The Lights of Pointe-Noire (17 page)

The painting

W
alking up the Avenue Général de Gaulle, in the town centre, you come to the Kassai roundabout and memorial, bearing a commemorative plaque with the eloquent inscription:

To the Free French of the Middle Congo, who joined forces to free the Mother Country under the insignia of the Cross of Lorraine. 18 June 1940–28 August 1940 …

Pointe-Noire jealously preserves its past as a colonial town, and the roundabout recalls the demarcation line between what was once ‘white city', on one side, and the ‘native quarters' on the other. In those days native inhabitants would leave their insalubrious shacks first thing in the morning and go into the ‘white town' to sell their labour as gardeners, kitchen hands, boys, etc. Of all francophone African writers, it is probably the Cameroonian novelist Eza Boto (Mongo Beti) who best describes a colonial town. In his novel
Cruel City
, the northern part of the city of Tanga is a ‘little France', imported into the tropics, with its sumptuous buildings, its streets in bloom, while the southern part rots in extreme poverty, without electricity and, when the town sleeps, terror is spread through the streets by criminal gangs.

Downtown Pointe-Noire is in this sense a kind of French territory, as the commemorative plaque at the Kassai roundabout seems to suggest. Unsurprisingly, just a stone's throw away, is the French Cultural Centre – now known as the ‘French Institute of the Congo, Pointe-Noire', to the irritation of the Pontenegrins, who wonder why this title is any better than the old one, which is fixed in people's memories.

It's a two-storey building, with four apartments on the first floor: the director's and three others for international charity workers, writers and artists invited by the Institute. For the past ten days I have been staying in one myself, and I will be leaving the day after tomorrow. Several works by Congolese artists hang on the living-room walls. I look, in vain, for the names of these artists, whose talent will probably never be known to the public. One painting in particular intrigues me: it shows a young woman, whose blank stare introduces a note of sadness into the room. When I arrived I thought I might move her, then I kept putting it off to the next day, perhaps out of laziness, or perhaps because of the secret power of the subject, who, I somehow felt, would not appreciate the gesture. To avoid her stare, I stopped turning my head to the right when I sat in the chair to write. Sometimes I turned my back to her, but that never lasted long; a voice whispered to me that the woman was reading over my shoulder and was responsible for most of my crossings-out. As though she objected to my daily writing-up of the past, though she knew nothing about my childhood and I must have been older than her, despite the age assigned to her by her creator, catapulting her into the past. With only two days left here, moving her would bring me more qualms than relief. She was there before, she will still be there, and I am only passing through. The director of the Institute, Eric Miclet, has assured me that he found her in this position when he took over his duties, and that his own inclination was, if something blends into the background, let it be. Teasingly, he said:

‘She's a bit like the guardian of the apartment! She's seen everything, heard everything, for years now. But she's never once, in all that time, told tales on the guests who've stayed here.'

As soon as the door opens, the woman frowns and seems to resent the light. So until now I have been sure to close the door quickly behind me, to preserve for her the image she likes to give of herself: a woman alone, with an expression of gloom pulling lines around her lips and eyes.

The background of the painting is incomplete, some of the birds have no wings, and the sky is only vaguely sketched in. Occasionally it makes me think of the film
The Painting
by Jean-François Laguionie, in which a painter leaves a picture unfinished, and you see a castle, gardens and a strange forest. There are three categories of people in the work: the Allduns – completely painted – the Halfies – still with some things missing – and the Sketchies, who are only vaguely there. The Allduns hunt down the Halfies and take the Sketchies into captivity. The only person who can establish peace between the protagonists is the Painter himself. Ramo, Lola and Plume set off to look for the artist, so he can come back and finish the painting…

I have no wish to track down the painter of this Congolese picture. I will settle for what Eric Miclet told me: if something blends into the background, let it be…

House of stories

E
ach time I go up the stairs in the Institute I remember how I used to climb them when I was only twelve years old, and there was nothing up there but books and readers from the remotest districts of Pointe-Noire. Since that time there's been a lot of building work, and I still can't find my way around. The old theatre has gone, and a new performance area has been created at the rear of the building. Young people arrive in the morning at the cyberspace in the basement, and don't leave again until closing time.

This used to be the only library in the whole town, with a children's books section which we made great use of. I'd put myself in a corner, near the window, and lose myself in comic strips whose heroes were trapped in this room, unable to leave and have new adventures because we wouldn't let them out, for fear they'd go and bewitch other children, in a different country. For us they were living people, of flesh and blood. We entered the premises with the sense that we were leaving Pointe-Noire for a long journey through a fantasy world where we were held captive. Was there a single one among us who didn't take on the names of our heroes, and act like them? Take Sosthène, for example, a muscular young man from the Rex district. He worshipped Tarzan so much, he adopted his name, but we knew he wasn't the real one because every time he tried to swing from branch to branch he fell and limped for the next three days. Zembla was much more like us, we found his name ‘very African', compared to Tintin or Blek le Roc. We were particularly fond of his friends Rasmus, Pétoulet, Tabuka, Satanas, Bwana and especially Yéyé, a black child, like us. We didn't want anything bad to happen to him. The useless conjuror, Rasmus, had us doubled up with laughter. When his magic tricks went wrong we felt sorry for him and hoped that some day or other he would become the greatest magician in the world. Many of Zembla's friends were animals – which we found reassuring, as we believed animals had souls, that they were the origin of the human species, and that each of us had an animal double hidden somewhere in the forest. We were amazed by Pétoulet, the kangaroo, as there was no such animal in our country, it came from a continent we couldn't find on the world map pinned up on the classroom wall. For this reason Pétoulet was our favourite of all the wild creatures. The lion and the panther were carnivores. Pétoulet, on the other hand, was what nowadays would be called a vegetarian. But he still had to go hunting, to feed all Zembla's animal friends, especially that greedy Satanas.

The lion, Bwana, terrified us, though he was less wicked than in our traditional stories, where he was a carnivore who ate up all the children until finally the smallest of them all, aided by the spirits of the forest, managed to slay him. The name Bwana – which featured in Tarzan too – meaning ‘master' in Swahili, was not offensive to us, even though it later came to symbolise submission, domination.

I didn't realise that in the library you could read whatever you felt like reading, picking things randomly off the shelf. I worked my way through in alphabetical order, starting to read the authors of French classical literature, beginning with ‘A'. Alain-Fournier was there, with
Le Grand Meaulnes
. Jean Anouilh with
Antigone
. Guillaume Apollinaire, whose only work of any interest to me was
Le Pont Mirabeau
. Similarly with Louis Aragon, I read only
Les Yeux d'Elsa
from the collection of the same title. I remember I skipped Antonin Artaud and Marguerite Audoux, and went quickly on to Marcel Aymé and
The Wonderful Farm
– I loved the cat who could make it rain, and admired Garou-Garou, who could walk through walls. Missing out Artaud and Audoux meant I got all the more quickly on to Balzac, whose novels alone took up a huge amount of space on the shelves. At this rate – unless I missed out quite a few writers – it was going to take me a very long time to get to Zola. Every time I saw a reader with one of his books I wondered how they could have managed to read all the books in the library. I reassured myself by saying they must have cheated, that he was just showing off with the works of Zola, to impress the girls. So whenever I was alone I would get on with
The Wonderful Farm
, but the moment I spotted a girl, I'd open up
Germinal
, with the look of someone so extremely studious they've actually finished reading the entire library. If a friend came over and was surprised to see Marcel Aymé on my table, I had an answer ready to hand: ‘I've finished all the books from A to Z, now I'm reading the first and the last ones again.'

Later, when I arrived in Nantes to continue my law studies, I happened to tune in one Friday evening to
Apostrophes
, a book programme chaired by Bernard Pivot. I almost leaped out of my seat when I saw that his guest was Jean Dutourd, whose
A Dog's Head
I had read, a book in which a child had a spaniel's head and big ears, which got him into all sorts of scrapes at school, during his military service and in his daily life, until in the end he met the love of his life. I turned to my French friends and said:

‘I read that author in Africa!'

Surprised, one of them asked:

‘Jean Dutourd? He's on the syllabus in Africa?'

‘No, but he's well placed…'

‘What do you mean, “well placed”?'

‘In the library of the French Cultural Centre in Pointe-Noire, he comes under D, after Alphonse Daudet, Denis Diderot, Alexandre Dumas…'

‘I still don't understand!'

My friends' perplexity sent me back into my shell. I didn't want to explain my adventures in detail, and we listened quietly to Dutourd, an old man with a moustache and glasses, talking enthusiastically about his most recent publication…

Farewell my concubine

M
y plane is tonight at eleven o' clock. I'm leaving today, Sunday, and it's so quiet that even the cars go slowly down the Avenue Général de Gaulle, though during the week this is one of the busiest streets in the town.

From my balcony I look over at the Adolphe-Sicé hospital, letting my cup of coffee go cold. Bienvenüe is still in hospital. I must go and say goodbye to her. I know she would appreciate the gesture.

A pair of amorous crows peck at each other on top of the hospital building. The more excited of the two is the rutting male. They're mating, and will make babies with plumage as dark as their own, while some of the patients, on the other hand, will leave for a country where the sun never rises. Even while I'm watching them disporting themselves, I think of all the things I haven't done, and should have done, during my stay. I should, for example, have gone to the Mont-Kamba cemetery to visit my parents' graves. It's what any son would have done. But I hadn't put it on my list of places to visit. Because Maman Pauline and Papa Roger came to me. They've been in this room with me all this time. They watch me writing, pull me up from time to time, and whisper to me what I should write down. Also, I tell myself that if I had gone to the cemetery, my other deceased relatives – my uncles, René and Albert, and my aunts, Sabine and Dorothée, among others – would have been cross with me and wouldn't have forgiven me for not going to see their graves. Another reason held me back: the deceased find it awkward when the living suddenly turn up in the garden of the supine before the actual day of remembrance, 2 November. They hate it when someone just walks into their bedrooms and they have to quickly get up and put on decent clothes to receive them…

Yesterday I didn't want to see anyone. I stayed in the apartment alone, pacing between the balcony, the living room, the bedroom. It was the day when I really got stuck into my writing. Exhausted, I dozed off, dreaming I had wings, that I flew over the forest of Mayombé as far as Les Bandas, the village where my mother had bought a huge field of manioc and maize and built a house out of clay. In my dream, Uncle Jean-Pierre Matété told me that the house and the field were still there, that I should do something about it, because Les Bandas isn't a village any more: a motorway goes there now, on the way to Brazzaville.

I woke with a start at the sound of the window, which had banged to in the wind. For a long while I sat looking at the painting on the wall: the sad lady smiled at me. At least that's how it seemed as I went up to her, as though her face was relaxing, her eyes filling with the natural light of day. Suddenly she looked just like my mother…

That evening I felt like getting drunk, to forget that I'd been trampling on the kingdom of my childhood. What would be the point, though? To be like the young man I had met in the late afternoon the day before last, in the Rex district, homeless, but apparently happy? He wanted me to take his picture, to show the whole world he lived on next to nothing, his glass was small but his own, and he was happy with that.

‘I'm nothing, I'm everything,' he declared. ‘The street is my mother. The sun is my father. What more should I ask of life?'

Now the street is everyone's mother, as is the sun. He was proud to be a child of the streets. And a child, too, of the sun.

‘My name's Yannick. I want to be your little brother… Will you have me?'

I hesitated, finding his request a bit weird. In the end I said yes. Why would I say no, after all, when up till now I had been making up my own brothers and sisters in cardboard cut-outs?

That evening I put together my few belongings. Most precious were the pages of this notebook that I'd crumpled up and thrown in the bin in the kitchen. There were others, too, all around me, and I couldn't possibly reread them all. I could just imagine the look on the faces of the customs people at Pointe-Noire, when they opened my suitcase and found a whole load of paper. They'd think I was some kind of mental retard or a spy who was concealing vital information among all this mess. Would they suspect that there was a bit of their own lives in these crossings-out, these indecisions of writing?

I also packed the self-published books which had been given me by various local authors. I promised myself I would read them in Europe or America. There is always something enriching in the suffering of a creator who hopes his bottle thrown into the sea will one day reach its destination. The knowledge that their work would be on that plane with me made them both glad and anxious. Glad because, for a short while, I would be carrying the burden of their obsessions. But they also dreaded me reading it, because I had already told them that many books are not made to travel, and disintegrate as soon as the plane crosses over borders. These are books that can be read only in the place where they were written. They have no passport, can't tolerate changes in climate, and discover that summer in the north is less warm than a heat wave in the tropics…

The taxi driver puts my luggage in the boot while my girlfriend takes a few last photos of the area around the French Institute and dives into the taxi.

I look once more at the street lamps on the Avenue Général de Gaulle. The yellowish light, and the insects buzzing round, make my head spin. When it comes down to it, this town and I are in an open relationship, she is my concubine, and this time I seem to be saying adieu. I'm so moved, I shed not one single tear.

As I finally get into the taxi, I wonder, as I always do, and as I always will: when will I return to Pointe-Noire again?