40

Last night, half asleep, I saw them again. My friends. As if in a dream. I should mention I had news of them a few years ago through my cousin Sefa. He told me that shortly after I left the country, Wali had been hit by a drunk driver on an avenue. After two weeks in a coma, he had opened his eyes, his eyelashes fluttering feebly under the fluorescent fixtures of his hospital room, the harsh light showing his mother what would now be her son’s life. Ironically, Wali, who’d had the role of blind, paralyzed Hamm in Endgame, had become a piece of furniture displayed in front of their house in the Bé neighbourhood by a resigned mother, who had hung around his neck a rosary with shiny transparent beads that gave him a papal air. And he would bat anxious eyelashes on the world around him, at passersby and fidgety kids, and it wasn’t theatre anymore. Although, seeing him so immobile and attentive, you’d have said he was waiting for his cue from another actor. Wali, soft flesh propped up against a tricycle.

Things weren’t great for Beno either. Shortly after Wali’s accident, he began to walk the streets of his neighbourhood with a bundle of crumpled newspapers under his arm, his hair unkempt, skimpily dressed in shorts and a tank top, which he later dropped to go naked. Or at best with just some scraps of fabric around his waist like Christ the martyr on Good Friday. There was talk of mental strain, and the family did try to lock him up in the house after successive treatments by a healer, an old priest who was a friend of his father, and an immature psychologist, which did nothing to stop his deterioration. The bundle of newspapers under his arm continued to grow, and he would plant himself in the middle of a road, smooth out the papers and read the news and events of the day out loud. And once his task as a news broadcaster was fulfilled, he would carefully fold his newspapers and start running toward a virtual finish line in the distance. And there were those who swore he could be seen all over the city, in Amoutivé, in front of Collège Saint-Joseph, in Agoué, in Djidjolé, but in particular in Tokoin, around the high school and the roundabout with the huge white marble dove. He had set up his headquarters near the dove, and it was said that at regular intervals, he would remove his loincloth and take a shit at the foot of the huge stone bird. He was agitated and loud, and many times, the police came and picked him up. He would disappear for a week, but finally reappear, calm and docile. He would sit against the base of the statue with his arms stretched out along his extended legs, and he could have been mistaken for his paralyzed friend, Wali.

Things were different for Sika, but just as extraordinary. She married a soldier, in what was considered a good match. She didn’t finish her studies. Sika, a housewife and mother of an army of six feisty kids. The colonel with the red beret married her in a sumptuous wedding and set her up in a big house on the outskirts of the city. He must have told her, “In my house, women don’t work. You won’t want for anything, ma chérie, my little firebrand.” And after the wedding, Sika began to hatch her chicks and get bored, and later, when the children were in school, she parked herself in front of a huge TV screen that took up a whole wall of her garish living room and devoured, via satellite, those series that would deaden the mind of a genius in no time at all. Sika stuffing herself with fritters in front of the TV and guzzling Pepsi-Cola and beer. She had become huge, like Big Momma in the movie with Martin Lawrence, lugging around rolls of flesh, with a big potbelly, elephant legs, and a greasy neck like an accordion. She would get drunk and try to forget the cute young girl she had been, sighing like a punctured inner tube and saying, “If my father had been alive, he wouldn’t have let me marry that lout with his tropical Légion d’Honneur!” And very often, she would end up falling asleep on the sofa.

That was the latest news of my friends, Wali immobile in his chair, Beno limp against the marble pedestal of an imperturbable stone dove, and Sika like a hot air balloon stranded in the thicket of comfortable tedium. And sometimes, the birds of a pointless remorse came and pecked at the balloon of her flesh, which began to lose its air in little farts through every pore. And her fat ass that in the evening would welcome with full honours the colonel on his return home from work. You could say it was endgame for Ito Baraka and his friends, children of the Green Revolution, the agricultural awakening that produced on an African coast a generation of young people who lolled around day after day in front of family homes they still hadn’t left at forty years of age, whistling the refrain of waiting through their decayed teeth while successive economic crises weakened hearts and purses that had long been empty. They waited with a feeling of having been screwed by that wily angel that had promised them change, a new, just world, etc. And the tail of the angel continued to smash their last illusions.