Mount Pleasant

by Patrice Nganang

  Nebu learned a lot by listening when he couldn’t respond. It taught him to control his rage. Taught him to keep it, like burning metal, at a safe distance from his body and his eyes. Taught him to strike it with a hammer, striking, striking, and striking again until it grew malleable, until it took on the shape he wanted to give it: flat like a knife, oval like a bird’s body, triangular like a lion’s head. It taught him to heat up his rage, to dilute his rage, to polish his rage; to file it, yes, to file it down and wipe it clean, like the metals he worked with. And Nebu polished his rage, blowing on his overheated fingers, blowing on his heart to keep it from exploding, blowing on the embers of his incandescent soul. Art is an antidote to madness.

  3

  The Depths of Friendship

  Oh, Nebu still had no idea what lay at the bottom of the volcanic abysses that fed Muluam and Ngbatu’s stories. Only once he had plunged into their gutters did he understand who those fools really were. To think how they sidled up to him, almost becoming his friends. The furnace needed fuel, and as usual, Muluam and Ngbatu were chosen to bring some back from neighboring Bamiléké land. They would have gone alone, as always, but since a new recruit had joined their master’s workshop, the devils sensed an opportunity for new mischief. Smiling, they bowed down at old Monlipèr’s feet.

  “Couldn’t Nebu come with us?” Muluam asked.

  The master surely had other plans in mind for the new apprentice, but lost in the clouds that were always hidden beneath his closed eyelids, he had no idea of the malice lurking in his interlocutors’ eyes.

  “Nebu?” he asked simply. “Yes.”

  Muluam and Ngbatu knew that as distracted as he was, dear old Monlipèr’s yes wasn’t really an answer.

  “He can help find the path,” Muluam reasoned.

  “Who knows, maybe the next time…” Ngbatu added.

  “And see the market as well.”

  “So he can learn about the prices.”

  The most pensive of all the Bamum bowed under the weight of these twinned arguments. As the newcomer, Nebu didn’t say a thing. But he saw the trap being set. The artisans were given two donkeys because three would have made them the target of bandits. Since the new apprentice didn’t have a mount, the three would take turns riding, although Bertha’s son opted to start out on foot. He walked for hours, following his colleagues as they rode on ahead, laughing at his stubbornness.

  “Don’t be so stubborn,” they told him from time to time, especially when they reached a valley. “Don’t you see the mountain ahead?”

  Their ugly words from the day before were still echoing in Nebu’s ears. He used his endurance to show them that he wasn’t just any old fool, much less a coward they could laugh at all they wanted. But he couldn’t go on forever, torturing himself to defend his dignity. Walking to Dschang would take several days. The first night, Nebu lay down far from his friends, despite their warnings: “The forest is full of wild animals!” The second, he still refused to speak to them, just let them keep on laughing at their own stories. After the second day, however, he could no longer avoid the complicity inevitable on such long trips without being ridiculous.

  It all started with hunger. The travelers’ provisions had run out too soon: Nebu and Muluam learned too late that Ngbatu ate like an elephant. Thankfully, he was an amazing hunter. In the evening he headed into the bush and soon returned, an antelope slung over his shoulders.

  “There you go,” he said, laying his still-struggling prey out on the ground. “That should do it.”

  And it did! Nebu learned that Ngbatu was the son of a well-known hunter who had turned to farming after the German administration had forbidden all the Bamum from carrying weapons. Of his four brothers, Ngbatu was the only one who’d escaped conscription, and only because he’d found shelter in Monlipèr’s workshop. Give or take a few details, Muluam’s story was the same; he was the son of a soldier turned farmer.

  When the defrocked hunter and soldier confided their stories, why didn’t Nebu admit that he was the son of a scribe, a peasant only because he was a slave? Bertha’s son didn’t want to remember his father. He learned many other things about his comrades, although his silence made him look like a snob in their eyes. When he awoke the next day, they were already long gone. He found them an hour later, hidden behind some bushes. He was ready to let loose with a mouthful of insults.

  “Shh!” Ngbatu cut him off.

  Muluam put a finger to his lips. Nebu tiptoed up and was dumbstruck by what he saw his friends were watching: a girl washing clothes in a stream. They held tight to their genitals so they wouldn’t explode. Bertha’s son was paralyzed by the sight. She was a dream caught mid-flight, the static perfection of a vision he thought he had conquered. There was no doubt: it was Ngungure.

  “She must be Bamum,” Ngbatu said.

  “What about the tattoos on her shoulders? She’s Bamiléké, no doubt about it,” Muluam disagreed. “After all, we are in Bamiléké territory.”

  Ngbatu cut to the chase. “Bamiléké or not, I don’t give a damn. She’s mine.”

  “No,” Muluam snapped back. “Mine.”

  “Why?”

  When Muluam stood up to go join the girl, a firm hand grabbed his leg and pulled him back behind the bushes. He swallowed an insult.

  “Let me go,” he grumbled, spitting out the grass from his mouth. “Let go of my foot, you sad fool!”

  A few years or even a few months earlier, Nebu would have been the first to want to seduce the girl by the stream. Today, however, what he said came as a real surprise.

  “Leave her alone!”

  His two companions really would have laughed if they’d known the reason behind this change of heart.

  “Well, if you don’t have any balls…” Muluam started to say.

  “What, is she your woman?”

  When the young men lifted their determined heads, the girl had already disappeared. Muluam and Ngbatu looked for her up and down the riverbank but eventually gave up. They came back to Nebu, united in their anger against him.

  “It’s your fault,” they declared.

  “No, it’s yours,” Nebu retorted.

  All three burst out laughing, for each was pointing at another’s face. They talked about the girl for quite a long time, although of course Nebu didn’t tell them that in her fluid shapes, he had suddenly recognized a face he knew very well. He didn’t even have a chance to explain. The girl in the stream soon faded from his friends’ memories, replaced by two opulent prostitutes they treated themselves to that evening in Dschang—“a bit of consolation.”

  Nebu also tried to forget the fleeting face of the girl from the riverbank. Art gave him the clay he needed to transform life’s ugly miasmas into a dazzling sky. He threw himself into his work with a will made stronger by his desire for revenge, and he cut himself off from the faces of those who wanted to make him miserable. He learned the ins and outs of the sculptors’ ancient craft from the hands of his master, finally accepting that gold was nothing more than the material with which he could realize his artistic dreams. He wanted to move closer to the sun’s bright light.

  Nebu learned how to fill the eyes of an antelope with gold and polish a lion’s teeth. Soon he knew how to inject an illusion of truth beneath the skin of a gilded leopard. He knew how to make an immobile lizard zigzag through the dust, and even how to make geckos cock their heads. He deftly re-created all the animals from memory. He knew that surprise is the silent expression of truth, and he suffered less when Muluam and Ngbatu got caught up in their endless critiques of his work. He knew, yes, Nebu knew he still had a lot to learn in Monlipèr’s workshop if he wanted to erase, once and for all, the shameful story that had brought him there, if he wanted to realize his vision with his own hands. Art is a corrective for a life that’s become unlivable. Art can transform a life. Art can become life. Art can be the whole of a life. Finally, he understood that.

  “You take everything too seriously,” Muluam said
one day.

  “Art is my life,” Nebu replied.

  The possibilities are limitless, he could have added, but instead he just said, “Don’t you get it?” No, his friend didn’t get it yet. How could he? Lost in the gilded park his hands had created, amidst the animals transformed by his talent, Nebu was always searching for new forms while his friends were content to repeat the same old things. He sought out unknown figures and unimagined visions. He sought animals he had only dreamed of, but never seen. Yes. Those he had imagined, even if just in his dreams, he wanted them, too. Soon he moved on to more abstract symbols, for he had deconstructed spiders enough to make the connection to birds, and he had dived deep enough into serpents to recognize their relation to dogs.

  One day, to the stupefaction of the whole workshop, especially his two chattering companions, he sculpted a two-headed dog. Nebu had progressed far ahead of them. He added his visions to Monlipèr’s vocabulary of Bamum symbols, and soon there were five-footed dogs coming out of the old engineer’s workshop, horses with human heads, winged men, and even, yes, even unicorns. Since Nebu never claimed credit for the forms he created, his master presented them to the sultan as his own discoveries. Still, the old blacksmith gazed at his new apprentice in amazement. More than anyone, he understood the call of innovation that burned in Nebu’s fingers. In all his years as a master artist, he had never met a young man who worked with such intense focus, who constantly found new expressions for his vision.

  “You’d think the Devil had possessed your hands, my son,” he commented one day.

  And that was very close to the truth!

  4

  Workshop Conversations

  Nebu’s dreams were intense. He saw all the details of Foumban’s streets. He saw the House of Passion he had set aflame in his vengeful anger. He saw her room, and in her room, sitting on the bamboo bed, Ngungure. He was sitting on the ground, between his girlfriend’s legs. He felt her knees against his shoulders, her breath on his neck. She was wearing a red pagne that covered her breasts. She was carefully, meticulously, braiding his hair, for Nebu’s hair had grown thick. She divided the mop into little sections that she combed and twisted between her fingers, one by one. At the same time, she sang in his ears a melody that made him feel stiff and weak. He woke up drenched in sweat. Ngungure was nowhere to be seen. Trembling, he touched his head. His hair was braided, and to his great surprise, he had a red pagne wrapped around his hips. He was so excited he had to take care of his erection with his own hands.

  Why was he suddenly ashamed? His whole life he had walked naked across the city, never imagining that one morning his own nakedness would cover him with shame. He had seen dozens of women’s pagnes fall at his feet and never would have thought that he’d feel such a need for the hands of the woman whose garment now covered him; that he would need her hands to awaken his body; that he would need to hear her voice whisper in his ears to come back to life. He was ashamed because he suddenly realized that he felt sick. He was stunned by the shocking discovery of his capricious desire and aggravated by his inability to control it. Still, he couldn’t believe that Ngungure had braided his hair during the night only to disappear at dawn. Were it not for his workshop fellows, who were making his life even more miserable, he would have spent more time pondering the mysteries of his night!

  “You braided your hair?” Muluam piped up as soon as he saw Nebu walk by the door to the furnace.

  “Good day to you,” Bertha’s son replied coldly.

  “Good day to you, Monsieur Bamiléké!”

  Ngbatu was on the same antagonistic wavelength as his companion, but Nebu’s dream had left the sculptor listless. If he had thought their escapade had been left behind back in the bush, the unstoppable logorrhea of these guys was there to prove him wrong.

  “Djo, you must be in love,” Muluam shot out. “Still that girl by the river?”

  “She’s Bamiléké, isn’t she?”

  “No, Bamum, I think.”

  “So when’s the wedding, djo?”

  “Or are you interested in Bamum girls now?”

  “The revenge of the Bamum.”

  Ngbatu and Muluam shared a sly laugh.

  “Bamum girls are good lays, aren’t they?” Muluam asked, suddenly calm.

  What do they know? Nebu thought, shaking his head. Assholes!

  He didn’t even tell his mother who had braided his hair, especially because Bertha had warned him against “wild hairstyles,” advising him to not overstep the limits set for slaves in Foumban.

  “What about artists?” he replied simply. “I am an artist.”

  Slaves had to keep their heads shaved. That wasn’t the most important thing, though. Bertha didn’t insist, because Nebu stood before his mother dressed just like an artist. The matron forgave him his choice of hairstyle because being an artist not only kept him close to the palace—or rather, close to her—it also kept him safe from the colony’s greedy clutches. Nebu added three pearl necklaces and earrings to his outfit. They were the only signs of his fingers’ talent, except for his artist’s uniform, of course.

  He didn’t share his nocturnal dream with his master, but rather asked him about the nature of truth.

  “Truth?” Monlipèr replied, lost in his far-off thoughts. “Truth needs to be hidden. Or else it’d blind us.”

  “Blind us?”

  “Yes, yes. We are like butterflies, my son, and truth is a lamp.”

  Nebu had to keep repeating those words. Truly his mother’s son, he had never looked his master in the eyes. For the first time, the man seemed old to him. Very, very old. Monlipèr was an old man weighed down by multiple responsibilities and many years of work. Nebu noticed that his master closed his eyes when speaking about the arts. Maybe it was a habit from spending long days in his suffocating, smoke-filled workshop. His voice seemed to come from the grave, from a mystical workshop, from the forges where blacksmiths had worked for millennia. He spoke in a whisper, but each of his words had the force of a steel stamp. The sculptor took in the words gratefully. If he’d had a notebook at hand, he would have written them down so he could reread and ponder over them later. He wanted to digest them slowly.

  “If the butterfly comes too close to the lamp,” Monlipèr continued, “it burns its wings, doesn’t it?”

  And Nebu repeated, “Yes, it burns its wings.”

  “So the lamp must always be covered to protect the butterflies,” the master concluded.

  “To protect the butterflies.”

  There was a long pause—an overly long pause—that Nebu didn’t break. Then Monlipèr continued.

  “For the lamp to burn, it must be protected from the wind.”

  Nebu repeated, “From the wind.”

  “Yes, yes. It’s what covers art that lets us see the truth.”

  He paused again.

  “It’s also what makes truth shine.”

  Suddenly Nebu remembered other very different things Monlipèr had said the day he’d first arrived in the workshop. Why? Because his master had spoken of blindness that day as well. He had said that Nebu’s European clothes blinded him. Wasn’t he contradicting himself? The young man didn’t insist. None of this was written down anywhere, so …

  “Without its covering,” the old man went on, “truth is furtive.”

  “Furtive,” Nebu repeated without revealing any of the thoughts running through his mind.

  “Yes, yes.”

  The young man was thinking about everything he had lived through, especially the girl by the riverside, her beauty, and how it had disappeared from his view. He thought about Ngungure’s face after making love. He was quiet for a moment because he couldn’t find the words to say what he wasn’t thinking about, and he didn’t want to lie either.

  “So art is just an attempt?”

  “Just an attempt,” Monlipèr replied, “for no work of art is perfect.”

  This was just the beginning of a more complicated idea, so the master had continu
ed: “Because art is the expression of our wounded humanity.” But Nebu’s ears were no longer open to hear the old man’s maxims. His mind was clouded with his own thoughts, and in the chaos, another idea was rising up, fighting ferociously to tear him away from Monlipèr’s philosophy.

  “To see better, you must shut your eyes.”

  Yes, that’s what the master said, and Nebu repeated, “Shut your eyes.”

  “Because art is the reflection of your most intimate dreams.”

  “Dreams,” Nebu said, “intimate dreams.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Your dreams.” Those words pursued him for quite some time. He repeated them again and again, measuring the weight of their possibilities until a truly frightening truth emerged: he didn’t agree with his master.

  “I want perfection, I do,” he said. “A vision of perfection.”

  And he added, “I want to open my eyes to see.”

  Then, “I want to re-create what I see in my dreams.”

  Finally, “I want my dreams to come true.”

  The central precepts of his aesthetic flowed from his mind automatically, freely. That night he covered himself with his girlfriend’s pagne before going to bed. Once again he dreamed of her. The scent of her body was stronger, his dream even more intense than before. Nebu dreamed the same dream several times. Sometimes it broke off and picked up again the next night. It took an even greater hold of him even while he was awake. He emerged from the labyrinth of his mind drenched in sweat, full of questions for his master. Only he was less and less able to speak honestly to old Monlipèr about his nocturnal possessions.

  How so? He saw Ngungure much more closely than she had ever allowed. He didn’t see just her face, but her nose, and not just her nose, but her nostrils. He saw his girlfriend separated into disparate parts, for soon he saw her hand cut open before him piece by piece, from the nails to her palm, from the palm to her wrist, from the elbow to her upper arm, and from the shoulder to her breast. He saw her breast rise in the juncture between her arm and her chest. He thought of Monlipèr’s phrase “wounded humanity.” It was a weighty argument. And Nebu realized that he had never really seen Ngungure. Don’t emotions blind us to truth’s brilliance? He realized that his girlfriend had always eluded him, and when he closed his eyes for the night, he dreamed of her even more intensely.