My uncle begins to talk to me, his head tilted up towards the ceiling, which, I remember, indicates I mustn’t interrupt him:
‘I haven’t changed, you know, I’m still the same man who held your hand through the night when you were terrified of the dark and thought it was full of man-eating ghosts from the tombs in the Mont-Kamba cemetery, coming to attack children. Your mother’s gone now, but she still lives, through me, and she’s left me enough breath in my lungs to wait for you, the time it took. Your rendezvous with her never happened; ours, thanks be to God, has happened. It didn’t happen by chance, you mustn’t blame yourself that you weren’t here when we mourned for my sister. I knew you were grieving too, wherever you were, I know everything that happens in your body, and in your spirit. The truth is, to me, you’re not a nephew, but my own son, the child I never had, the child I never will have now, because the older I get, the more I realise that I was put on this earth to protect the person my sister loved above everyone and everything: you. I never wanted descendants of my own, in case it took me away from you, and you considered me more as an uncle than a true father. I don’t want to be your uncle, I am your father! Was it an accident your biological father abandoned you? You should tell yourself now, you’ve been lucky to have three men in your life. The first one failed in his mission to be a father, and ran off just before you were born, you can wipe him from your mind, you have already, it’s better that way, lowlife like him don’t deserve respect, since they never showed any themselves. The second – your stepfather, Roger – was a generous man, who took you in, you and your mother. You must honour him, so that all adopted children, everywhere, know their life is not doomed to failure, just because their father was an idiot. I am the third man, completing the trinity of your fate. Do you not hear the sweet music of your mother’s voice when I speak to you? You may wander far from me, as you have done until now, but I will still be there, sometimes just sitting watching time flow by, but mostly wandering along the banks of patience, whatever the force of the gales. I’ll blow with all my breath on the embers of time itself to be able to stay on this earth just long enough to see you take over the reins of this shattered family, with all its internal divisions, that are hidden from you. Look at these people! They put on a united front, but when you scratch the surface you discover all this hostility, that I have to contend with. You’ve got one person accusing another of causing his father or mother’s death, and others fighting over land left by my brother Albert Moukila in the 1970s! Is that what you call a family? That’s what killed your uncle René, other people’s greed, even if it has to be said he didn’t exactly set a good example, grabbing the house that should have gone to your cousins Gilbert and Bienvenüe! I’ll forgive him that, though it is a pity the house was sold secretly by my older sister Sabine Bouanga’s son, with not a single centime going to Albert’s own children! I’m looking to you now to get your bleach out and do a proper clean-up in this family. Don’t be too nice about it, they’d think you were just being weak, and you’d pay with your life. I’m exhausted, totally exhausted, I’m sick of battling on all alone. You’re here now, and here I am, where I was when you left me. But I won’t be next time, you know. I’ll be gone too, gone to join my sister Pauline…’
In the silence that follows I sense that he wants to describe my mother’s last days, and is looking for the right words, or rather, wondering how to begin. He’s seen my face grow troubled, and he stops himself. We leave that chapter unopened, though it’s there in both our minds.
We leave the main house and go over to my mother’s castle. Outside the shack he turns to me and shows me his hands:
‘These are the hands that built this place, remember? You helped me a bit, you really wanted to be useful! The house isn’t the same now, there’s only half of it left, I had to cut the other part off when your mother died. I couldn’t bear to see the room she slept in…
He strokes the planks thoughtfully:
These planks speak to me at night… Do you know the same are used to make coffins?’
I nod my head. He was a great joiner in his day, and made the frames of many of the houses in this town. I never liked it when he made coffins and the bereaved families waited around outside his workshop.
I reach out and touch the planks too. Pleased by my gesture, he immediately says:
‘Yes, touch them, they’re glad to see you. They know who we are, they were there at the start. Whenever they moan it makes me think your mother’s suffering up there, and wants me to come and join her…’
I still don’t interrupt the flow of what seem like thoughts he’s been saving up for a long time now, for the day he could whisper them to me.
‘It seems like death’s had it in for us,’ he goes on. ‘Maybe there’s a curse on this patch of land, because of the way I treated Miguel. Night and day I think of the misery I inflicted on that dog…’
An image of Miguel pops into my head. I hear him barking, then whimpering with thirst and hunger. Once the link between myself and my imaginary sisters, he died at the foot of the mango tree that used to dominate the plot. Did the neighbours hear his desperate cries? And this tree, witness to the scene, why didn’t it set the poor beast free? Maman Pauline was crazy about Miguel, he was a present from one of her girlfriends who just wanted to get rid of the litter of puppies. People said she had so many dogs she sometimes threw some into the River Tchinouka. I was the one who thought of the name Miguel for our new arrival, who steadily grew each time I filled his bowl with milk. Feeding the dog was like a game for me, and he followed me round the whole day long, hoping for his next feed. He listened to me with his ears pricked up, and answered by wagging his tail like wind-screen wipers. I’d learned to reckon a dog’s age with him. Within a single year he was older than me, almost twice my age. I was proud to fix a sign at the entrance to the plot that said ‘Beware of the dog.’ I walked with him round the backstreets of the Voungou neighbourhood, confident he would be my constant protector. Alas, when some children my age threw stones at us, Miguel opted to hide behind me rather than go and bite them as he would have done if we had been at home and someone had come and attacked us. I realised that most dogs were only brave inside the boundaries of their master’s home. So often I had seen our dog, who was so timid when we were out and about, fling himself around the yard in a frenzy with his tail between his legs, barking his head off outside the house, fit to burst our eardrums. I loved him in spite of this, and he returned my love, licking my little hands with his tongue, or standing up on his two feet. Our happiness was not to last. My mother went away for a month and I was sent, for the first time, to stay with my mother’s military brother, Jean-Marie Moulounda, in Brazzaville. Papa Roger was at Maman Martine’s. The whole house was practically empty; Grand Poupy was at Sibiti and the various aunts had gone back to Louboulou to work in the fields. Only Uncle Mompéro was left, and my mother had asked him to look after Miguel, to feed him three times a day and take him for walks so he could do his business outside our plot. My uncle did this for two or three days. Then he left town himself to go and work on a site in Dolisie, the third-biggest town in the country, over three hundred kilometres from Pointe-Noire, where they were building a primary school. Instead of letting the dog wander free on our land, for a few days he had kept him tied up with a piece of rope to the foot of the mango tree, where he came and gave him his food and water, as Maman Pauline had asked. The day of his departure for Dolisie, my uncle forgot about Miguel and left him captive. On his return, a few hours before his sister, the poor beast was no longer of this world. Papa Roger and Maman Pauline cried murder. They considered trying to hide Miguel’s death from me. But they knew that when I got back from Brazzaville the next day, the first thing I would ask was: ‘Where’s Miguel?’
Uncle Mompéro suggested buying another dog. My mother was against this. She did not wish to sully the memory of Miguel, and added that if they hadn’t been capable of looking after one dog, there was no reason to
think they would do better with the next one.
When I got home, I was given to believe that Miguel had succumbed to a heart attack. Naively, I replied:
‘But dogs don’t die of heart attacks, because they don’t have all those problems in the heart that humans have.’
Uncle Mompéro took me to one side and told me the truth:
‘You were right, my boy, dogs don’t die of heart attacks… Miguel died because of my stupidity. I’m an imbecile, I accept that. When I left for Dolisie I completely forgot we had a dog, and that I’d tied him up. If I’d only left him unattached he would have survived. But it’s my fault, please don’t hate me for it. Your mother doesn’t want me to buy another dog, but if you want I’ll buy you one anyway…’
‘Don’t buy another dog…’
‘But why not?’
‘Because we didn’t buy Miguel… he was given to us. And anyway, when someone dies do you buy someone else to replace them?’
‘I could go and see the woman who gave your mother Miguel and if her dog’s had some more puppies we’d at least have a puppy from the same family as Miguel and…’
‘No, it was Miguel I loved, I don’t want another dog in my life, then when I think of dogs, I’ll only ever think of him…’
Uncle Mompéro fixes a plank that’s come loose from the shack, and turns to me:
‘That’s right, mon petit, Miguel’s always with me, as your mother is. When we had the first family reunion I couldn’t speak about him in front of everyone. It’s just the two of us today, face to face, please forgive me, help me wipe this curse away, I’m going down on my knees now…’
He goes down on one knee, and before he can get down on both I stop him:
‘No, Uncle, don’t do that, there’s no curse on this plot…’
‘How do you know? Animals are our relatives, our doubles, you said so in your book about the porcupine…’
‘I was only reporting what Maman used to tell me. There are friendly doubles, too, Miguel was one of those, he’s forgiven you for what you did…’
A smile appears on his face:
‘And do you forgive me too?’
‘I never held it against you for one moment, Uncle!’
He wipes his eyes with the back of his right hand. Tears no doubt released by my removal of this thorn from his foot.
We go back to the main house.
This is my third visit, but this time there’s no family reunion. Before I leave the plot, my uncle adopts a solemn air and says:
‘Are you already going back to where the whites are putting you up in the centre of town? My brother Matété looked for you there yesterday, they said you were out all the time. It’s very important, he wants to see you alone. Just agree to what he asks, he and I have talked about it… Will you leave me at least five thousand CFA francs? I just need to buy some little things like razors, toothpaste, soap…’
I smile at him as I take the notes from my pocket.
Close encounters of the third kind
There’s a knock at the door, I open it, and find Uncle Matété standing there. He’s come with a little bunch of bananas, which he puts down in the middle of the room. I pick it up and take it through to the kitchen, while he looks round my rooms, with undisguised amazement.
‘Do the whites pay for you to stay in this place?’
I explain that the French Institute invited me to attend a conference for a few days, and I decided to extend my stay, to see the family, and write a book.
‘And how much do you pay to stay here?’ he replies, going out on to the balcony.
‘They make this apartment available for writers and artists, I don’t pay anything.’
‘I came yesterday, it’s hard to get hold of you, I must have been back three times! This is all very nice, isn’t it?’
Without waiting for my reply, he points over at the building opposite:
‘Look, even at night you can see the Adolphe-Sicé hospital really clearly! Have you visited Bienvenüe there yet?’
‘No…’
‘I don’t blame you. You’re scared of Room One too, I guess? Anyone who goes in, even just to visit, will end up there one day to die…’
By night the hospital looks like a huge haunted manor house, with dim, uneven lighting issuing from the few windows still left open. Uncle Matété suddenly falls silent. He passes his hand over his close-cropped skull, which gleams with the light from the moon emerged from the dark clouds cast over the town. I imagine what he must thinking, how far his thoughts will take him. His eyebrows are quite grey and I sometimes think he looks older than Uncle Mompéro, who he gets on well with, and who was the one who told me he would be coming to see me, though I hadn’t been sure it would be today, this evening. They are both the children of Grandfather Grégoire Moukila, by different mothers.
I guess Uncle Matété’s thinking back to when I was a child in Louboulou village. I was around ten years old, and it was my first time in the bush. The second day of my visit, he decided to take me hunting with him, despite my mother’s objections, and my grandmother N’Soko’s indignation. Grandfather Moukila intervened to reassure everyone:
‘Let them go, they’ll be all right, my spirits will watch over them. After all, the boy needs to go there, before it’s too late…’
I have never forgotten our nocturnal escapade. I arrived home on my uncle’s shoulders, my legs scraped raw with scratches and grazes, my face covered in insect bites. Uncle Matété borrowed Grandfather’s shotgun and we left at the dead of night. Some time before leaving, we smeared our faces with ashes, a technique designed, he said, to catch the wild animals off guard, by convincing them we were of their kind. Next, round our ankles, we tied grasses I still don’t know the names of, to ward off any snakes we met on our way. We followed a winding path that my uncle knew like the back of his hand, till, after a few kilometres, we reached a stream burbling between rocks. At the edge of the stream he gave a sign to show I shouldn’t speak, not even whisper or squash a biting mosquito. A hundred or so metres from us a hind and a stag were drinking. I waited for my uncle to take up his position and shoot down at least one of them. But instead he knelt on the ground and began chanting words I didn’t understand. The two grazing animals watched us from a distance, but seemed untroubled by our presence. Uncle Matété’s prayer seemed to go on for ever, interspersed with names of people in our family like at school when the teacher was checking we were all present before starting lessons. Except that no one answered my uncle’s name-call. The two deer listened carefully to his monotonous speech, nodding their heads in agreement every now and then. When the prayer was finished, the two mammals bellowed loudly then began to move off from the water, eventually vanishing into the depths of the bush. The silence in their wake was chilling. My uncle knew what I was thinking, and got in first:
‘I’ll explain tomorrow, for now just follow me, we need to find something to take back home. We can cross the river now, we’ve got permission…’
We went on deeper and deeper into the forest and when I turned around, Uncle Matété whispered:
‘Never look over your shoulder in the bush…’
‘But we’ll get lost, we won’t know how to get home again,’ I worried.
‘Have you ever seen anyone get lost in his own home?’
‘But what if it was a big house, like the white people’s castles?’
‘Well, the difference is, this is our castle, we know it, it doesn’t just belong to one family like it does in the white people’s land, it belongs to all the villagers.’
We came out into a clearing and heard a noise coming from the top of a palm tree. My uncle swung his torch towards it. It was a pair of squirrels, one on top of the other, absorbed in a courtship ritual which was shaking the leaves of the tree. The bang from my uncle’s gun made my ears pop. Both animals had been hit with a single bullet. Uncle Matété picked them up from the bottom of the tree and put them in his game bag.
A bit
farther on, an anteater was curled up in a ball in the middle of the path. This species is renowned for its poor eyesight, but as soon as the torchlight caught him, he lifted his snout and tried to make a run for it. Too late: my uncle had already taken aim and squeezed the trigger. The bullet blew out the creature’s brains.
‘Right, we can go back now, that’s enough for this evening,’ he decided.
It seemed a long way home. It felt as though the weeds were slashing at my legs, and leaving my uncle’s untouched. I could hardly keep upright, and complained now of mosquitoes and other insects flying into my eyes. Some of these seemed to flash and then zoom in on me so fast I thought they must be shooting stars falling out of the sky. Uncle Matété told me to walk in front of him. After a few metres he noticed I was slowing us down. At this speed it would take us five or six hours to get back to the village. At first he teased me, calling me a town boy, then he lifted me over his head while I slipped my legs round his neck. My right foot rubbed against his well-stocked game bag, which he wore like a shoulder bag. Even in this more comfortable position I sometimes had to bend low to avoid the branches sticking out from the trees, and the little fluorescent creatures who must know I was just a town boy, the way they picked on me.
Back in the village I lay awake the rest of the night. I was in a sweat, haunted by visions of the hind and stag. I saw them standing there, the male with a human head, crowned with branched horns whose tips just touched the clouds, the female a little apart. The two of them spoke our language, and said my name. The pair had a fawn following after them now, and the little animal’s head looked exactly like mine! What’s more, he kept giggling for no reason, and his parents didn’t stop him.
I was up early next morning, at dawn: I ran into my uncle’s bedroom, while he was still snoring. He awoke with a start, and didn’t seem in the least surprised at my bursting in so early:
The Lights of Pointe-Noire Page 10