Sebastien ignores his sister. He’s still trying to hand me the machine that controls the car. I don’t know if I should take it or not. Edwige has disappeared into her room, she comes back with a switch made of vine creeper. Sebastien runs to put his present back by the chimney and then dashes outside. Miguel hears us running about the grounds and starts barking his head off. He barks so loud that we don’t even hear the car coming into the garage. Uncle René’s arrived, with his wife Auntie Marie-Thérèse.
Now we’ve sat down to eat. I hate the way they eat in silence at Uncle René’s. All you can hear is the sound of spoons and forks and you have to keep your mouth shut when you’re chewing your food. Not only that — you have to keep your eyes on your own plate. If you look at someone else’s plate, Uncle René kicks you under the table with his pointed shoes, it’s like being poked with a javelin. It hurts for days afterwards. Several times he’s got me on the shin, once or twice on the ankle, I was seeing stars for days. For the first few seconds it doesn’t hurt, you even feel really surprised and pleased because you don’t feel anything. Then all of a sudden, just when you thought it was over, the pain comes right up into your stomach, you feel it moving about in your small intestine and your pancreas, and your heart starts leaping about like a baby kangaroo in its mother’s pouch. Then you throw up on the spot because how can you swallow your juicy piece of meat when you’ve got a pain going up from your ankle or your tibia into your stomach?
The trouble is, while I eat, I keep an eye on other people’s plates to see if I need to eat more quickly than them to catch up or whether I should slow down a bit if I’m ahead of everyone else. Uncle René can’t stand that. He says it’s how a capitalist’s child would behave, already accumulating wealth at the expense of the Wretched of the Earth. He thinks if I look at Kevin and Sebastien’s plates, when they are the biggest eaters on earth, it means I envy them their pieces of meat. Even in the Russian films that come to the cinema Rex or cinema Roy, people don’t eat like my cousins do. In Russian films they’re only pretending to eat, that’s what Lounès says, anyway. When the Russians eat in a film it’s always faked. It’s not real food like in French films, because the French eat for real. Besides, they talk with their mouths full, even though it’s rude to behave like a savage especially since they’re meant to be the Whites.
The photo of Lenin on the wall is crooked. The one of Karl Marx too. Perhaps it’s the wind that does it, when you open the front door. Engels is sad because he never sees daylight. The immortal Marien Ngouabi is sad too, maybe because his photo is the smallest of the four. I’m sure his moustache has grown since the last time I ate here.
The photo of Victor Hugo’s gone. I can’t ask Uncle René — children mustn’t speak at table unless a grown up asks them a question.
‘Michel, have you noticed anything about the wall opposite you?’
It’s Uncle René asking.
I look up, and pretend to be thinking while I move my fork about, and I murmur: ‘No, I haven’t noticed anything.’
‘Nothing? Look up properly!’
So I say: ‘The photo of Monsieur Victor Hugo’s gone…’
Auntie Marie-Thérèse gives me a nasty look. She tells me that when someone is dead you don’t call him Monsieur any more, because they’re no longer around to oblige us to respect them. But for me all these people in the photos are alive. They’ve been watching me eat since I was really small. So they’re Monsieurs.
Uncle René is pleased with my answer. ‘Bravo! Bravo! Bravo nephew! Your cousins hadn’t even noticed!’
And we carry on eating, each with his nose in his own plate. I try to follow the rhythm. When they eat fast, I eat fast. When they slow down, I slow down. When they pause for moment, I pause too.
Edwige is on my left, Kevin is on my right. Opposite are Auntie Marie-Thérèse and Sebastien. Uncle René is like a president, because from where he sits he can keep an eye on all of us without moving his head or leaning forward. Kevin and Sebastien eat like pigs, you’d think they were in a race. Auntie Marie-Thérèse’s not pleased with them, she thinks they should slow down.
My uncle comes back to the subject of Victor Hugo, who’s been taken down from the walclass="underline" ‘Michel do you know why I took down the picture of Victor Hugo?’
I shake my head.
He stares hard at the wall and begins: ‘For years I loved that French poet stuck up there on the wall. He’s a man of genius, Victor Hugo, he represents in one man the entire nineteenth century, not to say our own century. I would almost say that he’s the only poet I love in the way I love Karl Marx, Engels, Lenin and the immortal Marien Ngouabi. But I’m going to show you something very serious now, which made me take down his photo from the wall.’
He stops eating, stands up and goes into the bedroom. None of us know what’s going on. What’s serious? What’s he got against poor Victor Hugo, who’s never done anything and who even wrote lots of poems you can recite out loud. We all wonder: Are we meant to stop eating too, or should we carry on without Uncle René, when there’s something seriously up in the house?
Auntie Marie-Thérèse signals to us to stop. Edwige and I stop eating, but my two cousins carry on. Auntie Marie-Thérèse shouts at them: ‘I said STOP!!!’
Sebastien had time to stuff a fat chicken wing into his mouth, and he’s still chewing.
Now Uncle René’s back. In his hand he has a very crumpled piece of paper, which he’s smoothing out. ‘I have photocopied the speech Victor Hugo made on Africa. He gave it during a banquet over which he presided in 1879. Sitting close to him was Victor Schoelcher, someone who fought for the end of slavery. And do you know what Victor Hugo said on that occasion?’
He puts on his spectacles, the kind that make him look like a doctor about to give a child an injection, and starts reading in the way the members of the Congolese Workers’ Party do when they make a speech: ‘“Oh what a land is Africa! Asia has its history, America has its history, even Australia has its history; Africa has no history.”’
He pauses for breath, as though he’s just won a swimming race in front of the dictator Idi Amin Dada. But we can see he’s skipping bits as he reads, that he’s picking what he wants to read to us. Why doesn’t he read it all out so we can go on eating our chicken in peace? When he pauses for breath he looks like a buffalo that’s escaped from some white hunters. Why didn’t he realise all this before he stuck up the photo of Victor Hugo on his wall? And if someone only reads out a little bit of something, and doesn’t give you the bit that comes after, how are you expected to put this bit together with the whole thing and understand what’s really been said?
He’s off again: ‘“Put all your surplus into Africa, and solve all your social problems, turn your proletariats into proprietors. Go on, do it! Build roads, build ports, build towns; expand, exploit, colonise, increase; and may the divine Spirit find its expression in peace on this earth, and The Human Spirit likewise, in freedom, far from the influence of priests and princes.”’
‘That’s enough, René, the children are here to eat and celebrate Christmas, not to listen to things that don’t concern them! And what happens if one day you discover that your comrades Marx, Engels and Lenin have said things you don’t like about Africa?’
Auntie Marie-Thérèse is the only person in the world who can talk like that to Uncle René. I don’t know how she does it because she’s not a big woman, not like Longombé’s mother or even Madame Mutombo. She’s very slim and short and her voice is like the voice of a little girl who’s afraid of boys. I can’t believe she talks like that to my uncle and that my uncle actually stops reading from the piece of paper about Victor Hugo. She must have some secret to be able to talk like that without my uncle getting angry.