Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in Congo. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches literature at UCLA. He was awarded the prestigious Grand Prix de Littérature Henri Gal for his body of work. He has also received the Subsaharan African Literature Prize for Blue-White-Red, and the Prix Renaudot for Memoirs of a Porcupine, which is published by Serpent’s Tail along with his other novels, Black Bazaar, Broken Glass and African Psycho.

Praise for Alain Mabanckou

‘This bar-room yarn-spinner tells his fellow tipplers’ tales in a voice that swings between broad farce and aching tragedy. His farewell performance from a perch in Credit Gone West abounds in scorching wit and flights of eloquence… vitriolic comedy and pugnacious irreverence’ Boyd Tonkin, Independent

‘A dizzying combination of erudition, bawdy humour and linguistic effervescence’ Melissa McClements, Financial Times

‘Broken Glass is a comic romp that releases Mabanckou’s sense of humour… Although its cultural and intertextual musings could fuel innumerable doctorates, the real meat of Broken Glass is its comic brio, and Mabanckou’s jokes work the whole spectrum of humour’ Tibor Fischer, Guardian

‘Deserves the acclaim heaped upon it… self-mocking and ironic, a thought-provoking glimpse into a stricken country’ Waterstone’s Books Quarterly

‘Taxi Driver for Africa’s blank generation… a deftly ironic Grand Guignol, a pulp fiction vision of Frantz Fanon’s “wretched of the earth” that somehow manages to be both frightening and self-mocking at the same time’ Time Out, New York

‘The French have already called [Mabanckou] a young writer to watch. After this debut, I certainly concur’ Globe and Mail, Toronto

‘Broken Glass proves to be an obsessive, slyly playful raconteur… the prose runs wild to weave endless sentences, their rhythm and pace attuned to the narrator’s rhetorical extravagances… With his sourly comic recollections, Broken Glass makes a fine companion’ Peter Carty, Independent

‘A book of grubby erudition… full of tall tales that can entertain readers from Brazzaville to Bognor’ James Smart, Guardian

‘Mabanckou’s narrative gains an uplifting momentum of its own’ Emma Hagestadt, Independent

‘Mabanckou’s irreverent wit and madcap energy have made him a big name in France… surreal’ Giles Foden, Condé Nast Traveller

‘Magical realism meets black comedy in an excellent satire by an inventive and playful writer’ Alastair Mabbott, Herald

‘Africa’s Samuel Beckett… Mabanckou’s freewheeling prose marries classical French elegance with Paris slang and a Congolese beat. It weds the oral culture of his mother to an omnivorous bibliophilia encouraged by his stepfather… Memoirs of a Porcupine draws on oral lore and parables in its sly critique of those who use traditional beliefs as a pretext for violence’ The Economist

TOMORROW I’LL BE TWENTY

ALAIN MABANCKOU

Translated by Helen Stevenson

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request

The right of Alain Mabanckou to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

First published as Demains J’aurai Vingt Ans in 2010 by Editions Gallimard

First published in this translation in 2013 by Serpent’s Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
London EC1R 0JH
website: www.serpentstail.com

ISBN 978 1 84668 584 2
eISBN 978 1 84765 789 3

Designed and typeset by sue@lambledesign.demon.co.uk
Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my mother Pauline Kengué – died 1995
For my father Roger Kimangou – died 2004

To Dany Laferrière

The sweetest thought
In the child’s warm heart:
Soiled sheets and white lilac

Tomorrow I’ll be twenty

TCHICAYA U TAM’ SI
Wrong Blood
Edited by P.J. Oswald, 1955

In this country, a boss should always be bald and have a big belly. My uncle isn’t bald, he hasn’t got a big belly, and you don’t realise, the first time you see him, that he’s the actual boss of a big office in the centre of town. He’s an ‘administrative and financial director’. Maman Pauline says an administrative and financial director is someone who keeps all the company’s money for himself and says: ‘I’ll hire you, I won’t hire you, and I’m sending you back to where you came from.’

Uncle René works at the CFAO, the only company in Pointe-Noire that sells cars. He has a telephone and a television in his house. Maman Pauline thinks things like that cost too much for what they are, there’s no point having them because people lived better lives without. Why put a telephone in your own home when you can go and make a call from the post office in the Grand Marché? Why have television when you can listen to the news on the radio? And anyway, the Lebanese down at the Grand Marché sell radios, you can beat them down on the price. You can also pay in instalments if you’re a civil servant or an administrative and financial director, like my uncle.

I often think to myself that Uncle René is more powerful than the God people praise and worship every Sunday at the church of Saint-Jean-Bosco. No one’s ever seen Him, but people are afraid of His mighty power, as though He might tell us off or give us a smack, when in fact He lives far far away, further than any Boeing can fly. If you want to speak to Him, you have to go to church and the priest will pass on a message to Him, which He’ll read if he has a spare moment, because up there He’s run off his feet, morning, noon and night.

Uncle René is anti-church and is always saying to my mother: ‘Religion is the opium of the people!’

Maman Pauline told me, if anyone calls you ‘opium of the people’ you should punch him straight off, because it’s a serious insult, and Uncle René wouldn’t go using a complicated word like ‘opium’ just for the fun of it. Since then, whenever I do something silly, Maman Pauline calls me ‘opium of the people’. And in the playground, if my friends really annoy me I call them ‘opium of the people!’ and then we get into a fight over that.

My uncle says he’s a communist. Usually communists are simple people, they don’t have television, telephone, or electricity, hot water or air conditioning, and they don’t change cars every six months like Uncle René. So now I know you can also be communist and rich.

I think the reason my uncle is tough with us is because the communists are strict about how things should be done, because of the capitalists stealing all the goods of the poor wretched of the Earth, including their means of production. How are the poor wretched of the Earth going to live off their labours if the capitalists own the means of production and refuse to share, eating up the profits, instead of splitting them fifty-fifty with the workers?

The thing that gets my Uncle René really angry is the capitalists, not the communists, who must unite because apparently the final struggle won’t be long now. At least, that’s what they teach us at the école populaire in Moral studies. They tell us, for instance, that we are the future of the Congo, that it’s up to us to make sure that capitalism doesn’t win the final struggle. We are the National Pioneer Movement. To start with we children belong to the National Pioneer Movement and later we’ll belong to the Congolese Workers’ Party – the CPT – and maybe one day one of us will even become President of the Republic, who also runs the CPT.

Hearing me – Michel – use the words my uncle uses, you might think I was a true communist, but in fact I’m not. It’s just that he uses these strange, complicated words so often – ‘capital’, ‘profit’, ‘means of production’, ‘marxism’, ‘leninism’, ‘materialism’, ‘infrastructure’, ‘superstructure’, ‘bourgeoisie’, ‘class struggle’, ‘proletariat’, etc., I’ve ended up knowing them all, even if I do sometimes mix them up without meaning to and don’t always understand them. For instance, when he talks about the wretched of the Earth, what he really means is the starving masses. The capitalists starve them, so they’ll turn up to work the next day, even though they’re being exploited and they didn’t eat yesterday. So before the hungry can win their struggle against the capitalists, they must do a tabula radar of the past and take their problems in hand, instead of waiting for someone else to come and liberate them. Otherwise they’re truly stuffed, they’ll be forever hungry and eternally exploited.

When we sit down to eat at Uncle René’s house, I always get put in the worst seat, bang opposite the photo of an old white guy called Lenin, who won’t take his eyes off me, even though I don’t even know him, and he doesn’t know me either. I don’t like having an old white guy who doesn’t even know me giving me nasty looks, so I look him straight back in the eye. I know it’s rude to look grown up people in the eye, that’s why I do it in secret, or my uncle will get cross and tell me I’m being disrespectful to Lenin who is admired the world over.

Then there’s the photo of Karl Marx and Engels. It seems you’re not meant to split these two old guys up, they’re like twins. They’ve both got big beards, they both think the same thing at the same time, and sometimes they write down both their thoughts in a big book together. It’s thanks to them people now know what communism is. My uncle says it was Marx and Engels who showed that the history of the world was actually just the history of people in their different classes, for example, slaves and masters, landowners and landless peasants and so on. So, some people are on top in this world, and some are on the bottom and suffer because the ones on top exploit the ones at the bottom. But because things have changed a lot and the ones on top try to hide the fact that they’re exploiting the ones at the bottom, Karl Marx and Engels think we should all be quite clear that the differences still exist, and that nowadays there are two big classes at odds with each other, engaged in a ruthless struggle: the bourgeoisie and the proletariats. It’s easy to tell them apart in the street: the bourgeois have big bellies because they eat what the proletarians produce and the proletarians or the starving masses are all skinny because the bourgeois only leave them crumbs to eat, just enough so they can come to work the next day. And Uncle René says this is what you call the exploitation of man by his fellow man.

My uncle has also hung on the wall a photo of our Immortal, comrade president Marien Ngouabi, and one of Victor Hugo, who wrote lots of poems that we recite at school.

Generally speaking, an Immortal is someone like Spiderman, Blek le Roc, Tintin or Superman, who never dies. I don’t understand why we have to say that comrade president Marien Ngouabi is immortal when everyone knows he’s dead, that he’s buried in the cemetery at Etatolo, in the north of the country, a cemetery which is guarded seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, all because there are people who want to go and make their gris-gris on his grave so they can become immortal too.

Anyway, there you go, we have to call our ex-president ‘The Immortal’, even though he’s no longer alive. If anyone’s got a problem with that, the government will deal with them, they’ll be thrown in prison and given a trial once the Revolution has got rid of the capitalists and the means of production at last belong to the wretched of the Earth, to the starving masses who struggle night and day, all because of this business with the classes of Karl Marx and Engels.

Maman Pauline knows I’m very frightened of Uncle René, and she exploits it. If I don’t want to go to bed at night without her coming in to kiss me goodnight she reminds me that if I don’t go to bed her brother will think that I’m just a little capitalist who won’t sleep because he wants a kiss from his mummy first, like those capitalists’ children who live in the centre of town or in Europe, especially in France. He’ll forget I’m his nephew and give me a good hiding. That shuts me up pretty quickly, and Maman Pauline leans over and just touches me on the head, but she doesn’t give me a kiss like in the books we read in class that take place in Europe, especially in France. That’s when I tell myself that not everything you read in books is true, and you shouldn’t always believe what you read.

Sometimes I can’t get to sleep, though not always because I’m waiting for my mother’s goodnight kiss, sometimes just because the mosquito net bothers me. Once I’m inside it I feel as though I’m breathing in the same air as the evening before, and then I start sweating so much you’d think I’d wet the bed, which I haven’t.

The mosquitoes in our quartier are strange, they just love sweat, it means they can really stick to your skin and take their time about sucking your blood till five in the morning. Also, when I’m inside the mosquito net, I look like a corpse, the mosquitoes buzzing round me are like people weeping because I’ve just died.

I told Papa Roger this. I did, I told him I’m like a little corpse when I’m inside my mosquito net, and one day, if they’re not careful, I’ll really die in there, and I’ll never be seen on this earth again, because I’ll have gone up on high to join my two big sisters, who I’ve never known because they were in too much of a hurry to go straight up to heaven. I was in tears myself as I told him that, imagining myself as a tiny little corpse in a tiny little white coffin surrounded by people crying pointlessly, since if you’re dead you’re not coming back, except Jesus who can work miracles, and resuscitate, as though death, for him, was just a little afternoon siesta.

It worried Papa Roger that I was starting to talk about death like that at my age. He told me children never die, God watches over them at night while they’re sleeping and He gives them lots of air to breathe so they don’t suffocate in their sleep. So I asked him why God hadn’t put lots of air in the lungs of my two big sisters. He looked at me kindly. ‘I’ll see to it, I’ll take off the mosquito net.’

But it was weeks and weeks before he did anything about it. He finally took my mosquito net off yesterday, when he got home from work. He’d been to buy some Flytox from someone in the Avenue of Independence. Usually any self-respecting mosquito who hears the word Flytox buzzes off quickly, rather than die a slow, stupid death.

Papa Roger put this stuff all over my room, so the smell would last longer. Now the mosquitoes in our quartier are no fools, you can’t trick them that easily, particularly since you can see the picture of a dying mosquito on the Flytox packet. Is it likely they’ll commit suicide instead of fighting for your last drop of blood? They wait till the smell wears off, then they come right back and bite you all over because they’re angry with you now for waging war on them. When in fact they’re just like you, they want to live as long as they can.

So, even if you pump your house full of Flytox, you should never claim victory too soon. The mosquitoes will always win in the end, and then they’ll go and tell all the other mosquitoes in town that in fact you can get round the product after all. Mosquitoes aren’t like us, they never keep secrets, they spend the whole night chatting, as though they’d nothing else to do. And since they’re the same ones as in the Trois-Cents quartier, and they’ve seen you spraying Flytox in your house, first of all they go to the neighbours’ houses, where they don’t have it and then when they’ve finished there they come back to your room to see if it still smells of Flytox. Some mosquitoes are even used to it, and explain to their mates how to protect themselves against it. They say, ‘Watch out for those guys, it stinks of Flytox in their house; if you don’t want to die, take cover for now in a wardrobe or a cooking pot or a pair of shoes or some clothes’. And they’ll wait till you turn down the light on the storm lantern. They’re pleased because they can see you’re scared of them. If you’re really scared, it means you’ve got lots of nice warm blood to feed them on over the winter, and you didn’t want them to find out. If one of them comes looking for a fight and you try to squash it with your hands or a bit of wood, the others then turn up with their sisters and their cousins and their aunts and bite you all over. One little group makes the noise, the others attack. They take turns. The ones making the noise aren’t always the ones that attack, and the ones attacking wait behind them in a circle. There you are, all on your own, you’ve only got two hands, you can’t see what’s happening behind you, you can’t protect yourself, they’re a well-trained army out for revenge because you’ve tried to wipe them out with your Flytox. You’re itching all over, you’ve got mosquitoes up your nose, mosquitoes in your ears, and they’re all biting away and laughing their heads off.

And that’s why I woke up this morning covered in red spots. If I sniff my arms, they still smell of Flytox. A really angry mosquito – the leader, perhaps – bit me just above my eye, it’s so swollen, you’d think the devil had thrown me an invisible punch. Maman Pauline put some boa grease on it and said, to cheer me up, ‘Never mind, Michel, your eye will be better by sunset. Boa grease, that’s what they used on me when I was little. Tonight we’ll put back the mosquito net your father took off. That Flytox the Lebanese sell is rubbish. And he knows it.’

When Caroline looks at me, I feel like the best-looking guy in the world. We’re the same age, but she knows all there is to know about us boys. Maman Pauline says she’s very advanced. I don’t know what that means. Maybe it’s because Caroline acts like a real lady. Even at her age she wears lipstick and she braids almost every woman’s hair in our neighbourhood, including my mother’s. Caroline listens to what the fine ladies say about men, and she can’t wait to be like the women she goes shopping with in the Grand Marché. Maman Pauline says Caroline knows how to make a dish of beans and manioc leaves, which a lot of grown-up people still can’t do. She is really very advanced.

Caroline’s parents and mine are friends. They live at the far end of the Avenue of Independence, just before the road that leads to the Savon quartier, where Uncle René lives. It’s a short walk from their house to ours, ours is the one painted green and white halfway down the same avenue, opposite Yeza, the joiner, who makes loads of coffins and lines them up in front of his lot, so people can come and choose.

Caroline and I used to go to school together, at Trois-Martyrs, but now she’s at a different place, in the Chic quartier. The reason she’s not at the same school as me now is because her father had a row with the headmaster.

I really miss those days when she’d come strolling down the Avenue of Independence, and meet me outside our house. We avoided the tarmacked roads because our parents said it was too dangerous, because none of the cars had brakes and the drivers drank corn spirit before they set off. We specially avoided the crossroads at Block 55, where someone got knocked down by a car at least once a month. In our quartier people blamed Ousmane, a shopkeeper from Senegal, just opposite the crossroads. Apparently he had this magic mirror that fooled the poor pedestrians, so they thought the cars were a long way off, like a kilometre away, when in fact it was more like a few metres, and bam! they ran them over, just as they started crossing. It looked like Ousmane had loads of customers, more than the other shops, because people died right outside his shop. We’d go round behind his shop, without even looking at it. Because we were scared of Ousmane’s magic mirror. Sometimes I’d be behind Caroline and she’d turn round and take my hand and give me a shake and tell me to get a move on because the devils in the magic mirror always caught children who lagged behind.

‘Michel, don’t look in Ousmane’s shop! Close your eyes!’

I walked fast. I didn’t want to vanish while she wasn’t looking. Our school was an old building painted green, yellow and red. When we finally got to the playground we had to separate. Caroline went into Madame Diamoneka’s class, and I went into Monsieur Malonga’s. My hand was damp because Caroline had been holding it tight all the way.

Around five in the evening we’d come home together. She’d drop me outside our house, then carry on home. I’d stay outside, watching her go. Soon she’d be just a little shape way off in the crowd. And in I’d go, happy.

My best friend, Lounès – who’s Caroline’s brother – liked walking to school alone. Was that because he didn’t want to walk alongside his sister? I think it was to show he was older than us. That he was in class with the big kids. Now he’s at middle school where you learn even harder things than you do at primary. And since he’s at Trois-Glorieuses, that’s where I want to go after primary school. If I went anywhere else I’d have to make new friends. I like Lounès, and I think he likes me too.

Caroline and Lounès’s father limps with his left leg, and people snigger when he walks by. It’s not nice to laugh at Monsieur Mutombo, it’s not like he said to God: I’d like to have a limp all my life please. He was born like that, and when he was a little boy and he tried to walk, his left leg was shorter than his right, or maybe his right leg was longer than his left.

In a way, Monsieur Mutombo could get rid of his limp if he wanted, all he has to do is wear Salamander shoes, they have these heels that are so high, a pygmy could wear them and look like an American sky-scraper. But I don’t think that’s a solution, since the right leg would still go on up higher and the left leg, the sick one, couldn’t match it. Unless if he cut off a bit of the sole of the right shoe, but then everyone would laugh at him because his shoes wouldn’t be the same height. The only thing to do is to ask God on his dying day to send him back with normal legs, because once God’s made a human being and sends him down to our world, that’s it, he won’t go back on his decision, otherwise people would stop respecting him. Besides, that would mean God could get it wrong, like the rest of us. Which has never been known to happen.

Monsieur Mutombo’s a very honest man. Papa Roger says so, and he’s his friend. He looks after Lounès and Caroline really well. He takes them to the Rex, where they’ve already seen films like Demolition Man, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Ten Commandments, Samson and Delilah, Jaws, Star Wars and lots of Indian films.

When Monsieur Mutombo comes to visit my father on Sundays, they go out to a bar in the Avenue of Independence. They drink palm wine, they talk in our ethnic language, bembé. If they stay too long at the bar Maman Pauline says to me: ‘Michel, look at you, sitting around like an idiot while your father and Monsieur Mutombo are out at a bar! You get up now, and go and see if they’re buying drinks for the local girls, and kissing them on the lips!’

I set off like a rocket, and arrive, panting, at the bar. I find Monsieur Mutombo and my father drinking, and playing draughts.

Papa Roger’s surprised to see me. ‘What are you doing here, Michel? Children aren’t allowed in bars!’

‘Maman told me to come and see if you were buying drinks for the local girls and putting your lips on theirs…’

And the two men part, laughing. I go home with my father, who’s a bit drunk. I hold his hand and he tells me things I don’t understand. Maybe when you’ve had a few drinks you can talk to invisible people who’ve been trapped inside the bottle by the people who brew it, that people who never drink can’t see.

Another Sunday, my father goes to see Monsieur Mutombo, and again they go off to drink in one of the local bars, to talk in bembé, and chat with the invisible people in the bottles, and this time it’s Lounès who goes to tell them that Madame Mutombo has asked her to come and check if they’re buying drinks for girls, and kissing them on the mouth.

Monsieur Mutombo is the best tailor in the whole town. He makes school uniforms for almost all the children round here. Some parents from other quartiers bring material for him to make up into uniforms for their children. He’s not short of customers in his workshop, particularly after the summer holidays, when he’s always behind because people wait till the last minute – often just three days before school starts – then come with their fabric and tell him to do it fast.

I like going to his workshop, with some fabric for my father over my shoulder, and watching him work with it, because he knows my father’s not just anybody, that he’s someone you can sit down and have a glass of palm wine or red wine with in a bar in the Avenue of Independence.

And you’d be amazed, if you saw the suit Monsieur Mutombo made, you’d think it was straight off the peg from Europe, except it’s not cut from a single piece and there isn’t that nice smell you get from Europe, and the Whites are so clever, they won’t tell us their secret so that we’ll carry on liking their clothes and wanting to wear them here, even though they’re more expensive.

The day I said to my mother that Madame Mutombo was a great fat woman, like a pregnant female hippopotamus, she boxed my ears and told me that if a woman’s big it means she has a big heart, and that the heart of someone who loves other people is always big. That made me think of Jeremy’s mother, he’s in my class, and I don’t like him because he’s too clever, he always comes second, after Adriano, the Angolan. Jeremy’s mother is very fat and very horrid, and she’s rude about all the other mothers in the neighbourhood.

My mother knew what I was thinking. She said, ‘True, not all big women have a heart as big as Madame Mutombo’s. I know you’re thinking of Jeremy’s mother, but that’s different.’

When Madame Mutombo comes to see Maman Pauline, she brings us doughnuts and ginger root juice. I don’t like her doughnuts, they’re too oily. I don’t like her ginger root juice because it burns the back of your throat and you end up in the toilet, pushing for an hour, with nothing coming out.

But Maman Pauline scolds me. ‘Michel, you just eat those doughnuts, now, and drink your ginger root juice. If someone gives you a goat, you don’t complain that it’s got a hole in its tooth!’

Madame Mutombo and my mother go shopping together. They buy peanuts in bulk and sell them on at the Grand Marché. I see them at our house, or at the Mutombos’, counting the money they’ve earned and splitting the profits fifty/fifty. You won’t find a capitalist doing that.

I often think about the day Caroline and I decided we were married. It was a Sunday afternoon, my parents were out. Caroline arrived when I wasn’t expecting her, with a little blue plastic bag with lots of things in. ‘Michel, I’m sick of waiting till we’re grown up, let’s get married today.’

We went round the back of our house and built a little tent with mango tree branches and cloths my mother had washed and left out to dry in the sun. It was our house, just for the two of us.

Monsieur Mutombo always makes pretty dolls for his daughter, so she had two of them with her that day. She said the dolls were our children. And we put them on a plank, to play together. Caroline started to get the food ready, with pretend plates and spoons: empty margarine tubs and little sticks.

After a few minutes, she announced that the food was ready. ‘Come, husband, let’s sit down to eat.’

Then she said that first of all we had to feed our babies because they were very hungry and were crying all the time. But first they had to have a bath. I washed the boy. Caroline washed the girl because when a boy’s naked he looks like me, and when a girl’s naked she looks like Caroline, so it was right that she should wash the girl and I should wash the boy. After their bath we put their bibs on so the food wouldn’t get on their clothes and then we fed them.

A few minutes later Caroline turned to me and said, ‘There now, they’ve had a good meal, they even burped!’

We rocked them, put them into bed, then we pretended to eat too. We had a conversation, trying to do it like grown ups. I touched Caroline’s hair and she touched my chin. She was the one who talked most. I listened, and nodded. We laughed a lot, and if I didn’t laugh she got cross. So I laughed, anyway, even when I wasn’t meant to.

I noticed she was sad, all of a sudden.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

‘Michel, I’m worried.’

‘What about?’

‘Our children. We must put some money in the bank for when they’re older, or they’ll be unhappy.’

‘You’re right, we should.’

‘You know, if they’re unhappy, the state will take them away and put them in a place for orphans, and they’ll end up like the thugs at the Grand Marché.’

‘Well, they mustn’t do that. We don’t want them ending up thugs at the Grand Marché. They’ll get sent to prison and we’ll be unhappy all our lives.’

‘And we must buy a nice red, five-seater car, and get even richer than the President of the Republic.’

‘You can count on me. We’ll buy our red five-seater from my uncle’s company, he’ll give us a family discount. I’m his nephew!’

‘And how much d’you think a red car like that costs, with five seats?’

‘I’ll ask my uncle.’

She passed me a stick, and a little empty glass: ‘Here, smoke your pipe, and drink up your glass of corn spirit.’

I pretended to smoke the pipe and drink my glass of corn spirit.

She took my hand. ‘Michel, you know I love you, don’t you?’

I didn’t answer. It was the first time I’d heard someone tell me ‘I love you’. And her voice was different, and she was looking at me, waiting for me to say something to her. What could I say? In the end I said nothing, I felt so light I thought I might just float up into the sky. My ears were hot. And my heart was beating so loud I thought Caroline must be able to hear it.

She was disappointed and let go of my hand: ‘Honestly, you’re hopeless! When a woman says “I love you”, you have to say “I love you too”, that’s what grown-ups do.’

So, like a grown up, I said, ‘I love you too.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really.’

‘Swear!’

‘I swear!’

‘How do you love me, then?’

‘I have to tell you how I love you?’

‘Yes, Michel, if you don’t tell me how you love me, what am I supposed to think? I’m going to think you don’t love me at all, and I’m going to be sad the whole time. And I don’t want to be sad because my mother says it makes women look old, that’s why my mother looks old because my father’s never told her how he loves her. I really don’t want to grow old. If I grow old then one day you’re going to tell me I’m not beautiful, and you’ll go and find another wife…’

Suddenly a plane flew over head. So then I said: ‘I love you like the plane that just went overhead.’

‘No, no, you’re not meant to say that! I want you to love me more than the plane because the plane’s everybody’s; it’s for people going to France, who never come back.’

I thought we were just playing, but then she started really crying. I felt like crying too, then. But Lounès had already told me men mustn’t cry in front of women, or they’ll think you’re weak. So I cried inside.

‘You still don’t get it, Michel! I want you to love me like the red car with five seats, our very own car, and our children’s and our little white dog’s.’

‘Yes, I love you like a red five-seater car.’

At last, she was happy, she touched my chin again, and I touched her hair, and dried her tears. When she tried to kiss me on the lips, I shrank back as though I’d been bitten by a snake.

‘Are you afraid of me?’

‘No.’

‘You are!’

‘No…’

‘Well why do you back off when I tried to kiss you on the mouth like in white people’s films?’

‘Mouths, that’s for when we’re really married, with witnesses, chosen by our parents.’

‘Who’ll be your witness?’

‘Your brother.’

‘Mine’ll be Léontine, she’s my best friend.’

She was so pleased, she poured me another glass of corn spirit. I said nothing, so she added: ‘I understand why you’re not talking, you’re tired, like men are when they come home from work. I’ll just wash the plates, then we’ll go to sleep.’

She turned her back to me, and pretended to wash the plates, by rubbing the margarine pots. She told me to carry on drinking my glass of corn spirit and smoking my pipe.

She counted up to twenty. ‘There, that’s done, I’ve washed everything! I’m going to shut the door, and put out the light, come to bed with me, don’t be afraid.’

To switch out the light, she pressed an imaginary button.

‘There you are, the light’s off!’

She lay down in the middle of the tent on her back, and closed her eyes. I said to myself, ‘She’s going to go to sleep for real, I don’t want to go to sleep in broad daylight. Besides, if my parents find us sleeping, I don’t know what they’ll think. I’d better get going, yeah, I’d better get out of here.’

Just as I was about to get up and leave the tent, she caught my hand. ‘Come on, lie down on top of me, close your eyes. That’s what grown-ups do.’

Maman Pauline goes into the bedroom. I follow her. She comes back into the living room, I come back too. She’s in front of the mirror, I’m just behind her. She puts on lipstick and powder, I make the same gestures, though I don’t put anything on because that kind of thing’s only for women, and apparently if boys put on makeup it means they’re done for, there’s something not right in their brain.

She’s wound a pagne round her head, for a scarf. I’m wearing a hat in the colours of our football team: green, yellow and red. She picks up her handbag, looks everywhere for the house keys. I can see them from here, but she just goes on and on looking, and finds them in the end behind the wardrobe.

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.

But my mother asks me to stay home because on Sundays schoolchildren do their homework for Monday. I’m not ok with that: ‘I’ve already done my homework, I knew we were going to go out this Sunday and…’

‘Well, you’ll just have to check it and see if there are any mistakes!’

I had no answer for that, so I said: ‘Maman, did you know bad men always go out on Sundays? They don’t have public holidays like Papa Roger, they don’t go to church, they’ll catch you and hurt you and take you to a bar where it’s all dark inside and then to a bedroom, to do nasty things to you.’

She laughs, tells me no one’s going to attack her. I don’t agree, and I keep on saying so because the people out there are the ones stopping Maman Pauline from giving me my good night kiss each evening. She can see I’m not going to calm down, that I’m going to follow her.

‘Michel, think carefully: you really want to come with me?’

‘Yes’, I say, in a small voice, like I’m about to cry.

‘Ok, ok, come with me then!’

It always worries me when she says ‘ok’, in that voice that seems to be hiding something really bad that’s going to happen to me. I worry when I see that little smile at the corner of her mouth, as though she’s thinking: ‘You come with me and see what happens, if that’s what you want.’ But I don’t care today, I’m happy, nothing’s going to happen to me. I’m already smiling, I’ll go along with her. We’ll walk out together. I’ll protect her.

I put my hat back on straight again and button up my shirt to the neck, and she comes up behind me and takes me by the shoulders. ‘My, you’re well dressed today! But do you know where we’re going?’

‘No…’

‘To Uncle René’s.’

I take a few steps backwards.

‘D’you still want to come?’

I shake my head. No I do not want to go to Uncle René’s house. I can just picture old bald Lenin. Marx’s beard, too, and Engel’s, and the sideburns of that well-known immortal, Marien Ngouabi. And I picture Uncle René, his wife and my cousins, eating with their eyes on their plates.

No, I don’t want to go to Uncle René’s.

Maman Pauline can see I’ve decided not to come, and off she goes on her own. I stand outside the house, watching her go. I can smell her perfume in the air. I breathe in deeply, with my eyes closed. Then when I open them, I see my mother, walking along the Avenue of Independence. Every now and then she turns around to check I’m not behind her. I want to see which direction my mother goes in. Usually, to go to my uncle’s house, you turn right at the end of the avenue, then carry on straight towards the Savon quartier.

There she is, getting into a taxi further on down. The car sets off but doesn’t turn right, it turns left, in completely the opposite direction to Uncle René’s, and disappears, heading for the Rex quartier. I’m standing in the middle of the road, a car could just come and knock me over because I’m busy thinking. I guess the taxi’s going to turn round and come back, that he’s set off the wrong way.

The cars drive round me, hooting their horns at me. One driver yells at me, says I’m mad, a street child, a son of a proletariat.

Me, son of a proletariat? Sounds like my uncle talking. But coming from Uncle René, proletariat’s a compliment. The proletariat’s someone who’s exploited by a capitalist, a bourgeois. I shouted back at the driver, ‘Opium of the people!’

He didn’t hear. If he had he’d have stopped to punch me in the face.

There’s still no taxi turning round in the street to bring my mother back, but I’m still standing there. I know Maman Pauline didn’t tell me the truth. Sometimes she tells me that the truth is a light and that you can’t hide a light in your pocket. That’s why the sun’s always stronger than the night. Yes, it was her that told me God created the sun so that men would know the truth. But men prefer the night, because it’s easier to cheat people in the dark. I have eyes that can see in the dark. My eyes are torches that never go out. Why did Maman Pauline hide the light and pretend day was night? Has she gone to meet the man with the old moped? Is there another guy, apart from this bad one with the gorilla arms?