Mount Pleasant (32 page)

The young folk of Nsimeyong were enthralled by Sara's story, and their endless discussion pushed the doyenne to continue her tale, exasperated that they understood so little of it.

 

2

In Yaoundé, Rain Is No One's Friend

November is the rainiest month in Yaoundé. But in this city, the rain has very strange habits. It can fall every day for a week between one and four in the afternoon. It falls with the precision of a Swiss watch but never forgets the cruel vivacity it owes to our proximity to the equator. Accompanied by a wicked wind, it twists trees, destroys houses, tears off roofs, and fills the Mfoundi River. When it rains, water takes control of the city. Those who live in the valleys take refuge in the hills. Colonial civil servants, officers, and doctors; merchants, palm wine tappers, and shoemakers; the unemployed, the prostitutes, catechumens, and nuns: everyone stops working because the city is shaken to its very soul by the thundering of the water falling from the sky—plop, plop, plop—and sinking deep into the ground's viscous arteries. Some take shelter under verandas, their shirts wet, pants rolled up to the calves, sandals in hand. They chat with the strangers next to them, and together, they curse the gods. Dogs shake themselves off, rousing horrified men and women. Roosters and hens stand on one leg, their heads buried beneath a wing. Only the ducks strut about proudly under the rain. Those ducks! They puff out their breasts as if showing off medals of honor, drinking down the water in crazed gulps.

The wind's clamor drowns out the voices. Rushing through windows, the wind opens them with a violent gust and then brazenly shuts them. Slamming doors when it wants, the wind scatters leaves across the ground and whips through the people's stupefied souls. The rain comes through the straw roofs, drenching lovers in their beds. But the rain also fills the calabashes people set in their courtyards to collect drinking water. Children turn their open mouths to the sky so drops fall directly down their throat. Others hold their hands like cups, quickly filled by the sky. Some just strip off their clothes, running, jumping, shouting, dancing, and playing naked under the singing rain. Sometimes, too, you'll see a man walking under the rain, his head covered with a large banana leaf. A rivulet of water flows down his back, marking his path as he stomps through the puddles. Sometimes it's a woman struggling to control her multicolored umbrella as the wind tugs it away. The woman doesn't walk, she dances under the storm. She dances like a Mami Wata, and the men in their shelters, captivated by the lascivious movements of her body, laugh and talk loudly together. Under the veranda's protection, they can do nothing but chatter.

“Idiots,” the woman shouts at them. “What are you looking at?”

“Your calabashes, Mami Nyanga,” a man replies shamelessly, “your calabashes.”

“
Your
uhuhu.”

“
Your
koukourou, ma ndolo.”

“
Your
nyama nyama-o.”

Meaningless onomatopoeias, you know how men are. Their eyes are always too big and they're too happy to talk when they've nothing to say. They laugh and talk so much because the rain has left the walking woman transparent and silenced their voices. But rain in this city can also be cruel. Who has forgotten the day it tore the zinc roof off a house and tossed it across the neighborhoods? Like hens at the sight of an eagle, everyone ran to hide, except for one child who wasn't sufficiently alert to the danger of the suddenly emptied courtyards and continued chasing his ball. The flying metal sheet decapitated him as the people screamed, unable to react, and his head rolled off after the ball he'd had so much fun playing with. Yaoundé's rain can't be what it is without awakening the scent of the earth, no. A possessive perfume, with an inebriating scent. It floods in through the nose, permeates your clothes, intoxicates the mind, and enchants the air even as its water turns paths into muddy tracks and poor neighborhoods into swamps. When it rains, it's as if the rain awakens the Essingan, the titular spirit of the city's seven hills, ordering him to march on Ongola, the city center, to join the forces of oppression and thunder down its vengeful and unjust anger on the valleys.

It was on one of those especially rainy days that Njoya recognized Nebu. Mount Pleasant was crowded that day. Not wanting to get wet, people had run for cover under the sultan's roof, and the men and women who'd come from afar to tell the monarch their life stories were stuck there, too. Everyone's eyes were turned toward the sky's madness. People were grasping onto windows and doors, insulting the rain that had covered their best clothes in mud and upset all their plans. With pale faces they took cover under verandas, their eyes still filled with the whispering of the sky's punishing spirits, distracted only by the unbelievable decision of one man who, after running through the storm for a long time, sought shelter under a roof only to realize that he was already totally soaked and so set off again on his marathon. These people took up all the covered spaces while the rain falling from the roofs drummed an endless tom-tom in the hollows of their souls, a tom-tom that shook up the universe just to make it stand still. This time it wasn't the sultan's fall that had stunned everyone all around and brought life to a halt. Everyone just accepted the only choice the rain offered the capital's inhabitants: to wait, wait, and wait some more. For when it rains, water becomes the sultan of Yaoundé; it becomes the paramount chief of the capital, and what's more, yes, it becomes the country's high commissioner!

Njoya had been up for a long time before Nebu arrived. The boy's delay had left the monarch's pages speechless. Bertha's endless story had kept him leashed up, it must be said. He had run through the rain, jumping in puddles and making his way along the overcrowded corridors. His efforts hadn't managed to make up for lost time, however, because the matron hadn't let him go until she had said the last sentence, the true ending to the story of the sculptor and the violent Lieutenant Prestat. So when Nebu came into Njoya's apartments—through the back door, for he was feeling guilty—he was met by the masklike faces of the slaves who, in their whole lives of servitude, had never seen anything as scandalous as a shadow arriving late. Ah, my children!

Just then a threatening voice welcomed him. “You are late.”

That was Nji Mama. The master's eyes were red with anger.

“You are late,” he repeated.

Nebu lowered his eyes, as was expected, and kept his hands clasped in front of him. Nji Mama's anger took on a new form as Nji Shua encouraged the master architect to “give a lesson to that little delinquent.”

“Show him.”

Everyone would have approved had the master architect whipped Nebu, for he was clearly at fault and deserved to be punished. There was a time when a slave would have been chased out of the palace for arriving late, but Nebu didn't know that. It had been the only way to ensure the sultan's safety. Who knows what kind of plot a late arriver could have cooked up during his lost time? Oh, of course, that was a long time ago, even if for Nji Mama it wasn't the rain, but the city itself, Yaoundé, or rather, no, the French, who had done away with the laws to which the Bamum had been accustomed, leaving nothing but chaos behind. That day, Nebu had once again crossed paths with Nji Shua's whip, and he stifled his urge to call for the matron. He knew that there was no escaping from punishment now. What held back the woodworker's hand this time, however, was a voice coming from inside, a cavernous voice that echoed across the somber corridors and, with a terse order, put a halt to the masters' anger: “Leave that child alone!” said the voice. “Don't touch him!”

It was Njoya's voice; he appeared in his wheelchair. He was dressed rather lightly, his posture more than ever suggesting a defeated fighter. His eyes darted around furiously. That was the first time he really saw Nebu. And what he saw was pitiful. The boy was trembling as only a tropical rain can make a child tremble. Fear had dissolved his flesh and his bones, fear of the whip.

“What's going on?” Njoya asked.

His voice cracked even more because of his apoplexy. Nebu would have responded, but he couldn't speak. Rather ashamed, the two masters kept quiet.

“Don't be afraid, my son,” Njoya continued.

Ah, if Nebu had spoken, his sputtered excuses would have called back to life the whole history of Foumban; he would have told the sultan about his suffering mother, the story of the whipped mother, the mother who hoped for her son's rebirth, determined to give him a better life than the accursed existence he had suffered. He would have evoked Nebu's tragic fate, the son, the young man, the artist who had felt the whip's lashes deep in his body, without crying, without calling for help from the sultan or anyone else in the universe, because his soul had been consumed by pain.

“Come here,” Njoya said. “Tell me what happened.”

Nebu knew that words alone could never fully express the suffering of the whole country that he had swallowed, a tale that had left his head shaved in a sign of unending mourning. His eyes looked for the words that could tell of the breadth, the odious, silent breadth of the grieving world, and of its tragedy, which had locked the sultan away in his bedchamber.

“Nebu is mute,” Nji Mama interjected.

He whispered in Njoya's ears, and right then, the old mama told me, she saw Njoya's eyes open wide, pausing in their dance. That's when she realized he was cross-eyed.

“Nebu?” he asked, after a long pause.

His encounter with this boy of the shadows had left him stammering.

“Yes, Alareni,” Nji Mama replied, “the boy is mute.”

Njoya opened his mouth to speak, but tripped over his own words and fell silent. He was struggling, yes, struggling with the vocabulary of his memory, which eluded his tongue. Nebu's frightened silence had opened the abyss in which the sultan had been imprisoned, and suddenly it was as if the men who had been caring for him had never really faced up to the truth of his long decline. It was as if, for the first time, all of them realized that their sultan had really fallen. Njoya soon pulled himself together, took a deep breath, then turned and rolled his chair back toward his room. Nji Mama, Nji Shua, and everyone else raced after him. For a moment the boy just stood there, frozen by the events he had caused and by how the utterance of his own name had revealed a great man's handicap. A blow on his back roused him, reminding him that the day's rhythm wasn't dictated by the late arrival of a shadow.

“To work,” Nji Mama's voice ordered. “To work!”

 

3

The Limits of Anti-French Sentiment

Mount Pleasant had received its ration of water. It had rained for a whole week on the neighborhoods where the natives lived. Housing had been destroyed, the Mfoundi River was swollen. The white neighborhoods, on the other hand, had stayed dry, even gotten some sun. Only the wind and the scent of the earth reminded everyone of the alluvial segregation, which was especially meaningful for Nji Mama.

“Know that here, even the rain supports the French,” he told his younger brother when Ibrahim arrived in Yaoundé. “Here, even the rain is unjust.”

The chief architect had never gotten used to Yaoundé. Some people cannot live in exile, Njoya's architect among them. He suffered. Without the sultan, he would have already finished his business, gathered his family, and returned home to Foumban. For him, Njoya's illness was the logical consequence of his stay in a foreign land. He blamed the weather, but also the ground and the rain, not to mention the capital's skies. Forgetting the nightmares that filled his sovereign's nights, he saw the high commissioner plotting behind the clouds and in the depths of the ground, controlling the rain and the fine weather from his palace in Ongola. The official's visits were too rare; his neglect of the sultan, after issuing the orders that had chased him from Bamum land, was in Nji Mama's eyes enough to convict him. In fact, everything pointed to him for one simple reason: he was French.

“They want to kill the sultan,” the chief architect told his brother the very day Ibrahim arrived in Mount Pleasant.

And he was categorical. Anger lit up his eyes.

Ibrahim shook his head. “Nji, aren't you exaggerating this time?”

Ibrahim knew that Nji Mama's anti-French sentiments long predated his exile and that his complaints about the weather in Yaoundé were just a new variation on the theme. He also knew that his brother respected France—the birthplace of many artists, he'd been told—even if he still had many other grievances against the French.

“Let's do something,” Nji Mama murmured, his wide-open eyes searching for a possible solution. “We must do something!”

“Like what?”

“I don't know…”

Nji Mama's face was lost in a despair Ibrahim had never seen before; he kept repeating, “I don't know, I just don't know—”

“Listen to what the doctor says,” his younger brother interrupted. “That's what we should do.”

“You're joking?”

It seemed that Ibrahim's suggestion had relit a fire in his brother's eyes where there had been nothing but ashes.

“Nji, you want the sultan to survive, right?” Ibrahim continued, holding his elder brother's hands.

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” Ibrahim begged, “listen to the white man.”

“Do you want to kill him?” Father Vogt had asked Nji Mama one day, having lost patience with the architect's hostility.

That was during the episode over the wheelchair, which Nji Mama had opposed until the end. Father Vogt had understood that it wasn't just about the chair. But his words had crossed a line. That Nji Mama would become his own sultan's murderer—ridiculous! As for the chief architect, he couldn't hold back his indignation. And to think Father Vogt was French on top of it all! “Alsatian,” the priest would have replied. “I am Alsatian, my dear friend.”