I HAVE NEVER WRITTEN ABOUT ELIAS ALMEIDAS LIFE. I noted down that fragment a couple of days ago in the plane, thinking I would read it out at the “African Life Stories” symposium. Each participating writer was due to present a brief personal testimony.
I quickly understood the extent to which I had been mistaken in my choice of text, so to speak. I had not been back to Africa for fifteen years…
Now at the reception where all the participants are gathered, I try to grasp in what way modes of thought and behavior have changed. Above all to grasp what it is that makes those few notes on Elias completely anachronistic to these people drinking, smiling at one another, kissing, exchanging cards. At the center of the room can be seen a nucleus formed by the dark suits of the “fat-cat Africans of the international conference circuit,” here to debate sustainable development. They are protected by a swirling mass of secretaries and press attachés. Two cameras from a television crew cut slowly through the crowd. I can make out the African writer who spoke this afternoon: in oracular tones he had extolled the ancestral magic, inaccessible to the European brain, the traditions and rites without which Africa would no longer be Africa, palaver trees, the sense of the sacred… He is chatting now to a colleague who, at the same roundtable discussion, made a slashing attack on the “nostalgia merchants,” the “gravediggers.” All those, in short, who did not believe, like him, that Africa was “surfing every new wave,” “swinging to the beat of modernity,” and even “grafting its black balls onto the anemic culture of Europe.” I can also see the lean and frail (“anemic”…) French novelist who, having made two trips to Senegal, claims to be an “adventurer into darkest Africa.” He is busy going into raptures over a group of traditional singers whose multicolored flowing robes smack of modern textile manufacture. Next to them a restless circle of rappers who will be performing this evening: smug little gigolo faces, the grimaces of spoiled children of political correctness, wearing outfits that flaunt the ugliness of a domesticated counterculture, reeking of cash. Finally, beside a score of drawings fixed to the wall, the couple I recognize: the plump white woman with beet-colored hair, one of the conference organizers, and her lover, the artist from Kinshasa. He is giving an interview to the journalists, pointing at his drawings; she watches him a little as if he were her own creation…
Is there such a great change, in fact? Over fifteen company in question has changed its name. The networks have reconstituted themselves. And only a handful of people would still be able to guess that the “upholder of the law” in question was Elias Almeida.
In fact, he has no other life than this ghostly presence in memories now grown confused, repressed, indecipherable. I remember hastily noting down the stories he told me, joining the dots between our various often chance encounters in Africa, in Europe, in the United States. But I can no longer conceive of any logic that might link these fragments, apart from the failure of all that he dreamed of, the loss of the one he loved.
Out on the terrace, I again locate Lupus, the constellation of the Wolf, in the dense black sky. Down below, on the hotels broad front steps, the crowd of guests is preparing to go and explore the night life of this African capital. The party goes on. The thick necks settle into grotesque limousines, the rank and file are assigned to broken-down minibuses. At a certain level of social clownishness, human stupidity almost inspires compassion. On the far side of the frontier, so close to this city, war rages, villages burn, adults kill children, other children become killers. The world against which Elias Almeida fought… The door onto the neighboring terrace opens; two figures hidden in the darkness settle into deck chairs. The fat white woman and her friend from Kinshasa embark on a verbose prelude to coitus.
This evening I decide to abandon the search for any rational order in the fragments of the past my memory has retained. The logic of history the causes of every war and every peace, universal morality – none of that has ever helped humanity to prevent a boot smashing a woman’s collarbone and children learning to kill. It was that night in Lunda Norte that made me wary of all those learned abstractions. Instead of history what I saw then was soldiers gripping a woman crouched on all fours, whom they had just raped and killed. One of them extracting the tiny granules of rough diamonds from her dead mouth. Now a child rigged up in a gas mask thrust his hideous head in at the window of our prison, threatening us with a weapon too heavy for his thin arms. Elias talked to him and learned that the boys father had been shot by President Neto’s regime, which was liquidating “factionalists.” Uneasily, I clung for a moment to the “historical logic” of the struggle against the enemies of the revolution. Finally I realized that what this lofty logic came down to was the gaze of that child high on cannabis, Eliass body, covered in infected wounds, and that woman’s distorted mouth, where a big breathless soldier’s fingers searched for ugly little pebbles. On his left cheek there was a scar in the form of a star. Next morning he was one of the few to escape the Cuban commandos. I had stopped with Elias close to a pit dug for the raped Zairean woman and the child with his face hidden by a gas mask. The earth was reddish brown, with a good smell of humid undergrowth. “The Kremlin will never forgive Neto for renewing contact with Mobutu… Elias murmured as if to himself. Five months later, in September 1979, Neto was dying in Moscow. The logic of history… Beside this grave for the Zairean woman and the child the notion of an archaeological dig passed through my mind as in a bad dream: what would the archaeologists of the distant future make of our civilization when they discovered this skeleton of a woman, with a few fragments of diamonds in its mouth, and that one of a masked child?
I hasten to write down what I know of Elias Almeida’s life. Without imposing any order on these fragments. Sometimes I am tempted by the novelistic play of coincidence: the poet Neto, having become president, kills thousands of men and then dies, as if in a funeral ode, by taking poison in a glass of champagne offered him by a pretty woman who, quite calmly, watches him die. An easy game, I know, these coincidences. Reality prefers failure, delay, the impossibility of communing in thought with a loved one. When he arrived in the Congo at the age of fifteen to join his father, there was an episode Elias had wanted to tell him about: a truck filled with Portuguese soldiers drives past, a burst of submachine gun fire, bullets ripping apart the foliage, birds scatter, others fall, and one limps in the dust, its wing broken. The soldiers’ laughter, the silence. The grandiose randomness of evil. Above all, Ellas wanted to tell his father about the circumstances of his mothers death. “Yes, I know I’ve been told about it,” his father said hurriedly. “Yes, that’s… how it is.”
Perhaps the true logic of life might be wholly contained in this unanswerable: “That’s how it is.”
2
Kinshasa. A black-and-white film.