Mount Pleasant (44 page)

“Empty,” he said once again.

There was just one cigarette left in the pack. He studied the lone cigarette, and it was as if it had the crumpled shape of his soul. He wanted to talk to the cigarette, to ask if it would agree to take the place of one of the fingers he'd lost in Berlin. His smile grew wide when he found a packet of matches. Ngono lit his last cigarette, inhaling hungrily, then let the smoke out through his nose. He looked at the match burning his fingers and then at the empty cigarette pack.

“Emptiness and more emptiness,” he said.

Everything amused him. He took a long drag on his cigarette, inhaled, and let the smoke out in small puffs. He didn't want to waste the smoke he felt filling his body. The match, on the other hand, was burning out quickly. It had formed a circle of light around his hand, but soon that miraculous light burned out as well. So he lit the cigarette pack on fire. The matches burst into flames so bright it made him jump. The light turned the surrounding trees into a wall. He saw the cocoa trees dance, then twist and turn into shadowy forms. The fire wasn't strong enough to reveal the actual faces of the spirits around him. He wanted to save the shadows. He felt his heart speed up its beat. He was happy! The fire of his happiness would soon burn out as well. The embers were burning his fingers. He tossed the pack on the ground only when he couldn't bear the pain any longer, and he watched the flame slowly die out. How sad when night again covered the world!

Does emptiness always win? he wondered.

Now the only light came from his cigarette.

 

17

The Cocoa Tree of the Mysterious Path

It was the faces of his two children that pushed Ngono to try to find his way out of the cocoa plantation. In the depth of the night he suddenly saw Carl's fragile eyes and Sara's delicate smile. This time the lights didn't disappear. On the contrary, it seemed evident to him that only his children made this empty country livable for him; they filled it with their lives. He felt that Cameroon was a nation and his children its population. This country was the only thing they had. And if he, Joseph Ngono, wanted to live here, he owed it to himself to become their child. The idea of becoming the child of his children made him smile in the half-darkness. So he'd have to live his life backward, he thought; from the very end to the beginning, back to front. The end is also a beginning!

“My life has been too scattered for me to live it in just one place,” he remarked.

A phrase took hold of his eyes: “The world is my country!”

And Ngono burst out laughing at that idea.

“I can only be condemned to solitude,” he noted. “My country is too vast.”

He paused again, inhaled deeply the warmth of his cigarette, and released puffs of smoke into the night.

“The world is my country,” he repeated, “not a family!”

This time it was images of his imprisonment in a camp upon his return to Cameroon that came to mind. What hurt the most was the word “family.” The reverse side of wandering is solitude. Had he ever loved his wife Sala? It was she who had given meaning to this life he'd dragged all over. He saw meaning in the faces of the two children she had given birth to. An accumulation of friends' faces followed those of his children, but also an assortment of missed opportunities, of casual friendships and families he hadn't had. He had been on the road for his whole life, Ngono, looking for a country that had continually escaped him. He had followed uncertain paths that led him nowhere. Today, imprisoned in the darkness of a cocoa plantation, he listened to the rhythm of his own soul, and the sarcastic shadow he had always tried to escape revealed itself to him, his companion in unending misfortune. For the first time since his return to his native land, for the very first time, he thought of his German wife and was covered with shame.

What happened to her, to Hilde? he wondered.

He thought that she had probably had children too.

Maybe she didn't remarry.

When had he stopped thinking of her? Had he ever loved her? Life's ugliness brings out the worst in men. Was he capable of love? Had his suffering made him inhuman? Did he really detest the whites? Had he become a racist, too? Was he a fascist, as Charles Atangana had suggested? Joseph Ngono trembled at the thought and recognized that he had been hurt by his friend's slur. There are limits, even to vocabulary! But he hesitated at the thought that Hilde had perhaps really loved him. Maybe she had kept her faith in him, as women often do, “somewhere in their most private parts.” That thought terrified him. He thought of his sister. Juliana has a husband now, he said to himself. Maybe she loves him.

He, however, had never looked on his friend Charles Atangana, now his brother-in-law, with as much contempt as he did that day. Images from the wedding ceremony ran through his mind, and that reminded him of one thing he had never had himself—the thing the Landlord hadn't failed to surround himself with back in Berlin, even as he dreamed of his far-off country—a family. Even Charles Atangana had a wife now, and a new family. What about him, Joseph Ngono? He hadn't actually married the mother of his children. He hadn't even officially recognized them as his own. He had spewed out his bitterness in a political argument with his friend; he had gotten dead drunk to forget that mistake; and now he was laughing at his own bad behavior. Was it jealousy? he wondered.

He saw himself standing in the shadows while his friend was surrounded by light.

“That bastard,” he said in Ewondo. “He's always walking on the sunny side of the street!”

Joseph Ngono burst out laughing at this image of his relationship with the chief. Yet he was also surprised by what it revealed about his personality: jealousy. Still laughing, his eyes took in the trees around him, his gaze lost along the infinite rows of cocoa trees. There's the truth of a happy family, he thought suddenly, the plantation of a happy home.

What he saw around him was ugly. Joseph Ngono couldn't deny it. Behind the smiling face of Charles Atangana he saw this sordid plantation, the battered faces of thousands of people he didn't know who had sacrificed their lives, their health, and yet who were also friends, brothers, sisters. Those people, he saw them in chains, sitting alongside the road, waiting to work in Charles Atangana's plantations. They were Ewondo, from his friend's ethnic group. He saw them weeding the chief's cocoa plantations, paid almost nothing, treated worse than the whites would have treated them just so Charles Atangana could have the most extravagant wedding in the colony. And it was his own sister's wedding too! Joseph Ngono realized that it is impossible to know the actual price of happiness and to remain happy. Sadness enveloped him. He realized he had finished his cigarette. He threw the burning butt down in front of him and watched it trace a red line in the somber air.

Was it his silhouette that he wanted to flee most of all? He couldn't know for sure; it was dark now. He walked across the plantation. He walked, bumped into trees, and kept walking. He was no longer drunk, but the clarity of his mind didn't help. He wanted to be inebriated. Yet it was enough that he was lost. He felt dizzy, and the trees still weren't revealing their secret to him.

He sat down under one, closed his eyes, and began to dream. He thought of his childhood. Wasn't that the only time when he could say without hesitation that he had been happy? He saw himself, naked, kicking a ball around in the rain, and he thought of Carl. He suddenly saw that his children were living the same life as he had. They had nothing new to tell him or to offer him, for their present was his past. He imagined that their future would be his present, and that thought made him very sad. We are all prisoners, he thought.

He turned his inflamed eyes on the cocoa trees. They, more than anything else, imprisoned his future. He wanted to cry out, to insult someone. But who? The guests at the chief's wedding might have heard his voice. He cried out. No one answered. His voice ricocheted off the trees and came back to him confused. Maybe the music drowned out all other noise, or maybe it was joy that left everyone deaf. Happiness is egotistical. He closed his eyes and decided to sleep. The scent of the earth combined with that of the cocoa plantation filtered into his mind. He woke with a start, coughing. He opened his eyes wide and realized that he couldn't breathe. Smoke was everywhere. He understood too late that after he'd tossed it, his cigarette butt had set the grass beneath the cocoa trees on fire. The trees in front of him were already caught up in the mad flames.

“Scheisse!”
he cursed in German.

What had made the fire spread so quickly? I wondered, truly surprised. Grass in the dry season? Or had his vengeful urine transformed into petrol? In his raging despair, had Joseph Ngono urinated fire on these trees? How was that possible?

“Shit!” he cursed again.

Sara informed me that her father had no petrol with him when he left the wedding party. How could he have? Wind carried the coals across the plantation, the doyenne said. How could I contradict her? The twin hills of Mvolyé and Nsimeyong played Ping-Pong with the fire, she added. And then she told me that her father had already understood that he had the power to change his life, that his friendship with Charles Atangana also brought him great satisfaction. Joseph Ngono's intent was not to commit a criminal act, she stressed, and even less a revolutionary one. He had lost his illusions and discovered a happiness defined by her, Sara, and her brother. Yes, if he was already an idealist, a dreamer, a Marxist, a nationalist, or—what else?—a poet, he would have emerged from his friend's plantation a changed man: he would have emerged as a family man.

However, with the plantation where he'd found illumination on fire, he was in danger. He had only his clothes with which to fight the flames. He took off his clothes and tried to fight the flames with his tuxedo. Sadly, the fire spread with a speed fueled by Yaoundé's dry season. Joseph Ngono fought the fire and shouted for all he was worth. He shouted and fought the flames. His jacket caught fire. He threw it away and, holding his breath, ran toward the center of the plantation. Even in his despair the trees didn't show him the way out. Soon he was again faced with the deadly yellow fire. It was as if the flames had joined forces with the lines of identical trees to build a suffocating and rancorous wall that blocked his way, leaving no chance for escape.

“Help!” he cried. “Help!”

No one answered.

“Help!”

The voice repeating his cry was just the crackle of the branches and leaves from the fire all around him, taking hold of the universe with its fury. Hope can't be quantified, only its results. Oh! Joseph Ngono once again opened his mouth and shouted for all he was worth, but all that came back to him was the melodious echo of his own voice. The flames had started in on a song he knew. A song as deep as the song of death. A hymn sung by a chorus of trees. He heard verses that he could understand even if he no longer knew all the words. It was a love song, a song of unhappy love. It was the lamentation of a lost country, a song so sublime and so poignant that Ngono had tears in his eyes. Yet he sang the fire's song, replacing the words he couldn't recall with names of his own choosing. He began with those of the people he had failed to love. He called for his German wife, Hilde, and then the mother of his children, Sala. He called his children, Sara and Carl, and his sister, Juliana. He even called out the name of his friend Charles Atangana.

One by one, Joseph Ngono recited the names of the people he held in his heart. He named his father, his mother, his grandfather, his grandmother, and the ancestral spirit of Yaoundé, Essignan. He continued with all the Cameroonians he knew. He called for the Landlord in Berlin: Mandenga! Mandenga! Mandenga! Tears ran down his cheeks. Ngosso Din, he didn't forget him, even if he'd never met him; then his boss, Manga Bell. Samba. He called for all the Cameroonians of the diaspora that he knew. He said the names of the members of the traveling theater group that had taken up his years during the war. He called out the name of Theophilus Wonja, his wife, Martha, and their four children. Louis Brody—whose girlfriends scattered across Germany were too many to name, and who couldn't even count all the children he had, “because that brought bad luck”—he called for him as well, and then Martin Dibobe, who worked for the railroad company, who was never available for meetings and always cursed “the white man's work.” And who else? Yes, who else, who else did he call? He even said the name of that woman from South-West Africa whom he'd met one day in Frankfurt, but maybe she was from Rhodesia. He thought he'd forgotten her long ago, Nyasha, and who else? He called all the people close to his heart, the people he called his family, as if only they, whom he'd failed to love as he ought to have, could still save him from the flames that day.

“Help me,” he begged. “I don't want to die here!”

 

18

The Cocoa Spirit

Here is what Sara told me: her father had reached a level of awareness such that he wanted nothing more than to be a happy father. I couldn't ask her how she knew that, just as I couldn't ask her how she had known the details of his thoughts when he was trapped inside a cocoa plantation. I knew that she had told herself this story over and over. I imagined that like any orphan, she had told herself the story of her father's death so often that it had become true. And with good reason!

“Show her some respect,” I advised the young men of Nsimeyong.

“In a certain way,” Arouna interrupted, “we all invent our history, don't we?”

“As long as it makes us happy,” I replied.

Sara wanted her father to have changed. Who would have refused her that? Some questions remained unanswered, questions that my friends from Nsimeyong only asked me later.