OPENING CREDITS

He was a man with a big idea. She could see it shining in his eyes. His pupils coiled into incandescent ribbons. She sank into his gaze to follow the river with him. But she didn’t believe in his project. It would never happen for real. Does anyone ever make it to the Congo?

That was the thing about him: he was a problem. And his big idea cost too much money. Expected too much from too many people. And for her the big idea was like another woman in his life.

‘From brooding too long on the Congo/ I have become a Congo resounding with forests and rivers/ where the whip cracks like a great banner.’ He read to her from Césaire. Who was not her favourite writer. But who left us some decent pages, there’s no denying it. And who was black, which carries some weight. Arguably. From then on, she came from there, too. From an impossible, cataclysmic, teeming country.

Every morning she woke up afflicted with a skin disease. Her shoulders, her breasts, the insides of her arms, anything that came in contact with him—her skin was ruptured with an embroidery of encrusted lines that were spreading. She rubbed and scrubbed but they didn’t go away. She showered but the water made no difference, and in the mirror she could see, beneath the skin, patterns of narrow tunnels, of delicate, hollowed-out pearl necklaces.

Even the make-up artist couldn’t do anything for her. And she was supposed to play the role of the diaphanous French woman, no tattoos, no marks. You can’t see your own face. Nor your back, granted. If you twist around, you catch a glimpse of shoulderblade, a bit of collarbone and the small of your back. But you carry your face in front of you like an offering. He saw her. She only saw herself in films or in the mirror. That flawless face, on which marks were even more visible.

And who was he? An actor like her, supporting roles, not that well known—his face was familiar, but not his name, which was hard to pronounce. If he had a radical streak in him, it manifested itself in his determination to keep his name—to make a career with a name like that. A name that she, too, would have liked to go by. She imagined combining it with her own typically French first name, Solange.

He didn’t like her looking at him when they made love. If she opened her eyes, he went shhhh. She shut them again; she went back inside the red darkness. But she had seen his face, overcome with emotion, his cheeks radiant, the sweat on his cheekbones, like tears. And his eyes fixed on her, shhhh. Two black pinpoints, staring out from under his eyelids, his Chinese eyes, two slits, beneath his triangular forehead.

She remembered his beauty geometrically, but who was the man in the photograph? Who was the man whose picture was in all the Hollywood gossip magazines? Who was the man who used to look at her, who, in her memory, is looking at her now? Her skin no longer bears any trace of him, only the imprint of time, the scars from film shoots that she seems to have dreamt up.