A memory of the orphanage at Loango crossed my mind, and I thought for a moment that the two guards were Old Koukouba and Little Vimba.
Yes, I was only a few hundred metres from the house, when I noticed a black car with smoked glass windows draw up outside the entrance. One of the guards rushed to open the driver’s door and at long last I saw up close the man who’d taken Maman Fiat 500 from me. It had always been his way, to show the Pontenegrins he drove his own car, and didn’t need bodyguards, but had been obliged to accept the two guards outside his house for the security of his family, and besides they were only armed with truncheons. But his demagogy would not be enough for him this evening, for I was about to gather all my strength and throw myself upon the very person I detested most in all the world, more even than Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako.
Loango
IT WAS SAID DURING my trial that I acted under the influence of insanity, and I’m banned from ever picking up a knife, now, even a plastic one.
Apparently the place where I’m imprisoned today is the site of the orphanage where I spent the first thirteen years of my life. The old buildings have been destroyed, replaced by those of this new penitentiary centre for criminals deemed to be ‘not responsible for their actions’.
I’m allowed to write, to fill page after endless page, the whole day long. At least someone’s keeping an eye on me, and the Director, Rémi Kata Likambo, often says I won’t be able to kill anyone with a pencil.
On Sundays I go with my fellow detainees to a prayer room, where a Zairian pastor talks to us about God. When he found out my birth name was Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko he sent out an instruction that it should never be used. But nor did he want me to be called simply ‘Moses’, though privately I believe I deserve this name because I liberated the people of Pointe-Noire from François Makélé, that maggot of a mayor who cared nothing about the living conditions of the Pontenegrins, and had probably got rid of Maman Fiat 500 and her girls in the Diosso Gorges. It was there they discovered a mass grave where most of the victims of his campaign ‘Zero Zairian whores in Pointe-Noire’ were heaped. The whole operation turned into a blood bath because of the hatred between our country and Zaire, fanned by politicians in the run up to elections.
It seems to me this priest, whose name I’ve forgotten, was a hypocrite. He’s a tall man, who wears tailored suits that don’t smell of mothballs – which is sufficient reason for me to hate him. Sometimes he gets in a muddle and speaks in English for a moment, just to show us he learned Holy Scripture in that language, which none of us understands. And he seems so distant and superior and looks at us disdainfully, as though he considers us a lost cause, unworthy of redemption…
I really must not forget to mention that I have a friend I get on well with, to whom I gave these confessions to read, having begun them several months ago, while I was being detained at Mbulamatadi, before being transferred here only a week after the works were finished – which is why everything round here is spanking new.
My friend kept my script for ten days, and during that time he avoided me in the canteen, the refectory and communal showers. I was unhappy with this, because I wanted to impress him, to show him I wasn’t just a vegetable or vulgar criminal. He gave me back my pages, saying that when he had time himself – as if he didn’t have plenty here – he would write down his story, which he wants to tell no one, not even me.
His name is Ndeko Nayoyakala, and he’s about forty years old, like me. Though his face is gaunt and wasted, his Herculean build stops anyone from picking a fight. He has problems with his brain, as well, and as soon as he gave me back my manuscript I flicked through it while he stood there and saw that he’d been unable to resist correcting a misspelling here, an anachronism there. We quarrelled over a tiny little comma that he said was in the wrong place, and which I wanted to keep just where it was.
Ever since I found him here, Ndeko Nayoyakala has kept to the same routine: in the morning he stands by the window in his cell and draws the passing planes.
One day I’d had enough of his obsession with flying machines, and talked to him about my childhood friend, and how he’d had the same passion too.
He looked at me for a moment:
‘What was his name?’
‘Bonaventure…’
‘Bonaventure who?’
‘Bonaventure Kokolo…’
He stood there, deep in thought, for a few seconds, then murmured, without looking up:
‘I’ll keep on drawing planes till the day I see a real one come and land outside the asylum, to take me away from here…’
About the Author
Alain Mabanckou was born in Congo in 1966. An award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist, Mabanckou currently lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches literature at UCLA. He is the author of African Psycho, Broken Glass, Black Bazaar, and Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty, as well as The Lights of Pointe-Noire (The New Press). In 2015, Mabanckou was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize.
About the Translator
Helen Stevenson is a piano teacher, writer, and translator who lives in Somerset, England. Her translation of Mabanckou’s The Lights of Pointe-Noire won the Grand Prix, 2015 French Voices Award.
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