Dr. Rieux
Years passed in that way.
I went to high school till I completed my baccalaureate. Kimbembé decided that I should occupy myself exclusively with Maribé, with her future. University studies would only have separated us, since the university was in Mapapouville.
So I stayed in Batalébé, at home and idle. Visits from my parents-in-law cheered the place up for a few days once in a while. I felt less alone. Mâ Boutoto liked me. I braided her gray hair while Tâ Kimbembé filled his pipe, leaning back against a mango tree. They were fond of their only son. I left them alone to talk with one another in the evening.
After they went home I would return to my solitude. When I didn’t go visit Christiane, I would read. I can say without vanity that I read a great deal in the years that preceded the events in Mapapouville. I helped myself to the contents of Kimbembé’s trunk. I gobbled up most of the books in it. Of them all, I read Albert Camus’s The Plague over and again. Three times? Four? Probably more. Of course Kimbembé in his perpetual contrariness reckoned that The Stranger was the more accomplished novel, producing arguments to that effect. I didn’t give a fig about his opinion. The Plague was my favorite book; I consulted it; I marveled at it as a treasure, even if it lacked a cover. It was the same copy that the young teacher had given me in the North.
Even today I can’t conceive of another cover for that book. I always think of it as having my own cover, the one I would have liked it to have. The one that’s in my dreams. It’s a strange image that came out of my reading. I picture a low sky, red as the clay of our cutoff lakes, and walls of disproportionate sizes. Shadows are seated along the bottoms of these walls. Old women. I don’t know what it means, but that’s how I imagine the outside of that book, whose words seem carved with a scalpel. Whenever I read it, I would admire Dr. Rieux’s boldness, his courage, in the face of the calamity that is the plague. I had the feeling of being imprisoned in the city of Oran along with Camus’s characters. I still remember the opening scene of the book: poor Dr. Rieux stumbling on a dead rat. What is this creature doing in the middle of the landing? A little detail, and everything begins. The noose tightens more and more, chapter by chapter . . .
After the Okonongo Affair I never stopped asking myself: Would Vietongo, our country, also experience a plague in its way? If so, I concluded, we lacked a doctor, a good doctor who if possible would be called Bernard Rieux, like in The Plague . . .