Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty

by Alain Mabanckou

  He starts talking, in his broken voice: ‘Last time I told you how my Grandfather Massengo died because my greedy uncle killed the cockerel for the New Year feast. Well now, after that I had to leave the village and come and live here in Pointe-Noire in one of the houses my grandfather had left. I lived with my other uncle, who died when I was twenty-five. This uncle’s name was Matété, he suffered from amnesia, an illness that ends up with you losing your memory. I’d lost both my father and mother, and he was all I had. When he died I was devastated because the two of us had lived together with no one else, and he wasn’t married, he had no children. I identified too closely with him, and I noticed I lost my memory too, just after he died. I was convinced he had passed his amnesia on to me, instead of taking it with him up to heaven, where my mother, who was already up there, would have blown on his brow and healed him. But it seems that the dead have to arrive in heaven with their hair all tidy, sweetly scented, men in a three piece suit, women in a white dress, and above all, in good health, and that’s why the illnesses stay in the cemetery and then go and live in one of the descendant’s bodies when the soul of the person who’s died finally starts climbing the stairway to heaven. I was that poor descendant. Are you still with me, Michel?’

  ‘Yes, I’m with you…’

  ‘Now since I’d become amnesiac too, I’d forgotten to go to my job at the Maritime Company where I was a manager. It was me that took on the newly qualified staff. Only I’d stopped going altogether and when my work colleagues got worried and came knocking at my door all the time to try and get me to see sense, I threw pepper water in their faces. I didn’t recognise them, and I thought they were garden gnomes come to trample my poor little spinach plants, when the only thing I had left to do was cultivate my garden in a corner of the plot my uncle had inherited from my grandfather and I’d inherited from my uncle. I could put up with anything, but not people coming and treading on my poor little spinach plants, that I loved watering. I told all my woes to those poor little spinach plants whenever grief overcame me and I thought of my mother, my father, and especially uncle Matété who probably still hadn’t recovered his memory even up in heaven. Those poor little spinach plants were my whole existence: I’d jump out of bed early and check no gnomes had been in the garden, jumping off the trucks of the Maritime Company; I’d take a pick, a hoe, a spade, a rake and a watering can, that I filled up with water from the river Tchinouka. Then I’d dig the soil, scattering seeds, whistling. Sometimes I’d spend the whole day just sitting in my vegetable garden, hoping to catch sight of my poor little spinach plants growing. I was afraid they’d pop up without me knowing. My neighbour, Maloba Pamba-Pamba started to get worried, and came to see me one day, with a pitying look on his face: “Little Pepper, you’ve been sitting in your garden since this morning, and not once have I seen you adopt the noble gesture of the seed-sower! What’s going on?” I replied: “I’m watching my poor little spinach plants grow.” He was astonished: “You’re watching your spinach plants grow?” I almost lost my temper: “There’s one thing I’d really like to understand: why do those poor little spinach plants of mine only grow when my back is turned? Does that not seem unacceptable to you?” He looked at me in some surprise: “Yes, that is unacceptable, Little Pepper.” I added: “It’s not ok, I’d even say it was ungrateful of them, myself! After all, who is it waters the poor little spinach plants? Who looks after them? Who pulls out the weeds that stop them growing? They can’t do this to me! I’m not leaving this garden until my poor little spinach plants are prepared to grow here and now, before my very eyes!” My neighbour, Maloba Pamba-Pamba murmured: “My dear Little Pepper, I am going to be frank with you: I think you need help. Things were bad before, but now they are desperate…”’

  Little Pepper stops speaking, and when he looks at me I know he’s wondering if I understand what he’s saying. But since he has told me not to interrupt, I keep quiet. I act like I’m in class and the teacher’s explaining something new. But I’d really like to say to Little Pepper: ‘Give me the key. I want to set everything straight today, and go to Egypt, and I’d like to grow up, too.’ But I mustn’t order him about because he’s a grown up, even if in his head everything’s bouncing around, like marbles bumping into each other, all those screws that have been loose ever since his uncle died. If I go on asking for the key, and don’t listen to him first, he’ll get really cross and then I’ll be going home empty-handed. Now, if I don’t get that key today, I’ll have to go and look through the bins again, tomorrow and the day after, and perhaps for the whole of the rest of my life, spend my whole life looking through the bins around here. I don’t want a life like that. So I listen to him. He has to stop some time.

  ‘But no, Michel, dear boy, now when I wandered down by the banks of the river Tchinouka, it was not for pleasure. It was the amnesia. I’d forget to stop at my own place, I’d carry on and on till I got to the river, convinced that I could walk on water, like Jesus. And when I tried to get across the river that runs through our quartier, even if I shouted three times over “alea iacta est!”, I’d still hesitate for a moment, because whatever it might look like, I don’t actually have the courage of a Roman general about to face up to Pompey the Great. Even when you lose your memory, there’s a red line you don’t step over. Amnesiac, yes. A living coward, yes. A dead hero, no. So I didn’t risk walking on the water, I hesitated, I told myself maybe it was too cold, or too polluted by the excrement of certain members of the local population who made out it didn’t matter if they did their business in the water, because world experts had proved that running water had no bacteria in it. My neighbour, Maloba Pamba-Pamba looked all over the quartier for me, to take me to a fetisher. Which was extremely decent of him. But he never got as far as the river, where I stayed for hours, wondering what I had come looking for in the dark hours of the night, braving the street dogs and the gangsters from the Grand-Marché, dividing their spoils and threatening each other with screwdrivers. I talked away to myself, I made wild gestures in the air, I laughed with the shadows of the night, with people all around me, and ended up scolding the frogs who were all yelling angrily at me. Amnesia also made me walk strangely. I’d wander off to the left, then to the right, I’d come back several times to the place where I’d started, but not recognise it. And since I was going round and round in circles, like a snail caught in his own slime, I had to find a way, some little thing, not too complicated, a little trick to stop me getting dizzy: I’d draw a cross of Lorraine to show where I’d already walked, so as not to come back the same way again a few minutes later. So suddenly, all the little streets in the Trois-Cents quartier, in Savon and Comapon were marked with dozens and dozens of crosses of Lorraine. Whenever I saw one on the ground I’d exclaim: “Aha! There’s a cross of Lorraine here! So I must have been past here already, I’d better go a different way where there aren’t any crosses of Lorraine!” And off I’d go somewhere else, but then some young jokers started drawing crosses of Lorraine all over the place. I’d find them in places where I’d never set foot in my life. I got more and more lost, because it really wasn’t easy to tell my crosses from those of the hoaxers, who had an undoubted gift for winding me up. So I stopped drawing crosses and spent my time instead rubbing them out, when I didn’t just stay at home cultivating my garden. At that point people decided I really was crazy and I went along with it. I forgot I had a house, I was convinced that the streets and the bins of this town belonged to me, that they were in fact where I lived. And since they were where I lived, I made my home in the streets and in the bins… That’s how I live now, outside, free, far from the wicked. What else can I do? Go round shouting that my last remaining shred of lucidity still outshines that of normal men? No, I’ve no time for that now, I’m exhausted, I’ve had it with all that. I like my life, I’m just going to sit and wait for my very last day, when I climb the stairway to heaven…’

  He lifts his head and points up at the sky. I lift my head too, but I can’t see t
he stairway up to heaven. He lowers his head and then hands me the old key. I’m so excited, I snatch it from his hands.

  As I get up to go he says, ‘Are you off for good then? Will I never see you again?’

  I’m not listening though, I’m already running. I feel free, I can breathe deeply too. I feel like I can fly. I feel like I want to laugh like I’ve never laughed before. My feet hardly touch the ground. I think of Carl Lewis, and I run even faster.

  I’ve already gone a long way, and I’ve even stopped thinking about the moment when I’ll hand my mother the key, when I suddenly remember that I’ve forgotten to ask Little Pepper two important things. So I turn back and I find him still in the same spot, with his head still bowed. He lifts it and smiles, and it’s as though he knew I would come back.

  ‘Ah, you’re back!’

  ‘There are two things I forgot to ask you…’

  ‘Then start with the first one.’

  ‘Have you still got the little key you found when we were looking through the bin together?’

  ‘Which little key?’

  ‘The tiny one that opens the cans of headless sardines from Morocco.’

  He fumbles in the pocket of his old coat and gives me the little key.

  ‘What are you going to do with it, now I’ve given you a real one?’

  Without thinking, I reply, ‘Maybe the little one is the right one. I’m going to keep them both, just in case.’

  ‘And what was the second thing you wanted to ask me?’

  ‘Have you seen My Sister Star and My Sister No-name?’

  He stopped laughing then.

  ‘You didn’t give me their real names! I meet so many people, and if I don’t have their names I can’t tell who’s who, can I? Come back and see me any time, with your sisters’ real names.’

  I run off again, without saying goodbye. I’m scared the night will grab hold of me, just as each ghost is settling back in its grave for a rest, after a long walk through the town.

  As I run I hear the two keys knocking together in my shorts pocket. The noise soothes me. I feel light, I still feel like laughing, like I did just now. But if I laugh, people will think that I’m a mad child. How else will they understand that I’m happy and I’m talking to myself because what I have in my pocket is the key to my mother’s happiness, and my father’s. And mine too?

  I can see a fat woman talking to our neighbour, Yeza the joiner. I peer at them, and make out Maman Pauline with them too, and Papa Roger and Monsieur and Madame Mutombo. When people are talking to Yeza it’s usually something to do with a coffin. Perhaps that’s why the fat woman’s crying and my mother and Madame Mutombo are comforting her.

  As I’m now at our front door, I can’t quite see what’s going on. From this distance the faces seem blurred and when they talk it’s as though there are no words coming out of their mouths. It’s like those films in black and white that the priest sometimes shows us in the courtyard of the church of Saint-Jean-Bosco. There all you ever see is men, women and children on their knees praying.

  I move forward into the middle of the lot and now I can see that the fat woman crying is the mother of Longombé, the apprentice. I recognise her, she’s the one who always comes to ask her son for money outside Monsieur Mutombo’s workshop. So I say to myself: ‘That’s it then, it must be Longombé the apprentice who’s dead’. And I start thinking about how it always made him laugh when I came to the workshop. How he would take my father’s trousers or my torn shirt and mend them. I’m not going to stay standing here in the middle of our lot. I want to know everything.

  So here I am in front of Yeza’s lot now. My mother’s just noticed me, and she shouts: ‘Michel, don’t just stand there, go on home!’

  Longombé’s mother disagrees. ‘He can stay, Pauline, my son was fond of him.’

  I go into the lot, and walk towards the sad little group. I discover that Longombé was hit by a car in the Block 55 quartier. The car had no brakes, and after knocking over the apprentice it crashed into an electric pylon. The driver ran off and they’ll never find him if he goes to live in the bush, where most gangsters live, and where the police never go.

  Longombé’s mother yells that a young man like her son can’t just die, the old should die before the young. ‘Why didn’t the car run me over, eh? It’s witchcraft!’

  According to her, Longombé had a spell put on him by someone, and it’s not the driver’s fault, they should let him be, because the accident happened in front of the shop that used to belong to the Senegali, Ousmane.

  And she just goes on shouting: ‘It’s all Ousmane’s fault, not the driver’s! Ousmane used his magic mirror to make a sacrifice of my son and make lots of money for his shop!’

  Now if I remember correctly, Ousmane doesn’t own the shop in Block 55 any more. He’s sold it, and opened another one in the Grand Marché. How can he still be doing his magic mirror when a Congolese has bought his shop?

  It’s as though Longombé’s mother’s read my mind. I hear her telling the others: ‘Yes, and you’ll tell me that Ousmane doesn’t run the shop on Block 55 any more! He’s sold it, you’ll say! Oh yeah! You think I’ll swallow that one? What am I, an idiot? My child’s death makes nice business for him, because he was my only one. And only sons are the sacrifice the fetishers like best in this country. You think it was by chance he had this accident? No! No! No! That Senegali, Ousmane, he’s the one behind all this. He sold his shop to that Congolese guy, and he sold him a piece of the magic mirror along with it! The two of them are in it together! And the mirror has to keep being fed with human blood, to create custom. The Congolese guy that runs that shop is his accomplice, they split the profits at night when everyone’s asleep, and they decide which child around here’s to be sacrificed next! You watch out, Pauline, you just be careful, one day they’ll try to take your son too.’

  She says Longombé was crossing the street in front of the Congolese bar, that he thought the car approaching from the right was a long way off, when in fact it was only a metre away. And bang! While she’s talking I remember about the story of the magic mirror when I used to walk to school with Caroline and our parents would tell us not to go past Ousmane’s shop. The cars would have run us over too, because of Ousmane’s magic mirror.

  Now they’re discussing the price of the coffin.

  Yeza wants far too much money. They’re begging him to lower the price. They tell him that Longombé’s mother is very poor, that she has no husband, that he ran off when Longombé was born. The joiner listens sympathetically. I get the feeling he’s going to cry. He even takes out a handkerchief and wipes away a tear, then says: ‘No, I’m sorry, I can’t lower the price of a coffin. I’ve given you a good price, but wood’s very expensive now. Go and ask the other joiners the price of a coffin and you’ll see!’

  Since Monsieur Mutombo and my father can’t get him to change his mind, they get their money out and start counting. The joiner watches them, with the look of a greedy man with a tapeworm. His head bobs up and down each time a note comes out of the wallet and is laid on the bamboo table that stands in his yard. They hand over a lot of money, and he takes it and stuffs the whole lot in his pocket with a little smile that really irritates me. Then he gets the money out again, puts it back on the table and counts it as though he doesn’t trust Monsieur Mutombo and my father.

  The whole group leaves the lot. The joiner goes into his workshop and we can hear the noise of his saw cutting up the wood.

  Maman Pauline comes over to me and leans forward slightly to talk to me without the others hearing: ‘Michel, you must sleep on your own in the house tonight, your father and I are going to the wake. Don’t forget to put up your mosquito net, and to switch out the lamp when you go to sleep.’

  She hugs me tight and kisses me. It’s the first time she’s hugged me like that, and given me a kiss. My cheeks are wet with her tears. If Maman Pauline is crying, she must be really unhappy, it must all be too much for her. I don’t
want her to be unhappy. I know my mother isn’t crying for the death of Longombé. She has often told me that when someone weeps for a death outside their own family it’s because they’re thinking about their own fears. But I’m not thinking about my own fears, I’m actually thinking about how Longombé used to laugh in the workshop, the way he used to look at the women getting undressed in front of him so he could take their measurements. And when all these thoughts come into my head then I do start to feel a bit of a bug in my eye.

  I hold out my arms for my mother to kiss me again, because I don’t know if she’ll ever kiss me again one day, or if I’ll have to wait for someone else round here to die first. She stoops down so she’s at the same height as me. My voice won’t come out, I don’t know what to say to comfort her, to stop her crying over Longombé’s corpse because she’s thinking of her own fears. Since my mouth is pressed up against her ear, I whisper: ‘Maman, I’ve got something for you…’

  I take out the key and show it to her, she takes it quickly and starts crying really loud. When they hear her, the others think she’s still crying about Longombé’s death.

  I see Monsieur Mutombo, Madame Mutombo, Maman Pauline and Papa Roger all walking away with Longombé’s mother and several other people from the neighbourhood come to join them. My mother turns round every now and then to look at me. Papa Roger too. The two of them have just been talking, and I get the feeling my father has now put the key I gave Maman Pauline into his pocket. I can tell even from here, because he keeps touching his pocket, as though he’s afraid the key might disappear. I do the same thing, touching the pocket of my shorts, and I can tell there’s still a key there, the little key for opening tins of headless Moroccan sardines.

  It’s the first time I’ve been down to the river Tchinouka with Caroline. I asked her to come. I went past her house and whistled three times. I was worried it would be Lounès who came out, but I knew, too, that he wouldn’t be there, that he’d gone into town with his father to buy fabric. So the day before, when he told me he was going out with Monsieur Mutombo, I said to myself: I have to meet Caroline, it’s very important.