Blue White Red

by Alain Mabanckou

Moki’s father was a humble and energetic man. He was short, and that bothered him. We could tell by the jokes he made about tall people, the butt of his jokes, and by the over-blown pride he showed when he reminded all those tall forgetful people that he, a tiny little man, barely 160 centimeters, had brought a tall son into the world, a very, very tall son, some 170 centimeters, he insisted, according to Moki. We would fire back that it takes two to make a baby, and the obvious explanation was that his wife was taller than he was.

  His modest height was, however, largely offset by a head-strong and stubborn personality and a serious, sepulchral voice. This voice made everyone think he was wise, even apart from his gray beard and bald shiny head, the few strands of hair salvaged from baldness could be counted on the fingers of one hand. He usually dressed in traditional multicolored clothes and rode around on a pedal bike. The old man saw his life change in one fell swoop. He was never himself again. It was as if he had followed a calling. His social promotion caught everyone off guard. It was like an unobstructed arrow in flight: he was put on the village council and shortly thereafter unanimously elected its president. His elevation did, of course, cause a bit of grumbling among elders in the neighborhood. But they raised their opposition in the shadows, in the talk shops, not out in the open in the neighborhood where the old man waved his ceremonial cane to demand silence. We didn’t dare confront him. He was blatant in his insistence that it wasn’t his gray beard or voice of a baritone gospel singer that got him nominated in such haste to the presidency of the village council. Quite a few old-timers had vied ceaselessly for this honorary position, and their beards were as white, if not whiter, than his. Some of them had stopped shaving the moment their first white hair appeared, and they ostentatiously trailed their beards in the public square like prophets that arrived too late in a world where the gods themselves were reduced to going door-to-door, identity card in hand, instead of their disciples and saints doing it for them. Something else was needed to convince the influential people in the neighborhood. Presidential candidacies are serious business in the village. The way candidates settled accounts had left bad memories in people’s minds. According to ancestral beliefs, old people frequently appear at night through the medium of dreams. One elder steps into another’s dream by breaking and entering. It’s a merciless battle in this netherworld where there are no women or children. The loser’s sleep could cost him a one-way ticket to the tomb. So when one could find grounds for agreement, one chose the path of conciliation. The most prudent elders preferred not to take the risk and waited until they were chosen for the throne without any competition. Wasn’t this the case with Moki’s father?

  He wasn’t the dean of these Methuselahs. He needed something else to discourage the voracious appetites of those who had waited in line for his post for at least a quarter century. What else? A son who lived in France, for instance, a Parisian. The candidacy of a father of such a son was powerful in itself. Other arguments weighed in his favor: Moki’s father was aware of everything going on in France. That was his trump card. Moreover, he had had the chance to attend the colonial school when the teachers—real teachers, he said—were recruited in the middle of the second grade, against their wishes. They tossed you out to go teach in an isolated backwater in the brush. It was a national duty. For Moki’s father, to have made it to the second grade in his first year was a point of pride, a feat that no one of his era had equaled. He wrote and read French fluently. He could have been a teacher if his parents had supported him for one more year. In his day there was only one primary school in the entire south of the country. It was fifty-two kilometers from Louboulou, the village where he was born. You went there on foot. You stayed for one week in a boarding school that accepted only the best students or those whose parents knew a village leader or a white man. Mothers and fathers brought food to their children. Alas, after a few years, squeezed dry by their considerable sacrifices of money and food, they gave in and asked their children to hightail it back to the fields to work with them. That’s how that type of education stopped for Moki’s father. He picked up a machete and a hoe and put himself in the service of his parents.

  After that, he did what other youth of his generation did and followed the current of rural exodus. He made his way to this neighborhood where the closest city, Pointe-Noire, was fifty kilometers away. He had been living here for some forty years with his four children and his wife. He worked, variously, as “boy,” then postman and receptionist at Victory Palace, a French hotel in the city center. His level of education put him above all the other council members who were for the most part illiterate. During council meetings he spoke about France—a country he had never visited. He was capable of reciting to the village council the names of all the kings and presidents sequentially from the Second Empire of Napoleon III up to the present, without faltering. He especially liked General de Gaulle (Digol was how he pronounced it) and he held forth, as if he had been there himself, about how the General came to Brazzaville in the 1940s and organized a conference in that city with the Algerian Committee. The outcome of this conference included a plan for a new organization of the French colonies in black Africa. Moki’s father told the story of this fragment of history at every meeting of the village council: “General Digol was tall. Very tall. A little taller than Moki,” he said. “That’s the reason that I gave my son Moki ‘Charles’ as his first name.”

  Somebody heckled that the General was quite a bit taller than Moki. He shot back that he knew the General better than anyone, and that people could challenge him on all the French presidents except the General.

  “That one, he’s mine . . .”

  Moki’s father was aware of his growing influence. The reverence people paid him began to make him lose his head. He wasted no time in adopting the latest fashions. He cast aside all his traditional clothing and preferred to wear clothes straight from Paris. From that time on, he wore gray trousers made of virgin wool, well pressed with sharp pleats. No belt, but tricolor suspenders (blue, white, and red), a white dress shirt, a black fedora, and the kind of good black shoes you wear to church. Suddenly he looked like the American blues singer John Lee Hooker. He strolled around the neighborhood, chest out, head held high, both hands in his pockets. Above all, you really needed to see him on his bicycle. He rode slowly, stopping to greet everyone he met at an intersection. Without any prompting, he gave everyone the latest news on Moki. He took out a letter, a postcard. He said that his son had just written him “a very long letter written in French from France, in the French of Guy de Maupassant himself!” “What’s new?” he’d ask, as if someone had posed the question. “My son is doing fine. The only thing is that it’s the middle of winter there right now, you know, winter is the season when the trees are in mourning, the birds are few and far between, the streets trail sadness, and even the white people stuff themselves into warm, heavy clothing. Ah, the snow is . . . how I can explain it to you? It’s like the foam on top of a beer, but a little firmer than that. When it snows, the roads over there are useless. It’s not easy to stop a car. The cold can kill you. You have to consume a lot of hot drinks and not stick your nose outside . . .”

  He recited these words like a child who had really memorized his lesson. He knew how to keep the crowd that was listening to him from leaving. Most importantly, he did not forget to tell everyone the exact date his son would return home . . .

  We knew it. Moki wouldn’t be coming home except during the vacations in the dry season, between July and September. That was party time. The liveliest time in the country. Everything suddenly happened so fast. The days, the weeks, the months ran by at a dizzying pace. The tree of time doesn’t let us have our fill savoring its fruits. Was it because this was the time of year we looked forward to the most? Of course. In the neighborhood, the smallest brouhaha turned into a mob scene. A brawl was the best excuse for everyone to come together in the street. We went out, not to put an end to the scuffle but in hopes that the show would last l
onger.

  When I think back on it now with a little distance, this unquenchable thirst for relaxation sprang from unimaginable situations. Funerals were no longer the lugubrious scenes they were known to be. We laughed and we burst into giggles more than we cried. We played chess and checkers and cards. We drank beer, palm wine, and maize alcohol all night long. We arranged to meet each other there, just a few meters from the corpse, behind the palm leaf hut where the distressed and suffering family cried and couldn’t do anything about it. The loss was nothing but a pretext. It was completely justified that we almost begged heaven to take the soul of an old person every week so that we could count on a moment to get together and collectively blow off some steam. The population in the neighborhood grew tenfold. And on top of that there were vacationers from the city and nearby villages.

  We all knew the latest. Moki was going to come back from Paris. His father didn’t keep the secret from anyone. People in the neighborhood had nothing but his son’s return on their lips. We were definitely waiting for the Parisian. That day was a blessed day. An event. The sudden hustle and bustle of Moki’s parents and brothers proved it. The Parisian’s family did not skimp on anything in preparation. It was time for a lot of work to be done. Everyone rolled up their sleeves. The courtyard was swept meticulously. Part of the street in front of the home was sprayed with water three times a day. Not a single leaf from the mango trees was left on the ground. The Parisian’s room, which looked out on the main street, was fixed up. The trunks of trees around the property were repainted. The two taxis were washed every night. A small table wrought of tropical vines was placed under the mango tree in the center of the courtyard. That’s where the Parisian would eat his meals. He would eat outdoors. The real reason was so that he ate in full view and knowledge of everyone. These little details were of great importance to Moki’s father. He said that his son would not eat like the lowliest village peasant. According to him, peasants swallowed big pieces of manioc with a little bit of salted fish, really just a very little bit, the size of a child’s finger. Then they drank two liters of water. What mattered was that their stomachs were full. Moki’s father laid out in detail the meals fit for his son to eat: he’d have an aperitif, an appetizer, a main dish, red wine from France, cheese, a dessert, and coffee. Just like in France, chez Digol . . .

  The old man swung into action and stayed up all night to get ready for Moki’s arrival. He didn’t use his bicycle anymore. To save time he got around in one of the two taxis. For these circumstances he got a chauffeur. He wore his nicest clothes, which had come straight from Paris. He was involved and took personal responsibility for the shopping that needed to be done. We knew him as an affable, smiling man, eager to please his neighbors. He hung all these qualities in his closet and displayed a remorseless severity.

  His chauffeur was no more than a whipping boy. The poor man endured his every fit of anger. The old man barked contradictory orders. He ordered him to park the car here, then there, then a little further away, before finally deciding to park it in the first spot. He ordered him to stay in the car with the motor running. As soon as the car was moving, Moki’s father dictated to the chauffeur how fast he should drive. He repeatedly told him to first shift into gear and then to carefully put on the brakes. The two men appeared to be driving together. “Turn left! Signal! Beep the horn! Don’t give him the right of way. Can’t you see that his car is older than ours? Pass that imbecile who’s blowing smoke right in my face! Who is that crackpot trying to pass us? Step on it. Don’t let him pass you! Come on, I said, go, go, go . . .”

  Under the stress of it all, the father of the Parisian aged ten years. Deep wrinkles streaked his face. A big vein that started on his forehead split his head in two. His eyes were red, his eyelids made heavier with black circles and lifeless pockets of skin. He wiped the sweat off his body with his fedora. He shouted himself hoarse, becoming irascible and more bilious as the big day appeared closer on the horizon. He took a calendar, crossed out the days gone by, counted how many were yet to come, underlined the big day in red, and scrawled something. He was not the least bit satisfied. Some small detail was missing. He complained. The courtyard wasn’t properly swept? He’d have none of it, and after scolding his wife and sons, he grabbed a long-handled broom himself. He stood, straight as an “I,” facing his property, his eyes riveted on the mango trees. He kept track of the leaves that fell. He lambasted the trees, promising to cut them down if they persisted in dropping their dead leaves with each ill-tempered gust of wind. That’s how his long monologues began. Words had no beginning and no end. A laugh that resonated and made us think he was no longer from this world. At meetings of the village council, the poor dignitaries were at a loss with his recitations about Paris, France, and the bravery of the man of June 18th: “Digol, a great man such as him doesn’t exist anymore. Men like him, they only come once a century. Indeed, there are even centuries when fate holds back and stockpiles its reserves of great men.”

  The tenor of the old man’s voice conveyed his emotional sincerity. Loyalty sparkled in his eyes, a blind loyalty deeply rooted in the depth of his soul.

  “Remember, my friends, Digol outright refused the 1940 armistice and the Vichy government. He sent an unforgettable appeal to London to drive forward without reprieve to combat the Nazis. How can you talk about the Resistance without realizing the stature of this mighty beefwood tree whose head is crowned with laurels of all the victories he won for the grandeur of France? After that, some youthful ingrates wanted to stir up trouble for him, to make mountains out of molehills, in May 1968. They were minuscule groups of students and union members. There, too, Digol showed he was a giant by leaving the seat of power one year later because those forgetful French people dared to challenge him in a test of strength, when they rejected a new course he proposed to them with a referendum . . .”

  In the evening, a wreck, his voice gone, the old man ran a trembling hand over his head, pulled out an armchair covered in leopard skin, and sank into it. He crossed his frail legs, adjusted his suspenders, filled his pipe, and drew long puffs.

  He was already snoring.

  His wife, an almost imperceptible silhouette compared with the old man’s strong personality, timidly shook him. The moon was just above them, round and grand: the dry season had come.

  The son was coming . . .

  Moki had arrived.

  Disorder in front of their villa. Crowds. The street was swarming with people. The light blazed bright all night long on their lot.

  The Parisian’s first day back was the day for family members. Even the most distant relative quickly climbed down the branches of the genealogical tree and announced their presence that day. They feared they would miss out on the hypothetical manna Moki brought back if they weren’t there. The cautious ones who could not turn up because of illness had their sons represent them. Maternal and paternal uncles, aunts, grandfathers, grandmothers, i.e., everyone belonging to the same villages as Moki’s father and mother turned up. Some—very few—brought presents: a chicken, a pig, or a sack of peanuts. The animals all capered about here and there in a concert of piercing cackles and grunts.

  Other family members, the majority, came with their arms dangling at their sides, counting on the right of primogeniture, or how closely they were related, which they externalized with familiarities that, in the end, never failed to irritate those in attendance. The family members sat in a small congregation in the courtyard, one after another, beggars for the Parisian’s favors.

  He listened to each and every one’s complaints, agreeing with this one, reprimanding that one, offering further consolation. At a certain point he got bored. He watched the birds perched on the mango tree. He squashed flies on the table. He was somewhere else. But he couldn’t leave this gathering without running the risk of offending the family.

  And so it was that a paternal uncle, jumping from one subject to another, complained about the past year’s bad harvest to explain why he
had arrived empty-handed, while a mistyeyed grandfather took his turn to explain that he had been in Adolphe-Cissé Hospital for a month without a single visit from the family members gathered together today. Scolding sounds grew louder. He was made to understand that this was not the time for an outpouring of bilious arguments. They would settle all of that amongst themselves. An aunt wanted to speak privately with Moki, it seemed, to share a dream about him that came back to her again and again each time the Parisian left for France . . .

  Moki’s father managed this whole group with his watchful eyes. He couldn’t throw them out, even if he thought they were a nuisance. To chase them like flies would jinx his son. Among our people, one family member’s success was not the business of one or two people. It had to benefit the entire clan in the broadest way possible. The old man required no reminder of the innumerable examples of egotistical parents who brought the curse upon themselves: the death of their sons and the funerals that not a single person attended. Everyone knows the popular saying about this. “Money has never mourned the dead.” Moki’s father was mindful of traditions. He respected them scrupulously. For him, hospitality was the highest principle. Leave the door open all day long. Prepare to feed more mouths than live in your house. Expect visitors at any moment. Don’t ask them foolish questions like: “Have you already eaten?” Instead, tell them: “Have a seat. We will bring you food and fresh water. . . .”

  To the question, “Have you already eaten?” the majority of visitors would reply “yes” with a sallow smile, mumbled under a mustache. They would stifle themselves, despite the hunger that knotted their stomachs. This torture spoke to their desire not to debase themselves by responding in the negative to that question. Don’t be mistaken by “I’ve already eaten”—you have to hear the resentment of the person with the lump in their throat. Better to die of hunger than to give a humiliating response, even if no food had passed their lips the night before. They leave, red-eyed with upset, their stomachs burbling with uninterrupted sounds. They consider themselves defeated, ridiculed, diminished like vulgar dogs that come home with their tails between their legs. They would immediately go out and say that they were offered nothing to eat, not even a glass of fresh water, and thus a family conflict would be born that could last several generations . . .