by Maryse Conde
“Of course,” he declared, bursting with laughter, “people are right. You’re bewitched, my beloved witch.”
Little Babakar was in love with his mother like every only son. He regretted that he could no longer suck on his mother’s breast and was growing inevitably a good several centimeters taller than her. He was sensitive to the ambient ostracism and isolation regarding his mother and it upset him. But Thécla was a problem: she made a mockery of the country she came from and poured contempt over Segu. It made him feel uncomfortable. So, we didn’t fit in anywhere?
The only moments he felt not exactly happy but at least relatively at ease were when he went to spend the long vacation with his father’s family. His father and mother drove him in their Mercedes with pennant flying to the little port of Koulikoro. They entrusted him to the captain of the ship Général Soumaré for the trip downriver, an old rust bucket of a boat that had seen better days. Built to carry a hundred or so passengers, it chugged along with three times more. Yet the River Management boasted that despite the ship’s age it had never broken down, and as soon as the waters permitted it sailed bravely as far as Gao, stopping at Segu and Mopti. Babakar was transformed then out of all recognition. Used to being lonely and spurned, he now became a king, worshiped and celebrated, dealing out his will as he pleased. He was the boy traveling on his own in a first-class cabin facing a blue sky streaked with white clouds. The hordes of kids in the other three classes and on deck fought to spend a moment in his company. The girls offered him everything they could. On the morning of the third day, when they arrived at Segu, he spotted with joy the slightly hunchbacked silhouette of his grandfather on the jetty.
His father’s family did not live in one of those luxury villas with swimming pools which emerged after independence, nor even a colonial house with a wraparound colonnaded veranda. They occupied a former compound of unusual architecture not far from the central market. Its high mud-brick wall facing the street, carefully restored after damage from the rainy season, was decorated with sculptures and triangular designs and ended with a range of turrets. It comprised a series of courtyards where relatives, cousins, uncles, aunts, nephews, and nieces lived. Knowing that all these people bore the name of Traoré like him filled him for the first time with a sense of security. Although he didn’t forget his beloved mother, here her memory became blurred. He wallowed voluptuously in the meanders of a genealogy. He became a link in the great chain engendered by a hundred bodies. Every day his grandfather made him bow down for the five prayers, which nobody bothered about when he was in Bamako, and every Friday, dressed in a rich bazin embroidered boubou, his grandfather took him to the mosque.
“They’re raising you like a heathen!” he lamented. “You’re descended from one of the first Bambara martyrs of Islam.”
Babakar repeated after him the words of the Chahada: “There is no god but Allah.”
Then sitting cross-legged in the shade of the century-old dubale tree which grew in the first courtyard and had supposedly witnessed generations of Traorés, he listened passionately to the family history.
“Get it into your head,” Ahmed told him, “we are the direct descendants of Tiékoro, the eldest of the four sons of Dousika, the royal counselor. All by himself he discovered the true God and left to study at the University of Sankoré. He became our first Enlightened One. He was executed a few meters from here in the courtyard of the Mansa’s palace for his love for Allah. His tomb had long been a place of pilgrimage. Muslims came from all over the world, even as far away as Pakistan, to pray on his grave. Then the French razed the cemetery and built a bus station on the same spot. Tiékoro’s first wife had been a slave from Beledougou whom he had met in Timbuktu. She was called Nadié. She had doubts about his love and committed suicide by throwing herself down a well. Tiékoro never got over it. It’s the perfect illustration of human relations. There is an eternal misunderstanding which separates us from those we love the most.”
His grandfather also told him the story of the empire of Segu. Babakar had trouble believing that this dirty, nondescript little town, infested with beggars, had once been a capital, a proud city behind its formidable mud-brick walls.
“The Mansa Ngolo Diarra reigned over Segu for sixteen years. Before he died, he consulted his fetish priests on how to keep his memory alive. They advised him to put golden earrings on the gills of a hundred and twenty caimans. “That way,” they assured him, “your name will live on so long as there are caimans in the river.”
Attach golden earrings to the gills of caimans! Babakar listened to him, hanging on his every word, and regretting he hadn’t been born in an age when such extraordinary things could happen. On Saturdays the old man often took the child to the Djembe where the best praise-singing griots in the country gathered in a kind of backyard, chanting for hours on end. They listened in wonder to the chiming notes of the kora accompanying the human voices and filling the night with waves of harmony which moved the soul to its very foundations. The old man’s favorite was Ali Farka Touré.
“He’ll go far,” he claimed.
He proved right. Despite his cataracts due to old age, he was clairvoyant. Ali Farka Touré was later to become an international star. When he died in 2006 the entire Malinke nation went into mourning.
Yet despite the deep affection he felt for his grandfather and the pleasure he got from being in his company, he was never happier than in the dark and untidy hut of his grandmother, cluttered with baskets, calabashes, rugs, and wrappers. Although she was no taller or larger than a ten-year-old girl, she exuded an extraordinary impression of authority. She had been one of the first midwives of Black Africa, as they used to say, educated at the famous Teachers’ Training College in Rufisque, Senegal. At that time, giving birth for a woman meant risking death while child mortality reached chilling heights. She heaped on her grandson tales of how she trekked on the back of a donkey or a mule across the bush to the farthest and poorest of villages. Nothing seemed as exciting to the boy as this victorious struggle to deliver life over death.
“When I’m grown up, I’ll do the same thing as you!” he swore.
She burst out laughing. “Come on now! Midwifery is not a man’s job.”
Why? he wondered, mortified. Why can men only be harbingers of death: soldiers, suicide bombers, and serial killers? Can’t they be deliverers of life as well?
In the end he had found the answer by enrolling in the Department of Obstetrics at the Faculty of Medicine in Montreal. Would his grandmother have been content with his decision? What would she have thought?
Babakar’s grandfather and grandmother never mentioned Thécla, who never set foot in Segu. It was as if she didn’t exist, with her blue eyes, her Caribbean origins, and her diabolical reputation. Only once did his grandmother stoop to pass judgment on her daughter-in-law.
“Thécla,” she had said sadly, “is someone who doesn’t believe in anything. It must be terrible for her.”
When Babakar turned fourteen his childhood came abruptly to an end, for in the space of a few months he lost the three people he loved most of all. First of all, his grandmother had a heart attack and died. His grandfather never recovered and passed away three months later. Then came his mother’s turn. They never knew whether Thécla died a natural death or whether she committed suicide—even that seemed highly unlikely, since she was too fond of her son and husband to abandon them. For her migraines, Thécla often chewed the roots of the fagara plant, which grows on the edge of ponds. One afternoon when she remained in her room long after her siesta, a servant came to wake her and found her rigid, her lips covered with white foam. Any attempt to revive her proved hopeless.
Since in the past she had converted to Islam to please her husband she was buried according to Muslim tradition. Her body was soberly wrapped in a white shroud and laid to rest. Babakar then curled up lifeless on the tiled floor and for three months never spoke a word or
opened his eyes. In the end he came back to life because life always has the last word.
The two Babakars, father and son, Senior and Junior, kept each to himself, withdrawn and taciturn in a house that was too big for them, where everything was going to the dogs. The son was jealous of his father and had never loved him very much. He thought his father responsible for Thécla’s death. Shortly after his mother died, while rummaging through her effects, he found a series of manuscripts with grand-sounding titles which had been returned by French publishers together with letters loaded with hypocritical praise. That was how he had learned his mother had dreamed of becoming a writer. Then she had believed in something! In literature—which hadn’t believed in her.
Yet—and this is perhaps the most surprising aspect of a story rich in all kinds of improbabilities, much like life itself—Thécla did not abandon her boy. She appeared to him in his sleep while he was convalescing from a fever. Never had he seen her so young and beautiful.
“Don’t think I have left you,” she murmured, “that’s impossible. You will never lose me even though I shall only appear under the cover of darkness in your dreams. Dreams are truer than reality. You know full well that only dreams come true.”
He was therefore accustomed to having her inhabit his dreams. She emerged almost every night, as a rule during the first hours of his sleep, tearing the veil of shadows that accumulated around his brow. She helped him resolve his problems and whispered answers. In short, she intervened in his decision-making like a counselor. In the early hours of the morning, when the sun forced him to open his eyes, he wept at having to leave her again. In fact, his need for her was never appeased.
-
THE FOLLOWING MONTH two unconnected events occurred one after the other. First of all, Hugo Moreno died. Quite suddenly. Just like that. Bobette was devastated and came to inform Babakar just as he was leaving for his surgery. The old man had passed away in his sleep. Apparently he had gone peacefully, judging by his face which showed nothing more than the wrinkles and furrows of old age. Around midnight, Antonio, his son, arrived in a hurry to take his father’s body back to his mother country. He hugged Babakar, who was surprised to find himself more upset than when his own father died.
“He loved you like his own son. We never got on.”
Bobette had managed to round up the neighbors and improvise a wake with white flowers, women dressed in black holding rosaries, and a demijohn of rum. Oddly enough the weather was dry that day, and the neighbors had managed to light a row of candles in front of the house of the deceased, and Janky Cosaque, the storyteller, had begun his tales with a yé krik and a yé krak for when death comes calling, don’t be disrespectful.
A few days later Movar’s house went up in flames like cigarette paper in the middle of the night. All the poor man could save were the undershorts he was wearing.
Hugo’s death had a terrible effect on Babakar. Despite the delight of having Anaïs at home, he felt even lonelier than before. Lost. Abandoned. Every day he walked down to the creek as he used to do with Hugo and stared at the immense watery tombstone of the sea. To add to his grief the number of patients dwindled at an alarming rate. Someone had written Thief on the door of his surgery. Trash cans full of garbage had been spilled in front of his house. In the evening people would throw stones against the front gate. To cap it all, Carmen told him that the Reverend Father Ricardo de Souza had climbed up his pulpit to cast out the merchants of the Temple, in other words men like Babakar.
Consequently, he did something he had never before thought of doing: search for his mother’s family, the Minerves. It wasn’t easy. Given the upheavals of our time, consisting of migrations, exoduses, and exiles for the sake of survival, people are used to rushing around left, right, and center like crazy ants, and most of the Minerves no longer lived on the island. Like so many others, they were scattered all over the place. Several could be found in Sarcelles, another branch in Marseilles living next to the Saint-Maclou priory, and yet another in Lille in Northern France. In Guadeloupe, out of a sprawling tribe of families, only two dozen men, women, and a good many children were left; thank God they still knew how to reproduce. Despite how hard Babakar had fiddled around with the internet to find any trace of a certain Rosa Minerve-Excelsior, a clairvoyant at Duplessis, the letter he sent her remained unanswered.
Since Duplessis was only fifty or so kilometers away, he drove over in next to no time. Yet once he had parked in front of the little house traditionally painted in blue, he didn’t have the heart to take his turn with the other customers seated on the veranda, and he turned round and drove home.
On the morning after his house had burned to the ground, Movar rang at Babakar’s front gate, rigged out in an olive-green Adidas tracksuit which obviously wasn’t his and was much too big for his frail body. Before apologizing profusely, he told Babakar what had happened. All his fellow countrymen, alas, were dying of hunger, like him. Despite his misfortune, the Model Farm had refused to pay him an advance on his wages. Could Babakar lend him a few euros? Babakar gave him the ridiculous sum he was asking and managed to get him to agree to stay at his place free of charge.
When Movar moved in, somewhat comforted, Babakar said to himself he had lost a father but gained the younger brother he had always wanted.
Movar soon proved he was only too grateful. He set to work and transformed an area overrun by couch and guinea grass into a genuine Garden of Allah. People came from as far away as Vieux-Habitants to admire his orchids. Furthermore, he laid out a kitchen garden and grew tomatoes, pumpkins, carrots, and eggplants which were as heavy as a woman’s breast. Above all, he was a godsend for Chloé Ranguin, helping her with all those disagreeable jobs that go along with looking after a baby. Anaïs adored him. Of course, Babakar was her uncontested God and when he was around she only had eyes for him, rejecting other people’s arms. But for Movar she had little gurgles of complicity as if she sensed they were fashioned from the same matrix. Much to the fury of Chloé, who demanded they only speak French-French, Movar spoke to Anaïs in Creole and sang her lullabies from his homeland. At night he kept his bedroom door open, for the little girl often had nightmares that woke her up. Only he could make her go back to sleep.
“Is she thinking of her maman?” Babakar fretted when they gathered at Anaïs’s bedside while her eyes were bright with fever.
We may ask ourselves what two men so different—one a graduate from a prestigious Faculty of Obstetrics, the other illiterate—could talk about. Every evening, once dinner was over and Anaïs was in bed, they sat down on the veranda with a pot of bitter bush herb tea, facing the opaque curtain of night and talking endlessly. Movar listened while Babakar rattled on, confessing things he had never told anyone. He liked the way Movar remained silent, the unsaid being more meaningful than the most understanding of answers.
“When I was a little boy, I was constantly terror-stricken and afraid of the night. My mother used to come and tuck me in bed, then tell me a story. She made a point of never telling me Creole tales from her native Guadeloupe, or Bambara stories. She would read me Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen, one of her favorite authors. When she had finished, she would kiss me on my forehead and leave. I was left to cry in the dark. One evening I was so upset she hadn’t stayed with me I tiptoed to her bedroom on the first floor. There I heard voices and, recognizing my father’s, I put my ear against the door to listen.
“‘My love, I adore you,’ he roared.
“In response she laughed in a brazen, sensuous way I had never heard before. Heartbroken, I tiptoed downstairs, feeling I was one too many. It was then that I began to detest my father and become jealous of him.”
One evening when the moon was full, Babakar began to tell the story of his life. Until then he had only confessed bits and pieces to Movar. He spoke with an odd detachment, even irony, as if his trials and tr
ibulations had affected someone else rather than himself.
-
BABAKAR’S STORY
If my mother had lived longer, I am convinced my entire life would have been different. But she left me too soon and left me with this empty heart that no man or woman has ever been able to fill. Her big mistake was being too beautiful, not the fact of being rumored a witch. People hate a woman who is beautiful; she frightens them and troubles them. When they meet such a person, they hurl stones at her. So, my mother was constantly wounded.
Her second mistake was that she didn’t bother about the values most humans abide by and which serve as the basis of their lives. Instead, she openly mocked them. And paradoxically she suffered from being isolated and disliked.
