Men (14 page)

They chatted; she felt hot; the wine and the jetlag and something about Christmas had gone to her cheeks. She mentioned Clèves, her southern Christmases, the absence of snow, the occasional red wind that deposited sand on the windows, sand that her mother claimed came from the Sahara. But she'd lost him already. She knew him well
enough: when she spoke about herself, he preferred her stories that intersected with the big picture: what it meant to be Basque, for example; her experience of France, of a particular school, of secular education; the astonishing refusal by the French republic to use the word ‘race'. Although she was thinking about her son, she spoke about Brice, her West Indian lover, and how she had not noticed that he was black.

Kouhouesso shrugged. She was adamant. At the time, she had focused on other aspects of Brice. But talking Congo and Conrad non-stop, she was bound to end up with a flushed face.

He rubbed his eyes with the flat of his hands.

‘You saw the look the salesgirl gave me.' It was a statement, not a question.

‘Anyone opening bottles of Carissa without indicating whether they intended buying them would get a dirty look,' she pleaded.

‘What gave her the right to think that I wouldn't buy some?'

She let it go; it was useless; he did not want to listen. Exhaustion prowled round them like a coyote.

But she started in again: ‘Brice himself never spoke about his colour.'

He cut her off: ‘You're after a certificate. A certificate of non-racism. In fact, you're only sleeping with me as a way of obtaining it.'

She shook her head vigorously, like a horse, a wounded
horse. She muttered the word
paranoia.

He pressed his palms against his eyes, then opened them, calmer now. ‘All those charming salesgirls, they remind me of those American girls, rushing up to say hello and goodbye and pretending that they're colour blind. It's important to them that they pass the test. Listen. You're not that sort of petty person. But if you didn't notice Brice's colour, that just goes to show how
repressed
you are.

The bastard, he had undergone analysis, too. Jungian, he told her. In Palo Alto, return trip twice a week in his Mercedes Coupé.

‘I'm not repressing anything,' she protested.

‘I can't remember who said:
to be Jewish is to ask oneself what it means to be Jewish.
I ask myself what it means to be black. Yet everyone seems to know. When you're black, others see it all the time. And who is the other? It's me. The role I'm expected to play.'

She didn't want to talk about Jews. Or black people, for that matter. Or others. She wanted to speak about them and about the rest of their trip and about Lisbon or not Lisbon and about children.

They finished off the seafood. The sole arrived; he sent it back—overcooked. Another sole arrived—perfect. He asked her to help him remove the bones, since she was born a fisherman's granddaughter. She was touched that he remembered. He looked at her kindly. He knew just how brittle truth was. Whether they liked it or not,
whatever, whatever
, they inherited centuries of cut-off hands, of whippings and deportation. And he didn't believe that love was stronger than death; that was only good for Walt Disney. No, they couldn't love each other inside a bubble or under Mary Poppins' umbrella.

Love. That was the first time he had said the word. The first time he had conjugated the verb to love with them as the subject.

She paid the bill; she had received a big cheque from Warner, and they were on her turf. Besides, they never went out in Los Angeles.

I HAVE TWO LOVES

It was the Christmas–New Year break and yet he had a series of meetings, one that day at Studio Canal, and on the 31st with Why Not. And Vincent Cassel's name kept popping up, like magic. Cassel…Cassel…he was the man of the moment.

She looked up the train timetables to Clèves (and perhaps to Lisbon) and booked two first-class TGV tickets for the following day, a three-day getaway. Kouhouesso was in a delightful mood. Naked under ye olde beams, he sang, wiggling an imaginary belt of bananas around his waist:

He told her about Josephine Baker, about Katherine Durham, about Miriam Makeba. He showed her a Makeba concert on YouTube, in Stockholm in '66. She was wearing a leopard-skin sheath dress. ‘Isn't that playing the racists' game, wrapping yourself in an animal skin when you're black?' asked Solange. He explained to her how the leopard skin was a sign of royalty. The only female black stars at the time were American or Caribbean. He was waxing lyrical, shocked: how could she never have heard of Makeba? He put on ‘Pata Pata' and took her hand to dance. He wanted to make a popular film, flashy, sexy, full of music and adventure, not a pretentious film, not a French film. He had a meeting with Boris from Formosa, who had already produced films in Africa.

She was surprised he hadn't asked her to go with him: she knew Boris from Formosa well. But it would appear that Kouhouesso had quite a past in Paris, a whole life and plenty of connections.

It was evening, she was waiting for him at the studio, the lights twinkling on the Christmas tree. They were expected for dinner at Daniel and Lætitia's. The minutes were ticking
by. She had spent the afternoon with Rose, in a hurry to tell her about the
two you, two you
incident. ‘Oh, he's so funny!' Rose said. ‘You have to marry a man like that, my dear!' She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. Were her breasts too small? And what about her belly? Her figure still perfect, a young girl's hips. It was time she told him about her son.

She called Rose. She called her mother, and her father, and her son. She called Daniel and Lætitia, to tell them they would be late. She saw his name come up on her screen,
Kouhouesso
. She answered straight away: they should start without him, he was extremely busy, Cassel was in Paris and he might be able to catch him in Belleville.

There was a full moon. The rotating beam from the lighthouse of the Eiffel Tower made the grey roofs wobble. If she drew their love in circles, he would take up the whole centre of her being, and she would be on the periphery of his orbit, like a little moon whose tides he would not be affected by and which would never eclipse his Big Idea.

At 10.15 p.m., in the taxi, he reprimanded her for having waited for him. ‘People have dinner late in Paris,' she announced, as if it were some sort of local custom. He was excited, radiant. Cassel was keen to come on board. And he had some fresh ideas. Boris had sent him the transcript of a speech that Sarkozy had just made in Dakar. Kouhouesso
was reading bits out loud and laughing with the taxi driver, who turned out to be from Brazzaville. He was coming out with lines, interspersed with extracts, holus bolus, from the speech, all in the voice of a character, the president of the African colony.

The tragedy for Africa is that the African Man has not become part of History. The African peasant, who for thousands of years has lived according to the seasons, whose ideal life is one in harmony with nature, knows only the eternal cycle of time, in tune with the endless repetition of the same gestures and the same words. In this apprehension of the world, where everything is forever beginning again, there is no place for either human adventure or for the idea of progress.
‘Straight out of the nineteenth century,' Kouhouesso explained, continuing verbatim, merciless.
In this universe where nature rules, people avoid the anguish of History that torments modern man, but they remain static in the middle of an immutable order in which everything seems to be preordained. They can never launch into the future. It never occurs to them to leave behind repetition and to invent a new destiny for themselves. This is the very heart of the problem with Africa—with your permission, I speak as a friend of Africa.
‘No mention of mass graves. Not the lightest hint of insincerity. A discourse from before Leopold II's time.'
The problem with Africa is that it must stop repeating itself, stop forever looking back. It needs to free itself of the myth of the eternal return, realise that the golden age it is perpetually lamenting will never come, precisely because it has never existed. The problem with Africa is that it is living too much in a present that is nostalgic for the lost paradise of childhood.

He was cutting and pasting on his phone, in the taxi, all the way to Daniel and Lætitia's. The taxi driver didn't say another word; the guy was more or less in a state of shock. Was it possible, for once, to speak about
something else
? It was 10.51 p.m. She sent a last text to Daniel, asking for the door code. They rang the bell, Daniel opened, and she said, ‘Kouhouesso,' and Daniel said, ‘Oh. Nice to meet you.' She knew the ‘oh' was a faux pas.

In the taxi on the way back he was doing that thing of pressing his palms against his face, a gesture of anxiety, distraction and—she had learnt how to read him—despair.

Did she have to
alert
people? Of what? His height, all 190 centimetres? His spectacular beauty? His mass of hair? Was she the guilty party, for letting them be taken by surprise? For not having pronounced his tricky name earlier? For
being
with him?

‘I'm supposed to get to know them but they make no effort to find out where I'm from.'

They were driving along by the Bois de Boulogne. The Moldavian taxi driver was not joining in.

‘It's the opposite…They're curious, actually…They're afraid of asking you questions because they don't want to stigmatise you by asking you where you come from.'

‘I'm not afraid of being asked where I come from. They see Paris as the centre of the world. The three Guineas and
Ghana, Niger and Nigeria, Zambia and Zimbabwe, it's all the same to them. And the Battle of Algiers, if they happen to remember it, was in the middle of nowhere.'

He retreated into his morass of anger, into the violence of bloody-minded History, rock-solid History. He was inside a time past, a present in the shape of a geodesic curve, which—here, in Paris—was relevant only to him. But she was in the taxi, and she wanted to be with him, together in that irreconcilable time.

She turned towards the huge black trees and told him she had a son. Who had chosen to live with her father, with whom he got along well—better than with her mother—and to whom she had sort of entrusted her son, let's say, soon after he was born. Her own father, she means, given that the alleged father of her child had disappeared, moved out, as soon as her belly began to show. She'd had him very young, too late for an abortion and
whatever, whatever
(she liked the expression), there we are.

Kouhouesso knew.

Knew what? That she'd had at least one child. Had he been reading the gossip columns? Had he Googled her? No (he lowered his voice in front of the Moldavian taxi driver): it was her areolas. They were brown. ‘White women have pale areolas, unless they've given birth to a child.' She felt as if she were going back, in the taxi, not only to Clèves, but to the 1980s, when she heard and repeated all sorts of rubbish—that you can tell by looking at someone if they're
not a virgin anymore and that boys with long fingers have long dicks. ‘It's a hormonal fact,' Kouhouesso insisted. Who told him? How many white women had he slept with? Do black women's areolas go darker? Why was she always full of questions, and he wasn't?

THE PROBLEM WITH AFRICA

In the stairwell of the studio, he told her that he had a meeting the next morning. In a few hours' time. ‘But the train,' she exclaimed. He looked surprised. Centrifugal energy scattered the Christmas tree, her parents, her son: if he was staying, she was staying in Paris. No, come on, she should go and see her family; he needed to stay for the film. They argued on the landing. She rummaged in her bag for the keys. They had had too much to drink; she would set the alarm for tomorrow morning, as planned, and they would leave, catch their fucking TGV. The neighbour appeared, wearing a furious look and a dressing-gown—here we go, she thought, we're going to end up down at the station for disturbance of the peace and breaking whichever law. But the neighbour took one look at Kouhouesso and beat a retreat.
She couldn't find the keys. In a hushed voice, Kouhouesso was cursing: he had back-to-back meetings, he had to be
in top form.
The keys had slipped into the lining of her bag.