Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty

by Alain Mabanckou

  ‘Yeah, Monsieur Loubaki, he’s alter ego!’

  I say the singer with the moustache can’t be saying the tree is his alter ego, his selfish person. Because why would you be weeping for a selfish person and missing him? You wouldn’t, you’d be being rude to him, the way people are to Loubaki in his bar.

  Lounès promises to ask his teacher at school, I mustn’t ask mine, because if by any chance he doesn’t know what alter ego and saligaud mean I’ll get into trouble. The teacher will be embarrassed in front of the pupils and think I’m trying to make fun of him, and whip me with a bicycle chain. At Trois-Glorieuses they don’t hit the pupils, they’re too big, some as big as the teachers, sometimes a lot bigger. So Lounès is safe.

  I don’t know why, I feel like going up to Loubaki and saying ‘saligaud’ and calling Lounès my ‘alter ego’. A little voice in my head says that saligaud is bad, and alter ego is ok. Better to be an alter ego than a saligaud. I’m quite sure the singer with the moustache wishes his tree, his alter ego, all the very best, and that’s why he weeps for it, the whole day long.

  In the evenings Papa Roger tunes in to Voice of America, a radio station that broadcasts the news in French, from America. I do wonder how the news makes it as far as a little country like ours and why our President doesn’t interrupt the signal because they do put out a lot of serious stuff on that station, stuff Radio Congo can’t say, or there’d be no more radio in our country.

  My father only listens to Radio Congo to hear the death notices for the towns and villages in our country. They never say why these people have died, they say ‘after a long illness’, like when Monsieur Moundzika died and Maman Pauline went to the wake for two days. What are these long illnesses that they can’t explain over the radio? Another thing, they always say they ‘regret’ to announce the death of so and so. Papa Roger says a lot of people ‘regretting’ the death of these people are actually in a hurry for them to depart this life, so they can go and take over the land and animals they’ve left behind: ‘Never trust anyone who makes an announcement on the radio, in the end they’re the ones who drive the widow and her children from the home of the deceased and seize their inheritance.’

  When it’s time for the announcements to come on, they play this sad music first of all, then the person reading them out puts on this sad voice as though the deaths he’s about to announce had occurred in his own family. I go to my room because I don’t like that music, and I hate the voice of the announcer. I know she’s pretending to be upset, that she gets paid to be sad. It’s just then that Maman Pauline sits up attentively. She asks us to turn the sound up, brings her chair up to the table and practically glues her right ear to the radio. And if she hears the names of the villages in the Bousenza region, like Moussanda, Nounga, Ntséké-Pemb Batalébé, Kimandou or Kiniangui, she turns round and says to us: ‘I know the people who’ve just lost their relative. They live near the river Moukoukoulou, behind where the Kibonzi family plant their crops.’

  And she cries, as though it was our relative who had just died.

  There’s a journalist on Voice of America that Papa Roger really likes, his name is Roger Guy Folly. During meals that’s all he ever talks about now. Is it because the journalist in question has the same name as him, Roger? When my father says his name you’d think he was talking about his own brother: Roger Guy Folly this, Roger Guy Folly that.

  It’s this American who tells us the time every evening:

  It’s twenty-one hundred hours, universal time, and you’re listening to Voice of America. Coming straight up, the evening news from Washington, with your faithful servant, Roger Guy Folly.

  Now, when Roger Guy Folly says ‘twenty-one hundred hours’ and I look at the alarm-clock on our dresser, I can see it’s not the same time in our country. So, when it’s night here, in other countries it’s still bright daylight, with children out playing. When we’re up and about here, in other places people are sleeping, and when we’re sleeping here, people elsewhere are up. It’s pretty weird.

  Papa Roger always agrees with what Roger Guy Folly says. Sometimes he shouts, turns to us, tells us to be quiet, and promises he’ll explain what’s being said in a few minutes because Maman Pauline gets sick of listening to things she doesn’t understand and countries she’s never heard of before. Papa Roger writes down the names of the people, towns and countries on a piece of paper for me.

  For example, this evening Roger Guy Folly is telling us about a town called Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. Phnom Penh is too complicated to pronounce. It’s complicated to write down too, but once you’ve done it, it’s as easy as swallowing. Otherwise how would the Cambodians manage to write it and say it every time, when they’re only human, like us?

  Maman Pauline can’t say ‘Phnom Penh’.

  Papa Roger says: ‘Pauline, it’s very simple. To say Phnom Penh you make your mouth really small, you breathe out through a little hole, like when you’re whistling, then you suddenly open you mouth wide, like when you’re surprised by something really bad that’s happened, which it usually has in Cambodia!’

  Roger Guy Folly tells us that the Vietnamese army has just taken the town of Phnom Penh and driven out the wicked people called the Khmer Rouge even though they are Cambodian too. The wicked people were treating their own people very badly, though they’re communist like we are. So the Vietnamese – their country is just next to Cambodia – said: Since these Khmer Rouge are threatening our borders, let’s get on over to Cambodia and take Phnom Penh out of the hands of the Khmer Rouge, that will give the Cambodian people a bit of a break after all that torturing, killing and liquidating by the Khmer Rouge. When the Cambodians went into Phnom Penh there was practically no one left in the city because of the Khmer Rouge, who’d driven everyone out. The Khmer Rouge had been really looking for a fight for ages. They pushed their Vietnamese neighbours over the edge, after years and years of fighting, like most countries with a common border. And then what happens is, one country says: This is my territory, the territory of my ancestors, I want to get it back, by fair means or foul. The other country says: Oh no, it’s not your territory, it’s mine, and I won’t let you take it back by fair means or foul. I’m going to protect it by fair means or foul. And they start fighting by fair means or foul for years on end. That’s why when the Vietnamese went into Cambodia, the Cambodians were frightened to begin with and said to themselves: What are these Vietnamese guys going to do to us? Have they come to take our country from us by fair means or foul? As soon as the Cambodians realised that the Vietnamese were actually after the Khmer Rouge, many of them helped the Vietnamese army, because they’d had enough of being tortured, killed and liquidated. The government of the Khmer Rouge fled, and went to hide in the bush. Their boss is called Pol Pot and he’s so wicked he wiped out over a million and a half people, then fled when the Vietnamese invaded his country.

  If I, Michel, was Cambodian, I would have supported Vietnam, no question. Not everyone likes the fact that Vietnam went into Cambodia to drive out the wicked Khmer Rouge. The Russians are ok with it, but countries like China or America and lots of others that secretly support the Khmer Rouge say: It’s wrong for Vietnam to go into Cambodia like that, we don’t agree, we’re going to carry on supporting the Khmer Rouge who are hiding in the bush. The Chinese even declared: We’re going to punish the Vietnamese too, we’re going to attack them good and proper, we’re going into their country like they went into Cambodia and we’ll see what happens then. Fortunately the Chinese plan failed.

  The result is, it’s a mess down there: now there’s a new government in Cambodia and from now on their country’s called the Popular Republic of Kampuchea. So in a way they’re like our brothers, but I don’t know if our country is against Vietnam or for it, because Roger Guy Folly doesn’t mention us in all this. Why would he talk about us? Who wants our opinion? Our country is so small, it’s never mentioned in the news. If we have a conflict here one day, like what’s happening in Cambodia,
then they’ll talk about us all the time, as if we were a big country. On the other hand, I prefer it if they don’t talk about us on the radio. Yes, I prefer being a little country, at least that way they leave us in peace; we can take it easy, which means no war, no grabbing another country’s cities, no Khmer Rouge here; no Pol Pot either, giving the Popular Republic of Kampuchea grief from where he’s hiding out in the bush.

  I feel really sick when Uncle René tells my mother that Papa Roger isn’t my real father, that he’s just a ‘foster father’. I don’t care for Papa Roger because he ‘fosters’ me, and he didn’t decide to be my father so he could do some ‘fostering’. Even ‘adoptive’ father’s better than that, at least that means he chose me and chose me after careful reflection. Papa Roger did actually see me before he decided to make me his child. Normally you don’t get to choose what your children look like, you don’t even see them before they come into the world. You wait for the doctor to say it will be a girl, or a boy. If Papa Roger really hadn’t wanted me when he first set eyes on me, he’d have left me alone with my mother. But I smiled at him that day – and according to Maman Pauline I was very happy, apparently that’s the moment when I came alive, and said to myself: ‘I, Michel, will be someone in life.’

  Papa Roger is my father, that’s all there is too it. I don’t want to know if I’ve got a real father somewhere. I’ve no wish to see the face of some man I don’t know, who’s supposedly my real father. He’s a coward, who left Maman Pauline all alone in hospital when he had married her back in Louboulou, my mother’s village. He was a policeman there, before he brought my mother to live in the district of Mouyondzi where he’d been transferred to. Maman Pauline was a little girl to him. And only two years after they married, this policeman said to her: now I’m going to do what I like, I’m sending you back to your bush, if you don’t agree. If you dare open your mouth, I will take more wives if I feel like it, Miss village girl from Louboulou, I’ll have your family put in prison till the end of time.

  Whenever Maman Pauline tried to speak, the policeman waved his pistol at her, like in a cowboy film and shouted: ‘What use to me are you, eh, Pauline? You’ve been pregnant twice. And twice the child was born dead, straight from your womb! So what use are you, eh? Your family are all sorcerers. They’ve put a gris-gris in your belly! You’ll never have children!’

  The policeman had stopped sleeping at home. He turned up for a few minutes in the morning to change his clothes, then he’d rush off again, as though our house was occupied by demons. Maman Pauline kept her mouth shut. What could she say to the guy? She knew very well that he lived with other women he loved more than her, other women he could have children with, who wouldn’t die as they came out of their mother’s womb. Maman Pauline left the door open all night because the policeman got angry with her if she shut it. He wanted to come and go whenever he pleased, whatever time of day. But he only came every other day, then every third day, then once a week, then once a month. Then Maman Pauline saw him no more. She didn’t even try asking at the police station where he worked. By the time the policeman had been gone three months, she had another problem which made her very sad: her belly was getting bigger. And she stopped leaving the house – she didn’t want the neighbours to see. She waited till nightfall to go out and do her shopping, from the women who sold soup in the streets. She wore several pagnes, to hide her belly.

  Maman Pauline often tells me how, on the night when I started kicking like a little bandit to be let out of her womb, she walked all the way to the central hospital in Mouyondzi. I nearly didn’t make it into this world because I was afraid of the men and women sitting round chatting in the delivery room. I thought that when I arrived on this earth there’d be silence, that I’d be all alone with her, like I was inside her, when I swam around holding on to the tube that sent me my food every day. But there you go, I didn’t want my mother to be unhappy, I didn’t want to go to heaven like my sisters. If people were sitting around talking, then there must be something wrong, and I wanted to know what, because no one was going to explain to me up in heaven why people like sitting around talking on earth, even when they’re in a hospital room. I wanted to see these people’s faces with my own eyes, hear their voices with my own ears. In fact, the people sitting round talking in the delivery room thought I was going to be silly enough to go the same way as my two sisters. But I wanted to live, I wanted to follow my mother wherever she went, I wanted to protect her against all the policemen on earth who threaten their wives with pistols when they’re meant to be threatening criminals. So the nurses watched me round the clock. I watched them too, with one eye, and on their sad faces I read that they were expecting the worst, because they’d already seen my mother in this hospital, in this same room, seen her leave in tears with a stone-cold baby in her arms, heading for the morgue, where she leaves the baby in the fridge. Some of the nurses were checking to see if I was breathing still. I said to myself: ‘I’m going to have a game with these adults, I’m going to show them I know their language, I know what they’re thinking.’ I had this little game, where I held my breath, closed my eyes, squeezed my lips and my buttocks, and sometimes went so pale I looked like the corpse of a white baby, since black babies, when they come into this world, are generally all white. And only turn black afterwards. Otherwise their parents will argue and think the real father’s a white man from up town. Thinking I was truly dead, the nurses rushed towards me. They started whimpering with my mother. Suddenly I opened my eyes. I felt like shouting: leave me alone, can’t you see I’m breathing? Can’t you see I’ve been alive for three days now, and my sisters were not even here for one day? If I really wanted to go to heaven would I be hanging around here all this time like an idiot who doesn’t know what he has to do to die? I may be a baby, I still know how to die, but I don’t want to stop breathing! I want to live! Let me rest now, I’ve come a long way! And let’s have a bit of quiet please. We’re in a hospital here!

  Maman Pauline came home with me a week after I arrived in this world. Her policeman’s never shown up, though he must have heard of me. My mother heard he was already going round saying he wasn’t my father, that she’d made this child with some local guy, the postman, maybe, or the palm-wine tapper, who, like the postman, passed by our house each morning. That’s what they were saying, all over Mouyondzi, and people came to spy on us. But they never found a man living in our house, or who came round at midnight and left in secret at five in the morning. In the market some of the women said that my mother had had a child with a devil who came to our house at night. I don’t think anyone there ever saw my face. When we went out, my mother covered my body from head to foot, leaving just two little holes so I could at least see the colour of the sky, because up there no one’s wicked.

  Maman Pauline left the district two months after my arrival. No way was she going to spend her time arguing with women who said untrue things about herself and me. Not that she was afraid of them, she knows how to scratch the face of a wicked woman. When she scratches a wicked woman it looks like she’s written a whole book on her face, in Arabic or Chinese. But she didn’t want any of that.

  I don’t actually know what Mouyondzi district looks like, out in the region of Bouenza, in the southern bush. Since all I’ve seen there is the sky, I imagine the earth must be red, like everywhere in Bouenza. That’s what our teacher says in geography, anyway. I also imagine that people’s animals down there – particularly pigs – go wandering wherever they like. I mention pigs because according to my mother the inhabitants of Mouyondzi love pig and eat it with plantain bananas whenever there’s a party, or someone’s just died. I imagine, too, that if the fathers in this district are all like Maman Pauline’s policeman, there must be lots of other children without a father and lots of other mothers living alone with their children. I have no wish to go there, not now or ever, I’ll only hate the people and want to wage global war on them, especially the policemen.

  I feel like a real child
of Pointe-Noire. Here’s where I learned to walk, to talk. Here’s where I first saw rain fall, and wherever you see your first rain fall, that’s where you come from. Papa Roger told me that once, and I think he was right.

  When she left Mouyondzi district, Maman Pauline didn’t want to go back to the village where she’d been born – she knew the people of Louboulou would laugh at her. She chose the town of Pointe-Noire because Uncle René already lived there and had just finished his studies in France. With our people it is common for the children to be given the names of the uncles, and my mother gave me Uncle René’s name, even though he’s not my father. My uncle was very pleased my mother chose him rather than their big brother, Uncle Albert Moukila, who worked for the electricity company.

  The good thing was that Uncle René was quite happy for Maman Pauline to come and live at his house, with me too, and he gave her a bit of money so she could set up her peanut business at the Grand Marché. She got up in the morning and went straight down to Mtoba, where she bought sacks of peanuts from the farmers. After that she shelled the peanuts and put them into bowls. At the Grand Marché she sat behind her table and waited for customers. Sometimes business was good, sometimes not. But even when it wasn’t, she’d say it didn’t matter, tomorrow would be better than today. She was never going to get rich with this business. At least she could buy me milk and nappies instead of having to ask Uncle René all the time. Now what she didn’t know was, there in the Grand Marché, her life was about to change. Mine too.

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