Every day I witnessed the same scenes: suspicious clients – usually married men – came in through a secret door, the important ones ushered into Maman Fiat 500’s apartment. I studied their attitude, especially those who, noticing my presence in the building for the first time, pretended they’d lost their way, that they’d actually been looking for the bistro Black Angels Have Small Dicks, which was right opposite and nobody could miss. And Maman Fiat 500 came out of her apartment – she always kept an eye on what was happening on the Avenue of Independence – took the strays by the hand and whispered:
‘No, there’s no mistake, you’ve come to the right place, you don’t want the bistro if you’re looking for a good time!’
Then she signalled to the girls who led them into the centre of the courtyard, installed them under a straw shack and served them some St Pauli beers.
Some of the clients still hesitated, muttering:
‘I should actually explain, I was just wandering aimlessly through the neighbourhood, I saw a light, and I said to myself: “Well, well, well, there’s a light over there, even though the whole neighbourhood’s cut off.” And then, if you see what I’m saying, I came over without even thinking what I was doing. Oh well, I guess I’d better be getting back…’
Then Maman Fiat 500 would reassure them:
‘Make yourself at home, no harm in having a bit of fun…’
Then she’d call to me:
‘Little Pepper, fetch me some St Paulis from across the way for these gentlemen…’
I liked to sit at the entrance to the building with Likofi Yangombé, a porter who had failed at his career as a boxer in Zaire. He lashed out with a stick at any undesirables who tried to peep through the breaks in the wooden fence at what was going on inside the enclosure. As soon as he saw me, he felt the need to tell me the tale of his glory days, in particular the little details of what happened before a fight:
‘You just can’t imagine how stressed you get before a fight! All you can think of is the sequence of punches you’ve been taught in training. Left, right, left again, right again. Then there are the legs. I know what I’m talking about, son. You don’t win a boxing match with your hands, you win it with your legs! They have to be light, help you fly, support you, and follow the rhythm of your arms. You try it one more time in the changing room, then you have to go, and you slip on a robe with your initials on the front, and your whole name printed on the back. You start dancing about, to warm up. In a few minutes, with your hands carefully wrapped up, then placed in Everlast gloves, you make your way down an interminable corridor, with your team following behind. And at last it’s there, waiting for you, far away at first, the ring, a little elevated square with ropes around. And there’s a roar, and the hall is plunged into darkness. That’s where the showdown takes place, before an excited crowd of people roaring for or against you…’
In the morning the girls each took up their position outside the room they’d been assigned by Maman Fiat 500 and waited for me to bring them their breakfast. I didn’t mind doing it, because I knew I’d be allowed to eat with them, and if I’d followed the promptings of my own greedy stomach I’d have eaten ten times a day, because the girls gave me ever more affection and my way of saying thank you was to go with them to market, or to the clinic in Mouyondzi where Maman Fiat 500 sent them every month for intensive medical check-ups.
In the evening they were more aggressive, and stood outside the front gates, protected this time by the three cousins of Likofi Yangombé, while he pretended just to be having a drink opposite, at the Black Angels Have Small Dicks, intervening whenever some joker came and bothered the girls…
ON THE DAY BEFORE my nineteenth birthday Maman Fiat 500 found me a job as a dockhand down at the port, thanks to one of her most regular clients, Rigobert Moutou. Head of personnel at the Maritime Company of Pointe-Noire (MCPN), he came three times a week, parking his scooter inside my ‘mother’s’ lot, and passing me a thousand CFA franc note for looking after his vehicle. Then he’d go and join Maman Fiat 500 in an apartment separate from the main house where the girls lived and worked.
One day, as he left Maman Fiat 500’s apartment, Rigobert Moutou whispered to me:
‘Come to the port tomorrow, I’ll put you on a salary, that way I won’t have to give you a thousand CFA francs every time I come.’
I knew this was Maman Fiat’s idea. She worried about my future and was sick of me hanging around in her courtyard year in year out, wandering from her apartment over to the main house, where sometimes I would intervene between three or four girls who were about to get into a fight. I expect she’d had enough of me being the kid who helped with everything, waiting to be sent to buy beers in one of the nearby bistros when clients arrived. From now on I would work, and gradually detach myself from her, that must have been what she wanted, because a month after I’d been signed on she gave me the keys to a little place she’d just acquired down by the River Tchinouka. It was just a little patch of land with a hut made of boards. Her plan was to build a large house, and the hut was there to ward off the crooks who went round selling off vacant land in the town as though it belonged to them.
So my job was to watch over the property, but it gave me some autonomy, even if I regularly went back to Three Hundreds to look in on Maman Fiat 500, say hello to the girls and check no one was trying to make trouble of any kind for my little adoptive family…
I was an exemplary worker. At least, that’s what my colleagues said. Why else would they have kept me on for ten years, until my state of health went and ruined it all? I would probably have become chief dock hand, and possibly one of the most important people running the whole port, who knows?
I got up early to go and wait for the MCPN lorry at a bus shelter in the Avenue of Independence, opposite Vicky’s Photo Studio. The vehicle stopped at every intersection, other dock hands piled on and we travelled along in silence. The lorry discharged us like sardines by the roadside at the entrance to the port and we walked up to a barrier where men in uniform checked our identity, confiscated our bags and finally let us pass. That was the start of our long, harsh day – unloading the containers under the watchful supervision of the foremen, as they suspected us of stealing objects brought in from abroad, and getting rid of them in the evening, on the streets.
My colleagues were astonished at my petty stealing:
‘Do you want them to send you back to school or what? If you’re going to get caught with stolen goods, you might as well get caught with something worth having!’
Any poor wretch caught red-handed was taken to the main customs office, a tiny little room that smelled of cat’s piss, with rats the size of papayas crossing from one corner to another, knowing they’d never be trapped because they were just part of the scene, and also because many people in the town considered killing an animal equivalent to attacking an ancestor, incurring the wrath of the spirits who are supposed to protect the living and make sure that they’re welcomed into the next world on good terms. The rats understood this, which explained the indolence of their movements, and why they didn’t even stop to check they were safe with strangers.
This was the office where they stripped the workers naked before lashing them with barbed wire and imposing a settlement of accounts which made them debtors for the rest of their lives. We feared coming up before the floggers, who would beat the culprits impassively, till blood flowed, and the louder they cried, the harder and longer they hit them. It was a sort of summary tribunal with no chance of redress: they’d heard that you’d stolen, there would be no investigation, but you’d be punished and fired. I saw family men down on their knees, pleading for forgiveness, weeping and pissing into their shoes while the flogger stood there unmoved.
At one o’clock in the afternoon, we finally got a break in which to eat. The foremen, with the floggers in tow, watched us like hawks throughout. They lived in fear of confabulations and transactions, and were therefore opposed to the idea of workers eatin
g together. At each table they posted a guard built like a weightlifter, chewing on great chunks of manioc, flicking his eyes over us, alert to the faintest whisper.
In the evenings we were only allowed to leave the port after interminable searches in which we were stripped down to our birthday suits with our hands in the air, in the customs office we referred to as ‘The Filter House’. On re-emerging, we felt like we’d passed an exam.
I was considered above all suspicion: together with an old customs officer, I stole ring-bound notebooks and pens. He was known as Papa Madesso Y Bana. To avoid being checked, he would bring the notebooks and the pens to my hut in the evening. I’d give him a ten thousand CFA franc note to help feed his nine kids, three wives, three official mistresses and a litter of nephews whose names he could never remember because he always mixed them up with his own brood.
IMPENETRABLE ARE THE WAYS of the Lord, Papa Moupelo would have said. What with my little job at the port and my regular visits to Maman Fiat 500’s, I seemed to be leading a normal life, when with a great fanfare, the mayor, François Makélé, the same one who had already driven us back to the Côte Sauvage with his famous ‘Grand Marché Mosquitoes’ operation, now launched ‘Zero Zairian Whores in Pointe-Noire’. You’d have thought life was one long election campaign. He wasn’t actually running for mayor this time, but for the Presidency of the Regional Council of Kouilou. The tricks were the same though: choose a group to gang up on, and wage a noisy campaign, preferably with aggressive involvement of forces of law and order and the TV cameras. The ‘Mosquitoes’ had completely disappeared from the Grand Marché, which had now grown so big it extended as far as the Rex district. In these circumstances, a campaign against the new ‘mosquitoes’ would mean driving all the kids of Pointe-Noire out of their own town. So operation ‘Zero Zairian Whores in Pointe-Noire’ fitted the bill, because it left the Congolese whores in peace and meant the mayor could boast about killing two birds with one stone: eradicating Zairian prostitution in the town, at the same time as fighting illicit immigration, since many of these women had come to Pointe-Noire via Angola or Cabinda Province, using couriers who had sold them Congolese identity cards…
In the town, then, everyone was talking about the witch hunt against the call girls from Zaire, and many people were concerned about the inhuman way it was being conducted, even if a large part of the population welcomed the initiative. How could they justify bringing in bulldozers, borrowed from construction companies, to destroy the majority of brothels in Pointe-Noire, while soldiers went round coshing the poor women, and transporting them in 4 x 4s to the Police Headquarters at the Lumumba roundabout to check their visa status? The interrogation they were subjected to was a mere formality, for in the end, whatever their situation, they were beaten up, and sometimes raped by a band of policemen…
Imagine my surprise the day I turned up at Maman Fiat 500’s to discover a field of rubble, as though a bomb had suddenly wiped everything out during a war with the Americans! I thought I must be hallucinating, a feeling exacerbated by a sort of darkness that descended on my soul. The shock was so terrible, I stood staring at this scene of destruction for over an hour, wondering what had become of Maman Fiat 500 and her ten girls.
When at last I came to my senses, I went to the town centre, where the Angolan and Cameroonian girls mostly worked.
I couldn’t find Maman Fiat 500 and her girls anywhere. I took the return bus back to my cabin, which from now on felt like the only link between me and my little family, who were without a doubt on their way home to Zaire. I paced up and down my tiny patch of land. I was at my wits’ end, I’d lost all sense of time, and it was probably around then I started to feel gaping holes in my head, hearing noises, like all these people running around inside it, echoes of voices from empty houses, voices not unlike those of Bonaventure, Papa Moupelo and Sabine Niangui, the twins, but most of all of Maman Fiat 500 and her ten girls. After that, nothing. I remembered nothing, not even who I was.
I HADN’T BEEN BACK to work for weeks, and several of my colleagues came knocking at my door, to try and bring me back to my senses. In a fit of panic I threw hot pepper water in their faces. I didn’t recognise them, I thought they must be garden gnomes trampling all over my poor little spinach plants, when all that was left for me now was to cultivate my garden in a corner of Madam Fiat 500’s plot of land. I could handle anything, except people coming and messing up my precious little spinach plants, which I watered with joy.
I’d leap from my bed very early, as though I was going to go to my place of work. I’d make sure a lorry from the Maritime Company hadn’t dropped off any gnomes in the garden, I’d fetch a pick and a hoe, a spade, a rake and a watering can, which I filled with water from the River Tchinouka. Then I’d whistle as I dug the soil and scattered seeds. Sometimes I’d just sit the whole day long in my vegetable plot, hoping to catch my spinach plants growing. I was actually worried they might pop up when I wasn’t looking and I’d feel like a fool next to my neighbour, Kolo Loupangou, an old man who liked to think he was an expert gardener, just because he’d got his technique and his gardening know-how from learned works devoted to the art.
Kolo Loupangou, who refused to plant anything but lettuces, asked me:
‘Is your spinach coming up?’
I replied:
‘Yes, my spinach is coming up.’
‘If your spinach is coming up, does that mean my lettuce will?’
‘No, your lettuces won’t come up!’
I said that to get rid of him, so he wouldn’t stand there looking at my spinach plants, distracting me, dragging me round to his way of thinking, talking to me about his old books. One of these books was called The Theory and Practice of Gardening, published by one Dezallier d’Argenvile in the 18th century, Kolo Loupangou explained. And he added that this Dezallier d’Argenville was a great garden lover, even if he was actually a lawyer by profession.
To be fair, I should admit that it was thanks to him that I’d switched my garden from one side of the plot to the other.
Kolo Loupangou had come over to see how I was getting on, and exclaimed:
‘You’re wasting your time Little Pepper, your garden is in the wrong place, it won’t flourish, there’s something important missing!’
‘Really? What’s that then?’
‘In Country House, Countess Genlis, or perhaps I should call her Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de Saint-Albin, points out that the kitchen garden should always be close to the dwelling and close to the dung heap. So you need a dung heap!’
And he helped me with this initiative. I was shocked to observe that he was burying cow dung and all sorts of disgusting things in my soil.
‘You see, the worse it smells, the better it is for your dung heap,’ he assured me.
The book he was most proud of had been published by Olivier Serres in the 17th century, with a title as long as your arm: Theatre of Agriculture and Field Management… in which all aspects of the art of cultivating and exploiting the land are set out with clarity and precision, in consideration of its various qualities and climates, both as expressed by the Ancients and acquired through experience…
‘This book is my bible.’
He immersed himself in the reading of this book for a whole half day, roaring with laughter as he did so. According to him, gardening was an art I would never understand because I didn’t have green fingers, because all I could grow were pathetic little spinach plants right by my house wall.
Although he said I lacked gardening experience, he admitted I managed quite well, conceding:
‘Yesterday, as the day declined, I was sitting in my doorway and I spied you with your old man’s rags, seeding with open hands the furrowed earth that will yield harvest in the months to come. Perhaps you don’t know it, but you were trying to imitate that famous and august gesture of the sower, whose tall dark silhouette o’ercasts the fields, his heart set on the fruit of passing time.’
I understood nothing
of this outburst, which was doubtless taken from his reading of ancient books. But I knew he was a kind man, and that it must be a compliment, since he said it all in a warm, kindly voice.
A few weeks later, when I was still savouring his compliment, and my memory troubles were getting worse, he saw me in my garden and ran across:
‘I haven’t seen you imitating the august gesture of the sower since this morning! What are you doing, standing there among your spinach plants?’
‘I’m watching them grow.’
‘What do you mean, watching them grow?’
‘There’s something I’d like to understand, and your books say nothing about it: why do my spinach plants only grow when I’m not watching? I find it unacceptable!’
‘You’re right. It is unacceptable.’
‘It’s ungrateful of them! Who is it that waters these poor little spinach plants? Who looks after them? Who pulls out the weeds that stop them growing? I won’t let them do it to me! I’m not leaving this garden until my spinach plants make up their minds to grow here and now, before my eyes!’
Kolo Loupangou gave me a long, sympathetic look and murmured:
‘Little Pepper, I’ll be frank with you: I think you need help. Your situation isn’t just serious, it’s completely and utterly desperate…’
For years he would continue to sing this refrain, as my memory problems affected my gait and I started to walk in zigzags because it completely slipped my mind that the shortest route from one point to another is a straight line, which is why, as they say around here, drunkards always come home late.
The minute I set foot outside my cabin, I’d get lost. I wandered all over the Côte Sauvage, because I actually thought my little house was on the other side of the ocean and I just had to walk across the water, a bit like the famous messiah whose exploits of this kind are all recorded in the Holy Book. Each time I tried to perform the same trick – I was very curious to know how this guy pulled it off, even urging one of his disciples to do likewise – I held back, muttering to myself that the water was too cold, or too polluted with the excrement of certain locals who claimed it was fine to relieve yourself in the sea because the wise men of our country had shown that salt kills all known germs, even the most resistant, the ones that hide deep down in the ocean.
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