Mount Pleasant (11 page)

“You're just not going to believe what's coming next.”

Sometimes even the most attentive listener needs to take a break. Bertha knew that. But life is a tobacco seller whose stand you just keep coming back to. Like the wandering imagination of an old lady. Sara, or rather the boy she had become, had to set aside the story of Nebu's adolescence before it was done, because there was work to do. There was the sultan. And in his coma, the monarch couldn't wait. If you recall, he had turned all of Mount Pleasant upside down. Apoplexy is no joke, even today. And in the 1930s? In colonial Yaoundé, where the central hospital hadn't yet been built? Ask me about it—or let's ask Sara. Or the archives.

There are many explanations for Njoya's survival. For example, the medical priest, Father Vogt, wrote in his circular #37 that it was the Hand of God that performed the healing. I can easily imagine that in his methodical heart, the prelate thanked the Lord for this miracle obtained without the usual candies, which was sure to pay real dividends soon. Weren't the rooms of Mount Pleasant the places in the city where the resistance to his hunt for pagans was the greatest? On the other hand, Njoya's doctors attributed their sovereign's survival to the ancestors, to Nchare Yen, the founding father, in particular, and to the titular spirit of Rifum, the motherland of the Bamum. Yet these learned men couldn't say why the sultan had come through his unhappy night but remained captive in an inexplicable sleep. Of course, no one asked young Nebu what he thought about it. But if someone had, he would have voted for a miracle. He remembered the collective sigh let out by the compound when Father Vogt, who'd been listening to Njoya's heart, declared to all those around, “He's still breathing!”

The phrase had been quickly repeated, echoing through the palace's many courtyards and corridors.

“He's breathing!”

“Thank God,” everyone cried. “He's breathing!”

Clearly the worst had been avoided, even if no one could say what the future might hold.

The sultan's apartments soon became the destination of a never-ending pilgrimage, although during the first days of his illness very few people were allowed into his bedroom. Thankfully, Nebu was among them. His duties had kept him there. So the boy was present when Chief Atangana came back to see his friend, this time keeping a low profile. Nebu was there as well when Marchand, the French high commissioner, paid him a visit. Since the events in Foumban with Lieutenant Prestat, the French had always preferred to work through intermediaries rather than with Njoya himself: first with Fompouyom, the sultan's official representative in Foumban, then with Nji Moluh, another of Njoya's sons, with whom they believed they were building a future.

“I was there,” Sara told me, “when the white man came.”

The high commissioner's visit was a political event and was treated as such. If for some, such as Nji Mama, the man had no other reason for coming than to “see with his own eyes” that the sultan wasn't already dead, for others, including Ngutane, this visit was more of an opportunity for diplomacy. With that in mind, she wore her finest garb, a
ndop
in the Bamum style, made of cotton with a pattern in indigo.

She was making a statement. Ngutane had not forgotten that the French had refused her father the help he needed, not only to repair his truck, but to get his life back on track. And when his family arrived in the capital, the colonial administrator had looked at the vehicle that had carried the sultan over the most dangerous pathways of his exile and said, “Well, it's junk now!” How could she forget that? That her father had opted to let the truck rot in his courtyard was no surprise. Njoya's truck had become the most visible symbol of the deterioration of the relationship between the royal family and the French.

The French official didn't stay long. He held his tongue, well aware that his mere presence was potentially explosive. Or maybe he finally understood that the Bamum were covering their shame with proud apparel. He brought several books, novels, as gifts for the sultan. They were accepted as marks of his humanity. After he left, Ngutane was seen reading aloud in her father's room the pages of a French newspaper that the high commissioner had added to his list of gifts. There was no better way to soothe that woman's wounded heart, for it was an edition of the
Journal illustré
.

Njoya lay quite still when she read. The sultan was shut off in his own private conversation with death. His daughter held his hand and, under the glow of a lamp, read the news of the world for an hour before getting up to dry her tears. Never before had she seen her father so weak. But she didn't flinch. What precisely did she read during those dark hours? In the boxes where Njoya's things are stored, I found copies of papers, the
Nouvelles coloniales
and the
Gazette de Paris
. But also a book by Hugo,
The Art of Being a Grandfather
. Because Europeans tend to frame everything in terms of their own reference points, I can imagine one of the sultan's French visitors (a colonial clown, shall we say) giving him that book in hopes that the sultan would, in exile, become like Hugo, a sort of “Guernsey patriarch.” And—why not?—the official could invoke Njoya's triumphant return from exile, a return that would coincide with the end of French colonization. Still, there's no better way to saw off the branch on which one is seated!

It was probably the priest who brought Njoya the French Bible I found among the sultan's things. It's hard to believe Ngutane would read pages from the Bible to her father; this man of science had not been very impressed by the stories of Jacob, Noah, and the others, which Göhring had translated for him back in 1913. Ngutane was clearly aware that her father, shocked by the excesses of the Christian God, had decided to write his own Book of Faith—his famous
Nuet Nkuete
, which he filled with stories the average Bamum would believe. More than biblical stories and their promises of eternal life, it was the joy of hearing tales told by his descendants that would give him a reason to live, wasn't it?

“Ngutane knew that for Njoya, words were like an intravenous injection,” Sara affirmed.

“And Nebu?” I asked.

Nebu? There was a different story ringing in his ears. A story of the flesh that consumed him entirely at the very moment he arrived home.

Bertha didn't even give him a chance to undress.

 

19

What Begins in Foumban Ends in Foumban

Foumban, 1913. The question really wasn't
if
but
when
Nebu's father would see through the chaos of his House of Passion; that's what the boy told himself. His mother was also sure it would happen soon, even if her wildest nightmares couldn't predict the outcome of his story. As for the Dog, his friends were just waiting for the juicy details of the nights in his second wedding bed. Impatiently waiting! He knew that his spicy bedtime tale would finally put him on the pedestal they had left empty for too long. After two or three months of wild passion, fueled by all the
mbitacola
and the other aphrodisiacs he ingested, he decided he had enough stuff to tell his story.

His mouth full of words, he ran to the raffia-wine seller, where he hoped to find his friends waiting with open ears. Rubbing his hands, he couldn't imagine that his friends, tired of waiting, had headed off in search of other entertainment. Or that maybe they'd found something to distract them that was not merely a repeat of the stories of their own second weddings, even if they were told by an excited new convert. All he would have needed was a bit of common sense, but that was the first thing he had thrown out the window, along with his loincloth. Bertha could attest to that! Like any smitten man, her husband believed his story was unique. So when, dressed in his European finery to make a real impression, he arrived at the place where he usually found his friends, no one was there. Even the wine seller, who was usually surrounded by a crowd of loud customers, was nowhere to be found. The Dog was dumbfounded. He searched all around Foumban before finally giving up at noon. “To hell with the jealous bastards!”

So he headed back to the House of Passion. The thought of finding Ngungure and picking up right where they'd left off gave wings to his feet. In the song on his lips, she was the most beautiful woman on earth. He stopped dead when he arrived in front of the house. He could hear frolicking going on inside, and he wasn't there. He concentrated hard to be sure of what his ears were telling him. Aie! Cries coming faster and faster, the sound of a repeated effort, rising higher and higher, and then? And then? A song of silence burst into a loud chorus.

The Dog froze in his tracks. He watched the walls of the House of Passion shaking, shaking, shaking. Horrified, he put his hands on his head.
“Woyo-o!”

As if possessed, he burst into a wicked cackle.
“Woyo-o!”
But even a laugh like that couldn't relieve the tension building up inside him. His hurried steps brought him to the door of the house, out of breath but sure of himself, mouth agape but full of words: in short, a shattered man. What he saw was beyond belief. What he saw was unnameable. His feet, his head, his hands all moved to grasp his cutlass. Deep within he felt an urgent need to kill what he couldn't even name, to silence the wicked laughter of the House of Passion, laughter that could come only from lips open in betrayal.

“Schwein!”
he shouted in German. “Pig!”

What stopped the Dog's advance was his son's face, which suddenly appeared in the cloud of his madness. He closed his eyes and opened them to behold a truth his entire body refused to acknowledge. He saw the flash of a man jumping out the window. Now he was alone in his room with his wife. Ngungure was naked, just as he had imagined on his way home, but this body he had so clearly sketched in his mind's eye evoked nothing but disgust. He felt a call to murder ricochet off the woman's eyes and glint on his cutlass. He took a step, raised his arm. Ngungure, realizing that demons had taken possession of his soul, just burst out laughing.

“Shut up!” he screamed.

She couldn't stop laughing. She wiped her mouth with her right hand, then with both hands, and still she kept chuckling, like a person who knows they're done for and wastes their last minute, their very last minute, pointing at their assassin and laughing because he is holding his gun in his left hand when he's right-handed. Like someone, in short, who is just wasting his time. Ngungure laughed, and for the first time, the Dog wondered why he loved her. He had shut the door of the house behind him. Even if he'd left it open, no one would have distracted him from his madness, as everyone else was in the fields.

“You really thought I loved you?” said the girl, holding her sides. “What a joke! Me, love you?”

She went on the offensive, knowing her end was near.

“Shut up!”

“Have you even looked at yourself?”

“Shut up!”

“Bent-necked old man!”

“Shut up!”

“Dirty dog!”

There are words not worth repeating. “Dog,” for example, reminded him of his first wife.

“Shut up, woman!”

Ngungure didn't give a damn about his words or their terrifying, explosive power.

“Do you really think I came here for you, you dirty old man? Do you really think my body belongs to you, you dried-out old fish?”

The dried-out old fish suddenly saw the humiliation that covered him. The Dog opened his mouth, took in a gulp of air, and barked, trying to save the man from the assassin within.

“I love…”

“I said, shut up!”

Ngungure's head, sliced off in one fell swoop, landed at the man's feet like a catfish tossed onto the shore. The poor girl hadn't even had time to finish her sentence—though clearly it would have ended with “your son.”

Her mouth was stopped just as it conjugated the verb “to love” in the first person singular of the present tense: “I love … I love … I love!” The verb named the very act the man had interrupted with his scandalized arrival. Ngungure's mouth could conjugate it infinitely: she needed to say it, to pronounce that verb in all its bloody fullness, to give sense to the tragedy that had to be played out to its end. What did the Dog think in this moment of profound solitude about that head, spitting purple and bouncing at his feet, repeating endlessly, “I love … I love … I love!”? An inexpressible thirst burned his throat; yes, his throat was parched.

The man needed to slake his rage. His hands needed to kill again. He shook because the fateful call would not be silenced. On the mattress that was supposed to attest to his own love, he could see sperm stains that weren't his, and his penis shriveled. His hands trembled, and his bleary eyes could not focus. He grabbed his tie, as if to strangle the woman he'd already beheaded, and then threw it over a beam holding up the roof of the house. This man, whose anger spilled out from his body, whose head was offered up to the roof of his House of Passion, and at whose feet lay the head of that bitch, his wife—he just stood there, thinking about the unimaginable game fate played with mortals. Then he climbed up on the first stool he found.

Yes, I'll admit it. What I've just told you is perhaps nothing more than a tall tale of Sara's creation, a fiction, a carpet of lies. But the story didn't stop there. Bertha arrived in time to cut the tie the Dog had used to hang himself. But she was too late to know precisely what had happened. If she had been there, the drama would have played out differently. Whatever may have happened, here's the thing: Bertha arrived at her co-wife's house and found her husband dancing from the ceiling, all decked out in his best clothes. An outfit she knew he had purchased to give himself a new lease on life. How could she have imagined he'd be buried in it?