Alain Mabanckou - The Lights of Pointe-Noire

He returns to the meeting room while we go back the way we came and the supervisor asks me quietly:

‘What was in the envelope?’

‘Just some money, to buy a beer.’

‘He doesn’t drink…’

‘Well, he can buy himself a lemonade, at least…’

At the exit to the lycée the supervisor looks sad:

‘You will come back and visit us again one day, won’t you?’

‘Of course!’

‘But when? Twenty-eight years from now? We’ll all be dead, and maybe the school won’t even be called Victor-Augagneur any more! I’ll have gone to join our dear departed Dipanda, up above…’

I reply, without conviction:

‘I’ll try not to leave it another twenty-eight years…’

Few Pontenegrins ever dare come as far as this part of the port. Placide Mouembe, my childhood friend, has driven me here, at my request. But he prefers to remain at a distance.

‘Don’t go any farther!’ he yells, increasingly anxious as I gradually advance towards the water.

In his car, all the way here, he kept telling me I must be careful. And he gave me strict orders:

‘We can go the whole length of the port and back, if you want, but please let’s not go to that cursed place where there are all those rocks. Strange things happen down there. I don’t want anything to happen to us…’

I decided he must be thinking of the times we used to roam down the beach in the hope of finding a wrap left behind by a mermaid, the famous Mami Watta. According to legend, whoever found it would become very rich. The Pontenegrins back then thought that the very wealthy people in our town must have happened upon the wrap of the woman with the fishtail and long golden hair. People from the rougher parts of town would be up at dawn to dash to the bit of the wharf where she was said to live. The most gullible among them would describe the features of this aquatic being with great attention to detail, as though they had actually seen her. She was blonde, or maybe she was black, or maybe a woman with porcelain skin. She was huge, surging out of a great gaping abyss far out to sea, and would come and lie down to rest a few centimetres from the wharf when the ships had gone out. Her piercing eyes lit up the whole of the Côte Sauvage as she stretched out on the sand to comb her hair. What time did you have to get up, if you wanted to see her? Some said around midnight, or even two in the morning. Others said around four. And even so, no one dared come here at these times.

But no, Placide wasn’t referring to Mama Watti, but to a different mystery:

‘The ocean keeps many things in its belly… the sea is dangerous still, brother, and has no pity. Do you know why the water is salty?’

‘I’ve already heard that one…’

‘Yes, the sea tastes salty from the tears of our ancestors, who wept as they made their cursed passage during the slave trade.’

Once we were through the entrance to the port and had parked the car, he began to look worried:

‘It’s a bad day to be down by the sea. There’s hardly anyone here, the boats look like ghosts watching us, ready to shove us in the water. I’m not going near those rocks…’

I was so insistent, though, that finally he gave in:

‘All right, then, let’s go, but we mustn’t get too close!’

All around me are the rocks where the waves come to die. As I approach, the sea suddenly falls calm. I can’t see what Placide is frightened of, it’s such a peaceful place, where any tourist would dream of spending an entire afternoon.

I turn around: Placide is waving at me to come back, but I don’t move, I look out across the stretch of sea and imagine what might be lurking in its depths.

A cormorant lands not far away; I turn my head to look at him just as a gigantic wave comes out of nowhere and smashes on to the rocks, wetting my trousers. From a distance, another, even bigger one races in at breakneck speed. I retreat and run back to join my friend, whose face is rigid with terror:

‘What did I tell you? Did you see that? Wasn’t that weird, those two waves? This part of the sea is the kingdom of darkness, it has teeth here and anyone who intrudes on her peace and quiet will be crushed! This is where the bodies of the drowned are washed up. Wherever you happen to die in these waters, it’s here that your body will be found! All the sorcerers in this town come and do their stuff here, that’s why I didn’t want us to get too close to this Zone of Death. The water looks peaceful enough, but if someone comes to stand on the rocks it turns rough, and swallows him with the third wave, which can be as high as a building with five or six storeys, believe me!..’

The cormorant I saw earlier passes overhead. Placide follows his flight and concludes, chillingly:

‘Those birds work hand in hand with the spirits of the sea. They’re accomplices, they tell the monsters of the sea if someone’s here! The bird that’s just flown over is disappointed, because he didn’t get what he wanted: you! Listen, let’s go back, we’re better off having a drink down by the Rex…’

That evening, after a drink at the Paysanat, Placide dropped me outside the French Institute. I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking of the two waves, and wondering what would have happened at the third wave, if I had stayed on the rocks…

I don’t remember ever having bathed on the Côte Sauvage as a teenager. I only ever went down there with the other kids in the hope of getting some sardines, jack mackerels or sole from the Beninese fishermen to take back to my mother, in exchange for help unloading the Ghanaian pirogues. We also went with the secret hope of spying on the half-naked women, particularly white women. The grown-ups said they didn’t know how to hide their ‘nether lands’ and made a great exhibition of themselves applying their suncream. Our curiosity bordered on obsession, since we were determined to check whether the blondes also had blond pubic hairs, and if the redheads were red ‘down there’ as well. Grown-ups idolised body hair to the point where you’d hear them whispering: ‘I chatted up this girl today, wow, she’s beautiful! She’s got hair everywhere, long and shiny, straight hair!’

Obviously, because these women depilated their bodies before they went into the sun, you had to get really close to see anything. Startled by our invasion, they would call us all the names under the sun, and go and complain to the coastguard of the Côte Sauvage, who would throw us off the beach.

Many of us, like myself, had never bathed in the sea here, scrupulously following the recommendations of the local sorcerers as to how to keep hold of our physical strength. We often went to ask their advice, and they would prepare gris-gris for us, to make us invincible when we got into fights. With the gris-gris to protect you, if you gave your opponent a thump on the head, he would fall unconscious, or his head would go into such a spin he’d start picking up the garbage that lay round about him. People said that some of these gris-gris, made in the most far-flung villages in the south of the country, like Mayalama, Mpangala or Boko, were so powerful that if you slapped a tree, the unripe fruits would fall and the leaves would turn to dust. Most of the kids were tempted by these fetishes from the age of fourteen. You just had to turn up at the sorcerer’s house with one litre of palm wine, and one of palm oil, a packet of Gillette blades, some cola nuts, chillis and charcoal. The guru would get out his arsenal of amulets, murmur a few obscure words, light some candles and ask you to hold out your wrists. He’d grab a Gillette blade and make three little cuts on each of your wrists. Once the blood began to flow he would rub on a black powder, which stung. You were not allowed to cry out or give any sign that the power was entering into you. For the pain he’d get you to chew on some cola nuts and drink a glass of palm wine. You paid him for his work, and he gave you a list of things you mustn’t do: don’t look under your bed, don’t put your left foot down first when you get out of bed, don’t approach women, and most of all, don’t swim on the Côte Sauvage. How could you check that the power had entered you? The sorcerer would slap you several times. After a moment, you went into a trance, mind and body. Then he’d hand you an empty bottle and ask you to smash it over your own head. If the glass broke without cutting you, it was a total success. Then you had to go and pick a fight with someone in the street, to be quite sure you were as strong as Zembla, Tarzan and Blek the Rock, all rolled into one…