On some evenings he would arrive earlier than expected, handing over a package to his children and declaring:
“Fresh gazelle! Go give it to your mother. We’ll eat it tonight!”
The children would present their mother with the meat, and their father would rush to cut it up for her.
After several years of marriage, however, Awu’s husband had never taken her into his arms the way she would have liked—not even once. Whenever she thought about such an embrace, Arms and Hands would appear in her head—sturdy arms and large hands perfect for holding her by the waist, her slim waist that villagers liked to criticize. A good mother, they used to say, was supposed to be pleasantly plump; it was a sign of fertility, good health, and well-being. Although her husband never complained, Awu knew very well that because of her waist, still slim even after several pregnancies, she was not considered by the village to be a canon of beauty. Yet she would have sacrificed everything to stay so slender. She was determined to do so more than anything else, for it was her secret hope that one day her husband would deliver her from her obsession; he would simply hold her by the waist and squeeze her tightly, so tight that it would take her breath away. And that would be it; she would be satisfied. This wish was so simple that she felt it almost childish. Until now, however, she had never once in her life seen a man embrace a woman in the way she was dreaming about. She did not even know if such a thing were possible. But her body silently, yet passionately, yearned for it. When she would gather up pieces of material to stitch together, pulling on the thread to enclose the fabric inside a ringlet, this bit of cloth so powerfully embraced would remind her of the strength of those Arms around her waist. This feeling was so intense that at times, it would leave her breathless to the point where she almost passed out, sometimes while even out in public.
When the lover in her head would transform himself into the Voice—a sweet, warm, reassuring, and convincing voice—no other sound was capable of reaching Awu’s ears. Sometimes upon hearing this voice, Awu would respond softly, and the sound of her own words would make her jump and frighten the Voice, who then sought to move away from this partner who had violated the boundaries of the dream.
Awu didn’t care if it was good or bad to let herself be bombarded by all these images and sensations. She was quite simply happy to have a secret garden and congratulated herself for hiding these desires so perfectly well.
Awu was convinced that her true wedding day would be the actual day this embrace would finally become a reality. She and her husband would both be liberated; she from an obsession, he from a specter.
Obame Afane was relieved to hear the rooster crow. He had lost nothing in the transition from night to day. The moans and groans of nocturnal beasts had progressively been replaced by the rhythms and greetings of diurnal animals of the nearby forest; in the village, gossip and grumbling announced the dawn. Daylight was determined to force its way into the bedroom in the form of vertical batons of light that made all the more noticeable the badly fitting window frames—constant reminders of how poor the workmanship really was. If those frames could talk, they would surely complain to the carpenter, letting him know how he had betrayed his craft, as if they were sure that the home’s two occupants would have agreed with them. It wasn’t such a misguided idea, judging by the looks of the rest of the room and its contents.
The best view of the bedroom was from the entryway, which looked directly onto the living room. From the vantage point of the outswinging entry door, the bedroom initially revealed a great deal of intimacy. A large bed made of bully-tree wood stood against the back wall and graced the center of the room. The bed had been skillfully smoothed out and assembled piece by piece using age-old craftsmanship; every detail had been done by hand. A short, sturdy stool flanked each side of the bed. In front of one stool sat an outdated, square-shaped crib with rungs of disproportionate size. In the corner a huge armoire topped with two imposing tin trunks seemed to watch over everything. With legs shamelessly rivaling pillars more typically found on a house, a solid wood table was planted against the back wall next to the other stool. Across from the table sat a sad piece of furniture suffering its own identity crisis—it was neither a bench nor a chair, but could pass for either one. Nearby, a practically empty bookcase stood with its sturdy, frustrated shelves resigned to the fact that their strength was of no use. On each side of the only door to the room, enamel bowls and rattan baskets lined the wall.
Daylight made its official entrance into the room through one of two openings: either the one situated above the crib, which gave the morning light the allure of an angel’s glow, or the other in front of the solid wood table. With the rising sun, each item in the room exited from the night to reveal itself in daylight.
All the gleaming woodwork was dark brown. The two tin trunks were cassava-leaf green. The two stools were covered with identical mats, both finely embroidered and abundant in color. On the table were two piles of notebooks, one of open notebooks stacked one on top of the other alongside a second pile of closed ones. A smoky glass kerosene lamp sat in the middle of the table and just next to that, a feather pen was soaking in its red inkwell. A wooden ruler was standing on alert alongside the pile of closed notebooks. The bowls contained dirty laundry and the baskets, clean clothes. Everything was neatly organized except for the bed and the crib, which their occupants had deserted shortly after daylight invaded.
“You didn’t sleep at all last night,” Awu said as she followed her husband along the little path, protected by mahogany trees and lined with tall bushes, which led to the river bank.
No matter what Awu said to him, Obame just sighed.
“Everything will be back to normal soon,” she went on. “Stop being so negative. After all, a child is a blessing, isn’t it?”
“But she’s so young, Awu. She’s only twelve. And her pregnancy is almost full term. And she’s been expelled from school. It’s over for her. It’s finished for this child, finished! Do you understand? And here I am beating myself, telling everyone else’s children what to do, alerting their parents about this very thing. Why did this have to happen to the daughter of my own sister? She put all her hope in her daughter. We put all our hope in her! And all this just as I am about to retire! It’s like all those years of preaching morality and teaching countless lessons were for nothing!”
With these words, Obame had stopped to turn toward his wife who, likewise, could do nothing but sigh after each word. They remained like this for a few seconds, face to face, contemplative, motionless.
At that moment Obame Afane the schoolteacher was wearing the very same expression that had won over Awu some years ago, when he had come to supervise final exams at the school to which she had just been assigned. She was eighteen years old at the time. It was her first year in the profession, and she was intimidated by her older and more experienced colleagues such as Obame Afane, even though he himself was only in his thirties at the time. Since the first impression he had created for her was one of toughness, Awu was always taken aback when he addressed her in a friendly, almost warm tone. She had imagined him to be disapproving and critical. What a look he had on his face when he realized during that same exam period that Mengara, one of his best students, was absent! He had asked one or two of Mengara’s classmates if they had seen him. But neither one had. So around noon, while the other teachers were heading toward the cafeteria for lunch, Obame the schoolteacher took it upon himself to go on foot to Nkoaman—a tiny, remote village two kilometers away from the school—to find out why his student was absent. During lunch, word of this spread very quickly among the teachers. Awu was more than impressed. She was bursting with admiration. Obame the schoolteacher even came back in time for the afternoon exam. He told those who were interested that Mengara—who was already motherless—had just lost his grandmother the night before the exam. His face at that moment expressed so much frustration and powerlessness that it touched Awu at the very core of her being: Obame the sch
oolteacher was the universal father.
He had that exact same impression talking about his niece’s problem that morning. All of a sudden, the child that Awu was carrying on her back started crying as if to jumpstart her parents back in motion; they resumed walking shortly thereafter. Arriving at the water’s edge, they strolled along the bank until they reached a clearing surrounded by interwoven shrubbery. There, with her right hand, Awu untied from her chest the two knots of her pagne designed to hold the baby on her back, while with her left hand she supported the baby’s little behind as she wedged its tiny hands under her own armpits. Once the two pieces of the pagne were free, she caught the tiny left hand with her right one and pulled onto her chest the pint-sized person who continued to whine. The little girl was about one year old. To calm her down, Awu offered the baby her breast for about ten minutes while sitting on her pagne spread out on the ground, her back propped against a tree trunk positioned right in the middle of where they were. From that spot, she could once again admire her husband in peace. He had undressed and dove into the river screaming and thrashing about to get warm; the water was so cold in the morning! Soon, he emerged onto the bank and chose the softest, best-shaped lump of clay. He lathered his entire body. Then he began to scrub himself energetically. He rinsed off and came back once more to soap up, this time using a bar of French soap that he again lathered onto his body. He had wide shoulders and strong arms, with muscles like instruments playing the rhythms of all the massaging and lathering. He left some soap for his wife and kids. When he had finished, he again went toward the river and surrendered his body to the whims of the water. Sometimes he swam on his side, then turned over on his stomach, executing an entertaining butterfly stroke, rhythmically disappearing and reappearing; other times he was lying on his back facing the sun, swimming the backstroke along with the current. He expressed himself with such freedom and independence that Awu was almost jealous of that river. To finish up, he did enormous breaststrokes toward the shore. And Awu thought to herself: “He’s coming back to me.”
For decades he had been devoting himself to this ritual, on this same rock. He was born a few meters from here, precisely on the spot where his wife was breastfeeding her child. That was almost fifty years ago now.
That was the year in which Ebomane had just gotten its own public school; prior to that, the rather large village only had an evangelical school, a source of both pride and contempt. But now a real school in the village! The kids no longer had to trek twenty kilometers every single day just to get an education! And what’s more, at the new school at least, no one was going to denigrate the religion of the Ancestors like they did at the missionary school!
Obame Afane’s father, Afane Obame, was a high priest of Melan3 worship. This ritual worship was celebrated every Saturday evening until dawn. You could hear the tam-tams4 resound from miles around.
The evangelical mission was located on the other end of the village; it was a bit set back on the top of a small hill. Afane Obame’s father, Obame Evouna, himself a high priest, had stood by and watched the mission being built on the other end of his village. He hadn’t fought against it because it had no impact on what he did on his own hill. In his view, it posed no threat to the religion of the Ancestors. And that was the most important thing.
The village was, in fact, located between two hills. At the top of one hill stood a little church whose doors and windows were perpetually left open, and a slender cross was displayed above. And the other hill was capped with gigantic trees whose trunks were flanked by bushes and shrubs.
Those indeed were the two temples of Ebomane—the Cross-Topped Hill and the Wood-Girded Hill.
The inauguration of the new school took place the first day of the academic year. And it was just at that moment when the whole village was arriving for the event that Oyane, Obame Afane’s mother, began to experience abdominal pain. At first she thought she needed to relieve herself. But by the time she got behind the main kitchen to the little shed that housed the septic tank, she realized that her bladder wasn’t full, but she crouched down anyway. Nothing came out. After a difficult time getting back up, she was moving along at a snail’s pace toward the little doorway when she felt an urgent need to defecate. She twisted and turned and practically limped back so she could crouch down over the hole once more. Two, five, ten minutes went by. Nothing. Fifteen minutes. Still nothing. In order to lift herself up again, she had to get up on all fours and move forward in that position until she could at least reach the door to hold on and catch herself at times when the pain was too intense. She had felt a stubborn, general, and irregular pain that was quickly growing in intensity and becoming excruciating. When the pain seemed to subside a bit, she seized the moment to head over, like a wounded elephant, toward the nearby kitchen that her mother-in-law was starting to close up.
“God in heaven!” her mother-in-law exclaimed at the sight of Oyane, unlocking the door at once. “There’s no time to spare! Start walking toward the river. I’ll take what we need and meet you there.”
She arrived a few minutes later to find out that Oyane hadn’t even arrived there yet since she was forced to stop along the way to sit on the ground when the pain was too much for her; she would pick up her slow, uncomfortable, and laborious pace only when the pain subsided a bit. When Oyane finally reached the riverbank, her mother-in-law rushed up to her, guiding her to a tiny clearing a few steps away, a clearing carpeted in the center by three big, beautiful, banana-tree leaves. Oyane lay down on them. A moment later the mountains echoed triumphantly the gut-wrenching cry of this birth, replaced soon thereafter by a little scream whose vigor and vitality rivaled those of the rhythms and greetings of diurnal animals. Obame Afane had arrived.
While the baby was laying close to his mother on the banana-tree leaf, the Nourishing Mass that had fed him for nine months, its mission accomplished, began liberating itself from its point of attachment, painfully, regretfully, but victoriously. Finally the end of the delivery was near. The mass of tissue, soft and still throbbing, showed itself at the Door of Life and was soon expelled. All red in the face, Oyane moaned, sad and happy at the same time, waiting for the next part. It wouldn’t take long: In one quick move, Oyane’s mother-in-law wrapped the mass in two large, glossy banana-tree leaves. Then she picked up the sharp, little, blood-stained machete that had separated Obame Afane from his mother. With an agile step, she traveled back up the path that led to the village, stopped halfway, and went off-trail. Soon she arrived at the foot of a clump of banana trees, and with her machete she furiously began to dig a hole in the soft, fertile ground. When the hole was deep enough to fit three plantains end to end, she stopped digging, set her machete off to the side, and opened up the bundle she had transported. The Mass of Life saw the light of day one last time before taking up residence in its new womb: that of the earth—this same earth that it would also rejuvenate. If the Nourishing Mass had the power to see, it would have observed, from the bottom of its hole, a face leaning over it, with closed eyes and lips praying over it; it would have also noticed the two hands kneading a little lump of earth drenched with spit to make a sort of mud, which those same hands then rubbed onto the face. And if this Mass of Life had indeed the power to hear, it would have learned by way of Obame Afane’s grandmother’s prayer that it was being given a new mission—to fertilize and impregnate the earth, to itself produce in order to sustain the life of men and women who were themselves called upon to perpetuate the lineage. By slathering her face with this mud, this grandmother had sealed a pact with the earth and thus they shared a common mission—to perpetuate life. A moment later, the Mass of Life assumed its new role in communion with the earth as the soil closed in on it.
“He shall be named Sikolo. He was born at the same time as the village school,” whispered the grandmother as she made her way back.
Grandmother had told Obame Afane the story of his birth dozens of times, always omitting the part about the placenta. A week after his c
ircumcision, however, his grandmother took him to the exact spot where he was born. He was six years old at the time. Although he had started to heal from his circumcision, he was still wearing large boubous.5 There, at his birthplace, his grandmother rolled out before him an old pagne that enveloped a hard object. A small machete was slowly revealed. His grandmother said to him:
“Look at this machete. It’s small but very sharp. It can easily be concealed. You couldn’t even tell that I had been carrying it in the pocket of my kaba,6 could you? To see the light of day, you came out of the Door of Life head first. That means that you will become a righteous man. That’s why I had used this blade as straight and radiant as a ray of sun. It has never been used since. Your younger brother, Nguema Afane, was born exposing his bottom to the Door of Life: that was a bad sign. That’s why I didn’t use a machete to separate Nguema Afane from his mother, who took her last breath as he took his first, but rather I chose ôkenguen be kône7—a blade made from plants as sharp as a razor. That’s what’s done in these kinds of cases. Here, take this machete. It’s yours. It separated you from your mother at birth. It binds you to your ancestors, yet separates them from you at the same time. Keep it preciously. It’s a keepsake. It’s as simple as that.”
So Obame Afane grew up with this object always tucked away in a secret place known only to him. And each time he came to swim, a few steps away from the place where he had been born, it was like a rebirth for him.
Obame came out of the water to grab his towel. He had left it behind on the tree trunk, there where his wife was sitting. He said to her:
“It’s your turn. Leave the child with me.”
Awu set the little girl down onto the pagne spread out on the ground, and in one swift move she undid her pagne, which was wrapped around her. The contact with the cold water caused Awu to arch her back. She eventually plunged into the water that came up to her shoulders and soon began bobbing up and down and spinning around.
Awu's Story Page 5