Alain Mabanckou - Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty

I also feel sorry for Miguel because with every year that passes, every hour, ever second, every degree of a second that goes by, he gets older faster than us humans. It’s not fair. And he looks at me with his one half open eye, as if he’s understood what I’m thinking. Yes, he knows what I’m feeling deep inside. He knows because dogs see invisible things, like ghosts and evil spirits which we humans can’t see in the flesh. Dogs can read men’s thoughts, from A to Z. Just because they can’t speak our language properly doesn’t mean they’re just idiots with a tail and fleas all over them. Besides, it’s not as if we know how to speak their language, which is much more complicated than ours.

In any case, it’s the first time I’ve seen Miguel this calm. Which means he’s not ferocious 24/7 after all. We should change the sign outside and put a different one up, with the exact time when Miguel isn’t ferocious. But if we put that on a sign maybe the bad guys from the Grand Marché will think: Let’s go and rob Monsieur René while his dog’s not being ferocious. Now I know the sign on the gate is a lie, it’s just there to scare off bad guys.

I’m jealous of Sebastien’s car. He let me try it and I thought: It’s a great thing to have, a car that does what you tell it from a distance when you press on a button, whereas when you drive a real car, you have to hold the steering wheel, so as not to bang into other cars. I dream about this car the whole time, and I don’t want to play with my truck, my shovel and rake. I’m sick of being a farmer. I really am sick of it. I think about Lounès. What present did he get? I think about Caroline. What did she get? Yeah, I want a car I can control from a distance. One day I’ll get one…

At the end of the day, Uncle René tells his boy to walk me home. I don’t even notice the cars going by as we walk. I don’t even look at the people we pass. I just glide past them, as though they were shadows. My thoughts are far, far away. I think about My Sister Star and My Sister No-name. Do they get presents up where they are?

Please let me pass my primary school certificate this year, and let Uncle René give me a car I can control from a distance, a car that follows me everywhere I go.

I’m going to put my little dreams in the boot of that car and drive them about till I’m twenty years old, and Miguel’s more than a hundred. Maybe he’ll die, but he’ll come back again as a little white dog, and then I can give him to Caroline.

One day I must ask Papa Roger why there’s only ever bad news when we listen to the news on the radio. You’d think every day was the end of the world, that when you switch on the radio in the evening, anything might happen. Even if it’s happening far from here, even if they’re not talking about people who live in our neighbourhood, it’s bad news for us too. I’ve never heard Roger Guy Folly laugh or make us laugh. Now I feel afraid every time I hear a journalist announce:

It’s twenty-one hundred hours, universal time, and you’re listening to the Voice of America. Coming right up, the evening news, with your faithful servant, Roger Guy Folly…

There’s a really bad guy in France called Jacques Mesrine who’s just been killed. He’d been sent to prison for twenty years, but someone helped him escape like in Lucky Luke , when the Daltons are able to escape from prison till Lucky Luke catches them again and then we can read the next episodes. If the Daltons really did escape, how could we ever read the next Lucky Luke episodes? What would Lucky Luke do without the Daltons? He’d just wander about the desert with his dog Rant-anplan and hunt little animals hiding under the cactuses.

Jacques Mesrine won’t be having any more adventures now, particularly since he attacked a judge’s daughter and held her hostage like the Iranian students who took the Americans hostage and shut them up in a cellar. Apparently they looked everywhere for Mesrine and no one could find him. People would say he was in such and such a place, but when they went there he’d left ages ago. Then other people said he was in this place that had been definitely identified, and then when they got to the definitely identified place they’d find Mesrine was already miles away.

So then the police killed him. They cornered him, the way you corner a palm rat in the bush. You ring all the holes, and the rats only have one hole to come out by, and you wait for them there.

Roger Guy Folly reports that Mesrine got away in his car and that’s when the police shot him. His wife was in it too, and she was injured. Now the people of France can breathe a bit easier, because Mesrine was their most dangerous enemy. According to Papa Roger, this Mesrine guy was stronger and more intelligent than our own famous gangster, who we called Angoualima, who had six fingers on each hand, four eyes, four ears and two willies. Angoualima cut people’s heads off, or stole from the Whites in the centre of town. But unlike Mesrine, he had no car he could escape in and get shot in with his wife. That’s why he didn’t get killed like Mesrine did. We don’t know how our Angoualima got killed. Who knows if he is really dead? It’s weird I get to hear the story of Mesrine just when round here people in the street are all starting to talk about Angoualima again, and some people are saying that there’s a gangster by the name of Grégoire Nakobomayo who’s following in the footsteps of our own public enemy number one. The problem is that Grégoire Nakobomayo is clumsy, he messes up his crimes and just makes the police in our town laugh.

Since Jacques Mesrine’s death, the gangsters in the Grand Marché have been copying his name and refuse to be nicknamed Angoualima like before. When you walk down the street you see the name Mesrine written on the walls of derelict houses and: I won’t give up without a fight . I don’t know what that means, why they want to have a fight, no one wants a fight with them, that’s what we’re all trying to avoid! Our gangsters want to be just like Mesrine, but they’ve got no cars, no wives to go on the run with them and get shot down by the police. So they end up getting caught alive and dragged back to the police station, and being given a good beating up before being released, because there’s not much room in our prisons which are pretty full.

What bothers me most isn’t this story about Jacques Mesrine. What really upsets me is that Roger Guy Folly also talked about a new law in France which says that you can refuse to let children be born. The child in the womb thinks it’s going to come into this world, but then they go to hospital and bang! the doctor makes it come out and chucks it in the bin. The word Roger Guy Folly uses for this is abortion . The journalist points out that in the past it used to be done in secret and lots of women used to die along with their children. The people who did the abortions were seen as murderers and were put in prison.

When Roger Guy Folly talked about abortion and explained the new law in France, which was championed by a woman called Simone Veil, Maman Pauline’s expression changed. She listened for a moment without saying anything, then she got up from the table and went into her bedroom. Papa Roger quickly searched for another radio station and happened upon Radio-Congo, where the journalists were talking about the ‘Day of the Tree’, which has just been set up by our President. From now on everyone has to plant a tree somewhere and the police are going to come and visit every neighbourhood, every household, to check that the President’s order has been obeyed. Anyone who doesn’t plant a tree will be fined, and if they’re members of the Congolese Workers’ Party they’ll have their card taken away. Poor old them, no more seats in the front row for the National Holiday processions.