Our Daily Life in Louboulou
Everything here seems frozen, suspended.
Birds with somber plumage cast a dismal shadow over the tops of the rows of Palmyra palms that enclose the houses. Their song travels across the hill, goes as far as the forest, and comes back in a crackling, fitful echo all the way to the first dwellings of the village. The buildings rise up in the immobility of a land laid low by a plague from which the inhabitants have been unable to recover and so have decided to give up the struggle. The kind of plague that above all should not be named, in case that should bring it back. So it’s unsurprising that the scars of fate, the fissures of resignation, should be visible on the bark of the trees. Old people are rarely even seen poking their nose out of doors. The moment they appear, they hurry out to gather their chickens and livestock, then shut the door of their house behind them.
We live here, Maribé and I, opposite what once must have been the market square, in this abandoned house that belongs to Mam’Soko, the old lady suffering from chronic rheumatism. She was the one who came out to see us. She’d spotted us in the distance when we first arrived. She must have asked herself what a woman and a teenage girl could be looking for in a backwater like Louboulou. She must also have dug in her memory to see if we might not belong to some family in the village. She’d started to observe us from the moment we put our things on the ground.
In Louboulou Maribé sleeps a lot.
Her sleep is deep but still interspersed with delirium, with twitchings and sobbings. Mam’Soko always comes and knocks at the window. Yesterday she dropped off some kitchen utensils. She told us to make ourselves at home here and said we shouldn’t hesitate to bother her if we needed anything. She told me again I should go out, take a walk with Maribé. I replied in the same way: we’re tired and we want to rest. I turned on the radio to listen to the news. Reception was a little fuzzy, but the Voice of the Vietongolese Revolution could be heard clearly.
Mam’Soko went back into her orchard, a few of the animals that have remained loyal to her following in single file. She spent the day sitting under her tree, talking to it, stroking its fissured trunk. Then she got up and moved toward her house. She only half-closed the door. She didn’t light her hurricane lamp. She waited for the shade of her husband. That’s why she doesn’t close the door. She prepared her rheumatism medication. You never know what might happen in the middle of the night. Before going to sleep, she chewed some tobacco leaves. Finally she lay down on her pallet and talked for a long time, until her eyelids grew heavy.
We didn’t see her again till sunrise the next day . . .
Mam’Soko’s Hospitality
A few days ago, when Mam’Soko first saw us standing in front of her second house, our belongings on the ground, she opened the door of her own house that was opposite it. I showed Maribé that someone was watching us. Night was slowly falling. We wondered whether we should go into the house or toward the old lady. The other inhabitants we’d seen did not seem at all surprised by our presence. Most of them were elderly. Some had walked by us without a glance. Others had given a slight nod and continued on their way.
Louboulou used to have a tradition of hospitality, especially at the time of well-fed cows, the shining years, when Massengo was alive. When travelers arrived in the evening, the villagers would slaughter a pig in their honor, offer them one of the houses for guests. Mam’Soko herself had opened the door of her second house wide. She had come forward with her stooping form, her hand gripping her cane. As she walked she mumbled unintelligible words, spitting on the ground. She came to a stop, trying in vain to straighten her back. Without a word she passed in front of us and opened the door of this second house of hers. We hesitated for a moment.
“This house has always welcomed strangers,” she said. “Make yourselves at home here. The house belonged to my brother-in-law, who’s in the cemetery at Crayfish Creek. Many people have slept here.”
Inside the house the old lady pointed to a hurricane lamp in the corner. We lit it—night had fallen by now. Mam’Soko took the lamp in her trembling hand. She first brought it close to Maribé’s face, which she scrutinized for a moment. Then she came up to me. At this point the light allowed me to see her features close up: dull, damp, yet mobile eyes; hollow cheeks; skin covered in wrinkles; thin ashen hair that barely covered part of her head. She sat on the ground as we unpacked our things. And she spoke about the village, about her husband, whose disappearance had remained in the collective memory . . .
Mam’Soko is from another era. Time has marked her. Her thinning hair has grown scorched as it turned white. She has had a life here. She reminded us that at one time Louboulou had a soul, had life. There were men, women, children. The dead wandered through the bushes, reincarnated as wild or domestic animals. That’s the reason she steers clear of game, for fear of eating one of her loved ones, perhaps even her husband, whose death however she has never accepted. Yet Massengo died over twenty years ago. Mam’Soko cannot bring herself to accept his death because it was stranger than any other passing in Louboulou.
The Mysterious Story of Massengo the Hunter
Chief Massengo, Mam’Soko’s husband, was an important person in the village. She speaks of him in the present tense even though he is dead. I have trouble acting as if he were still alive. At times, though, I find myself talking of him in the present, so as to respect Mam’Soko’s world.
Though dead, Massengo is the chief of Louboulou. He is its mind, its breath, its soul. He left vast fields of cassava, banana plantations, and cattle. He was a hunter, one who never came home empty-handed. He could not have accepted such a shameful thing. He was a man with a sense of honor. He had left the village while defending it with all his strength. He had seen its end coming. Village chiefs are like gods: they know the date they will go away, but they tell no one, so as not to incur the wrath of the spirits.
Like all village chiefs, then, Massengo saw when his day came. Mam’Soko had in fact tried to persuade him not to go hunting that evening. Massengo, who was obstinate, claimed his instinct had told him that that night he would bag some big game, the biggest of his career. Armed with his 12mm, he left the village late at night. Mam’Soko saw him walk away and merge into the shadows.
The rain would not have put Massengo off. It’s when the elements rage that a hunter achieves great things. Massengo encountered game leaping every which way in search of shelter among the branches.
It was the sorcerer Tongotsia who had retraced Massengo’s story, watching the drama in a basin of clear water. The sorcerer explained to the wise ones of Louboulou that Chief Massengo had gotten lost in the bush and had found himself a long way from his region. He had been tracking some game. Game that he saw more in his head than in reality. The chief had kept walking, parting the branches, without ever once looking behind him. The rain fell. Thunder rolled, flattening trees. Massengo came out into a clearing. A blinding light had drawn him to this place, where the wind was gathering strength before unleashing its devastating fury. Massengo realized that his legs were buckling. That something was moving in front of him, coming toward him. The figure of an animal. A doe. The chief instinctively pulled the trigger.
A shot rang out. The recoil threw Massengo several yards away from the creature. Pulling himself together, he got back to his feet. He felt as if he were emerging from a long sleep. He picked up his gun, went up to the dead animal. His heart skipped a beat. The beast was still in its death throes. But that was not what puzzled him the most. What sent him mad was seeing that the animal had a human head. And not just any human head: that of Massengo, the hunter, the village chief himself . . .
That night Massengo had killed his own totem, the animal that was his double and that had been protecting him since he was born. Nothing could be done. This was how most village chiefs died in the South of Vietongo. They themselves killed their own double.
That was the explanation Tongotsia the sorcerer gave to the village. The body of the chief was recovered from the forest. There was no game by his side. His body was disfigured as if he had died by shooting himself in the head.