How strange, how strange the echoes of deeds.
“Can your God forgive the living for what they don’t foresee?” Njoya asked, his struggle to speak tearing his face into a grimacing mask.
Father Vogt leaned his ear closer. Yet he had heard the question. He rubbed his beard and smiled, trying to take on an air of wisdom that his years in the tropics hadn’t produced. Here is a man whose conversion won’t be the result of the magic of sweets! A man whose suffering is a mystery! Clearly the sultan sought a way out of his torture, but what pained him so? Njoya didn’t just want to be saved from his past; he wanted to be absolved of a future that was taking ever more unexpected turns, starting with Yaoundé, where he was exiled, which had been named the capital of Cameroon in 1921.
The history of his people filled his body. All he needed was to put just one foot in his courtyard to see it come to life, to see hundreds of people born anew—dancing, singing, shouting, ecstatic! Hadn’t those thousand voices joined together to wail out those three accursed names and crush his body? Those people who filled his home, who had always filled his courtyard, would judge his actions. They all knew why Njoya was suffering; yes, he was convinced of that. Those evanescent storytellers, those who told of worlds of madness, were his paradise and his hell. That’s why their stories, stronger than medicine, had swathed the walls of the room of his salvation. But didn’t all those who had orchestrated a ballet of the dead in his quarters know the truth? The story of Manga, Ngosso, and Samba? Didn’t the tellers of impossible tales know Cameroon’s history? What was there to confess?
“Does your God forgive what the living can’t forget?” the sultan started again, spitting out each word with difficulty.
Father Vogt thought for a moment before answering.
11
Are the French So Very Different from the Germans?
Let’s head back to Foumban, fourteen years earlier, in 1916, for that’s when the seeds of Njoya’s doubt were sown. And for good reason. After nine months of occupation, the English left the capital of the sultanate in a military parade that woke everyone. A secret agreement with the French had persuaded them to abandon the city they had previously terrorized with their machine guns. Before leaving Foumban, the English officer offered Njoya his red pickup truck, the one he had brought to the city just a few weeks after his arrival. It all happened so quickly! Full of pride, the white soldier had shown the sultan his vehicle, telling him it was an example of King George’s grandeur, “a model of British technological prowess.”
It was, to be sure, a pretty old truck, but it had proved its strength on ungrateful hills and some wild paths. Njoya, of course, was happy to have a motorcar. Unlike the Fulani books he had leafed through and admired so long ago, or the Koran that he had immediately decided to imitate, the vehicle awoke in him the simple desire of possession. He didn’t need his master engineers, not Monlipèr, the blacksmith, not Nji Mama, the architect, not even Ibrahim, the calligrapher. All he needed was to sit down on the machine’s seat and move his hands and legs the way the Englishman had shown him. In his enthusiasm the sultan failed to question the reasons behind this sudden show of magnanimity on the part of a man who had previously taken such joy in humiliating him. Oh, Njoya ought to have wondered whether this car was his compensation for the Franco-British treachery!
But let’s leave that aside for now, shall we?
To show his goodwill, Njoya greeted the French forces with a speech in which he promised his cooperation and, in a further gesture of appeasement, also offered them, as he had the Germans, a plate of fresh eggs. The soldiers who raised the tricolored flag sang the Marseillaise, forgetting that the crowds gathered to watch were by then quite confused about all these different flags and songs. The sultan wasn’t wearing his ceremonial garb, something many interpreted as a sign of his displeasure. Things changed very little at first, except perhaps that the soldiers of the French forces (they all came from Congo) didn’t pray kneeling on mats as those of the English had done. They weren’t Muslim. Another important difference: the French commander didn’t move into the building where the previous German and English officers had set up their headquarters. No one weighed the significance of this, maybe because the Bamum were blinded by the all-too-great similarity among the faces that paraded through their courtyards. Yet the rituals varied so greatly from one group of colonizers to another. Oh, if only Njoya and the rest of the Bamum had reflected on the differences among the French, the English, and the Germans!
Some among them were blinded by things entirely unrelated to the spectacles of the occupation. Nebu, for example, was so obsessed by his experiments in the workshops of the new palace that the soldiers and their uniforms, their anthems and their flags had no effect on him at all. The search for perfection was the only thing on his mind. And how! One day, however, as he was gazing out the window of his bedchamber, the silhouette of a woman heading up the street caught his eye. She was a slave, and therefore naked. But her face was Ngungure’s. He closed his eyes and opened them again to be sure of what he was seeing. Bertha’s son would have sworn it was true: she was the embodiment of all his dreams, the exact image of the only woman he had ever really loved.
“That’s Ngungure,” he exclaimed joyfully. “That’s her!”
He stared at her intently, unable to believe his eyes. Oh! He saw the woman’s head, her neck and shoulders, and her hands rising up to balance a basket of tomatoes on her head. No, it just wasn’t possible! So he examined her legs and her feet. He watched her body as it moved, and he was captivated. He saw how her feet gripped the ground as she advanced so supplely, how her belly danced in rhythm with the slight movements of her silhouette. Just like Ngungure! Time and time again he had seen his beloved in his dreams, but never before had she appeared so perfectly. And yet he wasn’t dreaming.
When the woman passed in front of him, he called out, “Ngungure.” She didn’t answer. He whistled; she didn’t turn around. He didn’t complain, though, quite the contrary.
Still as proud as ever! he thought.
Once again he looked her over from head to toe; his eyes alit on her shoulders, then rolled down to measure the volume of her behind. Nebu noticed that her buttocks moved in perfect symmetry, following the stately back-and-forth of her steps. He was amazed at how Ngungure’s back called out to be measured by a sculptor’s knife: in his mind he saw himself cutting it into two equal parts, split open from top to bottom like a papaya. She spread apart and scattered her seeds without slowing her pace. Yet the bright flash of her blazing flesh helped the sculptor as he hurried to reshape her scattered parts. Because, as he tapped on his own temple, Nebu was quickly recalculating the mathematical equations he knew by heart. He wanted to be sure that it really was his beloved, without disturbing the surprising rhythm of her apparition, without freezing—and thereby dissolving—the gracefulness with which she had offered herself up to him.
He was torn between the joy of having found her again and the terrifying thought that his discovery would erase her from his sight. He thought for a moment about the girl he had glimpsed on the river shore, the washer girl from Dschang, and he remembered how fleeting beauty can sometimes be. He did not want to lose his Ngungure again. He ran to his room and grabbed his sheet, which he wrapped quickly around his body. He threw one corner of the cloth over his left shoulder, as a Fulani woman would do, and wrapped his beloved’s red pagne around his head. Then he set off after the woman.
“I’ll be back,” he said to his mother.
“Where are you going?” Bertha’s voice asked from the backyard.
“I’m not going far,” her son replied. “I’ll be right back.”
12
The Mathematics of a Woman’s Body
Luckily for Nebu, his mother didn’t protest. He realized only too late that he had forgotten his notebook.
“Argh!” he groaned. “I always forget it when I need it most!”
For a moment he considered going back to
the house for it, but the thought of running into his mother dressed as he was made him keep going. He was happy that his woman’s disguise allowed him to observe this newfound Ngungure freely, without being harassed by ill-mannered colonial soldiers. He wanted to capture her in movement. For a moment he was enchanted by the motions of his beloved’s hands. Then it was her feet, then her shoulders. The perfect balance of the whole appeared to him, a synthesis that wrenched a cry of ecstasy from his lips. Yet he kept silent. Instead his eyes dived into the woman’s steps, licking the footprints she left in the dust. He saw her place one foot on the ground, then the other, zigzagging slightly.
That’s when his thoughts turned to animals. First, to a horse. Then a goat. Of course he thought of a cat, but also of a bird in flight. For this woman’s behind was as harmonious as those that belonged to the animals he had seen trotting or taking off in flight. The elasticity of her steps evoked the voluptuous movements of a pigeon on the ground. And Nebu was reminded, as well, of a reptile’s sinuous advance; he noticed the similarities between a gecko’s slippery movements and the steps of his dear Ngungure along the red earth.
Nebu had never really paid attention to animals in flight or on foot. Nor had he ever dreamed of their movements. In order to concentrate on the shapes of the woman, he slowed her pace in his mind’s eye, as a musician might with a new song, to better grasp the notes he had just heard. He promised himself he would study how animals moved later. On Ngungure walked, each of her steps adding to the languorous harmony, shimmering with the brilliance of a glowworm.
The sculptor was lost in his thoughts, comparing animals and humans, sounds and steps, bodies and music, when suddenly he realized that the woman had stopped. She greeted another woman. He noticed that the aura projected by her body at rest was identical to that of her body in motion. It was as if she were suspended mid-step. She wasn’t moving, but her body still suggested movement. Walking was inscribed in her stance, like one sculpture in multiple poses. The result was breathtaking. There it was, the unifying principle he had always been searching for, the magical number.
“That’s it,” he cried, putting his hand to his mouth to muffle his voice. “That’s the formula!”
He watched the woman as she stood and walked, and at the same moment, his mind saw a statue perfectly still. His fingers were tingling. He wanted to shape his Ngungure, to sculpt her, re-create her right there where she stood. Because her body and her pose were perfection—of that he was sure.
“That’s it,” he mumbled into the palm of his hand. “The perfect body is the body of a slave!”
He had spoken out loud. Ngungure turned around. He tried to hide, fearing that his presence would be discovered too soon. He also didn’t want to shatter the pose struck by the woman’s body. Thankfully, since he was dressed as a woman, she didn’t notice him. On the contrary, he was able to observe all the more closely how her shape shifted as she turned. The chiasmus of their respective gazes intrigued him, even though he didn’t register it fully. Everything had happened so quickly, he had no time to dwell on this new mathematics of the body.
Ngungure soon left her companion and continued on; Nebu followed after her. They went by the baobab that marks the center of Foumban, going down and back up the hilly paths; they passed by houses and the headquarters of the French official, Prestat; they turned several corners and soon arrived in the women’s quarter. They crossed the iron market, where men paused in their work to steal a glance, grasping at the woman with their eyes as she passed. Then they went by the old palace, where the idle nobles gathered. Some people were shaving a neighbor’s head; others were tuning their musical instruments or playing ngeka. Everyone was waiting for the sultan to appear.
Ngungure didn’t speak with any of the noblewomen who sat in their courtyard cooling themselves with a raffia fan or chatting as they worked on their weaving. Nebu glimpsed several silhouettes inside the palace but quickly focused back on his model. A man greeted her; she responded with a bow. She hurried along, the suppleness of her body tracing identical shapes with each stride.
Nebu added this vision of her body’s perfection to all the others he had amassed in his dreams. Everything was drawn so clearly in his mind that, had he sat down at that very instant, he could have reproduced it on a slate, just as Nji Mama did with the buildings he constructed: from memory. He would have set down the angle of her feet, her shoulders, and her hands as they delicately balanced the basket of tomatoes on her head. Bertha’s son concluded that a body is but the sum of an endless array of triangles.
His face lit up with a smile at the thought of this mathematical beauty before him. Nothing was held back, each element revealed in turn, one after the other. What he saw, he saw in the immediate perfection of its presence. It seemed as if he could distinguish each of the woman’s muscles as she walked, each of her bones, each of her nerves, and that he could calculate the exact length of each step, and each one after that. He could not hold back the elegy that burst from his lips.
A poem to Beauty.
“Woman,” he began, adjusting his pagne, “you are my master.”
13
A Man Revealed in a Burst of Laughter
“Njapdunke!”
Nebu never could have said whether he had crossed Foumban once, twice, three, ten, or twenty times. His path was dictated by that of the woman; the shapes of her body had captured his soul, his entire soul. He had entered the spice market without even realizing it. Roused suddenly by the scent of a potent blend of spices, he found himself surrounded by hills of peri peri, salt, ginger, onions, curry, and tomatoes in an endless array of colors. In fact he had stopped only because a woman with a yellow scarf wrapped tightly around her head had hailed his Ngungure by a different name.
She had called her Njapdunke. Yes, Njapdunke, the name of the sultan’s deceased mother. At that very moment a treacherous flame sparked in the sculptor’s belly, pushing a diabolical cloud of smoke through his lungs, cutting off his breath, and setting his nostrils ablaze. He automatically opened his mouth and quickly covered it with both hands. He squelched his breath by exhaling as hard as he could. It was as if, emerging from a long tunnel or surfacing from the darkness of a curse, he suddenly came back to his senses.
“Njapdunke,” repeated the woman who had stopped the slave. She pointed at Nebu. “That man is following you!”
Nebu was paralyzed by those words: “that man.” Just then the turbulent fire descended from his nostrils into his throat and took a quick turn around his chest before heading into his belly, whence it emerged with a force that opened his mouth and loosened his unsuspecting hands.
“Ah, ah, ah…”
He found relief in a powerful sneeze that shook all the spice stands around him.
“Ah-choo!”
The cloth he had tied over his shoulder in his efforts to pass as a Fulani woman came undone and fell at his feet. He bent down to pick it up, but the slave woman he had been following didn’t give him the chance to cover himself up.
“Just what do you want?” she asked, staring him right in the eyes. “What do you want, you rat?”
As she spoke, she pointed her finger threateningly at his nose, all the while keeping her basket balanced on her head. Another woman with a shaved head abandoned her display of spices to join her. She spoke to the sculptor in a more conciliatory tone.
“Why don’t you just leave her alone, eh?”
“Woudidididi!” cried the woman with the tightly wound scarf, drawing the attention of the whole market. “Here’s a man who wants to become a woman!”
Lost as he had been in his own reflections, how could Nebu have realized that so many eyes were locked on him? He was shocked and confounded to discover the market’s collective gaze. They were women’s eyes—slaves’ eyes one and all—peering from behind their merchandise. Never before had Nebu stopped in the spice market, and in that very instant, the captive nudity of its population paralyzed him. Woken from his calculations of a
woman’s body in motion, he found himself surrounded by a hostile crowd. He was a man, the only man, and he wanted just one thing: to cover up his now naked body.
The women wouldn’t let him be.
“You thought she was off to see her boyfriend?” they teased.
Nebu’s body refused to obey any of his wishes; his repeated coughs kept stripping him bare. The women started making comments, trying to outdo each other. Each time he sneezed, they laughed and clapped their hands.
“God is giving you the punishment you deserve!”
But none of them knew just what Nebu was up to.
“Did you think she was cheating on you?”
“You don’t trust her, huh?”
“Oh, men!”
The woman who had just spoken erupted in a strange laugh, covering her mouth with the palms of her hands and doubling over, like a rooster dancing around a hen.
“He-a-heeee!”
Her friends replied in unison: “Woooooo-hoo!”
The woman with the orchestral laugh turned toward Nebu and got right up in his face, as if the laughing chorus of women gave her a voice she wouldn’t have had on her own. “So, you don’t trust your woman?”
Her laugh united the crowd. Even the woman who had spoken to the sculptor in a conciliatory tone now mocked him.
“Just look at this man,” she said to a few women who had stopped out of curiosity, now called as witnesses to masculine idiocy. “He’s so jealous he can’t even speak!”
“So jealous, let me tell you!”
“So excited that he can’t let his woman go anywhere, right?”
The impossible collection of gourds filled with colorful spices that she balanced on her head had turned her into a walking perfume store. She was talking and huffing with laughter, all at once. Everyone followed her lead. A few women left, dragging their children behind them, shocked by the brutal language of the marketplace, but others continued to heap shame on Nebu with their foul words.
Mount Pleasant Page 20