Alain Mabanckou - The Lights of Pointe-Noire

It seems strange to bump into them by chance, and I think to myself that such coincidences only happen in spaghetti westerns, where the protagonists pop up out of nowhere, exchange a few angry words, draw their guns and shoot at each other. What are they doing in this place, overlooking my late mother’s property?

‘Come on, come and have a drink with us,’ insists Georgette, though showing no particular pleasure at seeing me after all these years.

Hesitantly, I enter the bar.

Georgette, who is now over fifty, refusing to accept the evidence of her years, whitens her skin and dyes her hair. Even so, you can see grey hairs on her temples and at the nape of her neck. She’s a tiny thing, with Papa Roger’s features — we always called her ‘Photocopy’, even though she hated it. Yaya Gaston seems to have come to terms with the passage of time, though he certainly looks his age, and more. His lips are stained red with drink, and he has a badly trimmed little beard. He tries to get up and hug me, but can’t manage it.

‘Don’t get up!’ Georgette says to him, trying to conceal from me what is blatantly obvious: our older brother is wasted, today and every day.

She points to a stool for me, and orders a beer. Stony faced, as though some unspoken resentment burns within her, she begins:

‘So what are you doing here? D’you think we still need you?’

I take the knock without flinching. She lashes out again:

‘You’ve been in Pointe-Noire for a few days now, and you haven’t been to see us!’

Yaya Gaston interrupts his sister, and comes to my rescue:

‘I saw you yesterday at your talk at the French Institute!’

Yes, I had seen him the previous day. My memory of our meeting was not a pleasant one. I had been upset on his behalf, but also for the memory of our father. I noticed his presence just as he was about to be ejected from the room for having disturbed the audience. Almost too drunk to stand, he kept asking for the microphone at the end of the talk, with the crowd jeering and laughing all around him. It was offered to him, he seized hold of it, but went on repeating over and over, ‘Hello, hello, hello!’, as though he was holding a telephone. Eventually he managed to say, to the great amusement of the three hundred people present:

‘Hello, hello, hello! My name is Gaston. I am the great Yaya Gaston in the novel Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty , which talks about our late father, Papa Roger! I am the big brother of this gentleman here, the writer! We have the same father, he and I, same mother, same womb!’

A great commotion ran through the audience. Yaya Gaston, who had had the microphone snatched from him, found himself assailed with insults from all over the room. Seeing that the security guards were getting ready to evict him by force, I returned to my microphone and said:

‘Let him be, he’s my big brother…’

A deathly hush swept through the room, interrupted a few seconds later by Yaya Gaston’s whoops of victory as he shouted over and over:

‘What did I tell you? Did you hear what he said? He admits it, I’m his big brother, same father, same mother, same womb! Show some respect! Show some respect, you guys! I’m a person in a novel! I’m famous, people will talk about me even when I’m dead! How many of you can say you’re people in a novel, eh? Zero! I’m telling you: same father, same mother, same womb! Go on, little brother, you finish your talk, I’ll shut up now, I’ll wait for you!’

Afterwards I’d had no choice but to arrange to meet him at my father’s house in the next few days.

‘Give me some money to get home!’

He pocketed the ten thousand CFA franc note I offered him and turned on his heels, muttering:

‘We’ll wait for you at the house! Maman Martine doesn’t live in Pointe-Noire now, she went back to the village when Papa Roger died, but I’ll send her the money you’ve brought for her. I’m going to tell everyone you’re here…’

The night of the incident at the French Institute, I couldn’t sleep. I counted the insects crashing into the light bulb over my head. Why did my brother feel the need to bring up our connection, and expose himself to humiliation before the audience which clearly included people who knew perfectly well that I had no brother or sister who were ‘same father, same mother, same womb’? Did he really think that it was just blood that brings people together, not shared life experience? In any case, he was convinced that by affirming that we were brothers he would raise his esteem with the audience. On the other hand, if he had announced that I had been adopted by his father, he’d have looked like the worker in the vineyard who turns up at the twenty-fifth hour. I had been disturbed to see Yaya Gaston in such a state that evening. All that jeering had upset me; I felt as much the victim of it as he was himself. The public realised when they heard the catch in my voice, and saw I wasn’t responding with the energy I’d had at the beginning of the talk. Yaya Gaston plays a significant part in my life, which is why he is one of the principal characters in Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty , where I portray him as someone who is obsessively clean, an idol, a hero, a real, proper big brother. He had taken me under his wing, and we slept in the same room at Papa Roger’s house, despite the jealousy of his ‘same father, same mother, same womb’ brothers. Memories of that time still haunt me, especially Yaya Gaston’s multiple girlfriends — including the generous Geneviève — who would take our little room by storm and were all madly in love with him.

I wanted to see my big brother again. I had done the right thing, I said to myself, in arranging to meet him in our father’s house, because we wouldn’t have been able to talk calmly with him in the excited state he’d been in that evening. But clearly he hadn’t waited for the rendezvous and had been watching out for me together with Georgette, near my mother’s house, from inside the bar, hoping they might see me.

I had never been very close to Georgette. She was always out with her friends, always running off somewhere, despite Papa Roger’s fury. Constantly in conflict with Maman Martine, and sometimes with Yaya Gaston too, who we were meant to respect as the oldest of the family, Georgette had been a ‘trendy’ young woman. The way she dressed was on the verge of indecent, at a time when the young people of Pointe-Noire were attracted to the SAPE, the Society of Ambience-Makers and People of Elegance. Her lovers were ‘Parisians’, young men who came over from France to show off their over-the-top outfits during the dry season. Their skin had been whitened with products made from hydroquinone, and they had paunches — for them, a sign of elegance, since a rounded belly held up your belt and trousers more effectively than a flat one. The arrival of these young gods in Pointe-Noire stirred up trouble in families. The young girls lost their heads and turned rebellious, spending whole nights following the Parisians from bar to bar.

Seeing my sister again now, I realised at once that the ambush had been her idea, and that she had taken advantage of Yaya Gaston’s drink problem. He was just going along with her.

The waiter places a beer in front of me.

‘Drink it while it’s cold,’ advises Georgette, who seems to have calmed down a bit.

I do as she says, and she adds triumphantly:

‘We knew you’d come and hang around your mother’s plot, that’s why we’ve been sitting here since late this morning! You always loved your mother more than your father!’

A young man of around thirty sits down at our table. Noticing my surprise, Georgette introduces him:

‘This is Papa Roger’s cousin, so he’s your cousin too. I told him to come by. He’ll take the money you could have given Papa Roger if he’d still been alive…’