France, 1955
41. ON THE WINDY NIGHT an eight-year-old Mansour arrived in Paris, an albino woman gave him his first hot bath. He was terrified by the blonde of her eyelashes, the way her whole body was the color of his palms. The scent of burnt leather in her blonde braids lured his mind back to the world he’d run from, to the car shop across the street from the talibé orphanage.
Mansour had often gone to the car shop, sometimes to steal water, most times to bring them bottles of the potion the Marabout made to cause accidents on the road and give the shop business. Mansour would place the bottles on the ground, one in each corner of the sand. (For the rest of his life, every time he hears a car skid, he will imagine the work of the gris-gris that totaled sixteen Mercedes but looked like nothing more than urine.)
The albino woman’s circular cornrows dizzied him, lulling him away from his memories and back to the hot bathwater that was waking his wounds. He had thought the browning of the water, which came from the blood and dirt crusted on his skin, was simply his melanin depositing itself, the way kinkiliba tea leaves turned water brown. He watched the woman’s hands, thinking also that touching him might give her color too. The woman muttered to herself as she scrubbed his arm. He picked out the words from her rapid French that he could understand: Morning. Black. Fire.
She’d just come home from her night job cleaning toilets at Louis Vuitton and was complaining, Mama would tell him later that evening, about the three hundred purses they burned that night. Tossing the thousand-dollar wares into the flames like dirty rags instead of selling them at a price people like her could afford.
“C’est dingue. C’est tellement dingue ce monde.” This is a crazy world, she said.
When it was over, Mansour wheezed at the stale European air, shocked by the amount of water the woman drained from the bathtub, freezing and trembling in a knockoff Louis Vuitton shawl in the bedroom of a crowded Paris apartment.
Marie was the little girl on a naked box spring mattress beside him, the albino woman’s daughter, holding her father’s ruler as she calculated the dimensions of various stains based on their approximate likeness to squares, circles, hexagons. She did this with a furrowed brow and feverish precision, sucking her index and middle fingers. A brainy, merciless child who read the newspaper at four years old, adults knew to avoid her when they were tired, but Mansour listened as a six-year-old Marie reported these dimensions with the conviction of a government official.
“Bon,” she began, “158; 38; 1,023; 159. Comprends-nga?” Do you understand? she asked, and when he nodded, she kissed him. His first kiss: a garlicky, slimy welcome to the Western world.
42. WHEN THEY MOVED into their own place, Olu came night after night and waited for Mama to finish her shift, parking in the back alley of the noisy French restaurant where Mama worked. She earned just enough for an apartment in Roubaix that had hot water once a week and a radio with three stations. It was the building where they first moved after leaving Marie-Antoinette’s parents’ place across town. Mansour will always remember their building for the door that would swell so wide it couldn’t be shut when it rained; where a diabetic trafficked boy from the floor above ran Mama’s errands in exchange for a homemade lunch and asked Mansour to squeeze and pray over his fingers whenever he couldn’t feel his hands.
Over the building’s battling radios, the fish ever frying in Mama’s pan, Olu read Mansour children’s books. Mama watched him from the couch as he sat the mute boy on his knee, congratulating him on each small improvement. Mansour looked away less and less and started to smile. Before long, Olu was spending most of his time with Mansour, bringing balls for his mouth to help him enunciate and those choral recordings of French nursery rhymes.
Since arriving in Paris and reuniting with Mama, deeply introverted Mansour often found it safer not to speak. A habit of protective silence, but one that made her think he was mute. It was the songs that finally got him to speak again. Olu, an orphan, saw himself in the boy and encouraged Mansour as he strove to mimic the sound of other children’s voices, the words starting to form naturally. But he came to mimic so well, while still conversing so little, that it was difficult to tell if he truly understood what the words meant.
Sometimes, on weekends, Olu would visit. One morning, Mama set him a place alone at the breakfast table. She put a white cloth over the scuffed wood, a glass of plastic flowers at the center, polished his plate before placing it before his seat, and made him a cloth napkin from an old bedsheet. She completed the breakfast, then carefully placed the perfectly folded napkin over it and busied herself with other things until he came into the kitchen.
She faced away, washing dishes that were already clean, feigning indifference to his reaction. She heard a sound of delight come from him as he approached the table, and she struggled to control her grin.
Olu became perplexed, and his food became cold, as he waited for Mama and Mansour to join him at the table.
He left the table in search of them and found Mansour first, alone in his bedroom, eating his breakfast on a little stool at a little table.
“Hey,” Olu whispered. “Are you in prison?” The boy smiled. He’d always enjoyed his table and bench, a birthday present from Mama. You are a real man now with your own place to eat, she’d said.
Once Olu retrieved Mansour from the bedroom, he went and found Mama in the living room, eating her breakfast on the couch while she browsed the paper, reading with her finger to the line as she was taught in school.
“Why have you punished me?” he said. “Your table is beautiful. But it would be even more so with your presence.”
And though she was not used to this arrangement of the man eating with the family, a custom she’d become familiar with from television but could never imagine for herself, with time, she came to appreciate the informality.
Within a month, Mansour was going to the Catholic church’s day school. He was the oldest child there, but he was finally speaking. Mama was quietly surprised, but Olu was beaming.
Olu asked Mama to marry him on a snowy night in the back seat of his car.
“Will you marry me?” he asked nervously, repeating the question when she was slow to answer.
“Will you marry me … and accept Jesus Christ?”
Jesus would not be a problem. Over time, she could bring Olu around to Islam. She had convinced herself, just as he’d convinced himself that he could pull her his way. But there was more. She had seen it already, what a life with him might entail, for everything she wanted to feel, she watched him give away to Mansour. He rocked the boy; he whispered to him. He wiped his eyes when he cried. He took him by the hand on Sundays and introduced him to the world gently, one word, one park, one street at a time. And she saw the boy change. She saw Mansour speak, use his diapers less and less. And laugh—like his mother, a laugh that made the face look mean and put the whole body in a groove. The sight of Kiné in the boy’s face was too much. It put her in bed with a headache for nights at a time. It was painful for Mama to feel her so close.
Back home, Olu followed her to the living room and asked Mama again if she would marry him. She pulled her blanket on the sofa up to her nose and inhaled the stale scent of the old quilt, a gift from the landlord. She still said nothing.
“Why don’t you think it over while I take Mansour to town with me tomorrow?”
“But there’s no church school tomorrow,” she protested.
“There’s a choir in town from Switzerland. I met the director at church, and I told him about the boy’s voice. If he gets into that school, they would take care of everything. And he could catch up with boys his age. Let him try, Eva.”
She sighed and turned away.
“You have to pick him up before seven,” she said, her voice gruff and muffled by the couch pillow. Olu grabbed her, holding on until she laughed.
43. THERE MUST HAVE BEEN other children, but Mansour only remembers hiding under Olu’s arm, nestling in the silk lining of his wool coat, turning a small hole into a big one when he attempted to climb inside of it. The man smelled of wine, made him think of Sokhna. It was a comfort. But just as he dozed off to sleep in the pews, the choir director finally approached, telling Olu that it was Mansour’s turn to audition.
The director had to drag Mansour by the arm. He whined all the way from where he’d sat with Olu, down the cold central hall, where the flooring changed to cobblestone and the walls to wood panels. The choir director pushed him up the steps of the main stage, where the accompanist—an incredibly strong yet gaunt elderly woman—held Mansour in place and warned him not to move.
“We won’t have any more of that!” she said. And he believed her.
As he stood there, Mansour became distracted by the life-size glossy portraits of actors in medieval costumes that hung on the walls. All of them flaunting generous dark hair and olive skin, seeming to be real people, frozen in clownish poses. Each one made immortal just to entertain.
As he skimmed the room from the stage, Mansour locked eyes with the man who smelled like wine and felt a familiar feeling he had not long escaped in Senegal with the talibé: the power and the dread of performance.
From the back wall, Olu smiled and mimed things to make Mansour laugh. Mansour finally began to sing “O filii et filiae,” producing a sound so high and pure that the director’s face grew hot with tears and he dried his skin with the sleeve of his robe. He told Olu on the spot that Mansour was accepted.
“What a wonderful, wonderful find!” he said, with a muscular hand squeezing Olu’s shoulder.
They talked as the man ushered Olu back out into the entryway.
“I think he’d be more suited to the orphanage than the day school. That will give us more time to work with him,” the man said.
“But, Father, he’s not an orphan. His mother works in town.”
The man’s face soured. He turned to go back inside, walking quickly. Olu pursued him.
“Father, I don’t understand. We’re happy for the boy to join the choir, but he will live with his mother—as the other boys do.”
“No, he needs to be here. He needs real training.”
“I don’t want to take him from his mother. They’ve been separated before—”
“He can be the absolute best singer this choir has ever produced. But he needs to live here.”
Olu saw the man’s eyes brighten, felt himself being seduced. The man continued.
“How much do you want for him?”
In the car home, Olu was mostly silent. That moment and for the hours that followed, every time he looked at Mansour, Olu had a strange, stubborn look on his face.
Soon came the day that Mansour would see him for the last time.
44. RAISED VOICES BRING Mansour from his bed. He stands in the open sliver of his bedroom door to watch them in the living room.
“Eva! It is a place for orphans! Don’t you want your son to stay with you?”
“I work all hours. Who will bring him home every day?”
“I will!”
“And take him back? Every day? It’s hours away.”
Olu nods, and Mama’s gaze hardens.
“What about when you get tired of him? Yes, you will tire of taking care of a mute boy who will never repay you!”
“Don’t speak about him that way!”
“I thought that you trusted the church? Isn’t that why you took him there?”
“I took him there for the school, to give your son an opportunity. I did not take him there to become a ward of the state!”
“What does it matter?” Mama chupses.
Olu takes a step back, looking at her in a way that makes her want to take back her words. He speaks softly now, almost whispering.
“Why would you want to rid yourself of your own child?”
“He’s not my child,” she whispers back. “My sister died.”
Mansour shrinks into the darkness of the bedroom. Wonders what has happened to the aunt who wrote to his grandfather, asking for him. Wonders how that woman is the same one that he’s been brought to.
Mansour sees Mama disappear from view as she goes to the kitchen. Olu follows her, and Mansour steps out just enough to see them.
Mama is pulling garbage together for disposal. She knots the bags as she sniffles and drags her left hand across her nose. She pulls on her coat and leans beside the bags, against the dingy wallpaper of the old apartment.
“I thought I could earn enough to take care of him. I really thought I could give him …” She stops herself, stifling her emotions. “It’s good.” She wipes her eyes. “It will be good for him. They will give him food and clothes. It’s no less than what I have done.”
She gazes up at Olu. Her eyes look like they have been emptied of something, are now as fresh as they are cold. Then she opens the door and closes it behind her.
When she is gone, Olu stands in the dark and looks around the apartment as if he’s just arrived. He paces the dirty rug, squats on it, and feels the fibers with a large gentle hand.
“Mansour,” he calls, perceiving the boy from the corner of his eye. He turns to face him.
“Listen to me. The schoolmaster tried to buy you. He asked me what I would charge for you.” Olu looks at the boy, who stares back, unmoving. “They are not all bad people. But the man in charge there is not good. Do you understand?”
Mansour does not speak, and Olu stands from where he’s been squatting, and Mansour watches the man’s enormous shoes print the pattern of his soles onto the rug. He watches the man pick up Mama’s glass of water from the armrest of the plastic-covered sofa. The man drinks it down and stands at the window with his hands half in his pockets and elbows turned out. All the wrinkles seem to fall from his clothes, and he seems to be whole and perfect again.
Anticipating something that he cannot bear to see, Mansour closes his eyes, savoring the man’s presence for the last time.
He goes to put his fingers to his ears but finds that he wants to hear. He wants to remember this moment, these sounds: The leather briefcase squeaking as it’s lifted from the plastic sofa cover. The man’s hand cupping his cheek. Then the sound of footsteps moving away … steady and then unsteady, steady and then unsteady, steady and gone.
45. FOR THE FIRST TIME since they’d become a family with Olu, Mansour wakes up to the scent of the incense pot. The smoke of thiouraye is thick enough to make him wonder if he’s dreaming. The traffic outside seems particularly loud, and more light than usual is coming through the windows, revealing fingerprints on the dirty glass and browning leaves on the houseplants. He realizes that he and Mama are usually not home at this time of day.
She’s set a place for Mansour to eat alone at the couch as she used to do before Olu arrived in their lives and insisted that they all eat together. This is when Mansour begins to mourn, knowing for certain that life has reverted to what it had been before.
Sitting in Olu’s chair, Mama moves her prayer beads rapidly through her fingers as her lips silently mutter a name of God. She is looking right into Mansour’s eyes, but he can tell from the awe in them that it is not him she sees. Mansour watches her eyes return to him—the look she always gives him: expectation, as her spiritual ecstasy comes down.
Olu’s leftover newspapers remain on the breakfast table and there’s a half-eaten plate of breakfast that Mama hasn’t finished. Her head tips downward and her breathing becomes heavy.
Mama snaps her fingers, pointing to the plate of food that waits for him. He sits, eating alone, and he feels his lips quivering as he raises the omelet to them. When he tries to open his mouth, he wants to wail, so he closes it as tightly as he can again, presses his lips together until he goes numb.
At the French restaurant, where Mansour goes back to spending many hours now that Olu is not there to look after him at home, the cook who gives him madeleines tells him that fasting makes dreams stronger. It brings the mind closer to the mysteries of the universe.
Mansour stands for forty minutes in the crowded shop of a popular seamstress while Mama sits near the storefront window trying on gloves she can’t afford. He struggles to keep his tired arms outstretched as the woman measures him for the fitting of a jacket.
“You’re a most lucky boy.”
Her cross necklace rests on his head as she bends over him to complete the measurements.
“Nobody gets to sing for that choir.”
Once the measurements are taken, Mama takes him next door to the barber.
“Is this how you want it to be?” the barber says to Mama, perplexed by his own work when he’s finished with Mansour’s head. It’s something between a lopsided Afro and a Mohawk. Mama holds her chin at the mess with squinted eyes. Then she takes the clippers from the man’s hand and shaves Mansour’s head herself.
His head is cold then, so she buys him a hat and they head home.
The next day, they begin their long journey to the Catholic school. Mama drives her car to the train station, and Mansour watches the sun change places, lets all the heat and light sting him sweetly in the eyes.
When they arrive, she shakes the whole way from the street to the cathedral’s enormous front doors and hesitates before them. Facing a failure so complete. She is giving him away. The very thing she’d begged her father not to do. The very thing she’s come to Europe to impede. And to a church. When they were through with him, what would he believe about himself? About God? Or her? She looks back at the boy, who is some paces behind, his mouth tight, his eyes carefully blank and swollen. It seems that he heard something of her words with Olu, has been wary of her ever since, and she wonders how much he remembers Kiné. But in his silence, in the blankness of his expression, she cannot tell what he has understood. They’d been different, not as close, when he finally arrived in Europe. But Mama thought that maybe, over time, they might be close once more. But she knows now, with this decision, that he will never see her as he once did, that he will never again prefer her arms to anyone else’s.