The Lights of Pointe-Noire Read online

  For all the care she took to hide her worries from me, Maman Pauline could never quite conceal her fragility when, irritated that she still wouldn’t look at me when I desperately tried to catch her eye, I would ask her whether anything was wrong. Or course then she’d immediately burst out laughing and tell me I was worrying for nothing, of course she was fine, she must be, she was laughing, a person with worries wouldn’t be relaxed, or happy, like she was. She’d round off her little charade by adopting a manner too studiously relaxed to be genuine, and telling me some rambling story, still with that ill-contained hilarity that increased my anxiety and convinced me she was worried about something.

  If my attention drifted off, she’d notice straight away:

  ‘Why aren’t you laughing too? Don’t you like my story of the piglet born with two snouts and only one nostril? Don’t you think it’s funny?’

  I didn’t answer. I stared at the roof, then down at the floor. Now it was her turn to worry about me, as within seconds, as though it was catching, my face had suddenly darkened with the conviction that someone was out to harm her, or that, even with the magical powers of Massengo the scarecrow, she couldn’t pay back the loan she’d taken out to buy a licence at the Grand Marché and work with an easy conscience. Aged eleven I was already aware that the market tax had broken up many families, with mothers in despair because they’d been banned from selling peanuts for being a bit late with their payments. They’d arrive in the morning to find some council workers standing, Cerberus-like, at their table. Negotiation was not a term they used. They were paid to evict traders and replace them with others who had given them a bribe. Either the traders paid with money they borrowed from others, or they went back home wondering how they were going to feed the kid sitting waiting for them, blissfully unaware of its mother’s troubles. Now my mother wasn’t in either of these categories, she was careful to pay the licence fee in time.

  Her air of sadness had its origins elsewhere, and that look of hers, though not hard, not snake-like, even when she was angry, was the expression of her determination to scale the endless steps that rose before her, this humble peasant woman from Louboulou, a small town with red earth, that produced corn, and tubers and yams, and bananas, and grazing pigs. She wanted to forget that place, where the man due to be her husband ran off without a word, abandoning her to her fate a few months before my birth. So she chose to live as a woman from nowhere, amid the hurly-burly of the town of Pointe-Noire, where I am now, a coastal city with not much indulgence for people arriving with the soil of the fields on their feet. She looked on me as an extension of her existence, the ray of hope at the end of an infinitely long tunnel. I was the indisputable sign of the immortality she imagined she would finally achieve the day I emerged from her womb in a run-down building in the maternity hospital in the Mouyondzi district, that both torrid and glacial night of 24 February 1966, while the moon struggled to lighten the darkness and the cocks were already crowing at the new dawn. Scarcely able to believe her own happiness, which even the memory of the disaster with my father could not spoil, she anxiously placed her feverish hands on my chest to check I was still breathing, that I wasn’t an apparition who would vanish the moment she turned her back. She had to be persuaded to let the nurse wash the newborn babe she cradled in her arms. All that because she feared I would take the same path as my two older sisters, who died at birth. She had never been able to solve the mystery of their premature departure. Perhaps the two angel children had heard the prediction of a cousin of our mother’s, who, goaded by jealousy, had publicly declared one day that the destiny of Maman Pauline was the darkest of all her line. The same bad-mouthed cousin also said that my mother would have no children, that she’d die all alone in a hut, and if by any chance she did manage to have a baby, it would be a boy, an ungrateful boy who would leave the country when he was twenty years old, and be living thousands of kilometres away the day she drew her last breath. This baby would not belong to her, he would just be passing through, taking the first empty womb he could find.

  But my mother swept aside these predictions, putting them down to her barren cousin’s envy of another’s fertility, and came to Pointe-Noire with a child in her arms, and the scarecrow of my grandmother, N’Soko, wrapped up in palm leaves. She walked with her pagne wrapped around her hips, a way of showing that, even in despair, her head was high. Her path was long and winding, till one day a new man appeared before her. He would become my father, my real father, as I saw it, the one I instinctively stretched out my little hands to, smiling at last as I felt myself swept up off the ground, defying gravity, carried by the invincible, unsurpassable physical strength of this man, landing high up on his shoulders, my legs gripping tight round his neck. That was the day I first pronounced those two resonant, magical, identical syllables, the vowels interlaced with the two twin consonants: ‘papa’. This is the man I called deferentially ‘Papa Roger’, in my autobiographical book Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty, and who now lies in the Mont-Kamba cemetery, in a tomb close by my mother’s…

  Live and become

  I heard my mother had died in 1995. I was a student and had been living in a small studio in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, in the Rue Bleue, for over six years. I was expected back in Pointe-Noire for the funeral and the telephone rang endlessly. A cousin urged me to come back. My aunt Dorothée threatened to kill herself if I didn’t show up. My cousin Kihouari yelled that we’d be cursed if I didn’t get on the next plane.

  I stopped picking up the phone. It was as though the news had paralysed me, and this pleading from thousands of kilometres away pushed me farther into my corner. The world felt too small, and time seemed to have stopped in its tracks. Even when I climbed the stairs of our apartment block I would go on up past my studio, and find myself on the sixth floor, though I lived on the second.

  I didn’t go.

  The truth was, I dreaded coming face to face with the body of the woman I had last seen smiling, full of life. My fear of seeing her again, lifeless, had its roots in my childhood. Back then, like many other children of my age, I was phobic about corpses, especially since they were laid out in the yard so anyone who wished to could come and pay their last respects. Everyone had to file past the deceased, lean over them to within a few millimetres, and murmur some words of farewell. This proximity filled us children with dread, especially since, to our minds, the dead at first wandered on earth for a few weeks, waiting for their final departure, haunting the living, especially the children who had seen them during the funeral rites. Why them? Because the dead needed their innocence to survive the few days leading up to their departure.

  We dreaded the hearse, too, we hated black. As it crossed the street we closed our eyes, convinced that the dead person was peering out at us through the windscreen, memorising our faces. Some of us trembled, pissing ourselves with fright, unable to speak for several days. The dreams of others were full of the deceased, their delirious nights haunted by people with horns, vampire teeth and long tails, as in the familiar representations of the Devil. I stopped going to the funeral wakes in our neighbourhood. Seeing someone lying inert, made up and scented with Mananas – the perfume of choice on these occasions – with their arms crossed, affected me so badly I’d dwell on it for weeks, convinced I would meet the ghost of the departed after nightfall.

  Even though this time the deceased was my mother, I still couldn’t control my fears and even made out to myself that shortage of funds for the journey home was a good enough alibi for getting out of it without feeling guilty. I couldn’t bear to look at myself in the mirror, for fear I would find there the reflection of my ingratitude towards the woman who must be patiently waiting for me, in her coffin, surrounded by members of the family, all of them disgusted at my absence.

  All through that dreadful day, as I paced the room and wrote pages of my poetry collection Vagabond Legends, which I dedicated to the dead woman, her words echoed over and over in my mind. I thought back to our last me
eting, in 1989, a few hours before I left for France, where I was to study law in Nantes. She had come to say goodbye and had travelled over five hundred kilometres to Brazzaville, where I had spent the last week.

  We sat face to face in a bar in the Moungali neighbourhood, not far from the War Veterans building. Her expression was grim, her voice hoarse with emotion. She could scarcely string two words together. I held her in my arms and heard her call me ‘papa’, her way of showing me her affection. There was a moment’s silence, then I saw her tears…

  When she was able to speak again, she began to talk about the concerts given by our national orchestra, Les Bantous de la Capitale, in the 1960s, and the band Les Trois Frères, namely Youlou Mabalia, Loko Massengo and Michel Boyibanda.

  ‘That was the golden age,’ she said; ‘we wore miniskirts and high heels and the men went round in bell-bottomed trousers and Salamander shoes. Pointe-Noire was famous for its atmosphere, and everyone had work. Even Zaireans started to arrive, though up till then you’d only see them in Brazzaville, which they reached from Kinshasa, crossing the River Congo…’

  I nodded in agreement, and she went on:

  ‘The atmosphere’s gone now, there’s no music, young people don’t sing now, they just make noise. Anyway, I’ve stopped listening to their music, it gives me migraines…’

  The waiter passed by our table, his trousers worn and ripped. My mother glowered at him, her mouth drawn tight with scorn:

  ‘People don’t dress properly these days! Look at that young man serving our drinks, what way is that to dress? This country’s on its knees, I tell you! You’re right to get out, leave all this behind you…’

  The point of these digressions was simply to lessen the pain of separation, and help us forget we would be apart for a very long time. This was the bar where she always arranged to meet me when she came up from Pointe-Noire for her business. I was in my first years of university and was living in Brazzaville in a studio shared with my cousin Gilbert Moukila. When she turned up we were always relieved to see her: she’d give us a bit of money, so we didn’t have to wait for the state grant, which got doled out only in tiny doses and was in any case barely sufficient for our needs. She gave each of us the same sum, thirty thousand CFA francs, the equivalent of our grant. It was enough to get us through to the end of one month and await the next one with no worries.

  ‘So, you’re off to France, then?’ she said again, interrupting my thoughts, which had gone wandering off.

  ‘Well, yes, I…’

  ‘Oh, no need to apologise, Adèle was right!’

  ‘Adèle?’

  ‘My cousin, in Louboulou, the nasty gossip, who said I’d never have a child. I’ve often told you about her… I know you don’t like to say her name.’

  ‘But I am here! I’m your child!’

  ‘I know, but this cousin also said that I’d probably only have one boy and that he would go off on a long journey, far from me, and I would die alone in a hut like a person who has no family… You’re all I have in the world, but did you really love me?’

  ‘Of course I did!’

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter, you’re saying that to please me! It seems to me you’re glad to be going to live with the Whites, you don’t know how much you’re hurting me, I didn’t deserve this…’

  ‘No, no, I’m not glad at all…’

  ‘What will I do without you? Everyone will laugh at me because they’ll see I’m all alone, do you see what I mean?’

  She took a gulp of her beer and whispered:

  ‘Why do they do this to me?’

  Since I didn’t know who she was talking about this time, I ventured:

  ‘Who?’

  ‘France! The Congo! They’ve plotted to steal my son away, my only reason for living! There are lots of children in this country, why not send them to France instead of you? Look at me sitting here now! I’m as good as dead…’

  Resigned, she emptied the rest of her bottle into her glass, knocked it back in one, adjusted her headscarf.

  ‘Don’t you disappoint me, my boy. I’ve always been a model mother to you…’

  She opened her handbag and took out a bundle of notes.

  ‘There you are, that’s everything I earned this month, you’ll need it where you’re going… I’ve got a few notes left over I can give to Gilbert.’

  We’d been in the bar nearly an hour now. She had reeled off most of the names of people in our family who’d died. Uncle Albert, who worked for the National Electric Company. My deceased grandmother N’Soko, who saw me only once. Grandpa Grégoire Moukila, who was chief of the village of Louboulou, that far-flung corner of the Bouenza district, where all our family came from, and who lived to be a hundred and twelve. Not forgetting, of course, my two sisters, who’d died only a few hours after they came into this world.

  ‘Don’t forget them, the ones we’ve lost. And the day you can’t see your own shadow, you’ll know you’ve ceased to exist yourself…’

  She was silent for a moment, then added: ‘…And then you’ll be in the next world, like our ancestors who’ve passed on now, but still protect us, day and night…’

  Outside, the day was starting to fade. Inside the café, I could barely make out my mother’s features, only her eyes that glistened, lighting up the room. I could hear the frantic beating of her heart. The silence was like a wall between us, which neither one wished to break through. We said nothing, which said almost everything. She was transmitting something to me, but I didn’t know what. I was careful not to speak. The slightest word would have ruined the moment.

  She breathed out slowly, as though summoning up her courage, then got to her feet.

  ‘Just don’t disappoint me.’

  She stood outside the entrance to the bar now, and I was behind her, like a shadow. In her eyes I could read what she hadn’t dared say out loud: she had lost me, for good.

  She hailed a taxi parked opposite the café. The vehicle cut across the street in the path of the oncoming traffic and braked in front of my mother, who dived inside, holding back her tears.

  I stood there, at the door of the bar, like a pillar of salt.

  She wound down the window:

  ‘Become who you want to become and always remember this: hot water never forgets it used to be cold…’

  The taxi shot off. I watched it go, weaving through the traffic towards the Ballon d’Or roundabout.

  I would never see my mother again…

  One thousand and one nights

  For a long time, then, I let people think my mother was still alive. In a way I had no choice but to lie, having picked up the habit way back in primary school when I brought my two older sisters back to life in an attempt to escape the teasing of my classmates, who were all very proud of their large families, and offered to ‘lend’ my mother their offspring. Obsessed with the idea of bearing another child, she consulted the town’s most noted doctors, as well as most of its traditional healers, who claimed to have treated women who’d been sterile for twenty years or more. Disappointed in the white men’s medicine, and cheated by the crooks in the backstreets of Pointe-Noire, who had never healed so much as a scratch with their spells and sorcery, my mother resolved to accept her condition: mother of a single child, she told herself there were other women on this earth who had no children at all, and would have been delighted to be in her shoes. But she still couldn’t just sweep aside the fact that the society she lived in considered a woman with one child as pitiful as a woman who had none. Similarly, an only son was a pariah. He was the cause of his parents’ misfortune, having ‘locked’ his mother’s belly behind him, so he could be an only one, enjoying this lowly distinction which the community scorned. He was also said to have special powers: he could make it rain, he could stop the rain, bring fever on his enemies, and prevent their wounds from healing. He was all but assumed to have power over the rotation of the earth.

  I was quite prepared to believe all this, and searched in vain
for the hidden powers I was thought to possess, finally concluding that what an only child really possessed was the secret fortune to be gained from his parents’ constant fear they might lose him. The parents were convinced that he belonged to another world, he was bored in theirs and that all the toys in the world could never make up for that boredom. The sisters I resuscitated in their entirety became my only armour, reliable characters in an imaginary world where I felt at ease and where, for once, I could act like an adult, and not depend on others to take care of me.

  When I mentioned my sisters to my friends, I probably exaggerated. I proudly made out they were tall, beautiful, intelligent. I confidently added that they wore rainbow-coloured dresses and spoke most languages known on earth. And if anyone doubted me, I’d tell them they rode round in a red Citroën DS convertible, driven by their hired boy, that they’d flown in planes more times than they could count, and had sailed across seas and oceans. I knew I’d scored a point when the questions began:

  ‘So, have you been in the Citroën DS with your sisters?’ asked the most outspoken of my playmates, his eyes gleaming with envy.

  Quickly I found the perfect alibi:

  ‘No, I’m too small, but they’ve promised they’ll let me when I’m as tall as them…’

  Another, spurred by jealousy, I expect, would counter:

  ‘You’re making it up! Since when did you have to be big to get in a car? I’ve seen kids smaller than us in cars!’