Alain Mabanckou: Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty

Generally speaking, an Immortal is someone like Spiderman, Blek le Roc, Tintin or Superman, who never dies. I don’t understand why we have to say that comrade president Marien Ngouabi is immortal when everyone knows he’s dead, that he’s buried in the cemetery at Etatolo, in the north of the country, a cemetery which is guarded seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, all because there are people who want to go and make their gris-gris on his grave so they can become immortal too.

Anyway, there you go, we have to call our ex-president ‘The Immortal’, even though he’s no longer alive. If anyone’s got a problem with that, the government will deal with them, they’ll be thrown in prison and given a trial once the Revolution has got rid of the capitalists and the means of production at last belong to the wretched of the Earth, to the starving masses who struggle night and day, all because of this business with the classes of Karl Marx and Engels.

Maman Pauline knows I’m very frightened of Uncle René, and she exploits it. If I don’t want to go to bed at night without her coming in to kiss me goodnight she reminds me that if I don’t go to bed her brother will think that I’m just a little capitalist who won’t sleep because he wants a kiss from his mummy first, like those capitalists’ children who live in the centre of town or in Europe, especially in France. He’ll forget I’m his nephew and give me a good hiding. That shuts me up pretty quickly, and Maman Pauline leans over and just touches me on the head, but she doesn’t give me a kiss like in the books we read in class that take place in Europe, especially in France. That’s when I tell myself that not everything you read in books is true, and you shouldn’t always believe what you read.

Sometimes I can’t get to sleep, though not always because I’m waiting for my mother’s goodnight kiss, sometimes just because the mosquito net bothers me. Once I’m inside it I feel as though I’m breathing in the same air as the evening before, and then I start sweating so much you’d think I’d wet the bed, which I haven’t.

The mosquitoes in our quartier are strange, they just love sweat, it means they can really stick to your skin and take their time about sucking your blood till five in the morning. Also, when I’m inside the mosquito net, I look like a corpse, the mosquitoes buzzing round me are like people weeping because I’ve just died.

I told Papa Roger this. I did, I told him I’m like a little corpse when I’m inside my mosquito net, and one day, if they’re not careful, I’ll really die in there, and I’ll never be seen on this earth again, because I’ll have gone up on high to join my two big sisters, who I’ve never known because they were in too much of a hurry to go straight up to heaven. I was in tears myself as I told him that, imagining myself as a tiny little corpse in a tiny little white coffin surrounded by people crying pointlessly, since if you’re dead you’re not coming back, except Jesus who can work miracles, and resuscitate, as though death, for him, was just a little afternoon siesta.

It worried Papa Roger that I was starting to talk about death like that at my age. He told me children never die, God watches over them at night while they’re sleeping and He gives them lots of air to breathe so they don’t suffocate in their sleep. So I asked him why God hadn’t put lots of air in the lungs of my two big sisters. He looked at me kindly. ‘I’ll see to it, I’ll take off the mosquito net.’

But it was weeks and weeks before he did anything about it. He finally took my mosquito net off yesterday, when he got home from work. He’d been to buy some Flytox from someone in the Avenue of Independence. Usually any self-respecting mosquito who hears the word Flytox buzzes off quickly, rather than die a slow, stupid death.

Papa Roger put this stuff all over my room, so the smell would last longer. Now the mosquitoes in our quartier are no fools, you can’t trick them that easily, particularly since you can see the picture of a dying mosquito on the Flytox packet. Is it likely they’ll commit suicide instead of fighting for your last drop of blood? They wait till the smell wears off, then they come right back and bite you all over because they’re angry with you now for waging war on them. When in fact they’re just like you, they want to live as long as they can.

So, even if you pump your house full of Flytox, you should never claim victory too soon. The mosquitoes will always win in the end, and then they’ll go and tell all the other mosquitoes in town that in fact you can get round the product after all. Mosquitoes aren’t like us, they never keep secrets, they spend the whole night chatting, as though they’d nothing else to do. And since they’re the same ones as in the Trois-Cents quartier , and they’ve seen you spraying Flytox in your house, first of all they go to the neighbours’ houses, where they don’t have it and then when they’ve finished there they come back to your room to see if it still smells of Flytox. Some mosquitoes are even used to it, and explain to their mates how to protect themselves against it. They say, ‘Watch out for those guys, it stinks of Flytox in their house; if you don’t want to die, take cover for now in a wardrobe or a cooking pot or a pair of shoes or some clothes’. And they’ll wait till you turn down the light on the storm lantern. They’re pleased because they can see you’re scared of them. If you’re really scared, it means you’ve got lots of nice warm blood to feed them on over the winter, and you didn’t want them to find out. If one of them comes looking for a fight and you try to squash it with your hands or a bit of wood, the others then turn up with their sisters and their cousins and their aunts and bite you all over. One little group makes the noise, the others attack. They take turns. The ones making the noise aren’t always the ones that attack, and the ones attacking wait behind them in a circle. There you are, all on your own, you’ve only got two hands, you can’t see what’s happening behind you, you can’t protect yourself, they’re a well-trained army out for revenge because you’ve tried to wipe them out with your Flytox. You’re itching all over, you’ve got mosquitoes up your nose, mosquitoes in your ears, and they’re all biting away and laughing their heads off.

And that’s why I woke up this morning covered in red spots. If I sniff my arms, they still smell of Flytox. A really angry mosquito — the leader, perhaps — bit me just above my eye, it’s so swollen, you’d think the devil had thrown me an invisible punch. Maman Pauline put some boa grease on it and said, to cheer me up, ‘Never mind, Michel, your eye will be better by sunset. Boa grease, that’s what they used on me when I was little. Tonight we’ll put back the mosquito net your father took off. That Flytox the Lebanese sell is rubbish. And he knows it.’

When Caroline looks at me, I feel like the best-looking guy in the world. We’re the same age, but she knows all there is to know about us boys. Maman Pauline says she’s very advanced . I don’t know what that means. Maybe it’s because Caroline acts like a real lady. Even at her age she wears lipstick and she braids almost every woman’s hair in our neighbourhood, including my mother’s. Caroline listens to what the fine ladies say about men, and she can’t wait to be like the women she goes shopping with in the Grand Marché. Maman Pauline says Caroline knows how to make a dish of beans and manioc leaves, which a lot of grown-up people still can’t do. She is really very advanced .

Caroline’s parents and mine are friends. They live at the far end of the Avenue of Independence, just before the road that leads to the Savon quartier , where Uncle René lives. It’s a short walk from their house to ours, ours is the one painted green and white halfway down the same avenue, opposite Yeza, the joiner, who makes loads of coffins and lines them up in front of his lot, so people can come and choose.