Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty

by Alain Mabanckou

  Another thing I could do to interest Caroline would be to do what Louis de Funès does in Le Gendarme et les Extra-terrestres, a film Lounès really loves – he’s seen it three times already. He says in this film the extra-terrestrials change shape, so they look just like policemen and everyone else looks so similar, no one knows who’s an extra-terrestrial and who’s a human being. I could turn myself into Mabélé so Caroline thinks it’s her beloved Mabélé beside her, when in fact it’s me, Michel, I just look like Mabélé. And when I turn back into myself – because I’m actually better looking than Mabélé, Caroline will crack up laughing. It could really work, because Lounès says this actor Louis de Funès makes everyone laugh – girls, boys, children, old people, animals etc., and I don’t want to make everyone laugh, only Caroline.

  When my mother’s in love she feels like her heart is in her stomach. I’ve never felt that in my whole life. My heart is virtually immobile. Even if I jump, it stays exactly where it is. When I asked Lounès if he’d ever felt his heart in his stomach he thought I was mad.

  ‘Can your heart fall into your stomach?’

  I didn’t want to say that’s what happens when you’re in love. I’ve never seen Lounès chatting up girls. Usually it’s the girls that chat him up, and he acts like he wishes they wouldn’t, or like he hasn’t noticed. And when he acts like he wishes they wouldn’t, or he hasn’t noticed, that’s when the girls all run after him. And he comes to me and says proudly, ‘You see that girl? She’s been after me for ages but I’m going to leave her to be unhappy for a bit, then when I do go and talk to her she’ll be all over me!’

  I wouldn’t dare act like that in front of Caroline, if I act like I’m not interested in her and leave her to be unhappy for a bit, she’ll just say, ‘You’ve only yourself to blame, Mabélé loves me, and he doesn’t make me unhappy like you do!’

  Our school is this old red-brick building with a roof that’s going to fall in if they don’t fix it in the next few months, maybe even in the next two or three weeks. The parents have meetings every month about mending the roof. Papa Roger won’t go to the meetings any more. He thinks people just go along to talk big and say nothing, in French, so everyone will think they’ve been to France, like Uncle René, when they haven’t. At the end they vote to decide the date of the next meeting. And they’ll come back again to talk big in French while the school roof continues to get worse and worse. Also, there are some bad people who’ve stolen the wood for the windows to take home for firewood. When it rains, the water comes into the classroom, and we have to move all the desks into one corner so as not to get wet. That’s why we come to school with our waterproofs and why our schoolbooks are covered in plastic. There’s already the water that comes in through the roof, and if it’s going to come in through the windows as well it won’t be a school any more it’ll be a swimming pool, like in the houses of the capitalists in the town centre, who buy all their food at Printania.

  The reason it smells bad in our classroom is because the pupils wet themselves while the teacher’s whipping them. If you talk too much, the teacher tells you to get up and go and kneel down on the platform with your arms folded, in front of all your classmates. The teacher goes on with the lesson while you stay there thinking: What’s going to happen after the lesson, when he comes over to me? So you cry in advance. Which is actually a waste of tears, because it’s afterwards you should be crying, once you’ve been whacked. And when you cry in advance, everyone hears you. And because they can hear you it means you’re disturbing them when they’re meant to be copying out the lesson. So you just make things worse for yourself. The teacher turns to look at you, he’s very cross now. He goes to find a brick outside. He tells you to hold it high above your head and not move till the end of the lesson. If you drop the brick he gives you double punishment. You have to make really sure it doesn’t fall, even if it weighs more than you do. You start sweating, snot comes out of your nose. And since you don’t want to be snotty, you sniff it in, and it makes a strange noise like a ravenous chameleon swallowing insects. The teacher turns round again, and he’s even angrier than last time because you’re making a noise like a chameleon swallowing insects. He tells Adriano the Angolan to step up on the platform. Our top pupil’s very pleased because he already knows what’s going to happen.

  The teacher says, ‘Adriano, recite the speech given by the immortal Marien Ngouabi on the 31st December 1969, the day our brave Congolese Workers’ Party was formed.’

  Adriano stands to attention. He looks up in the air, and starts to talk like the immortal Marien Ngouabi, the same voice we use in our Revolutionary theatre class.

  Adriano yells, ‘Pioneers!’

  The class replies, ‘We serve!!!’

  Adriano: ‘All for the people!’

  Class: ‘And only for the people!!!’

  Adriano: ‘Victory or we die!’

  Class: ‘Victory or we die!!!’

  Adriano: ‘Who do we die for?’

  Class: ‘We die for the people!!!’

  Adriano: ‘What do we die for?’

  Class: ‘We die for the Revolution!!!’

  And now the class is warmed up, Adriano recites the speech of the Immortal: The year 1969 is drawing to a close. A year at whose end we can measure the length of the road that we have travelled, the pitfalls encountered, our sorrows and our joys. In short, one more year after which to take stock of our efforts and above all our failures. In the course of this very year our most dangerous enemies briefly entertained the hope that the National Revolutionary Council would give its approval to an executive conference bringing together a group of renegades in an attempt to lay the foundations of a national unity based on pro-ruling class, pro-colonialist factors: tribalism, regionalism and sectarianism. This hope, recently much nurtured in reactionary circles, was quickly dashed. Better still, after a glorious victory over imperialism and those who have betrayed the nation, our young and dynamic people had the courage this very day to found the boldest creation in the history of our Revolution: the Congolese Workers’ Party. The Congolese people have thus revived the flames of the Three Glorious Days of the Revolution of 1830. Today and from this day onwards we shall no longer sing the Internationale out of tune. On this day, 31 December 1969, Congo-Brazzaville has entered the annals of the great global proletarian Revolution…

  The class applauds. You kneel there crying with your brick over your head, and the teacher turns to you and orders: ‘Put the brick down, now you recite the speech of the immortal Marien Ngouabi, like Adriano.’

  And since you can’t recite it like Adriano, without stammering or forgetting a single word, you cry even harder. So the teacher takes the strap he has hidden in his bag and hands it to Adriano: ‘Here, Adriano, give him twenty strokes with the strap, since he can’t recite the most famous speech of the immortal Marien Ngouabi.’

  So Adriano wallops you while the rest of the class counts to twenty and you call out for your poor mother, who is fortunately unaware of what’s happened to you.

  There’s a map of the People’s Republic of Congo pinned up by the blackboard, just next to the map of Africa. We have to chant that the People’s Republic is a country in Central Africa, surrounded by Zaire, Angola, Gabon, Cameroon and the Central African Republic.

  I often say our country is really small, but you mustn’t say it in class, or the teacher will get mad and beat you even though everyone can see on the map of Africa that our neighbour Zaire is one of the biggest countries on the whole continent. No, you mustn’t say that either, or the people of Zaire will start to wake up; at the moment, they don’t even know their country is bigger than a lot of countries in Europe or that their president-dictator Mobuto Sese-Seko gave millions and millions of dollars to Don King so George Foreman and Mohammed Ali would go and fight there, when the people of Zaire are living in poverty.

  The teacher insists we memorise all the names of all the regions in our country, from north to south, east to west. We espe
cially have to know exactly where to find the village of the immortal Marien Ngouabi. His native village is Ombélé, it’s up in the north, in the Owando district. It’s where there’s a red cross on the map. During our citizenship lesson we learn that the Immortal’s mother is called Maman Mboualé and his father is called Osseré Dominique. And even though the Immortal was murdered by Northerners like himself, who wanted to take over from him, we’ve been taught what to say about these sad events. We have to say: The immortal Marien Ngouabi, founder of the Congolese Workers’ Party died fighting on the 18th March 1977. He had been murdered by the cowardly forces of Imperialism and its local lackeys.

  The teacher told us that in the end the government had managed to catch and imprison the local lackeys of Imperialism who killed comrade Marien Ngouabi. The Immortal fought hard but there was nothing he could do because it was a plot that had been hatched in Europe and the Europeans are brilliant at selling their plots to the Africans. The local Lackeys of Imperialism who killed our Immortal are black like us, Congolese, like us. The government promised that they will be tried and judged and sentenced to public hanging at the Revolution Stadium. The people must understand that you don’t mess with the Immortals. So, for the moment all we have to do is put Imperialism on trial. It will be hard to catch it and put it in prison because it doesn’t live here, unlike its local lackeys. And anyway, it’s White.

  According to Lounès, he and his classmates at secondary school study subjects that we can’t learn yet at primary school because our brains haven’t finished growing. We mustn’t put anything too difficult in them, or they’ll explode, and we’ll probably go mad and start talking to invisible people and picking up rubbish in the street. That’s why the mad people in this town all write arithmetic on the walls of houses, and sometimes poems too, thinking they’ve made them up themselves, when in fact it’s just their madness doing it. The mad people round here have the strangest names, I don’t know where they get them. Lounès told me about one of them called Athena. The police arrested him because he’d make up problems and write them on the walls of houses in the Avenue of Independence. Athena also gave the schoolchildren all the answers, so they just had to copy them down. And since it so happened that the problems went up during the exams, the children from the high school went looking for Athena in the streets of Pointe-Noire. When they found him, they brought him things to eat and drink, and sang him songs from when he was a tiny baby in his mother’s arms. Athena wept when he heard these songs, and they knew that crying would help his imagination even more. The pupils offered him new clothes, cut his hair and his beard for him, and led him to a huge wall opposite Vicky’s Photo Studio.

  ‘Athena, you have to help us, write up the problem on this wall, then tell us the answer.’

  Athena trembled with fear because, Lounès says, mad people always think children are giants, so they’re more afraid of children than of grown-up people. Anyway, Athena thought for a bit, then began scribbling away on the wall. The pupils all scrambled to write it down. After that they all said: ‘Athena, are you sure that’s the right answer? Athena are you sure this is the problem we’ll get in the exam?’

  Then there’s another madman over in Savon, they call him Archimedes, and another in Bloc 55 called Mango. Archimedes wanders around naked, likes to bathe in the river Tchinouka and fart in the waters to see the bubbles go Pop! Pop! Pop! Mango sits under any mango tree he can find at the side of the road. And when anyone asks what he’s doing there he’ll say he’s waiting for a mango to fall on his head.

  Lounès thinks Archimedes and Mango went mad because they were taught things in their childhood that their brains were too young to understand. Then the things all rotted inside their brains, and then the poor men started talking to invisible people and picking up rubbish in the streets of our town, as though they worked in Refuse Disposal.

  So complicated maths is for the big boys and girls at high school, and we do mental arithmetic, geometry and so on. First of all we do rectangles, then triangles, then squares, then circles, then cubes. With all that, our brains will gradually get used to the exercises you do at high school.

  But I don’t agree with Lounès. I think the stuff we do at primary school’s pretty difficult too. Once they gave us a problem I’ll never forget because instead of trying to find the answer I just kept thinking: ‘Is that the way it is in real life?’ This was the problem: a shopkeeper has bought ten hectolitres of red wine at thirty CFA francs a litre and a hundred and fifty litres of palm wine at twenty-five CFA francs a litre, how much must he pay? The whole class watched while Adriano, Willy-Dibas and Jérémie worked out how much the shopkeeper had to pay. I just sat there in the middle of the class, watching. They looked like hunchbacks looking for a needle they’d dropped on the floor. They were writing away furiously, while the rest of us just kept reading the exercise over and over. I was thinking: Why should we work out what the shopkeeper has to pay? Why can’t he do it himself, instead of bothering us when we’re still too young to be shopkeepers? Do Maman Pauline and Madame Mutombo think about bizarre sums in their business? Still, the answer had to be found, and only Adriano, Willy-Dibas and Jérémie found it. They got out of class before everyone else and I was the last to go.

  The next day, after the teacher had given us all a taste of the strap, he finally explained how to work out what the shopkeeper had to pay.

  ‘Now do you understand?’

  We all answered:

  ‘Yes sir!’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really!!!’

  We didn’t really understand at all, we had no idea, we’d just copied down what the teacher had written on the board. I know if he ever gives us the same problem again, only Adriano, Willy-Dibas and Jérémie will find the answer.

  Lounès’s school is called Trois-Glorieuses, after the Three Glorious Days of our Revolution. It’s near the Adolphe-Cissé hospital, not far from the sea. You can’t get there on foot, you have to get a bus from the Savon quartier. But the children don’t want to pay for their tickets, they want to keep the money to spend it on doughnuts at break. So they take the Workers’ Train which leaves directly from Savon, in the centre of town. It’s the TO, an old train with four carriages, and it’s normally used by the railway workers. But they let the schoolchildren take it, because if they work hard at school then one day they might become bosses in the national railway company, the Congolese Ocean Railway.

  Lounès thinks the high school kids cheat a lot on this train because they’ve seen the film Fear Over the City. There’s a white actor in it called Jean-Paul Belmondo who’s got problems because there’s a guy robbing banks in the city, and Jean-Paul Belmondo has to find him. But while he’s looking for the bank robber there’s another gangster called Minos going round killing single women. He says he’s bringing justice to the city. Isn’t that a bit weird, if someone wants to bring justice, to go round killing all the single women? So now Jean-Paul Belmondo has to go out and find Minos. He climbs on top of a moving train so he can chase the murderer, who’s already up there. Lounès swears that Jean-Paul Belmondo never falls when he’s fighting with Minos. The high school kids must have thought: If someone can climb on top of a moving train in a film without getting hurt, we can climb on top of the TO to avoid the ticket inspectors.

  So when the TO arrives at Savon station, the high school kids are there, waiting to climb up. First of all they check out where the inspectors are. And as soon as the train starts up, they run and cling on to the doors. Within a few seconds there are at least a hundred of them up on top of the carriages. Lounès says it’s called train-surfing. Once they’re up there, they hang on tight and duck when they go through a tunnel, like in Fear Over the City. The inspectors can’t follow them up there because they’re scared they’ll fall and be killed. Besides, they’re already too old, and old people can’t train-surf like high school kids. The inspectors get the TO to stop, and call the police. But by the time the police arrive it’s too late, t
he kids have already run off and are walking the rest of the way to school. Tomorrow they’ll be back, and they’ll train-surf again.

  One day I asked Lounès what makes a good train-surfer.

  ‘First of all – you must be fearless. Jean-Paul Belmondo was never afraid, in any of his films. In Fear Over the City it wasn’t him that was frightened, it was the city. Train-surfing’s easy; you wait till the train sets off, you run for a bit, then you run a bit faster and you grab hold of the door. Then you climb on to the ladders between the trucks and you’re up!’

  Maman Pauline asked me to go and buy some sugar from Diadhou the Senegalese, who has one of the biggest shops on the Avenue of Independence.

  I’ve only been walking for a few minutes, but it’s so hot this Sunday afternoon that my feet are burning. I ignored my mother when she said I should put my sandals on. When you walk barefoot on the tarmac out of the shade it’s like walking inside a wood burning stove. Sometimes I stop by the side of the road and shelter under a mango tree to cool my feet, but when I step back onto the tarmac my feet start burning again. So it’s better to stay on the tarmac, then your feet get used to the heat and you won’t even feel them. You just have to grit your teeth and try to forget you’ve got feet. It’s a bit like when you’re desperate for a pee and you’re a long way from home. If all you think about is having a pee and how good it will feel when you’ve had one, the pee is quite likely to burst out suddenly while you’re still in the street, and you’ll wet your pants. But if you try to forget it for a moment, you can hold on for another few metres.