37

After leaving old Mambou, we drove to the capital. I found myself on an avenue packed with pedestrians and street vendors. It must have been eleven o’clock or noon, and I headed towards the seashore. There was no crowd at the beach. A little albino boy was napping in the shade of a coconut tree and two girls were arguing and laughing their heads off. There was a metallic glint on the surface of the water in the distance. I sat down on the sand, my arms around my bent knees, my toes lapped by the dying waves. But very soon, I no longer saw the open sea before my eyes. I was thinking back to Koli, imagining him sitting beside me and asking me to describe the scene to him.

So I described to my friend the ridiculously blue waves, the fishermen and rowers coming back to shore, the line of sweating men pulling in nets, accompanying their task with songs repeated in chorus, the women sitting on an overturned pirogue, each waiting to be the first to bargain for the fish, the laughter, the loud voices, the two lovers perched at the end of the wharf, and the young man sitting beside it plucking the strings of an ancient guitar. I described that beach scene to Koli, the cheers of the men, who had succeeded in pulling in a net filled with seafood, the rush of the women for the sardines, carp, skate, tuna, tilapia, shrimp, crab, and herring, and the fishermen paying the men who had helped them. What I presented to Koli was a country of my own invention, because the nets were now empty, the fishermen bitter, and at the end of the wharf there were not lovers but a father worn out by his many burdens, getting ready to throw himself into the waves.

From the shore I headed to our neighbourhood on the outskirts. In the Hanoukopé district, I walked along the abandoned railway line. A pair of beggars went limping down the middle of the track, begging bowls in their hands and offspring hanging onto their big tattered boubous. Snot dripped from the kids’ nostrils, darkened by the dust-filled air. They were breathing black dust from a little charcoal market along the railway track, which had piles of bags punctured during transportation or by little pilferers. Roaming kids would help themselves to the charcoal and resell it a few sheds farther on to a stout old woman who cooked bean fritters and cornbread in a stove.

When I arrived in front of our house, I stood staring at the door for several minutes before opening it. My father, who wasn’t working that day, saw me from the terrace and dropped his reading glasses. He got up from his chair and shouted my name. Behind the house, there were hurried footsteps, and my mother appeared with a shriek and threw herself on my bony, ghostly body. My father stood to one side, a tear in the corner of his eye, while my mother hugged me till I could hardly breathe. My brothers and sisters weren’t at home, they’d gone out to get food. My father went to get another chair and sat me down, and my mother started circling the revenant in a strange ritual, feeling my body, my face, my belly, my muscles, while her breathing accelerated. My father stopped her, saying, “How about getting him something to drink?” Looking at me, he said, “Don’t say anything, we have all the time in the world.”

He was the one who spoke. He told of the dead and the disappeared. For the dead, things were settled, but for the others, those who hadn’t been found, no one could know. No way to track them down. My father had spent months harassing the police and carrying out fruitless searches wherever he could. He’d made long journeys into the interior of the country, questioning people, and twice he’d also gone to the neighbouring countries, especially those to the west, where people said there were training camps for young fighters. Perhaps I had decided to join the ranks of some obscure rebellion, he thought, to return to the back alleys of the country with a gun and a masked face.

The next day I went into the city to visit my friends. I was reunited with my little world, Beno, Sika, and Wali. I felt uncomfortable, because I knew I had ratted on them. But they were overjoyed and did not seem to notice my shifty traitor’s eyes. I asked for news of Gueule de Bois, our mentor and printer of our leaflets. Sika coughed and said he had been found in a drainage ditch with his throat slit. His computer had been stolen and they had tried to burn down his office. Many houses had been set on fire after the riots. At night, organized groups had lists of the homes they would burn. Old people who couldn’t escape the flames were asphyxiated and burned to ashes. There were thousands of handicapped people, paraplegics, amputees, and those with other injuries. The number of cripples had mushroomed.

My friends spoke of camps in the interior of the country. From there, too, people returned diminished—or never returned. And names of detention sites circulated, Otadi, Kazaboua, Agombio. People often came back blind, my friends said, their eyes dead for some obscure reason, and when they got home, they could no longer see what their house looked like or observe with their own eyes if it had remained intact or was damaged. They would feel their way along the walls and through the doors, but they didn’t actually know, and they still had in their heads the image of the house they had left and that couldn’t have changed. They now lived in nostalgia for that hut from the time before, nostalgia for an unchanged world, which was immutable in their heads and their memories as discredited deportees. They were cut off from the new order of things, and the trick would now be to re-establish the connection with that unsettling order—or disorder. And it must be said that very few of us managed it, even with good eyes in the full light of day, we found ourselves blind, like Koli and Hamm, desperately groping our way along the walls of this new world in the hope of finding markers, signposts, traces by which to relearn how to move forward. We walked into the walls, going around in circles, and in that rotation, the land, the country in our heads, was no longer facing the sun in the morning. And night after night we continued the rotation, lost to ourselves and others.