Mount Pleasant (27 page)

That's when his thoughts turned to animals. First, to a horse. Then a goat. Of course he thought of a cat, but also of a bird in flight. For this woman's behind was as harmonious as those that belonged to the animals he had seen trotting or taking off in flight. The elasticity of her steps evoked the voluptuous movements of a pigeon on the ground. And Nebu was reminded, as well, of a reptile's sinuous advance; he noticed the similarities between a gecko's slippery movements and the steps of his dear Ngungure along the red earth.

Nebu had never really paid attention to animals in flight or on foot. Nor had he ever dreamed of their movements. In order to concentrate on the shapes of the woman, he slowed her pace in his mind's eye, as a musician might with a new song, to better grasp the notes he had just heard. He promised himself he would study how animals moved later. On Ngungure walked, each of her steps adding to the languorous harmony, shimmering with the brilliance of a glowworm.

The sculptor was lost in his thoughts, comparing animals and humans, sounds and steps, bodies and music, when suddenly he realized that the woman had stopped. She greeted another woman. He noticed that the aura projected by her body at rest was identical to that of her body in motion. It was as if she were suspended mid-step. She wasn't moving, but her body still suggested movement. Walking was inscribed in her stance, like one sculpture in multiple poses. The result was breathtaking. There it was, the unifying principle he had always been searching for, the magical number.

“That's it,” he cried, putting his hand to his mouth to muffle his voice. “That's the formula!”

He watched the woman as she stood and walked, and at the same moment, his mind saw a statue perfectly still. His fingers were tingling. He wanted to shape his Ngungure, to sculpt her, re-create her right there where she stood. Because her body and her pose were perfection—of that he was sure.

“That's it,” he mumbled into the palm of his hand. “The perfect body is the body of a slave!”

He had spoken out loud. Ngungure turned around. He tried to hide, fearing that his presence would be discovered too soon. He also didn't want to shatter the pose struck by the woman's body. Thankfully, since he was dressed as a woman, she didn't notice him. On the contrary, he was able to observe all the more closely how her shape shifted as she turned. The chiasmus of their respective gazes intrigued him, even though he didn't register it fully. Everything had happened so quickly, he had no time to dwell on this new mathematics of the body.

Ngungure soon left her companion and continued on; Nebu followed after her. They went by the baobab that marks the center of Foumban, going down and back up the hilly paths; they passed by houses and the headquarters of the French official, Prestat; they turned several corners and soon arrived in the women's quarter. They crossed the iron market, where men paused in their work to steal a glance, grasping at the woman with their eyes as she passed. Then they went by the old palace, where the idle nobles gathered. Some people were shaving a neighbor's head; others were tuning their musical instruments or playing
ngeka
. Everyone was waiting for the sultan to appear.

Ngungure didn't speak with any of the noblewomen who sat in their courtyard cooling themselves with a raffia fan or chatting as they worked on their weaving. Nebu glimpsed several silhouettes inside the palace but quickly focused back on his model. A man greeted her; she responded with a bow. She hurried along, the suppleness of her body tracing identical shapes with each stride.

Nebu added this vision of her body's perfection to all the others he had amassed in his dreams. Everything was drawn so clearly in his mind that, had he sat down at that very instant, he could have reproduced it on a slate, just as Nji Mama did with the buildings he constructed: from memory. He would have set down the angle of her feet, her shoulders, and her hands as they delicately balanced the basket of tomatoes on her head. Bertha's son concluded that a body is but the sum of an endless array of triangles.

His face lit up with a smile at the thought of this mathematical beauty before him. Nothing was held back, each element revealed in turn, one after the other. What he saw, he saw in the immediate perfection of its presence. It seemed as if he could distinguish each of the woman's muscles as she walked, each of her bones, each of her nerves, and that he could calculate the exact length of each step, and each one after that. He could not hold back the elegy that burst from his lips.

A poem to Beauty.

“Woman,” he began, adjusting his pagne, “you are my master.”

 

13

A Man Revealed in a Burst of Laughter

“Njapdunke!”

Nebu never could have said whether he had crossed Foumban once, twice, three, ten, or twenty times. His path was dictated by that of the woman; the shapes of her body had captured his soul, his entire soul. He had entered the spice market without even realizing it. Roused suddenly by the scent of a potent blend of spices, he found himself surrounded by hills of peri peri, salt, ginger, onions, curry, and tomatoes in an endless array of colors. In fact he had stopped only because a woman with a yellow scarf wrapped tightly around her head had hailed his Ngungure by a different name.

She had called her Njapdunke. Yes, Njapdunke, the name of the sultan's deceased mother. At that very moment a treacherous flame sparked in the sculptor's belly, pushing a diabolical cloud of smoke through his lungs, cutting off his breath, and setting his nostrils ablaze. He automatically opened his mouth and quickly covered it with both hands. He squelched his breath by exhaling as hard as he could. It was as if, emerging from a long tunnel or surfacing from the darkness of a curse, he suddenly came back to his senses.

“Njapdunke,” repeated the woman who had stopped the slave. She pointed at Nebu. “
That man
is following you!”

Nebu was paralyzed by those words: “that man.” Just then the turbulent fire descended from his nostrils into his throat and took a quick turn around his chest before heading into his belly, whence it emerged with a force that opened his mouth and loosened his unsuspecting hands.

“Ah, ah, ah…”

He found relief in a powerful sneeze that shook all the spice stands around him.

“Ah-choo!”

The cloth he had tied over his shoulder in his efforts to pass as a Fulani woman came undone and fell at his feet. He bent down to pick it up, but the slave woman he had been following didn't give him the chance to cover himself up.

“Just what do you want?” she asked, staring him right in the eyes. “What do you want, you rat?”

As she spoke, she pointed her finger threateningly at his nose, all the while keeping her basket balanced on her head. Another woman with a shaved head abandoned her display of spices to join her. She spoke to the sculptor in a more conciliatory tone.

“Why don't you just leave her alone, eh?”

“Woudidididi!”
cried the woman with the tightly wound scarf, drawing the attention of the whole market. “Here's a man who wants to become a woman!”

Lost as he had been in his own reflections, how could Nebu have realized that so many eyes were locked on him? He was shocked and confounded to discover the market's collective gaze. They were women's eyes—slaves' eyes one and all—peering from behind their merchandise. Never before had Nebu stopped in the spice market, and in that very instant, the captive nudity of its population paralyzed him. Woken from his calculations of a woman's body in motion, he found himself surrounded by a hostile crowd. He was a man, the only man, and he wanted just one thing: to cover up his now naked body.

The women wouldn't let him be.

“You thought she was off to see her boyfriend?” they teased.

Nebu's body refused to obey any of his wishes; his repeated coughs kept stripping him bare. The women started making comments, trying to outdo each other. Each time he sneezed, they laughed and clapped their hands.

“God is giving you the punishment you deserve!”

But none of them knew just what Nebu was up to.

“Did you think she was cheating on you?”

“You don't trust her, huh?”

“Oh, men!”

The woman who had just spoken erupted in a strange laugh, covering her mouth with the palms of her hands and doubling over, like a rooster dancing around a hen.

“He-a-heeee!”

Her friends replied in unison: “Woooooo-hoo!”

The woman with the orchestral laugh turned toward Nebu and got right up in his face, as if the laughing chorus of women gave her a voice she wouldn't have had on her own. “So, you don't trust your woman?”

Her laugh united the crowd. Even the woman who had spoken to the sculptor in a conciliatory tone now mocked him.

“Just look at this man,” she said to a few women who had stopped out of curiosity, now called as witnesses to masculine idiocy. “He's so jealous he can't even speak!”

“So jealous, let me tell you!”

“So excited that he can't let his woman go anywhere, right?”

The impossible collection of gourds filled with colorful spices that she balanced on her head had turned her into a walking perfume store. She was talking and huffing with laughter, all at once. Everyone followed her lead. A few women left, dragging their children behind them, shocked by the brutal language of the marketplace, but others continued to heap shame on Nebu with their foul words.

“It's typical, don't you see?”

“My husband is the same way.”

“All men are the same.”

“All men!”

“Allah!”

“They've just got one thing on their mind!”

All the women shouted together: “Women!”

“No,” said the woman with the shaved head, “their
bangalas!
”

The spice market exploded in a single laugh. Some women were holding on to their neighbors' shoulders, others lifted their faces up toward the sun, slapping a leg or a knee or clapping their hands. The woman Nebu had followed was laughing too. And how! Her face contorted with laughter, she abandoned him to the pack. She pointed an accusing finger at Nebu's head, wrapped in Ngungure's pagne. She was choking with laughter. Another woman tried to calm her down, calling Nebu a “crazy man.”

“What a crazy man,” she said, “dressing up like a woman to follow his wife! How crazy is that!”

“Have you ever seen such a thing?”

“What?”

“A man dressed up as a woman.”

“Forget him,” the shaved-head woman said to Njapdunke. “He's just like all the rest.”

“Ah-achoo!” Nebu exploded.

The women no longer even noticed the explosive sneezes that prevented him from covering himself up. Their comments kept coming all the faster.

“Men are all the same!”

“All of them!”

“He's no different.”

“All he has is just one little finger…”

“Just one…”

Never had Nebu ever felt so naked, never. He fled back home without his cloth. Still, he tried to retain the image he had captured of the woman, the formula for a woman caught mid-step that he had discovered in the chaos. He wanted to sculpt the woman of his dreams in the shapes of the woman he had observed. What did it matter if she was a bitch? He was determined to sculpt Ngungure in her form. He had just dreamed of Ngungure with his eyes wide open, and he didn't want to question the reality of what he had measured. He was freed from his dreams, and at long last, he could create. The vision of this woman on the street encouraged him, and the laughter of the market women infused his hands with the rage he needed. The infinite dream of reality filled his mind with a patience that had escaped him until then. That's how he became his own master, the master of his dreams. Nebu hadn't written his thoughts down in a notebook. But he would do it soon enough in the only statue he would ever produce.

 

14

The Survey of Pain

If life is full of coincidences, from the most incredible to the commonplace, it is also full of missed chances. While Nebu followed the slave woman across Foumban, Njoya, accompanied by his masters and their assistants, was crisscrossing the streets of his city to map its topography. Njoya had been pushed to undertake this task by the French colonial administration's increasingly evident arrogance. He had been surprised by the arrival of the new authority, which had moved into the sultanate before he'd even been told why the English had left. Some surprising details caught his attention, especially the signature on the official French response to his speech welcoming them, which informed him that the headquarters in Dschang, in Bamiléké land—the Bamiléké whom the Bamum had previously defeated—were now more important than those in Foumban, a city more than four hundred years old.

“If the French prefer the bush,” Ibrahim had railed to all the notables, “let them go to Dschang!”

Yet Ibrahim couldn't help but see what was really going on: parts of the territory held by the ancestor Nchare Yen, pieces of land for which thousands of Bamum had, over the centuries, lost their lives, were falling into French hands without their sultan's consent. Njoya had been the one to offer land to the Germans, welcoming them into his city and his land. The English had imposed themselves with their machine guns. What about the French?

“Who do they think they are?” snapped an indignant Nji Mama.

“It's time to lay claim to our land,” the sultan replied, “to map out our country.”

With a team of a dozen people he explored all of Foumban's quarters and met with the landowners. The heads of the most important families were mobilized. Even the most respected slaves were called on to take part.

“The land is yours and no one else's,” Njoya told them. “You know better than anyone the boundaries of your compound.”