The Lights of Pointe-Noire

by Alain Mabanckou

  ‘You’ve come to tell me about the hind and the stag! You want to tell me you saw them in a dream?’

  ‘Yes…’

  ‘Well then! Now they know you! How did they appear to you?’

  ‘They were with their child, and the child had my face! He was laughing like a mad thing, I don’t laugh like that…’

  ‘I’d expect that, the child was happy to see you, because you and he are one body. The hind and the stag weren’t just ordinary animals. The male is the double of your grandfather, Moukila Grégoire, and the female is the double of your grandmother, Henriette N’Soko. If I had killed those creatures when we were out hunting yesterday, your grandparents would be dead by now. Before you enter the bush you have to go and say good evening to the doubles, then they help us find our game. People who don’t respect this ritual always come home empty-handed, or get lost in the forest. Or not lost exactly, but they get turned into trees or into stones by the spirits of the bush. When you’re grown up, whatever bush you go into, remind yourself that spirits live there, and be respectful of the fauna and the flora, including objects that seem unimportant to you, like mushrooms, or the lowly little earthworm trying to climb back on to the riverbank. In our family we only hunt squirrels and anteaters, those are the prey given us by our ancestors, because the other animals, unless we are expressly told otherwise in our dreams, are members of our family who’ve left this world, but are still living in the next. Would you eat your mother, your father or your brother? I think not. I know these things sound strange to you, you’ve grown up in the city, but they are simple truths that make us who we are. Now, you mustn’t eat hind or stag meat, because even if it didn’t kill you, a part of you would disappear, the part we call luck or, rather, blessing.’

  I gave a little cough behind Uncle Matété, as he stood there looking out at the Adolphe-Sicé hospital. He turned round and asked me very seriously:

  ‘Tell me truthfully: have you ever eaten hind or stag meat?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘That is a relief, nephew, you did listen to me, then! You can’t imagine how I worried about you!’

  We go back into the living room. Since he arrived unannounced, I’ve nothing to offer him. In the kitchen I find three eggs, which I break and throw into a pan. I break off three bananas from the bunch he gave me. While I’m busy making the food, I feel his presence behind me.

  ‘Nephew, what are you doing?’

  ‘I’m making you something to eat.’

  ‘No, no, don’t do that… In any case, I don’t eat eggs, and you can’t serve me the bananas I gave you!’

  At a loss, I suggest we go and eat out in the Rex neighbourhood. He turns down my offer:

  ‘I didn’t come here for that, nephew. I simply wanted to make sure you were all right, that you hadn’t eaten stag or hind meat in all these years. I introduced you to your animal double, the fawn you saw in your dreams when you were only ten years old. That little creature is still out there in the bush, he’ll live as long as you, or you’ll live as long as he does…’

  ‘Uncle, I know why you came: you want me to go and see my animal double in Louboulou.’

  ‘No, no, it’s too far, I don’t suppose you’ve got the time with everything you’ve got to do in the few days you’ve got left here. Your double will understand, but you must give him something, I’ll pass it on to him when I go down there next month…’

  ‘Ah! I get it! How much?’

  ‘Nephew, don’t you disappoint me, I know you live in a country where money is everything, but believe me, it’s not the only thing that matters in this world. The thing that has kept you alive this far is without price…’

  ‘What can I give to an animal I’ve only seen once in a dream when I was ten?’

  ‘Something that belongs to you, something of yourself…’

  He digs in his pocket and takes out an empty test tube, the kind doctors use in hospital to take blood samples.

  ‘Put your urine in there, I’ll keep it in the freezer, then I’ll go and pour it out by the stream in Louboulou where we were thirty-five years ago. The hind and the stag are gone now, your grandparents are dead, but their son, who’s your age now, will still be there. He must smell your presence, your urine will be enough for him to continue to bless you…’

  I go into the bathroom, and come back with the tube full. This time he takes a bag out of his pocket and rolls the object up inside it.

  ‘That’s perfect, nephew, now I must be on my way…’

  I hold out an envelope, with twenty thousand CFA francs inside.

  ‘No, nephew, I didn’t come to see you for that.’

  ‘Uncle, please, take it, it’ll pay for your trip back home…’

  He hesitates for a few seconds, lowers his eyes, and pockets the envelope:

  ‘Thank you, nephew.’

  Last week

  The suspended step of the stork

  I write in a school exercise book, tearing out pages from time to time, for the slightest crossing out. As though the past were a straight line, like a wave, unmoving, unruffled by the wind’s caprice. Sometimes, if I’m not happy with a paragraph, I dash into the kitchen and rummage in the little bin to find what I threw away yesterday. And I keep that instead, rejecting without a second thought words I was satisfied with only minutes before, and that seemed then to be a faithful transposition of my thoughts, images prompted by this return to the cradle.

  A few ‘budding writers’, as they like to call themselves here, dropped in to see me at the request of the director of the French Institute, who merely said:

  ‘They want to be writers, like any self-respecting Congolese, and they certainly have lots of manuscripts. I have never seen that in any other country I’ve worked in. Here, everyone is a poet! And they’ve been watching out for you for days! You must see them, and have a few words, it’s important to them. There are over a dozen of them down there, I’ve organised a little place for them to sit. No one will disturb you there…’

  We talked for over two hours in a corner of the lobby, just below my apartment. Some of them were fans of the poets Tchicaya U’Tamsi and Maxime Ndebeka. Others of the novelists Henri Lopes, Sony Labou Tansi and Emmanuel Dongala. They read me their poems and waited for me to salute their genius, or tell them to revise what they’d written. They were somewhat disappointed when I suggested I had no such sovereign power.

  Towards the end of these exchanges, during which each of them was trying to show his work to the others, to prove how much they deserved to be published – not counting those who had already paid to publish themselves, and who considered themselves above the others because they at least had printed proof of their status as writers – a young wordsmith asked me:

  ‘Why do you write?’

  I was beginning to feel rather tired, and said the first thing that came into my head:

  ‘I don’t know why I write, perhaps that’s why I tear out pages I’ve already scribbled on, and throw them in the bin. I know I have no choice, I’ll go and retrieve them the next morning and write them again. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, as long as one day the book’s finished.’

  They laughed at that, but I didn’t. Particularly since my bin right now is filled with crumpled pages…

  I add it up in my head: I’ve come back to this town seventeen years after my mother’s death, seven years after my father’s and twenty-three years after I left for France. And yet the time has flashed by. I’m just a black stork, whose years of wandering now outnumber the years left to him to live. I have landed here, by the stream of my origins, one foot suspended, hoping I might stop the flow of my existence, whose smooth course is troubled by the myriad leaves blown down from the family tree.

  I look for reasons to love this town, all smashed up though it is, and consumed by its anarchic growth. Like a long-lost lover, faithful as Ulysses’ dog, it reaches out its long, shapeless arms to me, and day after day shows me how deep its wounds are, as though I could
cauterise them with the wave of a magic wand.

  This morning I open Dark Side of the Sun, a collection of poems by that most Pontenegrin of Congolese writers, Jean-Baptiste Tati-Loutard. I come across these lines, which exactly describe my present state of mind:

  I trail in the wake of a tribe that is lost,

  A beast of the savannah plains, haunted

  By the rhythm of another herd…

  Seized by a longing to be outside of time

  To wander the obscure veins of the far-flung earth

  Where, relieved of a thousand earthly pains,

  The poor departed wander, long forgotten…

  I arrived like a migrating bird, its song half silenced, ready to accept the vast desolation of my country and to perch in the first tree with bark scuffed and scraped by the dry seasons. Perhaps I’m overstating, but the slightest silence troubles me, the least noise makes me jump, and inclines me to pull away from this inevitable encounter. I cast a candid eye on the places around me, and I know they look back at me in the same way, with big wide eyes. My shadow falls in front of me, as though showing me the way to go. Which should I trust, the shadow or the light? I see so many people shrouded in darkness, while all the time I’ve been away the sun has consumed the foundations of my childhood, and it is lost to me, ensnared in memories. I hear a voice whisper that a child will be born long ago, its teeth already in place and thick fuzzy hair on its head. So I start to dig, with the stubborn persistence of an anthropologist. My tool? A pick corroded by the salt of regret. A pick whose handle is attached by the thin wire of memory. A stubborn voice tells me that behind all the mutations of the city of Pointe-Noire, a few remnants will still be reborn from the ashes. I’ve been digging up memories so long, the town now seems to me like the Catoblepas, the indolent monster in Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony, which eventually devours its own feet. So I lend this erstwhile paradise my feet. I know if I keep on walking I’ll find the places of my childhood. Because Pointe-Noire sleeps with one eye open, the one that weeps with a single, inexhaustible tear, a tributary of sorts, that flows on towards the Côte Sauvage.

  I walk on through the streets of the city that’s obsessed me for so long, bearing the weight of my ingratitude. Each stone is a fragment of the time when, clutching the braces on my school uniform, mouth open, fists clenched, I would run till I’d no breath left in me, and never thought that space might have its limits, that time went on flowing, even when I had my eyes wide open. It was at this time, I recall, that I’d watch the planes passing over the town bound for unknown destinations. What was in these huge, noisy birds that shook our wooden huts and frightened our house pets and babies? Each plane, I reckoned, must carry a piece of bad news. Very bad news. I crossed my fingers, hoping one of these birds of ill omen would never land on our town, that no one would come knocking at the door of one of our family saying:

  ‘The doctor did everything he could, but sadly, God has called your relative home…’

  Passages leading nowhere. Some streets still have no name. Others wander off, hoping to come out by the Atlantic Ocean, but creep round the back of run-down houses and wind up in blind alleys dotted with piles of rubbish, mountains that block the horizon.

  A mangy dog slinks about with its tail between its legs, and looks at me out of the corner of its eye before running off. Must have thought I was a ghost. And I thought he was that dog from my childhood, Miguel. So we’re quits…

  Cinema Paradiso

  There are no cinemas left in this town, not since the 1990s, when the spread of the evangelical churches hijacked most of the buildings dedicated to the seventh art. The Cinema Rex, once a mythical venue for the projection of films, became a Pentecostal church called ‘The New Jerusalem’, with pastors in their Sunday best heralding Apocalypses like there’s no tomorrow, predicting the flames of Gehenna for wrongdoers, and miracles and good fortune for their flock. Disillusion is written on the faces of the blind, the deaf, the dumb and the lame. They loiter outside in the hope of divine healing.

  Here, though, we would gather and wait every morning for the poster to be put up for the film to be shown in the early afternoon. Here we applauded the adventures of Bud Spencer and Terence Hill in They Call Me Trinity and Trinity Is Still My Name or Super Fuzz. The doorman, a professional boxer with a face like a gangster in a Wild West movie, called all the shots, telling us where to stand in the queue. He worked with his boxing gloves strung round his neck and at the first sign of unrest in the crowd he pulled them on. We were his subjects, who must yield to his will, comply with his whims, or we’d get an uppercut that would send us straight to the Adolphe-Sicé hospital. He would eject you from your seat if he felt like it, to make room for a member of his family, or someone who’d bribed him, and you just had to sit on the floor. He let children in to showings reserved for ‘over 18s’, in exchange for a hundred CFA franc coin. As far as I recall, he was the person responsible for most of the brawls that took place outside and inside the cinema, taking advantage of the venue to apply what he learned in the training gym. Since he was ugly, we promptly nicknamed him ‘Joe Frazier’, Muhammad Ali’s most stubborn opponent.

  With the arrival in the capital of the first martial arts films, our local Joe Frazier realised no one was scared of boxing now, because a fighter, unlike a karateka, couldn’t fly into the air – what we called ‘lift-off’ – landing behind his opponent, and dealing him a fatal blow. We didn’t realise these ‘lift-offs’ were just cinematic tricks, the actors were ordinary people like us. Overnight, posters of Bruce Lee in The Way of the Dragon, Enter the Dragon or The Game of Death replaced the ones of Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. We lost interest in the spaghetti western actors, with their guns, which we could never own, and their horses, which we’d never seen up close. To us, karate seemed more accessible, you just had to learn the different katas and the philosophy of Master Gichin Funakoshi, the inventor of Shotokan Karate-Do. A number of dojos opened, where we handed over all our pocket money to Master Mabiala, who had proclaimed himself a black belt, 12th dan, and promised to reveal the secret of Bruce Lee’s ‘lift-off’. We all eagerly awaited the crucial moment when we would fly into the air, emitting a cry that would terrorise our opponent, but the so-called master dwelt instead on physical exercises that left us so exhausted that the number of pupils diminished every day. The truth was, we were his servants, he made us sweep out the dojo and his house, prepare his food, do the washing up or wash his clothes in the River Tchinouka. When people grew impatient and asked him when we were going to actually learn how to do the famous lift-off he would reply:

  ‘You haven’t finished learning all Master Funakoshi’s katas yet, and even when you have, there’ll be more katas, ones that were added by his disciples, in memory of him! So stop complaining, a bird can’t fly the day it’s born, its wings have to grow! It’s the same with you, you have to allow the wings of your spirit to grow. One day you’ll lift off without even realising!’

  The brave souls who continued to take his classes did finally manage lift-off: Master Mabiala put them up on the roof of his house with the aid of a ladder, and told them to jump, while doing Bruce Lee’s battle cry from The Big Boss…

  Comedies did survive the breaking wave of the martial arts films, thanks to the energy and droll mannerisms of Louis de Funès in the saga of The Gendarme of St Tropez or in Fantomas versus Scotland Yard and Fantomas Unleashed. The French actor played the role of Commissioner Juve, who is obsessed with capturing Fantomas, public enemy number one. The anti-hero spends his whole time taunting Superintendent Juve, then melting into the crowd, to the applause of the cinema audience. It was one of the rare times we cheered a baddie; we would never do that in a spaghetti western, where everyone booed Clint Eastwood’s enemies, demanding their money back. We particularly disliked it when villains Clint Eastwood had killed in a previous film appeared again in the next one. Since we took what happened in the cinema
to be real, we were shocked and decided they must think we were too stupid to realise this was a piece of trickery designed to get us to hand over our money.

  The Indian films escaped unscathed, thanks, no doubt, to the interminable love stories that were their hallmark, as well as to the physical strength of the actor Dara Singh, not to mention the magical world of The Magician from Hell, and above all the music, which made us weep. We dreamed that we would one day go to India, where we would marry Indian girls, adorned with the same jewels as the actresses who adorned the screen. India was our Peru, the place where our dreams would come true, with a little bit of magic, learned from what we saw at the cinema. We would express ourselves with ease in Hindi or Urdu, since we already sang along in these languages with the actors from these countries, even if we didn’t understand the words. Of course we’d be poor, but we wouldn’t mind, because in these films the man with no money always ended up marrying the beautiful girl, beating the rich man to it. We would insist on kissing the women properly, none of that modesty we found so irritating, and which obliged you to work out for yourself that the main actor and his sweetheart must have finally slept together…

  The projectionist at the Cinema Rex was a young womaniser who took a different girl up to his box at each showing. He picked them from among the young ladies who stood in line with us. In order to get chosen, they dressed up and put on lots of make-up, as though they were going to a party. We watched as they fluttered their eyes, to catch the attention of the technician, who took his time making up his mind. They’d bicker and insult each other over who would be the chosen one, privileged to watch the film through a little hole, right next to the one the images came through. Certain mishaps in the projection of the film were caused by the operator who, in order to impress the girl, explained all the tricks of the trade and what he called ‘the enchantment of cinema’. Since he talked rather loudly, the spectators at the back could hear him explaining that a film had twenty-four images per second, and that a shutter closed off the light beam in between them to create an impression of fluid movement on the screen. Suddenly the young woman would get overexcited and ask to be allowed to replace the reels, and send out the images upside down, by mistake. You could hear them giggling, running off into their hidey-hole and starting to make out, to the applause of the crowd. We bore no grudge against the projectionist, since we knew the enchantment came from him and his skill in handling the 35mm projector.