Mount Pleasant (21 page)

Ngbatu wanted more details. This guy was over the top, maybe that's what caught his interest. He wanted to see just how far a twisted imagination would go, just as Nebu wanted to study the contortions of his most pointed critics. Muluam went on, his hands held in front of him.

“His
bangala
stayed hard for a whole week!”

“Is that why he couldn't come out of the forest?”

“Yeah, he was so hard he finally had to take care of it himself, I swear.”

“Lies!”

“It was two weeks!”

“Let me tell you,” a confident voice broke in, “he screwed animals to find some release.”

“He screwed monkeys.”

“Antelopes.”

“Birds.”

Sometimes Nebu laughed at these monumental fabrications, but he couldn't tell his version of his father's death. The image of a son following his father through Foumban's neighborhoods, down streets, passages, and dark paths until he finally cornered him behind a house and gave him the fatal love he'd been begging for all over the city: that certainly wouldn't make this crowd laugh. And what about a son wiping his bloody knife on the grass, a knife red with the same blood that flowed through his own veins? That was just disgusting!

“Djo,”
Nebu heard behind him, “brother, we feel sorry for your father.”

“We feel sorry for him, we do.”

Bullshit, he thought. More nonsense from slaves.

Nebu learned a lot by listening when he couldn't respond. It taught him to control his rage. Taught him to keep it, like burning metal, at a safe distance from his body and his eyes. Taught him to strike it with a hammer, striking, striking, and striking again until it grew malleable, until it took on the shape he wanted to give it: flat like a knife, oval like a bird's body, triangular like a lion's head. It taught him to heat up his rage, to dilute his rage, to polish his rage; to file it, yes, to file it down and wipe it clean, like the metals he worked with. And Nebu polished his rage, blowing on his overheated fingers, blowing on his heart to keep it from exploding, blowing on the embers of his incandescent soul. Art is an antidote to madness.

 

3

The Depths of Friendship

Oh, Nebu still had no idea what lay at the bottom of the volcanic abysses that fed Muluam and Ngbatu's stories. Only once he had plunged into their gutters did he understand who those fools really were. To think how they sidled up to him, almost becoming his friends. The furnace needed fuel, and as usual, Muluam and Ngbatu were chosen to bring some back from neighboring Bamiléké land. They would have gone alone, as always, but since a new recruit had joined their master's workshop, the devils sensed an opportunity for new mischief. Smiling, they bowed down at old Monlipèr's feet.

“Couldn't Nebu come with us?” Muluam asked.

The master surely had other plans in mind for the new apprentice, but lost in the clouds that were always hidden beneath his closed eyelids, he had no idea of the malice lurking in his interlocutors' eyes.

“Nebu?” he asked simply. “Yes.”

Muluam and Ngbatu knew that as distracted as he was, dear old Monlipèr's yes wasn't really an answer.

“He can help find the path,” Muluam reasoned.

“Who knows, maybe the next time…” Ngbatu added.

“And see the market as well.”

“So he can learn about the prices.”

The most pensive of all the Bamum bowed under the weight of these twinned arguments. As the newcomer, Nebu didn't say a thing. But he saw the trap being set. The artisans were given two donkeys because three would have made them the target of bandits. Since the new apprentice didn't have a mount, the three would take turns riding, although Bertha's son opted to start out on foot. He walked for hours, following his colleagues as they rode on ahead, laughing at his stubbornness.

“Don't be so stubborn,” they told him from time to time, especially when they reached a valley. “Don't you see the mountain ahead?”

Their ugly words from the day before were still echoing in Nebu's ears. He used his endurance to show them that he wasn't just any old fool, much less a coward they could laugh at all they wanted. But he couldn't go on forever, torturing himself to defend his dignity. Walking to Dschang would take several days. The first night, Nebu lay down far from his friends, despite their warnings: “The forest is full of wild animals!” The second, he still refused to speak to them, just let them keep on laughing at their own stories. After the second day, however, he could no longer avoid the complicity inevitable on such long trips without being ridiculous.

It all started with hunger. The travelers' provisions had run out too soon: Nebu and Muluam learned too late that Ngbatu ate like an elephant. Thankfully, he was an amazing hunter. In the evening he headed into the bush and soon returned, an antelope slung over his shoulders.

“There you go,” he said, laying his still-struggling prey out on the ground. “That should do it.”

And it did! Nebu learned that Ngbatu was the son of a well-known hunter who had turned to farming after the German administration had forbidden all the Bamum from carrying weapons. Of his four brothers, Ngbatu was the only one who'd escaped conscription, and only because he'd found shelter in Monlipèr's workshop. Give or take a few details, Muluam's story was the same; he was the son of a soldier turned farmer.

When the defrocked hunter and soldier confided their stories, why didn't Nebu admit that he was the son of a scribe, a peasant only because he was a slave? Bertha's son didn't want to remember his father. He learned many other things about his comrades, although his silence made him look like a snob in their eyes. When he awoke the next day, they were already long gone. He found them an hour later, hidden behind some bushes. He was ready to let loose with a mouthful of insults.

“Shh!” Ngbatu cut him off.

Muluam put a finger to his lips. Nebu tiptoed up and was dumbstruck by what he saw his friends were watching: a girl washing clothes in a stream. They held tight to their genitals so they wouldn't explode. Bertha's son was paralyzed by the sight. She was a dream caught mid-flight, the static perfection of a vision he thought he had conquered. There was no doubt: it was Ngungure.

“She must be Bamum,” Ngbatu said.

“What about the tattoos on her shoulders? She's Bamiléké, no doubt about it,” Muluam disagreed. “After all, we are in Bamiléké territory.”

Ngbatu cut to the chase. “Bamiléké or not, I don't give a damn. She's mine.”

“No,” Muluam snapped back. “Mine.”

“Why?”

When Muluam stood up to go join the girl, a firm hand grabbed his leg and pulled him back behind the bushes. He swallowed an insult.

“Let me go,” he grumbled, spitting out the grass from his mouth. “Let go of my foot, you sad fool!”

A few years or even a few months earlier, Nebu would have been the first to want to seduce the girl by the stream. Today, however, what he said came as a real surprise.

“Leave her alone!”

His two companions really would have laughed if they'd known the reason behind this change of heart.

“Well, if you don't have any balls…” Muluam started to say.

“What, is she your woman?”

When the young men lifted their determined heads, the girl had already disappeared. Muluam and Ngbatu looked for her up and down the riverbank but eventually gave up. They came back to Nebu, united in their anger against him.

“It's your fault,” they declared.

“No, it's yours,” Nebu retorted.

All three burst out laughing, for each was pointing at another's face. They talked about the girl for quite a long time, although of course Nebu didn't tell them that in her fluid shapes, he had suddenly recognized a face he knew very well. He didn't even have a chance to explain. The girl in the stream soon faded from his friends' memories, replaced by two opulent prostitutes they treated themselves to that evening in Dschang—“a bit of consolation.”

Nebu also tried to forget the fleeting face of the girl from the riverbank. Art gave him the clay he needed to transform life's ugly miasmas into a dazzling sky. He threw himself into his work with a will made stronger by his desire for revenge, and he cut himself off from the faces of those who wanted to make him miserable. He learned the ins and outs of the sculptors' ancient craft from the hands of his master, finally accepting that gold was nothing more than the material with which he could realize his artistic dreams. He wanted to move closer to the sun's bright light.

Nebu learned how to fill the eyes of an antelope with gold and polish a lion's teeth. Soon he knew how to inject an illusion of truth beneath the skin of a gilded leopard. He knew how to make an immobile lizard zigzag through the dust, and even how to make geckos cock their heads. He deftly re-created all the animals from memory. He knew that surprise is the silent expression of truth, and he suffered less when Muluam and Ngbatu got caught up in their endless critiques of his work. He knew, yes, Nebu knew he still had a lot to learn in Monlipèr's workshop if he wanted to erase, once and for all, the shameful story that had brought him there, if he wanted to realize his vision with his own hands. Art is a corrective for a life that's become unlivable. Art can transform a life. Art can become life. Art can be the whole of a life. Finally, he understood that.

“You take everything too seriously,” Muluam said one day.

“Art is my life,” Nebu replied.

The possibilities are limitless, he could have added, but instead he just said, “Don't you get it?” No, his friend didn't get it yet. How could he? Lost in the gilded park his hands had created, amidst the animals transformed by his talent, Nebu was always searching for new forms while his friends were content to repeat the same old things. He sought out unknown figures and unimagined visions. He sought animals he had only dreamed of, but never seen. Yes. Those he had imagined, even if just in his dreams, he wanted them, too. Soon he moved on to more abstract symbols, for he had deconstructed spiders enough to make the connection to birds, and he had dived deep enough into serpents to recognize their relation to dogs.

One day, to the stupefaction of the whole workshop, especially his two chattering companions, he sculpted a two-headed dog. Nebu had progressed far ahead of them. He added his visions to Monlipèr's vocabulary of Bamum symbols, and soon there were five-footed dogs coming out of the old engineer's workshop, horses with human heads, winged men, and even, yes, even unicorns. Since Nebu never claimed credit for the forms he created, his master presented them to the sultan as his own discoveries. Still, the old blacksmith gazed at his new apprentice in amazement. More than anyone, he understood the call of innovation that burned in Nebu's fingers. In all his years as a master artist, he had never met a young man who worked with such intense focus, who constantly found new expressions for his vision.

“You'd think the Devil had possessed your hands, my son,” he commented one day.

And that was very close to the truth!

 

4

Workshop Conversations

Nebu's dreams were intense. He saw all the details of Foumban's streets. He saw the House of Passion he had set aflame in his vengeful anger. He saw her room, and in her room, sitting on the bamboo bed, Ngungure. He was sitting on the ground, between his girlfriend's legs. He felt her knees against his shoulders, her breath on his neck. She was wearing a red pagne that covered her breasts. She was carefully, meticulously, braiding his hair, for Nebu's hair had grown thick. She divided the mop into little sections that she combed and twisted between her fingers, one by one. At the same time, she sang in his ears a melody that made him feel stiff and weak. He woke up drenched in sweat. Ngungure was nowhere to be seen. Trembling, he touched his head. His hair was braided, and to his great surprise, he had a red pagne wrapped around his hips. He was so excited he had to take care of his erection with his own hands.

Why was he suddenly ashamed? His whole life he had walked naked across the city, never imagining that one morning his own nakedness would cover him with shame. He had seen dozens of women's pagnes fall at his feet and never would have thought that he'd feel such a need for the hands of the woman whose garment now covered him; that he would need her hands to awaken his body; that he would need to hear her voice whisper in his ears to come back to life. He was ashamed because he suddenly realized that he felt sick. He was stunned by the shocking discovery of his capricious desire and aggravated by his inability to control it. Still, he couldn't believe that Ngungure had braided his hair during the night only to disappear at dawn. Were it not for his workshop fellows, who were making his life even more miserable, he would have spent more time pondering the mysteries of his night!

“You braided your hair?” Muluam piped up as soon as he saw Nebu walk by the door to the furnace.

“Good day to you,” Bertha's son replied coldly.

“Good day to you, Monsieur Bamiléké!”

Ngbatu was on the same antagonistic wavelength as his companion, but Nebu's dream had left the sculptor listless. If he had thought their escapade had been left behind back in the bush, the unstoppable logorrhea of these guys was there to prove him wrong.

“
Djo,
you must be in love,” Muluam shot out. “Still that girl by the river?”

“She's Bamiléké, isn't she?”

“No, Bamum, I think.”

“So when's the wedding,
djo
?”

“Or are you interested in Bamum girls now?”

“The revenge of the Bamum.”

Ngbatu and Muluam shared a sly laugh.

“Bamum girls are good lays, aren't they?” Muluam asked, suddenly calm.