Men (11 page)

But weariness seemed to have caught up with Kouhouesso. The evening subsided into chatter about the weather: Bob was worried that the nurse was feeling the heat. Peter had never known such a sweltering December since he'd arrived in Los Angeles, the very first winter of the seventies.

The winter I was born, thought Solange. In Clèves, a long way from here.

Was it such a bad idea to have wanted to introduce him to the dinosaurs, to the witnesses of a time when Hollywood was one huge party? A cinephile like him should have been fascinated. Sure, his project was stalling, but they had all been through bad times, too. In the nineties, Maximovitch used to walk down Hollywood Boulevard with his starched mauve shirt and his bandana knotted in a floppy bowtie.
Do you remember me? I was Peter Maximovitch.
He would get himself photographed on exactly the spot where the statue of Shrek stands today. But he had lived on so long after his downfall that he had become a kind of idol. Personally, she worshipped him. He would have made a magnificent Kurtz, thin, lined, arrogant: more Kinski than Brando. If he'd survived Hollywood, the Congo wouldn't be the end of him.

She was joking around; she'd had too much to drink. Less than Kouhouesso, but too much. At this point in the conversation, he was sunk in his habitual silence, but the rest of the gang were all laughing; Peter, defying his age, was pretending to be Tarzan on an imaginary vine.

Then Kouhouesso spoke, only a few words, unequivocally, with incongruous force, in a tone that was almost brutal: ‘George will play Kurtz.'

‘Has George signed anything?' Gaspar asked out of interest.

Kouhouesso stood up. She felt obliged to follow him out, excusing herself. Everything was spinning. As she hurried past, she said
sorry, sorry
to the walls, to the wait staff.
When she replayed the evening in her mind, she felt ashamed; she wasn't sure exactly of what, and that was even more unpleasant.

She remembered the times when her father was intractable, simultaneously flamboyant and mute. Her mother's ghastly smile. Now she found herself having to ‘form a buffer', as her mother used to say. Between Kouhouesso and the world. But every single project in Hollywood had to undergo a dreadful blowtorch of criticism. Every director is interrogated, people have to see what they're made of: it's the mandatory crash test for every aspiring filmmaker.

In the car on the way home, the silence was that of their unique weariness; like a third person in their duo, this weariness loaded up in the back of the car, weariness like a child, which could at any moment leap at them and cause them to tumble into a ravine of anguish and hatred—yes, of hatred, a silent and suppressed hatred, a weary hatred. ‘Talk to me,' she begged. She was drunk at the wheel, but they were in Bel Air, not far from her place, which, in her state, was spinning less than Topanga. He was falling asleep. Their weariness was ebbing back towards the east, into the first rays of the dawn.

When they arrived in front of the gate, he wanted to go home to his place. He shook his head. This was serious non-cooperation. She went round to the other side of the car and made him get out. She struggled against the weight of him, against gravity; she struggled against whatever
force was holding him there, upright, unmoving, heavy, supported by the Earth and by hell, protesting in a language she didn't understand; he was so much bigger than her, so much stronger than her. She heard sirens—how ridiculous, a breathalyser test right in front of her place? Blue and white lights flashing, spinning. Kouhouesso was pressed against the bonnet, the cops repeating the same question: ‘Is this man bothering you?' She had no idea what was going on. Kouhouesso was yelling. She was terrified.

The concierge came to their rescue. He opened the gate, explained to the cops that the two of them were together and went back to his cupboard for the keys.

At two in the afternoon of their morning after, Kouhouesso woke up with a ‘hey'. On the television, thirty-nine high-school students had been killed with heavy weapons. By a boy: it was never by a girl. She wanted to get on a plane, put some space between her and America. She stroked his shoulder, but Kouhouesso shook himself, unhooked her hand as if it were an insect.

In an apocalyptic sunset, she took the car and fled to Olga's. They talked all night long, girl talk. The next day she drove aimlessly around Los Angeles. Her tears flowed over the intensely blue sky, into the dust of that month of December. Her tears flowed over the hills, over their savannah dryness and the strip of green, the lush edge of the gardens. She drove to the sea. In tears, she handed her keys to a Venice Beach parking valet. She sat on the low wall in front of
the stupid, sloshing, dirty-grey ocean. Surfers were settled on the surface like seagulls. Choking sobs rose and fell in her throat. There was a
pop pop
sound coming from behind her: the pelota players were hard at it, whacking their ball against the graffitied walls. It was like being in Biarritz in the off-season, when she was fifteen with no future. Except that life had moved on, and come to a stop here, on the edge of the Pacific.

She drove towards Topanga. The door opened: he was there. He had looked for her—where had she gone? Ted had called on behalf of George. A budget had been released to finance the storyboard. She guessed that George had footed the bill.

He took her out for dinner. They had lobster, baked oysters, Chablis, Saint-Julien. He was smiling again. He told her that she and he were tarred with the same brush: they thought only of themselves. Of their own personal advantage. It was all about being a black man and a white woman, not just a man and a woman: she had to get used to it; neither he nor she was to blame. The problem dated back to the round-ups in the forests. He thought her friends were unbearable. Hollywood legends, my arse. They were members of a club and they would never let him join. His experience proved to him that, because of their history, their cultural fluency, their sharp minds, Jews were definitely not the most racist among white people…She objected. He stopped her, she was too French, locked into her own
prejudices, let him finish. As usual during those dinners, he found it difficult to single out one particular sentence that was truly racist—well, he had a hunch, but let's not go there—it was everything, and it was done on purpose: you can never pass sentence on your enemy, he's caught up inside his whole worldview, his top-dog/underdog ideology of dominance. It was the obstacle that wore him down, the wall they erected without even realising, their world that they took to be the universe.
Universal Pictures presents!
He knew it by heart. And if they'd added a white guy, whether he was Jewish or not, who cares, and if they'd added another fucking Hollywood legend or a fucking young producer, the wall would have grown higher, expanded, exponentially. He needed Jessie. He needed Favour. Favour Adebukola Moon: the black actress who stood out from the crowd. He needed George and he needed her, too; but—he laughed—he was wary. He was wary of everyone. Even Favour. He laughed again. She paid the bill.

BLACK LIKE ME

Jessie lent them his bungalow at Malibu: an eight-room villa on the beach. The storyboard guy came every day; they locked themselves away to sketch out, frame by frame, the film Kouhouesso envisioned. Once the guy left, late at night, Kouhouesso would open bottles of wine and sit in front of the laptop he'd just bought himself. She would go to bed alone. She ended up missing Jessie's garrulous proselytism. Lloyd didn't understand why she'd turned down
ER
. She didn't dare tell him that she was waiting for the dates of an unlikely role in a dangerous film in an impossible country. In the Congo.

The rest of the time, Kouhouesso sat under the sunshade, facing the ocean, iPod in his ears or mobile phone on his knees. The film remained in the realm of the virtual;
the storyboard drawings were more to reassure potential producers than to plan actual shots. She went walking along the beach at low tide; she would look at him, a seated figure behind the guardrail, stuck in a dream house, in his very own Congo, with a woman who was waiting only for him.

What's he like, a man waiting? His head bent, heavy with alcohol and impatience. Consumed by the film shoot in his mind, by the images on paper. Rubbing his eyes with the flat of his hand, drawing on his immense weariness. She would hold out her hand, but he wouldn't take it. It was never the right time. Or rather it was always just when she was finally thinking about something else, or getting ready to swim, walk, read, that he would come up to her and put his arms around her. And afterwards he never said much. She complained about his moods. He accused her of calling what wasn't her business a
mood
: ‘If I stop believing in it, who will believe in it for me?'

‘George,' she replied.

She went down to the beach every day, for the pleasure of the beach, right there below the house. If it weren't for this film, this obsession, they would have been happy. She had begun cooking. She would have liked to have a dog to walk. She had got to know some of the locals in the area. You couldn't really call the strip of luxury villas between the sea and the highway a neighbourhood. A lot of them had dogs (even though it was illegal), a lot of them smoked (ditto), and they were easy to talk to. There was a Ukrainian guy
and a Chinese woman who had met in a psychiatric hospital and loved to talk about it; a bodysurfing grandmother who was always trying to get her granddaughters minded; a depressive architect who couldn't stand his clients anymore; a mysterious Greek woman who sermonised in the dunes. The impoverished, who lived almost on the beach, and the super-wealthy, who also lived there, but differently.

A French couple recognised her, despite her hat and sunglasses. They had landed there for their retirement, on stilts, like herons. They were keen to invite her over for dinner; she smiled politely. She imagined Kouhouesso in their exquisite decor—in the end, only she could put up with him.

On the weekend the beach turned democratic: more people, more families, including the servants of the surrounding houses. As well as those venturing from the east side of the city, who had driven since morning in order to spend Sunday at Malibu. Black families armed with enormous rubber rings, Fritos, beach umbrellas, and grandmothers sitting on folding chairs. The boys (like Jessie but very different from Jessie) went swimming without taking off their gold chains, and most of the time without knowing how to swim, which made the lifeguards in their sentry box nervous. Without much of an idea how to, she wanted to make friends with these people. She complimented the grandmothers on their grandchildren. She shared chips with them and chatted about the weather, often unable to grasp their accent, whereas she understood Jessie and Kouhouesso,
and Favour the Nigerian girl, and Lola from Suriname.

Being separated from Kouhouesso, even for a few hours, gave her the illusion, while she was with the black families, of somehow being with him. Yes, the familiarity was surprising. But perhaps it was not so much connected with Kouhouesso as with a déjà vu of her memories of the Basque Country, of her own adolescence. The fat grandmothers and the folding chairs. The ugly swimsuits, the towels that were not proper large beach towels but old rags from the bathroom cupboard. She remembered those occasional beach days, an hour's drive away, with her, say, boyfriend at the time, whom she was ashamed of, and the other girls on the beach, the—she thought about it, the white girls—the girls from Paris, the wealthy tourist girls; when she thought she was too fat and badly dressed, whereas—she knew now—she was the prettiest, the real princess. And she liked these girls at Malibu—a day out at Malibu—speaking too loudly to feel uncomfortable, with their ten-dollar Target swimsuits that were bad copies of expensive labels, and the enormous ice boxes, and the strollers in the sand. And the babies.

She had never held a black baby in her arms (‘a little prune', her mother used to say if she saw one on the TV). She had never chatted about sunscreens with black girls, or even imagined that they, too, used protection against UV radiation. But she, too, had owned one good T-shirt that she kept for special occasions. Far from here, two oceans away.

Some older adolescents came to ask her if she was an
actress. They flirted with her. It would never have happened in her previous life. Unimaginable. Until now, she had never spoken, either in Paris or Los Angeles, with one of those tall guys in hoodies. But she was no longer frightened. Anyway, she was old enough to be their mother.

In 1960, scarcely ten years before the heyday of Friedkin and Coppola, the journalist John H. Griffin, disguised as a black man for his memoir,
Black Like Me
, had been warned by his black friends: never look at a white woman,
even
a woman on a film poster. Asking for trouble. In California, the last lynching had taken place in 1947. The fellow had been caught on a ranch near Gazelle, and hanged in front of the only school in the area, in Callahan.

STORYBOARD IN MALIBU

And yet the film began to take shape, but as a cartoon strip. A crowded sketch: the forest, the shadows and the water, in black and white. The boat's lantern made a cone of light on the black water and the rest of the vessel was like a whale surfacing, grey on black, among the islands and sandbanks. Tracks hacked out by machete, the glow of oil lamps, torches that left the black people in shadow and highlighted the ivory and gold, and the dazzling fires, and the night in the sacred caves. Marlow's face on almost every page, a white patch, a halo, like a ghost: Kouhouesso did not want him to have any features. He was still hoping for Sean Penn. The first appearance of George as Kurtz was a close-up of his sweaty face, then a tracking shot of his long thin body. George said he was up for losing ten kilos; Kouhouesso
joked about the efficacy of local dysentery.

The director of photography and the chief lighting engineer came to work in Malibu for the day. Over the sound of the waves, she heard incoherent bursts of shouting, Kouhouesso's deep voice, brusque. When they came out of the study they barely acknowledged her and did not stay for dinner. There were pages of the storyboard, around the time Kurtz dies, where all the panels were black, with just a few white embers, and eyes, and teeth. Kouhouesso wanted to work with natural light, which meant the images would be not only dark but blurred, as only lightweight cameras were possible in the forest.