‘My dear, true friend, dear Chelos, As the moon is my witness, I am sending you another story from my little backwater of Sibiti…’
I wondered whether this Chelos person really existed or was just a product of his mischievous imagination. Grand Poupy wrote at night, when everyone else was asleep. He lit a candle, opened a school exercise book, took a ballpoint pen and covered the empty pages with black ink at breathtaking speed. The stories were mostly bawdy, particularly the one about a woman called Massika, and her lover, Bosco. Massika had assured Bosco that her husband was away at a funeral in a neighbouring village. He wouldn’t be back till the end of the morning of the following day. So, that evening, Bosco turned up and sat down to eat with Massika. The two love pigeons got drunk on palm wine and laughed together like hyenas. In the middle of the night they disappeared into the bedroom and began making love when suddenly there was a loud knocking at the door. Massika couldn’t think who it might be at that hour of the night. She must either open the door or do nothing and wait for the night visitor to go away. But he knocked louder and louder, and began shouting Massika’s name, till she realised it must be her man standing out there.
‘Come and open the door, I can’t find my key!’
‘I thought you went to the wake?’
‘I’ll explain later, first open the door.’
Bosco just had time to slip under the bed as the door opened and the man of the house put down his bag in the main room. He complained his feet were sore, and asked his wife to go and boil some water for him. When she came back and set a steaming bucket down before her husband he picked it up without a word, slipped into the bedroom with it and emptied it out under the bed. Bosco, who was stark naked, burst out of his hiding place, pushed past the husband, got as far as the main room and plunged out of the front door, followed by the adulterous wife. The two vanished in the darkness while in the distance you could hear the barking of dogs, who must have been having a laugh at their expense, two humans, dressed like Adam and Eve…
The truth was, Grand Poupy dreamed of being a writer…
Here’s Grand Poupy now. We embrace. Behind him I see a woman whose face is vaguely familiar. I hold out my hand to her tentatively, and my mother’s cousin looks almost shocked:
‘You’re going to shake her hand? Won’t you kiss her? Why so formal? Don’t you recognise her?’
I take another look. The woman smiles at me. I can see in her face, she’s a bit disappointed. She’s come to my mother’s plot, where Grand Poupy and I have arranged to meet, specially to see me. It was actually my mother’s cousin who insisted she come today because she hadn’t been able to make it to the family reunion, she was babysitting.
‘Go on, kiss her, it’s Alphonsine!’
I start at the name. Memories flood back, and Grand Poupy’s teasing smile and Alphonsine’s now beaming face make me realise how stupid I’ve been. I can see her now as she was back then, braiding my mother’s hair. I was too shy to come out of this hut, because I was in love with her. Grand Poupy bombarded me with advice, told me just to jump in and swim, wrote out what I had to say to her when we met. I was so paralysed by Alphonsine, face to face with her, I went to pieces, and started to stammer. She was troubled, too, and would run off when I finally managed to put Grand Poupy’s tips into practice, placing my hand on her shoulder. I sent her poems, letters which he read and corrected, and which even so received no reply. In this passionate, one-way correspondence I described her eyes, shimmering, yet moist, her fair skin, like clay fashioned by an archangel who had leaned over her cradle without her parents knowing. These letters were delivered personally by my mother’s cousin. At least, that’s what he swore when got back, with a smile on his lips, jeering at my cowardice. Alphonsine was well ready for me, he claimed, I had better hurry up or some scoundrel would come and put a spoke in the wheels.
‘You’ll have only yourself to blame!’ he warned.
I advanced at a tortoise-like pace in this relationship, to which I attributed all my adolescent angst. As far as I recall I never managed to be with Alphonsine and say anything coherent for more than about ten minutes. In my late teens I was living in Brazzaville and she was back in Pointe-Noire. We lost track of each other, resigned to a platonic relationship, without even a little kiss.
And here she is now right in front of me, a grown-up lady, with two children standing up straight behind her. Grand Poupy smiles impishly. Finally he cracks and bursts out laughing:
‘See, my boy, Alphonsine is one of the family now, I went a different way about it: I married her myself, and we’ve got children. So, they are your nephews, you must look after them as if they were your own children. We live in M’Paka, on the outskirts of town. One of our daughters, the oldest, is studying in Morocco…’
I burst out laughing too, and say:
‘Who’s the sly one, eh, Grand Poupy! There you were, pretending to give me advice, and all the time you were putting your own case!’
Alphonsine avoids my eye.
‘Hey, Grand Poupy, Alphonsine’s looking at the ground, she’s touching her hair, what does that mean, then?’
Another peal of laughter from my cousin.
‘Little rascal! You haven’t forgotten, then!’
As we make our way to my mother’s castle, I ask him:
‘What happened to your friend Chelos? You know, if you’ve still got those manuscripts, I can help you find a publisher in France and…’
‘Forget it, my boy, I don’t have that tapeworm in my gut that writers have, that eats away at their insides every day. Writing’s hard, but what’s even harder is knowing you’ll never be a writer, living with the idea you might have left something marvellous behind when you go. I love to read what you publish, you’ve become what I would have liked to be: a public storyteller. I don’t know what you’ll scribble down after this meeting, but with you I know to expect the worst, you got me perfectly in Black Bazaar… And when the kids here read it, they think I can still help them with chat-up lines!..’
My uncle
Uncle Mompéro is considered the ‘doyen’ of the family, since my mother passed on. He takes his role seriously, and no one would dare challenge his status. From the doorway of the solid built house — the one on which Maman Pauline had started the work, which was carried on and completed by my cousins — he watches the comings and goings in the yard. It is not unusual to hear him raise his voice, demand silence, or tick off the kids who are squabbling. Whenever a car goes past the house, he leaps out of his easy chair, checking that the little ones are safe. Equally, a noisy crowd will arouse his curiosity at once, shaking him from his torpor, to intervene if necessary. I saw all this today when I was chatting with my cousin Kihouari: he crept up on us, appeared in the doorway, then went back off into the main room to wait for me to come and see him once I had finished with the others…
Each time a stranger arrives on our plot he thinks it’s going to be bad news, and brutally poses the same question:
‘Who’s dead this time?’
The visitor will notice his air of worry and despair, no doubt because of all the sisters and brothers who’ve departed over the last twenty years: Uncle Albert, Aunt Sabine, Maman Pauline, Aunt Dorothée and Uncle René.
I’m facing him, and he knows I have no bad news to bring him. He wears a circumspect smile I find deeply touching, with his face only very slightly marked with expression lines between his eyebrows and his forehead. I suspect him of having cut his hair specially to look ‘tidy’ in front of me. Even his black shoes are spotless, as though he didn’t touch the ground when he walked. He’s sporting a fine white shirt with wide beige stripes.