by David Diop
God’s truth, we learned this when my father, after a year, tired of waiting for news of Penndo and Yoro Ba, sent my half brother Ndiaga to question Sadibou Guèye, who on a moment’s notice traveled to Podor, where Badara Diaw lived. Badara Diaw’s family had already, after a month without news of him, researched the route that he had told them he was taking with my mother. Weeping tears of blood, they told Sadibou Guèye what they feared had happened. Surely Badara and Penndo had both been kidnapped, just outside Mboyo, by a dozen Moorish horsemen, the traces of whom villagers had noticed on the riverbanks. The Moors from the north would kidnap black people to make slaves of them. I know, I understand that when they saw Penndo Ba’s beauty they did not hesitate to take her to sell her to their great sheikh for the price of thirty camels. I know, I understand that they captured her travel companion, Badara Diaw, too so that her theft would go unavenged.
As soon as he learned the news of Penndo Ba’s capture by the Moors, my father passed definitively into old age. God’s truth, he continued to laugh, to smile at us, to joke about the world and about himself, but he was never the same again. In one instant he had lost half of his youth, he had lost half of his joy in existing.
XVII
THE SECOND DRAWING I made for Doctor François was a portrait of Mademba, my friend, my more-than-brother. This drawing was less beautiful. Not because it was less successful, but because Mademba was ugly. I still think so, even if it isn’t completely true, because, despite the fact that death now separates us, the history of our teasing survives between us. But if Mademba wasn’t as beautiful as I am on the outside, inside he was more so.
When my mother left and didn’t come back, Mademba took me in. He took me by the hand and led me into his parents’ compound. My move into Mademba’s house happened slowly, over time. I slept there one night, then two in a row, then three. God’s truth, my installment in Mademba Diop’s family took place gradually. I no longer had my maman. Mademba, who felt my pain more than anyone else in Gandiol, wanted his maman to adopt me. Mademba took me by the hand and led me to Aminata Sarr: he put my hand into his mother’s and said, “I want Alfa Ndiaye to live with us, I want you to become his maman.” My father’s other wives weren’t mean, they were even nice to me, especially the first one, Ndiaga and Saliou’s mother. But despite that, I gradually left my family to join Mademba’s. My father, the old man, accepted it without a word. He said “yes” to Aminata Sarr, Mademba’s mother, when she asked to adopt me. Every year during the Tabaski Festival, my father even asked his first wife, Aïda Mbengue, to give the best part of the sacrificial sheep to Aminata Sarr. He ended up giving an entire sacrificial sheep to Mademba’s family. My father, the old man, could no longer look at me without wanting to cry. I knew, I understood that I resembled his Penndo too much.
Gradually the sadness left, gradually Aminata Sarr and Mademba, aided by the passage of time, made me forget the gnawing pain. At first, Mademba and I would go off to play in the brush, always heading north. He and I knew, between ourselves, we understood why. But we kept our hopes quiet, that we would be the first to see my mother, Yoro Ba, his five sons, and their herd. What we told Aminata Sarr about our daylong expeditions to the north was that they were to catch palm rats in traps, or to hunt turtledoves with slingshots. She would give us her blessing and a few provisions, three pinches of salt and a flask of cold water. And whenever we caught palm rats or turtledoves and roasted them—after gutting, plucking, or butchering them—staked on dry branches, we would forget my mother, her father, her five brothers, and their herd. Watching the orange flames of our small fire sizzle, reanimated from time to time by fat oozing from the crackling flesh of our haul from the brush, we were no longer thinking about the pain of absence that wrung our guts, but of the hunger that wrung them just as much. We stopped dreaming that by some incredible miracle Penndo had escaped her Moorish captors, that she had reunited in Walaldé with her father, her five brothers, and their herd, and that they would return together to Gandiol. At that moment, so close to her kidnapping, the only way I knew to surmount the irreversible absence of my mother was by hunting and cooking palm rats and turtledoves with Mademba, my more-than-brother.
We grew up, gradually, Mademba and I. And gradually we stopped taking the road north from Gandiol to wait for Penndo to return. At fifteen, we were circumcised on the same day. We were initiated into the secrets of adulthood by the same village elder. He explained to us how to conduct ourselves. The greatest secret he taught us was that it isn’t the man who controls events but events that control the man. Any event that surprises a man has already been experienced by other men before him. The effects of all human possibilities have already been felt. Nothing that might happen to us here, as terrible or as felicitous as it might seem, is new. But what we experience is always new because every man is unique, the way every leaf and every tree is unique. Men share with each other the same lifeblood, but each feeds himself from it differently. Even if the new isn’t really new, it’s always new for those who, ceaselessly, wash up on the world’s shores, generation after generation, wave after wave. So, in order to find yourself in life, to not lose yourself on the path, you must listen to the voice of duty. To think too much about yourself is to falter. Whoever understands this secret has the potential to live in peace. But it’s easier said than done.
I became tall and strong and Mademba remained short and frail. Every year in the dry season, the desire to see Penndo would take me by the throat again. I didn’t know how to chase my mother from my mind except by exhausting my body. I worked in my father’s fields and in those of Siré Diop, Mademba’s father. I danced, I swam, I wrestled, while Mademba sat and studied, and studied more. God’s truth, Mademba learned the holy book like no one else in Gandiol. By the age of twelve he could recite the Holy Koran by heart, while I could barely recite my prayers at fifteen. Once he had become more knowledgeable than our marabout, Mademba wanted to go to the white school. Siré Diop, who didn’t want his son to remain a peasant like him, agreed on the condition that I go with him. During those years, I would escort him to the threshold of the school, which I only crossed once. Nothing could enter into the insides of my head. I know, I understand that the memory of my mother had calcified the entire surface of my mind so it was hard like a tortoise’s shell. I know, I understand that there was nothing beneath this shell but the void of waiting. God’s truth, the space where knowledge would have gone was already occupied. So I preferred to work in the field, to dance and wrestle to prove the extent of my powers, to not think about the impossible return of my mother, Penndo Ba. It was only once Mademba was dead that my mind opened enough to let me see what was hiding there. You might say that with Mademba’s death, a big metal seed of war fell from the sky and cracked my mind’s shell in two. God’s truth, a new suffering joined with the old one. The two contemplated each other, they explained each other, they gave each other meaning.
When we turned twenty, Mademba wanted to go to war. School had put it in his head that he should save the motherland, France. Mademba wanted to become a somebody in Saint-Louis, a French citizen: “Alfa, the world is big, I want to see it. The war is a chance to leave Gandiol. God willing, we will return safe and sound. When we become French citizens, we’ll move to Saint-Louis. We’ll start a business. We’ll become wholesalers and we’ll distribute food to the shops in northern Senegal, including the ones in Gandiol! Once we’re rich, we’ll look for and find your mother, and we’ll buy her back from the Moorish horsemen who took her.” I bought into his dream. God’s truth, I owed him. And yet I said to myself that if I also became a somebody, a Senegalese rifleman for life, it could be that in the company of my detail I might one day visit the tribes of the northern Moors with my regulation rifle in my left hand and my savage machete in my right.
At first the recruiters told Mademba “no.” Mademba was too frail, as light and delicate as a crowned crane. Mademba was not suited to war. But God’s truth, Mademba was stubborn. Mademba,
who to that point was only resistant to mental fatigue, asked me to help him become resistant to physical fatigue. So, for two whole months, I forced Mademba’s feeble strength to grow and grow. I made him run in the heavy sand beneath the leaden midday sun, I made him swim across the river, I made him swing a daba in his father’s fields for hours and hours. God’s truth, I forced him to eat enormous quantities of boiled millet mixed with hot milk and peanut butter, as fighters worthy of the name do to put on weight.
The second time, the recruiting soldiers said “yes.” They didn’t recognize him. He had gone from crowned crane to fat partridge. For Doctor François, I drew the laugh that sprang to Mademba Diop’s face when I explained to him that if he wanted to become a wrestler he already had an alias: Turtledove Chest! I drew, in shadows and light, how Mademba’s eyes creased with laugher when I added that he’d puffed out so much his own totem wouldn’t recognize him.
XVIII
THE NIGHT BEFORE WE LEFT for the war in France, Fary Thiam said “yes” to me with her eyes, discreetly, surrounded by the girls and boys of our age set. It was a full moon that night, we were twenty years old and we wanted to laugh. We told each other short sweet stories full of innuendo, and riddles too. We weren’t gathered in Mademba’s parents’ compound that evening, as we were four years before. Mademba’s younger brothers and sisters had gotten too old to sleep through our suggestive stories. We were seated on wide mats on the corner of a sandy street in the village, sheltered by the low branches of a mango tree. Fary was more beautiful than ever in a saffron yellow dress that clung to her chest, her waist and hips. In the moonlight, her dress looked pure white. Fary shot me a quick but loaded look that seemed to say, “Get ready, Alfa, something important is going to happen!” Fary took my hand as she had on the night when she chose me when we were sixteen years old, glanced surreptitiously at the middle of my body, then got up and left the group. I waited until she’d disappeared around the corner and I got up as well to follow her from a distance to the small ebony forest, where we weren’t afraid to see the river goddess Mame Coumba Bang because of the desire we felt, my desire to enter the depths of Fary’s body, hers for me to enter it.
I know, I understand why Fary Thiam opened the inside of her body to me before we left for the war, Mademba and I. The inside of Fary’s body was warm, soft, and moist. I had never tasted, with my mouth or with my skin, anything so warm, soft, and moist as the interior of Fary Thiam’s body. The part of my body, my inside-outside, that entered Fary had never received such an enveloping embrace from top to bottom, neither in the hot sand on the shores of the ocean where, flat on my stomach, I had often thrust it for my own pleasure, nor in the secret of river water beneath my soapy hands’ caress. God’s truth, I had never known anything better in my life than the tender moist heat of the inside of Fary’s body, and I know, I understand why she let me taste it though it ruined her family’s honor.
I think Fary began to think for herself before I did. I think she wanted a body as beautiful as mine to know this sweet happiness before disappearing into the war. I know, I understand that Fary wanted to make me a man before I went to offer my beautiful body to the bloody battlefields of war. This is why Fary offered herself to me despite the ancestral prohibition. God’s truth, my body had experienced all sorts of great joys before Fary. I had felt its power in back-to-back wrestling matches, I had pushed it to the edges of its resistance in long races on the beach after swimming across the river. I had sprayed it with seawater beneath a sun as hot as hell, I had quenched it with cold water drawn from the deep wells of Gandiol after swinging a daba in my father’s and Siré Diop’s fields for hours and hours. God’s truth, my body had known the pleasure of reaching the limits of its power, but never had anything been as powerful as Fary’s warm, soft, and moist interior. God’s truth, Fary offered me the most beautiful present a young woman could offer a young man on the eve of his departure for war. To die without knowing all of the pleasures of the body isn’t fair. God’s truth, I know with certainty that Mademba never experienced the pleasure of entering the insides of a woman’s body. I know it, he died even though he wasn’t a man yet. He would have become one if he had known the tender, wet, and soft sweetness of the interior of a woman he loved. Poor, incomplete Mademba.
I know, I understand the other reason Fary Thiam opened the inside of her body to me before we left for the war, Mademba and I. When rumors about the war arrived in the village, Fary understood very well that France and its army would take me from her. She knew, she understood that I would be leaving forever. She knew, she understood that even if I didn’t die at war, I would never return to Gandiol. She knew, she understood that I would settle in Saint-Louis du Senegal with Mademba Diop, that I would want to become a somebody, a Senegalese rifleman for life, with a big pension to make my old father’s final years easier, and to one day reunite with my mother, Penndo Ba. Fary Thiam understood that France would take me from her, whether I lived or died.
That’s the other reason Fary offered me the warm, sweet, and wet insides of her body before I left to make war with the Toubabs, despite the honor of the Thiam family, despite the hatred her father felt for mine.
XIX
ABDOU THIAM IS THE VILLAGE CHIEF of Gandiol. This was determined by traditional law. Abdou Thiam detests my father because my father, the old man, made him lose face in front of everyone. Abdou Thiam collects the village taxes and one day he convened an assembly of the elders, which was soon joined by all the people of Gandiol. Inspired by a king’s envoy from Cayor and incited by a governor’s envoy from Saint-Louis, Abdou Thiam said that we needed to follow a new path, that we needed to cultivate peanuts instead of millet, peanuts instead of tomatoes, peanuts instead of onions, peanuts instead of cabbage, peanuts instead of watermelons. Peanuts meant more money for everyone. Peanuts meant more money to pay taxes. Peanuts would give new nets to the fishermen. Peanuts meant new wells could be dug. The money from the peanuts would mean brick houses, a permanent school, corrugated metal roofs for our huts. The money from the peanuts would mean trains and roads, motors on our canoes, clinics and maternity wards. Those who farmed peanuts, Chief Abdou Thiam concluded, would be exempt from their corvées, from mandatory labor. Those who didn’t would not.
So my father, the old man, stood up and asked permission to speak. I am his youngest son, his youngest child. My father has worn a helmet of white hair on his head since Penndo Ba left us. My father is a soldier of everyday life who only lived to protect his wives and his children from hunger. Day after day, in the river of time that is life, my father filled our bellies with the fruits of his fields and his orchards. My father, the old man, made us, his family, grow stronger and more beautiful just like the plants he fed to us. He was a grower of trees and fruits, he was a grower of children. We grew tall and strong like the seeds he planted in the loamy soils of his fields.
My father, the old man, stood up and asked permission to speak. It was granted, and he said:
“I, Bassirou Coumba Ndiaye, the grandson of Sidy Malamine Ndiaye, the great-grandson of the grandson of one of the five founders of our village, I am going to tell you, Abdou Thiam, something that you will not like. I will not refuse to dedicate one of my fields to the cultivation of peanuts, but I refuse to dedicate all of my fields to peanuts. Peanuts cannot feed my family. Abdou Thiam, you say that peanuts are money, but God’s truth, I don’t need money. I feed my family with millet, tomatoes, onions, red beans, with the watermelons that grow in my fields. I have a cow that gives me milk, I have a few sheep that give me meat. One of my sons who is a fisherman gives me dried fish. My wives extract salt from the soil all year long. With all of this food I can even open my doors to a hungry traveler, I can perform the sacred duty of hospitality.
“But if I only grow peanuts, what will feed my family? Who will feed the passing travelers who deserve my hospitality? Money from peanuts can’t feed them all. Tell me, Abdou Thiam, would I not be forced to come to your store to buy
food? Abdou Thiam, you will not like what I am going to say to you, but a village chief should concern himself with the people’s interests before his own. Abdou Thiam, you and I are equals and I do not want, one day, to have to come to your store to beg for rice on credit, for oil on credit, for sugar on credit to feed my own. I also do not want to close my door to a hungry traveler because I myself am hungry.
“Abdou Thiam, you won’t like what I’m going to say, but the day when all of the villages in our area only cultivate peanuts, the price of peanuts will go down. We will earn less and less money and you yourself will end up having to live on credit. A shopkeeper whose clients are all debtors becomes himself a debtor to his suppliers.
“Abdou Thiam, you won’t like what I’m going to say. I, Bassirou Coumba Ndiaye, remember the year we call ‘the year of hunger.’ Your late grandfather might have spoken to you about it. It was the year after the locusts came, the year of the great drought, the year the wells dried up, the year the dust blew down from the north, the year the river was too low to irrigate our fields. I was a young child but I remember that if we had not all shared everything during that infernally dry year, if we hadn’t shared our stores of millet, of red beans, our stores of onions, of cassava, if we hadn’t shared our milk and our sheep, we would all have died. Abdou Thiam, peanuts wouldn’t have saved us then, and the money from peanuts wouldn’t have saved us either. To survive the devil’s drought, we would surely have eaten the seed peanuts for the following year’s crop and we would have had to buy more on credit from the same people we’d sold our crop to at whatever price they set. From that moment on, we would have been poor forever, beggars forever! That is why, Abdou Thiam, even if you won’t like it, I say ‘no’ to peanuts and I say ‘no’ to peanut money!”