A Sunday to Remember
Christiane liked telling me the story of her romance with Gaston. There was a kind of exultation that filled her when she revisited those times. She had a special way of insisting on the details, of acting out the events, riveting my attention. She told me everything without reserve, spiritedly, from the second time we met at her place to braid our hair as we had the previous month.
That had been several years ago. During our farewell she must have been thinking about that Sunday afternoon. We’d only just gotten to know each other, yet it didn’t bother her at all to tell me all about Gaston and her. While I hadn’t told her a thing about married life with Kimbembé!
A Sunday to remember. Christiane was radiant. She talked and talked. We were sitting in raffia chairs behind their house, in the shade of the mango trees that mark the edge of their yard. It was in September. Gaston was at work at the Moukoukoulou Dam. As she braided my hair with adept, gentle movements, she spoke to me about Pointe-Rouge, giving my head a little shake from time to time to make sure I was listening. It’s true that I sometimes happened to doze off while her long, slender fingers moved softly in my hair, or as she dexterously parted it into rows using a porcupine quill.
The Lovers of Pointe-Rouge
It was in Pointe-Rouge that they had met. Gaston was working at the seaport, one of the biggest in the central part of the continent. Christiane was a clerk at the Main Post Office, opposite the train station. Nothing indicated a long-term relationship. They crossed paths on their way to their respective places of work downtown. They took the same bus each morning; Gaston would get on a few stops after Christiane. “When you see someone every day, at the same time, in the same place, they become familiar,” she asserted. “And the day you don’t see them at all, you ask yourself questions. Did he go to work earlier than usual? Is he off today? Is he sick?”
When they saw each other again, after this break that had in fact only lasted a day or two, each of them had at a distance hidden their delight at seeing the other. Christiane no longer remembered the exact moment when they’d started to say good morning to one another. First with a nod of the head, she recollected vaguely. Then with a handshake, and finally with a brief exchange of words. On several occasions Gaston had gallantly offered her his seat on the bus, an uncommon gesture in the fula-fulas and even the cent-cents of Pointe-Rouge, in which men have no scruples about jostling women, shouldering ahead of them as they get on so as to grab the most comfortable places. Christiane had been touched. To begin with she refused his offer; then she relented when Gaston insisted. In fact this courtesy troubled her; she felt she didn’t deserve it from someone she didn’t know well and only met by chance on her way to work. Were there ulterior motives in the attentions of this distinguished-looking young man? She didn’t dare believe it. It all seemed so real and natural that no actor could have performed so well. Some days she preferred to travel standing up, by the side of the young man, as far as downtown. She gave up her seat to another woman or an elderly person, who thanked her profusely.
Their talk remained polite, with a certain reserve. They were aware of never going to the heart of things, of avoiding a reality that was staring them in the face. It was like a watercourse that had to be crossed, with each of them on a different side, counting on the other to make the leap.
According to Christiane, Gaston was more bashful than she was. It was a bashfulness that he hid masterfully beneath an animation that allowed him to find topics to enliven any conversation. At such moments he would launch into long explanations in a scholarly tone of voice, making gestures of studied precision. When he mentioned books he’d read, it was hard to see it as pretentious. Everything seemed appropriate. Sometimes he’d bring up an example from La Fontaine’s Fables, several of which he knew by heart. The same went for the songs of Georges Brassens, which he would hum in a labored voice. Christiane had been spellbound the day the young man had recited one of the best-known of La Fontaine’s fables, “The Oak and the Reed.” “He read a lot, and dreamed of writing books,” Christiane said. He had produced piles of short stories, poems, and plays, but he came to the conviction that, although he had the will, the talent was missing, and that a person didn’t become a writer just by reading books.
“If you lack talent, you need modesty enough to read the work of others,” he would declare with a bitter expression.
The moment he fell silent, Christiane would be struck by his inward-looking, introverted nature, which made her think that this man from the North was a fragile being, extremely cautious in his relations with the opposite sex. But he gave the impression of being rather considerate, attentive, and kind, in a way that could be sensed at once in his manner of smiling, of saying hello: he would put his hand on his chest, over his heart, and bow almost to the ground. During a conversation he would nod his head, reassuring his interlocutor, helping in the choice of words or images. When he said good-bye he would place his hand on his heart again and turn back several times with a string of polite words.
The Singer Sewing Machine
Christiane and Gaston could have spent months sizing each other up like that. Things sped up thanks to a Singer sewing machine. This object came to symbolize their growing relationship. I can’t resist telling the story of the Singer here, the more so because Christiane spoke about it at length the day we said farewell.
Christiane didn’t see how things could have come about without the sewing machine. Gaston was afraid in advance of being awkward, and he held back, whereas Christiane for her part could not make the first move, something unthinkable for a woman, she told herself. Besides, what would Gaston have thought of her if she’d gone on the attack? She was hoping that Gaston would be more open, more willing. He, on the other hand, was scared of displeasing this young woman, who may have seen their relationship simply as friendship. Each time he decided that he’d push forward, that he’d take the plunge at the next opportunity, the words stuck in his throat in Christiane’s presence. And he said nothing, gazing at her as if begging her to understand his message by telepathy. Christiane would lower her eyes; the fula-fula or the cent-cent would stop downtown. They’d get off, say their good-byes with a handshake. She would cross Tchicaya U Tam’si Boulevard, aware that Gaston was watching her. She didn’t turn around. And the young man would come to the conclusion that they were not thinking the same thing.
The Customs Officers of Pointe-Rouge
Christiane had gone to the seaport of Pointe-Rouge to take delivery of a Singer sewing machine that she’d ordered from abroad. It had taken more than three months by cargo ship. She’d given up hope, till one day she received notification that it had arrived. That didn’t mean the battle was over: she would have to grease the palms of several customs officers to pick up her package the same day. In Pointe-Rouge everyone abides by this tradition. That is how the officers make ends meet, and many of them boast they earn more money like that than from their regular monthly salary. So for them, someone coming to pick up a package was a stroke of luck. They would surround the person, trail around after them. The addressee would have to traipse from one office to the next, not forgetting the security officers, who, if they were weren’t happy, could make the merchandise vanish in the space of a few seconds. All they needed was to whistle to their colleagues and the job was done.
On that day Christiane had understood that knowing people in the administration makes things easier. It saves you from the overexcited women counter clerks and the security officers sniffing around. You’re brought through a side door, unseen by those standing in line, who have been waiting for hours and who have need of even more patience when at midday they hear, from a clerk more interested in what he’s going to have for lunch, that their package is not available and that they should come back early the next morning.
“What do you mean, the package is unavailable?”
“Like I said.”
“But I can see it right there on the shelf behind you!”
“There’s no need to be difficult. It’s unavailable. You need to leave, or it’ll be three months before you get it!”
Christiane had not had to face such a disappointment. Gaston had come up when he saw her crossing the courtyard that led to the Central Customs Office, that famous part of the seaport where transactions were only ever accomplished by wetting the beard of the clerks and where there was always an inordinate concentration of customs officers per square yard. In a few minutes she’d picked up her Singer. She hadn’t paid a penny. Gaston had turned down the thousand-franc banknote she’d offered for him to go wet his beard in a downtown bar. They talked instead about eating together one weekday during their midday break.
The meal took place a few days later, in a little nganda in the Trois-Cents neighborhood, opposite the Rex Cinema.
A Failed Writer
The day of our farewell, Christiane brought up that memorable Sunday when, in between two braids that she was knotting in my hair, she’d told me how everything had subsequently progressed very quickly between her and Gaston. When she was with him she felt a power, a warmth running through her body. She imagined having already known him in a previous life. He was tall, with fine features and a mustache he trimmed with scissors almost hair by hair. He articulated clearly, careful to be understood, in a generous, melodious accent associated with the northerners of Vietongo. She valued his sophistication, his knowledge. For her, Gaston was a failed writer because of his perfectionism and his devotion to the great French authors. How could he fully pursue his passion when after every line he wrote, he would stop and declare that Balzac, Proust, and Montherlant had already written everything, in beautiful, elegant, incomparable language that was fixed for all eternity? Sitting in his office, gazing into space, he spent more time ripping his work up than actually writing. He would rise to his feet, stretch, and gaze through the window at the sea. He must have been asking himself what he was doing in that room filled with documents, which he would gladly have lined with books.
Gaston’s Family
Since the beginning of their relationship, Gaston had stressed to Christiane that he was from the North, mindful of the reactions he had met with from other young women in Pointe-Rouge, the emblematic city of the South. Christiane had responded by saying that she didn’t see how this information was helpful. The young man’s journey fascinated her, for he and his parents had come from far away. It was at the time when Pointe-Rouge was the Peru of Vietongo. People say that in those days everything seemed simple. No obstacles stood between people. Gaston had been living in Pointe-Rouge for many years, having arrived from the North at a young age with his parents after Vietongo became independent. He had gone to school there, attending Savorgnan-de-Brazza Middle School and Monseigneur-Carrie High School, from which he received his baccalaureate in literature. But then he’d entered the Customs School—was this a sign of destiny?—right opposite the Main Post Office, where Christiane would come to work a few years later, and after that he got a job with Customs Regional Management, in the Department of Inspection and Control at the Port of Pointe-Rouge.
From that point on, thanks to his job, Gaston gradually became independent from his family. He rented two rooms in a neighborhood on the edge of the city. That did not relieve him of the obligation of looking after his mother, father, and two younger brothers. He would go see them on Sunday afternoons. He never regarded those visits as a duty. He was close to his family—his mother, whose eyesight was failing as she grew older, and his father, who worked at the Pointe-Rouge morgue.
Basile Okemba was a famous figure in the city of Pointe-Rouge. No one challenged him or disrespected him. He would respond to his detractors by saying: “For the moment you can strut about insulting me. I’ll be waiting for you at the morgue; you won’t even have enough room. I’ll hang your body upside down like a sheep at the butcher’s and whip you so bad, when you report to the Lord on the Day of Judgment, he’ll have difficulty recognizing you even when you show him your ID card.”
Basile Okemba did thankless work. He was surrounded by the dead. Lifting those naked bodies, sticking them in drawers, was no ordinary job. He’d seen everything. Done everything. He’d shoveled up cadavers with a spade. He’d blocked up nostrils and ears that were oozing. Some dead bodies defecated several days after they were brought in. Others seemed to be grimacing, with their tongue sticking out. Others still had their jaws shut tight, as if they were terrified at the thought of passing from one world to the next. Worst of all was when he would patrol the great courtyard at midnight, a bulldog at his side. The windows of the hospital were closed. There was an icy silence. The trees seemed transfixed. Scrawny dogs rooted in the trash cans that were filled with dirty dressings. Basile Okemba would do the rounds of the hospital, a cigarette in his mouth. Shadows would pass in front of him. He didn’t look at them. They were for sure stray souls who hadn’t accepted that their time had come and that they needed to dissolve, to quit the bodies that had housed them. At that moment the bulldog, which was a few yards ahead of Basile Okemba, would give a bark.
You had to be a little bit mad to work at the morgue, some people said. Or a sorcerer, others added. It was during that time that Basile Okemba had acquired the habit of talking to himself. His words sounded disjointed to anyone who heard them. He would talk to the dead. Hurl abuse at them, rail at them when one of their arms fell out of a drawer. The dead listened, obeyed him. When he came home in the evening, the smell of cadavers filled the place. Because of his profession, he had given up eating meat, he who had seen the human body from every angle.
As for Gaston’s two brothers, their school days were worse than chaotic. The first failed his exams over and over again. The other kept having to repeat years and planned to learn cabinetmaking in the workshop of Mvoundou Joseph, a.k.a. Mompéro Mwana Mawa, the most highly regarded cabinetmaker in Pointe-Rouge. He specified that he would be a cabinetmaker but that he’d never make caskets. A joke that Basile Okemba did not much appreciate.
Gaston had become the sole source of support for the family, and he was a good provider. Later on, when he had to visit his family, he would never fail to take Christiane, who had been adopted at once by his brothers and his parents.