Men (15 page)

He sat at his laptop. The light annoyed her. When he finally came to bed, he lay still and fell asleep straightaway. She got up and felt in his jacket. His passport was there, the little navy-blue Canadian booklet with the Commonwealth coat of arms on the front. Stealing it would be a way of making sure he couldn't leave again.

His first and last names took up two whole lines. Kouhouesso Fulgence Modeste Brejnev Victory Nwokam-Martin. He must be the only person in the world with a name like that. He had told her that his father was a communist sympathiser, which explained some of his name. And he had obviously dropped the French bit.

He looked so young in the photo, shorter dreadlocks, a sleepy look.

She put the passport back in his jacket. It would be hard to think of anything more contemptible than stealing a black person's papers.

The alarm went off at six o'clock. They got dressed, made coffee. Kouhouesso grabbed the keys off the table and carried her suitcase to the Gare Montparnasse.

So, there was no point in her meeting him in Lisbon. He wasn't certain he'd get there. Let's be realistic: neither of them was very family-oriented. She had to exchange his return ticket to Los Angeles for an open return ticket; only
she could do it, as she was the one who had made the initial transaction. So, he would reimburse her the difference—in any case, the expense would be part of pre-production.

She sat in seat number fifteen in carriage number one. He carried her suitcase on board. When he stepped back onto the platform, she felt the train wobble and lean to one side. She focused on breathing to stay calm. He placed his hand flat against the window, his red palm, against which she placed hers, smaller, cold from the glass—did their fate lines and love lines meet up and point towards the same horizon of creased skin? She pressed her mouth to the glass, but he didn't. He smiled, shadows under his eyes; the condensation formed a crown around his head.

With the first lurch, the condensation evaporated. The outline of their hands remained, ghostly, and once it had faded she had the feeling that she would never see him again, that she should never return to her family, that she should stay with him, not relinquish him, but follow her desire, forever. The train tore her from him; France rose and fell in the window labelled security glass. After Poitiers, she sent him a text, once there was nothing more she could do: ‘I miss you.' He replied: ‘Me too.'

Whatever, whatever, the train rolled on, France was flat, green and watery, time was passing at 300 kilometres per hour and she fell asleep after the ‘Me too'. All of a sudden France had become forested. On the station platform, everyone was there: her father, her mother, her son. They had aged; her
son had got even fatter. ‘You came by yourself ?' She had prepared the ground for Kouhouesso; she had told them his name. All that, and now this. They were on their way to Clèves in the car, still another hour to go.

She started drinking straightaway, in front of the twinkling Christmas tree. Her father handed her a whisky: come on, a bit of festive spirit; he took it right out of his ex-wife's sideboard as if they had never been divorced. No news since the text message at Poitiers. Where was he? What was he doing? Her mother insisted on seeing what he looked like, this boyfriend-who-did-not-come. ‘He had a meeting with Vincent Cassel,' Solange boasted. She showed a photo of Kouhouesso. ‘Solange always comes up with real doozies,' said her mother, and her father pretended to be a cannibal: ‘I hooooope he's not going to eeeeeeat you.'

This man, who could not look at a black person without taking on a ghetto accent, this man, who—she usually forgot—was born in Dakar like Ségolène Royal and had spent the first four years of his life there, this man said, ‘Sarkozy is such an idiot' when they put on the news before dinner.

Her mother had cooked a fattened rooster. Solange's son was getting fatter and fatter, and, she had to admit, more and more ugly. He looked horribly like their old neighbour. ‘Do you remember Senegal, Dad?' It was the first time she had asked him. He could only remember one thing: the Harmattan, the dry wind from the Sahara: dust, his burning throat, blood dripping onto his little smock because he was
laughing with a friend and his chapped lips split,
crack
. ‘So, it's a type of foehn,' her mother said. ‘We have the same sort of wind here.'

She had brought her mother some Poison perfume and a signed photograph of George (her mother collected them). Some whisky for her father (bought duty free, along with the perfume). For her son, the very first iPhone and the latest iPod. And, for all three of them, she had filled in her customary vouchers: a return trip to Los Angeles, valid for the following year. Her father remembered the good old days when he got discount flights on Air Inter. All of a sudden, a text message: ‘Send me your address.' He must mean her address here, in Clèves. Was he planning on coming? Tomorrow? Text message silence. Her dinner was whisky.

She went upstairs while her mother was getting out the Yule log. The dwarf ice skaters on the icing reminded her of Christmas at Jessie's. Galaxies from here. In her room, the Playmobil pieces were in the same place she had left them a year ago. Her mother mustn't have opened the shutters since then; lit by a bulb in the ceiling, it was the bedroom of a girl who had disappeared. She pulled apart the Playmobil pieces; last Christmas she had piled them up, like an orgy, their little hooks grabbing imaginary genitals, girls and boys, boys and boys, girls and girls, along with the swimming pool, the campervan, and a horse. What was going on in her mind a year ago? There was really no point asking the question. She had no memory of herself. Back then, she was already
waiting for Kouhouesso, without knowing it, suffering less. She was still waiting for the future, just as she had been here in Clèves when she was fifteen, but back then the immediate future appeared in the form of a baby, surprise, surprise. A baby who, twenty years later, could barely speak. But that was understandable.

She would have liked to tell Kouhouesso her stories.
Pour her heart out.
In her childhood bedroom, under the light bulb with the rattan lampshade, she started whispering to him. She had had a child very young, like African girls did. In
Voici
magazine, just before she left for Hollywood, they had even written that her son was eighteen; it was all lies. She should have sued them. ‘Solange!' Her mother was calling from downstairs, the same sound as when she was young. She opened the shutters, and rolled a joint. The garden was in darkness; behind the cypress trees, she could see the lights on in the house where Rose's parents lived. ‘Solaaange!' The same summons. She carefully lined up all the Playmobil pieces along an imaginary pathway, then downed the whisky and knocked them into the campervan. She would find them again in the same spot in a year's time. No, she wouldn't come back. Or just with him. ‘Solaaange!' She fiddled with the Playmobil so that she wouldn't die. So that something would keep happening in that bedroom. Otherwise the Playmobil pieces would outlive her. Those things are indestructible. She left her glass, the size of a jacuzzi, in the middle of the toy swimming pool. She noticed
that Playmobil people were all white.

Her son hadn't moved from the couch. A plate with dwarves on it was lying on the floor. Something about those dwarves annoyed her. She was drunk. No, it was the joint. She raised her head and saw Kouhouesso. No, her father. She was an idiot. He was opening a bottle of his precious Saint-Émilion. The same attitude, shoulders back, neck held high, cigarette in his mouth. And the voice, that's what it was. The dictatorial solemnity. To pronounce whatever nonsense, as well. Older now, obviously. And white-haired. And bald: that was the funniest bit. But the same: same nose, same forehead, same slightly Chinese eyes.

The next morning—no, it was midday—the next day, she had no memory of her son leaving. Did her father drive him? Even though he was drunk? Her mother told her that a truck had come by, yes, a truck, not the postman, but a delivery man—with a FedEx package for her, signed for by the neighbour because the whole house was asleep. Her daughter obviously didn't do things the way everyone else did. The package made a rattling sound when she shook it.

It was a box of strange brownish-red fruit, the size of plums, as hard as walnuts. And there was a letter, or rather a scrawled note. It was the first time she'd seen his handwriting. ‘Some kola nuts from the Château-Rouge market.
Ciao ma belle
.'

What did that mean,
ciao ma belle
? If she imagined him saying it, it was tender, macho in a nice way. If she just read
it, for what it was, it was a farewell. Was that a metaphor, sending nuts? She was going mad. He had told her how much he was addicted to kolas as a child; she had never heard of them. Full of caffeine. In West Africa, everyone gives them as presents, as a sign of friendship, of welcome—when you're having drinks, whatever. She tried to peel them. She imagined his supple fingers stripping off the thick membrane. Fancy him remembering their conversation, paying that much attention—inside there was an ivory-coloured puzzle, pieces that fitted together perfectly, joined in order to be separated, shared. You could see it as a symbol, a thing cut in two; each person keeps a piece. It was surprisingly bitter for a friendship nut. And it made her fingers and teeth all red. She scrubbed them carefully.

She might as well head off on a bike ride along the river. A big sweater and old running pants. The cottonwool sky and the Nive River in winter, running high and silently beneath the bare trees, its surface grey-brown. Herons, moorhens, and an intrepid cormorant drying itself in an oak, far from the sea.

She daydreamed about his childhood, what he had told her about it, on the nights when she managed to get him to leave the computer. The intoxication of his words, yes—she had that feeling of being filled up with him, and then of being tense again, anxious to be with him properly, worried about having the right response, the right facial expression—to the point where all she could remember of his
stories of playing in Benue was his fear of the hippopotami, and the capture of a crocodile, like in a story from Kipling. Two childhoods from the same time but on two planets—no, the same planet but different coordinates. When she was in Grade 5, he was a courier for a Lebanese guy running a brothel. When she was watching
Children's Island
, he was going to the cinema for the first time:
The Miracles of Bernadette
, film reels carted around by missionaries and projected onto a length of printed fabric, the plainest they could find. The apparition of the Virgin in the cave at Lourdes was interrupted by little aeroplanes,
Super-Constellation
printed in copperplate, and the young paralytic started to walk with the slogan
Long Live Air-Africa Foreign Aid.

His open return ticket! She had to get on to it.

He had learned to read all by himself, not from the projections onto miraculous printed cloth but from the cases of beer the Lebanese guy was trafficking. Then an uncle had helped him to go to a Jesuit school in Douala. He had devoured their library. She, too, had learned to read by herself, with John and Betty books. What was the point? He had never shown any interest in her childhood—did he think he already knew about the childhood of white girls, the identical childhood as told in all the books and films? But what about
her
river,
her
summer, the surprising heat of temperate countries? And their dense forests? She would have censored her sexual exploits; she didn't feel he was ready to know what she was like as an adolescent,
the little wild girl, the young cannibal.

She thought about her father who, once he had got over the shock of meeting Kouhouesso, and had spouted his racist clichés as if out of politeness, would have settled into the serious issues: the rapport between men, the glass of red, the exclusion of women, male jokes. Everything would have gone smoothly. In fact, they would have got on brilliantly. Her father had lost his son. Kouhouesso had lost his father when he was a child. It would have been a perfect arrangement, clean and tidy like the strips of kola-nut skin. They had in common a silent world, a tough, seductive world where they stood alone, defeated or triumphant, but alone. And they both had a Big Idea; she was not sure exactly how to describe her father's—something to do with planes, blue sky, a spin-off business, diverse markets. He scorned chasing the yield: he was a man of the moment, taking the plunge, all in one go, heading into the wind. His Big Idea had not taken off, no doubt because he had not worked out exactly what it was. But she remembered the look in his eyes, the look into the distance, the look into which you wanted to disappear. What Kouhouesso saw, over there in the Congo, was the enormousness, the richness, the depth of horizon across the rivers. That was the problem with Africa, all that unfulfilled hope, and she could no longer live without it.

SOLANGE, BEST WISHES