The African Equation (16 page)

‘Let’s go,’ Bruno said.

‘What about him?’

‘He won’t tell us anything and he won’t follow us.’

‘At least ask him. He might point us in the right direction.’

‘Monsieur Krausmann,’ Bruno cried irritably, ‘that man is just as dead as his family.’

We got back in the pick-up. Bruno noisily engaged the gear stick, did a U-turn and set off into the gathering night. Turning, I saw the old man standing outside the blazing hut like a condemned soul at the gates of hell.

We had chosen to bivouac near a cave.

The stale smell of the
regs
spread through the coolness of the evening. A jackal barked somewhere. The night had returned to relieve the day of its mirages and give the darkness back its emptiness. Bruno and I hadn’t exchanged a word for more than an hour. We were each too busy putting our thoughts in order. We had lit a fire in the shelter of the cave, eaten dried meat, emptied a few cans of food and drunk a bitter coffee that hurt my palate, then, exhausted by all the driving, we got ready to sleep.

Bruno threw a handful of sand over the fire to extinguish it and, unable to hold on any longer, went and urinated on a dune. Relieved, he spread a blanket over the ground, wiped the dust off his backside and lay down. I heard him moving about in search of a comfortable position. After a great deal of twisting and turning, he at last moaned with contentment, curled up and stopped moving. I knew
he wouldn’t close his eyes until he had relived his old wanderings and reviewed, one by one, the people who had meant something to him. Every night until now, he had told me an episode of his African adventures, his encounters and his setbacks, his lost loves, his little deaths and his redemptions … I hoped against hope that he wouldn’t make an exception tonight. I needed him to talk to me, to make me drunk on his tribulations, to tell me about the women he hadn’t been able to hold on to, the opportunities he hadn’t been able to seize. His inspired voice might perhaps allow me to shrug off the guilty conscience that was infiltrating the furthest corners of my mind. Bruno was extraordinarily gifted at giving any disaster its dignity and finding a meaning in the unlikeliest things.

‘You haven’t uttered a single woman’s name since we’ve known each other,’ he said all at once.

The wind began to whistle through the cave while the shadows cast their spell over the nocturnal beasts you sensed in the darkness, far from their lairs, raking over a hunting field as dry as a bone. All the same, I was pleased to hear his voice. I would have liked him to talk about himself, and about Africa – his romanticism and his optimism would have been good therapy for me – but he had chosen to focus on me and, not expecting it, I didn’t know what to say.

‘I can’t remember you ever having talked about women, Monsieur Krausmann. Is there someone in your life?’

‘I’m a widower,’ I said, hoping that he would change the subject.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said after a moment’s embarrassment. ‘Illness?’

‘An accident.’

‘A road accident?’

‘No.’

‘Work-related?’

‘In a way.’

He lifted himself on one elbow and looked at me, his cheek resting in the palm of his hand. ‘Curiosity is an African flaw,’ he admitted. ‘Nobody here knows where curiosity ends and impoliteness begins. But you’re not obliged to answer me.’

‘Actually, I don’t have anything very interesting to say about the subject,’ I assured him.

‘Then I shan’t insist.’

‘It’s more complicated than that.’

‘I assume it is …’

He lay back down, crossed his hands over his stomach, and gazed up at the myriad of stars in the sky.

‘I often think about Aminata,’ he said. ‘I wonder what’s become of her, if she’s happy with her cousin, if she has children, if she still remembers the two of us … She seemed happy with me. I made her laugh a lot. I think she liked me. Maybe not as a lover, but at least as a friend … I’d picked her out among the girls in her tribe. She was very beautiful. A bit on the plump side, but really attractive. Eyes that sparkled like diamonds. And a smell like a meadow in springtime … I asked for her hand without consulting her, and the elder gave his permission. It’s a common practice among the Azawed … She could have refused. Nobody would have forced her. The elder informed her of my intentions, and she didn’t object … I don’t understand why she left. I try to find excuses for her, but I can’t. I can’t remember ever depriving her of anything. I was no thunderbolt in bed, but I performed
my conjugal duties decently … Her cousin didn’t visit us often, and never alone or outside a religious or family celebration. Never once did I catch him and Aminata looking at each other in a suspicious way. Then suddenly, away they flew like turtle doves. Without any warning, without a word of explanation. I was devastated.’

‘Are you still angry with her?’

‘I’ve often been angry with myself, but never with her … There are things we can’t really explain. They come down on our heads like tiles off a roof, and that’s it … Do I miss her? I’m not sure. She was a good girl, a generous girl. I don’t have the feeling she betrayed me. She simply made a choice. Did she realise how much she was hurting me? Not for a second. Aminata didn’t have a bad thought in her head. She was sweet-natured, and quite innocent.’

‘You still love her.’

‘Mmm … I don’t think so.’

‘Oh, yes, you still love her.’

‘No, I assure you. It’s ancient history … Aminata, for me, remains a vague regret. A misunderstanding of the flesh … Anyway, that’s life: it only takes from us what it’s given us. Neither more nor less.’

In the sky, the stars were trying to outshine each other.

Now Bruno was waiting for me to speak, to tell him something. I think he really wanted to hear what I had to say. Just as he was turning his back on me to sleep, convinced that I wasn’t going to tell him any secrets, my voice anticipated my thoughts and I heard myself say, ‘She killed herself.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘My wife … She committed suicide.’

‘Oh, my God!’

He didn’t add another word.

I stared at the stars until they merged together. I was stiff and cold, barely aware of the hard stones I was lying on. When, hours later, Bruno started snoring, I turned on my side and, with wild eyes, waited patiently for dawn to restore to the day what night had stolen from it.

It took us four hours of hard driving over stones as sharp as shards of glass to go a mere seventy kilometres. The ground was terraced over an interminable succession of natural paving stones, all white-hot. The pick-up swayed over the cracks, jolting and settling in an unbearable clanking of old iron. The abrupt twists of the steering wheel were grinding my wrists to a pulp. I was on the brink of a nervous breakdown. I found it hard to believe that you could cross vast swathes of land without seeing any people or coming upon a village. That pirates should choose little-used roads was understandable, but that you could drive for hundreds of kilometres without glimpsing the merest hut with a semblance of life around it was driving me mad. Every time we thought we were on the verge of getting out of trouble, we found ourselves back at square one, in the middle of nowhere, facing the same inhospitable horizon and surrounded by hills crushed beneath an outrageously sovereign sun, which, after forcing the earth to its knees, was trying to subjugate the sky and its Olympians. Destiny was starting to wear the mask of farce: what was the point of going on, I wondered, since our fate was sealed? Seized with suicidal frustration,
I felt like pressing down hard on the accelerator, closing my eyes and tearing straight ahead at breakneck speed …

Bruno was in no better a state than me. He had stopped peering through his binoculars at our surroundings, or suggesting which way we should go. He sat in the passenger seat, his shoulder against the door, and dozed, even though disturbed by the discordant jolts of the truck. I was angry at him for not being more insistent with the old man the previous day. He might have pointed us in the right direction; he might even have agreed to come with us. But Bruno claimed to know Africans better than anybody, to know exactly when you should make demands on them and when not. I asked him how come, after three days’ driving, he had no idea where we were. After all, he claimed to have been a guide to Western journalists and scientific expeditions. He replied in a condescending tone that in this part of the world a guide was basically someone who kept strictly to the routes he knew by heart, since you just had to deviate one millimetre from the beaten track to put yourself in as much danger as any fool …

We decided to rest in the shade of a monumental acacia whose branches were adorned with offerings to marabouts and ancestors: scarves, rag dolls, pieces of jewellery, combs tangled with hair, tiny terracotta pots at the bottom of which animal blood had dried. The area was strewn with dromedary droppings and traces of bivouacs. Near the revered tree, Bruno discovered a well without a coping, along with a rudimentary drinking trough. We washed ourselves from head to foot, cleaned our clothes and spread them over the burning stones to dry. Bruno dug out a pair of boxer shorts for me from the
bottom of the duffle bag, but they were too big for me; I made do with a pair of Y-fronts and a vest, both still in their cellophane. I had lost a lot of weight. My body was covered in spots, some turning grey; I had a boil under my right armpit, with two others in my groin; my thighs had deep furrows in them and there was a thick whitish crust on my knees. Bruno preferred to stay naked. With his unkempt beard and reptilian hair, he looked like a guru. He performed a series of gymnastic moves, opened his arms wide and crossed them, crouched down and stood up again, twisted his neck so that the vertebrae cracked, then, in order to draw a smile from me, he turned his back to me and bent over to touch his toes, thus offering me the hairy indentation of his backside, which he began to wiggle in a coarse manner. He continued this clownish exhibition until I burst out laughing. Pleased with his success, he waved his arms about in a burlesque choreography and, now an angry witch doctor, now a ballerina, went from a mystic dance to a classical ballet with staggering ease. Dazzled by his sense of improvisation and his comic gifts, which I would never have suspected he possessed, I laughed until the tears ran down my face, and it was as if I were expelling all the filth polluting my body and mind.

We ate in the shade of the acacia and slept, cradled by the cool breeze.

When I woke up, I found Bruno absorbed in the book by Joma Baba-Sy. When he closed it, he made an admiring pout. He lingered over the photo on the cover and admitted to me that he couldn’t believe a mass of rage and bestiality like Joma could harbour so much sensitivity … He reopened the book, skipped several pages, stopped at a particular poem and read it out loud:

‘Incredible, isn’t it?’

I shrugged my shoulders.

Bruno put the book down, rummaged in the satchel, and pulled out a wedding photograph. It showed a party taking place on a large patio hung with Chinese lanterns. Surrounded by tipsy guests, Joma posed solemnly beside his bride. Curiously, even though for two days and two nights I had been trying to shake off the crime I had committed, I found myself wanting to know a little more about my victim. Deep inside, I knew the idea was senseless, but driven by a morbid curiosity, like a murderer returning to
the scene of his crime, I took the photograph from Bruno. The low quality of the image made it hard to distinguish much about Joma, who was barely recognisable among the guests. We then turned to a number of articles cut out of a poorly produced local newspaper. The texts were full of misprints; all of them praised in fulsome style ‘the force of an exceptional poet’. A somewhat more sober article included an interview in which Joma told how he had gone from being a penniless village tailor to becoming a bard. In the same interview, he expressed the opinion that ‘with the Word we can overcome adversity’. In another cutting, there was a photograph, stuck between a crossword puzzle and a game of spot the difference, showing Joma receiving a trophy from the hands of an African lady in traditional costume, with a few lines by way of caption relating the ceremony. Next, we came across a small item reporting a bomb attack which had left two children wounded and a woman dead, the woman being ‘the young wife of the poet Joma Baba-Sy who received the Léopold Senghor Prize two weeks ago’. This last sentence was underlined in red. The article had been carefully preserved in a plastic wallet.

‘Life is strange,’ Bruno sighed, putting things back in the satchel.

I went to look for my clothes.

We loaded up the pick-up. Bruno wasn’t too keen on resuming the journey. He looked at the drinking trough, the marabout tree, the offerings hanging from the branches, the tranquillity of the place, and suggested we spend the night here, arguing that since it was a sacred site, there was no risk of being attacked and that with a little bit of luck someone might turn up. The dromedary droppings
weren’t fresh, but the well looked as if it was often used. I would have been happy to agree to his suggestion, and was about to do so when we heard a whistling sound. ‘What’s that?’ I asked. Bruno frowned. A quick glance around revealed nothing suspicious. Immediately, there was a swirl of dust close to us, followed by another soon after. Bruno shoved me inside the cab, started the engine, engaged the gear stick and set off at top speed. The pickup’s rear window exploded. ‘Get down!’ Bruno screamed at me as he accelerated. There was a sharp noise, and the windscreen cracked into a spider’s web pattern. Somebody was shooting at us! The pick-up wove in and out among the stones and the wild grass to avoid the bullets, leapfrogged on the uneven track, jumped several metres into the air, before falling again in a din of mistreated metal. The engine was being pushed to its limit. In our wild flight, we crashed straight into something; the pick-up skidded, almost overturned, but somehow righted itself. The impact had been unusually violent, and my head had hit the ceiling light. Now I clung to my seat and the dashboard. After a dizzying race, Bruno realised that the steering was going awry. A strange noise, like the grinding of defective gears, was coming from the right-hand side of the bonnet and getting louder with every bend. Stopping was out of the question. We had to get out of the sniper’s range as quickly as possible. A few kilometres further on, the vehicle became uncontrollable. The wheel that had been hit was becoming gradually looser, making it virtually impossible to steer. Bruno parked on the side of the track to assess the damage. He peered under the bonnet while I kept a lookout, my legs trembling and my heart pounding
fit to burst. Apart from the dust that was settling in our wake, there was no threat in sight. Bruno joined me. His downcast expression told me that the damage was catastrophic. He informed me that the ball joint and the shock absorber had taken a major hit and that the shaft drive wouldn’t last much longer. Not having the right tools or any spare parts to do an emergency repair, we got back in the cab and set off again, very slowly, and very aware of how much the vehicle was swaying. Bruno drove extremely cautiously, concentrating on the road, dodging the stones and ruts as if he were carrying nitroglycerine. Sweat dripped from his chin. We managed to cross a river bed but when we reached the opposite embankment the vehicle suddenly tipped forward and stopped. There was nothing more we could do. The shaft drive had broken and the wheel had come away from its stump … We were stuck.

Cursing, I climbed a hillock. When I reached the top, my heart almost failed: in front of us stretched the same labyrinth that had been driving us mad for days. My legs gave way and I fell to the ground. My elbows planted on my knees, my face in my hands, I looked left and right, and saw nothing but perdition. Something told me that the desert was aware of our desperate state and that when it had squeezed the last drop out of us, it would close its fist over us and reduce us to dust which the winds would then disperse among the mirages.

‘What are you looking at?’ Bruno asked, flopping to the ground beside me.

I pointed to the dereliction around us. ‘I’m looking at the loneliest place on earth.’

‘There are two of us,’ he said. ‘And we’re still alive. All is not lost. We just have to take the drama out of the situation.’

‘I don’t have the formula for doing that.’

‘The formula is in here,’ he said, tapping with his finger on my temple.

His gesture annoyed me.

Bruno let his gaze wander over the rocky ridges in the distance, then picked up a stone and weighed it in his hand. ‘Have you ever been face-to-face with your own death, Monsieur Krausmann?’

I didn’t reply, considering the question ridiculous and inappropriate.

‘The loneliest place on earth,’ he went on, ‘is when you’re facing a firing squad. You don’t know what it’s like. It’s then that you realise how long eternity lasts. It lasts the space of time between two commands: “Aim!” and “Fire!” What came before and what will come after don’t matter.’

‘You’re not going to tell me that happened to you.’

‘But it did. I was twenty-four. With a rucksack on my back and a compass in my hand, I thought I was Monod. I’d crossed the Tassili, the Hoggar, the Tanezrouft, the Ténéré. Not even Rimbaud travelled as much as I did. It was a wonderful time. Nothing like the mess things are in now.’

He put the stone down and let his memories flood back.

‘What happened?’

He smiled and opened his eyes wide. ‘A military patrol picked me up on the shores of Lake Chad. The sergeant immediately accused me of spying. That’s the mindset around here. If you aren’t a hostage, you’re either a mercenary or a spy. After some pretty rough questioning,
I was court-martialled and sentenced to death the same day I was arrested. The trial was held in the refectory, surrounded by soldiers having their meal and the clatter of knives and forks. The judges were a sergeant and two corporals. I found the procedure a bit hasty and the solemnity of the court somewhat grotesque, but I was young, and in Africa the grotesque is commonplace.’

He started tracing little circles in the sand with a distracted finger. His face became blank.