Alain Mabanckou - Broken Glass

I must say Diabolica did not understand my penchant for alcohol, she tried to account for it, she put it down to my mother’s death, but what did she know about her death, really, she knew no more than the wagging tongues of Trois-Cents, I preferred her not to mention my mother’s death, it really made me mad, I could even turn aggressive, and I’ve always been in control of my impulses, I’ve never let anger get the better of me, did she ever hear me criticize her mother, with her one eye bigger than the other, did she ever hear me criticize her father, with his clubfoot and his hernia dangling down between his legs, tell me that, but Diabolica didn’t let that bother her, she went on and on about it, waking up my mother’s corpse, disturbing her in her search for eternal rest, death’s not to be played with like that, we need to put things back in context here, and I actually started drinking well before my mother kicked the bucket, even if I have to admit that her disappearance speeded things up somewhat, but it saddened me to hear Diabolica linking my passion for alcohol to the death of my poor mother, and I felt I really mustn’t allow her to draw that particular conclusion, in fact I think I actually consumed rather fewer bottles during the weeks following my mother’s disappearance, it was my way of mourning, a mark of respect I owed her, and I only resumed normal activity once I was sure that my mother’s corpse had rotted away, and her soul had arrived at last in the garden of Eden

let’s say my mother died by drowning in the dirty water of the river Tchinouka, it wasn’t her fault, it was all very mysterious, and I’m going to just say a few quick things about it so that things are a bit clearer than the water of the river Tchinouka, because it’s important never to confuse one dead person with another, even if the dead all have the same color skin, I mean, just a little word, even if it means my bicycle chicken goes completely cold, I’ll still eat it later, so on the night of her departure for the next world, my mother had a terrible dream, she got up from her bed, eyes closed, mouth wide open, arms stretched out before her as though driven by an invisible force, the shades of the night, and she opened the door of her shack, and went down to the river, hoping to find my father, whom I never knew, it seems he was a highly regarded palm wine tapper in Louboulou, it seems in fact that he had two passions, jazz and palm wine, so those guys like Coltrane, Armstrong, Davis, Monk, Parker, Bechet, and the other negroes who played trumpet and clarinet, he knew all their tunes, which they say were invented in the cotton or coffee fields, to deal with the deep melancholy of their ancestral homeland, and in response, as well, to the whiplashes of their slave-driver masters, who could never understand why the caged bird sang, so anyway, my father was mad for these black men’s tunes, it was even said that he collected 33s and 45s of these guys on their trumpets and clarinets, and they say he died from witchcraft at point-blank range, they say someone shot him with a bullet he’d need to have had eyes in the back of his head to avoid, they say he was shot in the back while he slept, because he always slept on his front, even though several sorcerers in Louboulou had warned him not to, and they say it was his uncle who did it, so as to inherit his palm wine tapping tools, not to mention his 33s and 45s of the black men playing their trumpets and clarinets, but the whole story as my mother tried to tell it was too complicated, she wanted to justify her decision to leave the village of Louboulou for the town, she had decided to leave the village where these fine folk lived chiefly to protect me from the witchcraft at point-blank range and from the people who still had it in for my father even though he was dead, and she could see I had my doubts about the story of the nocturnal, mystical gunshot, well, I was less than two years old at the time, and I don’t know if I look like my father, people say I look more like the cowardly wretch who killed my progenitor in cold blood and who inherited my father’s collection of 33s and 45s of the black men playing their trumpets and clarinets, so my mother’s death seemed to me every bit as mysterious as my father’s, and at the time she died, the papers called the good woman’s death, which was just a small news item, a nocturnal accident, and they ran a headline about the body of an old woman being found on the banks of the river Tchinouka, and that’s why whenever I walk by the river I shout abuse at the water, I spit on the ground, I throw stones far, far out, right down into the depths of these vile waters, and rail at the injustice of it all

I set out to talk about my mother, but then the fugitive shade of my father appeared, so to get back to the point, I was saying how my mother’s death was also a mystery, she rose from her bed at midnight, in the clutches of a dreadful dream, walked down to the river Tchinouka, and there reenacted in every last detail a scene from the Bible, she walked on the dirty water of the river Tchinouka, as though she might cross over to my father in the other world, and then the dirty water of the river Tchinouka gulped her down into its belly, then spat her back out again like a piece of flotsam on the bank, saying it didn’t want her skeletal body in its watery belly, and the local cleaning workers came across her disfigured corpse, nibbled here and there by the small fry in the river and by other fish with no sense of decency, who were hanging around getting bored on the tide of the slimy wave, and the funeral wake was held at our place, on our lot, my mother’s body was laid out in the open air, according to the custom of Louboulou, and for this I must thank Diabolica, she looked after my mother very properly, and it was she who sent the contributions card around the neighborhood so that people could support us in our time of grief, and it was she who went to the morgue to identify the body because I don’t like looking at corpses, and it was she who led the chorus of women beneath the shelter made of palm leaves, and while they vied in their weeping and their wailing for the dead, Diabolica chased away the nasty flies with their worm-eaten feet, hoping for a look in at my mother’s remains, and it was she who supervised the washing of the body, because not just anybody knows how to wash a stiff, and it was she, as well, who sent an obituary notice to the radio station, to announce my mother’s death, and it was she who sent out a second communication, thanking everyone who had assisted us during this difficult time, and throughout these days of sadness, Diabolica dressed in black and daubed her face with white clay, and insisted on fasting throughout the funeral time, walking barefoot, leaving her hair uncombed, not looking at men, not talking to me, not saying hello, because that was the custom, and I can only conclude, in all honesty, that from this point of view, she was a woman I have nothing to reproach for, to this day

but it turns out Diabolica always thought that being an only son, who had already lost his father, I took refuge in drink, hoping somehow to get even by drinking red wine, since I’d never be able to save my mother’s memory by drinking all the dirty water of the river Tchinouka, and I swear, I wanted to build my life again, fit back together the broken pieces, and mend the holes, and stop spending all my time with the bottle of Sovinco red, but it wasn’t my fault, was it, that I’d been fired from my teaching post, I swear I loved teaching, I swear I loved having all my little pupils around me, I swear I loved teaching them their times tables, I swear, too, that I loved teaching them their past participles conjugated with avoir , and whether you have to make them agree or not, depending on the time of day and the weather, and the poor little things, dazed, confused, sometimes even angry, would ask me why the past participle does agree today at four o’clock, but didn’t yesterday at midday, just before lunch break, and I would tell them that what mattered in the French language was not the rules, but the exceptions to the rules, I would tell them that if they could understand, and memorize all the exceptions in this language, which was as changeable as the weather, then the rules would automatically become apparent, they would be obvious from first principles, and when they were grown up they could forget all about the rules and the sentence structure, because by then they would see that the French language isn’t a long, quiet river, but rather a river to be diverted