Later Yoro did tell me who brought her first to the refugee camp in Goma after our daughter died, and then to the zoo, where she wasn’t just a tourist attraction, the giraffe woman—something she imagined and accepted. You probably remember, my love, how upset we were over what they did to Sandy, our orangutan in Borneo. Yoro’s conditions were similar. So you’ll understand what I’m going to do and you’ll approve. Luckily, Yoro had recovered her strength a few days later and could point out for me the blue-helmeted peacekeeper who tricked her into the cage.
But that’s a few days hence. She could hardly speak when we first met, and all she did was sob for the animals that had died in the final battle. We slept together in the cage that first night. Two women in a cage, with another cage that had a cricket inside. I remembered that ancient Chinese custom. The concubines used to sleep to the song of a cricket in a golden cage. I thought a giraffe woman’s neck rings were also made of gold. But Yoro had her neck set in tin, and the cricket’s cage was made out of little sticks. When you took me to Thailand, the people there said they raised crickets because this insect had an aggressive nature. Do you remember? They used them to fight so people could gamble on them. You gave me a losing cricket as a gift. Its leg was bitten and it couldn’t fight anymore. We kept its cage in the backpack. The first night the cricket sang. My love. The first few nights it sang, and when I heard it, I took Yoro’s hand in mine so as to sleep with the feeling of your embrace for the first time since you’d gone.
I have no idea where the words in this letter will go, but I know that finding Yoro isn’t the end of the journey, as we had thought. I couldn’t put the end in writing; it would be an unnecessary risk, taking into account that you can’t read it. You must know that the risk I’m referring to isn’t to Yoro, who is now being looked after by S, my faithful friend. The risk I’m referring to is that I destroy the ending I want for this story. But if everything comes together as planned and if you survived death and you’re there somewhere above, there’s a good chance I’ll be able to tell you all about it myself. I love life. But losing it is a possibility that grows plumper and plumper the farther I move forward on this journey. And you know I’ve never been good with diets.
SIR, YORO AND I WAITED a few minutes in a tiny hole beneath the barbed wire surrounding the refugee camp. You, of course, didn’t realize that. Yoro knew the place well because that’s how they passed food to her from the outside when she lived in the camp, without having to report it to the authorities. Once a week, around midnight, a whistle sounded, and together with five other refugees she would sneak through the hole to fetch the aid some stranger would pass through. I imagined the group of six in the middle of the night—like hungry cats, eagerly answering the call of a voice no matter whose it was. That anonymous charity seemed more appropriate for animals than people, I thought. We heard footsteps a few minutes later and remained in the hole, noiseless. My hand brushed against something hard, coarse; I thought the worst, a cold body, but it was only the root of a tree. I looked above me and didn’t see a trunk or a treetop, nothing. I remembered the legend of the baobab, the tree that was punished for being too beautiful, forced to grow downward, underground. There I was with Yoro, in the same stratum as the root of a tree condemned to the blindness of a hedgehog. The most beautiful things in this land never seem to rise above sea level; instead all of it—the moon and the stars, even the birds and the clouds—is underground, buried, and afraid. The dead man and the mountain climber are both underground. How is it possible that someone who in a show of determination, muscle, and the strokes of his pickax reaches the top of a peak, aiming there to find freedom, is never able to see beyond what a dead man sees? When was this continent, over which life runs, flies, and cries out in pleasure, buried so deep? It’s important for you to know these things that run through my mind before the end. It’s not that you’ll understand me any better because of it, but I want it to go on the record that I love life, because it’s what places me above you.
While we were waiting in that hole for the people standing close to us to move on, it started to rain. The drops were small, but it was a hard rain. The earth began soaking it up and my hand sunk in a little. I felt another part of the root. Suddenly I was very cold. For a second I was afraid I myself was dead. Then I thought how coldness is a feature of death that only the living can feel. That’s when I realized I was alive. At times being dead and being alive seemed only a question of one’s deciding whether one was dead or alive. I kept evaluating my state: though we hadn’t eaten anything all day, I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t thirsty either. I’d had my last meal the day before, a bowl of rice that I shared with Yoro. The last water I drank was also several hours earlier. My mouth was dry, but without thirst. My stomach was empty, but without hunger. It’s as though this dryness and this emptiness were destined to remind me that living things need water and food; yet I, feeling their absence, didn’t need anything. Nothing. So was I dead? I looked at Yoro and all my doubts evaporated. We were alive. Or maybe that’s all it was, a question of deciding that we were alive.
When the people next to the barbed wire left, I saw that Yoro’s head was resting sideways on the ground. I didn’t want to wait any longer, but she grabbed me by the arm and held me there in the hole. She said the spiders made music when they wove their webs, that the larvae made a sort of purring sound when they grow, like lounging cats. She assured me that these tiny sounds are beautiful and that she had learned how to discern them in the mines. She appreciated these souls that for years were her only company, lives that nobody paid attention to, which were squashed under a foot or simply ignored. Then she told me she was afraid. And something happened then, sir, which I will never be able to forget. Yoro stretched out a hand and I saw what she wanted to show me by the light of my tiny lantern. A flying ant had opened its wings in the palm of her hand, in the form of a cross, and it’s not that I’m Christian or believe in many things, but I had to think it was nature’s way of sharing our circumstances. A snail left its shell, and after leaving a slippery trail, like a long, continuous kiss, it returned to its shell with its antennas down. A lizard egg cracked so that Yoro could see—and it seemed such an obvious, generous gesture—the spectacle of the creature’s premature birth. All these minimal lives were with Yoro. Not a single one of these creatures was on my skin. They were all on Yoro, caressing her in their own way. I think that if Yoro had been able to walk she would have gotten up; thousands of tiny backs would have held her and carried her faceup, looking at the starry sky. But I was there to move her, and after delicately brushing off all that life that had settled on her skin, I finally helped her up, and we moved to the other side of the fence.
It was the dead of night, and the area had become a boggy pit from all the rain. We had to walk with special care so our footfalls didn’t make noise splashing in the water. Luckily, the tent we were looking for wasn’t too far away from the hole we’d entered and, anyway, in the worst-case scenario, it wasn’t likely that anyone not in uniform would be bothered by our presence. Flies don’t generally bother other flies—they prefer to bother people, and there weren’t any people there because anyone who entered that place was transformed into a black insect that fought over the world’s garbage with other black insects. You might think that in the case of a refugee camp, the fence is there to protect those inside from what is on the outside. But that wasn’t the case. As I have already explained, many of the refugees were faced there with a war inside of a war, where humanitarian aid was sold at a premium, much higher than on the outside.