Alain Mabanckou - The Lights of Pointe-Noire

Yaya Gaston nods his agreement:

‘Don’t worry, little brother, just give him fifty thousand CFA francs or a bit more and he’ll be happy!’

Georgette leaps off her stool:

‘What? Fifty thousand CFA francs? Gaston, do you know what you’re saying? Is that kind of money going to bring Papa Roger back to us? What about me, then, how much would he give me? The same?’

Yaya Gaston says hastily:

‘Calm down, sister, I’m sure our little brother won’t give you less than a hundred thousand CFA francs! You know how generous he is!’

‘No way! I won’t be made fun of! I’m not accepting a little sum of money after he’s been abroad all these years, never seeing us! Not once, since he left, did he ever send us a single money order! I need a million CFA francs! We buried our father, we spent money and he sent us nothing! Do you think I’ll accept one hundred thousand CFA francs? Never! And if he gives me one hundred thousand CFA francs, I’ll chuck them in the gutter, so there!’

I do a quick calculation: I’ve only got thirty thousand CFA francs in my pocket, far less than the staggering amount expected by my sister, whom I like less and less by the minute. I’ve stopped looking her in the eye; as far as I’m concerned she’s a stranger to me now. All she talks about is money, not a word about the memory of our father. Basically, I’m supposed to reimburse the cost of Papa Roger’s funeral. I wonder why my maternal family didn’t take the same attitude, since I didn’t attend Maman Pauline’s funeral, and they never presented me with a bill. I try to control my irritation.

The so-called cousin of my father glances at my shoes from time to time. When he finally breaks his silence he says:

‘Will you leave me those shoes?’

Yaya Gaston looks down at my Campers, really practical in this heat.

‘Give me your shoes, little brother, not him. Papa’s cousin can buy himself some with the money you give him…’

The so-called cousin looks at my jeans and white shirt. Before he even opens his mouth, Yaya Gaston gets in ahead of him:

‘The shirt and jeans are taken! I’m having them. And my little brother can give me his suit as well, the one he was wearing at his talk…’

I can’t think how to get out of this trap now. I need to find an excuse to leave.

I try asking:

‘Are we still meeting at Papa’s house?’

‘Of course!’ responds Georgette. ‘We’ve told everyone, and they’re all impatient for their share, but you have to give me mine now, because I don’t want to get mixed up with the others when they all start fighting over it.’

‘I haven’t got anything on me, I didn’t expect to find you here and…’

Yaya Gaston stops me: ‘Listen, little brother, even if you only have twenty or thirty thousand CFA francs, give me that, for my fare. You can give us the rest when we have the reunion at the house.’

Georgette disagrees:

‘Gaston, could you just shut up for once? Are you listening to what I’m saying? Are you looking for problems, or what?’

‘He just needs to come an hour early, you go and sit in a bistro and he gives you the money!’ suggests the ‘cousin’.

Yaya Gaston backs him up. ‘That’s not a bad idea.’

Georgette’s looking for a counter-argument, but she needs time. She decides to call a ceasefire.

‘OK, we’ll do that! For now just give us twenty or thirty thousand CFA francs for our transport.’

From where we are now, to my father’s house, the cost of transport would be less than one thousand CFA francs. I’m tired of bargaining, and I dig into the pocket of my trousers. I manage to pull out a couple of notes and I put down twenty thousand CFA francs on the table. Georgette pockets them while the other two don’t even blink. That leaves me with ten thousand CFA francs for my own fare home and a meal at Chez Gaspard.

As I get to my feet I know already that I won’t be going to the family reunion, that I won’t see Yaya Gaston again before I leave Pointe-Noire, because of Georgette.

I walk out of the bar while they’re splitting up the twenty thousand CFA francs. They’ve already forgotten I exist, I can hear Georgette yelling at the other two:

‘No! I’m taking twelve thousand, you two can split the other eight!’

My cousin Bienvenüe has been admitted to the Adolphe-Sicé hospital. Her twin brother Gilbert rang to tell me a few minutes ago.

‘You’re staying not far from the hospital, you could drop by and see her, she’d like that,’ he insisted.

I don’t think I will visit her, I won’t have the courage, even though from the balcony of the apartment where I’m staying you can see the old colonial building, almost separate from the town, with its back to the Atlantic Ocean. Every morning since my arrival, I’ve stood here looking over at it, with a cup of coffee in my hand. When a crow settles on the roof, I think he must be adding up how many outings the ambulances make every day, between the city and this austere, crumbling place, often referred to by the locals as ‘ the death home ’. As a teenager, I passed by it on my way to the Karl Marx lycée, my stomach knotted with fear. I was convinced, like most of the students, that if you looked that way you’d bring bad luck on your family.

Grown-ups were quite clear that you must never ‘show your face to the hospital’, because it would take note of it, and remember it the day you passed through its doors and take your life. Some of us would cover our faces with our shirts as we came near the building. Others walked with their back to it. This fear was in fact fed by a character called Basile, who ran the hospital morgue. He was said to indulge in practices which were, to say the least, peculiar. He talked to corpses, and slapped them about if they wouldn’t lie quietly in the cold rooms. He got particularly angry with the corpses of young girls he believed had led debauched lives. He slapped them, then made up their faces and piled them up like animals in a single coffin, while raging:

‘Not so proud now, eh? Did you think you’d avoid the morgue? There’s only one in this town! A human being’s just a heap of flesh to me, flesh to feed the worms on!’

In the working-class districts, you’d pass Basile talking to invisible people, waving his arms around. Dogs ran after him, but never got too close to the little man with the angry face.

It was also widely known that Basile ate no meat, since he said he’d seen everything under the sun and to him there was no difference between cattle meat and human flesh…

Gilbert’s voice was very faint:

‘Bienvenüe is in Room One. You know, the room Papa was in…’

There was a silence, then he added, enigmatically:

‘And since Papa died in that room…’

This conclusion rang like an acceptance of a fateful verdict, which he had been expecting. At a loss for words to reassure him, I simply asked:

‘Isn’t there any other room besides that one?’

‘Everything’s taken, Room One was only free because people would rather take the sick person home with them than keep them in there… But she was in pain, I couldn’t do that…’

It’s more than three decades, now, since Uncle Albert died after being admitted to hospital in Room One, where two other members of the family had been before him, Uncle Mouboungoulou and Uncle Makita, who both died ‘after a long illness in Adolphe-Sicé hospital’, as it said on the evening announcements on the radio, to avoid divulging the cause of death.

‘Besides, there’s no doctor qualified to treat her illness, I phoned Cousin Paulin, he’s a doctor at the University Hospital in Brazzaville, he can’t get to Pointe-Noire for three days. For now they’re only giving Bienvenüe aspirin…’