NOTEBOOK 3

PLAYING IN THE DARK

“WHERE ARE YOU, BADOU? I HAVE BEEN SEARCHING EVERYWHERE FOR YOU.”

“Here I am, Nguirane.”

“It’s time for our three little glasses of mint tea.”

“Let me prepare it.”

“What! . . . You, Badou, making tea? Wouldn’t it be better if you left that to young Birame Sène . . . ?”

“I just bumped into Birame Sène under the arcades, not far from the Calypso night club. He was on his way to the stadium; you know as well as I do that he never misses a match when Niarela is playing.”

“You’re right . . . Does that really mean you, Badou . . . are going to make our àttaaya? I don’t want to upset you, but . . .”

“Tonight, Nguirane, I am going to serve you the most delicious mint tea you have ever tasted!”

“Let’s see about that. But tell me, Badou . . . ?”

“Yes.”

“Do you actually listen to the stories I tell you?”

“Do not doubt that for a single second, Nguirane.”

“All right then, the time has come for me to entertain you with my most enigmatic stories.”

“I see shadows fluttering around you.”

“From so far away?”

“Yes indeed, Nguirane.”

“Of course, Badou. I have no reason to doubt you . . .”

The narrow, winding path in the middle of the forest seems to go on forever and ever. It is pitch-dark. My eyes are glued to the tiny strip of yellow earth that I can make out in the darkness. It resembles a feeble ray of light. I must not stray from it, for if I do, I’m lost.

After all, this is the only way I can get to you.

The twittering of the birds in the treetops has suddenly stopped.

Thousands of wild animals are following closely in my tracks on velvet paws; it’s so quiet you would think they’re holding their breath. Now and again, I see their eyes glimmering through the undergrowth and the tall grass.

The young panther is getting impatient and says in a low voice, “He’s quite reckless, that one. What are we waiting for then, why aren’t we leaping at his throat?”

His mother admonishes him gently: “Beware of the Son of Man, my child. What a strange creature he is: he walks on only two paws and never stops devising new ways to hunt us down. This solitary walker may be intent on setting us a trap. Man is a creature that loves to kill. We don’t know why, nor does he himself.”

And now, Badou, here I am by your side, safe and sound.

We are sitting on a mat in the middle of the courtyard, talking about everything and nothing and enjoying our cere baasi. Try as you like to hide it from me, I can sense that your nerves are on edge. We are sipping our mint tea in silence, and I want to test your self-restraint. The suspense is getting too much for you, you are on tenterhooks, and yet, you are too proud to go down on your knees, begging me to talk.

You know that I am doing all this mainly to keep myself amused—but seeing you, who are normally so calm and laid back, in this state of inner turmoil, moves me greatly.

After the third glass you finally can’t take it anymore, and you plead with me to tell you everything I know. I must confess—not entirely without a certain sense of glee—that in reality, I neither saw nor heard a single thing when I was trudging all alone through the heart of the forest. Your answer comes like a shot, with such determination that I am quite taken aback: “That doesn’t matter. Tell me anyhow.”

“Tell you what, Badou?”

“All the things you have neither seen nor heard in that place. And, Nguirane, if the words weigh too heavily on your tongue, give them wings, turn them into birds like the ones that glide through the air.”

Hearing you talk like that, I nod my head, with a smile in my heart. Now I know you are no longer a child.

The mirror covers the entire surface of the wall.

It’s the biggest mirror the man has ever seen in his life. Instead of his own image, it throws back at him an entangled mass of bodies, twisted and intertwined like the gnarled branches of a baobab. The figures are warped, their faces hideously blurred, grimacing, and seemingly attached to the wrong bodies. They strike him as familiar and strange at the same time. He can’t be sure, of course, but the one with the grey hair and thick glasses at the very bottom of the picture could quite easily be him. Next, he notices an old woman sitting on the doorstep of one of the houses in the HLM district. She looks serious, preoccupied, with her eyes glued to the layu of rice she is holding in her lap. Painstakingly, she is picking bits of dirt out of it—tiny little black things—that get tossed into an iron pot. And yes, this time there can be no doubt, it’s the Mother. Mother Soukeyna Sall. But Mirror, why can’t you leave her in peace down there? Does your heartlessness really have to go that far? And over there, a few years earlier, one of the streets in the Medina. Number 5, I think it says, where it intersects with one of the big avenues. The sky is still overcast after the thunderstorm the night before, and rainwater has formed small puddles that come right up to the bottom of the rickety shacks. Buuba Këriñ, the charcoal seller with that shady, vacant look in his eyes is busy covering up his merchandise with a large sheet of thick, blue plastic. How strange, he should have done that before it started raining, it’s quite useless now. He remembers how they used to steal charcoal from Buuba Këriñ when they wanted to roast cashew nuts or make tea. His whole childhood comes alive right here, in this little street. Every time the weather was cloudy like today, they brought out their rubber soccer ball and laid out two opposing sides between the ramshackle houses. There was left-handed Babacar Mbow, who later became known as the giant of Ndem-Maïssa, and also his cousin, the tall, slender Alassane Niang, alias Joe, who died in some dormitory town in a foreign country—God rest his soul! And let’s not forget the two boys from the Bèye family, Assane Preira and Ben Diogaye . . . Suddenly he can see them all, right there, flat against the wall! His heart is pounding. All this has stirred up his memory so much that he has become very agitated and starts cursing the mirror for bringing the dead and the adolescent back to life so quickly. Slow down Mirror, not so fast!

On hearing his lamentations, the mirror cannot hide its irritation. “He who can satisfy you has yet to be born, Sons of the Earth! You can cope with almost anything except the solitude of the grave, and nothing in the world terrifies you as much as death. So why are you complaining about these flashes of eternity I am offering you? I have unraveled time in the opposite direction and turned you into the cherished child again, frolicking and gamboling about on the banks of this majestic river, shouting for joy in the rain. Now do tell me please—what more do you want to make you happy? I advise you to take heed and not to provoke my displeasure! If I shatter into a million pieces, you won’t just be plunged into death and desolation, but into something infinitely worse: nothingness and everlasting silence. Surely that’s not what you want?”

This fills him with fright: “No, I don’t want that. I want to dream. Please let me visit the place where time can neither go forward nor back!”

“Badou, tonight we will set off in search of Mame Ngor.”

“Mame Ngor? That name means nothing to me, Nguirane . . .”

“Mame Ngor is the founder of our lineage.”

Sitting under the mango tree in the middle of the courtyard, opposite the zinc entrance gate, I contemplate the first rays of the rising sun on the horizon. Niarela is still fast asleep, and I am counting my prayer beads. Every now and again, the silence is broken by the raucous cry of a bird. It’s our neighbors’ parrot, telling us noisily how much he detests the bars of his cage.

I empathize with him, since I am not at peace either. It’s a mystery to me why it is almost always around this time of day that my mind takes great leaps into the past, reviving long forgotten memories or images of my nearest and dearest. Whenever Ndambaw, your grandmother, comes back to me like that, my heart feels heavy and I say a silent prayer for her. Yes, Ndambaw, that good woman, she wasn’t only my wife but also my best friend.

I hear a sound on my left. Someone is turning a key. The door leading to Yacine’s living quarters opens and she appears, accompanied by a man. It’s always the same one, a certain Tamsir Bâ. Since the day he was introduced to me under that name, he has barely spoken to me again.

He frequently spends the night with Yacine Ndiaye, who is supposed to be mourning Assane Tall’s death. The whole of Niarela knows he is her lover. They walk straight past me. Perhaps they think I am still in bed.

In his sermon, Imam Keita launches a blistering attack against moral depravity, reminding us of the dreadful punishments set aside for widows who misbehave during their mourning period. Although he doesn’t name names, it’s not difficult to guess who he is targeting this morning.

After prayers, I go to exchange greetings with my neighbors. I enter each one of the houses, and everywhere I repeat the same question: “Did you spend the night in peace?”

Everywhere, without exception, the answer is yes, and then I am asked: “And you, Nguirane, did you spend the night in peace?”

This has been the start to my days in Niarela for almost forty years.

Afterward, I go back home and sit down under my mango tree.

Soon it will be seven o’clock in the morning, and the house is waking up. Every sound, every movement is intimately familiar to me. I see the faces without really having to look at them, and I am only half-conscious of the voices I hear. Thioro Thiam, always in the same old wrapper with its pattern of red-and-black butterflies, tied above her breasts, is crouching in front of the stove. She is one of my tenants, and at the same time every day, in that same corner of the courtyard, just beneath her window, she cooks millet porridge for her husband Lamine’s breakfast. Lamine, meanwhile, is listening to the daily news in his bedroom. He is a factory worker with a keen interest in politics, and morning after morning the voices of the country’s top young journalists can be heard coming from his radio. The fast-paced, staccato speech of these reporters often makes me think there must have been some dreadful disaster during the night, something like the sinking of the Joola, for example, or an attempt on President Daour Diagne’s life.

The taxi that arrives every morning to pick up my neighbor Oulimata Mané’s children, Gnima and Daouda, has just stopped outside the front gate, hooting twice. Before leaving for school, all neatly dressed and kitted out, they both come to greet me, and little Gnima makes a respectful curtsy. To tease her a bit, I say, “What a scatterbrain you are, my darling spouse! You mustn’t go to the market again without first asking me to give you today’s spending money. Look, here you are.” What an astonishingly precocious young lady she is, Gnima! She bursts into laughter, takes the twenty-five franc coin I am holding out to her, and says with her high-pitched little voice: “Don’t worry, my dear husband, tonight I am going to prepare the most delicious daxin with mutton tripe for you that you have ever tasted in your life!”

As soon as the two children have left, Lamine emerges from his room and walks up to me. It’s obvious the day has got off to a bad start for him. Try as he might to hide his anger, he cannot control the shakiness in his voice when he says to me, “Old Nguirane, excuse my choice of words, but our politicians are no better than a pack of rabid dogs! They loot our country, and once they’ve ruined it, they go and live a life of luxury on the Côte d’Azur or some similar place. This is simply not acceptable! If they think we are no better than a herd of cattle they can lead to slaughter, they are mistaken!”

As I listen to him, I say to myself that if there has ever been a day in Lamine’s life when he has truly wanted to wring someone’s neck, it must be today, on this Friday morning. It’s always the same story: a group of youngsters in their prime hear a report on the radio that makes them cross, and at the first opportunity, they smash everything to pieces. In the heat of the moment, it happens that they even cause bloodshed. But what exactly put Lamine into such a state? He is so furious, he forgets to tell me.

I could have asked him, but I am lost in old memories. Lamine reminds me of my own youth. Mind you, I had a lot more fire in my belly than he does. In my folly, I was convinced that “to die for the Cause” was the most desirable thing that could possibly happen to me. Unfortunately, I was just an ordinary unskilled worker and unaware of the fact that I was dealing with devious politicians. True cynics, they were. For intellectuals like them, the Revolution and all the rest of it was nothing but a big joke. They could see I took it all very seriously, and they used me. Today I feel embarrassed when I remember how naive I was in those days. I am often tempted to ask Lamine to take things a bit more lightly. The day is not far off when he will discover the bitter truth, but by then it’ll be too late. He can’t see through those villains who’s strategy it is to make him do all the hard work while they go on feathering their nests, leaving him stuck in this miserable hovel for the rest of his life, waiting for Thioro Thiam to bring him his bowl of early morning fonde. If I tell him that, he’ll just laugh at me. He will say: “Here goes another one of these old fuddy-duddies who doesn’t understand that times have changed!” No Lamine, times never change. There he is, walking away with his swaying sailor’s gait, his blue overalls under his arm. He gets as far as the front door, but then turns round and comes back again. I ask him if he has forgotten something.

“No,” he says.

I see him hesitate. Lamine is visibly perturbed, and that worries me. I can tell this has nothing to do with politics.

I repeat my question: “What’s the matter with you, Lamine?”

That’s when he starts talking to me about you, Badou: “Last night, I saw Badou Tall in my dream, old Nguirane. I don’t remember what we said to each other . . . That’s all . . . I just wanted you to know that . . . After the prayer of tisbaar, it would perhaps be a good idea if you call in the children from the neighborhood to give them alms, biscuits, sweets or some rice cakes. It will be good for Badou.”

“I will do it, Lamine.”

Lamine has suddenly become very emotional. It may be because of his dream or simply because we have just mentioned your name for the first time since you left Niarela. Emphatically, he declares, “Old Nguirane, I never met a better fellow than Badou Tall in my entire life. No matter where he is on this earth, God will watch over him, don’t ever doubt that.”

At that point I tell Lamine I am practically certain I won’t see you again and that the mere thought of it makes me very sad at times.

He shoots back, “Don’t mention bad luck, please, old Nguirane!”

Just after you left, the whole of Niarela kept asking: “Badou Tall—where can he possibly be?” But that doesn’t prevent Lamine from asking me the same question all over again: “Can it be true that even you, old Nguirane, aren’t sure of Badou’s whereabouts?”

Clearly, Lamine wasn’t entirely convinced. It was as though he was saying to me: “You can hide the truth from the rest of the people here in Niarela, old Nguirane, but I live next door to you, almost like your own son, so why aren’t you telling me where he is?” Lamine was not the only person to think like that in Niarela. I heard him muttering to himself that I wasn’t telling him the truth. So I had to swear yet again he was wrong, and that I was expecting a letter from you any day.

Lamine seemed to believe me, and suddenly he was lost in his thoughts, slowly shaking his head. “If you, old Nguirane, don’t know where Badou is right now, then who can? You were everything to him.”

“Badou was everything to me, too,” I said.

Then Lamine left, and all was quiet again in the courtyard.

As sometimes happens, inexplicably, I felt I was being watched. For several minutes already, there was this strong physical sensation somewhere in the nape of my neck. When I looked up, there was a cat sitting on top of the wall that surrounds the compound. We looked at each other. The glint in its eyes suddenly made everything seem unreal and vaguely unsettling. Without taking its gaze off me, the cat meowed, first once, and then again, before taking a supple leap and vanishing into the neighboring courtyard.

I never saw the animal again. And yet, not a single day has passed since then without my thinking about it. And when I do, I get the strangely uncomfortable feeling that it wanted to settle some old score with me.

Slowly but surely—and that’s what I find so surprising—it made me ask myself questions I had never asked before.

Your name is Nguirane Faye. But who are you really, you, the man by the name Nguirane Faye? Don’t you think that by now, close to the end of your life, you should at least be able to state clearly who you are?

Suddenly and for no obvious reason, I remembered the night you fell ill. It was an acute attack of cerebral malaria at two or three o’clock in the morning. Not a single bus or taxi in sight at that hour. Your mother, Bigué Samb, did not hesitate for a second. She tied you to her back, and the three of us set off across the deserted city.

When we got to the main city hospital, the doctor on duty examined you. He sounded terribly aloof when he said, “If you hadn’t brought this boy now, he would have been dead by sunrise.”

Another meow.

I turned round and looked at the wall again, but the cat was gone. Where could it possibly be?

As quick as a flash, I see myself bending over the lake. The water is clear, the surface perfectly smooth.

You call yourself Nguirane Faye, but who are you?

My alter ego seems amused by my bewilderment, but I am keen to take up the challenge. I want him to realize that he has no right to taunt me, and that I actually do know a thing or two about myself. Less than a year after I was born, my mother Khemes Sène fled from Mbering-Saaj in the Sine Delta, and somehow we ended up here in Niarela. And now I am in my eighties. My skin is on the light side, I am quite tall, and despite my age, I still manage to hold myself upright. What else? My father’s name was Dibocor Faye. Yes, all these small, seemingly insignificant details make up a human life, and they have helped me find my bearings here on earth. It would definitely be wrong to accuse me of just standing by passively in the face of injustice. During my time as an employee at the Air Liquide factory, I led some very tough strikes there. Although I was tortured and imprisoned more than once, I always came out more determined than before to fight for my ideas and make them prevail in the end. I belonged to a group of patriots actively opposed to the submission of our country to foreign rule. I even went to Accra with my comrades, where President Kwame Nkrumah gave us a handsome sum of money and promised us guns.

I am saying all this in the full knowledge that it’s not the correct answer to such a seemingly straightforward question: Your name is Nguirane Faye, but who are you? After so many lost battles and faded hopes, here I am now, at the mercy of the passage of time, like a hollow gourd swept away by the waves. You will understand when you read my Notebooks that mine was not what one would call a happy and fulfilling life. I have spent years literally just staggering around in the dark. No doubt it would have been better if I had steered clear of all those dreams and grandiose ideas. To spell out the brutal truth: my social status is nil, and not a single soul remembers me now. One day passes, then another and another. Each comes with its tribulations and its little sorrows. If we put them all in a row, one sunrise after another, that, apparently, is what we call time. Or a human life. Is it really that simple? No matter—each passing day brings us a bit closer to the one that blots out all the others under a thin layer of sand.

I may be talking to you about this only tonight, but I remember very clearly the first time I had this feeling of having been born in vain. The cat with eyes like glowing embers turned everything upside down for me.

On that day, I thought, “The God who made this and every other universe created us all, my name is Nguirane Faye and I am a descendant of Mame Ngor Faye. And yet, how can I claim to know myself if I don’t even know who my ancestor’s father and mother were? How many thousands of years ago did I set off on this journey that has taken me, Nguirane Faye and none other, all the way to the tree under which I am now sitting, in the courtyard of this house in Niarela, right here, and nowhere else in the world?”

You may well think all this is strange, Badou. And yet, sooner or later, every single one of us must set off and revisit his most distant past, asking himself when this whole story really started for him, and by that I mean his life among the rest of humanity. To accept that we don’t know anything about all these things is like resigning ourselves to dying before we have even been born. But he who is courageous enough to travel back in time will eventually find who he was looking for: his deceased ancestors. Day and night, he’ll have to listen to their pathetic weeping and wailing. He will hear the dead imploring God to take them back to their loved-ones because they are sick and tired of being shut up in their graves. As for you, Badou, never forget, please, that the present lives in the heart of the past. If you don’t want time to run away from you again, be sure to catch them both in the palm of your hand and remember to close your fingers very tightly around them.

The sudden appearance of this cat, its meowing, and the vague sense of anxiety this kind of animal tends to inspire at times, all that has been troubling me for several days now.

It’s as though a voice kept on saying to me, “Get up, Nguirane, go and say at least one prayer at Mame Ngor Faye’s grave. There are still a few people left in Mbering-Saaj who remember the ancestor and who can tell you about him. Don’t you want to know who you are and where you originally came from?”

And so it was, Badou, that I closed my bedroom door behind me one morning and set off to the Colobane bus station. Our Toyota minibus drove out of Dakar, past Rufisque and Bargny, and after the exit at Diamniado we continued straight down toward the Sine Delta. That’s when scenes of my childhood started coming back to me. In my mind’s eye, I saw a group of men sitting on the ground in a big inner courtyard covered with fine, yellow sand. Where was that? I can’t remember. All I can say is that it was quite far away from Mbering-Saaj. About a dozen villagers were sitting in a circle, and there was one particular name that they repeated again and again. The way they spoke about Mame Ngor Faye, the ancestor who came from a small town in the Sine Delta, was imbued with respect and even, it seems to me, a certain amount of fear. His name fascinated me, and I wanted to ask all sorts of questions about him. But I was only a child and afraid that all I would get for an answer was a slap in the face. I imagined the adults putting me in my place with indignant remarks like “Who gave you permission to meddle in the affairs of the grown-ups?”

“This is simply unheard of!”

“One must wonder what the world is coming to, really!”

“Leave me in peace, cheeky little brat!”

All this seems to have happened in another lifetime, Badou. But time itself has never slowed down its pace and a few years later, having become a grown up myself, I took a wife and came back to live right here in Niarela with my family. And to this day, the name Mame Ngor Faye has never stopped going round and round in my head. I may never have met him, but that doesn’t stop this ancestor from following me virtually everywhere. His soothing shadow is by my side night and day. He has been waiting patiently for centuries. And, you know, Badou, I sometimes tease him a bit. Then he rises up from the dead, pulls himself up to his full height and says to me, “Let those people talk, Nguirane. Just be aware that every single word that comes out of their mouth is a lie. The truth is this: if I am your ancestor, it is because you yourself have given birth to me.”

With longing I look up at the stars, hoping they will send me a sign, but the stars are mute. Only the wind—yes, the wind still carries Mame Ngor Faye’s breath.

Badou Tall, don’t you want to know what the grown-ups in the sandy courtyard were talking about? Ask me, and I, Nguirane Faye, will tell you.

“I am asking you, Nguirane.”

All right then, listen.

One of them started singing the praises of the ancestor’s vast erudition and soon the others joined in in unison: “Even the royal families entrusted their children to him.”

“No matter whether you were the child of a king or a pauper, he treated everyone the same. He was a righteous man, and princes with all their haughtiness didn’t impress him.”

“All right, I grant you that, but what about that terribly short temper of his?”

“Yes, his fits of rage were notorious!”

“He made you shake like a leaf in his presence.”

“We can all pretend to have forgotten his outbursts, except you, Malick!”

When Malick heard his name, he looked up. With a nervous flicker of a smile, he agreed. “It’s true, he never forgave me a single mistake. I remember the day when he chained me to a wooden post inside his sheep enclosure, where I was forced to spend the night sleeping with the animals. The following morning, at the crack of dawn, I got woken up with bowls of ice cold water and his lashes left me bruised and bleeding!”

Toward the end of his life, Mame Ngor Faye moved from there to Rufisque, where he settled down and married Bintou Diarra. But since they were both already quite old, the marriage was a sham. And now, Badou, just to tease me, you probably want to ask, “And the ancestress? What did they say about her?” Well, as odd as that may seem to you, nobody has ever mentioned her in my presence. So about the woman who gave birth to my father’s father, I know nothing, not even her name.

You wanted to know what people were saying about Mame Ngor Faye. I have faithfully told you all I can remember. If I add a single word to this, it will be pure invention. Oh well, why shouldn’t one invent a few things every now and again? Surely it’s better to do that than to leave the portrait unfinished. Mame Ngor Faye was very dark skinned and a man of enormous physical strength. He was also extremely tall, almost a colossus. And, based on numerous eyewitness reports, I think I can state with confidence that he was an irascible figure whose murky eyes struck fear in people’s minds. I always picture him crouching on a sheep skin with a cluster of young disciples at his feet; spellbound by the depth of his knowledge of the Divine, they are listening to his teachings of the One and Only.

How long ago was it when all of this happened? Just look at my white hair and my wrinkled skin and you will know that if it wasn’t two whole centuries ago, it can’t have been far off.

Mbering-Saaj is a small town about two hundred kilometers east of our capital. I got there in late morning. I climbed out of the Toyota minibus and wandered around for a long time without encountering a single living soul. In the past, a newcomer arriving in a place as deserted as Mbering-Saaj on that morning would have known instantly that everyone had gone to work in the fields. But times have changed and I was deeply perplexed by the dead silence in this town, which, at so early an hour, was already stifled by the heat of the sun. I continued walking haphazardly up and down the bumpy streets, hoping I might meet someone I could talk to. The few houses that weren’t locked up seemed uninhabited.

Eventually I noticed a man all by himself, who was leaning against the bamboo fence of one of the homesteads.

I went up to him. We exchanged greetings, and he didn’t take his eyes off me. He was probably asking himself, Who is this stranger? What is he doing in our town? I wanted to reply to his unspoken questions, but could I tell the very first person I came across why I had decided to go on such a long journey? It would have been a bit difficult to say to him, just like that, I heard a cat meowing in Niarela very early one morning, and so I came here to find out more about the ancestor.

Surely he would have thought I was mad. But this also I have to say, Badou: that fellow leaning against the fence didn’t strike me as completely normal. His skin was covered in a rash that must have been terribly itchy. He kept scratching himself while simultaneously making soft little clucking noises, and all this was punctuated by a lot of twitching and grimacing that distorted his face horribly.

This is how I introduced myself to him: “My name is Nguirane Faye. Nobody knows me around here, but Mbering-Saaj is my home, since this is where I was born. You and I must be related, because my father Dibocor Faye was Mame Ngor Faye’s grandson.”

He looked up. “Did you say Mame Ngor Faye, stranger?”

As I had secretly anticipated, his facial expression changed.

Full of hope, I replied, “Yes, they called him Mame Ngor, but his real name was Birane Faye.”

The man frowned and shook his head slowly and absentmindedly. “And you, stranger, you are trying to tell me you are his son?”

“No, that’s not what I said. I said I am his great-grandson!”

“How can it be that you are the grandson of Mame Ngor Faye?”

“You’re not listening to me! I am not his grandson, but his great-grandson!”

“Oh well, that’s the first time I hear that Mame Ngor Faye was anybody’s father or grandfather. Since when have you been his son, stranger?”

The fellow was obviously pulling my leg. I was fast losing my temper and replied sharply, “You seem to be playing the fool, my friend. What I told you is perfectly clear.”

It was as though he had been waiting for his chance to fight this out with me. Having spat a large glob of phlegm directly at my feet, he took a few steps toward me, shaking with rage. His eyes were bulging, and his yelling must have boomed right across town, “Do you know who you are talking to, stranger? Oh, to Hell with it! Just like everyone else, you obviously think I’m crazy!”

Hearing this convinced me that the man must be deranged, and I started backing off to get away from him.

You remember Wolof Njaay’s words, don’t you, Badou: If you want to embark on a boat to get to the other side of the river and the man at the helm is not quite in control of his senses, stay on the bank and let him leave without you.

To be on the safe side, I was trying to get out of his way when a voice coming from behind said very quietly, “Stay calm, stranger, and don’t, whatever you do, attempt to run away from him, because he would catch up with you in a flash and wring your neck as if you were a chicken. Just take a look at him, this fellow has superhuman strength.”

I turned round and saw a very old man, much older than myself. With his pipe in his mouth, he gazed at me for a long time. His face had a mischievous expression and in a conniving tone of voice, he said, “My ears managed to steal a few patches of your conversation, stranger.”

Unsure of myself, I replied, “Why did he want to attack me? I assure you, I have come here with the best intentions in the world.”

The old man smiled at me, and the skin around his little eyes became even more creased than before.

He said, “I remember the name of a certain Birane Faye from my childhood. He died in Rufisque. It’s him you are looking for, right?”

“Yes. Most people knew him by the name of Mame Ngor.”

“In that case, we are talking about the same person.” After a brief silence, he said, still looking at me, “And now stranger, I want you to explain to me in your own words why you have come all the way to Mbering-Saaj.”

“I am here to visit my ancestor’s grave and say a prayer for him.”

“Say a prayer for Mame Ngor . . . that’s certainly the first time I have heard such a thing. Here in Mbering-Saaj, nobody remembers ever having seen a relative of Mame Ngor Faye coming from far away to visit his grave.”

His voice, which suddenly sounded hoarse and tense, intrigued me. Was he accusing me of having abandoned my ancestor, or did he mean the ancestor did not actually deserve a visitor to come and pray for him?

I felt slightly lost, but on the spur of the moment, I said: “For me, there is nothing strange about the fact that I haven’t visited the ancestor before now. I live in Milan, and this is the first time in years I’m back in Senegal.”

His response was scornful and sarcastic: “So you live in Milan, do you?”

“Yes. And there . . .”

The old man cut me short with two words, which he pronounced slowly, one after the other: “You lie.” He sounded cold and heartless.

He paused, and then he said, “Nguirane Faye, you are lying. You don’t even know where the city you are talking about is. Furthermore, I want to inform you that I know you much better than you know yourself. I can tell you the exact place from where you left the capital early this morning to travel to Mbering-Saaj. Without moving from this spot, I have watched you climb into a minibus at the bus station in Colobane. You took a seat at the back and handed the conductor a ten thousand CFA franc note. I heard you say you wanted to go to Mbering-Saaj. And you should also know that if it had pleased me, that Toyota would have rolled over going round the first bend, and you would never have made it as far as Mbering-Saaj. For someone like me it’s really nothing to make their damned minibuses topple over on the road. I’ve caused the bodies of dozens of passengers to be crushed and scattered across the ravines more than once before. When you got here, you wandered around aimlessly for a long time, without encountering a single living soul in this town. And yet, from the moment you arrived in Mbering-Saaj, hundreds of pairs of eyes followed your every move. Yes, with great amazement, we all watched you as you were gingerly putting first one foot down on the soil of Mbering-Saaj, and then the other. You couldn’t see any of us, but we were all able to see you. Wherever you went, you were being watched, and people were saying to each other under their breath, ‘Indeed it looks as though this stranger is a genuine descendant of Mame Ngor Faye. What is he doing here? How can it be that this man has the audacity to come from so far away to challenge us?’ That’s the truth, Nguirane. And if you dare tell me any more lies about the city of Milan, that’ll be the end of you.”

I wanted to reply to that, but the words, like tiny bubbles of air, simply burst at the back of my throat and died there. So I decided to observe him all the more carefully. I was almost disappointed in the end that I couldn’t discover anything unusual about him. He looked like skin and bones in his grey sabadoor. His white slippers were covered in a layer of dust, and there was nothing special about the tengaade planted on his head. That was the kind of headgear worn by peasants for protection against the sun since time immemorial. The old man seemed normal in every way, and that may have been the very reason his words were so disturbing to me.

At any rate, nothing was going according to plan, and I was beginning to think of this trip to Mbering-Saaj as pointless and downright dangerous.

The old fellow started talking again, in an icy, supercilious manner, and without taking his eyes off me: “I have called you a liar, Nguirane. How do you react to that?”

All I was able to muster was a pathetic mumble: “I implore you to be lenient with me. It’s all I can do.”

“Lenience or pity is not what this is all about. I want to know the truth, and nothing but the truth. Why have you come here, and what are you doing here among us? You don’t seem to realize that this is a matter of life and death.”

A matter of life and death . . .

My heart was pounding: yes, I had got myself into a fine mess. I couldn’t help thinking of my early morning encounter with that cat in Niarela. I actually thought I could hear it meowing again. The old man kept looking at me intently, while thoughtfully sucking his pipe. What was I going to tell him? There are words that no Son of the Earth can utter without coming across as mentally deranged.

I thought, “I can never, ever, let him know that this whole story started with a meowing cat in Niarela and that it was that very cat whose meowing brought me here to Mbering-Saaj because I want to find out who I really am, and from which corner of His heaven God has plunged me, Nguirane Faye, into the maelstrom of time and the chaos that makes up this world. I am sure that if I tell him such utter nonsense, he will think I’m teasing him, and that could be very bad for me.”

To change the subject, I asked him, “And you, who are you, then, old man? What is your name?”

“Nguirane, this is the beginning of the end,” he said, after eyeing me disdainfully for several seconds. “Here in Mbering-Saaj even those who never set eyes on your ancestor know how much damage he did to us. I want you to be very clear about this: for us, Mame Ngor Faye was the worst of men.”

These words struck me as so outrageous that I instantly forgot about my fear. “My friend, I was just asking for your name, and instead of answering me, you heap insults on my family . . .”

He looked me up and down again and said sharply, “I am going to repeat once more what I have just told you: Mame Ngor Faye, your ancestor, was the worst of men.”

“What did you just say? Have I heard you correctly?”

“Yes, you have heard me correctly. Here in Mbering-Saaj, we remember Mame Ngor Faye’s cruelty very, very clearly. Even the newborn infants are scared in Mbering-Saaj when someone mentions his name.”

I am quite certain, Badou, that I never felt quite so inadequate at dealing with a situation as I did then. With bitter clarity, I said to myself, “One can barely imagine how atrociously the ancestor must have behaved toward the inhabitants of Mbering-Saaj if their hatred for him has lasted so many years.”

My mind was on fire, although I had no idea what this was all about. Why all this shutting of doors when I arrived in this town, one after the other?

I tried to prod him a little bit. “There is no minibus going to Dakar until tomorrow. That means I am going to have to spend the night in Mbering-Saaj.”

The old man pretended he hadn’t heard me and asked the same question for the third time, “Why did you come here, stranger? I know you have answered me already, but I want to hear you say it again.”

In the face of so much arrogance, cold rage suddenly gripped me, leaving no room for any other emotion.

I had no choice but to confront this, at the risk that it might cost me my life.

At this point in my story, I must tell you about a conversation I had in my youth with a man who was famous for his profound knowledge and wisdom. I was faced with a particularly difficult decision, and having listened to me patiently, he said, “My son, every time someone wants to trample on your dignity, remember the saying by Wolof Njaay. If you want to know which saying I am talking about, ask me, my son, and I will tell you.”

“I am asking you.”

“There goes a saying by Wolof Njaay: If you insist on playing the drum with an ax, you will only be able to obtain one single sound from it, no matter whether it is sweet or unpleasant to your ears.”

Badou Tall, there are days when we have to be strong enough to remember the simple fact that we will not die twice, but that death is an event just as unique and ludicrous as the sound of this drum. You can be afraid of it, of course, but not to the point of allowing just anybody to humiliate you.

That gave me the strength to answer him in a voice that was firm and clear, “If I have come all the way to Mbering-Saaj, it is for one reason, and one reason only: I want to know who this Son of the Earth by the name of Nguirane Faye really is.”

Clearly intrigued by my manner of speaking he frowned. “Which Nguirane are you talking about? Is there another one apart from you?”

“I mean the Nguirane Faye who is standing right here in front of you. I am talking to you about myself and I want you to listen very closely to what I am about to say to you, old man. A few days ago, a cat looked deeply into my eyes and then it meowed twice. On that day, I lost my peace of mind, and it was then that I at last decided to find out who I am. A man who doesn’t know where he comes from is like a leaf torn off a tree by the wind. It ends up whirling around in empty space. Just like this leaf, he is condemned to a life of idleness.”

The piercing gaze of the old man reminded me of the cat in Niarela. First, he slowly shook his head, and then he pointed to a tree, entirely devoid of foliage, with a dry, grayish trunk that was covered with thin black cracks. “Do you see the kàdd over there?”

“The one that seems to be leaning toward the setting sun?”

“Yes. They are talking to each other, those two.”

“Talking to each other . . . What can they possibly be saying?”

“Oh, nothing in particular. It’s the hour when they usually bid each other farewell.”

I was completely bewildered. “Bid each other farewell? Who is saying farewell to whom?”

“The setting sun to the kàdd.”

“I want to know the hidden meaning behind those words.”

“There is no hidden meaning. Every day at this hour, they bow in sync to bid each other farewell.”

All this made very little sense.

“But . . . Wait a moment . . .”

No sooner had I calmed down a bit than his voice became harsh and menacing again: “You should mind your own business, stranger! You’d better leave now. When you get to the kàdd, turn left. After a few hundred meters, you will see the graveyard where your ancestor is buried.”

I tried my luck with irony, “Well, well, well! The whole world should come and take lessons in hospitality from Mbering-Saaj!” I knew perfectly well, of course, that my cocky little remark was just a pretense intended to gloss over my abiding fear of the old man.

Clearly it was better not to provoke him.

Oh Badou Tall, what a story! What an incredible story! Just think of me there, with all my hopes and expectations of a royal welcome in Mbering-Saaj! I had really and truly expected my close and distant relatives from the neighboring villages to drop everything and come running at once, and I had imagined that, while we were paying each other our mutual respects, all the collective emotion and nostalgia would inevitably lead to a great deal of sobbing and shedding of tears. I had the strong sense that I had lived through all these scenes before and had seen all those people coming up to me and saying, in mock disbelief, “God Almighty! So the great Mame Ngor’s very own flesh and blood is with us again. The stranger we see before us is called Nguirane Faye, a genuine great grandson of the chief who was the best and most righteous one we ever had.”

I had even worried that in the course of their quarrels they might come to blows about who deserved the privilege of inviting me to his home, and that, because I didn’t want to offend anybody, I would end up having to stay on a lot longer in Mbering-Saaj than originally planned. Every time I announced I was going back to Niarela, they wouldn’t hear of it and repeated their tales of the exploits of my glorious ancestor, the intrepid conqueror who was also a great visionary and builder, all at the same time.

“A man of God like there are only a handful in an entire century!”

“At the time when he came to live in Mbering-Saaj, the pagan warriors were slaughtering innocent people, pillaging our villages and raping our women. With the Holy Book in one hand and his sword in the other, he alone dared oppose them.”

“Ah, those despicable Unbelievers! It’s best not even to talk about them. Veritable hyenas, they were. They didn’t care that he was trying to extricate their children from the clutches of idolatry, far from it. First they got drunk, gulping down countless bowls of palm wine, then they humiliated Mame Ngor Faye, kicking him and pissing on his head.”

“But the truth of the heart never fails to triumph over brute force. Who still talks about those dissolute savages who were unable to restrain their morbid desires? Who among us would not be ashamed to admit today that he is descended from those pagans?”

“The poet Serigne Mbaye Diakhaté has left us his description of the senselessness of what was happening during that time. Nobody could have said it better!”

“Let’s listen to a bit of what the great Serigne Mbaye Diakhaté had to say, my friend!”

And then, solemnly and with great dignity, one of them started chanting in a deep, sonorous voice:

 

Those who never stopped quarrelling

And thrusting their daggers in each other’s bellies,

Those who did nothing but drink from sunrise to sunset,

Who can say today where they are now, the vile miscreants?

There surely cannot be a more heinous crime

Than to violate God’s commandments.

He who is oblivious to this

Is bound to meet with a bad end.

Nobody knows

What has become of all those dissolute

Princes and ordinary men of the people you have all been

Swallowed up by the earth.

You, who were great once upon a time,

And you, the paupers of long ago,

Let me ask you: who knows today

What’s become of you?

 

After this poetic interlude, the conversation started up again, in an even more animated fashion than before. “Mame Ngor Faye! A learned man of a new breed such as we have never seen here before!”

“True, he was a difficult character, but that’s always the case with people of great integrity in this world so corrupted by lies.”

Badou Tall, had I heard those perfectly plain words while I was down there, I would be a changed man today. “Nguirane Faye, a descendant of the ancestor who saved the souls of the pagans, Nguirane Faye, a descendant of the Master of Mbering-Saaj.”

That’s the vantage point from which I would like to see the world around me. A horizon very unlike my own interior landscape, which has always been far too narrow. It’s a world that is much more open, where the air is pure and alive with the aura of Mame Ngor Faye. He founded a new nation down there in the Sine, where at every sunrise you can still hear the whinnying and neighing of his thoroughbreds galloping around the blazing huts. Screams of terror fill the air, and thousands of innocent people are dying. It certainly is not pleasant to watch. But isn’t that how time has always given birth to itself?

At Mbering-Saaj, among the snake worshippers, Mame Ngor covered himself in glory by braving a thousand dangers.

When the battle is over, he leaves. Can you see him, Badou, at the very moment when I am talking to you about him? He walks in silence, apart from his men. They follow him at a respectful distance, because he wants to be the one leading the way. All the birds of creation are fluttering and twittering above his head, and further afield, the tall trees are leaning toward him as if offering him their shade, since the sun is already sweltering hot. He is lost in his thoughts, and barely aware of what is going on around him.

The old man stood in front of me and seemed to be reading my thoughts—at least that is how I interpreted the sneering look on his face. I couldn’t really face the prospect of having to endure the chill and the damp out here for an entire night.

While trying hard to keep my composure, I said, “There is no way I am staying outdoors until morning.”

“Well, then you should go back home before nightfall.”

“I made a long journey to track down Mame Ngor’s grave.”

“So what?”

“Well, surely there must be someone who can lend me a room until tomorrow.”

He made no reply.

I added, “I am prepared to pay.”

With a scornful glint in his eye he said, “Like you, your ancestor was very stubborn; he never gave up. But that did not help him, I’m afraid. We forced him to his knees in the end.”

Despite all that, I had the feeling he harbored a certain affection and secret admiration for Mame Ngor’s strength of character.

“Surely you won’t refuse me your hospitality,” I said.

“We don’t want you here, stranger.”

It was as though we were no longer ourselves, he and I. It seemed as if our words, formed in the long forgotten past, had come and settled on our lips of their own accord.

He insisted, and this time he did so in a peremptory tone, “Be gone. Consider yourself lucky to be able to return to Niarela alive after treading on the soil of Mbering-Saaj.”

Without a word, I started walking toward the graveyard. I could feel the weight of his gaze in the nape of my neck, and my steps were faltering.

There is another eye. We don’t know it, and we cannot see it, because it is buried deep inside us. And yet, this inner eye alone gives access to the most secret places, places where none of us will ever set foot.

Far away, almost in line with the horizon, I could see a row of kàdd with fissured, grayish trunks; they had no leaves, but they were tall and slender. Interspersed between their roots were mounds of sand, most of them two to three meters apart. They were the graves, or rather what was left of them. Except for the occasional twittering of a few birds, there was total silence in the cemetery.

I had been wandering around for hours, increasingly oblivious to any lurking dangers. I simply couldn’t have made such a long journey just to let fear get the better of me. I was walking up and down between the graves at a leisurely pace, taking my time to read and reread each inscription. Sometimes I had to brush away the sand that was covering the small nameplates, and if I found a name even vaguely reminiscent of Mame Ngor Faye, I felt eager to continue my search. And yet, something told me that this couldn’t be the place where Mame Ngor’s body was buried. Certain signs, or rather vague inklings, convinced me of that more and more as I was trudging around in between the kàdd.

Today, back in Niarela, I understand that I basically lacked the courage to confront the awful truth: there was nobody down there for me to look for.

I was probably reluctant to put an end to my search, purely because I couldn’t face the idea that the moment would come when everything was over, forcing me to leave the town without knowing where to go next.

But after a while, I realized I had no choice but to accept things as they were. Night was falling. Standing at the entrance of the cemetery, I noticed the few scattered lights of Mbering-Saaj toward the West. The town seemed even farther away now than a few hours ago. I felt like I was on an island encircled by a fringe of lights in the middle of a sea of darkness. The moment I turned my head the other way, total obscurity blotted out everything. It was as if I was suddenly both blind and unable to breathe. And yet—I guess in an extreme situation you adapt quickly—it didn’t take long before I was almost at ease in this graveyard. My sense of pride told me to stop shaking like a leaf in front of people who would remain forever invisible to me. This was where my ancestor had covered himself in glory and I owed it to myself to remain worthy of him. And anyway, if your enemy prays that you should starve to death, burp loudly every time he walks past you. This proverb came back to me at the very time when I felt utterly overcome by my hatred for this enigmatic town.

I had no choice but to wait it out until the morning when I would be able to go and catch a minibus on the main road. Armed with a stick made of kel, I sat down, and, leaning against a large rock, I started piling up a heap of pebbles in front of me.

Although the wood of the kel is well known for its hardness, it was a laughable protection against snakes, jackals, and, last but not least, the inhabitants of Mbering-Saaj. I was determined of course, to sell my skin at the highest possible price, but it was obvious I wouldn’t be able to defend myself very well with that stick.

Soon the little town was totally immersed in the dark. It was fascinating to watch the lights going out one after the other.

I was probably dozing when I heard footsteps crunching the grass nearby. The profound silence meant every sound was very distinct. I was just about to open my mouth when a voice said softly, “No need to be afraid, it’s me.”

I was on edge and prepared for anything.

“Who are you?”

The man was trying to sound like someone who is aggrieved because his friend has forgotten him after a period of separation. Only, it didn’t ring true.

“So you already don’t recognize me anymore, Nguirane Faye?”

There was something quite unique—but what? How I wish I knew how to describe it!—in the way he was pronouncing my name. Nothing but my fear prevented me from recognizing him sooner. It was the old man with the tengaade and his pipe.

He sat down on the ground opposite me and came straight to the point. “So have you found what you were looking for, Nguirane Faye?”

I was quite taken aback by his way of addressing me so naturally, without the slightest hostility in either his words or his gestures. I even thought I could detect a tinge of weariness in his voice. It’s of course possible that my memory was playing tricks on me, but I definitely felt that away from the prying eyes of his people, he was relieved to be able to just be himself. This fleeting impression was quickly replaced by another, much more unpleasant one. I suspected this man was mocking me. I was on my guard and wanted to remain aloof, so I said, “It was you who chased me out of town like a mangy dog, wasn’t it?”

“You shouldn’t be so vindictive, Nguirane. Forget that incident.”

Hearing him speak so calmly infuriated me.

“What’s your name, old man?” I asked with the brazenness of someone who has nothing to lose.

“No reason to be so bad tempered, my son. In Mbering-Saaj they call me . . .”

He told me his name, but I cannot recall it, however hard I try. If one day I should remember it, I will write it down here in these Notebooks for you. For the first time since my arrival in Mbering-Saaj, I felt as though I had gained the upper hand over the person I was talking to. Barely able to conceal my anger, I said, “You have finally told me your name. But that’s not enough.”

“What else do you want to know, Nguirane Faye?”

“I want you to tell me why you are playing with me like this. I want to know what kind of game it is you’re playing. I won’t let you leave here until you have told me.”

Although it was pitch-dark, I could sense that this gave him a start, and I quickly understood that I had overestimated myself.

“Don’t speak to me like this, please,” he said, in a voice that had suddenly turned icy again.

Those words were enough. A few furtive gestures told me he was armed—probably with a dagger—and that he was ready to use it.

One might say my hour of truth had arrived. Never have I felt the cold breath of death so close to my skin as I did then, nor have I ever been so afraid. And since I vowed never to lie to you, Badou, I have to admit that my conduct on that occasion wasn’t exactly courageous. I very quickly forgot all my aspirations to heroism, and not a single one of Wolof Njaay’s proverbs came to my rescue. All I could do was beg this stranger to have pity on me, while trying to avoid total shipwreck in a last-ditch attempt at preserving my dignity.

“If—entirely unintentionally—I have hurt you, I want to ask your forgiveness,” I said.

“I am glad you have come to your senses at last,” said the old man. “It’s better like that for you.”

He paused, as if trying to control his anger, and mumbled something. I was relieved. I knew then that the danger had passed. Another spell of silence followed, and finally he said calmly, but perfectly aware that I was at his mercy, “Let me repeat my question one more time: have you found what you were looking for, Nguirane Faye?”

I responded in a tone so neutral that I myself was surprised: “Despite walking around the cemetery several times and stopping in front of each grave, I have been unable to find even the slightest trace of the ancestor. Tomorrow morning at first light I am going back to Niarela.”

Again, I was tempted at that point to drop a sarcastic little remark about the unforgettable hospitality proffered by the people of Mbering-Saaj, but was too much of a coward to actually do it. He did not respond, and I expressed my disappointment by saying, more to myself than to the old man: “I should never have left there.”

“You shouldn’t talk like that,” he replied. “I assure you that you will not leave this town empty-handed.”

I looked at him. Although my eyes were a bit more used to the darkness by now, I could barely make out his silhouette. But, due to the sheer intensity of the moment, this hardly mattered.

“Yes,” he said, “I am here to give you something as a gift from Mbering-Saaj.”

“A gift from Mbering-Saaj?”

“Yes.”

That was all he said, visibly keen to remain shrouded in mystery. All this was beginning to get too much for me.

“I have literally bent over backward to avoid being difficult,” I said. “Don’t you think you should rather leave me alone in this place where you are forcing me to spend the night?”

I was perfectly calm when I said this, hoping that my tone of voice would make him aware there was a certain line that nobody must overstep.

He was surprisingly conciliatory. “I understand your bewilderment, Nguirane. The gift I have brought you from Mbering-Saaj is neither palm wine nor dried fish nor baskets of mangoes or papayas.”

“Well, what is it then?”

“It is neither cassava nor any of the things one usually offers to a visitor before he leaves.”

“What is it, then?”

I made no attempt to hide my growing curiosity.

“Nothing that would weigh heavily upon your shoulders, Nguirane. I have come to bring you some words.”

“Words?”

“Yes, Nguirane. I am bringing you some words from Mbering-Saaj.”

There was yet another silence. Neither of us said anything, for different reasons, I guess. He was taking his time, getting ready to carry out a mission that was clearly of the utmost importance to him. I, on the other hand, was utterly dumbfounded. Despite the gravity of the moment, I couldn’t suppress a wry little smile, since the unusual ways of the inhabitants of Mbering-Saaj amused me. Funny birds they were, these people. Quite complicated, in fact. And then I had a surprising reaction: I burst out laughing. To this very day, I cannot say whether I did it on purpose or whether it happened spontaneously. Most probably it was just a release of the tension building up inside me while I was waiting. The old man seemed neither angry nor keen to call me to order. Once I had regained my composure, he simply said, “Now listen to me carefully, Nguirane. Here is what I have come to tell you on behalf of Mbering-Saaj.”

For the first time since opening these Notebooks, Badou, someone other than I will speak to you. I am passing his words on to you exactly as they came out of his mouth. I have neither left out nor added a single one. For that reason alone, I wish I could remember the old man’s name. However, that may be a lot less important than we think it is.

How often in the course of your lifetime do you see your own face in the mirror, Nguirane? Probably not very often, just like the rest of us. No human being, unless he is somehow deranged, will stand in front of a mirror for hours on end, looking at himself. It is in the nature of our reflection to be fleeting.

Joy. Anger. Sadness. All this comes upon us without warning and is gone in a flash. There is never enough time to examine the traces left behind on a person’s face. But there is another mirror that gives you the chance to read your soul. Do you want me to tell you what that is? It is the eyes of the others. The eyes of the people close to you, or even the eyes of a passing stranger of whom you only catch a glimpse in a narrow little lane downtown; someone you will see once, in other words, and never again. You would be surprised how much the stillborn glance from those eyes can tell you about yourself.

You are me.

I am you. This is as true for the members of a group as for each human being on his own.

But the day inevitably comes when a nation is afflicted by adversity. Things lose their proper shape; they become blurred and indistinct. The wise man says, “Alas, what has happened to the path leading us to our Truth? Suddenly our feet, instead of being planted firmly on the ground, are floating in empty space. Trickery and lies have gained the upper hand, and all at once, we are cut off from the signs and signals that used to guide us. He who has done this to us, who is he, and where did he come from?” A handful of courageous men rise up above the multitude, exclaiming, “Why should we sell our souls for next to nothing? Let’s rebel against foreign rule.”

They are treated like cranks.

People tell all sorts of nonsense to pacify them. “Haven’t you heard it yet? The new wind will purify the air.”

People taunt them. “Can’t you stop talking about your boring old ancestor? He was defeated and humiliated. Why would you want us to join him on his interminable, aimless wanderings?”

Think of the mango leaf, Nguirane. Full to bursting of the waters of heaven, breathing the air with all the vigor of its lungs, green and intensely alive, it is the essence of life itself, and myriad different species of butterfly are weaving a crown of many colors above its head. When birds come to tickle it, it quivers with pleasure.

However, one day that same leaf becomes unrecognizable. Little by little, it starts to decay. First a few small, yellowish patches appear along the edge. Then you see a hole, followed by more and more gaping holes. It gets creased, gradually loses its sap and before long the leaf has become like an old man whose rotten teeth are falling out one by one. One evening, a solitary walker treads on it, and it turns to dust.

Here in Mbering-Saaj, it has always been our custom to be very hospitable. Far and wide, Mbering-Saaj was known as a haven of peace. Back in the days when our neighboring kingdoms were embroiled in ferocious wars against each other and when honor and fortune were measured by the number of enemies killed on the battlefield—that is to say when madness and hatred ruled supreme—everyone knew that once a fugitive had crossed the border and managed to reach Mbering-Saaj he was safe.

And now, Nguirane Faye, I will tell you something that I have kept secret from you up to now: it was us who sent you the cat you heard meowing the other morning in the courtyard of your house in Niarela. We called you, you came, and now you will hear what we have to say to you about your ancestor Mame Ngor.

First of all, Mame Ngor didn’t even belong here. Like a lost soul, he just arrived one day from Ndiorène, the land of his birth. He’d been presumptuous enough to think he could turn the minds of its people inside out, so he was chased away from there. After spending a long time listening to his prophecies without having the slightest idea what he was talking about, his relatives in Ndiorène quite simply told him, “Mame Ngor, leave us in peace, please. We want you to go somewhere far away from here.”

Afterward of course, like so many other nations, Ndiorène succumbed to the giddy ideas of the Nameless One and ended up adopting the doctrines Mame Ngor had tried to impose on them. I am telling you this just by the way, Nguirane, but the fact is that the people of Ndiorène have only themselves to blame for being so feeble-minded. When they look back on their most distant past today, they cannot understand why the dates and places that make up their history don’t speak the same language. Here in Mbering-Saaj, on the other hand, we have remained faithful to the path our Ancestor traced for us. For centuries, we have had to deal with strangers coming here from every corner of the planet. Without exception, they all tried to break us—just into two pieces, mind you, not more. Please take careful note of that. We managed to get rid of them all in the end. We aren’t stupid, Nguirane, we know how the world works. And we know exactly what a disgraceful state of indignity other nations have sunk into, for one reason and one reason only, and that is their inability to remain themselves. Being ashamed of oneself can have extremely tragic consequences. We have seen it with our own eyes, since it has happened to our neighbors. We, on the other hand, refuse to be like the dead leaf that is trodden on and reduced to dust by a passerby who is not even aware of it. No, the sap in our veins is nourished by the rain and the wind, and bold enough to lick the face of the heavens.

That’s who we are.

We’ve always known it.

Mame Ngor, alas, didn’t know it.

He was the most arrogant individual we ever set eyes upon in Mbering-Saaj. It was our custom never to refuse strangers who came here anything, and Mame Ngor was welcomed with open arms. He wanted land, so we gave him land. He wanted to marry one of our young women, and nobody found the words to oppose him. When he told us about his travels to other countries, we were enthralled, since we weren’t used to having strangers living with us here in Mbering-Saaj who had visited such mysterious, far-away lands. We saw him as someone with great knowledge, and so he quite naturally became one of the most highly respected men in Mbering-Saaj. But he misread our generosity for weakness and said to himself, “These people in Mbering-Saaj are ignorant of the Truth, that’s why they don’t resemble me. I am going to turn them into human beings worthy of that name.”

He, like so many others, thought he could fill our heads with a lot of hot air about exotic places with outlandish names.

One day, we were utterly bewildered when we heard him scream, “I am offering you Truth as vast as the entire universe, and you want to talk to me about the way things are done in your godforsaken little corner of the planet! How much longer are you going to obey that ancestor of yours? Don’t you see, blockheads that you are, that he was not infallible?”

On that day, Nguirane, we understood that the moment had come to give Mame Ngor a clear answer.

This is what we said to him: “The Ancestor is still alive in us, and we know he is infallible. He has never misled us. Why do you want to make us exchange him for another?”

Instead of calming him down, as we had hoped, our words only intensified Mame Ngor’s rage. In response, he roared that we were more akin to wild beasts than human beings.

Have you ever heard anything more insulting, Nguirane Faye? Today, more than a century after they were spoken, these words are still ringing in our ears.

On the verge of madness, Mame Ngor was not content with the sacrilege he had already committed. Eager to impress us, he declared, “Tonight, something exceptional will happen in Mbering-Saaj. Each one of you will see it with his own eyes, and that will be the end of any doubts you may have wanted to cast on the unique Truth.”

At the appointed hour, we followed him deep into the forest. There, in a clearing, we waited for his miracle, but it never happened. All that mumbo jumbo, the oscillations, the rolling of eyes and the incantations came to naught. Believe me, we nearly killed ourselves making fun of him behind his back. But it was a terrible setback for Mame Ngor and seemed to make him more hysterical than ever. He started telling us far-fetched stories about the birth of the universe, the composition of matter and the movements of the stars. Nothing he told us bore any resemblance to what we knew! How could a man who claimed to have traveled around the world be so wrong? And furthermore, he never uttered a single sentence without more or less openly accusing our Ancestor of being a liar.

The whole thing was a scandal, and the moment had come to put an end to it.

And now, Nguirane, my father, my very own father will take over and speak to you. The words he addressed to your ancestor all those many years ago have been passed down by the chroniclers through the generations, and they are as follows: “Mame Ngor! Mame Ngor! Mame Ngor, you came to us as a stranger, and we received you with kindness. Why don’t you stay where you belong? The sky above our heads is made up of billions of stars. Believe me, Mame Ngor, we can tell you everything about each one of those stars, we can tell you how it was born and when it will die. Mame Ngor! Mame Ngor! Mame Ngor . . . stay where you belong!”

These powerful words were spoken by my father in the midst of a long spell of silence; they put Mame Ngor into a state of violent agitation. Looking wild-eyed and furious, he cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Are you pretending you can count the stars in the sky, people of Mbering-Saaj? Do you realize what that means? I do not know your Ancestor, and I don’t want to know anything about him, but I am telling you that he has purely and simply deceived you! Oh, if only you knew what’s in store for you!”

What impudence! The crowd started to show signs of irritation, and someone called out in disbelief, “Is it really our Ancestor you are talking about in those terms, Mame Ngor?”

But to remain truthful, I have to admit that Mame Ngor, your ancestor, was a man of great courage. No doubt his fearlessness saved his life on that fateful day, as it had done so often before. Although his life was at risk, he remained firm. “People of Mbering-Saaj, I urge you to distance yourselves from the man you call your Ancestor. He has already lost you, and he will lose your children as well. That man knows nothing about the sun and the moon, and he is a fool. Do not put your faith in his lies!”

Not one of us was prepared to believe that a normal human being could possibly say something so outrageous, in broad daylight, in a public square in Mbering-Saaj without being struck dead by lightning that very instant. A few admitted later on they first started having doubts at that moment.

One person asked him, “If our Ancestor is lying to us, who will tell us the Truth?”

Mame Ngor was a stubborn man, clearly unable to let go of his idée fixe. “Your Ancestor is a fool,” he replied.

“Well, we are listening, Mame Ngor. Talk to us, since you alone know the Truth.”

As I told you before, Nguirane, many of us were appalled by Mame Ngor’s brazenness. If we let him speak, it wasn’t just to confuse him, but because we were genuinely eager to hear what a man like him had to say to us. We think we have always been open to the outside world here in Mbering-Saaj and on that day, your ancestor almost succeeded in converting us to his ideas. We formed a circle around him so we could listen to him undisturbed. It wasn’t long, though, and we gazed at each other, aghast. Before us was a deplorable sight; first his muscles started twitching, then his entire body was racked by convulsions and his face turned into a hideous grimace—that’s the state Mame Ngor was in when he addressed us in a language we had never heard him speak before. We didn’t understand a single syllable of what he was saying.

It occurred to us afterward that we may have been wrong in thinking he was talking to us and that he was actually embroiled in a huge quarrel with invisible beings. We could see he was fully absorbed in battling the forces of darkness, but at the same time he seemed terribly lonely.

This appalling spectacle took away our last remaining doubts. The sages of Mbering-Saaj said, “This man deserves our pity, for only a madman would behave like that. It is our duty to cure him.”

It was decided to entrust him to the Master who often in the past had wanted to draw our attention to Mame Ngor’s case. But, outraged at the idea of being taken in hand by one of us, he showered the Master with insults and accusations and put up such a violent struggle that we feared for your ancestor’s life.

We were tired of fighting by then and proposed a sort of truce: “Mame Ngor, maybe the path you have chosen is the best one for the whole of mankind. That’s not impossible. Here in Mbering-Saaj, we don’t claim to know who on this earth is right and who is wrong, but no outsider has the right to interfere with our decisions. We are telling you to stick to your convictions and let us stick to ours; it’s the only way we can live together in peace. Since we have never chased a stranger away from Mbering-Saaj, we won’t force you to move very far from here. All we ask is that you settle down somewhere close to the border of our territory so that we can all live in peace.”

Mame Ngor did not object.

For several years, he kept to himself. We thought he had recovered his senses. How wrong we were. Mame Ngor was a crank on the brink of insanity, prepared to go to any lengths in order to impose his mad ideas on other people. No, he hadn’t given up on his plan to subject us to his rules; all that had changed was his way of doing it. He was patiently weaving his web, secretly planting his newfangled ideas in the heads of our children and sowing discord among the most powerful families to secure political support. He even managed to conduct himself like a great sage when settling quarrels he himself had furtively instigated.

One day, he started speaking his strange language again, but that wasn’t all. Armed with a piece of wood, he drew some signs in the sand: “The signs you see here,” he said, “indicate the Way, the only one that is viable for all human beings.”

So Mame Ngor was back at it again, peddling his harebrained ideas. This time, however, we were trapped. He now had support from many of the influential personalities in Mbering-Saaj, either because they’d been won over by his nebulous promises or because they wanted to take revenge on others for cheating them. One morning, we noticed a triumphant sparkle in his eyes and he finally looked more relaxed. According to the chroniclers, this was the one and only time he ever attempted to smile.

He declared, “From now on, I alone will be the ruler of this land.”

We all paid allegiance to him. Only the proudest and most prescient among us chose to leave and go into exile that very night.

Mame Ngor’s reign was brutal and barbaric. His men often seemed to pillage, torture and kill more for their own amusement than out of political necessity. In the beginning, the shock was so great that no one had the courage to oppose Mame Ngor. The streets of Mbering-Saaj were deserted immediately after sunset, and before long, neighbors stopped standing in the doorways for their usual friendly chats. Everyone was terrified of being denounced to Mame Ngor’s henchmen. Only our women dared resist, albeit not openly. They did this by composing songs with a double meaning—in a slightly altered form, we still hear them today—mocking the cowardice of their brothers and husbands in the fight against the Lion of Mbering-Saaj. Surreptitiously and with great cunning, they also ridiculed the tyrant himself while pretending to extol his courage and integrity. Oh, those were dark years, Nguirane! If only you knew how much we suffered! Allow me to take you on a brief excursion into our tormented past.

Mame Ngor has taken it upon himself to dispense justice in the public Meeting Square of Mbering-Saaj. The sessions are open to the public. Not content with having his opponents assassinated, he insists on openly humiliating them, too. One of the chroniclers describes how he used to lie stretched out in his hammock, with our most beautiful young girls, all of noble birth, massaging and fanning him. A long line of ordinary citizens are waiting to pay tribute to him with bowls of sour milk or other food items—you may be interested to know, Nguirane, that your ancestor had a passion for ñeleŋ and Birane Diop mangoes.

Occasionally he looks up, chewing a mouthful of food. He runs his eyes over the crowd. All of a sudden he asks, “Where is so-and-so today? We haven’t seen each other for a while. Ha! Could it be that so-and-so is hiding from me?”

This is a terrifying question, because everyone knows that so-and-so will be dead by nightfall. He emerges from the crowd and kneels down in front of Mame Ngor. The latter, after a lengthy silence, points an accusing finger at him. “My friends here in Mbering-Saaj, I am calling on you as my witnesses. I have been told that behind my back, this man tells absurd lies about the human anatomy and the origin of the salt in seawater. I bid him to repeat his clandestine words here and now, in front of everyone.”

The unlucky fellow starts to whimper like a child and swears, shaking with fear, that he has always been faithful to Mame Ngor’s teachings. “I have never done anything bad! My benevolent king, it’s my enemies that are slandering me.”

The crowd sneers at the accused, they spit in his face and they insult him.

Mame Ngor smiles: “Are you also denying that you have disregarded the food prohibitions I decreed?”

The accused remains silent. Now he is trapped. He knows that his moment of truth has arrived.

This time, Mame Ngor’s words sound more solemn: “You all know I am not a good judge since I tend to listen to my heart. I would rather let you decide this man’s fate, people of Mbering-Saaj.”

Immediately loud voices are heard, coming from the crowd. “Let’s condemn him to death, the drunkard! The drinker of palm-wine must be put to death!”

Mame Ngor makes a fleeting, perfunctory gesture and immediately a bunch of burly young men overpower the poor wretch and drag him away into the bush. As soon as it is dark, his family will hear the sinister growling of the hyenas, gorging themselves on his flesh.

But, Nguirane, no matter how long or how dark the night, the day will come when the sun appears again on the horizon. A few brave men awakened us from our slumber. They decided to attack Mame Ngor’s troops, refusing to give in. The battle was ferocious and continued for several months, but finally, Mame Ngor ordered his army to retreat. This is how he was finally beaten; the scene has remained etched in the memory of all who witnessed it for the rest of their life, and we, the people of Mbering-Saaj, have inherited that miraculous moment as our legacy. Mounted on their snow-white steeds, one and all, with their swords held high, Mame Ngor and his horsemen circled Mbering-Saaj seven times, uttering war cries in their weird, incomprehensible language. The neighing of the horses grew louder and more vehement all the time. Before turning his back on us for the final time, defeated and with fury in his heart, Mame Ngor cursed Mbering-Saaj. What a short memory he had, your ancestor! Had he forgotten already that our people have always taken revenge, blow for blow? When he cursed us, threatening to make us perish in an abyss filled with white-hot embers, we cursed him back even more forcefully. If only you could have seen our Ancestor on the battlefield, astride a leopard! As he pounced on the enemy, his mount was sucking the stars out of the sky with his breath, whereupon the fish, in terror, huddled up against the rocks at the bottom of the sea. It’s amazing to think that we are descended from this giant, we, the people of Mbering-Saaj. I don’t want to upset you, Nguirane, but your ancestor’s thoroughbreds nearly made us laugh with their little circus number! A few weeks later, he came back and tried to overpower us in the dead of night. But we were expecting him, and we were prepared. We definitely don’t count ourselves among those nations that succumb to a surprise enemy attack twice. Mame Ngor and his men hardly had enough time to set a few huts ablaze when we were already there, beating them back. We made mincemeat out of them and—let disgrace and misery be heaped upon them a thousandfold!—Mame Ngor and the other two survivors of his army owed their lives to a cowardly escape.

I would like to leave you with this final message, Nguirane Faye: we have been assaulted by far more powerful foreigners than Mame Ngor in the past. There were times when they came from the east, and there were times when they came from the west. They never spoke a language we could understand, but all of them, with equal determination, wished our Ancestor dead. And they were mad enough to want to make us his murderers! They thought of themselves as eagles and regarded us as the kind of prey that would be easy to devour! Well, we were forced to disillusion them very, very quickly. Nguirane, we may be cut off from the outside world here in this desolate spot, but the turmoil so many of our neighbors are in tells us that we were right. They feel sorry for us, it seems, but here in Mbering-Saaj, we don’t envy them. And always remember this, Nguirane Faye: I am not talking on behalf of millions of human beings. What I am saying is meant for the few thousand inhabitants of Mbering-Saaj who are happier here than anywhere else on earth.

And as for you, I realize it’s uncomfortable for you to be leaning against this rock while your body is slowly getting drenched with dew. However, the sheer fact that you are sitting at the entrance of this graveyard shows you are still alive. By chasing you away from Mbering-Saaj today, we have done exactly the same thing to you that we did to Mame Ngor a century and a half ago, with the sole difference that in those days we were armed. I told you that no one has ever come here to pray at Mame Ngor’s grave. That should have helped to convince you that your ancestor is not buried here. Go and look for him elsewhere. And how can you possibly imagine you were born here? That really is the height of madness.

I wish you a peaceful night, Nguirane. Nothing will happen to you this time: we called you, you came, and we have told you what you needed to know. But if between now and the end of time any descendant of Mame Ngor dares to set foot in Mbering-Saaj again, he will pay for it with his dear life.