Mount Pleasant (38 page)

He looked at Nji Mama, who had participated with him in all his experiments in Foumban. The chief architect, the man who had been at the origin of each of his inventions and who had first seen through Father Vogt's ruse, had nothing to say. Njoya didn't insist. The truth was that exile had had a devastating effect on the imagination of the illustrious master. Wounded in his soul, all his certainties unsettled, robbed of his greatest artistic project, the Palace of All Dreams, Nji Mama had let rage cloud his tormented eyes and anger take possession of his hands. The shadow of his boubous and the familiar sound of his sandals in the corridors were still anchored in Mount Pleasant's memory, but he was now only the silhouette of the man he'd been in Foumban.

Njoya also turned toward the master blacksmith, Monlipèr. The old engineer, though he had once built a printing machine for the sultan, was silent. The two masters were like baobabs planted in flowerpots. The growing roots would ultimately destroy the pot holding them. Yaoundé seemed to have dried up their spirit. But Ibrahim, the youngest of the council, smiled. He was that plant that only needs new soil to come back to life.

“Alareni,” he proposed, “you have been writing all this time.”

Njoya listened.

“Maybe now you should draw.”

Draw? Where could Njoya begin? The faces of all his visitors crossed his mind. He recalled that they were as different as life's surprises. Some were as black as ebony, others had the fair complexion of Arabs. There were some, like the Nubians, who were so black they looked blue. Visitors like Father Vogt were white. Some were tall while others were short, even though they were grandparents. There were fat ones, too, as well as others who were thin. Where to begin?

If someone had told Njoya that what he was composing, with his trembling hands in the half-light of his bedchamber, were the fragile forms of a nation that he hadn't yet named because she hadn't yet been born, perhaps he would have just laughed, for his quest aimed most of all to give a face to shapes that had become invisible and that were, moreover, too diverse to be truly unified. Was it worth the trouble to give them a name too? Ibrahim made him understand that an image would be closer to life's thousand faces than thousands of words would be, and that the face of a mother portrayed the infinite stories of maternity much better than a flood of words. Ibrahim became his guide, unleashing the waterfall of his words, for the master calligrapher was right. Njoya recognized it. Yes, why not draw?

“Why not draw?” he said, smiling broadly.

This was the first time the sultan took the artistic advice of the younger brother over that of the elder. In fact, Njoya's teetering body had already accustomed him to sharpening his eyes. He retraced the path he'd followed when inventing his writing system, this time backward. He went from letters to syllabograms, then to phonograms and pictograms. He did it in response to the request of the young master, who had already seen him draw shapes using the letters of the Lewa alphabet. Rather than a failed scribe, Njoya became an alert illustrator, and he began to look at the shapes he traced on his slate with surprise. Instead of taking beauty apart with his words, he discovered it in its original form. He let it flower like a frail daisy amidst a passel of leaves.

“The eye is essential,” the monarch said, exultant.

Nji Mama didn't understand at first, but Ibrahim was the master of these sessions.

Njoya continued. “The ear comes second, in fact.”

One day he turned around and looked at his shadow, who, standing behind him, was fanning his neck; he looked at Nebu as if he had never seen him before. The boy started.

“You say my shadow is mute?” he asked.

That's how the lad became the best story Njoya ever drew, and how Sara became the sultan's model. By chance—but is it really just chance?—she became the prototype for the remarkable voices floating all around.

 

10

The Sultan's Calculations

Foumban, 1922. Never had Nebu felt so much pain in his body, never! Confined to his bed for weeks, he couldn't even move a hand. He couldn't move his feet. It was as if he were condemned to take on the sultan's suffering in his own body, but eight years earlier and in his own way. Isn't it sublime that God invented mothers? Bertha flooded her son's suffering body with love. Because, in his suffering, Nebu had become once again the son that women had torn away from her, the son she could love to her heart's content. “All of this because of a girl,” she murmured, hot tears running down her cheeks.

Nebu didn't answer.

Bertha refused to remember the
tirailleurs
' whipping hands, or Lieutenant Prestat's vengeance, for that matter. For her, it was only the logical consequence of a chain of events that began with Ngungure. Had her son looked the other way when that bitch called him, he would have avoided the anger of the Frenchman and his soldiers—that's what she told herself. Her mother's heart was categorical. It beat with a systematic hatred for all girls, a hatred that was nothing more than the other side of her limitless love for Nebu, a hatred that would later transform into another sort of love. For the moment, the only thought in her head was, That whore!

Bertha's face was a mask of disgust because, when she looked at her son's suffering, she saw Ngungure's face. Her lips trembled when she thought of her grandson whom “that girl” had torn away from her, and she spit. To think that all the market women had come together to help birth the child! Bertha's hatred was as focused as Nji Mama's rage at the French, whom he blamed for the bad weather. For the master, his apprentice's woes, even his beating, were just the start of a litany of complaints he kept to himself, grievances that were sure to be followed by more misfortunes, all originating in Paris. With the methodical focus of the man of science that he was, he counted out one by one the atrocities committed by the French against the Bamum, and his mouth twisted open, as if trying to set off a cry for justice in his soul.

Of course Ibrahim had also been shocked by Prestat's bestial violence, but he had put his hopes in the new face of the French administration, Captain Ripert—especially since he had aligned himself with Madame Dugast. If women—white or black, German, French, or Bamum—had had a voice at the table in those days, maybe colonialism would have worn a different face. Maybe it would never even have existed at all. That's what Ibrahim thought: love, not war, would rule the world. And women were a calabash filled with love, etc. To his mind, it was possible to take a moment of dreadful suffering as a promise of future happiness, and maybe that's why he paid several visits to Nebu and spoke to him of conciliation. No, Ibrahim wasn't a fatalist, but hadn't the time come to look for paths toward peace, especially after the episode where that boy had almost lost his life? Was Ibrahim a wet rag? Far from it! Nor was he a coward. But he had lived long enough, and in the company of whites, to know that there are fights worth avoiding because they aren't necessary. “They are like women, you know,” he said. “Always jealous.”

The voices of Bertha, Nji Mama, and Ibrahim summarized the differing opinions that crossed paths in Njoya's ears, in some sense canceling each other out. The sultan didn't complain to the French administration about Prestat's violence, no. Maybe the group around Ibrahim convinced him of what he needed to do. The monarch accepted the suffering of one of his artists with a father's stoicism; yes, he accepted it, and took responsibility for the sculptor's care. Nor did he intervene when the French administration decided to replace Monlipèr as the head of the Artists' Alley. Then, as well, his authority had been publicly called into question, but Njoya politely ignored the provocation: “I'm not that crazy.”

After all, Mose Yeyap was “his son,” as he said. And after all, it was he, Njoya, who had taught Mose to write in Foumban's first Shümum school. And again, it was Njoya who had advised Fräulein Wuhrmann to take Mose under her wing when he was just an adolescent, who had allowed him to marry a slave and had let him continue the work of the Christian church after the Germans had been chased from the sultanate. Yes, Njoya had closed his eyes when, in his zeal, Mose had begun to convert the palace slaves—including the slave of his mother Njapdunke—to Christianity!

It wasn't a big deal if Mose Yeyap had become the Man of the French. After all, Njoya himself had sent his own children, including his daughter, to European schools. No one had forced him. “Losing a son” had never worried Njoya. Each child is a unique adventure. On the contrary, he was convinced that he had given “his son” the best opportunities life could offer. So he wasn't afraid of losing power when the Artists' Alley was put under Mose's control, even if the French administration saw it as a weakening of his prerogatives. The son in question, Mose, came from a very influential family, and in any event, he was destined to take his father's place among the palace councillors. “Time will resolve all misunderstandings,” Njoya believed. “Common sense will prevail.”

After the whipping, he sent two of his personal doctors to Bertha's house and ordered his wives to cook their best meals for the wounded man and his mother. As for Monlipèr, Njoya found a new position for the deposed master. He had always wanted to give other duties to this amazing blacksmith who had once built him a machine to grind corn. This time he gave him the task of building a printing press. From then on, they spent their nights working on plans and imagining shapes and figures. In fact, Njoya was convinced that work, and work alone, could wrest him from the chaos that was spreading its stench over the territory. More than ever, his workshops became his refuge.

The sultanate's largest worksite, and the one that meant the most to Njoya, was still the Palace of All Dreams. The monarch put all his remaining energy into it. Alone in the ruins of his emerging dreams, he found the silence that life's cacophony deprived him of. And it was the only place where he could retreat with his masters away from the arrogance of the new colonial administration. His dream was to silence the world, and especially the French, with his works, with the grandeur of his building projects. He hoped in that way to triumph over their small-mindedness, to shut their treacherous mouths for good. “The largest building in Africa,” that's what he called his new castle, then under construction, and he was impatient to see the look of surprise on the faces of the colonizers, who had made his life so difficult, when they saw the extent of his talents.

Common sense will prevail, he thought.

In secret, Njoya hoped that the French would finally bow down before him, full of respect, as had the Germans, who used to shout
“Donnerwetter!”
at each of his projects. He hoped they would recognize the strength of his vision, and when his Palace of All Dreams rose up to the setting sun, they'd simply say, “Fran Njoya.”

“Alareni.”

“Master.”

“Master.”

Again and again: “Master.”

 

11

The Awakening of the Artist in Pain

1922. A woman's body appeared to Nebu in all the perfection of its shapes, in the full harmony of its features and the poetry of its song. It appeared to him in the bliss of an equation. Was it the body of his dreams? Yes. Was it Ngungure's body? How to know? He never again saw the face of the woman who inhabited his dreams, since his dreams were now composed of disjointed shapes that he reconstructed when he awoke. Night after night the faceless woman returned to his ailing soul. She appeared so often that finally he began to wait for her on the borders of sleep, impatient, even in his trepidation, to dream his dreams.

Art is an elixir for an ailing soul. Bertha's son began to sculpt again because the faceless woman appeared less and less as his health improved; because, as he healed, the shapes that led him to ecstasy began to vanish. He wanted to keep dreaming of her. The less he suffered, the less the woman of his dreams filled his nights and the more he felt the need to bring her to life with the power of his hands. When Nebu began his statue, he couldn't even get up from his mat. That's why he started with the feet that he had observed so carefully.

Instead of using wood or bronze or stone, as he had been taught in Monlipèr's workshop and as he had done in his workshop in the palace, the sculptor used clay. The softness of the earth is a balm for a wounded body. He sculpted the woman's feet with precision, applying the techniques he had learned from his masters and the art he had devised while following and observing the slave woman and others in the street. Beginning with the feet was also the most prudent way to proceed because his mother wouldn't wonder if they belonged to a man or a woman but would simply be overjoyed that her son had found the strength to work again.

Nebu began to sculpt again because he had discovered that pride is an antidote for defeat.

“They didn't defeat you,” his mother swore when she saw him working. “They didn't defeat you.”

Her eyes were shining.

“They don't have that power,” her son replied, a smile on his lips. “On the contrary, they just made me stronger.”

He paused.

“Suffering has given me even more inspiration.”

Nebu finished the feet of the statue with all the love he had amassed in his dreams and with all the love that his mother spread over his body. It was apparent to him that the statue he was working on would be a testament to love. His mother was happy to see his work because she didn't yet know he was sculpting a girl's feet. It amused her to pretend that her son was sculpting himself legs so he could walk again, as he did in his dreams. For Nebu, the faceless woman could only be Ngungure.

Bertha was saddened when he announced that he was returning to his workshop in the palace. The mother was saddened, but the artist knew that there is no worse censor than a mother. In the palace under construction, amidst the community of artists working to bring their visions to life and whose compositions were all blended together in the Palace of All Dreams, Nebu could let his statue's legs grow according to his spirit.