Human Love Page 12

  5

  IN APRIL 1977 IN A STREET IN LUANDA he overheard a couple talking. The man was explaining to his wife that she was wrong not to clean the frying pan right away after supper because the grease, when congealed, gave off an intolerably pungent smell of burned fat. As man and wife walked along, they continued their mild altercation, each halfheartedly rejecting the others arguments. Given the price of oil, the woman maintained, it was better to keep a layer of it at the bottom of the frying pan …

  A ridiculous echo struck a chord within him: Cuba, a young French pasionaria irritated by the increasingly bourgeois attitudes of the “popular masses,” forever frying their fish amid acrid oil smoke … Now in Angola it was Year III of the revolution. He glanced at the couple as they made their way along the Avenida dos Combatentes. The husband, probably a member of the MPLA, the wife, given how she spoke and dressed, a government official. Both of them quite young. Sad.

  The Portuguese had cut and run; the country belonged to the Angolans; areas out of bounds to blacks no longer existed. The intoxication of the brand-new revolution was there to turn every word, every step taken into an adventure, a blaze of fire! If the revolution doesn’t change the way we love … Elias smiled, recalling the exalted dreams of his adolescence. In the distance the couple were still arguing: the man gesticulating with his right hand, no doubt demonstrating the correct way to scour a frying pan.

  The intoxication was something he had experienced powerfully as soon as he returned. All the more because the revolutions success had proved to be almost unbelievably dazzling. The colonizers had packed their bags and left, and the MPLA, the Marxist-Leninist party (the only party, according to malicious tongues), had set about building the society of the future. In order to comprehend this rapid progress he had reread a book on the 1917 revolution and verified that the seizure of power had been just as miraculously simple in Russia. Was this a trap set by history for revolutionaries drunk with victory?

  He was reminded of this trap when he encountered the spouses discussing their frying pan. Year III of the revolution … He was on his way back from Zaire after an intelligence mission in the absurd war (“a weary war,” he told himself) that put the two countries in conflict. The Angolan government wanted to know how much weight former refugees from Katanga carried in this struggle. The Soviets, for their part, were interested in the possibility of undermining Mobutu’s regime. Out in the field this curiosity on the part of both had led Elias to an Angolan soldier who was slaking his thirst, his face immersed in the water of a river. Drawing closer, he had seen that the man was dead, and little fishes were playing around his head as the current washed over it. In the forest beside the riverbank, the corpses there, too, had had time to settle into the poses of the living. That is how a battlefield appears when one comes upon it after the fighting is over …

  He had been hit himself by a shell splinter: that streak above his left eyebrow. “I could really have done without this trademark,” he told himself angrily. This nick was a characteristic feature of his image as a “generic African.” As he looked in the mirror, it suddenly occurred to him that this eyebrow, drawn into a slight frown by the scar, might be seen one day by Anna … For a long time now he had made it a rule to remember only one aspect of that Russian past: the train that halts in the middle of the snowy taiga, a young woman climbing back on board carrying the fragrance of the night in the fabric of her dress … In his profession the drug of memories was a grave danger, on account of their sweetness.

  The argument about a badly cleaned frying pan was a trigger, both ludicrous and timely He noted others, just as superficial and serious. For a time he managed not to grant them the terminal significance of: When revolutions die …

  The death knell sounds, he thought, one evening at an official dinner, when this type of woman appears. Seated opposite him, the wife of one of the party leaders was puffing out her cheeks to suppress a belch, sighing, using a fork to toy with the food left on her plate. Year III of the revolution, and somewhere, beside a river, that young dead soldier and, on the opposite bank, a village where the children would have been at one another’s throats for the meal that this fork was tinkering with …

  Another sign, the impeccably dialectical slanging match between Joâo Alves, now a minister, and an army sergeant, unable to resolve which of them should end up with a fine car that had been smuggled into the port of Luanda.

  But perhaps revolutions die when people begin going to visit them like private viewings at galleries. That tall Belgian woman, his fathers girlfriend in Kivu. Louise Rimens, going to Havana as a revolutionary tourist. And now these armchair viewers of the march of history, the Europeans he encountered in Luanda.

  In the month of May he forgot about these tiny indications that the revolutionary ideal was flagging. A popular uprising against the MPLA erupted. President Neto suppressed it in a bloodbath. This crackdown on “faction-alists” did away with a number of Elias’s friends. “The death knell sounds,” he told himself, “when revolutionaries start killing one another,” and he was by no means certain of his own survival. His control, who dealt with the Soviet secret service, broke off all contact. Moscow was waiting to see how far the repression would go: should its agent be rescued from the Angolan quagmire, or should he be sacrificed?

  Elias was spared. “Young but promising,” he quipped bitterly. The Soviets renewed contact and gave him a new mission: to gain authorization to be present at the interrogation of the “factionalists.” He succeeded. In one cell he saw a woman lying unconscious. Beneath her torn dress broken ribs stuck out.

  He recalled that President Neto wrote poetry.

  In 1978 Elias formed a part of the Angolan delegation that accompanied Neto to Zaire. This visit to Mobutu by the Marxist president infuriated the Kremlin. Doubtless the countdown had now begun for Agostinho Neto, the poet, Elias thought. An odd journey, in the course of which Elias noted with astonishment that the soldiers polishing Marshal Mobutu’s car were using French eau de toilette in spray form to clean the hubcaps.

  In May 1979 he again went to Kinshasa with a team that was to prepare for the new Neto-Mobutu summit. It was there that he learned of the arrest of Antonio Carvalho, the vet from Dondo who had made him read Marx. The man had now retired to the north of the country, playing no part in politics. But the hunt for “factionalists” had a need to unmask enemies everywhere.

  Elias left Kinshasa by car, traveling via Kikwit, hoping to reach Lunda Norte the following day. He was held at the frontier, not by the Zairean guards but by the Angolan rebel soldiers of UNITA. All things considered, the cruel tortures they inflicted were futile because the truth they were trying to extract from him was hard to admit: as one of Netos men, he was entering Lunda Norte to rescue someone Neto was going to kill.

  They threw him into a wattle-and-daub hut and left him without water for a day and a half. He lost consciousness several times and came to during the second night, when through the mists of his pain he heard whispering in a language he knew. He made an effort to prise open his eyelids, saw two shadows moving in the darkness. Two men the soldiers had recently impounded in this prison with crumbling walls. A dull voice muttered curses directed at the UNITA soldiers, then modulated into snoring. A different, younger one, suddenly murmured very distinctly; “I want to die another way, not like this African …” In Russian.

  THE YOUNG PRISONER WAS AFRAID; Elias sensed his panic in the darkness. He was moved by this anxiety on the part of a foreigner, possibly on his first visit to Africa. He would have liked to reassure him, speak to him about an exchange of prisoners such as the UNITA military must have in mind, otherwise they would have killed all three of them — along with the peasants they had just shot. He did not have the strength to say it, or even to make a sign to the Russian. His hands and feet were bound with wire that cut into his skin. But the will to assist the other man helped him to remain on the alert himself.

  The soldiers’ voices reached them throug
h the un-glazed window. He realized they were engaged in raping a woman, that fat Zairean woman with a very childish, chubby face whom he had noticed just before being thrown into this “prison” hut … The young Russian stood up to peer at what was happening outside. One of the soldiers must have seen him; the door opened, and thick boots began kicking, somewhat blindly, at the three bodies lying there. The young man shielded his head like a boxer on the ropes. His older comrade knew how to absorb the blows by means of abrupt, muscular swerves of his trained body

  Elias pictured the impression this must be making on the young prisoner, who kept whispering a mixture of curses and lamentations at intervals in the darkness. He probably perceived a world cleanly divided into the bastards, these UNITA brutes, who raped and killed and sold themselves to the Americans, and the heroes, or at least people of goodwill, struggling to guide Africa along the prescribed path of history Yes, a clear and well-defined perception of this kind. Tempting clarity …

  Such a world, neatly cut in two, did not exist, Ellas knew well. This night alone was an inextricable tangle of lives, deaths, words, desires, abysses. There was that woman with her childlike face and her heavy, fleshy buttocks, whom the soldiers were taking it in turns to violate. By diverting their aggression, this rape had very likely saved the three prisoners from being executed. Anyone skilled at telling fortunes would have shown that their survival depended simply on the pleasure offered by the buttocks of a woman on all fours beneath the soft light of the moon. And on the same night, in the town Elias had failed to reach, an old man, the vet, Carvalho, was being tortured to death. And on the beaten earth floor of a hut there lay this tall African (me, he thought in surprise), a virtual corpse, in fact, its wounds swarming with insects. In his youth this African had seen a man stretched out in a prison courtyard under a blazing sun, whose body presented more or less the same fly-infested wounds. The boy had made a silent vow then to fight against this world where a man could be transformed by his fellow human beings into such verminous flesh. The boy had grown up and fought, and now this echo of the past was so cruelly droll as to make him smile, in spite of the pain.

  Men invoke history, politics, morality … This allows them to explain everything, he thought. The leader of UNITA, the wicked Jonas Savimbi, is supported by the wicked Marshal Mobutu, who is supported by the wicked American imperialists. And the MPLAs good president Agostinho Neto, supported by Moscow, is fighting these terrible people so that the ideals of fraternity may triumph. How clear it all is!

  Elias opened his eyes: amid the stifling density of the night that drunken child was putting his head through the window frame from outside and threatening the prisoners with a submachine gun. He was capable of squeezing the trigger for sport or in a simple muscular twitch. His face was rigged out in a gas mask with a torn-off tube. The glass was broken, and his misty, drugged eyes appeared now full of hate, now languid, like those of a sick child. For men who liked clarity, this gaze did not exist.

  Just as this Africans racing thoughts did not exist (me, Ellas again reflected in amazement, and felt detached from his body covered in bleeding wounds, from the voice that was still alert within him). Two months earlier, that encounter at a diplomatic shindig in Lusaka. Anna with her husband, who now held a post at the Soviet embassy. A young woman very much at her ease amid the absurd exchanges of social chitchat. More beautiful than before, more radiant. And her Vadim, who still had a slight stoop, a mild myopic air. Avoiding them had not been difficult …

  The child appeared at the window again, aimed the gun, waved it. Shoot! Go ahead, shoot! Elias caught himself thinking, and was angry with himself for this weakness. But nevertheless the picture crossed his mind: a burst of gunfire, a moment of pain, that puts an end to the long-drawn-out pain of a day and a half, erases Annas face, whose newfound beauty is a betrayal of the face he loves. And after that burst, nothingness, which can only be the fragrance of the snow in the folds of a gray woolen dress …

  He came to his senses on hearing a cry. A woman’s voice, a brief exclamation, as if of joy, then the gunshot. Despite the throbbing of the blood in his temples, he picked up what the soldiers were saying: the Zairean woman they had just shot had diamonds concealed in her mouth … The young Russian was at the window again. Elias guessed what he could see. A dead woman, a soldier extracting tiny gray granules from her mouth.

  Then it came to him that the only true view of the world was just this one: in the dense humidity of a certain night men cluster around a woman who has just died, gripping her still warm body, which they have all had their way with. Unhurriedly, one of them rummages in the woman’s mouth with his index finger; the moon is almost full (clarity!); a drugged child sleeps, leaning against a tree, and in towns and villages a few dozen miles away life continues, people prepare to go to bed; in Luanda a couple discuss the fat left in a frying pan; in Lusaka a young woman sleeps beside her diplomat husband whom she has never loved; in Paris a female intellectual writes a text about the betrayal of revolutions; while beneath the mud of the Russian plains, beneath the rocky American deserts, gigantic cylinders sleep, crammed with death and capable of taking off at any moment and obliterating this land bathed in the blue light of the moon. And at the very heart of this insane world there is respite, a wooden house, a woman who walks out onto the snow-covered front steps at nightfall and gazes at the white road below the terraced treetops of the dark taiga … He could knock on the door of that house tomorrow, and he would be welcomed as if he were returning forever.

  For a moment longer he succeeded in seeing the world thus, in the totality of its interconnected lives. Then his vision became blurred; such a perception was unendurable for one human being. His eyes had only borne it because death was at hand, and this made him more than a man.

  Feverish whispers already seemed to be reaching him from the far side of life. He moved his head, and the pain from a cut reopening in his shoulder woke him up. “Why are they taking so long to kill her?” Elias recognized the Russians voice, words distorted by fear. He again wanted to reassure him, tell him about the Cuban commandoes who would doubtless attack at dawn (the previous day he had heard their gunfire, the kind of gunfire that draws the enemy into responding, thus giving itself away). He was going to survive, that young man, perhaps even to end up with a vivid memory of this night: the intimacy with death, a glimpse of madness, and then that dead woman spewing out diamonds … Scenes for a book he might well write in later life, as white people do, to draw a line under their years in Africa. In these pages everything would be clear. Heroes, villains. And everyone would have a life story that began at point A to arrive at point B. And yet when death stares you coolly in the face, you realize that in your life there are just a few hours, of sunlight or of darkness, a few faces, to which you return continually even as you draw further away from them … Fishermen on the island of Cazenga, a woman waiting for them. Then the same woman sitting on the threshold of a hut, a child crouching at her knee, his face buried in the crook of his mothers arm. Then that moment when he was most intensely himself: a halt at a little station in the snow, a young woman climbing onto the footboard of a train … And that winter dusk, too, an elderly woman standing on the front steps of her house, watching a bend in the road …

  He regained consciousness as he felt a hand unceremoniously searching through his jacket pockets. In his mind the words formed in Portuguese: “Nâo, nâo sou morto …” His mouth was too dry to articulate, his lips caked with blood. No, in any case, something else should be said. In the darkness he picked up the young Russian’s whispered words as he talked to himself without hearing. Elias knew there was nothing in his jacket pockets; the soldiers had taken his papers, his money, his notebook … The pen! Tucked away horizontally in an inside pocket, as if in a hiding place. The young prisoner was just flushing it out. Lean pickings. And what’s more, he did not know that …

  “The ink … The ink’s all dried up … But if you could memorize an address …”
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br />   The Man Who Loved

  1

  As he witnessed the betrayal of the ideals he had always fought for, his resolve did not falter In Africa the USSR abandoned bloody remnants of ideals, ruined dreams, the ghosts of those who had believed in them and died for them. I talked to him about this inglorious ending and spoke harshly, as true friends allow themselves to, of his awn commitment and the apparent futility of his remaining faithful to it. I was struck by the tone of his reply, that of truths that do not age. In his youth he had learned about the fate of a Russian general, Karbychev, who, as a prisoner of the Nazis, resisted all attempts over long months to turn him, rejecting the most tempting promises, scorning the threats, braving the tortures. On a bitterly cold day the S S made him walk outside naked and began spraying him with a jet of water. The man remained upright, motionless, slowly turning into a statue of ice … J remember having suggested to Elias that we were no longer in the same period and that our world was no longer … He interrupted me, though not rudely, to remark that he still lived in a world where a woman whose collarbone had heen smashed by a soldiers boot could be left to die. “In your Dostoyevsky,” he added, with a grim smile, “Ivan rejects the ideal society since creating it would oblige us to witness a child shedding tiny tears. Im not as rigid as that… But I am the child who saw his mother prostitute herself for a mouthful of bread. So, understand me well, it won’t be easy to make a turncoat of me …”

  I HAVE NEVER WRITTEN ABOUT ELIAS ALMEIDAS LIFE. I noted down that fragment a couple of days ago in the plane, thinking I would read it out at the “African Life Stories” symposium. Each participating writer was due to present a brief personal testimony.