But I refused. Ah! I refused. I’m sorry, Mademba Diop, I’m sorry, my friend, my more-than-brother, not to have listened to you with my heart. I know, I understand, I shouldn’t have turned my mind toward the blue-eyed enemy from the other side. I know, I understand, I shouldn’t have been thinking about the vengeance demanded by my brain, furrowed by your tears, seeded by your cries, when you weren’t even dead yet. But I heard a powerful and commanding voice that forced me to ignore your suffering. “Do not kill your best friend, your more-than-brother. It isn’t for you to take his life. Don’t mistake yourself for the hand of God. Don’t mistake yourself for the hand of the Devil. Alfa Ndiaye, could you stand before Mademba’s father and mother knowing that it was you who killed him, that it was you who finished the work of the blue-eyed enemy?”
No, I know, I understand, I shouldn’t have listened to the voice that exploded in my head. I should have shut it up while there was still time. I should already have been thinking for myself. I should, Mademba, have finished you off out of friendship so that you would stop weeping, writhing, contorting yourself in an effort to put back into your belly what had come out of it and was sucking at the air like a freshly caught fish.
V
GOD’S TRUTH, I WAS INHUMAN. I didn’t listen to my friend, I listened to my enemy. So when I capture the enemy from the other side, when I read in his blue eyes the screams his mouth can’t sling into the skies of war, when his open belly has become nothing more than a pulp of raw flesh, I turn back the clock, I finish off the enemy. As soon as he’s made a second plea with his eyes, I slit his throat like a sacrificial lamb. What I didn’t do for Mademba Diop, I do for my blue-eyed enemy. Out of my reclaimed humanity.
And then I take his rifle, after cutting off his right hand with my machete. It takes a long time and is very, very difficult. When I crawl home, slipping under barbed wire, between wooden posts rising from the viscous mud, when I come home to our trench that’s spread open like a woman facing the sky, I’m covered with the blood of the enemy from the other side. I’m like a statue made of mud and blood mixed together and I stink so badly even the rats flee.
My stench is the stench of death. Death has the stench of the inside of the body turned outside its sacred vessel. In the open air, the inside of the body of any human being or animal becomes corrupted. From the richest man to the poorest, from the most beautiful woman to the ugliest, from the most feral animal to the most harmless, from the most powerful to the weakest. Death is the stench of the decomposed inside of the body, and even the rats are afraid when they smell me coming, crawling beneath the barbed wire. They dread the sight of death moving, advancing toward them, so they flee. They flee at home in the trench, too, even after I wash my body and my clothes, even when I think I’ve purified myself.
VI
MY TRENCH-MATES, my war brothers, began to fear me after the fourth hand. At first, they laughed with me heartily, they enjoyed watching me come home with a rifle and an enemy hand. They were so pleased with me, they even thought of giving me another medal. But after the fourth enemy hand, they no longer laughed so easily. The white soldiers were beginning to say—I could read it in their eyes—“This Chocolat is really strange.” The others, Chocolat soldiers from West Africa like me, began to say—and I also read it in their eyes—“This Alfa Ndiaye from the village of Gandiol near Saint-Louis in Senegal is strange. When did he become so strange?”
The Toubabs and the Chocolats, as the captain called them, continued to slap me on the shoulder, but their laughter and their smiles had changed. They began to be very, very, very afraid of me. They began to whisper, right after the fourth enemy hand.
For the first three hands I was a legend, they cheered me when I returned, they fed me delicacies, offered me tobacco, helped me rinse off with big buckets of water, helped me clean my uniform. I saw in their eyes that they understood. I was performing, in their place, the grotesque savage, the enlisted savage obeying orders. The enemy on the other side should be trembling in his boots and under his helmet.
In the beginning, my war brothers weren’t bothered by my stench of death, the stench of a butcher of human flesh, but beginning with the fourth hand they avoided smelling me. They continued to give me delicacies, to offer me bits of tobacco they’d collected from here or there, to lend me a blanket to warm myself, but with a fake smile plastered on their terrified soldiers’ faces. They no longer helped me rinse myself with big buckets. They let me clean my uniform myself. Suddenly, nobody was slapping me on the shoulder and laughing. God’s truth, I became untouchable.
So they set aside a bowl, a cup, a fork, and a spoon for me that they kept in a corner of our dugout. When I came home very late at night on battle days, long after the others, never mind the wind, rain, or snow, as the captain said, the cook would tell me to go get my things. When he served me soup, he was very, very careful that his ladle not touch the interior, the sides, or the rim of my bowl.
The rumor spread. It spread, and as it spread it shed its clothes and, eventually, its shame. Well dressed at the beginning, well appointed at the beginning, well outfitted, well medaled, the brazen rumor ended up with her legs spread, her ass in the air. I didn’t notice it right away, I didn’t recognize the change, I didn’t know what she was plotting. Everyone had seen her but no one described her to me. I finally caught wind of the whispers and learned that my strangeness had been transformed into madness, and madness into witchcraft. Soldier sorcerer.
Don’t tell me that we don’t need madness on the battlefield. God’s truth, the mad fear nothing. The others, white or black, play at being mad, perform madness so that they can calmly throw themselves in front of the bullets of the enemy on the other side. It allows them to run straight at death without being too afraid. You’d have to be mad to obey Captain Armand when he whistles for the attack, knowing there’s almost no chance you’ll come home alive. God’s truth, you’d have to be crazy to drag yourself screaming out of the belly of the earth. The bullets from the enemy on the other side, the giant seeds falling from the metallic sky, they aren’t afraid of screams, they aren’t afraid to pass through heads, flesh, to break bones and to sever lives. Temporary madness makes it possible to forget the truth about bullets. Temporary madness, in war, is bravery’s sister.
But when you seem crazy all the time, continuously, without stopping, that’s when you make people afraid, even your war brothers. And that’s when you stop being the brave one, the death-defier, and become instead the true friend of death, its accomplice, its more-than-brother.
VII
FOR EVERYONE, for the soldiers both black and white, I have become death. I know this, I understand. Whether Toubab soldiers or Chocolat soldiers like me, they think I’m a sorcerer, a devourer of people’s insides, a dëmm. They think I’ve always been one, but that the war has revealed it. The rumor, stark naked now, claimed I had eaten the insides of Mademba Diop, my more-than-brother, before he was even dead. The brazen rumor said that I should be feared. The rumor, spread-legged and ass in air, said that I devoured the insides of the enemies from the other side, but also the insides of friends. The obscene rumor said, “Beware, watch out. What does he do with the severed hands? He shows them to us and then they disappear. Beware, watch out.”