Nji Mama included distinctive design elements in his sketches, patterns of snakes and geckos above the doors, for example. He surrounded the windows with five rows of bamboo rather than the two typically found in Foumban. As for the entryways, he decorated them with buffalo heads instead of human faces. More important, he replaced the seemingly infinite rooms found in the former palace with a more modest number (sixty), and had the interiors painted with yellow chalk, the color of the sun. For the exteriors he chose the color of the earth in Foumban. As for the windows and the doors, they were white.
Even if these decorative features contributed to the building’s originality, it was nothing compared with what Nji Mama had already built. He was the one who had worked with the sultan on a topographical map of Bamum land in 1913, before the war. In 1920, with a team of thirty assistants, he had drawn the map of Foumban. He, again, was the architect of the Palace of All Dreams in Foumban and oversaw its building as well. His many achievements were not limited to the domain of construction: he taught in Njoya’s schools, and he was responsible for the muntgu, the palace police, as well as for the collection and transcription of Bamum folktales. And he was credited with collaborating on—or perhaps inventing—the writing system officially attributed to Njoya. Yet the master was a deeply humble man and, I might add, too respectful of the sultan to boast of his own genius. Chief architect—that was his title, and it suited him.
“You must maintain control of time, Mama!”
For the moment, humility was the only possible response to the sultan’s anger; Njoya grumbled and banged his cane on the ground, showing little concern for his interlocutor’s expertise.
“Things can’t go on like this!”
“Yes, Alareni!”
Even the most respectful forms of address failed to calm the sovereign’s anger. It had become clear that Nji Mama was lost in Yaoundé without the assistance of his younger brother Ibrahim, who was a master craftsman as well as a Muslim, and whose hours were measured by the rhythm of his five daily prayers instead of by a watch. Ibrahim had stayed behind in Foumban, managing the sultanate’s assets in Njoya’s absence.
“Donnerwetter! Damn it all!” Njoya cursed in German. “I have been working all night, and look when you arrive!”
“Yes, Fran Njoya.”
Even his praise name had no effect …
“This just can’t continue!” Njoya railed.
Here I can imagine Nji Mama risking a subversive phrase, something along the lines of “Perhaps you are working too much, Mfon Bamum?”
He couldn’t really have said anything of the kind to Njoya, even if it was cushioned by a respectful expression of gratitude. There are things that no man—other than the colonizers—ever dared say to the sultan. Besides, Njoya had always worked too much. He walked in a dreamlike state; work was his refuge, the garment in which he clothed his wounded soul. For Njoya had to protect himself from many different furies. The period of time I’m discussing actually produced abundant documentation describing Njoya’s intellectual pursuits, things of which Sara had no inkling. Why? Nebu was illiterate, yes, but good God, let’s drop the speculations! I am just the mouthpiece for the dusty archives, for the documents eaten away by roaches. Still, I’ll admit that sometimes, carried away by the scent of the leather-bound pages of the Saa’ngam, the sultan’s memoirs, I abandon myself to the flow of my dreams …
That said, I have no right to lose sight of the goal of my efforts: to explore the building that is the life of an old lady. Sara’s life.
So why not just listen to her?
“What a man he was,” said the doyenne. “What a man!”
12
The Primer of Love
“You are a good boy.”
Bertha’s voice was insistent. With one hand she held Nebu’s head while she ran a wet razor over it with the other. The child didn’t complain.
“You’ll be a handsome man.”
She filled the child’s silence with her resonant voice.
“A very handsome man.”
If Nebu had spoken, Bertha would have expected to hear words in Shüpamum, the Bamum language. That’s because the matron was a pragmatic woman. This child had come back to her, and she didn’t want to waste her second chance. She wanted to show this prodigal son the best life had to offer, and like anyone offered a second chance, she knew exactly what she had to do.
“You’ll speak better,” she added.
Her eyes plunged into Nebu’s to erase any trace of Sara in them. Did the other boy have a stutter? That’s something she wanted her new son to get over. Did he wet his bed? That, too, he needed to get over. Bertha didn’t want a mute son, either; she wanted to overcome death. Her son’s tightly shut lips gave her the opportunity she needed to slip in words of her own choosing. Yes, it was up to her to coat this child’s lips with words of love that would replace Nebu’s tragic story. Bertha knew it: her son would speak not just to say something, but to conquer his former destiny. He would need a dictionary filled with a new kind of beauty. And what of Sara? Ah, the girl retreated into her own flesh, where she spun about in silence until, little by little, she built the vocabulary of her survival. She would take as her own the boy’s phrases, which Bertha whispered to her; patiently, she would learn the language of a redefined existence.
“I will teach you the words you need,” Bertha said. “Better words. Pure words.”
Bertha was carried away by her own enthusiasm. One day, she undid her pagne and offered her full breasts to Sara, as Bamum women would do for a prodigal son! “Do you want to eat the stars?” Her hands pointed at the nipples while her eyes expressed the perfection of her happiness.
“Crazy, isn’t it?” Sara summed it up for me. She was smiling.
Even the young men from Nsimeyong were stunned.
“So did you … eat … the stars?” I asked the old lady. “Did you?”
I waited, bemused, expecting Sara to reply, “Of course not.”
But what she said was “Of course I did.”
“What?”
“Would you have refused if it were you?” the doyenne asked, showing me her nine-year-old face.
That’s how Sara came to suckle at Bertha’s breasts and swallow the matron’s new words. Bertha insisted that the pronunciation be perfect, the tone sweet. “That is what makes a sentence exquisite,” she said, “for how could a virtuous soul reside in a filthy belly?” She remembered her son; she remembered how Nebu called some women “whores.” Such awful, slavish words, Bertha eradicated them from her respectable language.
“Butterfly,” she said, pointing at her own eyes.
She had realized that Nebu would turn away during his lessons—in other words, that her new son was in the grips of an undefinable shame. For the matron, however, moral integrity was measured by how well one chose one’s words.
“Butterfly.”
The truth is that Bertha wanted no more filthy words around her. She would have loved never to pronounce them again. She would have preferred that that sort of ugliness had never existed. It was the same for all the parts of the body: words she repressed, buried deep in the cellar of her vocabulary.
“Music,” she said instead of “heart.” “Gourd” for “buttocks.” And for “girls”? I just don’t know.
The hardest part was what to call the genitals, which had no place in the matron’s duties. Maybe her trembling hands, her stammered words, the whole arsenal of Bertha’s sanitized world revealed to Sara the tragic depths that hid behind the colorful butterflies. Ah, why do children always keep quiet about the essence of things, even though they see it so clearly?
“Sky,” the matron continued. “Dance.” That was her word for “love.”
One day Nebu awoke, and everything around him was covered with words: the sky, the birds, the clouds. That’s what Sara told me.
“A universe of love, then,” I replied, amused.
“Yes.”
“You know,” Bertha said to
her, “you always loved to eat.” And Nebu suckled at the matron’s breast as tears ran from Bertha’s eyes. He ate up Bertha’s words hungrily, and his full belly illuminated his delicious intelligence. He came to differentiate more and more clearly the unique faces of the identically dressed artists and artisans. It was as if the key to this busy royal court was found in the gluttonous grammar of his suckling. In his belly, Njoya’s world seemed liquid. In no time he had digested everyone’s name, but Mount Pleasant never became a place he could really call home.
The doyenne still remembered vividly the day she was first introduced to Nji Mama. Bertha saw the man walk by and greeted him with a whisper. The architect turned around. He had a graying goatee and deep, thoughtful eyes. His boubou, a flowing wide-sleeved robe, was made of cloth woven from bark and cut in the style traditionally worn by artisans. There was no pretension about him. No one would have guessed he was a master craftsman. The way he replied to Bertha reflected his humble dignity. The matron, on the other hand, had practically thrown herself onto the ground to salute him, uncovering the nobleman’s finely made sandals.
Later she confided to Nebu, “That was Nji Mama.”
The architect was an especially striking figure. He was present in Njoya’s chambers every day and at all hours, drawing maps, making sketches. People said he was working on a watch. When he wasn’t with Njoya, Nebu would see his silhouette moving quickly through the corridors, suddenly appearing right next to the boy, lost in thoughts he did not share. Other times Nebu would hear his sandals scuffing along. Who didn’t recognize him? Who had never passed by his dreamer’s face?
“Ma-ma,” that was the first word Nebu said in Shüpamum. Bertha, who had waited so long to hear it, was speechless. But for an entirely different reason: by speaking to his elder like an equal, before he had been spoken to, the child had broken a taboo.
“Pay no attention to what he is saying, master,” she beseeched the architect, at whom Nebu was pointing. “He’s only a child.”
“He’s a good child,” said the architect.
Bertha added, “His name is Nebu.”
“What a coincidence!” he exclaimed, visibly grasping for a distant memory. “He has the same name as your son, doesn’t he?”
Nji Mama’s thoughts were elsewhere; otherwise he would have heard Bertha’s whispered reply. “He … is … my … son!”
At this turn in Sara’s tale, I could only smile, for I knew something about the interweaving of names, lives, and destinies. Weren’t we, after all, and after eighty years, still caught in the web of this game that had first made the doyenne burst out laughing and then open her lips to tell her story? Even if our roles, unsettled by the secrets Sara and Bertha kept, were no longer the same, we were still enmeshed in a very strange love story.
“Yes, what a coincidence!” Bertha replied to the chief architect, this time out loud.
“What a coincidence!”
The man moved on, the echoes of his steps retreating along the corridors of the house.
Like a schoolmaster, Nji Mama always repeated what people said to him. Lost in his thoughts, he hadn’t noticed the happiness written on the face of this reborn mother.
13
A Hell of a Car!
It took a while to get over a visit from Charles Atangana. It wasn’t Nji Mama who would announce the chief’s arrival, but the commotion triggered by the appearance of his car in Mount Pleasant. He came to pay his respects to the sultan, as he regularly did, but this time he obviously also wanted to introduce the yellow-and-black Cadillac, the Golden Car he had purchased at the Colonial Exhibition. Charles Atangana wasn’t the first person in the city to have a car. There were a good number of whites who had them. Everybody recognized the high commissioner’s black Peugeot—or had at least heard of it. Njoya also had one; its skeleton, sitting there in the courtyard, had, through life’s twists and turns, ended up as a plaything for the children. For them, there was nothing trivial about hearing the roar of a real engine—vroom!—nor about seeing an automobile appear in the distance and slowly make its way into their lives. When its horn set the universe in motion, even the adults stopped dead, dropped what they were doing, and ran after the machine, shouting and clapping, their bodies clothed in a cloud of dust.
The artisans, servants, even the animals of Mount Pleasant followed the chief’s vehicle into the sultan’s courtyard. This was just the start of a long-standing fascination, for even after cars had become banal, the Cameroonian government would choose yellow as the color for taxicabs, as if to remind everyone of the chief’s mythic Cadillac.
This event gave Nebu his first real chance to leave Bertha’s house. How so? The boy just gaily followed the crowd, mesmerized by the machine’s magical movement; that was how he learned to navigate the corridors and gardens of Mount Pleasant. Neither Bertha’s breasts nor her calls could hold him back. No more than could Nji Mama’s threats rein in the children dancing around the miracle. Not to mention their parents, who stood there gaping. When the chief emerged from his infernal machine and stood in front of everyone, a long cigar in one hand and his foot on the running board, the collective frenzy reached a crescendo. Decked out, hat to socks, in the same color as his car, it seemed as if he were waiting for someone to take a picture. The sultan himself couldn’t stay away.
Charles Atangana’s explosive laughter wasn’t enough to silence the din caused by his arrival. Faced with such a technological marvel, the sultan, too, was like a child with new sandals. The chief glowed with pride as his friend walked around the machine, silently examining it piece by piece. Then he opened the door wide, as if inviting the whole breathless crowd into the secret realm of the gods.
“Aren’t you coming?” he asked Njoya, who had come out without his cane.
Charles Atangana’s voice rose above the crowd’s chatter and took hold of the sultan, who still hesitated to get into this Car of Light. It was a far cry from Njoya’s old red pickup truck, you have to admit. Luckily, he hadn’t been caught totally off guard, for he was dressed in his best.
“Donnerwetter,” he said at last. “God damn!”
His daughter Ngutane was the first to get into the vehicle of temptation. No one who knew her was surprised. Ngutane, oh Ngutane! The way she walked was an artistic manifesto. No one could imitate how she swayed her hips from left to right! Years earlier in Foumban, she had been the first to wear a brightly colored fabric that was all the rage in Berlin—a gift from the German schoolteacher, Fräulein Wuhrmann. Afterward she had ordered her tailors to make her a dress fashioned after the boys’ clothes she’d seen in the Quelle catalogs her Swiss friend collected.
In the Basel archives there are two photographs of her in fashionable outfits. I was able to interview people in Foumban who remembered seeing her coming down the Artists’ Alley in Foumban, wearing a broad red hat and high-heeled shoes, like some showgirl right off the stage of the Winterpalast theater in Berlin. She wasn’t known as Nji Mongu—the first daughter—for nothing. So she got into the car first and asked her father to follow her, as no one else would have dared to do. Njoya had never refused her anything. I don’t need to tell you that she would also be the first woman in Cameroon to drive a car—the very same one, in fact, that she had just gotten into. Yes, she’d convince the chief to teach her to drive! For the moment, she was glowing—not because of her audacity, but out of sheer happiness. She adjusted her outfit and waved goodbye to everyone through the window.
“Next time,” the chief said, “we’ll all go on a tour of the city.”
This time, he added, he just wanted to show the sultan his new acquisition.
“Show? What a joke! Then he started the engine, supposedly on account of Ngutane,” the doyenne stressed. Ngutane was the only woman who dared to be so presumptuous in the company of these powerful men. Oh, I know, maybe Sara exaggerated her character. But that’s not what’s most important, for one fact remains: the chief was always filled with a joy that had deserted Mount
Pleasant. Ngutane’s rush to get into his car was just a response to the melancholy that inhabited her father’s chambers. The sultan had opted to bury himself in his scientific experiments. He had traded the responsibilities his position previously imposed on him for the comfort provided in exile by his machines. He still allowed his daughter to read him the newspapers, because he couldn’t give them up. Ngutane relished this duty, for it kept her up-to-date with the changing fashions of the European capitals.
This child’s tastes (Njoya called Ngutane “his child,” even though she was already married and a mother herself) drew her to the Journal illustré; its pages of pictures fed straight into her dreams. The only drawback was that she often had to wait months for her copy. At least the French hadn’t outright forbidden Njoya to read European magazines, a habit of his that dated back to his friendship with the missionary Göhring.
Göhring was the first to write an article about the sultan. That was how the friendship started. The Swiss missionary had had to translate and read the article to the sultan, who then wanted to know what else was in the magazine, Der evangelishe Heidenbote. Narcissistic curiosity is at the root of many an extravagance. After reading all the magazine’s pages, the missionary thought to continue by reading the Bible, starting with the Old Testament. When the unbelievable stories of that book failed to whet the monarch’s appetite, Göhring moved on to Thomas Mann’s massive novel Buddenbrooks, which he used both to kill time and as a pillow. And wouldn’t you know, that exemplar of German literature, a bestseller in its day, captivated Njoya, who valued family above all else.
But let’s get back to Ngutane, who, after completing her studies at the German school, took on the role of her father’s reader, a function Göhring had held till then. Only a truly shortsighted colonial officer could have written what I saw in the archives: that Ngutane’s love of European clothing was a reflection of her vanity. How could anyone forget that she would also become Cameroon’s first woman of letters? Ah, it seems the French colonial chroniclers dismissed these reading sessions, for there is no mention in their records of a reader named Ngutane, although they made repeated reference to the “grandiloquent dreams” of the sultan’s daughter.
Mount Pleasant Page 5
