Alain Mabanckou - Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty

It’s different for the men: they take their measurements in front of everyone. When that happens I always close my eyes, because most of them have great big bellies, even though they’re not bosses or proletariat-exploiting capitalists. They have long hair under their armpits, sometimes they’re all white, like they’ve put ash on themselves, or powder, that’s been there for at least a week.

It’s always dark in the workshop. It used to be the place where the priests from the Church of Saint-Jean-Bosco used to store their spades, their rakes and their picks. Besides, since the church is only a few metres away, when the bells ring, Monsieur Mutombo tells everyone to observe a minute’s silence because the priest gave him this little building free of charge. I don’t know how he manages in the dark not to prick his big fat fingers with the needle of the Singer sewing machine. Since he’s very bald, with only a few grey hairs around his ears, it feels like it’s his head that lights the place, because when he goes out for a smoke it gets even darker inside, and when he comes back it brightens up a little bit again. I’ve never seen anyone’s head shine like that, not round here. Maybe he puts palm oil on it or maybe Madame Mutombo rubs a special cream into it every morning.

The reason I’m in Monsieur Mutombo’s workshop this morning is I’ve come to get my shirt mended, the one Lounès ripped when we were at the Tata-Luboka stadium and I ran off before the start of the match. No, I’m not going to tell Monsieur Mutombo it was his son who did it. Lounès didn’t mean to do it. He just wanted me to stay with him to watch the match, even if Caroline had come to support the Tié-Tié Caids, who won in the end. I heard it was Mabélé who scored all three goals in the match. In any case, I knew their team would win because their sorcerer made it rain, so the fetishes of the Voungou Dragons would get wet and not work. And apparently whenever the ball got in front of the Tié-Tié Caids’ goal, the sorcerers put invisible players on the pitch, who blew on it, and the ball flew off somewhere else, so the goal couldn’t be scored. On the other hand, whenever Mabélé, proudly wearing his number 11 shirt, found himself face to face with the goalie for the Voungou Dragons and was about to shoot, the poor goalkeeper saw a javelin instead of the ball, and stepped to one side immediately because he didn’t want to die pointlessly, and then the goal went in.

If I was a football referee for this quartier , I’d give red cards to the sorcerers sitting behind the goals, because they are the ones who decide which team will win, or if it’s going to be a draw. And a draw happens when both teams have chosen sorcerers with exactly the same powers, i.e., the same gris-gris .

I’ve just handed my torn shirt to Monsieur Mutombo at long last, and he’s looking at it as though it was an old duster, when in fact he made it himself last year.

‘What’s happened here? You’ve been in a fight at school and Monsieur Mutombo here has to sew up your shirt, eh?’

‘I wasn’t in a fight, Monsieur Mutombo.’

‘So a ghost tore your shirt did it?’

The apprentices are pretending to work. I can tell they’re going to burst out laughing any moment. They’ve come a bit closer, so they can get a look at my shirt.

‘Who did this?’ Monsieur Mutombo continues.

I say nothing.

‘All right, if you don’t tell me who did it, I’ll keep your shirt and I’ll show it to Roger and Pauline this evening. You’ll have to go home with no shirt on!’

I don’t want to go home with no shirt on, people will laugh at me in the street. And I don’t like people seeing I haven’t got any muscles yet. Especially the girls will laugh. No, I’ll have to say something.

‘I’ll tell you who did it.’

‘Ah, at last. So, who was it?’

‘Me. Myself.’

‘Very interesting! And how did that happen?’

‘It’s hard to explain. I was sitting like this, I put my back against the wall and there, all of a sudden, was this nail, out of nowhere. So just when I’m about to stand up to…’

‘Michel, cut it out! I understand that you are fond of Lounès and to protect him you’re prepared to take the blame yourself. But he’s already told me everything. Everything! It was him that grabbed your shirt…’

Now I understand why the two apprentices had started laughing earlier. They knew, too, that it was their boss’s son that had torn my shirt.

Monsieur Mutombo turns to them.

‘Longombé, fix the boy’s shirt, right now. And Mokobé, you do the turn-ups on Monsieur Casimir’s trousers, he’s been on at me since yesterday, even though I keep telling him he’s not very tall and turn-ups will make him look even smaller than the president of Gabon.’

I go up to Monsieur Mutombo and whisper in his ear.

‘Actually, I’ve got a bit of a serious problem…’

‘Well, what is it, this bit of a serious problem?’

‘Your apprentices…’

‘What have they done to you?’

‘They only do buttons and I don’t want them to spoil my shirt. My mother will be cross with me if they do.’

Monsieur Mutombo bursts out laughing. His apprentices have heard me, and they have a good laugh while they get the chance, because they’ve been holding it in for ages. Since all three of them are killing themselves laughing, I start laughing too, and then I can’t stop. Now when I laugh, it always makes other people laugh too, because I often laugh like a little jackal with a bad cough. So all four of us just go on laughing till a woman appears at the door of the workshop. It’s as though she can’t get in, frontways or sideways. She’s so enormous that it’s as though the door had just been blocked by an extraterrestrial. Even Monsieur Mutombo’s bald head casts no light now. The woman’s cheeks are all puffed out like someone blowing into a trumpet, or who has two mandarin oranges stuffed in their mouth. The sight of this makes me split my sides even more, it’s too much, I’m going to choke laughing, I point my finger at the woman, I tell myself the others in the workshop must surely laugh with me. But suddenly everyone else has stopped. They’re all looking at me. Monsieur Mutombo clears his throat and nods his head at me, as if to tell me to stop laughing. I stop laughing suddenly and wipe my tears with the end of my shirt.

Longombé stands up like a schoolboy who’s been caught chatting and has to go up to the board and write out a hundred times: I must not talk in class. He walks past me, still holding my ripped shirt in his hands and goes over to the woman, who has now moved away from the door. When she moved I thought they must have switched on the street lamps in the Avenue of Independence. While Longombé and the woman are talking outside, Monsieur Mutombo leans over to me: ‘You shouldn’t have laughed! Do you know who that woman is? It’s Longombé’s mother. She comes every day to ask her son for money.’

Now Longombé’s coming back into the workshop. He walks past me again, and gives me a strange look. I say to myself, ‘Oh heck, he’s angry, now he’s really going to ruin my shirt, to get his own back.’

The cleverest person in our class is called Adriano and he’s from Angola. He’s very light skinned because some of his grandparents had children with Portuguese people. That’s why no one teases him about his skin because it’s not his fault he’s not really black like us, it’s the Portuguese people’s fault.

The very first day Adriano arrived in class, the teacher told us that his father had been killed in the civil war going on in his country. Adriano and his mother came to take refuge in Pointe-Noire, so they wouldn’t be killed too. In their country, at night, the militiamen who follow a wicked Angolan called Jonas Savimbi attack the army of the president, Agostinho Neto. We were all scared when the teacher reminded us that Angola is not far from our country and that you can get here from there on foot, via a tiny country called Cabinda, which, like us, has loads of petrol. What really scared us was the idea that Jonas Savimbi and his militiamen might turn up in our country, just to annoy our President as well, and push us into a civil war. We learned that there are lots of Cuban and Russian soldiers in Angola, to help president Agostinho Neto stay in power, because he’s not just under attack from Jonas Savimbo, poor fellow, there are other enemies too, and they’ve formed the Front National de Liberation d’Angola, or FNLA, and their leader is a certain Holden Roberto, who doesn’t mess about. Agostinho Neto is caught between Jonas Savimbi and Holden Roberto, who are supported either directly or in secret, by the imperialists.