Men (8 page)

They made love. He touched her and, all of a sudden, she was overcome again, transformed. He was busy,
très occupé
: she no longer heard his rolling ‘r's, she only heard the turbulence of what she didn't know. The emptiness of her own days. The frenzy of missing him.

He went into the bathroom. Then downstairs to the living room. She could hear him talking on the phone. Typing on a keyboard. She wondered what he was up to, all those hours, instead of being in bed next to her.

She joined him. He looked up from his computer. She said the first thing that popped into her head: ‘I'd really like to go to Africa.'

‘No, you wouldn't,' he replied, returning to the computer.

‘Yes,' she insisted, like a child. ‘I'd like to see'—she stopped herself from saying ‘the elephants'—‘the Victoria Falls, and the source of the Nile.'

He shut his computer. ‘
Africa
, as such, does not exist.'

He was so cool, the way he said amazing things like that. But she had a good memory, at least short-term, and felt a rising panic.

‘You said it yourself, the other evening,
Africa
, as such. The first night at my place, when you arrived so late. Yes, you did. You said
the green patch which constitutes the centre of Africa.
It was nice.'

He started laughing his weirdly shrill laugh, as if he'd borrowed it from another body.

‘Africa is an ethnological fiction. There are
many
Africas. Same thing for the colour black: it's an invention. Africans are not black, they are Bantu and Baka, Nilote and Mandinka, Khoikhoi and Swahili.'

Those syllables were so foreign to her that she couldn't manage to pick them out in the sentence. They sounded like one long word to her. And when she was to say to him later, ‘Africa is an ethnological fiction', he would once again come out with that weird laugh, his eyes blank, and that calm, almost weary, suppressed anger. Where did she get the idea that Africa didn't exist? She was as unlikely to risk saying ‘from you' as she was to say ‘I love you'.

Her brain tended to lose traction when she was with him. She didn't have a single comeback. She knew nothing.
She hadn't read a single book. She no longer knew how to read. As for him, this man she loved, about whom she was learning so much, his tastes, his past, his pleasures, his strength, his talent and lack of humour, whose moods she was beginning to dread, she knew nothing about him.

By means of a phenomenon to do with time and space, with history and locations, with violence, a phenomenon that had nothing magical about it but which she could see was distorting the space between them, the sentences he uttered turned into other sentences in her mouth. Word for word, the same sentences took on a meaning that she didn't want. An atrocious meaning. This unmagical phenomenon was making her wait for a man whose ancestors had been slaughtered and enslaved by her own ancestors. Exploitation and slaughter continued, so it seemed, yes, continued with the consent of some of
her people
, but without
her people
ever relinquishing their dominant status.

He didn't utter these complicated truths the way she did. He mocked her
lefty blinkered idealism.
He agreed that
Africa
was in a desperate state, that he had turned his back on his native land, but he simply wanted to try to tell a story without getting waylaid carrying on about sacks of rice.

And when she maintained that the rice, sometimes, despite the despotic corruption and the big business of charities, still reached a few starving mouths, he outlined the path that rice took, from the rice field where it is better treated than the person who harvests it, to the mouth of the
person who swallows it, each then separated by thousands of kilometres, by millions of containers then blocked at customs, by billions of dollars in arms and cheap rubbish: thousands and millions and billions which would not suffice to give any idea of the established, ongoing, calculated scale of the exploitation of human beings by human beings and of the planet by its
homo erectus
tenants.

She was born where she was born, into the skin that was her skin, surrounded by the words that surrounded her. She worked out that it wasn't exactly that white people don't have anything to say about black people (they never stopped, ever since she was a little girl they'd been going on about them); no, it was that white people don't have anything to say to black people about black people. They can't even repeat things.

At dawn, he would finally come to bed; they would make love again. He fell asleep straight away. And went out into the yellow afternoons, into the emptiness of the sun at its zenith.

HOLLYWOOD DOOWYLLOH

She wouldn't see him for ten days, then suddenly he'd turn up. Completely available for her. She started to think that he did exist after all, that he wouldn't walk out of her life just like that. In silence, she endured his interludes of silence. Put all her efforts into keeping quiet about her empty days—more heartbroken than empty.

They usually saw each other at her place. He liked the layout, upstairs, the living room; he could work at night without disturbing her; at Jessie's (that's how he referred to his place) the bed was in the middle of the loft. But at Jessie's, she argued, there was a pool, a really private pool, not like the one in her apartment block. She could go swimming naked. She liked that pool.

‘Come on, it's lovely,' she said, splashing around, her two
small breasts like floats. ‘A real little fish,' he said admiringly, before returning to the shade of the loft. She floated on her back, eyes open onto the Californian sun. Let herself be dazed by the glaring light and by the listless palms, in the blue oval of the world. She could stay there forever, him working inside, her floating outside, in a place of their own.

She started to dream about Christmas. She had planned to spend a few days in France; actually she already had her ticket, bought three months ahead of time, business class but a good deal. She didn't dare enquire about his plans. All at once, it seemed vulgar. Anyway, was it an important date for him? Was he even Catholic?

She gave him a spare key and introduced him to the concierge. The concierge laughed and said that they had already met, thanks. And an astounding thing happened: Kouhouesso said some outlandish syllables and the other guy responded with similar extravagant sounds, and she stood there, gaping, like a fish out of water.

It was
camfranglais.
‘How did you know you were from the same place?' (She said ‘place' the way you'd point out, with your finger, a white spot on an explorer's map.) He laughed and replied that she, too, recognised her tribe, the many Basque people in Los Angeles. When he laughed like that, she lost heart. She was overcome by the particular weariness that seemed to be connected with their relationship.

He went away. Unmitigated waiting. Oh, she knew about waiting: waiting between films, between takes. But
this waiting was different. She lived only for his approval. She waited for life to start up again.

She tried to remember what she had been like before, the way, when you're sick, you try to remember being healthy: a state of being that you take for granted. She had been ambitious; she had crossed the ocean. Her agent was one of the best; she had been in major films, bit parts, for sure, but major films nonetheless. She had a project with Floria, quite another thing from the role as the Intended. And Soderbergh was sniffing around. Yes, she had waited, she had believed in her talent, she had kept her figure and looked after her body. She remembered all the time she spent choosing vegetables at the health shop, making her own smoothies, and doing her yoga with her teacher. And what else? She probably read, she waited for the delivery of her lunch, calorie-calculated by her dietician, she took elocution lessons, she called friends. In the evening she tried on clothes, she went to screenings, to opening nights, to dinners, occasionally to TV screenings. Buying her Bel Air home had monopolised her time and she had to work a lot to keep up the mortgage repayments. And, during all that time, he was in the city. And she didn't know. What a surprise: she didn't miss him. Before meeting him, she was fine without him. She wasn't even aware of his magnetic field: she was completely, blissfully unaware of him.

From now on, the instant his car drove behind the Hotel Bel-Air, she stayed at the bay window as if a fish bowl
had dropped on top of her. She fluttered around, gasping for air. The instant at the bay window was the beginning of emptiness, if emptiness is the form of a distraught urge, wanting so much to follow him and banging into the glass. On the other side: life.

After two days, she reached rock bottom, under a white, clinical light. It couldn't have been clearer. She called; he didn't pick up. She was familiar with the humiliation of texting without a response. Yes, he replied. He always ended up replying, but so long afterwards that it was not a reply: it was an event, a surprise, the sensational return of the hero.

One day he booked two tickets for the Cindy Sherman exhibition at MOCA. So he liked contemporary art? Cindy Sherman made up as a clown, Cindy Sherman disguised as a witch—she remembered that at her place, in the study, he had left a small poster of Cindy Sherman. He must have wanted to please her.

‘What a fabulous actress,' he said. She was annoyed. Until now, he had not watched any of her films, except the first one. He had arrived one evening bursting with questions: how had Godard directed her? Did Godard give you the script beforehand? Did Godard make you redo scenes? Godard, Godard: she was eighteen when she'd acted for Jean-Luc; she didn't have a clue who the guy with the Swiss accent was. ‘He was always ducking off to play tennis.'
Kouhouesso burst out laughing.

Did he think she was good, at least? Did he think she was
so much
younger?

At what pace did he want to go round the exhibition? Would he prefer to talk or stay quiet? Be alone, or share his impressions? Cindy Sherman in despair next to a telephone. Cindy Sherman as obese depressive. Cindy Sherman as granny with doggy. Cindy Sherman as blue-stained corpse. The dreadful impression of seeing her future unfolding.

He had stayed back. An old lady was talking to him. Elegant, French perhaps. Her eyelids, a delicate bluish tone, were wide open, her gaze fixed on him. Her chin raised, every part of her thin little body tense, it was like fate, the future, something missing. Eventually she rewarded Solange with four words: ‘You like Cindy Sherman?' The subtext, factual and depressing, was ‘How lucky you are'.

Old women adored Kouhouesso. So did middle-aged women. And young women. Even little girls. Over the months to come, all those months swept along by the Big Idea, she would see countless little girls leap onto his knees, and countless old ladies, with the same naivety, force their way through crowds, come straight up to him, to ask if he liked contemporary art/the panpipe/rattan furniture/silkscreen painting.

Afterwards they went driving around Los Angeles. Driving
for the sake of driving, for the city, for the night. She liked his car, a Mercedes Coupé from the eighties. It smelled of him. Incense and tobacco. It was like huddling inside his embrace. Assimilated. Integrated. With a solid chassis, her seatbelt tight, and the luxury of letting her hair blow in the wind. And if they missed a turn, they would die together.

The voice of the GPS spoke for them. Beverly Glen Boulevard. Mulholland Drive. Ventura Freeway. Pronouncing names, names of places for which they had crossed the world. The ghosts for which they had emigrated. The city, way down there, glittering like a sky. And the letters of HOLLYWOOD in one direction, DOOWYLLOH in the other. The further they drove, the further they went back in time. The Observatory from
Rebel Without a Cause.
Silhouettes in the mist, palm trees from the fifties against a sky from the fifties. In the glow from the lighthouses, the mist rolled back over and over, the night welcomed them with every spin of their wheels. They were sinking into the Californian dream, and it was inexhaustible.