A journalist once told me that when soldiers are issued their uniforms, they are also given cards listing ten rules of conduct, one of which is the fact that sexual abuse is prohibited. Just the thought of some soldier, some keeper of the peace, carrying such a card in his pocket disgusts me. Ten rules on a pocket flash card like those learning aids with vocabulary words so you can learn a new language while on the subway or standing in line. A quick memory prompt on a perverse backcloth: it’s for memorizing the terrible acts that are prohibited as if they were something new; the word rape on a flash card, the verb, was no more than something you had to learn consciously not to do. You study the lesson of “I shouldn’t rape” by the same method you employ to learn that in Spanish mesa means “table.” So you memorize it. And if you happen to forget, all you have to do is pull the card out of your pocket, remind yourself, and start all over again. If it should happen, the important thing is to follow the next step: hide it.
That’s how things were in the Congo. You know it perfectly well. Over twenty thousand soldiers came to protect the country in what was the United Nations’ most important peacekeeping mission. But they only made the situation far worse. It’s said that when the dying ends, so do the jobs, reason enough for soldiers to instigate internal conflicts to keep their double pay: military wages from their countries of origin and from the UN. I think people were hopeful at the outset, but when I walked through that camp, all the refugees wanted to know is when they would finally be left in peace or in war, but without all these peacekeeping forces with their blue helmets. Most victims lacked the resources to accuse their rapists, especially in a country where countless people couldn’t even tell you the day or year they were born. The most dedicated personnel did what they could and had even supported the creation of a soldiers’ DNA bank to determine the paternity of MONUC babies and to be able to file the appropriate criminal charges. Most soldiers agreed to the idea of a DNA bank, since accusations could be leveled against anyone, even the innocent, though, in general, innocent or not, what happened in the Congo has been the result of a great conspiracy of silence protected by the only organization in the country with money and means.
I ate lunch with the soldiers while I was visiting the refugee camp. The meat—they said while serving me—is Argentine; the cheese is French; the after-lunch coffee, Colombian; and the chocolate, Belgian. Everything was paid for by the UN. The mind, sir, which at times takes us down paths that we’re ashamed to acknowledge, played a little trick on me, and I wondered while I ate why the soldiers couldn’t show a little decency and pay the girls with some good roast chuck ribs and chocolate, instead of Fanta and cookies. What a shame the Congolese children haven’t tasted chocolate. I was mortified when I found myself thinking such a thing. And I thought back to what they had said, that the Congo changes even those with the best of intentions and I felt for an instant closer to the criminals than the victims.
YORO HADN’T GONE UNNOTICED in the refugee camps in Goma. They told me she’d gone to work voluntarily, wearing the rings around her neck, in a sort of zoo or menagerie on the outskirts of the city, built by the great Congolese military chief. Yoro probably thought, rightly, that a zoo is a better refuge than a refugee camp in a place where people had become like beasts.
When I got there, I saw the damages the rebellion had caused the day before. I was sure this was finally it, though, the last link that would bring me to Yoro. The zoo. All I wanted was to get onto the grounds, which when seen from outside were torn apart, full of howling creatures, bloodied. I thought it might be more practical to use the old wad of money instead of a door, always the black market. But there was no need to pay; a fire had razed most of the premises. Later I found out the zoo had been left to the grace of god a while before, a god that didn’t exist.
I don’t know why I even bother to write what happened once I got into these brand-new ruins because you certainly don’t deserve to know. You don’t deserve to know how I felt when I found Yoro. Writing even three words that might help you imagine what that moment was like would be a sign that I don’t love myself very much. It’s a matter of my own heart, something at once so beautiful and so painful that I refuse to waste time explaining to you how my entire life transformed in a single flash. Of course I explained it to my dead Jim as soon as I was calm enough and had the proper distance, which allowed me to write at a remove from the fever of that moment. Below is the letter I wrote to Jim. It’s written as if I really thought he could read it. Maybe the merciful, humane reader would like to know the details that preceded the end of my story, if someday you ever want to share this testimony with others and satisfy my last wish. You, sir, can just skip these pages, I wrote them for Jim, so move along to where I explain the only thing you care about in this case, which is my crime.
The zoo of a city at war, my love. Imagine what that’s like, a zoo in a city at war. Impossible to imagine without seeing it. Here you could truly feel people’s agony, much more than outside. You can’t really appreciate people’s death by seeing dead people. I had seen so many dead people already they all seemed the same to me. You can really feel people’s death in a derelict zoo; the hanging bellies of the hippopotamus dragging like newborns around a fake pond that’s nearly dry; the hoarse orangutan who has been sobbing so disconsolately it lost its voice and now merely opens its mouth wide in a silent scream that punctures your eardrums. Outside the zoo, the dead and the wounded are all the same. United in suffering, people lose their individuality. But in a zoo where animals have been abandoned in their confinement, each species manifests its pain in a different way, within the parameters of its way of being; the way of the bear, the way of the monkey, the way of the lion, the way of each animal in keeping with its nature, like all the facets composing a diamond that is the human heart. I’ve always known that the creatures inside Noah’s ark weren’t animals, but the entire spectrum of a person’s feelings. He tried to salvage joy and grief in all their variants. That was Noah’s work.
Oh, if only you could have seen Yoro’s eyes, my love… You would have fallen in love with her, even though she’s your granddaughter, and despite the love you felt for me. I felt a special attraction to her myself. How beautiful our granddaughter is, daughter of my biological daughter, and how good you were to find me, to make me feel like her mother without ever needing to let me in on the secret. You’d have told me eventually, I know that, but it doesn’t matter now. It never really mattered because I’ve moved along the same roads I’d have traveled had I known the truth, and perhaps not knowing made me a little more patient when I told myself: Take heart; don’t worry; looking for someone else’s daughter isn’t so important. But the second I laid eyes on her, I knew for sure that she’d sprung from my own genetic sequence. Some things you know without having to study them. So how important is blood, my love? Can it help us identify the mysteries of the human chromosome? I always thought it couldn’t, that blood isn’t important, and I still think this because even though I was born defective and wrongly sexed by relatives and doctors, at least I was born of myself. Yet when Yoro looked at me it was as if the little puppy of the little puppy I’d gestated for so many years suddenly recognized me, smelled me, and looked over my body with hunger, maybe looking for the nipple of the woman I wasn’t allowed to be when I was born, condemned to the flat chest of a sad man. But Yoro was there, turning me into a mother and a grandmother in one fell swoop. A snap! Everything faded into the background when I saw her. Like in a birthing chamber, only she, newly born, was all that existed. Her presence signified everything. Even you disappeared in those first few moments. The birth, my love, was painless. All the catchphrases mothers use are true: when Yoro was born, all that I had suffered stopped hurting me. It’s hard to explain, it’s not really that nothing hurt, more like all the suffering somehow transferred into a kind of movie that I could watch scene by scene, but no longer feel.