Brazzaville. The purity of gemstones.
He was on his way out of his hotel when two policemen in civilian clothes accosted him. Everything now happened with split-second timing. He looked them up and down scornfully, handed one of them his suitcase, and without raising his voice, ordered: “Here. Put this in my car out there. A gray Mercedes…” The trick worked perfectly. The tone of calm, peremptory authority. The policemen, who were supposed to be arresting him, obeyed, walked over to the exit, subjugated, hypnotized, and it was only once they were outside, where no “gray Mercedes” was to be seen, that they roused themselves and retraced their steps quickly. Elias had time to slip out through the side entrance, in front of which a car was waiting for him…
From those final years I retain a handful of such anecdotes that he used to recount to me with a smile when we ran into one another between flights, in the course of some mission or other. The memory of them is buried in a jumble of details that seem utterly pointless today but which were a matter of life and death at the time. The business with the suitcase… It is a routine technique, in fact, known as the “relay-object,” which he had doubtless learned during the course of his training as an intelligence agent. The procedure is simple: if anyone obstructs you, you must on any pretext whatever hand them an object that encumbers them and for which they become responsible. To a fierce gatekeeper barring your way at the entrance to a protected place you hand a briefcase, remarking: “General X’s sergeant will come to collect this at six-thirty hours. Take good care of it.” And while the guard is pondering, overwhelmed by the weight of the onus put on him, you pass through.
What remains in my memory is Elias s smile as he told me about these tricks of the trade, sometimes adding: “So in the end our practical training in Moscow wasn’t wasted. All those assaults on the presidential palace’… And by and large, I can confirm, it does happen more or less the way our instructors taught us it would. And the hardest thing of all is to avoid killing the children when there are bursts of gunfire on all sides… In our training they were celluloid dolls.”
Behind his light touch with the detail lay concealed long wars, sometimes raging, sometimes running out of steam, villages populated with corpses, and one morning, a fine spring morning, that youth dragging his mother’s body, riddled with bullet wounds, along a road in the south of Moxico. Elias took them to the nearest town. The intolerable weight of that body.
Behind the anecdote about the policemen encumbered by a “relay-suitcase” there had been very discreet negotiations that evening in Brazzaville between the emissaries of the South African regime (the demons of apartheid!) and the representatives of the socialist regime of Angola – the caution of two reptiles feeling one another in the dark, sniffing one another, hesitating between confrontation and doing a deal. And all mixed up with this nest of vipers, several CIA agents, as well as those of UNITA, and the indiscreet oilmen from Elf, and the diamond buyers (that Lebanese of Armenian origin, among others, the lid of his left eye grotesquely distended by a magnifying glass), and the arms salesmen, one of whom remarked to me one day with cheerful amazement: Tve sold such a lot, there really shouldn’t be many people left on earth
Some years later the diamond merchant would be discovered at his desk with his bloodied head resting on a pile of gemstones. The wife of the president who offered his hospitality for the secret meeting at Brazzaville would be accused of this murder. The arms salesmen would change the names of their agencies and the oilmen those of their companies. UNITA would be decapitated. But this would make no difference to the background noise at those African summits: the discreet chink of diamonds being appraised, the pumping of black blood beneath the waves, the crunch of armored vehicles on the rutted tarmac of cities in flames, the screams of raped women, children having their throats cut, the crackle of the flames on the burning roofs of huts, and somewhere at some great film festival the ecstatic whispers surrounding a star who is wearing around her neck stones of the first water, so rare, so pure…
At the emperors. Twelve pianists.
Yet another detail strangely preserved from oblivion: it could be called a dumb show, for the performance was entirely silent and the recounting of it left us speechless, giving rise to an almost metaphysical amazement. One of Bokassas residences, a room where the lights are low; a dozen piano stools in a row occupied by naked women who have their backs turned. A hand clap, and in a perfectly synchronized movement all twelve of them swivel round to face the master, who has a strangely weary, almost aggrieved air, as if this carnal treasure disappoints him profoundly… The vision of these “beautiful pianists with no piano,” as Elias called them, was on a level with other acts of depravity dreamed up by the tyrants of that continent, the pharaonic cathedrals and castles erected upon the graves of famine victims. But the twelve piano stools went further, for this spinning harem touched the most sensitive spot in a man’s heart: the impossibility of loving, even while possessing so much flesh, purchased in Africa, in Europe, and elsewhere… The master of the pianists – the “Emperor 1 – would be overthrown a year later in a country strewn with mutilated bodies. And amid all the jumble of wealth and obscenities that such a reign leaves in its wake, we are left with the picture of those twelve piano stools, absurdly lined up in a hall hung with valuable pelts.
Moscow. The death of a poet.
That vignette would soon find its echo during the trip to Moscow on which Elias accompanied President Agostinho Neto. The poison that killed the president had the characteristic of causing a spasm in the cardiac muscle, which made the death appear to be a perfectly convincing heart attack. It took just a psychological trigger, an additional rush of blood, to unleash the effect of the substance… The president was entering the suite placed at his disposal when in a small circular room he was passing through, this woman (she was busy cleaning the keyboard of a grand piano: a discordant lament of merry notes) greeted him and informed him that she would be taking care of his nocturnal requirements. The sentence was uttered in correct but somewhat rudimentary Portuguese, allowing for some ambiguity: nocturnal requirements?… A young blond woman, an apron fitting tightly over broad hips, emphasizing a slender waist… She stared at him as if awaiting a reply. He hesitated, sat down in an armchair, smiled at her. She settled down on the piano stool, as if she were resting for a moment before resuming her dusting. Beside the armchair, on a low table, stood several bottles of drink. Did he succumb straight away? After a glass? After an embrace? Or did they have time to undress and he to take his pleasure? The next day the Soviet authorities announced that the Angolan president, suffering from a serious illness, had come to the USSR to be treated, but despite all the efforts of the best doctors, he had not survived.