Читать книгу The Amputated Memory - Marjolijn de Jager - Страница 19

8

There was nothing but alarming news about my father: He had become a consultant to the Whites, a “collaborator,” as this new class of people was known from that time on. Or we were told that he had returned to Douala, where he had seduced and instantly married a midwife who worked at the maternity clinic of Eseka, Bitchokè’s stronghold.

“Couldn’t he ask his White friends to post his midwife-wife somewhere other than in this cursed place, where a certain Bitchokè, mad with hatred and contempt, decapitates his brothers?” Grand Pa Helly wanted to know. What irresistible destiny was driving his son Njokè to run so permanently with danger? Was it recklessness? Ignorance?

Grand Madja wanted to die of shame, and implored the ancestors and the spirits to open the earth beneath her feet and swallow her up. Alas! Not a month went by that we didn’t hear talk of Bitchokè: He had caught some patriot in the resistance with his own hands and delivered him to the White soldiers. He had set fire to the house of someone suspected of being a resistance fighter or one of their accomplices. He had abducted the wife of another fighter and had her raped by all his men to humiliate the husband. As a reward the Whites had given him hunting rifles with bullets meant for elephants. Then he had promised to kill Mpôdôl himself with an elephant bullet “to squash his dirty traitor’s skin and send it flying to the four corners of the world, so that the earth will forget he ever passed through this life.”

Bitchokè couldn’t tolerate hearing that another Black man was on the trail of Mpôdôl: It was his private hunt, as he reminded anyone who would listen. When he caught a resistance fighter and delivered him, Bitchokè was careful to behead him and have his head exhibited on the square for two days so that everyone would be sure to take note of his own power. Once and for all, he wanted to destroy the myth of invincibility that surrounded the famed patriotic resistance fighters, which so exasperated him.

“What ill fortune has generated this ‘nameless era,’ this non-era, saddling me with White soldiers and commanders, thereby overshadowing my power as a Lôs and relegating me to the despicable role of a ‘collaborator’ or, worse, of a mere underling?” Thus he would lament, in places where he had done his damage, according to the accounts spread by innumerable witnesses. “It’s the fault of that lousy Mpôdôl and his whole gang of gutless Mbombocks who could find nothing better to do than hide out like rats in the bush! Why didn’t they take up arms and organize a true resistance? Why didn’t they call upon the deities Ngué, Um Nkora Ntong, and all the other Lôs powers to liberate them?” he kept on moaning.

In fact, they said that Bitchokè utterly despised White men, but since he found them to be more shrewd and much more powerfully armed, he’d told himself that as long as he had to ally himself with someone, it might as well be them.

“I’m infuriated by every pretentious Black, I feel nothing but contempt for those so-called patriots, incapable of getting along with each other, who’ve allowed the colonizers to come in by taking advantage of their divisiveness! These Black pseudo-intellectuals and politicians know nothing about their own traditions anymore, and forget to call upon Lôs like myself to rid the country of these invaders. I’m especially angry with Mpôdôl, who, if he were worthy of the name, would obviously have called upon me, the greatest of all the Lôs! I swear I would have purged the Bassa land of all these cantankerous pigs, even if it meant eating them raw,” he never failed to add.

“One doesn’t necessarily catch mange the same day one eats a leopard’s skin,” as one of our old proverbs says. That is why on the day my father met Bitchokè for the first time, he never could have imagined the slew of misfortunes he had just unleashed.

Indeed, sometimes it is as if a higher power subjugates even our innate free will. Every act becomes an involuntary function, just like digestion or perspiration, and that’s fatal. To be sure, that fate is generated by prior acts, but when it starts moving you can’t escape it anymore, for each act must find its recompense. And only my father knows what actions he committed to set this peculiar destiny in motion.

Grand Pa Helly had to go in search of the news himself, and when he returned we were given the most recent, very colorful information. “The name of Njokè’s midwife is Naja as well,” he told us.

My mother took great offense at this, wondering why he couldn’t at least have found a midwife with a different name. She could understand that her incorrigible husband wanted a midwife, just as she could understand that he’d taken a White woman as a wife, since she herself was not. It was a craving like wanting sweets and was always very short-lived. The last time, the deserted White husband had simply sent his runaway wife back home, proving that it wasn’t just Black women who had to suffer the laws made by men for men. Although it was sad it was nevertheless a consolation.

What really bothered my mother was that her husband wanted to disregard her to the point of changing wives without changing names. This willingness to merge the two women shocked my mother to the highest degree. Ranting and raving into the wind, she called upon various witnesses—her father-in-law, her mother-in-law, her sister-in-law, and anyone else who was willing—to listen.

“Am I not right? On top of it all she’s a ‘sista’ Jehovah’s Witness like myself! If only she were a daughter of Babylon I could at least assume that she must have used Beelzebub’s methods to take away my man for good. But no, Njokè saddles me with a mind-boggling rival: the same religion, the same name, and maybe even the same character, who has already given him two boys while all I do is churn out girls. Now that’s Njokè for you, from beginning to end. When he wants to humiliate you he pisses on your foot without leaving a single spot dry. This time he just wants to out-and-out kill me, doesn’t he?”

As a Jehovah’s Witness, “more Christian than Christianity itself,” my mother was supposed to have relinquished the feelings of anger that feed any ideas of revenge, and therefore should have transcended this setback. But her new faith was clearly not yet strong enough, taking away her pugnacity while filling her with bitterness, a poison as violent as the venom of the naja serpent. Take a feeling of injustice and helplessness; add a pinch of unnoticed Christlike superiority plus a miracle perpetually postponed until “after Armageddon”; sprinkle it with a thirst for pleasure and repressed, demonized enjoyment; shake the whole thing well and there it is: a violent-venom-of-bitterness that triggers such base and twisted acts you’d deny them in good faith before Jehovah, because they were so unworthy of you; because you really couldn’t understand why God, who sees into every heart, wasn’t able to see that you would never do such a thing.

Yet, at the same time that you question divine perceptiveness, you become like lightning in your nightmares, an invisible bee, a deadly tarantula, or a dragon! You sting, strike out, vomit flames, tear to shreds, devour the enemy, and he no longer exists. Unfortunately, when you wake up, he is there, stronger and more handsome, more deeply loved. The bile rises and it’s sour. This is bitterness. After a while it becomes unbearable, and you engage in actions through intermediary people or symbolic objects. You grow branched horns.

Not able to take it anymore, my mother has her sister Roz come, another Roz, as if the family couldn’t have found a different name in the pagan calendar. To keep them apart, we call this one by the very stylish name “Tata Roz.”

And so Tata Roz comes to live with my mother Naja in the same town as my father and his new wife, whom we call “Mam Naja.” Very enterprising and eager to see immediate results, Tata Roz retains a lawyer to request a divorce wherein my father would carry the full blame, and my mother have full custody of the children. Above all, the attorney was to demand and obtain such a high alimony from my father that even the salary of his not-so-clever midwife-wife would be pruned. She fully deserved it, too, for having made the glaring mistake of taking on a more snakelike Naja than herself, along with her older sister, a ferocious woman named Roz. Mother took it upon herself to teach her this lesson and swore to show her that the brazen will be burned.

The first trial takes my father by surprise, so that the attorney gets everything he asked for. Thanks to his relations and those of his midwife-wife, my father appeals, and the verdict is overturned: My father is then held blameless and my mother sentenced to not see her children again. She leaves the courthouse sobbing bitter tears. Tata Roz, cursing my father all the way back to his bastard ancestors, immediately appeals. As the primary witness, she states that her sister’s children are not those of the madman Njokè, who is such a frivolous wanderer that he never even has time to sire any children with her; he’s always absent from his marital bed. She makes the suggestion that even the children of his new wife could very well not be his either, and summons him to prove the contrary by submitting to a paternity test.

As a result my father’s hair turns white in a single day. What? If he is now to prove his fertility, what is to prevent them from next wanting him to prove his masculinity? If his children are not his, then whose are they?

My mother agrees to play along with her sister to throw my father off. She confirms that she has had her children by ultra-powerful men such as Dimalè, Bitchokè, and still others whom she won’t bother to mention. Does he really think she would stay home with her legs and arms crossed, while he left her behind at his parents’ house to peck around with the chickens and the hens? If the chicks of the Lôs made him happy, she, on the other hand, wouldn’t settle for anything less than the ultra-powerful men themselves.

“In any event, if you agree to take the test, you’ll soon be convinced that you were nothing but a figurehead,” my mother attacks. “But for the sake of the good moments we’ve had together, I advise you to drop this pathetic business and try to remake your life with your midwife-wife instead of clutching at a trial that could dishonor you forever in the eyes of the whole nation.”

My father takes so long with his questions and investigations that he almost exceeds the time allotted him to appeal the new verdict that would deprive him once and for all of his paternity.

He wants to know what kind of test it is that can prove anyone’s paternity. He has never heard of such a thing, although he has been a fine “African doctor.” How can paternity be determined from anyone’s blood? Surely not from the blood group. Is cheating a possibility? Will he have to summon Bitchokè and Dimalè into the laboratory to clear this whole thing up? And if he really isn’t the father, will he have to summon every one of the country’s ultra-powerful to a duel so he can survive the shame of it all?

How could he never have suspected that he was being cuckolded? In fact, he would have sworn to my mother’s everlasting fidelity. His friends always envied him because he vowed that no one ever stole his women from him. When could he have been so absent-minded as to let himself be cheated? Above all, though, was it really possible for him not to be anyone’s father? And this test, this damned blood test—White people truly have some weird ideas to come up with such things. Even his midwife-wife has never heard of this famous test, and so she is unable to reassure her husband.

Finally, he finds an old retired doctor friend who asserts that these kinds of tests are not reliable enough and that, if need be, the judges can certainly be bought off.

So at the very last minute, my father appeals the verdict. Tata Roz can’t get over it—clearly the man is a true Lôs and will never be afraid of anything or anyone. Nevertheless, she decides not to abandon her new strategy. She introduces my mother to Bitchokè, who is immediately overcome by a mad craving to conquer this little woman, the first one on earth ever to resist him; yet he has no desire to violate her. He makes up his mind to win her over with kindness, to court a woman like a normal man for the first time in his life, and to take his time.

Everything is in place for the encounter with my father.

The news that Bitchokè is seeing my mother reaches my father soon enough, but he is too involved “politicking” with the country’s new “pacification” party that has just been established. The business of any Lôs sticking like glue to some woman is no longer of interest to him. The quest for power turns out to be far more intense—and, in any case, women are always falling all over him, so too bad for Bitchokè if he has nothing better to do than waste his time and energy on his own former lovelies, my father tells the local gossips. The government is promising an important position to whomever manages to deliver the Great Resistance Fighter alive. He will succeed and thereby outwit that spoilsport, Bitchokè.

“I lose nothing by waiting, and Bitchokè will find out in due time that Njokè is more of a Lôs than he is, as Dimalè already discovered at his own expense,” Father repeats over and over again, and snickers.