Alain Mabanckou - Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty

I just act like I don’t understand, and go on playing. Until Maman Pauline and Papa Roger tell me directly that I’m the cause of their misery, I’ll act like I know nothing, and understand nothing, and am waiting for them to spell it out.

This Sunday Lounès and I have been playing with my car on the big football pitch in the Savon quartier . We don’t even feel the late afternoon heat. He came and whistled for me outside the house and said: ‘We need to run your car in properly, or it will never go very fast. Let’s go to the football pitch in Savon, there’s no match there this Sunday.’

The two of us are trying to see how fast my car can go and how many minutes, or hours it will run for. As soon as it sets off we start shouting as though it was a race between two cars when in fact there’s only one. That’s when I realise my parents were right to want to give me two cars. We could have had a real race between Lounès and me. I don’t want to ask Sebastien to have a race with me, because then he’ll know I’ve got the same toy as him and he’ll be jealous of me.

The car’s already done several runs out and back. Suddenly we hear a strange noise as though I’d pressed on the stop button.

I yell: ‘It’s broken down! We’ll have to take it to my cousin’s!’

Then, remembering that I don’t want Sebastien to see my car, I press the start button again and again to make sure it really has broken down. It won’t move. Panicking, I pick it up and turn it over. Maybe it’s because of the dust. So I blow on it.

‘Don’t bother doing that, it’s not broken, the batteries are dead,’ says Lounès.

So I run over to the little bag I’ve brought with me, put the car away, and get out the football: ‘It doesn’t matter if the car doesn’t work, let’s play football. We’ll play penalties, since there’s only two of us, you go and stand in goal over there, and I’ll go first.’

Lounès doesn’t move. He just stands there in the middle of the pitch like a pillar, looking at me.

‘Why don’t you go and stand in goal?’ I ask.

‘I don’t want to, Michel. Here we are, just playing around, while your mother’s back there feeling miserable. That’s not right, is it? You need to think about her now. You need to find that key…’

This really annoys me, though usually I never get annoyed with him, because I know that if we have a fight he’ll win, with his muscles, and his height, and his advanced katas that he learns in Maître John’s club.

I go back and put my ball away and pick up my bag to leave the football ground. He runs after me: ‘Wait, Michel. I just want Maman Pauline to stop being unhappy, that’s all.’

We walk fast now, not speaking. We get to their house first.

‘You coming in to say hi to my parents?’

‘No. Another day.’

‘Come on, you’ll be glad you did. Caroline’s there…’

I don’t answer, just hold out my hand. He takes it, holds it for a while, and then says: ‘Off you go then, and don’t forget to change the batteries in your car, if that’s what you really care about.’

These days my dreams take me far far away. I’m not just Michel these days, the little guy you see running round the quartier , or walking about in a khaki shirt, blue shorts and a pair of plastic sandals. I wear polyester trousers, linen jackets, white cotton shirts with a bow tie. I wear a hat, too, like the child in that film The Kid that Lounès has told me about, doing his imitation of Charlie Chaplin. But I’m older than the boy who gets left in a car by his mother and goes to live with Charlie Chaplin till his mother comes back rich and takes him back and thanks the adoptive father. Yes, I’m a bit bigger than him, I’m the way I’d like to be when I’m twenty.

In my dreams I walk with my head held high, my shoulders back, people respect me, they greet me, they raise their hats when I walk by, and speak other languages, not just ours. I speak very correctly, you’d think I was born in whatever country I’m in, though it took me only seconds to get here, when in fact it would take a day, or maybe two, to get here by plane. Maybe I’m speaking Chinese because earlier in the day Lounès and I were talking about the Chinese who built the Congo-Malembé hospital in the Trois-Cents quartier . Maybe I’m speaking Arabic because I heard Monsieur Mutombo talking about Algeria. Maybe I’m speaking some Indian language because Lounès told me about an Indian film where there was a prince and princess being mean to a poor peasant.

…..

Every night it’s the same: before I close my eyes I think about far away countries. Once I’m asleep, I meet people who come from there and we get talking. They never ask where I’m from because in these dreams everyone is just the same, that’s how come I can speak any language on earth, when in fact it takes years to learn them. I fall asleep smiling because I know I can touch the sun and the moon and the stars. Life seems easy. But when I wake up I feel sad because I can’t speak a single word of any of the languages I knew really well in my dream. I’ve forgotten everything, everything’s been wiped out. It all seems so far, far away.

‘I’ve come to see Gorgeous Arthur.’

I’m a bit jealous because I was hoping Caroline was going to say it was me she’d come to see. I wish I hadn’t told her about Arthur. Now she’ll think about him all the time, and she won’t look at me any more. But then I think, Arthur’s just a picture on the cover of one of my father’s books, and I calm down because a picture can’t take someone’s wife from them. And anyway, Arthur’s dead.

We go inside, and I think I mustn’t show her the radio cassette player. But I’d really like to. If she sees that I’ll get lots of points over Mabélé. He’s never shown her anything like that, and he can only talk about things that don’t really exist.

I come out of my parents’ bedroom with A Season in Hell . I’ve turned it over so Caroline can’t see Arthur’s picture.

‘Close your eyes.’

She puts her hand over her face. Her fingers aren’t closed up properly, she can see what I’m going to show her.

‘You’re cheating. Cover your eyes with both hands!’

She puts one hand on top of the other. Now she can’t see anything. I come up to her and whisper in her ear, ‘Now you can open your eyes, here’s Arthur!’

At first she says nothing, then she snatches the book out of my hands. She touches Arthur’s face with the index finger of her right hand, she sniffs at the book as though it was something to eat. She runs another finger over Arthur’s hair and eyes. Finally, she opens the page I’ve marked and begins to read:

I abominate all trades. Professionals and workers, serfs to a man! Despicable. The hand that guides the quill is a match for the hand that guides the plough — What a century for hands! — I’ll never get my hand in. And besides, there’s no end to ‘service’. The beggar’s honesty distresses me. Criminals disgust me — men without balls. Myself I’m intact; it’s all the same to me.

‘What’s “the hand that guides the quill”? What’s “the hand that guides the plough”?’ she asks.

That startles me because she’s asking exactly the same questions I asked the first time I touched the book.

She’s stopped reading now, she’s waiting for my answers. I can’t tell her I don’t know or she’ll laugh at me and think I don’t know Arthur very well.

‘Well, the “hand that guides the quill” is a hand with feathers, it’s the hand of a white sorcerer who dresses up as a bird at night and snatches children and takes them to hell for a season. That’s why it’s called A Season in Hell .’