In his workshop there’s a big black-and-white photo of him surrounded by his family in Algeria. Monsieur Arezki and his wife are on either side of him. The children are squatting down in front and the little Algerian boy called Lounès is the one with very dark hair, like his father’s, looking down at the ground. Monsieur Mutombo explains proudly that the little Algerian Lounès was looking at the ground in the photo because he was trying to hide his tears at the return of his father’s friend to the Congo.
The wind blows and too many mangoes fall. We can’t eat them all. He’ll give me some and keep the others for his parents and Caroline.
I look at the sky and wonder if it will rain. When it rains it’s like a river running through the quartier. But I don’t think it will rain, the sky’s still clear.
Lounès tells me he’s got hairs growing down there.
‘Where down there?’
‘Down in my pants, inside.’
I don’t believe him, so he opens the zip of his pants and shows me. Little shiny black hairs like on a baby’s head. He says I’ll get them too. You have to have hair down there for girls to respect you. Otherwise they think you’re just a child and you can’t yell at them. Hairs are the sign you’re a man now, not your normal beard, even goats have that.
‘But I don’t want hairs down there!’ I tell him.
‘You’ll still get them.’
‘I want to stay the way I am!’
He changes the subject, and asks me if I’ve seen Caroline. So he’s picked up that something’s not right between me and his sister. I can’t hide it.
‘Don’t talk to me about Caroline!’
‘What is it? Has she upset you?’
‘Did you know it was her that did my mother’s braids, and that’s why Maman Pauline went out without me?’
‘Is that all?’
‘What d’you mean, is that all? Do you like it, then, when your mother goes out? If Caroline hadn’t done braids in her hair, she’d never have gone out without me that Sunday!’
We hear someone coming up behind us. It’s Madame Mutombo coming out of the house. Maybe she heard us talking.
‘What are you two whispering about?’
‘Nothing. Just chatting,’ Lounès says.
She moves slowly forward, carrying her big heart inside, and passes just in front of us. She’s got a sack of peanuts on her head, she must be going to the Grand Marché. We watch her go, then I put my lips close to Lounès’s ear.
‘I’ll tell you a secret, but you mustn’t tell, not even your sister…’
‘She’s not here, she went to braid our aunt’s hair this morning.’
‘Yes, but even when she comes back, you mustn’t tell her, or I’m done for!’
‘I won’t tell her.’
‘Ok, you’re not going to believe it. We’re capitalists now, in our house…’
‘Really? Proper capitalists?’
‘Yes, we’ve got a brand new machine, no one else has got one here yet, it’s a radio and a recorder at the same time. It’s a radio cassette player.’
I tell him about the singer with the moustache.
‘His name’s Georges Brassens. He’s a nice man with a moustache. He keeps talking about this tree he liked but that he can’t see now. And all day long he sings this song, all about his tree! I feel sorry for him, we have to help him. It’s not right that a man gets so sad about a tree he starts crying.’
‘Is he white?’
‘What d’you think, who else would cry about a tree?’
Before I leave him I promise him one day when he comes round to our house, we’ll listen to the singer with the moustache. One day when my mother and father are out.
It’s good being a boss. When I say ‘boss’, I don’t mean like my uncle, he’s not such a big boss as the President of our Republic, who’s President, Prime Minister, Minister of Defence, and President of the Congolese Workers’ Party, the CPT, all at the same time. You might get the impression he’s a bit greedy, holding all these positions himself. People do say whenever there’s a meeting of the President of the Republic, the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defence and the President of the CPT, our President sits on his own in a room, talking things over with himself, first as President of the Republic, then as Prime Minister, then as Minister of Defence, and last as President of the CPT. Which is why the meeting goes on longer than when he’s with his ministers.
You have to remember that he’s taken on all these posts to protect himself, which I can understand. If he accepts a Prime Minister who isn’t himself, the Prime Minister’s going to want to be President of the Republic too, and overthrow the Minister of Defence in a coup d’état, because he’s a dangerous member of the armed forces who has already carried out one plot to kill the immortal Marien Ngouabi, and succeeded. As a military man he knows all the other military men, and they all respect him because it’s not something everyone can claim, that he’s killed one of the immortals.
Papa Roger doesn’t like military men and he thinks ours are always hungry. You’d think the last time they’d eaten was a century and ten days ago. They’re not going to be much use if Zaire attacks us at five in the morning to take over our petrol and our Atlantic waters, with all the big fish, which are meant to belong to us as well. Our military men are too thin, they don’t do any keep-fit, not like the Americans and the Russians, who train all the time because they know that world wars come along all of a sudden, and when that happens you don’t have time to say, ‘Wait for me, I’m just going off to have a pee before I start fighting.’
Papa Roger also thinks our military men don’t do any sport because if we do have a war it won’t be tomorrow, and in any case if there is a war, a little country like the Congo’s never going to win. So their stripes are worth nothing. They’ve never fought a real war. Even though it’s not allowed, they’ll mount a coup d’état and bump off immortals with anyone who’s prepared to offer them new uniforms, ranks, crates of foreign beer and a fat salary.
Our President knows all this, which is why he’s decided to make himself Prime Minister, Minister of Defence and President of the Congolese Workers’ Party. The reason he’s decided to make himself President of the CPT is because, as Uncle René is fond of saying, it’s not rocket science to be president, first of all you have to be the boss of the CPT. The CPT chooses the president because we don’t like wasting time with elections, not like in Europe, where they even ask the people to choose who they’d like to be president! What kind of a joke is that? You don’t ask the people themselves who they’d like for president! What if they get it wrong, what then? It would ruin the country! Now, the members of the CPT have never got it wrong. So it’s right that they should be the ones who choose the President of the Republic for us. Besides, the President’s always reminding us in his speeches that the elections the Whites go in for, and tell us we have to have too, are a bad thing – they slow down the Revolution. Our country’s running late, we’re in a hurry, we need to catch up with Europe, and we can’t catch up with Europe if we’re constantly asking people to choose a President of the Republic. Besides, not everyone would be able to vote. Some people won’t even be there on the day, they’ll have toothache and have to go to the dentist. Others will go off to work on their plantations, and die of malaria or sleeping sickness. And it’s not nice, telling old people they’ve got to go and vote when they’re tired and have a right to a rest.
Lounès thinks our President’s a dictator because he’s a military man, but I don’t agree. I’m sure that in a lot of countries around the world there are dictators who aren’t in the army. So I don’t care if our President’s a dictator, it just annoys me that he says he’s been sent personally by God. Now if God wanted to send someone to be president of our country He would have sent his son Jesus because He’s already done that once to save men on earth. At least, that’s what the priest says on Sundays in the church of Saint-Jean-Bosco.
When the President tells us he’s been p
ersonally sent by God, people believe him, without stopping to check if it’s true or not. And we learn his speeches at school, like the sheep down at the Grand Marché, because what he says is supposedly for our good, and comes directly from God. We learn about his glorious life story. How he defeated the enemies of the Revolution in the north of the country, how he single-handedly massacred his enemies who had stolen our army’s tank and were preparing to bombard the north of the country, and then go back down south and bombard the little villages down there, including animals and poor peasants. They had to find the tank again fast, it was the only one the French left behind for us after Independence. The French really liked us, and we liked them too. They still like us, in fact, because they go on looking after our oil for us, which is in the sea near Pointe-Noire, because if they don’t we’ll only go and waste it or sell it to the Americans, who need it to run their enormous cars.
And apparently, because he was born invincible, our President’s the one who went into battle back when he was just a soldier and didn’t know it was written on the lines of his right hand that he would become president after a battle against the enemies of the Revolution. So he just turned up in the north of the country on an old Vespa, so well disguised that no one could tell if he was a soldier or a bit of grass waving in the wind. He crawled, he swam, he climbed trees. He attacked hundreds of enemies of the revolution who’d gathered by a river to work out how they could wipe us out in less than twenty-four hours. The future president let out a great war cry and began machine gunning them with his eyes closed. He was faster with a bullet than Lucky Luke himself. And when he’d run out of ammunition the spirits of our ancestors gave him heaps more. At one point even the spirits of our ancestors ran out of bullets too. The future president went and hid in a maize field, and there he met an old man of the Bembé tribe, who only had one tooth left in his head, and who told him to put maize kernels in his weapon. He was lying, and he didn’t believe him, but he had no choice because the enemies were coming up behind him en masse. So he loaded his gun with maize kernels anyway. When he fired, the kernels exploded, like grenades in the first world war. He fired and he fired and he kept on firing while the enemies of the Nation fell, one after the other and died like rats. The future president finally discovered where they had hidden our lovely French tank. The tank still worked, the opponents of the Revolution hadn’t used it. Then our future president came back with the tank, driving it himself, and the people cheered him and gave him flowers as he entered the national stadium with the tank.
As soon as he became President of the Republic, since he was by now a national hero, thanks to the tank, he wrote a big fat book that you have to read at middle school, high school and university. They only read us a few little bits because our brains are still too small, but when we get to middle school we’ll read it all, from start to finish.
It’s Saturday, and everyone out in the street is all dressed up, you’d think it was Independence Day. Some people always get dressed up like that on Saturdays. The minute I see all those suits and new wraps I know it must be Saturday. They all do it: come Saturday, they’re out there in their fine clothes from morning to the late afternoon, then in the evening they’re off to cruise the bars in the Avenue of Independence. They go dancing all night, and some of them sleep from Sunday to Monday midday and forget to go to work. The priest at Saint-Jean-Bosco complains his church is empty these days. How can you expect people to get up for church on a Sunday morning if they’ve been out partying from six in the evening till six in the morning and only found their way back home again by some small miracle?
It’s not too hot. The sky above me is calm and blue. When a plane goes by, I think of Caroline, even though I’m still cross with her. Now every time I think of my wife I have to think of a red car with five seats. And our two children, a girl and a boy. Not forgetting the little white dog.
While I’m busy imagining my life with Caroline, someone comes up behind me and touches my shoulder. It’s Lounès.
He laughs and asks if he frightened me.
‘Not at all,’ I say.
He likes creeping up on me. He’s brought some boiled sweets, two for himself and one for me. He gives me mine as soon as he creeps in. My father’s sleeping at Maman Martine’s today and my mother’s still at the Grand Marché selling peanuts with Madame Mutombo, so there’s no need to worry.
Lounès sits where I sit when I eat with my parents. I sit in my father’s place. I’ve left the door open. From where I’m sitting I can watch what’s happening outside.
Lounès looks at a new photo my mother’s put on the dresser. It was taken only a few days ago when we went to buy me some new Spring Court shoes at Printania, where they sell apples, grapes, and lots of fruit brought over from Europe. On the way home we stopped in a bar on the Avenue of Independence. A photographer came in with his camera, and forced my parents to have a picture taken.
‘Look at you all! All so handsome, the three of you, it’ll be a marvellous photo! I promise you, if you don’t look good, I won’t charge you.’
My mother said no because it’s wrong to waste money. But my father listened to the photographer’s pitch, about how he fed his ten children with his camera, and he hadn’t had a single client in the last month. He showed us a great gash on his tibia.
‘See that? I haven’t even got the money to buy drink, or Mercurochrome. And I’ve got two cousins and two uncles just turned up from the village and it’s up to me to feed them. There’s another problem too, I rent the house where we live, and the owner…’
‘All right, all right, take the photo!’ my father said. My mother frowned and gave my father a dirty look. He added: ‘I’m paying. Michel, come and stand between your mother and me.’
So now the photo’s there on the dresser. Sometimes I look at it for a few minutes and I’m happy I’m standing there between my parents. I know my mouth’s hanging open, that’s the photographer’s fault. He told us to smile at the little bird that popped out of his camera. I wasn’t going to smile till I’d seen what kind of bird it was: what colour, where it came out, if it flew, if it could sing like real birds that don’t hide inside cameras. I was standing there waiting for the bird with my mouth hanging open, but it wasn’t a bird came out, it was a light, which startled me. And another thing: I had no time to button up my shirt. You can see my chest, it’s a bit flat still, I’m too small to have muscles like Blek le Roc. My mother’s got a scarf wrapped round her head and a glass of beer at her lips. My father’s leaning slightly towards me, as though he’d like to protect me from the enemies of the Revolution who might wipe us out and win the final struggle. Out of the three of us, Maman Pauline is the tallest. I’ve got a glass of beer in front of me, but not to drink, just for the photo, because my mother told me if I didn’t have a drink in front of me the photo wouldn’t work out because the neighbours would think we’d only gone into the bar for the photo. So there’s a glass of beer in front of me, And so no one could say I was just pretending to drink, Maman Pauline took a sip from my glass. So if you look carefully at our photo, you’ll see my glass isn’t quite full, and you’ll think I was drinking beer that day, but it’s not true.
While Lounès is looking at the photo, I go into my parents’ bedroom, fetch my father’s briefcase and come back into the living room.
I have to do it like Papa Roger. I open the briefcase carefully and take out the tape recorder. I press a button, the little window opens. I pick up the only cassette we have and put it in the little window, then I close it, still being very careful. I press ‘Play’ and the singer with the moustache starts singing.
So there we are, listening to Georges Brassens and looking at his photo on the cassette box. Each time, Lounès tells me to be quiet, and replay the song once it gets to the end. On the cassette player there’s a button with an arrow pointing left. On the button it says ‘RWD’, that’s where you press to go back to the beginning of the song. I saw Papa Roger doing that before. I
don’t like arithmetic much, but by my reckoning I’ve pressed this button at least ten times to get back to the start of the song.
We’ve stopped talking, we’re just listening now. We’re beginning to know the words, but from time to time I have to ask Lounès what some of the difficult words mean. He knows more words than me because he’s in fifth grade at secondary school. For example, I don’t understand it right at the beginning of the song when the singer with the moustache says:
I left my old oak
My saligaud
My friend the oak
My alter ego
What’s a saligaud? I don’t know. Lounès doesn’t know. We give up, it doesn’t matter.
But then, what’s alter ego? We won’t want to give up on that one, alter ego may be what the song’s actually about.
‘“Alter ego”’s not French,’ says Lounès.
‘What language is it then, if it’s not French?’
‘It must be a kind of dialect, of some European tribe.’
‘A tribe?’
‘Yeah, some really small European tribe that still speaks real French, because that’s where French started.’
That’s what he says, but I can tell he’s not sure. It can’t be that, and we go on trying to work it out, and Lounès tells me that alter ego means someone really egotistical, like Monsieur Loubaki, who owns a bar called Relax, and makes the clients pay up the same day as they drink, whereas in the other bars you only pay at the end of the month.
Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty Page 5