Alain Mabanckou - The Lights of Pointe-Noire

I was quite prepared to believe all this, and searched in vain for the hidden powers I was thought to possess, finally concluding that what an only child really possessed was the secret fortune to be gained from his parents’ constant fear they might lose him. The parents were convinced that he belonged to another world, he was bored in theirs and that all the toys in the world could never make up for that boredom. The sisters I resuscitated in their entirety became my only armour, reliable characters in an imaginary world where I felt at ease and where, for once, I could act like an adult, and not depend on others to take care of me.

When I mentioned my sisters to my friends, I probably exaggerated. I proudly made out they were tall, beautiful, intelligent. I confidently added that they wore rainbow-coloured dresses and spoke most languages known on earth. And if anyone doubted me, I’d tell them they rode round in a red Citroën DS convertible, driven by their hired boy, that they’d flown in planes more times than they could count, and had sailed across seas and oceans. I knew I’d scored a point when the questions began:

‘So, have you been in the Citroën DS with your sisters?’ asked the most outspoken of my playmates, his eyes gleaming with envy.

Quickly I found the perfect alibi:

‘No, I’m too small, but they’ve promised they’ll let me when I’m as tall as them…’

Another, spurred by jealousy, I expect, would counter:

‘You’re making it up! Since when did you have to be big to get in a car? I’ve seen kids smaller than us in cars!’

I kept my cool:

‘Yeah, but was it in a Citroën DS you saw them?’

‘Um, no … a Peugeot…’

‘Well, there you go! To get in a Citroën DS convertible you have to be bigger than us because it’s a really fast car, it’s dangerous if you’re still little…’

No one in the group of kids had ever seen these sisters, and as my mythomania grew, so did their disbelief, and their questions rained down on me like gunfire. They were in Europe, I said, in America, or maybe Asia, they’d come back for a holiday in the dry season.

‘Can we meet them? Will they play with us?’ they all chorused.

‘Of course, I’ll introduce them to you, but they’re too big to play with us.’

Caught in the web of my own fictions, I started to believe in them more than my friends did, and I awaited the return of my siblings with quiet confidence. I kept a lookout for planes, tracked every Citroën DS in town, and to my great despair, found not a single convertible. The day I did see one, my disappointment was huge: it was black, and driven by a white couple with no child on board…

I was heard talking to myself on the way to school or in our neighbourhood, when my mother sent me to buy salt or paraffin. I’d spent so much time with my sisters in my head that now I saw them opening the door of the house at night, coming inside, going through to the kitchen, rooting among the pans and the leftovers of the food my mother had made. One day I whispered to my mother that my sisters had come to see us and found nothing to eat; she was silent for a moment, then, as though she found all this quite normal and was surprised I had only just noticed their nocturnal visits, she said:

‘Have you never noticed I leave two full plates out every evening, at the entrance to the house?’

‘I thought they were for Miguel…’

She tried not to laugh:

‘No, they’re not for the dog, though he does sometimes finish what your sisters leave.’

‘One of them had a yellow dress on and the other had a green blouse…’

‘Shush! Don’t tell anyone, not even your father, or they’ll stop coming…’

The day after this conversation my mother left out two dishes of beef and beans with two glasses of orange juice. I stood behind her to make sure she gave the sisters the same food as I’d had and that my older siblings each got the same amount, so they wouldn’t squabble. If I thought one had more than the other I would move a piece of meat over to the other plate, to even things up, while my mother looked on with a small smile of satisfaction.

In the morning I rushed out of the door to find that the two plates were still in the same place where my mother had left them. My sisters hadn’t touched their food. I shouted to Maman Pauline just as she was coming out of her room:

‘They haven’t eaten!’

‘Yes they have…’

‘The food’s still on the plates!’

‘Well, yes, it would be… It looks to you like there’s food on these plates, but in fact there’s nothing there. They’re empty.’

‘But I can see there’s food on them!’

At this, as though anxious to cut short this conversation, which could have continued for some time, she asked:

‘If there’s food on these plates, then tell me this, why didn’t Miguel eat it?’

‘I don’t know but…’

‘Dogs can see things that we can’t. Miguel knows there’s nothing on the plates, your sisters have had a feast…’

One evening, I was delighted to be given an apple that my father had brought back from the Hotel Victory Palace where he worked as the receptionist. I decided to show my gratitude by revealing the secret of my sisters’ apparitions.

‘I swear it, I saw them with my own eyes, clear as I see you now, Papa! And, when they eat, us humans can’t see that they’ve eaten, only dogs can! You do believe me, don’t you?’

He listened to me calmly as I babbled on, even acting out my sisters’ movements. When I’d finished my somewhat incoherent account, which he took for the ramblings of a rather over-talkative child, I felt bad for having said too much, and broken my pact with these two characters.

‘Don’t tell Maman I told you the secret. She’ll be cross with me…’

I could tell he would talk to my mother about it because he didn’t promise not to. All I got was a quick nod of the head before he went off to join my mother in the bedroom. I heard Maman Pauline’s laughter, then, in a hushed voice, ‘Don’t laugh loud like that, he’ll hear you…’

I had actually just lost the naivety which had made it possible for me to steer my way between the real world and the imaginary, to inhabit both without being paralysed by the wall of doubt which was a feature of the adult domain. I was sure I had lost the pleasure of talking with my sisters because I had not held my tongue. This made me terribly sad.

Those next few days, whenever I got up in the middle of the night to look out for my sisters, I found myself face to face with Miguel. His hair bristled and he quivered, pointing his nose towards the street, his way of telling me that the two people had just left, because they didn’t want to talk to me now I had revealed their nocturnal presence to Papa Roger. I was angry with myself, and my attitude towards my father changed. I think it was at this time that I began to cultivate the art of silence, to tell myself that anything I said would only make things worse. I spoke less and less of my sisters to my friends, and they stopped asking me. It was all over, they knew that, it was time I became a normal kid again.

Sitting in front of the door to our house, I watched Miguel, who looked as teary-eyed and sad as I did. I no longer knew what he meant when he wagged his tail. I expect he was trying to comfort me. Maybe he could help me recapture the joy I’d got from thinking I too belonged in that other world, the one he sensed with his canine intuition, the instinct God gave him instead of the gift of speech, which he’d given humans.