“Take off that damned hat,” Monlipèr ordered.
“Peasant…”
Nebu heard this coming from the furnaces, but he just closed his ears.
He was transformed when he put on the blue pants and the flowing boubou worn by artists, but the boy was still better dressed than the master, who styled himself with the respectable carelessness of a sage.
Before setting off down the Artists’ Alley, Nebu had thought about joining Njoya’s army or his police. He had even considered signing up for the German army, yes, of becoming an askari. The askaris were the only ones who could wander through Foumban’s streets and not be stripped bare by the nobles. Nebu had watched their entrance into Foumban, following behind the whites, dressed in beige uniforms, with red chechias on their heads and menacing weapons on their backs. Enough to make any adolescent go pale with envy. Many slaves had joined their ranks, moved by dreams of taking revenge against the nobles.
His mother alone had made him change his mind. Bertha threatened to slit her wrists if her son got mixed up with those “guys in poop-colored uniforms.” Nebu understood that the askaris went wherever the whites told them to go to kill their enemies. But he also decided against it because he had heard the accusations of rape that followed the soldiers, like flies chasing a boy who’s just taken a crap. No one in Foumban really liked the askaris. People sneered at them, especially the women, who called them “cockroaches.” They were all slaves, mostly from Dahomey. Nebu had suffered enough when his father’s saga had made him the target of all kinds of gossip. So he had hidden when the palace called out for a hundred volunteers to accompany a German prospector who was heading north “to meet the emperor of the Sokoto.” He had hidden in the bush and hadn’t come out until a week after the white man with the hippopotamus-tail whip had left.
Choosing the Artists’ Alley relieved him of the fear of conscription. A special order from Göhring had put Njoya’s artists under protection, keeping the hundreds of young men who worked there safe from the rapacious colonial administration. But Nebu didn’t know that yet. He had come straight from the fields, where his hands had never produced anything but yams. He had occasionally met artists, whom everyone admired. How could he have believed he would have a talent for producing anything other than muscular yams? But he didn’t want to spend his life working the earth, that’s for sure. He was horrified at the idea of ending up on one of the coffee, cocoa, or banana plantations that the Germans were setting up all over. The earth was the wealth of the Bamum, but Nebu despised peasants.
In his heart and in his mind he felt the need to better himself. Love gave him an idea of the magic mountain he was searching for. After making love to the first woman to seduce him (yes, it was the woman who had seduced him!), he had closed his eyes and seen strange figures take shape in his dreams. Like letters falling from the sky. After his second tryst he again closed his eyes, and the letters from the sky had become pictograms in the shape of a lion. This vision of a sky filled with letters captivated him for quite some time; the meaning of the universe’s words still eluded him.
Since he wanted more than anything to explore the realm of his dream vocabulary, to walk along the paths of his enchanted body, he began to examine the spice market intently. He would wait for girls, then follow and seduce them. He discovered that a dream following lovemaking is different from a sleeping dream: after lovemaking, he could experience the same captivating dream again. “I want to dream my dreams right to the end,” he decided. “I want to repeat the same dream again and again.”
Of course this was before he met Ngungure and began to dream of her shape and hers alone. Ngungure did not match any of his familiar pictograms; on the contrary, she chased them all away. She was a free woman who didn’t fit any of Nebu’s prejudices about noblewomen. For example, he could not guess how old she was. Much to his chagrin, he lost all his wits when he saw her. He searched in vain for the most common of words, always coming up empty. He stuttered, and were it not for his fingers, he would have been mute. The figures he drew for her were usually quite simple—just a lover’s mumbling. Ngungure was the one who taught him how to make love. Sometimes he missed her body so much that he dreamed of her fingers, the palm of her hand, the flesh that clothed her, although he, like any other slave in Foumban, still walked around naked. “I want my body to become your clothes,” Ngungure told him. “Then you won’t need to wear anything else.”
She undid the belt of his loincloth and dressed him as she desired: with her lips she dressed first his toes, then his knees, and finally his belly, his chest, nose, ears, and eyes. Then she undressed him once more, piece by piece.
“Your turn,” she said. And Nebu undid the red pagne wrapped around her chest. He uncovered her heavy breasts. He removed all her necklaces, the bracelets on her wrists, the jewels on her fingers, toes, and ears. He played with each of these accessories to her beauty, especially the golden ring attached to her belly button. But he left that ring there in the hollow of her belly. That’s just how Ngungure wanted him to love her: bit by bit, she insisted, like an artist.
She was the one who first spoke of him as an artist. She described something he could aim for with his lovemaking, something he could attain through love, the glowing promise of happiness. Yes, she gave him the gift of her body so that he could squeeze it and create a work of art. His nerves were on fire as he touched her toes, then moved on to her knees and her hips. He never would have believed how he would love looking between her legs, but she asked him to do it, saying that the pictogram he sought in the far-off sky of his dreams was traced right there.
“Don’t just dream about it,” she told him. “Draw it again yourself.”
And his fingers moved closer to the place he had seen.
“Wait, first draw on my body.”
Nebu traced an invisible tattoo around her belly button.
“Now on the bottom of my feet.”
He sketched figures on her hips, her thighs, kissed her from the bottom of her feet to her knees.
“Now here, between my legs,” said Ngungure’s voice.
He created shapes there.
“On my lips.”
He did.
Nebu obeyed until he could no longer feel his legs, till he lost his mind, until Ngungure opened up and pulled him in with every part of her body. When he penetrated her, she moved her limber hips so he could go deeper inside her. He went further, and she kept moving her hips, grabbing hold of his cheeks with both hands and pulling him into the deepest reaches of her body. He was searching for the lost pictogram, the one he had drawn on her belly—the shape of his own bewilderment. He reached into each part of her body, touched every nerve of her skin, each section of her veins, each drop of her blood, each note of her scent, and suddenly he felt Ngungure’s nails scratching his cheeks, her hands gripping his behind, her head buried in his neck, the bite of her teeth. Deep within her he felt something squeeze his cock tight—one, two, three, four, five times. Ngungure’s voice shattered his mind, but in her cries he heard one word murmured again and again, a sob from the innermost rooms of the house where he had finally found her, a verb conjugated in the present: “I love.”
He didn’t let Ngungure finish the conjugation. He knocked repeatedly at the door of her secret spot. More than her stammered word, more than anything—ah!—he loved to see her glowing face, the transformation of her features. Love leads to bliss, which is the realization of true love. Nebu made love to Ngungure again and again, just to see her face. He would have wanted to hold it in his hands forever, to capture it at the height of its most intense sensations. But this ardent face was fleeting! Elusive like a perfume. In its flight, a sudden line, a shapeless shape, a featureless face, a fevered bliss. Ngungure didn’t allow him time for quiet contemplation, no. She breathed deeply and lifted him up so high he thought he was a panther, a lion, an elephant. Tears fell from his trumpet, then he shattered into a thousand pieces and fell back on the mats of the woman he
had just loved. Already Ngungure’s face had disappeared. She put her clothes back on.
“I want to be a sculptor,” he said.
Ah, Nebu had dressed scandalously when he appeared in Monlipèr’s workshop because he wanted to be free from the loss he felt after making love, a loss without end since Ngungure’s death. He wanted to re-create his girlfriend’s evanescent face and, through art, make it eternal.
2
Let’s Talk About the Devil …
Nebu’s adventure was a classic coming-of-age story. People said Ngungure was a happy widow who found pleasure in vice, but that wasn’t all: in fact, she was a polyandrous nymphomaniac. Had he even asked these gossiping women for their opinions? But Nebu heard much more; snide comments dropped as he passed by, oozing all around like duck poop. Without realizing it, he began to pay some attention to these gangrenous rumors. He learned that before him, Ngungure had seduced twenty-seven young men in Dschang, in Bamiléké territory, inviting them one after the other to the House of Passion that a rich trader had built for her in a field.
There, unbeknownst to her rich lover, she made love to her men as only a free woman can. No! Nebu couldn’t believe it—all those piles of whispers, silences, and laughter. He heard the echoes in the looks and smiles cast his way each time he walked up the Artists’ Alley. The tale-tellers made fun of him because Nebu was the son of a man whose misfortunes were of mythic proportions, who had been seduced by a female spirit, a Mami Wata, then forced to buy a tie and beg for death on the streets in order to join her in her watery realm. “The bullshit of slaves,” he told himself. “They’re just jealous.”
Why would Bertha’s son have given any weight to such nonsense? But then a storyteller, who suggested he was one of Ngungure’s “closest neighbors,” started in, as if he had seen with his own eyes what went on in the aforementioned bush house.
“That man,” the storyteller wondered, perplexed, “didn’t he know that she was the Devil?”
So now his own mother’s foul words followed him right into the artists’ workshop! Nebu knew that the guy who was asking about the Devil was referring to his father. That jerk was surely looking for a fight, yet Bertha’s son paid him no mind. He focused on his art. No one had ever heard his side of the story. No one knew that he had first sketched the shapes he was so carefully composing in Monlipèr’s workshop on the skin of the wicked woman everyone kept talking about. And that was all right because had they known, never again could Nebu have walked calmly along the Artists’ Alley.
If his mother’s lie had saved his life, his artistry let him move quickly from day laborer to apprentice. Still, all the nonsense kept stripping him bare. They kept reinventing new lovers for Ngungure—there were thousands and thousands of them now, and with each telling, new names were added. Nebu’s silence gave the chatterers free rein to reinvent her life.
“Djo, djo,” whispered a voice, “brother, brother, have you heard? They screwed her together.”
“You mean one after the other.”
“No, djo, together.”
“They were slaves,” added another voice.
“Slaves?”
“Yes.”
The yes was immediately challenged.
“No, they were freemen.”
“Freemen?”
“Only nobles could do a thing like that, I swear.”
A boy with the menacing look of an off-duty soldier had spoken. He had short legs and the round cheeks of a newborn. The skin on his head was yellow with the workshop’s dust, and chickenlike eyes peered out from his greasy face. His name was Ngbatu.
All the apprentices turned toward him. He backpedaled. “Listen, listen, I’m not going to tell you who they were.”
The faces moved in closer all the same, and the guy who had sworn himself to silence struggled to excrete the sleazy story blocked up inside him. It took one minute—just one minute—before the workshop heard his incendiary mouth list off the names, carefully, as if reciting a prayer, although his brow was dripping with sweat. With a final wave of his hand he swore all the artists to secrecy.
“You see,” the distraught conspirator went on, revealing in a whisper the last drop of the awful secret he had only begun to share, “they were all Nguri.”
Never before had anyone dragged the Nguri, the noble princes of the Bamum, through such shit, but there was nothing Bertha’s son could say to refute the insult. Ah! The boy’s voice filled the workshop. “That guy must know,” he said, pointing.
All faces turned toward Nebu, who disappeared into his work.
“Didn’t your father work in the palace?”
“Djo, why not tell us?” urged the chatterer. “Your father was one of them, right?”
And that wasn’t all.
“You think we don’t know?”
He emphasized the we and then added, “You know the truth.”
And then, “Your father killed her, didn’t he?”
There are truths that cannot be kept silent. Nebu realized that, but still he didn’t speak.
“The muntgu killed your father, admit it!”
A story of palace intrigue turned into the full-fledged exposé of a perfect crime. The fourth time he was called out about his father, Nebu jumped up. His veins were bulging, his fist clenched. He thought an artists’ workshop would be a place where he could forget his manly troubles. But then the images of his violent passion came flooding back, taking hold of his hands, his body, setting off explosions of exasperation in his mind.
Thankfully, a voice intervened.
“Leave him alone!”
Such a scene could take place only when Monlipèr was absent. The master engineer was at the palace too often—getting new orders and delivering the pieces his artists had finished—to maintain the order Nebu would have liked in the workshop. The boy looked at his fellows and clenched both fists. He needed to control his mouth. He needed to restrain his body. Because he knew. Had his companions insulted his mother, he would have reacted differently. He would have dumped a cauldron of molten gold on the head of the loudest of the big talkers, namely Ngbatu.
“Say anything about my mother, Ngbatu,” he mumbled, “and you’ll wish you’d been born from a whore’s ass.”
Were these boys who were always pushing him to the edge even ready to hear the truth?
“You want to know the truth, you sons of rats?” Hearing that question, they would have plugged their ears! Nebu learned that truth is only one version of reality: “My father and I,” he could have said, “we fucked the same girl, one after the other.” His friends would have taken off, flabbergasted. “Yes, and then I killed my father, not the muntgu.” They would have said he was crazy. “It’s the truth, motherfuckers!”
Nebu couldn’t even own up to his crime! But it was better that way. He learned that in every work of art an unbearable truth is buried. He learned to sink his story deep into his art, leaving it to others to interpret, to refract it through the forms and features of their will—their imagination and their intelligence—with words that reflected their own morality, giving no consideration to the truth that had initially inspired him, the artist. He accepted that his story be told in the words of the first person who happened to pass by in Foumban. That was the only thing he could do if he wanted to escape death: accept it. So he accepted the image the artists soon evoked of a man running naked through the bush, and he became that ridiculous character he caught wind of when they made fun of him behind his back. The artisans laughed so hard that one of them bashed his own finger with a hammer.
“His penis was still standing when he took off running.”
Nebu looked at the boy who had just told his version of the story. He was pretty tall, with a chiseled, triangular-shaped face. He wasn’t dressed like an artist; all he wore were dirty pants, a reminder of his noble origins. Two strands of cowrie shells hung on his chest, and there were bangles around his wrists and ankles. His name was Muluam.
“In fact,” Muluam ad
ded, “he needed to hold on to his penis with both hands so he could run faster!”
Muluam spoke with the calm confidence of someone sure of what he knew. Nebu let him go on, and the boy started to act it out, holding an imaginary penis in his hands. “Like this.”
Ngbatu wanted more details. This guy was over the top, maybe that’s what caught his interest. He wanted to see just how far a twisted imagination would go, just as Nebu wanted to study the contortions of his most pointed critics. Muluam went on, his hands held in front of him.
“His bangala stayed hard for a whole week!”
“Is that why he couldn’t come out of the forest?”
“Yeah, he was so hard he finally had to take care of it himself, I swear.”
“Lies!”
“It was two weeks!”
“Let me tell you,” a confident voice broke in, “he screwed animals to find some release.”
“He screwed monkeys.”
“Antelopes.”
“Birds.”
Sometimes Nebu laughed at these monumental fabrications, but he couldn’t tell his version of his father’s death. The image of a son following his father through Foumban’s neighborhoods, down streets, passages, and dark paths until he finally cornered him behind a house and gave him the fatal love he’d been begging for all over the city: that certainly wouldn’t make this crowd laugh. And what about a son wiping his bloody knife on the grass, a knife red with the same blood that flowed through his own veins? That was just disgusting!
“Djo,” Nebu heard behind him, “brother, we feel sorry for your father.”
“We feel sorry for him, we do.”
Bullshit, he thought. More nonsense from slaves.
Mount Pleasant Page 15
