Half an hour later, he sank into his armchair in the lobby, sprawled out with his legs stretched in front of him, his hands resting on his stomach, eyes closed. This relaxed attitude lasted no more than a few seconds.
‘There are red ants in here! Red ants in my chair!’
He scratched desperately at his legs, then at his hands, and his face. He yelled for someone to bring him a drink of water. The staff clustered round him, till Mme Ginette, drawn by the noise, appeared from the stairs, horrified:
‘Quick, get him to hospital! It’s a tropical infection!’
The ambulance siren could be heard already outside and the victim was assisted by three employees, who all, for the first time ever, were wearing gloves.
That was the last time the ‘intruder’ was seen hanging around the lobby. Papa Roger had recovered his territory and at home we could tell, because he started telling stories about the Victory Palace again…
Quickly I walk away from the hotel, because someone’s been watching me from inside for a while now. Perhaps he thinks I’m a potential client trying to choose between his hotel and the competitor, the Atlantic Palace, only two hundred metres away.
Mme Ginette is no longer the owner, she sold the hotel to the Congolese in 1985, and went back to France. She’s in her nineties now. Once I ran into her niece in Montpellier, and we’ve stayed in touch.
The woman next door
The man I called my father died in 2005, ten years after Maman Pauline. I am not sure I ever really knew him. We were both intimate and distant. Intimate, because I had always felt his eyes watching me, accompanying me every step of the way, anxious I might stumble or fall, concerned I should choose the path he had opened up for me.
He seemed distant, too, not because he wasn’t my biological father, but because I knew nothing about him, never having met a single member of what I might have considered my ‘paternal family’, even if, to do him justice, his relationship with my mother had never been sealed at the mairie. Their union was an unspoken agreement, made material by the fact that a man and a woman lived under the same roof with a child, in a society where the collective opinion was more important than any signature on a piece of paper, or vows before a public authority. Sometimes, even when a civil marriage had taken place, a few wise old men would mutter among themselves:
‘So what, they just want to be like white people, those papers don’t count in our eyes, what matters is the word of the ancestors, they don’t need papers, people tear them up, anyway, after a few months’ marriage. Can the word of the ancestors be torn up?’
No, my parents were not officially married. In fact he wasn’t actually married to Maman Martine either, his other wife, with whom he had had eight children. This woman was what was called my mother’s ‘rival’, the word ‘rival’ in the language of the Congolese meaning ‘co-wife’. In itself, even the term ‘co-wife’ was incorrect, since neither of my two mothers had ever married Papa Roger before the mayor of Pointe-Noire. If it came to it, Maman Martine could claim more rights than my mother: she had had children with Papa Roger, her status of ‘wife’ had been legitimised by a traditional marriage, while in my mother’s case, my father had settled it all by buying a drink for my mother’s older brother, my maternal uncle, Albert.
I was aware of a generation gap between my ‘two mothers’. There were two eras, one of which might be considered that of the black-and-white photo, the other that of experimentation with colour. The age difference between them was more than twenty years, enough to ensure they had different takes on life, different interests. In this respect, Papa Roger had done the same as many other polygamists in this country: he had thrown in his lot with a younger woman, a very young woman, in this case — my mother — to compensate for his first wife’s declining beauty, and perhaps to protect himself against what he perceived as the monotony of married life, which they had shared now for nearly twenty years. But these were not the real reasons. Many polygamists needed their multiple marriages in order to feel strong and ‘manly’. You certainly had to be financially comfortable to juggle two households and bring up a brood so close in age that the names of some children got forgotten, or confused with others. In order to make ends meet, husbands usually sent their wives out to work, while they stayed at home or hung out in the local bars, where they might well meet another young lady to swell the ranks of the harem. Papa Roger, though a polygamist, was not of this breed; it was Maman Martine who stayed at home. She was more traditional, kept to the kitchen, often silent and self-effacing, speaking only in the language of her tribe, in bembé, not munukutuba, the language of Pointe-Noire, even though she had lived in this town for many years. She was the living embodiment of the ‘village woman’, who, it was said, expected her husband to provide everything for her. Whenever husband and wife argued, she would consult the council of old grey-beards, who welcomed the opportunity for a get-together and a good excuse to get drunk on palm wine, settling the dispute by the by. Maman Pauline, on the other hand, was more ‘with it’ — indeed, rather too much so for some people’s tastes, going out when she felt like it, and walking into a bar full of men without any of the bowing and scraping they considered their due. She did this by way of provocation, and if you pointed it out she would reply:
‘If they’re so respectable, what are they doing hanging out in a bar while their wives are at home? Looking for other women?’
Her independence came from the groundnut and banana business she ran at the Grand Marché, and even more so from what she considered the great achievement of her life: the purchase of a plot of land in Pointe-Noire, in the Voungou district. My father didn’t like her being autonomous, it made him feel, in his words, ‘useless’. A woman shouldn’t ‘wear the trousers’ in a relationship, or acquire possessions in her own name, these were the prerogatives of the husband, who also had the right to marry as many other women as he chose.
Much later — I must already have been at the lycée — Papa Roger started seeing another woman, one he intended to take as a third ‘rival’. Usually he was the most punctual man on earth, but now he started coming home late to my mother’s house, or to Maman Martine’s, and making up excuses, contradicting himself, arousing the suspicion of his two ‘official’ wives. He’d tell Maman Martine he was a bit late because he’d stopped off at my mother’s house. Then the next day, when he was meant to be sleeping at our house, he would argue that he had to go to Maman Martine’s on some urgent business, which he didn’t go into.
He couldn’t play this game for much longer than a few weeks. Maman Martine got wind of the affair through one of her friends, and alerted my mother:
‘I think Roger’s seeing Célestine… he hasn’t laid a finger on me for weeks, we’re like strangers in bed. I know him, there’s a woman on the scene.’
‘No! Célestine? Can’t he do better than that?’
Maman Martine, already half resigned to it, said meekly:
‘Well, it doesn’t matter much to me, I’m out of the running, I said goodbye to my youth a while back. But what’s this Célestine got that you haven’t? You’re young, you’re beautiful, you work hard, you and I have never fallen out! That Roger! He’ll never change! Well, I’m just going to tell him to keep his hands off me till he’s stopped seeing another woman on the side!’