NOTEBOOK 1

THE TALE OF THE ASHES

I CAN SEE HOW BAFFLED YOU ARE AFTER HEARING THE STORY ABOUT MY trip to Mbering-Saaj. Lost in your thoughts, you have been sitting there for a long while, leafing through these pages. I hear you murmuring, “For once, I really disagree with Nguirane . . .”

Slowly, I straighten myself up. I am surprised. “What do you mean, Badou?”

You recognize my voice, and you look around, but you cannot see me.

I reassure you, “I am at your side, Badou. I will be with you on your life’s journey until the very end, even though you won’t be able to see me.”

Now, at last, you are prepared to speak your mind. “The night you spent in Mbering-Saaj has not been in vain, Nguirane.”

“I was dead beat when I got back home . . .”

“I know. But you learned a lot down there, didn’t you?”

I just about have the strength to snigger. “I would have preferred to remain completely ignorant of Mame Ngor’s pathetic exploits on the battlefield!”

You think I am trying to make fun of you, and you nearly lose your temper with me. “Stop pulling my leg, Nguirane. You may be peacefully asleep down there, but your memory is wide awake. Never in your life have you learned so much about yourself as you did during that night in Mbering-Saaj.”

“I’m not sure I understand what you mean . . .”

“Nguirane, you love talking to me about mirrors all the time. Now it’s my turn to tell you that Mbering-Saaj has held up a mirror to you.”

We continue chatting about Mame Ngor for a little longer, and I say to you, “The grave I searched for in vain in Mbering-Saaj is somewhere else. When you are back in Niarela, I want you to go and find the place where the ancestor was laid to rest. That will be the starting point of our family history.”

This seems to give you a fright. “What you are asking of me is beyond my strength.”

“Don’t get me wrong. Remember that time is circular and the ancestor is not yet born. It’s you yourself who have to give birth to him.”

It is Friday, the day of your father’s funeral.

Large numbers of relatives and friends are flooding in from everywhere, since after the prayer of tisbaar, it will be time to go to the cemetery. Together with some of the other young men from the neighborhood you are busy putting up the big tent right here where I am sitting now. Next, you start arranging the rows of chairs inside. The early afternoon heat is almost unbearable.

Obviously, for me, this is not just a normal day like any other. I have to supervise everything. But in reality I am mainly concerned about Mbissane and his sister Mbissine, the two children Yacine Ndiaye brought back with her from Marseille. They simply don’t fit in with the other children in Niarela. They do everything differently, and I am worried they might misbehave toward the many mourners who will be at the funeral. No matter where they go, I will never let Mbissine and Mbissane out of my sight, ready to intervene the moment they put a foot wrong.

Ngoné Thioune, one of our neighbors, has hobbled over from her place and is shouting at the top of her voice, “Mbissane! Where on earth are you, Mbissane? Come here!”

Someone jokes, “Ah, our two little Toubabs!”

“They can’t be far,” says another, “I saw them around here just a moment ago.”

Ngoné Thioune starts yelling again, “Mbissane! Mbissine!”

The boy comes sauntering round the back of the house and stops dead right in front of Ngoné Thioune. He haughtily looks her up and down and stamps his foot on the ground. With an irritated gesture, he rattles off something very fast in French.

What insolence! Mbissane is in trouble because Ngoné Thioune is not the kind of person who will let a naughty little boy be rude to her without teaching him a lesson. She grabs one of his ears between her index finger and thumb, and, giving him a harsh look, more to scare him than out of anger, she scolds him, “Stop talking to me like that, little brat! If you ever do that again, I will make you pay for it very dearly. And don’t you dare move so much as an inch from here!”

After that, Ngoné Thioune resumes her shouting, “Where is the other one? Mbissine! Where are you, Mbissine?”

Mbissane looks puzzled and tells her something for the second time. Ngoné stops a young man who is walking past. “What did he just say?”

The young man smiles. “I heard it, but he talks too fast, the little chap, I can’t understand a word he’s saying.”

Then he turns to the boy. “Your auntie Ngoné wants you to repeat what you just said!”

“My sister is deaf, so there’s no point in calling her name. This is all just so silly!”

The young man does his best to translate for Ngoné Thioune. “He says that Mbissine is deaf.”

At that point Ngoné called you, Badou Tall, “Go and fetch Mbissane’s little sister for me. I want to talk to both of them.”

You don’t have time to reply to her. Mbissine, who was probably hiding not far from here, is coming up to you.

While I look at her, my mind turns back to her father’s time in Marseille. A whole chapter of Assane Tall’s life, the most important one in fact, will remain a mystery to me forever. Mbissane was born as a result of it, as well as this little eight-year-old girl, Mbissine, for whom her mother—may God forgive me for thinking this!—is an extremely bad role model. That at least is what people are whispering in Niarela. The other thing they say is that Assane Tall’s widow has been slightly unhinged for several years now.

There you are, walking past, just as Imam Keita and I are finalizing some of the details about the funeral. After prayers, the mourners will want to pay Assane their last respects. It’s a delicate situation: we have to avoid letting the ceremony drag on for too long without offending anybody. I see you walking up to your mother, Bigué Samb, and while you are talking to each other I suddenly realize the shocking finality of it all, the fact that it’s all over for Assane and that by the end of the day he will have been laid to rest for all eternity under a few inches of sand.

Now you are standing next to Mbissane. He is telling you something, and I see you nodding your head. A moment later, his sister Mbissine joins you. She, too, is saying something to you and gesticulating vividly with her little hands.

Ngoné Thioune, who is watching the three of you from a distance, rests her chin in her hand and exclaims, “These two little Toubabs! Their presence in Niarela is not a good omen! I, Ngoné Thioune, am telling you right now that this story is bound to end badly!”

“You are not the only one to think that, Ngoné!” echoes another voice.

I can assure you that none of us here in Niarela has ever come across a woman who behaved like Yacine Ndiaye. She spent her entire mourning period crouching on a mat on the floor, with half her face hidden behind a scarf. When members of our family came to pay their respects, she held out her hand to them while keeping her eyes averted, then abruptly pulled it back. Initially, a few of us thought her conduct was due to the depth of her sorrow. But in reality, it was her way of letting us know that she didn’t want anyone to come near her. That, incidentally, was what made people hate her so much, right from the start. And that is also why, without ever mentioning her name, people welcomed every opportunity to denigrate her. “It’s no secret how she was earning her living in Marseille!”

“Uglier than a she-monkey!”

“I am not surprised that she hides her face!”

“A widow who invites a drunkard into her bed! This is unheard of in Niarela!”

I know these last words concern none other than Tamsir Bâ, Yacine Ndiaye’s lover. Never will I forget the day I dared to broach that subject with her. “Tamsir is my cousin,” she replied crisply.

“A cousin who comes and spends the night with you?”

“Yes,” she said, seemingly unfazed, “he comes and keeps me company.”

Yacine Ndiaye didn’t even attempt to tell a decent lie. I could sense that she was furious with me, and I expected her to explode at any moment, shouting, “Stay out of this, Nguirane, this is none of your business!”

So I just said to her, very firmly, “I don’t care whether he’s your cousin or not, but I do not want to see this young man in my house again.”

Despite the fact that no one found out about it, and there was no shouting and screaming or anything like that, what happened next was simply awful.

Without raising her voice, Yacine Ndiaye told me straight to my face, “How dare you speak to me like this, Nguirane Faye, are you trying to give me orders, me, Yacine Ndiaye? Take a look at this . . . Yes, open your eyes wide, Nguirane Faye, and see what I have to show you.”

I looked at her. Nothing could have prepared me for what she had in store for me. She was standing in front of me, with her legs spread apart, and her loincloth open. Her index finger was pointing at her vagina, and in her usual icy, provocative tone of voice, she said, “Can you see this, Nguirane Faye? Can you see it clearly? It’s mine and I offer it to anybody I like.”

That day, my ears heard forbidden words and my eyes saw what they should never have had to see: the courtyard of the house suddenly became pitch-black. I implored God to pardon me, because such things only happen to those who have deeply offended Him in some way. I was convinced my last hour had come.

When I regained consciousness, the whole of Niarela had gathered around me.

“What happened, old Nguirane?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing? Without Dr. Fall, it would have been the end of you. Your screaming terrified us, Nguirane, and now you pretend it was nothing!”

They made me swallow the syrup Dr. Fall had prescribed and kept on asking me questions. I refused to answer them.

This is the very first time I have told this story to anyone. Am I doing this because I have sworn to keep nothing hidden from you? No doubt. But I also have the feeling it is easier to unburden oneself by means of the pen than through the spoken word.

For the family of the deceased, the ceremony at the end of the widow’s mourning period is supposed to be a second time dedicated to prayer and meditation. Yacine Ndiaye turned hers into an occasion for unbridled revelry. You had already left Niarela by then, and so you were spared the spectacle of seeing her friends and relatives invade our neighborhood when they started arriving from I-don’t-know-where. They turned the music right up and danced for three days in a row. In between two songs by the famous Modou Cissé—they could be heard all the way across the entire district, meaning several hundred meters away—the griots gave some of their riotous praise-singing performances in honor of Yacine Ndiaye. Her female friends were tossing banknotes into the air, which the griots snatched up in midair and pinned to their richly embroidered robes.

The inhabitants of Niarela, including me, were all utterly shocked and at a loss as to what should be done. To everyone’s surprise, your aunt Diabou went up to the group of women Yacine Ndiaye was with and scolded the dead Assane Tall in front of everybody present, “Assane Tall, can you hear me? Only God Almighty knows where you are right now! You should know nevertheless it’s your fault that these wretched people have had the insolence to come and disrupt our lives here in Niarela!”

As usual, Yacine Ndiaye pretended she had heard nothing.

I took Diabou aside. “Diabou, if you really feel you have to say this sort of thing, please don’t do it now . . .”

That was exactly what she’d been waiting for to unleash her fury on me. “You, Nguirane Faye, should keep your mouth shut! You will never dare to speak up because you have always relied on your family’s support! It’s an open secret—we all know about it! What’s going on in this house isn’t normal, and someone has to speak up. Wherever you are, Assane Tall, I want you to be aware that you are to blame for everything that’s happening here today! What have you made of your life, Assane Tall? You went to Marseille because you wanted to have fun, and every time we invited you to come back home, your reply was: ‘Just let me be—I am a man who is hard at work. I am busy piling up the money I want to bring back to Senegal!’ Well, Assane, the fruits of your labors are right here in front of our eyes: two kids about whom nobody can say whether they are fish or fowl, not to mention all your other little bastards that we haven’t seen yet! But what bothers me most of all is this, Assane: you have your peace and quiet now, wherever you are, having had a ball in Marseille, while we have to put up with all the suffering and humiliation that’s the result!”

Somebody said to her, “What on earth are you thinking, Diabou? Didn’t Nguirane Faye make it clear to you that this is the wrong time to say these things? Surely it’s not your responsibility to lecture people who think it’s better to throw parties than to glorify God through songs and prayers for Assane. We will each one of us have to justify our actions on Judgment Day.”

I took Diabou’s hand again and said very quietly, “Diabou . . .”

She looked at me as though she’d never seen me before; then she burst into tears and apologized, “Excuse me, Nguirane, I shouldn’t have talked like that.”

“It’s all right, I know how you must feel, but please get a grip.”

At that moment, Ngoné Thioune came to tell me there was a problem with your mother, Bigué Samb, “What do you mean, Ngoné? “

“Follow me, Nguirane,” she kept repeating urgently, while pulling me by the hand.

One of the local Niarela women sitting in the tent saw us walking past. Pressing her hands against her temples in despair, she shouted, “Out of the whole lot of us, you, Bigué Samb, are the best! If any of us women are your enemies, they have good reason to be afraid! The punishment God has in store for them will be terrible!”

When I got to Bigué, she was rolling around on the floor like a woman possessed. She had ripped her clothes to shreds and covered herself with sand, and she kept on clawing and scraping her face and her flanks with her fingernails. Several sturdy young men were doing their best trying to subdue her.

I bent down to her: “Do you have any faith in divine justice, Bigué? If you do, you have no right to behave like this.”

All she could muster was a pathetic little whimper. She was in such a state that there was no way she could have replied to me.

To see her in this near-demented condition took me straight back to the past. What a contrast between this scene and the one of her bidding farewell to Assane at the airport all those years ago. The occasion was simultaneously heartbreaking and endowed with all the hopes of two young people on the threshold of life. The harsh truth is, though, that we are nothing but paltry playthings in the hands of destiny—it could drive you insane when you stop and think about it. Yes, Bigué Samb and Assane Tall, there’s a tale to keep you awake at night! Just think, it is your very own father and mother we are talking about. I am not planning to tell you everything I know about this story—not even in The Book of Secrets—and I suppose you don’t want to know it all, anyway. They started making an exhibition of themselves when they were both still extremely young. We found it touching and amusing back then to see them so glued to each other all the time, in such a hurry to live out their precocious passion so fully. More than once, Assane let himself get beaten up by young fellows who were stronger than him, just to protect Bigué. Then he left for Marseille, and after a while, their love began to cool down more and more. During the first few months, Assane wrote long love letters to Bigué. In these letters, he gave her pretty little names like “Flame of My Heart” and such like, which were probably not of his own invention, but pinched from books, and she, who had barely been to school, proudly repeated them back to everyone. The letters either contained detailed descriptions of Assane’s daily life over there, or he would tell her about his extended late-night strolls in the Vieux-Port area, always with the same group of friends.

From time to time, he would send her cuttings from the local newspapers referring to him, Assane, as one of the greatest soccer players the local team had ever known. The two lovers had plans, of course. Assane said he was looking for a house so that you and your mother could join him in France. Bigué’s female friends had started working on the wedding preparations, when, quite suddenly, the letters became less frequent. After a few months, Bigué no longer dared put the question to the postman on his daily rounds in Niarela. That’s when we all noticed her growing hatred for Assane, a hatred no human language can possibly convey. We were dumbfounded, but what were we to do?

All that resurfaced in my memory while the others were splashing cold water over Bigué Samb to revive her.

Someone turned up the sound and “Mbëggeel,” one of Modou Cissé’s most famous songs literally exploded in the air. First separately, and then all together, Yacine Ndiaye and her female friends started dancing in the alleyway, rapturously clapping their hands and tapping their feet.

Never have I felt such a profound aversion for Modou Cissé’s music—or perhaps for just any music whatsoever—as I did on that day.

Living under the same roof with Yacine Ndiaye certainly isn’t easy.

Yesterday, while I was performing my prayers, little Mbissane came and peed right in front of me, nearly wetting my carpet. I call him little, but a ten-year-old is really no longer a child. When I told him that it’s not nice to do that, he stuck his tongue out at me. I then asked Arame, Yacine Ndiaye’s maid, to inform her mistress about the incident. Her response was that I should come and see her if I needed her. Well, I don’t consider it appropriate at my age to add fuel to the fire, so I went to see Yacine Ndiaye and said very calmly, “Yacine, you are letting my grandchildren run wild, it seems to me . . .”

“What have they done?”

When she asked this question, her tone of voice was so belligerent that I almost wanted to leave it at that.

“Whenever he sees me praying, Mbissane comes and either throws stones at me or he pees on my carpet,” I replied.

“That’s not a nice thing to do, but don’t you know that all children behave like that? And now would you excuse me please, old Nguirane. I am busy. If you insist on discussing these things further, I can send for you later on.”

That was simply too much for me and I totally lost my self-control. “So my coming to see you in person still isn’t enough, Yacine? Are you going to go so far as to kick me out of this apartment?” I asked her.

Her response was to curl up her lips in disdain. I was beside myself by now and I screamed, “Since you seem incapable of teaching your children manners, I will take care of that from now on.”

Without warning, Yacine Ndiaye leapt to her feet and stood in the middle of the room: “The day your hand touches Mbissine or Mbissane, I will have you arrested!”

I very nearly slapped her face, but held back just in time, worried that this might stir up the whole of Niarela. Since the entire neighborhood was waiting for a chance to teach her a lesson, I imagined all the young men would immediately come running and possibly flog her to death.

So I tried to reason with her. “Don’t you think, Yacine Ndiaye, that we should make an effort to live in peace in this small house? After all, Assane—”

She interrupted me before I could finish my sentence. “Do you have to talk about Assane Tall all the time? For me, that chapter is finished!” This was the first time since all this trouble started that I had heard her attacking Assane directly.

“What reproaches do you have against my son?” I wanted to know.

“That’s completely beside the point. It is my life we are talking about here, and let me tell you something else, old Nguirane: if you don’t stop bothering me, I am going to kick you out of this very house!”

“You’re going to kick me, Nguirane Faye, out of this house? Is that what I have just heard you say or did I get you wrong?”

“That’s precisely what I said.”

At that point I finally understood that very serious things were happening here that had previously escaped my notice. I wanted to give myself time to put my ideas in order and started walking toward the door with the words: “All right then, Yacine.”

As I was leaving Yacine Ndiaye’s apartment, I bumped head-on into Tamsir Bâ, her supposed cousin. When I looked at his hair and intensely bloodshot eyes, I thought to myself: “This young fellow must be ill. No one in good health can possibly have such a bizarre hair and eye color.” He looked like a real monster.