Mount Pleasant (47 page)

The only problem? It was the chief who was telling the story to his friends. She wouldn't have had the courage, or the right, to speak up herself, even if the sultan hoped she would.

“Her name is Sara,” Charles Atangana began, looking at Sara in the rearview mirror and smiling at her as well.

Sara was pure joy.

“What else can I say?” the chief continued, then paused thoughtfully.

He started with the end, which was also the beginning. He told the story of his friend, Joseph Ngono, and how he had survived the racist thugs in Berlin, then died in a cocoa plantation, “back in his own country, right where Mount Pleasant stands today.”

“It's still not a closed case,” he said, “but it'll come.”

He paused.

“Yes, it'll come, even if it takes twenty more years.”

He revealed, however, that the case had gone cold because High Commissioner Marchand had concluded, after reading the reports of his officials, that Joseph Ngono had died in a fire he'd set himself.

“It's just not logical,” insisted Charles Atangana.

The paramount chief didn't want to believe that “his brother” could have set fire to his cocoa plantation.

“He can't have done that to me.”

Then he said that he couldn't hold back his tears each time he thought about it; he felt responsible for the death of Joseph Ngono, who had left the wedding reception without telling anyone. Yes, the chief admitted that he hadn't yet found the right words to console his dear Juliana, his friend's younger sister.

“Your father was my brother, do you know that?” he asked Sara in their language, still looking in the rearview mirror that showed him only the girl's face.

Speaking to the sultan, he added, “We were like this.”

Saying “like this” in French, he pressed his two index fingers tightly against each other on top of the steering wheel.

“She grew up with her uncle,” he said. “Owona. But I always hoped she would come live with us.”

He fell silent.

“You are my daughter, do you know that?” he continued in Ewondo. “But I also wanted you to live with my friend here.”

After thinking for a moment, he corrected himself. “With my brother here, you know?”

Sara hadn't stopped smiling. After all, what did he know, Charles Atangana? If she had told him that several souls sparkled in her body, would he have believed her? Still, Sara smiled because she realized that he was looking at her in the rearview mirror; but when she looked in that mirror, what she saw was her own face. The chief looked at her with love-filled eyes. Like Njoya, who hadn't stopped looking at her these past few days as he was drawing her portrait so badly, could he decipher the tangle of her features? Ah, Sara didn't have the right to interrupt him and to speak for herself, in her own voice, in the midst of these men. If she had told her story, however, if she had opened her mouth in that car, she would have told the story of a mother of shadows, whose name Njoya certainly wouldn't have known, even though she had trained the majority of his wives. Sara would have described how, even though she was just a little girl, she had transformed Bertha's once terrifying grip into the embrace of a truly loving mother.

But Sara also would have told how she herself had invented this maternity by consenting to become the son Bertha had never stopped searching for in girls' bodies. Sara would have told how she had listened to a story that wasn't meant for a nine-year-old girl, just to awaken the breathless mother in the body of a menopausal woman. And the story of that mother would have been Nebu's, the master artist the sultan surely would have remembered with horror. Sara knew that the sculptor's story would have brought tears from all the men around her. Would they have had tears on their cheeks as well if she'd told them the story of her own life, after the death of her father in Charles Atangana's model cocoa plantation? Would they have cried if she had told them the story of her mother, Sala, whom she'd never seen again? Or the story of her brother, Carl, who had come to visit her only once and then to say, despite his young age, that he wanted to become a
tirailleur
“because then he could kill whomever he wanted, including Uncle Owona”? The chief would have certainly exploded in anger if she had revealed the truth about whose hands had set fire to his plantation. Or, rather, he would have said that he had always known.

“I always knew that he was,” he'd say, “that he was a … piece of shit.”

Sara smiled, but in truth, she was the one in tears. Was it because in this suffocating market the spices strangled her with their menacing odors? Was it the silence of all those women waving outside the closed windows? Or was it the thousand and one stories of the world that had come together inside that car, in that city? Suddenly a force took hold of her stomach, her lungs, her throat, her nose, binding them in one treacherous flame. Sara stiffened, opened her mouth, and with one hand, one foot, searched for support; she grabbed hold of the car seat, of her own knees and the knees of Nji Mama and Ibrahim, and then her own chest; she opened her nose wide to suck in the oxygen missing from the car, then closed her mouth and opened it once more, violently this time, and produced the sneeze of the century: “Ahh … ahhh … ahhh … aaatchoo!”

Ibrahim's newspaper went flying. When Sara reopened her eyes, the whole world's frozen face was fixed on her. Her monumental sneeze had made the Golden Car jump twice. The women all around stopped dead. The girl wiped her eyes and her nose with the back of her hand, astonished by the silence her voice had created. The men watched her closely.

“Akié,”
Charles Atangana finally asked, holding out a handkerchief. “Do you want to swallow us all up or what?”

He was smiling.

 

EPILOGUE

 

This is not a story to pass on.

—Toni Morrison,
Beloved

 

Untitled

 

History is a House of a Thousand Tales. It's a compound with many bedrooms, courtyards, corridors, passages, doors, and windows; a labyrinth, yes, a zigzagging concatenation of memory's chains, but also a house of several floors; an agglomeration of whispers, murmurs, gossip, anecdotes, cries, jokes, and laughter; a perpetual reminder. It's a school for the young and a projection of dreams; a banquet for zombies—the insatiable masses—and a balm for us all. It's the only real judge of our errors and our successes. A cruel master that stands before us. History is our only future. It is easy to imagine a past world, where a reified African would meet a white man, reified as well, in a tragic duel, in a battle for life or death, the first armed with an arrow, the second a cannon! How naïve to put one's feet into the colonizer's chains, to take up once again the struggle of the native man, even though we were born and raised independent. But what about the overwhelming wave of nausea that rises up within at the sight of this continent running blindly into the devil's hands, or when History rushes headlong into tragedy's camp. Sara's story reminded me that when the thunder of the First World War awoke Europe's capitals with its mad songs, its destructive hymns also echoed in several African cities.

Blessed are those who understood, in the flames of 1914, whether in Foumban or in Berlin, that they were entering not civilization's great house, but the corridors of mass murder. The millions who died in the trenches and on the battlefields of that world war left behind other souls, both black and white, forever wounded. Blessed, too, are those who in 1933, whether in Yaoundé or Paris, in Foumban or Berlin, had sufficiently clear vision to predict that their future was conjuring a huge furnace, much larger than the one from which they had just escaped. Those few, the chosen people of a story of madness, be they Njoya, Ngono, Atangana, or Bertha, knew that they were poised between two worlds, and not the two worlds evoked by history books, no. After listening to their tales, I can say that they were caught between a truly bleak present and a future bleaker still. That opaque fate, they shared it with the colonizers who had come into their cities and into their lives, whether they be Wuhrmann or Father Vogt, Prestat, Göhring, or Hirtler; but alas! they found no language sufficiently humane to relate their shared fate. Whatever the case may be, as they entered such an uncertain future, waking up in the ruins of their destroyed homes, holding in their hands the rare instruments they had invented—alphabets, pictograms, drawings, reports, books, statues, etc.—with which they sought to transform their fears and their dreams into figurines of lives, they were touched by the fire that hardens the bricks of the present. Their story is the flesh of our quivering earth.

I left Cameroon before Sara told me what happened after she'd been plucked bare in the Golden Car, right in the middle of town. I left Yaoundé with Nebu's story more or less complete in my mind, but with Sara's only just beginning. The young men of Nsimeyong accompanied me to the airport. They, too, carried the story of the old mama in their bellies, and I had seen for myself how much it had changed their lives. Arouna told me he had decided not to marry me after all. That made me burst out laughing, for we had become friends.

“Didn't I tell you I already have a husband?” I asked him.

It was his turn to laugh.

“You too, you are a labyrinth,” he answered, disappointed that I hadn't told him this at the outset.

“You never asked me,” I reproached him.

“You haven't even told us your story,” he suddenly remarked.

“You never asked me that, either.”

“Is he American?”

“Who?”

“Your husband.”

“Well…”

Two months after I got back to the United States, I found an envelope from Cameroon in my mailbox, an envelope covered with stamps. It held two letters, one of which was an extremely beautiful text written in Njoya's Lewa pictograms, and the second was a letter in French signed by all my friends in Nsimeyong. I started with the letter from my friends because it was easier to read. They told me that Sara was dead. The whole neighborhood had buried her with dignity, according to Bamum customs, even though she was Ewondo. But they also told me that Nsimeyong had decided to build a memorial in her honor, to transform the two stones that remained from Mount Pleasant into that house of which she had been the last surviving memory. By doing so, the letter informed me, the poor neighborhood hoped to “attract tourists.” Even in the dust that collective letter brought from far away, I could smell one of Arouna's financial schemes.

But the letter went on to tell me that Sara had been given a burial befitting the neighborhood doyenne she was. And here I had tears in my eyes. I suddenly saw her again, surrounded by hens in her courtyard in Yaoundé, sitting with her feet crossed; I saw her take a pinch of tobacco and swallow her sneezes so she could tell me the story of her life. I even felt the warmth of her fingers transforming my head of hair into that old-fashioned style that made her laugh and thrilled me to no end because it was the revelation of her life. I still felt her breath on my shoulder when she was braiding my hair, and I recalled how Sara pulled me toward her, whispering in my ears the most astonishing—or really the most unbelievable—bits of her story, safe from the indiscreet ears of the neighborhood and my friends. I saw Sara braiding my hair, grabbing my head, section by section, and keeping my whole mind alert. I was transported and, at the same time, submerged by the sky of that unending reminder she had inscribed on my head in the structured beauty of a cornrow braid (which had made many black women in the United States stop me on the street to ask who had done my hair). I ran to the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and there behind me I saw Sara, winking conspiratorially. I closed my eyes and kept looking at her. This time she smiled.

“What do you know?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I replied.

“Always nothing, always nothing,” she repeated, laughing and holding a pinch of tobacco in front of her nose. “Don't you learn history where you come from?”

She meant “in the United States.”

How to answer? Sara! Ah, Sara!

Her voice was still in my ears, her voice that had told me the most incredible stories in the simplest way; still, I couldn't hold back my tears when I translated her letter. It was the story of her life in Njoya's chambers after her public revelation. And she told of this new life with details I wouldn't have thought possible, with an honesty that, I finally understood, was her way of finishing with the House of Spirits that Mount Pleasant had in fact always been for her. But her letter ended with a sentence that made me fall right down: