UP TO HIS NECK IN IT

Vincent Cassel was there for ten days. Ten days to do all the Marlow scenes, three of which were in the caves with George, whenever he arrived. Olga was keeping her up to speed. So a wardrobe mistress was more important than she was—but what did she expect, other than this crush of people, crowded in chaotic accommodation, taking communal meals or otherwise, each of them with a task that more or less overlapped with someone else’s, all more or less feverish and sick, but all straining towards that imaginary interface where a book becomes a film? Where Africa becomes a story? With as much exertion as a boa constrictor swallowing a large antelope, with knots and jolts, hiccups, obstructions…

Only the Pygmy people went naked. The two hundred Bantu extras refused to be filmed naked. Or even half-naked. It was contagious. A kind of craze. What image did they want to present of black people? They were being treated as savages. Two hundred raffia sarongs designed by Olga and sewn in Morocco, with ornaments for the head, nose, arms and legs: no way. A delegation led by a certain Saint-Blaise demanded five thousand francs more per extra for them to strip down to their Bantu birthday suits. Kouhouesso laughed: seven euros more for each of them, a million CFA francs, two thousand dollars, it was nothing. Not even the cost of the sarongs. And he hadn’t forgotten that he owed Solange money: she should make out an invoice and the Company would reimburse her.

Hollywood versus the jungle: for five thousand more—five tins of sardines, a bit of roast chicken, a witch’s tip—two hundred villagers decorated in lucky charms showered the boat with arrows and ‘the bush was swarming with human limbs in movement’. The scene worked incredibly well. Jessie in particular was magnificent: he died with unexpected dignity, lying in the blood as if on a crimson mantle, with a look that was ‘extraordinary, profound, familiar’. You were wild, Jessie, you were sublime, I love you.

The black people from here were not like Kouhouesso. But, more especially, they were not like Jessie. Jessie was not like them. Of course (as Kouhouesso explained to her), there are African-Americans who want to become African. To be reunited with the Africa that was stolen from them. In general, the affair ends badly. Either they are too frightened ever to leave the Monrovia Sheraton, or else they are repatriated with dysentery. At worst, they end up as rastas in Addis Ababa, preaching that women have the mark of the devil, without ever giving up their American passports. There are infinitely more Africans who want to become American. Or, failing that, Canadian.

He took a drag on his cigarette and she had him back, the Kouhouesso who explained things to her, who unpacked them, who so royally shaped the world for her. They had celebrated Jessie’s last day of filming until dawn, and Kouhouesso had come back with her to the Straight and Narrow. How had she coped without his tireless commentary? It was like being deprived of her own eyes. Her own hands, she thought, as she took his in hers. Of her own head on her own neck. Of her own soft, muted voice. She kissed him in the hollow beneath his Adam’s apple. And she asked him if he was annoyed by her feelings for him, and he replied, ‘Why would I be annoyed?’

The soft hollow in Kouhouesso’s neck, wide enough for her fingertips, as round as puckered lips: time unravelled inside that hollow. And she kissed him as if it was the last time; she clung to this man who was becoming a tree, impassive, silent and tall.

She was reminded of witch-pricking: the piercing of European witches all over their bodies in order to isolate the Devil’s Mark, spots that were insensitive to pain, and thus proof of a woman’s evil nature. The hollow in Kouhouesso’s neck was like the last spot of softness in him. His softness had receded, almost to nothing, and was now lodged entirely in his neck—while everything in her was soft, vulnerable, undone.

He insisted: she should go to Poco-Beach, the Straight and Narrow really was a dump—actually that was another reason he visited her so infrequently. But she had no complaints: since he’d had chemical toilets installed, Little-Poco had become civilised.

Everything: he looked after everything. He was the boss, the skipper of the boat, the Coppola of Little-Poco. Every morning fifteen people were waiting in front of his hut with urgent questions: logistics, sets, props, water, schedules, a stolen paddle, a sudden altercation, the security firm treating the guards as slaves, departures, arrivals, returns, complications, crises. The distribution of wages, over the three filming locations, was done with envelopes of cash and a single courier on a motorbike, who had to be trusted. The Company had replaced Natsumi with a local wardrobe assistant, but Olga had got rid of her; as a result, she was overworked. The hairdresser, another local, was also doing make-up, without complaining: people here knew the value of work. The script boy had been recruited in Douala, the grips were from Nigeria, all the set workers and all the sound and lighting staff were Cameroonian. The allocated budget was phenomenal; the future of cinema was in Africa.

Kouhouesso strode purposefully through the forest: the trees were going to follow him as one, all in a row, directed at last. Machetes, secateurs, chainsaws and bulldozers: they were carving out corridors for the camera, otherwise the horizon loomed thirty metres away and the landscape closed in. The very idea of a film in that forest was a paradox that made Kouhouesso joyful and defiant.