slowly through the crowd. I can make out the African writer who spoke this afternoon: in oracular tones he had extolled the ancestral magic, inaccessible to the European brain, the traditions and rites without which Africa would no longer be Africa, palaver trees, the sense of the sacred … He is chatting now to a colleague who, at the same roundtable discussion, made a slashing attack on the “nostalgia merchants,” the “gravediggers.” All those, in short, who did not believe, like him, that Africa was “surfing every new wave,” “swinging to the beat of modernity,” and even “grafting its black balls onto the anemic culture of Europe.” I can also see the lean and frail (“anemic” …) French novelist who, having made two trips to Senegal, claims to be an “adventurer into darkest Africa.” He is busy going into raptures over a group of traditional singers whose multicolored flowing robes smack of modern textile manufacture. Next to them a restless circle of rappers who will be performing this evening: smug little gigolo faces, the grimaces of spoiled children of political correctness, wearing outfits that flaunt the ugliness of a domesticated counterculture, reeking of cash. Finally, beside a score of drawings fixed to the wall, the couple I recognize: the plump white woman with beet-colored hair, one of the conference organizers, and her lover, the artist from Kinshasa. He is giving an interview to the journalists, pointing at his drawings; she watches him a little as if he were her own creation …

  Is there such a great change, in fact? Over fifteen company in question has changed its name. The networks have reconstituted themselves. And only a handful of people would still be able to guess that the “upholder of the law” in question was Elias Almeida.

  In fact, he has no other life than this ghostly presence in memories now grown confused, repressed, indecipherable. I remember hastily noting down the stories he told me, joining the dots between our various often chance encounters in Africa, in Europe, in the United States. But I can no longer conceive of any logic that might link these fragments, apart from the failure of all that he dreamed of, the loss of the one he loved.

  Out on the terrace, I again locate Lupus, the constellation of the Wolf, in the dense black sky. Down below, on the hotels broad front steps, the crowd of guests is preparing to go and explore the night life of this African capital. The party goes on. The thick necks settle into grotesque limousines, the rank and file are assigned to broken-down minibuses. At a certain level of social clownishness, human stupidity almost inspires compassion. On the far side of the frontier, so close to this city, war rages, villages burn, adults kill children, other children become killers. The world against which Elias Almeida fought… The door onto the neighboring terrace opens; two figures hidden in the darkness settle into deck chairs. The fat white woman and her friend from Kinshasa embark on a verbose prelude to coitus.

  This evening I decide to abandon the search for any rational order in the fragments of the past my memory has retained. The logic of history the causes of every war and every peace, universal morality — none of that has ever helped humanity to prevent a boot smashing a woman’s collarbone and children learning to kill. It was that night in Lunda Norte that made me wary of all those learned abstractions. Instead of history what I saw then was soldiers gripping a woman crouched on all fours, whom they had just raped and killed. One of them extracting the tiny granules of rough diamonds from her dead mouth. Now a child rigged up in a gas mask thrust his hideous head in at the window of our prison, threatening us with a weapon too heavy for his thin arms. Elias talked to him and learned that the boys father had been shot by President Neto’s regime, which was liquidating “factionalists.” Uneasily, I clung for a moment to the “historical logic” of the struggle against the enemies of the revolution. Finally I realized that what this lofty logic came down to was the gaze of that child high on cannabis, Eliass body, covered in infected wounds, and that woman’s distorted mouth, where a big breathless soldier’s fingers searched for ugly little pebbles. On his left cheek there was a scar in the form of a star. Next morning he was one of the few to escape the Cuban commandos. I had stopped with Elias close to a pit dug for the raped Zairean woman and the child with his face hidden by a gas mask. The earth was reddish brown, with a good smell of humid undergrowth. “The Kremlin will never forgive Neto for renewing contact with Mobutu … Elias murmured as if to himself. Five months later, in September 1979, Neto was dying in Moscow. The logic of history … Beside this grave for the Zairean woman and the child the notion of an archaeological dig passed through my mind as in a bad dream: what would the archaeologists of the distant future make of our civilization when they discovered this skeleton of a woman, with a few fragments of diamonds in its mouth, and that one of a masked child?

  I hasten to write down what I know of Elias Almeida’s life. Without imposing any order on these fragments. Sometimes I am tempted by the novelistic play of coincidence: the poet Neto, having become president, kills thousands of men and then dies, as if in a funeral ode, by taking poison in a glass of champagne offered him by a pretty woman who, quite calmly, watches him die. An easy game, I know, these coincidences. Reality prefers failure, delay, the impossibility of communing in thought with a loved one. When he arrived in the Congo at the age of fifteen to join his father, there was an episode Elias had wanted to tell him about: a truck filled with Portuguese soldiers drives past, a burst of submachine gun fire, bullets ripping apart the foliage, birds scatter, others fall, and one limps in the dust, its wing broken. The soldiers’ laughter, the silence. The grandiose randomness of evil. Above all, Ellas wanted to tell his father about the circumstances of his mothers death. “Yes, I know I’ve been told about it,” his father said hurriedly. “Yes, that’s … how it is.”

  Perhaps the true logic of life might be wholly contained in this unanswerable: “That’s how it is.”

  2

  Kinshasa. A black-and-white film.

  A FAIR, MILKY SKIN, THICK, FLESHY THIGHS: a woman hitches up her tight-fitting skirt and settles herself into a large luxury car. Glaring lights stand out in the night, as always in Africa. The woman’s excessively golden hair glitters. Her stiletto heels oblige her to lift her knees quite high as she sits down. Her body folded up on the seat is reminiscent of a … yes, a fat turkey trussed for the oven.

  In the press of the crowd on the palace staircase I intercept Elias’s look, his brief smile. No other exchange should indicate that we are acquainted. With a swift, knowing gaze he points out a face to me, amid the throng of dark suits and evening dresses. An African of about forty, tall, corpulent, a little too tightly squeezed into a designer suit. Dilated eyes, nostrils visibly quivering. He stares at the woman wriggling about on the seat, adjusting her skirt around her broad thighs, as she seeks a comfortable position for her high heels. This feverish attention is lost among the whirlwind of words of farewell, little laughs, grotesque bowings and scrapings, in which “President” and “General” are bandied back and forth, the flutter of visiting cards, the bustle of chauffeurs and bodyguards. The man devouring the turkey-woman with his eyes believes he is invisible. On his left cheek I suddenly make out a pale asterisk, the trace of a scar. The face of the soldier retrieving diamonds from the mouth of a dead woman comes back to me. A coincidence? I should like to ask Ellas, But he has gone already, and besides, would he know himself?

 
; Several days later I learn that the man with the scar on his cheek is known to our secret services as “the Candidate” — a Zairean established in Luanda who manages the sale of Angolan oil to the Americans, who have never recognized Marxist Angola. They are thus buying oil from a phantom state! And the “Marxist” Angolans are buying themselves villas in Europe thanks to the oil sold to the American imperialists with whom they are at war. The logic of history … Washington has its money on “the Candidate,” as a probable successor to Mobutu in Zaire. Soviet intelligence have had their eye on this man for several months. The turkey-woman makes a good bait…

  This frenzied tangle of world affairs, the energy of thousands of men confronting one another, plotting, selling incalculable riches, piling up millions in secret bank accounts, wooing their enemies and tearing their allies to pieces, dragging their countries into long years of war, starving whole regions, paying armies of hacks to glorify their policies, all this crazy global machinery is concentrated that evening in the fleshy body of a blond woman whom a sweating black man would like to possess.

  In Elias’s look I perceive the rapid alternation between a fighters hardness and immense sadness better than before.

  A brief while later the dossier on “the Candidate” is enriched by a filmed sequence: him and the turkey-woman bonded together in a monotonous coupling. From time to time the woman reaches under the man’s body to make sure the contraceptive has not slipped … There is not much light in the room, and when she gets up, the woman peers at her underclothes to avoid putting them on inside out. From the bed the man watches her doing this, with a stubborn, strangely hostile air. The other, shorter sequence has a greater variety of light and shade. In it the man’s half open mouth can be seen, his eyes slightly bulging, staring at the woman whose head thrusts up and down rhythmically as she fellates him. Then he sleeps, while the woman rummages in a briefcase and page by page photographs a thick notebook with glittering gilt edges.

  At the year’s end comes the greatest surprise of all. Suddenly this whole game becomes completely pointless. The Americans abandon “the Candidate,” having found a creature more suited to their plans. French arms salesmen arrive in the marketplace and muddy the waters. In Moscow Andropov dies; power slips into an increasingly evident coma. In Luanda one tribe of corrupt men drives out another. The leaders furnish themselves with the services of new networks of traffickers. Bank account numbers are changed. The Angolan president promises the eradication, once and for all, of UNITA, which is supported by the Americans, and the immediate establishment of socialism, assisted by the USSR.

  And of all this gigantic farce what remains is Elias Almeidas life, endangered several times, in order (I observe maliciously) to obtain two pieces of film in which a portly African and a buxom white woman can be seen glued together.

  What also remains in my memory is Eliass look: cool determination and the sadness of one who no longer has any illusions.

  Cabinda. What can be demanded of a life and a death.

  Two years later we find ourselves in Cabinda, dining beside the harbor under a sky where the stars mingle with the lights on the oil rigs. Elias has just been spending time in northern Angola, “not far from the forests where those heroic UNITA idiots put us in the lockup,” he says with a smile. His right wrist is in plaster, and this shackle, too, is a reminder of that night long ago in Lunda Norte. Im on the point of asking him, in the same ironic tones, whether “the Candidate” could not by any chance be the sergeant who imprisoned us: he had a similar scar on his cheek.

  A man and a woman, both of them quite elderly, appear in front of the rickety tables on the terrace where we are sitting. They walk one behind the other, joined together by two long planks, which they carry on their shoulders, one on each side of their heads. The resemblance to the wooden collars once used to keep slaves in line immediately comes to mind. “People like them live on a dollar a month,” says Elias softly without looking at me. “Joâo Alves, that apparatchik I knew in Moscow, has just bought a second house close to Lisbon. He s delighted that with the entry into Europe, property prices will go up …”

  He remains silent for a long while, then, still in low tones, talks to me about his mission in Lunda Norte: to smash the diamond barter business, that vital sinew of war for UNITA (“Not to mention our ‘Marxists’ in Luanda,” he murmurs with gritted teeth). Arms for diamonds, and with the arms they conquer diamond-bearing territories and can thus buy more arms to conquer further territories. It is the same routine for oil …

  “So wars a very profitable industry,” he says, nodding toward the oil rigs. “And what’s more, instead of retiring, soldiers get killed, which suits everybody. Nothing new about it as a production cycle. In the old days they stirred up conflicts between tribes to provide themselves with slaves. But slaves were hard work. You had to tie them up, rather like those two old people with their planks, take them to the coast, transport them across the ocean, give them a scrap of food … Diamonds can be turned into houses near Lisbon much quicker,”

  I have an impulse to goad him into the admission I sense maturing within him: why risk his life if the dice are loaded and it is in everyone’s interest for this civil war to continue so they grow rich? I do not broach the topic head-on; I talk about the videotape of “the Candidate” and the turkey-woman. This fragment of film implied lengthy approach maneuvers, attempts at recruitment, blackmail … in the vague hope of having “our man” in a future government. Now all that work had come to nothing, producing only a video reminiscent of a third-rate blue movie.

  I am expecting a political rationale, a precept I had heard on his lips before now: “You can’t make a revolution in kid gloves.” “A professional should never ask himself: What’s the point? That’s a question for Hamlets.” Yes, a half-mocking reply designed to stop all Jesuitical moralizing in its tracks.

  This time there is no note of irony in his voice. “You know, maybe it’s my age, but I ask less and less of life. I often think it would have been enough for me just to have been able to save that child, you remember, in Lunda Norte, the one who’d put on an old gas mask. That little lad completely high on drink and drugs. I should have told him to hide so as not to be shot in the morning …”

  The old couple walk back close to the restaurant where we sit at the table. Relieved of their burden, the man and woman nevertheless walk as before, one behind the other, with the same heavy tread. Elias watches them walking away, then, without changing his tone, continues: “And with death it’s the same. When I was young I lacked all modesty, I dreamed of it being heroic, flamboyant. On the barricades, in some way or other … One day I learned how Antonio Carvalho died, my first master in Marxism. They tortured him appallingly to make him denounce me. Mine was the eye that got in their way, the ‘man from Moscow’ to be got rid of. Carvalho defeated them all because he smiled! Yes. He said nothing, just smiled. Right to the end …”

  We fell silent, our eyes directed toward the ocean, toward the darkness pockmarked with flares from the oil rigs. By day and night, deep in the dense waters, steel tubes suck in the earth’s black blood. This oil is transformed into arms, then into the red blood of human beings.

  Elias gives a slight shake of his head: “You say: two scraps of film with that fat pig fucking her … It’s not as simple as that. Under pressure from the Americans, that fellow had big plans. To create a real Zairean army equipped by the United States. An army of professionals, no longer those gangs of pillagers and drunkards Mobutu has at his disposal. If it had worked, we’d have had another war. And we’d have lost it. We managed to sideline that young man with his weakness for beautiful blond women … Another war. Yes. We’ve already reached seven hundred thousand dead since we started building the radiant future. And those seven hundred thousand include Carvalho. And that child buried with his gas mask on his head …”

  He is aware of a note of justification in his words, the eternal reasoning of spies: devious maneuvers, this necessary ev
il in order to prevent a much greater evil. Yes. the ousting of one crook to save thousands of innocents … the old argument revolutionaries and other benefactors of humanity generally put forward. We exchange glances, aware of what can lie hidden behind this “necessary evil.”

  Ellas begins to talk with a more relaxed, almost amused, air: “Its true that Zairean looked very like the sergeant who interrogated us at Lunda Norte. That scar from a bullet in the shape of an asterisk. But it wasn’t him. Just a man of the same type. An ambitious career soldier thrust toward the top either by ourselves or by the Westerners. One of those pawns they try to turn into a leader. Sometimes they crack. Sometimes they succeed, and you get Bokassa, Idi Amin, Mengistu, and the rest. If you can call that success. Yes, the same mold. The ingredients are always similar: money, an almost sensual desire for power, the flesh of women. I’ve met humans in this mold in Guinea-Bissau, in Brazzaville … To begin with you actually think you’re meeting the same person. And it’s not so much their physique that’s deceptive. There are big ones and little ones. No, it’s … their eyes, which seem to be saying: I’m ready for anything. Like that Zairean you saw. To ride in the limousine with that fat blond, he was ready to cover a whole country in graves.”

  We walk to the end of a jetty where we can feel the keen nocturnal force of the wind off the open sea. Elias s shirt flaps around his body making him look thinner, more fragile. In my mind’s eye I have a sudden vision of him, alone, assailed by a crowd of men whose faces are impossible to make out, they look so alike. Men cast in that mold, I tell myself, against whom he strives to fight… It is a losing battle, and he knows it. History, whose course he dreamed of changing, is in fact nothing more than an elegant metaphor, and a man staring at a woman’s broad thighs as she sits on a car seat, yes, often the hungriness of such a stare counts for more in this metaphor than the noblest of ideals and the commitments to causes made by heroes.