The morning that I read Auntie Roz these notes from my memory’s wanderings, riddled with holes though they were, tears suddenly began to flow from her still mischievous eyes. How strange to see her so shattered—as if she were an awkward psychic, who had dropped her mask during a sacred ceremony. I took her in my arms, and one of Grand Madja’s old lullabies began to well up from my throat, cautiously, as if I were afraid to be indiscreet.
Tears never fill a bottle,
Or else I would have a trunk full of bottles filled with tears.
I have wept so much over being caught off guard,
Wept so much over seeing betrayal on the face of the beloved,
That my trunk should be full of bottles filled with tears.
Alas, tears never fill a bottle.
“Oh my daughter, my dearest niece, how deeply you have touched me! How you have pierced me by bringing it all back to me! But then, it couldn’t have been otherwise—I was but the mold into which you were to be poured; I was but a guinea pig for your future experiences. All you did was meet the people who had put their mark on me before. All you did was take the path I had to clear, since there weren’t millions of individuals who had new dreams and struggled in a different way. In my time, too, everyone who made progress, teetering on slopes like these, inevitably encountered the same monsters, the same angels. Ah! Dora, my friend Dora, after all you suffered, in seeking redemption you spread your love to children heading for trouble, and were also able to take care of my niece!”
I hardly dared to breathe, afraid to break the stream of trust that had opened up. Auntie Roz stretched, turned her back to me to cuddle up closer against me, and kept talking, almost to herself.
“Just like you and your friend Amanyun, Dora and I ran away to Wouri, determined to serve the country side by side with Mpôdôl. ‘To the devil with marriage and the swarms of children that will only increase the number of sheep in the colonist’s herd,’ we used to say at the time. True, we were not among those first women to be educated then, not having had a chance to go to school, but we wanted to be among the First Female Resisters to lead the Political Battle for the Liberation of the Country, at least. Women’s patriotism would be the footing for the new nation, as advocated by Mpôdôl, and it seduced us more than the love of a man and the desire to have a family. Besides, what man of the time and milieu in which we lived could possibly have awakened the same kind of enthusiasm in us? Our thirst for the absolute made us more demanding, while our men were too busy trying to ape the White man! Feeble shadows or pale copies that they were, they had become invisible to our eyes. You see, it was an extraordinary period: Everything was new. Anyone who wanted to could be first at something: the first to be taught, the first to be an executive, prime minister, and even the first to be a traitor to his fatherland—the possiblities were there!”
“And you and Mother Dora, did you become the first free women activists, unencumbered by husbands and children, and utterly devoted to the struggle for independence?” I couldn’t help but ask.
“Yes. The ‘Amazons of Modern Time’ is what Mpôdôl himself named us. Ah, what an honor, what happiness! And so when he had to go underground, it seemed impossible for us not to follow him and at least to serve as his ears, mouth, and third eye—in short, to be his link to the outside world. You quickly had to learn languages, guile, secretiveness, and lots of other things, because it could save your life. So the mothers and aunts called us to tell us that time would be speeding up for us. It’s a phrase you, too, have heard. . . .”
“Yes, but what does it actually mean?”
“Didn’t I tell you we’ve had the same life? So why are you asking me questions again?”
She turned around and looked at me, her face wet with tears, then finally smiled as she wiped her eyes to chase away the burdensome shadows.
“Oh, I know why you don’t understand ‘the speeding up of time’; you have been blessed by the gods; you already were a mother when you were chosen. . . . A woman should always hurry to have her children while she’s still young and innocent. You never know what will happen later. Dora and I, having been as good as gold, were caught up in other things before becoming mothers, and we had plenty of time to question ourselves. When they tell a young woman that ‘time will speed up’ for her, it means she’ll have to undergo an initiation before her time, which normally wouldn’t occur until after menopause, when she can’t have children anymore. You know what that does to you when you’re twenty? You immediately want to have everything that is forbidden, even that which you had willingly refused. It was then that we fell in love, longed to have children, wanted to make a home like everyone else—but no! Anyway, you know what it is, you who have escaped death so many times through your sheer obstinancy in wanting another child to strengthen your home, although you could do nothing other than lose it!
“It is true that my beautiful love physically lasted only nine years, the ultimate number prescribed by our initiations. But these nine years were so intense that they gave us a feeling of eternity that has never left us, even though our communal life came to a chaste close, like a final parenthesis, as if to help me face the more solitary quest that seemed to impose itself on me, and guide me to a kind of hermit’s shelter that in the end was transformed into an exodus, an exile. . . .”
“But at least you had that beautiful love. You have been a complete woman, fully happy, for nine full years. What more can you ask for in life? In the end you’ve had everything, just as your grandfather predicted: all things female, all things male! While we . . . and especially my poor Dora . . .”
Her voice shook a little, and she got up, as if she were annoyed that she couldn’t remain as calm as she wanted to be. I used the time to serve her some water, then brought the glass back to the kitchen so she could pull herself together, but she took my hand and followed me, as if afraid to be by herself. It was the first time she showed her age: her spine compressed, her shoulders hunched as if she were very cold, which gave her a slight hump and made her look exhausted. Ah, what a rough time she must have had, like all my aunts Roz. . . .
Auntie Roz took me to the back of the garden, between the roots of the great rubber tree that had emerged from the ground like rocks. Leaning her back against the tree in Grand Pa Helly’s favorite position, she reminded me of him. I thought the flow had dried up for today, for it didn’t look as if Auntie wished to keep going. She scratched at the roots, picked some grass and shredded it between nervous fingers, then threw it to the wind like seeds of her tattered story. All of a sudden, she straightened up, took my head in her hands, and, looking me straight in the eye as if she were facing facts that had always escaped her before, she said: “Other than your childhood loves, such as Yèrè and your former husband, do you know that all the mature men in your story have also crossed my life in one way or another? Do you know that your Uncle Kon, the murdered prefect, was the great love of my friend Dora, who was expecting his child and followed him everywhere, even to that monster Bitchokè, where he was cravenly assassinated, and no one will ever know by whom? Dora was in such shock that she had a miscarriage. Do you think he died just so she wouldn’t have the baby, or did she miscarry so she wouldn’t have to know what it was to be a complete woman, because it had been decided one day that her ‘time as a woman had to be speeded up’ and made to serve the Bassa cause?”
“Auntie Roz, you’re frightening. How can you say such things? And what might that remarkable cause be, that we’ve never even seen? Where are the Bassa today?”
“Who knows! Still, those are questions we can’t help but ask, regarding the kind of iron grip of solitude that hounded us all, forcing us to abandon everyone we loved or to watch them die violently before our eyes! Do you know that Dora managed to find funds for a young man who was hanging around her to study in Europe because she was afraid she’d fall in love with him, just to have him move away from her and so protect him from what she now thought was a bad fate, if not a downright curse? That was Ndiffo. She was irresistibly attracted to him and decided to channel the impulse by making him into a son instead. When he returned to this country later on, she began to love him by proxy, and put him in contact with every girl in whom he showed even the slightest interest. She loved him through you, I tell you, for she literally threw him into your arms by continuously bragging to him about your qualities. When she told me this later, I didn’t know it was you. . . .”
“Really, Auntie, you know an awful lot about me! And now you tell me all these things about Mother Dora. But when do I get to hear something about you?”
“Ah, me—you know, it’s better to spare you my epic tale. All you need to know in the end is that I had to give up on Minlon so that he could be treated for some mysterious disease that was eating him and about to sweep him off in broad daylight. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to finish his studies, and that would have been a terrible waste, don’t you agree?”
“You’re absolutely right! It would have been an unthinkable disaster, for who else would have sown the little hope in us that keeps on lighting a few sparks here and there for a possible future? Truly, Auntie, your sacrifice was worthwhile, as I see it. But then what happened?”
“And then? Well, in the end we forgot each other, time passed, and we recognized we had to love in a different way, and only to the extent of our own strength, faith, and creativity. Still, I had to leave; I don’t think I could have resisted if I had stayed there. . . .”
“Actually, Auntie Roz, you should each have been declared a Lôs! Did anyone ever hear of a female Lôs? Still, that is what you were, even if it wasn’t said.”
“No, we weren’t Lôs. The function of a Lôs is not bestowed upon you; you become one by yourself. We were given a mission. They decided to sacrifice us, sacrifice a large part of ourselves, the female part of our creativity.”
“But you ran away yourselves to find greater exhilaration, and activities that involved the world more than a mere household could! The fact that you were selected was just an effect, while the cause came from your own aspirations and your own choice! That is being a Lôs—forcing nature and destiny. In the end, you have also succeeded, and I’m not the only one blessed by the gods!”
“Perhaps, but not as much as you. I didn’t find my Minlon again! I didn’t smell his scent or hear him whisper in my ear again. I never had those incredible shivers that ran along my skin, flooded his, and then came back to me like the backwash of a wave at high tide. We didn’t embrace each other again, to form a lightning rod against the thunderbolts of stupidity that subsequently wreaked such havoc and caused a tidal wave across the entire continent! Whole generations sacrificed . . . every value flouted . . . whole fields of knowledge forgotten, forever lost! What purpose did we serve? Sometimes I tell myself that if I had at least held on to my Minlon, if I’d married him, he might have died but done so happily in my arms! Instead they killed him through despair, exhaustion, and bitterness . . . and he departed all alone!”