Mount Pleasant (5 page)

And what of her father?

What father? Hadn't Uncle Owona become Sara's father after her own father died? Hadn't he inherited Sara's widowed mother? Ah, let's forget about this father for a moment: it would have taken just one word, one step, one move—yes, with one simple move Bertha could have discovered the depth of Sara's trembling silence. But
all girls are liars
: that was her opinion. Only a mother's ravaged face could have understood the horror Bertha was unable to comprehend. It wouldn't have cost Bertha a thing to get to know her girls a little more, that's what the doyenne told me.

And yet, and yet:

“What did anyone really know in those days?”

There are families that offered up their youngest born to the sultan in the hopes of a reward. For whom a daughter was merely a step on the ladder of their slow ascent to power, a tree that grew in order to protect them with its generous shade. Fathers who dreamed of moving closer to the palace, whatever the cost, certainly advocated most eloquently in defense of this convoluted logic. Sara's story, however, differed from the classic scenarios someone like Bertha could imagine among the Bamum in Foumban, for the girl was from a different ethnic group—a different world. She was Ewondo. And the sultan's matron, who had grown old watching over and judging the Bamum girls who were brought to her on the basis of their potential alone, would have benefited from being just a tad more curious in this specific case, from pushing a little harder on the locked gates of the girl's whispered words, from, in short, asking questions in the past tense.

“People are strange, but that's an argument with very short legs, isn't it?” Sara said to me, shaking her head.

Because Sara went from silence to wild convulsions, the matron was forced to pay closer attention to her. Soon her eyes began to follow the girl along the corridors of the house. And often Bertha's voice was heard calling Sara's name through the passages. When the old woman let go of the girl's legs on the day of the infamous egg test, Sara ran and hid, naked, in the first open room she found. Only a mother is able to cover up a shameful story under a cloak of love. And so the boy, yes the boy whom Bertha dragged from the room where Sara had disappeared would soon understand that the reason for the matron's increasingly labored breathing was that she had suddenly, and unexpectedly, rediscovered her maternal instincts.

Oh, was there any way to explain what had suddenly misted Bertha's pale cheeks and filled her sleepy breasts, except to say that he had been recognized by a mother's body? Had he shown just a little more curiosity, this boy would have discovered in the body of this maternal latecomer the tortured story of a loss, the story of a life linked to the end of his own.

Bertha asked the only question possible in this situation. “What's happening?”

She furiously wiped her hands on her rear end, as if she had just touched excrement.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

The boy whose gaze had frozen her own asked no questions. He stared at Bertha silently, desperately.

This is what happened: Sara had gotten confused. In the darkness where she sought refuge, she had put on clothes that didn't belong to her. Her mind was filled with thoughts of escape: escape from the matron, from Uncle Owona. Escape. Obviously, in her panic, she hadn't realized what she had become. But Bertha saw the boy she was from then on, and she immediately recognized him as her son. Yes, the matron recognized the young girl struggling in her arms as the son she had lost in the far-off, swirling mists of her life in Foumban. Her face turned to clay. Covering her mouth with her hand, she smothered a cry; she wanted to be sure of what she was seeing.

“Who are you?”

Bertha took a step back but stopped in the doorway, thus blocking out the light that could have revealed the truth.

“What's happening?”

She pressed hard on her belly to calm the kicks she had never expected to feel again.

Bertha shivered with cold, squeezing her dripping breasts and pushing on her aching belly. She knew her questions were of no use. Sara wouldn't answer any of them. The matron stripped this accidental boy with the violence of a disappointment felt by her alone. She raised her hand to strike but let it fall, having finally understood the limits of her anger. She didn't ask the girl to go get the whip for her punishment. On the contrary, her eyes were filled with tears when she finally managed to stammer, “Why?”

On that day, the relationship between Sara and Bertha was radically changed, retreating ever further into the labyrinth of lies. The matron, who for an instant had seen her son come back to her, wiped her eyes and discovered instead a terrified Sara. The shadows held nothing more for her than a mute and disoriented young girl. From then on, Sara noticed that Bertha eyed her suspiciously, looking for something only a mother can see.

Poor Sara. She had no idea about the crazy plan beginning to take shape in the mind of a matron whose maternal instinct had been abruptly awakened. She was truly dumbfounded when, after her attempted escape, Bertha burst into tears and stood frozen in front of her, holding a whip she suddenly lacked the strength to wield. The matron's lips were murmuring the words “my child.” Like a butterfly caught in a spider's web, the girl collapsed against the mats of the old woman's chest. Bertha cut the girl's hair, leaving only one lock on the top of her head, like a boy.

Since the Bamum prefer boys to girls, Sara had no trouble wending her way through Mount Pleasant's courtyards in her new apparel. Only the children on the sultan's car gave her any trouble: she distracted them from their games with the stationary automobile. As Sara passed by, they'd shout out invitations to play, but when she turned away, they'd taunt her with this annoying rhyme that hit the mark each time:

“Cluck, cluck, cluck! went the hen! Oh my!

See the little boy come by!

Tonight is the night I'm gonna die!”

Happily, the little devils were taken in by the cross-dressing. Nothing about Sara alarmed them. And in any event, Bertha quickly set them straight: children couldn't make fun of the sultan's shadow like that. As for Sara, she was happy to be left in peace at last, although she would have liked a chance to play with kids her own age.

“If walking around with a shaved head was the price to pay for being free from the matron's whip, that was a good deal,” the doyenne added, her grandmotherly pragmatism reflected in the set of her jaw.

But that wasn't all: Bertha also ran hot stones over Sara's chest to delay the development of her breasts. To tell the truth, this routine was no surprise to the girl: her mother had done it to her several times, too. Except that the matron wasn't trying to slow down the rapid growth of a woman. She wanted to bring her son back to life. She wanted to turn Sara into the boy she had become by chance: Nebu.

“Why did you go along with it?” I asked the doyenne.

Sara told the saga of her life without losing her smile; she took another pinch of tobacco, as if there were nothing strange about her story. She was thrilled that she had tricked the omniscient Sultan Njoya, and she still laughed about how a simple garment had changed the life of a little girl.

“Even the witch was completely taken in by it,” Sara told me. “I was a perfect little boy.”

“And did you like that?”

“What do you think?”

Her transformation into a boy had freed not just one but two women from the tragedies of their lives. If the tears that streamed down the matron's face each time she raised the whip to hit her allowed Sara to guess what was going on, only later would she really understand what it meant for Bertha to call her, forever after, “my son.”

 

9

The Labyrinths of Childhood

The exquisite pleasure of being someone else, that's what finally freed Sara from her suffering. The girl entered into a house, excuse me, into a life, where she didn't meet any children her own age, but where her ears were filled with a thousand stories. She entered into an existence where a specific task was assigned to her. Sara entered, in fact, into a house of mystery, a house of a thousand whispers, where silence was always menacing, filled with invisible ghosts. By an absurd stroke of luck, the sultan was in need of a shadow—the previous one had quit, preferring to live out his exile in the city's poorer quarters.

The little girl had to get used to the name Bertha gave her. Happily, her entrance into Njoya's inner circle was facilitated by her decision to remain silent. The sultan's secrets, along with her name, would remain buried in her mouth as if in a tomb—just as Bamum tradition required.

“Ah, I was only a slave,” Sara told me. “Nothing but a slave!”

Was she serious? I could have replied that since slavery had been abolished in the protectorate by colonial decree, her status was rather ill defined. There are questions that must be asked, especially if one has spent time in America.

“Tell me,” I asked her, “what did it mean to be a slave in those days?”

“I was the sultan's property. Only,” she added, raising her finger to emphasize her point, “he wasn't my master!”

Did Sara realize I didn't understand her answer?

“Your silhouette doesn't belong to you, does it?” she continued with a smile.

“No.”

“But it follows you everywhere.”

“Yes, it follows me everywhere.”

“Except that,” she added, giving a quick look around, “sometimes you don't see it. Well, that's the kind of life I had. The life of a shadow.”

Sara might have saved herself a lot of trouble had she answered Bertha's calls with less impertinence. The matron was exploring the unexpected consequences of her renewed motherhood. Breaking with tradition, Bertha insisted that the sultan's shadow spend his nights “at home.” What a strange demand! Yet there were ears to hear it, and hands willing to make it so. I had some trouble, I'll admit, imagining a woman who had been introduced as a witch suddenly shedding a mother's tears.

Sara reminded me of this simple truth: “Bertha always called me Nebu.”

The matron insisted, “I want the right to see him.”

The right? You have to understand how affection grows in the belly of a woman when she belatedly discovers the child that could have been her own. Could anyone have imagined that after her breasts' sudden reawakening, Bertha would vow to give birth to her son once more? Could anyone have suspected the pains she felt in her belly whenever her
boy
left for Njoya's chambers? Was there anyone who didn't hear the cries of a woman in labor coming from her room each time he did?

Only Nebu could have known it had all started the day Bertha took in a girl given as a gift by the chief. If a boy was seen leaving her house every day, who could swear it was a girl who had entered? As for the chief's men, they had come there only once and then disappeared, lost in the endless mystery of colonial violence.

“Nebu!” Bertha called. “Nebu, come here!”

Everyone found it funny to see her chase her boy with the shaved head through Mount Pleasant's courtyards. Everyone laughed when, out of breath, she called the child by his full name: “Nebuchadnezzar!”

But call she would, until her son's face appeared at her door. Sometimes an adult offered a helping hand and brought the recalcitrant child back to her: “Here he is!”

Bertha also tried flattery: “Do you know that when you were a child, you ate a lot?” That's how Sara knew that Nebu hadn't died in childhood, but when he was an adult. She understood that ultimately, Bertha dreamed not just of giving birth again to the child she'd lost, but of giving him an entirely different life. Bertha thought that life would be possible if she could just tell her newfound son the full story—bit by bit, anecdote by anecdote—tell him all the twists and turns in the life of the one she had lost; if she could just breathe into this miracle child, word by word, the life of the one who had fallen on the path through hell. It wasn't a problem for her that Nebu was the sultan's shadow. No, far from it.

From the doyenne's story I deduced that the matron needed her son back in order to love the work to which she had sacrificed her life. A mother's love has no limits, right? But Bertha rediscovered her purpose the moment she no longer had any girls to care for. Sara was the last one entrusted to her. She didn't want to dwell on that. Like all the others, that girl had failed the virginity test—and in the end, she'd just as soon forget that, too. Her son, Nebu, on the other hand, gave her back an energy she thought she had lost for good. She told him all the details of the other one's life: “Do you know that…”

Here's how it went. Sara would sit on the ground, with Bertha on a bench behind her, as if she were going to braid her hair. The matron would squeeze the little girl's body between her knees and hold her head with her hands. She would speak directly into her ears, whispering and singing. She would tell her about Nebu's life, all the details of his remarkable epic, his life in Bamum land, his travels in and around Foumban. She spoke to the child, but it was really one long monologue. She spoke until her voice gave out, until her words were emptied of life and burned her lips. She spoke as a mother speaks to her child, nourishing him with words and milk. At the end of her tale, it was as if suddenly someone else began to move within the little girl's body, in her limbs. The long-lost Nebu had come back to life, and suddenly a new destiny opened up for Sara. Hard to believe that Bertha's son was just one of the faces of the thronging crowd I discovered under the shell of Sara's face!

 

10

Symphony of a Colonial City

In the 1930s Yaoundé wasn't a city, but a town with a population of barely 150,000, whites and blacks included. In those days, the high commissioner's palace, the central post office, the police stations, the French bakery, the café La Baguette de Paris, the church in Mvolyé, and the palace of the paramount chief were the only signs of the capital city that Yaoundé has since become. These touches of European-style urbanity let everyone know they were in a colony. The many shops that spread out along the main road, including a pharmacy and even a pet store, gave the area—already known as Ongola—the feel of a place where things were looking up. Mount Pleasant, with its ornate bamboo walls and its raffia roof, adorned with geckos and two-headed snakes, stood out starkly, even among the disparate architectural styles. There were some compounds built in the Fulani style, especially in Briqueterie, the Muslim neighborhood, but they were becoming less common.