We get out of the car into the coolness of the night. It’s crazy how time flies at night. The street is deserted and I’m having a hard time standing up straight. The urge to dance I was feeling in the car is gone now. I feel like a zombie. One foot before the other, a faint clarity allows me to give short rash answers to my friend’s enthusiasm. I advance painfully down the stairs. Each step distills its dose of suffering and demands extraordinary effort. Where does Ludovic get all this energy? Mireille, Mireille, my heart feels like it’s about to explode! When we finally enter the apartment where the party is supposed to be taking place, the scene is somewhat pathetic. A blonde girl, her mouth slathered in red wine, moves her body clumsily in the space that’s supposed to be a dance floor. If I weren’t so heartbroken, maybe I might have found her pretty, but I’m somewhere else. No magic in the world will bring Mireille to me in this very moment. It’s laughable even to imagine that she might just suddenly surface out of the blue just because I love her. Two guys slouching on the couch are passing a massive spliff half-heartedly back and forth between them. We’re greeted by Ludovic’s cousin, who assures us that the party is just getting warmed up, and how cool it is that we stopped by. Something tells me that nobody else is going to be coming. While I’m trying to be friendly with the two potheads, Ludovic is busy trying out some kind of rhythmless dance moves with the wasted blond girl. A few minutes later, they’re kissing frantically. The hallucinogenic is making me feel good, I’m smoking, I’m drinking, talking about Mireille and the Kongo sorcerers to my two new sidekicks of the moment. In no time at all, Ludovic and the blonde chick are completely wrapped up in each other, tongues hanging out and everything. In my drunken state, it’s difficult for me to keep up with their erotic moves. They’ve barely made it into the room next door and you can hear them grunting like animals, the wood of the parquet creaks as if someone had just smashed themselves against it. The blonde girl sounds like she’s caught in some kind of hysterical laughter. They didn’t even bother to close the door.
The two guys, practically falling asleep by now, are having a good laugh as well. They keep taking turns at some pretty salacious commentary. One of them regrets being so fucked-up, cos he might have been able to take a hit as well without this drunken bitch ever having a clue.
I can feel I’ve had enough. I want to go home now, see Mireille and Drissa again, and talk to some of the benevolent spirits. So, I go on a rant insulting my fellow smoking buddies for their vulgarity, you’re complete morons, but these guys are elsewhere, ignore me, bad trip, they mutter to each other, giggling. My need for the warmth of a home has made me nasty. Suddenly my stomach starts acting up and bubbling. Thick, disgusting bile fills my mouth. I try to get up but I’m staggering, my body abandons me and I vomit in convulsive pain all over the poor guys, offended of course. Between hiccups, I insult them with a vengeance, throwing my fist out every which way while heading for the exit. On my way out, I bump into Ludovic in his boxers, alerted by the commotion. He rushes out of his love nest, let him go to hell, I’ve never been able to stand him, I escape into the solitude of the night.
I eventually find myself down by the quays. I decide to go and have one last drink over by the Place Sainte-Opportune. I stagger over to Les Halles, head down, and finally settle into a seat at the bar, La Cervoise. Pedro, the Peruvian barman, who I know very well, serves me an outstanding beer. He’s talking to me without even noticing that both ears and brain have pretty much shut down for the night. As usual, he beats me at a game of craps, which gives him quite the thrill and then he starts to put up the tables and chairs for the night. The guy has the gift of gab. I can no longer fight off the fatigue. My head is heavy. I’m only able to hold it up by sticking my mouth to the beer glass. I’m drooling on the side, pathetic. I’m disgusted with myself! Too bad for the girl who thought I was cute. Pedro quiets down. The evening is winding down. I have no desire for anything!
I’ve really had too much to drink and smoke. La Cervoise closed up, so I started to just wander aimlessly on the deserted streets. I think that I first fell backward and tried painstakingly to get up by leaning onto the front of the dark blue station wagon, number 357 of the national police force. Back on my feet, I opened my zipper and started to relieve myself. The urge was too pressing. Urinating gave me an intense satisfaction that I felt in my whole body.
Police. What’s going on with you? Take it easy. You don’t have to carry on like this because you can’t hold your drink. Come on, that’s enough! He stood before me with this saddened look, compassionate, holding his hands out to help me up. My neurons are short-circuiting and I think I showed him quite blatantly a contemptuous smile. His partner, outraged and disgusted, was sounding off, fucking shit, for fuck’s sake, I can’t believe assholes like this exist! He claims that I roared with laughter, head falling back like a lunatic, opening my arms in the shape of a cross. He couldn’t do anything. It all happened so fast. Pascal was too idealistic, he wasn’t careful enough. Today the streets are filled with all kinds of unknown riffraff. You can’t just walk down the street, relaxed, imagining it belongs to you. I hit him, pushed him, bit him, gave him some pretty hefty kicks in the head even though he was already down and lifeless. Thudding sounds against a skull on the asphalt. Let him take his load too, take his share of the suffering. At first he pleaded and then he finally shut up for good. There was blood everywhere. He must have thought about his wife, his daughter, and maybe he even recalled the young guy, crying on his brother’s shoulder, one day, not far from the Eiffel Tower. Afterward, there were handcuffs, screams, more beatings, a real maelstrom of violence all around me. I’m falling asleep standing up, appeased, relieved.
Now I’m a criminal, captain, you can go home now, but you had better make sure that you have locked the door and put on the deadbolts. Yes, gentlemen of the court, I pissed out all my frustrations, on the officer, my fear of the future, the love that left me, a devastated Congo, my friends’ distress, petrol the color of blood, the cement in my veins, rage in my eyes, and the invisible ones I no longer hear. Keep your ears open, let your eardrums quiver before my outcry and answer the call. It’s the urine of the wild cat that we alone can distill. I pissed on the officer and I beat on him pretty badly. To all these ridiculous questions that keep tormenting my life, I answered with calm fits of rage. What are you anyway, French or African? I hit where it hurt most and with everything I had, again and again! Once the evening, the sirens, the police cars flashing blue lights, the words behind the voices, the swarm of indecipherable images, when all of it had finally come to an end, I stood there standing. I didn’t even smile or cry. All I wanted was to sleep.
Drissa has been quiet for a longtime now, like the silence at home. Emptiness surrounds me. In the hospital where I came into this world, rats and dogs are mercilessly fighting over the cockroaches in the corridors. You basically enter the hospital to die on the bare mattresses, with no sheets. No one even thinks about repainting the walls.
A bunch of lost kids meticulously strip the dying of whatever they have left. Over there in my father’s village, the mobongui fire no longer illuminates more than half a dozen abandoned old men, with sad expressions and jaundiced, glassy eyes. Idle spirits dance and wait calmly, inaccessible, hidden in the darkness. During the past several years, the Chinese have returned home to build Capitalism in the Empire, still Communists in the Underworld. Carole is taking care of her pregnancy and will be a new mother in four months. She’s waiting patiently for Drissa to fully regain his faculty. She wants to start a family with him. The ancestor has done his time. On the bank, next to the Congo River where in the past you were meant to drown yourself, militiamen have built a torture chamber and an arbitrary detention space. Mireille has disappeared; tears in her eyes saying never ever again, forget even my name. We have lost trace of pious Kamel somewhere in a military training camp in Yemen. The guys from the neighborhood are preparing for a football match in the parking lot. As for me, I’ve savagely as
sassinated an officer of the law; an executive of legitimate violence, a responsible, loving, family man.
Make sure to lock the metal bars behind me, wall me up, set up the watch tower, fill it with trigger-happy snipers, release your watch dogs, you will never be able to rip out the heart of a wildcat. I wear the marks of the leopard in my loins. Captain, keep your airtight uniform on, firmly lace up your shiny black boots from the ankle up to the neck, pay attention to the openings, adjust your baseball cap and make sure it’s pointed before your eyes before I lick you! I have the instinct of the bush. I’m thriving, endlessly regenerating. I have the heart of the jungle. Hidden within me is a force you could never imagine, a furnace with inexhaustible resources. With its support, I have regained my bearings, thanks to the wisdom of my forefathers. This is and remains my most loyal companion.
I don’t want to have to hear any more of your questions, I’m done. You can always ask them but they’ll never affect me. They’ll just glide and ricochet off my head. Look, they’re all smashing horribly to the floor, as trivial as spit, ugly, insignificant. They dry up and disappear, in no time at all. Your questions, I’m propelling them, going forward, far from me. I’m sending them flying where they will never find me. If, for whatever reason they come back to bother me, even for the shadow of a split second, like pollen in the nose at springtime, I will effortlessly sneeze them all out right back at you!
Captain, I’m like Drissa, I’ve left. You only have my body, this carcass of doubts and complexes on which to unleash your fears, your hate, your civil penal code, whatever you want, but as for me, I’m out of here, ciao! You’ll never be able to catch up with me, seize me. I’m too clever for that. Good riddance, from here on out, I’m going to be very careful, especially with my head.
Given that Drissa and I look like no one else, we will remain standing! Together, we will continue to pull each other along, always higher, more agile, marvelous, strange, extraordinary. I’ll take his hand so that we can perfect our great leaps, the ones that we’ll weave among continents, worlds, and times. This is the real masterpiece of tomorrow.
We will swallow up the distances; powerless they will collapse on our path! Starting today, we will resist questions, weapons, and medication. You will not have my skin, captain, not you, not the judges, not Mireille, no one! You won’t ever have Drissa’s either, for I know he’s watching out and I’m minding out for him!
1. A reputed Parisian hospital in the Fourteenth Arrondissement, specializing in psychiatry and neurology, and symbolic of a mental institution.
2. The galette des rois is a flaked pastry cake traditionally on sale in France in early January to celebrate Epiphany. A small bean or porcelain figure, known as a fève, is inserted into the cake and the person who bites into it is anointed king (or queen), gets to wear the golden paper crown that is sold with the cake, and then select his queen (or her king) for the day.
Wilfried N’Sondé was born in 1969 in the Congo (Brazzaville) and grew up in France. He is widely considered one of the shining lights of the new generation of African and Afropean writers. His work has received considerable critical attention and been recognized with prestigious literary awards, most notably the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie and the Prix Senghor de la création littéraire.
Karen Lindo is a scholar of French and Francophone Literatures who taught in the United States for several years and is currently teaching and translating in Paris.
Dominic Thomas has published numerous books and edited volumes on the cultural, political, and social relations between Africa and France, and on immigration and race in Europe, including Black France (Indiana University Press, 2007) and Africa and France (Indiana University Press, 2013), and has translated works by Aimé Césaire, Faïza Guène, Alain Mabanckou, and Abdourahman Waberi. He is the Global African Voices series editor at Indiana University Press.
The Heart of the Leopard Children Page 10
