When the Plums Are Ripe

by Patrice Nganang

  “His name is Philothée,” Bilong replied.

  Philothée hadn’t stopped Captain Dio from inscribing his name next to his friend’s. He had signed where he was told to, awed perhaps by the white men and their things, just as he had been when he decided to join the poetry circle. That’s how, on the day when the women of Edéa had joined forces in front of Mininga’s Bar to liberate Bilong, two adolescents entered into the Second World War. Love, like friendship, is a castle full of surprises. Of course, Bilong and Philothée didn’t yet know just what they had gotten themselves into. On their way, they discovered all the advantages of signing up. They discovered parts of Cameroon they never would have dreamed of, met tribes they’d never before known of, and heard strange languages. Out of Edéa for the first time in his life, Philothée thanked Bilong every day for having helped him to discover the world.

  If that was all a soldier’s life was … but, alas! Who could have told him what that life really was? If only the Second World War had just let them explore Cameroon! Ah! Who could have told him what war really was? Living in a colony had limited his horizon; and given his young age, Philothée was always afraid of being roped into forced labor. Leaving was a tantalizing solution that Pouka had held up before him; the French army made it possible. The disappointment visible in his eyes was that of a starving man who realizes that yet another feast is escaping his grasp. Until that point, he and Bilong had shared their feelings and impressions, their sense of wonderment. Now, for the first time, “the lucky one” would have something different to tell him. That’s certainly why he cursed, “Shit!”

  “Step forward,” said Lieutenant Colonel d’Ornano. “March! One-two, one-two!”

  A soldier doesn’t look back. Bilong didn’t turn around. He didn’t see the envy in his friend’s eyes. He had never put his feet to the ground with such pride, such precision, never held his head high with such elegance, or swung his arms with such fervor. And the tirailleurs’ song that he knew so well, never had he sung it with such conviction. He thought of his father, so impatient to see him act like a man; of his mother, who had cried the day he’d done so; and mostly of Nguet, who had revealed the man within him. She who, on the first day of their love, had held his testicles and declared, as his penis grew longer: “Here is a man.” If only she could have seen him singled out from among all those thousands of soldiers come from all parts of Africa, singled out for the perfection of his bearing and the care with which he aimed his weapon. Ah, if only she had seen him that day when he was transformed by his soldier’s uniform! He sang the tirailleurs’ song—“Le Chant des Africains”—but really what Bilong chanted out were the psalms of the Book of Love, the Lerewa Nuu Nguet, written by the Sultan Njoya and that he reconstructed word by word in his head as he remembered his lover’s body, his lover whose demands and suggestions he had written down in rhyming couplets: in alexandrines, as he had learned to do.

  8

  The Dunes of Nguet

  Yet, oh … how sweet it is to hear your mother tongue as you prepare to depart! How sweet it is to listen to a lullaby from home when your soul is facing the unknown. It was Aloga who woke Bilong up that morning, with a serious, fatherly look in his eyes. The other Bassas stood around him. As the false Hilun put it, they wanted to say “one or two prayers.” This was the second time since they had found themselves in the emptiness defined by the hundreds of incomprehensible languages that set each group apart from one another that they had gathered together to speak in the one language that took them back to Edéa. If truth be told, Aloga was the only one to speak, even if he gave each of them a chance to say something.

  “You’ve said it all,” was what each replied.

  Hebga added, “Big brother.”

  And truly, Aloga had said it all. Later, his words will compete with the image of Nguet’s body in a battle for Bilong’s heart, when he sits in the truck headed for Murzuk, crossing dunes and sometimes feeling as if he’s been swallowed up whole by the land rising around him in gigantic waves of sand. On both sides of the convoy the meharists, led by Captain Dio, advanced on their camels. At the start of the procession was a truck carrying the company’s officers: d’Ornano, Leclerc, and several white soldiers. All Bilong could see around him were the great expanses of sand and the rays of the sun that stretched out ahead or behind them in turn. Sand, sand, sand, nothing but sand. He closed his eyes, for his tears had long since dried up. When he opened them, he was again struck by the sand stretching out before him.

  The sand-filled eyes of his four fellow tirailleurs reflected his own fear back at him. Lost in the belly of the earth, they hadn’t even had the chance to tell each other their respective stories. But maybe they did—I’m sure they did. On the tenth day of their trek, Bilong opened his eyes and the desert before him had the shape of a breast. Yes, a woman’s breast, gigantic, with the nipple pointing toward the sun. Then the sand turned into a flat belly, which disappeared into the depths of a vulva, and opened up again into two expansive legs. He elbowed his neighbor several times, but the brave fellow, a Nigerian, wasn’t impressed, nor were the three others, who were from Chad; they seemed to have come down with desert sickness and weren’t hiding it.

  “Let us sleep?” railed the Nigerian.

  It was the Chadians, however, who soon turned Bilong’s visions into a joke, for what else could they do there in the back of a truck, lost in the endless monotony of the dunes?

  “Cameroonian always thinking screw,” said one of the Chadians with a laugh.

  The others joined in.

  “Him see woman everywhere.”

  “Gnoxer desert, even.”

  That was pretty much true. Bilong got an erection each time he thought about his girlfriend. And now she had taken on the shape of the desert just to entrance him. What would the tirailleurs have said had they seen him plunge his hand into his pants pocket to calm his bangala? But that’s what his relationship with Nguet had become. She took on unforeseen shapes. Sometimes his girlfriend appeared as a tree, sometimes as a bird’s song, or the sound of a stream; at times she was a taste, the heady taste of a mango, ah! He saw her everywhere he looked, and each time his tongue, his fingers, and his penis answered her call. That, Bilong couldn’t explain—not to his mother or his sister, neither of whom would have understood. And let’s not even talk about the other tirailleurs!

  Twenty times a day Bilong made love to his girlfriend, and it just wasn’t enough. He had her up against the wall, on the table, on the chair, in every part of the house. He lifted up her right leg, then her left, then both, to penetrate her more deeply. He took her from behind, lying on the side, and still it wasn’t enough. A hundred and sixteen—no, seventeen—positions, and still there were more. Sometimes he put his penis between her breasts and moved back and forth, sometimes she held him in her closed fist, or sucked on him—a quickie between two tasks at work. Oh! What didn’t they do?

  If for Bilong paradise had the shape of Nguet’s orifices, his comrades were imagining the one that awaited them at the end of the war: an oasis. And right then, it was an oasis that appeared before Bilong’s eyes, at the end of a shallow valley. That oasis—he imagined it as succulent as Nguet’s sex. He closed his eyes and ears and saw Nguet’s vagina with as much precision as he saw the oasis ahead of them. He could make out the lips over here, the clitoris there, and on one side the rise of a small bushy tuft. He bathed in her evanescent perfume, felt his heart beating and his mouth go dry; then he opened his eyes and tried to catch up with the conversations of his companions, who hadn’t realized that he had cum.

  Those men would have burst out laughing if they had seen what he saw. But who could blame him for being afraid—afraid to death, in prey to that kind of fear that makes both heroes and those condemned piss or even shit in their pants? Oh! How many days did they spend crossing that burning desert? How many days did they walk through that endless expanse of gold? In his own mind, Bilong was making that trek across the very body of his
girlfriend, who had become the Sahara. His misty gaze could barely make out the lingering lights marking the path ahead, a promise writ in scarlet. Then he jumped: the meharists who were leading the trucks waved their arms, and the convoy came to a halt.

  “Kayouge,” they said. “Kayouge!”

  It was just a brief respite, even if their numbers were increased by the troops—English and others—who met them at Kayouge: a hundred men with heavier trucks, some of which had metal tracks instead of wheels. Lost there in the immensity of this distant place that he had always dreamed of exploring but that, now that he was here, terrified him, Bilong couldn’t make out the dunes that lay before him, no more than he could foresee what he would find in the Fezzan. At that point the date was already January 6, 1941; the troops that joined his company were those of Major Pat Clayton, the very ones who had brought a smile to d’Ornano’s lips the morning after that sleepless night.

  Bilong didn’t need to know all the details, and neither do you, really, my dear reader. As for me, the narrator of this book, I know that before him opened up one last triangle—and its hypotenuse was formed not by the truth of our Nguet, but rather by the Italian forces that our troops met in Murzuk, and especially by one certain Sicilian I’ll tell you about when the time is right.

  9

  Homework in History and Geography

  Here’s a quick summary of what has happened thus far: an adolescent left his home, attracted by the succulent smell of fried fish, or by the gentle song of a turtledove, or by a woman’s luscious, sweet ass, what does it matter? For this boy would suddenly find himself in the middle of a battle in the Sahara, a battle memorialized in history books, even if they have forgotten his name. Yet everything began that day, yes, it did, when Bilong joined the little poetry circle. Exhausted by counting syllables—an exercise Pouka had insisted they do repeatedly (“a poem is comprised of a sum of syllables, or feet, as we say”)—he had waited for the break like a man dying of thirst. And it was then that he had found himself standing in front of Mininga’s serving girls, who were eyeing the poetic fraternity from a discreet distance.

  “Don’t you have a glass of water for me?”

  He had spoken to the girl in the lacy dress, the one with big earrings, who usually worked the bar.

  “What are you doing over there?” she asked after she brought him the water, curious about what they were up to.

  It was Nguet.

  “Writing,” Bilong told her. He drank deeply from the goblet she had given him, his legs splayed so that the drips would soak into the ground.

  “Writing what?” our Nguet continued.

  “Rhymes.”

  Hearing that, the other women chimed in.

  “What’s that?”

  “Can you eat it?”

  Bilong lost all interest in trying to explain rhymes to them.

  “So,” Nguet began, “instead of going to the fields with everyone else, you come here, to the bar, to write rhymes.”

  “Instead of chattering on like this, you should be happy that we come here to work in your bar,” Bilong countered.

  Mininga would have agreed with him, except she hadn’t been there when the exchange took place.

  “Thank you for the water.”

  He handed the empty goblet back to the woman who’d spoken and started to turn away.

  “Don’t talk too much, now,” she snapped back. “But how long have you been doing that?”

  “How long?” Bilong exclaimed. “You want me to get to work on you?”

  “Just where is the man?” she retorted.

  The other women burst out laughing. With his back to the wall, Bilong tried to give a cocky answer: “Me, I’m gonna work you over, every part of your body, until you are in tears, wah, wah, wah.”

  “Ah, do you hear that?”

  “The kid is really something, huh?”

  Bilong started to leave, still thinking that he’d had the last word, when another reply made him stop in his tracks.

  “Does Mr. Poet do anything besides talk?”

  The boy had frozen in place. He turned around suddenly, an insult ready on his lips, but the sly whispering of the women made it clear they’d figured out he was a virgin.

  “Let the little kid grow up,” one of them advised—a suggestion that only made him less steady on his feet.

  “He has to get back to his rhymes,” said another.

  “I’ll be waiting right here for you,” replied Nguet. “You can show me how you work a woman over till she cries.”

  The women burst out laughing again. Bilong waded through their sarcasm, back to the table where Pouka was again explaining the importance of syllables. The maestro glared at him, but didn’t say anything. The next morning, Bilong was the first to arrive in the bar. He went straight to Nguet’s door and knocked.

  “Here I am.”

  Then it was the woman who was surprised. Her hair was still loose and she had only a pagne tied around her hips. Bilong jumped right on her.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” she said, backing away. “Do you think that’s how you go about working a woman over?”

  Bilong kept moving forward, and his momentum sent them both tumbling back on the bed. The boy tore off the woman’s pagne.

  “Are you trying to rape me?” she asked.

  She said “rape” in French, staring him down with the fiercest of glares. Only then did Bilong pause.

  “You see, I thought you knew how to make love to a woman…”

  Bilong, of course, didn’t admit how simple his problem was: he had never seen a naked woman before. Still, oh! Good Lord, Nguet figured it out, all right. Instead of getting dressed, she gestured for him to sit down next to her.

  “Sit right here,” she ordered.

  Bilong felt a wave of shame flood over him. She took his hand and, step by step, moved it over her body.

  “This is a breast, you see?”

  Bilong started to protest, acting out the part of an experienced lady’s man (“Me, I see breasts like that every morning with breakfast, what do you think?”), but she put her hand to his lips (and thankfully she didn’t say, “I know, your mother’s breasts that you still suck on each morning”).

  “Shhh,” she said. “Do you want me to yell? The whole bar doesn’t need to hear us, do they? Look, see, a breast is delicate.”

  She showed him her nipple.

  “Very sensitive.”

  She took one of his fingers and placed it gently on her nipple.

  “You touch it gently.”

  Gulp!

  “Now, I know you want to go straight here,” she said, showing him her vulva. The boy smiled.

  “Only you have to start here,” she said, pointing to her head, “if you really want to work me over until I cry. Then move on to here…”

  That’s how she introduced him to the whole surface of her body, like a desert he had to cross, one part after the other, one limb after the other, even if he was dying of thirst. And that’s how he discovered that his girlfriend was a whole territory for him to explore, day after day. The dunes of Nguet were revealed to him in a dark bedroom in Edéa. Like an experienced traveler, he hurried to dive into his studies of French poetry, arriving early each morning to knock at Nguet’s door: he who wants to go far gets an early start, as we say. So each morning when Bilong woke up, there before his eyes he could clearly see, unclothed, another part of Nguet’s body, the part of the day, shall we say—the knee, perhaps.

  That’s how Bilong became a regular traveler in his girlfriend’s territory. He arrived before the other members of the little poetry circle, his mind fixed on Nguet’s knee. He knew that to get to the knee, he’d go from the forehead to the nape, from the nape to the front of her neck, from neck to breasts, from chest to shoulder, arm, hand, fingers, and then belly; across her belly to the belly button, before heading to her curvaceous buttocks, and then on to her thigh, and finally, her knee. He soon discovered that it was Nguet’s clitoris that he loved to h
old between his lips, sucking on it gently, and that to get there, he needed patience and a delicate touch. Little by little, working over his girlfriend distorted his sense of time, because if he didn’t want to arrive late to the poetry sessions, he needed to come earlier and earlier to the lovemaking sessions. Day by day they grew longer and soon took up whole nights. Finally, he just moved in to Mininga’s Bar.

  The women of La Seigneuriale weren’t surprised to see him there every night. They smiled, and one suggested that he was learning how to work, after all. Bilong realized that working over a woman is like homework in history and geography. But let’s move on past the twists and turns of his endlessly repeated travels, yes, let’s move on, for the hero of this chapter has at least one historic role to play in this Second World War, which is where his explorations of Nguet’s geography had finally led him. Let’s move on past these pages in the history books that, instead of explaining the laborious efforts of a Senegalese tirailleur named Bilong, as I have just done, focus rather on praising the efforts of the officers. If you want to read them, you can open the book Le Général Leclerc vu par ses compagnons de combat (Paris: Editions Alsatia, 1948), pages 34, 47, and 61.

  And as for Bilong, history doesn’t even mention how he discovered the cane—the one the man who was still Colonel Leclerc used as an alibi to stay away from the front, on the peaceful side of the dunes, while he sent others, Senegalese tirailleurs in particular, into the no-man’s-land of the battle, even as he expected that history would soon forget those trivial details and, instead, build statues in his honor, like the one that graces an intersection in Douala. “I have a bit of a limp,” he would say. “So, Tirailleur First-Class Bilong, if you want to become an officer one day, take this grenade and go throw it at the Italian plane you see over there, because the Italians are all fascists.”