learning languages. That is why, in late September 1983, with what was left of my bank loan, I went back to the Institute of Oriental Languages, this time to enrol in the African Studies department, where I started learning Bambara, a perfect contradiction not only of my parents’ expectations for my future life but also of my own.
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TO BE HONEST, AT THE TIME I HAD NO concept of what an African language might be, even less of the workings of humanitarian organisations, but I signed up as a volunteer to one barely a year after I began studying Bambara. Out in the field I threw myself wholeheartedly into a project to build a school in northern Mali, three hundred kilometres from Bamako, near the former capital of the Songhai Empire.
With a naivety which now brings a smile to my lips, I could already see myself as a schoolteacher surrounded by dozens of orphans of all ages, staying on after lessons to take them down to the Niger and watch them have fun, jump, swim and play hide-and-seek while the great red disc of the sun dropped slowly into the river, where bare-breasted washerwomen stood waist-deep in the water, singing and laughing as they beat wet clothes over stones with wooden sticks that made a dull, slightly muffled thud. I myself would bathe the youngest children (Would I have known how to? Is being born a woman enough for that skill?), supporting the toddlers streaming back with one hand and soaping him with the other. Then I would tell him to wriggle his arms and legs in every direction in time to the washerwomen’s jubilant song, or do a slight variation on this the way African mothers do: bunching the child’s arms and legs over his tummy, then suddenly letting them go and smothering his silky soft naked body with kisses, as if he were my own baby, my child from Peking who, as he grew up, had changed skin colour—a frequent phenomenon in dreams, where physical appearances go unnoticed, can be modified and are often interchangeable. As I cared for my little orphans I would wash myself of the last stains I felt still deep inside me and which still hurt. I imagined they would dissolve like refracted prisms in the Niger.
Because most people live with constant anxiety about finding their place in society, few can afford the luxury of healing a broken heart in Africa. I was exceptionally lucky, I realised that. I was a chosen one, greeted each new day by this preferential treatment, which smiled down on me like the sun above the mists of the African bush. By coming in contact with life in its raw state (absent in Western societies so well organised they have frozen rigid), the hitherto inconceivable idea that love isn’t eternal and can die no longer frightened me. On the contrary, I discovered to my stupefaction all the beauty of a lost love, a melancholy liberating beauty, a sort of macabre dance in which I twirled and spun like a madwoman. I threw myself at strangers, meeting my one-night stands in the bush and Bamako’s kitsch restaurants, and eventually they all looked like a familiar ghost, Tumchooq.
The experiences I had then were salutary. Is there just one single love in a lifetime? Are all our lovers—from the first to the last, including the most fleeting—part of that unique love, and is each of them merely an expression of it, a variation, a particular version? In the same way that in literature there is just one true masterpiece to which different writers give a particular form (taking the twentieth century alone: Joyce, who explores everything happening inside his character’s head with microscopic precision; Proust, for whom the present is merely a memory of the past; Kafka, who drifts on the margins between dream and reality; the blind Borges, probably the one I relate to best, etc.). I imagine that if they met they would each apologise for stepping onto the shared stage too soon.
Perhaps it’s in my nature, but in Mali I had no more success than anywhere else in forging peaceable relationships with my compatriots within the humanitarian family. It really was stronger than me, I couldn’t help giving my opinion about everything going on around me, saying what I liked and what I found shocking: for example, the colossal amount our organisation spent on communication, which matched what was spent on work in the field; the difference in wages between