~ ~ ~
‘Have you found the key?’
‘Hey, calm down, Michel, my boy…’
‘I want that key — today!’
‘To start with, you never say “I want”. It’s rude.’
I sit down, like him, with my back against the cemetery wall.
Little Pepper’s lit a cigarette, his face disappears behind the smoke. When he coughs it sounds like the engine of an old truck that won’t start.
He starts talking, in his broken voice: ‘Last time I told you how my Grandfather Massengo died because my greedy uncle killed the cockerel for the New Year feast. Well now, after that I had to leave the village and come and live here in Pointe-Noire in one of the houses my grandfather had left. I lived with my other uncle, who died when I was twenty-five. This uncle’s name was Matété, he suffered from amnesia, an illness that ends up with you losing your memory. I’d lost both my father and mother, and he was all I had. When he died I was devastated because the two of us had lived together with no one else, and he wasn’t married, he had no children. I identified too closely with him, and I noticed I lost my memory too, just after he died. I was convinced he had passed his amnesia on to me, instead of taking it with him up to heaven, where my mother, who was already up there, would have blown on his brow and healed him. But it seems that the dead have to arrive in heaven with their hair all tidy, sweetly scented, men in a three piece suit, women in a white dress, and above all, in good health, and that’s why the illnesses stay in the cemetery and then go and live in one of the descendant’s bodies when the soul of the person who’s died finally starts climbing the stairway to heaven. I was that poor descendant. Are you still with me, Michel?’
‘Yes, I’m with you…’
‘Now since I’d become amnesiac too, I’d forgotten to go to my job at the Maritime Company where I was a manager. It was me that took on the newly qualified staff. Only I’d stopped going altogether and when my work colleagues got worried and came knocking at my door all the time to try and get me to see sense, I threw pepper water in their faces. I didn’t recognise them, and I thought they were garden gnomes come to trample my poor little spinach plants, when the only thing I had left to do was cultivate my garden in a corner of the plot my uncle had inherited from my grandfather and I’d inherited from my uncle. I could put up with anything, but not people coming and treading on my poor little spinach plants, that I loved watering. I told all my woes to those poor little spinach plants whenever grief overcame me and I thought of my mother, my father, and especially uncle Matété who probably still hadn’t recovered his memory even up in heaven. Those poor little spinach plants were my whole existence: I’d jump out of bed early and check no gnomes had been in the garden, jumping off the trucks of the Maritime Company; I’d take a pick, a hoe, a spade, a rake and a watering can, that I filled up with water from the river Tchinouka. Then I’d dig the soil, scattering seeds, whistling. Sometimes I’d spend the whole day just sitting in my vegetable garden, hoping to catch sight of my poor little spinach plants growing. I was afraid they’d pop up without me knowing. My neighbour, Maloba Pamba-Pamba started to get worried, and came to see me one day, with a pitying look on his face: “Little Pepper, you’ve been sitting in your garden since this morning, and not once have I seen you adopt the noble gesture of the seed-sower! What’s going on?” I replied: “I’m watching my poor little spinach plants grow.” He was astonished: “You’re watching your spinach plants grow?” I almost lost my temper: “There’s one thing I’d really like to understand: why do those poor little spinach plants of mine only grow when my back is turned? Does that not seem unacceptable to you?” He looked at me in some surprise: “Yes, that is unacceptable, Little Pepper.” I added: “It’s not ok, I’d even say it was ungrateful of them, myself! After all, who is it waters the poor little spinach plants? Who looks after them? Who pulls out the weeds that stop them growing? They can’t do this to me! I’m not leaving this garden until my poor little spinach plants are prepared to grow here and now, before my very eyes!” My neighbour, Maloba Pamba-Pamba murmured: “My dear Little Pepper, I am going to be frank with you: I think you need help. Things were bad before, but now they are desperate…”’
Little Pepper stops speaking, and when he looks at me I know he’s wondering if I understand what he’s saying. But since he has told me not to interrupt, I keep quiet. I act like I’m in class and the teacher’s explaining something new. But I’d really like to say to Little Pepper: ‘Give me the key. I want to set everything straight today, and go to Egypt, and I’d like to grow up, too.’ But I mustn’t order him about because he’s a grown up, even if in his head everything’s bouncing around, like marbles bumping into each other, all those screws that have been loose ever since his uncle died. If I go on asking for the key, and don’t listen to him first, he’ll get really cross and then I’ll be going home empty-handed. Now, if I don’t get that key today, I’ll have to go and look through the bins again, tomorrow and the day after, and perhaps for the whole of the rest of my life, spend my whole life looking through the bins around here. I don’t want a life like that. So I listen to him. He has to stop some time.
‘But no, Michel, dear boy, now when I wandered down by the banks of the river Tchinouka, it was not for pleasure. It was the amnesia. I’d forget to stop at my own place, I’d carry on and on till I got to the river, convinced that I could walk on water, like Jesus. And when I tried to get across the river that runs through our quartier, even if I shouted three times over “alea iacta est!”, I’d still hesitate for a moment, because whatever it might look like, I don’t actually have the courage of a Roman general about to face up to Pompey the Great. Even when you lose your memory, there’s a red line you don’t step over. Amnesiac, yes. A living coward, yes. A dead hero, no. So I didn’t risk walking on the water, I hesitated, I told myself maybe it was too cold, or too polluted by the excrement of certain members of the local population who made out it didn’t matter if they did their business in the water, because world experts had proved that running water had no bacteria in it. My neighbour, Maloba Pamba-Pamba looked all over the quartier for me, to take me to a fetisher. Which was extremely decent of him. But he never got as far as the river, where I stayed for hours, wondering what I had come looking for in the dark hours of the night, braving the street dogs and the gangsters from the Grand-Marché, dividing their spoils and threatening each other with screwdrivers. I talked away to myself, I made wild gestures in the air, I laughed with the shadows of the night, with people all around me, and ended up scolding the frogs who were all yelling angrily at me. Amnesia also made me walk strangely. I’d wander off to the left, then to the right, I’d come back several times to the place where I’d started, but not recognise it. And since I was going round and round in circles, like a snail caught in his own slime, I had to find a way, some little thing, not too complicated, a little trick to stop me getting dizzy: I’d draw a cross of Lorraine to show where I’d already walked, so as not to come back the same way again a few minutes later. So suddenly, all the little streets in the Trois-Cents quartier, in Savon and Comapon were marked with dozens and dozens of crosses of Lorraine. Whenever I saw one on the ground I’d exclaim: “Aha! There’s a cross of Lorraine here! So I must have been past here already, I’d better go a different way where there aren’t any crosses of Lorraine!” And off I’d go somewhere else, but then some young jokers started drawing crosses of Lorraine all over the place. I’d find them in places where I’d never set foot in my life. I got more and more lost, because it really wasn’t easy to tell my crosses from those of the hoaxers, who had an undoubted gift for winding me up. So I stopped drawing crosses and spent my time instead rubbing them out, when I didn’t just stay at home cultivating my garden. At that point people decided I really was crazy and I went along with it. I forgot I had a house, I was convinced that the streets and the bins of this town belonged to me, that they were in fact where I lived. And since they were where I lived, I made my home in the streets and in the bins… That’s how I live now, outside, free, far from the wicked. What else can I do? Go round shouting that my last remaining shred of lucidity still outshines that of normal men? No, I’ve no time for that now, I’m exhausted, I’ve had it with all that. I like my life, I’m just going to sit and wait for my very last day, when I climb the stairway to heaven…’