Today I can say this: the future was coming quickly. Soon Ngutane will come back to Yaoundé, divorced, having left her husband, who, in her absence, had become an “infidel” and taken a fifth wife. She will marry Ibrahim, her dear “Ibrahimou,” whom she has loved since childhood. She will be the scribe’s fourth wife. And that’s not all: Madame Dugast will for once forget her distaste for polygamy, which always chilled her love for “everything Bamum.” She will happily bless the marriage of “her best friends in Foumban, and offer them a special gift from Europe”: an Atmos clock, made in 1928. For years that wedding will set the standard for fashion.
Back to the moment at hand. Njoya’s eyes didn’t, in fact, see such a complicated future ahead. They had fallen on the photo of the man in a dark jacket under the newspaper’s headline. Is that or is that not Hirtler? he wondered.
Thirty years had passed, and his memory played tricks on him.
Have the Germans accepted this? he also asked himself.
He recalled how angry the Bamum had gotten when that stupid German officer, Lieutenant Hirtler, had sat on his throne; that was in 1903. Distant photos of a distant life, he thought, and handed the newspaper to Nji Mama. The life all around him was livelier. The cries, the laughter, the sunny faces, the theatrical gestures—all made Njoya happy. And then all those blacks dressed in Western clothes! Men going about on bicycles. They pedaled fast, zigzagging through the pedestrians, unaware of their graceful movements. The sultan thought he recognized Ngosso Din in the crowd. He looked again, but it was someone else. Soon he also thought he recognized Nebu, Muluam, and then Ngbatu, before realizing that the city was just playing another trick on him. All these people walking or riding or moving toward a dream, or maybe a nightmare that no one could foresee. They were like cats chasing their tails endlessly, turning their shadows into a circle until they fainted.
“Read this,” said Ibrahim’s voice from the back of the car. “President of the Assembly, that’s what Göhring has become…”
But Njoya didn’t want to listen anymore. If we’re to live with it, the past must be dreamed anew. But what about the future? The easy life in Foumban, where lazy pages sat in front of the palace, was a distant echo of the bouquet of life bursting out in this metropolis. It was as if the whole country offered itself up jovially, in a shadow dance, to the sultan who had come back to life. In front of a pet store, a black woman in extravagant clothes caught the attention of the Bamum men. Nji Mama saw her first.
“That one, she’s something else,” he whispered.
He was talking to his brother, who had shut himself off from the world by reading the newspaper, but his words alerted the three other men. The woman was holding a brightly colored umbrella over her head, and with her free hand she was pulling a dog, a particularly ugly creature that refused to budge and was barking terribly. None of the men in the car had ever seen such a pooch.
“Is that a rat or a dog?” Nji Mama asked.
Ibrahim answered, “Go ask the woman.”
“Is it a dog or a man?” Njoya added, with the same good humor as the two brothers.
The three men burst out laughing. The paramount chief, too. Then he looked in the rearview mirror. Only Nebu hadn’t reacted. The little boy was clutching his chest.
“Don’t you want a dog like that, Sara?” the chief asked.
20
The Surprising Blindness of the Polygamous
“Sara?” repeated the three Bamum.
In Mount Pleasant, everyone knew her as Nebu. Since she had no voice, she couldn’t contradict the name that the matron had given her. What’s more, at the end of Bertha’s thousand tales, hadn’t the soul of the lost son immigrated to the girl’s body? Hadn’t the dead man from long ago come back to life in this belly that had digested his torture in one story after another? For two years, Sara’s body hadn’t betrayed her secret. The hot stone with which Bertha flattened her breasts had done its job, you could say, but it was also as if the little girl’s decision to give Nebu another chance had suspended her development. Even at twelve years of age, she still didn’t have breasts.
Meanwhile, Njoya had taken her as his model, keeping himself busy by drawing the features of her face. Until then, he’d gotten only as far as the shoulders. He had struggled with this portrait of a shadow—it was the first he’d done. The definition of the eyes, the nose, the mouth, and the ears had given him the most trouble. That the boy had feminine features had helped him a bit, since that made him stand out. Isn’t beauty found at the intersection between total opposites? But Njoya just couldn’t finish Nebu’s portrait, despite all his efforts. His hands were weak, of course. Or was it his mind? Who could have told him that it was the abyss of Nebu’s body that escaped him? That it was the boy’s hundred faces that disconcerted him.
Ibrahim had encouraged him, revealing with a thousand words of praise the precision of his lines and sometimes even holding his hand and pushing it along, but to no avail. The sultan had structured the boy’s body around the face, which he had reduced to a few simple lines. He believed he had finally captured its essence when his friend revealed something unbelievable to him: The young boy he had spent his days drawing was actually a girl? The shock he felt was that of an artist who has for too long remained blind to his model, only suddenly appreciating his essential beauty.
“You’re joking!”
It was Nji Mama who answered.
All eyes turned toward Sara.
“You are…” the master architect stammered.
“A girl?” his brother concluded.
Sara nodded. Nji Mama and Ibrahim had to hold themselves back from pulling down the boy’s clothes to reveal the young girl who had hidden herself for so long. How had she done it? There, in the middle of the lively city, among the most fervent voices of the central market, the surprised men were frozen inside the car, their eyes fixed on the silent girl.
“A girl?” Njoya repeated.
“Don’t tell me,” Charles Atangana interrupted, speaking to the polygamists who surrounded Sara, “that you don’t recognize the scent of a girl?”
He was so surprised by his friend the sultan’s dazed reaction that he could only laugh. Sara’s revelation was just too comical for that monogamist; he couldn’t believe that Njoya’s six hundred and eighty-one wives hadn’t taught him to recognize a woman.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t know either,” he insisted, addressing Nji Mama and Ibrahim, “despite all your wives.”
“A girl!” Njoya repeated.
And he remembered all the times Sara had seen him naked. Nji Mama recalled, as well, the law mandating that the sultan’s shadow be a boy. Never had he been so wrong. He also remembered Nebu’s shivering face the day the boy had arrived late to work and entered Njoya’s life as a model. Ibrahim recalled only the drawing sessions, and he, too, remained as still as a statue. As for Sara, she wasn’t shocked at all. For her, Nebu’s story was over. Not because she had lived to the end of her character’s fate, but because a few days before, she had gotten up and discovered spots of blood on her mat. She had run to Bertha, thinking it was Nebu’s tragedy that was making her bleed. The matron had burst out laughing and told her it was something she’d have to live with from then on.
“It’s your own blood,” she said.
Sara still couldn’t understand. Bertha continued, “Now you are a woman.”
Sara knew that her development could only signal the matron’s defeat. Yet that day she saw no sign of surrender in the matron’s eyes. In a certain sense, the belated mother had, by telling her story, liberated herself from her accursed life, from the suffering of her soul; now she could accept someone else’s daughter for who she was. A very belated liberation, the doyenne confided to me, for Sara was no longer a young girl, and then the palace laws were rather strict: the onset of a girl’s period marked the end of her stay with the matron; it was the sign that she should be sent to the sultan’s bedchamber. The matron’s farewells provoked S
ara’s compassion, and because of that compassion, Bertha looked upon the girl with loving eyes. It was a love that Bertha and Sara had both been searching for up to then. The matron accepted it, even if it had arrived through an unexpected doorway. She kissed the new young woman and said her name for the first time. “Sara.”
She repeated Sara’s name several times, as if she were inventing her own liberation on the foundation of someone else’s. That day, Bertha left Mount Pleasant.
The capital swallowed up the rest of her story.
So we return to Charles Atangana and the Golden Cadillac.
“That’s my brother’s daughter, don’t you remember?” said the chief.
How could Njoya have remembered? He was rebuilding his memory step by step, one story after another, and it had taken him two years to regain the agility of his fingers, as well as the liveliness of his eye. He had realized that even if he had found his mind’s vitality once more, he still needed to breathe if he wanted to really live. Women were fighting all around the automobile, their faces smashed up against the windows. They wanted to show these luminaries the wonders they had for sale. The guards, overwhelmed, pushed them away, but couldn’t silence their voices:
“Onions?”
“Tomatoes? Tomatoes?”
“Chief! Chief!”
“Salt?”
“Do you want hot pepper?”
“Oranges?”
“Cheaper!”
“The cheapest in Yaoundé!”
“In Cameroon!”
“In the world!”
The market’s rich voice grew louder and, in a gust, swallowed up the vehicle in which a secret was being transformed into the beginning of a woman’s story. Because in the silent interior of a car, surrounded by those women, Charles Atangana began to tell Sara’s story. There in the center of Yaoundé, with his words he peeled away the layers of the still-silent girl as if she were an onion, even as the women outside waved the spices they wanted to sell in front of him. That’s where he revealed to Njoya the girl he had once offered him as a present. It could happen no other way, for Nebu’s story was that of a girl, as well as of a city. It was the story of the capital of a country that revealed itself in its hidden truths, in the woven pathways that echoed to the four corners of the earth and shocked the world, distant and threatening, in order to distill its own limitless perfumes.
How could Njoya have lived in this city for so long without catching a glimpse of its stories? The faces of all those women in the windows, yes, all those faces, contorted by words but rendered mute by the windowpanes that Nji Mama and Ibrahim had closed tight. Didn’t all those faces suddenly reveal the infinite variables of this singular story that was taking shape on the chief’s lips? The essential joy of this place that had brought the sultan back to life: How could he, Njoya, not have felt it for so long?
“I have been blind to life,” he said.
“No, dear friend,” Charles Atangana corrected him, “you were sick.”
“And you have begun to see again,” added Ibrahim.
Nji Mama added his words to those of the others: “To hear.”
“To talk.”
“To smell.”
“To walk.”
“To live.”
Looking at Nebu, Njoya now saw a girl, a girl dressed as a boy, who shivered as she turned her face toward him and timidly smiled. The sultan loved what he saw and smiled back. For now he could finish the incomplete portrait without hesitating, drawing the torso of the girl, the smiling girl. Yes, Sara was smiling, and her smile transformed her body into happiness. What Njoya discovered—the doyenne there in her courtyard was sure of it—was the beginning of her own story.
The only problem? It was the chief who was telling the story to his friends. She wouldn’t have had the courage, or the right, to speak up herself, even if the sultan hoped she would.
“Her name is Sara,” Charles Atangana began, looking at Sara in the rearview mirror and smiling at her as well.
Sara was pure joy.
“What else can I say?” the chief continued, then paused thoughtfully.
He started with the end, which was also the beginning. He told the story of his friend, Joseph Ngono, and how he had survived the racist thugs in Berlin, then died in a cocoa plantation, “back in his own country, right where Mount Pleasant stands today.”
“It’s still not a closed case,” he said, “but it’ll come.”
He paused.
“Yes, it’ll come, even if it takes twenty more years.”
He revealed, however, that the case had gone cold because High Commissioner Marchand had concluded, after reading the reports of his officials, that Joseph Ngono had died in a fire he’d set himself.
“It’s just not logical,” insisted Charles Atangana.
The paramount chief didn’t want to believe that “his brother” could have set fire to his cocoa plantation.
“He can’t have done that to me.”
Then he said that he couldn’t hold back his tears each time he thought about it; he felt responsible for the death of Joseph Ngono, who had left the wedding reception without telling anyone. Yes, the chief admitted that he hadn’t yet found the right words to console his dear Juliana, his friend’s younger sister.
“Your father was my brother, do you know that?” he asked Sara in their language, still looking in the rearview mirror that showed him only the girl’s face.
Speaking to the sultan, he added, “We were like this.”
Saying “like this” in French, he pressed his two index fingers tightly against each other on top of the steering wheel.
“She grew up with her uncle,” he said. “Owona. But I always hoped she would come live with us.”
He fell silent.
“You are my daughter, do you know that?” he continued in Ewondo. “But I also wanted you to live with my friend here.”
After thinking for a moment, he corrected himself. “With my brother here, you know?”
Sara hadn’t stopped smiling. After all, what did he know, Charles Atangana? If she had told him that several souls sparkled in her body, would he have believed her? Still, Sara smiled because she realized that he was looking at her in the rearview mirror; but when she looked in that mirror, what she saw was her own face. The chief looked at her with love-filled eyes. Like Njoya, who hadn’t stopped looking at her these past few days as he was drawing her portrait so badly, could he decipher the tangle of her features? Ah, Sara didn’t have the right to interrupt him and to speak for herself, in her own voice, in the midst of these men. If she had told her story, however, if she had opened her mouth in that car, she would have told the story of a mother of shadows, whose name Njoya certainly wouldn’t have known, even though she had trained the majority of his wives. Sara would have described how, even though she was just a little girl, she had transformed Bertha’s once terrifying grip into the embrace of a truly loving mother.
But Sara also would have told how she herself had invented this maternity by consenting to become the son Bertha had never stopped searching for in girls’ bodies. Sara would have told how she had listened to a story that wasn’t meant for a nine-year-old girl, just to awaken the breathless mother in the body of a menopausal woman. And the story of that mother would have been Nebu’s, the master artist the sultan surely would have remembered with horror. Sara knew that the sculptor’s story would have brought tears from all the men around her. Would they have had tears on their cheeks as well if she’d told them the story of her own life, after the death of her father in Charles Atangana’s model cocoa plantation? Would they have cried if she had told them the story of her mother, Sala, whom she’d never seen again? Or the story of her brother, Carl, who had come to visit her only once and then to say, despite his young age, that he wanted to become a tirailleur “because then he could kill whomever he wanted, including Uncle Owona”? The chief would have certainly exploded in anger if she had revealed the truth about whose hands had set fire to
his plantation. Or, rather, he would have said that he had always known.
“I always knew that he was,” he’d say, “that he was a … piece of shit.”
Sara smiled, but in truth, she was the one in tears. Was it because in this suffocating market the spices strangled her with their menacing odors? Was it the silence of all those women waving outside the closed windows? Or was it the thousand and one stories of the world that had come together inside that car, in that city? Suddenly a force took hold of her stomach, her lungs, her throat, her nose, binding them in one treacherous flame. Sara stiffened, opened her mouth, and with one hand, one foot, searched for support; she grabbed hold of the car seat, of her own knees and the knees of Nji Mama and Ibrahim, and then her own chest; she opened her nose wide to suck in the oxygen missing from the car, then closed her mouth and opened it once more, violently this time, and produced the sneeze of the century: “Ahh … ahhh … ahhh … aaatchoo!”
Ibrahim’s newspaper went flying. When Sara reopened her eyes, the whole world’s frozen face was fixed on her. Her monumental sneeze had made the Golden Car jump twice. The women all around stopped dead. The girl wiped her eyes and her nose with the back of her hand, astonished by the silence her voice had created. The men watched her closely.
“Akié,” Charles Atangana finally asked, holding out a handkerchief. “Do you want to swallow us all up or what?”
He was smiling.
EPILOGUE
This is not a story to pass on.
—Toni Morrison, Beloved
Untitled
History is a House of a Thousand Tales. It’s a compound with many bedrooms, courtyards, corridors, passages, doors, and windows; a labyrinth, yes, a zigzagging concatenation of memory’s chains, but also a house of several floors; an agglomeration of whispers, murmurs, gossip, anecdotes, cries, jokes, and laughter; a perpetual reminder. It’s a school for the young and a projection of dreams; a banquet for zombies—the insatiable masses—and a balm for us all. It’s the only real judge of our errors and our successes. A cruel master that stands before us. History is our only future. It is easy to imagine a past world, where a reified African would meet a white man, reified as well, in a tragic duel, in a battle for life or death, the first armed with an arrow, the second a cannon! How naïve to put one’s feet into the colonizer’s chains, to take up once again the struggle of the native man, even though we were born and raised independent. But what about the overwhelming wave of nausea that rises up within at the sight of this continent running blindly into the devil’s hands, or when History rushes headlong into tragedy’s camp. Sara’s story reminded me that when the thunder of the First World War awoke Europe’s capitals with its mad songs, its destructive hymns also echoed in several African cities.
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