“You really thought I loved you?” said the girl, holding her sides. “What a joke! Me, love you?”
She went on the offensive, knowing her end was near.
“Shut up!”
“Have you even looked at yourself?”
“Shut up!”
“Bent-necked old man!”
“Shut up!”
“Dirty dog!”
There are words not worth repeating. “Dog,” for example, reminded him of his first wife.
“Shut up, woman!”
Ngungure didn’t give a damn about his words or their terrifying, explosive power.
“Do you really think I came here for you, you dirty old man? Do you really think my body belongs to you, you dried-out old fish?”
The dried-out old fish suddenly saw the humiliation that covered him. The Dog opened his mouth, took in a gulp of air, and barked, trying to save the man from the assassin within.
“I love…”
“I said, shut up!”
Ngungure’s head, sliced off in one fell swoop, landed at the man’s feet like a catfish tossed onto the shore. The poor girl hadn’t even had time to finish her sentence—though clearly it would have ended with “your son.”
Her mouth was stopped just as it conjugated the verb “to love” in the first person singular of the present tense: “I love … I love … I love!” The verb named the very act the man had interrupted with his scandalized arrival. Ngungure’s mouth could conjugate it infinitely: she needed to say it, to pronounce that verb in all its bloody fullness, to give sense to the tragedy that had to be played out to its end. What did the Dog think in this moment of profound solitude about that head, spitting purple and bouncing at his feet, repeating endlessly, “I love … I love … I love!”? An inexpressible thirst burned his throat; yes, his throat was parched.
The man needed to slake his rage. His hands needed to kill again. He shook because the fateful call would not be silenced. On the mattress that was supposed to attest to his own love, he could see sperm stains that weren’t his, and his penis shriveled. His hands trembled, and his bleary eyes could not focus. He grabbed his tie, as if to strangle the woman he’d already beheaded, and then threw it over a beam holding up the roof of the house. This man, whose anger spilled out from his body, whose head was offered up to the roof of his House of Passion, and at whose feet lay the head of that bitch, his wife—he just stood there, thinking about the unimaginable game fate played with mortals. Then he climbed up on the first stool he found.
Yes, I’ll admit it. What I’ve just told you is perhaps nothing more than a tall tale of Sara’s creation, a fiction, a carpet of lies. But the story didn’t stop there. Bertha arrived in time to cut the tie the Dog had used to hang himself. But she was too late to know precisely what had happened. If she had been there, the drama would have played out differently. Whatever may have happened, here’s the thing: Bertha arrived at her co-wife’s house and found her husband dancing from the ceiling, all decked out in his best clothes. An outfit she knew he had purchased to give himself a new lease on life. How could she have imagined he’d be buried in it?
But the Dog didn’t die. Bertha arrived in time to save his last breath. As his first wife screamed in panic, he landed on the ground, right on top of Ngungure’s lifeless body, in a pool of the blood that stained the woven mat in his House of Passion. Bertha had been alerted by the brutal echo over the fields of a verb rarely used here: “I love … I love … I love!” She had a premonition that it was less a question of life than of death. And her fears were confirmed by the shadow of a naked man she saw running to hide in the forest.
Bertha wasn’t fooled for a minute. The fleeing man was her son. How could a mother not know? She didn’t follow him. No. She hurried off to confirm that the drama she hadn’t been able to forestall with her rumors and plots had reached its conclusion. She had the presence of mind to rewrite the ending of her choice. She used the cutlass her husband had killed with to save his life. The Dog awoke in a pool of blood and realized he wasn’t dead. In his crazed state, he had never thought he might survive, for that meant waking up in a world devoid of love and filled with shame. He shut his eyes to be sure: no, that wasn’t Bertha’s face he saw, and all of Foumban hadn’t come to see the show. He opened his eyes: his first wife was still there, and so was the crowd.
“Damn me,” he begged.
“It was your son,” Bertha replied.
The Dog’s wild eyes fell on the cutlass in the woman’s hand, and his soul exploded in a thirst for blood.
“Kill me!”
The fiery words made Bertha step back in horror. But the man who craved death followed her, his beseeching hands held out before him like a sleepwalker.
“Cut me into pieces!”
Bertha leaped out of the accursed house.
“Burn down the house!” shouted her husband, hot on her heels.
He didn’t stop begging her to kill him, whip him, cut open his belly. He used her praise names and cajoled her, swearing that she alone could fulfill his need: not for love, but for death. The Dog didn’t let her sleep all night.
Bertha was forced to flee her home and take refuge in the sultan’s palace, for only Njoya’s doors could keep her safe from such madness. Arrested by the sultan’s police and then released because he had been declared crazy by the palace judges, the Dog found himself wandering the city streets, drunker and more menacing than ever. He was still wearing the suit he had bought from the Swiss merchant, Herr Habisch, but now he stank like an old goat’s fart. His bloody tie hung around his neck and he asked passersby to help string him up.
This love story played out long after Lieutenant Hirtler’s arrival in Foumban, when, as we know, he was so foolish he sat on Njoya’s throne. Still, there were only a few Germans in Foumban, and they hadn’t yet set up their colonial court. I would like to know how they would have judged this affair. For a long time, different versions of the story circulated in the city’s houses, chambers, and drinking holes, but I found no trace of them in any of the colonial accounts. I’ve been told that there are detailed records written in Shümum of the judgment handed down by the judges in Foumban. But this precious document is part of the archives of Mose Yeyap, the sultan’s rival, who—yet another twist to this plot!—died several years before my arrival in Yaoundé. And his sons refuse to open the boxes he left behind, supposedly because they’re filled with accusations against Njoya.
We’ll soon learn just what Mose Yeyap was capable of.
For the moment, however, it’s enough to know that Bertha didn’t tell the judges the name of the man she saw running naked through the fields; this gives us a clearer sense of the unending chain of love that unites mother and son. “I don’t know who it was,” she said.
“She said it with her most honest face,” Sara told me, “I swear.”
Bertha told everyone that Nebu had left for Bamenda, a nearby town, right after the tragedy, adding that it was the right thing to do, since “a child shouldn’t see his father covered in shame.” This was the first time her maternity filled her with a pain she couldn’t express and the second time she refused to betray her son. As for Ngungure, sadly, Bertha saw her features on the faces of all the girls entrusted to her in the sultan’s antechambers. The matron could lie to everyone, but not to her own hands. The death of “that girl” had left her longing to cut out her tongue, wring her neck, and, yes, kill her herself. And this strange thirst, this macabre thirst that had already made her husband’s eyes cross, it turned her grip to steel and trapped her voice in a song no one in Mount Pleasant wanted to hear.
There are stories that must be told for the satisfaction of the storyteller—just for the storyteller.
For a moment, let’s forget who was listening.
NGUTANE AND NGONO
For many that were once great are now unimportant …
—Herodotus, The Histories, 440 B.C.E.
1
Sara’s Memory
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Isn’t writing history just following the evanescent perfume of someone who has departed? You sense their presence at the end of the trail; you follow the scent left by their footsteps in the dust; you rely on your own memory. But like a shy boy who scribbles a love note and counts on his younger brother to deliver it, how can you find the courage to speak up without embarrassing yourself? And what about the messenger? Irresponsible as a butterfly, he zigzags along the paths; he disappears down impassable trails and then somehow arrives at his destination, a fragile bit of truth held in his hands like some smiling promise. From the start of our quest for the girl-boy she once was, Sara’s pounding words held me captive, left me thirsting for more. There were moments when Nebu’s body suddenly appeared in the middle of her ramblings, but much of the time, the vague images I gleaned of the young man only made me skeptical.
It wasn’t just the old lady’s penchant for contradicting herself that made me wary. Mostly, it’s that there were mistakes in so much of what she told me, as my research easily revealed. I didn’t expect her to have a steel trap of a mind, far from it. But even the words for everyday things seemed to get confused by her wandering tongue. Sometimes she described events she certainly hadn’t lived through, that she couldn’t have witnessed herself. But just what constitutes a witness? Who gets to be a witness, and what does it mean to testify? The faulty memory of a ninety-year-old woman put an end to my questions, of course. I preferred to blame her memory—we all forget things. But nothing shocked me more than the day she undid her scarf and asked me to braid her hair.
I was equally amused and touched. You see, she barely had any hair left on her head.
“What hair?” wondered the young people from Nsimeyong, staring as they imagined the scandal that would result from the intimacy created by our exchange of words. Thankfully, Sara understood their sarcasm.
“Don’t tell me,” she quipped, “my hair is a mess.”
Her laugh sounded across the veranda.
“It’s just that…,” I began.
“What?”
All I could do was give in. I grabbed a bench and sat down behind her as she leaned back against my knees.
“You’re looking for a comb, right?” she asked with a smile.
“Yes, and some string, too.”
In truth I was grateful that even at her age, Sara still had moments of vanity. She described in great detail how she wanted her hair braided. She would have needed a huge Afro to reach her dream, but why should I tell her that with her sparse hair, all I could do was make motobos, those little braids that mothers do to make their daughters’ hair grow more quickly. The young people from Nsimeyong snickered silently, seeing me caught in this trap. Arouna covered his mouth with his hands to keep his laughter from exploding all over the courtyard. That Arouna. Terrible!
“Stop laughing, fool!” I barked at him. “Bring me a comb!”
“Let them be,” Sara interjected. “What do they know?”
She settled her head between my legs and smiled. One of the girls in the group brought me a wooden comb.
“Bertha could never wipe her mouth clean, you know,” Sara went on after a long pause. “She was just a poor woman with a dirty mind.”
How could I ever forget the disdain with which Sara said “poor woman.” Well, I wasn’t that Bertha. Feeling reassured, I gently braided the old woman’s hair. And I kept my ears open to hear the rest of her matron’s story. For the other Bertha hadn’t stopped there. Between phrases, Sara bit off pieces of string and handed them back to me. I’ll admit, the more I listened to her talk, the more I wanted to dive into the archives—that was the only way I’d be able to temper the glint of her sentences and stop her words ringing in my ears.
“Don’t wiggle so much,” I told her.
She winced from the pain of my braiding. But was that the only reason? Sara’s story was also twisting itself into knots, following her mood or the judgmental perspective that came with old age. When I finished her hair, I handed her a mirror. She was pleased with what she saw, turning her head this way and that to admire her beauty. Then she said, “You’ve turned me back into a young girl.”
I’ll never forget her beaming face.
“That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” she added.
What could I say? I opened my mouth, but all that came out was a question.
“Do you know who your father was?”
Though caught off guard in her moment of happiness, Sara didn’t hesitate. “He was called Ngono.”
Then I asked, “Do you know his name? I mean, his Christian name?”
Here the old woman grasped my hands. Their warmth spread through my body.
“I never called my father by his first name,” she confessed. “I wasn’t that badly brought up.”
That wasn’t what I meant. She stopped me from trying to make excuses.
“Just maybe—” I stammered, “you might have known…”
“Joseph,” she cut in. “But I didn’t really know him.”
She patted the top of her head, as if trying to get used to the motobos and their scattered tufts, or maybe to ease her aching scalp.
“Joseph Ngono, the political activist?”
A historian’s skepticism flooded over me: this was just too perfect. You see, where we come from, it’s practically a custom to fabricate illustrious genealogies. For example? you ask. Well, the number of children Njoya is supposed to have fathered makes it impossible to come up with a realistic estimate, and at any rate, he is considered the father of all the Bamum. Still, everywhere you looked around Mount Pleasant, people were trying to cash in on his name. Arouna’s own family name was Njoya! So I wouldn’t have been surprised if Sara had revealed that she was actually the paramount chief’s illegitimate daughter. Who would be stupid enough to question an old woman’s family tree? Or foolish enough to believe that Charles Atangana’s offspring were limited to the single boy and girl that his “dear Juliana” bestowed upon him, children who were baptized by Father Vogt, the first fruit of his church? Go on, open up a Cameroonian phone book! Look for “Atangana,” and you’ll see what I mean.
Even the most naïve historians would never believe that the pants of such a flamboyant man had been kept zipped up by threats of damnation—and Catholic threats at that. What we know is that Charles Atangana was married twice. After the death of his first wife, he wed his “dear Juliana,” with whom he’d been in love since his tender childhood. But that’s beside the point. If Sara had announced that the chief was her father, I wouldn’t have been surprised. It would have explained why she, of all Ewondo girls, had been offered as a gift to his friend. Wasn’t it a common practice among the people of the equatorial forest to give one’s own daughter in marriage to a friend?
But Joseph Ngono? No, I couldn’t get over it. The reason I had come back to Cameroon was to research the tumultuous history of our independence, a movement set in motion by this man we’d all forgotten. By a sort of lucky coincidence I had once run across his name in the Library of Congress, tucked away in a folder labeled “The African Colonial Diaspora in Germany.” The erasure of his life from the Cameroonian collective memory had awoken the historian in me, and the promise of a truly original dissertation had led me to Berlin. And now, somehow, at the end of my travels, I found myself sitting in the courtyard of his … daughter? Who would have believed it! Sara just smiled; she was too busy admiring the beauty of her new hairdo to give much thought to this new coincidence. Even my friends from Nsimeyong couldn’t understand why I was so excited. But on this vast sea where I alone was able to chart a course, the scattered knots of the old woman’s tale were growing tighter. Was it really just a coincidence?
If Sara was the daughter of Joseph Ngono, the cursed companion of Charles Atangana’s European travels, then the old woman’s tale was unfolding in directions I never could have imagined when I wandered into her courtyard, followed by a troop of adolescents from her neighborhood. And now this revelation of
the chief’s secret political machinations. Like any man with a strong personality, Charles Atangana’s anger knew no bounds. Many times he had rattled the chains of the colonial administration and had had a rival put away: Should I be surprised by this new betrayal of trust?
“So giving you to the sultan was an act of revenge?”
Sara looked at me as if I were a child, no older than the young people from Nsimeyong who were drinking up her tale—that is to say, as if I were an idiot, as if I understood nothing about men. She quietly took a pinch of snuff and asked, ever so quietly, “What do you think?”
I knew she was teasing me, and yet I was reassured by her words. I was even more at ease when, after I told her about finding her father’s name in the American archives, she gave a start and stared at me with that same hungry expression I had seen when I told her my name was Bertha.
“My father?” she asked. “Really?”
“You’ll have to tell me.”
And that was true, for the revelation of her paternity suggested the twisted outlines of a friendship that clearly had ended with her brutal separation from her mother. The next day, Sara began to call me her daughter, or her granddaughter.
“You are my granddaughter,” she said, “don’t you know?”
I was truly honored to be able to reveal to this fountain something of her own sources, to tell her about the circumstances leading up to her birth: events that had taken place on a continent, Europe, and in a country, Germany, and in a city, Berlin, where Sara never could have set foot. And so she became the eager audience for the story of her own gestation. The beginning is an end, isn’t it? For the moment, however, I had just one brief mention of an enigmatic name in the documents I had found, along with a few notes jotted down in my files. Ah, Sara was far enough removed from the story of Joseph Ngono that she could wait, like a child eager to hear an amazing epic tale. But what about me?
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