“You know how Catholic priests are,” she added slyly.
I asked her why she had run to him, since I remembered her telling me that she didn’t like this hunter of pagans, and why she hadn’t taken advantage of this opportunity to run away from Mount Pleasant. She smiled and, once again, contradicted herself.
“Where would I have gone?”
I was about to say, “Back to your mother’s,” but the doyenne continued on and confessed, “Maybe I went to him because I knew he could perform miracles.”
“You believed that?”
She burst out laughing.
“I was just a child,” she explained. “But I didn’t stay in his church. Just between you and me, it was far better to be Bertha’s son than one of his nuns, don’t you think?”
Really?
16
The Song of the Red Earth
As the proverb says, the past is a path that only those with ears can see. I don’t know if it’s Bamum, Ewondo, or Bamiléké. What I do know is that I’d have said the opposite: “That only those with eyes can hear.” Sara had long since ceased suckling, but the matron’s breasts hadn’t stopped producing milk. Nor had her language lessons come to an end. The rug woven by her love had grown into an unparalleled syllabary. Her vocabulary bordered on poetry. Sometimes she was so caught up in her newfound maternity that she began to sing and occasionally even danced a few steps.
In fact, what she told her son in a series of perfect words was a love story. A song a mother sings to her little boy so he’ll fall asleep smiling, and also to warn him about the heartaches sure to come. A song people whistled in their gardens and in their rooms, sometimes whispered like a prayer by girls in love. A song of calamity, of deep suffering, despite the beauty of its words; a song so sublime and poignant, I must say, that Bertha had tears in her eyes each time she sang it. With a few small exceptions, her song told of a lost land.
For the matron, this song blazed with an incandescent memory. A memory swathed in purple. Clearly, Bertha couldn’t continue to hum her heartfelt song after the drama that took place in the sultan’s room. The inhabitants of Mount Pleasant wouldn’t allow it. It made the walls of the house shiver, for its verses roused the memory of the red earth of Bamum land that, when it rains, holds tight to your sandals to prevent you from abandoning it.
“Do you want to kill us with that song of yours?” a woman asked one day when she heard the matron singing in her room.
“Stop!” ordered another voice.
“Enough is enough!”
“Shut up, woman!”
Thankfully, amidst the angry chorus of voices, some conciliatory words were heard.
“Why don’t you sing a different song, Bertha?” one woman suggested.
The echo of the names—Ngosso! Manga! Samba!—that Njoya had cried out in his suffering still rang in everyone’s memory, especially the elders. It was out of the question that the matron intone a song describing how she’d lived as a slave before the exile:
“No more bad memories!”
The prohibition was total:
“No more sad songs!”
“A joyful song!”
“A hymn to joy!”
“To life!”
To put an end to the list, someone suggested, “Say, Bertha, do you want us to hang ourselves because we’re in exile?”
“Because we’re so far from Foumban?”
“Because we’re in Yaoundé?”
Someone else added, “Do you want the sultan to kill himself because he fell?”
Sultan Njoya’s agony wasn’t something to make light of. Scenes describing the fate of slaves when monarchs died flooded the matron’s mind and shut her lips. She thought of her own fate. Then the fate of the royal wives. This made her angry, for she wanted to think only of her son, of Nebu, of life in Foumban. Maybe she was trying to defend herself against the unexpected turns life had taken when she decided to describe her son as a young man and to tell Sara the story of his adolescence. After all, Nebu’s life was just another version of her own!
One morning Bertha declared, “Nebu killed his own father.”
Her voice was calm, as if she had uttered that shocking phrase many times before.
“Yes, he killed his own father.”
Was this some sort of joke?
No. She continued: “But the Dog deserved to die!”
Sara had to get used to hearing the matron call her husband “the Dog.” Bertha’s deranged voice and her conspiratorial glance were enough to catch the girl’s attention, despite the feeling she occasionally had that she was back in the sewer she thought she had escaped the day Uncle Owona’s eyes had disappeared. Her ears recorded all the details of Nebu’s story. And Bertha described her son, for wasn’t it important that the girl listening know whose place she had taken?
“What a kind boy he was,” she said. “An angel!”
Sara tried to get ahold of herself as the matron continued.
“A good boy, really.”
The matron’s eyes filled with tears when she repeated, “Good boy.”
And then she added, “But he was possessed by the Devil.”
She spit out the word “Devil,” and her tears turned into lines of fire, which she hoped would protect Sara.
“Like his father, that Dog!”
This is what Sara could understand of the matron’s tale, so often interrupted by curses and tears: Bertha had nursed a feeling that could only be a luxury for many women in Foumban—jealousy. Of what? She couldn’t stop imagining her man—the one she’d been given to—off in the company of other women. As she saw it, her husband had married her, “so she deserved his love.” Outrageous words, especially when spoken by a woman of her lowly status among the Bamum. Still, Bertha, a slave, concocted many schemes to attract and hold on to “her man.”
Once, she staged a suicide. She certainly didn’t lack imagination! A few drops of goat’s blood on her and the Dog would be the most infamous man on the planet. Because she was an intelligent woman, however, the matron realized that since her husband already had enough saved up to buy a new wife, the suicide of his first one would only give him more freedom.
“A woman is the remedy for a woman”: that’s the treacherous wisdom men circulate among themselves, and the Bamum are no exception. At the same time, it’s impossible to keep faking suicide. Bertha’s husband hadn’t even asked her why she wanted to die; he had already closed the chapter of his life in which she was his only wife. One could conclude that a sinful longing had surged through his manly flesh, reminding him that while he was still making do with a monogamous life, all the other members of his cohort, the men of his clan with whom he had come of age, were already surrounded by several wives. To say that this gentleman had to make up for lost time is to underestimate the pressure he endured in the company of his fellows. He was a scribe, of course, and intellectual work pays very little. He might not have been innately inclined to polygamy, but he felt obliged by peer pressure to take another wife.
Every man wants more than one wife, he told himself. He just doesn’t know it yet. This phrase, which wasn’t his own but belonged to one of his friends, was soon his favorite. The problem is that he came to this decision quite late in his life. His son Nebu’s voice had already changed, and now he was showing signs of a beard. To be blunt, Nebu had also begun to look at women with a gleam in his eye. Nebu knew, of course, that he couldn’t lay claim to a girl, for, as the son of a captive mother, he had no rights. But still, his eyes, and especially his penis, refused to abide by the rules imposed by his condition. They each reacted quite independently when a girl passed by, his left eye in particular. Sometimes his loincloth seemed to catch fire. Then his tears flowed and his face grew hot. He felt something hard between his legs; thankfully, no one else knew about this insurgence of his flesh.
“What’s wrong?” Bertha asked whenever she happened upon Nebu in those moments of searing pain.
Nebu kept quiet.
“It’s the onions,” he’d say, even though his mother wasn’t cooking. “Onions.”
In those times, many slaves turned to animals. Often a cow or a dog would be heard crying out in the night. Nebu preferred to dream of women he couldn’t have. One day Bertha caught him lying in the fields, waving his arms and crying, alone but for the sun overhead. That day her maternal heart grew light, for after all, she told herself, the earth is an acceptable substitute. But she didn’t want to catch her son indulging in that way twice. She warned him never to forget that he would be doubly punished if he was caught lusting after a woman promised to a free man. The Bamum laws were very clear about what would happen if a male slave made love to a free woman. Still, it was even more dangerous to do it to animals. Just the thought of such things made Bertha sick.
Perhaps Nebu’s desire was fanned by knowing that if caught, he would be stoned. Bertha couldn’t ever be sure; male logic is so strange. She told her son that the flames felt by slaves—who, like him, couldn’t stop looking at other men’s women—would be with them when they were hanged. It’s true; there were many free women who slowed down on their way back from the river whenever they reached groups of slaves working along the path. Some shook their behinds slowly before the captive audience, the calabashes balanced on their heads highlighting their shapely bodies. Ah, there are moments, Bertha’s son said to himself, when the stoning promised by proverb-spouting elders doesn’t amount to much when compared with a man’s unquenchable desire. Other women would let their pagnes fall—oops!—as they settled a container of water on their heads, displaying their nudity for all to see. A slave would run to help the indiscreet woman with her impossible burden and her independent-minded garments, but gallantry was all he was permitted. Nebu’s body showed such evident signs of virility that the expert hands of many women lost their assurance in the middle of tasks as mundane as drawing water, and they’d spread their legs, which had already been offered up against their will to old men.
Let’s turn back for a minute to his mother, Bertha, the jealous woman who already couldn’t bear the idea of sharing her husband with another woman; yes, let’s imagine what she was like then. That she suffered sleepless nights, overwhelmed by the fear of seeing her son castrated right in the center of town or stoned because he had touched a nobleman’s woman: Wasn’t that the worst? Let’s imagine Bertha, already torn apart by her suffering, finally confronting her fate the day a noble girl came knocking at her door, tears streaming down her face, and told her, between exaggerated sobs, that she had been raped.
The girl’s name was Ngungure.
“Raped?”
Bertha stood up in her kitchen and automatically retied her pagne, tightening the knot under her arm. The day she feared had finally come, she was certain of it. She looked closely at the girl she’d been expecting since the birth of her son’s desire; she examined this “ugly face” and smiled, for it was all too evident: in Foumban, only an accusation of rape could open the doors of matrimony to such an ugly woman.
“By whom?”
“Nebu.”
17
Red Is the Western Soil
A mother is her son’s first advocate. It goes without saying that Bertha defended Nebu all the more vigorously since the charges were serious. Faced with this girl who wanted nothing less than her boy’s head, she felt maternal love squeeze her heart tight, grab onto her throat, her hands, her feet, and transform itself into an enormous burst of laughter that sent her flying out of her kitchen and into her courtyard, where she said the very phrase that every mother the world over would have said in her place: “Not my son, no way!”
She was categorical.
“Not Nebu!”
She clapped her hands to underscore her certainty, then covered her lips with the palm of her hand, bent her head, and let loose with the traditional cry of Bamum women: “Woudididi!”
Does idiocy know no limits? No. Bertha had seen it all before, for God’s sake, but this time she had seen right through the plot. Behind the flowing tears of that girl, she had caught sight of cold calculation inspired by a raw desire for cock.
“Why didn’t you go to the palace?”
The girl stood in the kitchen doorway biting her nails. Nebu’s mother understood that the bitch preferred the implacable justice of a woman to the proverbs of old men.
“What do you want me to do?” Bertha asked.
The girl sucked her thumb.
“Kill my own son?”
“No,” she replied.
Bertha was furious. “So just what do you want?”
Why does love always come hand in hand with suffering? That’s a question Bertha would ask herself only much later. For the moment, what she felt flowing through her veins was desire: the desire to strangle this girl, to cut off her childish fingers, to tear out her tongue. Yet the matron’s trembling hands did nothing more than reach out and slap Ngungure’s quivering mouth just as the girl was opening her lips to conjugate a verb Bertha could not bear to hear.
“I love—”
“Stop sucking your thumb,” Bertha cut in, “you hussy!”
Ngungure couldn’t finish the sentence as she had wanted. “… your son…”
Ah, this is the end of Foumban, Bertha thought. There was a time when a girl, and a noble to boot, never would have come into the courtyard of a slave to conjugate the verb “to love” so brazenly! Love? Bertha was a more than reasonable woman. She remembered her son’s face, scrunched tight, that time she’d caught him in the yam field. Then her face brightened at the thought that if he had finally found the woman who wanted nothing more than to touch him all she could, so much the better. She bought the girl’s silence with a few cowrie shells and then lectured her son. Of course, she neglected to tell her husband the details of this exchange. For her, it was over, a done deal, old news, and she could move on to something else.
When her husband informed her that evening that he had fallen in love, Bertha couldn’t help but burst out laughing a second time.
“You too?” she said.
She again covered her lips with the palm of her hand: “Woudididididi!” She made a couple of jokes about this epidemic of love that had taken over Foumban and then told her man he should be ashamed of himself. He should be getting ready instead for their son’s wedding. That’s when she began to hate the Dog. The borders between love and hatred are porous, as we all know, especially for a jealous woman. Bertha knew her husband wasn’t talking about her when he confessed he was in love. There are things one just doesn’t ask. But what wouldn’t the matron have given to know what hussy was responsible for this trick!
Things moved ahead rather quickly.
A few months later the Dog announced he had decided to get married again. Bertha couldn’t believe her eyes when he introduced her to the woman he had chosen—“a good girl,” he said. Yes, Ngungure, the very same one who had knocked on her kitchen door, a grotesque accusation against her beloved son on her lips. So when the Dog moved into a new house, the House of Passion he had built for the “Devil” (that’s what Bertha, who was Christian, called her), the matron saw a weed sprout up in her courtyard. Never had a silence been so strongly imposed, nor so accursed. “She really got me,” Bertha said, and she slapped herself for having underestimated the machinations of that hussy. “She really got me good!”
But that’s not all. She blamed herself for underestimating girls. “I would have killed her,” she went on, her eyes growing red. “I should have killed her.”
She couldn’t hide the powerlessness of her empty hands to commit the crime she desired. Her husband was so much in love that he went to Habisch, the local Swiss merchant, to buy himself some European clothes: a green jacket, a black belt, and white gloves. He also bought black shoes with white trim. The merchant advised him on what to buy: this is what Europeans wore when they got married. He invited his first wife to his wedding. Bamum la
w required it. The poor woman, whose love had already turned to hatred, thought of the many stupid things she could do to destroy this Europeanized joy that had planted its accursed roots in her courtyard. She could have started scabrous rumors: that the Dog’s wife was polyandrous, for example. But she restrained herself: as a co-wife, her opinion counted for nothing and would only make people laugh. Bertha also thought about shouting that the wedding was scandalous, shouting it so everyone could hear, but she remembered that it was in her best interest that the ceremony take place as planned. She didn’t want to have to flee because she was accused of witchcraft. Nothing worse could be said in Foumban!
Suspected of jealousy, Bertha would have lost all her standing, and like any other man taking a second wife, the Dog would have just laughed off her warnings. “Ridiculous!” That’s what he would have said. The jealous woman could feel the words dissolving in her mouth, but she still refused to keep quiet. And then there was her son. He offered no consolation: Wasn’t that Nebu she saw sidling along the walls to sneak into the House of Passion when his father was in the fields? The boy was so determined that only the threat of a curse from his mother slowed his steps—and then just for an instant!
“What are you doing over there?” Bertha demanded. “Do you want to die?”
She soon realized her questions were lost on the puzzled face of a boy who no longer knew what to do about his raging penis. Nebu could see no farther than his own erection.
“So curse me then,” he told his mother. “What difference would it make!”
“It’s your father!”
“He took my woman!”
If Nebu forgot he was talking to his mother, he remembered that Bertha had once before given her tacit blessing to his relationship with Ngungure. But because Nebu’s spirit was on fire, he forgot that Ngungure was now his father’s wife. He was already cursed! His mother saw that he was engulfed by the flames she had first seen light up his eyes.
Mount Pleasant Page 7
