CATHERINE HAD BEEN working for four years at the center for the fight against AIDS in Treichville, in cramped, messy quarters at the end of an ill-smelling corridor that ran through the hospital’s internal medicine ward. Cholera on the left, AIDS on the right. Her angular face was burned by the sun, but she’d acquired her colour in the street, not at the pool. Catherine was as thin as a stick, and dressed in a washed-out dashiki as if she wanted to advertise poverty that was not hers, or perhaps an independent spirit that could cause her problems in a job that involved a lot of representation. That was why I wore a dark jacket and a tie. Clothes amount to codes, of course, but they are also part of your toolbox. Are clothes a kind of compromise like the one I engaged in the night before? Catherine wasted no time telling me that she had been against my hiring as the officer in charge of legal affairs with the local authorities, but since I was there…
“Listen, Claude, there’s no standing on ceremony here, except with the employees, the help, and the security guards. They want you to keep your distance. They like it that way. So far, we’ve gotten along very well without legal counsel, we make our arrangements, we palaver for hours on end, we offer them gifts—that’s all in the budget. I throw dinners at my place and set out open bottles of whisky. The problem isn’t that there aren’t any laws—there are too many. Since the president decides everything, the members of parliament propose all sorts of laws on unimportant things, the directors write up rules, and the bureaucrats who do no work ask their staff to create forms that correspond to the new rules that spring from the new laws. Every form and every law, as innocent as it may look, exists for a reason. It represents one more obstacle, a hoop to jump through to get to the next office, and finally to the boss of all the offices who might just accept to sidestep some ridiculous law or overly bureaucratic rule. The boss can be the minister, or the prime minister, or the president. Up until now, we’ve been honing our craft. We’ve been getting along all right.”
Catherine’s eyes were dark and feverish, dark, sad circles on a woman who was only thirty-five or so. She seemed to be carrying all the world’s exhaustion on her shoulders. Her emaciated features made me think of Lolita, who was so happy this morning. Lolita, Catherine, Youssef—Africa was doing nothing for me. But Catherine did have an effect. “Come to the house tonight, I’ve got a good cook and a wine cellar.” Lonely women recognize the signs of emotion in a man the way migratory birds return periodically to the same cornfield for food so they can continue their exhausting flight to the next continent.
I love making people happy. Since I can’t seem to charm or impassion them, I have only good manners and kindness to maintain harmonious relations with them. Catherine was an unhappy woman. Her only motivation was her project. The fish was overcooked. Taking large mouthfuls of wine, she explained Africa to me all over again. Everything she said terrified me. Nothing works, everyone’s corrupt, but get used to it. You have to integrate, slip into the culture, and respect it. Very quickly we were in bed and I did my duty to provide pleasure, which was not unpleasant in itself. She cooed like a dove, or maybe a pigeon, I’m not sure. “Have you come to apply the funders’ rules?” she asked.
“Yes. I’m going to apply the rules. Five thousand doses of tritherapy each worth twenty thousand dollars a year, that’s not a cheap gift. I have no intention of seeing a single dose end up on the black market or given to a sick bureaucrat as a present.”
“Screw you, you poor, pretentious little White man. You want your aid to change everything!”
Of course I did. I was threatening Catherine’s idea of Africa. Her Africa didn’t need my clean conscience and my rules of good governance. I never understood why people mix everything up. They like to talk about cooking. I know that cooking reproduces the models of agricultural exploitation, the prices on world markets, shortages, and the histories of products. But cooking as a subject of conversation is good enough in itself, it can turn into poetry and evoke memories and places and events. We had just finished filling our mutual emptiness, and right away she started in telling me about good governance. I’d rather she tell me it wasn’t great, and couldn’t we start again, I would have made an effort, and concentrated on my erection, but no, dammit—good governance! Give me Lolita who ripped me off and cheated on me with anything on two legs, but at least she wouldn’t talk to me about China and Tibetan independence. I was the prisoner of this mongoose woman who had dragged her sadness to the Dark Continent. Nothing could throw me off balance except for women. Catherine made me sad, she was killing me, but I stayed close to her slim body, I stroked her ribs with my fingertips. How could I leave in the middle of the night in Abidjan, leave this sad useless bed, a morose woman who, as a final indignity, pestered me about my mission that was under her supervision? I need to sleep, I said. I thought about the five thousand doses of tritherapy; I was responsible for their proper delivery and proper use by the Treichville hospital. Like in a nightmare, I listened to Catherine tell me that she liked me and hoped we would work together efficiently. Lolita, I miss your simple lies.