Black Moses

by Alain Mabanckou

  Hither and thither I went, not realising that I kept looping back through the same spot. In my head I heard the waves booming, and when they broke I had the feeling everything around me was exploding, and I would be swallowed up by the sea. So I stuffed my fingers in my ears and stopped myself breathing for several seconds, till the waves disappeared and I could say to myself that it wasn’t the sea that was coming to get me, that I was the one who was haunted by its presence.

  The illness affected more than my walk: judging by my attire and my actions, people thought I must be a ghost who’d been thrown out of the Mongo-Kamba cemetery, or someone who might cross swords with his own shadow, and end up in profound disagreement with it over which way to turn at a crossroads. Dogs crossed my path and immediately fled, barking at me, to be on the safe side, from several hundred metres away, outside their master’s plot. So I saw that the best way to get rid of a dog was bark yourself. I’ve met dogs who were so astonished by – and possibly admiring of – my mimicry, they broke off barking and lay down before me, as though accepting me as leader of their pack…

  For protection in the dry season, I went round covered in a thick woollen blanket and a straw hat, carrying a long wooden stick to frighten the children, whose game was to pelt me with stones. I tried running after them, but they were so quick and agile that in no time they vanished from my sight. My new physical appearance made it difficult, even for my neighbour, to recognise who I was.

  Because I was going round and round in circles, like a snail caught in the spiral of its own slime, I needed some little trick for working out where I was when I went wandering. Using my stick, I drew a cross of Lorraine wherever I went, to avoid doubling back the same way a few minutes later. As a result, several alleyways were marked with multiple crosses of Lorraine, since I had as much right as anyone else to walk up and down the public streets, even though I didn’t pay taxes – besides, if only people who paid their taxes were allowed to use them, then God help us, our neighbourhood streets would be as empty as those in a deserted town in the Wild West.

  ‘Well I never, a cross of Lorraine! So I’ve been this way before, I’d better go a different way, where there are no crosses of Lorraine!’

  I’d change direction, but some young wags decided to put crosses of Lorraine everywhere. I got more and more lost, because I couldn’t tell my crosses of Lorraine from those of the jokers, who were as inventive as they were annoying. So I gave up drawing crosses of Lorraine, and spent my time rubbing them out instead.

  Some afternoons I’d do a tour of the town’s cemeteries, enjoying a spot of butterfly-chasing with a sling. I visited the tombs of Loandjili, Diosso, Fouks, Mpaka, Mbota and Mongo-Kamba, with the idea that my biological mother, who I never knew, was buried in one of these tombs. Not that I felt the need to discover who my true mother was, or why she left me at the orphanage of Loango a few days after my birth. What I really wanted was to spit on her grave, and ask for an explanation. Since I didn’t know if she was actually dead or alive, I railed against all the dead people in the cemeteries, resting in peace and enjoying people’s respect, while I was out here suffering. I scratched out the inscriptions on the crosses and wrote in other names instead. I admit now that because of me the families of the dead often got lost in the rows of a necropolis, and knelt down at the graveside of people they’d never known. And to cap it all, I would stand there cackling between two gravestones, not realising that only decency and courtesy stopped the unknown departed from telling me to go to hell.

  As if this wasn’t enough, at the time of the full moon, especially in leap years, I was determined to get to see the navel of a policeman’s wife. The idea haunted my sleeping and waking thoughts. It got so bad, I started drawing on the ground what I thought the navel of a policeman’s wife might look like, instead of crosses of Lorraine. I was pretty sure I’d seen all sorts of navels in our neighbourhood, and even in our town, but I’d never seen the navel of a policeman’s wife.

  When I passed a woman, any woman, in the street, I’d ask her if her spouse was a policeman. She’d always stare at me in astonishment:

  ‘Are you off your head, or what? Asshole!’

  At long last, a woman took pity on me. She’d seen me hanging around in the street for hours, asking women for their husband’s profession, never finding one who was married to a policeman. One day she stopped and told me that her husband, Fernando Quiroga, was a well-known lawyer/estate agent with an office in the centre of town.

  ‘Your husband’s a lawyer, not a policeman!’ I said, rejecting her approach to me outright.

  ‘Policeman, lawyer, it’s all the same thing…’

  ‘No, it’s not the same thing at all, one carries handcuffs, the other doesn’t, he snaffles the worldly goods people leave their heirs when they die!’

  ‘Can I just show you my nice little lawyer’s wife navel anyway?’

  ‘I want a policeman’s wife’s navel, and that’s that!’

  I read both disappointment and humiliation in her face.

  After a while I gave up on this, because I heard about a guy who died of a heart attack in the arms of a policeman’s wife when at long last she showed him her navel…

  I returned to the Côte Sauvage after many long years to find all the old vagrants had gone, and I felt like the oldest of them all.

  ‘That guy going “I’ve lost my memory”, he’s an interloper, he’ll denounce us to the police!’ some of them said among themselves.

  I swore I wasn’t in cahoots with the police. That I’d gladly return to my shack, but how would I get there?

  ‘You don’t know where you come from then?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right…’

  ‘But you do remember that you don’t know where you come from?’

  The young ones on the Côte Sauvage all thought I didn’t know what I was saying, that I was really just a mental retard. I put up with their cruel remarks, but I wouldn’t let them say I was a loser, that my incoherent words and behaviour recalled the primal utterances of our prehistoric ancestor back in the day when by mutual consent he divorced our cousin the monkey, because he was sick of him and had discovered he could go it alone, and light his own little fire using two flints rubbed together instead of wolfing down raw meat like a savage. A number of these false friends already had me dead and buried in a nice white shroud, so when they saw me reappear with my Don Quixote de la Mancha look, they decided I must be tilting at windmills or running after a simple peasant woman, my heart’s own desire.

  So they all shouted:

  ‘Look at this imbecile, he doesn’t even know where his shack is!’

  So they all turned away from me. One of them said to me in a voice full of scorn:

  ‘You know what your problem is, Little Pepper? Your visceral stupidity has paralysed your mouth. Its grip on your circumvolutions tightens daily. You talk to yourself, you think electricity pylons are magical giants you must fight by hook or by crook. One look at you and it’s quite clear, man truly is descended from the monkeys!’

  This was really too much, so I answered back:

  ‘One look at you and all doubt goes, luckily for you, and unlike me, you are not descended from a monkey, but you’re catching up so fast, the human race will have a whole new species of primate before you can say “light year”!’

  The creep then yelled:

  ‘You want my fist in your face or what? You old asshole! The cemetery’s the place for you, why are you still alive, when real people are dying all around you? What are you even doing in this town? What are you even for?’

  And he walked away, showing me the middle finger of his right hand, pointing up towards the sky…

  I RECALL IT WAS A BLISTERING afternoon. We were packed so tight in the Pointe-Noire Public Transport bus, that when people jabbed me in the ribs with their elbows, I jabbed them back just as brutally, until my neighbour, Kolo Loupangou, told me to calm down, behave properly, and above all not to show people that I had a long
-term problem, a really big problem, here in my head. He also spent the whole journey marvelling at how he had cornered me like a rat near the Côte Sauvage, and dragged me along with him, when he hadn’t seen me in my shack for several months and had been searching in vain in the remotest districts of Pointe-Noire.

  While I was busy complaining about the heat and smell of perspiring passengers, Kolo Loupangou waxed lyrical about the doctor he was taking me to:

  ‘You’ll see, he’s just great, I promise! He’s the only doctor who can treat diseases of the brain in this town, and quite possibly in this country! I don’t know what the hell he’s doing in Pointe-Noire, if I were him I’d have stayed in France, in Paris, and got paid as well as the white doctors! Doctor Kilahou saved Kaké Ebeti, an old bugger in his fifties, who’d been wandering naked through the streets for over twenty years and apparently had a centipede in his brain. He wouldn’t give a hurricane lamp to his maternal uncle, and his uncle was so bitter, he asked evil spirits to destroy the majority of his neurones! Doctor Kilahou did neutralise the mystical centipede, but first he got Kaké Ebeti to kneel before his uncle and buy him the hurricane lamp he’d been wanting for years. These days the old madman lives like a lord: he’s married to an ex-Miss Rex, wears suits from Europe with ties that outshine the rainbow and to top it all he’s landed the post of personnel manager at Printania supermarket! The same could happen to you Little Pepper!’

  I didn’t know what to say to this, I was more interested in the two bottles of beer I’d hidden in the sand by the Tchinouka, to keep them cool till I got back. The more I thought about it, the more I imagined these two bottles getting pregnant, having lots of little baby-beers, who one day would also have baby-beers, till my whole world was just one great ocean of alcohol.

  When the bus stopped opposite the building of the National Water and Electric Company, my neighbour heaved a sigh of relief:

  ‘This is where Kilahou’s surgery is, inside this fine building belonging to the NWEC.’

  In the lobby, Kolo Loupangou halted by the lift:

  ‘He sees his patients in private, and I respect his way of working. That’s how he cured Kaké Ebeti!’

  ‘Are you leaving then?’ I asked anxiously.

  He pointed over at a little room in the corner of the lobby:

  ‘I’ll wait for you there, to make sure you don’t disappear again for months. I won’t move till you come down!’

  ‘I don’t want to talk to someone I don’t know, he’ll just upset me for nothing and…’

  ‘Please, just be polite, don’t talk to him like you talk to your friends from the Tchinouka and the Côte Sauvage, he’s a doctor, he’s studied with the whites!’

  He stepped inside the lift with me, pressed the button, and stepped out again before the doors closed.

  I saw him settle onto the sofa and lunge at a jar of sweets on a coffee table.

  As soon as the lift doors opened on the first floor, I leaped out, convinced I was finally escaping a trap. On one of the doors on the landing, on the left, was a gilded plaque that declared:

  DOCTOR LUCIEN KILAHOU

  Neuropsychologist

  Faculty of Medicine, Paris

  Intern, Hospitals of Paris

  Enter without knocking

  I knocked anyway before entering.

  An old lady with legs like a wader bird, wearing large spectacles, looked me carefully up and down before letting me in.

  ‘The doctor will be with you in a moment, he’s just talking on the telephone.’

  ‘I’m in a hurry, Madame!’

  She shot me a look like a pistol:

  ‘You don’t have an appointment, and you’re in a hurry? Well then, why don’t you make an appointment for another day if you’re in such a hurry today?’

  While I was having a good look at her blonde wig, which only just covered about two-thirds of her skull, I was muttering to myself, inside: ‘Calm down, Little Pepper, your neighbour’s waiting downstairs, don’t disappoint him.’

  Embarassed by my staring at her, the woman attempted to move her wig forward a little, to hide a few grey hairs that were showing. She handed me a year-old newspaper and asked me to take a seat in an enormous waiting room with walls covered in pictures comparing from every possible angle the brain of a human with that of an elephant, a dolphin, a gorilla, a cat, a dog, a chimpanzee and a mouse.

  I looked at the one of the human. It was terrifying to think that we’re walking around with compacted mush in our heads. For the first time, I learned the terms for the different parts of the organ: mesancephalic duct, thalamus, hypothalamus, the pons, fornix and pineal gland. I imagined the assistant, who was keeping an eye on me from the reception desk, taking off her wig every evening and extracting her brain, to give her cranium a good clean before putting everything carefully back in place.

  I brushed these thoughts aside and opened the newspaper I’d been handed on arrival. As the photo of the mayor, François Makélé, occupied half of every page, I closed it again, and threw it on the floor. At a distance, my eyes met those of the assistant, who appeared not to appreciate this gesture.

  After a quarter of an hour, a short, obese man, with a bald head, came over, and held out a damp hand towards me. I refrained from giving him mine, and asked him suspiciously:

  ‘You work here too, do you?’

  ‘I’m Dr Lucien Kilahou…’

  I didn’t greet him in return, not because his hands were sweaty, but because he wasn’t wearing a white blouse like a real doctor but rather sported a pagne-like outfit with shiny embroidery around the sleeves and neck, which gave me migraines.

  ‘Please step this way, sir…’ he said.

  He led me into another room with fierce air conditioning and white walls. He gestured towards a leather seat, and sat down opposite me with his arms crossed over his paunch. My attention was caught by a framed photo on the wall just behind him, the only picture in the room: on one side of the doctor stood a white woman, on the other a plump, mixed-race adolescent girl, who looked exactly like him.

  ‘I’ve spoken to your neighbour, whose relative I cured, a few times on the phone. Your case interests me… I suggested he should bring you here, without an appointment, if ever he got hold of you. Clearly it hasn’t been that easy, it’s taken months! Anyway, I know about the difficulties you’ve been experiencing for some time now, and I can confirm that your neighbour has considerable respect for you…’

  ‘Yes, but he’s stayed at home!’

  ‘No, he’s waiting for you downstairs in the hall… Look to your left.’

  And sure enough, on a little black-and-white screen which I hadn’t noticed before, you could see the whole of the ground floor lobby and Kolo Loupangou cramming himself with sweets.

  The doctor stood up, went over to switch off the screen, and came to stand in front of me again:

  ‘Right, I’m going to ask you a few questions…’

  ‘Questions?’

  ‘In our jargon we call it SEMQ, or “Self-evaluation memory questionnaire”. I try, if possible, and necessary, to adapt my questions to the patient and the realities of our country.’

  He placed a pile of pictures before me, opened a notebook, and for over half an hour, questioned me on the names and faces of famous people in the Congo, the country opposite, France, black Americans such as Muhammad Ali, George Foreman or Martin Luther King, my childhood, the orphanage in Loango where, a week after my birth, the parents I never knew had dropped me and run. That was when I realised that my neighbour had given him some very precise details concerning my life.

  The doctor then focussed his attention on everyday tasks, directions to get to the Rex district or the Three Hundreds or Savon or Tié-Tié, current affairs, items of vocabulary in French, Mumkutuba, Lingala, etc. As soon as I answered, he put a cross on a form which I couldn’t read, because he had his big damp hand over it. I realised he was giving me marks, and that in the end my replies would tell him what was wrong wit
h me.

  My irritation with the doctor’s questions increased as the exercise went on.

  ‘Are you a man or a woman?’

  Without hesitating, I replied:

  ‘It depends on the day, on the month.’

  His moustache, which till now had been drooping, suddenly perked up in surprise.

  ‘And today – are you a man or a woman?’

  ‘Both, maybe. I don’t know, I’ve lost track…’

  ‘And what is your name?’

  ‘Little Pepper.’

  ‘I meant your family name, not your nickname…’

  ‘That’s what people call me, and if you haven’t got a family there’s no point having a family name… I’d have preferred to have a nice name! A name that sounds good!’

  ‘Really? Like what for example?’

  ‘Robin Hood…’

  ‘Why Robin Hood? That’s not a Congolese name, to my knowledge!’

  ‘It would take too long to explain, doctor…’

  ‘I want to come back to a question you didn’t answer: what is the name of the President of our Republic, the Father of our Nation?’

  ‘François Makélé…’

  ‘No, François Makélé is the mayor of Pointe-Noire, and I asked my secretary to give you a newspaper with his photo on every page. She told me you threw the paper on the floor. Why did you react like this?’

  ‘It was an old newspaper. It was from a year ago!’

  ‘I know, but we don’t elect a new mayor every year…’

  To cut short this interrogation, in which the doctor seemed to feel the need to correct me every time, and answer on my behalf, I changed the subject: