The African Equation (11 page)

I asked Bruno to stop and went back to my straw mattress.

In the evening, the guards placed a grille over the door of our jail and padlocked it. The confinement added an extra layer of depression to the sickly smell of the room. To get a little air, I went to the window, which was just a hole in the wall with thick iron bars across it. I wanted to gaze at the sunset, to escape for a moment from the thoughts that were tormenting me. I have to hold out, I told myself. When the sun had disappeared, the darkness threw itself on the shadows like a predator on its prey, and a senescent night, totally lacking in charm or romance, and worn down by age, prepared to make the desert its tomb. I didn’t know much about the African night, yet I knew it would remain, for me, as devoid of meaning as the chance that had led me to this godforsaken spot. I thought about the nights I had known in the old days, in Frankfurt, Seville, Las Palmas, the south of France, Istanbul, Salonica; saw again the terraces with their white balconies, the gleaming shop windows, restaurant bars lined with mirrors and made mysterious by subdued lighting, the places that had filled me with awe, the streets that led me through a thousand little ordinary joys, the small parks where children played, the benches in the shade of the birches to which old people and lovers came to hear themselves living, the tourists taking photographs of each other at the foot of the monuments; I heard their singsong voices, the bursts of music drifting out of the clubs, the coaches setting off
for the sun, and those nights seemed to me as subliminal and full as moons. It was amazing that a man deprived of his freedom, whose future was so uncertain, could revisit the life that had been stolen from him with such clarity, and that the small details to which he had paid no attention should come back to the surface with incredible precision and fill his heart with a nostalgia whose splendour was equalled only by the depth of his grief. So I closed my eyes and searched for the slightest little gleam that could alleviate my unhappiness; a shrill laugh, a quick run, a furtive glance, a smile, a handshake, anything that could fill my solitude with untold presences. Of course, Jessica was everywhere; I made out her perfume in the stench of my jail, recognised the swish of her dress in all the rustling around me; I longed for her in the midst of these shadows that were taking over my thoughts. Her absence left me naked, impoverished, mutilated; and there, standing by that damned window with the burning-hot bars, facing that night that had no story to tell and on which both rocks and men turned their backs, I made myself a solemn promise, a promise as unbreakable as a vow, not to weaken and, whatever happened, to get out of here and find my way back to my towns and my streets, my people and my songs, the places I had loved, the beaches where my tenderest memories lay, all my weaknesses and all my habits and all my countless illusions!

The third week of my captivity ended with a sandstorm that lasted three days and three nights. I thought I was going to choke to death. With a
cheche
around my head, my eyes swollen and irritated, I felt as if the dust was getting in through my pores. I’d never seen a sandstorm before, and I discovered this extraordinary phenomenon in a kind of delirium. It was like a malevolent flood, as if a Pandora’s box had unleashed on the world incessant gusts of wrath and evil spells. The sky and the earth had disappeared in a pandemonium of noise and obscurity; I could no longer tell day from night. All you could hear were the torrents of sand rolling across the desert and moaning elegiacally in the crevices. Then the storm suddenly abated and, as if by magic, everything went back to its accustomed place. The heat resumed its obsessive hum and the horizon its frustrating emptiness.

I had only glimpsed Hans twice since we had been separated. He was walking a little better now. Blackmoon let me know that my friend was getting special treatment and that in the evening he was taken for a walk behind the hill to help him recover. The atmosphere in the fort was fairly relaxed; the captain was in a good mood and Chief Moussa, who had left with his henchmen to plunder
the nearest villages, had come back, the two pick-ups overflowing with provisions.

Bruno and I were crouching by the door of our prison. Blackmoon stepped over the little barrier and walked to the foot of the dead tree, with a book in his hand and without his sabre. It was unusual for him to appear without it; it was as if he were missing a limb; he seemed different, an ordinary young man, calm, pleasant to look at. Without even glancing at us, he sat down on a clod of earth and immersed himself in his book, which remained obstinately open at the same page.

‘What have you done with your sabre, Chaolo?’ Bruno asked.

Blackmoon pretended not to have heard. When Bruno asked him the same question again, he looked around as if the Frenchman had been addressing someone else, then pointed to his own chest and said, ‘Are you talking to me?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘My name’s not Chaolo.’

‘Oh, really? Since when?’

Blackmoon shrugged and went back to his book. ‘It isn’t my name any more,’ he said after a pause, and gave me an exaggerated wink, as if asking me to enlighten Bruno.

‘He has a combat name now,’ I said. ‘It’s Blackmoon.’

‘Impressive,’ Bruno said, concealing a smile behind his hand. ‘Is that why you got rid of your sabre?’

‘It isn’t a sabre, it’s a machete,’ Blackmoon said with a hint of irritation. ‘I lent it to the cook. He needs it to cut up the animal.’

Bruno passed his swollen fingers through his beard, scratched his cheek and, ignoring the signals I was making to avoid things turning nasty, ventured, ‘Now that you
have a combat name, they’re surely going to let you have a sub-machine gun.’

Blackmoon seemed happy to play the Frenchman’s game. He pushed his glasses back towards his forehead and said, ‘The only time they put a gun in my hands, it went off by itself, and the stray bullet hit Chief Moussa’s dog and killed it. Captain Gerima, who’s a bit of a sorcerer, told me the spirit of firearms is incompatible with mine. Since then, I’ve carried a machete.’

He fell silent while a young pirate walked past pushing a wheelbarrow.

Bruno waited for the rest of the story, but it didn’t come. ‘What are you reading?’ he asked to restart the conversation.

‘I can’t read.’

‘What do you mean, you can’t read? You’ve been looking at that book for ages.’

‘I like looking at the words. For me, they’re better than drawings. They have so many mysteries. So I look at them and try to decode their secrets.’

‘You can spend hours on end engrossed in a book just to look at the words?’

‘Why, do you have a problem with that?’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘It doesn’t bother me. I sit down under a tree or on a rock, I open my book, I look at it and I feel fine … The only thing I regret is that I never went to college.’

‘What job would you have chosen if you had?’

‘Teacher,’ he said without hesitation. ‘There was one in my village. He was distinguished, and people treated him with respect. Every time he passed our house, I stood up to be polite. He had style, that teacher. My father said it
was because he possessed knowledge, and nothing’s above knowledge.’

‘Is that why you wear glasses? Because it makes you look like a teacher?’

‘There’s no law against dreaming, is there?’

‘Of course, it’s the one right there’s no law against … I assume you followed Moussa because he possesses knowledge?’

Blackmoon gave a scornful grin. ‘Moussa doesn’t possess anything. Joma says he’s an intellectual, and an intellectual is a big talker who shows off like a circus horse. A poser, that’s all Moussa is. He doesn’t believe a damned word of the speeches he bores us with.’

‘In that case, why do you stay with him?’

‘I’m not with him, I’m with Joma.’

‘Is he a relative of yours?’

‘Joma doesn’t have any family. He says he came into the world directly from the sky, like a shooting star.’

‘And why do you stay with Joma?’

‘I like him. He isn’t easy to get on with, but he’s straight. I’ve known him for years. He was a tailor in the market in my village and I was his boy.’

‘What does that mean, his boy?’ I asked Bruno.

‘It means I did everything for him,’ Blackmoon replied. ‘I maintained his moped, put away his rolls of cloth, ran errands for him. In return, he took care of me … It was good in the old days,’ he said with a sigh. ‘We had an easy life. We didn’t ask for much. Actually, we didn’t know if there was anything else …’

He bowed his head, saddened by the memory of that period of his life.

‘What happened?’ Bruno insisted.

‘What?’ Blackmoon, who had been lost in the past, said with a start. ‘What happened? Something that’s not going to stop now.’ His voice had turned dark and hoarse. ‘It was a mess. A bomb wiped out the market. We never understood why. Maybe because there was nothing to understand. Joma lost his workshop and his reason for living. He gave his sewing machines, his rolls of cloth and his scissors to his creditors and went off to war. I followed him …’

He was interrupted by Ewana who was back from the latrines. ‘Don’t listen to him,’ Ewana said. ‘He’s a loser. He’d piss off a dead man in his grave just by praying for his soul.’

‘Fuck you,’ Blackmoon said.

‘What would you fuck me with, scarecrow? You don’t even have balls.’ Ewana disappeared behind a ruined building.

Blackmoon started breathing heavily. His Adam’s apple rose and fell in his throat like a piston. Slowly, his face stopped twitching and his eyes grew calm.

‘What about you, don’t you have any family either?’ Bruno asked.

Blackmoon frowned, thought for a minute, then looked the Frenchman up and down. ‘You aren’t a shrink by any chance, are you? How do you always manage to get me to talk? You aren’t stealing my soul like the griots?’

‘I’m not a griot.’

‘Then what’s your trick?’

‘I don’t have a trick. We’re talking, that’s all. Man to man. Without any ulterior motive. I listen to you frankly and you open your heart to me.’

Blackmoon pondered Bruno’s arguments and found
them admissible. ‘Maybe you’re right. It isn’t that I don’t trust you, but around here, if you trust people too much, you’re a dead man. You never know when the lightning’s going to strike … Joma doesn’t believe in God or anyone. But he knows that with me, he can sleep easy. If he asked me to die for him, I’d do it … And even so, he doesn’t trust me.’

‘Have you ever killed for him?’

Blackmoon stiffened. The little grin that had been playing over his lips like a will o’ the wisp now abruptly deepened the creases at the corners of his mouth. ‘Were you ever a policeman?’ he asked Bruno.

‘No, never.’

‘Then can you explain why your questions make me want to piss on you?’ With that, he stood up, looked us up and down and grunted, ‘They’re all the same! You try to be nice, and they try to screw you over.’

And he went off to kick stones behind the rampart.

‘I told you the boy was unstable,’ I said sharply to Bruno as we went back to our straw mattresses in the jail. ‘You upset him, and he won’t forgive us in a hurry.’

‘No, no,’ Bruno reassured me, lying back on his mat. ‘The boy is seriously disturbed, I don’t deny that, but of all the sons of bitches who are keeping us in this hole, he’s the least formidable and probably the only one who has a bit of a soul left. I’ve been watching him for weeks. He likes to let himself go without really dropping his guard, which complicates things with him … He’s not as bad as he seems … He was the one who slipped me the miracle powder and the ointment. In these conditions, a gesture
like that almost restores your faith in the human race …’

He rolled a cloth into a pillow and slipped it under his neck.

His excessive serenity exasperated me. I was seriously starting to doubt his ‘great knowledge’ of African matters.

‘I think we should avoid getting too familiar with the boy.’

‘Why’s that?’ he asked nonchalantly.

‘These people are unpredictable.’

He gave a brief, dry laugh and dismissed my words with his hand. ‘It’s obvious you don’t know much about Africa, Monsieur Krausmann.’

Bruno brought out this excuse every time I disapproved of his actions or his theories about the complexity of people and things. As far as he was concerned, I was merely a middle-class European who lived in a bubble, as indifferent to the bedlam of the world as a goldfish in its bowl; a conventional doctor with manicured nails, so narcissistic he could live in a mirror, who saw only a superficial exoticism where there were other mindsets and other truths to explore. He even showed contempt for the narrowness of my culture and my lack of curiosity when it came to looking a bit further than the end of my nose, and declared emphatically that a person who couldn’t love one song from each folk tradition and one saint from each belief had only lived half a life. ‘The African,’ he said one night, ‘is a code. Decipher it, and you’ll achieve understanding.’

Bruno had told me the story of his life in Africa. In fact, that was all he had been doing in the time I’d been sharing the jail with him. He had fallen in love with the continent as a young man after reading
The Forgotten
Trail
, a novel about the Tuaregs by a French writer named Frison-Roche. Captivated by the Sahara and the peoples of the Hoggar, he had studied dozens of books dealing with the lives and customs of that part of the world, and had ended up hungrily devouring the work of the French naturalist Théodore André Monod, a great explorer of the desert regions as well as a scholar in many disciplines and an unequalled humanist, who had died at the beginning of the twenty-first century. At the age of nineteen Bruno had followed in his mentor’s footsteps, setting off with a group of students from Bordeaux to search for the famous ancient route, buried beneath the
ergs
and
regs
, which, according to Frison-Roche, King Solomon had taken in order to establish trade relations with the black kingdoms. After a short expedition in the Ténéré, the group of students returned to Bordeaux empty-handed, but Bruno stayed, and was taken in, half dead with dehydration, by a Fulani family. He spent several weeks in a nameless village before resuming his investigations. He never returned to France. He was in his element in the desert, sometimes an anthropologist, sometimes an archaeologist, before deciding to follow the movements of the caravan people and nomadic shepherds, and it was they who really introduced him to what was most special and remarkable about Africa. His wanderings lasted fifteen extraordinary years, during which he discovered Niger, Upper Volta, from where he was displaced by a bloody coup, Ghana, Mali, Senegal and Mauritania. He returned to Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso, before being chased out by another coup, then went back up to Aguelhok in the north of Mali, where he taught French to surprisingly receptive kids in an open-air classroom. He knew all the tribes in the
region: from the Idna to the elusive Regonatem, by way of the Imghad, the Ifora and the Chamanama. It was a Chamanama girl that he married, the beautiful Aminata, with whom he settled in Gao where he became a guide to scientific researchers. He came back one evening from a hike to find that Aminata wasn’t in the house. The neighbours told him that his wife had been abducted by a cousin of hers. The elder of the tribe assured him that he knew nothing about the abduction and had no idea where the kidnapper was hiding. Bruno set off in search of his wife and found her at last, two years later, in a township to the east of Zinder in Niger. His relief was short-lived: his wife informed him that she had not been abducted by her cousin, but that she had run off with him out of love. Humiliated and crushed, Bruno did not have the heart to go back to Mali; one night, he followed a star that shone less brightly than the others and wandered wherever the wind took him. He eventually settled in a village in Chad, where he ran an incense shop, then, thrown off course by the civil war ravaging the country, took refuge, first in Kenya, then in Tanzania, before waking up one morning from an alcohol-induced coma in a dive in Zimbabwe where a dancer named Souad set the nights alight with her swaying hips. Souad had Aminata’s magical eyes, her gingerbread complexion and her dizzying embraces. He loved her with all his might and invited her to follow him deep into the unexplored jungles where he would build for her mausoleums of emeralds, dreams by the cartload, dance floors carpeted in beautiful flowers and footlights directly powered by the sun. They actually went no further than the nearest mountain, where the shacks were no better than cowsheds and people died of starvation
and synthetic drugs; they soon became disillusioned with this absurd attempt at an idyll, and Souad, realising that happiness is impossible without money, didn’t hesitate for one second before dumping her handsome but penniless lover when a club owner promised her the moon if she agreed to go with him to Cape Verde. Mad with grief and hunger, Bruno resumed his peregrinations, entrusting his fate to the whims of the unconsoling roads that took him from one country to another for six years. He ended up in Djibouti, where he got by on odd jobs and adulterated beer, and then, offering his services to the Western media, started venturing from time to time to Somalia for the purposes of a TV item or a journalistic investigation, until the day he was kidnapped by bandits near Mogadishu along with a star of Italian television to whom he had acted as both interpreter and guide.