My mother never got to grow any grey hairs. But looking at my uncle I can imagine roughly what her scalp would have looked like if she had lived to be over sixty, like him. I am sure she wouldn’t have been one of those old ladies who spend the day sitting out in front of their houses. She’d still be on the go, selling her peanuts at the Grand Marché, where lots of elderly women still ply this trade, some of them dozing behind their stalls. If Maman Pauline saw me turn up here now, she would fling herself at me, with a huge smile that would make me believe she could get the better of time itself. That’s the impression Uncle Mompéro would like to give me too, today. He’ll say nothing of his state of health, which is declining, or of everything he’s endured these last twenty-three years, during which we have been out of touch. Now, Grand Poupy had already mentioned to me that our uncle wasn’t well, that he had undergone an operation for appendicitis, that the moment I turned my back he would suddenly age, facing the sawing pain of his poorly treated illness. I was astonished and protested that my uncle appeared to be in good health. Grand Poupy had at once grown serious:
‘When he heard you were coming back to Pointe-Noire, he put his illness to one side, to put a brave face on it. He’s like your mother, when she was hospitalised at Adolphe-Sicé, she ordered us to tell you nothing till she was dead. Uncle Mompéro isn’t in such good shape as you think, he won’t tell you, but don’t ask him, or he’ll never forgive us…’
My uncle begins to talk to me, his head tilted up towards the ceiling, which, I remember, indicates I mustn’t interrupt him:
‘I haven’t changed, you know, I’m still the same man who held your hand through the night when you were terrified of the dark and thought it was full of man-eating ghosts from the tombs in the Mont-Kamba cemetery, coming to attack children. Your mother’s gone now, but she still lives, through me, and she’s left me enough breath in my lungs to wait for you, the time it took. Your rendezvous with her never happened; ours, thanks be to God, has happened. It didn’t happen by chance, you mustn’t blame yourself that you weren’t here when we mourned for my sister. I knew you were grieving too, wherever you were, I know everything that happens in your body, and in your spirit. The truth is, to me, you’re not a nephew, but my own son, the child I never had, the child I never will have now, because the older I get, the more I realise that I was put on this earth to protect the person my sister loved above everyone and everything: you. I never wanted descendants of my own, in case it took me away from you, and you considered me more as an uncle than a true father. I don’t want to be your uncle, I am your father! Was it an accident your biological father abandoned you? You should tell yourself now, you’ve been lucky to have three men in your life. The first one failed in his mission to be a father, and ran off just before you were born, you can wipe him from your mind, you have already, it’s better that way, lowlife like him don’t deserve respect, since they never showed any themselves. The second — your stepfather, Roger — was a generous man, who took you in, you and your mother. You must honour him, so that all adopted children, everywhere, know their life is not doomed to failure, just because their father was an idiot. I am the third man, completing the trinity of your fate. Do you not hear the sweet music of your mother’s voice when I speak to you? You may wander far from me, as you have done until now, but I will still be there, sometimes just sitting watching time flow by, but mostly wandering along the banks of patience, whatever the force of the gales. I’ll blow with all my breath on the embers of time itself to be able to stay on this earth just long enough to see you take over the reins of this shattered family, with all its internal divisions, that are hidden from you. Look at these people! They put on a united front, but when you scratch the surface you discover all this hostility, that I have to contend with. You’ve got one person accusing another of causing his father or mother’s death, and others fighting over land left by my brother Albert Moukila in the 1970s! Is that what you call a family? That’s what killed your uncle René, other people’s greed, even if it has to be said he didn’t exactly set a good example, grabbing the house that should have gone to your cousins Gilbert and Bienvenüe! I’ll forgive him that, though it is a pity the house was sold secretly by my older sister Sabine Bouanga’s son, with not a single centime going to Albert’s own children! I’m looking to you now to get your bleach out and do a proper clean-up in this family. Don’t be too nice about it, they’d think you were just being weak, and you’d pay with your life. I’m exhausted, totally exhausted, I’m sick of battling on all alone. You’re here now, and here I am, where I was when you left me. But I won’t be next time, you know. I’ll be gone too, gone to join my sister Pauline…’
In the silence that follows I sense that he wants to describe my mother’s last days, and is looking for the right words, or rather, wondering how to begin. He’s seen my face grow troubled, and he stops himself. We leave that chapter unopened, though it’s there in both our minds.
We leave the main house and go over to my mother’s castle. Outside the shack he turns to me and shows me his hands:
‘These are the hands that built this place, remember? You helped me a bit, you really wanted to be useful! The house isn’t the same now, there’s only half of it left, I had to cut the other part off when your mother died. I couldn’t bear to see the room she slept in…
He strokes the planks thoughtfully:
These planks speak to me at night… Do you know the same are used to make coffins?’
I nod my head. He was a great joiner in his day, and made the frames of many of the houses in this town. I never liked it when he made coffins and the bereaved families waited around outside his workshop.
I reach out and touch the planks too. Pleased by my gesture, he immediately says:
‘Yes, touch them, they’re glad to see you. They know who we are, they were there at the start. Whenever they moan it makes me think your mother’s suffering up there, and wants me to come and join her…’
I still don’t interrupt the flow of what seem like thoughts he’s been saving up for a long time now, for the day he could whisper them to me.
‘It seems like death’s had it in for us,’ he goes on. ‘Maybe there’s a curse on this patch of land, because of the way I treated Miguel. Night and day I think of the misery I inflicted on that dog…’
An image of Miguel pops into my head. I hear him barking, then whimpering with thirst and hunger. Once the link between myself and my imaginary sisters, he died at the foot of the mango tree that used to dominate the plot. Did the neighbours hear his desperate cries? And this tree, witness to the scene, why didn’t it set the poor beast free? Maman Pauline was crazy about Miguel, he was a present from one of her girlfriends who just wanted to get rid of the litter of puppies. People said she had so many dogs she sometimes threw some into the River Tchinouka. I was the one who thought of the name Miguel for our new arrival, who steadily grew each time I filled his bowl with milk. Feeding the dog was like a game for me, and he followed me round the whole day long, hoping for his next feed. He listened to me with his ears pricked up, and answered by wagging his tail like wind-screen wipers. I’d learned to reckon a dog’s age with him. Within a single year he was older than me, almost twice my age. I was proud to fix a sign at the entrance to the plot that said ‘Beware of the dog.’ I walked with him round the backstreets of the Voungou neighbourhood, confident he would be my constant protector. Alas, when some children my age threw stones at us, Miguel opted to hide behind me rather than go and bite them as he would have done if we had been at home and someone had come and attacked us. I realised that most dogs were only brave inside the boundaries of their master’s home. So often I had seen our dog, who was so timid when we were out and about, fling himself around the yard in a frenzy with his tail between his legs, barking his head off outside the house, fit to burst our eardrums. I loved him in spite of this, and he returned my love, licking my little hands with his tongue, or standing up on his two feet. Our happiness was not to last. My mother went away for a month and I was sent, for the first time, to stay with my mother’s military brother, Jean-Marie Moulounda, in Brazzaville. Papa Roger was at Maman Martine’s. The whole house was practically empty; Grand Poupy was at Sibiti and the various aunts had gone back to Louboulou to work in the fields. Only Uncle Mompéro was left, and my mother had asked him to look after Miguel, to feed him three times a day and take him for walks so he could do his business outside our plot. My uncle did this for two or three days. Then he left town himself to go and work on a site in Dolisie, the third-biggest town in the country, over three hundred kilometres from Pointe-Noire, where they were building a primary school. Instead of letting the dog wander free on our land, for a few days he had kept him tied up with a piece of rope to the foot of the mango tree, where he came and gave him his food and water, as Maman Pauline had asked. The day of his departure for Dolisie, my uncle forgot about Miguel and left him captive. On his return, a few hours before his sister, the poor beast was no longer of this world. Papa Roger and Maman Pauline cried murder. They considered trying to hide Miguel’s death from me. But they knew that when I got back from Brazzaville the next day, the first thing I would ask was: ‘Where’s Miguel?’