Mount Pleasant

by Patrice Nganang

  “Let them stone me!” the son said.

  He meant the muntgu, the sultan’s police: they would stone him. And he imagined this horrific outcome over and over, even as he was screwing his father’s wife. Love? Oh, Nebu was already stoned, stoned! He didn’t need to die again. He was already dead, and his laughter in his father’s bedroom made his mother bleed again and again, bleed herself dry.

  “Burn down the house,” he added. “Burn us with it!”

  “You are my son,” Bertha replied.

  The mother’s dilemma wasn’t the same as the son’s.

  “I am a man.”

  “You are my child.” Bertha took his hands, pulled him in toward her chest, and pulled out a breast for him to suckle. “My son.”

  There is an age when a mother’s milk becomes bitter for the child.

  “Leave me alone!” Nebu shouted.

  He would rather his thirst be quenched by the flames of a fire than do his mother’s bidding. He would have preferred to express openly his love for his father’s wife, his girlfriend. In Foumban, many first wives had set fire to their co-wife’s house, but their jealousy never succeeded in bringing their husbands home. Nothing—not even being a mother—could protect a woman from the rage of a mob of men determined to avenge the humiliation of their fellow. It was always the woman who was exiled from the sultanate. That’s what the law said. So Bertha squelched her motherly fears and her wifely pains. There was already suffering enough.

  Had she set fire to Ngungure’s house, she would have said, “I did it for my son,” and all the men would have burst out laughing. “Find something more original, woman.”

  Bertha could already see her son being stoned. She pulled back in fear. Tears ran down her cheeks. Tears of love for her son on her right cheek and tears of hatred for her husband on the left. For the first time since Nebu’s birth, her womb contracted, as if in labor, as if she were again giving birth to this son she already saw dead.

  According to the doyenne, when the matron told this story, she kept hold of her belly, so unbearable was her pain. As Sara took in the terror provoked by the matron’s revelations, a look of compassion appeared on her face. I want to be Nebu, she thought, the son so beloved.

  She knew that a story once told can’t be untold; in that, it is similar to life itself. Bertha’s voice cracked under her pained cries—“Woudidididi”—as she sought to bury the wail she had repressed in Mount Pleasant as well as in far-off Foumban, as she sought a place to hide her defeated eyes from her unlikely son. That was only the beginning of a long and shameful story from which she hoped Sara would save her—the seventeenth chapter of a humiliation that had first left its mark on her neck and stained her hands with the horrific brutality of a crime before stealing her faith in the girls entrusted to her care. Still, she insisted, “The Devil stole my child.”

  She hadn’t stopped calling Ngungure the Devil.

  The start of this story left no doubt in Sara’s mind. Now she knew why Bertha had been so happy at her son’s return, and why she wanted to give birth to him once more.

  “Strange that she didn’t censor her story,” I commented. “You were only nine years old.”

  “She had been through hell,” the doyenne explained. “Regardless of the words she chose, her mind could only be dirty.”

  Sara’s eyes gave me an idea of this hell.

  “The poor woman was spitting flames without realizing it; she was eating shit and couldn’t even smell it anymore.”

  Sara was telling Bertha’s story—this was clear to me after just a few sessions—in order to escape from the furnace she had kept burning for eighty years, to put out the fire that had been set all around her. Bertha, meanwhile, kept inventing new words, the wounded flowers of her sublime vocabulary, to make up for the filth of her macabre existence. Listening to the matron’s suffering ate up Sara’s childhood day after day, one chapter after the other. As for me, I couldn’t keep from wondering: Was it better to transmit such stories to a child or to let a little girl disappear in the obscure chambers of a sultan’s life? In a way, it seemed to me that there wasn’t much difference. A story can also rape a soul.

  With her tales, the matron made Sara painfully aware of the hell she had lived through herself and gave her a glimpse of the paradise of a love Sara wanted to hear more about. I opened my ears like one might open an engine’s valves. The spoken word was the only connection between those two souls, those two worlds, but that only made the depth of their shared silence more evident.

  Life is a story as much as it is a destiny.

  18

  A Decidedly Scattered Story

  Each of us is a kaleidoscope of our times. Events that take place in the most far-flung corners of the earth must have repercussions in the world’s capital; delusion alone lets us believe it’s possible to live in isolation on this globe. To love is to accept the unexpected that knocks on destiny’s door. Maternal love is a metaphor for the strange relationship that links us to beings who have always been there and who are, in the end, as unknown to us as a newborn babe who has his whole long life before him to surprise us. In thread after thread of the doyenne’s tale, I discovered the infinite knots of a soul’s testimony; the old mama revealed the world of a woman whose name I shared and who was so far removed from me, so different!

  “I know that you didn’t speak,” I began one day, “but if you had asked Bertha questions, what would have been the first one?”

  Sara looked at me for a moment.

  “I knew you’d come back to that.”

  “To what?”

  “The scar on her neck.”

  The old mama was wrong. I wanted to get back to Samba, Ngosso, and Manga, to know who they were and above all why Njoya had their names on his lips the day of his collapse. She didn’t give me the time to ask. She took a pinch of her tobacco and opened wide both her eyes and her mouth, as if she wanted to swallow me up; then she froze in that position. She didn’t sneeze, no. We both laughed when I admitted that she’d scared me. Truthfully, it was hard for me to adapt to the zigzag rhythm of her narrative, to melt into the multiple lives she spread out before me. She alone controlled the tempo of her tale.

  So I settled myself into the tale she chose for me.

  “So, did she get that scar from her husband?”

  That would have made sense, right? But no.

  “Stories can wound us as well,” was Sara’s reply. “Don’t you know that?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  I would have liked a more direct answer to my questions, but I couldn’t find the words to make her understand that. I wanted her to respect the logic of her tale and to slake my greedy thirst for it with a series of goblets. The more I opened myself up to take in her stories, the more I got lost in Mount Pleasant’s corridors, and the more simple questions bubbled up in my mind: Who was Sara? Who were her parents? Yes, who was her father?

  “Why are you so impatient?”: that’s how she would have replied. Her tale had shown me a museum of the colonial era, introducing me to unknown figures, like Nebu, and to luminaries, like Njoya and Atangana, as well as to history’s illustrious martyrs—Ngosso, Manga, Samba—and who else? There are stories that don’t need a plot. Sooner or later they rise above the confusion and untangle their mysteries in a series of sentences.

  Sara was carried away by Bertha’s story. And since the end is, in some ways, also a beginning, Sara realized that the matron’s suffering was only just beginning on that day when she reached the bloody borders of her madness. If Bertha had taken little Sara’s tale seriously, she would have heard echoes of Nebu’s tale in the soft barks this girl with the enigmatic past made each time Bertha shaved her head.

  “No,” the doyenne continued, somewhat irritated. “It wasn’t her husband who gave her the scar. We’re just at the start of Nebu’s story.”

  Sara took another pinch of tobacco. Once again she didn’t sneeze, but before continuing, she tucked her snuff back into her c
leavage and opened her eyes so wide it was as if she were opening the Book of Life.

  “You’re just not going to believe what’s coming next.”

  Sometimes even the most attentive listener needs to take a break. Bertha knew that. But life is a tobacco seller whose stand you just keep coming back to. Like the wandering imagination of an old lady. Sara, or rather the boy she had become, had to set aside the story of Nebu’s adolescence before it was done, because there was work to do. There was the sultan. And in his coma, the monarch couldn’t wait. If you recall, he had turned all of Mount Pleasant upside down. Apoplexy is no joke, even today. And in the 1930s? In colonial Yaoundé, where the central hospital hadn’t yet been built? Ask me about it—or let’s ask Sara. Or the archives.

  There are many explanations for Njoya’s survival. For example, the medical priest, Father Vogt, wrote in his circular #37 that it was the Hand of God that performed the healing. I can easily imagine that in his methodical heart, the prelate thanked the Lord for this miracle obtained without the usual candies, which was sure to pay real dividends soon. Weren’t the rooms of Mount Pleasant the places in the city where the resistance to his hunt for pagans was the greatest? On the other hand, Njoya’s doctors attributed their sovereign’s survival to the ancestors, to Nchare Yen, the founding father, in particular, and to the titular spirit of Rifum, the motherland of the Bamum. Yet these learned men couldn’t say why the sultan had come through his unhappy night but remained captive in an inexplicable sleep. Of course, no one asked young Nebu what he thought about it. But if someone had, he would have voted for a miracle. He remembered the collective sigh let out by the compound when Father Vogt, who’d been listening to Njoya’s heart, declared to all those around, “He’s still breathing!”

  The phrase had been quickly repeated, echoing through the palace’s many courtyards and corridors.

  “He’s breathing!”

  “Thank God,” everyone cried. “He’s breathing!”

  Clearly the worst had been avoided, even if no one could say what the future might hold.

  The sultan’s apartments soon became the destination of a never-ending pilgrimage, although during the first days of his illness very few people were allowed into his bedroom. Thankfully, Nebu was among them. His duties had kept him there. So the boy was present when Chief Atangana came back to see his friend, this time keeping a low profile. Nebu was there as well when Marchand, the French high commissioner, paid him a visit. Since the events in Foumban with Lieutenant Prestat, the French had always preferred to work through intermediaries rather than with Njoya himself: first with Fompouyom, the sultan’s official representative in Foumban, then with Nji Moluh, another of Njoya’s sons, with whom they believed they were building a future.

  “I was there,” Sara told me, “when the white man came.”

  The high commissioner’s visit was a political event and was treated as such. If for some, such as Nji Mama, the man had no other reason for coming than to “see with his own eyes” that the sultan wasn’t already dead, for others, including Ngutane, this visit was more of an opportunity for diplomacy. With that in mind, she wore her finest garb, a ndop in the Bamum style, made of cotton with a pattern in indigo.

  She was making a statement. Ngutane had not forgotten that the French had refused her father the help he needed, not only to repair his truck, but to get his life back on track. And when his family arrived in the capital, the colonial administrator had looked at the vehicle that had carried the sultan over the most dangerous pathways of his exile and said, “Well, it’s junk now!” How could she forget that? That her father had opted to let the truck rot in his courtyard was no surprise. Njoya’s truck had become the most visible symbol of the deterioration of the relationship between the royal family and the French.

  The French official didn’t stay long. He held his tongue, well aware that his mere presence was potentially explosive. Or maybe he finally understood that the Bamum were covering their shame with proud apparel. He brought several books, novels, as gifts for the sultan. They were accepted as marks of his humanity. After he left, Ngutane was seen reading aloud in her father’s room the pages of a French newspaper that the high commissioner had added to his list of gifts. There was no better way to soothe that woman’s wounded heart, for it was an edition of the Journal illustré.

  Njoya lay quite still when she read. The sultan was shut off in his own private conversation with death. His daughter held his hand and, under the glow of a lamp, read the news of the world for an hour before getting up to dry her tears. Never before had she seen her father so weak. But she didn’t flinch. What precisely did she read during those dark hours? In the boxes where Njoya’s things are stored, I found copies of papers, the Nouvelles coloniales and the Gazette de Paris. But also a book by Hugo, The Art of Being a Grandfather. Because Europeans tend to frame everything in terms of their own reference points, I can imagine one of the sultan’s French visitors (a colonial clown, shall we say) giving him that book in hopes that the sultan would, in exile, become like Hugo, a sort of “Guernsey patriarch.” And—why not?—the official could invoke Njoya’s triumphant return from exile, a return that would coincide with the end of French colonization. Still, there’s no better way to saw off the branch on which one is seated!

  It was probably the priest who brought Njoya the French Bible I found among the sultan’s things. It’s hard to believe Ngutane would read pages from the Bible to her father; this man of science had not been very impressed by the stories of Jacob, Noah, and the others, which Göhring had translated for him back in 1913. Ngutane was clearly aware that her father, shocked by the excesses of the Christian God, had decided to write his own Book of Faith—his famous Nuet Nkuete, which he filled with stories the average Bamum would believe. More than biblical stories and their promises of eternal life, it was the joy of hearing tales told by his descendants that would give him a reason to live, wasn’t it?

  “Ngutane knew that for Njoya, words were like an intravenous injection,” Sara affirmed.

  “And Nebu?” I asked.

  Nebu? There was a different story ringing in his ears. A story of the flesh that consumed him entirely at the very moment he arrived home.

  Bertha didn’t even give him a chance to undress.

  19

  What Begins in Foumban Ends in Foumban

  Foumban, 1913. The question really wasn’t if but when Nebu’s father would see through the chaos of his House of Passion; that’s what the boy told himself. His mother was also sure it would happen soon, even if her wildest nightmares couldn’t predict the outcome of his story. As for the Dog, his friends were just waiting for the juicy details of the nights in his second wedding bed. Impatiently waiting! He knew that his spicy bedtime tale would finally put him on the pedestal they had left empty for too long. After two or three months of wild passion, fueled by all the mbitacola and the other aphrodisiacs he ingested, he decided he had enough stuff to tell his story.

  His mouth full of words, he ran to the raffia-wine seller, where he hoped to find his friends waiting with open ears. Rubbing his hands, he couldn’t imagine that his friends, tired of waiting, had headed off in search of other entertainment. Or that maybe they’d found something to distract them that was not merely a repeat of the stories of their own second weddings, even if they were told by an excited new convert. All he would have needed was a bit of common sense, but that was the first thing he had thrown out the window, along with his loincloth. Bertha could attest to that! Like any smitten man, her husband believed his story was unique. So when, dressed in his European finery to make a real impression, he arrived at the place where he usually found his friends, no one was there. Even the wine seller, who was usually surrounded by a crowd of loud customers, was nowhere to be found. The Dog was dumbfounded. He searched all around Foumban before finally giving up at noon. “To hell with the jealous bastards!”

  So he headed back to the House of Passion. The thought of finding Ngungure and
picking up right where they’d left off gave wings to his feet. In the song on his lips, she was the most beautiful woman on earth. He stopped dead when he arrived in front of the house. He could hear frolicking going on inside, and he wasn’t there. He concentrated hard to be sure of what his ears were telling him. Aie! Cries coming faster and faster, the sound of a repeated effort, rising higher and higher, and then? And then? A song of silence burst into a loud chorus.

  The Dog froze in his tracks. He watched the walls of the House of Passion shaking, shaking, shaking. Horrified, he put his hands on his head. “Woyo-o!”

  As if possessed, he burst into a wicked cackle. “Woyo-o!” But even a laugh like that couldn’t relieve the tension building up inside him. His hurried steps brought him to the door of the house, out of breath but sure of himself, mouth agape but full of words: in short, a shattered man. What he saw was beyond belief. What he saw was unnameable. His feet, his head, his hands all moved to grasp his cutlass. Deep within he felt an urgent need to kill what he couldn’t even name, to silence the wicked laughter of the House of Passion, laughter that could come only from lips open in betrayal.

  “Schwein!” he shouted in German. “Pig!”

  What stopped the Dog’s advance was his son’s face, which suddenly appeared in the cloud of his madness. He closed his eyes and opened them to behold a truth his entire body refused to acknowledge. He saw the flash of a man jumping out the window. Now he was alone in his room with his wife. Ngungure was naked, just as he had imagined on his way home, but this body he had so clearly sketched in his mind’s eye evoked nothing but disgust. He felt a call to murder ricochet off the woman’s eyes and glint on his cutlass. He took a step, raised his arm. Ngungure, realizing that demons had taken possession of his soul, just burst out laughing.

  “Shut up!” he screamed.

  She couldn’t stop laughing. She wiped her mouth with her right hand, then with both hands, and still she kept chuckling, like a person who knows they’re done for and wastes their last minute, their very last minute, pointing at their assassin and laughing because he is holding his gun in his left hand when he’s right-handed. Like someone, in short, who is just wasting his time. Ngungure laughed, and for the first time, the Dog wondered why he loved her. He had shut the door of the house behind him. Even if he’d left it open, no one would have distracted him from his madness, as everyone else was in the fields.