THE NIGHT OF THE PANGOLIN

Favour was thinner and the size of her breasts had perhaps been enhanced. Draped in striped cotton fabric, her silhouette a slender S, she was batting her painted eyelids slowly. As if it was too much of an effort to bestow a glance on those who were not royalty. ‘Brass leggings to the knees’, gilded gauntlets to the elbow, two crimson spots painted on her cheeks—Olga and the hairdresser were fussing around her. Kouhouesso had bought, from a passing Bamileke man, a Gabonese Punu mask with a three-tiered hairstyle, and Welcome, the hairdresser, who was not Punu, or anything for that matter, was struggling to reproduce it in all its splendour on Favour’s impatient head. Everyone was happy except her. There was the question of a wig.

That mask—almond-shaped eyes, long nose, imposing forehead—it was her, Favour. Kou had an eye for it; it was unsettling. When she appeared on the riverbank, wearing ‘the value of several elephant tusks’ (plastic), all that junk, cheap tat, all those jumbled elements finally came together in a framed image, and it was stunning; it embodied something like the Big Idea, Favour raising her bewitching arms to the heavens.

The only ones Kouhouesso wasn’t happy with were the men laying the rails: you would have thought they were French. The foreman was even a union member. They had huge problems uprooting stumps: deep holes had to be dug, then filled in with gravel transported from Douala. If they didn’t uproot the stumps, suckers grew back within the hour, the river poured in, and the embankment collapsed; rails had been seen floating away. It was as if, at night, some indomitable force destroyed the day’s work. It shook the earth, pulled up the sleepers. There was grumbling. Brows furrowed, eyes darkened at this curse on the deforested earth—naked and as if stripped. You didn’t have to be a witch to hear rumblings reverberating around Kouhouesso, waves of sound around the centre of a gong.

All he could talk about was Godard’s Weekend: the longest tracking shot in the history of cinema. He wanted his tracking shot to be subdued and smooth, as fluid as the river itself, stealthy, creeping along like the boat. He described the scene to the whole crew: the tracking shot would end with Favour raising her arms to the heavens. In the novel, her role stopped there, but there were rumours that she had wangled an appearance with George in the caves.

As for her, she could never find the right moment to speak to him about the Intended’s scenes. She counted in days, like in Los Angeles: six days since they had slept together. The location scouting was dragging on; they were finalising Cassel’s schedule first: they would fit in the minor scenes when they could. That’s what the assistant director had told her.

An anteater. Sleepers in the water, disturbed soil: an anteater. They hung it by the tail at the entrance to Siphindile’s. At one hundred and thirty centimetres and forty kilos, it was a good-sized anteater, the size of a ten-year-old child. Solange stayed on the verandah with the animal, which experts came to admire. They haggled. Its strange mouth, round and toothless, seemed to be sucking at the yellow dust. Solange was acquainted with moles, even big ones, from her mother’s garden, but she had never seen anything like this.

Freeboy wanted someone to buy the whole animal. He had spoken to it as he was killing it, to ask permission; he would not let it be chopped up like a common porcupine. Patricien was the one who ended up with it, whole, for his wife’s birthday in Kribi.

Fifty guests under a canopy of leaves, jerrycans of palm wine, musicians. The scales were the most difficult thing to deal with on the plate. Patricien said that anteaters were becoming extinct, that their scales were thought to be magic. One of the few non-human mammals to walk on its back legs, using its tail for support. Strictly nocturnal. Digs burrows, eats termites—its huge claws rip apart their towers, crack. Apart from that, it tastes a bit like duck, done with a peanut sauce confit.

Kribi was a pretty town. Patricien lived in a white wooden house, mouldy but nice. He was no longer poor, but he was not rich: no guard in front of what he called his ‘residence’. Not far from there was the cathedral, the so-called French quarter, two or three colonial houses, a sort of casino and a rustic hospital, and then, of course, the inevitable huts, shacks and whatever. Patricien’s wife had studied in Yaoundé. The hospital dated back to the nineteenth century, in every sense. There were interesting places to see. Perhaps things would be all right here for the Intended.

In the middle of the meal, she received a text message: ‘Start without me.’ He had finished with K, although he usually never signed off. How could there be any ambiguity? K, as if she could have been waiting for another man.

She drank yellow, frothy cucumber juice, ate fermented cassava, and the lump in her throat, the stupid knot in her stomach that she’d had since the days of waiting in Los Angeles, began to dissolve a bit. The sun was throwing confetti through the roof of leaves, and she could see herself from above, from the sky, from the satellites, a tiny dot among the other dots, drunk and a bit nauseated, in this little lagoon in front of the Ntem River, on the edge of the forest, deep in the Gulf of Guinea. Right in the crook of Africa. Far from the crook where she was born, the Bay of Biscay, the familiar right angle, smaller, more of an alcove, that she had left back in her own South-West.

Sitting here at this birthday meal, eating plantain banana and dead anteater, as if she’d been doing it her whole life. Kouhouesso had coloured her. He had turned her a little bit black. And the others knew it. She was becoming impregnated with their melodious accent, like in Clèves when she got used to men without education, women without careers, children without a future; but here she stayed vigilant because she was surprised by the responses. She thought hard. She made them repeat what they had said. She laughed belatedly at jokes and they found her charming. She was Africanising herself clumsily, but they forgave her. They were polite because they forgot that she was white. And she forgot, too. And she forgot K, a little. During the anteater party her mind was not preoccupied with him; he was everywhere but nowhere. She smiled at everyone. Wanting to be loved by everyone rather than by a single person was almost a relief.