He had high hopes of the first battle he was due to take part in. Ernesto had announced an assault on a base held by Belgian mercenaries. Ellas pictured himself bringing up ammunition to the fighters, assisting soldiers riddled with bullet wounds, strolling around after the battle with a red-stained bandage about his brow… But, crucially, he would come face-to-face with the white imperialists taken prisoner by the rebels.
When it was all over, there was not a single “Belgian mercenary” among the vanquished. A vast number of wounded and dead, all black. “Africans killed by other Africans!” Elias said to himself in a hard voice, which did not belong to him and which frightened him. To silence it, he hastened to assist the nurses, carried water, walked through the conquered village looking for survivors. The injuries did not resemble the noble wounds he had pictured being delicately dressed by women’s hands. This was flesh, hideously torn to pieces by fragments from grenades, intestines spilling out from torn bellies, skulls smashed open to expose their bloody contents. Moving on from the carnage, Elias found himself in a yard and saw someone he at first took to be a wounded man shuddering with spasms of pain. The light was fading, and it took him a moment to understand: at the edge of a pond a soldier was having his way with a woman, who lay with her face against the earth. He was thrashing about on top of her and, to stop her from crying out, pressing her head into the slime of the pool. In the center of one of the nearby huts Elias discovered a little girl who had managed to squeeze her body underneath a tiny table like a contortionist. She was shaking so much, the furniture looked alive. A boy older than her had hidden himself behind a pile of branches. This screen could be seen through, but the youth, crazed with fear, must have thought he was rendered invisible by the narrow basket he had put over his head. Through the wickerwork Elias could see motionless, staring eyes.
That night the soldiers celebrated their victory. To begin with they listened to Ernesto, but very soon the mood changed. Catcalls rang out, someone fired in the air, bottles of drink circulated. In an hours time half the huts were on fire and the ruddy glow of the flames picked out in the darkness now a drinkers tilted head, now a brawl, sometimes the excited stampeding of half-naked men around a woman who was being raped.
Ernesto, Jacqueline, and Eliass father had taken refuge in the villages “command post,” all trying to hide their fear in their own way Ernesto was writing notes; his father was studying a large-scale map; Jacqueline was pretending to read. But each of them, Elias could see, had a gun within reach; they all knew that from one minute to the next the savagery that was being unleashed outside could engulf them. At one moment a shill cry, a woman’s voice, cut through the uproar. The besieged occupants of the “command post” looked up. Eliass eyes met his fathers. “Ill go,” said his father. But Jacqueline leaped up and clung to him, exclaiming, “No. You’re not going out! They’re coming for us. They’re going to kill us all. They’ll cut our throats. They’re savages!” Ernesto sat there, holding his head in his hands, his face distraught.
During the night the fire died down, and as if in response to the calming of the flames, the noise of the orgy gradually fell quiet. Elias opened the door. In the sky, star-studded beauty. From the earth, an acrid stench, a mixture of blood, vomit, charred meat, sweat, sperm…
He could not sleep, thinking about the error Ernesto had committed. The Cuban had promised these men a prudent, logical, patiently constructed happiness – the dream of an ideal society, communism. But they, for their part, knew a much more immediate and violent ecstasy: this night, after a battle, the exaltation of drink and drugs, the absolute freedom they had to satisfy any desire whatsoever, to thrust open any door whatever, to kill whomever they pleased, to choose the woman who attracted them, to take her without having to beg for her favors, to slay her with the advent of postcoital disgust. To drink, to rest, to start again. Absolute freedom, yes, superhuman powers. For the duration of a night they could feel themselves to be the equals of the gods. And there was this poor Cuban lecturing them about respect for revolutionary order and the need to become industrious socialists…
Deep down inside himself Elias sensed the presence of someone (someone ignoble!) who was ready to prove the soldiers right. Not that he would have wished to approve of their type of happiness. But here in the depths of a jungle where these young men had daily brushes with death, this banquet of flesh and violence had a somber justification. A simple submachine gun made all-powerful beings of these peasants, offering in a few nights of orgy all that an ordinary man can scarcely hope for from a whole lifetime.
It was terrifying to tell himself that these soldiers might be right. And to feel he was one of them.
Elias walked a little way through the throng of bodies numbed with drunkenness and drugs, and suddenly remembered that it was his birthday. He was sixteen. He had the impression of a long vista opening up before him, a vortex of encounters, faces, new things to explore, to taste, to conquer. All the infinite richness of human life…
A shadow stirred in the darkness; he stepped back, peered intently. A drunken woman, almost naked, was extricating herself from the embrace of a sleeping man. She was seated now, her eyes glinting in the moonlight, her body rendered blue by its phosphorescence. Her mouth was gasping for air; her broad thighs formed a dark, hollow triangle… Elias told himself it would be so easy to copy the soldiers, to crouch down, to thrust the woman onto her back, to plunge into that dark triangle.
The infinite richness of life… As he moved away, he reflected that this one night alone concentrated within it all that man desires, fears, hopes for, detests. There was the victors’ jubilation, and the despair of the vanquished. Ernesto’s vibrant homily, and the soldiers’ abusive mockery. Dead flesh, and bodies stirred with pleasure. The abundance of food, and the famine that from tomorrow would torment the survivors of this ravaged village. There was the almost godlike freedom the soldiers took upon themselves in killing, raping, and torturing, and the subjection of those who, reduced to a mass of pain, were the victims of this freedom. There was the sky above and, doubtless, a god to whom so many suppliant voices were raised, but who remained silent, did not intervene, allowed a child to turn itself into a ball of flesh, wedged between the legs of a little table.
The whole world was condensed into that night. And yet something was missing. The essential thing was missing. Elias felt this lack like a gentle pressure on his eyelids: those evenings long ago, the threshold of their house in Dondo and his mother still, silent, as he hid his face in the crook of her arm. Life throbbed softly beneath the smooth curve of that arm… The essential thing was this love, and that was what was missing from this world. Each of the women who had just been raped and killed had carried this universe of tenderness and peace in the crook of her arm. Each of the men killing or being killed had been that child pressing his face against his mothers arm. All that was needed was to say this, to get other people to understand this.
It was thanks to this train of thought, he later realized, that he did not go out of his mind during that murderous night.
The following morning the fighter in his new khaki uniform who had demanded payment of his wages from Ernesto a week earlier reported to the “command post.” “I’ve had several of the arsonists shot, Commandante,” he announced. “Now’s the time to talk to the troops. Raise their political consciousness… Sober them up, while you’re at it.” He said it with the same mocking disdain, the assurance of one who knows himself to be master of the situation. I’ve witnessed the birth of a warlord, Elias would one day reflect, when that race of killers was taking possession of the continent.