Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty

by Alain Mabanckou

  I also read the back cover of One Flew Over the Cuckold’s Bed.

  This time, folks, the agency gets a call from Arthur Rubinyol, the famous virtuoso. Oh my Lord, roll out the red carpet, sing hymns of praise! Good job it was red is all I can say. At least the wine stains won’t show. To start with, there’s the rabbi, Sly-ball, oops, sorry, Silas, who goes and gets himself stabbed. Not to mention Miss Yankee, who cadges a lift in my plane, and sets about who-know-what-ing your old friend! Throw in our Finnish jaunt, during which Béru has a sniff at the lumberjack’s old lady, and I think you’ll agree that there are some pretty odd goings on in this here opus! And all because of a vindictive old cuckold! Talk about horn of plenty!

  San-Antonio writes a rude sort of French, I think to myself. It’s like you’re supposed to laugh at certain bits, because if you don’t it means you don’t understand his sense of humour, so you must be stupid. And what about this Arthur Rubinyol he talks about in his book, the one who’s a ‘famous virtuoso’? Might he be poking fun at my Arthur, even though my Arthur’s never done anything to him?

  I leave One Flew Over the Cuckold’s Bed and read the back covers of the other books by San-Antonio. But I don’t want to move everything, I’ll only look at the backs, because Papa Roger has lined them all up so neatly, you can read the titles.

  In this bookcase there are only books by San-Antonio, apart from the one by Arthur. Has San-Antonio written more books than anyone in the world? What’s Arthur doing here then, lying on top of these books? I think: San-Antonio must be very famous, more famous than Marcel Pagnol, more famous than Arthur, more famous than the Shah of Iran.

  I put back the five books. I try to remember what order they were in before, but I get in a muddle. Was Give Me Your Germs, My Darling on top of Put Your Finger Where Mine Is or underneath Do Things to Me? I can’t remember now.

  In the end I just put A Season in Hell on top of Dancing the Shah-Shah-Shah. Because the Shah San-Antonio writes about must be the same one who’s sick and in Egypt. Because I think Arthur also needs to know that the Shah of Iran isn’t well, that his cancer’s getting worse, while that criminal, Idi Amin Dada, lounges around in the pool in his villa in Saudi Arabia.

  The president of France is called Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. While the journalist, Roger Guy Folly, is speaking, my father writes the name of the president down for me on a piece of paper. French people’s names are too complicated, they’re never written the way they sound. But then the French think our names are too complicated. Odd, isn’t it?

  Roger Guy Folly informs us that Valéry Giscard d’Estaing is in deep trouble and may have to stop being president of the republic for the second time. He’s pretty much had it now, he’s all washed up. I think to myself: He’s probably ill, or he’s had an accident, poor man. But he’s not ill, actually, and he hasn’t had an accident. His problem is to do with some diamonds he was given by the president-dictator of the Central African Republic. And according to my father this dictator is as wicked as Idi Amin Dada of Uganda.

  While Roger Guy Folly’s explaining that the French president is being criticised by everyone in France, Papa Roger tells me, without looking over at Maman Pauline, that it’s a very difficult business to understand because when Giscard d’Estaing accepted the diamonds from the dictator Bokassa, I was still a baby, and Giscard d’Estaing wasn’t head of State, just the minister for a different French president called Georges Pompidou. According to my father, Pompidou was a fine, intelligent man, and no one was afraid of him, even if he did have enormous eyebrows like the Russian president, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, and Giscard d’Estaing was the finance minister for this man Pompidou.

  Seeing I don’t quite follow what he’s saying, and that I’m scratching my head with all the different thoughts swirling round in it, Papa Roger explains that the finance minister is someone who looks after all the money in a country, but the state keeps a careful eye on him, not like here, when the finance minister is someone who steals the country’s money or helps the President and the members of his government to hide it in Swiss bank accounts. In our country the state can’t keep an eye on the money because everyone’s got his hand in the till, from the top all the way down, and everyone accuses everyone else. And since you can’t send everyone to prison, they let it drop, and just carry on pinching the state’s money.

  The president of the Central African Republic who’s just been driven out of his country has a lovely name. It’s less complicated than the names French people have: he’s called Jean Bédel Bokassa. But unless you want him to cut your head off you’d better call him Emperor Jean Bédel Bokassa. It was his own idea to make himself emperor; he threw a big party and lots of heads of foreign countries came to celebrate at his house and acknowledge he’d now become an emperor. Long before he got into the trouble he’s in today, he was good friends with the French and now the French have dropped him like a dog with fleas, or rabies. Yes, he was a faithful servant of the French, because he fought alongside French soldiers during the Second World War, he got his military training from the French and they gave him a fine medal because wherever the French went to fight, he was always at their service, in Indochina or in Algeria. Jean Bédel Bokassa rose to the rank of captain in the French army before going home to Central Africa, where he was able to take advantage of the muddle down there after a coup d’état by some of the military against the president, his cousin David Dacko, to become president himself. It was some other soldiers who organised the coup d’état against his cousin Dacko, but Bokassa’s so clever, he managed to turn the situation round, take things in hand and end up becoming president of the republic, even though the coup d’état wasn’t his idea in the first place. So he made a coup d’état out of a coup d’état, my father says. Now, in becoming president he had actually overthrown his own cousin. That’s why Papa Roger reminds me that our worst enemies are sometimes members of our own family. If I become president of the republic, I’m definitely going to watch out for my Uncle René, and place my trust in Lounès, and appoint him prime minister.

  Apparently Emperor Jean Bédel Bokassa wept and wept at the death of General de Gaulle, who ran France before Georges Pompidou. De Gaulle was as tall as two men from round here, or as five and a half pygmies from Gabon. Papa Roger says people liked him in the Congo, because when the Germans decided to go and occupy France by force, General de Gaulle came to Brazzaville to announce that France was no longer in France, that the capital of France was no longer Paris, with the Eiffel Tower – Brazzaville was now the capital of free France. So the French all became Congolese like us. Besides, at that time, it was better to be Congolese than a Frenchman collaborating with the Germans, led by Adolf Hitler and his scary moustache. So we let the French all come over here, no problem. We said to ourselves: ‘Things must be pretty bad over there in Europe if the Whites are running to hide here in Brazzaville, the Germans and their leader Adolf Hitler must be giving them a hard time.’

  Papa Roger also remembers that the year the great de Gaulle died, people in our country acted as if their own president had died. We had a long history with de Gaulle, because when he came here and then took the plane back to Europe, our prophet, André Grenard Matsoua disappeared too. And to this day lots of people in the Kongo tribe think the prophet isn’t dead, that he’ll turn up at Brazzaville airport again one day with General de Gaulle. That’s why there’s always a crowd at Maya-Maya airport, waiting for General de Gaulle and our prophet to return. As far as we’re concerned, General de Gaulle’s not dead. The French are lying to us. Our prophet, Matsoua, isn’t dead, the French are hiding him somewhere with General de Gaulle. Some day, sooner or later, the two of them will come back to the Congo.

  But then Papa Roger really confuses us by telling us that General de Gaulle really is dead and that he’s buried in a part of France known as Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, a village with two churches.

  As soon as Maman Pauline, who had just picked up her glass, heard this weird-soun
ding name, Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, she leapt from her chair and her beer almost came snorting out of her nostrils.

  ‘How can they bury someone that important in a church? And how did they bury him in two churches?’

  Apparently the day General de Gaulle died, the dictator Jean Bédel Bokassa wept as though his own Papa Roger had died. He made out like it was his own father who’d just gone up to heaven and left him alone on earth. And he wept so much for his father de Gaulle that even the Africans began to wonder: What if it’s true? Now, it couldn’t possibly be, because Bokassa the First was as black as the bottom of a cooking pot. And a famous White like de Gaulle couldn’t have a black child. It’s impossible, even in a nightmare. But the Emperor Bokassa I didn’t care what people said, so he went to the General’s funeral and there he happened to meet the French minister for finance, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing who, it just so happened, had family in the Central African Republic. His family loved to go hunting animals in our forests for fun, even though the animals are the spirits of our ancestors, and have never harmed anyone. Our animals are lovely, they make sweet little babies so that the bush will always be full of living creatures, and so that each generation of little Africans can see with its own eyes what a lion looks like, what an elephant looks like, what a zebra looks like, what a squirrel looks like. The Whites in Giscard’s family played at hunting with these animals and killed them just for a bit of fun, and to take some photos. Then they stuck the heads of the animals on the wall so they could boast: ‘I hunted in Africa, I killed that lion, I killed that leopard and I killed that elephant.’

  Every time the minister for finance, Giscard d’Estaing, went to visit his family in the Central African Republic, he popped in to say hello to dictator Bokassa I, now they’d met each other at General de Gaulle’s funeral.

  Papa Roger reminds us too that Giscard d’Estaing came to visit Bokassa I, who showed him round his lovely palace and gave him lots of nice presents, including a present with all these diamonds on it. Bokassa I was always very nice to his guests and he gave Giscard some more diamonds the day he came to see him in the château he owned in France. And then it turns out there were other presents too, which is why my father says it’s a complicated business, and we don’t know whether Bokassa I is exaggerating, telling lies, making stuff up, because he’s angry with France now he’s in exile. Or if Valéry Giscard d’Estaing is trying to hide some other diamonds, and prove to everyone that he hadn’t been given real diamonds, just bling.

  So now it’s like world war between Giscard d’Estaing and Bokassa I. Bokassa must be sitting there in his country of exile thinking: Giscard, I gave you those presents, those diamonds, why did you go and attack my regime and put my cousin David Dacko back in power, when I’d already overthrown him in a coup d’état?

  Yeah, Bokassa I must be really annoyed at being driven out of the Central African Republic, and having to go and live with the Ivoirians. He thinks France has betrayed him, he wants revenge, he wants to topple President Giscard d’Estaing. And now that all you ever hear about on the radio and all you read about in the papers is this business with the diamonds, Papa Roger can’t see how the French can vote for Giscard d’Estaing. He’s going to get pensioned off, even if he is still a bit young. Bokassa I down on the Ivory Coast’s going to be happy about that.

  Just as Roger Guy Folly finishes speaking and Papa Roger turns off the radio, it occurs to me that Bokassa I won’t ever die of cancer. No, he didn’t love his country like the Shah did. Cancer’s for people who love their country or adventurers like Arthur. Also, Bokassa I could have chosen Egypt for his exile, instead of the Ivory Coast. When you’re in exile, or adventuring, if you don’t stop off in Egypt it means you’re not a good guy, you’re not very important. And I really don’t like Bokassa I. So I really do want the French to vote for Giscard d’Estaing again. Then at least Bokassa I will get lost.

  I go into my bedroom and put up the mosquito net. I can’t stop thinking about Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. I fall asleep over the last few words I say to My Sister Star and My Sister No-name:

  Let Giscard d’Estaing carry on being President of the French Republic for ever and ever

  May this business about the diamonds not make the French vote for a different president

  Let’s hear it for Giscard! Let’s hear it for Giscard!

  If Caroline thinks I’m going to apologise to her, she’s wrong. She was the one who wanted a divorce, not me. Why should I go running after her? Since I’m not speaking to her, and she’s not speaking to me, and Monsieur Mutombo thinks it’s not right, he turns to Longombé and Mokobé and asks: ‘What’s up with our two little lovebirds?’

  Caroline throws a fit and shouts that we’re not lovebirds. We’re not married, we never were married, her husband is a great footballer who wears the number 11 shirt and scores lots of goals and reads books by Marcel Pagnol. She goes running out of her father’s workshop.

  I’ve come round to bring Papa Roger’s mohair trousers. They’re brand new, but they’re too long, so they need to have several centimetres taken off, otherwise my father’s going to be sweeping the dust as he walks, like some other papas I’ve seen in the quartier. I see some of them who’ve turned up the hem of their trousers themselves and every time it comes down again, so you have to turn it back up in front of everyone, when it’s really hard to walk, if you’re always thinking you must be careful your trousers don’t come undone. Who thinks about their trousers or their shoes when they’re walking down the street? You think about other things, about where you’re going and how you’re going to get there in time.

  As soon as I walked into the workshop with my father’s trousers over my right shoulder, I saw Caroline sitting just by Monsieur Mutombo and I nearly left, thinking I’d come back later. But I went in anyway because the two apprentices at the back had already seen me.

  Longombé shouted, ‘Hey it’s our Michel!’

  Mokobé added, ‘Probably got his shirt ripped by his friend again!’

  I didn’t say hello to Caroline because she was looking at me already as if to say, ‘If you say hello to me I’ll shame you in front of these grown ups.’

  The apprentices were busy sewing her a red dress with green flowers on it.

  Monsieur Mutombo says to me, ‘Go and see what your woman’s doing outside, you should never leave your wife unhappy, someone else might cheer her up and marry her, and you’ll be left weeping alone.’

  I come out of the workshop. Opposite, there’s a little football pitch. Caroline’s sitting on the ground watching me walk towards her. Just as she’s getting up to move away I call, ‘Wait, don’t go, I’ve got something to say to you…’

  ‘No, it’s over, we’ve been divorced for ages.’

  I force myself to stay calm and say, ‘I know, but at least let’s talk about it and…’

  ‘No, I don’t want to talk to you, or I’ll start loving you again and then I’ll feel sad all the time!’

  Now she’s drawing things on the ground with a little twig. I look at her drawing close up.

  ‘What’s that then?’

  ‘Can’t you see it’s a rose? Mabélé taught me how to draw it, and he’s really good at drawing. He said I’m a rose, so now I’m drawing myself.’

  The name Mabélé irritates me. I lose my cool and go on the attack: ‘Does Mabélé know who Arthur Rimbaud is?’

  ‘Who’s that then?’

  ‘He’s a writer. He’s got loads of hair, it all grows in winter…’

  ‘Is he more famous than Marcel Pagnol? Has he got four castles and…’

  ‘No, Arthur hasn’t got all that stuff, he doesn’t care about things like that.’

  ‘If he hasn’t got a castle, that means he’s not rich and famous!’

  ‘But he travelled at lot, so he can get to see all the castles in the world.’

  ‘What about his own castles?’

  ‘He built them in his heart. And I’ll keep you in the castles I�
��ve got in my heart too, where no one can harm you.’

  She looks up at me at last. It’s almost as if she’s got a bug in her eye.

  ‘Where did you learn to say things like that, like some grown-up chatting up a woman?’

  ‘It’s thanks to Arthur.’

  ‘Really? Have you met him then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In my parents’ bedroom. And when I look at him hard he smiles and talks to me.’

  A plane passes overhead. I can’t ask Caroline to guess which country it’s going to. That’s a game between me and her brother.

  So I look at the plane on my own and I think: It’s going to land in Egypt. The capital of Egypt is Cairo. I don’t want that plane to go and land in Saudi Arabia where Idi Amin Dada is, swimming in his pool and boxing with his servants. I don’t want the plane to land in the Ivory Coast where Emperor Jean Bédel Bokassa the First tells tall stories about Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who wants to be president of the French Republic again.

  While I’m thinking about Egypt, Caroline takes my left hand and begs me, ‘Can I meet your friend Arthur with the castles in his heart too?’

  ‘Of course, he’d love that! But you’d better come to my house because my father will get cross if I take Arthur out into the street. And if my father gets cross, Arthur won’t ever smile at me again.’

  She’s just rubbed out the rose she had drawn in the earth, and she’s taken hold of my hand. We go back inside her father’s workshop.

  ‘You know, Mabélé’s not actually very good at fighting. Why did you run off when you met him in Diadhou’s shop? If someone attacks us one day in the street will you run off like that and leave me alone with the bandits?’