BEL AIR

The waiting began again, waiting as a chronic disease. A sticky fever, a torpor. And, between the times she saw him, the reinfections, she slowly immersed herself in the paradox that she was waiting for a man she was losing sight of, an invented man. The waiting was the reality; her waiting was the proof of his life, as if the body of this man, when she held him in her arms, was made of the texture of time, fatally fleeting.

It was twelve days later, through what seemed a coincidence to her, that she learned of the date of the Leonard Cohen concert. Because exactly twelve days later she received a text: ‘Amazing concert. Wish you were here.’

She saw on the internet that Leonard Cohen was playing, right then, at the Nokia Theatre. She couldn’t care less about Leonard Cohen: she had pinpointed him, Kouhouesso, here, like those arrows on street maps. Wish you were here—the fury and the frustration (all he had to do was invite her, get organised, plan!)—and then another beep, a second message: ‘Je ne t’oublie guère.’

Je ne t’oublie guère.

Twelve days, not a word, and now ‘I can scarcely stop thinking about you.’ Only an African could write such quaint French, so charming—she understood (knowing him, yes, knowing him better and better) that he wasn’t the slightest bit interested in her feelings for him. In English he treated her as an equal. As one foreigner to another foreigner. In America. On American territory.

Suzanne takes you down…

She let Leonard Cohen’s song ripple through her mind. Replacing Suzanne with Solange. Sorrowfully. Later, in the middle of the night, by dint of humming (if she hummed enough, he would return), he returned. She did not chastise him at all. They opened a bottle; he had already drunk a lot. An amazing concert—his friends loved it. So he might have been ready, as well, to introduce her to his friends?

‘I never know when we’re going to see each other again.’

‘But I’m here.’

Every exchange in French was a victory. Proof, even, of his love for her. She had lured him onto her turf. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. In French.

‘Twelve days without even a text message.’

‘Twelve days?’

He didn’t believe her. He was truly sorry. ‘I’ve been really busy.’

She was in between jobs, and he, apparently, wasn’t looking anymore. He said he’d become an actor by chance, just to pay the rent. What he cared about was making his film. He was in ‘pre-production’. She cancelled her girlfriends, her personal trainer, her yoga, her shrink, in order to be available for him. He appeared, then disappeared. He was a man who existed intermittently. When he left—she saw him disappear in his car, then saw his car disappear behind Hotel Bel-Air—he dematerialised. A phantom. She held empty space in her arms, clutched nothingness. Away from her, his existence was like an impossible memory.

They made love. He touched her and, all of a sudden, she was overcome again, transformed. He was busy, très occupé: she no longer heard his rolling ‘r’s, she only heard the turbulence of what she didn’t know. The emptiness of her own days. The frenzy of missing him.

He went into the bathroom. Then downstairs to the living room. She could hear him talking on the phone. Typing on a keyboard. She wondered what he was up to, all those hours, instead of being in bed next to her.

She joined him. He looked up from his computer. She said the first thing that popped into her head: ‘I’d really like to go to Africa.’

‘No, you wouldn’t,’ he replied, returning to the computer.

‘Yes,’ she insisted, like a child. ‘I’d like to see’—she stopped herself from saying ‘the elephants’—‘the Victoria Falls, and the source of the Nile.’

He shut his computer. ‘Africa, as such, does not exist.’

He was so cool, the way he said amazing things like that. But she had a good memory, at least short-term, and felt a rising panic.

‘You said it yourself, the other evening, Africa, as such. The first night at my place, when you arrived so late. Yes, you did. You said the green patch which constitutes the centre of Africa. It was nice.’

He started laughing his weirdly shrill laugh, as if he’d borrowed it from another body.

‘Africa is an ethnological fiction. There are many Africas. Same thing for the colour black: it’s an invention. Africans are not black, they are Bantu and Baka, Nilote and Mandinka, Khoikhoi and Swahili.’

Those syllables were so foreign to her that she couldn’t manage to pick them out in the sentence. They sounded like one long word to her. And when she was to say to him later, ‘Africa is an ethnological fiction’, he would once again come out with that weird laugh, his eyes blank, and that calm, almost weary, suppressed anger. Where did she get the idea that Africa didn’t exist? She was as unlikely to risk saying ‘from you’ as she was to say ‘I love you’.

Her brain tended to lose traction when she was with him. She didn’t have a single comeback. She knew nothing. She hadn’t read a single book. She no longer knew how to read. As for him, this man she loved, about whom she was learning so much, his tastes, his past, his pleasures, his strength, his talent and lack of humour, whose moods she was beginning to dread, she knew nothing about him.

By means of a phenomenon to do with time and space, with history and locations, with violence, a phenomenon that had nothing magical about it but which she could see was distorting the space between them, the sentences he uttered turned into other sentences in her mouth. Word for word, the same sentences took on a meaning that she didn’t want. An atrocious meaning. This unmagical phenomenon was making her wait for a man whose ancestors had been slaughtered and enslaved by her own ancestors. Exploitation and slaughter continued, so it seemed, yes, continued with the consent of some of her people, but without her people ever relinquishing their dominant status.

He didn’t utter these complicated truths the way she did. He mocked her lefty blinkered idealism. He agreed that Africa was in a desperate state, that he had turned his back on his native land, but he simply wanted to try to tell a story without getting waylaid carrying on about sacks of rice.

And when she maintained that the rice, sometimes, despite the despotic corruption and the big business of charities, still reached a few starving mouths, he outlined the path that rice took, from the rice field where it is better treated than the person who harvests it, to the mouth of the person who swallows it, each then separated by thousands of kilometres, by millions of containers then blocked at customs, by billions of dollars in arms and cheap rubbish: thousands and millions and billions which would not suffice to give any idea of the established, ongoing, calculated scale of the exploitation of human beings by human beings and of the planet by its homo erectus tenants.

She was born where she was born, into the skin that was her skin, surrounded by the words that surrounded her. She worked out that it wasn’t exactly that white people don’t have anything to say about black people (they never stopped, ever since she was a little girl they’d been going on about them); no, it was that white people don’t have anything to say to black people about black people. They can’t even repeat things.

At dawn, he would finally come to bed; they would make love again. He fell asleep straight away. And went out into the yellow afternoons, into the emptiness of the sun at its zenith.