Mount Pleasant (10 page)

“Why didn't you go to the palace?”

The girl stood in the kitchen doorway biting her nails. Nebu's mother understood that the bitch preferred the implacable justice of a woman to the proverbs of old men.

“What do you want me to do?” Bertha asked.

The girl sucked her thumb.

“Kill my own son?”

“No,” she replied.

Bertha was furious. “So just what do you want?”

Why does love always come hand in hand with suffering? That's a question Bertha would ask herself only much later. For the moment, what she felt flowing through her veins was desire: the desire to strangle this girl, to cut off her childish fingers, to tear out her tongue. Yet the matron's trembling hands did nothing more than reach out and slap Ngungure's quivering mouth just as the girl was opening her lips to conjugate a verb Bertha could not bear to hear.

“I love—”

“Stop sucking your thumb,” Bertha cut in, “you hussy!”

Ngungure couldn't finish the sentence as she had wanted. “… your son…”

Ah, this is the end of Foumban, Bertha thought. There was a time when a girl, and a noble to boot, never would have come into the courtyard of a slave to conjugate the verb “to love” so brazenly! Love? Bertha was a more than reasonable woman. She remembered her son's face, scrunched tight, that time she'd caught him in the yam field. Then her face brightened at the thought that if he had finally found the woman who wanted nothing more than to touch him all she could, so much the better. She bought the girl's silence with a few cowrie shells and then lectured her son. Of course, she neglected to tell her husband the details of this exchange. For her, it was over, a done deal, old news, and she could move on to something else.

When her husband informed her that evening that he had fallen in love, Bertha couldn't help but burst out laughing a second time.

“You too?” she said.

She again covered her lips with the palm of her hand:
“Woudididididi!”
She made a couple of jokes about this epidemic of love that had taken over Foumban and then told her man he should be ashamed of himself. He should be getting ready instead for their son's wedding. That's when she began to hate the Dog. The borders between love and hatred are porous, as we all know, especially for a jealous woman. Bertha knew her husband wasn't talking about her when he confessed he was in love. There are things one just doesn't ask. But what wouldn't the matron have given to know what hussy was responsible for this trick!

Things moved ahead rather quickly.

A few months later the Dog announced he had decided to get married again. Bertha couldn't believe her eyes when he introduced her to the woman he had chosen—“a good girl,” he said. Yes, Ngungure, the very same one who had knocked on her kitchen door, a grotesque accusation against her beloved son on her lips. So when the Dog moved into a new house, the House of Passion he had built for the “Devil” (that's what Bertha, who was Christian, called her), the matron saw a weed sprout up in her courtyard. Never had a silence been so strongly imposed, nor so accursed. “She really got me,” Bertha said, and she slapped herself for having underestimated the machinations of that hussy. “She really got me good!”

But that's not all. She blamed herself for underestimating girls. “I would have killed her,” she went on, her eyes growing red. “I should have killed her.”

She couldn't hide the powerlessness of her empty hands to commit the crime she desired. Her husband was so much in love that he went to Habisch, the local Swiss merchant, to buy himself some European clothes: a green jacket, a black belt, and white gloves. He also bought black shoes with white trim. The merchant advised him on what to buy: this is what Europeans wore when they got married. He invited his first wife to his wedding. Bamum law required it. The poor woman, whose love had already turned to hatred, thought of the many stupid things she could do to destroy this Europeanized joy that had planted its accursed roots in her courtyard. She could have started scabrous rumors: that the Dog's wife was polyandrous, for example. But she restrained herself: as a co-wife, her opinion counted for nothing and would only make people laugh. Bertha also thought about shouting that the wedding was scandalous, shouting it so everyone could hear, but she remembered that it was in her best interest that the ceremony take place as planned. She didn't want to have to flee because she was accused of witchcraft. Nothing worse could be said in Foumban!

Suspected of jealousy, Bertha would have lost all her standing, and like any other man taking a second wife, the Dog would have just laughed off her warnings. “Ridiculous!” That's what he would have said. The jealous woman could feel the words dissolving in her mouth, but she still refused to keep quiet. And then there was her son. He offered no consolation: Wasn't that Nebu she saw sidling along the walls to sneak into the House of Passion when his father was in the fields? The boy was so determined that only the threat of a curse from his mother slowed his steps—and then just for an instant!

“What are you doing over there?” Bertha demanded. “Do you want to die?”

She soon realized her questions were lost on the puzzled face of a boy who no longer knew what to do about his raging penis. Nebu could see no farther than his own erection.

“So curse me then,” he told his mother. “What difference would it make!”

“It's your father!”

“He took my woman!”

If Nebu forgot he was talking to his mother, he remembered that Bertha had once before given her tacit blessing to his relationship with Ngungure. But because Nebu's spirit was on fire, he forgot that Ngungure was now his father's wife. He was already cursed! His mother saw that he was engulfed by the flames she had first seen light up his eyes.

“Let them stone me!” the son said.

He meant the
muntgu
, the sultan's police: they would stone him. And he imagined this horrific outcome over and over, even as he was screwing his father's wife. Love? Oh, Nebu was already stoned, stoned! He didn't need to die again. He was already dead, and his laughter in his father's bedroom made his mother bleed again and again, bleed herself dry.

“Burn down the house,” he added. “Burn us with it!”

“You are my son,” Bertha replied.

The mother's dilemma wasn't the same as the son's.

“I am a man.”

“You are my child.” Bertha took his hands, pulled him in toward her chest, and pulled out a breast for him to suckle. “My son.”

There is an age when a mother's milk becomes bitter for the child.

“Leave me alone!” Nebu shouted.

He would rather his thirst be quenched by the flames of a fire than do his mother's bidding. He would have preferred to express openly his love for his father's wife, his girlfriend. In Foumban, many first wives had set fire to their co-wife's house, but their jealousy never succeeded in bringing their husbands home. Nothing—not even being a mother—could protect a woman from the rage of a mob of men determined to avenge the humiliation of their fellow. It was always the woman who was exiled from the sultanate. That's what the law said. So Bertha squelched her motherly fears and her wifely pains. There was already suffering enough.

Had she set fire to Ngungure's house, she would have said, “I did it for my son,” and all the men would have burst out laughing. “Find something more original, woman.”

Bertha could already see her son being stoned. She pulled back in fear. Tears ran down her cheeks. Tears of love for her son on her right cheek and tears of hatred for her husband on the left. For the first time since Nebu's birth, her womb contracted, as if in labor, as if she were again giving birth to this son she already saw dead.

According to the doyenne, when the matron told this story, she kept hold of her belly, so unbearable was her pain. As Sara took in the terror provoked by the matron's revelations, a look of compassion appeared on her face. I want to be Nebu, she thought, the son so beloved.

She knew that a story once told can't be untold; in that, it is similar to life itself. Bertha's voice cracked under her pained cries—
“Woudidididi
”—as she sought to bury the wail she had repressed in Mount Pleasant as well as in far-off Foumban, as she sought a place to hide her defeated eyes from her unlikely son. That was only the beginning of a long and shameful story from which she hoped Sara would save her—the seventeenth chapter of a humiliation that had first left its mark on her neck and stained her hands with the horrific brutality of a crime before stealing her faith in the girls entrusted to her care. Still, she insisted, “The Devil stole my child.”

She hadn't stopped calling Ngungure the Devil.

The start of this story left no doubt in Sara's mind. Now she knew why Bertha had been so happy at her son's return, and why she wanted to give birth to him once more.

“Strange that she didn't censor her story,” I commented. “You were only nine years old.”

“She had been through hell,” the doyenne explained. “Regardless of the words she chose, her mind could only be dirty.”

Sara's eyes gave me an idea of this hell.

“The poor woman was spitting flames without realizing it; she was eating shit and couldn't even smell it anymore.”

Sara was telling Bertha's story—this was clear to me after just a few sessions—in order to escape from the furnace she had kept burning for eighty years, to put out the fire that had been set all around her. Bertha, meanwhile, kept inventing new words, the wounded flowers of her sublime vocabulary, to make up for the filth of her macabre existence. Listening to the matron's suffering ate up Sara's childhood day after day, one chapter after the other. As for me, I couldn't keep from wondering: Was it better to transmit such stories to a child or to let a little girl disappear in the obscure chambers of a sultan's life? In a way, it seemed to me that there wasn't much difference. A story can also rape a soul.

With her tales, the matron made Sara painfully aware of the hell she had lived through herself and gave her a glimpse of the paradise of a love Sara wanted to hear more about. I opened my ears like one might open an engine's valves. The spoken word was the only connection between those two souls, those two worlds, but that only made the depth of their shared silence more evident.

Life is a story as much as it is a destiny.

 

18

A Decidedly Scattered Story

Each of us is a kaleidoscope of our times. Events that take place in the most far-flung corners of the earth must have repercussions in the world's capital; delusion alone lets us believe it's possible to live in isolation on this globe. To love is to accept the unexpected that knocks on destiny's door. Maternal love is a metaphor for the strange relationship that links us to beings who have always been there and who are, in the end, as unknown to us as a newborn babe who has his whole long life before him to surprise us. In thread after thread of the doyenne's tale, I discovered the infinite knots of a soul's testimony; the old mama revealed the world of a woman whose name I shared and who was so far removed from me, so different!

“I know that you didn't speak,” I began one day, “but if you had asked Bertha questions, what would have been the first one?”

Sara looked at me for a moment.

“I knew you'd come back to that.”

“To what?”

“The scar on her neck.”

The old mama was wrong. I wanted to get back to Samba, Ngosso, and Manga, to know who they were and above all why Njoya had their names on his lips the day of his collapse. She didn't give me the time to ask. She took a pinch of her tobacco and opened wide both her eyes and her mouth, as if she wanted to swallow me up; then she froze in that position. She didn't sneeze, no. We both laughed when I admitted that she'd scared me. Truthfully, it was hard for me to adapt to the zigzag rhythm of her narrative, to melt into the multiple lives she spread out before me. She alone controlled the tempo of her tale.

So I settled myself into the tale she chose for me.

“So, did she get that scar from her husband?”

That would have made sense, right? But no.

“Stories can wound us as well,” was Sara's reply. “Don't you know that?”

“Yes, I do.”

I would have liked a more direct answer to my questions, but I couldn't find the words to make her understand that. I wanted her to respect the logic of her tale and to slake my greedy thirst for it with a series of goblets. The more I opened myself up to take in her stories, the more I got lost in Mount Pleasant's corridors, and the more simple questions bubbled up in my mind: Who was Sara? Who were her parents? Yes, who was her father?

“Why are you so impatient?”: that's how she would have replied. Her tale had shown me a museum of the colonial era, introducing me to unknown figures, like Nebu, and to luminaries, like Njoya and Atangana, as well as to history's illustrious martyrs—Ngosso, Manga, Samba—and who else? There are stories that don't need a plot. Sooner or later they rise above the confusion and untangle their mysteries in a series of sentences.

Sara was carried away by Bertha's story. And since the end is, in some ways, also a beginning, Sara realized that the matron's suffering was only just beginning on that day when she reached the bloody borders of her madness. If Bertha had taken little Sara's tale seriously, she would have heard echoes of Nebu's tale in the soft barks this girl with the enigmatic past made each time Bertha shaved her head.

“No,” the doyenne continued, somewhat irritated. “It wasn't her husband who gave her the scar. We're just at the start of Nebu's story.”

Sara took another pinch of tobacco. Once again she didn't sneeze, but before continuing, she tucked her snuff back into her cleavage and opened her eyes so wide it was as if she were opening the Book of Life.