Still, I need to learn to recognise these little angels, and get their names straight, or they’ll be offended. Even if I’ve never seen them before, I feel close to them, and I know there’s a drop of my blood in their veins. The ones I do know slightly are the children of Gilbert, and of Bienvenüe, who is still in hospital, and whose absence is keenly felt at home. Their children insist on having their photo taken with me. And they choose, by chance, the same spot where I used to sit with Gilbert and Bienvenüe to eat. Here’s where Aunt Mâ Ngudi used to punish me for not finishing what was on my plate, where I toyed with my foufou balls, playing for time. And yet you could tell she really loved me. It was her that told my uncle one day that it wasn’t me wetting the bed, it was my cousin. My uncle was sceptical about this, so Mâ Ngudi then carried out an experiment which to Gilbert felt like the greatest mortification of his life. He was made to sleep alone in the room, while Bienvenüe and I slept in the living room. The next day the evidence spoke for itself: Gilbert, in terror of the three-headed monster, had once again pissed in the bed…
Whenever I was really naughty at home, my mother took me to Mâ Ngudi’s and told her I wouldn’t eat, that I was doing the ‘only child’ thing, as she put it. My aunt gave me a defiant look, then turned to my mother:
‘He’ll eat in this house, Pauline, don’t you worry, I’ll make sure of it. If he gets up to any tricks I’ll send him over to eat Grandma Hélène’s huge portions!’
Mâ Ngudi set to work making a beef soup and foufou balls. I wanted to slip away, but her fierce glare kept me rooted to the spot, and I stayed in the yard, right where my little nieces and nephews are sitting for the photo. Mâ Ngudi set a steaming plate of food, and a bowl of foufou down in front of me. I simply wasn’t hungry, but I had to eat, because my aunt had a rubber whip in her hands. I swallowed great mouthfuls, without feeling them go down into my stomach. I held back my tears, but suddenly felt the need to cough. I began to vomit, while Mâ Ngudi whipped me, and yelled at me to finish my food. I was used to seeing her wave a whip around. I’d stand there before her, eyes cast down in submission. You hardly ever caught her smiling. She was only ever radiant when Uncle Albert was around. It never lasted long, and we felt she was somehow never satisfied, even if everything was fine and we’d all eaten well, there was the washing up to do, the yard to sweep, the bottles on deposit to return to the bar in the Avenue of Independence. She wasn’t particularly hard on me, she treated her own children exactly the same, whipping them with a force that quite alarmed me. Whenever this happened, and I expected to be given the same punishment as them, since we had all been in it together, I feared the worst. But she tempered her lashes, reminding me, perhaps, that I wasn’t her child, that there were limits to her anger. Which Gilbert and Bienvenüe considered an injustice. My cousin always took it out on me once her mother had gone. She would pinch my ears and growclass="underline"
‘I’m pulling your great long ears, since Maman didn’t whip you like us!’
I met a friend from France in the lobby of the French Institute and showed him the photo of me with my nephews and nieces, and he remarked that they, ‘like most children in Pointe-Noire’, lived in a ‘paradise of poverty’. A native of Pointe-Noire himself, he launched into the kind of speech you hear from people who have lived so long in Europe, they now accept the image of the black continent projected by the media. While he was having his say, I watched him pityingly. He had forgotten where he came from, and had come to believe that the introduction of European ways would bring happiness to our country. He doesn’t seem to realise that the chains that bind him in what he believes to be a comfortable life in Europe hold no attraction for my little tribe over in the rue du Louboulou. True, he wears a suit and tie and polished shoes every day, when he’s back here. But whenever I meet him in Europe he’s dressed quite differently. Here he plays a role: broadcasting the notion that the salvation of every Congolese lies over in Europe. Back there he comes face to face with reality, which he won’t be sharing with the young people wandering the streets of Pointe-Noire: he lives in less than twenty square metres, must struggle to legitimise his presence in France, and gets up every morning to go in search of casual work.
These children, though, find points of light in the harshness of their lives. It took me a while to understand that they were just as happy as I was when I was their age, and found my happiness in a plate of hot food in the kitchen, in the growing grass, in the tweeting of a couple of courting birds, or in the poster for an Indian film showing at the Rex cinema, where we started queuing at ten in the morning in the hope of getting into the three o’clock showing. The difficulties of our parents’ lives were something quite distant, and besides, we had confidence in them, they cleverly concealed their anxieties, the shortages, the difficulty of getting through to the end of the month, so as not to spoil our childish innocence.
Thinking back to my childhood, when we hid in the lantana fields near the Agostinho Neto airport and hunted iridescent beetles or fished for minnows from the banks of the River Tchinouka, I replied to my friend, with his ‘Parisian Negro’ arrogance:
‘These children aren’t in a paradise of poverty. Here, look at the photo: that tyre, those flip-flops… that’s what makes them happy… flip-flops to walk in, the tyre they can all climb aboard like a motorbike big enough to carry all their wildest dreams. Every day my nephews and nieces walk out in a long line down the rue du Louboulou. Their childhood knits them together, they wouldn’t swap it for all the world. They drink from a small glass, but it’s their own. Your glass is big, but it’s not yours, and each time you want to drink from it, you have to ask for permission. And alas, that permission is never granted…
The ladykillers
His real name is Alphonse Bikindou, but we call him by his nickname, though no one knows what it means or where it comes from: Grand Poupy.
I meet him this afternoon at my mother’s place and it seems his face has not a wrinkle, and that he’ll stay exactly as I’ve always known him till the day he dies: quite small, a prominent forehead, narrow eyes sparkling with intelligence and cunning. He now has a thin moustache, and to take myself back to when I was a kid, only slightly younger than him, I try to ignore his facial hair, which puts a barrier between us. He is my mother’s cousin, and moved to Pointe-Noire from the country in the late 1970s, to live with us and go to the lycée. The very first day I saw him, I was captivated by his deep voice and his way of articulating almost every word separately. I started secondary school just as he started at the lycée, and we’d get up in the morning and put on our school uniforms, him all in khaki, with long trousers, me in a sky-blue shirt and dark blue shorts, and a red ‘pioneers of the Congolese Revolution’ kerchief round my neck. I always lagged behind him, and every now and then he would turn round, so I’d have to hurry to catch him up. I could never manage it, his little legs had a kind of almost mechanical strength despite the way the road seemed to get steeper and steeper, so that we would overtake other pupils sitting exhausted by the wayside. A bit farther on, at the junction of the Avenue Jean-Felix-Tchicaya and the rue Jacques-Opangault, where we went our separate ways, he would act the big brother — he was no longer a minor — and tell me to mind the traffic and hand me a twenty-five CFA franc coin:
‘Buy yourself some fritters and mash at break. Watch the big kids don’t steal your money.’