Men (12 page)

The sea rose, indifferent. High tides, waves breaking right onto the terrace; the noise was deafening under the stilts. He stayed inside, the shutters closed, in the dark, the sun outside exploding for no one at all.

Her country of choice was not the Congo but this beach, now so familiar, so Basque, with Los Angeles as a hazy background. She knew that at any moment she could join him: he was there, waiting, immobilised, in the house on stilts.

She chatted with the surfers. Most of them drove for hours to come searching for waves, sets not found anywhere else in the world. Then they stood on the dunes to get dry, among the empty cans and other bodies. Upright, like cormorants, gazing out at the waves they'd just left. She had already seen that look on some of the surfers in Biarritz:
on adults, the ones whose lives were consumed by surfing. And she said to herself: perhaps that's what it is. Perhaps that's what I recognise. That burnt-out look, fixed eyes, blazing, obsessed by the horizon, in this impossible man, Kouhouesso, my love.

Only once did she manage to drag him onto the sand, at sunset, after the storyboard guy had left and after a few glasses of wine. She was tanned, happy. Life would run its course right here, far from the Congo. She was wearing her white dress, the one with the straps and the crocheted bodice, and her big straw hat and sun-bleached braids. He was smiling, like magic, out of the blue. Yes, she was funny, and lively, and irresistible, and he was in love—he had to be, or else? Or else, why was he here?

He stopped at the edge of the water, dipped his toes in. ‘Come on!' she said, and pulled off her dress—bikini, I am Raquel Welch—and dived straight into the waves with a powerful freestyle. He raised his phone and took a photo of her: smile.

They would soon be celebrating six months together (he was amazed when she told him). And she had never managed to get him into the water, not the jacuzzi, not the pool, and definitely not the sea. He told her that salt damaged dreadlocks. He washed them once a week, ceremoniously, then spent a long time drying them: he worried
about mould. Afterwards, the bathroom smelled of incense. He had travelled in India and Nepal; he must have brought back some kind of herbal ointment, or from God knows what African shop.

The storyboard draughtsman delivered the four last panels: windows, daytime, a side table, the town. A pale face, a black corseted dress, a tight bun: it was her. Bathed in an unearthly glow. The precise curve of her body, her small breasts, her long nose, high cheekbones and forehead: her exactly. She had the role. That's how she found out.

Christmas was in three days. The only information she'd managed to glean from Kouhouesso was that on the day of her Air France flight he had a meeting with an assistant producer.

That morning she woke early. The smooth sea reflected the green sky, and the muzzles of two sea lions were bobbing in the wake of the waves. Without the sea lions it would have been difficult to know where exactly the sea was—or if the sky were not filling up the entire Pacific Ocean. She made herself a coffee on the terrace, sent a few text messages over there, to France. Then she rolled herself a joint and put on her sunglasses, staring eastwards, directly at the sun. Every minute, a plane took off from LAX, at the spot where the coast was flat, in the heart of the city. Up high they left long white streaks, lines of cocaine gradually crisscrossing
the space in every direction. At 11.20 a.m., she watched a minuscule plane rising slowly, over there, without a sound; she knew that plane leaving without her was the 11.20 a.m. for Paris CDG, immediately followed by another plane, then another, none of which she was in, as though minute by minute she was being shot into the sky, virtually, while still clinging here like a mollusc on the stilts of the house.

Kouhouesso didn't move all day.

The good news was that Oprah Winfrey might be interested. Production was starting up again.

ANGOLA IS A PARTY

The evening they returned to Topanga Canyon, they found the house completely lit up, thirty cars parked out the front, a gigantic pine tree erected on the edge of the swimming pool. Jessie, bare-chested, white beard and red boxer shorts, was greeting guests and handing out little bowls full of some sort of snow in which adorable dwarf pines were planted. The dwarf pines were made out of chocolate and the powder snow was intended for snorting. It took a few moments to decipher Alma's outfit: a bra made out of grey fur, Playboy Bunny hotpants, Nubuck leather Timberland boots, and a leather muzzle with reins that Jessie cracked on her naked back, for fun. Perhaps the most disturbing thing was the strange headdress tied to her head: gold antlers, a Spike TV trophy for the prize she had just received: ‘Most
Promising Sexy TV Star—Men's Choice.'

‘She's wearing a reindeer costume,' Jessie explained, as if it was obvious. He pretended to straddle her. ‘Father Christmas is going down your chimney, my darling. He has a big present for you.'

They fled upstairs. Fortunately no one was hanging out in the loft, but the music from below was too loud. And it was freezing up there: so that he could have a roaring fire in the fireplace, Jessie had turned the air conditioning on full bore all over the house.

They headed back to her place. Kouhouesso was silent, as he was every time he was annoyed by reality. She tried to stay quiet too, but she couldn't. They had to face facts: when Jessie was there, it was tricky living together. The practical solution was for Kouhouesso to move in with her for good.

In the meantime, she placed two plane tickets for Paris under their Christmas tree. She had bought two more tickets, full-price business. They wouldn't get there until the 26th. But now that her son was older, Christmas Day itself didn't matter as much.

He gave her a peck on the lips. But he wasn't sure: he really had to find time, before the shoot, to go and see his children.

In Luanda.

In Angola.

She had assumed he was born in Cameroon.

Twins. Who lived with their mother. Their stepfather was from Rio.

She made a quick adjustment to the world-map app in her head, skipping from one latitude to the next, leaving a large, blurry area over Angola. She pictured child soldiers, wearing dirty, oversized T-shirts, children from shanty towns, glue-sniffers, and prostitutes.

Hollywood–Angola, Los Angeles–Luanda, LAX–LAD: there was a plane every day. Direct. British Airways.

But, now that he thought of it, the twins would be in Lisbon for New Year. Their mother was Portuguese. And Lisbon was right next to Paris.

Paris–Lisbon!

No distance at all, she enthused, championing Europe's modest size, extolling the speed of the TGV, the quality of the freeways, the Maastricht Treaty and budget airfares. Whereas Luanda was so far away.

And so expensive, added Kouhouesso. There was nowhere under four hundred dollars a night. Compared with Rio, which was half the price, and half the distance.

She wanted to say that he wouldn't be in a hotel in Paris, but everything was moving too fast to get hung up on the geography.

The mother divided her time between Rio, Luanda and Lisbon, the three ports in Lusitanian waters. As for the twins, they lived in the Miami, one of the nightclubs frequented by the Luanda jetset, on a peninsula, right on the water.

A girl and a boy on a Facebook page, out-of-this-world good-looking, illuminated in red, green, blue, silver, spangled by glitter balls, fireworks and fairy lights—they seemed to be in their habitat. Spin the globe as fast as you can: that's the colour of the future. Luanda is a party. Rio is finished. Lisbon is dead. The twins both fell in love for the first time in Luanda: that's the problem with adolescents, according to Kouhouesso: they get
settled
, much more than their parents do.

With all these images piling up inside her skull, she couldn't think of anything else to say, other than how beautiful his children were.
There's no such thing as mixed race
: she knew what happened with sentences like that, sentences he uttered. They led to another image, a baby who might have been theirs, Kouhouesso and Solange, Solange and Kouhouesso.

She really should tell him about her son. But she still had two more days.

‘THE STAKE OF DEATH HAS BEEN PLANTED', ‘WE HAVE THROWN AWAY THE HOE' AND ‘THERE ARE NO MORE NAMES LEFT'

Kouhouesso had seen Oprah. And Oprah had seen Kouhouesso: she agreed to be a co-producer. The film shoot would be on a boat, following the chronology of the novel: leaving from the Thames in a schooner, navigating the coast of West Africa, then upriver in a little steamboat. If not in the Congo—let's be reasonable—then in Gabon or in southern Cameroon: better logistics, fewer heavy weapons. Kouhouesso pulled a face, but Canal Plus was coming on board. And the screenplay had been sent to Vincent Cassel.

‘It's going to be shot in the Congo,' he said to her. Yes, to her. She focused less on the hubris of his assertion than on
the fact that he trusted her and was confiding in her. They were smoking a joint in bed, their bags packed for Paris. The flight was the next day.
Kouhouesso in the Congo
. She smiled. A good antidote to Tintin. Kouhouesso had never set foot in the Congo, any more than she had. For him, too, it was the unknown. For him, too, it was
Africa
: jungle, untouched, inaccessible. For both of them: no asphalt, no guardrails. Being Kouhouesso—being black—did not immunise him against anything.

From what she had gleaned, he was born in a relatively arid area of Cameroon (she'd only recently learnt that there were
arid
areas in Cameroon). He was about two when he ran away from the concession. His mother found him, dead, stiff and dried out like a log of wood. She took him to the medicine woman, but the medicine woman said she needed to take him to the witch. He was probably under a spell. There was only one witch in the valley and she did nothing for less than a goat. The father was violently opposed to the expense and to resorting to such extremes; he was a rational man and didn't want to hear anything about spirits, from either the natives or anyone else. But Kouhouesso was still dead and looking more and more like a log of Assemela hardwood; he was getting harder and blacker before their eyes, turning into charcoal. When there was nothing but powder left of him, his mother sneaked away from the other wives, taking the family's only goat with her.

While his mother set off towards the hollow tree where
the witch lived, with him dead and the goat on a leash, a never-ending stream of car headlights disappeared behind the Hotel Bel-Air. She asked him if it was a traditional folk tale. Traditional of what? He laughed. Of the suffering of mothers, perhaps, she thought. She could picture her own mother lying down between her two aluminium bedside tables from the 1970s. But Kouhouesso's childhood seemed to be from an earlier time, as far in the past as she and he were in the future, bathed in the cone of light from the Bel Air cars. Cars that were not going to take him away, and into which he would not disappear—him, speaking now, alive and well, in her arms.

The witch took the goat and studied what was left of the dead child. She said that the child's name was Kouhouesso, that he had several other names but Kouhouesso was his real name. That he was an only child, but not the first. That his mother had had other children before him.

All that was true, the absolute truth. The witch said he was one of the children from a series of abikus. An abiku is a spirit child who lodges itself in the belly of women and is born in order to die, over and over again. As long as the spirit child is not recognised for what it is—an evil, tormenting and unrelenting creature—he will come back to blight hopes and promises.

The witch said that she would keep the child for as long as was necessary, but that it cost more for abikus: they would need to bring another goat. Otherwise, although the
child would live, it would stay crouching under the roots, waiting to be reborn as an abiku
.

So Kouhouesso spent days and nights in the hollow tree with the witch. When his mother returned, he was well and truly alive: he had got some colour back, and had even put on weight. Two fresh cuts, little triangles, were forming scars on his forehead. The witch told them to coat the scars with soot. Scarification was part of the treatment.