Alain Mabanckou: Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty

I don’t like this at all. I don’t want Maman Pauline to go out when Papa Roger’s not here. It’s true my father didn’t come home last night. He sleeps at our house one night, at Maman Martine’s the next. On Monday he’s with us, on Tuesday at Maman Martine’s, she lives in the Savon quartier , quite near my uncle’s. Papa Roger goes back and forth between the two women all week long, he’s like the postman you see in the streets of Trois-Cents. Now, there are only seven days in a week, not eight, so Papa Roger can’t divide the week in two, however good he is at arithmetic. He’s found a solution: one Sunday he sleeps at our house, the next at Maman Martine’s. That’s why he’s not at home today.

…..

I’m never in a good mood when Maman Pauline’s making herself pretty. I glance again at her hair, which Caroline’s braided. She’s put on her orange high-heels, a camisole wrap the same colour as her headscarf, and a pair of orange trousers. I don’t like it when she puts on the shiny orange trousers that are too tight round her legs and butt. Whenever she wears them, men stare at her walking, and whistle as she goes by. It makes me wonder what goes on in their heads, why they only have eyes for Maman Pauline, when there are other women walking around in shiny orange pants that are too tight round the legs and butt. Sometimes I even pick up a stone and aim it at one of the guys whistling at my mother. She stops walking, turns round and shouts: ‘Are you crazy? If that’s the way it’s gonna be, you’re not coming out walking with me again! I don’t like wild boys! Opium of the masses!’

But why didn’t she tell me she was going out before lunch? I don’t know where she’s going. The people out there might trap her at the end of the Avenue of Independence, for all I know, or in a bar. Lounès says some of the men in our quartier are really bad, they hang around at the corner of the Avenue of Independence and when a woman goes by they shout rude things at her or force her to drink a beer in a bar where it’s all dark inside, and then dance the rumba of Tabu Ley or Franco Luamb-Makiadi, and then end up in a room where they have to do all this stuff. I can’t imagine Maman Pauline dancing with anyone but Papa Roger. I can’t imagine Maman Pauline going to a room and doing stuff with any man except Papa Roger. I’m not having that. No. Besides, once, I remember, I gave a man who was talking too much with my mother what he deserved. Lounès told me about this secret way he had of protecting Madame Mutombo from bad men who look at women like that and whistle when they’ve gone by, like someone hailing a bush taxi in the street.

He said: ‘Michel, I promise you, if you put sugar in the tank of a moped, it’ll break down and won’t start. Sugar’s nice, we all like sugar, and mopeds like it too. And the moped will like it so much it’ll take off suddenly at two hundred kilometres an hour.’

I couldn’t think of anything better, so I said to myself: ‘I might as well try Lounès’s secret. What have I got to lose?’ So I did, because it made me really angry to see the man talking with Maman Pauline, and the way she listened to him, laughing, instead of shooing him away like I shoo away mosquitoes that come and bite me till all hours of the morning, Flytox or no Flytox. I’d never seen her laugh like that with Papa Roger. What did this guy have that my father didn’t? What could he be saying to make Maman Pauline laugh like that? And anyway, are you meant to make women laugh like that? Did I ever make Caroline laugh like that? I don’t like making Caroline laugh, whenever a woman laughs I feel embarrassed for her, I avert my eyes, so she won’t be embarrassed too. A woman looks awful when she laughs, you can see her teeth, and her tongue. Now you shouldn’t show your teeth or your tongue to just anyone in the street. Perhaps that’s why since the beginning of time, people have always hidden in the shower to brush their teeth.

So, I took a sachet of sugar and I went round the back of our house where the nasty man had parked his old moped, emptied the sachet into the petrol tank and came back and sat down by the front door, like a good boy. Maman Pauline and the nasty man were still laughing, showing each other their tongue and teeth. It felt like the whole thing lasted about a hundred years and ten days.

At last the nasty man said goodbye to Maman Pauline and put his arm round her waist. I thought: He’s suffocating my mother! But Maman Pauline just laughed again, while he was suffocating her. She showed him her teeth again, and her tongue was hanging out. I was embarrassed for her, she’s always so beautiful when her mouth is closed. I spat angrily on the ground because my mother hadn’t moved her body away from the rude man’s arm. She even seemed pleased he was squeezing her, she put her arm round the bad man’s waist, and the two of them carried on suffocating each other and laughing.

The man went off round the back of our house, he was pleased with himself, singing as he went.

A few minutes later he came rushing back, just as though he’d seen the devil himself.

And he was shouting, ‘My motor! My motor! My motor’s not working!’

At first I didn’t realise he was talking about his moped.

‘Where are the kids round here? Get them to come and push my bike!’

But there were no children around. They were all at mass that Sunday, and mass at Saint-Jean-Bosco lasts so long, even God starts yawning after a bit, the prayers go on forever, and they all say the same thing over and over in the hundreds of different languages of our country. I think God has a pretty heavy workload round here, even on public holidays.

Maman Pauline and I pushed the moped. It was no good, it still wouldn’t start. We went on pushing like slaves or the cart-pullers from Zaire you see at the Grand Marché. We got as far as where the Avenue of Independence gets so steep that cars always break down. This man saw us and took pity on us. I thought he was going to help us push the bike, but he said he was a Solex repair man, and though he was only really supposed to mend Solexes, he would take a look at this moped for no charge. That really annoyed me, I didn’t want him to fix the bike. He leaned over the moped, concentrating hard, like a watch mender. He opened the tank, tilted the moped so all the petrol ran out on the ground and discovered there was something white in there. He tasted it, and his eyes grew big and green as limes.

‘It’s sugar! Whoever did that’s a cunning rascal! Oooh, this is serious, really serious. I know this problem, believe me, this bike’s not going to start, not even if you push from here to the border with Cameroon!’

He looked about him, as though in search of whoever could have played this trick on him. I was sitting pretty in my corner, no one could accuse me since I’d been pushing the bike myself. You can’t accuse someone who’s been helping you. So he thought it was some jealous guy in the Trois-Cents who’d sabotaged his bike.

Anyway, the Solex repair man accepted a note for five hundred CFA francs. He advised our man to go and fill up at a petrol station, and off he pedalled towards the Savon quartier .

Maman Pauline and I walked back home in silence. I was happy I’d just saved her from the bad man, but she was sad.

The next morning, when I was getting my bags ready for school, she came and said, ‘Michel, I’m not stupid! I don’t like what you did yesterday! And since there’s no sugar left in the house, you’ll just have to go to school without breakfast!’

Now Maman Pauline wants to go out this Sunday. I want to protect her because Papa Roger sometimes says ‘people don’t like people’. Another thing he says is: ‘another man’s wife is always sweeter’. And the bad men down the Avenue of Independence are going to think my mother’s really sweet because her clothes and her hair are really nice. I’m going to wipe out those bad guys, one by one. I’m really strong. Oh yeah, I’m like Superman, the Incredible Hulk, Asterix and Obelix, like Spiderman, Zembla or the Great Blek. I’ve read about the deeds of these true immortals, Lounès gave me all that to read. I’ve got big muscles, too, like them, that swell up when I’m angry.