I don’t think I will visit her, I won’t have the courage, even though from the balcony of the apartment where I’m staying you can see the old colonial building, almost separate from the town, with its back to the Atlantic Ocean. Every morning since my arrival, I’ve stood here looking over at it, with a cup of coffee in my hand. When a crow settles on the roof, I think he must be adding up how many outings the ambulances make every day, between the city and this austere, crumbling place, often referred to by the locals as ‘the death home’. As a teenager, I passed by it on my way to the Karl Marx lycée, my stomach knotted with fear. I was convinced, like most of the students, that if you looked that way you’d bring bad luck on your family.
Grown-ups were quite clear that you must never ‘show your face to the hospital’, because it would take note of it, and remember it the day you passed through its doors and take your life. Some of us would cover our faces with our shirts as we came near the building. Others walked with their back to it. This fear was in fact fed by a character called Basile, who ran the hospital morgue. He was said to indulge in practices which were, to say the least, peculiar. He talked to corpses, and slapped them about if they wouldn’t lie quietly in the cold rooms. He got particularly angry with the corpses of young girls he believed had led debauched lives. He slapped them, then made up their faces and piled them up like animals in a single coffin, while raging:
‘Not so proud now, eh? Did you think you’d avoid the morgue? There’s only one in this town! A human being’s just a heap of flesh to me, flesh to feed the worms on!’
In the working-class districts, you’d pass Basile talking to invisible people, waving his arms around. Dogs ran after him, but never got too close to the little man with the angry face.
It was also widely known that Basile ate no meat, since he said he’d seen everything under the sun and to him there was no difference between cattle meat and human flesh…
Gilbert’s voice was very faint:
‘Bienvenüe is in Room One. You know, the room Papa was in…’
There was a silence, then he added, enigmatically:
‘And since Papa died in that room…’
This conclusion rang like an acceptance of a fateful verdict, which he had been expecting. At a loss for words to reassure him, I simply asked:
‘Isn’t there any other room besides that one?’
‘Everything’s taken, Room One was only free because people would rather take the sick person home with them than keep them in there… But she was in pain, I couldn’t do that…’
It’s more than three decades, now, since Uncle Albert died after being admitted to hospital in Room One, where two other members of the family had been before him, Uncle Mouboungoulou and Uncle Makita, who both died ‘after a long illness in Adolphe-Sicé hospital’, as it said on the evening announcements on the radio, to avoid divulging the cause of death.
‘Besides, there’s no doctor qualified to treat her illness, I phoned Cousin Paulin, he’s a doctor at the University Hospital in Brazzaville, he can’t get to Pointe-Noire for three days. For now they’re only giving Bienvenüe aspirin…’
‘It’ll be OK,’ I murmured, ‘don’t forget she’s your twin, the two of you are one body… If you believe your strength can pull her through, then it will.’
These words consoled my cousin, and as he hung up I heard him give a sigh of relief…
The day before she went into hospital, Bienvenüe was showing me another photo of when she was young. Deep down I knew she had only one thought in her mind: to throw off the thin body she had today, and catapult me back to the time when she was a beautiful young woman who turned the heads of the boys. She seemed to be apologising for what she had become. Which was not surprising, since it is common for sick people to take refuge in self-justification, whatever their state. Was there any particular reason she should act like this with me, who had known her when she was a beautiful young woman full of joy? Back then — she must have been around twelve — she, Gilbert and I all slept in the same bed. My presence between the twins evened things out in some way: I was a partition wall between them, a façade encouraging each of them to take their first steps towards independence, instead of seeing the world always from the point of view of their twinness. We made an inseparable trio, day and night. Gilbert, who was considered a bit of a spoiled child and an incurable egoist, nevertheless appreciated me sufficiently to lend me his favourite toys — in particular an electric train which, in our eyes, was the best toy on earth. You could travel the world with it, cross bridges, encounter Indian tribes, fight epic battles on the forecourts of deserted railway stations. Gilbert could also use me as a shield to hide his worst eccentricities. I remember, for instance, his fear of the dark. Uncle Albert often switched out the light to save energy, which did little to soothe my cousin’s fears. He trembled in his bed, convinced that a monster with three heads, who, according to him, lived in the sewers of the rue du Louboulou, would come in the middle of the night and eat us all up. He described this creature using images taken from Gidrah, the Three-headed Monster, which his big brothers, Jean de Dieu, Firmin and Abeille, had shown on a projector in the yard, using a machine bought for them by their father. In this film, a prophetess from another planet comes down to earth to announce the imminent arrival of a three-headed dragon known as King Ghidorah. The only people who could possibly save us were Rodan and Godzilla, who had also returned, and would join forces with Mothra to defeat the terrifying creature. And since Gilbert was sure that Rodan and Godzilla wouldn’t be turning up in the rue du Louboulou to offer their protection — because our street didn’t feature on any map known to man — he asked to sleep in the middle, and would hide under the cover till first light. He was so frightened, he refused to use the little pot that was left out by my uncle at the entrance to the room for us to pee into. If he ventured out of his hiding place he might fall into the jaws of the three-headed monster. He sprayed the bed with quantities of hot urine and I got the blame in the morning, with no support from his sister, as Uncle Albert lectured me, and my own silence condemned me. In case I said anything, Gilbert would threaten to stop lending me his train, or still worse, to stop me sleeping with them…
Uncle Albert lavished every attention on the girl twin, setting her apart from the rest. This annoyed Gilbert, who would grumble in private, but calmed down once his sister handed over half the presents she had received from my uncle. My mother, too, had a special fondness for Bienvenüe. Whenever she visited Uncle Albert she would ask straight away:
‘Where’s my girl Bienvenüe?’
Bienvenüe would come out of her room and run to Maman Pauline, who would then ask Aunt Ma Ngudi if she could take her along with her to the Grand Marché for the day.
‘But Pauline, Bienvenüe’s your daughter! Why are you asking me permission to take her with you?’
Bienvenüe would come home in the evening with armloads of presents. I was secretly jealous of her, particularly since my mother had never taken me with her to the market, where I could have watched as she talked to customers while I nibbled a few peanuts, ate a ripe banana with Beninese doughnuts and drank ginger juice.
The fact was, we were scared of Bienvenüe, not because of her tempestuous, unpredictable character, but because of the belief in our tribe that a female twin was more powerful than the male. As such, the minute Bienvenüe got angry, we dashed off, till she came to find us, and reassured us:
‘Come back, both of you, I won’t put a curse on you, I’m not angry now…’