Before I close my eyes, I think hard about my two sisters in heaven. My Sister Star and my Sister No-name. Is it night in paradise, or is it always sunny there? I ask them to watch over Maman Pauline, who’s all alone in the bush and will be alone again in Brazzaville surrounded by bad people who look at women in tight trousers.
~ ~ ~
Maman Martine’s got white hair growing on the sides. She realises I’ve seen them, that I’m thinking she’s older than Maman Pauline, who is probably her younger sister, but really much younger, her daughter maybe. But I’m thinking something else: would she possibly agree to have a seed from my mother’s insides and keep it in her insides, so that Maman Pauline’s children wouldn’t go straight to heaven without coming down to earth? If she’d do that, Maman Pauline would stop being unhappy, there’d be another child in our house, because Maman Martine’s children don’t go straight up to heaven as soon as they arrive. Also, if Maman Martine agrees to my plan, we could keep it secret, we would tell people that the little seed really came from her insides. One day I must talk to Papa Roger about it, because I don’t really think this doctor can sort things out inside my mother, even if he’s white and white people never get anything wrong. At the same time, I’m sure there must be loads of women like Maman Pauline, loads of women looking for a child the whole time, and who can’t have one and never will, even if they’re cared for by white doctors.
We’re sitting outside the front door. Maman Martine is scaling the fish we’re going to eat this evening when everyone’s here. It doesn’t matter if it’s not beef and beans. I eat everything here, and I pretend I like everything. I can be fussy with Maman Pauline but not with Maman Martine, it would really upset her.
At home there’s only Mbombie, Maximilien and little Félicienne, who’s just pissed on me when I was being really kind and giving her her bottle. I don’t know where the other children have gone. Yaya Gaston left early this morning for the port, and Papa Roger won’t get back till sundown. My other brothers and sisters ought to be here too, because it’s the end-of-year holiday.
Seeing I can’t stop looking at the white bits in her hair, Maman Martine says, ‘Ah yes, I’m not young like your mother Pauline, now. She must be the same age as one of my little sisters, the youngest, she’s just twenty-seven, she still lives in Kinkosso.’
She looks up at the sky, murmuring, as though she’s talking to someone else. She begins to talk, and she tells me how she grew up in Kinkosso and that to get to the village from the district of Bouenza you have to go in an Isuzu truck which takes four or five days. You go through other villages, across bridges that are just two trees laid side by side from one bank of the river to the other, so the trucks can pass. The only time they ever replace the trees is when there’s an accident, and lots of people die. That’s where she and Papa Roger met.
I like the way Maman Martine’s voice sounds when she tells the story about her and Papa Roger. Somehow she puts a bit of magic into it. I sort of believe her, but sometimes it sounds a bit like one of those stories from the time when animals and men could talk to each other about how to live together in peace.
When Maman Martine talks about when she met Papa Roger, she has a smile that lights up her whole face, and smoothes out the little lines — she looks young again, like Maman Pauline. Her face is all smooth, her skin is like a baby’s, her eyes shine and you forget about her grey hair. I imagine her as a young girl, turning boys’ heads. Somehow she manages to forget I’m there, and to imagine it’s someone different listening to her, her eyes are somewhere above my head, not focussed on me directly. She’s talking to someone who doesn’t exist, and I think: That often happens, it happens all the time, grown ups are all like that, they’re always talking to people from their past. I’m still too little to have a past, that’s why I can’t talk to myself, pretending to talk to someone invisible.
Maman Martine doesn’t realise that for a little while now her lips have been moving, her head gently swaying, her eyes growing moist, as though she’s about to cry. Sometimes she misses a few scales on the fish in her hands and I point out to her that there are still some scales left on the fish, that we might choke when we come to eat it.
She speaks very quietly. ‘Roger was a real little heart throb! I can see him now, as he was that year, back then in the village they still called him Prince Roger.’
Then she suddenly gives me a look as if to say she’s finished talking to the people from the past, now she’s talking to a real person. And that’s when I learn that aged twenty, Papa Roger was the best dancer in the Bouenza. In Ndounga, his home village, he was respected. When the rhythm of the tam-tams really got going he could actually rise off the ground and dance in mid-air while the crowd applauded and the women looked on adoringly, including the ones who were already married. When it came to dancing no one could get a win over him, or even a draw. He was famous then, and that was how he got his nickname ‘Prince Roger’. When there was a burial in that part of the country, they summoned him urgently, like calling a doctor when you’re sick. He’d turn up with his group of dancers — there were ten of them, all strong and handsome — and they danced all through the night, so that the deceased would not be sad on their journey to the other world, where the road doesn’t run straight, and there is no music, no dance.
The year he met Maman Martine, Papa Roger had been asked to go and dance in the village of Kinkosso, whose chief had died, aged one hundred and ten. Everyone, from all the villages in the region, had come to his funeral, because it wasn’t every day someone died aged one hundred and ten. When he got to Kinkosso, Prince Roger announced to the villagers, who were showering him with presents, ‘This evening I will dance more then ten centimetres off the ground because it’s our grandfather’s grandfather who’s died.’
The old sorcerers of the village threatened to make gris-gris against it, because they didn’t want the other villages in the Bouenza to think Prince Roger was the best dancer in the whole world. The old sorcerers knew the secret of the levitation dance but ever since its invention, no one had seen a human being dance ten centimetres off the ground.
Prince Roger insisted: ‘No one’s going to stop me paying my respects to our grandfathers! I will dance ten centimetres off the ground!’
The old people went a long way off from the village and held a big meeting against the rude young man who was poking fun at them. They nearly started fighting among themselves in the meeting. They all accused each other of inviting that rude Prince Roger. But in the end they reached agreement: they must make sure that the stranger’s dance went no higher than ten centimetres off the ground.
That evening when Prince Roger turned up in the village with his troupe, to find the women weeping over the corpse of the chief, he walked past three of the fetishers, and the oldest one came close to jostling him: ‘Hey, son, this isn’t just any village you know. You’re in our village here, and here we have rules that date back to the time when our ancestors walked about naked and didn’t yet know the word made flesh. You’ve got no grey in your beard yet, you’re too young to understand certain things only those with four ears and four eyes can grasp. You’d better watch out, you mark my words. You may not respect our village, but you’d better respect my grey beard and bald head.’