Descent into Night

by Edem Awumey

  She approaches the inert shape on the sofa and shakes it. Ito slowly opens his eyes. It will soon be over, and Kimi Blue decides she will stay with her friend to the end of his story. She says to him, “I’m willing to keep going if you promise you’ll go back to the hospital tomorrow.” But Ito Baraka is no longer listening. He is again lying stiff on the sofa, dead wood.

  42

  Ito Baraka is a flying man. From the sky above the apartment he’s looking down at his body lying on the sofa. That scene is followed by another one. It’s a Friday night, and Kimi Blue is sitting at a table in the bar they usually go to. The man sitting across from her is a poète maudit, a playwright, and he’s coming to the end. From the sky, Ito Baraka observes his own character, holding Kimi Blue’s hand. On the stage of the bar, the saxophonist they’ve come to hear is playing, and the words of the song give Ito a familiar shiver: “The women, the women, are rocking their children / And the men are lighting their pipes / And night is falling over the village . . . ” A song of nostalgia, into which the authors, Manu Dibango and Akofa Akoussa, have tried to inject a little joy. Kimi asks her man to dance. Ito Baraka thinks it would be a big mistake. He’ll collapse after a few steps. But he answers, “That’s an offer I can’t refuse, isn’t it? Come what may, I’ll follow you, my lady. Okay, here we go. You’ll have to excuse me for being so heavy in your arms. It’s just that I have to kind of hang on to you. Do you want to know if it’s true what the song says about the village?”

  “Yes. I have the impression it’s a time and a world that no longer exist. That makes you sad and you whine like a little kid. So what was it like in the village?”

  “I grew up in the city.”

  “But do you know villages? Have you been there?”

  “Yes. We spent the summer vacation in a village. And believe me, it wasn’t at all boring. The two months went by in a flash.”

  “How did you spend your time?”

  “Clowning, fooling around, kids’ games, splashing in mud puddles. The most beautiful times were in the evening. After supper, we’d sit in the middle of my grandparents’ yard around a big wood fire. The flames would turn the thatch of the roofs golden and my grandfather would tell us stories.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “You know, I’ve forgotten almost all of them. Adventures about jungle animals. They were exciting, but we were scared. Around the fire, grandfather’s voice would be booming.”

  “What scared you? The old man’s voice or the jungle?”

  “Both. And later, I understood that the jungle was not what I thought it was. After grandfather died, we often went back to the village. There was always a fire in the middle of the yard. The fire was lonely and sad because there was no one sitting around it.”

  “Why?”

  “The times had become dangerous. There were kidnappings, executions, rapes. The party was cleaning house and you couldn’t hang around outside at night and tell any kind of story.”

  “So why did you keep on making a fire?”

  “You have to have a fire at night. To keep away the wild animals. They could come and prowl around the huts. Oh! Excuse me, I’m crushing your toes.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “We had to keep away darkness and harm. You should do the same.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Carry a flashlight when you go home alone at night.”

  “Why?”

  “To keep harm away, to dissuade potential attackers from getting close to you. A flashlight and a whistle to rouse the neighbours in case of a problem.”

  “You see danger everywhere.”

  “Yes. The streets of the world are no longer what they were. Especially at certain hours.”

  “Go on, this is fascinating.”

  “No, I have to go and sit down. I’m feeling wobbly.”

  43

  On the sofa, Ito Baraka starts moving again, and opens his eyes. On his lips, the hint of a strange smile. Kimi notices, and looks at him inquiringly. Ito grimaces, “Take notes, Kimi.” The young woman is upset but does as he asks.

  ***

  According to the latest news, the madman, the one we used to call the Walker, has reappeared around Hanoukopé Market, with the same habits and rituals he was known for. He has started taking his morning walks in the neighbourhood again, beginning at six o’clock, going back and forth delivering his litany of insults to the nation, which he says is sleepy and spineless, and repeating his eternal call, “Revolution or nothing, my friends!” The words hammering in the morning mist, his voice rising and swelling, and swelling till it explodes in the middle of the market, filling the space, the men, and time with its breath of death. Because, even though they say he’s the same man, the old Walker I knew in my adolescence, I have trouble believing he’s still alive. He must be dead, and it’s a ghost who comes to put on a show in the streets in the mornings. He’s dead and rotting with his antiquated dream of revolution, that’s why they say it stinks when he goes by, and the fetid odour and the insults he scatters all around stick to your skin and your clothes like remorse or shame that is hard, if not impossible, to be rid of.

  That’s what I was told the last time I had news from back home. They say the old man yelled so loud that the young people have gone back to occupying the streets and roadways, their fists raised, discontented and determined to overturn the tropical order of things that don’t work, and in the sky, the sergeant with the Uzi watches them from his helicopter, and when the spectacle annoys him, he fires into the crowd of schoolkids and older people and on all who refuse to obey, but new threatening fists are raised toward his chopper in the sky.

  During this time, in other neighbourhoods of the city, there’s theatre again, what they call concert parties, actors with their faces painted setting up in the squares and clowning around. You can see them emoting in scenes of exaggerated drama, parodies of domestic situations or brawls among the common folk, fights between lovers, friends, or the weak and the strong, and when the weak one, his face twisted, collapses at the feet of the powerful one in a horrific enactment of the eternal victim, the crowd assembled around the actors bursts into uncontrollable laughter. And I imagine my friends watching the spectacle. Beno the loony walking past the scene indifferent, his newspapers under his arm, Beno lost, with his head permanently in the clouds and the shit. And I imagine Wali’s mother pushing the tricycle on which her son vegetates into the crowd of spectators in the hope that it will awaken the past and some emotions in him, in the hope that her lifeless son will start to move again, to live again. And since all this is taking place at an intersection where there’s a lot of traffic, I also envision Sika, more and more huge, passing by on the way back from her shopping and asking her driver to stop the car for a moment, rolling the back window down, and casting a vacant gaze at the spectacle, a tear running down her cheek.

  There are concert parties, they say, but there are also more traditional theatre troupes offering a variety of plays. A theatre that makes reference to the world of a Jarry or a Soyinka before leading you elsewhere in the singular decline of a people whose last dead souls were found at an intersection in the heart of a city devastated by an earthquake, to consider nobody knows what, since, obviously, there was no life anymore. Or that other creation in which tropical kings succeeded one another on a blood-soaked throne in a very short period of time, and to get to that throne, they each had to imagine and bring about the death of the previous monarch, with trickery, plots, backstabbing, treason, informing, and murders, until the throne disappeared under a sea of blood and the last putschist king no longer knew where to sit, he had nothing left but an emptiness to sit his colonial sergeant’s ass on and govern the flies and the dogs. Or that other play in which the tropical kings had gone mad, all of them, and they organized a ball where they danced with whores and
virgins, and the game was to try to be the first one to contrive the death of the other madmen, to poison their lives, and the wine that flowed freely down their gullets and between the thighs of the virgins and harlots, where they were forever sticking their noses and losing their wits. And the public, surprised and rapt, shouted hurrahs. Yes, Kimi, plays like that, always in that tropical order of things that don’t work.

  But the most impressive of the creators who have overrun the city, I was told, is a young man known as Bob Silak, who puts on the old Marivaux classic The Game of Love and Chance in his own way, using amateur actors who, in spite of the chopper, the sergeant, and the Uzi, take pleasure in wooing anyone who meets their mischievous gaze. On an improvised stage in a public square, they say to a woman spectator, “I love you madly! And if you look in your mirror, you’ll see that it is inevitable.” And the girls in the audience go along with the game because, in spite of the fear and the permanent state of siege, it is essential to continue creating scenes and a country for love. That’s what I tried to do with you, Kimi, but you must have realized very quickly that I’m one of those who can no longer invent anything, neither love nor hate. But at those times and those places where Bob Silak has his actors play, many pairs of eyes meet and many relationships are forged. People fall in love and go off to love each other until the next riot. That’s the game, and at night they cling to each other until a stray bullet explodes the chest of one of them, or the cops come and pick them up to throw them in prison for good. But sometimes the stray bullet lands elsewhere than in a body, sometimes it ends its flight of death in a wall, sparing the lovers, who then can continue the game of love until the next season. And that’s how life goes on back home, as in many other times and places. One lives in those rare spaces spared by the bullets.

  44

  As for me, in the months following my return from the camp, I lived more or less as a recluse, shut up in my bedroom in front of a big notebook in which I tried to write, a recluse because I’d lost the habit of living in the open air, in the wind from the sea or the sun in our alleys, which were too full of the friends I had just reconnected with. A kind of phobia of others and the outside world. It was hard to take up my troublemaking life with my friends where we had left off. I couldn’t help thinking that, at any moment, the “shadow police” would get their hands on them, their hands, billy clubs, the hood slipped over the head, the head and entire body diving into a ditch in which the remains of other unfortunates who had been betrayed were growing cold. But time passed and nothing happened. After the riots that led to the closing of the camps, it was the status quo once again, freeze image until the next explosion, the last act that would give the apocalypse its full dimensions, its eruption of fire, screams, and death.

  The country was paralysed by a general strike called by opposition parties and followed by most of the unions. The public service, the schools, and the university were closed, and the demand was that members and leaders of the military withdraw from politics. But it was hard for us to imagine the sergeant with the Uzi putting away his anger and his engines of death to go and spend the rest of his vulture’s life in the calm of a barracks. The strike lasted a year, and during that time, I saw very little of my friends. I made all kinds of excuses to avoid the outings they suggested, increasingly rare excursions into the bowels of our capital, because the desire was no longer there. My defection may have destroyed our wonderful esprit de corps, and in truth, I must say we no longer shared that unique restless spirit of dream and subversion. The first day I was reunited with my friends, I felt something like a weariness in them, as if they no longer believed in it, in spite of my return from hell.

  For my father, too, there was a pause, but, refusing the immobility imposed by the strike, he would wake up at dawn and, as he had always done on days of rest, he would set up his drafting table on our terrace and start drawing plans for houses that had not been commissioned. It was as if he was afraid that things would stop, that the country would end up disappearing into a sludge of tainted earth, blood, and broken bones. He was afraid, so he continued making his drawings, and on the tracing paper would appear the streets and buildings of our improbable future. And when the embers in my mother’s stove in the yard crackled as she busied herself preparing breakfast, when the burning charcoal filled the air with incandescent particles, perverse little morning stars, I was afraid. I was afraid the burning particles would fall on my father’s drawings and cause them to burst into flames, reducing the work he had done to ashes.

  And when I wasn’t spending time silently observing my father’s work, I stayed shut up in my room in front of the big notebook in which I had hesitantly started to do my first writing. Because we had gotten to know Beckett and the playwrights of our streets, I was trying to grope my way to writing a play. I remember creating pathetically naive scenes dripping with clichés of hope. I titled my play “The Country and the Roses.” It was totally rosy and optimistic, because, after the camp, it was—not hard to guess—an attempt to reintegrate a ghost into a life that, little by little, would run away from him, a life now marked by a permanent shiver, a trembling of my whole carcass at the slightest unexpected sound. And when I went out, I would turn around a thousand times, because I had the feeling I was being followed, so I’d cut short my errands to return to my lair. I’m a guy of lairs and caves, with life going on over my head while I cling to my prehistoric dream of freedom. But cracks long ago started to appear in the cave, like this basement, and everything is going to tumble down on us in a rain of rocks and dust.

  I never was able to find the text of that first play, I never found the country and the roses again, but I remember my disappointment on reading the final result. I had written that play in one sitting, and reading the words of happiness, I retched. It was shit that was too beautiful, too smooth, the stench removed. But shit, by definition, stinks, it churns your insides, your guts. However, little by little, in that rosy rereading of the country, Koli’s face began to appear. Koli, his regular features hardened by death, his hair a dazzling white, and finally, that was the light, it was the white hair and the childlike smile of a cellmate to whom I was reading Candide for the tenth time. My pages were filled with Koli Lem’s face, his head of light carried by a body that was drier and drier, his limbs stretching in the movement of walking. And Giacometti’s The Walking Man, to me, was Koli, walking in the streets of a city on fire like a body without a grave, walking towards someone, a friend who has promised to find him a grave, and who has said to him, “I will always remember you.” I believe I never promised Koli anything, except to try to write if I could, and finally, after months of shutting myself in, scribbling and erasing, I managed to write another play, one in which there was a dead man walking in a city on fire in search of his grave.

  My father encouraged me to submit that play to some of the literary competitions that were announced on posters on the walls of the cultural centres of the capital. If you won, you could get a grant to go to Avignon, Brussels, or Limoges. I didn’t win Avignon, but there was a visiting Canadian artist in our city at that time who had been on the preselection committee for one of the competitions. And when I was more and more shut up in my bedroom and least expecting it, I received a letter from that man saying he was disappointed that I hadn’t won the competition. He asked what I was doing—what I was doing besides writing—and urged me to submit a new play project to him. He would, with the help of a friend who ran an institution that provided funding for artists, help me get a grant to go to Quebec. For my file for the institution as well as for my visa application, I had to have a very serious project and mention that I had come in second in a previous competition in France. We anticipated some problems getting my visa, but that didn’t happen. I was free to go. And a little over a year after my return from the camp, I went away.

  I went away, finally, farther than Koli had hoped. I went away accompanied by the bright shadow and the c
andid head of my friend, and from then on, in the streets of my new life, Koli would push me from behind to help me keep moving towards salvation. Koli, the walking man, was no longer searching for a grave where he could rest his bones. His goal now was different, to give me courage and a desire to move forward. But that horse had been out of the race for a long time, broken and shoved into a corner of a cell long before the race. And since then, only the man Koli has been walking in the streets, while the horse has been sinking deeper and deeper into the sewers, with a new identity as a rat.

  45

  Dawn is breaking, with bluish glints on the window. Ito Baraka is suffocating. Kimi wonders if she should make him stop dictating. He’s hardly breathing anymore. Kimi again stops writing, the pen in her fist, eyes staring in front of her at the black screen of the TV.

  “Let’s stop, Ito. You need to rest,” she whispers haltingly.

  Ito props himself up on one elbow. “I need to rest? No, Kimi. Just drop it, you know very well it’s all over! I’ve been trying to tell you for hours. There’s nothing more to be done, which is why I’ve spent the night talking to you about Beckett and the living dead. If you’d left before now, I wouldn’t have been such a bother to you. Kimi Blue, why won’t you? You could have gotten out a long time ago, but no, you stayed, hoping for the absurd miracle of a resurrection of this strange creature. You blew it, my friend, it was game over at the start! What came after that was this slow rot you’re seeing. How can anyone put up with that? In the name of what? Love? But maybe you’re simply drowning in what I see as your fascination with the worst things in life? Your cancerous mother who saw her organs destroyed, one after the other, your alcoholic father who killed himself, your junkie friends panhandling at the intersections of the world, and who knows what else? It’s time for you to think a little about yourself, Kimi Blue, you can’t manage all the shit in the world! Mother Teresa, Doctor Schweitzer, they croaked in the end! She in a filthy Calcutta slum, and he in the pygmies’ green hell on the shores of the Congo River! I remind you that we met in the yard behind your store, between two garbage cans. And I didn’t see that as a good sign. Things were rotten from the beginning, Kimi. How many couples meet in such bizarre surroundings? You know what you have to do now? Get out! I remind you once again, at the risk of annoying you, of the role I had in Beckett’s play. I was Nagg, the grumpy, crazy old man stuck in his trashcan. I would stay there in a fetal position, and from time to time, I’d lift the lid to breathe a bit, because a fetus clings to life, it wants to be born. But I don’t want to, I’ve decided not to lift the lid anymore to breathe the tainted air. Let’s turn the page, Kimi Blue. What do you say? Have you made a decision? What is it? You’re staying? No, no, get the hell out! But before you leave, let me confess my shame at having sold out my friends in the purgatory of a torture chamber. If I’d held out, nothing would have happened to them. Because how can you explain the fact that all three were reduced to useless remnants of humanity, to that vegetative state in which they can no longer do anything but blink their eyes powerlessly at the changing seasons? Accidents, unfortunate coincidences, bad luck, you might say. But I can’t help thinking that the driver who ran over Wali was acting under orders, that Beno became a loony after a violent confrontation with a member of a shadowy militia tasked with settling scores with all those little shit disturbers whose names were on a blacklist for revenge, that the colonel who married Sika did so under orders, with express instructions to stuff her like a goose so she would swell and swell until she exploded within the gilded walls of her prison villa, that Nivaquine was given orders to eliminate Koli, who had dared to organize my escape. That’s it, Kimi, no doubt about it, don’t try to convince me otherwise! I’ve known it for a long time, and because there’s nothing to be done about this terrible truth, I giggle like a survivor after the moment of euphoria and I drink to the vegetative health of my friends! And at night, I close my eyes in the hope of being released from my burdensome carcass, I try, like Koli Lem’s flying men, to free myself from the birdlime of memories by spreading my burned survivor’s wings above the clouds. I try but invariably fail to conquer the skies of oblivion or detachment, and I fall back down heavily into this corrupt, rotten body. If you insist on helping me, here’s what you should do, Kimi. Find some of those hot peppers that set your tongue and your epidermis on fire, and rub my body with them when you see that I’ve left it for a night flight. That way, my spirit will not dare come back to its overheated former abode, and from up above, I’ll be able to see my carcass slowly waste away like the bodies forgotten in the street after a riot.”