STORYBOARD IN MALIBU

And yet the film began to take shape, but as a cartoon strip. A crowded sketch: the forest, the shadows and the water, in black and white. The boat’s lantern made a cone of light on the black water and the rest of the vessel was like a whale surfacing, grey on black, among the islands and sandbanks. Tracks hacked out by machete, the glow of oil lamps, torches that left the black people in shadow and highlighted the ivory and gold, and the dazzling fires, and the night in the sacred caves. Marlow’s face on almost every page, a white patch, a halo, like a ghost: Kouhouesso did not want him to have any features. He was still hoping for Sean Penn. The first appearance of George as Kurtz was a close-up of his sweaty face, then a tracking shot of his long thin body. George said he was up for losing ten kilos; Kouhouesso joked about the efficacy of local dysentery.

The director of photography and the chief lighting engineer came to work in Malibu for the day. Over the sound of the waves, she heard incoherent bursts of shouting, Kouhouesso’s deep voice, brusque. When they came out of the study they barely acknowledged her and did not stay for dinner. There were pages of the storyboard, around the time Kurtz dies, where all the panels were black, with just a few white embers, and eyes, and teeth. Kouhouesso wanted to work with natural light, which meant the images would be not only dark but blurred, as only lightweight cameras were possible in the forest.

The sea rose, indifferent. High tides, waves breaking right onto the terrace; the noise was deafening under the stilts. He stayed inside, the shutters closed, in the dark, the sun outside exploding for no one at all.

Her country of choice was not the Congo but this beach, now so familiar, so Basque, with Los Angeles as a hazy background. She knew that at any moment she could join him: he was there, waiting, immobilised, in the house on stilts.

She chatted with the surfers. Most of them drove for hours to come searching for waves, sets not found anywhere else in the world. Then they stood on the dunes to get dry, among the empty cans and other bodies. Upright, like cormorants, gazing out at the waves they’d just left. She had already seen that look on some of the surfers in Biarritz: on adults, the ones whose lives were consumed by surfing. And she said to herself: perhaps that’s what it is. Perhaps that’s what I recognise. That burnt-out look, fixed eyes, blazing, obsessed by the horizon, in this impossible man, Kouhouesso, my love.

Only once did she manage to drag him onto the sand, at sunset, after the storyboard guy had left and after a few glasses of wine. She was tanned, happy. Life would run its course right here, far from the Congo. She was wearing her white dress, the one with the straps and the crocheted bodice, and her big straw hat and sun-bleached braids. He was smiling, like magic, out of the blue. Yes, she was funny, and lively, and irresistible, and he was in love—he had to be, or else? Or else, why was he here?

He stopped at the edge of the water, dipped his toes in. ‘Come on!’ she said, and pulled off her dress—bikini, I am Raquel Welch—and dived straight into the waves with a powerful freestyle. He raised his phone and took a photo of her: smile.

They would soon be celebrating six months together (he was amazed when she told him). And she had never managed to get him into the water, not the jacuzzi, not the pool, and definitely not the sea. He told her that salt damaged dreadlocks. He washed them once a week, ceremoniously, then spent a long time drying them: he worried about mould. Afterwards, the bathroom smelled of incense. He had travelled in India and Nepal; he must have brought back some kind of herbal ointment, or from God knows what African shop.

The storyboard draughtsman delivered the four last panels: windows, daytime, a side table, the town. A pale face, a black corseted dress, a tight bun: it was her. Bathed in an unearthly glow. The precise curve of her body, her small breasts, her long nose, high cheekbones and forehead: her exactly. She had the role. That’s how she found out.

Christmas was in three days. The only information she’d managed to glean from Kouhouesso was that on the day of her Air France flight he had a meeting with an assistant producer.

That morning she woke early. The smooth sea reflected the green sky, and the muzzles of two sea lions were bobbing in the wake of the waves. Without the sea lions it would have been difficult to know where exactly the sea was—or if the sky were not filling up the entire Pacific Ocean. She made herself a coffee on the terrace, sent a few text messages over there, to France. Then she rolled herself a joint and put on her sunglasses, staring eastwards, directly at the sun. Every minute, a plane took off from LAX, at the spot where the coast was flat, in the heart of the city. Up high they left long white streaks, lines of cocaine gradually crisscrossing the space in every direction. At 11.20 a.m., she watched a minuscule plane rising slowly, over there, without a sound; she knew that plane leaving without her was the 11.20 a.m. for Paris CDG, immediately followed by another plane, then another, none of which she was in, as though minute by minute she was being shot into the sky, virtually, while still clinging here like a mollusc on the stilts of the house.

Kouhouesso didn’t move all day.

The good news was that Oprah Winfrey might be interested. Production was starting up again.