A FAIR, MILKY SKIN, THICK, FLESHY THIGHS: a woman hitches up her tight-fitting skirt and settles herself into a large luxury car. Glaring lights stand out in the night, as always in Africa. The woman’s excessively golden hair glitters. Her stiletto heels oblige her to lift her knees quite high as she sits down. Her body folded up on the seat is reminiscent of a… yes, a fat turkey trussed for the oven.
In the press of the crowd on the palace staircase I intercept Elias’s look, his brief smile. No other exchange should indicate that we are acquainted. With a swift, knowing gaze he points out a face to me, amid the throng of dark suits and evening dresses. An African of about forty, tall, corpulent, a little too tightly squeezed into a designer suit. Dilated eyes, nostrils visibly quivering. He stares at the woman wriggling about on the seat, adjusting her skirt around her broad thighs, as she seeks a comfortable position for her high heels. This feverish attention is lost among the whirlwind of words of farewell, little laughs, grotesque bowings and scrapings, in which “President” and “General” are bandied back and forth, the flutter of visiting cards, the bustle of chauffeurs and bodyguards. The man devouring the turkey-woman with his eyes believes he is invisible. On his left cheek I suddenly make out a pale asterisk, the trace of a scar. The face of the soldier retrieving diamonds from the mouth of a dead woman comes back to me. A coincidence? I should like to ask Ellas, But he has gone already, and besides, would he know himself?
Several days later I learn that the man with the scar on his cheek is known to our secret services as “the Candidate” – a Zairean established in Luanda who manages the sale of Angolan oil to the Americans, who have never recognized Marxist Angola. They are thus buying oil from a phantom state! And the “Marxist” Angolans are buying themselves villas in Europe thanks to the oil sold to the American imperialists with whom they are at war. The logic of history… Washington has its money on “the Candidate,” as a probable successor to Mobutu in Zaire. Soviet intelligence have had their eye on this man for several months. The turkey-woman makes a good bait…
This frenzied tangle of world affairs, the energy of thousands of men confronting one another, plotting, selling incalculable riches, piling up millions in secret bank accounts, wooing their enemies and tearing their allies to pieces, dragging their countries into long years of war, starving whole regions, paying armies of hacks to glorify their policies, all this crazy global machinery is concentrated that evening in the fleshy body of a blond woman whom a sweating black man would like to possess.
In Elias’s look I perceive the rapid alternation between a fighters hardness and immense sadness better than before.
A brief while later the dossier on “the Candidate” is enriched by a filmed sequence: him and the turkey-woman bonded together in a monotonous coupling. From time to time the woman reaches under the man’s body to make sure the contraceptive has not slipped… There is not much light in the room, and when she gets up, the woman peers at her underclothes to avoid putting them on inside out. From the bed the man watches her doing this, with a stubborn, strangely hostile air. The other, shorter sequence has a greater variety of light and shade. In it the man’s half open mouth can be seen, his eyes slightly bulging, staring at the woman whose head thrusts up and down rhythmically as she fellates him. Then he sleeps, while the woman rummages in a briefcase and page by page photographs a thick notebook with glittering gilt edges.
At the year’s end comes the greatest surprise of all. Suddenly this whole game becomes completely pointless. The Americans abandon “the Candidate,” having found a creature more suited to their plans. French arms salesmen arrive in the marketplace and muddy the waters. In Moscow Andropov dies; power slips into an increasingly evident coma. In Luanda one tribe of corrupt men drives out another. The leaders furnish themselves with the services of new networks of traffickers. Bank account numbers are changed. The Angolan president promises the eradication, once and for all, of UNITA, which is supported by the Americans, and the immediate establishment of socialism, assisted by the USSR.
And of all this gigantic farce what remains is Elias Almeidas life, endangered several times, in order (I observe maliciously) to obtain two pieces of film in which a portly African and a buxom white woman can be seen glued together.
What also remains in my memory is Eliass look: cool determination and the sadness of one who no longer has any illusions.
Cabinda. What can be demanded of a life and a death.
Two years later we find ourselves in Cabinda, dining beside the harbor under a sky where the stars mingle with the lights on the oil rigs. Elias has just been spending time in northern Angola, “not far from the forests where those heroic UNITA idiots put us in the lockup,” he says with a smile. His right wrist is in plaster, and this shackle, too, is a reminder of that night long ago in Lunda Norte. Im on the point of asking him, in the same ironic tones, whether “the Candidate” could not by any chance be the sergeant who imprisoned us: he had a similar scar on his cheek.
A man and a woman, both of them quite elderly, appear in front of the rickety tables on the terrace where we are sitting. They walk one behind the other, joined together by two long planks, which they carry on their shoulders, one on each side of their heads. The resemblance to the wooden collars once used to keep slaves in line immediately comes to mind. “People like them live on a dollar a month,” says Elias softly without looking at me. “Joâo Alves, that apparatchik I knew in Moscow, has just bought a second house close to Lisbon. He s delighted that with the entry into Europe, property prices will go up…”
He remains silent for a long while, then, still in low tones, talks to me about his mission in Lunda Norte: to smash the diamond barter business, that vital sinew of war for UNITA (“Not to mention our ‘Marxists’ in Luanda,” he murmurs with gritted teeth). Arms for diamonds, and with the arms they conquer diamond-bearing territories and can thus buy more arms to conquer further territories. It is the same routine for oil…
“So wars a very profitable industry,” he says, nodding toward the oil rigs. “And what’s more, instead of retiring, soldiers get killed, which suits everybody. Nothing new about it as a production cycle. In the old days they stirred up conflicts between tribes to provide themselves with slaves. But slaves were hard work. You had to tie them up, rather like those two old people with their planks, take them to the coast, transport them across the ocean, give them a scrap of food… Diamonds can be turned into houses near Lisbon much quicker,”
I have an impulse to goad him into the admission I sense maturing within him: why risk his life if the dice are loaded and it is in everyone’s interest for this civil war to continue so they grow rich? I do not broach the topic head-on; I talk about the videotape of “the Candidate” and the turkey-woman. This fragment of film implied lengthy approach maneuvers, attempts at recruitment, blackmail… in the vague hope of having “our man” in a future government. Now all that work had come to nothing, producing only a video reminiscent of a third-rate blue movie.
I am expecting a political rationale, a precept I had heard on his lips before now: “You can’t make a revolution in kid gloves.” “A professional should never ask himself: What’s the point? That’s a question for Hamlets.” Yes, a half-mocking reply designed to stop all Jesuitical moralizing in its tracks.
This time there is no note of irony in his voice. “You know, maybe it’s my age, but I ask less and less of life. I often think it would have been enough for me just to have been able to save that child, you remember, in Lunda Norte, the one who’d put on an old gas mask. That little lad completely high on drink and drugs. I should have told him to hide so as not to be shot in the morning…”