The Longest Journey
We made the journey by truck.
It took us more than three days to even get to Mapapouville. From there we were going to take another truck to Batalébé.
On the way Kimbembé dozed, his head resting on his trunk of books. Mapapouville was a very long way from the North. We slept in villages about which I have no recollection.
The truck would stop. They’d stretch out tarpaulins, and the travelers would jostle for the little space available. The next day we’d continue on our way.
When we reached Mapapouville we were exhausted. We were supposed to leave again two days later, but Kimbembé decided we’d take a break and stay for another seven or eight days. He wanted to show me the political capital, which I was seeing for the first time.
Discovering Mapapouville
We took a room at the Le Rail Hotel near the Central Station of the Vietongo-Ocean Railroad. Later on, the Le Rail would become a kind of second home for us. We’d spend the dry season there almost every year, during the school vacation.
Mapapouville had grown up along the right bank of the Vietongo River. It covered about twenty-one square miles and had a population of over nine hundred thousand. It was quite a change from the little district of Oweto that we’d come from.
Kimbembé knew the city. It was where he’d completed his higher education and taken his school-teaching exam. As a college student he’d had a little room at 1409 Avenue Loutassi on the Plateau des 15 Ans.
He wanted to go see his old neighborhood and the house he’d lived in. We went there one afternoon. We took a bus from behind the hotel, not far from the prime minister’s residence. It crossed the bustling neighborhoods of Poto-Poto and Moungali and dropped us at the start of the Avenue Loutassi.
Cars honked their horns back and forth at each other. Children played in the streets. Kiosks selling cigarettes and Kojak lollipops lined the main roads. The café-bars vied with one another in music, their tables and stools out in the public space. Passersby would stop, listen to the music curiously, then, unable to help themselves, perform dance moves to the general acclamation of the public and the vehicles threading their way through the crowd. Kimbembé had experienced similar scenes during his student days.
He showed me the Eden Café, across the street from the house where he’d lived as a student.
“This is one of the busiest cafés on the plateau. The Parisians, the Sapeurs, come here every evening to display their cars and their clothes.”
“Parisians, Sapeurs?” I said, confused by the city jargon.
“Right. They’re young people from this country who live in France. They ended up there out of a sense of adventure. They call themselves Sapeurs, from SAPE: the Society for Atmosphere and Personal Elegance. They whiten their skin with Nigerian products and buy designer clothes from the grand couturiers of the famous Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, then show them off back here during their vacations. The Eden is considered their locale of choice. It has the advantage of being situated right along the edge of the avenue. That way the dandies, who come from the Bleu-Blanc-Rouge neighborhood, can line up their Solex bikes or their cars with Paris plates. When they arrive in the evening, the nguémbos are waiting for them in the entrance to cheer them on as they hand out a few French francs or Parisian metro tickets to those aficionados.”
The Student Dormitory
A large, unfinished, grim-looking house with a long hallway, doors on either side, and a small interior courtyard. This was where Kimbembé the student had stayed. Each door had a number. All around there were other uncompleted buildings, right up to where the runway of Mapapouville Airport started. A little farther down the avenue you could see a series of permanently constructed residences, houses in marble, copies of European châteaux. The politicians and civil servants lived there.
I was somewhat surprised to learn that the student house belonged to one of the southern politicians, a legendary figure by the name of Kaya-Kaya. According to the official version, he had been implicated in the assassination of the Immortal President. Kaya-Kaya had been killed in that very house by a group of soldiers. As a student, for three years Kimbembé had rented the room next to the one in which the historic leader of the South had met his end. He told me he’d found the place thanks to an acquaintance who was a close friend of the late Kaya-Kaya’s older brother. This friend, a man with greedy eyes, would come to collect the rent a day before the end of the month, early in the morning, when the students were still brushing their teeth before heading out to the university.
The Eden and Its Regulars
Before we left the Plateau des 15 Ans, we took a table at the Eden, where we were served well-chilled Kronenbourgs. The late afternoon seemed quiet, yet the regulars began elbowing past one another as they came in. Kimbembé smiled at them, thinking that some of them would recognize him. His attention was drawn by a corpulent, gray-haired man who burst into the place. He hesitated a moment, then chose a seat at the far end, where he could barely be noticed.
“Watch what’s going on over there, Hortense, you won’t believe me! You see that guy? He reminds me of the good old days. Really, nothing has changed in this city! Generally speaking, at the Eden every spot has its meaning for those in the know. The man who just sat down over there is waiting for one of his latest conquests.”
“How can you tell?” I asked, turning blithely around to look at the new arrival. “No, that man could be our father,” I added.
“I can even tell you that the conquest is certainly a married woman. When we used to live here, people from high society, betrayed husbands, would give us a banknote to let them know when their wife was in the café. As soon as we thought we recognized them based on the brief description they’d given, we’d jump in a taxi or call the man we’d later refer to as our ‘benefactor.’ We made a little pocket money that way.”
Kimbembé didn’t have time to finish his story: a tall woman with an imposing backside, wearing a Dutch wax outfit, got out of a cab. She looked around as if to make sure no one was following her; then she stole hurriedly into the café and headed for the corner where the corpulent man was already in raptures at her arrival. The lovers kissed on the mouth. The woman sat down with her back to us, and they started talking in hushed tones. Beforehand the man had spoken a few words to the waiter and discreetly slipped him a banknote. The server had nodded with a complicitous smile and had indicated an inconspicuous staircase that led to the second floor of the establishment. The man went ahead of the woman, and the couple, in accordance with Kimbembé’s conjecture, entered one of the short-term rooms of the Eden. The two lovers only came out an hour later, just as we were getting ready to leave. The woman’s hair was mussed up at the sides, and the man’s shirt collar was inside out.
Boules D’ambiance
Kimbembé walked me all over the capital. We visited monuments, official buildings—especially the presidential residence, which we could only see from a distance. The cab driver, who’d been chatty when we set off, abruptly fell silent as we drew near to it.
“Don’t look in that direction,” he said, “or they’ll write down my plates. I have children to feed.”
So we drove by, looking the other way. We also saw the markets in Bacongo, Talangaï, Poto-Poto, and Ouenzé, and the sellers along the Vietongo River, at the Beach, from where you can see the country closest to our own, the Republic of Nzadi.
In the evenings, a few steps away from the Le Rail, an old Beninese woman with scarifications on her face sold corn mash and boules d’ambiance fritters. We’d sit down in the middle of the crowd. The conversations would be about everything: politics, the president’s mistress, the people who lived across the river and who were taking jobs away from the Vietongolese, or the most recent crimes that were terrorizing the Mapapouvillians. We would go from laughter to tears. The old Beninese woman would fan her fire with a large aluminum can lid. Blinding smoke would billow from the firepit and almost choke her clients, though they didn’t seem to mind. Other such small businesses abounded in the city. We went back several times to that place. I liked the corn mash, which only Beninese women knew how to make. Their Vietongolese rivals, driven by jealousy, claimed that these “foreigners,” who were also known as popos, prepared their dish with a liquid made back in their home country by grand masters of voodoo. According to the Vietongolese women, that was why customers flocked to the stalls of the popos till two or three in the morning.
For me Mapapouville was a marvel. I felt the same emotion every time Kimbembé and I went back. We’d take the train. One time alone we flew, leaving from the airport at Mabombo after a six-hour truck journey. Kimbembé had wanted me to fly in a plane at least once in my life. It was a small-engine machine that seemed to lose its balance every time it entered turbulent air. The engine cut out, then started up again, though the pilots and flight engineers remained calm. The landing was so rough that several passengers were thrown from their seats despite the safety belts. All the same, we arrived safe and sound.
The other times I was the one who insisted on traveling by train. Planes still scare me even today.