The Lights of Pointe-Noire Page 6

  ‘Where have all the children gone? Are their parents stopping them from coming to eat here? I’ve been keeping their food for two days now, I’m sick of heating it up!’

  It was upsetting to see her go to a public tip three days later and unload the rotting food, with tears in her eyes, while emaciated stray dogs circled around. She cursed herself for having such an ungrateful family, but the next day she’d start over again, doing what she did best in this world: cooking for others.

  Dieudonné Ngoulou, a hearty eater, who had remained loyal to her, and who we were mean to, because he was the weakest and most cowardly of all of us, revealed all to the old lady. Imagine our surprise when we found Grandma Hélène watching out for us at the corner of the rue de Louboulou and the Avenue of Independence at mealtimes, crouching down behind a mango tree, still with her legendary wooden spoon in her hands. Like a wounded cat fighting back, she would leap out, catch the crafty beggar by his shirt and drag him bodily back to her kitchen:

  ‘Thought you could pull a fast one on me, did you? Thought you were cleverer than me? Well, you can eat three helpings for me today, because I haven’t seen you for three days! You need to catch up! Come on, hurry up, I’ve no time to waste!’

  She had an obsessive fear of whites, mixed with absolute deference. She firmly believed that a few days before her death, a white woman would come and kiss her on the forehead, and open the doors to the next world, so she could pass on and complete up there what she had begun here below.

  ‘It’s the whites who take people off to the country where the sun never rises, and I know a white woman will come to fetch me when my time comes…’

  She would say this whenever there was a wake in the neighbourhood. Most people dismissed it as the ramblings of an elderly person whose mental faculties were waning as she approached the fateful day of her demise. But Grandma Hélène took it seriously.

  Several months before developing the illness which would paralyse her, she began putting her affairs in order, to people’s surprise:

  ‘My body’s packing up. I’m getting sicker all the time. I can’t cook properly any more. The white woman’s not far off now, I see her in my dreams. I wish she’d hurry up and set me free…’

  She bought a large metal trunk and a suitcase, and put them in a corner of the dining room, under an old piece of furniture. Her things were inside, and she could be heard muttering:

  ‘I’ll be cooking for other people in the land where the sun never rises, so I mustn’t forget my spoon… I don’t care about pots, they’ve got them up there, but I’m not going without my wooden spoon, it’s what gives my food its flavour…’

  Sometimes she would get up in the night to check everything was in order, that she hadn’t forgotten anything. Reassured, after a session of careful stocktaking, which sounded like a litany of her final wishes, she would go back to bed, lie down, fold her arms and, finally, close her eyes. All this time, the illness was gnawing away at her puny, pain-racked body.

  Everyone knew that the fateful hour could not be long now, as for several months she had cooked for no one and had lain pinned to her mattress in the dining room, her eyes riveted on her bags, and on the photo of the Virgin Mary. When they told her I was coming any day now, she didn’t react and her visitors thought she must have forgotten who I was…

  At the entrance to Grandma Hélène’s plot, stifling her emotion at seeing me after all these years, Mâ Germaine warns me:

  ‘She won’t recognise you. She doesn’t even know I’m her daughter now, and every time I go near her she’s terrified, as though I’m an evil spirit! Since she took to her bed, she hasn’t known anyone. And she hasn’t seen you for twenty-three years…’

  I go on into the room anyway. The first thing I see are the old lady’s belongings, piled up in a corner. The Virgin Mary looks sad, hanging there on the wall. It smells like a stable, and no one thinks to open a window to air it.

  I go over to the mosquito net and see a human shape inside it, twitching from time to time. It’s her, the old lady. Covered in white sheets of doubtful cleanliness, she lies still now, prisoner of a mysterious illness, which forces her to stay stretched out on her back, excreting and pissing on to the mattress, which is on the floor. She sees the visitors at a distance and groans:

  ‘I’m in pain, I’m in terrible pain…’

  Grandma Hélène is by now a human wreck, bound to this world only by the air she breathes. Curled up inside her white mosquito net, as though she’s already in a coffin, she looks almost like a corpse awaiting burial…

  ‘She won’t recognise you,’ insists Mâ Germaine.

  I ignore her warning and draw aside the mosquito net, so I can see her.

  There she is, curled up in the foetal position, her face relaxed. She senses my presence and opens her eyes as I lean over towards her.

  With a quick movement, she grasps hold of my hand:

  ‘Is that you?’

  Though I am not sure whether she has really recognised me, I nod. And then, to my utter amazement, I hear her babbling:

  ‘You see, my child, I’m proud of myself now, the food I gave you when you were a child has made you grow up big and strong, you’re nearly two metres tall… But anyway, that’s all in the past now, it’s done with, and I’m dying now, like your mother, Pauline Kengué, and your father, Kimongou Roger, and your aunts, Bouanga Sabine and Dorothée Louhounou, and your uncles, Albert Moukila and René Mabanckou, except at least I’ve been lucky enough to see you before I go to join them…

  ‘You aren’t going to die, Grandma…’

  ‘Oh, look at me, what have I become? A corpse! Was I like this when you left me? It upsets people to see me like this… If I still had the strength I would have killed myself, but I can’t move without help now, and no one wants to help me leave this life, not even my husband…’

  She begins to shudder, there is fear in her eyes:

  ‘There she is! There she is! Help me chase her away!’

  ‘Chase who away, Grandma? What?’

  ‘The shadow behind you!’

  ‘That’s not a shadow, Grandma, it’s someone who’s come with me and…’

  ‘It’s a shadow, I’m telling you, I see them all the time now! The Virgin Mary helps me chase them away. Please, help me chase that shadow there, watching me… Just do it for me.’

  ‘Grandma, that’s my girlfriend, we arrived together from France a few days ago and…’

  ‘Is she black or is she white?’

  ‘She’s white.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, then I’m saved! I’ve waited for her for years. I can go now, she’s come to set me free…’

  My mother’s castle

  At the family reunion to celebrate my arrival, I noticed two empty chairs opposite me, and two glasses filled with palm wine placed before each of them. Everyone had an explanation, except me. Just to be clear, I asked whether we were waiting for two more people, because there were already over thirty of us on the plot left by my mother. Looking embarrassed, a cousin whispered in my ear:

  ‘It’s your mother and father sitting on the two chairs. You think they are empty but in fact they are taken…’

  And she explained that other members of the family were absent, at rest in the Mont-Kamba cemetery, the burial place for the common people, at the other end of town…

  I walked round ‘Maman Pauline’s plot’, as they say here. There is a tiny hut tucked away in one corner of the property. Almost a blemish on this neighbourhood of solid buildings, with electricity. Every property in the Voungou neighbourhood has been carefully fenced in. Except ours, where the hut seems to have pointedly refused this practice, preferring the mode of the old communist regime, where we were told that everything belonged to ‘the people, and the people alone’. There was no point marking out the limits of your land, because no one, in principle, owned anything, only the state, which could exercise its own prerogative and disp
ossess inhabitants in the ‘collective interest’.

  Once the traditional chiefs started to sell off land, it was sensible to build ‘something’ on the land you acquired, in case those no-good dealers from the city sold it with false property deeds. These kinds of makeshift dwellings were known as ‘houses for now’, since the inhabitants hoped to put up comfortable homes at some point in the future. They usually died without having built the house of their dreams, having never had the means to do so.

  My mother acquired her plot in February 1979. I had just turned thirteen and was at Trois Glorieueses secondary school. I can still remember the seller coming round, a chief of the Vili people, who bargained with my mother and tried to increase her bid, claiming he had other, higher offers. My mother, an experienced businesswoman, pretended to have lost interest in the purchase and indicated to the seller that he could do a deal with the highest bidder, since she had now found another piece of land, in a better position, in the centre of town.

  A week later, the seller came back to see us in the studio we rented in the Fonds Tié-Tié neighbourhood. He had changed his tune, and modified his exorbitant demands. Where had all those clients gone, who’d been fighting to get in the door? He breathed not one word about them. The moment he accepted my mother’s offer of a beer, I knew he had capitulated, and had fallen into the trap skilfully laid for him by Maman Pauline, on whose lips I detected a look of triumph. She even rejected the average selling price for the neighbourhood.

  ‘I’m not buying this land for myself, it’s for my son,’ I heard her argue.

  I don’t know what other arguments she put forward, but I saw her take out some crumpled notes, unfold each one, and count out loud under the watchful eye of the greedy vendor. The trader stuffed the money into a plastic bag which he pulled out of the back pocket of his trousers. Which convinced me that the sale would definitely be completed that day, since he had thought to bring along something to put the money in.

  They arranged a rendezvous for the following day, to finalise the sale with the authorities.

  We had become house owners, and my father was not to learn of it until later, on the day we moved in…

  We planted maize on the land we had just acquired. But that wasn’t enough, we needed to give a clear sign to the crooks that we were the new owners. Uncle Mompéro, my mother’s younger brother, set about building a house made of wooden planks. I stood behind him, and from time to time he asked me to hand him the saw, the set square, the nails or the boards. I was proud to feel useful, to feel that I too, with my little hands, was contributing to the construction of our home. While the building work was going on, my mother prepared food in a corner, which we would eat during the afternoon break. She had engaged two Zairean builders, because she wanted a proper floor, even if the house had to be of planks. In less than a week, the house had taken shape, standing in the field of maize. We had left the house we were renting in the Fonds Tié-Tié neighbourhood and had moved in one morning, even though a storm was looming, threatening a heavy downpour. Our house had two tiny bedrooms and a small living room. I had one room, my parents the other. Uncle Mompéro himself slept in the living room in a bed he had built himself. And when two members of the family arrived from their villages – my mother’s cousin, Grand Poupy, and Papa Roger’s niece, Ya Nsoni – I let the latter have my room and slept in the living room with my uncle, together in the same bed. Every evening Grand Poupy spread a mat on the ground, and some nights I slept with him.

  Back here again, I find it hard to believe this is the same house we had then. The family reunion is being held in the middle of the yard. My facial expression, one of utter astonishment, is being closely watched.

  Uncle Mompéro, who took me on a tour of the plot as soon as I arrived, revealed that a part of the house had been ‘cut off’, leaving only the one room, where he sleeps.

  ‘Can we go in and look?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I don’t want you to go inside…’

  I didn’t insist, and we went back into the yard, where things were beginning to liven up since the drinks had arrived…

  Towards the end of the party, I leaned over to my cousin Kihouari, to ask him for the ‘right to occupy’ paper that my mother signed back then. It is a pink piece of paper handed out by the land registry office, bearing the family name and forename of my mother. It says that the land has a surface area of four hundred square metres. Just looking at it, I doubt it is as big as that. Kihouari tells me that there are indeed four hundred metres, as stated in the description from the land registry, but our neighbours at the back encroached by several square metres when they built the wall dividing our land from theirs.

  ‘This wall is actually on our land…’ he concluded, looking resigned.

  I recall that in the past the two plots were separated only by some stakes and barbed wire. At that time our neighbours had also built a ‘house for now’, a bit bigger than ours. Now they have a huge, permanent structure and this wall, which stops us seeing what’s going on at their place.

  Uncle Mompéro is listening in and gathers what Kihouari is telling me. My uncle adds, in quite a loud voice, as though he wants the whole family to hear:

  ‘After we buried my sister, Pauline Kengué, the neighbours didn’t wait even two weeks, they put up this ridiculous wall without even asking us! And they pinched a few square metres from us while they were about it! Is that acceptable, d’you think? That wall is on our land!’

  There was a general murmur of discontent. Everyone wants to express their exasperation in the face of this injustice. They wait for my reaction.

  I reassure them:

  ‘Tomorrow I’ll go to the land registry office and ask them to come and remeasure the dimensions of this plot. We can’t let them get away with it, it’s robbery!’

  A storm of applause greets my remarks. Only Kihouari doesn’t join in, surprisingly, since I was sure he would be in favour of my plan.

  He gives me a nod and we move away from the group to a corner of the plot, just behind the hut. His face is very serious now. He puts his hand on my left shoulder.

  ‘Please don’t do what you’re planning tomorrow…’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Don’t go to the land registry office…’

  ‘Are you kidding? They’re stealing square metres from us, and you want to let it go? Tell me the truth now: have the neighbours been slipping you money?’

  ‘No, absolutely not! How can you think such a thing! Would I, Kihouari, sell off part of my own aunt’s land?’

  ‘Well, what’s the problem, then?’

  He’s silent for a moment, looking over at the rest of the family. The group is getting gradually smaller. Some people are starting to leave, others are watching us, wondering what we are cooking up, over by the old shack.

  Kihouari clears his throat:

  ‘I think I had better tell you something very important, you seem out of touch with reality since you moved away…’

  I had never seen him look so serious. The death of his mother, Dorothée Lohounou – another of my mother’s older sisters – must have brought him face to face with his responsibilities: as the oldest of a dozen or more sisters and brothers, he had had to become wise before his time.

  ‘These neighbours you want to go for, they’re a bit like our family too. The owner, Monsieur Goma, died one year after Aunt Pauline Kengué. Monsieur Goma’s wife got kicked out like a sick dog by the brothers of the deceased. As for the children, they are scattered in their mother’s village. Two of them, Anicet and Apollo, live in France and London, and no one ever hears from them. They must be about your age, you used to play together in our yard and theirs. You even used to eat at their house, and sometimes they came and ate at ours. Now the younger brother of the late Monsieur Goma looks after their plot. He’s a bit strange, it’s true, but even so, it’s thanks to him that the plot hasn’t been sold by the same people who threw out the widow and wanted to get their hands on the
inheritance and disinherit the children! I respect him for that if for nothing else. Did you notice he dropped by to say hello and insisted on appearing in the photos we took when you arrived? His name is Mesmin, he knew you when you were a boy, that was his way of showing you he was practically a member of the family. So what would be the good at this stage of having a confrontation before the tribunal? You’re going to go back to Europe, or America, and you’ll leave us with hot potatoes in our hands. When we leave this life we leave whatever we owned on earth, why get into a fight over it now…?’

  I am speechless. Kihouari goes back to join the family, and I stand there staring at the little hut.

  I walk around the shack and trip over some stones propped up against the main façade. They used to be the two entrance steps. The seasons have worn them away, leaving just this scattered debris, which no one dares move, out of respect for my mother’s memory. The old slats of wood, bound by a kind of unshakeable solidarity, hold together, defying time. On the left, by the only window, I notice some bits of wood and plank that must have broken off with wear and tear. It wouldn’t occur to anyone to make a fire with them, they’re used to prop up the corners, to stop the shack falling down for as long as possible. Strings and pieces of wood positioned on the sheet metal keep the roof in place. The main door has been eaten away at the bottom by termites.

  Yes, I used to sleep there. My dreams were less confined than the space we lived in. At least when I closed my eyes and sleep lent me wings to fly, I found myself in a vast kingdom, not in a shack that looks today like a fisherman’s hut straight out of The Old Man and the Sea, or even The Old Man Who Read Love Stories.

  I’ve been so concerned with the shack, I’ve overlooked a solidly built structure on the plot, with three little studios attached. Two are occupied by tenants, and the third by Kihouari’s little brother, his wife and three children.

  Kihouari comes up behind me:

  ‘Aunt Pauline Kengué began the work on the solid structure… At the time she died there were only the two studios, we added the third…’