Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty

by Alain Mabanckou

  I don’t answer. Because I don’t want to have to hear Mabélé’s name again.

  Monsieur Mutombo’s amazed to see me coming back with Caroline. Longombé and Mokobé want to laugh, but they stifle it. They know Monsieur Mutombo will probably shout at them. Longombé pretends to sneeze, then finally bursts out laughing, as do Mokobé and Monsieur Mutombo. As the three of them are now laughing helplessly, Caroline and I start laughing too. As usual, I’m the one laughing loudest, holding my sides. The more I laugh like that, the more it sets the others off. I collapse on the floor, laughing. I get up again, laughing. I lean against the wall, laughing. I lean against the table where they cut the cloth, laughing. I laugh and laugh and laugh and suddenly, without warning, the whole workshop turns black. Monsieur Mutombo’s shiny head disappears. I turn round and see Longombé’s mother blocking the doorway. As usual, she can’t get in the door, not even sideways. I manage to stop laughing just in time. Besides, everyone else in the workshop has stopped. Longombé gets up and goes over to his mother, they stand and talk a few metres outside. I creep out to watch. Longombé’s giving his mother money. Too late, she’s seen me, and she calls threateningly: ‘Hey you, Pauline Kengué’s son! I’ll get you one of these days! Why do you laugh every time you see me? Because I’m fat, is that it? How do you know you won’t get fat when you’re grown up?’

  Off she goes, at top speed. When she walks the dust rises off the street. People she passes turn round as though they’ve seen an extra terrestrial. She shouts abuse at them, even though they’ve said nothing. I think: why doesn’t Longombé’s father ever come and ask his son for money? Has his father left his mother? Doesn’t Longombé even have an adoptive father? I feel sorry for him, working so hard and paying for his mother’s keep while I’m standing there laughing like an idiot. Would I like it if people made fun of Maman Pauline like that? No, I’d want to throw stones in his face.

  So I’m very sorry I laughed the last time, that I didn’t realise Longombé’s mother’s a brave lady, as brave as Maman Pauline or Maman Martine. Longombé comes back into the workshop and looks at me with red eyes, like an angry crocodile. Monsieur Mutombo tells him to hurry up and do my father’s trousers. He’s going to deliberately cut them too short and when my father puts them on he’ll look like a hare wearing trousers in Tales of the Bush and the Forest that they read to us in the infant school.

  Uncle René’s house is the prettiest in Rue Comapon. My uncle always worries because it’s so nice, and you can see it shining in the distance as you approach, that the local proletariats, who live in the clapboard houses, will break into his property at any moment and steal all his wealth. That’s why his plot has secure fencing all round it, with barbed wire on top. Anyone who thinks: I’ll just go and rob Monsieur René’s house because he’s rich, will hurt himself on the barbed wire, and bleed and scream like babies when they first come into the world, the ones that know already that they’re going to have big problems in their lives, and that they’d have been better off staying in their mother’s belly, or going straight to heaven without stopping off on earth, like My Sister Star and My Sister No-name. Also, it’s not just barbed wire protecting Uncle René’s plot, there’s a great big iron gate as well. That’s where everyone goes in. The other iron gate is at the back of the house – the entrance to the garage – which my uncle opens with a remote control.

  When you arrive at Uncle René’s house, first of all you ring the bell and wait in the street, then the houseboy comes to peer at you through a little hole that’s so well hidden that you’d never think anyone was looking at you. If you look suspicious, if you look like a trouble maker from the Grand Marché, the houseboy won’t open the door to you. If you won’t go away he puts Miguel onto you, who, my uncle says, is the fiercest dog in the neighbourhood, not to say the whole town, and why not the entire Congo. When Miguel’s excited he tries to bite his own shadow. The reason he’s so fierce is that the houseboy gives him corn spirit to drink. Once he’s had a glass of that he goes really quiet for a few seconds then he starts turning circles, chasing his own tail, but he can’t catch it because when he turns left it goes right, and when he goes right it goes left. Then he gets really mad that he can’t catch it, so he barks and rolls on the ground. The houseboy calms him down, puts a chain round his neck and ties him up to the foot of the sour sap tree in the yard. Miguel goes on barking, he’s so angry his spit dribbles from his mouth the whole time.

  Uncle René’s put a sign on the gate in big letters that says:

  BEWARE FEROCIOUS DOG 24/7.

  When I see ‘24/7’ I think: So when is Miguel ever NOT ‘ferocious’? Does he ever sleep? I do a quick sum in my head. Given that there are 365 days in the year – sometimes 366 – and a day lasts 24 hours, and an hour lasts 60 minutes, and a minute lasts 60 seconds, and a second is divided into sixty degrees, calculate in seconds the length of time during which a dog which is ‘ferocious’ 24/7 is ferocious over a period of five and a half years…

  So there I am, at the entrance to Uncle René’s house. At Christmas I have to visit Uncle René with the truck and plastic rake and shovel he gave me a few days earlier. I play mostly with Kevin, who’s eleven, and Sebastien who’s nine. You can’t play with Edwige, who’s fifteen, and is always telling us off when we run around in the house, and climb on her father’s armchairs without taking our shoes off.

  I didn’t want to come to Uncle René’s house today, but Maman Pauline said her brother would be cross if I didn’t go to see him; he’d think we resented the fact that he was richer than us. And besides, I do have his family name. Maman Pauline told me to go and take a shower, to scrub under my armpits, my backside and where I pee. I don’t like it when she says that. Does any normal person ever have a shower without washing under their armpits, their backside and where they pee? If you don’t wash there, why take a shower at all?

  ‘When you were a baby and I washed those bits, you always cried,’ she reminds me.

  I gave them a good scrub. After that she picked out a pair of blue underpants, some black shorts, a nice white shirt, a black bow tie and rubber sandals. She put my truck and my plastic rake and shovel in a bag.

  It was nearly midday, and it was already very hot, even in the shade. Just outside the door to our plot, Maman Pauline warned me, ‘Don’t get lost on the way. You go down the Avenue of Independence, turn right, then carry on till you get to the Savon quartier then you turn into the Rue Comapon. Watch out for cars and only cross the road when there’s a grown up crossing. Walk directly behind them. Behave yourself, don’t fall out with Kevin and Sebastien. I’ll be here when you get back this evening, your father too.’

  I nearly asked her why she’s telling me where Uncle René’s house is, when I know how to get there. I said nothing though, and set off walking down the Avenue of Independence.

  I felt a bit scared when I got to Uncle René’s gate. I was thinking: Is Miguel properly tied up to the sour sap tree? The reason I wondered that was because I’ve known that dog since he was a tiny little baby, but my uncle says that dog years and human years aren’t the same thing. A dog’s childhood is really short, they grow up much faster than humans. When a dog’s six months old he’d be ten if he was a person. When a dog’s one year old, he’d be fifteen if he was a person. When a dog’s five years old he’d be thirty-six if he was a person. Now, Miguel is five and a half years old. If he was a human being he would be forty-six years old now, and that makes him an old man compared to me even though I knew him when he was really small, and gave him his milk, which he really liked. So I don’t like the way he barks at me when I come to Uncle René’s house like I’m some kind of evil spirit come to steal my uncle’s riches.

  The boy has seen it’s me ringing the bell, and he opens the gate. He looks me up and down as though he’s thinking: What’s young Michel with his ridiculous bow tie got hidden in his bag then?

  Miguel’s barking at the back of the house, but he’s firmly tied up. First I
see Kevin, who’s as thin as a reed, with his little head on top of a long neck, like a half-starved giraffe. We’re outside the front door and Sebastien’s just behind him. We say hello, and shake hands.

  I go into the day room, I see they’ve got their toys out. Kevin’s got a bicycle. Sebastien’s been given a car that works with batteries and he’s explaining to me that he can play with it without touching it. I don’t believe him. He shows me a machine which controls his car, it’s small with little buttons: ‘That button’s to switch it on. That one makes it go straight. That one makes it turn left. That one’s to turn right. That one’s to make it turn round and come back. And that one’s to make it stop, and to turn off the engine, but you have to press it twice, or the car won’t understand what you want it to do. Here, try and switch it on and see what happens.’

  Just as I’m about to press the start button someone behind us yells: ‘STOP! STOP! STOP!’

  It’s Edwige, who’s just come out of the shower. Her hair’s still wet. She looks really tall, but she’s got spots all over her face, like someone with shrapnel in the World War. The last time I saw her she didn’t have that. But it’s true, I haven’t seen her for ages.

  ‘What are you doing? Papa says you’re not to touch those presents now! Honestly! Who said you could open them anyway? You’d better put all that away! And stop jumping on that chair with your shoes on!’

  Sebastien ignores his sister. He’s still trying to hand me the machine that controls the car. I don’t know if I should take it or not. Edwige has disappeared into her room, she comes back with a switch made of vine creeper. Sebastien runs to put his present back by the chimney and then dashes outside. Miguel hears us running about the grounds and starts barking his head off. He barks so loud that we don’t even hear the car coming into the garage. Uncle René’s arrived, with his wife Auntie Marie-Thérèse.

  Now we’ve sat down to eat. I hate the way they eat in silence at Uncle René’s. All you can hear is the sound of spoons and forks and you have to keep your mouth shut when you’re chewing your food. Not only that – you have to keep your eyes on your own plate. If you look at someone else’s plate, Uncle René kicks you under the table with his pointed shoes, it’s like being poked with a javelin. It hurts for days afterwards. Several times he’s got me on the shin, once or twice on the ankle, I was seeing stars for days. For the first few seconds it doesn’t hurt, you even feel really surprised and pleased because you don’t feel anything. Then all of a sudden, just when you thought it was over, the pain comes right up into your stomach, you feel it moving about in your small intestine and your pancreas, and your heart starts leaping about like a baby kangaroo in its mother’s pouch. Then you throw up on the spot because how can you swallow your juicy piece of meat when you’ve got a pain going up from your ankle or your tibia into your stomach?

  The trouble is, while I eat, I keep an eye on other people’s plates to see if I need to eat more quickly than them to catch up or whether I should slow down a bit if I’m ahead of everyone else. Uncle René can’t stand that. He says it’s how a capitalist’s child would behave, already accumulating wealth at the expense of the Wretched of the Earth. He thinks if I look at Kevin and Sebastien’s plates, when they are the biggest eaters on earth, it means I envy them their pieces of meat. Even in the Russian films that come to the cinema Rex or cinema Roy, people don’t eat like my cousins do. In Russian films they’re only pretending to eat, that’s what Lounès says, anyway. When the Russians eat in a film it’s always faked. It’s not real food like in French films, because the French eat for real. Besides, they talk with their mouths full, even though it’s rude to behave like a savage especially since they’re meant to be the Whites.

  The photo of Lenin on the wall is crooked. The one of Karl Marx too. Perhaps it’s the wind that does it, when you open the front door. Engels is sad because he never sees daylight. The immortal Marien Ngouabi is sad too, maybe because his photo is the smallest of the four. I’m sure his moustache has grown since the last time I ate here.

  The photo of Victor Hugo’s gone. I can’t ask Uncle René – children mustn’t speak at table unless a grown up asks them a question.

  ‘Michel, have you noticed anything about the wall opposite you?’

  It’s Uncle René asking.

  I look up, and pretend to be thinking while I move my fork about, and I murmur: ‘No, I haven’t noticed anything.’

  ‘Nothing? Look up properly!’

  So I say: ‘The photo of Monsieur Victor Hugo’s gone…’

  Auntie Marie-Thérèse gives me a nasty look. She tells me that when someone is dead you don’t call him Monsieur any more, because they’re no longer around to oblige us to respect them. But for me all these people in the photos are alive. They’ve been watching me eat since I was really small. So they’re Monsieurs.

  Uncle René is pleased with my answer. ‘Bravo! Bravo! Bravo nephew! Your cousins hadn’t even noticed!’

  And we carry on eating, each with his nose in his own plate. I try to follow the rhythm. When they eat fast, I eat fast. When they slow down, I slow down. When they pause for moment, I pause too.

  Edwige is on my left, Kevin is on my right. Opposite are Auntie Marie-Thérèse and Sebastien. Uncle René is like a president, because from where he sits he can keep an eye on all of us without moving his head or leaning forward. Kevin and Sebastien eat like pigs, you’d think they were in a race. Auntie Marie-Thérèse’s not pleased with them, she thinks they should slow down.

  My uncle comes back to the subject of Victor Hugo, who’s been taken down from the wall: ‘Michel do you know why I took down the picture of Victor Hugo?’

  I shake my head.

  He stares hard at the wall and begins: ‘For years I loved that French poet stuck up there on the wall. He’s a man of genius, Victor Hugo, he represents in one man the entire nineteenth century, not to say our own century. I would almost say that he’s the only poet I love in the way I love Karl Marx, Engels, Lenin and the immortal Marien Ngouabi. But I’m going to show you something very serious now, which made me take down his photo from the wall.’

  He stops eating, stands up and goes into the bedroom. None of us know what’s going on. What’s serious? What’s he got against poor Victor Hugo, who’s never done anything and who even wrote lots of poems you can recite out loud. We all wonder: Are we meant to stop eating too, or should we carry on without Uncle René, when there’s something seriously up in the house?

  Auntie Marie-Thérèse signals to us to stop. Edwige and I stop eating, but my two cousins carry on. Auntie Marie-Thérèse shouts at them: ‘I said STOP!!!’

  Sebastien had time to stuff a fat chicken wing into his mouth, and he’s still chewing.

  Now Uncle René’s back. In his hand he has a very crumpled piece of paper, which he’s smoothing out. ‘I have photocopied the speech Victor Hugo made on Africa. He gave it during a banquet over which he presided in 1879. Sitting close to him was Victor Schoelcher, someone who fought for the end of slavery. And do you know what Victor Hugo said on that occasion?’

  He puts on his spectacles, the kind that make him look like a doctor about to give a child an injection, and starts reading in the way the members of the Congolese Workers’ Party do when they make a speech: ‘“Oh what a land is Africa! Asia has its history, America has its history, even Australia has its history; Africa has no history.”’

  He pauses for breath, as though he’s just won a swimming race in front of the dictator Idi Amin Dada. But we can see he’s skipping bits as he reads, that he’s picking what he wants to read to us. Why doesn’t he read it all out so we can go on eating our chicken in peace? When he pauses for breath he looks like a buffalo that’s escaped from some white hunters. Why didn’t he realise all this before he stuck up the photo of Victor Hugo on his wall? And if someone only reads out a little bit of something, and doesn’t give you the bit that comes after, how are you expected to put this bit together with the whole thing and under
stand what’s really been said?

  He’s off again: ‘“Put all your surplus into Africa, and solve all your social problems, turn your proletariats into proprietors. Go on, do it! Build roads, build ports, build towns; expand, exploit, colonise, increase; and may the divine Spirit find its expression in peace on this earth, and The Human Spirit likewise, in freedom, far from the influence of priests and princes.”’

  ‘That’s enough, René, the children are here to eat and celebrate Christmas, not to listen to things that don’t concern them! And what happens if one day you discover that your comrades Marx, Engels and Lenin have said things you don’t like about Africa?’

  Auntie Marie-Thérèse is the only person in the world who can talk like that to Uncle René. I don’t know how she does it because she’s not a big woman, not like Longombé’s mother or even Madame Mutombo. She’s very slim and short and her voice is like the voice of a little girl who’s afraid of boys. I can’t believe she talks like that to my uncle and that my uncle actually stops reading from the piece of paper about Victor Hugo. She must have some secret to be able to talk like that without my uncle getting angry.

  Uncle René folds away his paper, looks at the space where Victor Hugo’s photo used to be. Now there’s just a square gap on the wall. Inside the square it’s a bit lighter than the rest of the wall. You can tell there used to be a photo there.

  ‘In any case’, he says, ‘tomorrow the boy will paint that wall, and then no one will ever know that Victor Hugo used to live here. I’ll put up a photo of Ho Chi Minh or Che Guevara in its place.’

  Uncle René wasn’t angry when he saw the toys had already been unwrapped. I thought he would be because he’s often the one who says when we should rip the wrapping off our presents. Even if I do get the same present every year, I take my present out of my bag and rip off the wrapping and pretend to be happy. That’s why today, since I’m not visibly happy, he asks, ‘Do you like your truck and your shovel and rake?’