V didn’t need any further clarification. She didn’t have to say it; all of us who had listened to her story understood what kind of meat Jeanette had been eating. One woman stood up and made her way through the chairs nearly crawling, wobbly. Outside of the little room we heard someone scream, “Please, someone call a doctor!” A boy had just passed out too. Obviously, no doctor ever came, and now that scream of the newly arrived white person seemed so bogus to me. A doctor to alleviate someone’s wounded sensitivity? Should he have warned V that her story wasn’t appropriate for the general public? No, not only did she not acknowledge it, she wasn’t the slightest bit ruffled by our expressions of horror, the scream of someone who surely had to wait for that moment to learn the nature of true pain. V kept still, her hands on the table, grave, looking each one of us in the eye, each and every one of us, and in a very poised tone of voice said, “Je suis désolée. I don’t mean to wound you, but the Congo needs help.”
Delivery: 2011–2014
Despite what she wrote in her letter, Yoro never left the Congo, though she had changed mines. She went from mining coltan to mining gold at a site controlled by armed groups called Chondo. She was no longer there by the time I arrived, though something happened there that I’d never forget. Outside of the mine there was a man who weighed on a rudimentary scale the gold each miner extracted. He placed a match on one of the scale’s little plates, and on the other one, gold. For no reason, right before my eyes, they slit a woman’s throat and stole her tiny seed of metal, which passed from the scale to the hands of the man who had slaughtered her. It was the first time I’d ever seen someone’s throat being slit. I’ve often wondered if I’d ever experience it myself; if the circuit linking my eyes to my brain would still function for that last second to see and smell the same earth that would cover me, the ultimate freshness of the root tangling around my waist in a welcoming embrace into the nothing.
The Chondo mine was the third world’s bottomless pit. It was the seventh world. There couldn’t possibly be anything worse lower down. Though nowadays I believe there is always something deeper down, always something worse, substantial enough to sustain all the strata over a buried surface. I think I never actually saw the sturdy bedrock of hell, and yet how deep I went. When they took me to the Shinkolobwe mine in the Katanga region, the last mine that I would have to see, luckily, I stopped counting hells. It’s an endless descent, because in that descent is the journey to death, the journey of the restless wanderer.
You must have an idea already of what they extract in Shinkolobwe. Nobody had to explain it to me beforehand. You know why? Because the closer the jeep got to the mine, the more fragile the vegetation became—more and more frail, drier, yellower, deader and deader. Also the noises indicating the presence of animals grew fewer and fewer until there were none. Silence. Once there, only silence. There was a small artificial lake ahead, which the Belgians, pressured by the Americans, built to conceal what was below. But the dimensions of what lay below the lake were fabulously ambitious, and the mine never ceased its clandestine operation. The mineral was exported through Zambia. Most people said it was copper, others cobalt. Perhaps. But the most valuable resource there was uranium. Uranium, sir. Once again, oh yes, uranium. But what sets this mine apart from Rössing is that this uranium is not some garden-variety uranium. It’s the selfsame uranium that fed the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Life’s like that sometimes, isn’t it? Just when you think you’ve overcome what hurt you the most, you find yourself in a river whose current isn’t taking you to the outlet, but to where it’s born, forcing you to flow the course for a second time. That’s where I was, smack in the pit that exterminated my city. By day the mine didn’t seem to function, but large groups worked there by night extracting the uranium, whisking it out of the country illegally in trucks, passing customs at the border with rigged radioactivity detectors and moving through random controls for a few bucks in bribe money. The inanimate are the only ones with a right to life in this land. People kill each other, animals go extinct, vegetation burns, but the raw material of money abides. The continent of the human rights of the dollar. Human beings are no more than conduits, copper wires. Dollars won’t save your life, though if you’re alive they allow you to move. He who has money and is alive can move, money guarantees mobility, but not survival—that depends on chance. This took place in 2011. The second night in Shinkolobwe, in a tunnel whose ceiling filtered the radioactive water from the lake, I learned conclusively that Yoro had died. I had expected as much, don’t think I hadn’t already calculated that likelihood.
I DIDN’T WANT TO TELL YOU about Yoro’s death earlier, because I wanted you to read the story following the same steps as I did. So there you go, Yoro was dead, it had happened in 2011, in a tunnel raining the same acid drops that had filled the open mouths of my thirsty Hiroshima. I discovered the news at the end of my life and hereby document it at the end of this testament, which probably has more pages left to write than I have days. Yoro. Dead. But no, I didn’t crumble; I’d come undone so many times by now that I lost the capacity to feel that depth of sadness anymore. I’m going to let you in on a secret. I really like to be touched. Poor Jim, I used to bore him to tears asking him over and over again to caress my arms, my hair, and my legs while we were watching a movie or before we fell asleep. I tried to stroke myself to liberate him from my whims, but it was never the same. The only caresses that relaxed me came from someone else’s hand. The explanation, or what I tell myself at least, is that the skin processes pleasure only when the origin of a touch is a surprise, when the brain isn’t aware of its coming, can’t anticipate its intensity, the exact point where or when it’s going to take place. The same as sorrow, I think. Sorrow, like the pleasure of a caress, materializes only in virgin territory; for it to take effect it has to happen as if for a first time. In my case, after having experienced a multitude of sorrows, I find that nothing takes me by surprise anymore; I’m an arm, a leg, a piece of hair groped in the same place so many times, I’ve lost the capacity for despair. Yet I could and can feel joy because despite what I’ve done, I’m a good woman, and good people never lose their ability to feel joy. The news that Yoro had given birth to a girl didn’t compensate for the loss, but it gave me enough joy to continue forward. I’d asked myself so many times if the pregnancy she spoke of in her letter had been carried through to term. The answer was yes. She gave her daughter, as she had promised in the letter Jim could never read, her same name. Yoro, her daughter, Jim’s granddaughter. In a sense also my own granddaughter, only in a sense, or at least that’s what I thought before finding out what I’m going to explain now.
What I’m going to tell you now I read in a document given to me by one of Yoro’s caregivers in the mine. Yoro had entrusted it to her, afraid someone might try to take her daughter away. The document certified Yoro’s last name, a name Jim knew but had always kept hidden from me. He never used the name when referring to her. And when I saw the name, the whole puzzle clicked into place. Sure, it could have been a coincidence. But that didn’t even cross my mind. If her name was the same as mine, it was because Yoro was flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, and my encounter with Jim had been no coincidence. In a flash it all made sense. I watched my entire universe levitate, in a single instant, right before my eyes, the entire meaning of a story lasting years revealed itself. As I said, my encounter with Jim hadn’t been off the cuff. Jim had searched me out because I was his daughter’s father, her biological father, and when he found me as the true woman that I am, it was only natural that he would fall in love with what was the closest thing of all to Yoro.