The Lights of Pointe-Noire

by Alain Mabanckou

  Later, when I arrived in Nantes to continue my law studies, I happened to tune in one Friday evening to Apostrophes, a book programme chaired by Bernard Pivot. I almost leaped out of my seat when I saw that his guest was Jean Dutourd, whose A Dog’s Head I had read, a book in which a child had a spaniel’s head and big ears, which got him into all sorts of scrapes at school, during his military service and in his daily life, until in the end he met the love of his life. I turned to my French friends and said:

  ‘I read that author in Africa!’

  Surprised, one of them asked:

  ‘Jean Dutourd? He’s on the syllabus in Africa?’

  ‘No, but he’s well placed…’

  ‘What do you mean, “well placed”?’

  ‘In the library of the French Cultural Centre in Pointe-Noire, he comes under D, after Alphonse Daudet, Denis Diderot, Alexandre Dumas…’

  ‘I still don’t understand!’

  My friends’ perplexity sent me back into my shell. I didn’t want to explain my adventures in detail, and we listened quietly to Dutourd, an old man with a moustache and glasses, talking enthusiastically about his most recent publication…

  Farewell my concubine

  My plane is tonight at eleven o’ clock. I’m leaving today, Sunday, and it’s so quiet that even the cars go slowly down the Avenue Général de Gaulle, though during the week this is one of the busiest streets in the town.

  From my balcony I look over at the Adolphe-Sicé hospital, letting my cup of coffee go cold. Bienvenüe is still in hospital. I must go and say goodbye to her. I know she would appreciate the gesture.

  A pair of amorous crows peck at each other on top of the hospital building. The more excited of the two is the rutting male. They’re mating, and will make babies with plumage as dark as their own, while some of the patients, on the other hand, will leave for a country where the sun never rises. Even while I’m watching them disporting themselves, I think of all the things I haven’t done, and should have done, during my stay. I should, for example, have gone to the Mont-Kamba cemetery to visit my parents’ graves. It’s what any son would have done. But I hadn’t put it on my list of places to visit. Because Maman Pauline and Papa Roger came to me. They’ve been in this room with me all this time. They watch me writing, pull me up from time to time, and whisper to me what I should write down. Also, I tell myself that if I had gone to the cemetery, my other deceased relatives – my uncles, René and Albert, and my aunts, Sabine and Dorothée, among others – would have been cross with me and wouldn’t have forgiven me for not going to see their graves. Another reason held me back: the deceased find it awkward when the living suddenly turn up in the garden of the supine before the actual day of remembrance, 2 November. They hate it when someone just walks into their bedrooms and they have to quickly get up and put on decent clothes to receive them…

  Yesterday I didn’t want to see anyone. I stayed in the apartment alone, pacing between the balcony, the living room, the bedroom. It was the day when I really got stuck into my writing. Exhausted, I dozed off, dreaming I had wings, that I flew over the forest of Mayombé as far as Les Bandas, the village where my mother had bought a huge field of manioc and maize and built a house out of clay. In my dream, Uncle Jean-Pierre Matété told me that the house and the field were still there, that I should do something about it, because Les Bandas isn’t a village any more: a motorway goes there now, on the way to Brazzaville.

  I woke with a start at the sound of the window, which had banged to in the wind. For a long while I sat looking at the painting on the wall: the sad lady smiled at me. At least that’s how it seemed as I went up to her, as though her face was relaxing, her eyes filling with the natural light of day. Suddenly she looked just like my mother…

  That evening I felt like getting drunk, to forget that I’d been trampling on the kingdom of my childhood. What would be the point, though? To be like the young man I had met in the late afternoon the day before last, in the Rex district, homeless, but apparently happy? He wanted me to take his picture, to show the whole world he lived on next to nothing, his glass was small but his own, and he was happy with that.

  ‘I’m nothing, I’m everything,’ he declared. ‘The street is my mother. The sun is my father. What more should I ask of life?’

  Now the street is everyone’s mother, as is the sun. He was proud to be a child of the streets. And a child, too, of the sun.

  ‘My name’s Yannick. I want to be your little brother… Will you have me?’

  I hesitated, finding his request a bit weird. In the end I said yes. Why would I say no, after all, when up till now I had been making up my own brothers and sisters in cardboard cut-outs?

  That evening I put together my few belongings. Most precious were the pages of this notebook that I’d crumpled up and thrown in the bin in the kitchen. There were others, too, all around me, and I couldn’t possibly reread them all. I could just imagine the look on the faces of the customs people at Pointe-Noire, when they opened my suitcase and found a whole load of paper. They’d think I was some kind of mental retard or a spy who was concealing vital information among all this mess. Would they suspect that there was a bit of their own lives in these crossings-out, these indecisions of writing?

  I also packed the self-published books which had been given me by various local authors. I promised myself I would read them in Europe or America. There is always something enriching in the suffering of a creator who hopes his bottle thrown into the sea will one day reach its destination. The knowledge that their work would be on that plane with me made them both glad and anxious. Glad because, for a short while, I would be carrying the burden of their obsessions. But they also dreaded me reading it, because I had already told them that many books are not made to travel, and disintegrate as soon as the plane crosses over borders. These are books that can be read only in the place where they were written. They have no passport, can’t tolerate changes in climate, and discover that summer in the north is less warm than a heat wave in the tropics…

  The taxi driver puts my luggage in the boot while my girlfriend takes a few last photos of the area around the French Institute and dives into the taxi.

  I look once more at the street lamps on the Avenue Général de Gaulle. The yellowish light, and the insects buzzing round, make my head spin. When it comes down to it, this town and I are in an open relationship, she is my concubine, and this time I seem to be saying adieu. I’m so moved, I shed not one single tear.

  As I finally get into the taxi, I wonder, as I always do, and as I always will: when will I return to Pointe-Noire again?

  Postscript

  On 15 July 2012, I had a phone call from Gilbert to say my grandmother, Hélène, had just died. Exactly three weeks to the day after my departure from Pointe-Noire. So the old lady wasn’t wrong: she had waited to be delivered by a white woman. Along with the other members of the family, I made my contribution, sending a sum of money by Western Union, which Gilbert handed over to her widower, Old Joseph, before witnesses. Because so many families have torn each other apart over that. People always exaggerate the amount of money sent by a relative living abroad. When Gilbert called me, he put on the loudspeaker:

  ‘Cousin, I’ve got ten people sitting round me, including Uncle Mompéro and Grand Poupy. Can you tell us yourself how much you just sent for Grandmother Hélène’s funeral?…’

  I told him, and he repeated the amount out loud so that the others wouldn’t bring a case against him. When I hung up, I saw again the old lady, rigid under her mosquito net, and her hand gripping me as though holding on to life itself…

  I’ve spoken to Gilbert again on the telephone. Bienvenüe left the Adolphe-Sicé hospital the very day after Grandmother Hélène’s funeral. He was like a man who has just pulled off a victory:

  ‘Because you know, cousin, when she was in that hospital, a bit of me was in there with her! We shared the same womb, we wallowed in the same amniotic fluid! You can tell me the truth now.
You were a bit scared too, weren’t you? That’s why you didn’t go and visit her, when you were living opposite! I do understand – you know it’s the first time a member of our family has been in hospital, in that room, Room One, and come out alive? My father – your uncle – he died in that room, didn’t he? I was scared, I prayed every day. I was even tempted to go and pray in the pentecostal church of the New Jerusalem – just goes to show!’