Men (16 page)

Two and a half months without any news. Two and a half months. Without any direct news, at least: Ted and the executive producer had heard. He was location scouting in Africa. He had called from Luanda. He had visited studios in Lagos with his assistant and the director of photography. He had called from Kinshasa. The Congo was complicated. The Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC) and the Presidential Protection Division (DPP). The North—Kivu; and the South—Kasai. The Ugandan and Rwandan armies. And over in Tshikapa there was a full-on epidemic of Ebola. He had to retreat to Brazzaville. Even in Brazzaville, it was chaos. George's agent was fed up with it. She stayed tuned to the news like never before, at least she tried to—the news from over there.

Recently, he'd been moving around south of Cameroon, near the border with Guinea; he had sent a fax from a town called Kribi. She was following him on her mobile tracking app. At the end of the fax, which the producer showed her, he had added a line, in French, by hand: ‘Solange, best wishes.'

She was left with ‘best wishes' just like she had been left with his kola nuts: inside the skin, a bittersweet taste that was better than nothing.

She had received her contract: the Intended, three scenes with Cassel, interior day, location of shoot to be determined, $23,000. Everyone was making some sort of salary sacrifice (except Jessie, apparently). Africa had drained the budget, swallowed it up. On the other hand, given the cheap cost of local labour, fitting out a boat on the spot ended up being cheaper than a boat in the studio. As for the river, the location scouting had come up with the Ntem, the Dja or the Lobe. They still had their work cut out with the choppers. If they stayed in Cameroon, the tracks were supposed to be accessible in the dry season; he was scouting for caves that would be four-wheel-drive accessible. But it was borderline for George, whose window of availability was right when the rainy season began.

So that was the bulletin to the yellow hills of Hollywood, the news filtering through, bits and pieces, in the stress of preparations, among the cross-purposes, both obtuse and obvious, the contradictory, conflicting interests, all in an attempt to come up with a film.

Olga had been recruited: from the mourning dress to the crew's uniforms, from the raffia sarongs to the brass leggings, it was a real costume film. Natsumi had been promoted to costume props and was already at work on the ‘polished gold ring stuck in the lower lip', on the charms and amulets, the feathers, the ankle and wrist bracelets. The make-up artist was brushing up on scarification, tattoos and teeth filing.

It did her good to spend time with the girls during her long Los Angeles days. She worked on her mourning dress with Olga; they chose the material together on Pico Boulevard. A grey dimity cotton. Mother-of-pearl buttons. A double hem in pleated crepe, with a ruffle and a belt. Puff sleeves with lace cuffs. Period stockings. A real corset. Long underwear. What wasn't visible on the screen was also important—a corseted woman, an Intended stiffened by grief.

She had ended up acting in
ER
, three episodes in a row. The wife of a diplomat refuses to leave the hospital until she can determine the fate of her son. She starts living in the waiting room, in the corridors and the cafeteria, her YSL suit more and more crumpled, both noble and a nuisance, and a romance develops with Dr Barnett. Finally, an interesting role, and she could pay for her house in Bel Air. They were talking about a comeback for her in the next season.

Two and a half months. How long does it take for a relationship to break off ? For an affair to unravel? Love deteriorated. Idiotic love, which stops you from living.
Desire, which is a form of hell.
Ciao ma belle. Best wishes.
In the
ER
studios, in the arms of Dr Barnett—she was with him everywhere. Playing a woman rescued from a fire—a telemovie about Los Angeles firemen, a fee and a role beneath her capabilities; the director knew it and made the most of it. And she couldn't take refuge in the hollow of his shoulders. Rose was virtual on Skype; George was filming or on Lake Como; Olga was not really a confidante—and all the others, competing actors and actresses, were out for her blood. Lloyd, a kind and professional agent, treated her with long-suffering sympathy, as if all he could do now was wait for the end, the end of a terrible illness, one of those horrifying tropical contact diseases.

But the film was going to happen: George's contract was signed. Lloyd looked enigmatic, like the person who predicts the exact date of plagues—locusts, ulcers, the annihilation of herds of animals, the descent into darkness.

A year earlier, she had committed to the next Chabrol film. In a fit of sensible behaviour, she turned up in France on the scheduled date and it was
during this very film shoot
that Kouhouesso had reappeared in Los Angeles, and was looking for her—yes, looking for her, so it seems—and by the time she arranged to return, he was no longer taking calls; then he replied too late. Desynchronisation. No dates, no meeting places, no peace of mind. ‘It's hardly convenient': the last sentence she was left with, the last text from Kouhouesso. The next meeting, the only scheduled date,
the only commitment, was playing the Intended, towards the end of the shoot, in six months' time.

She couldn't wait that long.

Incredibly motionless. Unmoving. Immovable. Anchored. Watching films he has watched. Polanski and even Pollack. Listening to Leonard Cohen on a loop. Preparing her role as well. Only hearing conversations in which, through various convolutions, his name cropped up. Reading books he had read. Biographies of Conrad. The story ‘The Forest', by Robert Walser, in the last book she'd seen in his hands: she read and reread ‘The Forest', looking for clues, tracks, the map of Kouhouesso's brain, the shape of his thoughts, ‘incredible images of worlds where the forest went on forever…'

She looked for Kribi on Google Earth: the forest extends to the sea, unless it's the river, a thread of river for every thread of tree root…and the trees continue, beyond the Equator, through Gabon, through the Congo, and up to the north of Zambia.

Her stomach all scrambled, her mind on fire. A tight thread linked her to him, over there, in his forest. In which unimaginable, dense vegetation? Or in which coastal bar with which girl, which Favour, which Lola? She remembered that slightly old-fashioned novel from her childhood,
Future Times Three
, by Barjavel. The Traveller journeys through
time, but he has a little rip in his spacesuit. In his belly. He disembowels himself. His intestines stay in the past while his body returns to the present. Poor gutted chook. She was the traveller staying in one spot. And which seer could read her future, when her entrails were uncoiled in the labyrinth?

A MOMENT OF GLORY

She woke up over Mali, went back to sleep. She woke up over Kano for the breakfast tray. The earth was bright orange. The place names came up on the flight information screen. Above Jos she saw a river and a huge dark triangle—she couldn't tell whether it was a lake or a rocky mountain range. Then a series of parallel grey lines, one after the other. Then clouds. Suddenly Mount Cameroon, a red island in the white sea. Then they began the descent into Douala. She couldn't see anything, not the mangroves as promised in Google Earth, nor the river heading into the sea. They landed in clouds. Clouds of hot water. She took off her sweater. The clouds were in the city, in the airport. It smelled like fuel, sewers and sugar. Under the sign
If you are accosted by unauthorised taxi drivers, call this number
were thirty taxi drivers, all asking,
‘What's it like over there?' As if they were fans, she smiled and waved, aloof. She saw on the screen that there was a delay of six hours for her connecting flight to Yaoundé. The counter where she stood to make a complaint was so wet she thought someone had spilt a glass of water. ‘Wait here,' advised the stewardess in a Cameroon Airlines
boubou
, ‘and don't get in a taxi.' Was it dangerous? No, but with the traffic jams, she probably wouldn't make it back—the bridge was impassable at that time.

Nevertheless, she was not going to spend six hours here without seeing some of the city where he had spent his adolescence, the beach where he must have daydreamed, out on boats, cargo ships. As soon as she had left the shade of the airport, she coated herself in SPF50 sunscreen. She had studied the area on the satellite app and located the highway, as well as a path on the right to the sea. She dragged her hand luggage and the wheels made a noise on the worn-out asphalt. Lots of people were on foot like her, and, like her, dragging or pushing paraphernalia, but, unlike her, they were all black. Women with objects on their heads, including a Dell computer. Children with goats. Daring motorbike riders with three or four passengers who called out to her, ‘What do they do over there?' And cars tooted at her. There was no footpath. The way to the beach was there, off to the right, an ochre dirt path. A woman was selling mangoes. The beach? It was more like the port down there. Wasn't it lucky that all these people spoke
French. This was Kouhouesso's country, this was his birth-place—to hell with Canada.

Soon a wheel broke and anyway it was awkward dragging the little suitcase. She put her passport and her money in a pocket and hid the case under some leaves she would later learn were called ‘elephant ears'. Right then they looked to her more or less like the philodendrons in dentists' waiting rooms. The path was no longer yellow but brown, and soft; her sneakers subsided and she felt momentarily demoralised when her toes became immersed in black water. A plane took off right over her head; the air smelled of kerosene and flattened vegetables.

They reached the river she had seen on the satellite app—a sewer, unfortunately, lined with garbage, and foul-smelling. Giant ficus trees or other green things had grown into tangled creepers. You would need to be the size of a frog and have the same skills. The jungle must have grown back since the satellite image had been taken; she had heard about this phenomenon: in the same way objects become coated with limestone in petrified waterfalls, so tropical plants grow over abandoned bodies.

She still had four hours but she retraced her steps. Her suitcase was there, covered in bees and water droplets. At the edge of the highway, she bought a fizzy grapefruit drink. It was all they had on the little stall called Moments of Glory. They didn't have it in ‘lite'. Four hundred CFA francs: something like half a euro. Without change, she
left a five-hundred-franc note. Traffic jams. Heading to the airport, the traffic was fine. A taxi was two thousand francs (still no change). ‘You're on Cameroon Airlines?' The driver laughed. ‘Here we call them
Maybe Airways.
You haven't reached the end of your journey yet.'

In the haze, night fell in a colourless sky. There was a sea of sorts, flat and metallic, a distillery, lovers sitting on rocks. No beach, a coast without a seaside, a muddle of vegetable fibre and water. It was not clear where the land began and where the water ended or which bit was the river. At the Cameroon Airlines counter the stewardess told her that the flight had been brought forward: they were waiting for the white passenger. She had to slip through the luggage airlock, behind the counter, quickly, with ten other latecomers rushing along. The little green, orange and yellow plane, the colours of a parrot, was sitting on the runway; she and the others ran towards it.

She had handled things like a pro. She would tell Kouhouesso all about it. Tomorrow. Tomorrow she would see him. She mused on the fact that she had only thought about him occasionally: the exotic is a distraction.

THE STRAIGHT AND NARROW

Yaoundé, the Hilton, waiting for the car. The trip was ridiculous, but it was the assistant producer who had organised everything: as seen from Hollywood, Douala, Yaoundé and Kribi must have seemed like a game of Scrabble spread out on a table. She had already made enough of a fuss to come early; she kept her geographical reflections to herself.

Kouhouesso wasn't answering. Perhaps there was no network in the forest. The driver booked by the assistant producer was on his way from town. How did we manage before mobile phones? The four-wheel drive smelled of Landes pine fragrance; the air conditioner was on full. The town levelled out as the trees got taller, fewer and fewer houses and more and more trees, until there were only trees. You couldn't really call it a landscape. There was nothing
to see beyond the edge of the road, beyond that first row of trees, like a sort of huge hedge. The word ‘forest' itself was inadequate. This forest and the Landes forest were as different one from the other as, say, the Atlantic and Lake Como. It was a whole other concept, completely different raw materials: as much green as you could wish for, but fleshy, bulging. And the path was rough. There was no more asphalt; there were holes, bumps, ditches in the middle of the road. To her mind, this was not a road but a trench, a gorge. With plank bridges.