INCREDIBLE IMAGES OF WORLDS WHERE THE FOREST WENT ON FOREVER

She had taken some care choosing her outfit, a Vanessa Bruno summer dress. But she was too hot in it; silk is suffocating. In the shade inside his hut, standing erect like a king from ancient times, Kouhouesso was lean, smouldering, his eyes blazing. He greeted her with a peck on the cheek. He no longer smelled of incense but of the same vegetable, sugary, slightly musty smell that she already detected on herself. He told her that he was coming out of a ‘little bout of malaria’. She was taking her Lariam, wasn’t she? Her naturopath in Bel Air had prescribed her some quinine essential oil, but she didn’t want to induce prophylaxis.

She stayed silent, feeling like the twenty-fifth wife, too little too late, coming to beg for an audience. Why didn’t he embrace her? Why, after more than three months, didn’t he jump all over her? He looked tired and was talking as if it were only yesterday that he had left her on the platform at the Gare Montparnasse in the cold fog of the Paris winter. The scenes in the forest were not working well. He had sacked the director of photography—Marco was no longer there?—and taken on the one Terrence Malick used; at least he’d know how to deal with the shadows and the green. Marco was threatening legal action, the producer in Hollywood was kicking up a fuss, and a camera had been stolen, as well as a video assist monitor and even some easy rigs—a little bit of everything had disappeared. They had found the camera in the Kribi TV shop; he’d had to buy it back at the American price. Why didn’t she go and wait for him at Poco-Beach: it would be much more peaceful, a beautiful spot. Jessie and the Americans were staying there, as well as Favour, in custom-built lodges, electricity, bathrooms, coconut palms. She would be much better off there than at Little-Poco.

She hadn’t come for the peace; she had come to see him. It would be difficult: he was working and moving around all the time, the boat still at Kribi, the sets in the forest, the sound production limping along. Water was a huge issue. Jessie had been sick, a catastrophe. She couldn’t care less about Jessie. She moved towards him. He lay down on top of her, pulled up her dress. His mattress was damp, too. She abandoned herself, but him, what about him? She put her arms around him, hugged him. Where was he? In which Africa? When she opened her eyes again, he was smiling at her kindly. It seemed more like politeness than love.

Out the front of the Straight and Narrow, a woman was waiting for her, the woman from the night before, the one who was digging under her window. ‘Five thousand,’ said the woman. She didn’t understand. ‘Your bush husband back: five thousand.’ Solange walked around her in silence. The woman grabbed her by the arm; the contact was uncannily cold. ‘Five thousand.’ She had already paid, and he would have ended up coming back to the village anyway. The woman made a strange cutting gesture in the air; in another world, in another context, it might have been a backhand in tennis, or a box cutter across the throat.

She was hot in the dugout canoe. The paddle dipped into the water as if into oil; the birds themselves fell silent. This heat was senseless; she could not stop herself from opening her mouth, but the air outside was much hotter than the inside of her body. Kouhouesso shut his eyes as if they were louvre windows, and the bare-chested oarsman wouldn’t stop splashing himself with water. He paddled the heat, he stirred up the river and the sky, he liquefied in the mirages. The sheet of water was riffled by waves carrying the sound of voices, blasts, strange sounds coming from nowhere. The vibrations made their way into Solange’s body. She had visions of the house in Malibu, the Mediterranean shade, the white-tiled bathroom, the sea generating currents of fresh air. That was yesterday, that was before. She would have liked to contemplate the forest, have the wisdom of painters and ecologists, but this flickering green and orange Africa was just one more problem. Not a single one of these trees explained Kouhouesso. They just amounted to one more enigma pitted against her, impenetrable, dangerous, a non-human kingdom, the manifestation of a power that was reduced to sawdust elsewhere.

Far ahead they could glimpse the construction site. Bulldozers were preparing the ground beside the river bank. Workers were laying rails, their shoulders dripping with sweat in the blazing sun. Kouhouesso wanted a tracking shot of the arrival of the boat. The uprooted mangrove trees looked like giant dead spiders, their legs in the air. They were clearing them out: mangrove trees were no use. The kapok trees were chopped into pieces for making kapok fibre and plywood. The occasional mahogany trees were sold as logs. She was learning vocabulary. There were a lot of trees without names, growing far from the French language: the bibinga, said the oarsman as they skirted the monumental trees. The zoubé, the ekan, the alep, the okongbekui. The graft hadn’t taken: it was impossible to transplant French onto those fantastic forms, those voluminous roots, those magnificent verticals. Except for that one, tall and curved, bright green, luxuriant: rattan, neither a chair nor a table, but living rattan that thrust its palms into the water. Here they said nlông. And Freeboy, one of the Pygmy guides, used different syllables again for the same trees; it seemed as if there were as many names for a single tree as there were growth rings. The chainsaw sliced: tchick tchick. Then more slowly: ebony. It would end up in planks all the same. The Pygmies were the ones who stacked them.

Olga was there. It would have been a pleasure to see her again if Olga had been in the mood. But the blowpipes made in China had got lost between Shanghai and Douala. The arrows had got there safely, but Olga had been thrown by the behaviour of the customs officers at Douala. At first the blowpipes were regarded as weapons of mass destruction, and their container was held up; then they had never arrived; then the parcel was definitely there, but it wasn’t a parcel of blowpipes; in any case she had to pay through the nose to get them cleared. Olga had decided to commission a local artisan to make two hundred blowpipes out of softwood; after all, there was no shortage of wood. On the other hand, around there they only knew how to make machetes and assegais; she had to do drawings and calculate the right dimensions. One by one, the local artisan made them. His name was Ignatius; he was up to one hundred and eighty. The whole village was in training, the two hundred extras, almost all the men, and the women when they didn’t have something better to do. There were plastic arrows all over the ground, everywhere.

Solange was sitting in the shade of a frangipani tree, on a chair someone had brought there for her. She was sprinkling herself with a spray bottle of water. The legs of the chair were sinking into the ground. It was like a long siesta. She felt as if she was a germinating plant, her very cells proliferating. The ants were the only thing to watch out for; if an army of ants approached, she had to get out of their way. The ground was covered in dead leaves scattered with small beetles, and living creepers that she thought she could hear growing. She made herself shift around the shade’s compass in little jolts, just to get the heat moving.

She had visions of Kouhouesso: he appeared in apparitions, flashes. He was working. He was filming. Lights. Camera. Action. She found it difficult to take, difficult to believe; she was on a film shoot without acting, not knowing what to do with her hands, her eyes, her body, her thoughts. Something was hovering, like air turning solid. Everything was vibrating in blocks of heat. Everything was dripping; the whole world was perspiring. Here at the Equator, the belt around the Earth, it was like an attack of shingles that was slowly going around, via her, Solange, on her chair. An illness which, once it had come full circle, would destroy her. The Special Tropical Insect Screen was useless: she scratched herself. Blisters. Kouhouesso seemed impervious to uncertainty; he had gone into another zone, into fiction. Occasionally she caught his eye; she would have liked to get up and kiss him in front of everyone, but by the end of the day the chair legs had left deep, narrow holes in the ever-present humus, like those left by spider crabs.