Human Love Page 5

  He broke away from his fathers embrace and stammered: “You know. Mothers … dead. And when she was —” “Yes, yes, they told me,” his father hastened to reply and walked over to straighten a map that hung on the wall. “Yes, I heard … Yes. That’s …” Elias was expecting, “That’s terrible,” but his father gave a cough and concluded, with a sigh, “That’s how it is.”

  At that moment a woman came into the room. Tall and thin. A white woman. “Let me introduce you,” said his father. “Elias. Jacqueline.” She had colorless eyes, a somewhat lined, angular face, and wore a military garb of the same slightly theatrical cut as his father’s uniform. Listening to her, Elias learned she was Belgian, a militant anticolo-nialist and internationalist (she emphasized her commitment insistently in almost every sentence). All this was doubtless very important, but strangely, Elias was mainly thinking about the woman’s long body, which his father doubtless held in his arms at night. He felt a sad satisfaction now at not having spoken about his mother, about her broken collarbone.

  “He doesn’t look too bright, your boy. I’ll have to give him a bit of a jolt. Wake his ideas up …” Jacqueline said it in French, so as not to be understood; his father nodded agreement, with a complicit smile. Elias replied in French, looking her straight in the eye: “Don’t waste your time, Madame. The Portuguese have already performed that thankless task.” The arrival of another white person rescued the adults from their confusion. Elias had time to notice that the map on the wall was of New Zealand. He never discovered why.

  Elias took an immediate liking to the man who had just walked in, perhaps because he came as close as possible to an adolescent’s image of a revolutionary A face lit by a hidden fire, brisk, firm gestures, words capable of causing his listeners’ chests to swell. And that prophetic gaze, faintly squinting eyes that seemed to see beyond the disappointing present, beyond this scattering of huts among the trees, beyond the laundry gently rippling on a line. He was dark, with the long, gleaming hair of a painter, and as he smoked he released long, curling, bluish strands, very different from those emitted by the others; it was his signature in the air. Elias came under his spell, as everyone did. The soldiers called him “Commandante;” his father and Jacqueline, Ernesto. After five minutes of conversation he turned to Elias and proclaimed in inspired, solemn, almost prophetic tones: “Elias, you will come with us, to Havana. You will study there. You will learn the science of Revolution!” Was it the resonant impact of the Spanish or the ringing tones of the promise? It carried such conviction that, as if hypnotized, Elias pictured a town beside the sea and a double of Ernesto instructing him in revolution. The Cuban was a kind of sorcerer, a wizard with words, Elias would think later. He left the room, drugged with hope.

  This narcotic effect overwhelmed the whole of that little revolutionary base and lasted for two days, until Ernesto’s departure. The warriors who only the previous day had been wandering around aimlessly or sleeping marched about as if on parade, took part in tactical exercises, river crossings … Even the expressions on their faces changed. In this remote corner of the tropical rain forest, Ernesto gave them a glimpse of a radiant path, a horizon to aim for. The speech he delivered spoke of just this horizon, a world of liberty, of plenty, of happiness. To reach it they must take the road of armed struggle, proletarian solidarity…. Did they all understand this? Elias was not sure that they did, but he sensed it was more a matter of magic than of logic. Like the language of sorcerers, he thought, no one understands it, but no one is immune to it. “The triumph of our struggle will sound the death knell for the forces of imperialism … Your children will live in a world without poverty, without exploitation.” The music of these words blended with the shades of night, with the glittering of the first stars. Ernesto’s face, lit by the firelight, seemed to reflect the shining future he could already discern in the depths of the forest.

  That night Elias noticed a light burning in the hut that served as command post. An oil lamp, Ernesto’s head bowed over a notepad, a pen quivering in his hand. Every now and then the man raised his head and smiled, peering for a long time into the darkness. With all the enthusiasm of youth, Elias felt he was living through a moment that belonged to history.

  The next day Elias came upon a soldier who was preparing to play his part In history: half recumbent, his back propped up against the hot wall of a hut, he was rubbing away energetically at a smooth black object. It was an amulet, yes, a lucky charm, he explained, vaguely at first; then, flattered by the boys interest, he was more specific: “I wear it here, next to my heart. That side says if I shoot, I kill my enemy This side says, if he shoots, the bullets bounce off me. IVe already tried it.” He was buffing his gri-gri with something that gave off a greasy, fleshy stink. “So that s leather, is it?” asked Elias. The soldier suddenly flew into a rage and thrust him aside, abusing him. “You shall never know!” he shouted. “Or else you will die! Never!” And walked off into the forest without pausing in his polishing.

  Returning to the camp, Elias came upon a conversation In a dark spot between the younger woman cook and a soldier he had seen before, the one who had been haranguing a crowd of ghosts in a drugged state. Now he was talking very softly, very fast, all the while attempting to thrust a bundle of cloth into the young woman’s hands. This was a very fine dress, he assured her, trimmed with lace and glass beads. It was clear to Elias that they had already reached the final round of the negotiations: the cook was no longer saying no, the soldier was talking with the excitement of someone who is certain his bid will succeed. Before going to sleep Elias thought about this couple, who were now engaged in making love. The man was very fat; his belly spilled out over his belt. One had to imagine this swollen, sweating mass pressing down on the young woman’s very slender body. Elias experienced a violent constriction in his lungs. Jealousy, desire, no doubt, pity, but most of all incomprehension: this piece of fabric with its glass bead trimmings, this coupling, and then nothing, a void, life continuing as before, just as dull, just as stupid. He made an effort to salvage the residue of love in this encounter between a fat body and a slim one. Then he remembered the movements made by the feet of lovers in the sexual act. Tensing, scratching, relaxing. If only he could ask Ernesto: “Could your struggle one day awaken something other than that in human hearts?”

  Two days later he managed to join his father, whose travels across the country he was now to share. “Its no good waiting passively for the revolutionary situation to arise,” Ernesto declared, addressing the rebels. “You have to provoke it. Yes. By force of arms!” Elias thought he had heard this terminology somewhere before. But most of all what these words silenced in him was the only question he longed to ask: “After the revolution, do you think people will love one another in a different way?”

  HE NO LONGER REMEMBERED PRECISELY when the spell created by Ernesto’s speeches was broken. Perhaps this was the evening: from his seat beneath a tree Elias saw a young soldier drawing a spiders web of signs on the earth with a fragment of wood, smiling at his own thoughts. Lost In his daydream, he was deaf to the orators ringing words. The struggle against imperialism, the promise of happiness after the triumph of the revolution … The soldier already seemed happy here, in this night cloudy with heat, in front of the arabesques he was tracing, expressive of a secret joy, of hopes at once fanciful and humble. Then Elias noticed that the young man was not the only one to be inattentive.

  Yet his father, Jacqueline, and Ernesto were unsparing of themselves as they traveled back and forth across the eastern Congo, their assigned territory. “The thunder of the people’s revolt can already be heard!” the Cuban declaimed one day at one of the rebel bases. A heavy clatter of cooking pots suddenly erupted from the kitchen, as if echoing his words. Tickled by this droll coincidence, the warriors burst out laughing. It took Ernesto some time to regain control of his audience, to reimpose the radiant trance to which his flock generally succumbed.

  As the days went by the effect of this
verbal intoxication grew weaker. One evening, following the speech, a soldier remained in his place after his comrades had dispersed. His eyes half closed, lulled by the drug, he was gabbling snatches of the phrases that he had just heard: “Marx,” “class struggle,” “neo-colonialism,” “Lenin” … For him these words had the same impact as the magic formulae intoned by a holy man.

  Their forays now reminded Elias of trying to light a fire with damp matches. The flame flickered for the space of a slogan, only to be dissipated by the narcotic fumes in which the warriors immersed themselves every evening after a days march or a fire fight. A conflagration would have been needed, the uprising of a whole population, a “revolutionary situation.” But the revolution was slow in coming, and one morning the people appeared in the person of a tall old man who came to the camp and sat down beside the door of the “command post.” Ernesto emerged, followed by Eliass father, and the old man addressed them. They did not understand his dialect. A soldier came up and, in some embarrassment, translated.

  “Hes complaining because our men have taken his food supplies.”

  “Tell him our fighters are paying with their blood for the bread the people give them,” declared Ernesto in ringing tones, adding, more softly, for my fathers ears: “There you are, you see. The peasantry is a weak link in the revolution. Always this filthy petty proprietors reflex.”

  “He says his son has been killed,” continued the interpreter. “And now he has his three grandchildren to feed.”

  “Our soldiers may die tomorrow defending him against his oppressors! And all he can think about is his wretched potatoes….”

  “He says the children may die today”

  There were, Elias noted, two peoples: one of them, glorified in speeches, the “working masses,” whose triumphal entry into the paradise of communism was being prepared for, an ideal people, as it were, and then this other people, which thanks to its humdrum destitution brought dishonor to the great revolutionary project.

  The warriors, too, were far from ideal. Ernesto used to mark the most exalted moments in his harangues with an abrupt gesture: he would tilt his head back, his eyes fixed on the horizon, as if he could already see the luminous advent of the future. It was just this brief pause that a soldier took advantage of one evening, to ask, in a slightly disdainful voice: “What about our pay, Commandante. When are we going to get it?” Elias looked round. A young, powerfully built man wearing a new khaki uniform, very different from those the others had managed to procure for themselves. He was surrounded by a group who looked as if they were his henchmen. Elias had a simple and disconcerting thought: That fellow in khaki could easily go over to the enemy if he were offered more.

  Before going to bed he saw Ernesto writing in his notebook by the light of an oil lamp.

  The following morning, on the way to another rebel camp, the Cuban gave vent to his fury: “For that politically immature soldier to be worrying about his pay is, at least, comprehensible. But when a chief like Soumialot wants to be paid for every skirmish, its enough to disgust you with this country. And in dollars, too, if you please. And after IVe promised him Cuban regiments will be coming soon … And our other strategist, this Gbenye. Have you heard his reasoning? He wants to know what tribe the enemy soldiers belong to. That s how hell decide whether or not to fight. Try talking to them about proletarian internationalism!”

  Jacqueline shared Ernesto’s anger. Elias s father was silent. Then, unable to contain himself, he began to defend these former peasants, now turned revolutionaries. He explained that the country had recently emerged from long decades of oppression, with no elites, with no real identity, and that the local chiefs held fast to the only certain bond: tribal membership.

  One day the debate got out of control. ‘Tm beginning to wonder,” Ernesto exclaimed furiously, “whether this historical backwardness the Congolese suffer from can ever be made up. Yes, comrade. I ask myself if they can really be made to progress to the Marxist-Leninist view of the world. Dont be angry, but I have grave doubts over the possibility of ever getting anything into these peoples skulls other than drugs, fucking, and the sorcerers’ mumbo-jumbo!” Elias thought his father was about to reply with equal sharpness. But the man held his peace, and it was only after a moment that he riposted in a calm, weary voice: “Very sorry Ernesto. This is the only people we have to offer you.”

  That evening Elias witnessed a scene that appeared to prove the Cuban right. In an absurd replay, he came upon a couple negotiating a sexual deal. Beneath a lamp that lit the entrance to the camp, a soldier was holding out a garment to a young woman, all the while whispering a hurried gabble of promises. She was pretending to refuse him, but in her curiosity was already examining the fabric, turning it toward the light. “What are these stains?” she exclaimed suddenly. “Blood?” Uneasy, the soldier assumed a casual tone of voice: “Oh, that’s nothing. It’s juice. Or paint. It’ll come out in the wash …” As Elias continued on his way, he thought about the person who had been robbed of that dress; he pictured a woman violated, wounded, staining the fabric with her blood. A woman who had probably been killed for the sake of this booty … The Cuban’s words struck him as amply justified.

  He had high hopes of the first battle he was due to take part in. Ernesto had announced an assault on a base held by Belgian mercenaries. Ellas pictured himself bringing up ammunition to the fighters, assisting soldiers riddled with bullet wounds, strolling around after the battle with a red-stained bandage about his brow … But, crucially, he would come face-to-face with the white imperialists taken prisoner by the rebels.

  When it was all over, there was not a single “Belgian mercenary” among the vanquished. A vast number of wounded and dead, all black. “Africans killed by other Africans!” Elias said to himself in a hard voice, which did not belong to him and which frightened him. To silence it, he hastened to assist the nurses, carried water, walked through the conquered village looking for survivors. The injuries did not resemble the noble wounds he had pictured being delicately dressed by women’s hands. This was flesh, hideously torn to pieces by fragments from grenades, intestines spilling out from torn bellies, skulls smashed open to expose their bloody contents. Moving on from the carnage, Elias found himself in a yard and saw someone he at first took to be a wounded man shuddering with spasms of pain. The light was fading, and it took him a moment to understand: at the edge of a pond a soldier was having his way with a woman, who lay with her face against the earth. He was thrashing about on top of her and, to stop her from crying out, pressing her head into the slime of the pool. In the center of one of the nearby huts Elias discovered a little girl who had managed to squeeze her body underneath a tiny table like a contortionist. She was shaking so much, the furniture looked alive. A boy older than her had hidden himself behind a pile of branches. This screen could be seen through, but the youth, crazed with fear, must have thought he was rendered invisible by the narrow basket he had put over his head. Through the wickerwork Elias could see motionless, staring eyes.

  That night the soldiers celebrated their victory. To begin with they listened to Ernesto, but very soon the mood changed. Catcalls rang out, someone fired in the air, bottles of drink circulated. In an hours time half the huts were on fire and the ruddy glow of the flames picked out in the darkness now a drinkers tilted head, now a brawl, sometimes the excited stampeding of half-naked men around a woman who was being raped.

  Ernesto, Jacqueline, and Eliass father had taken refuge in the villages “command post,” all trying to hide their fear in their own way Ernesto was writing notes; his father was studying a large-scale map; Jacqueline was pretending to read. But each of them, Elias could see, had a gun within reach; they all knew that from one minute to the next the savagery that was being unleashed outside could engulf them. At one moment a shill cry, a woman’s voice, cut through the uproar. The besieged occupants of the “command post” looked up. Eliass eyes met his fathers. “Ill go,” said his father. But Jacqueline le
aped up and clung to him, exclaiming, “No. You’re not going out! They’re coming for us. They’re going to kill us all. They’ll cut our throats. They’re savages!” Ernesto sat there, holding his head in his hands, his face distraught.

  During the night the fire died down, and as if in response to the calming of the flames, the noise of the orgy gradually fell quiet. Elias opened the door. In the sky, star-studded beauty. From the earth, an acrid stench, a mixture of blood, vomit, charred meat, sweat, sperm …

  He could not sleep, thinking about the error Ernesto had committed. The Cuban had promised these men a prudent, logical, patiently constructed happiness — the dream of an ideal society, communism. But they, for their part, knew a much more immediate and violent ecstasy: this night, after a battle, the exaltation of drink and drugs, the absolute freedom they had to satisfy any desire whatsoever, to thrust open any door whatever, to kill whomever they pleased, to choose the woman who attracted them, to take her without having to beg for her favors, to slay her with the advent of postcoital disgust. To drink, to rest, to start again. Absolute freedom, yes, superhuman powers. For the duration of a night they could feel themselves to be the equals of the gods. And there was this poor Cuban lecturing them about respect for revolutionary order and the need to become industrious socialists …

  Deep down inside himself Elias sensed the presence of someone (someone ignoble!) who was ready to prove the soldiers right. Not that he would have wished to approve of their type of happiness. But here in the depths of a jungle where these young men had daily brushes with death, this banquet of flesh and violence had a somber justification. A simple submachine gun made all-powerful beings of these peasants, offering in a few nights of orgy all that an ordinary man can scarcely hope for from a whole lifetime.