Men Page 4

  Kouhouesso. Kouhouesso. Nwokam. Up until now she had scarcely thought about Africa, other than to send off a cheque. Africa and its starving children. Africa and its machete massacres. Africa, where her father was born, although he never talks about it. The huge foreign land, a drop of liquid, hanging below Europe: never been on her itinerary. She worked in a pub in Moscow. Earned twenty thousand dollars for a one-hour performance in Hong Kong. Received a prize for Musette in Japan. From east to west and from west to east, but never south.

  She turns on her computer, does a satellite search of Africa. Cameroon is at the bottom of a right angle, one of many countries. The English-speaking part isn’t marked. A band of mist follows the coastline, Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Liberia, a string of lagoons and towns with names like Togo, Tegbi, Yemorasa, Akwidaa, Sassandra. When you get to Cape Palmas you end up in the ocean. If you head in the other direction, straight east, you find vegetation. You arrive in the Congo. Which extends a long way south. There are wide rivers with oval islands floating like leaves fallen from the trees. She learns that there are two Congos. The app can’t decide where to mark the border between Kinshasa Congo and Brazzaville Congo. The two cities, K and B, are opposite each other on the two sides of the river, but further away each riverbank is marked by a red line indicating conflict. It’s as if the islands were floating without a country, as if the river slipped stateless between its banks. Wide, but no wider (she turns the Earth around with her finger) than the Gironde and its mouth, where from Médoc you can see the lights of Royan, in the distance, through the grey.

  Rose’s face appears at the top of the screen, bilibili. Rose is in her office at the Medical Psychology Centre on Boulevard Ornano in Paris. She mustn’t have had time to have lunch. While Solange is in her camisole on the slopes of Bel Air. Day and night at the same time. You never get used to it, that’s for sure. Rose looks at her: ‘Wow, you look beautiful.’ Solange looks at Rose, her best friend for twenty years. Tries telepathically to transmit what she’d like to say. Kouhouesso Nwokam. She wonders if it’s operating between them, what Rose calls transference. Rose describes it as a continuous transmission of radio waves between shrink and patient, in both directions, wherever you are on the planet.

  Kouhouesso Nwokam. Kouhouesso Nwokam telepathically. Probably a bit tricky. Was he going to come, after all? The screen image wobbles and there are crackling sounds, sandstorms are gusting, enormous cables have been cast into the ocean so that Solange can speak to her friend Rose.

  ‘What do you think—I’m speaking to you as shrink—a man sleeps with you and seems to have a good time, but then doesn’t call you, and then, when he does call, he makes you wait again?’

  ‘What time is it?’ asks Rose, and it’s not clear if she’s worried about her friend or her next patient.

  ‘Four o’clock.’

  Four o’clock on her side of the globe. In the morning. The sky is mauve-blue over Bel Air.

  On the other side of Earth, Rose looks up at her pale sky. Solange hurries on. ‘This time it’s different. What I feel—even allowing for the fact that he might not feel it—is special, precious, it hasn’t happened to me for a long time, perhaps since we were adolescents, although’—she silences her straight away—‘I don’t want to go back there.’

  Rose says, ‘Waiting is an illness. A mental illness. Often a female one.’

  Solange says, ‘What I feel means so much to me that I’m fine to wait, I’m fine to wait a bit. Waiting isn’t even that bad. And, you know, he’s not like the others, the others you’re thinking about, it’s not a repeat performance.’

  She doesn’t feel like telling her that he’s black. Nor that she’s only known him for three days. Various ideas are running through her mind. Various details. On a couch, she wouldn’t know where to begin.

  A sudden image pops up: Saint Teresa made into a Bernini statue, spotlit by myriad beams, each one sharp but exquisite, each one leading her back to him. Which beam does she follow first? Which does she extend further? Rose wouldn’t understand. At worst, she’d pronounce some platitude. Even shock would be hurtful. So he was black, surely there was no need to kick up a huge fuss about it? In the village where they were born, everyone was white, except—now that she thinks about it—Monsieur Kudeshayan, the grocer. Who was not exactly black: his skin was darker than Kouhouesso’s, charcoal-grey, grey like lead, but he was from Pakistan or somewhere around there. You don’t call those black people black. Oddly enough.

  Perhaps something cropped up. But he could have called her. Perhaps he fell asleep. Surely he didn’t have an accident? Another of those ideas that pop into her mind: do black people have a tendency to be late? Do Africans have a slightly idiosyncratic relationship with time? The beam pierces her. Is that a racist thought? Is she being bombarded by racist beams? Is Kouhouesso black in the sense of—is Kouhouesso the black people? So she would be the Basque people?

  She would like to talk about this with someone. She would like to talk about this with him. She would like to go to the nightclub with him. Basque, on the corner of Vine and Hollywood. She would like to speak to him about where she comes from.

  And how about with women? Don’t they have a slightly idiosyncratic relationship with women?

  Those beams, they’re flashes of lightning. Could Rose possibly accuse her—let’s say, simply put her attraction down to the undeniable fact that he has dark skin, and, as well, an impossible name, African in any case—could Rose reduce her crazy desire for this undreamt-of man to the stupid stubborn fact that he is black?

  The doorbell. It’s him.

  The precise object of her waiting—him, here. Him and not another. The waiting had been so immense that he had been, as it were, dissolved by it. He had become—him, this man—inconceivable. A constellation whose existence is known, visible in the sky, but beyond reach and consequently abstract, and in the end irrelevant.

  She had the strange impression of possibly being content with something else, with someone else, another man or even a film she might have chosen. What would the film have been about? And what other man—would he have been black? The annoying question appeared to her as if in a dream, involuntarily. An angry crowd was yelling at her, fists raised beneath the windows in her mind. A mechanical crowd, with huge keys in their backs.

  Him. He was here. Did he want a coffee, some water, some wine? He chose wine. Or an orange juice? She had very good oranges. She was talking rubbish. Her pulse was pounding in her throat. She was not used to it. Him. He helped himself to wine. Didn’t mention being late—was he in fact late? In the end, had he actually mentioned a time? He was sitting there, at ease, his magnetic field spread around him like a cape, and she no longer knew why she had expended so much energy waiting for him; why she had not simply waited for him, like you wait for someone who is coming, someone who is going to ring the bell and sit down with his glass, his ease, and his psychedelic coat.

  She was hungry. Another image superimposed itself, an absurd image, on the TV one day, of a tall, thin Ethiopian woman leaning against a tree, eating the bark. She had no image in her mind for English-speaking Cameroon.

  He was speaking to her. She was not listening. She got up to find some pistachios. She had waited for him so long that she was still waiting for him. The waiting kept cruising under its own momentum, like a boat. She was in the boat. And he was, too, sitting on his couch in the middle of the sea, floating, glass in hand, and only in a distracted and enchanting way paying attention to the passing cruise ship packed with passengers talking furiously.

  Am I in love with him? Was that love, the way she waited and now, without listening, watched his beautiful lips move over his beautiful teeth? She wanted to kiss him. He was speaking animatedly, with passion, his voice mellow and soft, deep and throaty. As if his initial deep silence now resonated in his words.

  Then she realised he was drunk. Like the first time. But she wasn’t: she had no way of knowing precisely what was making
him so impassioned. She was the slow-motion spectator of a speeded-up film. Or perhaps she was just tired.

  She looked at this man, his magnetism, sitting in her home at four o’clock in the morning and she wondered if that was it, what she wanted. She wanted him to kiss her. All men want to kiss her. The shy ones drink first, then it’s as per normal. A normal man would kiss her. Even her less attractive girlfriends, her girlfriends who aren’t actresses, tell her what men are like and they’re like that. Especially at an indecent hour in the home of a woman in a camisole to whom you’ve already said intoxicating words.

  BRASS LEGGINGS

  He talked to her about the Congo. Not any old Congo, not the little Brazzaville Congo, no, the big Kinshasa one, where very quickly the road runs out and there are just the long arms of the river, which she had looked at on Google Earth three hours earlier. The coincidence was disturbing. She was going to chat about the islands—but he had drawn breath to introduce a new topic of conversation, and was now talking about Heart of Darkness. He told her about Conrad’s novel. The story of a man who is looking for a man. Marlow looking for Kurtz, a retired officer from a colonial regiment, a ‘devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly’. Conrad’s Congo is ‘something great and invincible, like evil or truth’. And Europe—white-faced Europe, the premonition of genocides. He cited the African woman in the novel ‘with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments’, ‘brass leggings to the knees’ (she pictured the sorceress in Kirikou). He cited the ‘Intended’, ‘this pale visage’, blonde and diaphanous (she pictured herself). Was it a racist novel? No. But it was time for an African to seize power in Hollywood. It was time to take back from America the history of indigenous people.

  She was overwhelmed with tiredness. Couldn’t they just have a normal conversation? But he kept talking: he wanted to make a film adaptation of Heart of Darkness, something different from Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and, in any case, on location—a crazy project, he was aware of that, his first film as a director and with equatorial ambitions to transport a crew into the heart of the forest and, once there, attempt to mount that masterpiece of a novel. Coppola went to the Philippines in order to film Vietnam; he would go to the Congo to film the Congo.

  She interrupted him. She hadn’t read the novel, but wasn’t it a bit of a cliché: Heart of Darkness? A bit too run-of-the-mill for Africa? He protested. What he was interested in was precisely the stereotype, the ultimate cliché, what white people saw when they thought about Africa: darkness and elephants.

  Was she white people? That beam pierced her chest. Did he see her as a white person? Was he—worse—here because she was white? She had been loved for her buttocks, for her talent, for her celebrity, but never for her colour. Or else all men, all the white people who had desired her up until now, had only done it on condition that she was white?

  She turned away and was startled by their reflection. In the bay window against the night sky, a man and a woman leaning into each other. She was struck by their beauty. The curve of the woman and the straight line of the man, her lying down, him sitting up, classically beautiful, thin and so Hollywood, her face-on and him in profile, yin-yang, snap: both perfectly matched. He could have any woman of any colour. She could have any man she wanted. Everyone on Earth may have wanted to sleep with him, but he was here with her.

  She moved closer to him. He kept talking. His strange gaze fixed on her, on the surface of her camisole, as if he were carrying out a topographical survey. Surprisingly and almost inadvertently, the Congo had allowed itself to be enslaved. Belgium was a tick on a giant’s back, and how do you even locate the tick when humans, since childhood, have stared at the immense green patch that is the centre of Africa? He was describing, with circular gestures, how shot after shot, mise en abyme after mise en abyme, his film would become more and more claustrophobic, ‘burrowing deep into the centre of the Earth’. And suddenly she had the faint hope that someone might know, finally know—perhaps him—where the centre of the world was. Everywhere, and in men, she had searched for it, that centre, that intensity. From the sound of him, it was over there, deep in the Congo. With him.

  He was impetuous, bitter and wise. She wanted to taste that charm; she wanted him to be quiet but to keep talking to her; she wanted to devour his mouth. In France, when a man spends a long time explaining something to a woman, it’s above all in order to sleep with her. She opened another bottle. She hadn’t considered matching her nail polish with her camisole, deep pink on flesh pink—and, what does it even mean: flesh-pink white?

  ‘To be honest,’ she began, ‘I’d completely forgotten, for instance, that Belgium had invaded the Congo.’

  ‘Not invaded. Colonised, violated, carved up, butchered. Fifteen million dead. And France. Twenty thousand dead for the only railway from the Congo to the ocean.’

  ‘As many as that.’ She sighed. Her living room was filled with skulls.

  He checked his phone—she was frightened it was a text from another woman—but he started to read the first page of Conrad’s novel out loud to her from his screen: a gloomy London, the Thames, a ship in the night. He envisaged a murky opening shot, black sky, and then the sea emerging in a fade-in.

  ‘And you’ll find producers here, in Hollywood?’

  He paused, an actor’s pause.

  ‘You know who will play Kurtz?’

  A new beam illuminated her. She understood.

  ‘George.’

  ‘And who do you think will play the Intended?’

  A rush of blood, her lips went taut, she felt the urge to inflate them and raise herself, yes her, towards him, towards the sky, towards an outlandish future, an expedition to the Congo, a marvellous and terrifying film shoot.

  ‘Gwyneth Paltrow.’

  She got up. There are always moments of huge disappointment in the life of an actress, dishonesty, rigged horsetrading, nocturnal betrayals, and boorish behaviour. One of her nails was torn. She felt a childish regret, the silly idea that, if she had matched her nails to her outfit, he would have given her the role.

  He explained the finances of the project, the money George was putting in, and perhaps Studio Canal, and a producer in Lagos, even Africana Studies at UCLA. Why did she feel like crying at this point? She still fancied his lips, that’s what was so exasperating: her raging desire. His project would never get off the ground. George was forever having those philanthropic notions, and anyway that would be the biggest bit of miscasting of his career—George as a bad guy? But there was always the challenge, for a star like him, to surpass Brando. Even in a shambolic production in the depths of the jungle.

  And it wouldn’t be a shambolic production. With George on board it would end up on screens all over the world. The perfect UFO. A huge action movie, but also a bit arty. A big deal in any case, entrusted to an African, with the anything-but-vulgar touch that George adds to Hollywood, and that this man Kouhouesso also has, yeah, baby, he’s got it.

  Gwyneth Paltrow? That pathetic beanpole?

  She placed her lips on his. It was like kissing a bouquet of peonies. Fleshy, luscious and beaded with freshness. Peonies saturated with a strong liqueur, soft, manly flowers, intoxicating.

  She could no longer see his face, nor his roaming eyes. Their outlines cancelled each other out, cyclopean heat and moist mouths. He kept talking, but less. It was as if his mouth was blossoming from his scratchy cheeks, his lips even sweeter, and she was melting, soft and hard and tender and tense. He pulled away for a second and she thought he was going to preach to her again about the Congo, but no. He was staring at her. He looked happy.

  Lying next to his big body, her camisole slipped above her head, she was once again touching this man, who was speaking to her about herself, who was saying wonderful things, who was burying himself in her and then pulling back as if reluctantly. She clung to him, until their bodies blurred in the embrace, deep, but not effusive. It was easy, so easy to remain in this marvellous suspension of breath where she was n
o longer waiting for him—it was he who was waiting for her.

  Later, her thigh was resting on his thigh, and her arm was on his arm, and she was so white and he was so black that it made her laugh, it was tantalising, appetising, almost like a pastry confection; their bodies were so distinct one from the other, touched each other so unequivocally, ended and began exactly at the demarcation of the skins, and they wanted to start again just for that, to check once again that here is me and there is you and that we can locate ourselves and take pleasure in that, precisely that, the decorative difference, invented especially to look good. And he laughed to see her laugh and she said to herself, if he laughs he loves me. If he laughs we will keep on laughing and taking our pleasure.

  The crows were cawing on the electricity wires; the sky was a milky blue. Their reflection had disappeared into the bay window. There was nothing left of them but their real bodies; there was nothing left of them but the two of them. The image of them had retreated to where images reside, in the folds of the Hollywood hills, in the shadows.

  AND YOU GHOSTS RISE BLUE FROM ALCHEMY

  The light woke her, and the sensation of lying with him. She never slept for long. She breathed in the divine smell of his hair. The incense from his cathedral of hair. From his dreadlocks. She let them envelop her, wrap around her. They were a bit itchy, the ends prickled, they rolled like beads in the bed. That’s what left the marks in the morning, etched into her skin. During the day she watched these marks slowly fade, like secret wedding rings, around her arms, her shoulders, her waist.