The Lights of Pointe-Noire

by Alain Mabanckou

  The city council agreed to Uncle Albert’s request, after he’d paid backhanders to a few of the government employees who then came and raised their glasses, shamelessly, at the renaming ceremony for the street. Every week members of the family would drop in to see Uncle Albert, and when he withdrew into his bedroom you knew he would re-emerge with some money to give the visitor. Broadly speaking, though it was not to be said out loud, you went round to Uncle Albert’s in the hope of leaving again with a few thousand CFA francs. If people arrived while he was having his siesta they would hang around in the yard, pretending to chat with Gilbert and Bienvenüe, my uncle’s twins, my cousins, with whom I spent much of my childhood. The twins understood what was going on, and sensed that their father was basically the family bank. Sometimes, so he wouldn’t be disturbed while he was resting, Uncle Albert would place a packet of banknotes on the table and leave it to his wife, Ma Ngudi, to distribute them to the various visitors.

  My mother would also stop off at the rue de Louboulu. Not to pick up money, but to hand some over to Ma Ngudi, because I sometimes lived at my uncle’s for a while. Maman Pauline had requested this, ‘in the interests of Albert’s nephew’. Ma Ngudi was said to be good with children who didn’t eat enough – sometimes I would eat only the meat, and leave the fufu and manioc.

  One evening my mother came to pick me up at Uncle Albert’s, and Marcel, my father’s bête noire, just happened to be hanging around close by. By pure coincidence, Papa Roger, on his way back from work, had also decided to thank my uncle and his wife for having me to stay with them, and probably to leave a little envelope for my cousins Bienvenüe and Gilbert, as he often did.

  My mother and I were still saying goodbye to Uncle Albert when we heard a great rumpus out in the street. It had to be a fight, because all the kids in the neighbourhood were shouting:

  ‘Ali boma yé! Ali boma yé! Ali boma yé!’

  It was the famous cry of the Zaireans at the ‘May 20th’ Stadium during the legendary fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. In both Congos, it had become customary to chant it at any brawl.

  We all dashed outside into the street, and found a real punch-up going on, which had brought the entire Rex neighbourhood running to the rue du Louboulou. Marcel and my father were on the ground, covered in dust, and Papa Roger was on top, despite being so much smaller than the other guy, who seemed to me to be some kind of colossus, measuring nearly two metres, a good head taller than most houses in the street. Each time Marcel tried to get to his feet and catch my father off guard, the local people, including several members of our family, caught hold of his shirt or one of his feet, and he lost his balance again, to Papa Roger’s advantage. Picking a fight in the middle of this group, where we were as good as joined at the hip, was equivalent to signing his own death warrant.

  My mother yelled at the top of her voice:

  ‘Roger! Leave the guy alone! He hasn’t done anything!’

  My father wouldn’t let go of Marcel’s neck.

  ‘I’ll kill him! I’ll kill him!’

  Buoyed up by the excitement of the group, he was leaping around, striking karate poses which he’d seen in the film The Wrecking Crew, butting him, kicking him, kneeing him, and again, till Marcel, his face all bloodied, managed to work himself free and make a run for it. The whole neighbourhood ran after him. Everyone had a piece of wood or a stone in their hands.

  ‘They’ll kill him!’ shrieked my mother.

  ‘We sure will!’ came a voice from the crowd.

  You couldn’t tell who was throwing the stones and who the bits of wood, which Marcel was just managing to dodge. He had long legs and ran as though death itself was at his heels. In a few strides he crossed the Avenue of Independence and vanished into thin air in the winding streets of the Trois-Cents neighbourhood, the haunt of the prostitutes from Zaire. His pursuers knew not to go looking for him on that territory, where a fight could quickly turn into a general riot.

  Back at our house, my parents were rowing fiercely. My mother was telling my father it was a coincidence that Marcel happened to be in the rue de Louboulou. My father didn’t believe her, and was convinced that Maman Pauline had arranged a meeting with him, and that Uncle Albert was in on it, as were the entire Bembé tribe in the rue de Louboulou.

  ‘So then why did the very people from my tribe that you’re accusing take your side?’

  My father didn’t answer that. Proof, perhaps, that he realised my maternal family had been rooting for him, and he’d been carried away by suspicion and rage…

  My mother is a miss

  The photo’s in black and white, with a bit torn off at the bottom, on the right-hand side. It was taken at the end of the 1970s, one afternoon in the Joli-Soir district. I had come to meet my parents in this bar, where we are all sitting at a table. The two of them have glasses raised to their lips, and mine is on the table. It’s filled with beer, my mother insisted on this, she didn’t want anyone to think I was only there for the photo. We had to make it look like I had been sitting drinking with them for some time. I can still hear my mother acting like some finicky film director, to the photographer’s slight surprise:

  ‘Hold on, monsieur, we’re not ready! First get rid of those flies buzzing round the table! A fine way to mess up people’s photos! I’ll tell you when to press the button!’

  She swept her eyes across the room, hoping she could put off the moment when he took the picture. A few people entered and were making their way to the back of the bar. She grabbed her chance:

  ‘What’s all this, then? Did you see that? You can’t even take a photo in this country these days, not since President Marien Ngouabi died! Tell them to stop coming in for a moment!’

  Then, turning her attention to us:

  ‘And you two, act as though the photographer wasn’t there! Especially you, Roger, whenever someone takes your photo you look all tensed up like a snail that doesn’t know which way to turn! What way is that to behave? And you, boy, sit properly now. Sit up straight like a boy scout, like a boy who’s proud to be sitting there between his papa and mama!’

  Despite all these precautions, at which the photographer’s annoyance grew, she failed to notice a fourth glass on the table, to my left, in front of Papa Roger. He had bought a drink for the photographer, who had knocked it back in one, without saying thank you, eager to get on with the serious business. Instead of moving his glass out of the way, he had left it there. He seemed completely overwhelmed by his job, which, in order for him to make any money at all, required him to go all round town, from one bar to another, persuading people to have their photos taken. He wrote down your address in an old notebook and came round to your house the next day with the picture. You had to pay him a deposit beforehand. He made sure to print several copies of the same image, since if it turned out to be a masterpiece, everyone was going to want one. He was known in most districts of Pointe-Noire by now. And that day he was blowing his own trumpet in front of my parents, saying:

  ‘I’m the only one in this town with a Hasselblad SWC! Even the Americans used one when they went up into space! Do the other photographers in this town have one? No they do not! Just me! That’s why they call me Mr Hasselblad SWC!’

  Could anyone verify his claims? No one understood his gibberish anyway, all you saw was him pressing a button, and a flash that went off just like on any other camera. But my mother cut him short:

  ‘Stop prattling and tell us how much the photo costs!’

  Mr Hasselblad SWC struck up a ridiculous pose with his camera and, in the blink of an eye, the flash exploded in our faces…

  The photo looks different to me now. Perhaps because I’m looking at it in the town where it was taken. It’s as though in Europe or in America it keeps its secrets hidden. I look more closely. My mother dominates the picture. All you see, practically, is her and the scarf round her head. She seems more relaxed than my father and I, who are both trying to squeeze into the small amount of space she’
s left us. She wanted to be the one people saw when they looked at the photo. We were just there to highlight her presence, the principal’s impact being very much dependent on the involvement of those playing the secondary roles. This was clearly the impression she wished to create, with the way she is leaning slightly to the right, as though my father and I no longer existed, or as though we were intruding on what she considered her moment of glory, which she would leave for posterity.

  She is looking at the camera lens with a little smile, showing she has found the perfect pose. She doesn’t know I’ve got my mouth open, a blank expression, big wide eyes that seem to be asking what the point of this photo is. Normally she would have reminded me:

  ‘Sit up straight, look, we’re having our picture taken!’

  She’d have told me to close my mouth, she didn’t like this expression, considering it unworthy and unflattering.

  My shirt is hanging open – perhaps I had lost my buttons again, ‘like an idiot’, as my mother would have said. I admit that buttoning up my shirt was not a priority. I often had my shirt with all the buttons in the wrong holes.

  Now I notice various details that I haven’t seen before. For example, my mother’s right shoulder seems to be crushing me, while my father’s trying to keep us propped up. That’s why his head is pressed up against mine. I can see, too, my father’s fingers on my mother’s left shoulder. I think it must be his left arm holding us up and without it we wouldn’t have managed to hold the pose. Lastly, the marks left by the bottles on the surface of the table suggest the waiters didn’t wipe them very often…

  Two women

  I called her ‘Grandma Hélène’, but she was really my aunt, and she lived in the rue de Louboulou, just behind Uncle Albert’s house. She went everywhere barefoot, and stopped outside every house to offer vegetables, fruit, manioc, foufou or a demijohn of palm wine. Grandma Hélène was one of those people who you think has to have been born old, toothless, white haired, hesitant in her movements, like a stray gastropod, it was so impossible to imagine her young. You couldn’t tell her age, she didn’t know herself, having lived her entire life without an identity card or a birth certificate. In her day, to obtain such documents, you had to pay a visit to the colonial authorities, who measured your height, inspected the state of your teeth and made a guess at an approximate year of birth with the famous expression: ‘Born around…’. Neither her husband, Old Joseph, nor she herself ever bothered to do this, particularly since several of the traditional chiefs, whose opposition to the colonial administration took particularly imaginative forms, spread rumours to the effect that the whites had a secret plan: anyone who agreed to have civil papers drawn up for them would have their souls carried off to Europe. These individuals would once again become slaves, and would undergo the fateful ‘voyage’ of the slave trade, which would take them, via Europe, all the way to America, where they would be sold to the highest bidder and set to work from dawn to dusk in plantations owned by their brutal masters. According to these highly placed sources, this was how the whites had created the slave trade, knowing they would never have the physical strength to confront the blacks and take them captive. Fear ruled, like the fear that gripped the villagers when the first cameras arrived in their land. At the time every possible argument – most of them outlandish in the extreme – was used to dissuade people from allowing themselves to be photographed. Just look at Europe, which only managed to keep going by hijacking souls and spirits. They spoke admiringly of their ancestors, who, when photographed against their wishes, simply didn’t appear on the image, because they were more mystical than the white man, and had taken the precaution of covering their souls with a kind of anti-flash cover.

  In any case, no one would have asked Grandma Hélène or her husband their age, it would have implied they were too old and should be thinking about moving on to that distant country where, the Bembé believe, the sun never rises. Old Joseph looked so strong, people always thought he must be several years younger than his wife. A man of few words, he would sit out in the sun – source of all longevity, he believed – and thoughtfully watch time passing, just sitting on his own front doorstep. His left eye was useless, the entire surface of the pupil covered over by a large, pale tumour. He could now see only through the other eye, but even so, not one detail of the comings and goings in his yard escaped him. Some were afraid of his sickly eye, rambling on about the old man using it in the dark to find out the sorcerers’ tricks and foil them, before it was too late.

  Their firstborn daughter, Mâ Germaine, seemed as old as them. There was a rumour that the couple had handed down the secret of long life to their descendants. Grandma Hélène was aware of this, and would babble crossly:

  ‘We’re already old, age has forgotten us, and we’ve forgotten it too. That’s the secret of our longevity…’

  Old Joseph was rather overshadowed by Grandma Hélène, but she herself led a busy life, to say the least, continually checking that no one she knew wore a mask of despair. If they did, she would go over to them, lift it off, and mumble some comforting words, assuring them things would be much better tomorrow. She’d been nicknamed ‘Mother Teresa’ because though she had more than ten children under her roof she put the interests of others even before those of her own offspring. Idle gossips were quick to imply that each time you got a gift from Grandma Hélène she took a year off your life to extend her own and that of her husband and children. Hence the uncouth manner in which some people rejected the old lady’s generosity, accusing her of being a witch.

  In actual fact, in all the time since she arrived from Louboulou she had never grown used to the idea that everything here was different, and that life in the city was unlike life back in the village in every way. Here an act of kindness drew suspicion. There it was a sacred duty, designed to keep the ungrateful, the selfish and individualists away from the village. In her mind, Pointe-Noire, and in particular the rue de Louboulou, was her village, it had simply been relocated, and because of this she had an obligation, as a peasant woman in possession of vast plantations in her home country, to share what she possessed with the population, whoever they were, that was the way she had been brought up.

  She was so highly respected, she had become like a patriarch of the tribe, a kind of protective presence, even, watching over our family and the inhabitants of the rue de Louboulou. She would prepare food in a huge aluminium pot, then turn up in the street, grab hold of any child who happened to be passing, and sit them down in front of a large, steaming portion. Gluttons were only too delighted, along with various parasites and outright crooks, who knew you only had to drift past her house at mealtimes to get yourself a square meal. Which is probably why several adults could be found pacing up and down her yard, emerging fit to burst, like boa constrictors who’ve swallowed an antelope. We children, on the other hand, didn’t hang around her that much; to us her generosity felt like a punishment in disguise, particularly as once we had finished eating Grandma Hélène would applaud, then say, with a great big smile:

  ‘Well done, children! Well done! And now give me a belch, to show how good it was! Come on, a nice big belch! Quick!’

  This was another of the customs she had brought with her from the village: she needed to hear her guest belch, or her face would grow troubled, and she felt her food could not have been nice. But even after you belched – to her delight – she would pile up your plate again and stand in front of you, to make sure you finished it, and gave another belch, even louder than the last. And she would point out which bit of meat to eat first, even instructing you to drink lots, to make sure your food ‘went down well’ and you had enough room in your stomach for even more. Even while one cooking pot emptied, as she served up food to all comers, she was getting the next one on the fire, and reeling off from memory the names of people who hadn’t eaten, with a large wooden spoon in her hands:

  ‘I know Albert’s twins, Gilbert and Bienvenüe, haven’t come by yet, or Jean-Pierre Matét
é and Mompéro, who were supposed to drop in today. And then there’s Sabine and Dorothée, and I mustn’t forget Kengué, Kimangou, Mizélé, Ndomba, Ndongui, Miyalou Kihouari, Milébé, Matété, Nkouaka, Marie, Véronique, Poupy, Firmin, Abeille, Jean de Dieu or René…’

  You’d hear her saying to herself as she roamed round her kitchen in a cloud of smoke:

  ‘I’m worried I’ll run out of manioc! Who else have I forgotten?’

  One time, when we just weren’t hungry, we thought we’d found a way of avoiding her. You just had to go via the street behind, parallel to the rue de Louboulou. It worked for a while, and Grandma Hélène got in a great state over the defection of so many kids: