African Psycho Read online

  In the chamber, some people who were not used to the rituals of the courthouse ventured to clap, to the great joy of the public prosecutor, who was positively suffocating with false modesty. The president of the court’s little hand-bell put an end to their enthusiasm. The judge threatened to have the chamber evacuated, reminding us that this wasn’t Anselmi Stadium and that we should reserve our applause for the next game between our national team and that of the country over there…

  Well, a few years after this trial, I would like to tell this public prosecutor that, by nature, I too detest society. I don’t give a damn about my past, which he would deem muddy. I cannot stand to see people teeming in the neighborhood of my youth. I am attached to this land that I take as mother and father, for wont of having had real parents. I am responsible for its honor, its reputation. Whoever speaks ill of He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot offends me personally. Yes, I would have liked to live alone in this city and stroll at every hour of the day or night without encountering another soul. That’s why, until the day I accepted that Germaine was coming to live with me, I always lived alone. I wallowed in my solitude and derived from it a kind of satisfaction I wouldn’t have traded for anything in the world. Everything that happened outside meant little to me. My workshop was what counted most for me. It was society that didn’t understand me. As a result, aware that I was in the right, I had to erect a fortress between society and myself… I have not lost my lone-wolf habits. I still barricade my plot’s main bamboo door and look three or four times down the street. I do not allow any client to enter my place of business with his wrecked car. I take care of this myself. Once it is fixed, I deliver it to his residence. That way, my ivory tower is preserved from indiscreet looks. I know that my neighbors, who by the way I am not eager to know, must curse me when I bang on scrap iron, sometimes late into the night…

  5.

  To kill—a verb I have worshiped since coming of age. Fundamentally, all the small jobs I carried out were done in the hope of later being able to conjugate this verb in its most immediate and fully realized form.

  Of course, as of today, I cannot take credit for any murder. To my great surprise, after the failed act against Master Fernandes Quiroga, there was even a lull when the idea of doing harm no longer appealed to me. I was plunged in torpor by a sort of Christian goodness. I was like a lost mollusk. Was this a start toward tolerance?

  I cannot find an explanation for this period of dead quiet, these days when I was ashamed to exist, to bear the name Grégoire Nakobomayo, a name I owe, no doubt, to a lottery in the institutions where picked-up children are parked.

  I knew I wasn’t myself. I knew that I was no more than an empty shell, an ordinary being, cultivating his garden on the margin of society.

  I would look at my hands with dismay and reproach myself for certain earlier deeds, such as stealing old people’s wallets or IDs, piercing my adoptive brother’s eye because he wanted to abuse me and many others still. These ones were of lesser importance, but as a matter of fact they strengthened my experience so that I could one day arrive at a more coherent gesture, with a result that would suit me and, by the same token, delight Angoualima, my idol, in his grave.

  In these moments of depression, I would sob in my shop and, raging, bang the mallet against beat-up cars. To calm down, I would go out at night and hang around He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot’s alleys. I would approach a whore and relieve myself like one who hasn’t touched a woman in centuries. Having liberated myself, I would be gripped by remorse for wasting my seed. I scrutinized the streetwalker with hate and held back the urge to crush her carotids with hands that had finally grown bigger but lacked a credible criminal reference.

  During the first hours of the next day, I would head toward the cemetery of The-Dead-Who-Are-Not-Allowed-To-Sleep. I would spend an eternity in front of the Great Master’s grave and tell him about my days and nights…

  I didn’t understand why I couldn’t claim at least one successful murder in my favor. Every one of my projects ended in a fiasco or was attributed to some lame scoundrel from He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot. During that time, I took all the blame that Angoualima’s ghost directed at me without flinching, because his ghost is more demanding and more ruthless than he himself was when he was alive.

  One day, exasperated by this lethargic state, I looked at myself in the shower after masturbating without feeling any real pleasure. I saw the face of an incompetent, of a clumsy individual, and hit my fist hard against the mirror. It fell to pieces. Blood dripped from my severed veins and I started licking it until the last drop, promising myself to achieve my goal, sooner or later…

  Now I get up every day and whisper Angoualima. I go to bed every night and whisper Angoualima. He hears me, I know. He has become the father I have not known and haven’t tried to know, for fear of forever losing my identity.

  I have returned to the Great Master’s grave on several occasions lately to collect my thoughts. I have told him about everything that’s weighing on my heart, but have refrained from announcing the crime I am planning against Germaine on December 29. Otherwise—I know him well—he would have to express his opinion again and perhaps yell at me because I am taking too much time to proceed.

  I know that, from the bottom of his grave, Angoualima the Great Master sees everything. But never mind. This time I am taking the risk of concealing my project from him. The crime I am about to commit belongs to me first and foremost because I want to save my neighborhood from dishonor. I wouldn’t want the Great Master to imagine that he had anything to do with it. I want to conceive of everything from beginning to end and plant my foot upon my victim as a sign of satisfaction, like a hunter happy to have killed his first big game. My crime will be more beautiful than those of my idol…

  6.

  Angoualima had experience, I’ll admit that. He had been lucky to learn the ropes of the trade in the country over there, where he had spent his youth. Born like me in He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot, the “picked-up child” that he was, would become in turn a pedicab driver, a kitchen hand and a fishmonger on the bank of the Mayi River before anyone heard of him around here. He was then renowned for his trick of misleading those who were looking for him by having shoes made for himself that left footprints going in the wrong direction. No bandit had thought of this before he did, and this only served to strengthen his legend.

  We were far from imagining that he would leave the country over there and cross back over the Mayi River to come live in his native country and distinguish himself as one of the most ingenious murderers we had ever known.

  Back in He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot, Angoualima started with spectacular robberies in the residences of the white aid cadres from the center of town. He mastered mpini, the ability to make himself invisible by reciting formulas that even our country’s charlatans and witch doctors found unfathomable. He had in his possession a dry herb that he would burn. It would put the owners of the houses that he “visited” in the middle of the night to sleep. He would then take his time, sit down, turn on the TV, turn up the music as loud as possible, open the fridge, heat up some food and eat while his victims snored like mopeds with damaged mufflers. Next he would shove the husband to one corner of the bed, flip the wife over, and drive his thing into her. Journalists had unanimously nicknamed his thing “the fifth limb” because it was as big as Mayi River fishermen’s biceps. He always left twenty-five Cuban cigars burning in the raped woman’s thing. Before leaving, his truck full of goods, he would sign Angoualima on the residence’s walls…

  I was coming of age and beginning to visit our city’s courthouses, and I have to tell you, we were living through the period of the greatest terror, during which Angoualima sent statuettes with severed heads to his future victims. Not one month would go by without someone discovering two or three heads of men or women on the wild coast, Cuban cigars in their mouths, their hair combed, the rest of their bodies a few feet away. Angoualima saw to it that these
faces appeared to be smiling and their eyes open, enjoying the cigar screwed between their lips.

  In spite of the canvassing the police undertook in the area of the wild coast, they did not succeed in arresting my idol, who took perverse pleasure in playing hide-and-seek with these poor uniformed men. As soon as they had their backs turned, they were called again a half hour later to come verify the presence of the heads of men and women lined up on the fine sandy beach. And they noticed the special footprints of Angoualima’s famous shoes. The policemen followed them excitedly, like hunting dogs, and they didn’t understand that they directed them toward the water, as if the country’s enemy number one, who was described as a monster, came out of the sea with a giant fish tail…

  At that time, of course, he was the only topic that both the national press and the press of the country over there would cover. My idol was more famous than our President of the Republic and our musicians combined. And this even though it was the one-party year, when the portrait of our head of state could be seen at every intersection in our country. This was also the year when, coming from the country over there, we discovered great musicians on the order of Rochereau Tabu Ley, who appeared at the mythic Olympia theater in Paris; Luambo Makiadi, a.k.a. Franco, and his unequaled fifths on the guitar; Lita Bembo with his Salamander shoes; and Sam Mangwana and his afro. Finally, it was the era of such musical groups as Lipua-Lipua, Stukas with Lita Bembo, Zaïko Langa Langa with Manuaku Waku, etc. Angoualima stole the headlines from them in our country and the country over there. There was no more room for other news items, and journalists even had to shorten the sacrosanct political pages dedicated to the president in order to have more space to recount in detail the Great Master’s lightning ascent.

  Life is not what it used to be. We were waiting with bated breath for Angoualima’s next stunning deed…

  The population was curious to see my see my idol’s face at long last. This is why the tabloids sold like hot cakes when they announced they were publishing pictures of him in their center spreads.

  Can I just say: Could these even be called pictures?Where on earth did these people take them? Was the Great Master such an idiot that he would accept being the target of flashbulbs?

  Sure, there were pictures. I don’t deny it. People believe everything that’s published in the newspaper. They may have their doubts about radio and television, but not about the information and images published in a newspaper. It’s written, therefore it’s serious, therefore it’s been verified, and after all, these people who know how to write are not imbeciles, etc.

  In fact these were vague and debatable images, montages that sent readers to seek the help of big magnifying glasses to better make out every detail. Even a pregnant woman’s first ultrasound was clearer…

  As a result, every man in the street could have been Angoualima. What am I saying, every man? Maybe not just every man, because people also said that he was able to change sex depending on the crime he was about to commit. Better yet, that he was able to transform himself into a teenager, and that every time this kid was asked to run an errand into an estate, he turned back into Angoualima in order to act.

  Capitalizing on the general confusion, the pathetic villains of He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot passed themselves off as my idol. Irritated, the Great Master had to clean house on both of our city’s banks. Every day, we would discover the head of a murderer who, the previous day, had claimed he was the real Angoualima. With all this going on, our city’s scoundrels were feeling more threatened than the ordinary citizens did. Parents forbade their children to utter this cursed name, which returned to people’s lips and fed conversations in markets, bars and funeral homes. Some even claimed that Angoualima had simply been invented by some citizens who did not want to pay taxes, without anyone understanding the link between taxes and the heads of victims that were being picked up along the wild coast…

  Very quickly Angoualima became synonymous with murder, invisibility, theft, rape and with the ability to leave the police behind. Popular songs banned by the government perpetuated this myth of the faceless murderer. No one knew in which of the city’s districts the Great Master resided. People talked about He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot or Sotexco, then about the Plateau, or again about Talangaï, Poto-Poto, Ouenzé or Moungali…

  In short, he lived everywhere. And people also imagined he lived underground because the worm was his totem; that he lived at the bottom of the sea because the shark was his totem; that he lived in treetops because the bird was his totem; that he lived in freight trains because, in order to fool the police, he was able to turn himself into a package or blend into a herd of sheep; that he lived in cemeteries because that was where he drew his supernatural strength; that he lived in the hollows of baobab trees because the rodent was his totem.

  People would report that he was an herbivore; hmm, no, that he had to be a cannibal; hmm, no, that he didn’t eat; hmm, no, that he could refrain from eating for months or be content with just one peanut and one glass of water every other day! They added that he came out only during nights when the moon was full. And during tornadoes, he took on the appearance of a shivering white puppy that inspired such pity that any Good Samaritan would take it into his residence to keep it warm…

  At this time when television was still in black and white, during a program that even now counts amongst the small screen’s most intense moments in our country, one man, his face uncovered, claimed he had crossed paths with the Great Master Angoualima at one o’clock in the morning near the stream that cuts our city in two. And he declared that Angoualima was not an ordinary being, which everybody knew already. If it was to say this that the man had been invited, the entire city would have taken the set by storm to repeat over and over again that my idol was not an ordinary man!

  What was surprising, however, was that the man in question swore on his deceased mother and father’s heads that he had seen my idol with his own eyes, and that it wasn’t a dream.

  The interview, which he granted exclusively to the journalist, remains engraved in our memories. It is reportedly dissected every year in our journalism schools, where its technique is called “Well then? Trust me!”…

  “Well then,” the journalist began, his strong accent typical of the north of the country. “You have seen him with your very own eyes. What kind of a face does he have?”

  “He has two faces,” answered the interviewee. “Yes, I saw two faces just as if I were seeing you here twice over, trust me!”

  “Well then, what do you mean, two faces? Explain this to us, we find it hard to understand! Answer while looking into camera A, please…”

  “Yes, two faces! One in front and one in back, Angoualima can look both in front of him and behind him, trust me!”

  “Well then, two faces, therefore four eyes, therefore four ears, therefore…”

  “Yes, therefore everything you say…Yes, that’s it exactly. And what’s more, his four eyes, four ears, two mouths, two noses are well well-regulated, trust me!”

  “Well then, of these two faces, which one is in the front and which one is in the back? Answer while looking into camera B, please…”

  “It depends on his mood, trust me!”

  “Well then, how does he manage to speak with two mouths?”

  “One mouth begins the sentence and the other one finishes it, trust me!”

  “Magnificent! Magnificent! Hmm. Please forgive me, dear viewers. Well then, how does he manage to eat with two mouths?”

  “I told you that everything about him was well-regulated! One mouth chews, transfers the food into the other, which swallows it, trust me!”

  “Very impressive! Really very impressive! Well then, what happens if he becomes sick?”

  “Please, sir, what are you saying here? Do you understand what you’re talking about? Angoualima cannot become sick entirely, given that when one part of his body suffers, the other is always in good health, trust me!”

  “Quite astoundi
ng! Really quite astounding! Well then, how does he go about making love, given that you seem to be hinting to our viewers and myself that he has two things instead of one like normal men? Answer while looking mostly into camera C, please…”

  “He always makes love to two women, who get down on all fours and present their behinds to him. As for him, he gets down on his knees in the middle and performs violent back-and-forth movements. Thus he satisfies both women at the same time, trust me!”

  “Well, what a man he is! Hmm. Forgive me, dear viewers, it’s emotion speaking… Well then, more concretely, because this is a question viewers must be asking themselves, and that I myself am asking myself, and therefore you must answer while still looking into camera C: how does he go about shitting? Because he surely has to shit like we do, doesn’t he?”

  “Come on, it’s simple: one anus for shitting on even days and the other anus for shitting on odd days, trust me!”

  “Hell! Well then, another concrete question that viewers must be asking themselves and that I myself am asking myself: how does he go about peeing? Because he must surely pee like we do! Answer while still looking into camera C, please…”

  “He pees every hour: one thing for peeing even hours and another thing for peeing odd hours, trust me!”

  “Quite unbelievable! Really, quite unbelievable! Well then, a dumb but practical question that springs to my mind, and doubtlessly to viewers’ minds: how then does he manage with his pants, given that pants, as you know, are made for those who have only one thing, when you seem to be hinting to viewers and to myself that he has two things, one in front and one in back or vice versa? Answer while still looking into camera C, please…”

  “I saw him wearing pants with two zippers: one in front, one in back, and vice versa, as you say, trust me!”

  “What imagination! Really, what imagination! Well then, still among the practical questions I am asking myself and feel our viewers are asking themselves too. While answering you can choose between camera A or camera B but absolutely not camera C, please. How then does he manage to sleep and not suffocate himself given that he has one face in front and one face in back or vice versa? Because he has to sleep like we do, you do agree, don’t you?”