Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty (5 page)

Suddenly I feel my heart drop into my boots: my father's started clearing his beans to one side before starting on the piece of meat in question. Oh no, don't let him do that, he mustn't eat it himself, it's mine, it's mine! My head follows his hand as it moves, I close my eyes as the piece of meat finally disappears into his big wide mouth. For several minutes he can't speak, that meat is so tender, so good, that if you talk too much you can't appreciate it as you should.

The moment he placed it in his mouth, I closed my eyes, imagining it was me, Michel, that had picked up the piece of meat, that was chewing it, me that had the aroma of tomato sauce and Maggi-cube in my nostrils, that the slab of meat had gone straight down into my little stomach, which is only too
happy to continue the work begun in my mouth.

I open my eyes and see that my dream has not come true. The meat did not go into my stomach, but into Papa Roger's. I'm sad to have lost out, though I don't let my father see. But I can see from the way he's looking at me that he knew I wanted that piece and is pretending he didn't. I hear him belch, picking the remains of the meat from between his teeth.

To cheer myself up I think: ‘It doesn't matter, maybe Papa Roger didn't give me the big piece this evening to stop me getting greedy like my cousins, Kevin and Sebastien.'

I've cleared the table. Maman Pauline will wash the plates before we go to bed. Maybe she won't even wash them till tomorrow morning, before she goes to the Grand Marché, sometimes she leaves them when she's tired.

Now Papa Roger announces he's got something very important to show us, something it seems we've never seen in our lives before. I'm still a bit cross with him because I didn't get the piece of meat. He's not going to wipe out my disappointment just by showing me something important.

He raises his wine glass above his head, as if he'd beaten Brazil in the World Cup.

‘Let's celebrate! You'll see, it's wonderful!'

So my mother and I wait. We don't know what he wants us to celebrate with him. We've checked there's nothing on the table, nothing hidden underneath it, or anywhere else in the room.

‘Come on, raise your glasses!'

I think of all the wonderful things there are in the world and I wonder what Papa Roger can be about to show us that will stop me thinking about the bit of meat in his belly right now.
Perhaps he's going to say he's had a pay rise. Or that he's found a better job than the one at the Victory Palace Hotel. Or that now he's got a big office, bigger than Uncle René's, with a beautiful secretary and bodyguards as big as black American soldiers, and the bodyguards will stop just anyone coming into his office without an appointment. Or that he's bought a fantastic car. It'd be great if he'd bought a car, but I'm worried he's going to tell me the car in question is red with five seats. He's not allowed to buy a car like that. I'm going to buy one, so my wife, Caroline, will be happy, with our two children and our little white dog.

Papa Roger's so happy, he's going to finish the bottle of wine all on his own. If he goes on like that he'll end up drunk and start talking to the invisible people that the alcohol producers put in the bottles. If he's drunk he won't be able to show us anything amazing. That's why Maman Pauline quickly removes the bottle, but he just has time to fill his glass, and he raises it to his lips with a little smile at the corner of his mouth. It's almost as though he enjoys the fact that we're waiting, that we can't drink as we're supposed to unless he tells us what it is that's so amazing.

He talks about all sorts of things, about what's been happening at work, but not about the amazing thing. It seems his boss, Madame Ginette, has come back from Paris. They've repainted the walls in the hotel, and redone the garden behind because she called to tell them she was coming back from France with two men whose job it is to check all the things that aren't right in hotels and then blame people for being lazy, or have them sent home.

My father has the hiccups, but he still manages to say: ‘These two people… hic… these two people came over from France… hic… they were just trying to find fault. That's their job. One of
them… hic… went looking everywhere, even behind the pan of the WC. Meanwhile the other one was looking at every single bill with a magnifying glass… hic… and in the end he saw there wasn't a single CFA franc missing from the till… hic…'

Maman Pauline's had enough: ‘You promised you were going to show us something very important and amazing! What is it?'

At last, my father empties his glass, pushes back his chair, gets up and goes into the bedroom. He's not walking quite straight like a normal person. We hear him saying his boss's name. We look at each other and wonder what he's gone looking for.

Maman Pauline whispers: ‘I think your father's had one or two glasses too many.'

Papa Roger comes back into the living room with a black briefcase, which he puts down on the table.

‘It's in there, inside this case, hic… hic!'

My mother's still sulking. ‘What are you waiting for then?'

Papa Roger presses a button, the briefcase opens. Maman Pauline and I almost bang our heads, because without realising it, we both decided at exactly the same moment to look what was in side the case. There's only a little black box. Papa Roger sees we're wondering what it can be for, and he tells us it's a radio cassette player, a new brand that's just come out over in Europe and that not many people in our country have, not even some of the capitalists. And you can also listen to the radio on it.

It's the first time I've seen a machine like this. Maman Pauline's looking at it fearfully as if it was a bomb that was going to blow up in a few minutes and kill all three of us.

Papa Roger explains that you can record lots of things in it, you just have to press once on the button marked ‘Play' and on another red one that says ‘Record'. But for the moment he wants
to play us something because he can't record anything, since he doesn't have a blank cassette.

Maman Pauline wants to leave the table.

‘Here we are, with not much money, and you go buying things like that!'

‘Hic… listen, Pauline…'

‘How much did it cost, anyway?'

Papa Roger smiles as though he'd been waiting for this question. He takes his time before telling us it was a present, that he's already had the radio cassette player for several days, he'd hidden it at the Victory Palace Hotel. He didn't take it home to Maman Martine's because there are too many children there, they might damage it while he was out. And he tells us how he was given it by a white man, Monsieur Montoir, as a thank you because he is always so nice to him when he comes to spend his holidays at the hotel. He's so happy talking about this white man, that suddenly his hiccups disappear.

‘Monsieur Montoir is a regular at the hotel, a White. When he arrives from France, I look after him personally. I post his letters, I tell him where all the best bars are.'

He adds quietly, ‘It's thanks to me he has such a nice time here. I bring him back very beautiful, very young girls, to his room.'

I think, ‘Next time Uncle René comes round to our house there's going to be serious trouble. He's going to think we're gradually turning into capitalists, and soon we'll have television, hot water and air conditioning. Well, he has television too, after all, and hot water, and air conditioning, perhaps he'll be a bit jealous because he hasn't got a radio cassette player, it's a new model, but he can't be cross with us for that, he can go out and buy one anytime.'

My father warns us, ‘Listen carefully: we must be very discreet and not go round telling everyone in the
quartier
we've got a radio cassette player.'

Will I tell Lounès the secret? I think I will. I don't hide anything from him, and he tells me loads of things. So why shouldn't I tell him?

My father's rummaging in the case again, and brings out a cassette. He presses the button of the cassette player and a little window opens. He puts the cassette in, closes the little window and presses again on ‘Play'. My mother and I almost bang heads trying to see how it works inside the machine. There's a tape that turns in the cassette and our eyes follow the rhythm of the brown coloured tape. We can't hear anything, but the tape is turning.

Suddenly a loud voice makes us leap backwards. Papa Roger keeps very calm, he's not afraid like us.

Someone starts singing. My father turns up the volume slightly. I look at my mother's face. It is completely still. Her mouth is half open, her hands are crossed, resting on the table. She looks exactly like a statue in Saint-Jean-Bosco church.

Now we hear a chorus that makes me start wiggling my shoulders, though this isn't the kind of music we normally dance to round here.

At the foot of my tree

I lived happily

I never should

Leave the foot of my tree.

At the foot of my tree

I lived happily

I never should

Take my eyes off my tree.

Maman Pauline's starting to move about now, but not to dance with me, I sense she's just getting annoyed. For the moment she says nothing, but she looks at my father, who's moving his head to the rhythm of the song. I think, ‘It's your head you have to move, not your shoulders. So I stop dancing with my shoulders and I start moving my head, like my father. I also tap my fingers on the table because Papa Roger needs to know that at least there's one person in this house who's happy about this music he's brought home, the kind you don't hear in the bars around here.

The man is still singing. You must be able to hear his booming voice out in the street. And all he's talking about is a tree that he wishes he hadn't taken his eye off. I think: ‘What's he crying like that for over a tree? We've got millions of trees in the forest, people cut them down all the time and they never cry, not a bit, they make it into firewood for cooking with. Even we've got three trees on our land! And if our mango trees ever disappear, am I going to start crying like the man singing in the radio cassette player? The singer must just be someone who's always sad. Something bad must be happening in his life for him to be crying over a tree, when you should really cry about human beings when they leave this earth. Maybe the singer lives in a place where there are no trees left. And since he's gone away from the only tree he had, well, that's why he's crying the whole day. Besides, his voice is like someone who sings at burials around here, and makes all the women and children start crying.' The voices of the people who sing at burials are so sad, and so warm, that even when it isn't a member of your own family who's died you'll stop for a few minutes in the street and weep too. And if you weep in the street, the family of the dead person will see and get even sadder and cry even more.

While the singer's going on about his tree, I pick up the box that the cassette came in. I turn it over and at last I see the photo of the singer. It's a white man, with lots of hair and shining eyes. He has a moustache and a sad expression, but his face is kind. I think: ‘He's never hurt anyone, you can see that. Other people bother him, but he just goes on thinking about his tree. Like all kind people, the singer must have lots of white globules, even whiter than teeth when you've just cleaned them with Colgate or Landry Enamel. He'll go to paradise and he'll leave his white globules to all the children who've been good. So I should listen to what he says because perhaps he's secretly talking about something else, not the tree. I must go on nodding my head like Papa Roger and pretend to sing, as though I know the words.'

There's another thing that attracts me, something between the singers' lips: a pipe. It's not like the pipe Caroline asked me to smoke when we got married, it's a real pipe, not a little stick.

But the thing that really interests me is his moustache. I really like his moustache. Papa Roger doesn't keep his, he shaves it almost every day. When I'm big I hope I'll have a moustache like the one the singer has, and from now on I'm going to call him ‘the singer with the moustache' even if his real name, on the cassette, is Georges Brassens.

I'm sitting with Lounès at the foot of their mango tree. It's the only tree they have. We've got a mango, a papaya and an orange tree. But the Mutombo family's mango tree has more branches and leaves than ours. When I come round to see Lounès we always sit under this tree, in a corner, by the entrance to their house. We only collect the mangoes that have fallen because Monsieur Mutombo gets cross if we pick them. He says you have to wait for a fruit to fall off the tree in the wind because then it's God Himself who's decided. So we've never picked a single fruit from that mango tree. We often sit waiting for God to hand them to us Himself.

Lounès is older than me. I'm growing fast, so I hope we'll soon be the same height, but he needs to stop growing first. He's muscular, I'm thin. If he hasn't seen me for three or four days he drops by to see if I'm at home. Sometimes he even goes looking for me at Maman Martine's, and whistles three times from the street to tell me to come out. I do the same when I'm looking for him: first I walk past their house, and whistle three times. If he's not there I go to Monsieur Mutombo's sewing workshop, sometimes I find him there helping his father to stack the materials they've brought in town, or putting coal in the steam iron.

Today we're sitting underneath the mango tree because we haven't seen each other for a while. I've been sleeping at
Maman Martine's the last two nights, while my mother was at the wake for Monsieur Moundzika, who's died ‘after a long illness' as they put it in the announcement on the radio. As Maman Pauline's a friend of Madame Moundzika, she had to be with her in her grief.