As soon as the ceremonies of the mourning novena are over, my father decides to double efforts to complete the work on his artificial pond. And so the torment begins again.
Grand Pa Helly’s permanent absence weighs more and more heavily as the days go by: There’s no one left to play the role of mediator between my father and the others, to smooth over his verbal and physical tactlessness, to alleviate the harshness of his decisions, making fun of them and introducing some humor. Everyone bears the full burden, taking everything to heart, while the atmosphere grows heavier each day.
Added to this is the unspoken, shared impression that my father is in some way responsible for Grand Pa Helly’s disappearance. Here no one believes that anyone dies a natural death. However, Grand Pa himself never stopped complaining about those who are always looking for a scapegoat; I believe sincerely that he would not have thought kindly at all of people holding his son responsible for his death. Even Grand Madja is one of them; she so obviously stays away from her son that you feel she shares the general sentiment. I wonder whether she is aware that she’s dissociating herself from him and for the first time putting him in danger. Her grief is such that she’s beginning to lose some of her sense of reality.
So all of us work in silence, putting the full weight of our belligerence into finishing the job as soon as possible. Most likely it will take another week—and not a day longer!
That is when the Ba Touu Pék, the Omniscient One, revs up his machine of surprises. I’m crossing the dike to go to the other side of the pond, where there is some shade, and work there when my father calls out to me severely: “There goes another lazybones, dragging her feet to make time go by! Come back right now and do your work here.”
“Papa, it’s too hot there. Maybe you didn’t notice, but almost everyone has moved to the other side. We’ll go back there when the sun starts to go down. We’re using the time to make some progress on the other bank.”
“Nonsense! What about your sisters—they’re still here, are they made of different material? Stay and get back to work.”
I keep going toward the other bank, but he pulls me back roughly, and I feel like a plum tree being shaken. Nausea wells up in my throat. I return to my sun-exposed spot. But after three roundtrips with my container of soil I feel I’m about to faint. I rally all my willpower to avoid my father’s thunder, but my destiny has already ceased to be my own. I’m nailed to the ground, perspiring profusely, and incapable of any reaction. Grand Madja comes running over to me and reaches me before my father does, preventing him from being the first to speak.
“Leave her alone, will you please! Isn’t she doing enough already? Isn’t she brave enough for you, in the state she’s in?”
“What state? You’re the one who spoils the girl. She’s not what she used to be, and I’m not at all pleased with the changes in her. She’s going to get up and go back to work or else. . . .”
“Or else what? You’re going to get rid of her pregnancy?”
“Her preg . . . excuse me?”
Something tells me to get away from there as fast as I can. I gather up my last bit of energy and rush off to the dike. When my father recovers, he charges at me, knocking down anyone in his path. He grabs me by the neck and pulls me back in the other direction, then pushes me toward home.
Since my Aunt Roz has gone to town for treatment, I know there won’t be anyone else to stand up to him and that I’ll have to protect myself if I don’t want to be slaughtered. So I decide to keep calm and control myself. As soon as we are out of view he shouts: “What? You’re pregnant? Since when and by whom?”
“Not by you, in any case! This is my business.”
I’ve scored. He lowers his head for a moment.
“What do you mean?”
“May I remind you that I’m engaged and that it’s up to my fiancé to ask questions of this sort. Unless you wish you were the perpetrator of this one, too?”
Two smacks in the face send me flying to the floor and stop my breath. Grand Madja arrives with a few other people, worried about what might happen. I feel a rage close to madness rising up. I pull free from Grand Madja’s hands and plant myself in front of my father, who is being held back by half a dozen others.
“Is that all you can do with your children, hit them, give them blood transfusions? What else can you do to me? Kill me? Well, don’t be shy: You’ve just about done that already. You did kill me once before, you know.”
“Shut up, or I’ll cut your tongue into little pieces.”
“You don’t get it, do you? It’s all over. I’m dead and you can’t kill me twice. You cannot reach me anymore. From now on I’m a ghost who can only haunt you. Touch me, and I will rattle off your entire life right here in public!”
The bystanders are rooted to the spot. First of all by my voice, that improbable voice that always emerges from me in moments of extreme agitation. And then, they also cannot understand why my father hasn’t yet smashed me to bits but, on the contrary, beats a grumbling retreat: “Just pray to heaven that your path doesn’t cross mine again today.”
Grand Madja comes over to me and murmurs in my ear: “Get away from here. Go to the Mayos or somewhere else, it doesn’t matter where, but hide, or else I feel a great misfortune will be coming your way. Ah, my husband! You surely have abandoned me with this monster. Who will help me now?”
She crumples to the ground like a sack of potatoes and begins to weep all the tears she has held back since Grand Pa Helly’s death. I run off, weeping, too, for her helpless sorrow, for my pointless anger, for our whole absurd condition.
I cannot walk fast; my lower belly hurts. It’s as if the baby is kicking me or bumping me with its head, I don’t know which. I feel overwhelming fear. Something tells me to hide in a bush, to rest, but I don’t know why it comes into my head that my father could find me there and suffocate me with my baby, still inside. Or else a snake might bite me, and I would die senselessly, rotting away alone in my shrub. It’s as if I am riveted to the road; if my father should come in pursuit of me, he will find me here, but at least there will be passersby as witnesses.
An intersection. Where to go? Where would he not be likely to look for me? Or better, where would he look for me first? I need to go in the opposite direction. I decide to retrace my steps and take the longest way to the train station. It is necessary to put at least one train trip between him and me. But I’m dealing with my father, and he’s thought of it before I have and sent Isma to catch me. When he materializes behind me like a hunting dog, I’m only one kilometer from the station. I feel relieved, sure that my friend won’t hand me over. I start to cry in his arms: “God be praised, Isma! I feared the worst. Please, hide me, help me get away from death. Think of our friendship and have pity on me. Think of your responsibility, too, in everything that might happen to us, to my child and me, if Papa should find us. Why are you so unsympathetic to my arguments?”
“I don’t want you to go away, that’s all. You’re the one who brought us here, my sister and me, and you’re not going to desert us now. We’ll stay together; your father is not really going to kill you. Maybe he’ll spank you, but I’ll be there to console you. I love you, you know.”
I can’t get over it. How can you claim to love someone and not recognize that her life is in danger? While he thinks only about keeping me for himself, he doesn’t realize he’s in the process of risking our lives. I implore him again, try to pull him behind the shrubbery, promising to have sex with him, right here and now, if he agrees to keep me company in a hiding place so that my father won’t find me. Surprisingly, he seems tempted, and his eyes are looking for the ideal shrub when my father appears. Faced with this dilemma, he shrugs his shoulders. I look at him with pity. He would have hidden me to sleep with me, but not to save my life. Really, I’ve had it up to here with men. When my father arrives he looks calm and asks: “Is it that bastard of a sub-prefect who took the liberty of getting you pregnant before marrying you first?”
Why didn’t I say yes? I think he would have settled for taking me home and dealing the old man a blow to make him pay. Alas, I’m too honest and, not given to keeping quiet, my big mouth opens up as if I’m about to vomit.
“Now, that would kill me. Isn’t it enough that he cuckolds you with that Naja wife of yours? Fortunately I forced him to buy you a young substitute wife to save your honor. But honor is not something you’re familiar with anymore, is it? If they promise you an old car it’s reason enough for you to sell your entire family and your own soul as well. If anyone like you were to make me pregnant, I think I’d vomit the fetus out through my mouth.”
I can see that every word stabs him and I’m quite prepared to say ten times more when he stops my breath with the back of his hand. I feel the imprint swell up on my cheek as if it were being inflated from the inside out. Blood spurts inside my mouth.
“You little slut! So it’s not even your own fiancé who got you pregnant? Where have you been hanging around to pick this up?”
He kicks me in the belly so hard that it throws me more than five meters toward a slope, and I go hurtling down it, punch-drunk. He comes to me, in slow-motion, and shouts: “So that’s the way it is, is it? Fine! I’ll help you vomit it up; I’ll rid that belly of yours from the bastard inside. As long as I don’t see the fetus with my own eyes, I won’t stop beating you, and that’s on my word as Njokè!”
My final hour is here. I take out a small bracelet-watch my mother gave me, enclose it inside my left hand, and swear to myself: “As long as the palm of my hand doesn’t open to let go of this watch, my belly won’t let go of my child, a child whom I declare to be the opposite of violence and the world’s future, and that’s on the word of a future female Njokè.” I shut my heart and my whole body, everything except my eyes. I hunch up in fetal position and stop moving. Only my gaze watches the events. I look at my father the way you look at the void.
He hits and hits. Not coming up against any resistance, he grows ever more irritated and, dripping sweat, pulls me over the ground like a sack of cocoa. People arrive and beg him to stop. He threatens them, goes after a few of them, kicks them, then comes back to me, lifts me up, throws me over his shoulders and moves ahead. When he’s tired he throws me down like a bundle of wood. I maintain my fetal position, fall and roll and stop moving. The motionlessness exasperates him. He curses me, insults my mother and her whole family: “Ah! Your phony innocence, just like your mother’s, is no surprise to me; all I have to do is turn my back for all of you to cheat on me with my own cousins, with White men, and even with Yoruba! Ah, but I’ll make you pay for all your mother’s whims, and her sister’s, and their own damned mother’s!”
My gaze is blank—no anger, no fear, no hate, no love—for the simple reason that at this moment I don’t feel anything at all. All I hear is Grand Pa Helly’s voice telling me not to let anyone get rid of my child, and all my efforts are going into protecting my belly. I’m determined not to waste any energy.
At times he pulls at one of my feet or arms, or grabs me by the neck the way you pick up a puppy or a kitten. But it gets him nowhere. He knows that I won’t move on my own feet, that he will either have to give up on bringing me home, which he will not allow himself to do, or carry me the way he had promised to carry his father; this is making him crazy.
He cuts down some shrubbery branches, collects bits of palm from the stacks of branches people leave beneath the palm oil trees along the road, and in utter fury whips me with them until he’s exhausted. Then he carries me again. . . .
He would like to sit and rest a while, but the ever-growing crowd behind us prevents him. Finally he sits down with his back against a tree, for my weight is becoming too much for him. I sense that he wants to talk to me, so I clench my jaws to make sure that no sound will come from my mouth, and even less from his.
What would I do if he were to speak to me in that voice he sometimes uses to talk to his mother when trying to mollify her: “Little Mother, have pity on me! Help us out of this situation.”
There’s no doubt that I would slip down and walk,
That all my strength would leave me,
All my resistance crumble,
And there’s no doubt that my baby would be detached from my belly;
I clench my jaws more tightly. . . .
To cross tumultuous rivers
Like the Liéguè or the Yamakouba,
By the only tree trunk that serves as a bridge,
To cross the turbulent waters
On the shoulders of someone
Or with someone on your back
You have to be stark raving mad,
And yet we cross,
But we are not that mad,
For we know full well that the drop would be fatal.
Inwardly we are both trembling;
Alas, our hearts are equally matched,
And no one wants to let the other sense the fear.
We both hold our breathes
And feel the held breath of the crowd behind us.
Bravado becomes our only motivation,
Bravado or courage,
The courage to face ourselves before knowing who we are.
Sometimes we have to brave the world, brave life and death,
To discover and know better our possibilities and limitations,
The real truth is that courage
Is to be fearful and move forward still.
When I think back on this today, I cannot help but admire you, Father, and admire what you passed on to me in spite of yourself. Had you used that tremendous courage to serve a great cause, had you been humble, had you been able actually to love someone, you could have changed the world. Alas!
Once we escape the threat of a fall into the unruly waters of the Yamakouba and then the Liéguè, your knees buckle, Father, and we collapse on the ground together. You don’t even try to get up again. I feel that sleep is about to overtake us; we have been on this road for more than six hours in a violent, hand-to-hand struggle. Even the wildest passions are blunted when fatigue sets in. Your desire to tame me, Father, has disappeared, has crumpled, is dead on its feet.
The silent crowd of onlookers has crossed the rivers, following us; some of them hold hands while others are determined to go it alone. Now they surround us like an army of shadows. Night fell a long time ago. A gentleman emerges from the darkness, points his hunter’s torch at us, and bursts out laughing when he sees you fully stretched out with your head on my belly.
“Aha! Here we have a Lôs comfortably ensconced on his daughter’s belly right in the middle of the road! Didn’t I hear you say that you wouldn’t stop beating her until you’d seen the fetus expelled from that belly? Well, her belly still seems quite round to me, and I don’t see any blood between her legs! Now then, sublime Lôs that you are, go ahead, beat her, beat her! What are you doing? Sleeping? Might that little girl here have been right about you? Who else will you frighten anymore? Come on, get up and kill her, just so you’ll force all of us to tremble whenever we see you!”
You, Father, get up painfully.
“You’re lucky I can’t see you or recognize your voice, or else I’d make a date with you in your bed tomorrow morning, you bastard! You’re not the one to dictate to me how to discipline my daughter. If you don’t have what it takes to make your own daughters, just bring your wife to my cocoa plantation, and I’ll lend you a hand, you son of a bitch!”
The man leaps up with all his claws out, but you bring him down with a swift kick that propels him into the crowd of shadows. Cries fly through the air and get you excited: You get up and kick a few others, blindly punching them in the jaw or the stomach, creating panic. The noose is loosening a bit.
“Go home and leave me alone, all of you! What I do to my daughter is none of your business, you gang of cowards!”
At that very moment the well-known voice of the Mbombock Mbondo Libon rises from the crowd, calm as only the voice of a Mbombock can be.
“You are right, you can do to your daughter whatever you want. You can even kill her, and no one here will raise a finger to keep you from doing so since you are stronger than the entire tribe, right? But remember one thing: This land belongs to the tribe of the Lôg Sénd. And the Lôg Sénd tell you via my mouth that you will have to eat your daughter after you kill her, for you shall not lay her to rest here on their land.”
“Is that so? And who’ll prevent me? You, perhaps, you degenerate? If you’d been as powerful as you want people to think you are, you so-called Mbombock, you would have kept the Whites from ordering us around in our own land! Poor assholes! Would you have even said a word to me if my father were alive? Just be aware that I’m not afraid of your band of sorcerers. And if you want, I’ll fight you on this very land!”
“Very well, then! Go ahead and kill your daughter. . . .”
You turn around and rush at me like someone possessed, lift me off my feet, and throw me with brute force into the ditch. You are moving forward to finish me off when the youngest son of Great-Aunt Kèl Lam grabs you from behind and pulls at you with all his might. You are flustered, Father, for you were not expecting anyone to intervene. A large moon has come out from behind the trees and illuminates the scene as if by magic. Now your cousin confronts you:
“And you were actually ready to kill your daughter on the order of sorcerers, Njokè? I knew you were dumb, but now I know you’re stark raving mad! Well, since you want to kill your daughter, you ought to know that you’ll have to kill me first!”
“As you wish, dear brother! That will be one less imbecile in my aunt’s house.”
When you raise your arm, with all the power that is yours, to grab at your cousin, you bring it down on the razor-sharp machete he has held up as a shield. Blood spurts into the air. The cousin takes to his heels, you and the horde of shadows following him. They have forgotten about me in the ditch. It is Fidèle Foulani, desperately looking for me in the dark and whispering my name over and over again, who manages to pull me from my hole very late that night. You, Father, have lost a great deal of blood and are unconscious. The bystanders would gladly let you die, but your cousin saves your life by asking for help to bring you to an uncle, a healer, who will stop the hemorrhage, tend to the terrible wound, and give you stimulants.
You do not regain consciousness for five days, in your aunt’s house where your cousins insist on watching and taking care of you. Grand Madja could not stop them and prefers to stay and nurse me. When they bring you home, Father, we look at each other for a long moment, but you don’t say a word to me. I know something has broken inside you, inside us. It’s the end of an era, a world. It’s a fate we must accept from now on. Nine days later I manage to get away, having decided to go back to the big city where my mother lives.