Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty

by Alain Mabanckou

  So then the Shah turned up in Morocco, but he didn’t stay long because the Iranians warned him that if Monsieur ex-President didn’t clear out of Morocco, they’d assassinate all King Hassan II’s family. So the Shah himself said to King Hassan II, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll leave Morocco, I don’t want them to kill your family.’

  So then he left Morocco and went to some islands called The Bahamas because there wasn’t a single country left brave enough to welcome him. And he didn’t stay there long either, because Henry Kissinger (the American minister for what goes on abroad) suggested he should go and live with the Mexicans.

  At this point I said to myself, ‘It’s strange, why don’t the Americans take in the Shah, why do they keep sending him to this country or that? Maybe it’s because they’re scared of eating hot potatoes, as Papa Roger puts it. The Mexicans are like us, my father remarks. They suffer as we do, but at least they’re better than us at football because they’ve already hosted the World Cup, even if Brazil actually won it. I don’t even know if one day we’ll qualify to go and play with the best players in the world. If we can’t even invite the Shah to come and live with us, how’s anyone ever going to trust us to host the World Cup?’

  Next Roger Guy Folly says that the Shah’s adventures are not over yet. Soon he’s going to have to leave Mexico because he has cancer and he really needs to be cared for in a country where he has a hope of recovering. Otherwise he might die.

  So, some time in the next few days, the Shah will be sent to the United States for care. The Mexicans, who are very kind, have promised to have him back again after the operation. At least this piece of information cheers my father up. Just now he was refusing to eat, and was about to go off and listen to the singer with the moustache under the mango tree, but now he asks Maman Pauline, ‘Is there any more to eat, a little piece of grilled meat, perhaps, with some cassava?’

  I’m trying to read a book off my father’s shelves. I’ve chosen this one because it was on top of the others and the smallest. On the cover there’s a picture of a young white man. To look at he seems very clever, as though he knows about things even old people won’t know till their dying day. He looks like an angel, with his left hand propping up his chin. His smile makes me smile too, even if it’s just a photo I’m looking at, not a real person. I say to myself, ‘Like all white people, this young man has a lot of hair, and his hair grows faster than ours because they have a lot of snow where they live, and we don’t. Very strange.’

  On the back of the book they explain what it’s about, and who wrote it. Then they tell you about the life of the young man with the face of an angel. When I read that I think: But how did he have time to do the things they say here, he’s still so young? For example, they say his father abandoned his mother. That his mother looked after all five children on her own. That he wrote poems when he was very young and that even a grown up called Paul Verlaine loved him so much that he almost killed him with a pistol. He and this grown-up had some other kind of relationship, but they don’t explain that clearly here: you get the feeling it would be shameful to go into it. This man Paul Verlaine hurt the poor young man with a pistol and he got put in prison for it. They also say the reason this Paul Verlaine behaved badly was because he had problems with his wife and had drunk a lot of alcohol the day he was seeing the young man with the face of an angel. When you’re drunk you can’t control what you’re saying or doing to people, you say stupid things, you do stupid things, you can’t walk straight because you think the roads have gone all wiggly and that the cars going by are just plastic toys like the one Uncle René gave me to get me to play at farming at Christmas or on St Michel. Now when you’re drunk you have long conversations with people who don’t exist, invisible people that the people who make the alcohol that goes in bottles. You may also laugh out loud and shout rude things at passers-by who’ve done nothing. I know all this because Monsieur Vinou, one of our neighbours, is the biggest drunk on the planet. When he’s been at the bottle, he directs his remarks over towards our house – you’d think it was us that drove him to drink his corn spirit or his red wine in the bars of Trois-Cents. The alcohol has turned his lips red and he’s always getting into fights, though he’s not a strong guy. He’s always shouting, ‘Why’s the whole neighbourhood turn against me when I have a tipple?’ If he ever gets hold of a pistol like that Paul Verlaine, he’ll shoot at anything that moves. But since he doesn’t have a pistol yet, he shouts at his six children, calls them bastards, bush toads, West African crickets etc. He tells his wife she’s not his wife, she’s a public rubbish bin, where the men from Trois-Cents have dumped their waste and the waste is rotting her body and making it stink. When he needs to piss or do other stinky business, Monsieur Vinou leaves his yard, pulls down his trousers and does it all in the street, even though there’s a toilet at the end of his yard. Would you say that was the behaviour of a normal man? If someone starts forgetting they’ve got a toilet in their yard, it must be the alcohol that makes them do bad things, and that’s maybe why Paul Verlaine fired a shot at the young man with the face of an angel.

  The title of the little book I’m looking through is A Season in Hell. There’s a title in it I really like: Bad Blood. It sounds like an expression we’d use around here. In lingala, bad blood means makila mabé. When Maman Pauline says in lingala that someone has bad blood it means they were born all wrong, luck’s against them, they’ve got no hope, even the birds passing overhead crap on them. I don’t know if that’s what the young man with the face of an angel meant too, but he must have been very angry to choose a title like that, it could be bad luck for anyone who reads the book.

  I choose a page, I read out loud, almost as though I’m praying:

  I abominate all trades. Professionals and workers, serfs to a man! Despicable. The hand that guides the quill is a match for the hand that guides the plough.

  On the back cover it says it’s a book of poems, but there are no separate lines, no words that sound the same at the end of each line, like in the poem Lounès recited. Does that mean I don’t have to follow what Lounès told me? There are some words and expressions in this poem I find really difficult. I’ll have to ask Lounès what they mean, or Lounès can ask his teacher at school. For example, I don’t know what ‘the hand that guides the quill’ means. Perhaps it’s the hand of a white sorcerer who dresses up as a bird at night and comes to snatch children and take them to hell for a season. Yes, that’s probably it, because just before that the young man talks about his ancestors the Gauls, who were real gangsters, he says. He says that as ‘flayers of beasts, burners of grass’, they were the most inept people of their age. Which is odd because our ancestors were like that too. Maybe they are distantly related to these people called the Gauls. Now I understand why my father told me once that in his day, at school, they taught them that our ancestors were Gauls.

  In the poem in question, I find the words ‘the hand that guides the plough’. I’ve already heard Uncle René use the word ‘plough’, when he talks about farming. When I want to get something done quickly, or I do it sloppily, he tells me off and shouts: ‘Don’t put the plough before the ox!’

  The plough was always behind the oxen, so they could pull it. Now, the young man is talking about ‘the hand that guides the plough’. That really does make it tricky, what with the hand that guides the quill and the hand that guides the plough, I’m really confused.

  When you go into Monsieur Mutombo’s workshop it’s really like going into a tunnel, with clothes hanging up above your head. Lounès’s father has two silent young apprentices working away at the back, doing the same thing over and over again, like two robots. Their job is to put the buttons on the shirts and trousers once Monsieur Mutombo has finished sewing them. I’ve never seen them put a piece of cloth on the table, pick up the scissors and cut it up. I do rather wonder if they’d even know how to make a pair of shorts for a child at infant school. If you try to talk to them they just look at you with these hug
e eyes, if they dare open their mouths Monsieur Mutombo will shout, ‘Lazy good-for-nothings, I’ll send you back to your parents and you’ll have to pay them back the money they’ve spent on your training!’

  The thing they like best is taking the women’s measurements. They tell them to take their clothes off, including their underpants, and they take a look at lots of other things that women normally only show their husband or their doctor. They measure the women up at the back of the shop, on the right. You can’t quite see what the apprentices are doing. You can just hear one of them saying to the woman, ‘Take your top off, and the bottom half, and your pants, stand very straight, hold your head up, close your eyes.’

  It’s different for the men: they take their measurements in front of everyone. When that happens I always close my eyes, because most of them have great big bellies, even though they’re not bosses or proletariat-exploiting capitalists. They have long hair under their armpits, sometimes they’re all white, like they’ve put ash on themselves, or powder, that’s been there for at least a week.

  It’s always dark in the workshop. It used to be the place where the priests from the Church of Saint-Jean-Bosco used to store their spades, their rakes and their picks. Besides, since the church is only a few metres away, when the bells ring, Monsieur Mutombo tells everyone to observe a minute’s silence because the priest gave him this little building free of charge. I don’t know how he manages in the dark not to prick his big fat fingers with the needle of the Singer sewing machine. Since he’s very bald, with only a few grey hairs around his ears, it feels like it’s his head that lights the place, because when he goes out for a smoke it gets even darker inside, and when he comes back it brightens up a little bit again. I’ve never seen anyone’s head shine like that, not round here. Maybe he puts palm oil on it or maybe Madame Mutombo rubs a special cream into it every morning.

  The reason I’m in Monsieur Mutombo’s workshop this morning is I’ve come to get my shirt mended, the one Lounès ripped when we were at the Tata-Luboka stadium and I ran off before the start of the match. No, I’m not going to tell Monsieur Mutombo it was his son who did it. Lounès didn’t mean to do it. He just wanted me to stay with him to watch the match, even if Caroline had come to support the Tié-Tié Caids, who won in the end. I heard it was Mabélé who scored all three goals in the match. In any case, I knew their team would win because their sorcerer made it rain, so the fetishes of the Voungou Dragons would get wet and not work. And apparently whenever the ball got in front of the Tié-Tié Caids’ goal, the sorcerers put invisible players on the pitch, who blew on it, and the ball flew off somewhere else, so the goal couldn’t be scored. On the other hand, whenever Mabélé, proudly wearing his number 11 shirt, found himself face to face with the goalie for the Voungou Dragons and was about to shoot, the poor goalkeeper saw a javelin instead of the ball, and stepped to one side immediately because he didn’t want to die pointlessly, and then the goal went in.

  If I was a football referee for this quartier, I’d give red cards to the sorcerers sitting behind the goals, because they are the ones who decide which team will win, or if it’s going to be a draw. And a draw happens when both teams have chosen sorcerers with exactly the same powers, i.e., the same gris-gris.

  I’ve just handed my torn shirt to Monsieur Mutombo at long last, and he’s looking at it as though it was an old duster, when in fact he made it himself last year.

  ‘What’s happened here? You’ve been in a fight at school and Monsieur Mutombo here has to sew up your shirt, eh?’

  ‘I wasn’t in a fight, Monsieur Mutombo.’

  ‘So a ghost tore your shirt did it?’

  The apprentices are pretending to work. I can tell they’re going to burst out laughing any moment. They’ve come a bit closer, so they can get a look at my shirt.

  ‘Who did this?’ Monsieur Mutombo continues.

  I say nothing.

  ‘All right, if you don’t tell me who did it, I’ll keep your shirt and I’ll show it to Roger and Pauline this evening. You’ll have to go home with no shirt on!’

  I don’t want to go home with no shirt on, people will laugh at me in the street. And I don’t like people seeing I haven’t got any muscles yet. Especially the girls will laugh. No, I’ll have to say something.

  ‘I’ll tell you who did it.’

  ‘Ah, at last. So, who was it?’

  ‘Me. Myself.’

  ‘Very interesting! And how did that happen?’

  ‘It’s hard to explain. I was sitting like this, I put my back against the wall and there, all of a sudden, was this nail, out of nowhere. So just when I’m about to stand up to…’

  ‘Michel, cut it out! I understand that you are fond of Lounès and to protect him you’re prepared to take the blame yourself. But he’s already told me everything. Everything! It was him that grabbed your shirt…’

  Now I understand why the two apprentices had started laughing earlier. They knew, too, that it was their boss’s son that had torn my shirt.

  Monsieur Mutombo turns to them.

  ‘Longombé, fix the boy’s shirt, right now. And Mokobé, you do the turn-ups on Monsieur Casimir’s trousers, he’s been on at me since yesterday, even though I keep telling him he’s not very tall and turn-ups will make him look even smaller than the president of Gabon.’

  I go up to Monsieur Mutombo and whisper in his ear.

  ‘Actually, I’ve got a bit of a serious problem…’

  ‘Well, what is it, this bit of a serious problem?’

  ‘Your apprentices…’

  ‘What have they done to you?’

  ‘They only do buttons and I don’t want them to spoil my shirt. My mother will be cross with me if they do.’

  Monsieur Mutombo bursts out laughing. His apprentices have heard me, and they have a good laugh while they get the chance, because they’ve been holding it in for ages. Since all three of them are killing themselves laughing, I start laughing too, and then I can’t stop. Now when I laugh, it always makes other people laugh too, because I often laugh like a little jackal with a bad cough. So all four of us just go on laughing till a woman appears at the door of the workshop. It’s as though she can’t get in, frontways or sideways. She’s so enormous that it’s as though the door had just been blocked by an extraterrestrial. Even Monsieur Mutombo’s bald head casts no light now. The woman’s cheeks are all puffed out like someone blowing into a trumpet, or who has two mandarin oranges stuffed in their mouth. The sight of this makes me split my sides even more, it’s too much, I’m going to choke laughing, I point my finger at the woman, I tell myself the others in the workshop must surely laugh with me. But suddenly everyone else has stopped. They’re all looking at me. Monsieur Mutombo clears his throat and nods his head at me, as if to tell me to stop laughing. I stop laughing suddenly and wipe my tears with the end of my shirt.

  Longombé stands up like a schoolboy who’s been caught chatting and has to go up to the board and write out a hundred times: I must not talk in class. He walks past me, still holding my ripped shirt in his hands and goes over to the woman, who has now moved away from the door. When she moved I thought they must have switched on the street lamps in the Avenue of Independence. While Longombé and the woman are talking outside, Monsieur Mutombo leans over to me: ‘You shouldn’t have laughed! Do you know who that woman is? It’s Longombé’s mother. She comes every day to ask her son for money.’

  Now Longombé’s coming back into the workshop. He walks past me again, and gives me a strange look. I say to myself, ‘Oh heck, he’s angry, now he’s really going to ruin my shirt, to get his own back.’

  The cleverest person in our class is called Adriano and he’s from Angola. He’s very light skinned because some of his grandparents had children with Portuguese people. That’s why no one teases him about his skin because it’s not his fault he’s not really black like us, it’s the Portuguese people’s fault.

  The very first day Adriano arrived in class, the teacher
told us that his father had been killed in the civil war going on in his country. Adriano and his mother came to take refuge in Pointe-Noire, so they wouldn’t be killed too. In their country, at night, the militiamen who follow a wicked Angolan called Jonas Savimbi attack the army of the president, Agostinho Neto. We were all scared when the teacher reminded us that Angola is not far from our country and that you can get here from there on foot, via a tiny country called Cabinda, which, like us, has loads of petrol. What really scared us was the idea that Jonas Savimbi and his militiamen might turn up in our country, just to annoy our President as well, and push us into a civil war. We learned that there are lots of Cuban and Russian soldiers in Angola, to help president Agostinho Neto stay in power, because he’s not just under attack from Jonas Savimbo, poor fellow, there are other enemies too, and they’ve formed the Front National de Liberation d’Angola, or FNLA, and their leader is a certain Holden Roberto, who doesn’t mess about. Agostinho Neto is caught between Jonas Savimbi and Holden Roberto, who are supported either directly or in secret, by the imperialists.

  After these explanations, the teacher was happy to be able to tell us that our country likes President Agostinho Neto because he’s communist, like us. Adriano was very pleased about that.

  In the classroom we sit in order of intelligence. When you come in, the first row, facing you, is made up of the three best pupils in the class: Adriano, Willy-Dibas, and Jérémie. The second row is for the fourth, fifth and sixth best pupils. And it carries on like that, right to the back of the class. The stupidest are in the back row. They get left at the back so they can chat and throw ink pellets at each other.