Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty (7 page)

Lounès thinks our President's a dictator because he's a military man, but I don't agree. I'm sure that in a lot of countries around the world there are dictators who aren't in the army. So I don't care if our President's a dictator, it just annoys me that he says he's been sent personally by God. Now if God wanted to send someone to be president of our country He would have sent his son Jesus because He's already done that once to save men on earth. At least, that's what the priest says on Sundays in the church of Saint-Jean-Bosco.

When the President tells us he's been personally sent by God, people believe him, without stopping to check if it's true or not. And we learn his speeches at school, like the sheep down at the Grand Marché, because what he says is supposedly for our good, and comes directly from God. We learn about his glorious life story. How he defeated the enemies of the Revolution in the north of the country, how he single-handedly massacred his enemies who had stolen our army's tank and were preparing to bombard the north of the country, and then
go back down south and bombard the little villages down there, including animals and poor peasants. They had to find the tank again fast, it was the only one the French left behind for us after Independence. The French really liked us, and we liked them too. They still like us, in fact, because they go on looking after our oil for us, which is in the sea near Pointe-Noire, because if they don't we'll only go and waste it or sell it to the Americans, who need it to run their enormous cars.

And apparently, because he was born invincible, our President's the one who went into battle back when he was just a soldier and didn't know it was written on the lines of his right hand that he would become president after a battle against the enemies of the Revolution. So he just turned up in the north of the country on an old Vespa, so well disguised that no one could tell if he was a soldier or a bit of grass waving in the wind. He crawled, he swam, he climbed trees. He attacked hundreds of enemies of the revolution who'd gathered by a river to work out how they could wipe us out in less than twenty-four hours. The future president let out a great war cry and began machine gunning them with his eyes closed. He was faster with a bullet than Lucky Luke himself. And when he'd run out of ammunition the spirits of our ancestors gave him heaps more. At one point even the spirits of our ancestors ran out of bullets too. The future president went and hid in a maize field, and there he met an old man of the Bembé tribe, who only had one tooth left in his head, and who told him to put maize kernels in his weapon. He was lying, and he didn't believe him, but he had no choice because the enemies were coming up behind him en masse. So he loaded his gun with maize kernels anyway. When he fired, the kernels exploded, like grenades in the first world war. He fired and he fired and he kept on firing while the
enemies of the Nation fell, one after the other and died like rats. The future president finally discovered where they had hidden our lovely French tank. The tank still worked, the opponents of the Revolution hadn't used it. Then our future president came back with the tank, driving it himself, and the people cheered him and gave him flowers as he entered the national stadium with the tank.

As soon as he became President of the Republic, since he was by now a national hero, thanks to the tank, he wrote a big fat book that you have to read at middle school, high school and university. They only read us a few little bits because our brains are still too small, but when we get to middle school we'll read it all, from start to finish.

It's Saturday, and everyone out in the street is all dressed up, you'd think it was Independence Day. Some people always get dressed up like that on Saturdays. The minute I see all those suits and new wraps I know it must be Saturday. They all do it: come Saturday, they're out there in their fine clothes from morning to the late afternoon, then in the evening they're off to cruise the bars in the Avenue of Independence. They go dancing all night, and some of them sleep from Sunday to Monday midday and forget to go to work. The priest at Saint-Jean-Bosco complains his church is empty these days. How can you expect people to get up for church on a Sunday morning if they've been out partying from six in the evening till six in the morning and only found their way back home again by some small miracle?

It's not too hot. The sky above me is calm and blue. When a plane goes by, I think of Caroline, even though I'm still cross with her. Now every time I think of my wife I have to think of a red car with five seats. And our two children, a girl and a boy. Not forgetting the little white dog.

While I'm busy imagining my life with Caroline, someone comes up behind me and touches my shoulder. It's Lounès.

He laughs and asks if he frightened me.

‘Not at all,' I say.

He likes creeping up on me. He's brought some boiled sweets,
two for himself and one for me. He gives me mine as soon as he creeps in. My father's sleeping at Maman Martine's today and my mother's still at the Grand Marché selling peanuts with Madame Mutombo, so there's no need to worry.

Lounès sits where I sit when I eat with my parents. I sit in my father's place. I've left the door open. From where I'm sitting I can watch what's happening outside.

Lounès looks at a new photo my mother's put on the dresser. It was taken only a few days ago when we went to buy me some new Spring Court shoes at Printania, where they sell apples, grapes, and lots of fruit brought over from Europe. On the way home we stopped in a bar on the Avenue of Independence. A photographer came in with his camera, and forced my parents to have a picture taken.

‘Look at you all! All so handsome, the three of you, it'll be a marvellous photo! I promise you, if you don't look good, I won't charge you.'

My mother said no because it's wrong to waste money. But my father listened to the photographer's pitch, about how he fed his ten children with his camera, and he hadn't had a single client in the last month. He showed us a great gash on his tibia.

‘See that? I haven't even got the money to buy drink, or Mercurochrome. And I've got two cousins and two uncles just turned up from the village and it's up to me to feed them. There's another problem too, I rent the house where we live, and the owner…'

‘All right, all right, take the photo!' my father said. My mother frowned and gave my father a dirty look. He added: ‘I'm paying. Michel, come and stand between your mother and me.'

So now the photo's there on the dresser. Sometimes I look at it for a few minutes and I'm happy I'm standing there between my parents. I know my mouth's hanging open, that's the photographer's fault. He told us to smile at the little bird that popped out of his camera. I wasn't going to smile till I'd seen what kind of bird it was: what colour, where it came out, if it flew, if it could sing like real birds that don't hide inside cameras. I was standing there waiting for the bird with my mouth hanging open, but it wasn't a bird came out, it was a light, which startled me. And another thing: I had no time to button up my shirt. You can see my chest, it's a bit flat still, I'm too small to have muscles like Blek le Roc. My mother's got a scarf wrapped round her head and a glass of beer at her lips. My father's leaning slightly towards me, as though he'd like to protect me from the enemies of the Revolution who might wipe us out and win the final struggle. Out of the three of us, Maman Pauline is the tallest. I've got a glass of beer in front of me, but not to drink, just for the photo, because my mother told me if I didn't have a drink in front of me the photo wouldn't work out because the neighbours would think we'd only gone into the bar for the photo. So there's a glass of beer in front of me, And so no one could say I was just pretending to drink, Maman Pauline took a sip from my glass. So if you look carefully at our photo, you'll see my glass isn't quite full, and you'll think I was drinking beer that day, but it's not true.

While Lounès is looking at the photo, I go into my parents' bedroom, fetch my father's briefcase and come back into the living room.

I have to do it like Papa Roger. I open the briefcase carefully and take out the tape recorder. I press a button, the little window
opens. I pick up the only cassette we have and put it in the little window, then I close it, still being very careful. I press ‘Play' and the singer with the moustache starts singing.

So there we are, listening to Georges Brassens and looking at his photo on the cassette box. Each time, Lounès tells me to be quiet, and replay the song once it gets to the end. On the cassette player there's a button with an arrow pointing left. On the button it says ‘RWD', that's where you press to go back to the beginning of the song. I saw Papa Roger doing that before. I don't like arithmetic much, but by my reckoning I've pressed this button at least ten times to get back to the start of the song.

We've stopped talking, we're just listening now. We're beginning to know the words, but from time to time I have to ask Lounès what some of the difficult words mean. He knows more words than me because he's in fifth grade at secondary school. For example, I don't understand it right at the beginning of the song when the singer with the moustache says:

I left my old oak

My saligaud

My friend the oak

My alter ego

What's a
saligaud
? I don't know. Lounès doesn't know. We give up, it doesn't matter.

But then, what's
alter ego
? We won't want to give up on that one,
alter ego
may be what the song's actually about.

‘“
Alter ego
”'s not French,' says Lounès.

‘What language is it then, if it's not French?'

‘It must be a kind of dialect, of some European tribe.'

‘A tribe?'

‘Yeah, some really small European tribe that still speaks real French, because that's where French started.'

That's what he says, but I can tell he's not sure. It can't be that, and we go on trying to work it out, and Lounès tells me that
alter ego
means someone really egotistical, like Monsieur Loubaki, who owns a bar called Relax, and makes the clients pay up the same day as they drink, whereas in the other bars you only pay at the end of the month.

‘Yeah, Monsieur Loubaki, he's
alter ego
!'

I say the singer with the moustache can't be saying the tree is his
alter ego
, his selfish person. Because why would you be weeping for a selfish person and missing him? You wouldn't, you'd be being rude to him, the way people are to Loubaki in his bar.

Lounès promises to ask his teacher at school, I mustn't ask mine, because if by any chance he doesn't know what
alter ego
and
saligaud
mean I'll get into trouble. The teacher will be embarrassed in front of the pupils and think I'm trying to make fun of him, and whip me with a bicycle chain. At Trois-Glorieuses they don't hit the pupils, they're too big, some as big as the teachers, sometimes a lot bigger. So Lounès is safe.

I don't know why, I feel like going up to Loubaki and saying ‘saligaud' and calling Lounès my ‘alter ego'. A little voice in my head says that
saligaud
is bad, and
alter ego
is ok. Better to be an
alter ego
than a
saligaud
. I'm quite sure the singer with the moustache wishes his tree, his
alter ego
, all the very best, and that's why he weeps for it, the whole day long.

In the evenings Papa Roger tunes in to Voice of America, a radio station that broadcasts the news in French, from America. I do wonder how the news makes it as far as a little country like ours and why our President doesn't interrupt the signal because they do put out a lot of serious stuff on that station, stuff Radio Congo can't say, or there'd be no more radio in our country.

My father only listens to Radio Congo to hear the death notices for the towns and villages in our country. They never say why these people have died, they say ‘after a long illness', like when Monsieur Moundzika died and Maman Pauline went to the wake for two days. What
are
these long illnesses that they can't explain over the radio? Another thing, they always say they ‘regret' to announce the death of so and so. Papa Roger says a lot of people ‘regretting' the death of these people are actually in a hurry for them to depart this life, so they can go and take over the land and animals they've left behind: ‘Never trust anyone who makes an announcement on the radio, in the end they're the ones who drive the widow and her children from the home of the deceased and seize their inheritance.'

When it's time for the announcements to come on, they play this sad music first of all, then the person reading them out puts on this sad voice as though the deaths he's about to announce had occurred in his own family. I go to my room because I don't like that music, and I hate the voice of the announcer. I
know she's pretending to be upset, that she gets paid to be sad. It's just then that Maman Pauline sits up attentively. She asks us to turn the sound up, brings her chair up to the table and practically glues her right ear to the radio. And if she hears the names of the villages in the Bousenza region, like Moussanda, Nounga, Ntséké-Pemb Batalébé, Kimandou or Kiniangui, she turns round and says to us: ‘I know the people who've just lost their relative. They live near the river Moukoukoulou, behind where the Kibonzi family plant their crops.'

And she cries, as though it was our relative who had just died.

There's a journalist on Voice of America that Papa Roger really likes, his name is Roger Guy Folly. During meals that's all he ever talks about now. Is it because the journalist in question has the same name as him, Roger? When my father says his name you'd think he was talking about his own brother: Roger Guy Folly this, Roger Guy Folly that.