AND UNDER THE HUGE BLACK TREES
It had rained. The first downpours of the season. The track was so bad that they were all quiet, she at the back, clutching the doorhandle, anticipating the bumps and shivering, preoccupied by feeling cold in the brutal humidity. The winch cable broke the first time they got bogged. Like a rifle shot it sprang back, invisible, and left a long yellow gash in the trunk to which it was attached. The Toyota bounded forward, then stopped dead. She thought of the bulls from her childhood, of their final twitches on the ground.
Mud swallowed their boots. The Baka and Bagyelis guides, Freeboy, M’Bali and Tumelo, somehow managed to stay on the surface, wearing thongs. They all had amulets around their necks. Freeboy was constantly fiddling with his iPod and seemed to be murmuring prayers. Unless he was singing in his head. The forest was dripping, long cords of water; everything seemed vertical.
She felt dizzy. George gave her a bar of magnesium-enriched organic chocolate. George’s agent had insisted on being there, as a kind of bodyguard, and it was weird having two extra white guys. George fitted in everywhere, whether it was desert, intergalactic space, urban jungle or here; but his agent was something else, with his explorer’s jacket and his mosquito head net: all he needed was the helmet to look like Dr Livingstone.
They got the car started later. There were six of them in the large Toyota, which was now so steamed up that they couldn’t see the forest anymore, followed by a whole convoy. The track was a dark tunnel. Patricien turned on the headlights. Kouhouesso said nothing. Patricien made conversation and George cracked jokes. She had a sore throat. She was obsessed by thoughts of hot tea. Her body ended up accepting the bumps as part of the habitat, a local manifestation of gravity. She became supple, elastic. She fell asleep clutching the doorhandle, groggy from the lurching, wedged between George and Freeboy.
They reached the ferry on the River Dja. The mout-mout sandflies were on the attack. Once she had put on her balaclava and her gardening gloves, the ferry boy (called ‘the Admiral’ by the pilot) stared at her more intently than if she had been bare-headed. The pilot and the Admiral laid two planks in the clay of the riverbank. Kouhouesso drove the first four-wheel drive, which embarked gracefully in one go. The little ferry subsided, the cables strained and the posts bent towards the water. Patricien held out his hand to her, George’s agent made a point of holding George’s hand, and they all climbed aboard. All at once, everything was simple; it worked. Things were running smoothly, without interruption. At last, time consisted of the same substance as the river. She had a Paris flashback: she was in Rue du Bac on the corner of the boulevard. Where was she headed? Who was she going to see? Back in her country. In the country where things flowed white. The Admiral leaned all of his little body over the enormous steering wheel and managed to turn it, faster and faster; the ferry lurched for a second, then edged forward, as if it understood what was expected, like a donkey or a horse. She felt the movement in her body. Then there was sliding. The ferry turned until it was across the river. And she said to herself, right, now it will get stuck somewhere and tip over. But no, the current made it go faster, side-on, like a crab.
The Admiral was scarcely more than a child. When she looked back at him he turned away, serious, his eyes fixed on the riverbank. Thousands of yellow butterflies fluttered, weightless, over the river. Kouhouesso was smoking, leaning on a Castrol tank, and she had another flashback, this time from when she was a little girl, of her father: such beauty, such strength, such total shutting down of oneself.
It was a cable ferry (at first she heard clamp). Cable, the pilot corrected her, opening his mouth wide on the a. Clunk clunk all around them, a hullabaloo from hell, how old was this thing? From the Germans, for sure, the pilot reckoned: with an engine like that it had to be Prussian. He had inherited it from his father. In the very beginning there were elephants to crash through the forest and make elephantine tracks with their huge bodies. Behind them plunged duikers, antelopes, white-bellied hedgehogs, wild pigs, anteaters, bushbucks. And after them came the Pygmies, and after them the Bantu, and after them the white people: Germans, English, French. From his ferry, the pilot had seen elephants twice. Never any gorillas. What frightened him most were water buffalo, who stood their ground instead of fleeing. Once, he had seen a lion. In Douala, at the zoo.
She daydreamed about circus elephants. One walked past, with a red bellboy hat, straight out of her long-ago childhood, far from the jungles. But it was too late to go back to the past. To go back there, like going back to another country, was no longer possible: she was too far away, too embedded; nothing connected her to herself any longer, apart from this man, Kouhouesso.
He went back with the ferry; they had to do seven trips all up, for the seven cars and the whole crew. A thin line of mist veiled the middle of the river; Kouhouesso’s silhouette turned grey, translucid. The ferry was silent in that direction, carried by the current or by something smooth and strange that she couldn’t fathom. The clackety-clack clackety-clack only started up on the return trip, grew louder; the second Toyota arrived; everyone was wet; it was raining on the other shore. Then Kouhouesso set off again. Favour was in the final convoy. The four-wheel drive moved forwards on the water, the motor cut, as if carried by time itself. From afar, Solange saw Kouhouesso hold the door open and Favour climb out gracefully, her thin black arm raised to her mouth as he lit her cigarette. A puff of smoke. Only then came the wham of the door, only then the noise carried, reached her, three hundred metres a second, she calculated, three hundred metres a second if I screamed, if I called out his name, Kouhouesso.
Later, they drove along by a grove of oil palms, the sky aligned between the trunks. They reached the first cliffs. There was, unbelievably, a sort of car park. Baka women under a lean-to made of palm leaves were selling grilled fish. They were big fish, more like catfish, served whole in palm leaves, as takeaway. Further down there was a branch in the river where a man was fishing, using Ivory soap. The fish were crazy about it—whether it was the particular smell or animal fat, no one knew. She took a few photos. She watched M’Bali and Freeboy: they peeled off the skin with their thumbs; there were no scales. Crackled black skin over a layer of slimy fat; underneath it was good, yellow and juicy. She had removed her gardening gloves and little bees kept landing on her fingers—she let out a scream. It wasn’t a sting, there was no stinger. Perhaps she had touched—what was the name of it—one of the antennae or whiskers of the fish.
‘Those soussous,’ said Freeboy, ‘they stay alive when they’re dead, yikes! When it’s stuck on a spear it keeps moving for much longer-longer.’
Her thumb was swelling up. Trust her to get stung by a dead fish, a typical moundélé.3 She had brought antihistamine cream, but her luggage was stashed somewhere in the Toyota.
They climbed on foot towards the caves. Between the trees, they could glimpse, not sky, but more trees, slopes full of them, at different heights. Freeboy pointed out huge round holes in the ground, elephant tracks, the clear imprint of their nails. M’Bali chopped off a double creeper and they tasted pure vegetable water. George’s agent was the only one who refused it.
Occasionally, from behind, on the bends of the ascent, she glimpsed Kouhouesso at the head of the procession. They were moving fast. The path was clear, hardly any machete work needed. Since he’d been in the lead for so long, Kouhouesso was way ahead. Freeboy was running behind him and Kouhouesso seemed gigantic in contrast. Patricien brought up the rear; otherwise everyone was between her and Kouhouesso: Favour, Hilaire, Germain, Vincent, and George and George’s agent, and Thadée, Idriss and Saint-Omer, and Kouhouesso, and Olga, M’Bali and Tumelo, Welcome, Archange and Pamphile, and Gbètoyeénonmon the Benin chef, whom everyone called Glueboy, and Freeboy, whom everyone knew by that name, which was probably his real name, and the MAS-36-carrying armoured guard, and others whose names she had forgotten. All these black people in single file, carrying things on their heads; it was all very well knowing it was for a film, that touch of déjà vu was still there. She and Favour were the only ones not lugging something along; even George and Vincent had backpacks.
Her hand was hurting and her forehead was burning, but she was also in the grip of something icy—the forest, she thought, the forest had a hold on her. She concentrated in order to keep walking. She said to herself: if I focus hard enough on Kouhouesso, he will turn around. He will turn around at the top of the path. He will turn around and look at me and wait for me. His head, with its unfathomable expression, will turn around. The hollow of his neck, so soft. And he’ll smile at me and urge me on. No, just turning around would be enough. She launched the telepathic thread up the path. Kouhouesso was disappearing, swallowed up by the giant grasses. She headed towards him, sending powerful thoughts his way: turn around, look at me. But the line of walkers was stretching out and something on the path was blocking the way, the path was not cooperating, the path was against her. It was blocked at Favour. The forest and Favour were against her.
Out of the blue, the word came down that they were stopping, right there. An enormous fern, well, some green thing, a giant celery, had propagated to such an extent, via roots and new growth, that a platform had been created on the slope. Once they stopped, the little bees landed everywhere, bombarding wherever they could, as ferocious as flies. There was a flash: it was Favour nonchalantly throwing a sumptuous silvery stole over her shoulders. M’Bali wandered into the forest and came back with white worms he called ‘cockchafers’. Bottles of water went up and down the line. The little chlorine tablets leaped as they fizzed: it was as if she was watching herself zigzagging, trapped, subdividing, diminishing. And, out of the blue, Kouhouesso. What was he doing? He was coming down the path. Where was he going? Further and further down the line. Why? He stopped in front of her. She raised her eyes. ‘Are you all right, gorgeous?’ She showed him her hand. He said it was nothing and squeezed it in his own hand. His lips shone. Had he eaten some cockchafers? Eat me, she thought. A prayer, a supplication to the cannibal. Eat me. Let’s be done with it. Let him eat her forevermore.