Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty Read online

  Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in Congo. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches literature at UCLA. He was awarded the prestigious Grand Prix de Littérature Henri Gal for his body of work. He has also received the Subsaharan African Literature Prize for Blue-White-Red, and the Prix Renaudot for Memoirs of a Porcupine, which is published by Serpent’s Tail along with his other novels, Black Bazaar, Broken Glass and African Psycho.

  Praise for Alain Mabanckou

  ‘This bar-room yarn-spinner tells his fellow tipplers’ tales in a voice that swings between broad farce and aching tragedy. His farewell performance from a perch in Credit Gone West abounds in scorching wit and flights of eloquence… vitriolic comedy and pugnacious irreverence’ Boyd Tonkin, Independent

  ‘A dizzying combination of erudition, bawdy humour and linguistic effervescence’ Melissa McClements, Financial Times

  ‘Broken Glass is a comic romp that releases Mabanckou’s sense of humour… Although its cultural and intertextual musings could fuel innumerable doctorates, the real meat of Broken Glass is its comic brio, and Mabanckou’s jokes work the whole spectrum of humour’ Tibor Fischer, Guardian

  ‘Deserves the acclaim heaped upon it… self-mocking and ironic, a thought-provoking glimpse into a stricken country’ Waterstone’s Books Quarterly

  ‘Taxi Driver for Africa’s blank generation… a deftly ironic Grand Guignol, a pulp fiction vision of Frantz Fanon’s “wretched of the earth” that somehow manages to be both frightening and self-mocking at the same time’ Time Out, New York

  ‘The French have already called [Mabanckou] a young writer to watch. After this debut, I certainly concur’ Globe and Mail, Toronto

  ‘Broken Glass proves to be an obsessive, slyly playful raconteur… the prose runs wild to weave endless sentences, their rhythm and pace attuned to the narrator’s rhetorical extravagances… With his sourly comic recollections, Broken Glass makes a fine companion’ Peter Carty, Independent

  ‘A book of grubby erudition… full of tall tales that can entertain readers from Brazzaville to Bognor’ James Smart, Guardian

  ‘Mabanckou’s narrative gains an uplifting momentum of its own’ Emma Hagestadt, Independent

  ‘Mabanckou’s irreverent wit and madcap energy have made him a big name in France… surreal’ Giles Foden, Condé Nast Traveller

  ‘Magical realism meets black comedy in an excellent satire by an inventive and playful writer’ Alastair Mabbott, Herald

  ‘Africa’s Samuel Beckett… Mabanckou’s freewheeling prose marries classical French elegance with Paris slang and a Congolese beat. It weds the oral culture of his mother to an omnivorous bibliophilia encouraged by his stepfather… Memoirs of a Porcupine draws on oral lore and parables in its sly critique of those who use traditional beliefs as a pretext for violence’ The Economist

  TOMORROW I’LL BE TWENTY

  ALAIN MABANCKOU

  Translated by Helen Stevenson

  This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

  A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request

  The right of Alain Mabanckou to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and

  Patents Act 1988

  Copyright © 2010 Editions Gallimard

  Translation copyright © 2013 Helen Stevenson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  First published as Demains J’aurai Vingt Ans in 2010 by Editions Gallimard

  First published in this translation in 2013 by Serpent’s Tail,

  an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

  3A Exmouth House

  Pine Street

  London EC1R 0JH

  website: www.serpentstail.com

  ISBN 978 1 84668 584 2

  eISBN 978 1 84765 789 3

  Designed and typeset by [email protected]

  Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my mother Pauline Kengué – died 1995

  For my father Roger Kimangou – died 2004

  To Dany Laferrière

  The sweetest thought

  In the child’s warm heart:

  Soiled sheets and white lilac

  Tomorrow I’ll be twenty

  TCHICAYA U TAM’ SI

  Wrong Blood

  Edited by P.J. Oswald, 1955

  In this country, a boss should always be bald and have a big belly. My uncle isn’t bald, he hasn’t got a big belly, and you don’t realise, the first time you see him, that he’s the actual boss of a big office in the centre of town. He’s an ‘administrative and financial director’. Maman Pauline says an administrative and financial director is someone who keeps all the company’s money for himself and says: ‘I’ll hire you, I won’t hire you, and I’m sending you back to where you came from.’

  Uncle René works at the CFAO, the only company in Pointe-Noire that sells cars. He has a telephone and a television in his house. Maman Pauline thinks things like that cost too much for what they are, there’s no point having them because people lived better lives without. Why put a telephone in your own home when you can go and make a call from the post office in the Grand Marché? Why have television when you can listen to the news on the radio? And anyway, the Lebanese down at the Grand Marché sell radios, you can beat them down on the price. You can also pay in instalments if you’re a civil servant or an administrative and financial director, like my uncle.

  I often think to myself that Uncle René is more powerful than the God people praise and worship every Sunday at the church of Saint-Jean-Bosco. No one’s ever seen Him, but people are afraid of His mighty power, as though He might tell us off or give us a smack, when in fact He lives far far away, further than any Boeing can fly. If you want to speak to Him, you have to go to church and the priest will pass on a message to Him, which He’ll read if he has a spare moment, because up there He’s run off his feet, morning, noon and night.

  Uncle René is anti-church and is always saying to my mother: ‘Religion is the opium of the people!’

  Maman Pauline told me, if anyone calls you ‘opium of the people’ you should punch him straight off, because it’s a serious insult, and Uncle René wouldn’t go using a complicated word like ‘opium’ just for the fun of it. Since then, whenever I do something silly, Maman Pauline calls me ‘opium of the people’. And in the playground, if my friends really annoy me I call them ‘opium of the people!’ and then we get into a fight over that.

  My uncle says he’s a communist. Usually communists are simple people, they don’t have television, telephone, or electricity, hot water or air conditioning, and they don’t change cars every six months like Uncle René. So now I know you can also be communist and rich.

  I think the reason my uncle is tough with us is because the communists are strict about how things should be done, because of the capitalists stealing all the goods of the poor wretched of the Earth, including their means of production. How are the poor wretched of the Earth going to live off their labours if the capitalists own the means of production and refuse to share, eating up the profits, instead of splitting them fifty-fifty with the workers?

  The thing that gets my Uncle René really angry is the capitalists, not the communists, who must unite because apparently the final strug
gle won’t be long now. At least, that’s what they teach us at the école populaire in Moral studies. They tell us, for instance, that we are the future of the Congo, that it’s up to us to make sure that capitalism doesn’t win the final struggle. We are the National Pioneer Movement. To start with we children belong to the National Pioneer Movement and later we’ll belong to the Congolese Workers’ Party – the CPT – and maybe one day one of us will even become President of the Republic, who also runs the CPT.

  Hearing me – Michel – use the words my uncle uses, you might think I was a true communist, but in fact I’m not. It’s just that he uses these strange, complicated words so often – ‘capital’, ‘profit’, ‘means of production’, ‘marxism’, ‘leninism’, ‘materialism’, ‘infrastructure’, ‘superstructure’, ‘bourgeoisie’, ‘class struggle’, ‘proletariat’, etc., I’ve ended up knowing them all, even if I do sometimes mix them up without meaning to and don’t always understand them. For instance, when he talks about the wretched of the Earth, what he really means is the starving masses. The capitalists starve them, so they’ll turn up to work the next day, even though they’re being exploited and they didn’t eat yesterday. So before the hungry can win their struggle against the capitalists, they must do a tabula radar of the past and take their problems in hand, instead of waiting for someone else to come and liberate them. Otherwise they’re truly stuffed, they’ll be forever hungry and eternally exploited.

  When we sit down to eat at Uncle René’s house, I always get put in the worst seat, bang opposite the photo of an old white guy called Lenin, who won’t take his eyes off me, even though I don’t even know him, and he doesn’t know me either. I don’t like having an old white guy who doesn’t even know me giving me nasty looks, so I look him straight back in the eye. I know it’s rude to look grown up people in the eye, that’s why I do it in secret, or my uncle will get cross and tell me I’m being disrespectful to Lenin who is admired the world over.

  Then there’s the photo of Karl Marx and Engels. It seems you’re not meant to split these two old guys up, they’re like twins. They’ve both got big beards, they both think the same thing at the same time, and sometimes they write down both their thoughts in a big book together. It’s thanks to them people now know what communism is. My uncle says it was Marx and Engels who showed that the history of the world was actually just the history of people in their different classes, for example, slaves and masters, landowners and landless peasants and so on. So, some people are on top in this world, and some are on the bottom and suffer because the ones on top exploit the ones at the bottom. But because things have changed a lot and the ones on top try to hide the fact that they’re exploiting the ones at the bottom, Karl Marx and Engels think we should all be quite clear that the differences still exist, and that nowadays there are two big classes at odds with each other, engaged in a ruthless struggle: the bourgeoisie and the proletariats. It’s easy to tell them apart in the street: the bourgeois have big bellies because they eat what the proletarians produce and the proletarians or the starving masses are all skinny because the bourgeois only leave them crumbs to eat, just enough so they can come to work the next day. And Uncle René says this is what you call the exploitation of man by his fellow man.

  My uncle has also hung on the wall a photo of our Immortal, comrade president Marien Ngouabi, and one of Victor Hugo, who wrote lots of poems that we recite at school.

  Generally speaking, an Immortal is someone like Spiderman, Blek le Roc, Tintin or Superman, who never dies. I don’t understand why we have to say that comrade president Marien Ngouabi is immortal when everyone knows he’s dead, that he’s buried in the cemetery at Etatolo, in the north of the country, a cemetery which is guarded seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, all because there are people who want to go and make their gris-gris on his grave so they can become immortal too.

  Anyway, there you go, we have to call our ex-president ‘The Immortal’, even though he’s no longer alive. If anyone’s got a problem with that, the government will deal with them, they’ll be thrown in prison and given a trial once the Revolution has got rid of the capitalists and the means of production at last belong to the wretched of the Earth, to the starving masses who struggle night and day, all because of this business with the classes of Karl Marx and Engels.

  Maman Pauline knows I’m very frightened of Uncle René, and she exploits it. If I don’t want to go to bed at night without her coming in to kiss me goodnight she reminds me that if I don’t go to bed her brother will think that I’m just a little capitalist who won’t sleep because he wants a kiss from his mummy first, like those capitalists’ children who live in the centre of town or in Europe, especially in France. He’ll forget I’m his nephew and give me a good hiding. That shuts me up pretty quickly, and Maman Pauline leans over and just touches me on the head, but she doesn’t give me a kiss like in the books we read in class that take place in Europe, especially in France. That’s when I tell myself that not everything you read in books is true, and you shouldn’t always believe what you read.

  Sometimes I can’t get to sleep, though not always because I’m waiting for my mother’s goodnight kiss, sometimes just because the mosquito net bothers me. Once I’m inside it I feel as though I’m breathing in the same air as the evening before, and then I start sweating so much you’d think I’d wet the bed, which I haven’t.

  The mosquitoes in our quartier are strange, they just love sweat, it means they can really stick to your skin and take their time about sucking your blood till five in the morning. Also, when I’m inside the mosquito net, I look like a corpse, the mosquitoes buzzing round me are like people weeping because I’ve just died.

  I told Papa Roger this. I did, I told him I’m like a little corpse when I’m inside my mosquito net, and one day, if they’re not careful, I’ll really die in there, and I’ll never be seen on this earth again, because I’ll have gone up on high to join my two big sisters, who I’ve never known because they were in too much of a hurry to go straight up to heaven. I was in tears myself as I told him that, imagining myself as a tiny little corpse in a tiny little white coffin surrounded by people crying pointlessly, since if you’re dead you’re not coming back, except Jesus who can work miracles, and resuscitate, as though death, for him, was just a little afternoon siesta.

  It worried Papa Roger that I was starting to talk about death like that at my age. He told me children never die, God watches over them at night while they’re sleeping and He gives them lots of air to breathe so they don’t suffocate in their sleep. So I asked him why God hadn’t put lots of air in the lungs of my two big sisters. He looked at me kindly. ‘I’ll see to it, I’ll take off the mosquito net.’

  But it was weeks and weeks before he did anything about it. He finally took my mosquito net off yesterday, when he got home from work. He’d been to buy some Flytox from someone in the Avenue of Independence. Usually any self-respecting mosquito who hears the word Flytox buzzes off quickly, rather than die a slow, stupid death.

  Papa Roger put this stuff all over my room, so the smell would last longer. Now the mosquitoes in our quartier are no fools, you can’t trick them that easily, particularly since you can see the picture of a dying mosquito on the Flytox packet. Is it likely they’ll commit suicide instead of fighting for your last drop of blood? They wait till the smell wears off, then they come right back and bite you all over because they’re angry with you now for waging war on them. When in fact they’re just like you, they want to live as long as they can.

  So, even if you pump your house full of Flytox, you should never claim victory too soon. The mosquitoes will always win in the end, and then they’ll go and tell all the other mosquitoes in town that in fact you can get round the product after all. Mosquitoes aren’t like us, they never keep secrets, they spend the whole night chatting, as though they’d nothing else to do. And since they’re the same ones as in the Trois-Cents quartier, and they’ve seen you spraying Flytox in your house, fi
rst of all they go to the neighbours’ houses, where they don’t have it and then when they’ve finished there they come back to your room to see if it still smells of Flytox. Some mosquitoes are even used to it, and explain to their mates how to protect themselves against it. They say, ‘Watch out for those guys, it stinks of Flytox in their house; if you don’t want to die, take cover for now in a wardrobe or a cooking pot or a pair of shoes or some clothes’. And they’ll wait till you turn down the light on the storm lantern. They’re pleased because they can see you’re scared of them. If you’re really scared, it means you’ve got lots of nice warm blood to feed them on over the winter, and you didn’t want them to find out. If one of them comes looking for a fight and you try to squash it with your hands or a bit of wood, the others then turn up with their sisters and their cousins and their aunts and bite you all over. One little group makes the noise, the others attack. They take turns. The ones making the noise aren’t always the ones that attack, and the ones attacking wait behind them in a circle. There you are, all on your own, you’ve only got two hands, you can’t see what’s happening behind you, you can’t protect yourself, they’re a well-trained army out for revenge because you’ve tried to wipe them out with your Flytox. You’re itching all over, you’ve got mosquitoes up your nose, mosquitoes in your ears, and they’re all biting away and laughing their heads off.

  And that’s why I woke up this morning covered in red spots. If I sniff my arms, they still smell of Flytox. A really angry mosquito – the leader, perhaps – bit me just above my eye, it’s so swollen, you’d think the devil had thrown me an invisible punch. Maman Pauline put some boa grease on it and said, to cheer me up, ‘Never mind, Michel, your eye will be better by sunset. Boa grease, that’s what they used on me when I was little. Tonight we’ll put back the mosquito net your father took off. That Flytox the Lebanese sell is rubbish. And he knows it.’