Human Love

1

WITHOUT THE LOVE HE FELT FOR THAT WOMAN, life would have been no more than a night without end in the forests of Lunda Norte on the frontier between Angola and Zaire.

I spent two days in captivity there with a colleague, a Soviet military instructor, and with what we took to be a corpse stretched out on the floor of our prison of dried clay, an African, dressed not in fatigues, like us, but in a dark suit and a white shirt stained brown with blood.

When under threat, our existence is laid bare and we are shocked by the stark simplicity of what drives it. During the hours of my imprisonment I discovered these crude mechanisms: fear erases our purported psychological complexity, then thirst and hunger drive out fear, and what remains is the staggering banality of death; the mind recoils, but this reaction soon becomes laughable in the face of the discomfort caused by small bodily needs (such as that, for both of us, of urinating in the presence of a corpse), and ultimately what arrives is disgust with oneself, with this little bubble of being that once considered itself precious in its uniqueness but will burst, along with all the other bubbles.

At nightfall the armed men who had arrested us seized four Zairean peasants, three men and a woman, who were crossing the frontier, bringing food to the “diggers,” as they call the diamond hunters locally. The men were stripped and slaughtered, the woman submitted to their violations with a placidity that lent an almost natural air to the brutality of these couplings. She remained totally silent, not a curse, not a groan. I remember one of the soldiers’ faces: the postcoital nausea, the drowsy aggressiveness of his gaze as he incuriously observed the convulsions of the one who just had taken his place between the Zairean woman’s broad thighs.

This blasé voyeur now had the urge to manhandle us; it was predictable, carnal fulfilment breeds dissatisfaction. He aimed several kicks at the long corpse of the African. Turning my face away to avoid the flailing boots, I thought I could hear footsteps outside the door, the click of a weapon. The idea of having to die at any minute wrenched a picture out of the darkness as clear as any black-and-white photograph: the dirty rope hobbling my ankles, the grease stains on the soldier’s pants, the unglazed window opening, very low down in the wall, through which I had just been observing the rapists. A woman’s voice, strangely joyful, rang out, cut short by a brief burst from a submachine gun. The soldier rushed outside, leaving each of us to his own remission: the Africans immobility, the instructors cough after taking a dose of spirit from a flask concealed in his combat kit, my own thoughts thrown into confusion between this sudden intimacy with death and the pleasure the men had taken in the Zairean woman’s plump body.

I was young, and this abrupt reduction of life to no more than pleasure and death did me good. It is easier to accept your end when you know you are a piece of flesh fighting to attain physical bliss (like the soldiers outside the window), and dying if it loses. “Those black UNITA bastards!” the instructor swore. He took another swig and almost immediately began snoring. I admired this man. He knew the raw truth of life. I was in the process of being initiated into his basic wisdom: we’re not unique, but all alike and interchangeable, pieces of meat, seeking pleasure, suffering, and battling against each other to possess women, money, and power, all of which are more or less the same thing, and one day losers and winners will be joined together in the perfect equality of putrefaction.

It was not cynicism; I lived these stark truths without really thinking, inhaled them along with the clammy sultriness that oozed over my skin, with the smell of decomposing bodies. The substance of the world was this organic mass, of which we were all a part – myself, the sleeping instructor, the dead African, the soldiers taking it in turns to ejaculate into the woman’s tormented vagina, the three peasants with their shattered skulls… I felt profoundly at one with this mass of humanity.

“That great fat slob, Savlmbi. One day hell get his face smashed in… ideological training… for the cadres…” The instructor was muttering in his sleep, swatting his face repeatedly to drive away the mosquitoes. I began to doze as well, numb with tiredness, content to dissolve into a stew of anonymous bodies.

The cry that went up outside had nothing impersonal about it. It was appallingly unique in its distress. Someone was being killed. Someone very specific was dying. A woman, that woman, the Zairean woman. I leaped up on my hobbled feet, clung to the narrow rectangle of the window. It was not a particularly cruel sight but eloquent of palpable, precise insanity. A soldier, the big sergeant who had interrogated us the day before, was squatting in front of the Zairean woman, now held on her knees in front of him by two soldiers. He was thrusting his fingers into the woman’s mouth, for all the world as if he were a dentist inspecting this gaping oral cavity. An electric flashlight in the hand of one of the soldiers lit up the sergeant’s face. A scar, a broad asterisk, smoothed by time, gleamed on his cheekbone.

To avoid tipping over into madness, I tried to invent some explanation, an African rite, an exorcism… one of those mythical superstitions the experts delight in, which might have made sense of this nocturnal dumb show. But only one thing seemed clear: the woman had just died, and I was witnessing a postmortem ceremony. A night sticky with humidity and decaying vegetation, the stinging web of insects, these men clasping her body, their fingers thrusting into her mouth, scraping at her throat…

The real terror of dying only struck at that moment, a knotty spasm like the awakening of an unknown being that had grown stealthily inside me and was now tearing at my entrails, my brain. The birth of my own cadaver, stuck fast to me, like a double.

After that nocturnal reprieve I was left with the memory of a paralyzing panic, next a sleepwalkers exhaustion, and then a new alarm provoked by the eruption of voices outside the door, a gunshot in the forest. I crawled along looking for a breach in the rough cast of the wall, woke the instructor, suggested that we should escape (he muttered, “This whole damned jungle here s the prison,” before going back to sleep). Thanks to the Zairean woman’s death, I was picturing the first moments that would follow my own: the soldiers would drag my lifeless body over and throw it down beside that of the African. The instructor might well be shot as he slept, but in any case he was one of that Soviet generation who died in the name of the mother country, of the freedom of fraternal peoples, of proletarian internationalism. On the brink of this last step into the void, I felt I was alone. I should have to escape alone.

This survival reflex having banished all shame, I approached the corpse. I wanted to search it, extract anything that might be of use to me: money and his papers, if he had contrived to hide them from the soldiers, any object of value with which to bribe a guard, the pen I could already feel in his pocket. A fine fountain pen, a relic of the civilized world. Its smooth, reassuring weight had the effect on me of an amulet…

“Theres no ink left in it.” The whisper caused the darkness around me to congeal into the density of smoked glass. A few moments later I found I was still holding out the pen, trying to hand it back, like a clumsy and shamefaced thief. “It’s this furnace… the inks all dried up… But if you could memorize an address…”

I was not surprised to hear him speaking in Russian. At that time, during the 1970s, thousands of Africans spoke it. But when I had recovered my wits, what struck me was the address spelled out by the black man. It was a place close to the Siberian village where I was born, a terrain that had always seemed to me to be the most obscure on earth. The man named it without hesitation, and it was only the fact that his lips were parched with thirst that added a burning, raw breathiness to the sound of the syllables. Definitive, like a last wish.

There was no longer any logic to the minutes that went racing by. Everything happened at once. His fevered but amazingly calm eyes shone by the glow of the lighter whose flame I shielded with my hand. I saw his wrists swollen beneath the twists of thick wire that I began to break through, strand by strand. I heard him gasp as the first trickle of water slipped down his throat. We had barely a pint of water left and. thirsty as he was, I thought he was going to swallow it all. He restrained himself (gritting his teeth) and spoke very softly banishing my fear in a few words. In the morning he said, the Cubans would attack and might well set us free. The chances were not great, but one could always hope. In that case the two of us, the instructor and I, could hope to be exchanged for UNITA prisoners… His tone was expressionless, detached, not seeking to influence me. Quite simply, as I would later understand, it offered me the chance to hold on without fear and trembling. Not to freeze at every cry. His words were there to teach me how to die when it was time to die. For a moment I believed I might be able to join him in this haughty indifference in the face of death. And then I managed to snap the last piece of wire on his left wrist, and with his hands free, he took off his jacket, unbuttoned his shirt. Before the lighter burned my fingers, I had time to see the flesh carved raw, a suppurating crust covered in insects. Outside the door a howl from the Zairean woman rang out once more (later on the African would explain to me what the soldiers were looking for in this woman’s tormented body).

Why are they taking so long to kill her? The thought that formed in me came unbidden. They should have killed the lot of us. And, most of all, killed the parasites devouring this black man! In the darkness I could hear a piece of cloth being rubbed and smell the acrid tang of spirit: the African was cleansing his wound, the instructor had just passed him the flask. Huddled up against the wall, I felt as if I myself were entirely covered in wounds crawling with death.

And it was at that moment, heard over the sound of the instructors breathing (he had dozed off once again), that the African’s voice asserted itself, yet more remote than before, not concerned to persuade. He was no longer talking about the likelihood of our being rescued, nor about the Cuban forces advancing from the direction of Lucapa. What he was saying sounded like the murmuring that could be heard from very old men seated beside their izbas in my childhood. They would stare into the distance and speak of beings who no longer existed except in their white heads, heavy with years of war and the camps. Elias (I learned his name) was five or six years older than myself, but his voice had a resonance beyond his own life.

He spoke of a train traveling through an endless forest in winter. The journey lasted several days and little by little had blended into the life stories of the passengers, who eventually got to know one another like close kin. They shared food, recounted their past lives, stepped out into snow-covered railroad stations and returned carrying great black loaves under their arms. Sometimes the train would come to a halt in the heart of the taiga; Elias would open the door, leap out amid the snowdrifts, and hand down the woman who had brought him on this trip to the end of the world. They could hear the crunch of footsteps, the hiss of the locomotive in the distance… Then silence descended, a constellation glittered above the snow-laden fir trees, the exhalation of the sleeping forest filtered inside their clothes; the woman’s hand in his hand became the only source of life in the icy darkness of the universe…

He could have promised me a swift rescue by a Cuban commando squad the next morning; or a stoical, heroic end and survival in the memory of others. Or alternatively a painless death and the future bliss of eternal life. But none of this would have liberated me from fear as completely as did his slow, calm narrative.

The train moved off, he related, and there was a moment of childish anxiety, the fear of not having time to climb on board behind the woman he loved.

Despite the darkness, his tone of voice betrayed a smile, and incredulously, I sensed a smile on my own lips, too.

In my memory the address he had asked me to keep in mind would become the one sure refuge, a place to return to after losing everything, and where you know you will be accepted just as you are.

THE DOOR SLAMS SHUT BEHIND ME, and the full tragicomedy of the situation is revealed: wanting to avoid the hotel elevator and the jovial crowd of the ones I refer to as “the fat-cat Africans of the international conference circuit,” I climbed all nine floors of the back stairs on foot. And mistook the exit. Two rooms face onto the roof terrace, mine and the one whose interior I can now see through the large window. I cannot retrace my steps; the emergency exit is blocked, no doubt in the interests of people taking refuge on the rooftops from a fire – so that firemen can pick them up there. And in the room that I can see from the terrace, a man and a woman are already embarking on what shows every sign of leading to a sexual encounter. To get back to my own room, I should have to walk past their open French window and step over several plants in plastic holders… Impossible. I could have done it at the moment when the door slammed: stammered apologies, a rapid dive toward my own room… Now several seconds have elapsed; from being an idiot gone astray on the rooftops, I have turned into a Peeping Tom. The man s fingers are busy between the woman’s shoulder blades, fiddling with the fastenings of her bra. We know how to do so few original things with our own bodies. His hands appear very black on the woman’s milky skin.

I know them: she is one of the organizers of the “African Life Stories in Literature” symposium to which I have been invited; he is an artist from Kinshasa. The breasts he has finally liberated look like spheres of mozzarella. I crouch behind a planter, waiting for them to switch off the light and for pleasure to make them drowsy. My own terrace is only four or five steps away. But their lights are still on, and their bed faces the French windows: if I reached out with my arm I could almost touch the body of the man lying there, whose genitals the woman has begun to kiss.

Perhaps it was the expensiveness of their suits that caused me to take off. Whenever I find myself among these “fat-cat Africans of the international conference circuit,” I am truly amazed at the fine quality of their clothes. Just now outside the elevator it was the same astonishment, derived, no doubt, from the years of my own ragged youth long ago: What does it cost, a suit like that? A thousand dollars? More? My surprise was not new, but this time I sensed that a reaction was called for. I made for the back stairs.

The theme of the conference they are taking part in is sustainable development in Africa (our symposium is no more than a free cultural sideshow tacked on to these weighty deliberations). They had spent the afternoon in polishing their terminology: when referring to famine should one speak of “extreme poverty” or “absolute poverty”? “Undernourishment” or “malnutrition”? A good question, because aid and budgets will hinge on which terms are used. Later on, following a protracted dinner, these experts went streaming toward the elevators, laughing with the sibilant and liquid resonance of tipsy African voices, slapping one another’s palms, as if congratulating one another on a good joke. I studied their suits, of the finest wool, and the backs of their heads, which sloped down, via rolls of flesh, onto thick necks. I knew that in Africa, more than anywhere else, real life loves the grotesque. “Malnutrition,” “absolute poverty,” and those necks! Even the most fiercely radical journalist would not have dared to invent such a shocking contrast. And yet… Imagining these gleaming necks all around me in the elevator, multiplied by the mirrors, I felt nauseated, I fled.

And now I am punished, condemned to wait for a sexual act to come to fruition. From my hiding place I can just see the face of the woman crouching on all fours; her eyes are half closed, her lower jaw hangs down, revealing her tongue and teeth.

The swift mosaic of memory suddenly brings back the past of twenty-five years ago. A woman raped by soldiers, myself a prisoner, unable to move, waiting… The kaleidoscope of life replicates that night long ago in northern Angola but transforms it into farce: a plump female, the organizer of the “cultural program,” is being serviced by a young painter from Kinshasa for whom she will mount an exhibition in Paris or Brussels. While I am held prisoner between two pots of bougainvillea. I try to find it funny History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Even our own petty personal histories do it…

In the bed the woman is now lying on top of the man. She is the one doing the work; her legs can be seen heaving rhythmically. The panting grows louder; the moment of my release is at hand. I stand up, ready to leap. Then the telephone rings; the rules of vaudeville are observed right to the end. The bodies wriggling as they extricate themselves from their embrace, the woman gasping: “Sh!” Her slight cough as she tries to adopt a plausible tone of voice. Out of breath, she picks up the phone. “Hullo, Christian. Yes, it’s me. No, I haven’t been running. It’s just so hot here. You’ve no idea. Whew! Apart from that, nothing special to report, really We’re slaving away from dawn till dusk, and as usual, no one’s satisfied… Is Delphine all right? Put her on. It’s Mama, Delphinette… No, sweetheart, I haven’t seen any elephants yet. Next time. When you come here with Mama…”

I ran into them at Roissy before the flight. Christian, the husband, who had driven his wife to the airport, reminded me of a certain photograph: a pale, thin man, an old soldier marching along a muddy road. There was an element of old-fashioned ingenuousness in his look, of resignation in that drooping mustache. He had their daughter with him, the six-year-old Delphine, and while waiting at the check-in, he had talked to me about this child, “a late arrival,” and their twenty-two-year-old son. His wife was rushing about in the throng of conference guests, checking tickets, making calls on her cell phone. “She works like crazy,” Christian said to me, looking at me with his gray, unbearably honest eyes. “I don’t know how she survives – all these trips to Africa!” The child, lost in a reverie, was setting out a row of little plastic figures on a bench. Her lips were whispering an inaudible rigmarole. She looked like a little girl from bygone days with her fair pigtail, her lace collar.

“I love you, sweetheart. Night-night. Let me talk to Daddy… Look, Christian, if they haven’t made the transfer by the fifteenth, send them a note by recorded delivery and let’s see what happens… Right. I’ll call you tomorrow. I’ve got a report to write now for the delegate general. Kiss, kiss. Sleep well.” She hangs up and remains sitting on the bed for a moment, scratching her shoulder and yawning repeatedly. The man starts fiddling with the remote control, selects a football match, then changes to videos of music with a strong beat. The woman presses against him, kisses his nipples, slides toward his belly. He changes channels.

A concert. Handel, I think. The woman lifts her head, her mouth half open. The same mouth, I suddenly say to myself, that in a few days’ time will be kissing Delphinette, that little girl with the fair pigtail…

It is hard for the lovemaking to get started again. Desire has run into the sand. The woman swings heavily off the bed, makes her way toward the bathroom. Her bulk had struck me earlier as reminiscent of mozzarella. No. More like soap, very white, very lardy. Or Turkish delight. Her thick, dyed hair is the color of beets. A round face, with little watchful eyes. She is a sow, plain and simple. And yet nothing is simple. Christian, Delphinette… The bathroom door closes. The man stands in front of the television. He has gone back to the videos, swaying in imitation of the dancers’ apelike antics. I get up, slither in between the thick branches of a shrub, stretch out on my own terrace.

The southern sky. And there, above the harbor, that constellation, Lupus, the Wolf…

For a long time now the only logic in my life has been the play of coincidence, sometimes tragic, sometimes comic. As just now, when that memory of twenty-five years ago, a night of great fear in the forests of Lunda Norte, suddenly found its farcical echo: this elegant hotel in an African capital and myself captive outside the French windows of a bedroom where a fat white administrator is getting herself seen to by a young black artist. He has just stepped outside for a smoke, and from my terrace I can see his figure silhouetted against the wall.

In my youth I believed history was set in its path, and that our lives ought to be a committed response to this. I thought good and evil existed, and that the struggle between them in the modern world took the form of the class struggle. And that one should choose sides, help the weak and poor (which was precisely what I believed when, still a young man, I came to Angola), and that ones life, even if unhappy and painful, would then have a justification and follow a coherent course, structured from one phase to the next. Set down thus, all this seems somewhat naïve, and yet I lived for years guided by this naïveté. And I can no longer even remember at what moment, to put it pompously, I lost faith. The simple truth is that one day what I began to discern behind the great laws of history, the noble causes, the high-flown rhetoric, was the mischievous play of coincidence, a sly, mocking law. For this is the only logic there is: twenty-five years apart, a black woman raped by soldiers, a white woman screwed by a black man. And there outside the elevator another coincidence, a Congolese diplomat with the smooth trace of an ancient scar on his cheek, like the one on that sergeants face long ago.

A still more distant recollection comes to mind, that very first image of Africa in a children’s book: a dismembered elephant, its enormous head trampled by a white hunters boot, the trunk, the feet, the torso, surrounded by smiling and almost naked black men. I remember the unease inspired in me by the thoroughly technical aspect of this butchery. Yes, a great body transformed into a pile of meat, from which everyone will carve himself a slice. Later on, Africa itself would often remind me of that great animal cut in pieces by human predators.

“We’re launching a program of subsidy for African illustrators. Ill try to get you included in the project.” Now the two lovers are sitting on their terrace. The organizers voice is languid, lazy, that of a woman physically gratified, eager to please the man who has fulfilled her. I feel the same nausea as earlier outside the elevator. And violent disgust, not with these two but with myself. During the session that afternoon I should have stood up and spoken about those suits of theirs, or at least the fat on their necks. Yes, I should simply have said: “There will be wars, famines, and epidemics on this soil of Africa, gentlemen, for as long as you have those rolls of fat on the backs of your necks.” And later I should have walked up to the room next door and said, “There is in this world, madame, a six-year-old child, Delphinette, your daughter, whom you will shortly be kissing with the very same lips that are now sucking on this erect black penis.”

I smile bitterly. Twenty-five years ago I should have been capable of speaking like that. I still believed in the struggle between good and evil. Now this believer no longer exists. The tricks of coincidence are cruel, for they confront us with what we once were and make us realize how little of us is left. There is nothing left in me of the person who in darkness snapped the wires on the wrists of a man on the brink of death. Elias Almeida.

Except, perhaps, this memory, twenty-five years old. At about two thirty in the morning, the noise around our hut fell away; the soldiers, weary of carousing, raping, and partying (I discovered then that war could be a party, too), turned in for the night. Elias stood up and invited me to step outside our prison, as if it had been a holiday villa. He addressed a few firm, calm, trenchant words to the guard pointing his submachine gun at us. And the scorn for death in his voice was such that the soldier lowered his gun and remained rooted to the spot. The moon cast a blue luminescence over a few empty crates, an old car wheel, and what I at first took to be a pile of rags. It was the body of the Zairean woman. By now I had learned why the soldiers were so intent on rummaging in her mouth.

“You dont know the southern sky yet, my friend,” Elias said to me. “Look. Up there is my favorite constellation. The Wolf.”

THE WOMAN HELD HER PEACE because she had had time to conceal in her mouth a handful of tiny diamonds, given to her by a digger. This traffic in these frontier zones of Lunda Norte is constant. But when the soldiers made to snatch her treasure from her after the rape, she resisted. They killed her, and the sergeant retrieved the granules, which were ugly, as rough diamonds often are, without any risk of being bitten.

Ellas explained the scenario to me, but, thus demystified, did it become any less harsh, less absurd? Any easier to comprehend?

Nothing was comprehensible that night. Not even the fear. That came later, when I relived those hours in cold blood, giving myself time to be terrified by the idea of one danger or another. And to punish the young man who had set out to strip a corpse, I would exaggerate my cowardice. The shame of having tried to steal that pen was to haunt me for years.

Much more dangerous for us than the soldiers, if the truth be told, was that drunk and drugged youth who from time to time stuck his head in at the window of our hut and threatened us with his gun. He was not a boy soldier; it was at the start of the following decade that those juvenile warriors spread everywhere. No, he was just an orphan, adopted by the unit like a young stray animal. His show of being a little bully boy amused the fighting men. He had picked up an old gas mask, who knows where, and from time to time, as dusk fell, this hideous countenance would appear at our window. The glass in the mask was broken, and all that was left of the respirator was a short tube, a kind of sawn-off elephant’s trunk. We could see dark eyes, cloudy with alcohol and hemp, a grimace of hatred that would suddenly be transformed into the smile of a weary, sick child. He took aim at us, tossing his extraterrestrial’s head, targeting first one, then the other, and uttering a yell that faded away into a long drowsy whisper, then he disappeared. For a time we would hear his howls moving off among the trees. His voice bore a curious resemblance to the high-pitched and desperate tones of the Zairean woman. Two or three times I even thought she was coming back to life again, before realizing my mistake.

For a while I kept an eye on the youth’s comings and goings through the camp. He was not there when the soldiers were poking about in the dead woman’s mouth. Perhaps he had collapsed somewhere under the trees. He came later, saw the motionless body, doubtless thought the woman was summoning up her strength after being violated or else sleeping. He shook his gun at her to frighten her and assaulted her, imitating the soldiers, grasped her breasts, parted her thighs. And got up again at once, peered at his fingers, holding them up to the light that came from the tents, then to the moon. From the doorway of our hut the soldier guarding us called out to him mockingly The youth knelt down and began rubbing his hands on the ground. A moment later, rigged out in his mask again, he returned to threaten us at the window more aggressively than before. I was engaged in biting through the rope that bound Elias s ankles. I felt him tensing, as if he had sensed that this time the youth might really shoot. He sat up and spoke very softly, as if remembering a forgotten story. The youth answered him, removed the mask. When he had gone, Elias murmured: “His father was executed two years ago – by our beloved president, Comrade Neto. Whose valiant and faithful servant I am. Youll see. Nothings simple here in Africa.”

All through my life I have encountered Africa experts who could explain everything. I would listen to them, aware of my own ignorance. But the truth is, I have never been able to rid myself of the incomprehension that arose in me that night in Lunda Norte. Perhaps this confusion was also one way of understanding. At least it enabled me to purge my hatred of that drunken child who took aim at me, smiled at me, and was quite capable of shooting me, to silence the grief that dwelt in him.

In twenty-five years I have found no place among our fine theories for that young human being, who had already raped and killed, and who often peers at me in my dreams through the broken window of his gas mask. No, I have never claimed to understand Africa.

The taste of the wet rope still lingered on my tongue as Elias stood up, teetered, and made his way toward the door. I had just freed his ankles. Yes, the taste of the rope, the blood, the tormented flesh. With a few incisive words he waved aside the guard and, tilting his head back, murmured: Tve always felt this southern sky was very close to us. Perhaps because I was born beneath its stars. Look up there. That’s my favorite constellation: the Wolf.”

He must have sensed that in my young head, shattered by Africa, the world was being reduced to the corpse of a woman engorged by the pleasuring of men.

Having arrived during the night, the Cuban units attacked at the first gray light of dawn. At this drowsy and misty hour (as I was to observe one day in a firefight at Mavinga) the men who kill and those who are killed resemble ghosts; as they slip away into death, it seems less abrupt, a soft descent, a shape, a life, being rubbed out as if by an eraser.

Excellent fighters, these Cubans! The cordon was watertight; the advance of small commando units, covering one another in turn, was rapid and controlled, like an attacking maneuver on a sports field. When their voices could be heard near our prison, Elias called out to them in Spanish, The military instructor, who had woken up, yelled in Russian. The door opened, and by the ashen light of dawn reality began to permeate the nights phantasmagoria. Two Soviet military advisers who had taken part in the assault came and joined us. Fresh water had the impact of an antidote. A doctor gave us injections redolent of the sterilized cleanliness of a hospital. The world of the living was reasserting itself, banishing the void. And among the trees the prisoners were burying the dead. The instructor spoke a comical Russo-Hispano-Portuguese lingo, to the amusement of the soldiers surrounding him. The spicy aroma of canned meat hung on the air and gave me a pleasant knot in my stomach.

I saw Elias a little apart, where, under the supervision of a soldier, two prisoners, detailed as gravediggers, were busy I walked over, glanced into the grave they were filling. At the bottom of the same pit, a woman’s body in her torn clothes, one breast bared, riddled with bullets, and, pressed up against her, lying on his side in a very lifelike pose of abandon, the youth, still wearing his gas mask. I was on the point of asking them to let me undo the rubber from his face, but the rhythmic fall of shovelfuls of reddish earth had already covered the two bodies almost completely. “It doesn’t matter,” murmured Elias, and drew me toward the camp. I thought his “doesn’t matter” was a rather hasty way of sparing me a pointless gesture, one pain too many. But as he walked along he added in more resolute tones: “If there’s nothing beyond all this, then men are no more than ants, chewing, copulating, and killing one another. In that case nothing matters. And they can bury this kid without removing his carnival toy. Yes. If there’s nothing beyond all this… To be certain a woman’s not just a lump of meat that’ll rot beneath the red earth, you need to love well.”

It was perhaps the only time I ever heard the word love on his lips, love in the sense of falling in love, being head over heels in love. Some years later we met in Kinshasa, and that evening he told me again about the train that had carried them, him and his beloved, through endless white forests. He was already aware of all that separated them and all that threatened his own life, divided between wars, revolutions, and games of espionage. But his voice was serene, almost joyful. He said he would have given everything just for the scent of the cold that clung to the dress of the woman he loved. They were getting back onto the train after a halt in the taiga at night, and for a few moments, amid the warmth of the compartment, he could detect this fragrance of snow on the gray wool of her dress. “I would have gone through G-2 again for it,” he murmured, leaning closer and smiling at me. This was the Zairean detention camp where he had been horribly tortured. Men were generally broken there within a few weeks. It was then that I thought I understood the “beyond all this” he had spoken of beside the pit where they were burying the diamond carrier and the masked child. Understood, too, why it was love that made the world matter, without which we should be no more than insects hurrying to take our pleasures, masticate, and die.

… It is the moment of leavetaking on the terrace next door. The lovers arrange to meet tomorrow, to go dancing at the Nirvana, the best club in town, according to the artist. The woman, the organizer, has it all planned: “They’ll be reaching the end of their palaver about eight thirty. Once I’ve taken them to the restaurant, I’ll slip away…” “They” is us, a dozen writers, the cultural shop window for the international conference on sustainable development in Africa. And “their palaver” is our symposium tomorrow: “African Life Stories in Literature.” The lovers kiss, and the young man goes off, with a big portfolio under his arm. He had called to show her his drawings… Appearances have been maintained.

Only yesterday all this would have seemed totally insignificant to me. A white woman on the wrong side of forty takes advantage of a professional trip to Africa to embark on a not very demanding affair with a young African, sexually better endowed than her husband, Christian, with his honest, melancholy eyes. Being little given to moralizing, I might even have found it rather endearing, the gains won by feminism now taken for granted, modernity without complexes. I might have sustained the irony as far as to salute this “fair exchange,” the lady receiving her youth hormone therapy, the young stud support for some phony association he ran. Yes, I should have had thoughts along those lines, midway between amusement and indifference, and quickly forgotten them.

But many things have happened since yesterday I have relived that night in Lunda Norte, I have recalled the sight of that youth in his gas mask, first of all the young braggart threatening us, then the child huddled up in a grave of red earth, pressed against a woman with a mutilated breast. I have remembered Elias s words the day he told me about the torture at Camp G-2: “They hung us from our wrists and twisted our bodies. At a certain moment the pain was such that you really felt as if wings were growing between your shoulder blades and they were ripping them off. Then you lost consciousness.”

Yes, I had rediscovered Elias Almeida’s face and voice in my memory. For long years I had been in flight from this rediscovery, I dreaded it. Now his gaze rests on our life here – myself, the white woman and the black man who have just taken their pleasure and parted. The woman has showered, gone to bed, scribbled several lines in her notebook (no doubt she writes down the details of all these liaisons she has on her trips to Africa). The day before I should have laughed at it. Now, with Elias s eyes upon us, this I know: while she is dancing with her gigolo tomorrow night, they will be digging a grave to bury a woman with torn breasts and a nameless child. And at the same moment, in a cellar from which no cry escapes, a man hanging by his wrists from a hook will not even feel the burning of the cigarette end stubbed out on his neck by a soldier. Yes, at the same moment. For on this soil of Africa all this happens unremittingly. “African Life Stories in Literature…”

To respond to Elias’s voice, one would have to be able to talk about this terrible synchronicity in human lives. To speak of that night in Lunda Norte, the nasty little granules of diamonds extracted from a woman’s mouth by a soldier just after she had been raped and shot; to speak of the asterisk on the soldiers cheek and the rather similar scar on the clean-shaven face of one of the fat-cat Africans outside the elevator this evening, and of the youth whose left hand, with its slender fingers, was the last thing to disappear beneath the shovelfuls of red earth; to speak of the white administrator who, in recognition of services rendered, will arrange an exhibition for her African lover, who draws smiling children; to speak of the six-year-old girl, little Delphinette, who does not yet know this aspect of her mother: a tousled head thrust between the thighs of a sweating male; to speak of a man whose shoulder blades are being twisted by the strappado till he loses consciousness, feeling he has wings… And to speak of that young Angolan in the railway compartment, never taking his eyes off a woman whose dress retains within its folds the fragrance of a forest deep in snow Speak of this man who loved.

A week after our release, I saw Elias again at the Luanda airport. The colleague traveling with him addressed him by a name unknown to me – doubtless one of those names Elias had gone under during his life, or, rather, during his lives. When we were left alone, he clapped his hand to his brow and exclaimed: “There, you see. I’d completely forgotten… Here. Its yours. Keep it. There’s ink in it now!”

It was the fountain pen I had tried to steal from him. This pen would travel through twenty-five years of journeying and oblivion, would several times be confiscated, along with other personal possessions. But I would always succeed in recovering it.

It is with Elias Almeida’s old fountain pen that I am currently writing these notes.

2

THE BIRD HE HAD BEEN CARING FOR managed to stay aloft, that day, then tumbled down awkwardly He picked it up and saw in the creature’s eye a reflection of the apprehensive joy he felt himself: soon this ball of feathers will go soaring up into the sky!

In 1961 he was eleven. The uprising against the Portuguese had just been crushed. Did he understand what that meant? Did he know that villages had been burned with napalm and that the Americans had supplied the bombers? That impaled human heads were becoming mummified along the roadsides? That to reward the victorious army they had opened brothels into which young Angolan women were crammed, as in a cattle market?

At the age of eleven does one know about or understand, and above all does one want to understand, such adult antics? Elias no longer remembered if the horrors of 1961 had been known to him at the time or recounted to him later by his fathers friends. He remembered the bird and its first, hesitant flight.

At all events he knew that his father had fled to the Congo to fight alongside Lumumba, a black man who talked on equal terms with white men. He knew that his father was a hero because he wanted to liberate the contratados, the prisoners packed together in trucks covered in wire mesh, on roads scorched by the sun. His father fought so that black people should be able to come freely into the cities where the whites lived, like this city of Dondo, where Elias’s mother went to work, leaving at nightfall. After his father left they too had fled from the capital, Luanda, and after long wanderings had ended up in this rotten cluster of shacks on the banks of the Cuanza, at the edge of the whites’ city.

His father was dedicated to the happiness of the people. Elias had heard this from the mouths of men who used to visit their home before the uprising. Less clear was the amount of unhappiness that this great future happiness brought with it. The corpses of Angolans left in the streets by the soldiers. His fathers flight. And one night this sobbing, the tears of his mother, she who was so strong and cheerful that he believed her incapable of weeping. The hard work in the textile warehouse where she sorted coupons – that was what she had told him. But one evening she came home earlier than usual, sat down on the threshold of their hut, and looked at her son as if he were an adult. Tve had enough of those white boozers, their drink, their bad teeth… she murmured, and at once, as if to correct herself, began talking about the days long ago on the island of Cazenga when she used to wait for the fishermen s return. Elias sensed a fault line of untruth in these happy recollections but could not detect what was wrong. His mother was a simple fisherman s daughter, he thought, and his father a man who could read and write and whose features were so fine that people used to think he was of mixed race. Perhaps that could explain it all. His father was fighting for the happiness of the people, and his mother was this people, ignorant and fearful… Elias felt an urgent longing to be among his fathers companions in arms, far away from this hovel with its smell of stagnant water.

… Years later, having become a “professional revolutionary,” in the ideological jargon of the time, he would recall that moment when for the first time he had despised the people, with all the arrogance of one who seeks to build a paradise on earth for that very people. And he would reflect that all dictatorships are born of this lofty disdain.

But that evening at Dondo he was too young to be aware of it. Scraps of discordant notions jostled in his head: the flaw of untruth his mothers words had betrayed, the future happiness that demanded so many sacrifices, the time before the uprising, rather a gentle time (as he unwillingly recognized) in their house at Luanda… And that baker, a white man, who had one day given him a little bread roll sprinkled with poppy seeds. Elias did not want to count him among all those Portuguese who, according to his father, must be driven out or killed. And his mothers voice, too, now humming the lament generally sung by the contmtados caged in their trucks. How to unravel all that?

He squatted down and hid his face in a place where all this world of confusion ceased to exist, in the warm, tender crook of his mothers arm. Life flowed on drowsily there, lulled by the pulsing of the blood, an utterly different life, without the grimaces of the dead by the roadsides, without untruth. In the smooth warmth of this arm a scented night reigned that enveloped him completely, his face, his body, his fears. He half opened his eyes and his eyelashes caressed his mothers skin and the folded arm shivered slightly beneath this caress. Happiness like this was simple and needed no explanation, like the coolness that arose from the Cuanza, like the long scattering of stars above the house. Elias sensed on his lips the phrases that would speak of this happiness and the love his face found in the sweetness of the crook of this arm, but words seemed pointless. Nothing expressed the joy of that moment better than the tiny stirrings of the bird hidden inside his shirt. Its wings moved softly, tickling him, and from time to time he could feel the minute staccato of its beak against his chest.

Two days later he was already having to run to keep up with his birds flight. When he stopped, breathless, the bird landed too, then hopped toward him, nestling against his feet. Then he noticed they had crossed the frontier to the whites’ city This alarmed and also amused him: what mad freedom for that frail pair of wings! They would soon be soaring over the forbidden city, even over the river, beating the air of another country, the Congo perhaps… Whereas in his case, a few more steps could cost him his life. The patrols shot first and asked questions afterward, especially at nightfall.

To avoid them, he followed the course of the Cuanza and at one moment had to make his way around a long building resting on piles driven into the sand of the river bank. Portuguese voices, harsh laughter mingled with the clatter of frying pans, the fierce hissing of oil on overheated metal. The smell of fried fish awoke his hunger. Behind open windows men were eating, draining glasses of dark liquid, calling out to one another, picking their teeth. Mainly white, a few of mixed race, almost all dressed in uniform. Some of them in the company of black women who chuckled and licked fingers glistening with fat, adjusted their hair. There was not a single white woman.

Suddenly Elias saw his mother.

The man sitting next to her was a rather small and ugly Portuguese soldier. And this was incomprehensible, for whites are by nature handsome, elegant, and incomparably superior to blacks. Elias had never doubted this, as one does not doubt the brilliance of the sun, the currents in rivers. But now the ugliness of this man in his cups was plain for all to see: a crumpled uniform on a squat body, shapeless lips now pressed against the dirty glass, then stretched out into a smile, into a gabble of words… And his mothers smile that made her unrecognizable. Ugly… And the man s fingers, short, fleshy, gripping his mothers elbow, that thumb thrust into the crook of her arm!

The bird, nestled inside his shirt, suddenly escaped, flitting between the piles that supported the building, settled, hidden behind a bush. Elias ran off in hot pursuit amid this petrified forest of timbers covered in algae, stumbled, grazed his forehead against a beam. In the darkness it seemed as if the bird were spying on him, teasing him. He heard its chirruping, moved forward, stooping, then flung himself toward a black ball that was detaching itself from one of the piles. His hands seized it and at once let go in disgust. It was a dead pigeon, half eaten by rats. He began running again, slithering on heaps offish scales, on swathes of rubbish. The piles surrounded him, closed in on him, barred his way. He fell and, as he got up, became aware that he was floundering in the waters of the Cuanza, with his feet slowly sinking into the slime. He also realized that he was no longer trying to catch his bird, for the creature had already returned and was obediently perched on his shoulder. No, in his breathless flight he had been trying to reach the row of windows that extended out over the riverbank on a wooden platform. That window, over there, whose support he reached, tugging his feet out of the clay A moment ago he had seen his mother and the soldier get up from the table, leave the main room, go out onto the balcony. Then a window had lit up…

Now inside a little room with yellow walls there was a black woman seated on the bed. Naked and motionless, very upright. In front of her a man was hopping about angrily. The top half of his body was already undressed and he was struggling with his pants, in which one of his legs had become entangled. His face was very tanned, as were his neck and hands, but his chest and belly appeared white and crumpled. He was performing his leaping dance, hissing oaths. “Like a monkey” Elias reflected later, while observing that it was generally black people who attracted the comparison. At the time he had been incapable of thought, of understanding. He stared at the motionless woman who resembled a statue of smooth, black wood. She was not looking at the man tangled up in his clothing, nor at the walls of the room, nor the window. Her eyes saw what no one else could see. She did not smile. And her beauty obliterated the rest of the world.

The man finally freed himself of his pants, stood up, naked on his short bowlegs. Hideous. Went up to the woman, seized her by the forearms, thrust her back onto the bed…

The window slipped slowly upward. Elias felt his feet sinking into the cool mud, up to his ankles, over his ankles. The bird flew off from his shoulder, disappeared among the piles. A boat passed on the river, the voices sounded very close, other voices rang out in response, coming from the shore. The beams of electric flashlights sliced through the darkness. Footsteps squelched rapidly like suction pumps on the clay of the riverbank.

He ran, fell, hid, noticing his shadow projected by a flashlight onto a wall, a bush. The frontier of the shanty-town was very close. He crossed it and collapsed behind a cob wall. In the distance gunshots pierced the night; then silence enveloped him, all he could hear was the beating of his own heart, which corresponded strangely to the rhythmic glittering of the stars above his head.

In the morning he observed his mother and saw nothing that looked like that black wooden statue in the yellow room. Only her gaze, perhaps, which sometimes plumbed an abyss other people were unaware of.

He lived through the days that followed in the feverish hope of plunging his face into the warm and tender crook of that arm and thus forgetting all he had seen, causing the building on piles and the hopping man-monkey to vanish.

But hardly a week later a friend of his fathers came to see them with a message. From the whispering of the adults Elias learned that Lumumba was dead, his father was on the run, and above all, that they must escape from Dondo as fast as possible.

The warning was late in coming. The next evening, on his return from fishing, Elias found their shack empty The police had arrested his mother in a street in the city.

For a time his mothers footprints would remain visible in the powdery earth around their house. He would walk with extra care so as not to erase them. Then a shower of rain came and obliterated every trace.

THE TRICK WAS TO WALK INTO THE CITY of the whites carrying an old birdcage. He had found it on a garbage dump and repaired it with strips of bamboo. The police finally got used to the sight of this young black who, when questioned, would reply: “Senhor Oliveira has told me to take his bird to the vet.”

He walked past the shopping arcades, the Post Office building, and, hidden behind a tree, began watching the entrance to the prison. At nightfall, when passersby were few and far between, he climbed into the fork made by two huge branches, hung his birdcage amid the foliage, and froze, his gaze hypnotized by the dense crowd behind the high enclosure.

“So human beings can be killed without being deprived of life,” thought Elias, observing this mass of bodies, mea-gerly covered in rags. No need to drain them of their blood, to dismember them. It was sufficient to starve them, throw women and men, old and young, all in together, make them perform their functions in the presence of the others, keep them from washing, forbid them to speak. In fact, to eliminate every sign of their belonging to the human race. A corpse was more alive than them, for a dead man can still be recognized as a man.

The indistinct mass of people moved slowly, trickling across from one wall of the courtyard to the other. If his mother had appeared at that moment, alone, separate from the cluster of bodies, if he had recognized her, he would have ceased to exist, burned to a cinder with grief. He would have become the cracked base of the tree, the great round stone he put his foot on to climb up… Fortunately distance transformed the prisoners into a lava of anonymous cells. And yet this was all he hoped for: to see his mother again.

One evening he again collided with the unstable borderline of life. He ventured as far as the prison gates and through the railings saw a man lying in the courtyard. Still alive, for his arms moved occasionally, his hands slipping slowly across his body As if he were trying to ascertain on his bare skin the state of the wounds glistening under a restless crowd of insects. Worse than death, thought Elias, sensing in his own body, on his own skin, the fire of that swarming death agony. And he told himself he could not have lived for a moment with such vermin-infested wounds.

The sight of that body corroded by decay turned him into a somnambulist; he wandered away from the railings, picked up his birdcage, began walking slowly, mechanically He no longer noticed the passersby, did not seek to avoid the patrols. As vividly as one hallucinating, he pictured his mother beside that half naked man, his dark wounds buzzing with flies. And told himself that there must surely be a place somewhere on earth where his mother and that prisoner could have taken refuge to keep their sufferings at bay, if only for the duration of a sigh. There must be a being who would have offered them shelter.

At that hour, Dondo Cathedral, massive as a fortress, was empty and silent. Elias heard the echo of his own footfalls on the paved floor, and even, it seemed to him, the beating of his own heart, amplified by the height of the nave. So polished was the gilding on the statue of the Virgin that it appeared translucent. He had difficulty in making out the expression on the face amid this glitter, peered at the lowered eyelids, the tartly closed lips…

He prayed like a child who had never learned to pray. Only this vision was put into words: “I want my mother to be sitting there in the doorway of our house in the evening. I want to hide my face in the crook of her arm.” The words, haltingly whispered, sought to convey this to the statue of the woman with lowered eyelids and tart lips. He had once seen a film in a cinema in Luanda, in which a man’s prayer was granted. It happened in books, as well, he knew.

The priest’s shout was terse and harsh. Elias jumped to his feet and ran toward the exit, his head bowed to avoid a second blow from the stick. Father Anibal’s cane thumped on the paving stones with an angry clatter that accompanied the fugitive all the way to the creaking of the great door.

Father Anibal was not a hard man. He was quite simply frightened. At this hour each day he passed through the cathedral on his way to meditate in his big presbytery garden. He had already been deep in his reverie when this young black jumped up in front of him. Furthermore, even before taking fright, the priest had sensed an anguished intensity within the empty space of the building, an unaccustomed density amid that air laden with silent prayers, whether ancient or recent. He knew what people generally asked heaven for. On this occasion there was a difference in the vibration left by the unspoken words. And yet the cathedral was empty. He had taken several steps and then stumbled, knocking over a large basket. No, a birdcage! Strident trilling, wings flapping, and above all, the abrupt movements of this skinny black youth, whom he had at first taken for a lurking dog. He struck out and swore in order to conceal his fear… Once he was settled in his garden, his thoughts returned uneasily to the extraordinary tension he had sensed in the nave just now. The bond uniting the one who prays with the one who receives the prayer. And he, the priest, the confidant of both. In his youth he had truly believed in this… This evening he did not know what troubled his meditation more – the loss of his faith, eroded over the years by contact with the stupidity and cruelty of human beings, or the face of that child running away with his birdcage under his arm.

Two days later they brought his mother to the house. Elias had no time to think about his prayer being answered, for the woman they deposited on the low bed, like a thing, bore little resemblance to his mother. It was as if a blade had sliced this slender shaving of humanity off that solid mass of prisoners. Her arms, shrunk to the outline of the bones, were no longer black but gray. One of her collarbones was broken and stuck out from beneath a filthy bandage. Her mouth seemed very narrow, greatly extended, on account of the line of dried blood stretching her lips at the corners. The crook of her arm, which Elias touched with his brow, remained cold.

They had got rid of her because the authorities did not want a known opponents wife to die in prison. After months of massacres they were trying to calm things down, wipe away the blood, portray themselves to international opinion as humanitarians. The Americans, whose aircraft had been bombing insurgent camps several weeks previously, were now beginning to talk about democracy, decolonization…

At the end of the second night the bird became fren-ziedly agitated in its cage. Elias got up, held it in his hands, tried to calm it. But the creature escaped, flew toward the doorway, perched for a moment on the half that stood open, then vanished into the darkness. His mother died before sunrise while he was away drawing water from the Cuanza. As the dawn came, the river was tinged with pink, and it was almost possible to believe that the world existed for the joy of the living.

A week later Father Anibal, accompanied by two seminarists, came looking for Elias. Troubled by the memory of the young African he had driven away with blows of his stick, he decided to repair the damage. Elias listened to the priests proposals (commands, in fact, which simply had to be obeyed), but his thoughts returned to the pages of a book his mother had read to him long ago in their house in Luanda: a youth who had strayed was set back on the right path by a priest, and all at once a radiant horizon of promises opened up before him… The next day Elias was admitted to the Mission, the boarding school where he would live and study for four years. His own horizon would be the glorious title of assimilado. Which signified, as he would very soon learn, that he, a negro, little different from a monkey, could one day gain entry to the whites world.

HE STUDIED FEROCIOUSLY, with the obstinacy of a drug addict forever obliged to increase the dose in order to shut out memories. At his age he already had a whole world of blood and death to forget.

Besides, while he had not yet acquired his title of as-similado, it was in his interests not to stray too far from the Mission, for once outside it he reverted to being “a cheeky young African strolling about in the city of the whites.” It was better not to leave the cocoon while preparing, like a pupa, for his metamorphosis into a civilized man.

By the age of fourteen he spoke French and Spanish, in addition to Portuguese, and could read Greek and Latin. He sometimes surprised Father Anibal by quoting from philosophers whom the latter had never read and, occasionally, never even heard of. One day the priest completely lost his temper. They were talking about the history of the church, and Elias alluded to Pope Célestine V, the papal monk who abjured the luxury and pomp his predecessors had surrounded themselves with, a humble man who paid for it with his life. A man who, if he had been living today, would not have tolerated the brazen wealth of some and the poverty of others… Father Anibal flew into a rage, waving his stick; Elias even thought he was about to strike him. “You ve been cramming your poor black head with too many things. You Ve got it all topsy-turvy. Célestine is a saint. And the church needed warriors to bring the word of God to tribes like yours! If we’d not converted you to Christianity, you’d still be living in trees!”

He was a hot-tempered man, Elias knew, but one who bore few grudges and quickly repented of his choleric outbursts. The next day, to make up for it, Father Anibal took him to a reception given by the city authorities. In the great hall decked out with Portuguese flags, Elias stood apart from the elegant dresses and colorful uniforms, close to the window, through which the breezes from the Cuanza wafted in. The guests who caught his eye must have wondered whether they were looking at a servant or a youth of mixed race who had come with his white progenitor. They’ve noted that I no longer have my monkey’s tail, thought Elias with a smile. And they’re telling themselves that in a few more years I may have learned how to eat with a fork…

Watching the coming and going of uniforms, he remembered the yellow room in the long building on piles. It was probably one of these military men who had gone there on a certain evening to couple with a beautiful black woman. The white women among the guests were mainly short and thin, or else extremely fat, in which case they complained noisily about the climate. Each and every one of them clasped her glass in a particular hold that amazed him: reminiscent of a raptors talons, a firm, voracious grip. He reflected that to get to where they had got to in life, they had doubtless needed to be endowed with these tough, clawlike finger-joints. There were also some people of mixed race in the company. They were dressed with greater care than the whites and seemed continually on the alert. They practically stood to attention when spoken to and replied in a Portuguese so correct that It lacked all savor, articulating every syllable as people do after being cured of a stammer.

“And that’s the best that could ever happen to me,” thought Elias, as he studied their smooth, rigid faces, their uneasy eyes. Yes, with superhuman application, and by means of countless acts of servility and hypocrisy, he had a fair chance of joining the envied ranks of the people of mixed race – of living in constant fear of losing his status and sinking back to the level of a negro, of having to be whiter than a white.

That evening, after the reception, Father Anibal honored him by inviting him to his garden. They sat in wicker armchairs with cups of tea in their hands. The father was in an excellent mood, that of a jovial parish priest who has drunk good wine, attended a fashionable gathering, and been appreciated for his eloquence. “You see,” he was saying to Elias, “God so loves His creatures that He even allows them to commit evil. Yes. So great is God’s love, that He even grants them this freedom. And that’s why wars, famines and crimes occur.” He doubtless regretted losing his temper the day before and now wanted to show off his doctrinal skills. As he talked about the wars and famines tolerated by God, he had a benign and dreamy air.

I could become a priest, too, Elias said to himself. And he pictured a fine presbytery, a garden like this one, ablaze with bougainvilleas but, most of all, this serenity: nothing happens here that is not the Lord’s will. Then he suddenly knew that this God was hateful to him because he allowed his creatures to smash a woman’s collarbone. That slender broken collarbone was enough for him to reject this world and its creator!

Elias felt this so violently, choking on such a sob in his throat, that the priest, who had just fallen asleep in his armchair, woke up, as if the consistency of the air had changed. He shook himself, yawned, patted his dog, which had come to rub itself against his knees. “My old friend Boko’s been limping for the past couple of days. Take him to the vet tomorrow, all right?”

The police stopped Elias very close to the house of Antonio Carvalho, the vet. He had to explain himself. As he continued on his way Elias remarked to himself, with that sharp irony that would greatly assist him in life: “Boko s an assimilado already”

The state of the dogs health necessitated an extended course of treatment, with two weekly injections. The priest accepted this version in good faith. Elias would call on the vet, leave Boko to run about in the garden, and, with a pounding heart, settle down to listen to this strange white man, this Portuguese who wanted to change the world. Carvalho was married to an Angolan woman, not all that unusual a situation for a colonial. What was unusual was that he had not made a servant of his black wife. “You see, Elias, she’s the one who welcomes us into her country, not the other way round. One day the whites will have to understand this. Yes, we need a real revolution in people’s minds.”

It was at his house that Elias read the works of Marx for the first time, and believed he had found in them what he had grievously lacked: the certainty that the world of human beings was neither predestined nor irremediable and that it was therefore possible to transform it, make it better, root out the evil from it. One could erase from this world the room with yellow walls where an ugly, naked man hopped up and down before a woman who sold him her body for the price of a meal. In this transfigured world a man covered in dark wounds would not be left out in the middle of a prison courtyard crammed with human ghosts. And there would not be a woman’s slender, fragile collarbone, smashed by a soldiers boot… Years later he would study Marx in Moscow, arguing about it with his comrades. But his first reading would remain the most vivid, thanks to this promise of a fight against the evil that God tolerates.

Carvalho had known Elias s father, but there was a serious ideological difference between them. The vet maintained that, according to Lenin, revolution could not lead to victory without a revolutionary situation being created in advance. It was therefore necessary to wait, to prepare the ground, to raise the political consciousness of the masses. Whereas his father followed a voluntarist line advocated by Trotsky, hoping to conquer with the help of a small group of revolutionaries cut off from the people. Lenin called this strategy the “infantile disorder of leftism.”

One secret confided in him made a much greater impression on Elias than all these theoretical distinctions: Carvalho remained in touch with his fathers comrades, and from time to time was visited by his contact agents.

At the start of the following year, 1965, one of these spent several days in hiding at the vets house. Elias met him and heard an account of their struggle in the eastern Congo. During the course of two sleepless nights he made his decision: he would leave with this man to join his fathers companions. He could no longer wait for the famous “revolutionary situation.” For the revolution’s heart was already beating somewhere in the darkness of the Congolese jungle.

“The revolutions heart,” “the darkness”… He was fifteen, and it was in such terms that he pictured the world. But, most of all, he wanted his father to know how his mother had died.

3

SO HERE WAS WHERE THE REVOLUTIONS HEART was beating: in this village of the eastern Congo in the Kivu hills. Before his arrival there, Elias had pictured the clash of arms, faces etched by combat, fiery speeches, heroism and sacrifice, words whispered on the brink of death, warriors with proud, manly features. The revolution…

The first thing he saw bore no resemblance to any of that. Two women were preparing a meal in front of a hut, placidly arguing all the time, kneading the dough on the bare plank of the table. Their language was unknown to him, and this made the scene even more commonplace; it would have been the same in Angola or anywhere else, whatever the country, whatever the language. One of the women was big and mature, very fleshy. Her large, almost bare breasts, smeared with flour, swung heavily over the table, colliding with one another at each movement of her arms. The other was very young, with a smooth body and lithe buttocks. There was washing hung out on a line to dry, an almost homely mixture of mens shirts, towels, women’s underwear…

Numb with exhaustion after a long journey, Elias wandered about with the feeling that he had penetrated behind the scenes of the revolution, just where its actors were preparing to perform brave deeds, glorious feats of arms. In the alfresco canteen a soldier was asleep, seated at a table, his head resting on the thick planks where a stripped Kalashnikov lay spread out. One of the parts had tumbled onto the ground. Elias picked it up and set It down discreetly amid the rest of the military Erector Set. Another, stationed amid the bushes, was haranguing his audience. Elias drew closer to listen to him and saw that the orator had no one in front of him. He was addressing empty space, his vacuous gaze floated in a cloud of aromatic, slightly acrid smoke. The same, thought Elias, as used to swirl around the children of the streets, the little hemp smokers In Dondo’s shantytown in the evenings. A young warrior crossed the courtyard with a firmly resolute tread, adjusting a submachine gun on his shoulder, as if at any moment he were about to join battle, then stopped, began chatting with the two cooks and laughing.

Life in this backyard of the revolution seemed like a game Elias could not yet make sense of. They had told him his father was due to return the following morning, and he would doubtless be able to explain these relaxed rebels’ extraordinary way of life. Elias had already noticed a whole host of oddities: the drugged orators harangue, the young submachine gunner s unexpected laughter… And at night, in the room next door, the ponderous wrestling of copulating bodies, an utterly banal activity, so little In harmony with the passionate purity he associated with the revolution. By the full moon s phosphorescent light he could see the end of a bedframe and two pairs of feet. The movements of the soles of the feet reflected the pleasure taken. At one moment the mans right foot was waving wildly and dug a hole In the mattress. It was ridiculous. Pleasure is ridiculous when there’s no other bond between us, thought Elias. The toes curled, as if in a fit of cramp, then relaxed. The foot expressed everything, from feverish desire to final collapse. The woman was the fat cook he had seen on arrival. He was old enough to sense that among so many men on their own, the presence of such women was inevitable. But he could not understand why the dream of revolution had not yet taught these men and women to pursue a love different in kind from this brief, breathless jiggling.

… Many years later he would recall the naïveté of the question, while telling himself that this boyish view of revolution and love had not been all that foolish. For what is the point of such liberating turmoil if it does not radically change the way we understand and love our fellow human beings? Then he would realize that ever since that night of the full moon, love had become a secret yardstick for him, a touchstone by which to judge all human activity on this earth.

At first Elias thought a thief had arrived: amid the mists of the small hours a man skirted the neighboring hut, pushed open the door discreetly, then stepped outside again and studied himself in the rectangle of mirror fixed beside the door frame. He smoothed his hair, adjusted the collar of his combat kit, turned round…

Elias recognized his father. He struck him as small (It’s because IVe grown, thought Elias) and was dressed with the lady-killer elegance affected by some military men. His uniform was too tight, overloaded with pockets and buttons. He looked like… a Portuguese officer! Elias moved away from the window, hoping his own words could sweep away this painful first impression. He had so much to tell this man.

He wanted to talk to him about his mother in the prison at Dondo. An invisible woman, impossible to make out amid the throng of prisoners. And then, snatched away from that human mass, a mute shadow lying there in their shack on the banks of the Cuanza. And beneath her ashen skin, the white gleam of the broken collarbone. He would talk, too, about Anibal, the priest whose god calmly accepted it all, this broken collarbone, a prisoners body covered in wounds crawling with insects, and the death of this woman who, a few days earlier, had held all the happiness in the world in the crook of her arm…

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 leaped 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.

It was terrifying to tell himself that these soldiers might be right. And to feel he was one of them.

Elias walked a little way through the throng of bodies numbed with drunkenness and drugs, and suddenly remembered that it was his birthday. He was sixteen. He had the impression of a long vista opening up before him, a vortex of encounters, faces, new things to explore, to taste, to conquer. All the infinite richness of human life…

A shadow stirred in the darkness; he stepped back, peered intently. A drunken woman, almost naked, was extricating herself from the embrace of a sleeping man. She was seated now, her eyes glinting in the moonlight, her body rendered blue by its phosphorescence. Her mouth was gasping for air; her broad thighs formed a dark, hollow triangle… Elias told himself it would be so easy to copy the soldiers, to crouch down, to thrust the woman onto her back, to plunge into that dark triangle.

The infinite richness of life… As he moved away, he reflected that this one night alone concentrated within it all that man desires, fears, hopes for, detests. There was the victors’ jubilation, and the despair of the vanquished. Ernesto’s vibrant homily, and the soldiers’ abusive mockery. Dead flesh, and bodies stirred with pleasure. The abundance of food, and the famine that from tomorrow would torment the survivors of this ravaged village. There was the almost godlike freedom the soldiers took upon themselves in killing, raping, and torturing, and the subjection of those who, reduced to a mass of pain, were the victims of this freedom. There was the sky above and, doubtless, a god to whom so many suppliant voices were raised, but who remained silent, did not intervene, allowed a child to turn itself into a ball of flesh, wedged between the legs of a little table.

The whole world was condensed into that night. And yet something was missing. The essential thing was missing. Elias felt this lack like a gentle pressure on his eyelids: those evenings long ago, the threshold of their house in Dondo and his mother still, silent, as he hid his face in the crook of her arm. Life throbbed softly beneath the smooth curve of that arm… The essential thing was this love, and that was what was missing from this world. Each of the women who had just been raped and killed had carried this universe of tenderness and peace in the crook of her arm. Each of the men killing or being killed had been that child pressing his face against his mothers arm. All that was needed was to say this, to get other people to understand this.

It was thanks to this train of thought, he later realized, that he did not go out of his mind during that murderous night.

The following morning the fighter in his new khaki uniform who had demanded payment of his wages from Ernesto a week earlier reported to the “command post.” “I’ve had several of the arsonists shot, Commandante,” he announced. “Now’s the time to talk to the troops. Raise their political consciousness… Sober them up, while you’re at it.” He said it with the same mocking disdain, the assurance of one who knows himself to be master of the situation. I’ve witnessed the birth of a warlord, Elias would one day reflect, when that race of killers was taking possession of the continent.

Ernesto left Africa a week after that night of fire. Elias saw him vigorously cramming a bundle of notebooks tied with string into his pack. The reason for his departure was just and noble, like everything the Cuban proclaimed in his speeches: he was going to carry the torch of the revolutionary struggle elsewhere, to seek the support of liberation movements in fraternal nations. He said this in grave, inspired tones, and as they heard him they savored the slightly faded piquancy of that verbal drug so intoxicating to men’s souls.

Jacqueline followed him almost immediately, but hers was a noisy, resentful flight. In the flood of reproaches she poured forth right up to the last minute, what stayed in Eliass mind was this regret that, for him, best defined the true nature of white people: “It could have been a fascinating experiment!” Jacqueline exclaimed. “I could have launched a veritable cultural revolution, starting with film, the art form most accessible to the people…” The whole of the West was there, thought Elias. The arrogant desire to transform other peoples lives Into an “experiment,” into a testing ground for their own Ideas. And then if this human material resists, to abandon it, to move on in search of a more malleable one.

Most of all, he grasped the very great difference between two types of revolutionary: those who could pack their bags, depart, settle somewhere else, and those who did not have this choice. Elias’s father remained.

FROM THEN ON THEIR STRUGGLE WAS HARSHER, more primitive, and also more authentic – the day-to-day battle for survival of a handful of men. Elias noted that the resistance of the defeated expressed the essence of war better than grand strategies and glorious victories. The fury of their fighting no longer had any goal beyond that moment at nightfall, after the final shots, when they found themselves still alive, another day of reprieve, when the glances they exchanged were silently eloquent of their poignant closeness as human beings.

Previously Ernesto’s speeches had given a semblance of logic to the endless treks through the forest, the gun battles, the deaths of young men who had lived so little. Such deaths did not seem pointless now, but rather directed toward a different destination, like the light of that constellation reflected in the eyes of the wounded soldier Elias gave a drink to. His lips were still moving under the trickle of water; the iris in his eyes caught the glittering of the night, then suddenly everything froze, the mouth, the eyelashes… As he closed his eyelids, it seemed to Elias as if these eyes still perceived the dark abyss of the sky more broadly than ever. This was the very first man he had kept company with as he died.

Defeat taught him a lot. One day, hidden in a thicket, he saw soldiers finishing off wounded men, watched by their commander, that soldier in a new uniform, the man he had thought capable of changing sides for more pay He had done so, and was now hunting down the diminishing number of rebels led by Elias’s father.

The rout had transformed his father as well. He was no longer the operatic revolutionary in his fancy uniform that made him look like a Portuguese officer. No, like the fighters he was trying to extricate from the encirclement, his father was russet with dust, bearded, his eyes reddened from lack of sleep, from the sun, and from stress. He had a limp in his left leg, hit by shrapnel, and the calf was swathed in dirty bandages.

Elias realized that before he came to the Congo, this was how he had pictured his father.

One evening, passing through a village, Elias caught sight of two women, one young, the other older, halfheartedly arguing as they prepared a meal. He stopped, struck by the similarity: this was an exact replica of what he had seen that very first day, on his arrival at the rebel camp. The same actions, the same voices, the same serenity. All of It perfectly Indifferent to Ernesto’s speeches, to the violence of the fighting, to the promises of a better world. These women’s happiness had nothing exalted about it, and yet happiness it was: the golden haze of the sunset on the road, the cries of the children among the huts, the smell of food and the cool breeze already filtering up from the river, the gentle lapping of the water beneath an oar… In a train of thought he did not succeed in following through to the end, he told himself that this happiness presented a greater threat to Ernesto’s revolution than any class enemy.

Finally there came a moment when the very thing that gave strength to their band on the run, the tie, the blood-soaked bond, became its principal flaw: together, they were easily identifiable; they needed to separate and, one by one, “blend in with the populace.” Elias remembered Ernesto instructing the soldiers in this technique.

He had already read, and would later read again, scenes in books of farewells between comrades in arms. These featured ringing turns of phrase, solemn oaths, tears choked back, and, if a loving woman was involved, long embraces interrupted only by the revving of engines. Their own parting had nothing melodramatic about it. They counted up and shared out the remaining ammunition, then did the same with the food and the scant medical supplies. His father, followed by several men, took up position between two hills to allow the others to move away safely to escape the commando units that maintained tight surveillance of the area. Elias did not even really have time to talk to him, and it was only the next day that the meaning of their separation became clear: impossible now to ask all the questions that had been slowly accumulating within him since his arrival in the Congo.

A week later this impossibility of talking felt like a suffocation. For he saw his father again.

Mingling with a group of peasants in flight from the fighting, Elias was standing on the high bank of a river and, like them, watching a boat as it traveled past. A man was rowing with all his strength to pull away from the shore, where soldiers were directing almost continuous gunfire at him. The grimaces of the men shooting could be made out clearly down below as they aimed long bursts in the direction of the boat. The face of the man in flight was clearly visible too: his mouth urgently gasping for breath, a vagabonds beard, that roll of bandages on the left calf – his father. A man about to be killed at any moment.

To prevent this death he would have had to throw himself from the top of the bank, roll down the slope, rush at the soldiers, and… And be killed by the first bullet. Elias remained motionless, hypnotized by the spurts from bullets hitting the water around the boat, as if in a random game.

The distance was already considerable; the shooting from the submachine guns lacked precision, the soldiers swore, got annoyed, their aim became even wilder. For a moment Elias believed, hoped with all his being, that his father was going to escape.

It was then that he saw the white man with a ginger mustache and red patches on his round face, smiling and dour at the same time. Of average height, stocky, his bowlegs in khaki shorts, he had the air of a professional irritated by the incompetence of amateurs. Unhurriedly, he set up the mount of his machine gun on the sand, cleared the sights, took a drag on his cigarette, and laid the stub down on a rock. Aimed, fired… And smiled condescendingly at the soldiers as they applauded him. In the distance the fugitive, struck in the head and throat, threw up his arms, let go the oars, fell backward. The boat continued in its course across the river, then began to drift. The ginger-haired man picked up his cigarette again, exhaled a slow curl of smoke.

When Elias had the strength to think, he told himself that his fathers death resembled the fall of a bird hit in mid-flight. He did not know why, but this image made his grief less appalling.

One of Ernesto’s promises was kept. Traveling via clandestine networks, then via Algeria and East Germany, Elias managed to reach Cuba. It felt as if he were traveling through time, toward an encounter with a dream that had already been realized, one that in Africa was barely beginning to put out shoots, nourished by endless tides of blood.