Mount Pleasant (46 page)

How different from the 1920s, when these same people had been overjoyed by the burning of his cocoa plantation! The crowd is a very naïve child. Ten years had passed, ten years, and Charles Atangana was once more the paramount chief. It was obvious in the gaze of all those people who had lined up along his path, drawn there as if by magnetic force. It was hard to imagine there was a greater authority in Yaoundé, or that it would be the French high commissioner, Marchand. You would have thought the country had stopped being a protectorate and that Charles Atangana had become its president!

When the chief stopped later in front of a shop, Njoya felt sad. It was painful to him that he couldn't just step out of the car and walk by himself in the street. Here in Yaoundé, he knew he had a freedom of movement he never would have had in Foumban. But for his body, ah! Charles Atangana soon returned, a newspaper in his hand.

“News from Germany,” he announced, getting back into the car.

He knew the news would interest his friends. Germany was the secret they shared. So he read the headline: “‘Adolf Hitler Is Named Chancellor.'”

“Lieutenant Hirtler?” asked the three Bamum with one voice, their eyes wide open.

“Don't ask me,” Charles Atangana replied, shrugging his shoulders. “Me, I've already left that country behind.”

The tone of his voice translated his feelings well. The subject was closed for a moment. But just for a moment. Njoya hadn't had a newspaper for quite some time; since Ngutane had gone back to Foumban, in fact. He realized how much he missed her. Her vitality always made up for the sluggishness of his feet. Still, he recognized that she was doing invaluable work in Bamum land. He knew she had galvanized the people in a way that his representative, Fompouyom, and even his heir, Nji Moluh, had been unable to do. He had received a letter from her recently, in which she told him about the success of her campaign for the schooling of the nobles and added that her own children had already been admitted to Madame Dugast's elementary school. Ah, the sultan thought, the most important thing was that she be with her family, with her children. That's where she needs to be, he added.

Today I can say this: the future was coming quickly. Soon Ngutane will come back to Yaoundé, divorced, having left her husband, who, in her absence, had become an “infidel” and taken a fifth wife. She will marry Ibrahim, her dear “Ibrahimou,” whom she has loved since childhood. She will be the scribe's fourth wife. And that's not all: Madame Dugast will for once forget her distaste for polygamy, which always chilled her love for “everything Bamum.” She will happily bless the marriage of “her best friends in Foumban, and offer them a special gift from Europe”: an Atmos clock, made in 1928. For years that wedding will set the standard for fashion.

Back to the moment at hand. Njoya's eyes didn't, in fact, see such a complicated future ahead. They had fallen on the photo of the man in a dark jacket under the newspaper's headline. Is that or is that not Hirtler? he wondered.

Thirty years had passed, and his memory played tricks on him.

Have the Germans accepted this? he also asked himself.

He recalled how angry the Bamum had gotten when that stupid German officer, Lieutenant Hirtler, had sat on his throne; that was in 1903. Distant photos of a distant life, he thought, and handed the newspaper to Nji Mama. The life all around him was livelier. The cries, the laughter, the sunny faces, the theatrical gestures—all made Njoya happy. And then all those blacks dressed in Western clothes! Men going about on bicycles. They pedaled fast, zigzagging through the pedestrians, unaware of their graceful movements. The sultan thought he recognized Ngosso Din in the crowd. He looked again, but it was someone else. Soon he also thought he recognized Nebu, Muluam, and then Ngbatu, before realizing that the city was just playing another trick on him. All these people walking or riding or moving toward a dream, or maybe a nightmare that no one could foresee. They were like cats chasing their tails endlessly, turning their shadows into a circle until they fainted.

“Read this,” said Ibrahim's voice from the back of the car. “President of the Assembly, that's what Göhring has become…”

But Njoya didn't want to listen anymore. If we're to live with it, the past must be dreamed anew. But what about the future? The easy life in Foumban, where lazy pages sat in front of the palace, was a distant echo of the bouquet of life bursting out in this metropolis. It was as if the whole country offered itself up jovially, in a shadow dance, to the sultan who had come back to life. In front of a pet store, a black woman in extravagant clothes caught the attention of the Bamum men. Nji Mama saw her first.

“That one, she's something else,” he whispered.

He was talking to his brother, who had shut himself off from the world by reading the newspaper, but his words alerted the three other men. The woman was holding a brightly colored umbrella over her head, and with her free hand she was pulling a dog, a particularly ugly creature that refused to budge and was barking terribly. None of the men in the car had ever seen such a pooch.

“Is that a rat or a dog?” Nji Mama asked.

Ibrahim answered, “Go ask the woman.”

“Is it a dog or a man?” Njoya added, with the same good humor as the two brothers.

The three men burst out laughing. The paramount chief, too. Then he looked in the rearview mirror. Only Nebu hadn't reacted. The little boy was clutching his chest.

“Don't you want a dog like that, Sara?” the chief asked.

 

20

The Surprising Blindness of the Polygamous

“Sara?” repeated the three Bamum.

In Mount Pleasant, everyone knew her as Nebu. Since she had no voice, she couldn't contradict the name that the matron had given her. What's more, at the end of Bertha's thousand tales, hadn't the soul of the lost son immigrated to the girl's body? Hadn't the dead man from long ago come back to life in this belly that had digested his torture in one story after another? For two years, Sara's body hadn't betrayed her secret. The hot stone with which Bertha flattened her breasts had done its job, you could say, but it was also as if the little girl's decision to give Nebu another chance had suspended her development. Even at twelve years of age, she still didn't have breasts.

Meanwhile, Njoya had taken her as his model, keeping himself busy by drawing the features of her face. Until then, he'd gotten only as far as the shoulders. He had struggled with this portrait of a shadow—it was the first he'd done. The definition of the eyes, the nose, the mouth, and the ears had given him the most trouble. That the boy had feminine features had helped him a bit, since that made him stand out. Isn't beauty found at the intersection between total opposites? But Njoya just couldn't finish Nebu's portrait, despite all his efforts. His hands were weak, of course. Or was it his mind? Who could have told him that it was the abyss of Nebu's body that escaped him? That it was the boy's hundred faces that disconcerted him.

Ibrahim had encouraged him, revealing with a thousand words of praise the precision of his lines and sometimes even holding his hand and pushing it along, but to no avail. The sultan had structured the boy's body around the face, which he had reduced to a few simple lines. He believed he had finally captured its essence when his friend revealed something unbelievable to him: The young boy he had spent his days drawing was actually a girl? The shock he felt was that of an artist who has for too long remained blind to his model, only suddenly appreciating his essential beauty.

“You're joking!”

It was Nji Mama who answered.

All eyes turned toward Sara.

“You are…” the master architect stammered.

“A girl?” his brother concluded.

Sara nodded. Nji Mama and Ibrahim had to hold themselves back from pulling down the boy's clothes to reveal the young girl who had hidden herself for so long. How had she done it? There, in the middle of the lively city, among the most fervent voices of the central market, the surprised men were frozen inside the car, their eyes fixed on the silent girl.

“A girl?” Njoya repeated.

“Don't tell me,” Charles Atangana interrupted, speaking to the polygamists who surrounded Sara, “that you don't recognize the scent of a girl?”

He was so surprised by his friend the sultan's dazed reaction that he could only laugh. Sara's revelation was just too comical for that monogamist; he couldn't believe that Njoya's six hundred and eighty-one wives hadn't taught him to recognize a woman.

“Don't tell me you didn't know either,” he insisted, addressing Nji Mama and Ibrahim, “despite all your wives.”

“A girl!” Njoya repeated.

And he remembered all the times Sara had seen him naked. Nji Mama recalled, as well, the law mandating that the sultan's shadow be a boy. Never had he been so wrong. He also remembered Nebu's shivering face the day the boy had arrived late to work and entered Njoya's life as a model. Ibrahim recalled only the drawing sessions, and he, too, remained as still as a statue. As for Sara, she wasn't shocked at all. For her, Nebu's story was over. Not because she had lived to the end of her character's fate, but because a few days before, she had gotten up and discovered spots of blood on her mat. She had run to Bertha, thinking it was Nebu's tragedy that was making her bleed. The matron had burst out laughing and told her it was something she'd have to live with from then on.

“It's your own blood,” she said.

Sara still couldn't understand. Bertha continued, “Now you are a woman.”

Sara knew that her development could only signal the matron's defeat. Yet that day she saw no sign of surrender in the matron's eyes. In a certain sense, the belated mother had, by telling her story, liberated herself from her accursed life, from the suffering of her soul; now she could accept someone else's daughter for who she was. A very belated liberation, the doyenne confided to me, for Sara was no longer a young girl, and then the palace laws were rather strict: the onset of a girl's period marked the end of her stay with the matron; it was the sign that she should be sent to the sultan's bedchamber. The matron's farewells provoked Sara's compassion, and because of that compassion, Bertha looked upon the girl with loving eyes. It was a love that Bertha and Sara had both been searching for up to then. The matron accepted it, even if it had arrived through an unexpected doorway. She kissed the new young woman and said her name for the first time. “Sara.”

She repeated Sara's name several times, as if she were inventing her own liberation on the foundation of someone else's. That day, Bertha left Mount Pleasant.

The capital swallowed up the rest of her story.

So we return to Charles Atangana and the Golden Cadillac.

“That's my brother's daughter, don't you remember?” said the chief.

How could Njoya have remembered? He was rebuilding his memory step by step, one story after another, and it had taken him two years to regain the agility of his fingers, as well as the liveliness of his eye. He had realized that even if he had found his mind's vitality once more, he still needed to breathe if he wanted to really live. Women were fighting all around the automobile, their faces smashed up against the windows. They wanted to show these luminaries the wonders they had for sale. The guards, overwhelmed, pushed them away, but couldn't silence their voices:

“Onions?”

“Tomatoes? Tomatoes?”

“Chief! Chief!”

“Salt?”

“Do you want hot pepper?”

“Oranges?”

“Cheaper!”

“The cheapest in Yaoundé!”

“In Cameroon!”

“In the world!”

The market's rich voice grew louder and, in a gust, swallowed up the vehicle in which a secret was being transformed into the beginning of a woman's story. Because in the silent interior of a car, surrounded by those women, Charles Atangana began to tell Sara's story. There in the center of Yaoundé, with his words he peeled away the layers of the still-silent girl as if she were an onion, even as the women outside waved the spices they wanted to sell in front of him. That's where he revealed to Njoya the girl he had once offered him as a present. It could happen no other way, for Nebu's story was that of a girl, as well as of a city. It was the story of the capital of a country that revealed itself in its hidden truths, in the woven pathways that echoed to the four corners of the earth and shocked the world, distant and threatening, in order to distill its own limitless perfumes.

How could Njoya have lived in this city for so long without catching a glimpse of its stories? The faces of all those women in the windows, yes, all those faces, contorted by words but rendered mute by the windowpanes that Nji Mama and Ibrahim had closed tight. Didn't all those faces suddenly reveal the infinite variables of this singular story that was taking shape on the chief's lips? The essential joy of this place that had brought the sultan back to life: How could he, Njoya, not have felt it for so long?

“I have been blind to life,” he said.

“No, dear friend,” Charles Atangana corrected him, “you were sick.”

“And you have begun to see again,” added Ibrahim.

Nji Mama added his words to those of the others: “To hear.”

“To talk.”

“To smell.”

“To walk.”

“To live.”

Looking at Nebu, Njoya now saw a girl, a girl dressed as a boy, who shivered as she turned her face toward him and timidly smiled. The sultan loved what he saw and smiled back. For now he could finish the incomplete portrait without hesitating, drawing the torso of the girl, the smiling girl. Yes, Sara was smiling, and her smile transformed her body into happiness. What Njoya discovered—the doyenne there in her courtyard was sure of it—was the beginning of her own story.