Marius is an old man’s name, that’s what people say around here. Papa Roger likes the footballer Marius Trésor — he’s a black who plays for the French team — so he called one of my brothers after him. Sometimes he gets called Trésor, which he likes. Marius dreams of going to France one day, so he can become a footballer like Marius Trésor who, according to him, is the first black captain of the French team, when there are players like Michel Platini and Didier Six in the team, who really ought to be captains, not him, because after all, you don’t expect to find a black ordering whites around.
Marius knows how you smuggle your way to Europe. He’s only thirteen, but he already knows that stowaways make their way through Angola where there’s a civil war, and no one has time to keep checks on things when there’s a war. The stowaways get the plane from there to Portugal, then make their way to France. He knows because his best friend, Tago, is Jerry the Parisian’s little brother, and Jerry the Parisian’s a young man who comes back home every dry season and tells us how in France you can get everything without working, including suits and ties. Jerry the Parisian’s a Sapper, so Marius wants to be one too, it was him that told me Sapper stands for Société des ambianceurs et personnes élégantes. Sappers are people who dress really well, that’s all they care about, they walk elegantly and wear expensive clothes made by European tailors, not by Monsieur Mutombo. Maybe that’s why Monsieur Mutombo doesn’t like them and is always criticising them. He says the Sappers are thugs that come from Paris to get our girls pregnant then abandon them and their children and go back and live a comfortable life in Europe.
Marius plans to leave our country the day he turns eighteen. So that means, if I’ve worked it out right, that in only five years’ time, he’ll go off to be a Sapper like Jerry the Parisian. Now at eighteen I don’t think he’ll be able to become a footballer, because the king, Pelé, started playing when he was fifteen. I think my brother’s more likely to become a great Sapper than a great footballer like Marius Trésor, Didier Six or Michel Platini. You can be a Sapper at any age, you don’t have to do lots of fitness training, go running every morning or work up a sweat training. But first Marius needs to find the money to get to France. Lots of money. That’s why he works at the Victory Palace Hotel in the school holidays, putting out the bins and watering the flowers. Papa Roger got him this little job, but he doesn’t know that the reason Marius works is so that one day he can leave us all and go and live with the Whites in Europe. So Marius is saving up his pocket money in a little wooden box he hides under the bed and checks before he goes to sleep and when he wakes up. He thinks there are jealous people in the neighbourhood who might cast spells to stop him going to Europe and becoming a great Sapper, or footballer. The jealous people might send rats to get under his bed, and they might eat all his money, even the coins. So every night he sprinkles this stuff round the box, called Death to Rats. Any rat that comes round trying to eat his money is going to die an instant death from the poison.
People round here always find the name Ginette surprising, but I think it’s really pretty. It’s the name of the owner of the Victory Palace Hotel. Our father wanted to please his boss, who’d given him his job and held on to him for years. Apparently the boss was pleased my father had called his daughter after her. The result was, Madame Ginette increased Papa Roger’s salary by 13 °CFAs a month. In December she gives our sister Ginette a bigger present than she gives the other children of the hotel workers who were not clever enough to call their daughters Ginette.
Ginette’s a tiny little thing. You wouldn’t think she was eleven, she looks more like eight. I guess she won’t be very tall because Papa Roger’s short. But you mustn’t tell her she’s too short or she’ll get mad and refuse to eat her lunch or supper. If we want to really annoy her and eat her food we tell her she’s really small, that she looks like she’s only eight. If she’s very hungry she’ll eat anyway, and swear she won’t eat tomorrow, at lunch or supper. By the next day she’s already forgotten that we told her the day before that she was really small.
When he saw that his boss was really happy that he’d called our sister Ginette after her, Papa Roger decided he’d do the same again when he had another daughter. He planned to call her Marie-France, after Madame Ginette’s older sister. But this time, Madame Ginette was not pleased. She said enough was enough. That it was getting ridiculous. Papa Roger was very disappointed. In the end he named his daughter after his late mother. So the sister who’s nine is called Mbombie like our late paternal grandmother. Otherwise she’d have been called Marie-France and she would have always had a big present at the end of the year. Sometimes Papa Roger calls her Marie-France anyway, because he really likes his boss. But Mbombie doesn’t like that name and she won’t answer when you call her by it.
‘Don’t call me Marie-France! Have you ever heard of anyone called Marie-Congo or Marie-Zaire?’
Maximilien is a boy who never says no, where most people by the age of six have long since learned to refuse to do things that grown ups want. So at home everyone asks him to go and buy this or buy that, close the front gate, go and see if the pan is boiling over in the kitchen. As soon as you ask him to go and buy something he runs off like the world 100 metres champion. Then after a little bit he stops, comes back again and asks you all wide eyed, ‘What was I meant to go and buy? Where do I have to go to buy it?’
Often we send him to get doughnuts, or sweets, or a Gillette razor blade for Yaya Gaston, ribbons for Ginette’s braids, palm oil for Maman Martine. But when he gets back he gets shouted at because on the way home he’s lost the change the shopkeeper gave him. We know he’s lost it when he starts crying and pointing back at the street, as though the street had stolen his money. Sometimes he forgets to come straight home with the shopping and stops at the crossroads to watch a row between some prostitutes from Zaire who are fighting with forks and pan lids because the younger one has stolen the older one’s client. Maximilien is determined to stop them fighting so that afterwards the older one, who’s been beaten up by the younger one, will give him a bit of money for saving her life.
Félicienne is the baby of the family. Maman Martine looks after her as though she’s her only child. As a result she still acts like a spoilt five month old baby even though she’s two. It’s as though she doesn’t want to grow up. She still crawls, even though she can walk fine when she chooses, especially when she’s coming to me. And she looks like she’s going to hang on to her bottle for a while yet. Once I came across her fixing her own milk. As soon as she saw I was watching her she stopped and started crying, as if she’d been stung by a wasp. Maybe because she realised I had found out her little game.
Félicienne likes me to take her on my knee, but when I do I always feel something hot on my belly: she’s wee’ed on me, and now she’s laughing. She does it on purpose. So whenever she holds her arms out to me with a big smile to get me to pick her up and carry her on my shoulders, I look the other way. Because I know it’s me she wants to wee on, no one else. It’s not really naughty, it’s just her way of playing with me, and perhaps it’s also her way of telling me she loves me as much as her blood sisters and brothers.
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I love it when Yaya Gaston lets me sleep in his studio, even if it makes my brothers a bit jealous. Yaya Gaston knows I won’t gossip about what goes on in his studio, though honestly I could tell all sorts of stories, because I see all the pretty girls who come to visit him and even bring him food. The food they bring is so good, they must make it extra well to make Yaya Gaston love them even more. I listen to them talking, boasting about how pretty they are, prettier even than film actresses, when it’s not possible, in fact, to be prettier than an actress. They try to be nice to me so that Yaya Gaston will love them. But it’s just a smokescreen really because when Yaya Gaston’s back is turned there are some of them that stare at me with these big mean eyes; they want me to get out of the house so they can be alone with our big brother. I don’t go, unless Yaya Gaston tells me to go take a walk outside. It’s not their house, it belongs to us.