The cormorant I saw earlier passes overhead. Placide follows his flight and concludes, chillingly:
‘Those birds work hand in hand with the spirits of the sea. They’re accomplices, they tell the monsters of the sea if someone’s here! The bird that’s just flown over is disappointed, because he didn’t get what he wanted: you! Listen, let’s go back, we’re better off having a drink down by the Rex…’
That evening, after a drink at the Paysanat, Placide dropped me outside the French Institute. I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking of the two waves, and wondering what would have happened at the third wave, if I had stayed on the rocks…
I don’t remember ever having bathed on the Côte Sauvage as a teenager. I only ever went down there with the other kids in the hope of getting some sardines, jack mackerels or sole from the Beninese fishermen to take back to my mother, in exchange for help unloading the Ghanaian pirogues. We also went with the secret hope of spying on the half-naked women, particularly white women. The grown-ups said they didn’t know how to hide their ‘nether lands’ and made a great exhibition of themselves applying their suncream. Our curiosity bordered on obsession, since we were determined to check whether the blondes also had blond pubic hairs, and if the redheads were red ‘down there’ as well. Grown-ups idolised body hair to the point where you’d hear them whispering: ‘I chatted up this girl today, wow, she’s beautiful! She’s got hair everywhere, long and shiny, straight hair!’
Obviously, because these women depilated their bodies before they went into the sun, you had to get really close to see anything. Startled by our invasion, they would call us all the names under the sun, and go and complain to the coastguard of the Côte Sauvage, who would throw us off the beach.
Many of us, like myself, had never bathed in the sea here, scrupulously following the recommendations of the local sorcerers as to how to keep hold of our physical strength. We often went to ask their advice, and they would prepare gris-gris for us, to make us invincible when we got into fights. With the gris-gris to protect you, if you gave your opponent a thump on the head, he would fall unconscious, or his head would go into such a spin he’d start picking up the garbage that lay round about him. People said that some of these gris-gris, made in the most far-flung villages in the south of the country, like Mayalama, Mpangala or Boko, were so powerful that if you slapped a tree, the unripe fruits would fall and the leaves would turn to dust. Most of the kids were tempted by these fetishes from the age of fourteen. You just had to turn up at the sorcerer’s house with one litre of palm wine, and one of palm oil, a packet of Gillette blades, some cola nuts, chillis and charcoal. The guru would get out his arsenal of amulets, murmur a few obscure words, light some candles and ask you to hold out your wrists. He’d grab a Gillette blade and make three little cuts on each of your wrists. Once the blood began to flow he would rub on a black powder, which stung. You were not allowed to cry out or give any sign that the power was entering into you. For the pain he’d get you to chew on some cola nuts and drink a glass of palm wine. You paid him for his work, and he gave you a list of things you mustn’t do: don’t look under your bed, don’t put your left foot down first when you get out of bed, don’t approach women, and most of all, don’t swim on the Côte Sauvage. How could you check that the power had entered you? The sorcerer would slap you several times. After a moment, you went into a trance, mind and body. Then he’d hand you an empty bottle and ask you to smash it over your own head. If the glass broke without cutting you, it was a total success. Then you had to go and pick a fight with someone in the street, to be quite sure you were as strong as Zembla, Tarzan and Blek the Rock, all rolled into one…
Indeed, the Côte Sauvage has always been the object of darkest speculation on the part of the Pontenegrins. In their minds, the sea was where the sorcerers from all over town met to draw up a list of all the people who would die in the coming year. Accordingly, any death that occurred here was considered a mystery, the key to which was closely guarded down at the very bottom of the ocean, where all the evil spirits lived, disguised as the fauna of the deep, feeding on human flesh. In short, as soon as a body was seen floating on the ocean surface, these creatures reached out with their giant octopus tentacles to catch them and drag them down to the ocean bed, devouring them at their leisure.
In the ‘news in brief’ column of our local newspapers back then, they kept a record of drownings which eventually turned out to have been sacrificial deaths, sometimes instigated by the family of the deceased. Many of those who drowned were albinos. Local people believed albinos possessed supernatural powers and that if, for example, you slept with an albino girl, you would recover your virility, or get rich. Such was the prejudice against albinos, the sacrificers tended to overlook the fact that albinism is not a curse, simply a hereditary illness found not only among humans but among certain animals too, such as amphibians and reptiles. From an early age we were indoctrinated with this harsh social reality, and we went along with it, so that if we encountered an albino we already began to imagine them drowned, their corpse, at best, washed up on a beach, if the underwater creatures were already busy devouring their previous victims. Charlatans of all kinds stepped into this breach, decreeing that true attonement could be achieved only by sacrificing those individuals whose skin was sufficiently pale and eyes colourless, red, light blue, orange or purplish-blue for them to be blamed for the entire community’s woes. The justification was almost always the same: albinos had not been born like that by chance, they were whites gone wrong who unfortunately had landed here, and in any case, once thrown into the sea they would return to Europe where they would recover the true colour of their skin. The sea was the perfect setting for the drama of this return to the cradle. That was the whole point — white men had arrived at our shores by sea, to capture the Negroes and carry them away, to a place no one ever returned from — except albinos, who came back with this strange coloured skin. So we were doing them a favour, sending them back to Europe.
What with all this, we were not exactly surprised that no albino kids ever came to walk with us along the Côte Sauvage. Their parents, if they really cared about their children, would keep them locked up at home, since even out in the street they were not safe from stone-throwing, not to mention the dogs who joined in too, barking at them as though face to face with a monster.
The Côte Sauvage had also swallowed up another category of individuals, dropped unscrupulously into its waters: the crippled and lame. It was a pretty sordid image when, the day after an act of this kind, the sea held on to the corpse of the deceased, but returned their wheelchair. Someone would recover it and take it to sell in one of the markets downtown, where no one would ever question the provenance of this damaged merchandise. There were so many disabled folk dragging themselves around the town, the seller usually found a buyer within the hour.
The painting
Walking up the Avenue Général de Gaulle, in the town centre, you come to the Kassai roundabout and memorial, bearing a commemorative plaque with the eloquent inscription:
To the Free French of the Middle Congo, who joined forces to free the Mother Country under the insignia of the Cross of Lorraine. 18 June 1940–28 August 1940 …