Alain Mabanckou - The Lights of Pointe-Noire

‘A smile isn’t enough, you have to wait till she touches her hair, and especially till she looks down at the ground. Did she do that, the beauty who went by a couple of minutes ago?’

‘No…’

‘Well then, that’s why I didn’t waste my energy! I’m telling you, the pretty ones are only interested in the boys who don’t notice them. They want to be seen, that’s what they’re aiming for. And another thing, if you meet two girls together, an ugly one with a pretty one, I mean, start with the ugly one, and the pretty one will start flirting with you the next day, just as a challenge to the other one. I call it the billiard technique: to get to a ball and pocket it you need to hit another one, and fortunately it’s possible to hit two birds with one stone, because both balls could end up in the same pocket, or in two different holes! But that takes experience, and you’re still a beginner…’

‘And if both of them are pretty, which ball do you aim for?’

‘Impossible! There’ll always be one prettier than the other, there’s no such thing as a draw in beauty, or in ugliness either!’

Sometimes, when he wasn’t looking, I’d open the notebook where he wrote down the girls’ names, with some of them marked ‘to simmer’.

Intrigued, I plunged in one evening:

‘So what does it mean, to simmer?’

Grand Poupy gave a start, and his face expressed grave disappointment:

‘So, how long have you been looking through my private things?’

He had raised his voice, and just as I began to feel tears pricking my eyes, he spoke more softly, to console me:

‘No point snivelling now… What’s done is done. Don’t do it again. I’ll tell you what “leave to simmer” means…’

He took out the notebook from his satchel and opened it:

‘On the left-hand page I write out the names of the girls I’ve already been out with, and the right-hand page is for the ones I’m still working on. Some of them are the tricky ones I’ve already tried it with, I’ve kissed them on the lips, but they put on an act, they don’t want me to go any farther. So I pretend I’m not interested in them, like I haven’t got time for them, I let them simmer, like a dish you cook over a low heat in a pot. It pays off eventually because in the end those are the girls that come running after me! And I’m back in charge!’

I wasn’t honest with my mother’s cousin, I continued to read his notebook without him knowing. I discovered it wasn’t just the names of his sweethearts he wrote down. He also recorded his memories of Sibiti, the place he came from. I remember long passages without a single crossing out, in which he described the adventures of a certain Chelos, to whom the writing was addressed. They all began the same way:

‘My dear, true friend, dear Chelos, As the moon is my witness, I am sending you another story from my little backwater of Sibiti…’

I wondered whether this Chelos person really existed or was just a product of his mischievous imagination. Grand Poupy wrote at night, when everyone else was asleep. He lit a candle, opened a school exercise book, took a ballpoint pen and covered the empty pages with black ink at breathtaking speed. The stories were mostly bawdy, particularly the one about a woman called Massika, and her lover, Bosco. Massika had assured Bosco that her husband was away at a funeral in a neighbouring village. He wouldn’t be back till the end of the morning of the following day. So, that evening, Bosco turned up and sat down to eat with Massika. The two love pigeons got drunk on palm wine and laughed together like hyenas. In the middle of the night they disappeared into the bedroom and began making love when suddenly there was a loud knocking at the door. Massika couldn’t think who it might be at that hour of the night. She must either open the door or do nothing and wait for the night visitor to go away. But he knocked louder and louder, and began shouting Massika’s name, till she realised it must be her man standing out there.

‘Come and open the door, I can’t find my key!’

‘I thought you went to the wake?’

‘I’ll explain later, first open the door.’

Bosco just had time to slip under the bed as the door opened and the man of the house put down his bag in the main room. He complained his feet were sore, and asked his wife to go and boil some water for him. When she came back and set a steaming bucket down before her husband he picked it up without a word, slipped into the bedroom with it and emptied it out under the bed. Bosco, who was stark naked, burst out of his hiding place, pushed past the husband, got as far as the main room and plunged out of the front door, followed by the adulterous wife. The two vanished in the darkness while in the distance you could hear the barking of dogs, who must have been having a laugh at their expense, two humans, dressed like Adam and Eve…

The truth was, Grand Poupy dreamed of being a writer…

Here’s Grand Poupy now. We embrace. Behind him I see a woman whose face is vaguely familiar. I hold out my hand to her tentatively, and my mother’s cousin looks almost shocked:

‘You’re going to shake her hand? Won’t you kiss her? Why so formal? Don’t you recognise her?’

I take another look. The woman smiles at me. I can see in her face, she’s a bit disappointed. She’s come to my mother’s plot, where Grand Poupy and I have arranged to meet, specially to see me. It was actually my mother’s cousin who insisted she come today because she hadn’t been able to make it to the family reunion, she was babysitting.

‘Go on, kiss her, it’s Alphonsine!’

I start at the name. Memories flood back, and Grand Poupy’s teasing smile and Alphonsine’s now beaming face make me realise how stupid I’ve been. I can see her now as she was back then, braiding my mother’s hair. I was too shy to come out of this hut, because I was in love with her. Grand Poupy bombarded me with advice, told me just to jump in and swim, wrote out what I had to say to her when we met. I was so paralysed by Alphonsine, face to face with her, I went to pieces, and started to stammer. She was troubled, too, and would run off when I finally managed to put Grand Poupy’s tips into practice, placing my hand on her shoulder. I sent her poems, letters which he read and corrected, and which even so received no reply. In this passionate, one-way correspondence I described her eyes, shimmering, yet moist, her fair skin, like clay fashioned by an archangel who had leaned over her cradle without her parents knowing. These letters were delivered personally by my mother’s cousin. At least, that’s what he swore when got back, with a smile on his lips, jeering at my cowardice. Alphonsine was well ready for me, he claimed, I had better hurry up or some scoundrel would come and put a spoke in the wheels.

‘You’ll have only yourself to blame!’ he warned.

I advanced at a tortoise-like pace in this relationship, to which I attributed all my adolescent angst. As far as I recall I never managed to be with Alphonsine and say anything coherent for more than about ten minutes. In my late teens I was living in Brazzaville and she was back in Pointe-Noire. We lost track of each other, resigned to a platonic relationship, without even a little kiss.

And here she is now right in front of me, a grown-up lady, with two children standing up straight behind her. Grand Poupy smiles impishly. Finally he cracks and bursts out laughing:

‘See, my boy, Alphonsine is one of the family now, I went a different way about it: I married her myself, and we’ve got children. So, they are your nephews, you must look after them as if they were your own children. We live in M’Paka, on the outskirts of town. One of our daughters, the oldest, is studying in Morocco…’