Lounès thinks our President’s a dictator because he’s a military man, but I don’t agree. I’m sure that in a lot of countries around the world there are dictators who aren’t in the army. So I don’t care if our President’s a dictator, it just annoys me that he says he’s been sent personally by God. Now if God wanted to send someone to be president of our country He would have sent his son Jesus because He’s already done that once to save men on earth. At least, that’s what the priest says on Sundays in the church of Saint-Jean-Bosco.
When the President tells us he’s been personally sent by God, people believe him, without stopping to check if it’s true or not. And we learn his speeches at school, like the sheep down at the Grand Marché, because what he says is supposedly for our good, and comes directly from God. We learn about his glorious life story. How he defeated the enemies of the Revolution in the north of the country, how he single-handedly massacred his enemies who had stolen our army’s tank and were preparing to bombard the north of the country, and then go back down south and bombard the little villages down there, including animals and poor peasants. They had to find the tank again fast, it was the only one the French left behind for us after Independence. The French really liked us, and we liked them too. They still like us, in fact, because they go on looking after our oil for us, which is in the sea near Pointe-Noire, because if they don’t we’ll only go and waste it or sell it to the Americans, who need it to run their enormous cars.
And apparently, because he was born invincible, our President’s the one who went into battle back when he was just a soldier and didn’t know it was written on the lines of his right hand that he would become president after a battle against the enemies of the Revolution. So he just turned up in the north of the country on an old Vespa, so well disguised that no one could tell if he was a soldier or a bit of grass waving in the wind. He crawled, he swam, he climbed trees. He attacked hundreds of enemies of the revolution who’d gathered by a river to work out how they could wipe us out in less than twenty-four hours. The future president let out a great war cry and began machine gunning them with his eyes closed. He was faster with a bullet than Lucky Luke himself. And when he’d run out of ammunition the spirits of our ancestors gave him heaps more. At one point even the spirits of our ancestors ran out of bullets too. The future president went and hid in a maize field, and there he met an old man of the Bembé tribe, who only had one tooth left in his head, and who told him to put maize kernels in his weapon. He was lying, and he didn’t believe him, but he had no choice because the enemies were coming up behind him en masse. So he loaded his gun with maize kernels anyway. When he fired, the kernels exploded, like grenades in the first world war. He fired and he fired and he kept on firing while the enemies of the Nation fell, one after the other and died like rats. The future president finally discovered where they had hidden our lovely French tank. The tank still worked, the opponents of the Revolution hadn’t used it. Then our future president came back with the tank, driving it himself, and the people cheered him and gave him flowers as he entered the national stadium with the tank.
As soon as he became President of the Republic, since he was by now a national hero, thanks to the tank, he wrote a big fat book that you have to read at middle school, high school and university. They only read us a few little bits because our brains are still too small, but when we get to middle school we’ll read it all, from start to finish.
~ ~ ~
It’s Saturday, and everyone out in the street is all dressed up, you’d think it was Independence Day. Some people always get dressed up like that on Saturdays. The minute I see all those suits and new wraps I know it must be Saturday. They all do it: come Saturday, they’re out there in their fine clothes from morning to the late afternoon, then in the evening they’re off to cruise the bars in the Avenue of Independence. They go dancing all night, and some of them sleep from Sunday to Monday midday and forget to go to work. The priest at Saint-Jean-Bosco complains his church is empty these days. How can you expect people to get up for church on a Sunday morning if they’ve been out partying from six in the evening till six in the morning and only found their way back home again by some small miracle?
It’s not too hot. The sky above me is calm and blue. When a plane goes by, I think of Caroline, even though I’m still cross with her. Now every time I think of my wife I have to think of a red car with five seats. And our two children, a girl and a boy. Not forgetting the little white dog.
While I’m busy imagining my life with Caroline, someone comes up behind me and touches my shoulder. It’s Lounès.
He laughs and asks if he frightened me.
‘Not at all,’ I say.
He likes creeping up on me. He’s brought some boiled sweets, two for himself and one for me. He gives me mine as soon as he creeps in. My father’s sleeping at Maman Martine’s today and my mother’s still at the Grand Marché selling peanuts with Madame Mutombo, so there’s no need to worry.
Lounès sits where I sit when I eat with my parents. I sit in my father’s place. I’ve left the door open. From where I’m sitting I can watch what’s happening outside.
Lounès looks at a new photo my mother’s put on the dresser. It was taken only a few days ago when we went to buy me some new Spring Court shoes at Printania, where they sell apples, grapes, and lots of fruit brought over from Europe. On the way home we stopped in a bar on the Avenue of Independence. A photographer came in with his camera, and forced my parents to have a picture taken.
‘Look at you all! All so handsome, the three of you, it’ll be a marvellous photo! I promise you, if you don’t look good, I won’t charge you.’
My mother said no because it’s wrong to waste money. But my father listened to the photographer’s pitch, about how he fed his ten children with his camera, and he hadn’t had a single client in the last month. He showed us a great gash on his tibia.
‘See that? I haven’t even got the money to buy drink, or Mercurochrome. And I’ve got two cousins and two uncles just turned up from the village and it’s up to me to feed them. There’s another problem too, I rent the house where we live, and the owner…’
‘All right, all right, take the photo!’ my father said. My mother frowned and gave my father a dirty look. He added: ‘I’m paying. Michel, come and stand between your mother and me.’
So now the photo’s there on the dresser. Sometimes I look at it for a few minutes and I’m happy I’m standing there between my parents. I know my mouth’s hanging open, that’s the photographer’s fault. He told us to smile at the little bird that popped out of his camera. I wasn’t going to smile till I’d seen what kind of bird it was: what colour, where it came out, if it flew, if it could sing like real birds that don’t hide inside cameras. I was standing there waiting for the bird with my mouth hanging open, but it wasn’t a bird came out, it was a light, which startled me. And another thing: I had no time to button up my shirt. You can see my chest, it’s a bit flat still, I’m too small to have muscles like Blek le Roc. My mother’s got a scarf wrapped round her head and a glass of beer at her lips. My father’s leaning slightly towards me, as though he’d like to protect me from the enemies of the Revolution who might wipe us out and win the final struggle. Out of the three of us, Maman Pauline is the tallest. I’ve got a glass of beer in front of me, but not to drink, just for the photo, because my mother told me if I didn’t have a drink in front of me the photo wouldn’t work out because the neighbours would think we’d only gone into the bar for the photo. So there’s a glass of beer in front of me, And so no one could say I was just pretending to drink, Maman Pauline took a sip from my glass. So if you look carefully at our photo, you’ll see my glass isn’t quite full, and you’ll think I was drinking beer that day, but it’s not true.