Even now, when I think back on that time, it still puts me so much on edge that I’ve overlooked an important detaiclass="underline" Yoro didn’t know I existed. So the letter must have been addressed to Jim. That basic point hadn’t even crossed my mind as I sat there those first few minutes holding the envelope in my unsteady hand: I didn’t exist for Yoro. In any case, I opened it and read it. So many things happened in those five minutes after reading the letter. I screamed, I cried, I broke the pitcher Jim had given me as a gift, that had never broken on its own, the pitcher no renter had dropped in all these years, that continued reminding me not only of Jim’s absence but of the absence of everything else, of Yoro, of my own self. I felt like tearing the letter to shreds, forgetting it. But instead I folded it away and kept it on me at all times. That day I entered my ninth month of pregnancy, which would still last for a long time, but it gave me one advantage: I could now take fewer precautions, move around in the shower without the fear of slipping. I felt less heavy because Yoro was no longer growing inside of me. Now she was on the outside and I had to find her to cut the umbilical cord, to rock her in the cradle and sing a lullaby in the name of Jim’s love.
WHEN YOU READ what Yoro wrote in the following pages, sir, try to imagine what it all meant to me. Then read the letter from the point of view of the future as you know it, and you’ll see that if it doesn’t absolve me entirely, at least it justifies my acts. I spent the first part of my life focused on Yoro, and the second half, my years in Africa, looking for her, afraid that I might die before I found her or didn’t find her in time. Let’s just say that when I got there and found out what happened, nothing else mattered. I don’t know how to explain it. I wanted and I want to spend my old age with Yoro, but the great mission of my life, to hug her and hold her, had already been accomplished. So the hatred I felt then for the people who had hurt her far outweighed the possibility of being able to swallow that hatred in order to spend the years or months left of my life with her, which some might consider a more thoughtful response. It was a strange feeling for me.
Thinking rationally, anyone might conclude that my responsibility was to stay with her, shower her with Jim’s and my love, try to make up for everything she’d lost, all those years of silence. But when I had the occasion to exact revenge, to avenge her—indeed, not just her—I did, even knowing that it meant separation, and this time forever, and that I would be subject to your brand of justice. But you know something? I believe I was kept apart from Yoro for a reason, something that was determined by the fate imposed upon us. Because, tell me, what was I going to do once I found her? Pretend I’m Jim? Pretend I’m finally a fulfilled mother? Pretend to be playing house at my age? Pretend to be killing time exchanging life stories and circumstances, everything we didn’t know about each other, like two old friends reencountering each other? People throw out empty expressions all the time, like we’re making up for lost time or we’re just catching up. I might have unthinkingly used catchphrases like those before running into Yoro, but now I was aware of them, I realized how a catchphrase is but a euphemism that hides what these sentences really are: vacuous words empty of meaning. You can’t make up for lost time and you can’t catch up for one very simple reason: we are so much more than random pieces of data.
In fact, I’d say 90 percent of what we are is not merely information, but has to do more with the senses. I could tell Yoro how being constantly frustrated while searching for her, and then losing Jim, had made me a recluse for a number of years; that walking outside was like stepping into a spinning tunnel; that for years I truly felt her in my belly, sensed her growing there. I could tell her all of that and much more, but would it help her to comprehend my love? No. And though it isn’t the case in this situation, data can be falsified. Why? Precisely because data is empty of meaning: it’s interchangeable, superfluous. What matters is saying while you are physically present with the other: “Yoro, here I am. Feel in this embrace all the weight of the life I’ve spent looking for you.” And it’s true that in the culture I grew up in, physical contact is not customary, not even in extreme cases, but I’ve been a hybrid for a very long time. It doesn’t matter; modify it if you want, morph it into some gesture instead of a hug, and it’ll still mean the same thing. What doesn’t work is raw information.
Had I plenty of life yet before me, I could fill it with facts and figures, shared experiences alongside her, and it has value, this shared future, but for the three days I have left in the world, I preferred to guarantee that nobody else will fall prey to the hands that abused Yoro in the name of peace. I may not dress in uniform, sir, or carry a name as slick or unctuous as that greasy pizza of military men and mozzarella, but I do have power, the same as anyone else, and it’s a pretty remarkable power, simpler than you can imagine before you actually wield it: the power to take a life. And that’s what I did: no need to hide behind a flag of peace, which they rape each time they rape a woman. I alone am enough. So once I embraced Yoro, I knew it was all she needed to understand what she needed to understand. Yoro acknowledges everything, she acknowledges us, she acknowledges Jim and me. We needed nothing else. Ours was an atavistic attraction, an attraction that connected us from an ancient place where we recognized each other without being conscious, without knowing what it was that bound us to each other so tightly. I allowed myself to become a criminal because I sensed that everything was spilling over now. At my age. You see? No time for regret, much less a desire for it.
So go ahead now, read Yoro’s letter below to see what it was that I read that day, which according to the date stamp had been sent a month and a half earlier:
Dear Dad:
In a few minutes, a friend and confidante will come to take this letter and send it clandestinely. Things aren’t easy here—I’ve been trying to smuggle this letter out for years. Till now I’d only written it in my head so nobody else could find it. Everything happened so abruptly, they just came to tell me that it’s now or never, my chance has come; so let me go straight to the most urgent point. I’m somewhere in Zaire. Look for me. Do you still remember me? You’re all that I have. All the other foster families have turned a blind eye. I don’t know if you’re aware, but I lived with five different families. A new family every two years. You’re the only one I stayed with for a longer period of time, those first five years of my life. The address on this letter is the one you obliged me to memorize. I’ve lived hoping against hope that you haven’t moved. Each one of the families took really good care of me, I can’t deny that, and I missed each one of them when I left, but your love is what I remember the most. I don’t know if perhaps I’m idealizing things because I was so little. I’m frightened to think you might be dead or that you’ve killed me off in your heart, where I remember once being.