Alain Mabanckou - The Lights of Pointe-Noire

Even though this time the deceased was my mother, I still couldn’t control my fears and even made out to myself that shortage of funds for the journey home was a good enough alibi for getting out of it without feeling guilty. I couldn’t bear to look at myself in the mirror, for fear I would find there the reflection of my ingratitude towards the woman who must be patiently waiting for me, in her coffin, surrounded by members of the family, all of them disgusted at my absence.

All through that dreadful day, as I paced the room and wrote pages of my poetry collection Vagabond Legends , which I dedicated to the dead woman, her words echoed over and over in my mind. I thought back to our last meeting, in 1989, a few hours before I left for France, where I was to study law in Nantes. She had come to say goodbye and had travelled over five hundred kilometres to Brazzaville, where I had spent the last week.

We sat face to face in a bar in the Moungali neighbourhood, not far from the War Veterans building. Her expression was grim, her voice hoarse with emotion. She could scarcely string two words together. I held her in my arms and heard her call me ‘papa’, her way of showing me her affection. There was a moment’s silence, then I saw her tears…

When she was able to speak again, she began to talk about the concerts given by our national orchestra, Les Bantous de la Capitale, in the 1960s, and the band Les Trois Frères, namely Youlou Mabalia, Loko Massengo and Michel Boyibanda.

‘That was the golden age,’ she said; ‘we wore miniskirts and high heels and the men went round in bell-bottomed trousers and Salamander shoes. Pointe-Noire was famous for its atmosphere, and everyone had work. Even Zaireans started to arrive, though up till then you’d only see them in Brazzaville, which they reached from Kinshasa, crossing the River Congo…’

I nodded in agreement, and she went on:

‘The atmosphere’s gone now, there’s no music, young people don’t sing now, they just make noise. Anyway, I’ve stopped listening to their music, it gives me migraines…’

The waiter passed by our table, his trousers worn and ripped. My mother glowered at him, her mouth drawn tight with scorn:

‘People don’t dress properly these days! Look at that young man serving our drinks, what way is that to dress? This country’s on its knees, I tell you! You’re right to get out, leave all this behind you…’

The point of these digressions was simply to lessen the pain of separation, and help us forget we would be apart for a very long time. This was the bar where she always arranged to meet me when she came up from Pointe-Noire for her business. I was in my first years of university and was living in Brazzaville in a studio shared with my cousin Gilbert Moukila. When she turned up we were always relieved to see her: she’d give us a bit of money, so we didn’t have to wait for the state grant, which got doled out only in tiny doses and was in any case barely sufficient for our needs. She gave each of us the same sum, thirty thousand CFA francs, the equivalent of our grant. It was enough to get us through to the end of one month and await the next one with no worries.

‘So, you’re off to France, then?’ she said again, interrupting my thoughts, which had gone wandering off.

‘Well, yes, I…’

‘Oh, no need to apologise, Adèle was right!’

‘Adèle?’

‘My cousin, in Louboulou, the nasty gossip, who said I’d never have a child. I’ve often told you about her… I know you don’t like to say her name.’

‘But I am here! I’m your child!’

‘I know, but this cousin also said that I’d probably only have one boy and that he would go off on a long journey, far from me, and I would die alone in a hut like a person who has no family… You’re all I have in the world, but did you really love me?’

‘Of course I did!’

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter, you’re saying that to please me! It seems to me you’re glad to be going to live with the Whites, you don’t know how much you’re hurting me, I didn’t deserve this…’

‘No, no, I’m not glad at all…’

‘What will I do without you? Everyone will laugh at me because they’ll see I’m all alone, do you see what I mean?’

She took a gulp of her beer and whispered:

‘Why do they do this to me?’

Since I didn’t know who she was talking about this time, I ventured:

‘Who?’

‘France! The Congo! They’ve plotted to steal my son away, my only reason for living! There are lots of children in this country, why not send them to France instead of you? Look at me sitting here now! I’m as good as dead…’

Resigned, she emptied the rest of her bottle into her glass, knocked it back in one, adjusted her headscarf.

‘Don’t you disappoint me, my boy. I’ve always been a model mother to you…’

She opened her handbag and took out a bundle of notes.

‘There you are, that’s everything I earned this month, you’ll need it where you’re going… I’ve got a few notes left over I can give to Gilbert.’

We’d been in the bar nearly an hour now. She had reeled off most of the names of people in our family who’d died. Uncle Albert, who worked for the National Electric Company. My deceased grandmother N’Soko, who saw me only once. Grandpa Grégoire Moukila, who was chief of the village of Louboulou, that far-flung corner of the Bouenza district, where all our family came from, and who lived to be a hundred and twelve. Not forgetting, of course, my two sisters, who’d died only a few hours after they came into this world.

‘Don’t forget them, the ones we’ve lost. And the day you can’t see your own shadow, you’ll know you’ve ceased to exist yourself…’

She was silent for a moment, then added: ‘…And then you’ll be in the next world, like our ancestors who’ve passed on now, but still protect us, day and night…’

Outside, the day was starting to fade. Inside the café, I could barely make out my mother’s features, only her eyes that glistened, lighting up the room. I could hear the frantic beating of her heart. The silence was like a wall between us, which neither one wished to break through. We said nothing, which said almost everything. She was transmitting something to me, but I didn’t know what. I was careful not to speak. The slightest word would have ruined the moment.

She breathed out slowly, as though summoning up her courage, then got to her feet.

‘Just don’t disappoint me.’

She stood outside the entrance to the bar now, and I was behind her, like a shadow. In her eyes I could read what she hadn’t dared say out loud: she had lost me, for good.

She hailed a taxi parked opposite the café. The vehicle cut across the street in the path of the oncoming traffic and braked in front of my mother, who dived inside, holding back her tears.

I stood there, at the door of the bar, like a pillar of salt.

She wound down the window:

‘Become who you want to become and always remember this: hot water never forgets it used to be cold…’

The taxi shot off. I watched it go, weaving through the traffic towards the Ballon d’Or roundabout.

I would never see my mother again…

For a long time, then, I let people think my mother was still alive. In a way I had no choice but to lie, having picked up the habit way back in primary school when I brought my two older sisters back to life in an attempt to escape the teasing of my classmates, who were all very proud of their large families, and offered to ‘lend’ my mother their offspring. Obsessed with the idea of bearing another child, she consulted the town’s most noted doctors, as well as most of its traditional healers, who claimed to have treated women who’d been sterile for twenty years or more. Disappointed in the white men’s medicine, and cheated by the crooks in the backstreets of Pointe-Noire, who had never healed so much as a scratch with their spells and sorcery, my mother resolved to accept her condition: mother of a single child, she told herself there were other women on this earth who had no children at all, and would have been delighted to be in her shoes. But she still couldn’t just sweep aside the fact that the society she lived in considered a woman with one child as pitiful as a woman who had none. Similarly, an only son was a pariah. He was the cause of his parents’ misfortune, having ‘locked’ his mother’s belly behind him, so he could be an only one, enjoying this lowly distinction which the community scorned. He was also said to have special powers: he could make it rain, he could stop the rain, bring fever on his enemies, and prevent their wounds from healing. He was all but assumed to have power over the rotation of the earth.