by Maryse Conde
Babakar shrugged his shoulders.“I’m not a foreigner. I’m as French as you are. And if you really want to know, I belong to this island through my mother: a Minerve. Have you heard the name?”
Firmin shook his head in exasperation.
When Babakar emerged from the town hall one hour later, Lucien Lucius had finished sweeping every nook and cranny outside and was smoking, seated on an overturned dustbin. Babakar was still laughing at the way he had turned the tables by saying the child was his—he who seldom laughed.
Let’s rewind.
Some forty years earlier, on the stroke of eight in the morning—when the heat was already sticking to the skin like a damp hand-me-down—Babakar Traoré Sr., principal of the Tiguiri elementary school in the north of Mali, his cane under his arm, was striding across the schoolyard. The building was nothing much to talk about, don’t start imagining things; it was nothing but a series of prefabricated constructions laid out in a square behind a mud-brick wall. Babakar Traoré Sr. was reading his favorite newspaper La Voix des patriotes, the only one of its kind to dare poke fun at the men in power. With his dark-brown boubou and small leather skullcap, he was the embodiment of respectability. He never forgot he belonged to an aristocratic Bambara family from Segu who had once supplied counselors to the dissolute and fetishist Mansas before giving Islam its first martyr, Tiékoro Traoré. The family had later made a name for itself in the struggle against colonization, and some hotheaded members had rotted in prison or died in exile in the Seychelles.
By now, as a result of their attitude towards the regime following independence, such malcontents had been declared undesirable. Those who couldn’t afford to find refuge abroad (there was a Lansana Traoré in the department of Marine Biology at the University of Chicoutimi in Canada) led a lackluster life at home.
The fate of Babakar Traoré Sr. had been an exception to the rule, and for a time he had been made a minister. Minister of what? Nobody could remember. But the important fact is that he had been made minister, a title one takes to the grave. Unfortunately, he had rapidly lost his precious job and was then dispatched as school principal to this godforsaken hole with no hope of getting out.
Once he had finished reading his paper he was about to return to his office when the old caretaker with a strangulated hernia, wearing an anachronistic fez similar to that of the Y’a bon Banania advert, approached him in the company of a small, shapely young girl. Her face caught his attention due to her velvety black skin, riddled with beauty spots, and her delicately rounded chin with a furrowed dimple, symbolizing affection. Although she had a queenly bearing, she was dressed, alas, in a tasteless, inelegant pair of black faded baggy men’s trousers and a shapeless T-shirt. Visibly a foreigner. No African would be rigged out like that.
Once inside his office she had removed the oversize sunglasses that straddled her delightful nose and Babakar had received the electric shock of her blue eyes—yes, blue—so unexpected in that dark face. Pretending not to have noticed the effect they had produced, she casually introduced herself.
“Thécla Minerve. I’m the teacher you requested for the second-year primary class. The education authorities should have informed you of my arrival.”
Babakar pretended to open drawers and search through a pile of files, but he knew it was a waste of time. Those people in Bamako had never sent him a letter. Anyway, he was quite prepared to welcome the stranger.
“When did you arrive in Tiguiri?” he asked.
She sighed, then, closing her incomparable eyes, began to rattle on: “In the middle of the night, by bus. In Bamako they warned me not to take the plane or the boat. I’m convinced now it was wrong. A bus must be the worst way to travel. We drove for three days or perhaps it was four or five, I can’t remember. I don’t know how many times we broke down. We had to sleep in the open under the stars near Mopti. Every ten kilometers or so we were stopped by the police and those passengers who had the means had to delve into their wallets and baksheesh the police for them to leave us alone.”
“You’re lucky to be alive,” Babakar Sr. laughed, “and not to be in the hands of one of those gangs who ransom travelers. Alas, it’s the new face of Africa, which nobody dares look at. Where are you staying?”
“At the Caravansérail. Is there another hotel near here?”
Babakar got up. “Come, I’ll take you there. After such an adventure, you deserve to rest for a couple of days. You’ll start on Thursday.”
Under the mocking eyes of the teachers and pupils, who were amused by the newcomer’s getup, the two took their seats in Babakar Sr.’s Skoda.
If it weren’t for the Joliba—named “the Niger” by the French—Tiguiri, built on its right bank, a village of a thousand souls, would be devoid of charm. It’s the Joliba that poeticizes Tiguiri during the rainy season when its waters are high. In the morning it covers the village in a thick mantle of mist through which the Somono fishermen’s boats glide furtively and silently as ghosts. At noon, when the blazing sun is a glowing disk high in the sky, its waters reflect the sun’s ferocity. In the evening, the river falls asleep and its waters, still thick with mist, slowly flow towards the sea. Because of its location, Tiguiri was once an important slave market. Arab traffickers from every corner of North Africa came to stock up with eunuchs and concubines for the royal harems. Likewise, starting in the sixteenth century, European traders from Spain and Portugal would come to buy anything they could lay their hands on.
“Thécla Minerve?” Babakar asked as they drove round the Quadremisha Mosque, a horrible concrete square daubed in white, which clashed with the Sudanese-style architecture. “You’re from the French Antilles then?”
“Yes, I’m from Guadeloupe. How did you guess?”
Babakar explained he had known a good many students from Guadeloupe and Martinique while studying law at the Faculty in Montpellier, and all had characteristic names given them at the time when slaves were registered as new citizens. Apollo, Socrates, Aristophanes, Solomon, and Bacchus; there was no escaping the names from Greco-Roman antiquity.
She had been unable to hide her surprise. “You studied law? I did too!”
He went on to explain, endeavoring to speak simply, without seeking to make an impression since he was often accused of being pompous, sensing that this was the start of a conversation which was to last for years and years as well as the beginning of an enduring love.
“My previous life was somewhat surprising. I studied law and practiced as a lawyer, first of all in my native city of Segu.”
There he stopped. And since Thécla remained silent, he continued.
“Then Bamako. Later I tried my hand at politics and was appointed minister in the government after independence. I fell out of favor and was dispatched here in disgrace in order to meditate on the ups and downs of politics.”
The Caravansérail was originally a camp built for some Germans searching for ostrich eggs and feathers. In actual fact, they were after young Fulani shepherds. At that time the camp was a hive of activity and the night used to ring out with shouts of “Bier! Bier!” or “Trink! Trink!” or one of those drinking songs the Germanic race adore. When the ostriches on the point of extinction became a protected species, the camp had been converted into a hotel for backpackers. But not many of them ventured as far as Tiguiri. As a result, the Caravansérail gradually became a dismal shack whose walls were peeled and faded, in which the piping rusted and huge cockroaches had a ball everywhere. Only lovers came, looking for a place to screw. From time to time there were more prestigious guests, and recently a French film crew had come to shoot a documentary about life on the river.
Thécla did not stay long at the Caravansérail. Less than a month after she arrived at Tiguiri, she moved in with Babakar Traoré. Two months later the imam slipped into his boubou made of rich bazin fabric and celebrated their marriage.
Thécla was immediately un
popular with the inhabitants of Tiguiri. Firstly, because of the color of her eyes. For as long as people could remember, in all of Mali and throughout the world, nobody had ever seen a black person with blue eyes. Admittedly, the illustrious Sudanese poet Magala y Magale sang about the iridescent eyes of his beloved; but poets have poetic license and, what’s more, “iridescent” is not “blue.” Furthermore, Thécla, this foreign intruder, made no effort to learn Bambara, Malinke, Soninke, or Fulani—in short, none of the languages of the region.
Yet despite the noose of malevolence that tightened around them, the couple’s first years passed in bliss, according to Adiza, their humpbacked servant. Obviously the humpbacked Adiza couldn’t understand a single word of what they were saying and merely went by their expressions. She claimed that from the very first cup of kinkeliba in the morning it was one kiss after the other and they never stopped fondling each other and laughing. They had the same taste in books, which they shared and in whose margins they made notes. They loved the same music, especially Bembeya Jazz National from Guinea and the reggae songs by Bob Marley from Jamaica.
At mealtimes Thécla sat on Babakar’s knees like a child and ate from the same plate. In short, their existence had the flavor of a plate of fonio—the food of the gods according to the French ethnologists.
In the fourth year of their union, belying the bad-mouthers who accused her of sterility, the wife’s belly began to swell up. In August, when the waters of the Joliba’s riverbed started to flow again, she gave birth to a son. He was given the same name as his father: Babakar Traoré. Out of curiosity, visitors filed through the newly built El Hadj Omar Saïdou Hospital, a gift from the East Germans, in order to see for themselves whether the baby had inherited the witch’s eyes. But he was a thoroughbred Traoré, gazing at life through his dark-brown eyes, as shiny as prunes from Agen.
-
BLUE EYES IN a black face? That deserves an explanation. To do that, however, we need to rewind even further. It’s a well-known fact that the past nurtures and enlightens the present.
The first of Thécla’s ancestors to have blue eyes was called Wangara. He was no taller than one meter and fifty-eight centimeters and he passed on his small height and blue eyes to his descendants. He was the son of Macalou and his third wife, Fatoma. Although later on as a slave he was baptized Joseph, Wangara always kept his African name. He was captured on the Slave Coast at a place called Sosonabu, ripe for raids. He must have been fifteen, the elders claimed, even though he looked barely twelve. They remembered he had been born during the dry season, so dry that flames broke out spontaneously in the bush and balls of fire rolled under the feet of the hunters. Despite his small stature, he had proved his bravery by killing one, two, or three lions from Mourga, the extremely ferocious ones mentioned by Amadou Hampâté Bâ, and tying their tails around his waist. They were getting ready to marry him, but before the Council of Elders could agree on the dowry of the betrothed, the European slave traders and their African accomplices one night put Sosonabu to the fire and the sword. Considered to be too old to endure the trials of the Middle Passage—that crossing from the enchantment of Africa to the hell of the Caribbean—Macalou and Fatoma had their throats slit. Witnessing the scene, Wangara cried and cried his heart out, so much so that his eyes changed color, like a hue that comes out in the wash. Now brown, they veered to blue.
This metamorphosis was not perceived immediately since the unfortunate Wangara lay prostrate with grief at the bottom of the hold of the slave ship Christ Roi. But on the fifth day at sea the sailors forced him to come up on deck to wash away his vermin with buckets of water. In full sunlight they realized the change and were highly amused.
A black boy with blue eyes; now there’s a miracle!
The captain, Antoine de la Ville Jégu de Saint Martin, was far from joking. He was calculating the enormous profit he could make from such an anomaly. The other slaves, Wangara’s companions of misfortune, thought differently. They saw it as a sign of endearment from the gods. Those eyes signified that Wangara was no ordinary mortal. He was capable of reading the past and the present as well as deciphering the invisible. Henceforth they overwhelmed him with marks of respect, groveling in front of him and no longer addressing him by his first name, instead replacing it by convoluted circumlocutions such as “He whose head reaches the sky,” “He whose eyes pierce the night,” or “He who is as tall as the doum palm.”
All this exasperated Wangara, who could no longer grieve in peace and who was constantly disturbed by inept entreaties such as “O Venerable! Let me see my deceased father!” or “O Almighty! Let me embrace and clasp in my arms again my deceased mother!” or “O Divination! Do you know what is in store for us at the end of this terrible, endless journey?” or “O Clairvoyant! What land are we sailing to? It is unlikely our journey will end in happiness.”
On arrival in the Antilles, Wangara was purchased by Master Emmanuel Breston de la Taille. Emmanuel liked boys, little boys. This one, he thought, deserved to be more than a “cane nigger” or a “hoe nigger.” He dressed him in a brocade uniform and employed him as a dwarf waiter in charge of brushing up the crumbs from the table. For fun, he married him to Baptista, his daughter’s favorite slave, who was a Maasai and measured almost two meters. God works in mysterious ways: the couple fell passionately in love and had five children one after the other, all with blue eyes and shorter than average in height.
However, when Emmanuel’s wife, the sweet Eléonore with her pearly-white arms, was carried off by a mysterious illness, soon to be followed by four of their sons, and in the same year a fire in the kitchen devastated the big house, the master grew suspicious of those eyes and that small body which had once enchanted and delighted him. He was now in a hurry to get rid of Wangara and Baptista. The couple was purchased by the mean and miserly Louis-Elie Tresmond de Saint Moreau, a rustic lout unimpressed by the color of eyes, however singular they may be, who dispatched the pair into the fields. Louis-Elie was a pervert; today we would have called him a pedophile. Partial to young girls, he lusted after the daughter of the linen maid. On the evening when he penetrated her room with the firm intention of raping her, he became violently sick and slid to his death in his own vomit and shit.
They arrested Wangara. Throughout the colony he was now seen as an evil eye, using obeah to cause material harm, and deemed responsible for these strange events. Wangara put up no defense. Not a single word came out of his mouth. He was hanged on a low branch of a silk cotton tree, a tree that has virtually disappeared today in the Caribbean, and took with him the answer to the question that has been handed down from generation to generation.
Were they sorcerers? Upon the abolition of slavery, a mischievous registry officer had endowed Wangara’s descendants with the somewhat lavish name of Minerve. The unsolved mystery has only continued to deepen.
Making matters even more complicated was the fact that although the Minerves were all small in size, they didn’t all have eyes of the same color blue. Sometimes they veered toward dark brown, sometimes gray or mauve. Did this mean their supernatural gift depended on the individual? As a rule, that’s what happened. Their eyes were of a vague color during the first months, even the first years of their lives, until suddenly one morning they turned blue. Leaning over the cradle, the onlooker would receive a splash full in the face, comparable to the ocean waters off La Désirade or the perfume by Davidoff called Cool Water or that rare and pricey rum from Martinique. The color deepened over the coming months, and became set, until passersby would stop in amazement: “Well I never! Have you seen that child’s eyes?”
If it hadn’t been for their extraordinary eyes and their Lilliputian size, the Minerves would have been like any other native islander. No handsomer, no uglier, no less intelligent, no more obtuse. They didn’t breed any writer of renown nor any brilliant painter or sculptor. Not even a doctor, a lawyer, or a senior civil servant. In short, generally speak
ing, they were small-time businesspeople and all kinds of pen pushers. Yet they were the subjects of crazy rumors. It was whispered that one Minerve had been an intimate companion of Louis Delgrès, who had advised him to set light to the Habitation D’Anglemont in a final blaze of fireworks.
“Let’s finish with a flourish,” he is said to have whispered in the ear of the officer, who was fainthearted despite his stripes. “Let us engrave our names on pillars of fire in memory of the inhabitants of these islands as well as every man the world over.”
Others claim that another Minerve was responsible for the sad fate of Antoine Richepanse, who was taken with violent stomach pains before being felled by yellow fever.
Thécla would have liked to settle the matter and to know whether or not she possessed a supernatural gift. Oh, to unleash the wind and make it rain. And especially, to dispatch to kingdom come those who poked fun at her and called her “witch.”
Her mother, a deeply religious person who dreaded committing mortal and venial sins, refused to listen to such rumors. Her father, a tiny little man who permanently wore a pith helmet and whose eyes were hidden behind thick sunglasses, was a pharmaceutical assistant at the hospital. After work his house was crowded with people. What had they come for? Why was it all so mysterious? Thécla soon discovered he was the brains behind a lucrative traffic selling morphine, penicillin, and other sought-after drugs that he stole from the hospital. She would have preferred a sorcerer for a father rather than a thief; it’s so much more dignified.
On reaching the age of twenty- three, in the very middle of her law studies, and tired of torturing herself with questions without answers, she dumped her law books and decided to look for work in Black Africa, which nobody had yet renamed Sub-Saharan Africa. You might say this was out of pure political activism. At that time such a term was very much in vogue and she was certainly left-wing. But the truth was that she hated her family and the society into which she had been born and which had always ostracized her. She dreamed of breathing a great bowl of fresh air. She was content with the first country in need of expatriates: Mali. Don’t go embarking on a quest for identity or searching for a Bambara ancestor. Thécla had never heard of the Bambara kingdom of Segu, even though she would later marry a descendant of a yerewolo. One last detail: the pay was good.
