Mount Pleasant (39 page)

He needed to work on the sculpture lying down, for his body was still too weak to stand for long. Even in this position he was able to give the body of his sculpture the behind of his dreams, “as round as two calabashes.” When he finished the back of the woman, he noted the voluptuous reaction of the artists, and he paused. If only his colleagues could polish their language as well as they polished their materials! From his years in the Artists' Alley, in Monlipèr's workshop, and especially from Muluam and Ngbatu, the sculptor knew how foul a goldsmith's language can be.

“Djo,”
one of the artists said, “you still want some?”

Everyone burst out laughing.

“You haven't had enough clit?”

“Enough pussy?”

“And we all thought the French had cut off your penis!”

“So you still have your balls?”

“Leave him alone,” a friendly voice piped up.

Dirty jokes were the only way these souls, so focused on material beauty, could have fun while they worked. It was their way of keeping their dreams alive amidst life's garbage. A way to remember that their work aimed to make life's ugliness bearable.

“He's sculpting a girl to avoid masturbating,” said a miniaturist.

“What do you mean?”

“That he's going to screw his statue?”

“God is great!”

“Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

“What?”

“A sculptor screwing his own statue.”

“Djo, djo, djo,”
a voice continued, “masturbating next to his statue, that's understandable, but screwing it…”

“He is crazy.”

The man who kept talking about “screwing his statue” was a middle-aged weaver. Was it Nebu's lying-down position that inflamed his mind? His own rugs were more traditional, only symbols in elaborate patterns. Nebu smiled; the weaver was from the old school, Monlipèr's school. He didn't even bother to answer the insult.

“Another girl?” a calligrapher said in surprise. “Are you looking for bad luck?”

“Why don't you forget about girls?”

“Haven't they made you suffer enough?”

Some artists defended Nebu.

“Do you want him to make only animals, like you?”

“Spiders?”

“Two-headed snakes?”

“Leopards?”

“Horses?”

“Men on horseback?”

“And that's all?”

“Leave him alone!”

Never had a community of artists been so electrified by a work of art. The painters stopped working; they stared at Nebu's work, their mouths gaping open. The portraitists were stunned into silence. They had made hundreds of portraits of the sultan, his family, and his lineage. They had used their best techniques to depict the potential of the human body. They knew where the shadows fell and where light should be placed to give the most realistic effect. But in the presence of this sculpted woman, they suddenly measured the imperfections of their mathematical calculations. The weavers also stood speechless before Nebu's mastery. As for the miniaturists, who could have convinced them that their figurines were still worth anything? The calligraphers, they were as dumbstruck as the scribes.

The more the statue took shape, the more faces glowed and the more tongues loosened. Each one could clearly see a woman taking shape, and not just a woman: a woman in motion. And not just a woman in motion: a woman in harmony with her silhouette, a woman whose chest hung just as it should to heighten her beauty, a woman whose behind was “as round as two calabashes”; it was the woman all Bamum men had always dreamed of. The perfection of her body awakened the desire of the artists, who all wanted to make love to her, yes, to possess her, yes, to screw her one after the other. That's what really made them all chatter on as they stood there around her. This woman awoke the man slumbering in each of them and made them bow down at her feet, their open mouths yapping out their adoration. Only a few artists, the eldest among them, could wrest themselves from the strength of her charms. But they, too, were stupefied.

The youngest artists were simply incapable of keeping their mouths closed as they felt the hardness growing between their legs. They didn't care that in the very heart of their chattering, Nebu was lost in the most enigmatic of silences. The men were agitated and their language smutty because they saw in Nebu's work the creation of a master, a new master, and because this creation took hold of their bodies and unsettled them as no work of art ever had before.

“Master,” one of the miniaturists finally said. “Master.”

He was the first to renounce the trashy talk, transforming it into an exclamation. The congregation echoed him.

“Master.”

“Master.”

The cacophony converged in this one word. Nebu hadn't even completed his creation. He still had the woman's head to do. He spent days and weeks working on it, for he wanted it to correspond perfectly to his vision. He didn't want to reproduce Ngungure's face, for he assumed that the face of a woman known to be dead, whose bloody head was still present in everyone's mind, would have chased all the artists from the palace. He didn't want to reproduce Njapdunke's face, because the pain of losing her was being replaced, bit by bit, by the pain of never having seen the son she had taken away. Nor did he want everyone to burst out laughing at the sight of Njapdunke's face, since as everyone remembered, she had been Prestat's woman.

And his mother? She was a slave. Nebu didn't want his statue to be looked down upon. So he decided to compose a face at the intersection of the three women he loved so much, and in such different ways. The eyes he took from Ngungure because they were the eyes that had captured him, chained him up in a House of Passion. The ears he took from his mother because Bertha was the one who had truly listened to the story of his suffering from beginning to end. The mouth he took from Njapdunke because his hands still remembered its sweetness clearly. The nose he took from his mother because Bertha's nose was as sweet as a mango, etc.

Rather than signing his artwork with Nji Mama's name, Nebu drew a gecko eating its tail, a tattoo he had first drawn on Ngungure's belly. With this head, the statue of the woman became so perfect, so much a woman, so precise that you could have recognized her children if she'd had any. You would have known her social status by the sway of her hips as she walked. A woman sculpted from among all the possible Bamum women, she was
the
woman every man hoped to see emerge from life's monotony and walk into his courtyard. But most of all, she was the woman Nebu had never, ever stopped dreaming about.

She was his love.

When he said “done,” the sculptor heard a clamor rise up around him. The artists were applauding. Each one showed his respect. All looked at his finished work and it was as if a silent prayer dictated the movement of their eyes. They walked around the statue, shaking their heads. Some took Nebu's hands and smiled happily. They wanted to touch the fingers that had brought such beauty to life before their eyes. When Nji Mama came to see the work that was creating such a commotion in his workshops, he could only repeat what everyone else had already said: a new master was born.

“I knew it,” he added. “I always knew it.”

Nebu had asked his master to wait for his work to be finished. He didn't want to be distracted by the judgment of an eye he respected so much. And now it was a triumph, it was triumph itself. Nji Mama's joy burst forth when he welcomed the new master into the ranks of those few men, that select number in Foumban who had been ennobled because of their talent and called
Nji
. A man of very few words, Nji Mama didn't intone a hymn of praise, as the other artists and masters had done. His eyes alone expressed his joy, his eyes that were usually so clouded. Then his face lit up, and the master burst out laughing. The master laughed because of the excellence before his eyes. Everyone laughed with him because everyone understood that Nji Mama's laughter translated the enchantment each one had experienced.

Even the chief architect couldn't wait to see the eyes of his colleague Monlipèr explode at the sight of the statue of love. Everyone knew the old master would laugh as well, the laugh of a philosopher, the laugh of an old man. No one wanted to miss his words. But everyone wanted to hear his laugh echo through the workshops. Maybe he'd raise his hand and declare that Nebu's statue was “the crowning achievement of Bamum art.” Would those words have even sufficed, would they have been accurate enough to describe what the sculptor had done? What about “the pinnacle of the creations of all the masters”?

Nebu was the pure product of two of the best workshops and two of the most respected masters the Bamum had ever known. Wouldn't the reference to tradition diminish his feverish talent? Why not talk of a “work of genius”! For in fact Nebu was a genius, yes, the resurrection of the best sculptors of Nok, Ife, and Benin. The reincarnation of the masters who had carved the House of Granite in Zimbabwe. The renaissance of Africa's true artistic genius, which had transformed Egyptian stones into pyramids! That's what amazed everyone. What would the colonizers say? Yes, what would the French ethnographers say? Does it matter? To me, yes, and what's more, their dubious comments are public: “Copy of a photograph most certainly seen in the display of a Swiss merchant who had previously opened a shop in Foumban”; “A poor imitation of European realist art.”

Why are you surprised? The arguments put forth in the archives are always the same when it comes to the locals. It's always so evident. Yet, what would the sultan say? What about Njoya? What would he say, he whose eyes were used to beholding grandeur? Nji Mama was walking on air, but also full of gratitude. He would bring the new master to the sultan's attention; he would be the one who whispered in Njoya's ear, when he introduced Nebu, “Alareni, here is a new spirit.”

“Donnerwetter!”
the sultan would say when he saw Nebu's statue, and everyone around him would agree.

This would be the third time Njoya would meet the sculptor. The first time, Nebu was a slave; the second, the sculptor was half dead. This time Njoya would free him from the obligation to dress in ways that marked him as an apprentice and as a slave. Bertha's son no longer appeared to be one or the other with his long, untamed goatee and hair that flowed down his back. The monarch would make him a respected master, a
Nji
. No one was surprised that Nebu was the only one not enthralled by his historic creation.

“That's how true artists are,” Nji Mama observed. “Always skeptical,” he added after a pause.

 

12

Artists in Politics

If Njoya had told himself that bringing Monlipèr back to the palace would resolve some of the conflicts shaking up the Artists' Alley, he had underestimated the outrage caused by the replacement of the old master by a man the artists called a simple talker—a man in the pay of the French, to boot. Artists and artisans came several times to tell him that the best workshops had been left to the rats and to inform him of the planned death of their furnaces. These complaints saddened the sultan, who greatly valued the arts. He reassured the complainants, asking them to follow the orders of the French administrator, who, no doubt, he added, wanted to get them to do their best work, just through different methods. He also asked them to respect the initiatives of Mose Yeyap, who was, after all, a son to him.

Njoya also knew moments of doubt and instants of rage—the latter being more frequent. What was most important to him was to avoid any public conflict, especially at that moment, when his mind was entirely preoccupied by the construction of his new palace. It was the thirtieth year of his reign, and never before had he quarreled with the whites who had passed through his lands. The fact that he had survived two colonial regimes reassured him. It hadn't been easy. He had even maintained the peace in his country in 1914, when people said the whole world was at war. As for Ripert …

When, in defiance of all protocol, Muluam and Ngbatu came once more to lay out their grievances against Mose Yeyap, Njoya asked them to calm down and go back to work. He advised them to follow the directives of their new master because that was what apprentices were supposed to do. He then told them that the roads of art were long and that the best way to become a master was to avoid politics and to work, work, and work some more. He took the example of Nebu, whom he knew to be the friend of these two fellows and who, after being dragged to the center of town and beaten almost to death by soldiers, had still mastered his anger, transformed it into beauty, and become the youngest master ever among the Bamum.

“He could have gone mad, right?” Njoya added. “He could have gone mad.”

“Yes, Alareni,” the two apprentices replied pitifully.

“But he didn't.”

“No, Alareni.”

“Follow his example,” the sultan concluded, “and common sense will prevail in the house.”

“Imitate the masters,” he added.

Njoya couldn't really turn a deaf ear when these young men expressed a fury that boiled in his veins as well. Looking at them, he saw his own youth. One day they'll understand, he reassured himself. They'll understand that keeping quiet doesn't mean being a coward.

Njoya believed he'd put the affair behind him when the two apprentices left, bowing deeply, walking backward, and murmuring words of praise and thanks.

“Master.”

“Master.”

“Alareni.”

The next night, Foumban was awoken by the shouts of a terrified woman. Mose Yeyap had just barely escaped from the cutlass of a man who had forced his way into his house and terrified his family, although no one was hurt. The Man of the French had fled through the bush and spent the rest of the night hiding in his employer's office.