After so many years searching for Yoro, when I finally found her, it was like coming back to you again. Spilling water over your ashes at the foot of a tree to watch how the limbs rise up. All of you, erect. Yoro has your eyes, but with a twinkle of a star that has heated up over years of pressure. There was pressure there. The pressure of war. She was so young, and yet the look in her eyes was on the verge of splintering from rage, from heat. But she was good. She bent down to caress the wizened skin of a crocodile. But the animal didn’t move. If it had been a person, I would have thought he was dead, but for a crocodile inertness and sadness are one and the same thing, and sadness, everyone knows, is an evergreen tree.
We walked slowly, checking all the cages. Many of them were open. We saw a tiger approaching some fifty yards away. We knew it by its stripes. The stripes were nearly the only thing it had left. Stripes without a tiger. It couldn’t walk. It scraped forward with its front paws alone, dragging the back ones so slowly we weren’t the least bit alarmed when it got close. When it reached us, it raised a hungry tooth to the sky; that’s what its feline strength had been reduced to, a chameleon’s failed attempt to catch a fly.
Yoro is beautiful, my love, but what really stands out is her kindness. She caressed the iron bars as if they were wounded flesh. She entered the cages with respect, as if not wanting to awaken the dead. We saw a young elephant, still alive. It was lying on its side and it reached out to us with its empty trunk, which reminded me again of the image in my recurring nightmare, shed snakeskin—though now I knew what had happened to my penis, my testicles. All of it was in Yoro. An empty elephant trunk was no longer a symbol of my genitals looking for me all over Hiroshima; now it was just that, an empty elephant trunk. Yoro and I spent many hours together picking whatever grass was left, locating grain and water in other cages. For the elephant. It was so weak. Yoro placed the food in the lobes at the end of the trunk for it to smell, then set it in the elephant’s mouth with some water. It was as if she’d grown up taking care of sick elephants. Maybe it was just that. Right now I don’t know anything about her. How to ask? I haven’t told her who I am yet either. But I believe she knows, Jim, I believe she does. I wish you could see how she looks at me. She knows the same way that I’ve always known, like you never told me, through the silent communication that runs from body to body. It doesn’t matter, though. I will tell her the truth. I have to think about how to go about it. How to explain using words why we have spent a life, the only lives we had, looking for her mother, looking for her. Our only life, Jim. A life dedicated almost exclusively to searching for the treasure you didn’t live to find.
We spent seven days at the zoo. The first six we traveled on foot. The last, my love, the last, Yoro left on the back of an elephant. If only you could have seen it. The elephant was tame. It stepped around the bodies lying on the ground. I realized when I mounted that seen from above like that, desolation multiplies. That’s how I saw the city as a battleground. That’s why the kings and the gods deserve less forgiveness, because the higher up you are, the better you see the plain and the easier it is to prevent war.
Squalid horses roamed about with their ribs poking out, sniffing the human pasture. They nibbled it. Thousands of years of an herbivore’s diet replaced by a carnivorous one. The thing about war is that it makes anything possible. I watched the horses, my love, die without complaint. Their way of showing pain is silence, which isn’t the case with other animals. Will I die silent as a horse or will I let out a pig’s squeal that in a single blast quells all the silence I’ve suffered? We trekked through the city for almost an hour before the elephant finally recovered its ancestral memory, raised its trunk to the sky, and shook us off its back with a great trumpeting roar. From the ground we heard its footsteps running away, but it didn’t bother to sidestep the vacant-eyed faces of the ones responsible for his captivity. Two helmets cracked in a single footfall. I liked the sound of it. “Peace,” it said on one of them. But you can’t drain a solid, and the soldier brain, now a liquid thread, might just flow into one of the lagoons of true peace, the peace those soldiers ridiculed. About a year ago, a spoiled little girl in a suit made a feminist speech at the UN headquarters. The candid words of an actress aren’t going to change the world. The world is fixed by the tread of an elephant recovering its memory as it races away. You taught me you don’t ask for equality using words like please. Equality is not even under discussion. That was then. It’s different now. The only way to defend black people and women is the tread of an elephant. The world no longer understands words.
Jim, my love. Here I am, me, who never believed in life after death, writing to you. You see? My writing is all messy now, because I realize I never told you the crucial part. I should have told you in the beginning that Yoro was one of the attractions in the zoo. Yep. Like another animal. You’re asking yourself why, I bet. And I know you’re not here, you aren’t reading this, it’s absurd to be writing to you, and yet I have to find the right words to tell you delicately that Yoro wears five bronze rings around her neck. Almost five pounds of weight on her collarbone. I found her huddled in her cell. A ring around her neck was chained through a loop to one of the bars. “A guard told me that Burma is at war.” That was the first thing she said to me. Only afterward did I realize that Burma is where you had suffered too. Is that land still in conflict? You didn’t come immediately to mind because when Yoro mentioned Burma, it was meant as some kind of rationalization for the wars. It didn’t seem so strange, more like a discreet form of asking forgiveness for all forms of conflict in general. As I said, Yoro’s most outstanding feature is kindness. She spoke to me in her mother tongue, Japanese. It’s the language her mother taught her as a protection, she told me later, so that nobody would understand them. She was curled into a ball of sadness, all except for her neck, which was tall and straight. There was a tiny cage at her feet. A cricket inside. “An insect and a giraffe woman are alike in one way,” she told me. “If you remove one of our rings, we’re nothing.” I imagine it must be true. The insect would bleed to death, the neck of the woman would break. When I severed the chain that held her in the cage, it took an hour for her to articulate a single word. Then she started to speak.
Before explaining what will lead to the end of my life, I have to tell you the story, link by link as Yoro told it to me, of what took her mother, our daughter, from Japan to Africa. It’s not about her mother getting sick. As you know, the medical reports the families sent periodically always showed stable results. Yoro was a strong baby, resilient, a healthy adolescent. The top secret project, the test-tube baby created with the hope of observing how weeds flower in it, how the pitiable cypress trees of radiation sickness grow willowy, grew up to be a strong, healthy adolescent, and she remained vigorous for such a long time that she stopped being of interest to the project overseers. So they got rid of her for being healthy. And they sent her to the mines to keep her quiet, with a labor contract that was already breached at signature, where radiation exposure finally took her life. That’s how it happened. Everything so simple, and so tough. From Japan to Africa, Jim. We should have come to Africa together. How did it slip by us? The origin. Of the woman. Of Yoro. Today the scar, the keloid on my left cheek in the form of the African continent has more significance than ever, like an outline of that crucial element sought for so many years: Yoro.