Pure Men

1

“Have you seen the video that’s been going around the past few days?”
All I wanted was to fall asleep in my post-orgasmic inebriation. Alas. In this world, there’s always that one charitable soul who, rather uncharitably, wants to sober you up. The voice was insistent: “It’s on nearly every cell phone in the country. Apparently, some TV station even broadcast it before they got cut off . . .”
No choice, then. I was obliged to return to my bedroom, where the smell of underarm perspiration and cigarettes lingered in the air, though overpowered, smothered in fact, by the dense spoor of sex, of her sex. I could have recognized her coital scent among a thousand, a unique olfactory signature that evoked the open sea, like a swirl of incense drifting down from the heavens… It was getting dark. Past the time when you could still guess the hour. Night. And yet, the voices outside refused to fade. Theirs was the garbled chorus of a tired people who had nonetheless lost their appetite for sleep long ago. They were talking, if you can call it that: sentences without start or finish, incomplete monologues, never-ending dialogues, inaudible murmurs, deafening outbursts, implausible interjections, ingenious onomatopoeias, maddening nocturnal sermons, pitiful declarations of love, the obscenest of curses. Talk. No, decidedly not, they slobbered their sentences like greasy sauces, which were dribbling out, incidentally, without regard for meaning, preoccupied only with warding off what would have otherwise been their death sentence: silence. The terrifying silence that would have forced every so-called talker to examine who they really were. They drank tea, played cards, surrendered to boredom and idleness but with a semblance of class, with the disingenuous elegance that frames powerlessness as a choice that some loftily call dignity. Bullshit. They were putting the entire weight of their existence into every sentence, every gesture, except that their lives weighed nothing at all. The scale of destiny didn’t even quiver. The needle always at zero. The most terrible part was that this fight to the death wasn’t unfolding on a majestic stage worthy of the stakes. No, it was taking place in the vast anonymity of filthy, sand-strewn streets cloaked in darkness. Just as well, they all would have committed suicide if they could have seen one another. It was sad enough as it was. They were waiting. God knows for what. Godot. The Barbarians. The Tartars. The Syrtes. For the wild beasts to vote. God knows for whom. Every time one of them laughed, it was as if they were throwing up a distress beacon that exploded in the sky. Some find that admirable. Just look at those brave people! Laughing despite it all! They defy death with their faith in life! Honor in poverty, etc.! And so, hearts are stirred, accolades bestowed, regal busts carved. But if you ask me, statues should only be erected for the dead, for heroes or tyrants. These inhabitants of the night were simply poor and miserable. Though did I have the heart to expose their illusory courage?
“Did you hear me?”
“Yeah, you were talking about that video.”
“Oh! So you did see it?”
“No. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“So then why did you say ‘that video’?”
“Who knows. Reflex.”
“You weren’t listening to me.”
“Not really, no, I’m sorry. But I did hear you say ‘that video.’ So what is it?”
“Hang on. I have it.”
She left the hollow of my shoulder to rummage for her phone amid the pillows, sheets, blankets, and the clothes scattered across the bed, earlier, in the rush of the act. She lay back on my chest. I was momentarily blinded by a bright light as she fiddled with her phone a few centimeters above our faces. But then, soon enough, all I saw was the screen.
“You realize that we’re a living metaphor for our time. We’ve all gone blind… The light of technology isn’t illuminating us, it’s burning our retinas, plunging the world into perpetual darkness and— ”
“God, you’re such an intellectual,” she interrupted pitilessly. “What you’re saying might even be interesting. But I don’t understand any of it. Not a word.”
She was lying. She understood everything. Better, she was almost always able to guess, no, more than that, deduce, yes, that’s it exactly, deduce what I was going to say from the first sentence out of my mouth. Rama. That was her name. Fiercely intelligent and yet so embarrassed by the sharpness of her mind that she spent her life hiding it in public, out of shame or modesty. But I’d stopped playing along long before. I angrily ripped off her mask.
“You’re lying. I can tell. You can’t help yourself.”
“No one cares what you have to say about the blindness of the world. If you’re capable of seeing that everyone else has gone blind, it’s because you think you haven’t. But are you so sure that you can see? C’mon, just watch.”
She hit Play and the video began with the whirl of muddled images and sounds that signals an amateur behind the lens. No contextual elements, just voices, shadows, breathing. So the person filming wasn’t alone but seemingly amid a thicket of men. The image was hazy at first (a trembling hand) but stabilized after a few seconds. Then the person spoke— it was a man— asking, as much for himself as for those watching, what was going on, but no one answered. He raised his arm slightly to get a better shot of what was happening around him: a mob on the move, dense, numerous. Voices rose in the distance: “The cemetery! To the cemetery!”
“The cemetery? Why?” asked the man.
The video became choppy again; you could sense a change in rhythm, an acceleration of movement as if, to follow the crowd, the man holding the phone had begun to run. “Why the cemetery?” he repeated, beseechingly, “Why the cemetery?” Still with no response, he continued to advance rapidly, and soon harsh male voices cried out, “It’s here! It’s this one!” The man filming slowed down and said, sounding like an absurdly professional voice-over, “We’re in the cemetery. I’m going to get closer to see,” then elbowed his way through the gathered crowd (you could hear grumbles and vehement protestations), apologizing but still forging ahead, dodging and jostling. There was a sudden movement on the screen, followed by several seconds of total darkness. “He drops his phone here but it’ll start again,” said Rama, and soon enough we had “eyes on the ground,” as the terrible expression goes. The filmmaker appeared to have reached a spot where he could no longer advance; the mob was too packed.
He made an audible expression of horror before raising his phone above the crowd. Then, a few feet away, surrounded by a wall of men, there it was: a grave being dug by two muscular guys wielding shovels; a grave that was already quite deep, a profound gash in the earth’s flesh around which, apart from the two diggers, no one was moving. The bystanders appeared to be frozen, as silent and grim as if it were one of their family members or their own body, their own soul, being buried. Even the hand holding the phone was as though petrified; it had stopped trembling, the image was steady, neat. The two men were digging like frenzied gold miners who sense treasure is near. One was bare-chested, the other in an unbuttoned shirt so drenched with sweat it was glued to his skin; both were panting. They were digging impressively hard, shovelful after shovelful of dry earth and rage. The pit grew wider, deeper, until one of the diggers said, “We’re good!” And then, as though that was the signal for which everyone was waiting, the mob grew more feverish, more primal. It was as if something monstrous was lying in the depths, human and terrestrial alike. People began to shout: “Get him out!” “He’s started to rot. . .” “What a stench!” “Smells like sin!” “Smells like the mother’s cunt from which he should have never emerged!”
Before I could grasp what was happening, I saw one of the gravediggers on his knees beside the pit, his bare chest plunged in the grave, his muscles taut. A few seconds later, he reemerged: shoulders and head first, then his arms, followed by something— the hint of a human form, yes that was it— which he was trying to extract; the second digger ran to his aid and they pulled together, cursing, short of breath. Little by little, like a heavy chest buried for a thousand years, the form came out of the ground. The mob gasped in a mix of horror and delight. I heard Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar! several times, even the man filming said it. The two diggers were still pulling. The figure— it looked like a long piece of deadwood wrapped in white cloth— was almost out. They pulled, one final effort, like the woodcutter’s last blow before the baobab falls, and the corpse sprung from the grave, prompting a deep and inhuman rumble of frightened shouts, obscenities, and Koranic verses. The exhumed body fell back to the ground in a cloud of dust. I closed my eyes, horrified and disgusted, but the video continued, stoking my morbid curiosity. I reopened them.
The image became increasingly blurry, all momentum and turbulence. The mob was on the move again but less unified. A white spot remained visible on the screen, however, like a landmark: the shroud unraveling as the corpse was dragged out of the cemetery. The person filming was following the body closely, he caught up to the men who were angrily and unceremoniously hauling it behind them. The deceased was dragged through the dust and the shroud abandoned, you could see there was only a thin sheet still protecting the body. A few seconds later, against the sound of guttural, satisfied breaths, I saw the naked body, its member protruding. I closed my eyes to escape it but only saw the man more clearly, dead and stark naked, a purely mental image that imprinted itself on my brain cells, exaggerated and made excruciatingly distinct by my imagination. I opened my eyes just as the corpse was being tossed out of the cemetery with a volley of insults and gobs of spit, then the video abruptly ended, or Rama stopped it, I don’t remember.
A few moments passed without a word. Even the voices outside seemed to have gone quiet. It was the kind of silence you simultaneously fear prolonging and breaking, both options feeling like they would lead to disaster. But something had to be said. Rama went first.
“Well? Upsetting, isn’t it?”
“Where did this happen?”
“Here, in Dakar. I don’t know exactly where yet. But it happened, is the thing.”
I shrugged. I had neither the heart nor the desire to say anything else. My throat was dry, my tongue heavy in my mouth. My chest rang hollow. I got out of bed, walked over to the window, and lit a cigarette as peals of laughter from below slowly reformed their black constellation in the sky. I was wondering why Rama had shown me the video. She knew I didn’t like the sight of violence, not because I had a weak stomach but for the simple reason that I loathed the perverse fascination it sparked in me. I felt nausea rising, exacerbated by my cigarette, and a great weariness settle over my body. I tried to shake it off by focusing all my energy on contemplating houses in the darkness. A futile effort.
“Come here,” she eventually said.
I understood exactly the tone of that invitation. Sickened (oh, but the flesh is weak), I tossed away the cigarette butt and joined her. She began touching me. I couldn’t hide that I was still shaken, still uneasy. My stomach in knots from the image of the corpse springing from the grave. Rama’s body was suddenly unfamiliar. I felt clumsy and awkward, I couldn’t remember how to make love. But my amnesia was short-lived, the motions embedded in my hands, my eyes, my breath, my skin, my lips; these are memories you can’t lose unless you were to forget yourself entirely. Desire returned a few minutes later, much more quickly than my good conscience would have preferred (though I’d have liked to see that conscience take on Rama’s warm naked body, her ass as hard as the fists of a vengeful boxer, her small breasts as soft and inviting as a nest of feathers). I came like a saint transfigured in mystical ecstasy.
Experience profound terror at the sight of something, rattled to your core, then succumb to pleasure shortly after, the tragedy forgotten… Man is the only creature capable, the only one who can play, in turn, or at the same time, brother to the monster and sister to the angel. True decency never lasts. Unless it’s just me who’s this way.
I remember — I was still studying in France at the time — how moments after learning of my mother’s death, devastated by grief, I collapsed into the arms of my then-girlfriend. Her name was Manon and I was with her when my father called. So she heard alongside me the fateful news that no man on earth wants to receive but which he knows he cannot escape. Manon consoled me, holding me to her chest like a child as I soaked her blouse with sorrow. We stayed like that for some time. It was winter, a few days before Christmas, and the sharp burn of cold on my bones, the black shroud of night prematurely draped over the world, the melancholy that always accompanied me at that time of year, all of it, compounded the sadness caused by the terrible and yet simple fact that my mother was dead.
I wept in Manon’s arms for what felt like hours. And then suddenly, still in tears, with an impulse I found both surprising and horrifying but irrepressible all the same, I began to stroke her breasts and inner thighs, then tried to take off her clothes. I was gripped by a wild and unfathomable desire to fuck her like never before, then and there. She refused, at first. But who can refuse a little comfort to a man who’s just lost his mother? She eventually gave in. I don’t know if it was out of perversity, pity, Christian charity, or true love. Or was it fear? Was she afraid that in a blind rage, I would force myself on her? Rape her? Did I rape her? It didn’t occur to me until now. Dear Lord… I never saw her again after that.
Still, that night, the night I learned of my mother’s death, was also, for me, a sublime night of passion with Manon. And yet it was one and the same, a night during which pain, infinite pain, and carnal delight blended so seamlessly that my soul emerged exhausted, near dead, but with the reassurance of what I considered the very foundation of my humanity: tragedy. Or monstrosity. But within that very monstrosity, I was merely a man, a small broken man, miserable, unfortunate, and orphaned. I deserved to die that night. I should have. I would have been happy to. I would have been reunited with my mother.