Alain Mabanckou - Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty

To be honest, I had long dreamed of going to Iran. But not in these conditions! This is the 20th century after all. A little surprising, then, to find oneself in a sabre fight! But fear not, your San-Antonio soon reveals himself an ace in this discipline, and the sbires who try to rub him up the wrong way, while not exactly eunuchs, are no Casanovas either. As for the adventures of Bérurier in the land of the Thousand and One Nights (thousand and one plights, more like), they cannot be summed up in one short paragraph. Let it simply be said that when it comes to giving your dancing the Shah-Shah-Shah there are many ways of crumbling that cookie! Some harder than others, as you will see!

What does he mean, there are lots of ways to crumble a cookie and that it can be hard to dance the Shah-Shah? Is that meant to be funny or sad? What’s the Shah done to him? And it sounds as if he’s decided to go and fight in Iran, this San-Antonio. Well, I don’t like the sound of that one bit. So I put the book down on the bed.

I don’t know why, but I can’t take my eyes off the cover of One Flew Over the Cuckold’s Bed . Maybe because there’s a picture of a bird on it. I like birds because they live on the earth and in the skies. Birds can see forests, like ours, as well as deserts, like the Sahara, in The Little Prince . They travel long distances and sing, to make the sun shine on the earth. Birds are nice, they never harm anyone. You won’t find a bird going to Iran to fight, like San-Antonio.

I also read the back cover of One Flew Over the Cuckold’s Bed .

This time, folks, the agency gets a call from Arthur Rubinyol, the famous virtuoso. Oh my Lord, roll out the red carpet, sing hymns of praise! Good job it was red is all I can say. At least the wine stains won’t show. To start with, there’s the rabbi, Sly-ball, oops, sorry, Silas, who goes and gets himself stabbed. Not to mention Miss Yankee, who cadges a lift in my plane, and sets about who-know-what-ing your old friend! Throw in our Finnish jaunt, during which Béru has a sniff at the lumberjack’s old lady, and I think you’ll agree that there are some pretty odd goings on in this here opus! And all because of a vindictive old cuckold! Talk about horn of plenty!

San-Antonio writes a rude sort of French, I think to myself. It’s like you’re supposed to laugh at certain bits, because if you don’t it means you don’t understand his sense of humour, so you must be stupid. And what about this Arthur Rubinyol he talks about in his book, the one who’s a ‘famous virtuoso’? Might he be poking fun at my Arthur, even though my Arthur’s never done anything to him?

I leave One Flew Over the Cuckold’s Bed and read the back covers of the other books by San-Antonio. But I don’t want to move everything, I’ll only look at the backs, because Papa Roger has lined them all up so neatly, you can read the titles.

In this bookcase there are only books by San-Antonio, apart from the one by Arthur. Has San-Antonio written more books than anyone in the world? What’s Arthur doing here then, lying on top of these books? I think: San-Antonio must be very famous, more famous than Marcel Pagnol, more famous than Arthur, more famous than the Shah of Iran.

I put back the five books. I try to remember what order they were in before, but I get in a muddle. Was Give Me Your Germs, My Darling on top of Put Your Finger Where Mine Is or underneath Do Things to Me ? I can’t remember now.

In the end I just pu t A Season in Hell on top of Dancing the Shah-Shah-Shah . Because the Shah San-Antonio writes about must be the same one who’s sick and in Egypt. Because I think Arthur also needs to know that the Shah of Iran isn’t well, that his cancer’s getting worse, while that criminal, Idi Amin Dada, lounges around in the pool in his villa in Saudi Arabia.

The president of France is called Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. While the journalist, Roger Guy Folly, is speaking, my father writes the name of the president down for me on a piece of paper. French people’s names are too complicated, they’re never written the way they sound. But then the French think our names are too complicated. Odd, isn’t it?

Roger Guy Folly informs us that Valéry Giscard d’Estaing is in deep trouble and may have to stop being president of the republic for the second time. He’s pretty much had it now, he’s all washed up. I think to myself: He’s probably ill, or he’s had an accident, poor man. But he’s not ill, actually, and he hasn’t had an accident. His problem is to do with some diamonds he was given by the president-dictator of the Central African Republic. And according to my father this dictator is as wicked as Idi Amin Dada of Uganda.

While Roger Guy Folly’s explaining that the French president is being criticised by everyone in France, Papa Roger tells me, without looking over at Maman Pauline, that it’s a very difficult business to understand because when Giscard d’Estaing accepted the diamonds from the dictator Bokassa, I was still a baby, and Giscard d’Estaing wasn’t head of State, just the minister for a different French president called Georges Pompidou. According to my father, Pompidou was a fine, intelligent man, and no one was afraid of him, even if he did have enormous eyebrows like the Russian president, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, and Giscard d’Estaing was the finance minister for this man Pompidou.

Seeing I don’t quite follow what he’s saying, and that I’m scratching my head with all the different thoughts swirling round in it, Papa Roger explains that the finance minister is someone who looks after all the money in a country, but the state keeps a careful eye on him, not like here, when the finance minister is someone who steals the country’s money or helps the President and the members of his government to hide it in Swiss bank accounts. In our country the state can’t keep an eye on the money because everyone’s got his hand in the till, from the top all the way down, and everyone accuses everyone else. And since you can’t send everyone to prison, they let it drop, and just carry on pinching the state’s money.

The president of the Central African Republic who’s just been driven out of his country has a lovely name. It’s less complicated than the names French people have: he’s called Jean Bédel Bokassa. But unless you want him to cut your head off you’d better call him Emperor Jean Bédel Bokassa. It was his own idea to make himself emperor; he threw a big party and lots of heads of foreign countries came to celebrate at his house and acknowledge he’d now become an emperor. Long before he got into the trouble he’s in today, he was good friends with the French and now the French have dropped him like a dog with fleas, or rabies. Yes, he was a faithful servant of the French, because he fought alongside French soldiers during the Second World War, he got his military training from the French and they gave him a fine medal because wherever the French went to fight, he was always at their service, in Indochina or in Algeria. Jean Bédel Bokassa rose to the rank of captain in the French army before going home to Central Africa, where he was able to take advantage of the muddle down there after a coup d’état by some of the military against the president, his cousin David Dacko, to become president himself. It was some other soldiers who organised the coup d’état against his cousin Dacko, but Bokassa’s so clever, he managed to turn the situation round, take things in hand and end up becoming president of the republic, even though the coup d’état wasn’t his idea in the first place. So he made a coup d’état out of a coup d’état , my father says. Now, in becoming president he had actually overthrown his own cousin. That’s why Papa Roger reminds me that our worst enemies are sometimes members of our own family. If I become president of the republic, I’m definitely going to watch out for my Uncle René, and place my trust in Lounès, and appoint him prime minister.