If I was a football referee for this quartier, I’d give red cards to the sorcerers sitting behind the goals, because they are the ones who decide which team will win, or if it’s going to be a draw. And a draw happens when both teams have chosen sorcerers with exactly the same powers, i.e., the same gris-gris.
I’ve just handed my torn shirt to Monsieur Mutombo at long last, and he’s looking at it as though it was an old duster, when in fact he made it himself last year.
‘What’s happened here? You’ve been in a fight at school and Monsieur Mutombo here has to sew up your shirt, eh?’
‘I wasn’t in a fight, Monsieur Mutombo.’
‘So a ghost tore your shirt did it?’
The apprentices are pretending to work. I can tell they’re going to burst out laughing any moment. They’ve come a bit closer, so they can get a look at my shirt.
‘Who did this?’ Monsieur Mutombo continues.
I say nothing.
‘All right, if you don’t tell me who did it, I’ll keep your shirt and I’ll show it to Roger and Pauline this evening. You’ll have to go home with no shirt on!’
I don’t want to go home with no shirt on, people will laugh at me in the street. And I don’t like people seeing I haven’t got any muscles yet. Especially the girls will laugh. No, I’ll have to say something.
‘I’ll tell you who did it.’
‘Ah, at last. So, who was it?’
‘Me. Myself.’
‘Very interesting! And how did that happen?’
‘It’s hard to explain. I was sitting like this, I put my back against the wall and there, all of a sudden, was this nail, out of nowhere. So just when I’m about to stand up to…’
‘Michel, cut it out! I understand that you are fond of Lounès and to protect him you’re prepared to take the blame yourself. But he’s already told me everything. Everything! It was him that grabbed your shirt…’
Now I understand why the two apprentices had started laughing earlier. They knew, too, that it was their boss’s son that had torn my shirt.
Monsieur Mutombo turns to them.
‘Longombé, fix the boy’s shirt, right now. And Mokobé, you do the turn-ups on Monsieur Casimir’s trousers, he’s been on at me since yesterday, even though I keep telling him he’s not very tall and turn-ups will make him look even smaller than the president of Gabon.’
I go up to Monsieur Mutombo and whisper in his ear.
‘Actually, I’ve got a bit of a serious problem…’
‘Well, what is it, this bit of a serious problem?’
‘Your apprentices…’
‘What have they done to you?’
‘They only do buttons and I don’t want them to spoil my shirt. My mother will be cross with me if they do.’
Monsieur Mutombo bursts out laughing. His apprentices have heard me, and they have a good laugh while they get the chance, because they’ve been holding it in for ages. Since all three of them are killing themselves laughing, I start laughing too, and then I can’t stop. Now when I laugh, it always makes other people laugh too, because I often laugh like a little jackal with a bad cough. So all four of us just go on laughing till a woman appears at the door of the workshop. It’s as though she can’t get in, frontways or sideways. She’s so enormous that it’s as though the door had just been blocked by an extraterrestrial. Even Monsieur Mutombo’s bald head casts no light now. The woman’s cheeks are all puffed out like someone blowing into a trumpet, or who has two mandarin oranges stuffed in their mouth. The sight of this makes me split my sides even more, it’s too much, I’m going to choke laughing, I point my finger at the woman, I tell myself the others in the workshop must surely laugh with me. But suddenly everyone else has stopped. They’re all looking at me. Monsieur Mutombo clears his throat and nods his head at me, as if to tell me to stop laughing. I stop laughing suddenly and wipe my tears with the end of my shirt.
Longombé stands up like a schoolboy who’s been caught chatting and has to go up to the board and write out a hundred times: I must not talk in class. He walks past me, still holding my ripped shirt in his hands and goes over to the woman, who has now moved away from the door. When she moved I thought they must have switched on the street lamps in the Avenue of Independence. While Longombé and the woman are talking outside, Monsieur Mutombo leans over to me: ‘You shouldn’t have laughed! Do you know who that woman is? It’s Longombé’s mother. She comes every day to ask her son for money.’
Now Longombé’s coming back into the workshop. He walks past me again, and gives me a strange look. I say to myself, ‘Oh heck, he’s angry, now he’s really going to ruin my shirt, to get his own back.’
~ ~ ~
The cleverest person in our class is called Adriano and he’s from Angola. He’s very light skinned because some of his grandparents had children with Portuguese people. That’s why no one teases him about his skin because it’s not his fault he’s not really black like us, it’s the Portuguese people’s fault.
The very first day Adriano arrived in class, the teacher told us that his father had been killed in the civil war going on in his country. Adriano and his mother came to take refuge in Pointe-Noire, so they wouldn’t be killed too. In their country, at night, the militiamen who follow a wicked Angolan called Jonas Savimbi attack the army of the president, Agostinho Neto. We were all scared when the teacher reminded us that Angola is not far from our country and that you can get here from there on foot, via a tiny country called Cabinda, which, like us, has loads of petrol. What really scared us was the idea that Jonas Savimbi and his militiamen might turn up in our country, just to annoy our President as well, and push us into a civil war. We learned that there are lots of Cuban and Russian soldiers in Angola, to help president Agostinho Neto stay in power, because he’s not just under attack from Jonas Savimbo, poor fellow, there are other enemies too, and they’ve formed the Front National de Liberation d’Angola, or FNLA, and their leader is a certain Holden Roberto, who doesn’t mess about. Agostinho Neto is caught between Jonas Savimbi and Holden Roberto, who are supported either directly or in secret, by the imperialists.
After these explanations, the teacher was happy to be able to tell us that our country likes President Agostinho Neto because he’s communist, like us. Adriano was very pleased about that.
In the classroom we sit in order of intelligence. When you come in, the first row, facing you, is made up of the three best pupils in the class: Adriano, Willy-Dibas, and Jérémie. The second row is for the fourth, fifth and sixth best pupils. And it carries on like that, right to the back of the class. The stupidest are in the back row. They get left at the back so they can chat and throw ink pellets at each other.
The second the teacher asks a question, Adriano has the answer, as if he’d dreamed it in the night, like that criminal Idi Amin Dada, who dreamed of what he would do to the Asians. And every time our teacher says to Adriano, ‘Don’t you answer, give the others a chance to answer and show their intelligence for a few minutes of their lives at least.’ Adriano doesn’t like that, he wants to answer all the questions. But why should we bother coming to class if there’s an Angolan who knows all the answers, even about things to do with our country, like rivers and lakes? Adriano doesn’t like it when someone else behind him gets it right. But when no one knows the answer — which is usually the case — the teacher has to say to him, ‘Adriano, now you can answer.’ When he’s told us the answer, everyone has to stand up and clap for five minutes or more. His face goes all red like a tomato, and the teacher gives him a present: a box full of chalks, a notebook and a textbook containing all the speeches of the President of the Republic.