When I left, I saw some of the miners with shallow pans in the river’s muddy waters, using the same techniques as gold miners do. At the bottom of the tray were little black and gray pickings: that was coltan. Everything was dark there, not only the material they were quarrying and the inside of the mine, but also outside, the dirty faces, the strange absence of sunlight. I started by asking the workers outside the mine about Yoro, and they passed the same question down the line one by one until it went past the mouth of the tunnel and on down the line inside. The question, my voice, had to go as far as the earth’s kidney, I thought, before it came back—hopefully answered in the positive—through the same mouth of the same tunnel where I was sitting on a rock, waiting, with brown water covering my feet and red varicose veins, hidden like the galleries where Yoro might be.
I was afraid that no information would come back out of the tunnel. I recalled the radical silence reigning over Hiroshima the first few days after Little Boy’s explosion. The dying in the hospital where I was convalescing stopped moaning. Not even the children cried. There was only a whispering of names. People with their faces blown to pieces looking for their loved ones, a strange experience because it didn’t depend on the one looking but on the one being looked for. Documentation, paper, were the first things to burn in the explosion, so the only way of identifying people was by the sound of the voice of the survivor. If the wounded person didn’t have the strength or the will to say Yes, it’s me to the mouth approaching the ear, his or her father, son, would go on forever whispering into the wrong ears. So many years have passed since then, and now I was the person looking for a loved one, waiting for her to identify herself.
My voice finally went out and came back. They hadn’t seen a white person working there in the past few years. Getting the answer to that question took so long that I worried the process might take more time than I had left in this world. I was horrified to imagine that receiving the right response—the definitive response, the information I’d spent a lifetime searching for—might take so long that it would reach my worm-riddled ears only when they were unable to hear or send a signal to my amorphous brain, fallen to the bottom of my skull, shrunken or liquefied.
SIR, I HAVE VERY LITTLE TIME LEFT. I’ll try to keep it even briefer, and say that despite the many pages I’ve written, there are certain details I’ve skipped, especially since they can come for me at any moment now.
I lived that subterranean life for many years. Even when I went outside, the images that flooded my mind belonged to the interior of a mine. You could say that after fifteen years on this continent, I can recognize it only underground. That’s my expertise.
What can I tell you about my time in Africa? You were born on a beautiful continent, for the little I’ve actually seen from the surface, but they’re boring holes in it, hollowing out the inside of the continent. One day you’ll be sleeping in your bed and wake up suddenly underground, or you’ll go to your daughter’s room and discover a deep hole when you open the door where the miners are excavating and throwing the useless material atop that little girl whom you tucked into bed and kissed good night just a little while before. You’ll be left clutching the doorframe, paralyzed by the vision of a white nightgown disappearing into the brown, the gray, the blue-black flesh of this earth. And from there you’ll watch all the horrifying cogs and gears at work. You’ll see how the buried body will slip and slide through those tunnels like a recently cast nut along a factory assembly line, where nobody believes they’re assembling the weapon that will end up burying you like another nut falling on the same assembly line, and so on and so forth till the continent is nothing but a big factory spitting nuts out so some guy in another hemisphere can destroy things on the cheap.
I remember shortly after arriving being invited to a party where I saw a Belgian artist fashion a sculpture—or that’s what he called it—that was highly acclaimed and that, after a while, I associated with the African massacre. Before the eyes of his country’s dignitaries and all the people invited to the opening, he grabbed a jerrican full of liquid aluminum and spilled it into the mouth of an ant colony. He waited a few seconds for the liquid to solidify, then dug out a big block of earth, which he cleaned with a pressure hose, exposing the passageways that the ants had excavated. The silver aluminum tunnels showed the beauty of the insect labyrinth, but there was no sign of life there whatsoever. Sometimes I think this will be the only salvation for these lands. A giant sculptor might come along to spill liquid iron into the thousands of tunnels of this human ant colony before it’s completely hollowed out and all of us fall to the bottom: men, elephants, snakes, antelopes, monkeys. Though by that time I think I’ll be far away from here. I won’t be alive, not here or in any other place. But Yoro will. Yoro is already safe, and I laugh at you. I despise you. I feel joy. Nobody will take that joy away from me. Even if they torture me before executing me, I will think: “The torture will last one, two, seven days. But my happiness will last an eternity. It will outlast my body, my conscience, because it will be the sound repeated in a chain, an alpha gorilla pounding his chest to claim his territory, the sound of the rain that comes to fill the crevices left by the parched earth.” You have no power over that feeling of mine and it will prevaiclass="underline" happiness, free laughter, the spark in the air, the fall from corporeal confinement.
“THE CONGO ENDS UP CHANGING even the best person,” I once heard a UN soldier say. You remember I told you what happened one day on the North American television program This Is Your Life, when a victim of Hiroshima and William Sterling Parsons, the commander of the Enola Gay who dropped the bomb, were put together on the same set? Well, a few years ago I saw another example that I found as sad as that program. You’re perfectly aware, sir, what I’m talking about, but I’m thinking once again of that reader who still has her or his full capacity to empathize, the reader able to feel pain before the suffering of others. To that reader I want to explain that there’s a video used to train personnel for the largest international organization in the world, the United Nations. The video I’m referring to is called To Serve with Pride, and it has the subtitle “Zero Tolerance for Sexual Exploitation and Abuse.” It informs UN bureaucrats about issues anyone belonging to the United Nations should be fully aware of already. The video defines their conception of sexual exploitation. Later, when everything was about to go down, the video became one of the interlocking pieces of the puzzle enabling me to recognize the sinister final image.