When the Plums Are Ripe

by Patrice Nganang

  I cannot fathom what effect it must have had on you, a Negro—that is to say, not belonging to a dominant race—to have been named governor of the French colony of Lake Chad. I do not know if you have or have not expressed your colored jubilation with one of those beautiful dances, so popular in your homeland, performed with bare feet and exposed buttocks, or if you have celebrated the happy event with a new tattoo (another charming custom that sailors have learned on your shores) of a beautiful “equality, fraternity, and liberty” scrawled from your sternum to your belly button. But I expect you drank champagne as are wont to do … those you administer, even as they swath themselves in the vainglory of the battle waged at Mentana, finding succor in the broad and sagging bosom of the Third Republic between Montmartre and the Eiffel Tower. This revenge by your snub-nosed race for the traditional tyranny of whites must have seemed to you worthy of an epic. And you will have certainly imagined your future life as a military officer, wearing high boots and a top hat, your shirt untucked. The celebrations held upon your arrival—the white faces of your new subjects bowed in a sign of democratic respect, the grace of their ladies, tinged by cupidity and gloom—will no doubt appeal to your simple and primitive soul. But, please, do not allow yourself to succumb to nostalgia for your native tom-toms …

  That’s where I stop! I must stop! The future was still trying to sort out its vocabulary, but no black man, whether a colonial governor or a tirailleur, a rascal or anyone else, could ever imagine a future where they’d read such shit. For the Antillean governor of Chad, that letter was proof that the dice had been rolled.

  Meanwhile, in Edéa, the future was appearing to the Old Man in grandiose visions that no one wanted to listen to anymore. Because, really, you shouldn’t push things. M’bangue had for the fifth time in a row dreamed of Hitler. There are those—and they were many—who had already closed their ears to the phrase he kept on repeating: “he committed suicide.” They didn’t even have the patience to hear him describe Berlin, as he promised to do. Time, and especially age, must have softened his head, they said. His sporadic visions of the apocalypse were the only things that lit up his eyes, and that really did nothing to convince the skeptical. Some interpreted his dreams as foretelling France’s defeat, because, between us, this time France couldn’t count on the Americans to save her, as the whispered voices put it. Bassa land had much to hold against Germany, but even more against France. In reality, the heart of this forest had never belonged to Paris. Upon hearing news of the French defeat, there were those in Edéa who danced in the street. The tirailleurs had smashed a few teeth, but hadn’t been able to silence the crowd. Here the belligerents’ worldwide conflict had the feel of a boxing match that divided living rooms, with members of the same family supporting opposite sides. Some, mainly the older ones, remembered the first round of the fight that had taken place in their courtyards back in 1915. A family legend: Fritz, for example, still wrote Cameroon with a K, German-style: Kamerun. M’bangue’s dreams had deep, historic roots, but everyone around knew who was the loopy boxer.

  13

  The Man of Letters

  Just to say that, when all was said and done, the group that had been meeting every morning for the past two months in Mininga’s Bar stood out like a sore thumb. Take a moment to imagine the scene: France has fallen and French Equatorial Africa has rallied to the Resistance and General de Gaulle; M’bangue keeps dreaming of Hitler. Meanwhile, in the Bassa forest, six fellows are spending these dark days reading French poetry. They had to do it. Obviously, stranger things were happening: France was discovering the daily routines of collaboration, for example. Pouka smiled as he recalled his promise to Father Jean, that he wouldn’t start some sort of commune. He thought about Louis Auguste Blanqui and all the other madmen of French history, and recognized that he himself lacked the courage for that sort of dream. Nor did he share Rabelais’s goal of founding a utopian Abbey of Thélème. It was hard enough for him to know that the villagers made expressions of polite surprise or sarcasm behind his back; when he’d arrived, they’d seen him as a civil servant rather than a writer, and couldn’t understand why every morning he headed over to a disreputable bar run by a wolowolos.

  “You say he’s a writer?”

  Try explaining to those villagers that he was a visionary, and their conclusion would be simple:

  “It’s the French who did that to him.”

  In truth, Pouka’s doubts only really caught up to him the day he arrived and found the bar empty. Mininga, her serving girls, and the three regulars were the only ones there. Suddenly aware of the seductive powers of those stylish women, he sat down on a crate and waited, gazing out at the thousand trees that revealed nothing more than their trunks, dappled with red and black, and at the village that gazed back at him with amusement. Women passed by. One elbowed her companion and then waved at Pouka as she whispered to the woman, who in turn stared at Pouka, greeting him with a broad smile and respectful nod. Men hurrying by returned his hello automatically, then gave a start and waved again enthusiastically, surprised to see him there. They kept asking how things were in the city, how life was for him in Yaoundé, trying, it seemed, to confirm what they already knew. Some of the ruder ones were too surprised by the sight of Pouka there in front of Mininga’s Bar to do anything more than stammer out the same stupid phrase:

  “Oh, I didn’t recognize you, my son!”

  With the slew of scandalized exclamations he’d heard from our Sita and her women still ringing in his ears, Pouka discovered the face of small-town hypocrisy.

  “Yes, you did see that,” he heard as well, “that’s M’bangue’s son.”

  “Wandafoot!”

  Thinking he was seeing things, the man turned back to take another look.

  “Good day, my son,” he said, with a great show of respect, a broad smile plastered on his face.

  Pouka responded to his greeting with a bow of his head.

  “Good day, father.”

  What imbeciles! he thought. His former disdain for villagers came rushing back. He really thought he had tamped down the women’s anger over the to-do with Bilong. That morning, his solitude showed that he’d clearly failed. Pouka watched the people passing by and realized the peasant women had gotten the better of him. He knew them all too well, oh yes, he was their son, after all. He knew the details of their treachery. He heard what those men whispered to each other: not that he had fallen, but that he’d surely been chased out of the city, and that even his father was losing his mind over it. That M’bangue, to make matters worse, had gone half blind. That he was possessed by witchcraft—that was why he kept dreaming about Hitler! “That’s the Old Man’s son? You’re joking!”

  “He’s the one who wanted to corrupt Bilong?”

  Happily, the sainted plum took it upon itself to punish these troublemakers, for the woman who’d just spoken slipped on a pit—tossed there by the grilled plantain vendor—that she’d been too distracted to notice. The woman kept on chattering, despite the impossibly heavy load she carried. Her friend was just barely able to keep her from falling, but the basin full of fruit that she’d been carrying went flying out all over the ground, much to the amusement of everyone there. Pouka rushed over to help her gather up her mangoes and oranges. Embarrassed, the woman stammered, “Pardon me, papa, pardon me, papa.”

  When he escaped from the confusion, the writer found Philothée sitting in his chair and trembling. The boy was out of breath. He looked like he’d been running, or that he’d just gotten out of a brawl. Pouka hadn’t seen him come out of the forest.

  “You are late,” he began dryly, before switching quickly to the fatherly tone he’d adopted since his humiliating confrontation with our Sita. “What’s wrong?”

  Philothée didn’t answer.

  “Where is everyone?” he asked, beginning to worry.

  Philothée was clearly the last person he expected to see that morning. He’d realized long before that he’d made a mistake when h
e’d let this guy join the little circle. Was it pure stupidity that made his eyes go blank every time he was asked a question? Pouka wouldn’t have been surprised if one day he just stopped coming. And now, on this morning of surprises, he was the only one to show up! Couldn’t have been more ironic. Thanks to this unexpected turn of events, he sidled over to the boy and realized that, as well as being out of breath, Philothée was struggling to control a stutter that made his eyes cloud over, made him weigh each syllable, massaging it, cajoling it, shaping ever so carefully in the trembling fullness of his mouth the word he wanted to say.

  Pouka didn’t recall him stuttering like that when he’d interviewed him on the first day, or in any of the sessions since, but on this day he was too happy that at least this one member of the group had shown up to press the point. Instead, he changed the topic.

  Or rather, came back to it.

  “Where is everyone?” he asked again.

  Philothée lined up all the vowels and consonants of the word he wanted to say, stared blankly around, as if begging the recalcitrant syllables to let themselves be spoken.

  “In the ff … ff…” Pause. “Fields.”

  It was August, plum season. How could Pouka have forgotten? That morning his father’s house had emptied out, too, when everyone headed to the fields. He’d gotten up at seven o’clock—that is to say, they’d let him sleep in; they were obviously used to his city ways. Still, he was surprised none of the members of the little circle had mentioned the day before that they wouldn’t be there. Yet Philothée’s beaming face expressed an even greater certainty.

  “And you,” he asked, “aren’t you going to the fields?”

  Pouka immediately regretted the question, for Philothée began to stutter beseechingly.

  “Read,” he said. And Pouka understood he had made a choice, even if he didn’t have the words in him to lay out the whole story.

  He chose poetry, Pouka repeated to himself, although he wasn’t quite certain this was what the boy had wanted to say. Still, he didn’t forget what Philothée had shown him with just one or two words: that the alphabet can take possession of a soul. That letters are inscribed deep in a body’s flesh. That words find their way out in bursts. That every sentence is a prayer. Which means that each poem is a hymn. That day he led the class with just one member, the one who had to wrestle the hardest with the letters of the alphabet that were buried in his gut. But the struggle he saw in Philothée’s eyes each time he tried to say a word or a phrase helped him to devise the group’s motto: “Welcome to all men of letters!”

  It was a sincere invitation addressed to all who weren’t there that day. Pouka hadn’t yet begun to see the alphabet as the real matrix of poetry, but he would soon enough. What he knew was that he’d just discovered the first lettered man of his utopia: Philothée.

  “Are you trying to chase away all my customers?” Mininga asked when he told her about his discovery that day.

  She was right. Still, the idea that he was building his literate society in a bar made him smile.

  “The bordello of letters,” he murmured to himself, looking silently in turn at the woman, her serving girls, and the grilled plantain vendor. “That is poetry.”

  “What’s that, now, my dear?” Mininga asked.

  “Give us two beers,” he shot back.

  He was happy to seal the pact that now joined him with his very first lettered man. And then he tossed a coin to the woman selling grilled plantains, who was looking at him like a hungry dog.

  “Two plantains and four plums.”

  He stared out into the flame trees and the forest beyond.

  Edéa’s forest.

  14

  The Daydreams of a Solitary Woodcutter

  Which brings us back to the forest … Hebga hadn’t expected Pouka to turn back into the personal troubadour he’d been as a child. He’d given it some thought, smiling because his little brother had become a writer, but was then distracted by the women’s voices filtering through the trees. He stopped his exercises and looked in the direction of the noises. Among the dozen or so women who were walking in a line through the bush, he recognized his mother, our Sita, at the head, followed by Ngo Bikaï. It was August, the time of the annual harvest festivals. “I’ll see you later, ladies,” he said apologetically. He smiled again at the thought of how close Fritz’s wife was to his mother. Those two don’t need me at all, he thought. Really, they were a real couple, a “husband-and-wife” pair, he told himself with a chuckle. He greeted the women politely. All of them jumped when they saw him in the bushes, but replied happily. When one woman made a face, he realized she must have thought he was taking a shit. He smiled.

  So Ngo Bikaï is our Sita’s right-hand woman, huh? he wondered as they disappeared in the distance, their voices no more than an echo.

  He thought that type of relationship was more common among men, but still it didn’t surprise him. To his mind, his mother was a man, and she always had been, even when his father was alive. He smiled again at the thought that our Sita needed a right arm, since he’d always thought what she needed was a pair of trousers. His mind turned back to Pouka, maybe because he was still impressed by the neatly pressed trousers his cousin had worn since his return. How did he manage to avoid all the dust? He could still see him as a little boy, hitting the ground with his right hand each time he, Hebga, completed a push-up, which was how the boy had learned to count. He saw him singing songs he made up, and thought of what he was now doing each morning, surrounded by his pupils in Mininga’s Bar, teaching poetry to the peasants. Time passes quickly, Hebga had to admit. Yes, Pouka had been acting quite strangely lately. His return to the village had everyone scratching their head.

  Ah, he was really a poet!

  During his training sessions, Hebga gave free rein to his thoughts: Was there anything that didn’t cross his mind? More to the point, was there anything he didn’t see? The forest is truth’s sanctuary. He would happen upon men crouching in the bushes, relieving themselves, and in typically Cameroonian fashion, they’d stand up to tell him off. “Hey, what are you looking at? Imbouc!” Sometimes he stumbled upon couples making love, and only the girl would cover her face. As for the man, ah! The other day, for example, he had seen Nguet by the river with her new red-hot lover. The two grabbed at each other hungrily, thinking they were all alone. Hebga had smiled because he wasn’t at all interested in our Nguet. He hoped they’d be happy, very happy, although that didn’t stop him from recalling the shape of her body, especially her heavy breasts, her hips “so round it seemed she was carrying weapons on both sides,” and then her buttocks. He stopped daydreaming about Nguet, mostly because the story he’d heard about her current rhythm man amused him so—who hadn’t heard that story? The guy’s answer made him laugh, and he lodged his ax deep in the trunk of a tree: “Mama, I’m living with a wolowolos.” Hebga repeated the phrase out loud right there in the middle of the forest. For him, Nguet was just a wolowolos.

  When the men told and retold that story, each added his own little bit. One said, “Mama, I’m living with a mamy nyanga,” while for another it was a mbrakata—each had their reasons. They all found Bilong’s phrase equally entertaining, for, in the end, it came down to: “Mama, I’m living with a whore.” The things kids say these days, am I right? The word “whore” had spread all over along with the story of the boy whom some called Bilong while others opted for Charles. All the men went wild over his carefully polished phrase. It took something to say a sentence like that “to his own mama,” and Hebga added, in front of our very own Sita, “for God’s sake.”

  “That little guy is something else,” people said, and Hebga thought just the same thing.

  “Just how old is he?”

  “Ten years old,” some said.

  “You’re lying!”

  “Just ten and he’s already screwing, oh, daddy.”

  All the men agreed he was about “thirteen, fourteen,” admitting that it was pretty preco
cious to be using his bangala “already at that age for something other than peeing,” even if they thought it wasn’t too early for a “good Bassa man.” Hebga had seen the guy. He knew he wasn’t just a little kid. Mostly, he knew Nguet. Her scent, he could have picked it out in a field of flowers. Nguet, he had screwed her several times, once she’d even sucked on his thing. Just thinking about it gave him a hard-on. He stopped in the middle of his exercises—he was stretching and crossing his arms in front of him while marching in place, like a tirailleur. He watched his loincloth rising slowly, as if buoyed up by the thought of Nguet’s body, which he saw bit by bit, from her bare feet to her hips, her tummy and belly button, her breasts and the tattoos on her chest, her hair gathered into three braids, thick like goat’s horns, with cowrie shells at the end, and then her eyes—oh, her eyes!—her cat-like eyes that stared at him while she was doing it, doing … doing what? He decided he couldn’t keep going with his exercises given the circumstances. He just couldn’t concentrate, yes, that’s what he told himself, so he decided to stop. He wanted to think about something else.

  The woods can tear your soul apart. Their scent is intoxicating and the solitude leads you into the wildest, most disorienting daydreams. Right then he was dreaming of Nguet sitting in a clearing, surrounded by the other girls from the bar and his friends—Um Nyobè, Fritz, and some others he couldn’t identify. It was just like that day when he had actually come upon Mininga, dressed in her Sunday best, jewels displayed on her breast, sitting there with her girls in the bush: “We’re having lunch,” she said with a smile, passing plates here and there. “Will you join us, my dear?”

  Hebga had already completed his exercise routine for the day. So he pulled his ax out of the tree trunk. Right then he heard a piercing scream in the distance. And then women crying. He shuddered, thinking of the women who’d gone by just a bit before. He heard the scream again. No need to say that his erection disappeared as soon as he thought of his mother. When the third scream came, he was already tearing through the bush with his ax. He no longer felt his feet or his hands, not the branches that tore into his body or the tree leaves that slapped him. The women’s cries had become sobs, scattered but distinct.