The Lights of Pointe-Noire (6 page)

Two women

I
called her ‘Grandma Hélène', but she was really my aunt, and she lived in the rue de Louboulou, just behind Uncle Albert's house. She went everywhere barefoot, and stopped outside every house to offer vegetables, fruit, manioc, foufou or a demijohn of palm wine. Grandma Hélène was one of those people who you think has to have been born old, toothless, white haired, hesitant in her movements, like a stray gastropod, it was so impossible to imagine her young. You couldn't tell her age, she didn't know herself, having lived her entire life without an identity card or a birth certificate. In her day, to obtain such documents, you had to pay a visit to the colonial authorities, who measured your height, inspected the state of your teeth and made a guess at an approximate year of birth with the famous expression: ‘Born around…'. Neither her husband, Old Joseph, nor she herself ever bothered to do this, particularly since several of the traditional chiefs, whose opposition to the colonial administration took particularly imaginative forms, spread rumours to the effect that the whites had a secret plan: anyone who agreed to have civil papers drawn up for them would have their souls carried off to Europe. These individuals would once again become slaves, and would undergo the fateful ‘voyage' of the slave trade, which would take them, via Europe, all the way to America, where they would be sold to the highest bidder and set to work from dawn to dusk in plantations owned by their brutal masters. According to these highly placed sources, this was how the whites had created the slave trade, knowing they would never have the physical strength to confront the blacks and take them captive. Fear ruled, like the fear that gripped the villagers when the first cameras arrived in their land. At the time every possible argument – most of them outlandish in the extreme – was used to dissuade people from allowing themselves to be photographed. Just look at Europe, which only managed to keep going by hijacking souls and spirits. They spoke admiringly of their ancestors, who, when photographed against their wishes, simply didn't appear on the image, because they were more mystical than the white man, and had taken the precaution of covering their souls with a kind of anti-flash cover.

In any case, no one would have asked Grandma Hélène or her husband their age, it would have implied they were too old and should be thinking about moving on to that distant country where, the Bembé believe, the sun never rises. Old Joseph looked so strong, people always thought he must be several years younger than his wife. A man of few words, he would sit out in the sun – source of all longevity, he believed – and thoughtfully watch time passing, just sitting on his own front doorstep. His left eye was useless, the entire surface of the pupil covered over by a large, pale tumour. He could now see only through the other eye, but even so, not one detail of the comings and goings in his yard escaped him. Some were afraid of his sickly eye, rambling on about the old man using it in the dark to find out the sorcerers' tricks and foil them, before it was too late.

Their firstborn daughter, Mâ Germaine, seemed as old as them. There was a rumour that the couple had handed down the secret of long life to their descendants. Grandma Hélène was aware of this, and would babble crossly:

‘We're already old, age has forgotten us, and we've forgotten it too. That's the secret of our longevity…'

Old Joseph was rather overshadowed by Grandma Hélène, but she herself led a busy life, to say the least, continually checking that no one she knew wore a mask of despair. If they did, she would go over to them, lift it off, and mumble some comforting words, assuring them things would be much better tomorrow. She'd been nicknamed ‘Mother Teresa' because though she had more than ten children under her roof she put the interests of others even before those of her own offspring. Idle gossips were quick to imply that each time you got a gift from Grandma Hélène she took a year off your life to extend her own and that of her husband and children. Hence the uncouth manner in which some people rejected the old lady's generosity, accusing her of being a witch.

In actual fact, in all the time since she arrived from Louboulou she had never grown used to the idea that everything here was different, and that life in the city was unlike life back in the village in every way. Here an act of kindness drew suspicion. There it was a sacred duty, designed to keep the ungrateful, the selfish and individualists away from the village. In her mind, Pointe-Noire, and in particular the rue de Louboulou, was her village, it had simply been relocated, and because of this she had an obligation, as a peasant woman in possession of vast plantations in her home country, to share what she possessed with the population, whoever they were, that was the way she had been brought up.

She was so highly respected, she had become like a patriarch of the tribe, a kind of protective presence, even, watching over our family and the inhabitants of the rue de Louboulou. She would prepare food in a huge aluminium pot, then turn up in the street, grab hold of any child who happened to be passing, and sit them down in front of a large, steaming portion. Gluttons were only too delighted, along with various parasites and outright crooks, who knew you only had to drift past her house at mealtimes to get yourself a square meal. Which is probably why several adults could be found pacing up and down her yard, emerging fit to burst, like boa constrictors who've swallowed an antelope. We children, on the other hand, didn't hang around her that much; to us her generosity felt like a punishment in disguise, particularly as once we had finished eating Grandma Hélène would applaud, then say, with a great big smile:

‘Well done, children! Well done! And now give me a belch, to show how good it was! Come on, a nice big belch! Quick!'

This was another of the customs she had brought with her from the village: she needed to hear her guest belch, or her face would grow troubled, and she felt her food could not have been nice. But even after you belched – to her delight – she would pile up your plate again and stand in front of you, to make sure you finished it, and gave another belch, even louder than the last. And she would point out which bit of meat to eat first, even instructing you to drink lots, to make sure your food ‘went down well' and you had enough room in your stomach for even more. Even while one cooking pot emptied, as she served up food to all comers, she was getting the next one on the fire, and reeling off from memory the names of people who hadn't eaten, with a large wooden spoon in her hands:

‘I know Albert's twins, Gilbert and Bienvenüe, haven't come by yet, or Jean-Pierre Matété and Mompéro, who were supposed to drop in today. And then there's Sabine and Dorothée, and I mustn't forget Kengué, Kimangou, Mizélé, Ndomba, Ndongui, Miyalou Kihouari, Milébé, Matété, Nkouaka, Marie, Véronique, Poupy, Firmin, Abeille, Jean de Dieu or René…'

You'd hear her saying to herself as she roamed round her kitchen in a cloud of smoke:

‘I'm worried I'll run out of manioc! Who else have I forgotten?'

One time, when we just weren't hungry, we thought we'd found a way of avoiding her. You just had to go via the street behind, parallel to the rue de Louboulou. It worked for a while, and Grandma Hélène got in a great state over the defection of so many kids:

‘Where have all the children gone? Are their parents stopping them from coming to eat here? I've been keeping their food for two days now, I'm sick of heating it up!'

It was upsetting to see her go to a public tip three days later and unload the rotting food, with tears in her eyes, while emaciated stray dogs circled around. She cursed herself for having such an ungrateful family, but the next day she'd start over again, doing what she did best in this world: cooking for others.

Dieudonné Ngoulou, a hearty eater, who had remained loyal to her, and who we were mean to, because he was the weakest and most cowardly of all of us, revealed all to the old lady. Imagine our surprise when we found Grandma Hélène watching out for us at the corner of the rue de Louboulou and the Avenue of Independence at mealtimes, crouching down behind a mango tree, still with her legendary wooden spoon in her hands. Like a wounded cat fighting back, she would leap out, catch the crafty beggar by his shirt and drag him bodily back to her kitchen:

‘Thought you could pull a fast one on me, did you? Thought you were cleverer than me? Well, you can eat three helpings for me today, because I haven't seen you for three days! You need to catch up! Come on, hurry up, I've no time to waste!'

She had an obsessive fear of whites, mixed with absolute deference. She firmly believed that a few days before her death, a white woman would come and kiss her on the forehead, and open the doors to the next world, so she could pass on and complete up there what she had begun here below.

‘It's the whites who take people off to the country where the sun never rises, and I know a white woman will come to fetch me when my time comes…'

She would say this whenever there was a wake in the neighbourhood. Most people dismissed it as the ramblings of an elderly person whose mental faculties were waning as she approached the fateful day of her demise. But Grandma Hélène took it seriously.

Several months before developing the illness which would paralyse her, she began putting her affairs in order, to people's surprise:

‘My body's packing up. I'm getting sicker all the time. I can't cook properly any more. The white woman's not far off now, I see her in my dreams. I wish she'd hurry up and set me free…'

She bought a large metal trunk and a suitcase, and put them in a corner of the dining room, under an old piece of furniture. Her things were inside, and she could be heard muttering:

‘I'll be cooking for other people in the land where the sun never rises, so I mustn't forget my spoon… I don't care about pots, they've got them up there, but I'm not going without my wooden spoon, it's what gives my food its flavour…'

Sometimes she would get up in the night to check everything was in order, that she hadn't forgotten anything. Reassured, after a session of careful stocktaking, which sounded like a litany of her final wishes, she would go back to bed, lie down, fold her arms and, finally, close her eyes. All this time, the illness was gnawing away at her puny, pain-racked body.

Everyone knew that the fateful hour could not be long now, as for several months she had cooked for no one and had lain pinned to her mattress in the dining room, her eyes riveted on her bags, and on the photo of the Virgin Mary. When they told her I was coming any day now, she didn't react and her visitors thought she must have forgotten who I was…

At the entrance to Grandma Hélène's plot, stifling her emotion at seeing me after all these years, Mâ Germaine warns me:

‘She won't recognise you. She doesn't even know I'm her daughter now, and every time I go near her she's terrified, as though I'm an evil spirit! Since she took to her bed, she hasn't known anyone. And she hasn't seen you for twenty-three years…'

I go on into the room anyway. The first thing I see are the old lady's belongings, piled up in a corner. The Virgin Mary looks sad, hanging there on the wall. It smells like a stable, and no one thinks to open a window to air it.

I go over to the mosquito net and see a human shape inside it, twitching from time to time. It's her, the old lady. Covered in white sheets of doubtful cleanliness, she lies still now, prisoner of a mysterious illness, which forces her to stay stretched out on her back, excreting and pissing on to the mattress, which is on the floor. She sees the visitors at a distance and groans:

‘I'm in pain, I'm in terrible pain…'

Grandma Hélène is by now a human wreck, bound to this world only by the air she breathes. Curled up inside her white mosquito net, as though she's already in a coffin, she looks almost like a corpse awaiting burial…

‘She won't recognise you,' insists Mâ Germaine.

I ignore her warning and draw aside the mosquito net, so I can see her.

There she is, curled up in the foetal position, her face relaxed. She senses my presence and opens her eyes as I lean over towards her.

With a quick movement, she grasps hold of my hand:

‘Is that you?'

Though I am not sure whether she has really recognised me, I nod. And then, to my utter amazement, I hear her babbling:

‘You see, my child, I'm proud of myself now, the food I gave you when you were a child has made you grow up big and strong, you're nearly two metres tall… But anyway, that's all in the past now, it's done with, and I'm dying now, like your mother, Pauline Kengué, and your father, Kimongou Roger, and your aunts, Bouanga Sabine and Dorothée Louhounou, and your uncles, Albert Moukila and René Mabanckou, except at least I've been lucky enough to see you before I go to join them…

‘You aren't going to die, Grandma…'

‘Oh, look at me, what have I become? A corpse! Was I like this when you left me? It upsets people to see me like this… If I still had the strength I would have killed myself, but I can't move without help now, and no one wants to help me leave this life, not even my husband…'

She begins to shudder, there is fear in her eyes:

‘There she is! There she is! Help me chase her away!'

‘Chase who away, Grandma? What?'

‘The shadow behind you!'

‘That's not a shadow, Grandma, it's someone who's come with me and…'

‘It's a shadow, I'm telling you, I see them all the time now! The Virgin Mary helps me chase them away. Please, help me chase that shadow there, watching me… Just do it for me.'

‘Grandma, that's my girlfriend, we arrived together from France a few days ago and…'

‘Is she black or is she white?'

‘She's white.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Yes.'

‘Oh, then I'm saved! I've waited for her for years. I can go now, she's come to set me free…'