The Lights of Pointe-Noire

by Alain Mabanckou

  The day is almost over. A taxi draws up outside the plot. Uncle Jean-Pierre Matété called for it. I’m just about to climb in, when I feel once more the presence of Kihouari at my back.

  ‘Brother, the old shack is a disgrace to the family, we’re going to pull it down and put something else in its place…’

  I give him a furious look.

  ‘No way! I’m going to restore it, the place is meaningless without the shack…’

  Before getting into the car I add:

  ‘It’s my mother’s castle…’

  He looks at me pityingly, unable to understand why I should be more interested in the hut than in the solid structure, of which he is visibly proud. He’s almost disappointed in me when I conclude:

  ‘The one I’m going to pull down is the solid building, I’ll replace it with another one… I will start work next year.’

  The taxi sets off, and Uncle Mompéro, Uncle Matété and Grand Poupy wave goodbye from a distance. I’ll be back one day…

  A fistful of dollars

  I’m wandering through the Voungou neighbourhood in the late afternoon. Maybe in search of clues to remind me of my childhood games. Occasionally I stand still for a few seconds and close my eyes, sure I don’t need them to see the true face of the things jostling about in my mind, their contours blurred with time. Passers-by can sense I’m not local – or am no longer. Who, besides the town madmen, would dare stand around, for example, gazing at a pile of rubbish, or the carcass of an animal, getting emotional over the clucking of a hen, perched, inexplicably, on a table in the empty market?

  The family members I saw yesterday at our reunion don’t know that I am only two hundred metres from my mother’s property, like a criminal returning to the place of the crime to reassure himself that he made no mistakes, or to erase any clues that might lead the investigators to his door. If they saw me, they would improvise another party, with empty chairs in memory of my parents.

  So I take the small backstreets, with my cap jammed right down to the top of my eyebrows. Just as I reach an intersection and let two taxis go by before crossing the marketplace, I hear a female voice call me from somewhere ahead:

  ‘Little brother! Hey, little brother!’

  I look up, and try to hide my surprise: it’s Georgette.

  She’s standing at a pavement table outside a small bar. She is number two of the eight children my father had with my ‘second mother’, Maman Martine. I can see Yaya Gaston behind her, too, sitting at a table with a bottle of Pelforth. He’s wearing sunglasses and the orange overalls you see on the men who work in the warehouses down at the seaport of Pointe-Noire. His is scruffy, stained with black grease marks. It looks like he never takes it off, and wears the same outfit for work and around town. He waves me over to join them.

  It seems strange to bump into them by chance, and I think to myself that such coincidences only happen in spaghetti westerns, where the protagonists pop up out of nowhere, exchange a few angry words, draw their guns and shoot at each other. What are they doing in this place, overlooking my late mother’s property?

  ‘Come on, come and have a drink with us,’ insists Georgette, though showing no particular pleasure at seeing me after all these years.

  Hesitantly, I enter the bar.

  Georgette, who is now over fifty, refusing to accept the evidence of her years, whitens her skin and dyes her hair. Even so, you can see grey hairs on her temples and at the nape of her neck. She’s a tiny thing, with Papa Roger’s features – we always called her ‘Photocopy’, even though she hated it. Yaya Gaston seems to have come to terms with the passage of time, though he certainly looks his age, and more. His lips are stained red with drink, and he has a badly trimmed little beard. He tries to get up and hug me, but can’t manage it.

  ‘Don’t get up!’ Georgette says to him, trying to conceal from me what is blatantly obvious: our older brother is wasted, today and every day.

  She points to a stool for me, and orders a beer. Stony faced, as though some unspoken resentment burns within her, she begins:

  ‘So what are you doing here? D’you think we still need you?’

  I take the knock without flinching. She lashes out again:

  ‘You’ve been in Pointe-Noire for a few days now, and you haven’t been to see us!’

  Yaya Gaston interrupts his sister, and comes to my rescue:

  ‘I saw you yesterday at your talk at the French Institute!’

  Yes, I had seen him the previous day. My memory of our meeting was not a pleasant one. I had been upset on his behalf, but also for the memory of our father. I noticed his presence just as he was about to be ejected from the room for having disturbed the audience. Almost too drunk to stand, he kept asking for the microphone at the end of the talk, with the crowd jeering and laughing all around him. It was offered to him, he seized hold of it, but went on repeating over and over, ‘Hello, hello, hello!’, as though he was holding a telephone. Eventually he managed to say, to the great amusement of the three hundred people present:

  ‘Hello, hello, hello! My name is Gaston. I am the great Yaya Gaston in the novel Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty, which talks about our late father, Papa Roger! I am the big brother of this gentleman here, the writer! We have the same father, he and I, same mother, same womb!’

  A great commotion ran through the audience. Yaya Gaston, who had had the microphone snatched from him, found himself assailed with insults from all over the room. Seeing that the security guards were getting ready to evict him by force, I returned to my microphone and said:

  ‘Let him be, he’s my big brother…’

  A deathly hush swept through the room, interrupted a few seconds later by Yaya Gaston’s whoops of victory as he shouted over and over:

  ‘What did I tell you? Did you hear what he said? He admits it, I’m his big brother, same father, same mother, same womb! Show some respect! Show some respect, you guys! I’m a person in a novel! I’m famous, people will talk about me even when I’m dead! How many of you can say you’re people in a novel, eh? Zero! I’m telling you: same father, same mother, same womb! Go on, little brother, you finish your talk, I’ll shut up now, I’ll wait for you!’

  Afterwards I’d had no choice but to arrange to meet him at my father’s house in the next few days.

  ‘Give me some money to get home!’

  He pocketed the ten thousand CFA franc note I offered him and turned on his heels, muttering:

  ‘We’ll wait for you at the house! Maman Martine doesn’t live in Pointe-Noire now, she went back to the village when Papa Roger died, but I’ll send her the money you’ve brought for her. I’m going to tell everyone you’re here…’

  The night of the incident at the French Institute, I couldn’t sleep. I counted the insects crashing into the light bulb over my head. Why did my brother feel the need to bring up our connection, and expose himself to humiliation before the audience which clearly included people who knew perfectly well that I had no brother or sister who were ‘same father, same mother, same womb’? Did he really think that it was just blood that brings people together, not shared life experience? In any case, he was convinced that by affirming that we were brothers he would raise his esteem with the audience. On the other hand, if he had announced that I had been adopted by his father, he’d have looked like the worker in the vineyard who turns up at the twenty-fifth hour. I had been disturbed to see Yaya Gaston in such a state that evening. All that jeering had upset me; I felt as much the victim of it as he was himself. The public realised when they heard the catch in my voice, and saw I wasn’t responding with the energy I’d had at the beginning of the talk. Yaya Gaston plays a significant part in my life, which is why he is one of the principal characters in Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty, where I portray him as someone who is obsessively clean, an idol, a hero, a real, proper big brother. He had taken me under his wing, and we slept in the same room at Papa Roger’s house, despite the jealousy of his ‘same father, same mother, same womb’ brot
hers. Memories of that time still haunt me, especially Yaya Gaston’s multiple girlfriends – including the generous Geneviève – who would take our little room by storm and were all madly in love with him.

  I wanted to see my big brother again. I had done the right thing, I said to myself, in arranging to meet him in our father’s house, because we wouldn’t have been able to talk calmly with him in the excited state he’d been in that evening. But clearly he hadn’t waited for the rendezvous and had been watching out for me together with Georgette, near my mother’s house, from inside the bar, hoping they might see me.

  I had never been very close to Georgette. She was always out with her friends, always running off somewhere, despite Papa Roger’s fury. Constantly in conflict with Maman Martine, and sometimes with Yaya Gaston too, who we were meant to respect as the oldest of the family, Georgette had been a ‘trendy’ young woman. The way she dressed was on the verge of indecent, at a time when the young people of Pointe-Noire were attracted to the SAPE, the Society of Ambience-Makers and People of Elegance. Her lovers were ‘Parisians’, young men who came over from France to show off their over-the-top outfits during the dry season. Their skin had been whitened with products made from hydroquinone, and they had paunches – for them, a sign of elegance, since a rounded belly held up your belt and trousers more effectively than a flat one. The arrival of these young gods in Pointe-Noire stirred up trouble in families. The young girls lost their heads and turned rebellious, spending whole nights following the Parisians from bar to bar.

  Seeing my sister again now, I realised at once that the ambush had been her idea, and that she had taken advantage of Yaya Gaston’s drink problem. He was just going along with her.

  The waiter places a beer in front of me.

  ‘Drink it while it’s cold,’ advises Georgette, who seems to have calmed down a bit.

  I do as she says, and she adds triumphantly:

  ‘We knew you’d come and hang around your mother’s plot, that’s why we’ve been sitting here since late this morning! You always loved your mother more than your father!’

  A young man of around thirty sits down at our table. Noticing my surprise, Georgette introduces him:

  ‘This is Papa Roger’s cousin, so he’s your cousin too. I told him to come by. He’ll take the money you could have given Papa Roger if he’d still been alive…’

  Yaya Gaston nods his agreement:

  ‘Don’t worry, little brother, just give him fifty thousand CFA francs or a bit more and he’ll be happy!’

  Georgette leaps off her stool:

  ‘What? Fifty thousand CFA francs? Gaston, do you know what you’re saying? Is that kind of money going to bring Papa Roger back to us? What about me, then, how much would he give me? The same?’

  Yaya Gaston says hastily:

  ‘Calm down, sister, I’m sure our little brother won’t give you less than a hundred thousand CFA francs! You know how generous he is!’

  ‘No way! I won’t be made fun of! I’m not accepting a little sum of money after he’s been abroad all these years, never seeing us! Not once, since he left, did he ever send us a single money order! I need a million CFA francs! We buried our father, we spent money and he sent us nothing! Do you think I’ll accept one hundred thousand CFA francs? Never! And if he gives me one hundred thousand CFA francs, I’ll chuck them in the gutter, so there!’

  I do a quick calculation: I’ve only got thirty thousand CFA francs in my pocket, far less than the staggering amount expected by my sister, whom I like less and less by the minute. I’ve stopped looking her in the eye; as far as I’m concerned she’s a stranger to me now. All she talks about is money, not a word about the memory of our father. Basically, I’m supposed to reimburse the cost of Papa Roger’s funeral. I wonder why my maternal family didn’t take the same attitude, since I didn’t attend Maman Pauline’s funeral, and they never presented me with a bill. I try to control my irritation.

  The so-called cousin of my father glances at my shoes from time to time. When he finally breaks his silence he says:

  ‘Will you leave me those shoes?’

  Yaya Gaston looks down at my Campers, really practical in this heat.

  ‘Give me your shoes, little brother, not him. Papa’s cousin can buy himself some with the money you give him…’

  The so-called cousin looks at my jeans and white shirt. Before he even opens his mouth, Yaya Gaston gets in ahead of him:

  ‘The shirt and jeans are taken! I’m having them. And my little brother can give me his suit as well, the one he was wearing at his talk…’

  I can’t think how to get out of this trap now. I need to find an excuse to leave.

  I try asking:

  ‘Are we still meeting at Papa’s house?’

  ‘Of course!’ responds Georgette. ‘We’ve told everyone, and they’re all impatient for their share, but you have to give me mine now, because I don’t want to get mixed up with the others when they all start fighting over it.’

  ‘I haven’t got anything on me, I didn’t expect to find you here and…’

  Yaya Gaston stops me: ‘Listen, little brother, even if you only have twenty or thirty thousand CFA francs, give me that, for my fare. You can give us the rest when we have the reunion at the house.’

  Georgette disagrees:

  ‘Gaston, could you just shut up for once? Are you listening to what I’m saying? Are you looking for problems, or what?’

  ‘He just needs to come an hour early, you go and sit in a bistro and he gives you the money!’ suggests the ‘cousin’.

  Yaya Gaston backs him up. ‘That’s not a bad idea.’

  Georgette’s looking for a counter-argument, but she needs time. She decides to call a ceasefire.

  ‘OK, we’ll do that! For now just give us twenty or thirty thousand CFA francs for our transport.’

  From where we are now, to my father’s house, the cost of transport would be less than one thousand CFA francs. I’m tired of bargaining, and I dig into the pocket of my trousers. I manage to pull out a couple of notes and I put down twenty thousand CFA francs on the table. Georgette pockets them while the other two don’t even blink. That leaves me with ten thousand CFA francs for my own fare home and a meal at Chez Gaspard.

  As I get to my feet I know already that I won’t be going to the family reunion, that I won’t see Yaya Gaston again before I leave Pointe-Noire, because of Georgette.

  I walk out of the bar while they’re splitting up the twenty thousand CFA francs. They’ve already forgotten I exist, I can hear Georgette yelling at the other two:

  ‘No! I’m taking twelve thousand, you two can split the other eight!’

  Two-faced woman

  My cousin Bienvenüe has been admitted to the Adolphe-Sicé hospital. Her twin brother Gilbert rang to tell me a few minutes ago.

  ‘You’re staying not far from the hospital, you could drop by and see her, she’d like that,’ he insisted.

  I don’t think I will visit her, I won’t have the courage, even though from the balcony of the apartment where I’m staying you can see the old colonial building, almost separate from the town, with its back to the Atlantic Ocean. Every morning since my arrival, I’ve stood here looking over at it, with a cup of coffee in my hand. When a crow settles on the roof, I think he must be adding up how many outings the ambulances make every day, between the city and this austere, crumbling place, often referred to by the locals as ‘the death home’. As a teenager, I passed by it on my way to the Karl Marx lycée, my stomach knotted with fear. I was convinced, like most of the students, that if you looked that way you’d bring bad luck on your family.

  Grown-ups were quite clear that you must never ‘show your face to the hospital’, because it would take note of it, and remember it the day you passed through its doors and take your life. Some of us would cover our faces with our shirts as we came near the building. Others walked with their back to it. This fear was in fact fed by a character called Basile, who ran the hos
pital morgue. He was said to indulge in practices which were, to say the least, peculiar. He talked to corpses, and slapped them about if they wouldn’t lie quietly in the cold rooms. He got particularly angry with the corpses of young girls he believed had led debauched lives. He slapped them, then made up their faces and piled them up like animals in a single coffin, while raging:

  ‘Not so proud now, eh? Did you think you’d avoid the morgue? There’s only one in this town! A human being’s just a heap of flesh to me, flesh to feed the worms on!’

  In the working-class districts, you’d pass Basile talking to invisible people, waving his arms around. Dogs ran after him, but never got too close to the little man with the angry face.

  It was also widely known that Basile ate no meat, since he said he’d seen everything under the sun and to him there was no difference between cattle meat and human flesh…

  Gilbert’s voice was very faint:

  ‘Bienvenüe is in Room One. You know, the room Papa was in…’

  There was a silence, then he added, enigmatically:

  ‘And since Papa died in that room…’

  This conclusion rang like an acceptance of a fateful verdict, which he had been expecting. At a loss for words to reassure him, I simply asked:

  ‘Isn’t there any other room besides that one?’

  ‘Everything’s taken, Room One was only free because people would rather take the sick person home with them than keep them in there… But she was in pain, I couldn’t do that…’

  It’s more than three decades, now, since Uncle Albert died after being admitted to hospital in Room One, where two other members of the family had been before him, Uncle Mouboungoulou and Uncle Makita, who both died ‘after a long illness in Adolphe-Sicé hospital’, as it said on the evening announcements on the radio, to avoid divulging the cause of death.

  ‘Besides, there’s no doctor qualified to treat her illness, I phoned Cousin Paulin, he’s a doctor at the University Hospital in Brazzaville, he can’t get to Pointe-Noire for three days. For now they’re only giving Bienvenüe aspirin…’