Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty

by Alain Mabanckou

  Papa Roger’s so happy, he’s going to finish the bottle of wine all on his own. If he goes on like that he’ll end up drunk and start talking to the invisible people that the alcohol producers put in the bottles. If he’s drunk he won’t be able to show us anything amazing. That’s why Maman Pauline quickly removes the bottle, but he just has time to fill his glass, and he raises it to his lips with a little smile at the corner of his mouth. It’s almost as though he enjoys the fact that we’re waiting, that we can’t drink as we’re supposed to unless he tells us what it is that’s so amazing.

  He talks about all sorts of things, about what’s been happening at work, but not about the amazing thing. It seems his boss, Madame Ginette, has come back from Paris. They’ve repainted the walls in the hotel, and redone the garden behind because she called to tell them she was coming back from France with two men whose job it is to check all the things that aren’t right in hotels and then blame people for being lazy, or have them sent home.

  My father has the hiccups, but he still manages to say: ‘These two people… hic… these two people came over from France… hic… they were just trying to find fault. That’s their job. One of them… hic… went looking everywhere, even behind the pan of the WC. Meanwhile the other one was looking at every single bill with a magnifying glass… hic… and in the end he saw there wasn’t a single CFA franc missing from the till… hic…’

  Maman Pauline’s had enough: ‘You promised you were going to show us something very important and amazing! What is it?’

  At last, my father empties his glass, pushes back his chair, gets up and goes into the bedroom. He’s not walking quite straight like a normal person. We hear him saying his boss’s name. We look at each other and wonder what he’s gone looking for.

  Maman Pauline whispers: ‘I think your father’s had one or two glasses too many.’

  Papa Roger comes back into the living room with a black briefcase, which he puts down on the table.

  ‘It’s in there, inside this case, hic… hic!’

  My mother’s still sulking. ‘What are you waiting for then?’

  Papa Roger presses a button, the briefcase opens. Maman Pauline and I almost bang our heads, because without realising it, we both decided at exactly the same moment to look what was in side the case. There’s only a little black box. Papa Roger sees we’re wondering what it can be for, and he tells us it’s a radio cassette player, a new brand that’s just come out over in Europe and that not many people in our country have, not even some of the capitalists. And you can also listen to the radio on it.

  It’s the first time I’ve seen a machine like this. Maman Pauline’s looking at it fearfully as if it was a bomb that was going to blow up in a few minutes and kill all three of us.

  Papa Roger explains that you can record lots of things in it, you just have to press once on the button marked ‘Play’ and on another red one that says ‘Record’. But for the moment he wants to play us something because he can’t record anything, since he doesn’t have a blank cassette.

  Maman Pauline wants to leave the table.

  ‘Here we are, with not much money, and you go buying things like that!’

  ‘Hic… listen, Pauline…’

  ‘How much did it cost, anyway?’

  Papa Roger smiles as though he’d been waiting for this question. He takes his time before telling us it was a present, that he’s already had the radio cassette player for several days, he’d hidden it at the Victory Palace Hotel. He didn’t take it home to Maman Martine’s because there are too many children there, they might damage it while he was out. And he tells us how he was given it by a white man, Monsieur Montoir, as a thank you because he is always so nice to him when he comes to spend his holidays at the hotel. He’s so happy talking about this white man, that suddenly his hiccups disappear.

  ‘Monsieur Montoir is a regular at the hotel, a White. When he arrives from France, I look after him personally. I post his letters, I tell him where all the best bars are.’

  He adds quietly, ‘It’s thanks to me he has such a nice time here. I bring him back very beautiful, very young girls, to his room.’

  I think, ‘Next time Uncle René comes round to our house there’s going to be serious trouble. He’s going to think we’re gradually turning into capitalists, and soon we’ll have television, hot water and air conditioning. Well, he has television too, after all, and hot water, and air conditioning, perhaps he’ll be a bit jealous because he hasn’t got a radio cassette player, it’s a new model, but he can’t be cross with us for that, he can go out and buy one anytime.’

  My father warns us, ‘Listen carefully: we must be very discreet and not go round telling everyone in the quartier we’ve got a radio cassette player.’

  Will I tell Lounès the secret? I think I will. I don’t hide anything from him, and he tells me loads of things. So why shouldn’t I tell him?

  My father’s rummaging in the case again, and brings out a cassette. He presses the button of the cassette player and a little window opens. He puts the cassette in, closes the little window and presses again on ‘Play’. My mother and I almost bang heads trying to see how it works inside the machine. There’s a tape that turns in the cassette and our eyes follow the rhythm of the brown coloured tape. We can’t hear anything, but the tape is turning.

  Suddenly a loud voice makes us leap backwards. Papa Roger keeps very calm, he’s not afraid like us.

  Someone starts singing. My father turns up the volume slightly. I look at my mother’s face. It is completely still. Her mouth is half open, her hands are crossed, resting on the table. She looks exactly like a statue in Saint-Jean-Bosco church.

  Now we hear a chorus that makes me start wiggling my shoulders, though this isn’t the kind of music we normally dance to round here.

  At the foot of my tree

  I lived happily

  I never should

  Leave the foot of my tree.

  At the foot of my tree

  I lived happily

  I never should

  Take my eyes off my tree.

  Maman Pauline’s starting to move about now, but not to dance with me, I sense she’s just getting annoyed. For the moment she says nothing, but she looks at my father, who’s moving his head to the rhythm of the song. I think, ‘It’s your head you have to move, not your shoulders. So I stop dancing with my shoulders and I start moving my head, like my father. I also tap my fingers on the table because Papa Roger needs to know that at least there’s one person in this house who’s happy about this music he’s brought home, the kind you don’t hear in the bars around here.

  The man is still singing. You must be able to hear his booming voice out in the street. And all he’s talking about is a tree that he wishes he hadn’t taken his eye off. I think: ‘What’s he crying like that for over a tree? We’ve got millions of trees in the forest, people cut them down all the time and they never cry, not a bit, they make it into firewood for cooking with. Even we’ve got three trees on our land! And if our mango trees ever disappear, am I going to start crying like the man singing in the radio cassette player? The singer must just be someone who’s always sad. Something bad must be happening in his life for him to be crying over a tree, when you should really cry about human beings when they leave this earth. Maybe the singer lives in a place where there are no trees left. And since he’s gone away from the only tree he had, well, that’s why he’s crying the whole day. Besides, his voice is like someone who sings at burials around here, and makes all the women and children start crying.’ The voices of the people who sing at burials are so sad, and so warm, that even when it isn’t a member of your own family who’s died you’ll stop for a few minutes in the street and weep too. And if you weep in the street, the family of the dead person will see and get even sadder and cry even more.

  While the singer’s going on about his tree, I pick up the box that the cassette came in. I turn it over and at last I see the photo of the singer. It’s
a white man, with lots of hair and shining eyes. He has a moustache and a sad expression, but his face is kind. I think: ‘He’s never hurt anyone, you can see that. Other people bother him, but he just goes on thinking about his tree. Like all kind people, the singer must have lots of white globules, even whiter than teeth when you’ve just cleaned them with Colgate or Landry Enamel. He’ll go to paradise and he’ll leave his white globules to all the children who’ve been good. So I should listen to what he says because perhaps he’s secretly talking about something else, not the tree. I must go on nodding my head like Papa Roger and pretend to sing, as though I know the words.’

  There’s another thing that attracts me, something between the singers’ lips: a pipe. It’s not like the pipe Caroline asked me to smoke when we got married, it’s a real pipe, not a little stick.

  But the thing that really interests me is his moustache. I really like his moustache. Papa Roger doesn’t keep his, he shaves it almost every day. When I’m big I hope I’ll have a moustache like the one the singer has, and from now on I’m going to call him ‘the singer with the moustache’ even if his real name, on the cassette, is Georges Brassens.

  I’m sitting with Lounès at the foot of their mango tree. It’s the only tree they have. We’ve got a mango, a papaya and an orange tree. But the Mutombo family’s mango tree has more branches and leaves than ours. When I come round to see Lounès we always sit under this tree, in a corner, by the entrance to their house. We only collect the mangoes that have fallen because Monsieur Mutombo gets cross if we pick them. He says you have to wait for a fruit to fall off the tree in the wind because then it’s God Himself who’s decided. So we’ve never picked a single fruit from that mango tree. We often sit waiting for God to hand them to us Himself.

  Lounès is older than me. I’m growing fast, so I hope we’ll soon be the same height, but he needs to stop growing first. He’s muscular, I’m thin. If he hasn’t seen me for three or four days he drops by to see if I’m at home. Sometimes he even goes looking for me at Maman Martine’s, and whistles three times from the street to tell me to come out. I do the same when I’m looking for him: first I walk past their house, and whistle three times. If he’s not there I go to Monsieur Mutombo’s sewing workshop, sometimes I find him there helping his father to stack the materials they’ve brought in town, or putting coal in the steam iron.

  Today we’re sitting underneath the mango tree because we haven’t seen each other for a while. I’ve been sleeping at Maman Martine’s the last two nights, while my mother was at the wake for Monsieur Moundzika, who’s died ‘after a long illness’ as they put it in the announcement on the radio. As Maman Pauline’s a friend of Madame Moundzika, she had to be with her in her grief.

  Before she left she said to me: ‘You’re going to Martine’s for a few days, I’ll come and collect you after the wake. Be good, and behave as you do with me. If I hear you got up to any tricks I’ll make sure you feel it.’

  A wake lasts at least two or three days, sometimes as long as a week, even two if the dead person’s not happy with his family and is sulking in his coffin. Then you have to wait for the traditional chiefs to arrive from their village with their tam-tams and fetishers, to make gris-gris. The fetishers will ask the dead person to move on to heaven for good, and not come back haunting people round midnight. Some dead people are really tricky, they start bothering people on the day they’re to go to the cemetery: they jam the wheels of the hearse, so it can’t move forward, they throw thunderbolts around the quartier, make rain, and their ghost comes to the funeral ceremony to check no one’s making fun of the corpse, or that the men aren’t flirting with the women when they should be weeping. If the corpse’s ghost sees he hasn’t been washed properly, or that the sheets on the body are bargain sheets, the ones the Senegalese sell down at the Grand Marché, and that no one’s crying much, they’ll start pestering folk at night.

  When Maman Pauline went to the wake, I said to myself: ‘Let’s hope the ghost of this corpse isn’t too tricky.’ She came back two days later, the ghost in question had behaved properly, he was happy with the wake and was prepared to depart at the same time as the body, and leave people in peace.

  .....

  As soon as a mango falls off the tree, Lounès and I eat it. Since he’s bigger than I am, he gets first bite. He gets two bites, I just get one. That’s only right, his stomach’s bigger than mine.

  Sometimes we just sit there in silence, with our eyes shut, so we can hear the butterflies flying up above us. Most of all we like watching the planes flying overhead, guessing which country they’ll land in. If one of us says the name of a country, he has to say the name of its capital too. That’s how I know that the capital of Belgium is Brussels, the capital of England is London and Germany’s is Berlin. But Lounès does world history at Trois-Glorieuses secondary school and he explained that with Germany it was a bit complicated because it’s a country that’s divided in two, with a big wall to keep the people apart, though they’re all Germans. One part’s capitalist, the other’s communist. I didn’t know the name of the capital of the communist bit, though it’s a country that likes us because we’re all struggling against the capitalists. It was Lounès who explained to me that the capital of the other Germany which is communist like us is called Bonn.

  I watch him munching his mango, it takes me back to Monsieur Mutombo’s workshop, when Monsieur Mutombo’s saying, ‘My son’s name is Lounès, it’s a promise I made to my Algerian friend.’

  Then he explains that he lived in Algeria for a year and a half, in a quartier of the town of Algiers called Kouba. At that time he wanted to be a tradesman like the Arabs in our country, who are now the richest people in Pointe-Noire.

  I listen to him tell his story, waving his hands around: ‘I only went to Algeria because I believed we could be businessmen too. We could make lots of money like the other tradesmen, or else one day they’d be selling us cassava, even though we’ve been producing it ourselves since the dawn of time.’

  If you go into Monsieur Mutombo’s workshop he’ll tell you his Algeria story at least ten times. The one thing you mustn’t say is, ‘You told me that last year.’ If you do that he’ll just down tools straight away and you won’t get your shirt or your trousers for at least another two weeks. You just have to hear him out, and he’ll start by telling you it was in the quartier called Kouba that he first learned the trade of cobbler, before giving it up to become a tailor. He’ll also tell you it was there he first met the man who’s like a brother to him: an Algerian called Arezki.

  The longer I look at Lounès, the more he reminds me of his father talking about his friend Arezki. ‘Meetings like that are meant to happen! Every morning, from the window of his house, Arezki would see me getting off the bus. Every time he met a black man he’d tell the story of his journey to Senegal, where he and his family had lived for many years. He’d wave at me from a distance and I’d wonder if he was someone I’d known in the Congo, or if he’d confused me with someone else. Then one day he invited me to drink tea at his house, and he told me: “No, we’ve never met, but my door is always open to you, brother.”’

  Monsieur Mutombo will then explain that in Algeria there are lots of black people like us, and that these black people are Algerians. He’ll add quietly that people with our colour skin suffer almost as much as Blacks in South Africa, where Whites and Blacks can’t sit next to each other on the bus, even though buses are there for everybody. Some people get on with animals that have fleas, so why can’t black people go in the bus too? And Monsieur Mutombo will suddenly get angry, but you mustn’t think it’s against you, just because you’re listening.

  ‘People don’t talk much about the suffering of the Blacks in Arab countries! What’s that about then? You don’t find many pale skinned Arabs there marrying Arabs with dark skin. Racism and slavery don’t just exist between White and Blacks, you know! Arabs had black slaves too, they whipped them like the Whites whipped us back then, and wh
en I see the way the pale skinned ones treat the Blacks over there I think nothing’s changed since slavery. Now my Algerian brother, Arezki, he didn’t care if his neighbours thought the Black who came to drink tea with him was his servant. That’s right, in Kouba they took me for a “boy”. Arezki’s wife was called Saliha, and they had two sons: Yacine, the older brother, who was studying in Europe, and then the little one, Lounès, who was very clever, with bright blue eyes. There was a daughter between the two boys, Sara. Sometimes I’d walk in the streets of Algiers with the two children. And people would turn round and wonder if they could be my children. If so why weren’t they as dark as me? Then they’d think I must just be the servant who was looking after the children of an Algerian capitalist family. Does that seem right to you?’

  Once he’d finished being angry he’d talk about Algeria in a sad voice, while continuing to stitch your suit.

  ‘I gave up cobbling to learn tailoring in a little workshop in an old quarter of Algeria called the Casbah. It made more sense for me to learn tailoring because back home the school children change uniforms every year, but many of them go to school barefoot. You can see, my workshop’s doing well. I’ve bought my own plot, I’ve built a big house, and I’m not one to go round moaning. But, oh, I did love the Casbah! In that part of town the houses are all squeezed together and look out across the sea. It’s like living in ancient times. You see people threading their way through the zigzag alleyways. There are steps everywhere, everything’s up and down. If you don’t know your way round you can get lost. During the war with Algeria the French wouldn’t go into the Casbah, they were afraid they’d get lost and be attacked by the Algerians, even the children know where the steps lead and which little passage goes where. Before I left Algeria I made a promise to Arezki and his wife. I told them that if God gave me a son he too would be called Lounès. That’s how things were with our ancestors, they named their children after people who were dear to them, not just after their own relatives.’