Uncle Mompéro suggested buying another dog. My mother was against this. She did not wish to sully the memory of Miguel, and added that if they hadn’t been capable of looking after one dog, there was no reason to think they would do better with the next one.
When I got home, I was given to believe that Miguel had succumbed to a heart attack. Naively, I replied:
‘But dogs don’t die of heart attacks, because they don’t have all those problems in the heart that humans have.’
Uncle Mompéro took me to one side and told me the truth:
‘You were right, my boy, dogs don’t die of heart attacks… Miguel died because of my stupidity. I’m an imbecile, I accept that. When I left for Dolisie I completely forgot we had a dog, and that I’d tied him up. If I’d only left him unattached he would have survived. But it’s my fault, please don’t hate me for it. Your mother doesn’t want me to buy another dog, but if you want I’ll buy you one anyway…’
‘Don’t buy another dog…’
‘But why not?’
‘Because we didn’t buy Miguel… he was given to us. And anyway, when someone dies do you buy someone else to replace them?’
‘I could go and see the woman who gave your mother Miguel and if her dog’s had some more puppies we’d at least have a puppy from the same family as Miguel and…’
‘No, it was Miguel I loved, I don’t want another dog in my life, then when I think of dogs, I’ll only ever think of him…’
Uncle Mompéro fixes a plank that’s come loose from the shack, and turns to me:
‘That’s right, mon petit, Miguel’s always with me, as your mother is. When we had the first family reunion I couldn’t speak about him in front of everyone. It’s just the two of us today, face to face, please forgive me, help me wipe this curse away, I’m going down on my knees now…’
He goes down on one knee, and before he can get down on both I stop him:
‘No, Uncle, don’t do that, there’s no curse on this plot…’
‘How do you know? Animals are our relatives, our doubles, you said so in your book about the porcupine…’
‘I was only reporting what Maman used to tell me. There are friendly doubles, too, Miguel was one of those, he’s forgiven you for what you did…’
A smile appears on his face:
‘And do you forgive me too?’
‘I never held it against you for one moment, Uncle!’
He wipes his eyes with the back of his right hand. Tears no doubt released by my removal of this thorn from his foot.
We go back to the main house.
This is my third visit, but this time there’s no family reunion. Before I leave the plot, my uncle adopts a solemn air and says:
‘Are you already going back to where the whites are putting you up in the centre of town? My brother Matété looked for you there yesterday, they said you were out all the time. It’s very important, he wants to see you alone. Just agree to what he asks, he and I have talked about it… Will you leave me at least five thousand CFA francs? I just need to buy some little things like razors, toothpaste, soap…’
I smile at him as I take the notes from my pocket.
Close encounters of the third kind
There’s a knock at the door, I open it, and find Uncle Matété standing there. He’s come with a little bunch of bananas, which he puts down in the middle of the room. I pick it up and take it through to the kitchen, while he looks round my rooms, with undisguised amazement.
‘Do the whites pay for you to stay in this place?’
I explain that the French Institute invited me to attend a conference for a few days, and I decided to extend my stay, to see the family, and write a book.
‘And how much do you pay to stay here?’ he replies, going out on to the balcony.
‘They make this apartment available for writers and artists, I don’t pay anything.’
‘I came yesterday, it’s hard to get hold of you, I must have been back three times! This is all very nice, isn’t it?’
Without waiting for my reply, he points over at the building opposite:
‘Look, even at night you can see the Adolphe-Sicé hospital really clearly! Have you visited Bienvenüe there yet?’
‘No…’
‘I don’t blame you. You’re scared of Room One too, I guess? Anyone who goes in, even just to visit, will end up there one day to die…’
By night the hospital looks like a huge haunted manor house, with dim, uneven lighting issuing from the few windows still left open. Uncle Matété suddenly falls silent. He passes his hand over his close-cropped skull, which gleams with the light from the moon emerged from the dark clouds cast over the town. I imagine what he must thinking, how far his thoughts will take him. His eyebrows are quite grey and I sometimes think he looks older than Uncle Mompéro, who he gets on well with, and who was the one who told me he would be coming to see me, though I hadn’t been sure it would be today, this evening. They are both the children of Grandfather Grégoire Moukila, by different mothers.
I guess Uncle Matété’s thinking back to when I was a child in Louboulou village. I was around ten years old, and it was my first time in the bush. The second day of my visit, he decided to take me hunting with him, despite my mother’s objections, and my grandmother N’Soko’s indignation. Grandfather Moukila intervened to reassure everyone:
‘Let them go, they’ll be all right, my spirits will watch over them. After all, the boy needs to go there, before it’s too late…’
I have never forgotten our nocturnal escapade. I arrived home on my uncle’s shoulders, my legs scraped raw with scratches and grazes, my face covered in insect bites. Uncle Matété borrowed Grandfather’s shotgun and we left at the dead of night. Some time before leaving, we smeared our faces with ashes, a technique designed, he said, to catch the wild animals off guard, by convincing them we were of their kind. Next, round our ankles, we tied grasses I still don’t know the names of, to ward off any snakes we met on our way. We followed a winding path that my uncle knew like the back of his hand, till, after a few kilometres, we reached a stream burbling between rocks. At the edge of the stream he gave a sign to show I shouldn’t speak, not even whisper or squash a biting mosquito. A hundred or so metres from us a hind and a stag were drinking. I waited for my uncle to take up his position and shoot down at least one of them. But instead he knelt on the ground and began chanting words I didn’t understand. The two grazing animals watched us from a distance, but seemed untroubled by our presence. Uncle Matété’s prayer seemed to go on for ever, interspersed with names of people in our family like at school when the teacher was checking we were all present before starting lessons. Except that no one answered my uncle’s name-call. The two deer listened carefully to his monotonous speech, nodding their heads in agreement every now and then. When the prayer was finished, the two mammals bellowed loudly then began to move off from the water, eventually vanishing into the depths of the bush. The silence in their wake was chilling. My uncle knew what I was thinking, and got in first: