Mount Pleasant

by Patrice Nganang

  That’s when she remembered that Njoya had written a history of the Bamum, the Saa’ngam. She recalled all those folks (some very strange characters among them) who had come to the house where he’d lived back in the twenties, when he’d been banished for the first time, to the House of Exile in Mantoum. Ngutane had been only a kid back then, but she remembered all the visitors from far-off places, from cities she’d never heard of whose names set her dreaming: Ouagadougou, Dakar, what names! And also Cairo, Khartoum, Timbuktu. Or even nearby Yaoundé, the home of a very likable man—although he wore too much perfume—whose name she’d soon learn: Charles Atangana. She couldn’t forget how these strangers would sit around the sultan and tell him about the world’s highs and lows. Later the palace scribes had compiled these firsthand accounts in a book that Ibrahim, the chief calligrapher, had illustrated with his most beautiful designs. Ngutane thought again about how happy her father had looked when he held in his hands the brand-new compendium of all their words, the Saa’ngam. And most of all, how the chattering breadth of all those destinies, melted into one book, had erased all traces of his own misfortune from his face. It was the memory of those happy days that convinced our Nji Mongu to transform her father’s chambers in Mount Pleasant into a House of Stories.

  8

  Coincidences Here and There

  On December 12, 1913, a young man is attacked in Berlin by unknown thugs whose names posterity would have done well to learn. At the same moment, another young man is coming down a busy street in Foumban, looking for his father, the laughingstock of the city. The young man has a knife between his teeth; his heart has been split open by shame. On the same day and at the same time, but years later, in 1931, a young girl dressed as a boy is staring, hoping to glimpse some signs of an awakening consciousness in a sultan who was stricken but now grows stronger as he listens to life’s unbelievable stories. The story of the monarch learning that his own lot isn’t the most tragic one that can befall a colonized man has taken root in one of the protectorate’s most powerful families.

  Question: What do these three stories have in common other than being brought together by the pen of a historian, a woman just arrived from the United States? My friends from Nsimeyong were speechless. Even Arouna, I could see, had fallen silent. History is more than mathematics, he was probably thinking. Well, yes, I went on, listen to these other apparently disparate episodes: June 28, 1914, a young man pulls a gun from under his suit coat, shouts an insult in his mother tongue, and empties his gun into the heart of Franz Ferdinand, who clearly did not understand what the man said, but who belonged to one of the oldest and most powerful families in Europe.

  “Scheisse!” shouted Franz Ferdinand before he died. “Shit!”

  Nothing more.

  At the same time, in Leeds, England, a young worker makes love to his girlfriend. The girl’s father, coming home from work too early that day, opens the door to his house and freezes at what he sees.

  “Son of a bitch!” he shouts.

  He dives into his things and pulls out a rifle. The worker is able to jump out a window, leaving behind the disappointed father and the naked, humiliated girl.

  And again, at the same time, in Casamance, in Senegal, a seventeen-year-old fisherman returns home empty-handed after a day fishing.

  “What a damned day!” he says to his father.

  The old man bursts out laughing. “Because you didn’t catch any fish?”

  “Well, I guess the father of the fisherman isn’t a fish,” Arouna began with a laugh, “or else this whole thing is kinda fishy…”

  Why did I suddenly lose patience at this quip from my friend?

  Tell me, I cut in, could the father of the fisherman see the net in the unfathomable, shifting depths of the ocean that links all these people together? His son, the young worker in Leeds, and Franz Ferdinand didn’t know each other. They had nothing in common but their humanity. And this humanity was certainly relative at that time—is there any way that the heir to the Hapsburg monarchy could compare himself to a young Englishman without a future who has to get his girlfriend knocked up before he can marry her? And their humanity seems to have even less in common with that of the Senegalese fisherman, who is, after all, nothing but a native.

  And yet, the death of Franz Ferdinand will start World War I. Exactly one year after his assassination, which sank the whole world into an abyss, the young Englishman signed up to escape fate’s stranglehold and take on a role admired by all: a hero. As for the young fisherman, back in his village he was enrolled as a tirailleur, his eyes aglow at the promise of his first salary. These men, however different they may have been, all died in a slaughter they never even understood …

  “It takes more than a fish to curse a day,” the father had said to the sad young fisherman, his son. But the boy hadn’t understood. He didn’t get it at all. “What besides a fish?” he asked.

  “Yes, what besides a fish?” Arouna asked. “Tell us.”

  Listen, I replied, the fisherman respected the wisdom of his father, the proverbs that rolled off his tongue. But the old man had no answer to that very simple question. As for me …

  9

  What Else?

  Sara didn’t want to hear about coincidences. The question posed by the young fisherman was the key. That day would be damned, in fact, history tells us as much. Damned thousands of times over by the millions of young men from around the world whose lives would be interrupted by a bullet. And yet neither Arouna nor my other friends from Nsimeyong plugged their ears. It was Sara who didn’t want to hear about history’s perverse twists of fate. Life in Mount Pleasant was historic enough for the old woman, and Njoya’s life held the last possible hope for life’s upheavals. She was counting on Ngutane to usher in a day of blessings.

  So I let Sara take it from there. Nothing could be more disappointing to the sultan’s daughter, she went on, than the man who came to tell his story that day; as soon as he stepped into his friend’s room, it was clear that the paramount chief had decided to demolish the castle of rumors that had been built there.

  “That’s the kind of man he was,” added Sara sarcastically. “Egotistical to the bitter end.”

  Charles Atangana wanted to do what he thought was right, that’s all. But he had a way of hiding his multidimensional ego beneath a neatly framed philosophy. In short, he wrapped his bullshit up in flowers.

  “Sometimes, silence is a good remedy,” he said after hearing the story of his predecessors’ successes on Ngutane’s stage.

  And he added, “Especially for a sick man.”

  His wife agreed. Charles Atangana sat down beside the bed and took his friend’s hand. That day he was humbly dressed, although he still cut an elegant figure. Maybe the chief remembered that his friend had fallen into this stupor after one of his flamboyant visits. Maybe he felt a tad guilty.

  “I am speechless,” Charles Atangana repeated. “Speechless.”

  That said it all.

  After a while he got up and started working the pedal of the gramophone in Njoya’s room. The machine played a waltz, even if it skipped a few notes. The flight of an invisible orchestra filled the space. The chief stood there nodding his head, keeping time to the music with a tap of his foot and a click of his lips. The music was vaguely familiar. What mattered most was that his friend liked it, he said. Njoya had brought the gramophone back with him from his trip to Buea in 1908. It was a gift from the former German governor, Ebermaier. A large blue blossom opened up, and as soon as the apparatus began its miraculous sputtering, everyone froze in their tracks. The sultan once danced to the sound of this marvelous flower at the ball given by the governor to mark the kaiser’s birthday; since then, the gramophone had graced Njoya’s room.

  Sometimes Njoya would set the pedal in motion and play a piece, especially when he was in the right mood. The music machine had become part of his daily routine, just like those little things, the biscuits Herr Habisch had brought to Foumban when he opened
his shop there.

  “Can you waltz?” Charles Atangana asked. He stood up, ready to dance but needing a partner. He had asked the question of Ngutane, but she only smiled; it wouldn’t have been proper for her to fill her ailing father’s room with such exuberance. The madness of the chief was no excuse. Even his wife declined. Yet Charles Atangana would not be deterred. He took a few steps, his arms held out in a circle in front of him, as if holding an imaginary woman. And he began to dance, yes, to dance with his cigar. The women looked on in amusement, unmoving but jealous of the invisible woman who brought such joy to the chief. He led the invisible woman, going faster and faster with the music, caught up in the whirlwind, just like at a fancy ball. It wasn’t only the chief dancing; it was his jacket, his hat, his handkerchief that floated like a butterfly. His shadow danced, and the lamplight fluttered to the rhythm as well.

  Juliana Ngono was the first to see Njoya move, and she shouted in her language, “He’s dancing with his fingers!”

  The chief stopped mid-step. The invalid, lying in his bed, was moving a finger, a hand, his head to the rhythm of the music.

  “Well, then!” the chief exclaimed, breaking the stunned silence that met the sultan’s indomitable spirit. “Well, then! He really likes it!”

  Then Charles Atangana caught Ngutane’s hand and pulled her to him. The sultan’s daughter didn’t protest; how could she? She began to sway to the music, following her partner’s lead. Once around the room, then the chief released her and took hold of his wife by the waist. Perhaps he remembered the two waltzes he had danced when he was an Ewondo lecturer, or the waltz he was always talking about—when a prostitute on the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s red-light district, danced with a dying man who promised to give her anything she wanted, eternity even, if she’d give him “one last dance.” Or then again, maybe he remembered the balls thrown by the German emperor. The chief felt a devilish surge of energy as he led more and more invisible women in his dance.

  Outside the sultan’s chambers, tree branches bobbed, their leaves falling to the sound of the magical gramophone. The music spread beyond Mount Pleasant’s corridors, through the city, and down Nsimeyong’s hills, like the scent of an enchanted flower. Yaoundé’s lampposts swayed, and if you looked carefully, you could have seen them take each other in their arms and kiss. The city’s rare vehicles zigzagged along the streets. Even the children were caught up in the enthusiasm of this unfamiliar song. Colonizers and locals, whites and blacks, even dogs and cats were dancing. Even the fish in the Mfoundi River gave in and were carried away by the swiftly churning waters. The doyenne remembered that she, too, had been seduced by the sublime power the paramount chief exercised over everyone and everything. She wasn’t the only one. All of Mount Pleasant’s artisans stood and stared like children at the universe’s dance, their mouths agape.

  “I had never seen anything like it,” Sara told me, still under the music’s enchantment. “Never.”

  That day, Charles Atangana showed Mount Pleasant why the city referred to him as a magician. They said that he could stop the rains, that there was a Yellow Room in his palace: anyone who entered came out without his shadow. They said he kept the keys to that room in the right pocket of his jacket, on the end of the golden chain that always hung from it. They also said that it was his magic that had made all the Europeans who came to Cameroon—the Germans, the English, the French, and even the Spanish—his closest friends. His greatness, they said, came from how he combined African magic with the Western science he had learned in Europe.

  What didn’t people say about him? In any event, the chief woke up the cursed sultan with a dance. Even after the universe had settled down, Njoya still held his hand aloft, tracing arabesques in the air.

  “He wants a slate,” shouted Nji Mama. “Bring him a slate! He wants a slate!”

  “A slate!”

  “A slate!”

  A copyist soon brought him a notepad and ink.

  “I said a slate,” Nji Mama insisted, “you idiot!”

  The architect’s anger put a stop to the music. But Njoya wanted it to go on. He spoke, yes, he spoke in an unfamiliar voice.

  “Dance,” he whispered. “Dance!”

  Nebu saw tears of joy run down the sultan’s cheeks. A joyful face never before seen. A monumental silence fell all around.

  “You should have seen him,” Sara insisted, her face still lit by the miracle of that awakening long ago. “It was … It was…”

  The old mama’s lips searched for the right word, her fingers snapping to mark the holes in her vocabulary, or perhaps keeping time with the long-silent music. Still today, yes, still today in Nsimeyong the legs of an old man can be set in motion by the rhythm of a magical waltz. The man rises in the middle of his courtyard, puts his arms around the waist of his wife or the nearest woman, and they dance. Sometimes the sound of an accordion accompanies them. That dance is called le bol, clearly a deformation of the French bal: there’s no doubt that after all these years, Yaoundé is still dancing at the ball that the paramount chief Charles Atangana opened that long-ago evening.

  10

  Even the Animals …

  Yes, people talked about the dancing city for a good long time.

  “For days on end,” Sara told me.

  The sultan’s marvelous waltz brought a new wave of visitors to Njoya’s bedside, she added. If Africa had been made aware of the fall of a great man, the whole universe showed up after the mythic dance. They came from unheard-of places, from unknowable cities, drawn in by the allure of this far-off miracle. The visitors never failed to dress as if they were going to an imperial ball. It started with one peacock who appeared, lighting up the corridors of the house with his iridescent tail feathers; even the animals were caught up in the mad dance. And they all met on the way to Mount Pleasant.

  At night, masses of butterflies gathered around the sultan’s bed to tell him the story of their transformation, how ugly maggots became beautiful. They danced dreamily around the hurricane lamp, moving to the sounds of a symphony played by dogs and cats in the distance. The cats led the moon in a joyful hymn. Sitting on the roof of the house, they sang poems of love and despair. The sultan’s household awoke to strains of birdsong proclaiming the glory of the newborn day in rhyming couplets.

  A colony of northern birds flew down from Europe, no joke, to sing of the beauty of winter for Njoya’s ears and to tell him how lucky he was to live in the warm embrace of Africa’s eternal sun. Ducks crossed the city to bring him the tale of their collective death on life’s starving streets. Slaves had to use flaming branches to sweep away the lines of ants marching to Njoya’s bedroom, where they hoped to tell him how, by working together, they had transformed dust into a golden mountain. What to say of that animal—what is it called? Sara struggled to find the right name—that swore he was too busy to dance? No one, the animal went on, “not even the sultan of the Bamum,” suffered as much as he. He grew angry when Ngutane told him that her father’s curse was the same as had befallen Sisyphus.

  “What?” he shouted. “Just who is this Sisyphus?”

  “A Greek god.”

  Njoya’s daughter told him the story.

  “Me, I have to push balls of poop with my feet,” the animal complained. “Did your Sisyphus have to do that?”

  Ngutane didn’t answer. She understood the poor animal—he would have filled her days recounting the gloomy twists and turns of his incomparable hell had Ngutane not chased him away. Another day, slaves killed a boa as it zigzagged along the walls of the House of Stories. It was coming to tell the sultan how it had swallowed an antelope. Yes, Sara confirmed, the whole mad world met at Njoya’s doors, wanting to share its wondrous tales.

  After the boa incident, no one had the courage to get the magical gramophone’s pedal going again. Still, the sultan’s happiness remained in everyone’s memory. The universe would never be the same, and everyone knew it.

  11

  Coffee and Cake on a Hot
Afternoon in Berlin

  Although Sara had broken with our normal routine and told two stories in a row, I hadn’t interrupted her. After all, I was there to listen. And yet I had some good news to share. It was connected to Franz Ferdinand and the drama that followed his assassination. The Germans reacted as if it were their own kaiser who had been killed, and they weren’t the only ones. Most European nations already had a declaration of war signed, sealed, and ready to deliver to their enemies long before a bullet pierced the chest of the Hapsburg heir. If that bullet hadn’t been shot, no doubt they would have found another pretext.

  For Sara’s father, on the other hand, World War I was a blessing. We’ll never know how he felt in those moments of collective hysteria, or what he was thinking. Nor will we know who he was with and what he was doing the day war broke out. Did he join the excited crowd and dance with joy in the streets of Berlin? Was he even in a crowd?

  I found just one note in the archives of Berlin’s Anthropological Society, dated May 1914, that mentioned her father’s name.

  “About my father?” the old lady asked, unable to speak.

  “An official document bearing his signature,” I confirmed.

  It was a document donating his body to science in the event of his death. A better fate than that of the many unknown soldiers who fell as the war started. Still, this bit of information horrified the doyenne. I suspected that perhaps it was a bargain he struck with the famous Dr. Mult, who had bailed him out of jail. Alas, I wasn’t able to find a picture of him in the anthropology museum’s collection of photographs of Africans, each one taken of a naked subject and noting the measurements of his or her skull. But some of the snapshots didn’t give the subject’s name. I was, I’ll admit, relieved by this shadow of doubt, for I wouldn’t have dared show those pictures to Sara, who had made it clear that she didn’t want just any old guy for a father. If only she knew what a poet is capable of doing to survive.