Alain Mabanckou - Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty

As soon as I walked into the workshop with my father’s trousers over my right shoulder, I saw Caroline sitting just by Monsieur Mutombo and I nearly left, thinking I’d come back later. But I went in anyway because the two apprentices at the back had already seen me.

Longombé shouted, ‘Hey it’s our Michel!’

Mokobé added, ‘Probably got his shirt ripped by his friend again!’

I didn’t say hello to Caroline because she was looking at me already as if to say, ‘If you say hello to me I’ll shame you in front of these grown ups.’

The apprentices were busy sewing her a red dress with green flowers on it.

Monsieur Mutombo says to me, ‘Go and see what your woman’s doing outside, you should never leave your wife unhappy, someone else might cheer her up and marry her, and you’ll be left weeping alone.’

I come out of the workshop. Opposite, there’s a little football pitch. Caroline’s sitting on the ground watching me walk towards her. Just as she’s getting up to move away I call, ‘Wait, don’t go, I’ve got something to say to you…’

‘No, it’s over, we’ve been divorced for ages.’

I force myself to stay calm and say, ‘I know, but at least let’s talk about it and…’

‘No, I don’t want to talk to you, or I’ll start loving you again and then I’ll feel sad all the time!’

Now she’s drawing things on the ground with a little twig. I look at her drawing close up.

‘What’s that then?’

‘Can’t you see it’s a rose? Mabélé taught me how to draw it, and he’s really good at drawing. He said I’m a rose, so now I’m drawing myself.’

The name Mabélé irritates me. I lose my cool and go on the attack: ‘Does Mabélé know who Arthur Rimbaud is?’

‘Who’s that then?’

‘He’s a writer. He’s got loads of hair, it all grows in winter…’

‘Is he more famous than Marcel Pagnol? Has he got four castles and…’

‘No, Arthur hasn’t got all that stuff, he doesn’t care about things like that.’

‘If he hasn’t got a castle, that means he’s not rich and famous!’

‘But he travelled at lot, so he can get to see all the castles in the world.’

‘What about his own castles?’

‘He built them in his heart. And I’ll keep you in the castles I’ve got in my heart too, where no one can harm you.’

She looks up at me at last. It’s almost as if she’s got a bug in her eye.

‘Where did you learn to say things like that, like some grown-up chatting up a woman?’

‘It’s thanks to Arthur.’

‘Really? Have you met him then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘In my parents’ bedroom. And when I look at him hard he smiles and talks to me.’

A plane passes overhead. I can’t ask Caroline to guess which country it’s going to. That’s a game between me and her brother.

So I look at the plane on my own and I think: It’s going to land in Egypt. The capital of Egypt is Cairo. I don’t want that plane to go and land in Saudi Arabia where Idi Amin Dada is, swimming in his pool and boxing with his servants. I don’t want the plane to land in the Ivory Coast where Emperor Jean Bédel Bokassa the First tells tall stories about Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who wants to be president of the French Republic again.

While I’m thinking about Egypt, Caroline takes my left hand and begs me, ‘Can I meet your friend Arthur with the castles in his heart too?’

‘Of course, he’d love that! But you’d better come to my house because my father will get cross if I take Arthur out into the street. And if my father gets cross, Arthur won’t ever smile at me again.’

She’s just rubbed out the rose she had drawn in the earth, and she’s taken hold of my hand. We go back inside her father’s workshop.

‘You know, Mabélé’s not actually very good at fighting. Why did you run off when you met him in Diadhou’s shop? If someone attacks us one day in the street will you run off like that and leave me alone with the bandits?’

I don’t answer. Because I don’t want to have to hear Mabélé’s name again.

Monsieur Mutombo’s amazed to see me coming back with Caroline. Longombé and Mokobé want to laugh, but they stifle it. They know Monsieur Mutombo will probably shout at them. Longombé pretends to sneeze, then finally bursts out laughing, as do Mokobé and Monsieur Mutombo. As the three of them are now laughing helplessly, Caroline and I start laughing too. As usual, I’m the one laughing loudest, holding my sides. The more I laugh like that, the more it sets the others off. I collapse on the floor, laughing. I get up again, laughing. I lean against the wall, laughing. I lean against the table where they cut the cloth, laughing. I laugh and laugh and laugh and suddenly, without warning, the whole workshop turns black. Monsieur Mutombo’s shiny head disappears. I turn round and see Longombé’s mother blocking the doorway. As usual, she can’t get in the door, not even sideways. I manage to stop laughing just in time. Besides, everyone else in the workshop has stopped. Longombé gets up and goes over to his mother, they stand and talk a few metres outside. I creep out to watch. Longombé’s giving his mother money. Too late, she’s seen me, and she calls threateningly: ‘Hey you, Pauline Kengué’s son! I’ll get you one of these days! Why do you laugh every time you see me? Because I’m fat, is that it? How do you know you won’t get fat when you’re grown up?’

Off she goes, at top speed. When she walks the dust rises off the street. People she passes turn round as though they’ve seen an extra terrestrial. She shouts abuse at them, even though they’ve said nothing. I think: why doesn’t Longombé’s father ever come and ask his son for money? Has his father left his mother? Doesn’t Longombé even have an adoptive father? I feel sorry for him, working so hard and paying for his mother’s keep while I’m standing there laughing like an idiot. Would I like it if people made fun of Maman Pauline like that? No, I’d want to throw stones in his face.

So I’m very sorry I laughed the last time, that I didn’t realise Longombé’s mother’s a brave lady, as brave as Maman Pauline or Maman Martine. Longombé comes back into the workshop and looks at me with red eyes, like an angry crocodile. Monsieur Mutombo tells him to hurry up and do my father’s trousers. He’s going to deliberately cut them too short and when my father puts them on he’ll look like a hare wearing trousers in Tales of the Bush and the Forest that they read to us in the infant school.

Uncle René’s house is the prettiest in Rue Comapon. My uncle always worries because it’s so nice, and you can see it shining in the distance as you approach, that the local proletariats, who live in the clapboard houses, will break into his property at any moment and steal all his wealth. That’s why his plot has secure fencing all round it, with barbed wire on top. Anyone who thinks: I’ll just go and rob Monsieur René’s house because he’s rich, will hurt himself on the barbed wire, and bleed and scream like babies when they first come into the world, the ones that know already that they’re going to have big problems in their lives, and that they’d have been better off staying in their mother’s belly, or going straight to heaven without stopping off on earth, like My Sister Star and My Sister No-name. Also, it’s not just barbed wire protecting Uncle René’s plot, there’s a great big iron gate as well. That’s where everyone goes in. The other iron gate is at the back of the house — the entrance to the garage — which my uncle opens with a remote control.

When you arrive at Uncle René’s house, first of all you ring the bell and wait in the street, then the houseboy comes to peer at you through a little hole that’s so well hidden that you’d never think anyone was looking at you. If you look suspicious, if you look like a trouble maker from the Grand Marché, the houseboy won’t open the door to you. If you won’t go away he puts Miguel onto you, who, my uncle says, is the fiercest dog in the neighbourhood, not to say the whole town, and why not the entire Congo. When Miguel’s excited he tries to bite his own shadow. The reason he’s so fierce is that the houseboy gives him corn spirit to drink. Once he’s had a glass of that he goes really quiet for a few seconds then he starts turning circles, chasing his own tail, but he can’t catch it because when he turns left it goes right, and when he goes right it goes left. Then he gets really mad that he can’t catch it, so he barks and rolls on the ground. The houseboy calms him down, puts a chain round his neck and ties him up to the foot of the sour sap tree in the yard. Miguel goes on barking, he’s so angry his spit dribbles from his mouth the whole time.