The Lights of Pointe-Noire (9 page)

Children of paradise

I
have a lot of ‘nieces' and ‘nephews' now. A small group gathers round me in Uncle Albert's yard, devouring me with their huge eyes, pulling at my shirt with their little hands. If I move, the whole buzzing little cluster follows me; I stop, and they stop too, afraid, I think, that I might disappear. For these kids I'm like an apparition, a shadow that will vanish with the setting sun. In their minds I'm just a character, artfully constructed by their parents, to the point where the poor kids actually think I can heal the lame and restore sight to the blind. One of them – the tallest – sniffs at me like a dog trying to identify his master after a long absence. They all want to be the first to speak. One wants sandals, and embarks on a series of elaborate explanations:

‘'Cause you know, Uncle, if you don't have new sandals, you can't get to school on time, you have to spend two hours in the street mending them and when you tell the teacher he won't listen, he just says “little liar”, but it's not true, I'm not a liar! Don't you believe me, Uncle?'

‘I believe you, Antoine.'

He's happy now, and starts jumping about, while behind me I hear a shy little girl's voice:

‘Uncle, I want a dress like Ursula's!'

‘Who's Ursula?'

‘I can't tell you. There are too many people here, they'll tease me…'

‘Whisper it in my ear, then…'

I signal to the others to move off a bit, and I bend forward till I'm down at little Julie's height. She puts her mouth right next to my ear and hisses:

‘Ursula's a bad girl! She's my enemy…'

‘Your enemy?'

‘Yeah, she pinched my boyfriend because her father bought her a red dress with yellow flowers on. I want the same dress so my boyfriend will love me too…'

As she's speaking right into my ear, I answer right back into hers. This game makes the others jealous, I can tell from the frowns on most of their faces. They reckon Julie's getting special treatment, and they all want to talk to me like this, but I straighten up again.

They shout out a litany of lists. Each time I say yes, the lists get longer. Some requests are quite reasonable, like Célestin's:

‘I want some Kojak sweets.'

Another has more contemporary tastes:

‘I want a video game I saw on the TV yesterday!'

One of the cocky ones pushes the group aside:

‘Uncle, I'm the brainiest here! You have to get me a laptop computer!…'

Another contradicts him:

‘He's lying, Uncle, he never listens, he had to repeat his last two years of primary! I'm the brainiest, and I want to go to France and America with you!'

I don't know exactly how many of them there are, and I've no idea when they were all born. They aren't all here. Some are only a year apart, or even a few months. Every day new ones are added to the long list I was given when I arrived in town.

The mother of a nephew I don't recognise pushes her son towards me:

‘His name's Jaden, you'd better not leave him out!'

This nephew is hiding behind his mother, I can just see the gleam of his eyes.

‘Go on, Jaden, tell Uncle what you want him to buy you!'

Jaden is overwhelmed now, he sucks on his thumb and whines:

‘A car…'

‘OK, I'll get you a toy tomorrow when I go into town,' I tell him.

At this his eyes widen and he takes his thumb out of his mouth.

‘No, I want a car like grown-ups have, with a real horn, otherwise I'll make an accident, and someone will die!'

His mother strokes his head:

‘Jaden, you're too little to drive a big person's car…'

‘Doesn't matter if I'm little! I still want a car, I can keep it till I'm big…'

Cornered, the mother says:

‘Uncle will buy you one and put it in a garage in France for you. They look after cars in France, they never get stolen there. And when you're grown up you can go and fetch it yourself. In a real plane!'

But he's a cunning one, and shakes his head in disbelief:

‘No, when he leaves he won't come back again!'

‘Why do you say that?' his mother says.

‘You told me, you said when this uncle goes travelling he stays with the whites for twenty years and doesn't come back, and I'll be as old as Papa in twenty years. And Papa's old already, and he doesn't have a car…'

Even when it's not clear how we are related, they all call me
tonton
, uncle, and no one seems to mind, especially not the parents. Since I never had a brother or a sister, this gives me an unaccountable sense of pride. I don't know them, and I will forget most of their faces once I get back in the plane. Little Jaden is probably right: how many have left, and never returned, or returned only twenty years later? Every household in the town can probably claim one.

Still, I need to learn to recognise these little angels, and get their names straight, or they'll be offended. Even if I've never seen them before, I feel close to them, and I know there's a drop of my blood in their veins. The ones I do know slightly are the children of Gilbert, and of Bienvenüe, who is still in hospital, and whose absence is keenly felt at home. Their children insist on having their photo taken with me. And they choose, by chance, the same spot where I used to sit with Gilbert and Bienvenüe to eat. Here's where Aunt Mâ Ngudi used to punish me for not finishing what was on my plate, where I toyed with my foufou balls, playing for time. And yet you could tell she really loved me. It was her that told my uncle one day that it wasn't me wetting the bed, it was my cousin. My uncle was sceptical about this, so Mâ Ngudi then carried out an experiment which to Gilbert felt like the greatest mortification of his life. He was made to sleep alone in the room, while Bienvenüe and I slept in the living room. The next day the evidence spoke for itself: Gilbert, in terror of the three-headed monster, had once again pissed in the bed…

Whenever I was really naughty at home, my mother took me to Mâ Ngudi's and told her I wouldn't eat, that I was doing the ‘only child' thing, as she put it. My aunt gave me a defiant look, then turned to my mother:

‘He'll eat in this house, Pauline, don't you worry, I'll make sure of it. If he gets up to any tricks I'll send him over to eat Grandma Hélène's huge portions!'

Mâ Ngudi set to work making a beef soup and foufou balls. I wanted to slip away, but her fierce glare kept me rooted to the spot, and I stayed in the yard, right where my little nieces and nephews are sitting for the photo. Mâ Ngudi set a steaming plate of food, and a bowl of foufou down in front of me. I simply wasn't hungry, but I had to eat, because my aunt had a rubber whip in her hands. I swallowed great mouthfuls, without feeling them go down into my stomach. I held back my tears, but suddenly felt the need to cough. I began to vomit, while Mâ Ngudi whipped me, and yelled at me to finish my food. I was used to seeing her wave a whip around. I'd stand there before her, eyes cast down in submission. You hardly ever caught her smiling. She was only ever radiant when Uncle Albert was around. It never lasted long, and we felt she was somehow never satisfied, even if everything was fine and we'd all eaten well, there was the washing up to do, the yard to sweep, the bottles on deposit to return to the bar in the Avenue of Independence. She wasn't particularly hard on me, she treated her own children exactly the same, whipping them with a force that quite alarmed me. Whenever this happened, and I expected to be given the same punishment as them, since we had all been in it together, I feared the worst. But she tempered her lashes, reminding me, perhaps, that I wasn't her child, that there were limits to her anger. Which Gilbert and Bienvenüe considered an injustice. My cousin always took it out on me once her mother had gone. She would pinch my ears and growl:

‘I'm pulling your great long ears, since Maman didn't whip you like us!'

I met a friend from France in the lobby of the French Institute and showed him the photo of me with my nephews and nieces, and he remarked that they, ‘like most children in Pointe-Noire', lived in a ‘paradise of poverty'. A native of Pointe-Noire himself, he launched into the kind of speech you hear from people who have lived so long in Europe, they now accept the image of the black continent projected by the media. While he was having his say, I watched him pityingly. He had forgotten where he came from, and had come to believe that the introduction of European ways would bring happiness to our country. He doesn't seem to realise that the chains that bind him in what he believes to be a comfortable life in Europe hold no attraction for my little tribe over in the rue du Louboulou. True, he wears a suit and tie and polished shoes every day, when he's back here. But whenever I meet him in Europe he's dressed quite differently. Here he plays a role: broadcasting the notion that the salvation of every Congolese lies over in Europe. Back there he comes face to face with reality, which he won't be sharing with the young people wandering the streets of Pointe-Noire: he lives in less than twenty square metres, must struggle to legitimise his presence in France, and gets up every morning to go in search of casual work.

These children, though, find points of light in the harshness of their lives. It took me a while to understand that they were just as happy as I was when I was their age, and found my happiness in a plate of hot food in the kitchen, in the growing grass, in the tweeting of a couple of courting birds, or in the poster for an Indian film showing at the Rex cinema, where we started queuing at ten in the morning in the hope of getting into the three o'clock showing. The difficulties of our parents' lives were something quite distant, and besides, we had confidence in them, they cleverly concealed their anxieties, the shortages, the difficulty of getting through to the end of the month, so as not to spoil our childish innocence.

Thinking back to my childhood, when we hid in the lantana fields near the Agostinho Neto airport and hunted iridescent beetles or fished for minnows from the banks of the River Tchinouka, I replied to my friend, with his ‘Parisian Negro' arrogance:

‘These children aren't in a paradise of poverty. Here, look at the photo: that tyre, those flip-flops… that's what makes them happy… flip-flops to walk in, the tyre they can all climb aboard like a motorbike big enough to carry all their wildest dreams. Every day my nephews and nieces walk out in a long line down the rue du Louboulou. Their childhood knits them together, they wouldn't swap it for all the world. They drink from a small glass, but it's their own. Your glass is big, but it's not yours, and each time you want to drink from it, you have to ask for permission. And alas, that permission is never granted…

The ladykillers

H
is real name is Alphonse Bikindou, but we call him by his nickname, though no one knows what it means or where it comes from: Grand Poupy.

I meet him this afternoon at my mother's place and it seems his face has not a wrinkle, and that he'll stay exactly as I've always known him till the day he dies: quite small, a prominent forehead, narrow eyes sparkling with intelligence and cunning. He now has a thin moustache, and to take myself back to when I was a kid, only slightly younger than him, I try to ignore his facial hair, which puts a barrier between us. He is my mother's cousin, and moved to Pointe-Noire from the country in the late 1970s, to live with us and go to the lycée. The very first day I saw him, I was captivated by his deep voice and his way of articulating almost every word separately. I started secondary school just as he started at the lycée, and we'd get up in the morning and put on our school uniforms, him all in khaki, with long trousers, me in a sky-blue shirt and dark blue shorts, and a red ‘pioneers of the Congolese Revolution' kerchief round my neck. I always lagged behind him, and every now and then he would turn round, so I'd have to hurry to catch him up. I could never manage it, his little legs had a kind of almost mechanical strength despite the way the road seemed to get steeper and steeper, so that we would overtake other pupils sitting exhausted by the wayside. A bit farther on, at the junction of the Avenue Jean-Felix-Tchicaya and the rue Jacques-Opangault, where we went our separate ways, he would act the big brother – he was no longer a minor – and tell me to mind the traffic and hand me a twenty-five CFA franc coin:

‘Buy yourself some fritters and mash at break. Watch the big kids don't steal your money.'

As he walked off, I'd stand and watch him for a moment, making his way down to the far end of the avenue to where the Karl Marx lycée stood. After a few minutes he was no more than a tiny speck, absorbed into the crowd of students. Then off I went to the Trois Glorieuses secondary school. I arrived just in time for the raising of the flag in the schoolyard, when we all sang the national anthem, which we were made to learn by heart:

Arise, brave country,

Who, in three glorious days,

Seized the flag and raised it

for a Congo, new and free

That never more will stumble

And no more be afraid.

Our chains we have burst open,

Now freely we will work

We are one sovereign nation.

If my foes do slay me,

Before my hour has come,

Brave comrade, take my gun;

And if a bullet hits my heart

Our sisters all will fearless rise,

Hills, river, too, with all their might

Will repel the invader.

Today our land is born anew,

And all in value equal,

No leader but the people,

Who alone has chosen

To stand in dignity.

Grand Poupy favoured white shirts and terylene trousers, which he ironed energetically every weekend. He cut his own hair, in the style of the Afro-American actors of the 1970s, whose posters we fought over on the Avenue of Independence, where they were laid out for sale on the ground outside the Rex, the Duo and the Roy.

The layout of the interior of our three-room house changed with the arrival of my mother's cousin. By now it was a really tight squeeze, with my aunts Sabine Bouanga and N'Soni in one room, and my parents in the other. Any other member of the family who happened to turn up had to find a corner in the living room to lay down a mat, without getting too close to where Uncle Mompéro had set up his bed and would not be moved. Grand Poupy's arrival would upset my routine. I no longer slept with my uncle, and chose instead to share the mat with the latest arrival, listen to him relate amorous escapades, which of course always ended with victory for him and the surrender of his lady-love, as long as Uncle Mompéro didn't complain and tell us to shut up. Grand Poupy would lower his voice, while my uncle ranted from his bed:

‘I can hear you, Poupy, you're keeping me awake! If you don't shut up I'll wake up the boy's mother and you can explain yourself to her! Ever since you got here you've been filling his head with your lies! Has anyone ever seen these girls you're always boasting about?'

At this point Grand Poupy would whisper to me:

‘Let's go to sleep, I'll tell you the rest tomorrow. Uncle Mompéro doesn't know Grand Poupy, ladies' man extraordinaire!'

On days when there was no school, he would suggest we take a walk in the neighbourhood:

‘I'll show you how to approach a girl, just watch what I do! As soon as I see a girl, I'll go up and talk to her. There's one sign that's always a giveaway: if I put my hand on her right shoulder and she doesn't remove it, things are looking good…'

We were standing at an intersection about two hundred yards from the house, a strategic spot from which we could see most of the girls in the Vongou neighbourhood pass by. They were on their way to market, some dressed in multicoloured pagnes, others in tight-fitting trousers, with tops that bordered on indecent. If my mother's cousin liked the look of one of them, he would turn up the collar of his shirt, smooth his Afro with the palm of his hand, and quickly spray some perfume under his armpits, behind his ears and even inside his mouth:

‘Don't move, I'm coming back!'

He'd set off after the girl, imitating almost to the point of caricature the manner of Aldo Maccione, who he'd seen in
L'Aventure c'est l'aventure
.

I watched from a distance as Grand Poupy hitched up his trousers, smiling his broadest smile and finally placing his hand on the girl's right shoulder. He would turn back to me and wink. Seeing his conquest didn't shake off his hand, I decided Grand Poupy must be right, he was an ace, and his technique was infallible. What would have happened if the young lady had removed his hand? I had complete faith in his ability to come up with a response. He'd probably already encountered more difficult cases, and knew instinctively which girls he could target and be sure of success. So, I decided, he wouldn't risk it if he thought there was a chance he'd be rejected. Why, for instance, did he tend to go for the ugly ones, when a real beauty might be passing just a few centimetres away, flashing us her most provocative smile? If I ventured to question him on this matter, he would say, with an air of great experience:

‘A smile isn't enough, you have to wait till she touches her hair, and especially till she looks down at the ground. Did she do that, the beauty who went by a couple of minutes ago?'

‘No…'

‘Well then, that's why I didn't waste my energy! I'm telling you, the pretty ones are only interested in the boys who don't notice them. They want to be seen, that's what they're aiming for. And another thing, if you meet two girls together, an ugly one with a pretty one, I mean, start with the ugly one, and the pretty one will start flirting with you the next day, just as a challenge to the other one. I call it the billiard technique: to get to a ball and pocket it you need to hit another one, and fortunately it's possible to hit two birds with one stone, because both balls could end up in the same pocket, or in two different holes! But that takes experience, and you're still a beginner…'

‘And if both of them are pretty, which ball do you aim for?'

‘Impossible! There'll always be one prettier than the other, there's no such thing as a draw in beauty, or in ugliness either!'

Sometimes, when he wasn't looking, I'd open the notebook where he wrote down the girls' names, with some of them marked ‘to simmer'.

Intrigued, I plunged in one evening:

‘So what does it mean, to simmer?'

Grand Poupy gave a start, and his face expressed grave disappointment:

‘So, how long have you been looking through my private things?'

He had raised his voice, and just as I began to feel tears pricking my eyes, he spoke more softly, to console me:

‘No point snivelling now… What's done is done. Don't do it again. I'll tell you what “leave to simmer” means…'

He took out the notebook from his satchel and opened it:

‘On the left-hand page I write out the names of the girls I've already been out with, and the right-hand page is for the ones I'm still working on. Some of them are the tricky ones I've already tried it with, I've kissed them on the lips, but they put on an act, they don't want me to go any farther. So I pretend I'm not interested in them, like I haven't got time for them, I let them simmer, like a dish you cook over a low heat in a pot. It pays off eventually because in the end those are the girls that come running after me! And I'm back in charge!'

I wasn't honest with my mother's cousin, I continued to read his notebook without him knowing. I discovered it wasn't just the names of his sweethearts he wrote down. He also recorded his memories of Sibiti, the place he came from. I remember long passages without a single crossing out, in which he described the adventures of a certain Chelos, to whom the writing was addressed. They all began the same way:

‘My dear, true friend, dear Chelos, As the moon is my witness, I am sending you another story from my little backwater of Sibiti…'

I wondered whether this Chelos person really existed or was just a product of his mischievous imagination. Grand Poupy wrote at night, when everyone else was asleep. He lit a candle, opened a school exercise book, took a ballpoint pen and covered the empty pages with black ink at breathtaking speed. The stories were mostly bawdy, particularly the one about a woman called Massika, and her lover, Bosco. Massika had assured Bosco that her husband was away at a funeral in a neighbouring village. He wouldn't be back till the end of the morning of the following day. So, that evening, Bosco turned up and sat down to eat with Massika. The two love pigeons got drunk on palm wine and laughed together like hyenas. In the middle of the night they disappeared into the bedroom and began making love when suddenly there was a loud knocking at the door. Massika couldn't think who it might be at that hour of the night. She must either open the door or do nothing and wait for the night visitor to go away. But he knocked louder and louder, and began shouting Massika's name, till she realised it must be her man standing out there.

‘Come and open the door, I can't find my key!'

‘I thought you went to the wake?'

‘I'll explain later, first open the door.'

Bosco just had time to slip under the bed as the door opened and the man of the house put down his bag in the main room. He complained his feet were sore, and asked his wife to go and boil some water for him. When she came back and set a steaming bucket down before her husband he picked it up without a word, slipped into the bedroom with it and emptied it out under the bed. Bosco, who was stark naked, burst out of his hiding place, pushed past the husband, got as far as the main room and plunged out of the front door, followed by the adulterous wife. The two vanished in the darkness while in the distance you could hear the barking of dogs, who must have been having a laugh at their expense, two humans, dressed like Adam and Eve…

The truth was, Grand Poupy dreamed of being a writer…

Here's Grand Poupy now. We embrace. Behind him I see a woman whose face is vaguely familiar. I hold out my hand to her tentatively, and my mother's cousin looks almost shocked:

‘You're going to shake her hand? Won't you kiss her? Why so formal? Don't you recognise her?'

I take another look. The woman smiles at me. I can see in her face, she's a bit disappointed. She's come to my mother's plot, where Grand Poupy and I have arranged to meet, specially to see me. It was actually my mother's cousin who insisted she come today because she hadn't been able to make it to the family reunion, she was babysitting.

‘Go on, kiss her, it's Alphonsine!'

I start at the name. Memories flood back, and Grand Poupy's teasing smile and Alphonsine's now beaming face make me realise how stupid I've been. I can see her now as she was back then, braiding my mother's hair. I was too shy to come out of this hut, because I was in love with her. Grand Poupy bombarded me with advice, told me just to jump in and swim, wrote out what I had to say to her when we met. I was so paralysed by Alphonsine, face to face with her, I went to pieces, and started to stammer. She was troubled, too, and would run off when I finally managed to put Grand Poupy's tips into practice, placing my hand on her shoulder. I sent her poems, letters which he read and corrected, and which even so received no reply. In this passionate, one-way correspondence I described her eyes, shimmering, yet moist, her fair skin, like clay fashioned by an archangel who had leaned over her cradle without her parents knowing. These letters were delivered personally by my mother's cousin. At least, that's what he swore when got back, with a smile on his lips, jeering at my cowardice. Alphonsine was well ready for me, he claimed, I had better hurry up or some scoundrel would come and put a spoke in the wheels.

‘You'll have only yourself to blame!' he warned.

I advanced at a tortoise-like pace in this relationship, to which I attributed all my adolescent angst. As far as I recall I never managed to be with Alphonsine and say anything coherent for more than about ten minutes. In my late teens I was living in Brazzaville and she was back in Pointe-Noire. We lost track of each other, resigned to a platonic relationship, without even a little kiss.

And here she is now right in front of me, a grown-up lady, with two children standing up straight behind her. Grand Poupy smiles impishly. Finally he cracks and bursts out laughing:

‘See, my boy, Alphonsine is one of the family now, I went a different way about it: I married her myself, and we've got children. So, they are your nephews, you must look after them as if they were your own children. We live in M'Paka, on the outskirts of town. One of our daughters, the oldest, is studying in Morocco…'