I don’t know where they are keeping me, Dad. I know only that they brought me to Zaire, which I think is a gigantic place and so unstable they had to change the name. Now I think it’s called the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But I can’t say for sure because I live underground. Some of my companions who share this underground confinement say that pretty soon they’re going to take us to Namibia. They say there’s uranium there and people die in the open-air mines where it’s extracted; we die here buried in the earth, pulling minerals from its guts. At least they get to see the sky every day. When this letter reaches you, I will probably be here or someplace in Namibia. But since you’re in the military, I thought you might figure out a way to find me. I don’t know how I got here. I was with my last family one day, and the next I knew I was being loaded on a plane to I don’t know where, with a bodyguard, and then another plane, and another. They made me work doing things that I don’t want to talk about here, I wouldn’t know how. And then they sent me to a mine, and here I am. It’s a clue, of course, but they say that in this country there are many mines like this one, so it’s not much information for you to go on. I heard we’re in a coltan mine near Goma, but I’m not entirely sure. One of the ways they torture us is by lying to us about where we are, using a different name every once in a while to confuse us. We can’t ever be sure of anything we’re told. Only what we see. Which is mostly death. So many of my companions here have died, and nobody says anything when they do. Sometimes they just leave them where they fall, as if they aren’t in the way. Eventually they end up in the earth covered by the stones we excavate with our bare hands. We are our own mass grave.
For a while my families would send reports about my health. I don’t know who wanted them. They’d ask me questions all the time. My whole life, a long battery of tests. I don’t know what it is they expect me to come down with, but now I really am beginning to feel weak, and for the first time I’m afraid it might have something to do with the disease everyone has been waiting for. If it is, and if it’s serious, I want to die close to you, Papa. I’m saying goodbye before they come to take the letter. I pray it makes it to you. I’m waiting for you. Please don’t forget me. Besides, Papa, I’m pregnant, my belly is growing even in the miserable conditions here, working in the tunnels fourteen hours a day. I’m so frightened. I want this child, even though it’s the result of rape. It was one of the armed men, though all the men guarding the mine are armed. This particular mine, though, is also an arms reserve.
At first I wanted to get rid of the baby. I’ve never wanted to be a mother, and less so after being raped. I’m not so young anymore either. I must be around thirty-nine. More than half of those years were spent underground. Like a dead woman. I’d pull the baby out myself, but I don’t know how to do it and I’m afraid. Now it’s the only thing that keeps me company. If you make it here and don’t find me, please look for him or her. To make it all easier, I decided to give the baby a name, my same name, whether it’s a boy or a girl: Yoro. There’s a Spanish guard here who once told me that Yoro means to cry in his language, but it’s written in a different way. If anyone deserves this name, it’s me. I’ve cried an ocean. Please, I beg of you, if you can’t locate me, please find your grandson or granddaughter, who will have my same name, and give him or her the chance to live to contradict it. I’ve already cried for myself and for the baby, and for the children of his or her children. I’ve never, ever forgotten you. You are my true father.
Your daughter,
Yoro
I was sixty-six years old when I read that letter. I’d just returned to New York to rest, to stay put in the home I had once shared with Jim and to take care of myself while I waited—as I had always waited—for the definitive fatal disease to come and take me. I had reached this age and lived calmly, fear-free. But that letter shaved years away. Her cry for help rejuvenated me, which shouldn’t be confused with feeling happier, more beautiful, or more agile than before. What it did was throw me back into the tunnel of fear from many years before. The distress came from knowing that I would go after her, and in order to find her I had to be alive, and I had to remain alive for a good while longer, and to remain alive a good while longer I had to feel again the fear of death, the fear that I might not get there in time. A double fear, since again I knew it wasn’t only about me anymore, but about two of us: her and me. This anxiety brought me strength more than anything else. The strength to stand up for myself and for her, Yoro, whom I could feel again inside of me. At sixty-six years of age I finally felt the heaviness of an advanced-stage pregnancy. Nine months. I was a terribly strong old pregnant woman. I remembered my mother. When I was little she told me she’d wanted to give me a little brother, and that she and my father had tried for a long time but were never successful. She said it regretfully; almost embarrassed, as if apologizing for having denied me a playmate, a companion with whom to share my troubles or achievements later in life, when she was no longer around, someone with whom to grieve her death. She was very intuitive, my mother. It was if she could foresee that I would be left alone too early. A brother, if he had survived the bomb, would certainly have been a great help in my life. A heart that loved the same mother I did, a pair of eyes that shared a vision of all the pain my eyes have seen, a sense of joy that would have relieved some of the melancholy that had weighed me down since I was a little girl.
MY MOTHER USED TO SAY that the only way to attain something was by visualizing yourself with it, seeing yourself together with what you desire. Yoro’s letter made me grasp those words fully. Thanks to the letter I could now truly see myself with Yoro for the first time. Did it mean I had her? That I would find her in the end? This pregnancy on the verge of birth is what brought my mother to mind. Coincidentally, yesterday was her birthday, and I realized I had forgotten to think about her and wish her well, which was strange for me. Yoro melded with her in my mind and I began putting things together. I thought how true it was that my mother hadn’t been able to get pregnant again, but when she curled me inside her uterus like a little pink woolen sweater, she had also gestated another little girl, who was inside of me. So I was born pregnant. It’s why I felt pregnant so many years later. It’s why, truly, I’ve been pregnant my whole life. Pregnant—the day I read the letter—at sixty-six years of age. And that’s why, too, I’ve resisted, why I recovered from what anyone else would have solved with a bullet, a rope, or a knife. I withstood thanks to the daughter my mother gestated inside me to keep me company. Now I can be alone because I know I never really am, no matter what it looks like to other people, no matter what it looks like to me. So that’s why I take such good care of myself and drink alcohol only on special occasions. I avoid eating unhealthy things, don’t puff on cigarettes, and stay away from drugs. That’s why I’ve chosen carefully the people who can enter my body. That’s why I use my claws when attacked. That’s why in spite of everything and without really knowing why, I never chose death, nor would I give my life up for someone else, not even my mother if she were still alive, or Jim, though at times I’ve thought that for him I would.
No, I would never have given my life up for anyone because I’m not a single person, I’m two. There’s a girl inside of me, I knew when I read the letter; there’s a little girl I knew was Yoro. Yoro was inside of me, not since birth but from before I was born, from when I was being formed, the process that brought me from embryo to fetus, and from fetus to baby. This was my mother’s treasure and greatest gift, even though I wasn’t aware of it yet: my strength. She is my strength; it is she who gives me extraordinary energy. People wondered how I could be so alive, despite my age. Don’t overdo it, people said, not knowing what I was carrying inside. Today I’m more aware of this than ever. And you’ll be too when I’m ready to tell you about it. I was one body with two hearts, one body cupped inside of another. That must be why my little dog would approach my belly and rub her ears against it like a stethoscope. She must have heard Yoro’s beating heart, and the dog wou
ld whimper and Yoro must have liked the closeness of the animal too. I could tell when something charmed her because I’d close my eyes and feel so light that I would soar like an eagle at rest, an eagle nested in the flight of another eagle. I saw that image so many times. That’s the strength, the high flight and serenity. My mother’s gift. Sixty-six years of pregnancy that I never interrupted because, though at times it may have been a burden to carry so much life, I could never have aborted my mother’s daughter. Yesterday was her birthday and I hadn’t even thought about her. I closed my eyes, clutching Yoro’s letter in my hand, and expressed myself more or less in these terms:
“Mama, it was your birthday yesterday. I was far away and couldn’t celebrate with you. But I appreciate the astuteness you’ve shared with me throughout my life. My little girl and I, our daughter and I, love you with all the potency of our two hearts that beat to your beauty and generosity.”
THAT LETTER GAVE ME the vigor I needed to look for Yoro, to give birth, but I grew unsettled as I began preparing for the trip. I was confronting this without Jim for the first time. And as if dealing with this at my age wasn’t daunting enough, the letter shook me up in another way. As you must have read, Yoro explained she was about to be taken to mine uranium. Uranium. The central ingredient of the bombs that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Uranium. In my little girl’s hands. It’s a relatively abundant material in the earth’s crust, but can only be mined cost-effectively in regions where there is a high concentration of it, and where nobody cares about the ensuing environmental contamination from the extraction process, neither the country’s government nor the international companies that hold mining rights. Which is to say, this type of mining takes place only in the trash dumps of the world, the landscapes that are of no interest to anyone, the air that can be poisoned because the lungs they fill belong to people who have no value whatsoever, the neglected class. Nuclear energy is much cleaner—I’ve heard it said so often—but believe me, I know something about uranium, and I know that, aside from the risks of accidents in nuclear power plants located in developed countries, the most polluting phase is the first one, the site of extraction, not only for the environment and nearby cities, but also for the hands of the people who mine it without knowing they’re being murdered. Even if the workers knew their lives were at risk, they’d continue extracting the uranium because death by starvation seems more imminent than death by radiation poisoning. You can feel hunger—it pricks every day—but radiation poisoning is a silent killer. Besides, you know that in Africa there are always more workers than jobs. A thousand ants for each tiny crumb of bread. If they don’t explain the risks of exposure, it’s not for fear of being left without laborers, only that there’s no time to waste; the white queen orders them to extract material, no break. Time isn’t only gold in Africa. It’s more valuable than that. Time is uranium. Africans aren’t informed about the hows and the whys of the death that is coming because the need to fill their bellies, or their sons’ or daughters’ or parents’ bellies, is far more urgent. Starvation, that physiological law, doesn’t hide; on the contrary, it is made manifest. Radiation, on the other hand, is the way death satiates its own hunger: silence.
Uranium. Just the name to me was like something straight out of hell, like Uranus, that god, son and husband of Gaea, Mother Earth. Uranium changed my life. It took my parents, grandparents, and friends away; decimated my city; destroyed my country; insulted the human race. Yet there it was, to all countries the most coveted gold, radioactive gold that Yoro was now extracting, handling, someplace in Africa. In an African mine, where no doubt the process didn’t follow any safety measures for workers, who are in reality slaves, as I came to see for myself later on.
I’ll skip the details of my preparation for the Africa sojourn. First, because I have to finish this testimony today. And anyway, let me just say that it’s not about the journey for me. Whenever I go somewhere, be it short distances on foot or long ones by train, I go directly from the departure scene to the arrival scene. The in-between is always like a big empty space I sneak into so I can find my own world. I’m not interested in itineraries, only where I come from and where I’m going, which in my case are not existential issues but practical ones.
So I will limit myself to saying that I made it to a desert worn out by one of these mines, the Rössing mine in Namibia. It had taken a few weeks for me to get all the details together, so I decided to start in this country, where Yoro had said in her letter they were going to take her. If I didn’t find her there, I would continue on to the Congo.
The Rössing mine is in the Namib Desert some thirty-eight miles from Swakopmund, the German colonial city where I am today, where, as I learned in my previous stay, the residents like to brag about their buildings and wide streets with fairy-tale houses in the shade of palm trees planted rigidly equidistant from one another, scrupulously aligned, like teeth adjusted by the best German orthodontist. They are proud of their urban design, but also of the special attention the Germans paid to the population as compared with other colonizers. Apparently they built schools. What good folk, those Germans. What they don’t tell you is that the schools were just for white people. But I didn’t see any schools in Swakopmund, only the slave labor camps, the first testing grounds for the concentration camps the Germans would later bring to Europe, along with the eyes, brains, and other organs of Africans preserved in formaldehyde for racial studies. Just a few years ago, Germany finally returned the skeletons they’d taken. Now the descendants of the colonialists pat the shoulders of Africans who lost their grandparents, greeting them like buddies; they surf together in the sand dunes of that desert and invite their international friends to come and record them speaking North American slang with their state-of-the-art cameras. A friend of mine told me not long ago about two members of the United Nations peacekeeping forces who surfed the dunes or more like staggered down them on a kind of board. I thought it was nearly as ridiculous as their ill-named peace mission, which not even staggeringly have they actually been able to complete.
The Namib Desert is the most important tourist attraction and the country’s greatest source of revenue, more so even than the mines. Swakopmund is a major tourist enclave, bordered on one side by the icy, though striking, vistas of the Atlantic coast, and on the other three sides by the Namib Desert. The climate is cloudy and humid, and the legion of ships that get beached in the fog along the coast are an attraction in and of themselves, uncanny shipwrecks that people on land, adults and children, pick apart to sell off the materials until there’s nothing left. Tourism, one of the country’s few sources of revenue, is being put at risk by the uranium being exported to the UK, France, the United States, and my country, Japan. So why should I care about any of this at this stage in my life? I guess if I’m writing about it, it’s because it still matters to me, but let me get back to what I really care about: Yoro, whom I hoped to locate in the desert mine.
A villager in one of the last places I went explained the effects of the desert invasion through an interpreter. That’s how I came to understand the value of that great esplanade of shifting sands before the mine was built. Multinational companies defended their actions by saying it was a perfect spot, a nothing in the middle of nowhere. As if the nothing was not as valuable, or even more priceless, than the something, the populated, the city. Ignoramuses. Because of them, the desert is losing its presence. They made the necessary nothing disappear, that indispensable place for insignificant plants and animals that were and are going extinct, essential for the survival of nearby villages and tourism. The relentless racket of heavy machinery and its constant beeping every few seconds supplanted the silence. The emptiness, a mythical place for those coming from far away and a fundamental physical space for those living nearby, was filled up with trucks and roads that coiled into an enormous spiral descending level by level to below the ground, a kilometer-wide oval where thousands of hands scrabbled in search of the cancerous substance.
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nbsp; The man who acted as my interpreter placed a tiny reptile that looked like a pink chameleon in the palm of my hand. It was one of only a few of that species that were left, or at least the villagers said they no longer found them in the sand as they had before. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a beautiful creature. Its mouth was turned up in a permanent smile, but its skin was what caught my eye, so fine it seemed translucent. Looking closer, I realized that what at first I thought were the pastel tones of its skin—bluish orange, a very soft green—were in fact the colors of its internal organs, which were visible underneath. I thought of that legend of the old queen of Brittany whose skin was so delicate, so white, that when she drank red wine, her throat went blue with each swallow. How could such a delicate creature resist the harsh desert light, the direct rays of the sun that a few minutes earlier had turned my arms, my hands, my unprotected skin all red and patchy? How could that little animal—seemingly unformed, still inside the egg—survive in such a severe environment? A land scorched by the ruthless sun was its habitat, and yet it couldn’t survive something ostensibly so much less powerful than the king of the solar system: the human touch.
One day the locals observed the arrival of vast quantities of heavy machinery: trucks, equipment of all makes and models, technologies they’d never heard of or seen before. The British company Rio Tinto had been working the mines since the seventies. They had promised to build schools, create jobs, and provide better infrastructure for the population, and over the years they’ve done exactly nothing to better the lives or the standard of living of the locals. The only thing that rose was the death toll from direct and indirect contamination. The workers labored for a pittance and the uranium profits were siphoned out of the country or stolen by the government officials who signed away the mine’s exploitation rights. A few years later, in 1978, a sort of prefabricated city grew up some ten miles away from the mine for the Rössing laborers. They christened it Arandis. To visit the mine and the settlement was for me like a new descent into hell, as you’ll see in my chronicle of events. As I mentioned earlier, the hell in my life hasn’t been organized as levels one below the other, but horizontally, on the same plane, like a huge flat surface on which each door opened onto a different version of suffering. I’d never seen it as a gradation of pain going from lesser to greater, though each form of misery seemed worse than the last, even if it wasn’t, as a result of the newness in the form of pain. But what I saw in Rössing was like an authentic classical descent into Avernus, and being belowground added to the feeling of perversity. For once, an inferno into which I was thrown fit the traditional subterranean image.
The Story of H Page 24