YORO WASN’T IN RÖSSING, nor had she ever passed through. Either she hadn’t arrived yet or she’d been misinformed or misled when she wrote her letter. Or maybe she was dead. The thought of her being a casualty didn’t dampen my plans, though; I had pledged the rest of my life to looking for her. I would die in Africa. My spirits flagged at times, of course, but they’d been at rock bottom for so long that however low they dipped now, it was never enough to throw in the towel. I’d gotten so used to my ration of sadness that no additional misery would be enough to take me down much further. You could say that my ongoing sorrow was like a maintenance dose. I learned the mechanics of extreme pain: a tightrope walker’s cord, on which the acrobat, the wounded person, isn’t worried about losing his balance. Balance isn’t the problem for people whose only worry is an acrobatic move that’s difficult for them: instead, it’s reaffirming the will to stay on the cord, to live. That’s the secret, don’t ever get off; the body’s weight keeps the cord from lifting higher, and pain tends to elevate us, only to let us fall like dead weight from the sky. Very early on I learned to get off the ground where the ants roved, the predators, the dogs, who’d run straight toward the smell of my torn flesh. That wire was my place, some ten feet high. No running with the pack, on firm ground—I had to concentrate all my efforts on resigning myself to walking that tightrope. Of course it was uncomfortable, but one learns to live with discomfort. The trick was not to go so high that if I fell I would break every bone in my body or die once and for all. That’s why I’ve always acted this way, accommodating, discreet, trying to make discomfort my natural territory, a tightrope walker, at the same time aware that those ten feet above the ground are what give me an upper hand: I could leap from on high like a panther pouncing on its prey from a tree branch; attack from a position of ambush, from the invisible heights, the way the bomb fell on me. From that moment on, sir, I no longer lived on my tightrope. The pain is gone. I’m at peace. Now that I’m on the ground, I miss the temptation to jump, but it was revenge that put my feet back on earth.
THE ONLY TWO REFERENCES in Yoro’s letter are the Namibian uranium mine and the coltan mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After the Namibia fiasco, and not knowing specifically which of the countless mines there are in Congo, I finally chose one of the best known, in the outskirts of Goma in North Kivu.
I found lodging in a house with views of Lake Kivu. It looks like such a lovely body of water. It looks spotless. But the lake is hell, and I was warned about it when I got there. Close to a thousand feet deep, the lake contains approximately 300 cubic kilometers of carbon dioxide and 60 cubic kilometers of methane, a gas that can become a detonator, especially because it’s near Nyiragongo volcano. Which means Lake Kivu is an explosive lake, and if the gas it contains should ever surface, it will expand through the atmosphere and kill off thousands of people by suffocation. Theoretically, this could happen at any time. This doesn’t frighten me, though. There’s very little that frightens me these days. At sunset, while I was taking in all the apparent beauty of the lake, I thought how if one day it should actually explode, it would blow out the cemetery too: the victims of Rwanda. There’s a refugee camp nearby. What can I possibly tell you about this area that you don’t already know? When I went to visit the camp a little later, I realized how much the sanctuary was like the lake, only superficially tranquil, because in its guts a group of UN soldiers sporting blue helmets was corroding it to the core, corroding the refugees, especially the female refugees, who carry in their vaginas the best currency for international aid. You bet—the blue of their helmets matches the color of Lake Kivu. A blue to cover up the brown. But I’ll take care of those blue helmets a little later.
A few days after I got here, I started measuring distances in time, since the local roads were precarious at best. Miles didn’t exist. It is impossible to determine the length of a road that isn’t there. So everything around me was measured in time, and even then the length of time was only approximate, since the hours or days it took to get from one place to another depended on the rains, the presence or absence of a tree fallen across the road, the sudden appearance of an illegal improvised roadblock or a bullet, which of course suspended time.
But the day we set out for the mine I could calculate both distance and time thanks to other factors indicating the nearness to our destination: we began passing numbers of people walking with sacks on their backs. Several of them were adolescents and children. By now such sights don’t shock me—you can’t possibly expect me to get outraged over seeing a child with a sack on his or her back. I would be a hypocrite to argue that this child should go to school if his family is dying of hunger. But coltan is a macabre metal, one of the densest metals on earth, which makes it extremely heavy. A relatively small sack of coltan weighs almost ninety pounds, so you could say, as so many others do, it’s a size that even a child could carry, and if they hunch over like that it’s because they like to complain. And so we passed hordes of people on the way, stopping often to pay a toll foisted on us by armed groups or the regular army, money extorted to allow them to continue on with the mineral burden they would sell for a few dollars in the city, to be sold in Europe for three hundred a pound. All of this I learned later. No matter, whatever the final tab, nothing justified that daisy chain of horrors originating in the belly of that mine.
Inside the mine. You know what people do inside a mine? Search. For years, entire lifetimes, they surrender their health, their time, their strength, to searching. An eternal search for something—in this case coltan. Curiously enough, most of the people looking for it have no idea what it’s used for. I was searching in the galleries of the mine, surrounded at all times by other people searching. The galleries are built specifically for searching. If only I had a tunnel to dig in, or a thousand of them, I thought. But the quest that I had been on thus far had taken place on an immense esplanade, a huge prairie with boundless horizons on all sides, in whose vastness there wasn’t a single mineral to clean, pebble to remove cautiously from the earth, ever so tentatively nursing the hope of finding that one valuable material that would please only me.
In some way I envied this trade that has been carried on over the centuries. The laborers in those mines worked without machinery, and the process of extraction was done in a wholly artisanal way—enviable. I imagined that the techniques for finding and extracting the mineral had been passed on from generation to generation, and that the whole enterprise was based on a kind of sustained ancestral authority and communal effort of people of all ages. I in contrast was a solitary miner. Nobody showed me how to excavate, nobody helped me bail the water out of my gallery because, as I said, my gallery was an esplanade, and when water came in, there was no place to chuck it, and I could only wait, drenched, for days, months, years, for it to dry out. I saw the lights they wear on their heads in the mine in Goma and knew they wouldn’t have been of any use because I searched in the light of day, and intense sunlight is what damaged my eyesight more and more, not darkness or advanced age. I didn’t have the fans the miners use to renew the air in the galleries and protect themselves from gases because I worked outdoors, winding through the variables that are the enemy of any quest: complete freedom, no clues, no suggestions, no guide. The coltan miners kept moving their makeshift fans here and there to breathe better. And how ironic that outside the mine, far from the subterranean galleries, the land known as the world’s second lung because of the lushness of its vegetation was in bloom. The miners, me, we were like microbes attacking that lung’s alveoli, like others who attacked from above by chopping trees, killing off the population and selling off their lands for a pittance to huge multinational companies, who then used the cheap land for uncontrolled dumping. Poor second lung of the world, mortally wounded, tubercular, pneumonic. I registered several galleries, bolstered every four or five yards by trunks, like catacombs, people who lived cut off from the rest of the world unaware that the fruit of their labor, coltan, was precisely an essential piece of global communication, an essential superconductor for manufacturing mobile telephones, laptops, and state-of-the-art weapons. Coltan was the coin of their sacrifice, served up to finance the wars that killed their fathers, their sons, themselves, living in agony to the death, buried by the coin swathed in earth.