Alain Mabanckou - Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty

She takes another look at Arthur, as if she’s really frightened of him now. She puts the book down on the table: ‘And aren’t you scared the feathered hand is going to take you down to hell too?’

‘No. Arthur will protect me.’

‘What about “the hand that guides the plough”?’

‘It’s the hand that guides the plough in a field, the hand of a farmer, and my uncle says, you should never put the plough before the ox.’

Can she tell I don’t actually know what it means? I speak calmly, without hesitation. And under her admiring gaze, I feel cool air entering my lungs. I know I’ve just scored a thousand points against Mabélé. That Mabélé’s of no account now. I’m so happy, I take the book from her, and go and put it back in my parents’ room.

I come back into the living room with the radio cassette player. The cassette is already inside the machine. I press ‘play’. The singer with the moustache starts weeping about his tree. When the song gets to the bit about alter ego and saligaud , I start to explain to Caroline what it means but she goes: ‘Hush! Keep quiet!’

She listens, swaying her head. The song’s finished now, I press on ‘RWD’ and it starts again.

Caroline stands up: ‘Dance with me!’

‘No, you can’t dance to this sort of song, and…’

‘I want to dance with you to this song! Come on!’

I’m standing facing her, but I leave a big gap between us.

‘Are you frightened of me? Don’t you know how to dance, or what? Come here, and hold me tight!’

I hold her really tight, and we move slowly. She’s closed her eyes and it’s as though she’s not in the house with me any more, she’s flying, far far away, further than Egypt. I close my eyes too, so I can fly in my thoughts as well, and I think of the concert I saw at the Joli Soir with Maximilien. I see the woman dancing in the very short skirt, her backside blocking the hole in the wall, her long legs, her great big breasts almost hanging out. My heart’s beating really fast now. I put my head on Caroline’s chest like a baby that’s drunk up its bottle and falls fast asleep. Now, Caroline doesn’t have big breasts yet like the woman I saw dancing. I can feel some little breasts though. I imagine that in a few years they will grow as big as a pair of ripe papayas.

While we’re dancing and our two bodies are like just one body, she puts her mouth right next to my ear: ‘Michel, you’re still my husband, and I want to live in the big castle inside your heart.’

Her words make my heart race. I’m floating like a kite in the sky. I’ve never felt this happy, not even eating meat and beans. I never want this moment to stop. I want it to last till the end of time. I feel Caroline’s hand touching my hair, her mouth close to my ear. I close my eyes again, till the moment I hear her say very quietly: ‘Michel, where is the key to Maman Pauline’s belly?’

I open my eyes, I stop dancing and I pull away from her. I lunge towards the radio cassette player on the table, and I press on the button that says ‘STOP’. I can feel anger rising in me, I’m almost shaking with it, but Caroline stays very calm, and goes on: ‘I’m your wife, and I don’t love Mabélé. Do you understand that? But if you don’t give your mother that key we’ll get divorced again, and next time I’ll go and live with Mabélé for real.’

She arranges her hair, looks at herself in the mirror and picks up her little bag.

She’s already at the door when she says: ‘I’m speaking plainly to you because you’re my husband. Married couples shouldn’t have secrets. They’re meant to tell each other everything. And I’m afraid of you now, because if you can hide the key to your own mother’s belly, the first child we have is bound to close up my belly and hide the key somewhere like you did. And then I won’t have two children with you, like I want, I’ll be an unhappy woman like Maman Pauline. Don’t you see?’

‘Have you found the key?’

‘Hey, calm down, Michel, my boy…’

‘I want that key — today!’

‘To start with, you never say “I want”. It’s rude.’

I sit down, like him, with my back against the cemetery wall.

Little Pepper’s lit a cigarette, his face disappears behind the smoke. When he coughs it sounds like the engine of an old truck that won’t start.

He starts talking, in his broken voice: ‘Last time I told you how my Grandfather Massengo died because my greedy uncle killed the cockerel for the New Year feast. Well now, after that I had to leave the village and come and live here in Pointe-Noire in one of the houses my grandfather had left. I lived with my other uncle, who died when I was twenty-five. This uncle’s name was Matété, he suffered from amnesia, an illness that ends up with you losing your memory. I’d lost both my father and mother, and he was all I had. When he died I was devastated because the two of us had lived together with no one else, and he wasn’t married, he had no children. I identified too closely with him, and I noticed I lost my memory too, just after he died. I was convinced he had passed his amnesia on to me, instead of taking it with him up to heaven, where my mother, who was already up there, would have blown on his brow and healed him. But it seems that the dead have to arrive in heaven with their hair all tidy, sweetly scented, men in a three piece suit, women in a white dress, and above all, in good health, and that’s why the illnesses stay in the cemetery and then go and live in one of the descendant’s bodies when the soul of the person who’s died finally starts climbing the stairway to heaven. I was that poor descendant. Are you still with me, Michel?’

‘Yes, I’m with you…’

‘Now since I’d become amnesiac too, I’d forgotten to go to my job at the Maritime Company where I was a manager. It was me that took on the newly qualified staff. Only I’d stopped going altogether and when my work colleagues got worried and came knocking at my door all the time to try and get me to see sense, I threw pepper water in their faces. I didn’t recognise them, and I thought they were garden gnomes come to trample my poor little spinach plants, when the only thing I had left to do was cultivate my garden in a corner of the plot my uncle had inherited from my grandfather and I’d inherited from my uncle. I could put up with anything, but not people coming and treading on my poor little spinach plants, that I loved watering. I told all my woes to those poor little spinach plants whenever grief overcame me and I thought of my mother, my father, and especially uncle Matété who probably still hadn’t recovered his memory even up in heaven. Those poor little spinach plants were my whole existence: I’d jump out of bed early and check no gnomes had been in the garden, jumping off the trucks of the Maritime Company; I’d take a pick, a hoe, a spade, a rake and a watering can, that I filled up with water from the river Tchinouka. Then I’d dig the soil, scattering seeds, whistling. Sometimes I’d spend the whole day just sitting in my vegetable garden, hoping to catch sight of my poor little spinach plants growing. I was afraid they’d pop up without me knowing. My neighbour, Maloba Pamba-Pamba started to get worried, and came to see me one day, with a pitying look on his face: “Little Pepper, you’ve been sitting in your garden since this morning, and not once have I seen you adopt the noble gesture of the seed-sower! What’s going on?” I replied: “I’m watching my poor little spinach plants grow.” He was astonished: “You’re watching your spinach plants grow?” I almost lost my temper: “There’s one thing I’d really like to understand: why do those poor little spinach plants of mine only grow when my back is turned? Does that not seem unacceptable to you?” He looked at me in some surprise: “Yes, that is unacceptable, Little Pepper.” I added: “It’s not ok, I’d even say it was ungrateful of them, myself! After all, who is it waters the poor little spinach plants? Who looks after them? Who pulls out the weeds that stop them growing? They can’t do this to me! I’m not leaving this garden until my poor little spinach plants are prepared to grow here and now, before my very eyes!” My neighbour, Maloba Pamba-Pamba murmured: “My dear Little Pepper, I am going to be frank with you: I think you need help. Things were bad before, but now they are desperate…”’