Lounès is older than me. I’m growing fast, so I hope we’ll soon be the same height, but he needs to stop growing first. He’s muscular, I’m thin. If he hasn’t seen me for three or four days he drops by to see if I’m at home. Sometimes he even goes looking for me at Maman Martine’s, and whistles three times from the street to tell me to come out. I do the same when I’m looking for him: first I walk past their house, and whistle three times. If he’s not there I go to Monsieur Mutombo’s sewing workshop, sometimes I find him there helping his father to stack the materials they’ve brought in town, or putting coal in the steam iron.
Today we’re sitting underneath the mango tree because we haven’t seen each other for a while. I’ve been sleeping at Maman Martine’s the last two nights, while my mother was at the wake for Monsieur Moundzika, who’s died ‘after a long illness’ as they put it in the announcement on the radio. As Maman Pauline’s a friend of Madame Moundzika, she had to be with her in her grief.
Before she left she said to me: ‘You’re going to Martine’s for a few days, I’ll come and collect you after the wake. Be good, and behave as you do with me. If I hear you got up to any tricks I’ll make sure you feel it.’
A wake lasts at least two or three days, sometimes as long as a week, even two if the dead person’s not happy with his family and is sulking in his coffin. Then you have to wait for the traditional chiefs to arrive from their village with their tam-tams and fetishers, to make gris-gris. The fetishers will ask the dead person to move on to heaven for good, and not come back haunting people round midnight. Some dead people are really tricky, they start bothering people on the day they’re to go to the cemetery: they jam the wheels of the hearse, so it can’t move forward, they throw thunderbolts around the quartier, make rain, and their ghost comes to the funeral ceremony to check no one’s making fun of the corpse, or that the men aren’t flirting with the women when they should be weeping. If the corpse’s ghost sees he hasn’t been washed properly, or that the sheets on the body are bargain sheets, the ones the Senegalese sell down at the Grand Marché, and that no one’s crying much, they’ll start pestering folk at night.
When Maman Pauline went to the wake, I said to myself: ‘Let’s hope the ghost of this corpse isn’t too tricky.’ She came back two days later, the ghost in question had behaved properly, he was happy with the wake and was prepared to depart at the same time as the body, and leave people in peace.
…..
As soon as a mango falls off the tree, Lounès and I eat it. Since he’s bigger than I am, he gets first bite. He gets two bites, I just get one. That’s only right, his stomach’s bigger than mine.
Sometimes we just sit there in silence, with our eyes shut, so we can hear the butterflies flying up above us. Most of all we like watching the planes flying overhead, guessing which country they’ll land in. If one of us says the name of a country, he has to say the name of its capital too. That’s how I know that the capital of Belgium is Brussels, the capital of England is London and Germany’s is Berlin. But Lounès does world history at Trois-Glorieuses secondary school and he explained that with Germany it was a bit complicated because it’s a country that’s divided in two, with a big wall to keep the people apart, though they’re all Germans. One part’s capitalist, the other’s communist. I didn’t know the name of the capital of the communist bit, though it’s a country that likes us because we’re all struggling against the capitalists. It was Lounès who explained to me that the capital of the other Germany which is communist like us is called Bonn.
I watch him munching his mango, it takes me back to Monsieur Mutombo’s workshop, when Monsieur Mutombo’s saying, ‘My son’s name is Lounès, it’s a promise I made to my Algerian friend.’
Then he explains that he lived in Algeria for a year and a half, in a quartier of the town of Algiers called Kouba. At that time he wanted to be a tradesman like the Arabs in our country, who are now the richest people in Pointe-Noire.
I listen to him tell his story, waving his hands around: ‘I only went to Algeria because I believed we could be businessmen too. We could make lots of money like the other tradesmen, or else one day they’d be selling us cassava, even though we’ve been producing it ourselves since the dawn of time.’
If you go into Monsieur Mutombo’s workshop he’ll tell you his Algeria story at least ten times. The one thing you mustn’t say is, ‘You told me that last year.’ If you do that he’ll just down tools straight away and you won’t get your shirt or your trousers for at least another two weeks. You just have to hear him out, and he’ll start by telling you it was in the quartier called Kouba that he first learned the trade of cobbler, before giving it up to become a tailor. He’ll also tell you it was there he first met the man who’s like a brother to him: an Algerian called Arezki.
The longer I look at Lounès, the more he reminds me of his father talking about his friend Arezki. ‘Meetings like that are meant to happen! Every morning, from the window of his house, Arezki would see me getting off the bus. Every time he met a black man he’d tell the story of his journey to Senegal, where he and his family had lived for many years. He’d wave at me from a distance and I’d wonder if he was someone I’d known in the Congo, or if he’d confused me with someone else. Then one day he invited me to drink tea at his house, and he told me: “No, we’ve never met, but my door is always open to you, brother.”’
Monsieur Mutombo will then explain that in Algeria there are lots of black people like us, and that these black people are Algerians. He’ll add quietly that people with our colour skin suffer almost as much as Blacks in South Africa, where Whites and Blacks can’t sit next to each other on the bus, even though buses are there for everybody. Some people get on with animals that have fleas, so why can’t black people go in the bus too? And Monsieur Mutombo will suddenly get angry, but you mustn’t think it’s against you, just because you’re listening.
‘People don’t talk much about the suffering of the Blacks in Arab countries! What’s that about then? You don’t find many pale skinned Arabs there marrying Arabs with dark skin. Racism and slavery don’t just exist between White and Blacks, you know! Arabs had black slaves too, they whipped them like the Whites whipped us back then, and when I see the way the pale skinned ones treat the Blacks over there I think nothing’s changed since slavery. Now my Algerian brother, Arezki, he didn’t care if his neighbours thought the Black who came to drink tea with him was his servant. That’s right, in Kouba they took me for a “boy”. Arezki’s wife was called Saliha, and they had two sons: Yacine, the older brother, who was studying in Europe, and then the little one, Lounès, who was very clever, with bright blue eyes. There was a daughter between the two boys, Sara. Sometimes I’d walk in the streets of Algiers with the two children. And people would turn round and wonder if they could be my children. If so why weren’t they as dark as me? Then they’d think I must just be the servant who was looking after the children of an Algerian capitalist family. Does that seem right to you?’
Once he’d finished being angry he’d talk about Algeria in a sad voice, while continuing to stitch your suit.