Читать книгу The Amputated Memory - Marjolijn de Jager - Страница 12
ОглавлениеThe moment of first words takes us back to early childhood.
Childhood, innocence, luck—the marvelous luck that protects the steps of the beginner and the innocence that becomes a formidable rebuttal to malice.
We speak of an unhappy childhood when someone hasn’t been this lucky and, with precocious insight, discovers the pettiness of adults; when someone learns to feel fear and abhorrence for growing up; when the child is caught in the web of condescension. Yes, I, Halla Njokè, was really lucky.
My luck is all the more miraculous because I was born insightful, my eyes like magnifying glasses wide open onto the lies, the thievery, and the violence of adults. But I always told myself that they acted out of fear. Never once did it occur to me that it was out of malice.
Malice is revolting, and, had I discovered that, it would have contaminated me. I would have been filled with hate and, without a doubt, become a killer. I would have murdered my father and every man like him. I would have murdered my stepmother and every woman like her. To this day, more than seventy years later, I still don’t understand or tolerate viciousness.
But even though my adult years led me to encounter a great deal of malice, if I never killed anyone, it is because the luck of my childhood stayed with me. I discovered I had been correct right from the start: It really is fear that causes despicable actions, and someone who is afraid actually deserves compassion. And I sensed that I would not be able to express my compassion with greater feeling than through song.
SONG 1
And so I want to talk not only to my clan’s women,
But to people of the future, too,
Speak of some men in my life and of you, Father, above all,
Lament rather than blame all the fathers who,
By wanting to deny their failure, through their offspring loathe themselves
And, like perjurers, end up demeaning even their own children,
May even stoop to killing them just to survive, drinking their cup of shame down to the dregs,
One hell of a dirty little life that has no soul, that has no goal. . . .
But, Father, as I tell your story, it is my passion, too, of which I’d like to sing
My passion for life, its troubles, its hard lessons, and its joys.
I’d like to unveil my devotion and my gratitude to those who, like you,
Like the stepmother throwing the orphan out into a wanton world,
In the end provided a better initiation than loving mothers might have.
I want to speak to you of genies and great men of action,
Like a legend,
Born straddling two eras and two worlds,
Quartered, with all their driving forces quelled
Fighting like lions in spite of it all.
Allow me then, men of mine, to testify for you,
Express my gratitude to you who have at least bequeathed me passion for what is beautiful
And the thirst for a great opus.
• • •
How I loved you, Father! How handsome you were in the photo you sent to Aunt Roz! In your austere khaki outfit, with long wide pants and long-sleeved shirt buttoned to the chin, you look like a prince in a fairy tale.
On the back of the picture you have traced marks that only Aunt Roz knows how to read, and she tells us what they say: “Teacher at Maloumè.” I gaze and gaze at them, and will always know how to write them, even if I do not know the alphabet.
Not a day goes by that I don’t touch the photograph to make sure I haven’t forgotten the marks written on the back. Aunt Roz is beginning to complain that I’ll ruin the picture, but it makes no difference. I always come back to it.
Then Aunt Roz has Grand Pa Helly make a frame from woven rattan, decorated with openwork like lace, a true masterpiece. Very carefully she glues your photo in the center and hangs it on the wall facing the work table in her house. As she strings beads and creates the necklaces she sells at the market at the end of every month, she often raises her eyes as if to ask for your opinion or advice. I follow her gaze with surprise—it doesn’t seem to bother her that she can no longer read the marks. But for me, they were part of the photograph, and now that they’ve been spirited away I find it a bit flat. I report my disappointment and surprise to Grand Pa Helly, my father’s father, and tell him how sorry I am that I didn’t copy and save these marks in some other place.
“But how would you have done that?” he asks in amazement. You don’t even know how to write yet.
“Maybe I would if I knew what to write with, and if I had such a tool,” I say in my most serious manner, desperate to convince him.
He bursts out laughing, although I don’t understand why. Seeing my wounded expression, he goes off and opens the largest of his wicker suitcases, the one that is always locked away and doubly protected by his stool crowned with the word Mbombock. Grand Pa takes out a package, from which he extricates some things that were then still unfamiliar to me. He gives me my first notebook and a soft lead pencil, telling me teasingly that he’s waiting for my first letter. Thinking he is challenging me to copy the marks, I promise myself that one day when my aunt isn’t home I’ll take the picture out of its frame, although I know in advance it will certainly get me a good spanking.
Luckily, Father, you sent another picture, of you in a police uniform as white as that of the “guardians of the peace,” as the men who passed through to take the census were called. On the back of the photo, according to Aunt Roz, it did actually say: “Guardian of the Peace in Victoria.” I decide to copy all of it in my notebook before my aunt glues the photo into another frame. Every day, I use her absence to begin my copying on a new page, trying to make the marks as small and neat as they are on the back of the picture. Sadly enough, the harder I try, the fatter they get. I don’t dare show them to Grand Pa Helly; I’m too scared he’ll make fun of me! Half the notebook is already filled with my scribbles. Still, I’m quite sure they really are the marks on the back of the photo, but I honestly don’t understand why I can’t get them to be smaller.
As I apply myself, I’m intrigued by the fact that some of them return again and again or appear in double sets, as if to repeat or insist on something. I’m dying to unglue the other photo to see if it is the same. Only my fear of a spanking holds me back; how long will I be able to resist?
Then a new photograph arrives.
On this one you are wearing an apron and a tall white hat above an equally white uniform. Aunt Roz says: “Maître d’Hôtel of the Regional Commander of Eséka.” This time I count fourteen differences among the thirty-eight little marks, and I tell myself that perhaps ranks are measured by the number of different marks. As you are moving up in rank, they increase the marks. I try to add up all the ones my father has already had since he was at Maloumè, not forgetting there are doubles, too, and I come to the conclusion that he’s a very great gentleman. The proof is that his costumes are growing ever more complex.
As a result of devoting myself to recopying every mark on both pictures, I manage to transcribe them from memory, even in the sand. One Sunday at church, as I follow Aunt Roz’s finger in the hymnal, I am astonished to recognize some of the marks that I already know how to write. Unfortunately, I still can’t read them. But I’m very excited to know that the same marks are used for saying everything and writing everything, even songs. I entertain myself by writing them in every direction and mixing them up in different ways: Insàloum, ienixria . . . beginnings, endings, middles. I show my notebook full of scribbles to Grand Pa Helly and Aunt Roz, beside myself with excitement. She laughs so hard she is holding her sides. “Your imagination is going to kill you yet,” she tells me. “Just be patient, two more years and perhaps they’ll let you start school.” After skimming my notebook from the first page to the last, Grand Pa Helly hugs me very tightly: “You are a character, my dear little wife,” he exclaims. His golden eyes sparkle with affection. I clutch his neck.
Since there is no new photograph coming to let me practice more marks, the lovely lace of the rattan frame directs my attention toward wickerwork. I ask Grand Pa Helly to help me frame your last two pictures, Father.
SONG 2
Your beauty,
The beauty of your body and of the spirit that dwelled inside
Was manifest in everything you said and did.
For me, Grand Pa Helly, it was what lay at the foundation of everyone’s respect for you,
And lay, above all else, at the foundation of my own.
You’d hold high your slender body with its infinite extremities,
Muscular and firm despite your more-than-ninety years;
Your torso, almost always bare, displayed tall blue palm trees
Proudly tattooed in front and back and on your arms as well,
A grayish blue backlit by your light brick-red complexion,
As the blue-green of your veins rushed restlessly along the full length of your arms.
Your beauty,
The beauty of your soul and the experience gathered,
Though to be sure not one tooth had resisted time;
Your high cheekbones hollowed by the veritable trenches of your cheeks,
While your pure golden eyes threw lightning flashes of every rainbow color,
Depending on the facets and the intensity of your emotions,
Depending on environment and its vibrations,
And they’d light up those trenches like cozy little nests;
Your ears flamed red when you were angry,
Grand Pa Helly, you, my rainbow man . . .
And the beauty of your art made you the very center
Of creation in Massébè, and of what was raged for me, too,
The closest-to-perfection man.
• • •
Grand Pa Helly is a planter, as are all the other men in Massébè. Every head of household here has to be a planter. More than anything else, it is the size of his plantation that decides his importance. A head of household is anyone who has a sizeable number of descendants—grown children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, all of whom live together and work the same piece of land. The men do the planting and take care of the cocoa, coffee, or palm oil groves, while the women and children cultivate the food crops that feed the family. Living together, they form what is known as a compact family, which does not strain kinship. The combined fields of every man and woman of a single compact family form the “plantation” that makes the head of the household into either a great or a small planter.
Massébè, at that time, is a minuscule village consisting of about thirty compact families. The largest of these comprises a hundred people, sometimes more. Our own family has no more than thirty-five members, yet Grand Pa Helly is considered the most important head of household, and he would be the chief of Massébè had he not categorically refused. All he feels is disdain for the role of chief, which the colonists imposed on a profoundly democratic people whom they contemptuously saw as lawless. The present chief has become a lackey in the service of a government the colonists put in place. His only task is collecting taxes and identifying and informing on any independent spirit among his own people. Grand Pa says that if that role were his he would not be able to eat or sleep, or look at himself in the mirror.
Even though he is not the chief of Massébè, he is by far the most respected of all family leaders. First of all, he is the oldest and the best informed in his social world: He followed the ultimate initiation known as the Curved Cane. He is also the best informed on the culture of the colonists because he studied at the Roman Catholic boys’ school in Bibia and was supposed to be ordained as a pastor when he resigned, figuring he already was a pastor in his own tradition and seeing no real reason to hold a double office. What’s more, his plantation is the largest of all those in Massébè. My father sometimes arrives with hordes of servants that he brings back from deals he has made with other tribes, no one knows how. For about one to three months these people work with him at a hellish pace to push back the virgin forest and enlarge our plantation. Then they leave again without worrying about the upkeep, to the great exasperation of the whole family, now doomed to doubling its efforts.
There is another reason why everyone respects Grand Pa Helly: The village square belongs to him. It was he who gave all the grounds needed to build the public places: chapel, school, and market. And it was our family that conceived of, proposed, and realized their construction, and that also graciously provided the community with its catechist and schoolteacher.
Every family in Massébè lives on its own land, at a distance of one to five kilometers from each other, depending on the property’s size. However, lured by the location, each also asked for and was granted a dwelling on the square, which had become the center of the village. They baptized the square Bondè, which means “to begin,” in recognition of Grand Pa Helly’s initiative.
Bondè Square looks like a rectangular garden, evenly divided into multicolored, flowering patches that are the dwellings with their Bantu-style four-sided roofs, whitewashed with kaolin, and made of brick-red clay or the black clay of the swamp. Here and there, encircled by small enclosures of shrubs blooming like a demure pagne, a colorful skirt, they charmingly line the main road that links Massébè to the other villages. During the week the square is populated only with nursery-school children and members of those families who are responsible for looking after them and feeding them. But on Saturdays and Sundays, on holidays or market days, you would think you were in a swarming anthill—even the oldest woman of the nearby village of Pan will abandon her fields to come and have a good time in Bondè Square.
Our family is the only one that does not own a dwelling on Bondè Square. My father gets all worked up about that, for Grand Pa decided that this is the way it will be as long as he’s alive. He dreads that the human congestion would make my father’s escapades too easy. And every man in Massébè is grateful to Grand Pa Helly for his good sense, generosity, and tact, since most of them have already been cuckolded by my father.
Still, if Grand Pa Helly is the most respected of the heads of household in Massébè, it is above all because of his talents as a cabinet and basket maker. He makes remarkable furniture that everyone wants for his home, all the more so because it is displayed in the marvelous mail-order catalogue La Redoute à Roubaix. Depending on his needs, he barters some of the pieces for merchandise to be selected from the same catalogue. Often the regional commander sends prisoners, well-guarded by armed men, to transport Grand Pa Helly’s furniture to the station. It is first shipped to the harbor of Wouri and then sent to France by boat. The pieces can be seen in the following year’s catalogue: armchairs, stools, chaise lounges, and beds made of wood, rattan, or a combination of the two.
Our bit of forest contains a few hectares of semi-marshland where Chinese bamboo grows, as well as rattan creepers, raffia palm trees, and a red wood that is perfect for making sculptures, furniture, and utensils such as spoons, plates, mortars, and pestles. When my father is there, he always makes sure to cut as many creepers and as much bamboo as he possibly can, so that the stock doesn’t diminish, and Grand Pa Helly won’t be forced to get the supplies himself and thereby interrupt his creative work.
To show his gratitude, Grand Pa chooses from the La Redoute catalogue—in addition to the tools he needs, such as planes, saws, knives, and chisels—some objects that my father covets: an organ, an accordion, a guitar, or a Telefunken radio.
Grand Pa Helly also barters in Massébè and neighboring villages—his furniture and utensils in exchange for cattle, poultry, fancy pagne fabric, and so on. As a result, he has a large pig pen on the edge of the swamp, and there are always at least a hundred sheep grazing in the fields. Sometimes our hen house cannot even hold all the fowl, and the surplus of chickens, guinea hens, and ducks sleeps in the cocoa and coffee trees. Clearly, Grand Pa Helly is thought of as a very wealthy man. Yet he never has money. For reasons unknown to me, he always refuses to keep any or even to touch it. All the money he makes from the sale of what he produces serves to feed and look after the family.
It is Aunt Roz’s responsibility to divide the money among the different households, and she always goes about it in the same way. First she gives what comes to Grand Pa Helly as head of the family to Grand Madja, who manages it. Then the share allocated to my parents, my brother, my younger sister, and me, is given to my mother if she is there. If she is not there, Aunt Roz holds on to what is ours and gives only a fifth of it to my father despite his protests, which she always ignores, for everyone knows that my father always has holes in his pockets. No matter how large the sums of money he earns, he can never keep from squandering them in a single day. Then Aunt Roz gives a share to the households of each of my father’s other three women. Although he had never married them, they had arrived with the twenty or so children—all girls—they had by him in the course of his travels. The final share goes to Aunt Roz and her husband, Ratez.
Grand Pa is also respected because he is the only one here who is unimpressed by money. The only thing that impresses him in other people is any know-how that he does not possess himself. For instance, when he sees furniture in the La Redoute catalogue made by others that he considers more beautiful than his own, he swoons with admiration and won’t rest until he has created something at least as stunning.
Obviously, Father, during the times of your absence I couldn’t have been better placed to learn how to weave rattan as finely as lace and to create handsome frames. It seems that a long time has gone by since you sent the last photograph, and I’m beginning to fear I’m losing interest in my weaving, too. What’s happening to you and when will you be back?
And then one day, Father, like an apparition, a miracle, you arrive, and in your white shirt and midnight blue pants you are so much more handsome in real life than in the pictures. You are the only Black man among all those White men, who are with you for reasons I’ll never really know. They are all wearing various kinds of gray or greenish khaki that accentuates the washed-out look of their skin—as if lately they had been ill fed.
And you, the Black man, you are luminous, dazzling, striking. You get busy with a pot of boiling water that Grand Madja brings out, and drop large needles and some strange-looking tubes into it. You break small glass bottles filled with water and suck it all up into another glass tube, to which you then attach a thick needle. You go into a bedroom with grandfather, followed by a great-uncle, another one, and yet another. They all come back out holding one buttock, trying to hide their grimace. What can you possibly have done with your uncles’ buttocks? How can an old man be made to show his behind to his nephew in secret? And who do you think you are, father, to dare force yourself upon your fathers with needles and hurt their buttocks? And what is the role in all this of the White men? (Years later I was to learn that at the time of the great epidemics, your White people had provided you with medications for distribution in several villages, and that you arrived to allocate these as a preventive measure. But at the time, none of this made any sense to me at all.)
No one ever thinks of explaining things to children, who just see people coming and going, and events unfold. Like ants, they are threatened and sometimes crushed by the indifference of the violent and inexplicable actions of giants, and no one ever explains a thing. But since children are more garrulous than ants, they have a tendency to ask embarrassing questions. Then they are sent packing with a “Oh, do be quiet! Don’t you see your father is talking?”
And I pretend to be silent. Inside my deepest self, though, at that moment I am more talkative than ever. I do believe I actually asked every one of life’s questions in that single day: questions on beauty and ugliness. Yes, indeed, there were human beings who were beautiful and terrifying, with eyes as green as the forest and as blue as the sky. There were nasty ones with fingers and noses as crooked as fish hooks. I had questions about skin and its colors, white like fresh peanuts with reddish capillaries, or red like copper as in the ceremonial bracelets of Aunt Roz and Great-Aunt Kèl Lam. Skins as black as polished ebony like those of my mother, Naja, or Grand Madja Halla, or else the brick red of russet gazelles like those of my father and all his daughters, who came from one and the same mold. Then I also had questions about the course of life and the deportment of men. Where were they going, some gangly like wading birds, some scampering like goats, or heavily dragging their feet like the giants in legends, their thoughts concealed from the outside world? Who was the true creator of all this, what were his goals and afterthoughts—why, how? Many answers entered my mind as well, some of which have stayed with me until the present time. That day I understood that, in the end, happiness comes from the ability each of us has to come up with convincing responses to our own questions.
After chattering like rain that rushes down the rocks during a tornado, the White men were all slumped beneath the large mandarin tree in the courtyard, drinking foamy beverages they had taken from their bags. Aunt Roz, who’d been busy in the kitchen, had served them golden chicken and fried plantains. While they enjoyed their meal they started talking faster. I figured that with such fine food and their big appetite they would soon regain some color and not want to go back home at all. My father would certainly be happy to keep his friends around a little longer.
Throughout the day all the men of the village came parading by. You, Father, scribbled on a piece of paper signs like the ones on the backs of the photographs, but they kept me too far away so that I couldn’t tell whether there were any I already knew. Finally you came and joined the White men, drank the same thing as they did, and spoke with them as if they were part of your family. They took out a Telefunken radio like the one Grand Pa had, only smaller. While you were listening, you all kept on talking more than the radio did. Grand Madja asked you what you were so worked up about. You said that the Arabs were refusing to hand Palestine over to the Jews and that horrible things were happening in Israel.
I was barely able to stifle a cry of surprise, because Grand Madja opened her mouth wider than mine and exclaimed: “This box tells you things that are going on in Palestine, in Israel, in heaven where God and his angels dwell?” You laughed, laughed so hard that my mouth closed in shame over the whole mountain of questions I was about to ask, which in your eyes might seem even more stupid. And then all of you left again, with bags on your back the same way we carry our little rattan baskets, only yours were made of fabric.
In the evening, sick and tired of my questions, Aunt Roz told me that my father had been responsible for preventing an epidemic. She might as well have said nothing: Not one of her words made any sense to me yet. What I did understand was that you, Father, would be gone for a long time. Strangely enough, I didn’t feel sad, just impatient for you to return, convinced that it would bring new and exciting experiences. Oh yes, I loved you so much.
