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 dispossess 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.