by David Diop
* * *
SO EVEN THOUGH I don’t speak Mademoiselle François’s French, I understood the language of her eyes on the middle of my body. It wasn’t difficult to understand. It was the same as with Fary Thiam and all the other women who have wanted me.
But, God’s truth, in the world before, I would never have wanted anyone other than Fary Thiam. Fary wasn’t the most beautiful girl in my age set, but she was the one whose smile most moved me. Fary was very, very moving. Her voice was soft, like the lapping of the river against fishermen’s canoes on quiet mornings. Fary’s smile was the dawn, her ass round as dunes in the Lompoul desert. Fary had eyes that were both doe and lioness. At times an earth-shattering tornado, at others an ocean of tranquility. God’s truth, I would have lost Mademba’s friendship to win Fary’s love. Luckily, Fary chose me over Mademba. Luckily, my more-than-brother deferred to me. It was because Fary chose me in front of everyone that Mademba stepped aside.
She chose me one night in deep winter. Among my age set we had planned an all-nighter, a vigil, a night without sleep to be spent dazzling one another with clever talk until dawn at Mademba’s parents’ place. We would drink Moorish tea and eat sweets with the girls in our age set in Mademba’s compound. We would speak of love in surreptitious terms. We pooled our money and bought three packs of Moorish tea and a large cone of sugar wrapped in blue paper at the village store. With the sugar we made a hundred small millet cakes. We spread out wide mats on the fine sand of Mademba’s compound. When night fell, we set seven small red-enamel teapots on the glowing iron cradles of seven small coal fires crackling with sparks. We had carefully displayed the small millet cakes on large metal platters, imitation French faïence borrowed from the village store. We had put on our most handsome shirts, the lightest ones possible so we would be resplendent in the moonlight. I did not have a button-up shirt. Mademba lent me one that was too small for me, but I was resplendent anyway when the eighteen young girls of our age set made their entrance into Mademba’s family’s place.
We had lived sixteen years and we all wanted Fary Thiam, though she wasn’t the most beautiful. And Fary Thiam chose me from among everyone. As soon as she saw me sitting on the mat, she came to sit cross-legged next to me; God’s truth, right next to me, so that my right thigh and her left thigh touched. God’s truth, I thought my heart would break my ribs from the inside, the way it beat, beat, beat. God’s truth, from that moment I knew what it meant to be happy. There is no joy greater than the joy Fary caused when she chose me beneath the shining light of the moon.
We had lived sixteen years and we wanted to laugh. We took turns telling short funny stories full of double entendres, we invented guessing games. Mademba’s little brothers and sisters, who had been asleep, heard us and came to join us, one by one. And I felt like the king of the world because Fary had chosen me and not anyone else. I took Fary’s left hand and pressed it in my right hand and she let me have it, confident. God’s truth, Fary Thiam has no equal. But Fary didn’t want to give herself to me. Each time I asked her to let me enter the insides of her body after that night when she chose me over everyone in my age set, she refused. Fary always said “no,” “no,” and “no,” for four years. A boy and a girl from the same age set do not make love. Even if they’ve chosen each other as intimate friends for life, a boy and a girl of the same age set must never become husband and wife. I knew this, I was aware of this peasant law. God’s truth, I knew this ancestral rule, but I did not accept it.
Maybe I began to think for myself long before Mademba’s death. As the captain liked to say, there’s no smoke without fire. And as the Fula nomads’ proverb says, “At dawn you can already know if the day will be good or bad.” Maybe my mind began to doubt the voice of duty, too well heeled, too well dressed to be honest. Maybe my mind was already preparing to say “no” to the inhuman laws that pass for humane. But I held on to hope, despite all her refusals, even if I knew, I understood why Fary always said “no” up until the night before we left for the war, Mademba and I.
XVI
GOD’S TRUTH, DOCTOR FRANÇOIS is a good man. Doctor François gives us time to think, to come back to ourselves. Doctor François gathers us, me and the others, in a big room where there are tables and chairs like at school. I’ve never been to school, but Mademba went. Mademba knew how to speak French, I don’t. Doctor François is like a schoolmaster. He tells us to sit down on the chairs, and on each table his daughter, Mademoiselle François, dressed all in white, places a piece of paper and a pencil. Then, signing with his hands, Doctor François tells us to draw whatever we want. I know, I understand that behind the glasses that magnify his matching blue eyes, Doctor François is looking inside our heads. His matching blue eyes aren’t like those of the enemies from the other side, who wanted to separate our heads from the rest of our bodies with their small malicious shells. His piercing, matching blue eyes are scrutinizing us in order to save our minds. I know, I understand that our drawings are there to help him wash our minds clean of the filth of war. I know, I understand that Doctor François is a purifier of heads that have been soiled by war.
God’s truth, Doctor François is reserved. Doctor François almost never speaks to us. He only speaks to us with his eyes. That’s convenient, because I don’t know how to speak French, unlike Mademba, who went to the Toubabs’ school. So I speak to Doctor François with my drawings. My drawings please Doctor François, who tells me so with his big matching blue eyes when he looks at me, smiling. Doctor François nods and I understand what he wants to say to me. He wants to say that what I am drawing is very beautiful and very expressive. I know, I understand very quickly that my drawings tell my story. I know, I understand that Doctor François reads my drawings like a story.
The first thing I drew on the piece of paper given to me by Doctor François was a woman’s head. I drew my mother’s head. God’s truth, my mother is very beautiful in my memory and I drew her coiffed in the Fulani style, adorned with jewelry in the Fulani style. Doctor François was overcome by the beautiful details of my drawing. His big matching blue eyes behind his glasses clearly told me so. With nothing but my pencil, I brought my mother’s head to life. I knew, I understood very quickly what brings a head drawn in pencil to life, in the portrait of a woman such as this one of my mother. What brings a drawing on a piece of paper to life is the play of shadow and light. I put some glints of light in my mother’s big eyes. These glints of light leapt out from white slivers of paper that I had not colored in with black. Her head was also brought to life by minuscule slivers of paper that my pencil had barely touched with black. God’s truth, I knew, I understood, I figured out how, with a simple pencil on paper, I could tell Doctor François how beautiful my Fula mother was, with heavy gold twists hanging from her ears and thin circles of red gold piercing the wings of her hooked nose. I could tell Doctor François how beautiful my mother was in my childhood memories, with her charcoaled eyelids, her painted lips half parted to reveal her beautiful, white, very, very well-aligned teeth, and with her head of hair threaded with gold. I drew her in shadows and light. God’s truth, I believe that my drawing was so vivid, Doctor François heard my mother say from her sketched mouth that she was gone, but that she had not forgotten me. That she was gone and had left me with my father, the old man, but that she loved me still.
My mother was my father’s fourth and final wife. My mother was a source of joy and then of pain for him. My mother was the only child of Yoro Ba. Yoro Ba was a Fula shepherd who walked his herd across my father’s fields each year, during the migration south. His herd, which came from the Senegal River valley, was brought during the dry season to the eternally green plains of the Niayes, very close to Gandiol. Yoro Ba loved my father, the old man, because he gave him access to his artesian wells. God’s truth, the peasants of Gandiol didn’t like the Fula shepherds. But my father wasn’t a peasant like the others. My father had opened a path in the middle of his fields toward his own wells just for Yoro Ba’s her
d. To those who wanted to know why, my father always said that everyone must live. My father had hospitality in his blood.
You don’t give such a beautiful gift with impunity to a Fula worth his name. A Fula worth his name like Yoro Ba who drives his herd in the middle of my father’s fields to give them water from his wells would have to give a very, very big gift in return. God’s truth, my mother is the one who told me: a Fula who has been given a gift he can’t return may die of shame. A Fula, she told me, is capable of stripping himself naked to pay a griot for a song if he has nothing left but his clothing to give. A Fula worthy of the name, she said to me, would even go so far as to cut off one of his ears to pay a traveling griot when he has nothing left but a piece of his body to give.
For Yoro Ba, who was a widower, apart from his herd of white, red, and black cows, what he valued most was his one daughter amid his five sons. God’s truth, for Yoro Ba, his daughter, Penndo Ba, was without price. For Yoro Ba, his daughter deserved to marry a prince. Penndo could have earned him a regal dowry, at least a big herd equivalent to his, at least thirty camels from the northern Moors. God’s truth, my mother told me this.
So Yoro Ba, because he was a Fula worthy of the name, announced to my father, the old man, that he would give him his daughter Penndo Ba’s hand in marriage on the next transhumance. Yoro Ba asked no dowry for his daughter. He wanted only one thing: that my father would set a date for his marriage to Penndo. Yoro Ba paid for everything, he bought the bridal clothing and the twisted gold jewels, he slaughtered twenty heads of cattle from his own herd on the day of the wedding. He paid the singing griots with dozens of meters of expensive cloth, with heavy bazin brocade and lightweight indienne made in France.
You don’t say “no” to a Fula worthy of the name who gives you his beloved daughter’s hand in marriage as repayment for the hospitality shown to his herd. You can ask “why?” of a Fula worthy of the name, but you can’t tell him “no.” God’s truth, my father did ask Yoro Ba, “Why?” and Yoro Ba answered, my mother told me this, “Bassirou Coumba Ndiaye, you are a simple peasant but you are noble. In the words of a Fula proverb: ‘Until a man is dead, he is not yet done being created.’ I have met many men in my life, but not a single man like you. I am learning from your wisdom, that I may grow in wisdom. Because you have shown the hospitality of a prince, when I give you my daughter, Penndo, I am mixing my blood with that of a king who does not know he is a king. In giving Penndo to you in marriage, I am reconciling immobility and mobility, the stillness of time and the flow of time, the past and the present. I am reconciling the rooted trees and the wind that rustles their leaves, the earth and the sky.”
You can’t say “no” to a Fula who gives you his own blood. So my father, the old man who already had three wives, said “yes” to the fourth, with the agreement of the three others. And this fourth wife, Penndo Ba, is the one who gave me life.
But seven years after Penndo Ba’s wedding, six years after my birth, Yoro Ba, his five sons, and their herd stopped returning to Gandiol.
For the next two years Penndo Ba lived only for their return. The first year, Penndo remained amicable with her co-wives, with her husband, with me, her only child, but she was not happy. She didn’t like staying in one place. Penndo had accepted my father, the old man, even though she had barely finished childhood. She agreed to marry him out of respect for keeping one’s word, out of respect for Yoro Ba. Penndo had come to love my father because he was her exact opposite. He was as old as an immutable landscape, she was young like the changing sky. He was immobile as a baobab tree, she was the daughter of the wind. Sometimes opposites fascinate each other because of the differences between them. Penndo had come to love my father, the old man, because he contained all of the wisdom of the earth and of the recurring seasons. My father, the old man, idolized Penndo because she was what he was not: movement, joyous instability, novelty.
But Penndo couldn’t handle immobility for seven years except on the condition that her father, her brothers, and their herd would return each year to see her at Gandiol. They brought with them the scent of travel, the scent of their encampments in the scrub brush, the scent of nights spent on guard to defend their herd from hungry lions. They brought in their eyes the memories of animals they had lost on the road and always found, living or dead, never abandoned. They told her of roads lost to the dust in daytime and rediscovered by starlight. In the singing language of the Fula people, they recounted their year of nomadic life each time they passed through Gandiol, driving their large herd of white, red, and black cows toward the eternally green plains of the Niayes.
Penndo, who could only survive Gandiol when she was able to look forward to their return, began to wither the very first year of their absence. Penndo Ba stopped laughing for good the second year they didn’t come. Every morning during the dry season, when they should have been there, she would send me to go look at the well where Yoro Ba used to bring his herd to drink. She looked sadly at the path through the middle of the fields that my father had cut for them. She tilted her ear, hoping to hear the distant sound of Yoro Ba’s animals and her brothers. I secretly watched her eyes, crazed with loneliness and regret, when we would return slowly to Gandiol after hours of unacknowledged waiting at the farthest northern border of the village.
I was nine years old when my father, who loved Penndo Ba, told her to leave to look for Yoro Ba, for her brothers and their herd. My father preferred her to leave than to die. I know, I understand that my father would rather have had my mother alive but far away from him than dead on his doorstep, laid to rest in the Gandiol cemetery. I know this, I understand it because my father became an old man as soon as Penndo left us. From one day to the next, his hair turned completely white. From one day to the next, his back hunched. From one day to the next, my father fell still. As soon as Penndo left, my father began to wait for her. God’s truth, no one would have dreamed of mocking him for it.
Penndo wanted to bring me with her, but my father, the old man, refused. My father said that I was too young to leave on an adventure. It wouldn’t be easy to find Yoro Ba while saddled with a young child. But I knew, I understood that in fact my father was afraid that Penndo would never return if I left with her. With me in Gandiol, he was assured she would have a very, very important reason to come home. God’s truth, my father loved Penndo.
One evening, not long before her departure, Penndo Ba, my mother, took me in her arms. She said to me, in her musical language, Fulfulde, which I no longer understand, that I was a big boy, that I should be able to listen to her reasons. She needed to know what had happened to my grandfather, to my uncles and their herd. We never abandon those who gave us life. Once she knew, she would return: she would never abandon the one she had given life. God’s truth, my mother’s words both helped me and hurt me. She held me in her arms and she said nothing more. Like my father, as soon as she left I began to wait for her.
My father, the old man, had asked my older half brother, Ndiaga, the fisherman, to carry Penndo in his canoe as far as possible on the river north, then east. My mother asked for me to be able to accompany her for half the journey. Ndiaga had attached a smaller canoe to the back of the large one that carried me, my mother, and Saliou, another of my half brothers, who was to bring me back to Gandiol when the time came. Seated side by side on a bench at the head of the canoe, silent, we held hands, my mother and I. Together we looked at the river’s horizon without really seeing it. From time to time the erratic swaying of the boat would deposit my head on Penndo’s naked shoulder. I felt the flashes of her skin’s heat against my right ear. Finally I attached myself to her arm so that my head no longer left her shoulder. I dreamed that the goddess Mame Coumba Bang would keep us in the middle of the river for a long time, despite the libations of cheese curd we’d offered her when we left the shores of our village. I prayed that she would entwine our canoe in her long liquid arms, that her brown algae hair would slow our progress despite the long paddle strokes my hal
f brothers were using to beat her back so we could resist her powerful current. Out of breath from their river-peasant labors tracing invisible grooves in the water, Ndiaga and Saliou were silent. They were as sad for me as they were for my mother, who was about to be separated from her only son. God’s truth, even my half brothers loved Penndo Ba.
The time came for us to separate. Mute, head and eyes lowered, we stretched our joined hands toward my mother so she could bless us. We listened to her murmur unfamiliar prayers, long prayers of blessing from a Koran she knew better than we did. When she fell quiet, we raised the palms of our joined hands to our faces, to collect every last breath of her prayers, as if we were drinking from their source. Then Saliou and I moved into the small canoe, which Ndiaga had cut free with an abrupt gesture filled with suppressed anger directed at himself, at the tears that were rising to fill his eyes. Then my mother looked at me intensely one last time to cement my image in her memory. And then, as my canoe was carried in the soft lapping of the current, she turned her back. I know, I understand that she didn’t want me to see her cry. God’s truth, a Fula woman worthy of the name does not cry in front of her son. But I cried very, very much.
No one really knows what happened to Penndo Ba. My half brother Ndiaga brought her by canoe as far as the city of Saint-Louis. There, he entrusted her to another fisherman by the name of Sadibou Guèye, who was to take her for the price of a sheep in his commercial canoe as far as Walaldé, in Diéri, the usual camping spot at this time of the year for Yoro Ba, his five sons, and their herd. But the waters of the river were too low, and Sadibou Guèye passed Penndo on to one of his cousins, Badara Diaw, so that he could accompany her along the riverbank on foot as far as Walaldé. Very few people reported seeing them beyond the village of Mboyo, after which they evaporated into the brush. My mother and Badara Diaw never made it to Walaldé.
