ONLY PEOPLE WITHOUT A VISION RESORT TO REALITY

He hardly ever slept, at least hardly ever in the village. She kept hearing the four-wheel drives coming back from the river, from the caves, from Kribi. She called him but he didn’t pick up; she knocked on the door of his hut. The guard stared into space, as still and wrinkled as a monitor lizard. ‘It’s me,’ she said. No answer, but she heard the fan on the other side of the mud wall. ‘It’s me,’ she said, louder. ‘It’s me, Solange.’ Usually, he let her come in. The guard stared into the distance, towards the black wall of the forest.

Storms rumbled, passed by, without rain. A steady stream of Toyotas churned back and forth from Kribi: they needed water for the rain machine, bottled water. Jessie refused to perform in the storm scenes unless the machine ran on Évian. A thousand francs per bottle, imported through Douala. If a single drop of non-mineral water, even chlorinated water, found its way into Jessie’s mouth (so his LA lawyer had warned), if a single drop of undrinkable local water contaminated him with amoebas or with God knows what African killer disease, the production crew and Kouhouesso would answer for it.

The rain machine, filled to the brim with Évian, was carried on board the boat by six locals and camouflaged with bits of metal sheeting at the back of the steam engine. Solange was also carried on board, and stashed in the hold, up to her waist. Lights. Fog machine. Action. The rain had to sweep over the river as well, bombard it with water. Everyone was soaked, the camera under a tarp, the cinematographer under an umbrella, and Jessie, half-naked and glistening, leaped around, wilder than wild, thrilled to be acting the fool. He opened his mouth wide, his gold lip-plate and all, and drank the thousand-franc water, the French water whose super-clear, super-pure alpine molecules combined with those of the brown river. The Company, as Kouhouesso called his production crew, was not going to be impressed. What sort of return could you expect from a business that threw thousand-dollar banknotes in the water? Why not film under a shower of champagne?

Later, the boat reached the shore in silence. The Hollywood rain had stopped. Kouhouesso was pleased; his scene was a wrap. Tomorrow they would shoot the rain of arrows: under the orders of the assistant director, two hundred extras would each take aim five times. And, once the rails were finally laid, the tracking shot. Favour would appear, the Witch, the Creature in Brass Leggings. But right now there was a noise. ‘Cut!’ said the soundman.

Music. Incredible music. Sounds of pop-pop and peep-peep, chh-chh and clap-clap, more and more high-pitched, then dropping into low notes. A tom-tom but muted, mellow, like an accent—Solange thought she heard Kouhouesso’s voice murmuring on the river from all directions. It was a Pygmy welcoming party. Well, no one was sure; no one knew if the Pygmy girls were doing it specially for them, but they looked at home there: twelve- or thirteen-year-olds completely naked, with little pointed breasts, standing in the brown water up to their waists, beating it with the flats of their hands, in unison. An elemental harmony, a skill so dazzling it could render you sentimental.

‘Roll camera, roll camera!’ shouted Kouhouesso. Solange could tell that he was seeing it all: no costume drama, no period setting, the little naked Pygmies had been there forever, and Joseph Conrad had seen them. But now they had stopped performing, all standing in the river as straight as the letter I. ‘Music!’ Kouhouesso yelled at them. ‘Come on, what the hell—this time for Africa, girls, tom-tom!’ They ran away, nut-brown naked buttocks leaping into the elephant-ear plants. It was over. Cut. It wouldn’t make it into the film.

Kouhouesso jumped onto the bank and smashed his fist into the knotted furrow of a tree. Crack. The whole boat fell silent. ‘Perhaps they’ll be there tomorrow,’ Solange ventured from the hold, where she was suffering from a slight bout of river sickness. Kouhouesso stormed into the jungle.

It is not possible to storm into the jungle. A long prickly creeper had hooked onto the back of his clothes, around his shoulders, back, waist, and Freeboy was hacking away, at his feet as well, in among the roots, in the whatever-they’recalled plants: tchick went the machete. He had tracked them down. The girls were there, alert and curious, ready to take to their heels. ‘Atchia,’ said Freeboy. They replied, ‘Atchia.’ One little hand on the pubic area. The other held out to her, Solange. What did they want—the bottle of Évian she had saved from the downpour? The boldest girl held it in both hands, opened it. They took turns to drink, as if it were nectar of the gods, then gave it back to Solange with the lid carefully screwed back on. (What disease, what parasites, did those little mouths, those little hands, those round bellies harbour?)

Later, at the Pygmy village, Freeboy and Kouhouesso spoke with the chief. He was genuinely small. One of the surprises in this world is that Pygmies are small: the validation of a cliché, the fusion of idea and fact. ‘You say Baka, not Pygmy,’ objected Patricien, half-Baka himself, and of medium height. He was getting agitated. Kouhouesso had just given the order for fifty flasks of Fighter whisky to be purchased immediately in Little-Poco: the price he had agreed with the girls for them to perform their concert again. ‘That’s enough to kill the whole village,’ said Patricien to Solange. He took her back to Little-Poco, by canoe then four-wheel drive. Solange was extremely hot and had a headache. ‘You have to drink some water,’ Patricien said. But all the viruses in the world seemed to be concentrated in what was left of the water in the Évian bottle.

Solange had a fever. Was she imagining the tom-toms in the distance, or was the Pygmy village celebrating, with shots from those little plastic flasks whose dubious benefits she herself was enjoying—full of a golden beverage, very strong and very bad, but scorching, and which seemed to clear a passage in the humidity?

He came to find her that night. He needed her opinion. He showed her the rushes on his portable monitor. Those foolish girls had got dressed up for their concert, one in a David Beckham T-shirt, the other with a sort of Petit-Bateau child’s sleep sack stretched to fit her. In the water, it looked like a kind of Miss Pygmy wet T-shirt competition. There was Kouhouesso’s assistant, then Kouhouesso himself, then several black giants and a white giant (the soundman), the whole crew of the film boat came into the frame, trying to persuade the girls. Jessie was clacking his gold lip-plate like false teeth and terrifying the girls. They took their clothes off and patted the water timidly with the flats of their hands. Ploppity-plop, plip, plip, chlap. It was rubbish, unusable—and the way they stared at the camera the whole time: impossible. Kouhouesso had made a mistake. Even if he had caught it unrehearsed, what would he have done with it?

It was all for the best: that sort of self-indulgence gets cut in editing. Instead of documentary-style girls what he needed was his blowpipes scene. Only people without a vision resort to reality—that’s what the Zulus say. Novels, films! The attack on the boat. The swarm of arrows. Jessie, bleeding. He was waving his hands around, miming, standing up: the firearms responding, Winchester and Martini-Henry rifles, bang-bang, ‘as though the mist itself had screamed’. She was laughing: he was the film, he was the trees, he was the boat and the river all by himself, he was the arrow and the gun, the corpse and the annihilator.

They drank a few whisky flasks together, tearing them open with their teeth. They were silent. The heat and fatigue had caught up with them. ‘Still, it’s not the Congo,’ she said. He had wanted to see Paris, the historical buildings; she wanted to see the Congo, crocodiles. ‘Fortunately there are not many crocs in the Ntem anymore,’ he said, smiling. He had seen the Congo. The boats rotting on the Pool Malebo. They would have spent the film shoot paying over and over again, sending soggy scraps of paper to the Company, on which receipts would be written, in biro, along the lines of ‘Departure Authorisation Tax’, signed by a guy armed with a Kalashnikov, who would answer to the name of One-Eye-Only or Leftie, followed eight days later by another tax for another military guy, followed by another piece of paper, until the official had passed his use-by date or been bumped off, replaced by another gang, higher charges, embargos, ransoms. And the boat would not have moved. Here, they only had to pay up occasionally, and to people with names.

‘Still,’ she persevered, sucking on her flask of Fighter, without really knowing what she was talking about. They were being attacked by buzzing creatures. He rolled the mosquito net around them and pointed the fan at the creases. In the clammy, scratchy cocoon, riddled with draughts, they made love. The electricity cut out. The electricity came back on. Later, the tin can that served as a bedside table seemed to move of its own accord and ring out like a bell: mice were squabbling over her health-food biscuits. Kouhouesso chased them away. When he moved she felt the disruption of the fan’s breeze. In the shadowed room she could not see him: he really was the invisible man, black in the night, air in the breeze.

Towards dawn she thought she heard digging under her window again. She was frightened to go and look, or to wake Kouhouesso. She took a sleeping pill. Since Christmas—since, what would she call it, her departure—she could no longer sleep. Since the night of the Playmobil. As if all the alcohol she had drunk in Clèves that night was still in her bloodstream, keeping her in permanent jetlag, in a state of everlasting fatigue, as impenetrable as a forest.

When she woke up he was gone. And under the window the soil had been disturbed, as if the ground had been stripped, pale yellow, soft, a trail of moisture leading from it, disappearing under the trees. She thought of the witch, and wondered whether to take her a five-thousand-franc note.