Whenever we moved house around the city, the scarecrow, who we called Massengo, came with us. When we’d rented in the Fonds Tié-Tié quartier, he’d been there, propped up behind the door of my parents’ room. The year we lived with Uncle René, house-sitting while he was doing some training abroad, Massengo came too. When we bought our own place in the Voungou quartier, he stayed with us. Every New Year, my mother left a plate of pork and plantain bananas out for him, the traditional dish of the Bembé tribe. She talked to him for at least an hour to bring him up to date on what we’d done that year, and on our hopes and projects for the year just beginning. I learned later that my mother didn’t have a bank account, that she kept her savings in a hole that was guarded by Massengo, who was said to have the power to increase tenfold all savings placed in his care. I believed this, especially as my mother was never without money…
For all the care she took to hide her worries from me, Maman Pauline could never quite conceal her fragility when, irritated that she still wouldn’t look at me when I desperately tried to catch her eye, I would ask her whether anything was wrong. Or course then she’d immediately burst out laughing and tell me I was worrying for nothing, of course she was fine, she must be, she was laughing, a person with worries wouldn’t be relaxed, or happy, like she was. She’d round off her little charade by adopting a manner too studiously relaxed to be genuine, and telling me some rambling story, still with that ill-contained hilarity that increased my anxiety and convinced me she was worried about something.
If my attention drifted off, she’d notice straight away:
‘Why aren’t you laughing too? Don’t you like my story of the piglet born with two snouts and only one nostril? Don’t you think it’s funny?’
I didn’t answer. I stared at the roof, then down at the floor. Now it was her turn to worry about me, as within seconds, as though it was catching, my face had suddenly darkened with the conviction that someone was out to harm her, or that, even with the magical powers of Massengo the scarecrow, she couldn’t pay back the loan she’d taken out to buy a licence at the Grand Marché and work with an easy conscience. Aged eleven I was already aware that the market tax had broken up many families, with mothers in despair because they’d been banned from selling peanuts for being a bit late with their payments. They’d arrive in the morning to find some council workers standing, Cerberus-like, at their table. Negotiation was not a term they used. They were paid to evict traders and replace them with others who had given them a bribe. Either the traders paid with money they borrowed from others, or they went back home wondering how they were going to feed the kid sitting waiting for them, blissfully unaware of its mother’s troubles. Now my mother wasn’t in either of these categories, she was careful to pay the licence fee in time.
Her air of sadness had its origins elsewhere, and that look of hers, though not hard, not snake-like, even when she was angry, was the expression of her determination to scale the endless steps that rose before her, this humble peasant woman from Louboulou, a small town with red earth, that produced corn, and tubers and yams, and bananas, and grazing pigs. She wanted to forget that place, where the man due to be her husband ran off without a word, abandoning her to her fate a few months before my birth. So she chose to live as a woman from nowhere, amid the hurly-burly of the town of Pointe-Noire, where I am now, a coastal city with not much indulgence for people arriving with the soil of the fields on their feet. She looked on me as an extension of her existence, the ray of hope at the end of an infinitely long tunnel. I was the indisputable sign of the immortality she imagined she would finally achieve the day I emerged from her womb in a run-down building in the maternity hospital in the Mouyondzi district, that both torrid and glacial night of 24 February 1966, while the moon struggled to lighten the darkness and the cocks were already crowing at the new dawn. Scarcely able to believe her own happiness, which even the memory of the disaster with my father could not spoil, she anxiously placed her feverish hands on my chest to check I was still breathing, that I wasn’t an apparition who would vanish the moment she turned her back. She had to be persuaded to let the nurse wash the newborn babe she cradled in her arms. All that because she feared I would take the same path as my two older sisters, who died at birth. She had never been able to solve the mystery of their premature departure. Perhaps the two angel children had heard the prediction of a cousin of our mother’s, who, goaded by jealousy, had publicly declared one day that the destiny of Maman Pauline was the darkest of all her line. The same bad-mouthed cousin also said that my mother would have no children, that she’d die all alone in a hut, and if by any chance she did manage to have a baby, it would be a boy, an ungrateful boy who would leave the country when he was twenty years old, and be living thousands of kilometres away the day she drew her last breath. This baby would not belong to her, he would just be passing through, taking the first empty womb he could find.
But my mother swept aside these predictions, putting them down to her barren cousin’s envy of another’s fertility, and came to Pointe-Noire with a child in her arms, and the scarecrow of my grandmother, N’Soko, wrapped up in palm leaves. She walked with her pagne wrapped around her hips, a way of showing that, even in despair, her head was high. Her path was long and winding, till one day a new man appeared before her. He would become my father, my real father, as I saw it, the one I instinctively stretched out my little hands to, smiling at last as I felt myself swept up off the ground, defying gravity, carried by the invincible, unsurpassable physical strength of this man, landing high up on his shoulders, my legs gripping tight round his neck. That was the day I first pronounced those two resonant, magical, identical syllables, the vowels interlaced with the two twin consonants: ‘papa’. This is the man I called deferentially ‘Papa Roger’, in my autobiographical book Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty, and who now lies in the Mont-Kamba cemetery, in a tomb close by my mother’s…
Live and become
I heard my mother had died in 1995. I was a student and had been living in a small studio in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, in the Rue Bleue, for over six years. I was expected back in Pointe-Noire for the funeral and the telephone rang endlessly. A cousin urged me to come back. My aunt Dorothée threatened to kill herself if I didn’t show up. My cousin Kihouari yelled that we’d be cursed if I didn’t get on the next plane.
I stopped picking up the phone. It was as though the news had paralysed me, and this pleading from thousands of kilometres away pushed me farther into my corner. The world felt too small, and time seemed to have stopped in its tracks. Even when I climbed the stairs of our apartment block I would go on up past my studio, and find myself on the sixth floor, though I lived on the second.
I didn’t go.
The truth was, I dreaded coming face to face with the body of the woman I had last seen smiling, full of life. My fear of seeing her again, lifeless, had its roots in my childhood. Back then, like many other children of my age, I was phobic about corpses, especially since they were laid out in the yard so anyone who wished to could come and pay their last respects. Everyone had to file past the deceased, lean over them to within a few millimetres, and murmur some words of farewell. This proximity filled us children with dread, especially since, to our minds, the dead at first wandered on earth for a few weeks, waiting for their final departure, haunting the living, especially the children who had seen them during the funeral rites. Why them? Because the dead needed their innocence to survive the few days leading up to their departure.