Men (18 page)

She hadn't come for the peace; she had come to see him. It would be difficult: he was working and moving around all the time, the boat still at Kribi, the sets in the forest, the sound production limping along. Water was a huge issue. Jessie had been sick, a catastrophe. She couldn't care less about Jessie. She moved towards him. He lay down on top of her, pulled up her dress. His mattress was damp, too. She abandoned herself, but him, what about him? She put her
arms around him, hugged him. Where was he? In which Africa? When she opened her eyes again, he was smiling at her kindly. It seemed more like politeness than love.

Out the front of the Straight and Narrow, a woman was waiting for her, the woman from the night before, the one who was digging under her window. ‘Five thousand,' said the woman. She didn't understand. ‘Your bush husband back: five thousand.' Solange walked around her in silence. The woman grabbed her by the arm; the contact was uncannily cold. ‘Five thousand.' She had already paid, and he would have ended up coming back to the village anyway. The woman made a strange cutting gesture in the air; in another world, in another context, it might have been a backhand in tennis, or a box cutter across the throat.

She was hot in the dugout canoe. The paddle dipped into the water as if into oil; the birds themselves fell silent. This heat was senseless; she could not stop herself from opening her mouth, but the air outside was much hotter than the inside of her body. Kouhouesso shut his eyes as if they were louvre windows, and the bare-chested oarsman wouldn't stop splashing himself with water. He paddled the heat, he stirred up the river and the sky, he liquefied in the mirages. The sheet of water was riffled by waves carrying the sound of voices, blasts, strange sounds coming from nowhere. The vibrations made their way into Solange's body. She had
visions of the house in Malibu, the Mediterranean shade, the white-tiled bathroom, the sea generating currents of fresh air. That was yesterday, that was before. She would have liked to contemplate the forest, have the wisdom of painters and ecologists, but this flickering green and orange Africa was just one more problem. Not a single one of these trees explained Kouhouesso. They just amounted to one more enigma pitted against her, impenetrable, dangerous, a non-human kingdom, the manifestation of a power that was reduced to sawdust elsewhere.

Far ahead they could glimpse the construction site. Bulldozers were preparing the ground beside the river bank. Workers were laying rails, their shoulders dripping with sweat in the blazing sun. Kouhouesso wanted a tracking shot of the arrival of the boat. The uprooted mangrove trees looked like giant dead spiders, their legs in the air. They were clearing them out: mangrove trees were no use. The kapok trees were chopped into pieces for making kapok fibre and plywood. The occasional mahogany trees were sold as logs. She was learning vocabulary. There were a lot of trees without names, growing far from the French language: the
bibinga
, said the oarsman as they skirted the monumental trees. The
zoubé
, the
ekan
, the
alep
, the
okongbekui.
The graft hadn't taken: it was impossible to transplant French onto those fantastic forms, those voluminous roots, those magnificent verticals. Except for that one, tall and curved, bright green, luxuriant: rattan, neither a chair nor a table,
but living rattan that thrust its palms into the water. Here they said
nlông
. And Freeboy, one of the Pygmy guides, used different syllables again for the same trees; it seemed as if there were as many names for a single tree as there were growth rings. The chainsaw sliced:
tchick tchick.
Then more slowly:
ebony.
It would end up in planks all the same. The Pygmies were the ones who stacked them.

Olga was there. It would have been a pleasure to see her again if Olga had been in the mood. But the blowpipes
made in China
had got lost between Shanghai and Douala. The arrows had got there safely, but Olga had been thrown by the behaviour of the customs officers at Douala. At first the blowpipes were regarded as weapons of mass destruction, and their container was held up; then they had never arrived; then the parcel was definitely there, but it wasn't a parcel of blowpipes; in any case she had to pay through the nose to get them cleared. Olga had decided to commission a local artisan to make two hundred blowpipes out of softwood; after all, there was no shortage of wood. On the other hand, around there they only knew how to make machetes and assegais; she had to do drawings and calculate the right dimensions. One by one, the local artisan made them. His name was Ignatius; he was up to one hundred and eighty. The whole village was in training, the two hundred extras, almost all the men, and the women when they didn't have something better to do. There were plastic arrows all over the ground, everywhere.

Solange was sitting in the shade of a frangipani tree, on a chair someone had brought there for her. She was sprinkling herself with a spray bottle of water. The legs of the chair were sinking into the ground. It was like a long siesta. She felt as if she was a germinating plant, her very cells proliferating. The ants were the only thing to watch out for; if an army of ants approached, she had to get out of their way. The ground was covered in dead leaves scattered with small beetles, and living creepers that she thought she could hear growing. She made herself shift around the shade's compass in little jolts, just to get the heat moving.

She had visions of Kouhouesso: he appeared in apparitions, flashes. He was
working.
He was
filming.
Lights. Camera. Action. She found it difficult to take, difficult to believe; she was on a film shoot without acting, not knowing what to do with her hands, her eyes, her body, her thoughts. Something was hovering, like air turning solid. Everything was vibrating in blocks of heat. Everything was dripping; the whole world was perspiring. Here at the Equator, the belt around the Earth, it was like an attack of shingles that was slowly going around, via her, Solange, on her chair. An illness which, once it had come full circle, would destroy her. The Special Tropical Insect Screen was useless: she scratched herself. Blisters. Kouhouesso seemed impervious to uncertainty; he had gone into another zone, into fiction. Occasionally she caught his
eye; she would have liked to get up and kiss him in front of everyone, but by the end of the day the chair legs had left deep, narrow holes in the ever-present humus, like those left by spider crabs.

ONLY PEOPLE WITHOUT A VISION RESORT TO REALITY

He hardly ever slept, at least hardly ever in the village. She kept hearing the four-wheel drives coming back from the river, from the caves, from Kribi. She called him but he didn't pick up; she knocked on the door of his hut. The guard stared into space, as still and wrinkled as a monitor lizard. ‘It's me,' she said. No answer, but she heard the fan on the other side of the mud wall. ‘It's me,' she said, louder. ‘It's me, Solange.' Usually, he let her come in. The guard stared into the distance, towards the black wall of the forest.

Storms rumbled, passed by, without rain. A steady stream of Toyotas churned back and forth from Kribi: they needed water for the rain machine, bottled water. Jessie refused to perform in the storm scenes unless the machine
ran on Évian. A thousand francs per bottle, imported through Douala. If a single drop of non-mineral water, even chlorinated water, found its way into Jessie's mouth (so his LA lawyer had warned), if a single drop of undrinkable local water contaminated him with amoebas or with God knows what African killer disease, the production crew and Kouhouesso would answer for it.

The rain machine, filled to the brim with Évian, was carried on board the boat by six locals and camouflaged with bits of metal sheeting at the back of the steam engine. Solange was also carried on board, and stashed in the hold, up to her waist. Lights. Fog machine. Action. The rain had to sweep over the river as well, bombard it with water. Everyone was soaked, the camera under a tarp, the cinematographer under an umbrella, and Jessie, half-naked and glistening, leaped around, wilder than wild, thrilled to be acting the fool. He opened his mouth wide, his gold lip-plate and all, and drank the thousand-franc water, the French water whose super-clear, super-pure alpine molecules combined with those of the brown river. The Company, as Kouhouesso called his production crew, was not going to be impressed. What sort of return could you expect from a business that threw thousand-dollar banknotes in the water? Why not film under a shower of champagne?

Later, the boat reached the shore in silence. The Hollywood rain had stopped. Kouhouesso was pleased; his scene was a wrap. Tomorrow they would shoot the rain of arrows:
under the orders of the assistant director, two hundred extras would each take aim five times. And, once the rails were finally laid, the tracking shot. Favour would appear, the Witch, the Creature in Brass Leggings. But right now there was a noise. ‘Cut!' said the soundman.

Music. Incredible music. Sounds of
pop-pop
and
peep-peep
,
chh-chh
and
clap-clap
, more and more high-pitched, then dropping into low notes. A tom-tom but muted, mellow, like an accent—Solange thought she heard Kouhouesso's voice murmuring on the river from all directions. It was a Pygmy welcoming party. Well, no one was sure; no one knew if the Pygmy girls were doing it specially for them, but they looked at home there: twelve- or thirteen-year-olds completely naked, with little pointed breasts, standing in the brown water up to their waists, beating it with the flats of their hands, in unison. An elemental harmony, a skill so dazzling it could render you sentimental.

‘Roll camera, roll camera!' shouted Kouhouesso. Solange could tell that he was
seeing
it all: no costume drama, no period setting, the little naked Pygmies had been there forever, and Joseph Conrad had seen them. But now they had stopped performing, all standing in the river as straight as the letter I. ‘Music!' Kouhouesso yelled at them. ‘Come on, what the hell—this time for Africa, girls, tom-tom!' They ran away, nut-brown naked buttocks leaping into the elephant-ear plants. It was over. Cut. It wouldn't make it into the film.

Kouhouesso jumped onto the bank and smashed his fist into the knotted furrow of a tree.
Crack.
The whole boat fell silent. ‘Perhaps they'll be there tomorrow,' Solange ventured from the hold, where she was suffering from a slight bout of river sickness. Kouhouesso stormed into the jungle.

It is not possible to storm into the jungle. A long prickly creeper had hooked onto the back of his clothes, around his shoulders, back, waist, and Freeboy was hacking away, at his feet as well, in among the roots, in the whatever-they'recalled plants:
tchick
went the machete. He had tracked them down. The girls were there, alert and curious, ready to take to their heels. ‘
Atchia
,' said Freeboy. They replied, ‘
Atchia
.' One little hand on the pubic area. The other held out to her, Solange. What did they want—the bottle of Évian she had saved from the downpour? The boldest girl held it in both hands, opened it. They took turns to drink, as if it were nectar of the gods, then gave it back to Solange with the lid carefully screwed back on. (What disease, what parasites, did those little mouths, those little hands, those round bellies harbour?)

Later, at the Pygmy village, Freeboy and Kouhouesso spoke with the chief. He was genuinely small. One of the surprises in this world is that Pygmies are small: the validation of a cliché, the fusion of idea and fact. ‘You say
Baka
, not Pygmy,' objected Patricien, half-Baka himself, and of medium height. He was getting agitated. Kouhouesso had just given the order for fifty flasks of Fighter whisky to be purchased
immediately in Little-Poco: the price he had agreed with the girls for them to perform their concert again. ‘That's enough to kill the whole village,' said Patricien to Solange. He took her back to Little-Poco, by canoe then four-wheel drive. Solange was extremely hot and had a headache. ‘You have to drink some water,' Patricien said. But all the viruses in the world seemed to be concentrated in what was left of the water in the Évian bottle.