Mount Pleasant (22 page)

What do they know? Nebu thought, shaking his head. Assholes!

He didn't even tell his mother who had braided his hair, especially because Bertha had warned him against “wild hairstyles,” advising him to not overstep the limits set for slaves in Foumban.

“What about artists?” he replied simply. “I am an artist.”

Slaves had to keep their heads shaved. That wasn't the most important thing, though. Bertha didn't insist, because Nebu stood before his mother dressed just like an artist. The matron forgave him his choice of hairstyle because being an artist not only kept him close to the palace—or rather, close to her—it also kept him safe from the colony's greedy clutches. Nebu added three pearl necklaces and earrings to his outfit. They were the only signs of his fingers' talent, except for his artist's uniform, of course.

He didn't share his nocturnal dream with his master, but rather asked him about the nature of truth.

“Truth?” Monlipèr replied, lost in his far-off thoughts. “Truth needs to be hidden. Or else it'd blind us.”

“Blind us?”

“Yes, yes. We are like butterflies, my son, and truth is a lamp.”

Nebu had to keep repeating those words. Truly his mother's son, he had never looked his master in the eyes. For the first time, the man seemed old to him. Very, very old. Monlipèr was an old man weighed down by multiple responsibilities and many years of work. Nebu noticed that his master closed his eyes when speaking about the arts. Maybe it was a habit from spending long days in his suffocating, smoke-filled workshop. His voice seemed to come from the grave, from a mystical workshop, from the forges where blacksmiths had worked for millennia. He spoke in a whisper, but each of his words had the force of a steel stamp. The sculptor took in the words gratefully. If he'd had a notebook at hand, he would have written them down so he could reread and ponder over them later. He wanted to digest them slowly.

“If the butterfly comes too close to the lamp,” Monlipèr continued, “it burns its wings, doesn't it?”

And Nebu repeated, “Yes, it burns its wings.”

“So the lamp must always be covered to protect the butterflies,” the master concluded.

“To protect the butterflies.”

There was a long pause—an overly long pause—that Nebu didn't break. Then Monlipèr continued.

“For the lamp to burn, it must be protected from the wind.”

Nebu repeated, “From the wind.”

“Yes, yes. It's what covers art that lets us see the truth.”

He paused again.

“It's also what makes truth shine.”

Suddenly Nebu remembered other very different things Monlipèr had said the day he'd first arrived in the workshop. Why? Because his master had spoken of blindness that day as well. He had said that Nebu's European clothes blinded him. Wasn't he contradicting himself? The young man didn't insist. None of this was written down anywhere, so …

“Without its covering,” the old man went on, “truth is furtive.”

“Furtive,” Nebu repeated without revealing any of the thoughts running through his mind.

“Yes, yes.”

The young man was thinking about everything he had lived through, especially the girl by the riverside, her beauty, and how it had disappeared from his view. He thought about Ngungure's face after making love. He was quiet for a moment because he couldn't find the words to say what he wasn't thinking about, and he didn't want to lie either.

“So art is just an attempt?”

“Just an attempt,” Monlipèr replied, “for no work of art is perfect.”

This was just the beginning of a more complicated idea, so the master had continued: “Because art is the expression of our wounded humanity.” But Nebu's ears were no longer open to hear the old man's maxims. His mind was clouded with his own thoughts, and in the chaos, another idea was rising up, fighting ferociously to tear him away from Monlipèr's philosophy.

“To see better, you must shut your eyes.”

Yes, that's what the master said, and Nebu repeated, “Shut your eyes.”

“Because art is the reflection of your most intimate dreams.”

“Dreams,” Nebu said, “intimate dreams.”

“Yes, yes.”

“Your dreams.” Those words pursued him for quite some time. He repeated them again and again, measuring the weight of their possibilities until a truly frightening truth emerged: he didn't agree with his master.

“I want perfection, I do,” he said. “A vision of perfection.”

And he added, “I want to open my eyes to see.”

Then, “I want to re-create what I see in my dreams.”

Finally, “I want my dreams to come true.”

The central precepts of his aesthetic flowed from his mind automatically, freely. That night he covered himself with his girlfriend's pagne before going to bed. Once again he dreamed of her. The scent of her body was stronger, his dream even more intense than before. Nebu dreamed the same dream several times. Sometimes it broke off and picked up again the next night. It took an even greater hold of him even while he was awake. He emerged from the labyrinth of his mind drenched in sweat, full of questions for his master. Only he was less and less able to speak honestly to old Monlipèr about his nocturnal possessions.

How so? He saw Ngungure much more closely than she had ever allowed. He didn't see just her face, but her nose, and not just her nose, but her nostrils. He saw his girlfriend separated into disparate parts, for soon he saw her hand cut open before him piece by piece, from the nails to her palm, from the palm to her wrist, from the elbow to her upper arm, and from the shoulder to her breast. He saw her breast rise in the juncture between her arm and her chest. He thought of Monlipèr's phrase “wounded humanity.” It was a weighty argument. And Nebu realized that he had never really seen Ngungure. Don't emotions blind us to truth's brilliance? He realized that his girlfriend had always eluded him, and when he closed his eyes for the night, he dreamed of her even more intensely.

It was a stroke of luck, he thought when he woke, that he couldn't discuss Ngungure's nakedness with his master. But he was convinced that therein lay the secret of the artistic truth he sought, and that this set him apart from Monlipèr. One day Nebu saw a portrait of Ngungure among the photos Herr Habisch had displayed in front of his shack of surprises, and he thought of his dreams. He didn't react as children do, amazed to see friends' faces, or like those women, frightened when they happened upon pictures of people long dead. Nor did Nebu react like an artist who is searching for something new. He didn't thank his ancestors for sending him dreams of what photography could be, long before he had actually seen a photograph—before the arrival of the white man. Photography provided a practical solution to the theoretical problems he'd faced up till then.

Nebu had gone to Herr Habisch's to return the clothes he had bought and no longer wore. He wanted to trade them in for something more useful. Drawn in by the photos, he immediately knew what he wanted. The Swiss merchant refused to take back Nebu's clothes, however, and the apprentice's wages didn't leave him with much extra in his pocket. All the artist could do was plant himself in the middle of the kids and women crowded in front of the display of stiff faces. Looking at Ngungure's portrait, he was overcome with shame, and he glanced around, fearing that his private thoughts had been revealed to the pack, for the photograph of his girlfriend's face was a close-up, as only a lover could have seen her. It made public the forms that Nebu had only ever glimpsed in his dreams. The only difference was that this photo was in just two colors, black and white. And he'd never seen his girlfriend in just two tones.

When he left, he had a smile on his lips. What he had seen was forever inscribed in his mind. He smiled because, if he admitted that photography was technically amazing, he also realized it had its limits. It didn't achieve the detail of his dreams, but it did give him something he could say to old Monlipèr. That's why he wasn't disappointed when he returned to the workshop. He knew that it was up to him, and him alone, to recompose his girlfriend's face with his own hands, just as she appeared in his dreams. The furtive shapes of her beauty, the re-created beauty of a woman everyone had always said was ugly, that's what he wanted to capture in his art, what he termed his face of bliss, or his look of pure contentment.

“I want to capture that bliss,” he promised.

There are stories that must be told just for the story itself, just for the story. This was one of them.

 

5

Getting Back to Ngutane and Bertha

That said, let's turn another page! Let's move on to the story about the young boy Nebu. Or that's what the doyenne said when she really meant the story of the young girl Sara. Her own story. Whew! In 1931, Mount Pleasant was filled with many lively stories, just as labyrinthine as those taking place in Foumban or in wartime Germany, although very different, too. As seen from Yaoundé, the world was still within reach, and everyday worries were pedestrian.

“Flowers.” Ngutane's voice was insistent. “Flowers and not peace tree leaves. Not peace tree leaves, you idiots!”

Her outbursts were always met with silence. Wasn't she right? The sultan's daughter had had to lead two slaves into the bush to show them what she wanted, and still no luck. The next day again her voice rang just as loudly through the corridors.

“I said NO peace tree leaves! Don't you have ears?”

Two days later, it was “Flowers don't attract snakes!”

And again, Ngutane stressed, “Believe me, will you? Flowers … do … not … attract … snakes!”

Ah, Ngutane had lots of reasons for losing her patience. Another time Sara saw her scolding a foolish slave who the previous day had put warm water on the sunflowers Njoya so loved and had let them die, yes, die.

“What did you think you were doing?” Ngutane shouted. “Making tea?”

And that wasn't all.

“Where is your head?”

Was there anyone in Mount Pleasant who still had their head? Once, Sara heard a burst of laughter in the main courtyard; when she came out, she saw one of the sultan's wives dressed like a European. The woman wanted to make her ailing husband die laughing!

“Or make God cry,” the doyenne added.

No need to say that these scenes at the invalid's bedside were the focus of everyone's attention. Enough people had crowded into the House of Stories that it was hard for anyone to remember who actually lived there. The house was enough of a puzzle that everyone thought they were in a poor, crowded neighborhood, and the house was strange enough that a kid like Sara could get lost, lose the thread of the stories that, one after the other, should have led her back to Nebu's body without making the impatient Bertha wait too long. Those fictional stories—told, repeated, or forgotten—those knots and all those abysses were captivating, even if the corridors where they were told were quite similar.

I could well imagine (who couldn't?) that Bertha's story was too tangential for a kid's ears. Especially because, for example, when the matron spoke of the birth of her son's artistic vocation, she got so caught up in the details that her audience was superfluous. Of course she wanted ears there so she could tell them about the meanderings of Nebu's artistic conscience; what she didn't want was a nine-year-old passing judgment. She was telling Nebu's story in order to make her own soul suffer again, to remind her body of the pain she had already experienced: to find a way to escape from the horrors of her past life. You could say that Nebu's story was as painful for her as childbirth.

Ah, Bertha didn't need an audience! Compassion is a mother's virtue, and she had none, especially when it came to the young Nebu. She raised her hand to slap the child when he came back late from the sultan's bedchamber. Did anyone think that the start of this woman's story would be the end of her violence? True, it had been a long time since she had last sent “her child” to bring back a whip from the courtyard. Yet she fell back on those outmoded methods one evening when Nebu told her he'd lost track of time. Bertha had heard better excuses from children before. She began to shout, “Are you trying to trick me?”

Once it caught fire, her rage would not burn out quickly.

“You're just like him,” she said, her eyes red, “just like him!”

She was talking about the other Nebu, of course, the young man madly in love, the artist, the apprentice. As she repeated “him,” pain lit up her eyes.

“Selfish,” she said. “You're the most selfish child on earth!”

With these words she whipped herself into an ever greater fury, feeding the fire of her rage with repeated images of how Nebu had abandoned her.

“An individual,” she went on, “a nothing!”

You
try to tell Bertha that her story was raping a child's soul! Go tell her that for Sara, listening to stories at the sultan's bedside, now that he was awake, was far better than trying to follow the metamorphoses of a dead woman's face. You do that, the doyenne insisted, and then let me know if you can calm her down. Every story has its limits.

“You're no better than he was,” Bertha insisted, “not at all!”

This time the boy she held in her hands didn't wait till the bamboo whip was lifted over his head.

“If you move,” Bertha threatened, “I'll cut off your nuts!”

But Nebu didn't have any nuts.

“I say, if you move…” the matron repeated. “Nebu, get back here!”

The kid didn't come back.

“Nebuchadnezzar, get back here!”

Nebu fled, as far as he could. He knew the reach of the matron's anger. Her voice filled the main courtyard.

“My God,” she screamed, “why did I give birth to such a rat?”