Under African Skies (25 page)

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Authors: Charles Larson

BOOK: Under African Skies
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Translated by Richard Bjornson
 
The last shades of night had barely lifted in the village of Nsam. A fifty-year-old woman left her hut. Supporting herself on a cane, she walked over to a little neighboring house, planted herself in front of the door, and began to shout: “Edanga … ! Edanga … ! Get up. Edanga … ! You have more than five river crossings to make … ! Get up so that you can be on your way … !”
Not the slightest sign of life from the interior. The woman approached, and rapping her little cane on the barricaded door, she began again: “Isn't there anyone in this house, then? It seems silent as a grave. Could Edanga have left already without taking anything with him?”
She broke off, having heard the creaking of a rattan bed.
“Aha … ! Are you there then, Edanga, still asleep? How many legs do you have, eh? More than five river crossings and with that basket on your head … ! Get up, Edanga. Now is the time to be on your way. When traveling by foot, people quickly get tired in the heat of the sun!”
Inside, a voice grumbled disgustedly. Then, with a great creaking of the lock, the door opened, permitting an approximately thirty-year-old man to emerge. His pants had been patched repeatedly, and his shirt was covered with mud splotches. Without looking at the woman, he sank down upon a log: his features were drawn.
“What's wrong, Edanga?” She was worried.
“Where's the basket, Mother?” he muttered, and that was his only reply.
The woman regarded her son for a moment before wending her way back to the hut. When she returned, she was dragging an enormous basket pleated with palm leaves. She deposited it in front of him. Once more she disappeared into the hut and returned with a good-sized rooster and a hamper filled with assorted parcels.
“Go get yesterday's stalk of bananas. I can't carry it. It's too heavy. Don't forget to take the yams as well. These days your wife must be begging, if she wants to stay alive at Mbankolo. It's been many moons since you've been there.”
Edanga complied, dragging his heels. He came back and placed the stalk of bananas and the yams in the bottom of the basket. Then he sat down again on the log; he was holding his head between his hands, and his gaze was lost in space. His mother could not understand why he was in such a bad mood. He had always been happy and gay, especially when it was a question of going to Mbankolo. With slow, labored motions she began to arrange the food, all the while sighing; “Here's the package of groundnuts, and here's the cucumber … ! Here's the packet of sesame seeds, and here's the one with the spices … ! There are also several bunches of onions and a little calabash of palm oil … ! In this package, there's some smoked fish; it could crumble into little pieces if you aren't careful how you carry the basket … !”
If there had been a witness to this scene, he might well have asked who the woman was talking to. Frozen into a posture of complete detachment, her son had eyes only for the surrounding vegetation, still bathed in the misty shadows of dawn, and he had ears only for the dissonant chorus of frogs, toads, crickets, and birds greeting the sunrise with their carefree songs.
“Good, that's it, Edanga! You can leave now. You can tell your wife that I'll do my best to come see her someday myself.”
Edanga's mother had said it with a hint of triumph in her voice, as she finished tying up the basket with banana-tree fibers and carefully placing the good-sized rooster on top.
A moment later, like a slave who intends to obey only his own whims, the young man stood up ponderously. He stretched and ill-humoredly inspected the enormous, food-swollen basket with his eyes, before bending down …
“What're you doing, Edanga?” said his mother suddenly, as an idea crossed her mind. “Today is Sunday, and you want to leave for Mbankolo like that? Without washing up? Without changing clothes?”
“You're getting senile, Mother!” scolded the young man angrily. “I know old people of your age who don't talk such nonsense! To get me out of bed so early, when the basket hadn't even been loaded yet?”
Before the dumbfounded eyes of his mother, he tested the weight of the basket, lifted it, and placed it on his head. He was just preparing to get under way when an almost completely bald old fellow shot out of a nearby hut and began to take his turn at scolding: “Who are you so impudently accusing of senility, Edanga? My wife may be old, but yours who is so young and beautiful—where is she? If you were a man worthy of that name, she wouldn't still be imprisoned in the sixa
6
after three years … ! And all that simply because you can't pass the catechism examinations … !”
“Aie-Kai-yai, Father!” cried Edanga with respect and fear. “I didn't insult my mother … ! All right, don't tease me about that. I'm going … !”
“Yes, go, and be quick about it!” bellowed Edanga's father as he brandished his flyswatter, “My daughter must be dying of hunger at Mbankolo … ! Look at his getup! It's that of a convicted criminal! Do people pay visits on their loved ones in such filthy costumes … ?”
Swelling in turn with threats and mockery, the paternal voice railed on as the young man disappeared around a turn. He walked along a pebblestrewn road, his head burdened with thoughts of martyrdom beneath the heavy basket of food, on top of which the good-sized rooster intermittently trumpeted a royal cockadoodledoo, as if to accentuate Edanga's torments.
It wasn't the first time that Edanga had gone to the Catholic Mission at Mbankolo. He had gone there many times during the last three years. A twenty-kilometer walk with a heavy load of food on his head eventually became an onerous burden to him. The last time was six months ago. On that day, he'd found the women of the sixa in a coffee plantation. Covered with sweat and under the supervision of an elderly catechist, they were clearing the land with blunt machetes dulled by long years of toil. As they worked, their tearful voices intoned this popular lament:
Skin and bones,
I've become skin and bones,
Skin and bones like a ripe fruit withering on the vine,
Never having been relished by a loving tongue.
I toil in the fields of Lord
Fada
7
I toil for whole moons and whole seasons,
And my spine grows old with it,
Yet Lord Fada doesn't love me,
And when I'm told that the race of
Fadas
Never long to see a woman's skirt,
I know that I'm toiling in vain,
Toiling for nothing,
Toiling to harvest nothing.
Men shall I toil then,
Oh, my mother,
In the fields of one who loves me?
Edanga had slipped behind a bush and made a sign. Having caught a glimpse of him, Angoni had asked permission to go shake his hand and receive her provisions. Immediately, a switch whistled through the air and flattened itself cruelly on Angoni's tender skin. Then a scolding voice: “What conduct! Who deceived you into thinking that you're out here with me to find ways of committing a sin against the sixth commandment, eh? Get back to work, and be quick about it!”
Tears in her eyes, Angoni went back to work. Edanga could not prevent himself from crying at the sight of his fiancée's tears. “Did I pay the bride price for my beautiful Angoni to watch her being mistreated by just anybody?” he asked himself, trembling with rage. Alas, what could he do but chew the cud of his bitterness in silence? No one had ever dared raise a hand against a catechist, even in the country's most unenlightened village. And all the more if he were the catechist in charge of the sixa. No one! That would have meant provoking the wrath of the
Fadas
. And God alone knows whether a
Fada
might not be more respected and feared than a white Commandant. People feared the white Commandant because he had brutal guards armed with long sticks that spit lightning. But a
Fada
, think about it … ! Not only was he of the same race as the white Commandant; he was also God's representative on earth. Not any old God, but the one who had made white men superior to black men!
Already boiling with a desire for vengeance, Edanga felt his blood turn to ice at these thoughts. Thus, completely crestfallen and defenseless, he
withdrew from the coffee plantation to go, like everyone else, and wait for his fiancee in the visiting room at the Mission.
The visiting room at the Mission was a plank enclosure that witnessed countless uneasy whisperings, hastily blurted words, and half-formed tears. At four o'clock every day, it became animated with pairs of fiancés. There, separated by a cruel wall which it was forbidden to cross, engaged couples chatted, hardly able to see each other through the peepholes in the wall. And what chats they had … ! The old catechist marched ceaselessly back and forth, his ears pricked up like those of a sheep dog. If in all this chirping he overhead a few words he considered obscene, he would cry scandal, separate the offenders, and sometimes even threaten to delay the formal celebration of their marriage. For that reason, each couple continued to speak softly, like saints—that is, without prattling about love or exchanging amorous smiles. The women adopted a more reserved attitude. In their faces one could not see the passion which renders the world's ugliest fiancee beautiful in the presence of her beloved. Their eyes were fixed in glassy stares, like those of elderly widows who no longer expect anything from life. What sorts of pleasantries can two fiancés exchange in front of interlopers? All of a sudden, an enormous bell was tolling loud enough to split your eardrums, calling all the occupants of the
sixa
to evening prayers. And as each guest withdrew from the cursed visiting room, his heart was consumed with a throbbing grief.
On his return journey, after this mockery of a conversation, Edanga must have astonished anyone who saw him pass. Every once in a while, he'd stop abruptly in the middle of the road, brandishing an angry fist in empty space, shaking his head, clapping his hands, or simply raising three fingers into the air and shouting, “That's the last time!”
He had sworn never again to set foot at Mbankolo with a heavy basket of food on his head only to return alone, tormented by grief and far from his beautiful Angoni. Three years his heart had been bleeding in an endless wait for her whom he had chosen as his life's companion. Three years …! Night and day, the image of Angoni haunted him, invaded him in the form of a melancholy obsession. He had a wife, but he was vegetating in celibacy. He might have understood if Angoni had rejected his marriage proposal. He might have understood if, for one reason or another, Angoni had been held back by her parents. But that his beloved should remain imprisoned for more than three years in the
sixa
! He racked his brain to understand it and to find some justification for it. He recited his catechism like a parrot, but it was
all in vain, for never after any of the numerous examinations did his name appear on the list of successful candidates! Yet the dowry had been paid in full. Moreover, after the negotiations which accompany any engagement, Angoni had in fact been handed over to him. However, she was not destined to live with him at Nsam for more than three months.
 
Yes, three months; that is to say, until that day when the priest of Mbankolo, who was on tour, arrived with a great deal of fanfare. In front of the entire assembled population of Nsam, the missionary became red-faced with anger as he began to rail against the old man, Edanga's father: “What a scandal to let your child live in a state of mortal sin with his fiancée! You have but a short time left to live on this earth, and yet you are doing everything you can to earn a passage to hell! Do you know that all those sins your son is committing against the sixth commandment redound upon your soul? Do you know that?”
“Yes,
Fada
, I know it!” Edanga's elderly father muttered, trembling with fright.
He had trembled with fright to see a vision of himself in the other world, being fed into that immense furnace where all those who failed to toe the line in this world would burn forever and ever, according to the decrees of the Holy Roman Church …
That day had been a day of mourning for the two fiancés. His eyes swollen with masculine tears and his body dripping with sweat, Edanga had thought he would go mad with grief! He felt an invisible dagger bite into his heart. But when he was somewhat cured of his mental sufferings, he had resolved to learn the catechism by heart in order to regain his beautiful Angoni, who had been carried off to the
sixa
by the priest of Mbankolo …
Turning over in his head the troubled past, Edanga asked himself as he was walking, “What is it exactly that they teach those women in the sixa? What more than a few scraps of catechism, while making them work like beasts of burden! Besides, the worst of it is that a certain number of them wake up one fine morning to find their stomachs bulging with the fruits of adulteries that go unpunished … !” His legs no longer belonged to him. They moved forward, stumbling more and more frequently. Each time they knocked against a stone, he cried out, “And there you have it! Even the stones in the highway have sometimes had enough of being stepped on by those who pass by!” And he told himself that he, too, had enough of groaning beneath the cruel regulations of those people at Mbankolo.

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