According to the woman at the mine, my daughter wasn’t allowed to speak much or my granddaughter either. Baby Yoro had been left unprotected when her mother died. Cannon fodder from the day she was born. To begin with, being the offspring of a black father and an Asian mother, she was neither-nor, mzungu tali tali. But she had certain features that set her apart too. Mostly the shape of her eyes and her very long neck. A Burmese guard who had helped her mother for years had placed a few golden rings around her neck as the girl grew to protect her from lions, he said, though he said different things at different times, like how the rings were symbols of nobility in his land. But what lions? And what nobility? Such things don’t exist underground.
When Yoro died, baby Yoro was taken to a refugee camp outside of Goma. With my eyes wide open when I arrived in the city, the first thing I saw was prostitution. That’s right, alongside all the five-and-dimes, prostitution is how many of the women eke out a living, selling their bodies for food or money. It’s why I could never understand this need for soldiers to rape underage girls or pay for sex with them in cookies or Fanta. Later it was explained to me when we arrived in the refugee camp. The soldiers figured these girls were more likely to be healthy; they wanted to avoid catching sexually transmitted diseases. As demand grew, prostitutes began arriving from surrounding areas, as happens in other countries, and set up shop there to satisfy the hankerings of UN people who, however much they try to hide the fact, are a cog in the machine that leads to human trafficking of minors.
There were hundreds of rape victims in that refugee camp, underage and adult women alike, who gave birth to what came to be known as a “MONUC baby,” meaning a baby conceived by rape or a criminal sexual transaction on the part of a UN blue helmet. Only girls not young enough to have had their first menstrual cycle were safe from unwanted pregnancy. I could verify it all on my own from firsthand testimonies in situ. Hanging all over the UN’s central pavilion were posters with illustrations prohibiting sexual relations with minors. Many women go to the UN for help. Can you imagine what it must feel like for them to encounter all these warnings directed at the peacekeeping staff, posted all around their supposed sanctuary? Just think of the confidence generated by all these posters in the selfsame headquarters of the people who have supposedly come to their country to protect them. It’s as if a wounded person showed up at a hospital where the operating room had posters in the halls around it reading “Killing patients is not okay.”
A journalist once told me that when soldiers are issued their uniforms, they are also given cards listing ten rules of conduct, one of which is the fact that sexual abuse is prohibited. Just the thought of some soldier, some keeper of the peace, carrying such a card in his pocket disgusts me. Ten rules on a pocket flash card like those learning aids with vocabulary words so you can learn a new language while on the subway or standing in line. A quick memory prompt on a perverse backcloth: it’s for memorizing the terrible acts that are prohibited as if they were something new; the word rape on a flash card, the verb, was no more than something you had to learn consciously not to do. You study the lesson of “I shouldn’t rape” by the same method you employ to learn that in Spanish mesa means “table.” So you memorize it. And if you happen to forget, all you have to do is pull the card out of your pocket, remind yourself, and start all over again. If it should happen, the important thing is to follow the next step: hide it.
That’s how things were in the Congo. You know it perfectly well. Over twenty thousand soldiers came to protect the country in what was the United Nations’ most important peacekeeping mission. But they only made the situation far worse. It’s said that when the dying ends, so do the jobs, reason enough for soldiers to instigate internal conflicts to keep their double pay: military wages from their countries of origin and from the UN. I think people were hopeful at the outset, but when I walked through that camp, all the refugees wanted to know is when they would finally be left in peace or in war, but without all these peacekeeping forces with their blue helmets. Most victims lacked the resources to accuse their rapists, especially in a country where countless people couldn’t even tell you the day or year they were born. The most dedicated personnel did what they could and had even supported the creation of a soldiers’ DNA bank to determine the paternity of MONUC babies and to be able to file the appropriate criminal charges. Most soldiers agreed to the idea of a DNA bank, since accusations could be leveled against anyone, even the innocent, though, in general, innocent or not, what happened in the Congo has been the result of a great conspiracy of silence protected by the only organization in the country with money and means.
I ate lunch with the soldiers while I was visiting the refugee camp. The meat—they said while serving me—is Argentine; the cheese is French; the after-lunch coffee, Colombian; and the chocolate, Belgian. Everything was paid for by the UN. The mind, sir, which at times takes us down paths that we’re ashamed to acknowledge, played a little trick on me, and I wondered while I ate why the soldiers couldn’t show a little decency and pay the girls with some good roast chuck ribs and chocolate, instead of Fanta and cookies. What a shame the Congolese children haven’t tasted chocolate. I was mortified when I found myself thinking such a thing. And I thought back to what they had said, that the Congo changes even those with the best of intentions and I felt for an instant closer to the criminals than the victims.
YORO HADN’T GONE UNNOTICED in the refugee camps in Goma. They told me she’d gone to work voluntarily, wearing the rings around her neck, in a sort of zoo or menagerie on the outskirts of the city, built by the great Congolese military chief. Yoro probably thought, rightly, that a zoo is a better refuge than a refugee camp in a place where people had become like beasts.
When I got there, I saw the damages the rebellion had caused the day before. I was sure this was finally it, though, the last link that would bring me to Yoro. The zoo. All I wanted was to get onto the grounds, which when seen from outside were torn apart, full of howling creatures, bloodied. I thought it might be more practical to use the old wad of money instead of a door, always the black market. But there was no need to pay; a fire had razed most of the premises. Later I found out the zoo had been left to the grace of god a while before, a god that didn’t exist.
I don’t know why I even bother to write what happened once I got into these brand-new ruins because you certainly don’t deserve to know. You don’t deserve to know how I felt when I found Yoro. Writing even three words that might help you imagine what that moment was like would be a sign that I don’t love myself very much. It’s a matter of my own heart, something at once so beautiful and so painful that I refuse to waste time explaining to you how my entire life transformed in a single flash. Of course I explained it to my dead Jim as soon as I was calm enough and had the proper distance, which allowed me to write at a remove from the fever of that moment. Below is the letter I wrote to Jim. It’s written as if I really thought he could read it. Maybe the merciful, humane reader would like to know the details that preceded the end of my story, if someday you ever want to share this testimony with others and satisfy my last wish. You, sir, can just skip these pages, I wrote them for Jim, so move along to where I explain the only thing you care about in this case, which is my crime.
The zoo of a city at war, my love. Imagine what that’s like, a zoo in a city at war. Impossible to imagine without seeing it. Here you could truly feel people’s agony, much more than outside. You can’t really appreciate people’s death by seeing dead people. I had seen so many dead people already they all seemed the same to me. You can really feel people’s death in a derelict zoo; the hanging bellies of the hippopotamus dragging like newborns around a fake pond that’s nearly dry; the hoarse orangutan who has been sobbing so disconsolately it lost its voice and now merely opens its mouth wide in a silent scream that punctures your eardrums. Outside the zoo, the dead and the wounded are all the same. United in suffering, people lose their individuality. But in a zoo where animals have
been abandoned in their confinement, each species manifests its pain in a different way, within the parameters of its way of being; the way of the bear, the way of the monkey, the way of the lion, the way of each animal in keeping with its nature, like all the facets composing a diamond that is the human heart. I’ve always known that the creatures inside Noah’s ark weren’t animals, but the entire spectrum of a person’s feelings. He tried to salvage joy and grief in all their variants. That was Noah’s work.
Oh, if only you could have seen Yoro’s eyes, my love . . . You would have fallen in love with her, even though she’s your granddaughter, and despite the love you felt for me. I felt a special attraction to her myself. How beautiful our granddaughter is, daughter of my biological daughter, and how good you were to find me, to make me feel like her mother without ever needing to let me in on the secret. You’d have told me eventually, I know that, but it doesn’t matter now. It never really mattered because I’ve moved along the same roads I’d have traveled had I known the truth, and perhaps not knowing made me a little more patient when I told myself: Take heart; don’t worry; looking for someone else’s daughter isn’t so important. But the second I laid eyes on her, I knew for sure that she’d sprung from my own genetic sequence. Some things you know without having to study them. So how important is blood, my love? Can it help us identify the mysteries of the human chromosome? I always thought it couldn’t, that blood isn’t important, and I still think this because even though I was born defective and wrongly sexed by relatives and doctors, at least I was born of myself. Yet when Yoro looked at me it was as if the little puppy of the little puppy I’d gestated for so many years suddenly recognized me, smelled me, and looked over my body with hunger, maybe looking for the nipple of the woman I wasn’t allowed to be when I was born, condemned to the flat chest of a sad man. But Yoro was there, turning me into a mother and a grandmother in one fell swoop. A snap! Everything faded into the background when I saw her. Like in a birthing chamber, only she, newly born, was all that existed. Her presence signified everything. Even you disappeared in those first few moments. The birth, my love, was painless. All the catchphrases mothers use are true: when Yoro was born, all that I had suffered stopped hurting me. It’s hard to explain, it’s not really that nothing hurt, more like all the suffering somehow transferred into a kind of movie that I could watch scene by scene, but no longer feel.
After so many years searching for Yoro, when I finally found her, it was like coming back to you again. Spilling water over your ashes at the foot of a tree to watch how the limbs rise up. All of you, erect. Yoro has your eyes, but with a twinkle of a star that has heated up over years of pressure. There was pressure there. The pressure of war. She was so young, and yet the look in her eyes was on the verge of splintering from rage, from heat. But she was good. She bent down to caress the wizened skin of a crocodile. But the animal didn’t move. If it had been a person, I would have thought he was dead, but for a crocodile inertness and sadness are one and the same thing, and sadness, everyone knows, is an evergreen tree.
We walked slowly, checking all the cages. Many of them were open. We saw a tiger approaching some fifty yards away. We knew it by its stripes. The stripes were nearly the only thing it had left. Stripes without a tiger. It couldn’t walk. It scraped forward with its front paws alone, dragging the back ones so slowly we weren’t the least bit alarmed when it got close. When it reached us, it raised a hungry tooth to the sky; that’s what its feline strength had been reduced to, a chameleon’s failed attempt to catch a fly.
Yoro is beautiful, my love, but what really stands out is her kindness. She caressed the iron bars as if they were wounded flesh. She entered the cages with respect, as if not wanting to awaken the dead. We saw a young elephant, still alive. It was lying on its side and it reached out to us with its empty trunk, which reminded me again of the image in my recurring nightmare, shed snakeskin—though now I knew what had happened to my penis, my testicles. All of it was in Yoro. An empty elephant trunk was no longer a symbol of my genitals looking for me all over Hiroshima; now it was just that, an empty elephant trunk. Yoro and I spent many hours together picking whatever grass was left, locating grain and water in other cages. For the elephant. It was so weak. Yoro placed the food in the lobes at the end of the trunk for it to smell, then set it in the elephant’s mouth with some water. It was as if she’d grown up taking care of sick elephants. Maybe it was just that. Right now I don’t know anything about her. How to ask? I haven’t told her who I am yet either. But I believe she knows, Jim, I believe she does. I wish you could see how she looks at me. She knows the same way that I’ve always known, like you never told me, through the silent communication that runs from body to body. It doesn’t matter, though. I will tell her the truth. I have to think about how to go about it. How to explain using words why we have spent a life, the only lives we had, looking for her mother, looking for her. Our only life, Jim. A life dedicated almost exclusively to searching for the treasure you didn’t live to find.
We spent seven days at the zoo. The first six we traveled on foot. The last, my love, the last, Yoro left on the back of an elephant. If only you could have seen it. The elephant was tame. It stepped around the bodies lying on the ground. I realized when I mounted that seen from above like that, desolation multiplies. That’s how I saw the city as a battleground. That’s why the kings and the gods deserve less forgiveness, because the higher up you are, the better you see the plain and the easier it is to prevent war.
Squalid horses roamed about with their ribs poking out, sniffing the human pasture. They nibbled it. Thousands of years of an herbivore’s diet replaced by a carnivorous one. The thing about war is that it makes anything possible. I watched the horses, my love, die without complaint. Their way of showing pain is silence, which isn’t the case with other animals. Will I die silent as a horse or will I let out a pig’s squeal that in a single blast quells all the silence I’ve suffered? We trekked through the city for almost an hour before the elephant finally recovered its ancestral memory, raised its trunk to the sky, and shook us off its back with a great trumpeting roar. From the ground we heard its footsteps running away, but it didn’t bother to sidestep the vacant-eyed faces of the ones responsible for his captivity. Two helmets cracked in a single footfall. I liked the sound of it. “Peace,” it said on one of them. But you can’t drain a solid, and the soldier brain, now a liquid thread, might just flow into one of the lagoons of true peace, the peace those soldiers ridiculed. About a year ago, a spoiled little girl in a suit made a feminist speech at the UN headquarters. The candid words of an actress aren’t going to change the world. The world is fixed by the tread of an elephant recovering its memory as it races away. You taught me you don’t ask for equality using words like please. Equality is not even under discussion. That was then. It’s different now. The only way to defend black people and women is the tread of an elephant. The world no longer understands words.
Jim, my love. Here I am, me, who never believed in life after death, writing to you. You see? My writing is all messy now, because I realize I never told you the crucial part. I should have told you in the beginning that Yoro was one of the attractions in the zoo. Yep. Like another animal. You’re asking yourself why, I bet. And I know you’re not here, you aren’t reading this, it’s absurd to be writing to you, and yet I have to find the right words to tell you delicately that Yoro wears five bronze rings around her neck. Almost five pounds of weight on her collarbone. I found her huddled in her cell. A ring around her neck was chained through a loop to one of the bars. “A guard told me that Burma is at war.” That was the first thing she said to me. Only afterward did I realize that Burma is where you had suffered too. Is that land still in conflict? You didn’t come immediately to mind because when Yoro mentioned Burma, it was meant as some kind of rationalization for the wars. It didn’t seem so strange, more like a discreet form of asking forgiveness for all forms of conflict in general. As I said, Yoro’s most outstanding
feature is kindness. She spoke to me in her mother tongue, Japanese. It’s the language her mother taught her as a protection, she told me later, so that nobody would understand them. She was curled into a ball of sadness, all except for her neck, which was tall and straight. There was a tiny cage at her feet. A cricket inside. “An insect and a giraffe woman are alike in one way,” she told me. “If you remove one of our rings, we’re nothing.” I imagine it must be true. The insect would bleed to death, the neck of the woman would break. When I severed the chain that held her in the cage, it took an hour for her to articulate a single word. Then she started to speak.
Before explaining what will lead to the end of my life, I have to tell you the story, link by link as Yoro told it to me, of what took her mother, our daughter, from Japan to Africa. It’s not about her mother getting sick. As you know, the medical reports the families sent periodically always showed stable results. Yoro was a strong baby, resilient, a healthy adolescent. The top secret project, the test-tube baby created with the hope of observing how weeds flower in it, how the pitiable cypress trees of radiation sickness grow willowy, grew up to be a strong, healthy adolescent, and she remained vigorous for such a long time that she stopped being of interest to the project overseers. So they got rid of her for being healthy. And they sent her to the mines to keep her quiet, with a labor contract that was already breached at signature, where radiation exposure finally took her life. That’s how it happened. Everything so simple, and so tough. From Japan to Africa, Jim. We should have come to Africa together. How did it slip by us? The origin. Of the woman. Of Yoro. Today the scar, the keloid on my left cheek in the form of the African continent has more significance than ever, like an outline of that crucial element sought for so many years: Yoro.
The Story of H Page 28