The Heart of the Leopard Children

by Wilfried N'Sondé

  Yes sir, I’m a good student, everything is going well at the university. I passed my exams. I couldn’t find a decent job. I don’t have the right kind of face for the ticket window! My love for Mireille, like my love for my mother, I’ll keep that safe deep inside of me. You see, I’m doing the best I can. It’s not easy but I’m managing, a beer, a glass of wine, a bit of weed or hashish, it’s more for fun at the end of a long week. Leave me out of your statistics. Try to come and meet me where I really am or if you like I can come to you! Go on, let the sorcerers and magicians dance, they only come out to dance at night once the church and the library are closed. Get a good night’s rest. Lay your head on your pillow and let them sing you to sleep. Their steps are so quiet, only the sound of their voice will resonate in your head.

  Drissa knows the white overcoats only too well. From now on, they accompany him in every step of his life. The nurses take him away in the middle of the day. He was frightening everyone! Unbalanced, going berserk, wallowing in his urine, screaming his insanity. The police were already there to put his uncle in his place.

  Do you know Drissa? That’s my question for you. One sentence, only four words as you get up to leave the room and I block your passage. I want to go back to the cell, be among the cigarette butts, the filth, my thoughts, my leopard ancestor, with my barefoot grandfather, Drissa exhausted, drained of his whole being like a wet bird. Mireille and her cotton underpants, like when we were kids.

  Push me violently against the wall of my cell, my ancestor is waiting for me!

  Ancestor, look at me, this thing in chains, a disturbing cascade, this incomplete knot, in blood and tears. This is your son, ancestor! You are looking on at me from a distance; I’m in suspension, chained down in these new lodgings. Disguised as a proud patriarch, you seem legitimate, reigning over a bunch of crazy detainees. But I’m sad for you, you also believed. What kind of legacy have you have passed on to us, what wasted freedom, laws executed by those with the most powerful arms? Promises of independence, pride reclaimed, all of it exploited, winding up with the most absurd expression of racism. Greed inaugurated the order of the day, paving the way for genocides and killings. Ancestor, you are pretending to have forgotten. As in your childhood, you are meditating, making appeals and taking refuge among the eternal invisible ones, meanwhile a cannonade continues to dominate mutilated bodies.

  Charlemagne Ngouvou, Joan of Arc Maboundi, Wilfried N’Sondé, Anatole Nganga, and so many other names, what have we become, ancestor, we don’t even realize that we have been handing out ridiculous sobriquets that imitate our former master? Blanche Senga, Euloge Sita, Jean de Dieu Mienandi, Anicet Boungoudiabampoutou. . . . We have emulated the pride of the clever monkey, who can find the most unusual first name from the Catholic calendar. Ancestor, who are we really? Look at what I have become!

  I have let you down, ancestor? I did my best. What can you do with me? There is no garbage can for humans! I’m bringing a little bit of you to suffer with me in my hole. Stop pretending you can’t hear me with your disdainful scowl. Get down from your contempt and submit to my turmoil! I have the clarity for those who are lost. Remember how Drissa wanted to know what a Bakongo chief was, a Zulu, Kikuyu, Shona, Bamileke, Mandingo, Ashanti, Wolof. . . . His father had bought a driver’s license to show off with a car that was way more than he could afford with his salary. That car meant no electricity at home, and there you were going on about great men of remarkable dignity and rectitude, who nobly executed the justice of proud and merciful men.

  Ancestor, you stayed quiet, while your friend, Drissa’s uncle, great marabout that he was, went on to fill his pockets by exploiting other people. Magic, the foundation that connects us all to the single broken line in life, the horizontal line that banishes right before our eyes the differences between yesterday and today. He made a business of other people’s naivety and you looked the other way. He sold his powers and became a merchant of dreams and threats, all so that he could buy himself women and cars.

  Where were your words in the face of this tragedy? And what of the future you silence, leaving me here to face myself? Shaking your head you say you can’t understand, you grew up so far away from all of this. A couple of years in Europe and you accuse me of having forgotten who I am! Was there so little to preserve and transmit in the end?

  It’s high time to open a high-security national park so that I can be kept in my original ecosystem against all outside influences. Captain, professor, ancestor, grant me at least the dignity of whales, the right to exist that giant tortoises enjoy.

  You can go now, ancestor. I’m not angry. I have the devil and the benevolence of the spirits. I only need the strength to rediscover love and the will to live for tomorrow.

  Who’s this guy? I’ve been standing for hours in front of this cell. He won’t stop screaming. The guy’s completely nuts! A real motherfucker. A real wild animal. He gets fucked up and kills a guy by kicking him to death. No surprise they kill each other in their country, real barbarians. Why can’t they just stay in their own country instead of coming here to ruin our lives? I’m getting tired of taking him back and forth for interrogation. I had to examine the inside of his mouth and his asshole. Disgusting! He fought like a wild cat. My colleagues didn’t miss a beat with this piece of shit. You’d think he’d been run over by a car. Thank God my shift ends in an hour. I almost feel like letting the idiot go just so I don’t have to hear him singing in African. Every time I bang on the bars for him to shut up, the more the jerk rattles on in his savage language. The guy scares me. At one point, I thought he was really some kind of sorcerer or you know some version of their weird kind of superstitions, you know like voodoo or black magic. On one of my rounds I couldn’t see him anymore. The bastard had hidden under his bed. By the time I realized it, I must have lost a pound from all the worrying. I already imagined myself writing up a report explaining that the prisoner had managed to escape from the cell using supernatural powers. I was scared shitless. Naturally I had to beat up a prisoner who couldn’t defend himself. It’s just that he pushed me to my limits, refused to stay put. Any longer and I would have had the Disciplinary Board up my ass. Thank God this one was already so messed up that another beating didn’t make any real visible difference. Right now it’s feeling like things could get out of hand pretty fast. I’m dying to get out of here. At least the head honchos don’t want to talk about what happened. The whole precinct feels like its spoiling for a fight. And this nut job just won’t stop. He’s loud, he cries, and he stinks. He does seem pretty young though for a homeless guy. Really more lost than dangerous. He’s not even that big or strong. Seems to be battling his own demons. When I look in on him, it’s like he doesn’t even see me. I even got that feeling when I was beating him. Maybe it’s the drugs. He’s just as backward as the rest of them. Let’s face it, it’s not like these guys invented gunpowder or made an effort to do something other than music and sport. You might even think he was clever if he started running around in his tiny cell or doing some break-dancing!

  When I have children, I’m going to think long and hard about where to raise them, stay clear of neighborhoods with guys like this in them. What, now I’m a racist? If everybody would just stay where they come from, we’d have way less problems. I remember the neighborhood they stole my car in. I was a student officer back then. The whole scene that night was like a riot and the investigators still haven’t figured out the real reasons for all that havoc. Those assholes totally dented up my car. Pretty twisted, there was even blood on the back seat, some girl’s underwear and socks. Real savages!

  I’m getting off work early today. The junior officers look like they’re sticking together. Given the mug they’re wearing, this detainee is going to have a hell of a fifteen minutes.

  The silence is back and it’s making me think of Drissa. Drissa, what’s left of you is a waste. What’s a Negro, a real one? And you were already shaking! What, you weren’t born over there? You don’t know anythin
g about it? You don’t speak your own language? Black on the outside, white on the inside! You better hang on so you can at least make sense in these lines, otherwise you’re going to wind up as a question mark. You better watch out, my friend, they want to erase you from the text. Root yourself down, anchor yourself fast, anywhere, wherever you feel good about yourself, a little parentheses that you can open, enough to slip into and have a bit of happiness before the final sentence is written.

  Of Drissa, nothing is left except for a kind of black spot, indelibly stuck to his body, bye-bye, who is that one, there? You’re a shameful site. Come back in another life. Who is really black? What’s a White person like? His head bobs back and forth, day and night, bouncing, going from one rejection to another. You don’t look like much of anything. The machine that made you went haywire. You didn’t even fall from a banana tree. At least get moving behind a tam-tam! You were not written into this program. Go find a hole where you can be forgotten and let’s not hear another word from you! Wear a pendant of a miniscule map of Africa in fake leather. What’s a real Black person like? In any case, he doesn’t look much like one! Go and bleach your skin and show your face to the world, from Johannesburg to Paris, by way of Kinshasa. Make yourself handsome! Go on, get rid of some of that color, but not too much or you’ll look whitewashed, affecting a Parisian accent, and no one likes that either. Speak French eloquently and amaze the imbecile, marveled by modernity, ignorant of civilization, barefoot, bare breasts hanging all the way down to the navel in open air, with two children hanging on. Forget your CFA ways, chewed tobacco stuck to the bottom of your feet, asking once again what is the color of the White man’s feces. Don’t eat like a Pygmy, but don’t be too delicate either, or they’ll think you’re acting like a White man. Who do you think you are? Don’t forget your own people, the violence, the slavery, the colonies, the humiliation, the harassments, the whip. No ma’am, yes boss. Get those words out of your mouth and go enroll at the Sorbonne!

  Drissa is struggling just to stand up straight. He’s completely broken, beginning to think outside of his own head. The question marks are culminating inside him like lightning bolts, going from bottom to top, from yesterday to tomorrow. Today has been set aside, left in suspense, an inferno. His head and his life are too heavy for his shoulders to carry. You’re not real, a mere shadow, a byline messing up the statistics just so you can sneak your way on to the metro. Sorry, but you weren’t called for the casting. With a face like that, there’s no role for you. Train stations, the RER, you create problems for the national education system, just more delinquency and rising high school dropout rates. He wants to stand firm, but his legs can’t hold up anymore. Drissa, relax.

  Listen to what the words are really saying my brother, there are men and then there’s the color. Normality is in place and the minority is debated based on definitions of difference. Stop running in place. A good distance from you a satellite is talking about you. You better come to terms with the fact that there’s no color in what you’re doing. Did Mozart compose white music? You keep going on about how passionate you are about Negro art and black music. You better wake up, brother. You better get up to speed.

  Drissa, don’t let go of my hand. Think about Mireille and me. She doesn’t give a shit. She only wants me. She couldn’t care less about this black and white bullshit, Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Protestants, Animists. . . . For her, all these stories about spirits are nothing but pure primitive superstition!

  Mireille isn’t kissing the color black when she coyly tells me she wants me, her mouth on my neck and her hand running over my body. It’s true that she puts on a good show when she stops by the house. She’s just a schoolmate! The ancestor who has no idea who she is sends her stories and tales. She listens, smiles, and looks on at me. Her favorite tale is the one about the mistreated child, mutilated and assassinated by his mother who hated him for his beauty and who, thanks to the benevolence of the spirits, was eventually resuscitated.

  Mireille sits at the table and eats with my mother. They don’t speak too much with words but rather with their eyes. My mother dives into her meal with her fingers, smiling occasionally. She could never really hate White people. Mireille is especially uncomfortable when my sister asks her why she’s so white. She looks on at me, her eyes beaming. The ancestor stares at her later on as if she’s someone completely unfamiliar. Maybe he will always be a distracted child, always on the lookout for those unseen forces that can hinder our advancement. In any event, he instructs me to take her back home, to be a gentleman. He says it like an insult, or an order because he was never a great source of tenderness.

  Drissa has forgotten our dreams, and we were such good friends. She, he and I, neighbors right from the beginning, we met each other on the gray swings next to the sandbox. Later on, Mireille would cheer us on during soccer matches in the parking lot. Drissa lived on the same floor, and Mireille lived on the third floor in the building just in front of ours. Her window was just behind the willow tree that has since been cut down. We were basically together all the time.

  Very early on there was already this physical attraction between Mireille and I, but we were a one of a kind team, a fleet of falcons manipulated spiritually by the ancestors and the spirits, energized by the finesse and great ideas that Mireille had and protected by Drissa’s marabout uncle. As kids, we played our games with this vague notion that we were, each one in a unique way, following our own destiny, but together. We were in our own world, away from all the other boys and their fights and the girls with their predictable love dramas. We would lay on the grass, looking up at the sky as though it were the only theater worthy of our ambitions. We would fix our gaze intensely on the stars we imagined far beyond the gray skies.

  We treasured our childhood. We had no money, so we spent all our holidays with the other youth and among the five buildings in the neighborhood, along the stretch of highway that ran past our project. Our empire was in the basement. Spanish, Portuguese, Algerians, Vietnamese, Congolese, Malians, Bretons, the whole world was in the parking lot and the swimming pool which we would enter through a gap in the fencing.

  Mireille, Drissa, and I, we were a one-of-a-kind team. While the boys distracted the shopkeepers, she would innocently, behind those brown curly locks and her little red freckles, steal sweets. Her angelic face dispelled any suspicion of her character. Then we would take off and share the loot in uncontrollable laughter and self-satisfaction. I can still hear it today resonating in my ears. Our behavior commanded the respect and friendship of the other children in the neighborhood. We were no longer in the category of overprotected bourgeois brats, daddy’s boys. We were considered brave and earned the right to a peaceful existence. No one would dare to give us detention at the end of the school day.

  We even earned the admiration of Kamel, otherwise known as Dinosaur, whose criminal reputation basically preceded his birth. Long before becoming a real criminal, dealer of hard and mild stuff, charged with assault and battery, he used to grab handbags and rob people in the streets. During almost his entire childhood and adolescence, he would break into the home of our high schoolmate Ludovic’s parents’ place. He started by taking their deserts while they would be having lunch outside during the summers and then went on to break into the garage and steal a bicycle. At seventeen years old, he emptied their entire home of the silver and hi-fi equipment. Ludovic was so frightened of Kamel he never dared express his suspicions. Relieved of their meager riches, the family finally decided to install the best and most expensive security system.

  Later on, once Kamel had found a new way of life, thanks to his conversion to the grace of the Muslim faith, he absolutely wanted to personally apologize for all the awful things he had put them through. That’s how Ludovic’s mother came to find three fully bearded men ringing at her doorstep one afternoon. Within a matter of seconds, she turned as pale as a dead person, and her knees started trembling so intensely that she was about to faint. The poor woman had se
en way too many television programs about Muslims, how particularly cruel the men were and how they hated women more than their worst enemies. They prayed all day long and washed their feet five times per day. She had also learned that these guys, who distributed bombs all over the place because there were so many good Christians that needed to be sent to heaven, would cut off the heads of Western tourists just for the fun of it. In the state she was in, she couldn’t even hear what the youngest of the three was saying to her in the gentlest tone. As far as she was concerned, a whole scam was already in place. Like her husband had explained, this was part of a bigger scheme to basically divert her attention. These guys couldn’t wait to get on to their next petty theft. One minute they were taking gunshots up the ass, the next they were fucking around with an alarm system that directly alerted the cops at the police station.

  It was a game for Mireille, Drissa, and I to steal in the supermarkets, a way for us to experience fear. Given the means we had, it was just another way to use our overactive imagination. Our real country was the eternal love we had for our mothers, fixtures behind the hearth-burning fires. They were experts at negotiating in the markets. Those who had mastered French helped those who needed help. In time, they had basically reinvented the French language. I would spy on them from a distance, sitting on their bright colored mats, right by the sign that read: “Walking on the grass is prohibited.” Aside from the everyday challenges they faced, they openly confided to each other about their husbands, the father of their children, the men with whom they shared an apartment. They all came from countries where a marriage based on love was an unnecessary and dangerous luxury. In the bedroom, it was next to impossible to make the difference between tenderness and procreation. Romantic love was a puerile and embarrassing idea. We grew up far away from kind words and tender hugs. We were used to major confrontations and even sometimes to physical violence, to the coldness of the cement floor and ice-cold looks.