Men (19 page)

Solange had a fever. Was she imagining the tom-toms in the distance, or was the Pygmy village celebrating, with shots from those little plastic flasks whose dubious benefits she herself was enjoying—full of a golden beverage, very strong and very bad, but scorching, and which seemed to clear a passage in the humidity?

He came to find her that night. He needed her opinion. He showed her the rushes on his portable monitor. Those foolish girls had got dressed up for their concert, one in a David Beckham T-shirt, the other with a sort of Petit-Bateau child's sleep sack stretched to fit her. In the water, it looked like a kind of Miss Pygmy wet T-shirt competition. There was Kouhouesso's assistant, then Kouhouesso himself, then several black giants and a white giant (the soundman), the whole crew of the film boat came into the frame, trying to persuade the girls. Jessie was clacking his gold lip-plate like false teeth and terrifying the girls. They took their clothes
off and patted the water timidly with the flats of their hands.
Ploppity-plop
,
plip, plip, chlap.
It was rubbish, unusable—and the way they stared at the camera the whole time: impossible. Kouhouesso had made a mistake. Even if he had caught it unrehearsed, what would he have done with it?

It was all for the best: that sort of self-indulgence gets cut in editing. Instead of documentary-style girls what he needed was his blowpipes scene. Only people without a vision resort to reality—that's what the Zulus say. Novels, films! The attack on the boat. The swarm of arrows. Jessie, bleeding. He was waving his hands around, miming, standing up: the firearms responding, Winchester and Martini-Henry rifles,
bang-bang
, ‘as though the mist itself had screamed'. She was laughing: he was the film, he was the trees, he was the boat and the river all by himself, he was the arrow and the gun, the corpse and the annihilator.

They drank a few whisky flasks together, tearing them open with their teeth. They were silent. The heat and fatigue had caught up with them. ‘Still, it's not the Congo,' she said. He had wanted to see Paris, the historical buildings; she wanted to see the Congo, crocodiles. ‘Fortunately there are not many crocs in the Ntem anymore,' he said, smiling. He had seen the Congo. The boats rotting on the Pool Malebo. They would have spent the film shoot paying over and over again, sending soggy scraps of paper to the Company, on which receipts would be written, in biro, along the lines of ‘Departure Authorisation Tax', signed by a guy armed with
a Kalashnikov, who would answer to the name of One-Eye-Only or Leftie, followed eight days later by another tax for another military guy, followed by another piece of paper, until the official had passed his use-by date or been bumped off, replaced by another gang, higher charges, embargos, ransoms. And the boat would not have moved. Here, they only had to pay up occasionally, and to people with names.

‘Still,' she persevered, sucking on her flask of Fighter, without really knowing what she was talking about. They were being attacked by buzzing creatures. He rolled the mosquito net around them and pointed the fan at the creases. In the clammy, scratchy cocoon, riddled with draughts, they made love. The electricity cut out. The electricity came back on. Later, the tin can that served as a bedside table seemed to move of its own accord and ring out like a bell: mice were squabbling over her health-food biscuits. Kouhouesso chased them away. When he moved she felt the disruption of the fan's breeze. In the shadowed room she could not see him: he really was the invisible man, black in the night, air in the breeze.

Towards dawn she thought she heard digging under her window again. She was frightened to go and look, or to wake Kouhouesso. She took a sleeping pill. Since Christmas—since, what would she call it, her departure—she could no longer sleep. Since the night of the Playmobil. As if all the alcohol she had drunk in Clèves that night was still in her
bloodstream, keeping her in permanent jetlag, in a state of everlasting fatigue, as impenetrable as a forest.

When she woke up he was gone. And under the window the soil had been disturbed, as if the ground had been stripped, pale yellow, soft, a trail of moisture leading from it, disappearing under the trees. She thought of the witch, and wondered whether to take her a five-thousand-franc note.

UP TO HIS NECK IN IT

Vincent Cassel was there for ten days. Ten days to do all the Marlow scenes, three of which were in the caves with George, whenever he arrived. Olga was keeping her up to speed. So a wardrobe mistress was more important than she was—but what did she expect, other than this crush of people, crowded in chaotic accommodation, taking communal meals or otherwise, each of them with a task that more or less overlapped with someone else's, all more or less feverish and sick, but all straining towards that imaginary interface where a book becomes a film? Where Africa becomes a story? With as much exertion as a boa constrictor swallowing a large antelope, with knots and jolts, hiccups, obstructions…

Only the Pygmy people went naked. The two hundred Bantu extras refused to be filmed naked. Or even half-naked.
It was contagious. A kind of craze. What image did they want to present of black people? They were being treated as savages. Two hundred raffia sarongs designed by Olga and sewn in Morocco, with ornaments for the head, nose, arms and legs: no way. A delegation led by a certain Saint-Blaise demanded five thousand francs more per extra for them to strip down to their Bantu birthday suits. Kouhouesso laughed: seven euros more for each of them, a million CFA francs, two thousand dollars, it was nothing. Not even the cost of the sarongs. And he hadn't forgotten that he owed Solange money: she should make out an invoice and the Company would reimburse her.

Hollywood versus the jungle: for five thousand more—five tins of sardines, a bit of roast chicken, a witch's tip—two hundred villagers decorated in lucky charms showered the boat with arrows and ‘the bush was swarming with human limbs in movement'. The scene worked incredibly well. Jessie in particular was magnificent: he died with unexpected dignity, lying in the blood as if on a crimson mantle, with a look that was ‘extraordinary, profound, familiar'.
You were wild, Jessie, you were sublime, I love you.

The black people from here were not like Kouhouesso. But, more especially, they were not like Jessie. Jessie was not like them. Of course (as Kouhouesso explained to her), there are African-Americans who want to become African. To be reunited with the Africa that was stolen from them. In general, the affair ends badly. Either they are too fright
ened ever to leave the Monrovia Sheraton, or else they are repatriated with dysentery. At worst, they end up as rastas in Addis Ababa, preaching that women have the mark of the devil, without ever giving up their American passports. There are infinitely more Africans who want to become American. Or, failing that, Canadian.

He took a drag on his cigarette and she had him back, the Kouhouesso who explained things to her, who unpacked them, who so royally shaped the world for her. They had celebrated Jessie's last day of filming until dawn, and Kouhouesso had come back with her to the Straight and Narrow. How had she coped without his tireless commentary? It was like being deprived of her own eyes. Her own hands, she thought, as she took his in hers. Of her own head on her own neck. Of her own soft, muted voice. She kissed him in the hollow beneath his Adam's apple. And she asked him if he was annoyed by her feelings for him, and he replied, ‘Why would I be annoyed?'

The soft hollow in Kouhouesso's neck, wide enough for her fingertips, as round as puckered lips: time unravelled inside that hollow. And she kissed him as if it was the last time; she clung to this man who was becoming a tree, impassive, silent and tall.

She was reminded of witch-pricking: the piercing of European witches all over their bodies in order to isolate the Devil's Mark, spots that were insensitive to pain, and thus proof of a woman's evil nature. The hollow in Kouhouesso's
neck was like the last spot of softness in him. His softness had receded, almost to nothing, and was now lodged entirely in his neck—while everything in her was soft, vulnerable, undone.

He insisted: she should go to Poco-Beach, the Straight and Narrow really was a dump—actually that was
another
reason he visited her so infrequently. But she had no complaints: since he'd had chemical toilets installed, Little-Poco had become civilised.

Everything: he looked after everything. He was the boss, the skipper of the boat, the Coppola of Little-Poco. Every morning fifteen people were waiting in front of his hut with urgent questions: logistics, sets, props, water, schedules, a stolen paddle, a sudden altercation, the security firm treating the guards as slaves, departures, arrivals, returns, complications, crises. The distribution of wages, over the three filming locations, was done with envelopes of cash and a single courier on a motorbike, who had to be trusted. The Company had replaced Natsumi with a local wardrobe assistant, but Olga had got rid of her; as a result, she was overworked. The hairdresser, another local, was also doing make-up, without complaining: people here knew the value of work. The script boy had been recruited in Douala, the grips were from Nigeria, all the set workers and all the sound and lighting staff were Cameroonian. The allocated budget
was phenomenal; the future of cinema was in Africa.

Kouhouesso strode purposefully through the forest: the trees were going to follow him as one, all in a row, directed at last. Machetes, secateurs, chainsaws and bulldozers: they were carving out corridors for the camera, otherwise the horizon loomed thirty metres away and the landscape closed in. The very idea of a film in that forest was a paradox that made Kouhouesso joyful and defiant.

THE NIGHT OF THE PANGOLIN

Favour was thinner and the size of her breasts had perhaps been enhanced. Draped in striped cotton fabric, her silhouette a slender S, she was batting her painted eyelids slowly. As if it was too much of an effort to bestow a glance on those who were not royalty. ‘Brass leggings to the knees', gilded gauntlets to the elbow, two crimson spots painted on her cheeks—Olga and the hairdresser were fussing around her. Kouhouesso had bought, from a passing Bamileke man, a Gabonese Punu mask with a three-tiered hairstyle, and Welcome, the hairdresser, who was not Punu, or anything for that matter, was struggling to reproduce it in all its splendour on Favour's impatient head. Everyone was happy except her. There was the question of a wig.

That mask—almond-shaped eyes, long nose, imposing
forehead—it was her, Favour. Kou had an eye for it; it was unsettling. When she appeared on the riverbank, wearing ‘the value of several elephant tusks' (plastic), all that junk, cheap tat, all those jumbled elements finally came together in a framed image, and it was stunning; it embodied something like the Big Idea, Favour raising her bewitching arms to the heavens.

The only ones Kouhouesso wasn't happy with were the men laying the rails: you would have thought they were French. The foreman was even a union member. They had huge problems uprooting stumps: deep holes had to be dug, then filled in with gravel transported from Douala. If they didn't uproot the stumps, suckers grew back within the hour, the river poured in, and the embankment collapsed; rails had been seen floating away. It was as if, at night, some indomitable force destroyed the day's work. It shook the earth, pulled up the sleepers. There was grumbling. Brows furrowed, eyes darkened at this curse on the deforested earth—naked and as if stripped. You didn't have to be a witch to hear rumblings reverberating around Kouhouesso, waves of sound around the centre of a gong.

All he could talk about was Godard's
Weekend
: the longest tracking shot in the history of cinema. He wanted his tracking shot to be subdued and smooth, as fluid as the river itself, stealthy, creeping along like the boat. He described the scene to the whole crew: the tracking shot would end with Favour raising her arms to the heavens. In the novel,
her role stopped there, but there were rumours that she had wangled an appearance with George in the caves.

As for her, she could never find the right moment to speak to him about the Intended's scenes. She counted in days, like in Los Angeles: six days since they had slept together. The location scouting was dragging on; they were finalising Cassel's schedule first: they would fit in the minor scenes when they could. That's what the assistant director had told her.