Mount Pleasant

by Patrice Nganang

  Father Vogt preferred not to imagine how the pope would react to this even if he was convinced that the Catholic Church would understand his motives. Besides, Pope Pius XI had never been to Africa. The prelate didn’t merely give God a familiar name—he called him Nshi, after the river everyone knew, the life source of the Bamum—Nji Shua’s disciples were also given names everyone recognized. People were heard crying out in joy because he’d just mentioned the name of a copyist or a miniaturist, a ceramist or a weaver. None of them had ever imagined that their uneventful life would one day be part of a great tale. At other points people heard tears, laughter, or a long murmur because, like an actor who can’t resist playing to the audience, Father Vogt couldn’t keep himself from hamming it up. All the listeners had recognized their names in the tale when they realized that the only one left unmentioned belonged to the man whom the father had come to convert first and foremost: the sultan. After inserting Njoya’s entire entourage into his tale, the priest turned back toward the monarch, setting in motion the next phase of his elaborate battle plan.

  “What happens to Nji Shua?” Njoya asked, impatient to know the rest.

  “He is betrayed.”

  A shock wave ran through the crowd.

  “What?”

  “Betrayed?”

  “Yes,” said the priest, taking a deep breath. “Betrayed.”

  Njoya smiled and hit his cane on the ground. He recalled his discussions with the missionary Göhring, the only white he had ever called his brother. He saw once more the night of his confession, which he had never gotten over: Manga, Samba, Ngosso. Yes, the sultan had been in power for too many years not to know that Father Vogt’s love story could only end with betrayal.

  “By whom?” he asked, for that was the only possible surprise.

  “Who dared…” an indignant voice added.

  There, Father Vogt didn’t use a familiar name; he stuck with the story’s original. The fire he’d lit in his listeners’ eyes would have burned the traitor to ashes if he’d singled out someone in the crowd. He looked around slowly, articulating each of the syllables as he said, “Ju-das.”

  “Judas?”

  “Yes, Judas.”

  “Judas what?”

  “Judas Iscariot.”

  “Who is this Judas Iscariot?” the listeners asked each other, as if talking to strangers.

  “Point him out!”

  “He’s a character in the story,” said Father Vogt quickly, raising his hands. “Just a man in the story.”

  Everyone felt reassured. A man with a name that ugly could only be a traitor, they said. The crucifixion was an easy part of the story to tell. Father Vogt knew it by heart, of course, and he elaborated it dramatically, hammering each of Calvary’s nails into his listeners’ hands. The horror he saw traced on their faces, he had planned it all out, right down to the silence that followed the end of the Passion. He closed his book, wiped his burning mouth, bowed before the sultan, took time to catch his breath, and then disappeared into the crowd. The fate of Nji Shua would make its own way into everyone’s soul overnight. The smile on Njoya’s face gave the priest hope that maybe, this time, he had reached his goal.

  The night was calm. But the next morning Mount Pleasant awoke to women crying and children running every which way in the corridors.

  “He’s dead,” voices shouted.

  “What?”

  “He is dead!”

  “Who?”

  “He is dead!”

  The men rushed into the surrounding woods, where they found the body of the carpenter, Nji Shua, crucified on the branches of a eucalyptus. No one shuddered. Not even Njoya, for he had been convinced by the Story of Stories. With the zeal of the newly converted, everyone waited three days, staring at the face of the dead man, who, they were certain, couldn’t fail to rise from the dead and complete the already mythical tableau of his suffering. There were even some so zealous that they swore that Nji Shua’s beard had gone white; others insisted that hair was growing in his bald spot. All these rumors contributed to turning his cadaver into a legend. The wives he had treated so badly during his lifetime declared him a saint.

  Everyone was disappointed that Father Vogt didn’t come back to finish his story now that the hero’s crucifixion had taken place. If they failed to understand why the priest, instead of rejoicing, was so unwilling to witness his Judgment Day in person, they refused to believe the tale told by the catechumens, who said they’d found him in the church, damning the population and offering up curses that the children wouldn’t complete: “That son of a…”

  “Nji Shua won’t rise from the dead,” someone said after the fourth day. “He won’t rise.”

  It was the familiar voice of someone who’d always looked upon the French skeptically. The chief architect hadn’t even gone to see the body of the man with whom he’d built so many buildings. He just pronounced the final words: “He will not rise.”

  “Wait, Nji, you’ll see,” people replied. “A dead man doesn’t run away.”

  “Does that mean he can rise?” Nji Mama asked.

  Some argued.

  “The white man is strong,” they said. “Why don’t you accept it?”

  “If someone is stronger than you are, just carry his bag.”

  “It’s only been three days and one morning since Nji Shua’s death.”

  “And one morning.”

  “Not even four full days.”

  “Not even four days.”

  After the fifth day, when the colonial police came to investigate—alerted by the stench of the body people refused to bury, which had filled the whole city with its asphyxiating miasmas—a woman accused everyone of having interrupted the miracle. It was the dead man’s third wife.

  “He just married me,” she said. “How could he be dead already?”

  “Go take care of your children,” people replied. “Now you are a widow.”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  “Well, you’re free to find another father for your child.”

  Ibrahim announced the news to his brother.

  “You were right,” he said. “Nji Shua is truly dead.”

  The carpenter’s tragedy had as many public repercussions as the priest’s humiliation. By using Bamum names for his story, Father Vogt had lifted the violent master, who whipped his apprentices and wives, to an unparalleled height. Suddenly the possibility of becoming a saint had appeared before Nji Shua, along with the promise of a paradise he had already forgotten about. Who would spit on the beatification? There was only one thing he had to do, and it required courage. Nji Shua, long accustomed to living the life of a villain, had clenched his teeth and accepted that he would die like a hero. His apprentices didn’t refuse the nails he distributed; they had been waiting a long time for a chance at revenge. Ah, Nji Shua didn’t even cry out when they pierced the palms of his hands and his side. Being crucified was the only good thing that could still happen to him in this life.

  Yet the crucifixion of Nji Shua also marked the beginning of the end of Mount Pleasant. Who would agree to live in the shadow of a master who hadn’t been brave enough to live his life to the end? The memory of his life was as shameful as that of his death, and it soiled a whole other story that hadn’t yet been told. Their collective effort to wipe his face from their memories was a failure. The dead man was buried under the tree where he’d had himself killed, like a dog. Even the tree died soon after. It wasn’t just that Father Vogt’s miracle didn’t take place; he had dragged the colonial police right into Mount Pleasant’s courtyard, and that evoked bad memories of far-off Foumban. Each person recalled the dramatic start of Njoya’s exile and the upheavals of the French administration. No need to say that the time for revenge had come for Nji Mama. He had always looked at the priest with suspicion, but had never thought that vengeance would taste so sweet.

  “I told you,” he repeated to anyone willing to listen. “I told you not to trust that man.”

  There w
eren’t many to contradict him. Even his younger brother kept silent.

  Njoya heard the story of Judgment Day differently. The tragedy of the man who had taken a curse upon himself and asked to be crucified to satisfy his deep need for salvation reminded the sultan of the illusory depths and false promises of tales. Njoya was disappointed, but he was certain that the dead man hadn’t just written another version of his life, he had put an end to stories altogether. After this, no other story would make any sense. There were no more delicious stories to listen to or interesting folktales to tell. Each sentence was clichéd, each word tarnished by blood’s purple ink. The idea that the only thing possible after this story’s conclusion was that every story come true filled the sultan with sudden happiness. Even the drying up of words in the mouths of storytellers and the false promises of stories seemed unimportant in light of his ecstasy. That day, he got up and walked without his wheelchair. He had come through the world’s stories and discovered that the only thing that remained was the palpable reality of the present, all stories being but the prologue to life.

  “I am emerging from a very long dream,” he said when he reached the main courtyard and the sun’s caress. “A very long dream.”

  He hadn’t staggered.

  9

  The Virtues of a Drawing Well Done

  Over the long course of his ailment Njoya had understood that his body was his true master. He had become the slave of his flesh and bones. If the invention of a writing system was due to his will to give form to the world’s multiple voices—much as he had done with the Shümum language, drawing on the other languages spoken around him—his grudging memory, his trembling hands, and his feeble body had taught him that now, in his chambers in Mount Pleasant, he had reached the end of a long path. The only thing left after the end of so many stories was to retrace the route of his life. To begin everything over again, he thought. To live it to the fullest.

  Faced with the thousands of names of people whose stories had been told to him by hundreds of voices, he finally understood that he had been allowed to contemplate the infinite variety of life in order to notice that in each section, however small, the universe’s dramas play out. After Nji Shua’s failed resurrection, he opened his eyes and saw fragments of unfinished stories floating in the air like butterflies. Stories taking the place of religion, each offering identical promises of bliss. What made him sad at the high point of his newfound joy is that Nebu erased his slate after each storytelling session. Njoya had tears in his eyes thinking about those thousands of lost stories.

  He recalled how he had remained motionless when listening to the stories that had given him the most joy, and how he’d almost succumbed to those that had threatened to wipe him out. He wanted to explore the world of sensations again, to come back to life; he wanted to become an animal, a two-headed snake that shifted at will between two destinies. He wanted to become a lizard that lost its suddenly burdensome tail. He wanted the power to take apart his nightmares by chewing them patiently; yes, he wanted to chew on the story of Ngosso Din, among others, to chew on it calmly so he could swallow it at will. He wanted to become the master of his memory and, like a cow, rekindle the memory of feasts from the midpoint of his life, to digest and savor them anew. Yes, he wanted to hold the beauty of words immobile before him.

  Njoya recalled how he had invented his writing system. He recalled asking everyone around him to draw life’s most important things. Nobles, free men and women, slaves, children, blacksmiths, sculptors: everyone had set to work diligently and summarized their lives on a slate. They had all brought to life the encyclopedia of their experience, the well-considered dictionary of their dreams, their wisdom and their fantasies, their hopes and the facts of their existence, the arts and trades common in the sultanate; and they had drawn it all on many slates. Njoya remembered how he had all those slates washed and then had drunk down the collected water. Then he had fallen asleep.

  Never before had his belly hurt as much as that night of his epiphany. He had called his shadow ten times during the night to help him go to the bathroom. And when he finally closed his eyes for a few hours, holding his behind with both hands, a dream had unrolled the encyclopedia of life, broken down into minimalistic forms. All the forms of the world were encapsulated in his mind in distinctive figurines. Was he in a trance, still dreaming, or already awake when he wrote down the first pictograms of his Lewa alphabet? He no longer knew. He who had eaten death and life and, in his body, transformed them so he could bend them to his will, he was the happiest man on earth. Because his dream wasn’t dead. He had kept it alive in a book, a lerewa. He wanted to retrace the path of his life, but this time in reverse. The joy the past gave him transformed his awakening in Mount Pleasant into a promise. After the fiasco of Judgment Day, Njoya still hungered for the quest promised by Father Vogt, for the story that would save him from the tunnels of his thoughts by capturing the essence of ephemeral beauty. He still thirsted for that one story that would give his body back its full powers, as his alphabet had previously done for the universe’s forms. He knew, yes, he knew that his work couldn’t stop at the borders of Foumban; the storytellers who had visited him in Mount Pleasant had opened the windows of his life to the universe. He had always needed a translator to understand the surprises of the world that were revealed in their stories, but this time he wanted to relive the ecstasy by listening to them differently—in all their purity.

  He looked at Nji Mama, who had participated with him in all his experiments in Foumban. The chief architect, the man who had been at the origin of each of his inventions and who had first seen through Father Vogt’s ruse, had nothing to say. Njoya didn’t insist. The truth was that exile had had a devastating effect on the imagination of the illustrious master. Wounded in his soul, all his certainties unsettled, robbed of his greatest artistic project, the Palace of All Dreams, Nji Mama had let rage cloud his tormented eyes and anger take possession of his hands. The shadow of his boubous and the familiar sound of his sandals in the corridors were still anchored in Mount Pleasant’s memory, but he was now only the silhouette of the man he’d been in Foumban.

  Njoya also turned toward the master blacksmith, Monlipèr. The old engineer, though he had once built a printing machine for the sultan, was silent. The two masters were like baobabs planted in flowerpots. The growing roots would ultimately destroy the pot holding them. Yaoundé seemed to have dried up their spirit. But Ibrahim, the youngest of the council, smiled. He was that plant that only needs new soil to come back to life.

  “Alareni,” he proposed, “you have been writing all this time.”

  Njoya listened.

  “Maybe now you should draw.”

  Draw? Where could Njoya begin? The faces of all his visitors crossed his mind. He recalled that they were as different as life’s surprises. Some were as black as ebony, others had the fair complexion of Arabs. There were some, like the Nubians, who were so black they looked blue. Visitors like Father Vogt were white. Some were tall while others were short, even though they were grandparents. There were fat ones, too, as well as others who were thin. Where to begin?

  If someone had told Njoya that what he was composing, with his trembling hands in the half-light of his bedchamber, were the fragile forms of a nation that he hadn’t yet named because she hadn’t yet been born, perhaps he would have just laughed, for his quest aimed most of all to give a face to shapes that had become invisible and that were, moreover, too diverse to be truly unified. Was it worth the trouble to give them a name too? Ibrahim made him understand that an image would be closer to life’s thousand faces than thousands of words would be, and that the face of a mother portrayed the infinite stories of maternity much better than a flood of words. Ibrahim became his guide, unleashing the waterfall of his words, for the master calligrapher was right. Njoya recognized it. Yes, why not draw?

  “Why not draw?” he said, smiling broadly.

  This was the first time the sultan took the artistic ad
vice of the younger brother over that of the elder. In fact, Njoya’s teetering body had already accustomed him to sharpening his eyes. He retraced the path he’d followed when inventing his writing system, this time backward. He went from letters to syllabograms, then to phonograms and pictograms. He did it in response to the request of the young master, who had already seen him draw shapes using the letters of the Lewa alphabet. Rather than a failed scribe, Njoya became an alert illustrator, and he began to look at the shapes he traced on his slate with surprise. Instead of taking beauty apart with his words, he discovered it in its original form. He let it flower like a frail daisy amidst a passel of leaves.

  “The eye is essential,” the monarch said, exultant.

  Nji Mama didn’t understand at first, but Ibrahim was the master of these sessions.

  Njoya continued. “The ear comes second, in fact.”

  One day he turned around and looked at his shadow, who, standing behind him, was fanning his neck; he looked at Nebu as if he had never seen him before. The boy started.

  “You say my shadow is mute?” he asked.

  That’s how the lad became the best story Njoya ever drew, and how Sara became the sultan’s model. By chance—but is it really just chance?—she became the prototype for the remarkable voices floating all around.

  10

  The Sultan’s Calculations

  Foumban, 1922. Never had Nebu felt so much pain in his body, never! Confined to his bed for weeks, he couldn’t even move a hand. He couldn’t move his feet. It was as if he were condemned to take on the sultan’s suffering in his own body, but eight years earlier and in his own way. Isn’t it sublime that God invented mothers? Bertha flooded her son’s suffering body with love. Because, in his suffering, Nebu had become once again the son that women had torn away from her, the son she could love to her heart’s content. “All of this because of a girl,” she murmured, hot tears running down her cheeks.