Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty (15 page)

The reason I'm in Monsieur Mutombo's workshop this morning is I've come to get my shirt mended, the one Lounès ripped when we were at the Tata-Luboka stadium and I ran off before the start of the match. No, I'm not going to tell Monsieur Mutombo it was his son who did it. Lounès didn't mean to do it. He just wanted me to stay with him to watch the match, even if Caroline had come to support the Tié-Tié Caids, who won in the end. I heard it was Mabélé who scored all three goals in the match. In any case, I knew their team would win because their sorcerer made it rain, so the fetishes of the Voungou Dragons
would get wet and not work. And apparently whenever the ball got in front of the Tié-Tié Caids' goal, the sorcerers put invisible players on the pitch, who blew on it, and the ball flew off somewhere else, so the goal couldn't be scored. On the other hand, whenever Mabélé, proudly wearing his number 11 shirt, found himself face to face with the goalie for the Voungou Dragons and was about to shoot, the poor goalkeeper saw a javelin instead of the ball, and stepped to one side immediately because he didn't want to die pointlessly, and then the goal went in.

If I was a football referee for this
quartier
, I'd give red cards to the sorcerers sitting behind the goals, because they are the ones who decide which team will win, or if it's going to be a draw. And a draw happens when both teams have chosen sorcerers with exactly the same powers, i.e., the same
gris-gris
.

I've just handed my torn shirt to Monsieur Mutombo at long last, and he's looking at it as though it was an old duster, when in fact he made it himself last year.

‘What's happened here? You've been in a fight at school and Monsieur Mutombo here has to sew up your shirt, eh?'

‘I wasn't in a fight, Monsieur Mutombo.'

‘So a ghost tore your shirt did it?'

The apprentices are pretending to work. I can tell they're going to burst out laughing any moment. They've come a bit closer, so they can get a look at my shirt.

‘Who did this?' Monsieur Mutombo continues.

I say nothing.

‘All right, if you don't tell me who did it, I'll keep your shirt and I'll show it to Roger and Pauline this evening. You'll have to go home with no shirt on!'

I don't want to go home with no shirt on, people will laugh at me in the street. And I don't like people seeing I haven't got any muscles yet. Especially the girls will laugh. No, I'll have to say something.

‘I'll tell you who did it.'

‘Ah, at last. So, who was it?'

‘Me. Myself.'

‘Very interesting! And how did that happen?'

‘It's hard to explain. I was sitting like this, I put my back against the wall and there, all of a sudden, was this nail, out of nowhere. So just when I'm about to stand up to…'

‘Michel, cut it out! I understand that you are fond of Lounès and to protect him you're prepared to take the blame yourself. But he's already told me everything. Everything! It was him that grabbed your shirt…'

Now I understand why the two apprentices had started laughing earlier. They knew, too, that it was their boss's son that had torn my shirt.

Monsieur Mutombo turns to them.

‘Longombé, fix the boy's shirt, right now. And Mokobé, you do the turn-ups on Monsieur Casimir's trousers, he's been on at me since yesterday, even though I keep telling him he's not very tall and turn-ups will make him look even smaller than the president of Gabon.'

I go up to Monsieur Mutombo and whisper in his ear.

‘Actually, I've got a bit of a serious problem…'

‘Well, what is it, this bit of a serious problem?'

‘Your apprentices…'

‘What have they done to you?'

‘They only do buttons and I don't want them to spoil my shirt. My mother will be cross with me if they do.'

Monsieur Mutombo bursts out laughing. His apprentices have heard me, and they have a good laugh while they get the chance, because they've been holding it in for ages. Since all three of them are killing themselves laughing, I start laughing too, and then I can't stop. Now when I laugh, it always makes other people laugh too, because I often laugh like a little jackal with a bad cough. So all four of us just go on laughing till a woman appears at the door of the workshop. It's as though she can't get in, frontways or sideways. She's so enormous that it's as though the door had just been blocked by an extraterrestrial. Even Monsieur Mutombo's bald head casts no light now. The woman's cheeks are all puffed out like someone blowing into a trumpet, or who has two mandarin oranges stuffed in their mouth. The sight of this makes me split my sides even more, it's too much, I'm going to choke laughing, I point my finger at the woman, I tell myself the others in the workshop must surely laugh with me. But suddenly everyone else has stopped. They're all looking at me. Monsieur Mutombo clears his throat and nods his head at me, as if to tell me to stop laughing. I stop laughing suddenly and wipe my tears with the end of my shirt.

Longombé stands up like a schoolboy who's been caught chatting and has to go up to the board and write out a hundred times: I must not talk in class. He walks past me, still holding my ripped shirt in his hands and goes over to the woman, who has now moved away from the door. When she moved I thought they must have switched on the street lamps in the Avenue of Independence. While Longombé and the woman are talking outside, Monsieur Mutombo leans over to me: ‘You shouldn't have laughed! Do you know who that woman is? It's Longombé's mother. She comes every day to ask her son for money.'

Now Longombé's coming back into the workshop. He walks past me again, and gives me a strange look. I say to myself, ‘Oh heck, he's angry, now he's really going to ruin my shirt, to get his own back.'

The cleverest person in our class is called Adriano and he's from Angola. He's very light skinned because some of his grandparents had children with Portuguese people. That's why no one teases him about his skin because it's not his fault he's not really black like us, it's the Portuguese people's fault.

The very first day Adriano arrived in class, the teacher told us that his father had been killed in the civil war going on in his country. Adriano and his mother came to take refuge in Pointe-Noire, so they wouldn't be killed too. In their country, at night, the militiamen who follow a wicked Angolan called Jonas Savimbi attack the army of the president, Agostinho Neto. We were all scared when the teacher reminded us that Angola is not far from our country and that you can get here from there on foot, via a tiny country called Cabinda, which, like us, has loads of petrol. What really scared us was the idea that Jonas Savimbi and his militiamen might turn up in our country, just to annoy our President as well, and push us into a civil war. We learned that there are lots of Cuban and Russian soldiers in Angola, to help president Agostinho Neto stay in power, because he's not just under attack from Jonas Savimbo, poor fellow, there are other enemies too, and they've formed the Front National de Liberation d'Angola, or FNLA, and their leader is a certain Holden Roberto, who doesn't mess about. Agostinho Neto is caught between Jonas Savimbi and Holden Roberto, who are
supported either directly or in secret, by the imperialists.

After these explanations, the teacher was happy to be able to tell us that our country likes President Agostinho Neto because he's communist, like us. Adriano was very pleased about that.

In the classroom we sit in order of intelligence. When you come in, the first row, facing you, is made up of the three best pupils in the class: Adriano, Willy-Dibas, and Jérémie. The second row is for the fourth, fifth and sixth best pupils. And it carries on like that, right to the back of the class. The stupidest are in the back row. They get left at the back so they can chat and throw ink pellets at each other.

The second the teacher asks a question, Adriano has the answer, as if he'd dreamed it in the night, like that criminal Idi Amin Dada, who dreamed of what he would do to the Asians. And every time our teacher says to Adriano, ‘Don't you answer, give the others a chance to answer and show their intelligence for a few minutes of their lives at least.' Adriano doesn't like that, he wants to answer all the questions. But why should we bother coming to class if there's an Angolan who knows all the answers, even about things to do with our country, like rivers and lakes? Adriano doesn't like it when someone else behind him gets it right. But when no one knows the answer – which is usually the case – the teacher has to say to him, ‘Adriano, now you can answer.' When he's told us the answer, everyone has to stand up and clap for five minutes or more. His face goes all red like a tomato, and the teacher gives him a present: a box full of chalks, a notebook and a textbook containing all the speeches of the President of the Republic.

Those of us in the middle of the class, the average ones, dream
that one day we might move up to the front row beside Adriano, but it's not easy. If you get a better mark than someone in a higher row, you go and sit in his place, and he moves back to your row. Occasionally I've got as far as the third row, but the next day I always got moved back because the person whose place I'd taken had gone and worked really hard all day Sunday, so he can get his place back among the top ten. It's only the front row that never changes, because Adriano, Willy-Dibas and Jérémie are so clever, they confer with each other so no one else can come up to their level. If the three of them are cross with you they pass a little piece of paper to someone in the class who doesn't like you. They write down the answers to the question on this piece of paper, and the classmate, who you don't like either, just copies them down. When you get into class the next morning, the classmate in question has changed places, now he's just behind Adriano, Willy-Dibas and Jérémie. And you're hopping mad.

I try really hard not to get moved to the back row, to stay in the middle of the class. In my row no one bothers you, and no one sees you either, because the teacher usually only notices the front and back rows.

Us boys wear khaki shirts and blue shorts, and the girls wear orange shirts and blue skirts. Every morning, to be allowed into class, you have to recite the first four articles of the law of the National Pioneers Movement, the MNP. I know them by heart now. Sometimes I dream that I'm reciting them in a stadium that's even fuller than the Revolution Stadium. Every evening before I go to bed, and every morning before I get up, I recite them. I close my eyes, I imagine I'm someone about to serve his country, that thanks to me capitalism won't reign victorious in
our country, and I murmur the four articles, like a prayer:

Article 1: the pioneer is a conscientious and effective junior militant. In all things he obeys the orders of the Congolese Workers' Party.

Article 2: The pioneer follows the example of the immortal Marien Ngouabi, founder of the Congolese Workers' Party.

Article 3: The pioneer is thrifty, disciplined and hardworking, and completes his tasks.

Article 4: The pioneer both respects and transforms nature.

There's a boy in our class called Bouzoba who is not very bright. When I say he's not very bright, I'm being nice because Bouzoba is the stupidest boy in the whole class, so he sits in the back row, in a corner, where he can get on with being stupid without being seen. It was him that invented the famous ‘mirror game' which is the craze at the moment in the playground. During break, he goes around with a little mirror in his pocket and when the girls are playing he comes up behind one of the girls who's standing up and puts his little mirror on the ground between the girl's legs to see the colour of her pants. Then he comes and tells us that the girl standing over there is wearing red pants and the one beside her has green pants with a hole in. And when the girls walk past us, we say, ‘Marguerite, you've got red pants on! Célestine, you've got green pants with a hole in!' The poor girls start whimpering and go and tell the teacher that we've seen Marguerite's red pants and Célestine's green pants with a hole in. The teacher also goes to tell the head teacher that some of the children have seen Marguerite's red pants and Célestine's green pants with a hole in. And the head teacher
comes personally to beat the boys in our class, because no one dares tell on Bouzoba, because he's strong and muscular and he'll beat us up in the playground and make us pay a month's fine: we have to give him our pocket money every day, and scratch his backside when he's got an itch.

The head teacher's very crafty and he really wants to know who made up the mirror game. First of all he gives us all a good hiding, and then he goes up onto the platform and says, ‘Who can tell me what colour Célestine's pants are?'

The class sits in silence – you can hear the flies buzzing. The head teacher repeats his question with a broad smile, as though promising not to belt anyone who can tell him the colour of Célestine's pants. This is when that idiot Bouzoba puts his hand up at the back of the class and yells, ‘Sir, sir, Célestine's pants are green!'

‘Really? And how do you now that?'

‘I saw it with my pocket mirror!'

He gets out his pocket mirror, waves it in the air. Then he adds, ‘I'm not lying, sir, look, here's my mirror!'

The head teacher grabs Bouzoba by the ears and drags him into his office to beat him even more, and make him tidy the books and clean the windows as a punishment.

Our desks are too small, so we're all squeezed up together. You can easily read or copy what the person next to you is writing if you haven't done your homework. Everyone does it. I've stopped looking at what the others do, because every time I end up copying their mistakes. When someone's writing quickly, as though he knows what he's doing, you don't imagine he's making a mistake. So you copy off him, without thinking, because if he was writing rubbish he wouldn't be writing that
quickly, he must be really clever, like Adriano, Willy-Dibas or Jérémie.