Men Page 13

  Olga was there. It would have been a pleasure to see her again if Olga had been in the mood. But the blowpipes made in China had got lost between Shanghai and Douala. The arrows had got there safely, but Olga had been thrown by the behaviour of the customs officers at Douala. At first the blowpipes were regarded as weapons of mass destruction, and their container was held up; then they had never arrived; then the parcel was definitely there, but it wasn’t a parcel of blowpipes; in any case she had to pay through the nose to get them cleared. Olga had decided to commission a local artisan to make two hundred blowpipes out of softwood; after all, there was no shortage of wood. On the other hand, around there they only knew how to make machetes and assegais; she had to do drawings and calculate the right dimensions. One by one, the local artisan made them. His name was Ignatius; he was up to one hundred and eighty. The whole village was in training, the two hundred extras, almost all the men, and the women when they didn’t have something better to do. There were plastic arrows all over the ground, everywhere.

  Solange was sitting in the shade of a frangipani tree, on a chair someone had brought there for her. She was sprinkling herself with a spray bottle of water. The legs of the chair were sinking into the ground. It was like a long siesta. She felt as if she was a germinating plant, her very cells proliferating. The ants were the only thing to watch out for; if an army of ants approached, she had to get out of their way. The ground was covered in dead leaves scattered with small beetles, and living creepers that she thought she could hear growing. She made herself shift around the shade’s compass in little jolts, just to get the heat moving.

  She had visions of Kouhouesso: he appeared in apparitions, flashes. He was working. He was filming. Lights. Camera. Action. She found it difficult to take, difficult to believe; she was on a film shoot without acting, not knowing what to do with her hands, her eyes, her body, her thoughts. Something was hovering, like air turning solid. Everything was vibrating in blocks of heat. Everything was dripping; the whole world was perspiring. Here at the Equator, the belt around the Earth, it was like an attack of shingles that was slowly going around, via her, Solange, on her chair. An illness which, once it had come full circle, would destroy her. The Special Tropical Insect Screen was useless: she scratched herself. Blisters. Kouhouesso seemed impervious to uncertainty; he had gone into another zone, into fiction. Occasionally she caught his eye; she would have liked to get up and kiss him in front of everyone, but by the end of the day the chair legs had left deep, narrow holes in the ever-present humus, like those left by spider crabs.

  ONLY PEOPLE WITHOUT A VISION RESORT TO REALITY

  He hardly ever slept, at least hardly ever in the village. She kept hearing the four-wheel drives coming back from the river, from the caves, from Kribi. She called him but he didn’t pick up; she knocked on the door of his hut. The guard stared into space, as still and wrinkled as a monitor lizard. ‘It’s me,’ she said. No answer, but she heard the fan on the other side of the mud wall. ‘It’s me,’ she said, louder. ‘It’s me, Solange.’ Usually, he let her come in. The guard stared into the distance, towards the black wall of the forest.

  Storms rumbled, passed by, without rain. A steady stream of Toyotas churned back and forth from Kribi: they needed water for the rain machine, bottled water. Jessie refused to perform in the storm scenes unless the machine ran on Évian. A thousand francs per bottle, imported through Douala. If a single drop of non-mineral water, even chlorinated water, found its way into Jessie’s mouth (so his LA lawyer had warned), if a single drop of undrinkable local water contaminated him with amoebas or with God knows what African killer disease, the production crew and Kouhouesso would answer for it.

  The rain machine, filled to the brim with Évian, was carried on board the boat by six locals and camouflaged with bits of metal sheeting at the back of the steam engine. Solange was also carried on board, and stashed in the hold, up to her waist. Lights. Fog machine. Action. The rain had to sweep over the river as well, bombard it with water. Everyone was soaked, the camera under a tarp, the cinematographer under an umbrella, and Jessie, half-naked and glistening, leaped around, wilder than wild, thrilled to be acting the fool. He opened his mouth wide, his gold lip-plate and all, and drank the thousand-franc water, the French water whose super-clear, super-pure alpine molecules combined with those of the brown river. The Company, as Kouhouesso called his production crew, was not going to be impressed. What sort of return could you expect from a business that threw thousand-dollar banknotes in the water? Why not film under a shower of champagne?

  Later, the boat reached the shore in silence. The Hollywood rain had stopped. Kouhouesso was pleased; his scene was a wrap. Tomorrow they would shoot the rain of arrows: under the orders of the assistant director, two hundred extras would each take aim five times. And, once the rails were finally laid, the tracking shot. Favour would appear, the Witch, the Creature in Brass Leggings. But right now there was a noise. ‘Cut!’ said the soundman.

  Music. Incredible music. Sounds of pop-pop and peep-peep, chh-chh and clap-clap, more and more high-pitched, then dropping into low notes. A tom-tom but muted, mellow, like an accent—Solange thought she heard Kouhouesso’s voice murmuring on the river from all directions. It was a Pygmy welcoming party. Well, no one was sure; no one knew if the Pygmy girls were doing it specially for them, but they looked at home there: twelve- or thirteen-year-olds completely naked, with little pointed breasts, standing in the brown water up to their waists, beating it with the flats of their hands, in unison. An elemental harmony, a skill so dazzling it could render you sentimental.

  ‘Roll camera, roll camera!’ shouted Kouhouesso. Solange could tell that he was seeing it all: no costume drama, no period setting, the little naked Pygmies had been there forever, and Joseph Conrad had seen them. But now they had stopped performing, all standing in the river as straight as the letter I. ‘Music!’ Kouhouesso yelled at them. ‘Come on, what the hell—this time for Africa, girls, tom-tom!’ They ran away, nut-brown naked buttocks leaping into the elephant-ear plants. It was over. Cut. It wouldn’t make it into the film.

  Kouhouesso jumped onto the bank and smashed his fist into the knotted furrow of a tree. Crack. The whole boat fell silent. ‘Perhaps they’ll be there tomorrow,’ Solange ventured from the hold, where she was suffering from a slight bout of river sickness. Kouhouesso stormed into the jungle.

  It is not possible to storm into the jungle. A long prickly creeper had hooked onto the back of his clothes, around his shoulders, back, waist, and Freeboy was hacking away, at his feet as well, in among the roots, in the whatever-they’recalled plants: tchick went the machete. He had tracked them down. The girls were there, alert and curious, ready to take to their heels. ‘Atchia,’ said Freeboy. They replied, ‘Atchia.’ One little hand on the pubic area. The other held out to her, Solange. What did they want—the bottle of Évian she had saved from the downpour? The boldest girl held it in both hands, opened it. They took turns to drink, as if it were nectar of the gods, then gave it back to Solange with the lid carefully screwed back on. (What disease, what parasites, did those little mouths, those little hands, those round bellies harbour?)

  Later, at the Pygmy village, Freeboy and Kouhouesso spoke with the chief. He was genuinely small. One of the surprises in this world is that Pygmies are small: the validation of a cliché, the fusion of idea and fact. ‘You say Baka, not Pygmy,’ objected Patricien, half-Baka himself, and of medium height. He was getting agitated. Kouhouesso had just given the order for fifty flasks of Fighter whisky to be purchased immediately in Little-Poco: the price he had agreed with the girls for them to perform their concert again. ‘That’s enough to kill the whole village,’ said Patricien to Solange. He took her back to Little-Poco, by canoe then four-wheel drive. Solange was extremely hot and had a headache. ‘You have to drink some water,’ Patricien said. But all the viruses in the world seemed to be concentrated in what was left of the water in the Évian bottle.

  Solange had a f
ever. Was she imagining the tom-toms in the distance, or was the Pygmy village celebrating, with shots from those little plastic flasks whose dubious benefits she herself was enjoying—full of a golden beverage, very strong and very bad, but scorching, and which seemed to clear a passage in the humidity?

  He came to find her that night. He needed her opinion. He showed her the rushes on his portable monitor. Those foolish girls had got dressed up for their concert, one in a David Beckham T-shirt, the other with a sort of Petit-Bateau child’s sleep sack stretched to fit her. In the water, it looked like a kind of Miss Pygmy wet T-shirt competition. There was Kouhouesso’s assistant, then Kouhouesso himself, then several black giants and a white giant (the soundman), the whole crew of the film boat came into the frame, trying to persuade the girls. Jessie was clacking his gold lip-plate like false teeth and terrifying the girls. They took their clothes off and patted the water timidly with the flats of their hands. Ploppity-plop, plip, plip, chlap. It was rubbish, unusable—and the way they stared at the camera the whole time: impossible. Kouhouesso had made a mistake. Even if he had caught it unrehearsed, what would he have done with it?

  It was all for the best: that sort of self-indulgence gets cut in editing. Instead of documentary-style girls what he needed was his blowpipes scene. Only people without a vision resort to reality—that’s what the Zulus say. Novels, films! The attack on the boat. The swarm of arrows. Jessie, bleeding. He was waving his hands around, miming, standing up: the firearms responding, Winchester and Martini-Henry rifles, bang-bang, ‘as though the mist itself had screamed’. She was laughing: he was the film, he was the trees, he was the boat and the river all by himself, he was the arrow and the gun, the corpse and the annihilator.

  They drank a few whisky flasks together, tearing them open with their teeth. They were silent. The heat and fatigue had caught up with them. ‘Still, it’s not the Congo,’ she said. He had wanted to see Paris, the historical buildings; she wanted to see the Congo, crocodiles. ‘Fortunately there are not many crocs in the Ntem anymore,’ he said, smiling. He had seen the Congo. The boats rotting on the Pool Malebo. They would have spent the film shoot paying over and over again, sending soggy scraps of paper to the Company, on which receipts would be written, in biro, along the lines of ‘Departure Authorisation Tax’, signed by a guy armed with a Kalashnikov, who would answer to the name of One-Eye-Only or Leftie, followed eight days later by another tax for another military guy, followed by another piece of paper, until the official had passed his use-by date or been bumped off, replaced by another gang, higher charges, embargos, ransoms. And the boat would not have moved. Here, they only had to pay up occasionally, and to people with names.

  ‘Still,’ she persevered, sucking on her flask of Fighter, without really knowing what she was talking about. They were being attacked by buzzing creatures. He rolled the mosquito net around them and pointed the fan at the creases. In the clammy, scratchy cocoon, riddled with draughts, they made love. The electricity cut out. The electricity came back on. Later, the tin can that served as a bedside table seemed to move of its own accord and ring out like a bell: mice were squabbling over her health-food biscuits. Kouhouesso chased them away. When he moved she felt the disruption of the fan’s breeze. In the shadowed room she could not see him: he really was the invisible man, black in the night, air in the breeze.

  Towards dawn she thought she heard digging under her window again. She was frightened to go and look, or to wake Kouhouesso. She took a sleeping pill. Since Christmas—since, what would she call it, her departure—she could no longer sleep. Since the night of the Playmobil. As if all the alcohol she had drunk in Clèves that night was still in her bloodstream, keeping her in permanent jetlag, in a state of everlasting fatigue, as impenetrable as a forest.

  When she woke up he was gone. And under the window the soil had been disturbed, as if the ground had been stripped, pale yellow, soft, a trail of moisture leading from it, disappearing under the trees. She thought of the witch, and wondered whether to take her a five-thousand-franc note.

  UP TO HIS NECK IN IT

  Vincent Cassel was there for ten days. Ten days to do all the Marlow scenes, three of which were in the caves with George, whenever he arrived. Olga was keeping her up to speed. So a wardrobe mistress was more important than she was—but what did she expect, other than this crush of people, crowded in chaotic accommodation, taking communal meals or otherwise, each of them with a task that more or less overlapped with someone else’s, all more or less feverish and sick, but all straining towards that imaginary interface where a book becomes a film? Where Africa becomes a story? With as much exertion as a boa constrictor swallowing a large antelope, with knots and jolts, hiccups, obstructions…

  Only the Pygmy people went naked. The two hundred Bantu extras refused to be filmed naked. Or even half-naked. It was contagious. A kind of craze. What image did they want to present of black people? They were being treated as savages. Two hundred raffia sarongs designed by Olga and sewn in Morocco, with ornaments for the head, nose, arms and legs: no way. A delegation led by a certain Saint-Blaise demanded five thousand francs more per extra for them to strip down to their Bantu birthday suits. Kouhouesso laughed: seven euros more for each of them, a million CFA francs, two thousand dollars, it was nothing. Not even the cost of the sarongs. And he hadn’t forgotten that he owed Solange money: she should make out an invoice and the Company would reimburse her.

  Hollywood versus the jungle: for five thousand more—five tins of sardines, a bit of roast chicken, a witch’s tip—two hundred villagers decorated in lucky charms showered the boat with arrows and ‘the bush was swarming with human limbs in movement’. The scene worked incredibly well. Jessie in particular was magnificent: he died with unexpected dignity, lying in the blood as if on a crimson mantle, with a look that was ‘extraordinary, profound, familiar’. You were wild, Jessie, you were sublime, I love you.

  The black people from here were not like Kouhouesso. But, more especially, they were not like Jessie. Jessie was not like them. Of course (as Kouhouesso explained to her), there are African-Americans who want to become African. To be reunited with the Africa that was stolen from them. In general, the affair ends badly. Either they are too frightened ever to leave the Monrovia Sheraton, or else they are repatriated with dysentery. At worst, they end up as rastas in Addis Ababa, preaching that women have the mark of the devil, without ever giving up their American passports. There are infinitely more Africans who want to become American. Or, failing that, Canadian.

  He took a drag on his cigarette and she had him back, the Kouhouesso who explained things to her, who unpacked them, who so royally shaped the world for her. They had celebrated Jessie’s last day of filming until dawn, and Kouhouesso had come back with her to the Straight and Narrow. How had she coped without his tireless commentary? It was like being deprived of her own eyes. Her own hands, she thought, as she took his in hers. Of her own head on her own neck. Of her own soft, muted voice. She kissed him in the hollow beneath his Adam’s apple. And she asked him if he was annoyed by her feelings for him, and he replied, ‘Why would I be annoyed?’

  The soft hollow in Kouhouesso’s neck, wide enough for her fingertips, as round as puckered lips: time unravelled inside that hollow. And she kissed him as if it was the last time; she clung to this man who was becoming a tree, impassive, silent and tall.

  She was reminded of witch-pricking: the piercing of European witches all over their bodies in order to isolate the Devil’s Mark, spots that were insensitive to pain, and thus proof of a woman’s evil nature. The hollow in Kouhouesso’s neck was like the last spot of softness in him. His softness had receded, almost to nothing, and was now lodged entirely in his neck—while everything in her was soft, vulnerable, undone.

  He insisted: she should go to Poco-Beach, the Straight and Narrow really was a dump—actually that was another reason he visited her so infrequently. But she had no complaints: since he’d had chemical toilets installed, Lit
tle-Poco had become civilised.

  Everything: he looked after everything. He was the boss, the skipper of the boat, the Coppola of Little-Poco. Every morning fifteen people were waiting in front of his hut with urgent questions: logistics, sets, props, water, schedules, a stolen paddle, a sudden altercation, the security firm treating the guards as slaves, departures, arrivals, returns, complications, crises. The distribution of wages, over the three filming locations, was done with envelopes of cash and a single courier on a motorbike, who had to be trusted. The Company had replaced Natsumi with a local wardrobe assistant, but Olga had got rid of her; as a result, she was overworked. The hairdresser, another local, was also doing make-up, without complaining: people here knew the value of work. The script boy had been recruited in Douala, the grips were from Nigeria, all the set workers and all the sound and lighting staff were Cameroonian. The allocated budget was phenomenal; the future of cinema was in Africa.