Men

by Marie Darrieussecq

  ‘That’s normal,’ he chuckled. ‘We’re stars.’

  Paris was whirling around them; they were being swept up from the square, Comment ne pas perdre la tête, serrée dans des bras audacieux?1

  At the end of the canal, at Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, she lost him for a moment. He had gone into a chemist and was standing, tall and impossible to miss, at the hair products counter: in front of the Carissa-brand shea butter, argan conditioner for split ends. As a shocked salesgirl looked on, he opened a bottle and got her to smell it. That was it. Frankincense. Myrrh and gold, the Magi. She went weak at the knees, reached for the back of his neck, and kissed him. ‘I can only find it in France,’ he said. Did he jump on a plane as soon as he ran out? Did he seduce a French girl whenever he had none left? The salesgirl, a metre from them, was standing stock-still, fascinated. He paid the paltry amount on his American Express card and they walked out with a bag full of bottles.

  They hailed a taxi and had dinner at the Terminus Nord. She would have liked to show him around the Goutte d’Or, but he wasn’t keen on seeing those African neighbourhoods, no taste for such exoticism, no ndolè2, no peanut chicken: he wanted foie gras and fig jam, oysters, sea snails, a grilled sole and some Pouilly-Fuissé.

  They chatted; she felt hot; the wine and the jetlag and something about Christmas had gone to her cheeks. She mentioned Clèves, her southern Christmases, the absence of snow, the occasional red wind that deposited sand on the windows, sand that her mother claimed came from the Sahara. But she’d lost him already. She knew him well enough: when she spoke about herself, he preferred her stories that intersected with the big picture: what it meant to be Basque, for example; her experience of France, of a particular school, of secular education; the astonishing refusal by the French republic to use the word ‘race’. Although she was thinking about her son, she spoke about Brice, her West Indian lover, and how she had not noticed that he was black.

  Kouhouesso shrugged. She was adamant. At the time, she had focused on other aspects of Brice. But talking Congo and Conrad non-stop, she was bound to end up with a flushed face.

  He rubbed his eyes with the flat of his hands.

  ‘You saw the look the salesgirl gave me.’ It was a statement, not a question.

  ‘Anyone opening bottles of Carissa without indicating whether they intended buying them would get a dirty look,’ she pleaded.

  ‘What gave her the right to think that I wouldn’t buy some?’

  She let it go; it was useless; he did not want to listen. Exhaustion prowled round them like a coyote.

  But she started in again: ‘Brice himself never spoke about his colour.’

  He cut her off: ‘You’re after a certificate. A certificate of non-racism. In fact, you’re only sleeping with me as a way of obtaining it.’

  She shook her head vigorously, like a horse, a wounded horse. She muttered the word paranoia.

  He pressed his palms against his eyes, then opened them, calmer now. ‘All those charming salesgirls, they remind me of those American girls, rushing up to say hello and goodbye and pretending that they’re colour blind. It’s important to them that they pass the test. Listen. You’re not that sort of petty person. But if you didn’t notice Brice’s colour, that just goes to show how repressed you are.

  The bastard, he had undergone analysis, too. Jungian, he told her. In Palo Alto, return trip twice a week in his Mercedes Coupé.

  ‘I’m not repressing anything,’ she protested.

  ‘I can’t remember who said: to be Jewish is to ask oneself what it means to be Jewish. I ask myself what it means to be black. Yet everyone seems to know. When you’re black, others see it all the time. And who is the other? It’s me. The role I’m expected to play.’

  She didn’t want to talk about Jews. Or black people, for that matter. Or others. She wanted to speak about them and about the rest of their trip and about Lisbon or not Lisbon and about children.

  They finished off the seafood. The sole arrived; he sent it back—overcooked. Another sole arrived—perfect. He asked her to help him remove the bones, since she was born a fisherman’s granddaughter. She was touched that he remembered. He looked at her kindly. He knew just how brittle truth was. Whether they liked it or not, whatever, whatever, they inherited centuries of cut-off hands, of whippings and deportation. And he didn’t believe that love was stronger than death; that was only good for Walt Disney. No, they couldn’t love each other inside a bubble or under Mary Poppins’ umbrella.

  Love. That was the first time he had said the word. The first time he had conjugated the verb to love with them as the subject.

  She paid the bill; she had received a big cheque from Warner, and they were on her turf. Besides, they never went out in Los Angeles.

  I HAVE TWO LOVES

  It was the Christmas–New Year break and yet he had a series of meetings, one that day at Studio Canal, and on the 31st with Why Not. And Vincent Cassel’s name kept popping up, like magic. Cassel…Cassel…he was the man of the moment.

  She looked up the train timetables to Clèves (and perhaps to Lisbon) and booked two first-class TGV tickets for the following day, a three-day getaway. Kouhouesso was in a delightful mood. Naked under ye olde beams, he sang, wiggling an imaginary belt of bananas around his waist:

  I have two loves, two you, two you,

  Paris and my native land

  Both forever, two you, two you,

  My heart is at their command

  Hollywood is sublime

  But no one can deny

  It hits me every time

  Paris makes me high

  He told her about Josephine Baker, about Katherine Durham, about Miriam Makeba. He showed her a Makeba concert on YouTube, in Stockholm in ’66. She was wearing a leopard-skin sheath dress. ‘Isn’t that playing the racists’ game, wrapping yourself in an animal skin when you’re black?’ asked Solange. He explained to her how the leopard skin was a sign of royalty. The only female black stars at the time were American or Caribbean. He was waxing lyrical, shocked: how could she never have heard of Makeba? He put on ‘Pata Pata’ and took her hand to dance. He wanted to make a popular film, flashy, sexy, full of music and adventure, not a pretentious film, not a French film. He had a meeting with Boris from Formosa, who had already produced films in Africa.

  She was surprised he hadn’t asked her to go with him: she knew Boris from Formosa well. But it would appear that Kouhouesso had quite a past in Paris, a whole life and plenty of connections.

  It was evening, she was waiting for him at the studio, the lights twinkling on the Christmas tree. They were expected for dinner at Daniel and Lætitia’s. The minutes were ticking by. She had spent the afternoon with Rose, in a hurry to tell her about the two you, two you incident. ‘Oh, he’s so funny!’ Rose said. ‘You have to marry a man like that, my dear!’ She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. Were her breasts too small? And what about her belly? Her figure still perfect, a young girl’s hips. It was time she told him about her son.

  She called Rose. She called her mother, and her father, and her son. She called Daniel and Lætitia, to tell them they would be late. She saw his name come up on her screen, Kouhouesso. She answered straight away: they should start without him, he was extremely busy, Cassel was in Paris and he might be able to catch him in Belleville.

  There was a full moon. The rotating beam from the lighthouse of the Eiffel Tower made the grey roofs wobble. If she drew their love in circles, he would take up the whole centre of her being, and she would be on the periphery of his orbit, like a little moon whose tides he would not be affected by and which would never eclipse his Big Idea.

  At 10.15 p.m., in the taxi, he reprimanded her for having waited for him. ‘People have dinner late in Paris,’ she announced, as if it were some sort of local custom. He was excited, radiant. Cassel was keen to come on board. And he had some fresh ideas. Boris had sent him the transcript of a speech that Sarkozy had just made in Dakar. Kouhouesso was reading
bits out loud and laughing with the taxi driver, who turned out to be from Brazzaville. He was coming out with lines, interspersed with extracts, holus bolus, from the speech, all in the voice of a character, the president of the African colony.

  The tragedy for Africa is that the African Man has not become part of History. The African peasant, who for thousands of years has lived according to the seasons, whose ideal life is one in harmony with nature, knows only the eternal cycle of time, in tune with the endless repetition of the same gestures and the same words. In this apprehension of the world, where everything is forever beginning again, there is no place for either human adventure or for the idea of progress. ‘Straight out of the nineteenth century,’ Kouhouesso explained, continuing verbatim, merciless. In this universe where nature rules, people avoid the anguish of History that torments modern man, but they remain static in the middle of an immutable order in which everything seems to be preordained. They can never launch into the future. It never occurs to them to leave behind repetition and to invent a new destiny for themselves. This is the very heart of the problem with Africa—with your permission, I speak as a friend of Africa. ‘No mention of mass graves. Not the lightest hint of insincerity. A discourse from before Leopold II’s time.’ The problem with Africa is that it must stop repeating itself, stop forever looking back. It needs to free itself of the myth of the eternal return, realise that the golden age it is perpetually lamenting will never come, precisely because it has never existed. The problem with Africa is that it is living too much in a present that is nostalgic for the lost paradise of childhood.

  He was cutting and pasting on his phone, in the taxi, all the way to Daniel and Lætitia’s. The taxi driver didn’t say another word; the guy was more or less in a state of shock. Was it possible, for once, to speak about something else? It was 10.51 p.m. She sent a last text to Daniel, asking for the door code. They rang the bell, Daniel opened, and she said, ‘Kouhouesso,’ and Daniel said, ‘Oh. Nice to meet you.’ She knew the ‘oh’ was a faux pas.

  In the taxi on the way back he was doing that thing of pressing his palms against his face, a gesture of anxiety, distraction and—she had learnt how to read him—despair.

  Did she have to alert people? Of what? His height, all 190 centimetres? His spectacular beauty? His mass of hair? Was she the guilty party, for letting them be taken by surprise? For not having pronounced his tricky name earlier? For being with him?

  ‘I’m supposed to get to know them but they make no effort to find out where I’m from.’

  They were driving along by the Bois de Boulogne. The Moldavian taxi driver was not joining in.

  ‘It’s the opposite…They’re curious, actually…They’re afraid of asking you questions because they don’t want to stigmatise you by asking you where you come from.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of being asked where I come from. They see Paris as the centre of the world. The three Guineas and Ghana, Niger and Nigeria, Zambia and Zimbabwe, it’s all the same to them. And the Battle of Algiers, if they happen to remember it, was in the middle of nowhere.’

  He retreated into his morass of anger, into the violence of bloody-minded History, rock-solid History. He was inside a time past, a present in the shape of a geodesic curve, which—here, in Paris—was relevant only to him. But she was in the taxi, and she wanted to be with him, together in that irreconcilable time.

  She turned towards the huge black trees and told him she had a son. Who had chosen to live with her father, with whom he got along well—better than with her mother—and to whom she had sort of entrusted her son, let’s say, soon after he was born. Her own father, she means, given that the alleged father of her child had disappeared, moved out, as soon as her belly began to show. She’d had him very young, too late for an abortion and whatever, whatever (she liked the expression), there we are.

  Kouhouesso knew.

  Knew what? That she’d had at least one child. Had he been reading the gossip columns? Had he Googled her? No (he lowered his voice in front of the Moldavian taxi driver): it was her areolas. They were brown. ‘White women have pale areolas, unless they’ve given birth to a child.’ She felt as if she were going back, in the taxi, not only to Clèves, but to the 1980s, when she heard and repeated all sorts of rubbish—that you can tell by looking at someone if they’re not a virgin anymore and that boys with long fingers have long dicks. ‘It’s a hormonal fact,’ Kouhouesso insisted. Who told him? How many white women had he slept with? Do black women’s areolas go darker? Why was she always full of questions, and he wasn’t?

  THE PROBLEM WITH AFRICA

  In the stairwell of the studio, he told her that he had a meeting the next morning. In a few hours’ time. ‘But the train,’ she exclaimed. He looked surprised. Centrifugal energy scattered the Christmas tree, her parents, her son: if he was staying, she was staying in Paris. No, come on, she should go and see her family; he needed to stay for the film. They argued on the landing. She rummaged in her bag for the keys. They had had too much to drink; she would set the alarm for tomorrow morning, as planned, and they would leave, catch their fucking TGV. The neighbour appeared, wearing a furious look and a dressing-gown—here we go, she thought, we’re going to end up down at the station for disturbance of the peace and breaking whichever law. But the neighbour took one look at Kouhouesso and beat a retreat. She couldn’t find the keys. In a hushed voice, Kouhouesso was cursing: he had back-to-back meetings, he had to be in top form. The keys had slipped into the lining of her bag.

  He sat at his laptop. The light annoyed her. When he finally came to bed, he lay still and fell asleep straightaway. She got up and felt in his jacket. His passport was there, the little navy-blue Canadian booklet with the Commonwealth coat of arms on the front. Stealing it would be a way of making sure he couldn’t leave again.

  His first and last names took up two whole lines. Kouhouesso Fulgence Modeste Brejnev Victory Nwokam-Martin. He must be the only person in the world with a name like that. He had told her that his father was a communist sympathiser, which explained some of his name. And he had obviously dropped the French bit.

  He looked so young in the photo, shorter dreadlocks, a sleepy look.

  She put the passport back in his jacket. It would be hard to think of anything more contemptible than stealing a black person’s papers.

  The alarm went off at six o’clock. They got dressed, made coffee. Kouhouesso grabbed the keys off the table and carried her suitcase to the Gare Montparnasse.

  So, there was no point in her meeting him in Lisbon. He wasn’t certain he’d get there. Let’s be realistic: neither of them was very family-oriented. She had to exchange his return ticket to Los Angeles for an open return ticket; only she could do it, as she was the one who had made the initial transaction. So, he would reimburse her the difference—in any case, the expense would be part of pre-production.

  She sat in seat number fifteen in carriage number one. He carried her suitcase on board. When he stepped back onto the platform, she felt the train wobble and lean to one side. She focused on breathing to stay calm. He placed his hand flat against the window, his red palm, against which she placed hers, smaller, cold from the glass—did their fate lines and love lines meet up and point towards the same horizon of creased skin? She pressed her mouth to the glass, but he didn’t. He smiled, shadows under his eyes; the condensation formed a crown around his head.

  With the first lurch, the condensation evaporated. The outline of their hands remained, ghostly, and once it had faded she had the feeling that she would never see him again, that she should never return to her family, that she should stay with him, not relinquish him, but follow her desire, forever. The train tore her from him; France rose and fell in the window labelled security glass. After Poitiers, she sent him a text, once there was nothing more she could do: ‘I miss you.’ He replied: ‘Me too.’

  Whatever, whatever, the train rolled on, France was flat, green and watery, time was passing at 300 kilometres per hour and she
fell asleep after the ‘Me too’. All of a sudden France had become forested. On the station platform, everyone was there: her father, her mother, her son. They had aged; her son had got even fatter. ‘You came by yourself ?’ She had prepared the ground for Kouhouesso; she had told them his name. All that, and now this. They were on their way to Clèves in the car, still another hour to go.

  She started drinking straightaway, in front of the twinkling Christmas tree. Her father handed her a whisky: come on, a bit of festive spirit; he took it right out of his ex-wife’s sideboard as if they had never been divorced. No news since the text message at Poitiers. Where was he? What was he doing? Her mother insisted on seeing what he looked like, this boyfriend-who-did-not-come. ‘He had a meeting with Vincent Cassel,’ Solange boasted. She showed a photo of Kouhouesso. ‘Solange always comes up with real doozies,’ said her mother, and her father pretended to be a cannibal: ‘I hooooope he’s not going to eeeeeeat you.’

  This man, who could not look at a black person without taking on a ghetto accent, this man, who—she usually forgot—was born in Dakar like Ségolène Royal and had spent the first four years of his life there, this man said, ‘Sarkozy is such an idiot’ when they put on the news before dinner.

  Her mother had cooked a fattened rooster. Solange’s son was getting fatter and fatter, and, she had to admit, more and more ugly. He looked horribly like their old neighbour. ‘Do you remember Senegal, Dad?’ It was the first time she had asked him. He could only remember one thing: the Harmattan, the dry wind from the Sahara: dust, his burning throat, blood dripping onto his little smock because he was laughing with a friend and his chapped lips split, crack. ‘So, it’s a type of foehn,’ her mother said. ‘We have the same sort of wind here.’

  She had brought her mother some Poison perfume and a signed photograph of George (her mother collected them). Some whisky for her father (bought duty free, along with the perfume). For her son, the very first iPhone and the latest iPod. And, for all three of them, she had filled in her customary vouchers: a return trip to Los Angeles, valid for the following year. Her father remembered the good old days when he got discount flights on Air Inter. All of a sudden, a text message: ‘Send me your address.’ He must mean her address here, in Clèves. Was he planning on coming? Tomorrow? Text message silence. Her dinner was whisky.