Sometime later, when demonstrations outside the mines became widespread, mostly by antinuclear groups, it came out that the so-called daily controls meant to measure radioactivity levels were actually done only once a year. According to the mining companies’ spokesmen, the registered data showed radioactivity levels below the danger zone. But independent experts warned about the danger of never being at the zero point, and since radioactivity is cumulative, daily exposure to the ingredient that supplied countries with nuclear arms, uranium—at levels far below dangerous for short periods but always above the zero point—was a trigger for illnesses.
So here I was in Africa so many years after Hiroshima, yet another place where doctors obeyed orders that were clearly inhumane: they colluded in hiding the diseases from the people who were sick, allowing them to continue working under conditions that were killing them off little by little every day. Hundreds of pawns worked like that, dying for some foreign king in this endless rummaging around, the relentless burrowing under death’s sun.
YORO WASN’T IN RÖSSING, nor had she ever passed through. Either she hadn’t arrived yet or she’d been misinformed or misled when she wrote her letter. Or maybe she was dead. The thought of her being a casualty didn’t dampen my plans, though; I had pledged the rest of my life to looking for her. I would die in Africa. My spirits flagged at times, of course, but they’d been at rock bottom for so long that however low they dipped now, it was never enough to throw in the towel. I’d gotten so used to my ration of sadness that no additional misery would be enough to take me down much further. You could say that my ongoing sorrow was like a maintenance dose. I learned the mechanics of extreme pain: a tightrope walker’s cord, on which the acrobat, the wounded person, isn’t worried about losing his balance. Balance isn’t the problem for people whose only worry is an acrobatic move that’s difficult for them: instead, it’s reaffirming the will to stay on the cord, to live. That’s the secret, don’t ever get off; the body’s weight keeps the cord from lifting higher, and pain tends to elevate us, only to let us fall like dead weight from the sky. Very early on I learned to get off the ground where the ants roved, the predators, the dogs, who’d run straight toward the smell of my torn flesh. That wire was my place, some ten feet high. No running with the pack, on firm ground—I had to concentrate all my efforts on resigning myself to walking that tightrope. Of course it was uncomfortable, but one learns to live with discomfort. The trick was not to go so high that if I fell I would break every bone in my body or die once and for all. That’s why I’ve always acted this way, accommodating, discreet, trying to make discomfort my natural territory, a tightrope walker, at the same time aware that those ten feet above the ground are what give me an upper hand: I could leap from on high like a panther pouncing on its prey from a tree branch; attack from a position of ambush, from the invisible heights, the way the bomb fell on me. From that moment on, sir, I no longer lived on my tightrope. The pain is gone. I’m at peace. Now that I’m on the ground, I miss the temptation to jump, but it was revenge that put my feet back on earth.
THE ONLY TWO REFERENCES in Yoro’s letter are the Namibian uranium mine and the coltan mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After the Namibia fiasco, and not knowing specifically which of the countless mines there are in Congo, I finally chose one of the best known, in the outskirts of Goma in North Kivu.
I found lodging in a house with views of Lake Kivu. It looks like such a lovely body of water. It looks spotless. But the lake is hell, and I was warned about it when I got there. Close to a thousand feet deep, the lake contains approximately 300 cubic kilometers of carbon dioxide and 60 cubic kilometers of methane, a gas that can become a detonator, especially because it’s near Nyiragongo volcano. Which means Lake Kivu is an explosive lake, and if the gas it contains should ever surface, it will expand through the atmosphere and kill off thousands of people by suffocation. Theoretically, this could happen at any time. This doesn’t frighten me, though. There’s very little that frightens me these days. At sunset, while I was taking in all the apparent beauty of the lake, I thought how if one day it should actually explode, it would blow out the cemetery too: the victims of Rwanda. There’s a refugee camp nearby. What can I possibly tell you about this area that you don’t already know? When I went to visit the camp a little later, I realized how much the sanctuary was like the lake, only superficially tranquil, because in its guts a group of UN soldiers sporting blue helmets was corroding it to the core, corroding the refugees, especially the female refugees, who carry in their vaginas the best currency for international aid. You bet—the blue of their helmets matches the color of Lake Kivu. A blue to cover up the brown. But I’ll take care of those blue helmets a little later.
A few days after I got here, I started measuring distances in time, since the local roads were precarious at best. Miles didn’t exist. It is impossible to determine the length of a road that isn’t there. So everything around me was measured in time, and even then the length of time was only approximate, since the hours or days it took to get from one place to another depended on the rains, the presence or absence of a tree fallen across the road, the sudden appearance of an illegal improvised roadblock or a bullet, which of course suspended time.
But the day we set out for the mine I could calculate both distance and time thanks to other factors indicating the nearness to our destination: we began passing numbers of people walking with sacks on their backs. Several of them were adolescents and children. By now such sights don’t shock me—you can’t possibly expect me to get outraged over seeing a child with a sack on his or her back. I would be a hypocrite to argue that this child should go to school if his family is dying of hunger. But coltan is a macabre metal, one of the densest metals on earth, which makes it extremely heavy. A relatively small sack of coltan weighs almost ninety pounds, so you could say, as so many others do, it’s a size that even a child could carry, and if they hunch over like that it’s because they like to complain. And so we passed hordes of people on the way, stopping often to pay a toll foisted on us by armed groups or the regular army, money extorted to allow them to continue on with the mineral burden they would sell for a few dollars in the city, to be sold in Europe for three hundred a pound. All of this I learned later. No matter, whatever the final tab, nothing justified that daisy chain of horrors originating in the belly of that mine.
Inside the mine. You know what people do inside a mine? Search. For years, entire lifetimes, they surrender their health, their time, their strength, to searching. An eternal search for something—in this case coltan. Curiously enough, most of the people looking for it have no idea what it’s used for. I was searching in the galleries of the mine, surrounded at all times by other people searching. The galleries are built specifically for searching. If only I had a tunnel to dig in, or a thousand of them, I thought. But the quest that I had been on thus far had taken place on an immense esplanade, a huge prairie with boundless horizons on all sides, in whose vastness there wasn’t a single mineral to clean, pebble to remove cautiously from the earth, ever so tentatively nursing the hope of finding that one valuable material that would please only me.
In some way I envied this trade that has been carried on over the centuries. The laborers in those mines worked without machinery, and the process of extraction was done in a wholly artisanal way—enviable. I imagined that the techniques for finding and extracting the mineral had been passed on from generation to generation, and that the whole enterprise was based on a kind of sustained ancestral authority and communal effort of people of all ages. I in contrast was a solitary miner. Nobody showed me how to excavate, nobody helped me bail the water out of my gallery because, as I said, my gallery was an esplanade, and when water came in, there was no place to chuck it, and I could only wait, drenched, for days, months, years, for it to dry out. I saw the lights they wear on their heads in the mine in Goma and knew they wouldn’t have been of any use because I searched in the light of day, and intense sunlight i
s what damaged my eyesight more and more, not darkness or advanced age. I didn’t have the fans the miners use to renew the air in the galleries and protect themselves from gases because I worked outdoors, winding through the variables that are the enemy of any quest: complete freedom, no clues, no suggestions, no guide. The coltan miners kept moving their makeshift fans here and there to breathe better. And how ironic that outside the mine, far from the subterranean galleries, the land known as the world’s second lung because of the lushness of its vegetation was in bloom. The miners, me, we were like microbes attacking that lung’s alveoli, like others who attacked from above by chopping trees, killing off the population and selling off their lands for a pittance to huge multinational companies, who then used the cheap land for uncontrolled dumping. Poor second lung of the world, mortally wounded, tubercular, pneumonic. I registered several galleries, bolstered every four or five yards by trunks, like catacombs, people who lived cut off from the rest of the world unaware that the fruit of their labor, coltan, was precisely an essential piece of global communication, an essential superconductor for manufacturing mobile telephones, laptops, and state-of-the-art weapons. Coltan was the coin of their sacrifice, served up to finance the wars that killed their fathers, their sons, themselves, living in agony to the death, buried by the coin swathed in earth.
When I left, I saw some of the miners with shallow pans in the river’s muddy waters, using the same techniques as gold miners do. At the bottom of the tray were little black and gray pickings: that was coltan. Everything was dark there, not only the material they were quarrying and the inside of the mine, but also outside, the dirty faces, the strange absence of sunlight. I started by asking the workers outside the mine about Yoro, and they passed the same question down the line one by one until it went past the mouth of the tunnel and on down the line inside. The question, my voice, had to go as far as the earth’s kidney, I thought, before it came back—hopefully answered in the positive—through the same mouth of the same tunnel where I was sitting on a rock, waiting, with brown water covering my feet and red varicose veins, hidden like the galleries where Yoro might be.
I was afraid that no information would come back out of the tunnel. I recalled the radical silence reigning over Hiroshima the first few days after Little Boy’s explosion. The dying in the hospital where I was convalescing stopped moaning. Not even the children cried. There was only a whispering of names. People with their faces blown to pieces looking for their loved ones, a strange experience because it didn’t depend on the one looking but on the one being looked for. Documentation, paper, were the first things to burn in the explosion, so the only way of identifying people was by the sound of the voice of the survivor. If the wounded person didn’t have the strength or the will to say Yes, it’s me to the mouth approaching the ear, his or her father, son, would go on forever whispering into the wrong ears. So many years have passed since then, and now I was the person looking for a loved one, waiting for her to identify herself.
My voice finally went out and came back. They hadn’t seen a white person working there in the past few years. Getting the answer to that question took so long that I worried the process might take more time than I had left in this world. I was horrified to imagine that receiving the right response—the definitive response, the information I’d spent a lifetime searching for—might take so long that it would reach my worm-riddled ears only when they were unable to hear or send a signal to my amorphous brain, fallen to the bottom of my skull, shrunken or liquefied.
SIR, I HAVE VERY LITTLE TIME LEFT. I’ll try to keep it even briefer, and say that despite the many pages I’ve written, there are certain details I’ve skipped, especially since they can come for me at any moment now.
I lived that subterranean life for many years. Even when I went outside, the images that flooded my mind belonged to the interior of a mine. You could say that after fifteen years on this continent, I can recognize it only underground. That’s my expertise.
What can I tell you about my time in Africa? You were born on a beautiful continent, for the little I’ve actually seen from the surface, but they’re boring holes in it, hollowing out the inside of the continent. One day you’ll be sleeping in your bed and wake up suddenly underground, or you’ll go to your daughter’s room and discover a deep hole when you open the door where the miners are excavating and throwing the useless material atop that little girl whom you tucked into bed and kissed good night just a little while before. You’ll be left clutching the doorframe, paralyzed by the vision of a white nightgown disappearing into the brown, the gray, the blue-black flesh of this earth. And from there you’ll watch all the horrifying cogs and gears at work. You’ll see how the buried body will slip and slide through those tunnels like a recently cast nut along a factory assembly line, where nobody believes they’re assembling the weapon that will end up burying you like another nut falling on the same assembly line, and so on and so forth till the continent is nothing but a big factory spitting nuts out so some guy in another hemisphere can destroy things on the cheap.
I remember shortly after arriving being invited to a party where I saw a Belgian artist fashion a sculpture—or that’s what he called it—that was highly acclaimed and that, after a while, I associated with the African massacre. Before the eyes of his country’s dignitaries and all the people invited to the opening, he grabbed a jerrican full of liquid aluminum and spilled it into the mouth of an ant colony. He waited a few seconds for the liquid to solidify, then dug out a big block of earth, which he cleaned with a pressure hose, exposing the passageways that the ants had excavated. The silver aluminum tunnels showed the beauty of the insect labyrinth, but there was no sign of life there whatsoever. Sometimes I think this will be the only salvation for these lands. A giant sculptor might come along to spill liquid iron into the thousands of tunnels of this human ant colony before it’s completely hollowed out and all of us fall to the bottom: men, elephants, snakes, antelopes, monkeys. Though by that time I think I’ll be far away from here. I won’t be alive, not here or in any other place. But Yoro will. Yoro is already safe, and I laugh at you. I despise you. I feel joy. Nobody will take that joy away from me. Even if they torture me before executing me, I will think: “The torture will last one, two, seven days. But my happiness will last an eternity. It will outlast my body, my conscience, because it will be the sound repeated in a chain, an alpha gorilla pounding his chest to claim his territory, the sound of the rain that comes to fill the crevices left by the parched earth.” You have no power over that feeling of mine and it will prevail: happiness, free laughter, the spark in the air, the fall from corporeal confinement.
“THE CONGO ENDS UP CHANGING even the best person,” I once heard a UN soldier say. You remember I told you what happened one day on the North American television program This Is Your Life, when a victim of Hiroshima and William Sterling Parsons, the commander of the Enola Gay who dropped the bomb, were put together on the same set? Well, a few years ago I saw another example that I found as sad as that program. You’re perfectly aware, sir, what I’m talking about, but I’m thinking once again of that reader who still has her or his full capacity to empathize, the reader able to feel pain before the suffering of others. To that reader I want to explain that there’s a video used to train personnel for the largest international organization in the world, the United Nations. The video I’m referring to is called To Serve with Pride, and it has the subtitle “Zero Tolerance for Sexual Exploitation and Abuse.” It informs UN bureaucrats about issues anyone belonging to the United Nations should be fully aware of already. The video defines their conception of sexual exploitation. Later, when everything was about to go down, the video became one of the interlocking pieces of the puzzle enabling me to recognize the sinister final image.
Now as I write, I imagine the members of the UN peace mission sitting down with a notebook and, pen in hand, taking notes while they’re explaining what they understand to be sexual exploitation. It appears as th
ough it’s not such an obvious thing that someone working to defend peace knows what pedophilia is, just to give an example. On several occasions the video ponderously enunciates the rules, such as “payment with money, jobs, goods, or services in exchange for sex is prohibited.” The video also describes a few real-life cases as practical illustrations for the theory. And so it tells the case of a sixteen-year-old girl who was brought to Liberia as a prostitute and who was confined there in a place called the Sugar Club. When the girl sees a UN vehicle at the door of the establishment, she thinks she’s saved and, relieved, runs to the car to ask for help. The driver rapes her and later informs the owner of the club that the girl had tried to escape. It’s like what happens in those popular tales when a princess gets lost in a forest and thinks she’s safe when she sees a little house with the lights on. She doesn’t realize that it’s in the house and not in the forest where the greatest threat lies, or maybe she comes to understand it only when the soldier pulls up his zipper. Another illustrative story on the video: A UN worker gave some cookies to a young girl in exchange for sex: he got her pregnant and subsequently skipped town. The mother got by selling bananas to care for her boy, at less than a dollar a day. The boy was called mzungu tali tali, an insult that means “not black or white”; an out-of-the-ordinary child who was denied treatment even by the Congolese doctors, who alleged they couldn’t understand the mystery of difference, this mixed body.
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