When the Plums Are Ripe Read online

  4

  Flourishes of a Far-Off Conversation

  These sessions of divination were for M’bangue what the writing of a poem was for his son, poetry’s newly converted disciple. The Old Man had traced a circle in the dirt in front of his feet. He counted once, twice, three times, calculated the odds, and then checked his equation. He wiped his face with both hands, as if trying to come to grips with the truth of his own prediction, before describing what he had seen. His words had made Pouka shudder, then stand up and leave. Pouka was well aware that, had he repeated this paternal declaration to his bosses, who were so caught up in their own whispering back in the capital, they would have burst out laughing. Clearly, not much would have changed if the colonists had a good laugh from time to time, if Yaoundé had been shaken up by a resounding peal of laughter, especially in these uncomfortable days, but still, yes … still! And besides, many of his father’s visions hadn’t come true, after all, his son could bear witness to that. But Pouka would never forget that dream about Hitler. Much later, when his mocking compatriots began to call him Trissotin, he remembered the words his father had spoken with such confidence to the crowd gathered there in Edéa as he emerged from a trance, and Pouka thought, deep in his heart: That time I was right.

  Being right means nothing, except in history’s long view, as we all know. And the history in question here was improbable, unbelievable, the most obvious of tricks. The young man just shrugged his shoulders, as anyone would have done upon hearing a story too far-fetched to be true, then stood up and dusted off his behind. A moment later, as he arrived in the courtyard of his cousin the boxer, he was already thinking of something else. He had no choice, really, his father’s words were chasing him away.

  “Hey, cuz,” the boxer shouted as soon as he opened the door, “you’ve turned into a white man!”

  He pulled Pouka in and hugged him tight, then grabbed him by the shoulders and stared: first at his face, then peeling away his clothes with his eyes and stripping him bare to the bone. His booming voice roused everyone around who hadn’t already heard who’d just come back from the city, and by that I mean, just his friends.

  “Take a look at this! Hebga!” they exclaimed.

  It’s true he had really changed. Pouka was no longer the little boy who trailed in the boxer’s shadow, who wrapped Hebga’s fists with cloth before each match, massaging his muscles, slapping his stomach, saying just the right words to build up his courage so he could smash his opponents’ faces. Pouka was no longer the ambianceur who livened up Hebga’s matches, but did that mean he’d become a white man? The thought amused the writer, just as he was amused by the famished eyes eating up his clothes and shoes, seeing on his shoulders an aura of success—something quite unimaginable to the overworked drudge he’d become. This called for a celebration, for exuberant toasts in the bar. Never would the newly returned prodigal son have deprived the village of its deserved bacchanal.

  What luck—there in Mininga’s Bar he met up with Um Nyobè, an écrivain-interprète like himself, another kid from the village who’d been educated in the missionary school and then joined the French administration, but whose boyish looks and sartorial simplicity were in stark contrast to his own exuberant style. “The seminarian, that’s Um,” Pouka would say. Um Nyobè had arrived in the village before him, called back by a sudden death in his family—“an uncle on my father’s side”—and his need to attend the funeral. He was only going to stay for a few more days, but still, still …

  “You never come to visit me, either,” Pouka shot at him. “You’d think I was some kind of a criminal!”

  “Oh, Yaoundé,” Um Nyobè replied. “You know how it is.”

  “Pouka lives in Madagascar, did you forget?”

  Um Nyobè stifled a laugh. No, Pouka hadn’t changed at all. After all this time … his vanity hadn’t waned one bit. He still always talked about himself in the third person. Ah, Pouka! In fact, Pouka’s neighborhood, Madagascar, was right next to Messa, where Um Nyobè and other civil servants like him lived, just one or two kilometers away, really.

  “Are you forgetting that I’m your elder?” Pouka added.

  Although surprised that these two guys from Yaoundé only ran into each other in this village courtyard, the villagers were all of one mind: it was up to Um Nyobè to make the first step.

  “Oh well, then my apologies,” he conceded, adding, “big brother.”

  As expected, Pouka recognized many other childhood friends. Fritz, for example, already the head of a family, whose business interests were in Douala rather than the capital, and who seemed to want to list all the benefits of his lifestyle: “when you don’t work for the white men,” when you are “your own boss,” as he said. Before he could, Hebga cut him off.

  “Ah, my brothers,” the boxer jumped in, “tell me all about Yaoundé!”

  Today you’d be more likely to hear, “Tell me about Paris!” And in fact, there in the middle of June 1940, that’s what Hebga would have asked if he hadn’t been, like all the rest of the local population, cut off from history’s twists and turns. He should have asked what had happened in France, why she had surrendered so quickly, how the City of Light could have fallen so easily and allowed herself to be occupied by Germans; and then, most important, what would this mean for Cameroon? Yes, was Cameroon going to remain under the control of a defeated country? The guys who were so busy giving each other hugs, drinking beer, and eating grilled plantains and plums, they would start asking these questions soon enough, believe me. All you had to do was see the cold look in Um Nyobè’s eyes to realize that—even if Hebga’s endless questions dominated this comical welcome-home party until the night gave way to snores.

  5

  Like Mythical Cousins

  Hebga was a young man, about twenty years old; his bulging pecs, adorned with a few scattered tufts of hair, stood out as a challenge. His braids hung down on both sides from a middle part, a reminder of the German haircut he once had, an elegant look that was accentuated by the billowing pagne wrapped between his legs, like an ample diaper, and tied at his hips. For Pouka, he was a godfather. He always had been. What joined these two together was stronger than the blood that linked the writer to his father’s fifty other children: a mysterious bond born in the bush, the work of a tenacious woman, if truth be told. For Pouka had really been raised by our Sita, Hebga’s mother, his father’s eldest sister and, for all the residents of Edéa, the Mother of the Market. She had never come to terms with having only one living child and so had accepted her brother’s firstborn as if he were her second. This wasn’t a problem in the eyes of the young Pouka, who readily accepted his adopted older brother, since he had none of his own.

  In the depths of the forest, the bond between the two boys had strengthened. After his father’s death, Hebga had become the village’s woodcutter. He was only sixteen at the time. That it was an iroko, an African teak tree, that had made him an orphan seemed to have instilled in him an endless need for vengeance. The forest was filled with too many enemies to count. He faced off against the tree trunks alone, when usually it took a whole legion of men to cut one down. Pouka always went with him into the bush, balancing on his head the food and water that fueled his cousin’s strength. Once Hebga began his struggle with the chosen tree, Pouka would shout out words of encouragement, sometimes intoning hymns to spur him on. Their bond grew quite quickly through this routine of song and grunts, of words and effort, and soon was so strong that it would have been difficult to say which one of them needed the other more.

  It was only a question of time before everyone would learn of the bonds of sweat and words that made them brothers. One morning Edéa awoke to a chorus of voices announcing the arrival of the boxing champions. This was nothing surprising. Several times each dry season, the railroad company crisscrossed the bush, putting on its show and raking in money. They were as much actors as wizened athletes, trained by a wily manager—a Frenchman, to top it off—who understood how muc
h money he could make by putting on spectacular, if rigged, fights. For the villagers, this was an opportunity to break the dull monotony of their day-to-day. Two hulks smashed each other’s face to the pack’s applause, while women covered their children’s eyes and grumbled about men’s stupidity. The men preferred these boxing matches to the itinerant movie showings organized by the Catholic church, because after a while the films chosen by Father Jean made only the children laugh. Boxing, that was what they clamored for, and the company took advantage of the breaks between each round to keep raising the stakes.

  But one day this happened: someone in the crowd, a kid, burst out laughing when the referee lifted the arm of the declared winner. What kind of fly had bitten Pouka? That disrespectful little kid couldn’t contain himself when the man named the Champion of Cameroon stared at him with his red bloodshot eyes. No way! As if galvanized by the attention of the crowd now fixed on him, the boy shouted in his loudest voice:

  “My cousin is the real Champion of Cameroon!”

  The boxers burst out laughing. But they were the only ones there who didn’t know Hebga. Sometimes, as they toured the country, they had met villagers, lacking in modesty, whose long struggles in the fields had led to fantasies of incredible victories: weak men blind to their own delusions of grandeur. Thinking perhaps that this would be a chance to make a bit more money by adding an unplanned battle to their routine, the manager asked the crowd: So who is this champion? No one stepped forward.

  “Where is your cousin?” he asked the kid.

  Pouka pointed him out. The spectators’ eyes were drawn to the calm and powerful man who, like everyone else, had been watching the boring fight. People in Edéa still talk about the match that took place the next day, or maybe the next week. Not just because the man crowned champion the day before fled into the forest in the middle of the battle, but rather because the impresario hadn’t been able to convince our Sita to give him her son as a replacement, despite the suitcase full of money he held open before her market-woman’s eyes.

  Sita seemed to have seen it all before. As the Mother of the Market, she was the one who rented stands to the women. She was also the one responsible for collecting the monthly contributions that served as a sort of health insurance fund. She was used to handling money, that was clear. But this time they were talking about a “suitcase full of money” opened right in front of her eyes—even if that was a bit of an exaggeration. They were in our Sita’s home when the white man first brought up taking her son to Yaoundé. Hebga’s mother was so disinterested that he suggested Douala instead. When our Sita showed no more enthusiasm for that, he moved on to taking her son to Paris. Nothing doing. That’s when he mentioned the suitcase full of money. But even that didn’t sway the most stubborn bayamsallam in the equatorial forest. The versions told of this story are as malleable as the books in which they’ve been written, but they all agree on the words Hebga’s mother used to shut him down, for they have become legendary in Bassa land:

  “Over my dead body.”

  The man was dumbstruck. Our Sita repeated herself: “Only over my dead body will my son go to Paris.”

  An incredible stubbornness, really, for who among us didn’t dream of going to Paris? What ill could come of using your talent to make money? But this woman had buried her husband and didn’t want to lose the only son she had left of the ten children she had given birth to.

  This story is also about the birth of Pouka’s poetic talents, for after his public intervention, he had had to convince his cousin that within him lay a pugilist capable of making a professional boxer flee right in the middle of a fight. He had to find the right words to convince Hebga, who as yet had only measured his strength against tree trunks, when the crack of his ax was the only sound in the deep silence of the bush, that he could fell a human giant in just the same way. From the start of the first fight Pouka’s words flew with gymnastic speed, rising up to mythic heights. The boy crouched down, the better to whisper in his cousin’s ears, to massage his soul and his pride, to firm up his fist and his body, to set his eyes aflame.

  He invented all the adjectives he could to persuade his cousin of his own grandeur, to prove that his opponent was nothing but a rank amateur: a “nuthin’,” “a worthless piece of crap,” a “sansanboy.” The true poet creates greatness in the very heart of doubt.

  “Son of a cat!” Pouka said.

  He was talking about Hebga, but that wasn’t all he said.

  “Lion of the bush!”

  “Born of a genie’s fart!”

  If these words turned Hebga’s fists to steel, when Pouka intoned the champion’s hymn the feet of that boxer for a day started in on a rhythmic dance that left his opponent totally unnerved. On Pouka sang, and as the crowd clapped its hands and stomped its feet, the village’s boxer landed blows to his opponent’s eyes, nose, and temple.

  “Eagle, eagle of the bush!”

  And Pouka continued, “The Ax!” And everyone repeated, stressing both syllables, “The Ax!”

  “The Ax!”

  “The Ax!”

  “The Ax!”

  One punch can carry the weight of a whole city. Hebga’s were those of a forest. “The Ax!” He was fighting for all of Bassa land—“The Ax!”—and Pouka’s songs let him tap into its strength. “The Ax!” Soon the shouts of the crowd slowed down: “The Ax!” “The Ax!” “The Ax!” Hebga had knocked out his opponent. He marched around him, chanting spells, trumpeting out insults, cursing. The boxer tried to stand up. “The Ax!” “The Ax!” “The Ax!” He was struggling for all he was worth. But his knees, no, his feet, no, his spine, his whole body, suddenly went on strike. He was shaky, but managed to get up on his feet.

  “Break his nose!”

  Crowds can spin out of control. Right then a voice rose up and shattered the silence around the man who was fighting as much against himself as against the village’s favorite son.

  “Poke his eye out!” Pouka said.

  Hebga paused, suddenly disoriented by a kid’s crazy words, but also by his opponent’s strange wobbling.

  “Smash his gut!”

  Then Pouka quickly shifted gears.

  “Kill him!”

  Everyone was shocked to hear such words coming from a kid’s mouth. A moment of hesitation. His opponent took advantage of it to pick himself up and rush headlong through the crowd, which, caught by surprise, opened a path for him. The man bolted through like lightning and disappeared into the bush, which closed up tightly to hide his shame. There were those who wanted to give chase, voices that sent amused exclamations along after him, bursts of laughter that compounded his humiliation. The tale of his crushing defeat became legend that night in Mininga’s Bar; as the drinkers laughed and laughed, everybody took a turn acting out the scoundrel’s flight. Hebga’s opponent had opted for shame over death. As for the myth of the boxer that was born that day, well, Hebga was still powerless in the face of the determination—the intransigence, I’d even say—of our Sita, his mother. That was the day Pouka began to write songs, first to temper the violence of which he’d never before thought himself capable, and then to provide a rhythm for the story of his hero’s grandeur. Every athlete has his poet. We were in the 1930s. Well before the child grew into the man familiar to us all, the man who took himself for an aristocrat.

  6

  Battling a Hypothetical Opponent

  Then came 1940. What had changed in the meantime? Pouka would learn soon enough: Hebga had become fixated on probabilities, obsessed with the lottery, always studying the patterns in the winning numbers that appeared in La Gazette du Cameroun. He couldn’t read, of course, but the winning numbers didn’t get by him. Had he ever won the big prize? All you had to do was look at him to know he was still holding on to his dreams. Yet he hadn’t stopped going into the forest. Pouka quickly realized that, too. But now the goal was more to strengthen his muscles than to cut down trees. Despite his mother’s efforts to wear it down, his Parisian dream lived on, k
indled by the music of Josephine Baker and others that Mininga played from morning to night in her bar. Making his dream come true overshadowed everything else—it was crazy, really. It seemed as though Hebga had been dragged into the forest by his opponent and forced to go at it for round after round, just in hopes of seeing the doors to Paris’s paradise open for him. The day of his first fight he hadn’t chased after his fleeing opponent. Now, come rain, come shine, he got up in the morning and headed off into the forest. He walked alongside the first planters heading to the fields, rising like them at cock’s-crow. It’s just that his mission wasn’t to dig yams and macabo from the ground. No, he knew well that his victory over the boxer was more a bit of luck, a gift from the fight manager, than the result of any serious training on his part.

  He had used wrestling moves when his opponent was expecting uppercuts. He didn’t yet know the rules of boxing, but he knew how to use his body. Swinging an ax, smashing it into tree trunks, had shown him what his body could do. He knew he needed to manage his strength if he wanted to survive a long fight. Let’s go back to the fight where it all began, and I’ll explain why he landed only a few blows on his opponent. Hebga was aware of his double advantage. First, he was the crowd’s favorite and Pouka was its mouthpiece; his cousin shouted words of praise and all bets were on him. Then, there was the fight he had watched the night before. He had observed the tactics of his future opponent and knew how he used his body. The body, after all, is like a tree trunk, Hebga was sure of that: it is shaped by the blows it has received.