Maman Pauline often tells me how, on the night when I started kicking like a little bandit to be let out of her womb, she walked all the way to the central hospital in Mouyondzi. I nearly didn’t make it into this world because I was afraid of the men and women sitting round chatting in the delivery room. I thought that when I arrived on this earth there’d be silence, that I’d be all alone with her, like I was inside her, when I swam around holding on to the tube that sent me my food every day. But there you go, I didn’t want my mother to be unhappy, I didn’t want to go to heaven like my sisters. If people were sitting around talking, then there must be something wrong, and I wanted to know what, because no one was going to explain to me up in heaven why people like sitting around talking on earth, even when they’re in a hospital room. I wanted to see these people’s faces with my own eyes, hear their voices with my own ears. In fact, the people sitting round talking in the delivery room thought I was going to be silly enough to go the same way as my two sisters. But I wanted to live, I wanted to follow my mother wherever she went, I wanted to protect her against all the policemen on earth who threaten their wives with pistols when they’re meant to be threatening criminals. So the nurses watched me round the clock. I watched them too, with one eye, and on their sad faces I read that they were expecting the worst, because they’d already seen my mother in this hospital, in this same room, seen her leave in tears with a stone-cold baby in her arms, heading for the morgue, where she leaves the baby in the fridge. Some of the nurses were checking to see if I was breathing still. I said to myself: ‘I’m going to have a game with these adults, I’m going to show them I know their language, I know what they’re thinking.’ I had this little game, where I held my breath, closed my eyes, squeezed my lips and my buttocks, and sometimes went so pale I looked like the corpse of a white baby, since black babies, when they come into this world, are generally all white. And only turn black afterwards. Otherwise their parents will argue and think the real father’s a white man from up town. Thinking I was truly dead, the nurses rushed towards me. They started whimpering with my mother. Suddenly I opened my eyes. I felt like shouting: leave me alone, can’t you see I’m breathing? Can’t you see I’ve been alive for three days now, and my sisters were not even here for one day? If I really wanted to go to heaven would I be hanging around here all this time like an idiot who doesn’t know what he has to do to die? I may be a baby, I still know how to die, but I don’t want to stop breathing! I want to live! Let me rest now, I’ve come a long way! And let’s have a bit of quiet please. We’re in a hospital here!
Maman Pauline came home with me a week after I arrived in this world. Her policeman’s never shown up, though he must have heard of me. My mother heard he was already going round saying he wasn’t my father, that she’d made this child with some local guy, the postman, maybe, or the palm-wine tapper, who, like the postman, passed by our house each morning. That’s what they were saying, all over Mouyondzi, and people came to spy on us. But they never found a man living in our house, or who came round at midnight and left in secret at five in the morning. In the market some of the women said that my mother had had a child with a devil who came to our house at night. I don’t think anyone there ever saw my face. When we went out, my mother covered my body from head to foot, leaving just two little holes so I could at least see the colour of the sky, because up there no one’s wicked.
Maman Pauline left the district two months after my arrival. No way was she going to spend her time arguing with women who said untrue things about herself and me. Not that she was afraid of them, she knows how to scratch the face of a wicked woman. When she scratches a wicked woman it looks like she’s written a whole book on her face, in Arabic or Chinese. But she didn’t want any of that.
I don’t actually know what Mouyondzi district looks like, out in the region of Bouenza, in the southern bush. Since all I’ve seen there is the sky, I imagine the earth must be red, like everywhere in Bouenza. That’s what our teacher says in geography, anyway. I also imagine that people’s animals down there — particularly pigs — go wandering wherever they like. I mention pigs because according to my mother the inhabitants of Mouyondzi love pig and eat it with plantain bananas whenever there’s a party, or someone’s just died. I imagine, too, that if the fathers in this district are all like Maman Pauline’s policeman, there must be lots of other children without a father and lots of other mothers living alone with their children. I have no wish to go there, not now or ever, I’ll only hate the people and want to wage global war on them, especially the policemen.
I feel like a real child of Pointe-Noire. Here’s where I learned to walk, to talk. Here’s where I first saw rain fall, and wherever you see your first rain fall, that’s where you come from. Papa Roger told me that once, and I think he was right.
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When she left Mouyondzi district, Maman Pauline didn’t want to go back to the village where she’d been born — she knew the people of Louboulou would laugh at her. She chose the town of Pointe-Noire because Uncle René already lived there and had just finished his studies in France. With our people it is common for the children to be given the names of the uncles, and my mother gave me Uncle René’s name, even though he’s not my father. My uncle was very pleased my mother chose him rather than their big brother, Uncle Albert Moukila, who worked for the electricity company.
The good thing was that Uncle René was quite happy for Maman Pauline to come and live at his house, with me too, and he gave her a bit of money so she could set up her peanut business at the Grand Marché. She got up in the morning and went straight down to Mtoba, where she bought sacks of peanuts from the farmers. After that she shelled the peanuts and put them into bowls. At the Grand Marché she sat behind her table and waited for customers. Sometimes business was good, sometimes not. But even when it wasn’t, she’d say it didn’t matter, tomorrow would be better than today. She was never going to get rich with this business. At least she could buy me milk and nappies instead of having to ask Uncle René all the time. Now what she didn’t know was, there in the Grand Marché, her life was about to change. Mine too.
…..
It was one very hot Sunday afternoon. The Grand Marché was pretty empty. She looked up and saw a man in front of her table, not very tall, well-combed hair, a well-ironed shirt and a briefcase in his left hand. At first she thought it was one of those bad men who sometimes come round asking the stallholders to pay a fee to the town hall, or else there’ll be no table for them the next day at the market. When you come across a bad man, you always feel a bit afraid, but in this case she felt her legs trembling, as though her heart was about to fall into her stomach — she says that’s what happens when she’s in love. The man with the briefcase bought lots of peanuts and my mother guessed straightaway that anyone who buys peanuts like there’s no tomorrow must have a large family to feed. No one can eat all that themselves. So she added lots of extra peanuts, and even reduced the price.
After that, the man with the briefcase turned up regularly at my mother’s table. He stopped buying peanuts from anyone else, and if she wasn’t there he left and came back the next day, which really annoyed the other stallholders, who now spread a rumour that Maman Pauline hid Bembé gris-gris under the table to snare clients, and that her peanuts were prepared overnight by the spirits, who put a bit of salt on them. They said the moment you tasted one of my mother’s peanuts you were done for, you’d be condemned to return forever to her table, like it was the Congolese National Lottery, which you can never win unless you’re part of the President’s family.