Mount Pleasant

by Patrice Nganang

  It was a stroke of luck, he thought when he woke, that he couldn’t discuss Ngungure’s nakedness with his master. But he was convinced that therein lay the secret of the artistic truth he sought, and that this set him apart from Monlipèr. One day Nebu saw a portrait of Ngungure among the photos Herr Habisch had displayed in front of his shack of surprises, and he thought of his dreams. He didn’t react as children do, amazed to see friends’ faces, or like those women, frightened when they happened upon pictures of people long dead. Nor did Nebu react like an artist who is searching for something new. He didn’t thank his ancestors for sending him dreams of what photography could be, long before he had actually seen a photograph—before the arrival of the white man. Photography provided a practical solution to the theoretical problems he’d faced up till then.

  Nebu had gone to Herr Habisch’s to return the clothes he had bought and no longer wore. He wanted to trade them in for something more useful. Drawn in by the photos, he immediately knew what he wanted. The Swiss merchant refused to take back Nebu’s clothes, however, and the apprentice’s wages didn’t leave him with much extra in his pocket. All the artist could do was plant himself in the middle of the kids and women crowded in front of the display of stiff faces. Looking at Ngungure’s portrait, he was overcome with shame, and he glanced around, fearing that his private thoughts had been revealed to the pack, for the photograph of his girlfriend’s face was a close-up, as only a lover could have seen her. It made public the forms that Nebu had only ever glimpsed in his dreams. The only difference was that this photo was in just two colors, black and white. And he’d never seen his girlfriend in just two tones.

  When he left, he had a smile on his lips. What he had seen was forever inscribed in his mind. He smiled because, if he admitted that photography was technically amazing, he also realized it had its limits. It didn’t achieve the detail of his dreams, but it did give him something he could say to old Monlipèr. That’s why he wasn’t disappointed when he returned to the workshop. He knew that it was up to him, and him alone, to recompose his girlfriend’s face with his own hands, just as she appeared in his dreams. The furtive shapes of her beauty, the re-created beauty of a woman everyone had always said was ugly, that’s what he wanted to capture in his art, what he termed his face of bliss, or his look of pure contentment.

  “I want to capture that bliss,” he promised.

  There are stories that must be told just for the story itself, just for the story. This was one of them.

  5

  Getting Back to Ngutane and Bertha

  That said, let’s turn another page! Let’s move on to the story about the young boy Nebu. Or that’s what the doyenne said when she really meant the story of the young girl Sara. Her own story. Whew! In 1931, Mount Pleasant was filled with many lively stories, just as labyrinthine as those taking place in Foumban or in wartime Germany, although very different, too. As seen from Yaoundé, the world was still within reach, and everyday worries were pedestrian.

  “Flowers.” Ngutane’s voice was insistent. “Flowers and not peace tree leaves. Not peace tree leaves, you idiots!”

  Her outbursts were always met with silence. Wasn’t she right? The sultan’s daughter had had to lead two slaves into the bush to show them what she wanted, and still no luck. The next day again her voice rang just as loudly through the corridors.

  “I said NO peace tree leaves! Don’t you have ears?”

  Two days later, it was “Flowers don’t attract snakes!”

  And again, Ngutane stressed, “Believe me, will you? Flowers … do … not … attract … snakes!”

  Ah, Ngutane had lots of reasons for losing her patience. Another time Sara saw her scolding a foolish slave who the previous day had put warm water on the sunflowers Njoya so loved and had let them die, yes, die.

  “What did you think you were doing?” Ngutane shouted. “Making tea?”

  And that wasn’t all.

  “Where is your head?”

  Was there anyone in Mount Pleasant who still had their head? Once, Sara heard a burst of laughter in the main courtyard; when she came out, she saw one of the sultan’s wives dressed like a European. The woman wanted to make her ailing husband die laughing!

  “Or make God cry,” the doyenne added.

  No need to say that these scenes at the invalid’s bedside were the focus of everyone’s attention. Enough people had crowded into the House of Stories that it was hard for anyone to remember who actually lived there. The house was enough of a puzzle that everyone thought they were in a poor, crowded neighborhood, and the house was strange enough that a kid like Sara could get lost, lose the thread of the stories that, one after the other, should have led her back to Nebu’s body without making the impatient Bertha wait too long. Those fictional stories—told, repeated, or forgotten—those knots and all those abysses were captivating, even if the corridors where they were told were quite similar.

  I could well imagine (who couldn’t?) that Bertha’s story was too tangential for a kid’s ears. Especially because, for example, when the matron spoke of the birth of her son’s artistic vocation, she got so caught up in the details that her audience was superfluous. Of course she wanted ears there so she could tell them about the meanderings of Nebu’s artistic conscience; what she didn’t want was a nine-year-old passing judgment. She was telling Nebu’s story in order to make her own soul suffer again, to remind her body of the pain she had already experienced: to find a way to escape from the horrors of her past life. You could say that Nebu’s story was as painful for her as childbirth.

  Ah, Bertha didn’t need an audience! Compassion is a mother’s virtue, and she had none, especially when it came to the young Nebu. She raised her hand to slap the child when he came back late from the sultan’s bedchamber. Did anyone think that the start of this woman’s story would be the end of her violence? True, it had been a long time since she had last sent “her child” to bring back a whip from the courtyard. Yet she fell back on those outmoded methods one evening when Nebu told her he’d lost track of time. Bertha had heard better excuses from children before. She began to shout, “Are you trying to trick me?”

  Once it caught fire, her rage would not burn out quickly.

  “You’re just like him,” she said, her eyes red, “just like him!”

  She was talking about the other Nebu, of course, the young man madly in love, the artist, the apprentice. As she repeated “him,” pain lit up her eyes.

  “Selfish,” she said. “You’re the most selfish child on earth!”

  With these words she whipped herself into an ever greater fury, feeding the fire of her rage with repeated images of how Nebu had abandoned her.

  “An individual,” she went on, “a nothing!”

  You try to tell Bertha that her story was raping a child’s soul! Go tell her that for Sara, listening to stories at the sultan’s bedside, now that he was awake, was far better than trying to follow the metamorphoses of a dead woman’s face. You do that, the doyenne insisted, and then let me know if you can calm her down. Every story has its limits.

  “You’re no better than he was,” Bertha insisted, “not at all!”

  This time the boy she held in her hands didn’t wait till the bamboo whip was lifted over his head.

  “If you move,” Bertha threatened, “I’ll cut off your nuts!”

  But Nebu didn’t have any nuts.

  “I say, if you move…” the matron repeated. “Nebu, get back here!”

  The kid didn’t come back.

  “Nebuchadnezzar, get back here!”

  Nebu fled, as far as he could. He knew the reach of the matron’s anger. Her voice filled the main courtyard.

  “My God,” she screamed, “why did I give birth to such a rat?”

  Several voices hurried to calm her down.

  “That’s how children are.”

  “Forget about it.”

  “My own children…”

  Bertha didn’t want to hear anything
unless it was about her son, her own Nebu, about her own maternity. Nothing superfluous! She just kept screaming out her pain even louder.

  “I’m going to teach him to respect what his mother says!”

  All the voices agreed.

  “Yes, you show him!”

  “Hit him!”

  “He needs it!”

  “Do you want a whip?”

  “That’ll teach him to listen!”

  “Nebu, where is the whip?”

  “Children must respect their parents!”

  “Hey, who took my whip?”

  “You must teach him to love you.”

  “Teach him love.”

  “Where is my whip?”

  “I’m sure your apprentice took it.”

  “Here, here’s a whip.”

  “That’s how children are.”

  “They wanted to hide my whip, uh-huh!”

  “I told you I’d found your whip.”

  “Yaoundé,” one voice said. “It’s Yaoundé that’s making our kids crazy.”

  It was a bald man with a bushy beard who said that, the menacing one who’d been so eager to find her whip. Nji Shua, the carpenter, whose beard always frightened the kids. He was known for his violent rages. No one called him by his Shümum name, Laponte, because he behaved like a brute. He whipped his apprentices till they peed in their pants, just for making little geometry mistakes.

  That day, when Nebu came back to Bertha’s, his ears burning and his eyes red with tears, the matron knew who had beaten him. She rushed to the door of Nji Shua’s workshop, where the child told her she’d find his torturer. There she was, standing at the door of the man no one dared to look in the eye.

  “Nji Shua,” she shouted, “who asked you to hit my child?”

  She was met with silence.

  “Why don’t you just slap me, too?”

  Silence.

  “Criminal,” she cried at the door’s persistent silence. “Assassin!”

  She marched through the motionless courtyards.

  “Is it bad luck or what?” she said to the few apprentices who stared at her, too afraid of the carpenter to show their approval of her actions. “He can’t teach his own wives to listen to him and yet he dares to punish my son!”

  Njoya’s bedchamber was filled with fantastic stories. Paths that twisted and turned through unexpected lives, a paradise of surprises for children. All who visited would have liked to stay longer. Except Bertha; yes, all except Bertha. Yet one day her son went into the monarch’s bedchamber and found him standing there—just standing there, not lying in his bed, Sara reported. The mute little girl she was back then was about to scream; she was ready to drop everything she was carrying. But the sultan gestured for her to keep quiet. Njoya wanted to surprise everyone. He always liked to catch his entourage off guard. Nebu played along, trembling as he completed the task for which he’d come: taking away the sovereign’s excrement.

  Some secrets are too heavy for a kid to bear; once outside, he coughed, and the calabashes he was carrying crashed down at his feet, feces covering the slaves lying before Njoya’s door. Horrified, they stood up, but their anger was stayed when Ngutane’s voice suddenly rang out. Rather than the shouts of a mischievous child, it was the voice of Njoya’s daughter that filled the corridor.

  “He walked?”

  She had seen it with her own eyes, but still couldn’t believe that Njoya had gotten himself up to stand by the window. She was asking the slaves, who stammered in their confusion.

  “He walked?”

  “He walked?” they asked back.

  Njoya’s smile was their only answer.

  Ngutane wanted to know the details. “He really walked?”

  Soon she opened the chamber’s window and, putting her hand to her lips, let loose with the joyful cry of a Bamum woman: “Woudidididi!”

  When she was sure of the truth, she ran through the corridors, her voice echoing in the main courtyard, announcing in tremolo the sight she had been awaiting for weeks, months.

  “Alareni walked!”

  Her voice multiplied her joyful cries.

  “He’s walking!”

  “Fran Njoya is walking!”

  “The sultan is walking!”

  The echo of this cry that began in Njoya’s bedchamber woke up not just Mount Pleasant, but also Nsimeyong and all of Yaoundé. The hundred people gathered at the sultan’s doors, all those who had been waiting so long and so impatiently for a sign of life from their fallen sovereign, joined Ngutane in her celebratory cries. Some ran back to their homes, others came rushing out, all lifted their voices in a universal song.

  “Woudidididi!”

  The cry that took over Mount Pleasant on that tumultuous day of revelation didn’t belong only to Ngutane, but to a country, a whole continent.

  “He is walking!”

  “He is walking!”

  It was a long, strident cry that cut across the main roads of the stupefied city, rolled right down the hills like a landslide, and even grabbed hold of the fish in the river:

  “Woudi … Woudi … Woudi … Woudidididi!”

  6

  The Audacity of an Apprentice Before His Master

  Back when he was in Foumban, Njoya never could have stepped into his palace courtyard and not found it full of action. Dozens of flutists, and just as many talking-drum players and poets singing his praises, turned each of his steps into another mythic tale. Telescoping trumpets, or kakaki, algaita oboes, and bells tried to outdo each other, providing a sound track for his walks. Despite all this tumult, he went along the streets of the city at his own pace. Sometimes he’d walk as far as the spice market, stopping amidst the thousand scents and the “woudidis” of the women amazed to see him, checking the prices of palm oil, paprika, chili, ginger, and bitter leaf as if he were a woman. He’d stop at a covered stand and ask the salt vendors about their wares as well as their families. He walked into the courtyards of houses, letting children come and tell him their names and their dreams for the future.

  “What do you want to become?” he’d ask them.

  “A master,” replied one young girl.

  “A weaver, like my father,” said a boy.

  “A potter.”

  “A calligrapher.”

  “An officer in the palace police.”

  Some children were too timid to talk. Sometimes one declared that he would rather be the sultan, which always made everyone laugh. Even Njoya.

  “You must imagine your future if you want it to come true,” he told them. “Don’t ever let anyone else dream your dreams for you.”

  The children fell silent at these words of wisdom.

  Then he’d ask, “What did I say?”

  And they’d repeat, just like in school: “Don’t ever let anyone else dream your dreams for you.”

  The sultan would smile and add, “Dreams are a basket of unending treasures.”

  And then, “You don’t want a thief to steal them from you, do you?”

  “No, Alareni!”

  “And not your future either, right?”

  “Yes, Alareni!”

  “Why?” one child asked, seeming to grasp the invisible threat the sultan hinted at.

  “Well, because the future, that’s your gift to all of us, my son.”

  Njoya also reminded the children that every night they could dream the world anew and rebuild their future each day.

  These ideas were far too weighty for them, but no one could resist the charm of his words.

  “If you don’t dream when you’re children, what will you do when you’re grown up?”

  One of the sultan’s favorite destinations was the Artists’ Alley. Njoya loved to watch the artists at work. He became someone altogether different in a workshop, giving the blacksmiths and ceramists advice, speaking as if he were one of them; and he was one of them. He watched how their hands moved, the speed with which their feet set the machines in motion. He made suggestions about the choic
e of materials and colors, on how to use and combine them.

  Monlipèr gloried in these visits to the workshop where he ruled. The old man went up and down the main street, more agile than any of the praise singers who busily surrounded the sultan, dancing in his shadow and ahead of him, adorning each of his gestures with an array of descriptions, decorating the sky with his magnificence.

  It was during one of these visits that Nebu did what he should not have done; he leaped out of the frantic crowd and threw himself at the monarch’s feet.

  “I want to work at the palace, Alareni!”

  Only Njoya’s kindness kept him from being cut to shreds by the police and their cutlasses, for his sudden movement had broken all protocol. The sultan asked his riflemen to lower their weapons.

  “I want—to work—for you,” Nebu stammered.

  Bertha’s son spoke into the dust where he had thrown himself. His words were unintelligible. When he got back up, assisted by two guards who held him back, his braided hair was covered in the red earth of Foumban; he looked like a mystic. Nebu knew there was no precedent for his actions, but he also knew that only an extraordinary gesture could free him from the workshops of the Artists’ Alley, from his master above all. Later he’d learn that it was because of his braided hair that the palace guards hadn’t killed him. They thought he was an herbalist and were expecting him to describe his visions.

  “He’s just a madman,” Monlipèr begged, waving his hands at the menacing guards. “He’s my apprentice!”

  Monlipèr was exaggerating a bit. Nebu had spent only two years in the master’s workshop and already he wanted to move on. This wasn’t how things usually went, but a necessary step in this case. The boy had learned all he could in Monlipèr’s workshop, and as he grew less humble, he was increasingly unable to hide what was emerging in his dreams. And now work had begun on the sultan’s new palace! This was an important project for any artist or artisan with ambition. Everyone working there had been chosen by the sultan himself or by one of his foremen. For once, Muluam and Ngbatu didn’t seek to do harm with their indiscretion; filled with nothing but admiration for Nebu’s hands, they now used all the superlatives at their disposal to prove that the palace was just the place for his talent to bloom.