and that exaggerated, almost caricaturized presence of animality, that’s what filled our small chests and threw us up against the great termite wall, those dark castles bristling against the sky. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so driven since then. Such a strong urge to measure my strength, to dominate. It was a moment in our lives, just a moment, with no explanation, with no regrets, with no future, almost with no memory.
I thought it would have been different if we’d stayed in Ogoja, if we’d become just like the Africans. I would have learned to perceive, to sense things. Like the boys in the village, I would have learned to talk with living beings, discover the godliness in termites. I even think I would have forgotten about them after a while.
There was a feeling of haste, of urgency. We’d come from the far side of the earth (for Nice was truly another side of the world). From an apartment on the sixth floor of an upper-middle-class building ringed with a small garden where children were forbidden to play, we’d come to live in equatorial Africa on the banks of a muddy river in the middle of the forest. We didn’t know we would ever leave there. Perhaps, like all children, we thought we would die there. Back there, across the sea, the world was mired in silence. A grandmother and her stories, a grandfather with his lilting Mauritian accent, playmates, classmates, it had all just stopped cold, like toys one puts away in a trunk, like the fears one shuts up in the closet. The grassy plain had obliterated it all, in the hot afternoon wind. The grassy plain had the power of making our hearts pound, of bringing forth the rage, of leaving us drained every evening, ready to drop into our hammocks.
* * *
The ants were the antithesis of that rage. The opposite of the grassy plain, of destructive violence. Were there ants prior to Ogoja? I don’t remember them. Or most probably those “Argentinean ants” – black specks that would invade my grandmother’s kitchen every night, along tiny routes leading from the potted rosebushes balanced on the gutter to the piles of refuse she burned in her boiler.
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