Once on a Moonless Night (19 page)

After our meal we went and had coffee in the little café opposite called Le Chien qui Fume, then he would go home and I would catch a metro from Duroc station to get back to the Latin Quarter. I never allowed myself to insist on seeing him back to his studio, for he loathed being an object of pity, except when he suggested I read to him in the afternoon. Those afternoons sometimes went right on until the light failed, both of us enjoying a sense of calm and delight as we bathed in the charm of the Tumchooq language. I felt at peace with myself at last, as if nothing could threaten my newfound equilibrium. Well, almost.

A curvaceous young woman, who lived in the building opposite in a studio also under the eaves on the seventh floor facing the one belonging to the Tibetan monk, appeared in the window at regular intervals and undertook a shameless seduction scene intended for my instructor’s neighbour—a young Greek doctor doing time as a houseman in Paris—who was also at his window. Separated from each other by the street, they embarked on an aerial conversation, clearly discernible as it batted back and forth. Their exchanges, which became more provocative with every passing minute and were delicious in their simplicity, grew increasingly audible as my weary reading voice feebly mumbling Tumchooq words eventually constituted nothing more than background noise to their vaudeville performance, and we were reduced to the status of privileged spectators in the front row of the stalls. At some point the question was settled, the young woman left her window and the action moved to the future Greek surgeons studio on the other side of a party wall thinner than a sheet of cardboard, plunging my tutor and me into a state of appalling embarrassment, defenceless against an auditory onslaught of excited laughter, undressing noises, exclamations and female comments about the size of the Hellenic medical students member, encouragements, filthy words, creaking bedsprings, groans of ecstasy—my God, it went on, every second felt like an eternity! Their moans came through the wall without any loss of intensity, taking the statue of Buddha by storm, coagulating in the air between the Tibetan monk and me, smothering my voice so that, in spite of the heroic stoicism I displayed, my sentences in Tumchooq lost their resonance, their musicality their rhythm, becoming as bleak and monotonous as bare mountains, bare beaches, a bare horizon in that bare studio, ready to collapse when the two neighbours’ cries accelerated faster and faster until they eventually exploded into Greek monosyllables that the Olympian hero hurled in our faces in all their enormity as his exploits reached their climax.

Of all the Tumchooq texts I had laid hands on, Mr. Tarakesa delighted most in the one from the mutilated scroll and would regularly begin a morning session by asking me to read and reread it; and, if he wanted me to carry on reading in the afternoon, it was always to devote the time to that text, either in the original language or in the French translation, or even in the Tibetan version that he himself had established and dictated to me. That portion of text was his chosen one, it seemed to be part of his furniture, on a par with his gas stove or his teapot. He accumulated different commentaries on it, frequently making comparisons with
The Jatakas
, accounts of Buddha’s previous lives, which form an important part of the Buddhist canon in Pali and which he knew by heart. I sensed that he secretly hoped to bring his learning to bear on the unknown and, in his meditations, to find the end of the fable, even if its conclusion turned out to be just a single sentence.

Our weekly sessions carried on for nearly a year with a few interruptions during school holidays, then Mr. Tarakesa left for New York, where the Dalai Lama had entrusted him with an important responsibility. It was a Thursday when I learnt from another tutor that he had resigned from the Institute of Oriental Languages. I couldn’t wait until that Saturday morning’s session, our last, and went to see him the same evening. He welcomed me in, surprised to see me. I had barely sat down, while he—as usual—prepared the tea, before I burst into tears. I knew he was embarrassed by my outburst, but I found it impossible to contain, overwhelmed by the sorrow of separation from the last person who connected me to everything I loved, to the Tumchooq language and, therefore, to Tumchooq himself. I was filled with fierce depression and a feeling of loneliness; until then I had been bolstered, sustained and brightened by the hope that I would one day see the mutilated scroll completed by Mr. Tarakesa, a hope he was now burying for ever. I recovered my composure as best I could, and when he started talking it was to ask me, as if he, too, were obsessed by the missing part of the manuscript, to let him know if the other fragment of the scroll or the integral text of the sutra were ever found. He himself, he admitted as much, had tried to imagine the ending, but in vain, even though the character in the fable—the man hanging on the edge of the cliff—had often appeared to him in his little studio, suspended in mid-air, a few inches above the floorboards, for longer than the laws of gravity allowed, but each time the image had vanished almost the moment he saw it.

“What I need,” he told me with a sigh, “is a pair of those golden wings like founders of religions, great philosophers, Buddha himself and some of his disciples, wings that allowed them to ‘take off’ and fly over the world. Without them, a mere mortal like you or me can never hope to be up to the task.”

“Even Paul d’Ampère?” I asked him.

He looked embarrassed by the question, repeated Paul d’Ampère’s name several times, then, after a long silence, said:

“I know him only from his work and from what you’ve told me about him. An individual as exceptional as him—erudite, sensitive and with his experience of suffering—would probably have acquired those wings and been able to fly. And I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had found the end of the parable, except that he was a Westerner.”

“I don’t see the connection.” My voice had a slightly shaky quality.

“Our imagination is dictated by who we are. It seems to me that finding the end of a teaching like that requires an entirely oriental mind, far beyond dissertations on the outside world, explorations of human conscience and earthly passions, beyond the unpredictable beauty of an isolated sentence or image …”

I brought an abrupt end to the visit, not even letting him finish what he was saying. I even ran to get away, because I was so exasperated by the way he talked about Paul d’Ampère. Whatever we do, we’re still just “Westerners” to them! Among themselves they can have hatred, wars and massacres, but they know each other, understand each other and never think of each other as foreigners.

I can’t remember whether I slammed the door or how I got out onto the street, but I do know my whole body was shaking, on the brink of hysteria, and I had to sit down at the bottom of the steps for God knows how long. Then I went home on foot, dragging my feet beneath icy rain, which reminded me of that sad night coming out of hospital in Peking when I wandered like a sleepwalker in a state of immense loneliness. When I reached Concordia, tortured by an appalling migraine, I locked myself in my room and stayed in bed for three days, more dead than alive. Since that day I’ve never set foot in the Tibetan department again. At a stroke, I sloughed off the three languages (Chinese, Tumchooq and Tibetan) that I had learnt for the sake of someone I loved, someone who had disappeared in the meantime; languages which had come to be—and would remain—prisons in which I shut myself away.

My renunciation of three Asian languages began a slow eradication of my memories of Tumchooq, perhaps even a decline in my love for him. The fact that he was not with me hurt less: my heartache was abating. The only thing that survived was my pleasure in learning languages. That is why, in late September 1983, with what was left of my bank loan, I went back to the Institute of Oriental Languages, this time to enrol in the African Studies department, where I started learning Bambara, a perfect contradiction not only of my parents’ expectations for my future life but also of my own.

2

T
O BE HONEST, AT THE TIME I HAD NO
concept of what an African language might be, even less of the workings of humanitarian organisations, but I signed up as a volunteer to one barely a year after I began studying Bambara. Out in the field I threw myself wholeheartedly into a project to build a school in northern Mali, three hundred kilometres from Bamako, near the former capital of the Songhai Empire.

With a naivety which now brings a smile to my lips, I could already see myself as a schoolteacher surrounded by dozens of orphans of all ages, staying on after lessons to take them down to the Niger and watch them have fun, jump, swim and play hide-and-seek while the great red disc of the sun dropped slowly into the river, where bare-breasted washerwomen stood waist-deep in the water, singing and laughing as they beat wet clothes over stones with wooden sticks that made a dull, slightly muffled thud. I myself would bathe the youngest children (Would I have known how to? Is being born a woman enough for that skill?), supporting the toddlers streaming back with one hand and soaping him with the other. Then I would tell him to wriggle his arms and legs in every direction in time to the washerwomen’s jubilant song, or do a slight variation on this the way African mothers do: bunching the child’s arms and legs over his tummy, then suddenly letting them go and smothering his silky soft naked body with kisses, as if he were my own baby, my child from Peking who, as he grew up, had changed skin colour—a frequent phenomenon in dreams, where physical appearances go unnoticed, can be modified and are often interchangeable. As I cared for my little orphans I would wash myself of the last stains I felt still deep inside me and which still hurt. I imagined they would dissolve like refracted prisms in the Niger.

Because most people live with constant anxiety about finding their place in society, few can afford the luxury of healing a broken heart in Africa. I was exceptionally lucky, I realised that. I was a chosen one, greeted each new day by this preferential treatment, which smiled down on me like the sun above the mists of the African bush. By coming in contact with life in its raw state (absent in Western societies so well organised they have frozen rigid), the hitherto inconceivable idea that love isn’t eternal and can die no longer frightened me. On the contrary, I discovered to my stupefaction all the beauty of a lost love, a melancholy liberating beauty, a sort of macabre dance in which I twirled and spun like a madwoman. I threw myself at strangers, meeting my one-night stands in the bush and Bamako’s kitsch restaurants, and eventually they all looked like a familiar ghost, Tumchooq.

The experiences I had then were salutary. Is there just one single love in a lifetime? Are all our lovers—from the first to the last, including the most fleeting—part of that unique love, and is each of them merely an expression of it, a variation, a particular version? In the same way that in literature there is just one true masterpiece to which different writers give a particular form (taking the twentieth century alone: Joyce, who explores everything happening inside his character’s head with microscopic precision; Proust, for whom the present is merely a memory of the past; Kafka, who drifts on the margins between dream and reality; the blind Borges, probably the one I relate to best, etc.). I imagine that if they met they would each apologise for stepping onto the shared stage too soon.

Perhaps it’s in my nature, but in Mali I had no more success than anywhere else in forging peaceable relationships with my compatriots within the humanitarian family. It really was stronger than me, I couldn’t help giving my opinion about everything going on around me, saying what I liked and what I found shocking: for example, the colossal amount our organisation spent on communication, which matched what was spent on work in the field; the difference in wages between white “managers” and black employees; the fierce competition—worthy of privately owned companies—between different organisations, etc. I therefore had a feeling of relief, almost of deliverance, when I could finally spend my time in a dug-out canoe on the river Niger. This started in June 1985, when the first delivery of school equipment arrived after my long campaign to acquire it through repeated letters and endless intercontinental calls to French establishments. The equipment was intended for Ansongo in the Gao region, where I had been trying for several months to set up a school for the Songhais. The railway does not go beyond Bamako, so wood, animal fodder, cooking pots, dried fish and every imaginable sort of produce is transported along the Niger in large hand-built boats. I had mine constructed as follows: an impressively thick beam ten metres long and five wide was hoisted and fixed onto several canoes connected together to form a sort of platform, and equipped with an old engine, which could be heard banging and spluttering several kilometres away, worse than a pneumatic drill.

I recruited two crew members, a retired boatman and his wife, who would work as our cook, and I had the equipment, sent from goodness knows what prehistoric hangar, loaded on: desks and benches which looked pre-war if not from colonial days, two or three blackboards with flaking paint, and boxes of exercise books, chalk, pencils and pens. I called my vessel
Tumchooq
, and in black ink in the mysterious letters of that ancient language—despite the waning spell they had over my heart, I still thought them beautiful and irreplaceable—I wrote the name on a yellow flag, which I attached in the middle of a pile of desks to the bridge of my African craft. When anyone asked what my banner meant and I replied that it was the name of the greatest greengrocer in Peking, people eyed me suspiciously as if I’d gone quite mad.

Like Marlow in
Heart of Darkness
and like Conrad himself, both of whom travelled up the Congo on a small steamboat, I went down the smaller Niger on board the
Tumchooq
, from the clear waters at Bamako, through a series of rapids at Sa-tuba, across the Mandingo Plateaux, taking four days to cross the vast Macina plain with its network of tributaries, lakes and swamps. At times my boat, its engine screaming, toiled through putrefying weeds that undulated below the surface like hair. My boatman stood at the prow, prodding the riverbed with a pole, while I held the tiller, which left a wake through the mud and weeds, stirring up a swampy stench and prodigious quantities of mosquitoes. But none of this dampened my mood and, after that difficult stretch, we came back onto the winding but clearly defined main channel.

I turned off the engine and everything was quiet again; all we could hear was the sound of the water, as old as the world. The exhausted boatman drank some dolo and fell asleep, blind drunk, over the rudder, and
Tumchooq
drifted. It was such a pleasure seeing the boat abandon itself to the whims of the current that night, where, just like in the mutilated scroll deciphered by Paul d’Ampère, the moon, masked by dark, low clouds, did not appear. The boat was no longer navigating but gliding over that ebony surface, occasionally bumping into the bank and setting off again in the right direction.

After midnight the moon appeared, illuminating a few meagre huts along the way, dark, silent family homes. In places there were nameless aquatic plants with purple flowers, their stalks and roots mixed in with wide flat leaves and slender reeds. Further on, small islands of flowers floated on the water, paler, more grainy and crumpled. Overwhelmed by sleep, I climbed up onto the cases of stationery, lay down on a desk, perhaps the very one my grandparents used, and fell asleep, just like that.

I was woken by a noise: swaying and lurching, the old boatman was making his way towards the back of our square vessel. Moving almost with the virtuosity of an acrobat and the slow stealth of a sleepwalker, he climbed down to the rudder, the upper blade of which was half submerged in the water. Once there, he paused, took down his trousers, squatted and stayed motionless in that position for as long as the procedure took. I couldn’t help laughing out loud when he almost lost his precarious balance and fell into the river as he bent right down to water level to wash his buttocks.

After Mopti, a major trading centre with a fishing port where the Niger is joined by the Bani, one of its main tributaries,
Tumchooq
set off across the limestone and sandstone plateaux of the Bandiagara region in Dogon Country. Villages became increasingly scarce and we could travel for hours without glimpsing a human presence as far as the eye could see, apart from columns of smoke rising in the distance over the vast bush. Towards midday we suddenly heard the sound of an engine in the sky and, apparently swooping out of nowhere, a drumming helicopter appeared overhead, extraordinarily low and slow-moving, its powerful draft flattening the weeds along the banks and making our bodies vibrate so much they felt drained of all substance. Painted in yellow on the cockpit door beneath the blades were the words:
EMBASSY OF USA
.
Tumchooq
was paralysed, quivering in every limb, and its flag flew off in the air when the mechanical monster whirred away, gleaming in the blinding sunlight.

Three hours later we came across it again in a Dogon village, with a team from the American embassy, Malian soldiers and local policemen who had come by jeep. They were outside tall, round straw huts with thatched roofs and were surrounded by naked children and the silent intensity of a crowd of locals in rags. The body of an American missionary, with hair so dusty it looked like an albinos, was carried to the helicopter on a handcart. The body had been found in the bush, about ten kilometres from the village. According to the Malian policeman I spoke to, it was going to be difficult to identify the perpetrator of this appalling crime, because the wounds and marks found on the missionary were unusual, and the body was in an advanced state of decay. The local Dogons claimed the culprit was a bull giraffe roaming the area, a solitary creature six metres tall (a whole metre above average) and known for his violence during the rutting season.

We continued on our way and, two days later, reached the Timbuktu region, the starting point for Saharan caravans where the river, which until then is angled from south-west to north-east, begins a long eastward curve, forming a pretty loop, narrowing through the gorge at Tosaye and curving out towards the south-east at Bourem. We finally arrived in Gao, the former capital of the Songhai empire, crossed the Tilemsi Valley and made our way down to the Ansongo Valley through a series of rapids.

Savouring a moment of relaxation, I looked at my surroundings with the eye of a schoolteacher who would spend the rest of her life there: a quiet valley where they grew rice, cotton, groundnuts, millet, sorghum, etc.
Tumchooq
was warmly welcomed by the Songhais; the school equipment was unloaded, admired and transported to one of the major villages, where it was put into attractive buildings with domed roofs. After resting for two days I set off again on my African boat, heading back upriver for a second delivery of equipment from France due to arrive in Bamako.

Although released from the weight of the equipment,
Tumchooq
suffered more on the return journey, finding it harder to resist the rivers assaults: water seeped into the canoes supporting the platform of my unusual-shaped vessel; we had to bail constantly, with calabashes, only rarely exchanging the odd word. I decided to stop off in the Dogon village where we had seen the American embassy helicopter, because it started raining and the menacing black clouds indicated a violent downpour. As I ran through the rain I caught sight of a strange object attached to the top of a post at the entrance to the village. From a distance this thing, which appeared hazy through the raindrops, looked about the size of a small box of sweets dangling on the end of a rod; swaying beneath the box, fragile as a ribbon, was an endlessly long thin shape, which fell right to the ground. As I drew closer the box grew bigger until it overflowed my field of vision: it was a wooden cage with a head imprisoned behind its bars, not a man’s head as in
Heart of Darkness
, but a giraffes. I had to touch the ribbon hanging beneath the cage with my own fingers to grasp that it was the gigantic animal’s spine.

A villager who spoke Bambara told me that after the American helicopter left, Dogons from all over the region set out to hunt down the giraffe rightly or wrongly accused of the missionary’s death.

“A white man’s life is priceless,” he told me. The hunt seemed vital to the villagers, who were afraid of the Americans—although the embassy had formulated no concrete demands on the subject—and whose regional governor had threatened to withhold all international aid if the culprit went unpunished. The hunt had mobilised about a hundred men and two police jeeps. The scapegoat, pursued across the bush for two whole days, took refuge in the mountains, but in the end, hounded on all sides by men shouting and firing shots as they drew ever closer, it was so exhausted a breath of wind would have mown it down. In the small hours of the morning it was found dying at the foot of a white limestone cliff. It was then transported to the village, where a witch doctor finished it off.