The Laughing Cry, page 23
In his uniform of a serving officer, he stood stiffly at attention, just beside the catafalque, and carried his hand, with a brusque gesture, to the peak of his cap. Standing there immobile, for several seconds, perhaps a minute, or even two. Immobile and serious, as if he were teaching someone how to give a military salute. Tiya didn’t even glance at him. Impassive, eyes irredeemably closed. Bwakamabé, with an angry gesture, let his hand fall from his peak and slap against his thigh; then he retreated to the solitude of his Palace, leaving Tiya to be borne in the hearts of the anonymous multitude.
The carpenters approached the coffin, and the blows of their hammers resounded in our hearts.
The separation had begun. The funeral procession formed up for the march to the edge of the city. A long convoy. Longer than the procession for 15th August. No meeting, no marriage, no funeral in the country had ever called together so many woolly heads.
There was a pause at the edge of the town. One by one, groups came forward to deposit, some a wreath, some a bouquet, on the big wooden coffin. The cries of Ma Melanie became heart-rending, insupportable. There was no funeral elegy. Philo the Great, whose shoulders never ceased shaking, also cried out, along a line joining her belly to the skies. No benediction either. Old Tiya was an atheist. A freemason, according to some.
Nevertheless, we sang a canticle. The curves of the melody and the innocence of the words warmed our hearts. This was just what we needed to offer the Old Man, a present of naked adolescent beauty, in a last gesture of pity. Equally, to forgive him his atheism. So that our God, our gods, would pardon him. But look, he wasn’t an atheist of Satan’s. Our good God the Father doubtless has his own. The way they describe Him to us. He’s too intelligent not to understand that sort of unbelief. I’m sure he has opened his arms to Tiya. One doesn’t make a present to Satan of such a soul as that.
It’s only a brief farewell,
My brothers,
It’s only a . . .
The procession had divided into two groups. The larger stayed behind, singing and praying, then quickly dispersed. The other consisted of some trucks and Land Rovers. One of them was full of political militants of his generation — other Tiyas.
Ma Melanie cried out still louder, as if she had some devil shaking her from within.
That evening, amid the general announcements and just before the sports news, the radio stated that Monsieur François Tiya, retired teacher, who had died in Paris “after a long illness”, had been buried.
The authorities claimed that, at the moment of dispersal, agitators had wanted to sing the hymn of Tiya’s party. Immediately, they had been overwhelmed and arrested by Monsieur Gourdain’s agents, mingling with the crowd. In Moundié, it was also reported that all the officials absent from their posts on the afternoon of the funeral had been rewarded with a dismissal without their month’s pay.
That’s how the Old Man left us, exactly. For the rest, you have so exploited my confidences that I have little to add to your account of the meeting between the French ambassador and Bwakamabé.
The meeting began in a stormy atmosphere. This one had summoned that one to express his displeasure at the articles of Gavroche Aujourd’hui. Crazy with rage, he did so while tearing diplomatic language to shreds, treating Monsieur Bruno de la Roncière exactly like a colonial master abusing his “boy”. I myself felt a shame and humiliation such as I’ve never felt before or since. Taking advantage of a brief pause, the Frenchman invoked the freedom of the press as experienced in his country, and besought “the Marshal” not to confuse the calumnies of an independent review with the respectful sentiments of the French Government towards him.
Bwakamabé broke out again, in the most brutal and vulgar language, going so far as to say that President Pierre Chevalier was really a poor fish, with no real power, if he couldn’t even establish his right to punish journalists who insulted friendly heads of state, and that France was setting a bad example in respect to her political children in Africa.
In his book In the Service of the Quai, Bruno de la Roncière devotes less than a page to this interview and presents himself in the dominant role, which certainly doesn’t conform with the truth . . .
The day was long in Soweto. I’d have needed a breast as broad as the earth to support the oppressive mixture of anguish and spleen that fumed within me. Even today, I could describe the smallest details of Cécile’s sitting room. But I was also closely attentive to the noises in the street. Every car slowing down, every voice approaching, every telephone ringing made my heart sink. A day endless as the sand waves in the sea of the Sahara. I wanted to read. Some old numbers of Jours de France, of Bingo, a missal, Evenings in the Cottages, I think. Love’s Secretary, a Kama Sutra in a fine edition, the Complete Works of Kim il Sung; those of Daddy were also there.
Cécile came in very late. After midnight. She gave me, with a mother’s conjurations, an air ticket, a passport in the name of Wapelu, some health certificates, an exit permit prepared by the security services, and a large khaki-coloured envelope. Inside were five packets of ten thousand francs each, bearing Daddy’s effigy. I said to myself that the world was changing, if it was now the women who sent money. There was also a note from Ma Mireille, scribbled in the maladroit hand of a child. I folded it carefully and slipped it into my shirt pocket. While Cécile moved busily from one room to another, I counted the money. I’d never had so much in my hands before.
“Here.”
Cecile threw me a pair of pyjamas.
“You’ll be better in there for sleeping. Otherwise you’ll get all cramped up.”
A man’s pyjamas, the little hussy!
“You can undress in the bathroom. Go through here and take the first door on your right.”
There was plenty of time for all that. And anyway, I was fine as I was. Even at home, I never wore pyjamas.
“The light’s just outside the door. On the left. Wait, I’ll get you a clean towel.”
At last, I obeyed her. From politeness, or lack of initiative.
Well-showered and wearing the nightclothes, I really did feel a brief sensation of physical comfort. I plunged into the wide arms of a chair in the sitting room and unfolded Ma Mireille’s letter to study it properly.
“You aren’t going to stay there all night? Come on, you must get some sleep.”
I told her I wouldn’t be long in dropping off.
“But you aren’t going to sleep in there!”
I didn’t understand.
“Too many mosquitoes there.”
“Oh, poof! A few mosquitoes aren’t going to kill me.”
“Ts, ts, ts, come and sleep in here, you’ll be much better off. There’s a fan. That always chases away the mosquitoes.”
Did she have two bedrooms, then?
A nice little square bed, without feet, which seemed to rest directly on a maize-patterned carpet.
“But, Cécile . . .”
“Cécile what?”
“But this is your bed, no?”
“So, then? Does it scare you? Don’t be afraid, no bedbugs in it.”
“I just mean that . . .”
So after all, I was the one whose ideas were misplaced. Cécile was a sister, no? Ma Mireille’s most reliable friend. For me, a kid sister. It was obvious that she was abreast of everything. She wouldn’t be the one to betray us. She just wanted to fulfill her mission to the last, completely, without a hitch and forgetting nothing. And then, why can’t a man and a woman sleep side by side without immediately . . . ? Cécile was my sister.
She fell asleep right away, ignoring me completely. I felt her through the rhythm of her breathing. As for me, I kept tossing and turning, my thoughts in a whirl. What an incredible story to fall on my head. Me, a conspirator! What an imagination these policemen have! They must have listened to all the telephone conversations between Soukali and me since she joined the Bulgarian Embassy. I knew quite well that one should never trust those machines. Just think, an embassy ending in -ist, too . . . The phone is sure to be tapped, twenty-four hours a day. I had a feeling it would all end like this. But Soukali laughed at my fears. I had to ring her up, talk to her, show my interest in her. Well, you’ve seen already. What a woman! A real torrent. She’d even have liked me to write songs for her. Not because she wanted to hear them interpreted by one of our bands. No. Just songs for her. To be read and sung only between our four eyes. Are there two women on earth like Soukali? After all, she was quite right. Love shouldn’t be confined to the level of the mat. It’s above all a matter for the guitar. Didn’t I sleep in the same bed with Elengui, without automatically doing that, every night? Nevertheless, I love her too, Elengui. There, I mustn’t forget. I can’t go away just like this. I’ll scribble her a word tomorrow, to explain this fuck-up to her. Must also leave her something. More than one check. Yes, I had my checkbook with me. Cécile could give her the whole thing. A sister, Cécile. A real one. Not sister in the aggressive sense of the word. A real sister, on whom one could count in moments of difficulty. Must also write a word to Soukali. They say you only love once. But I must be peculiar. I have loved, and I still love, Elengui and Soukali with an equal ardour. And if there are some nuances in my feelings for one or the other, it isn’t a matter of quantity. Only of quality. For Elengui, a profound and intense tenderness; for Soukali, fire, music and perfume. Ma Mireille? Not the same thing. Let’s say, a certain hankering after forbidden fruit, plus the dizzying pleasure of being valued more highly than one of the great ones of this world.
Cécile stirred. She turned on her side, in the posture of a runner lifting one knee. She brushed against me. I put a hand on her shoulder to protect her. She was a sister. She cuddled up with a groan. She pressed against me with a little shudder. I squeezed her harder. My little sister. Our limbs, our fingers, interlaced each other in a multiple, complex way difficult to describe. Like the thousands of threads that advance and knot into each other to weave a magic web. Cécile, my sister.
The hands, the fingers, the nails. Then the mouths. The hair. The tongues, like the wings of little red sparrows. Without even the murmuring of a single word. In the reassuring darkness. Cécile, my sister. What youth in her breasts and thighs! Really something to sing about! At what moment, the plunge into the well? Without any shock, like a movement in a smooth and well-rehearsed dance. At what moment, the step into the saddle? And those thighs trotting, trotting, trotting. Cécile, my sister. Cécile, éhé! Cécile! Cécile! Yééé. No, no. Oh! Yes!
“What have we . . . ?”
She squeezed my hand, then muttered some incomprehensible endearment. I put my hand on her head and pressed her to me.
“Yes . . . you understand, yes?”
“Ma Mireille told me to take very good care of you. That you should lack nothing, right up to the moment you step on the plane.”
“Are you going . . . to give her details of the way in which you looked after me?”
A barely perceptible shrug.
Cécile accompanied me to the airport and performed all the formalities for me. Thanks to a special card, she was entitled to go right to the end of the gangway. We kissed each other on the cheeks. With affection.
“Good-bye, my sister.”
“Good-bye, Maître.”
Hard to leave one’s country!
Nevertheless, as soon as the plane took off, a joyful excitement, something bizarre, uncontrollable, invaded me.
“Champagne, miss.”
The air hostess didn’t even notice my agitation.
I will spare my readers the long pages of rhetoric in which my young compatriot ex-Cabinet Secretary, in the name of revolutionary modesty, takes issue with exotico-pornographic writing. Some will certainly miss these pieces of eloquence, in which the pen of a gifted polemicist demolishes with implacable dialectic the depraved tendencies of a decadent bourgeoisie, which insists on contaminating a virginal Africa by the systematic export of its dissolute values. But I couldn’t publish them without adding my own reflections upon these edifying lessons in morality. To his venerable and learned ethic and to my own banalities and platitudes, each in turn ridiculous in their conviction of revealing new truths, I have preferred the forgotten voice of the good Diderot.
To begin with, dear reader, these are not fables, but history, and I feel no more guilty, perhaps less, when I recount the fooleries of Jacques, than Suetonius did when he transmitted to us the debaucheries of Tiberius. However, you read Suetonius and make no reproach against him. Why do you not frown upon Catullus, or Martial, or Horace, or Petronius, or La Fontaine and countless others? Why do you not say to the Stoic Seneca: “What need have we of the antics of your slave with his concave mirrors?” Why have you confined your indulgence only to the dead? If you will reflect a little on this bias, you will perceive that it is born of a vicious principle. If you are innocent, you will not read me; if you are corrupted, you will read me without ill effect. And then, if what I have said does not satisfy you, open Jean-Baptiste Rousseau’s preface and you will find my apology there. Who among you dares blame Voltaire for writing The Maid? None. So you have two scales for the actions of men? “But,” you say, “The Maid of Voltaire is a masterpiece!”- Too bad, because then one will only read it the more — ”And your Jacques is only an insipid rhapsody of events, some real and some imaginary, written without grace and arranged without order” — All the better, my Jacques will be the less read for it. Whichever way you turn, you are in the wrong. If my book is good, it will give you pleasure; if it is bad, it will not do any harm. No book is more innocent than a bad book. I amuse myself by writing under borrowed names the follies that you commit; your follies make me laugh; my writing puts you in a rage. Reader, it’s for you to speak frankly, but I find that the more wicked of us two is not myself. How happy I would be if it were as easy to protect myself from your baseness, as it is for you to avoid the boredom or danger of my work! Villainous hypocrites, leave me in peace. F . . . k like unsaddled asses; but allow me to say “f . . . k”; I pass the action to you, just pass me the word. You pronounce boldly enough “kill”, “steal”, “betray”, but the other word you dare to speak only between your teeth! Is it that the less you exhale of these so-called impurities in speech, the more of them remain in your thoughts? And that you have performed the genital action, so natural, so necessary and so correct, so as to exclude the sign of it from your conversation, or to imagine that your mouth, your eyes or your ears would be soiled by it? It is fine that the expressions the least in use, the least written, the best killed, should be the best known and the most generally understood, just as that one is; also the word futuo is no less familiar than the word bread; no age is ignorant of it, no idiom is deprived of it. It has a thousand synonyms in all the languages, it expresses itself in all without being expressed, without voice, without form, and the sex which does it most is that which keeps most silent about it. I can still hear you, you cry out: “Fie, cynic! Fie, impudent man! Fie, sophist!” Have courage, go on insulting at your will an estimable author whom you have constantly in your hands, and of whom I am only here the translator. The license of his style is almost a guarantee of the purity of his morals; it is Montaigne: “Lasciva est nobis pagina, vita proba.”
(Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and his Master, Paris, 1773 or 1774 or 1775)
The French Government’s reception must have been close to that accorded to the Queen of England, even if the microscopes of doctors in protocol could discover any nuances between them. Nuances of detail only, affirmed our ambassador in Paris, with a disdainful gesture and connoisseur’s tone.
Before his departure from our country to that of the Uncles, Daddy wanted to sulk because, in the end (had that la Roncière fellow really done his job?) the French Government had held firm and refused the extradition or imprisonment of students or other opponents in exile. They had confined themselves to picking up the most active (those whom Daddy called “the ringleaders”) according to a list furnished by Monsieur Gourdain, and to offering them a compulsory vacation in Corsica. Daddy had treated this action as an affront and threatened to delay his visit. Our ambassador had quickly sent a telex announcing that everything was ready for his reception and giving a description of the program which would make even the most obdurate colonial officer salivate. In the name of compromise, and on the wise, pressing advice of Ma Mireille and his chief diviner, Daddy finally agreed to go.
A certain rabble and several organised fringe groups (with whom I suspected the young compatriot Cabinet Secretary to be in contact) published protest articles and communiqués touching on democracy, human rights, and denouncing collusion, both characteristic and shameful, between the bourgeois power of Pierre Chevalier and the “Ubu of the Tropics”.
The composition of the delegation posed certain problems, especially in the matter of the presidential household. Ma Mireille insisted upon being the only wife in his entourage. His concubines would hear nothing of that. Many of them already saw themselves posing for photographs in front of the Eiffel Tower, at the doors of Dior, or chatting with Tino Rossi or Claude François.
“Who does she think she is, eh? If she were able to satisfy him, would he still need to come and find us?”
And to clench the point, they would spit at you some jibes as pertinent as they were gross. Daddy tried to settle the palaver by a judgement of Solomon: only Ma Mireille would appear at the chief ceremonies, in the role of the official First Lady of the country. The concubines, for their part, would be listed as ladies-in-waiting.
“Can’t be done, can’t be done. I have my own ladies-in-waiting, chosen by myself. I don’t want them mixed up with those . . .”
“No, Ma Mireille. I won’t allow it. Take back that word. My girls are not harlots. They are honest women. As honest as you are.”
