Mount Pleasant (3 page)

What made me change my opinion about these young people from Nsimeyong was how suddenly they silenced their chatter as soon as Sara opened her mouth. At first Arouna was the only one who asked questions. I couldn't do anything to change that. Sara had known him since he was a boy. I told myself that she must think I was just another of his “clients,” one of those people from the university who often come around with a tape recorder to collect the true stories of the elders, which they then label as literature.

“Your name?”

“Bertha,” I replied.

Sara's eyes lit up, and her gaze shot right through me: “Ah!” Just then she burst into a laugh I could never forget, a laugh that silenced the universe. The old woman's voice echoed in the courtyard, sending chickens scattering.

“But you're nothing like her,” she added.

Her laugh turned into a racking cough that made her repeat the word “her” in a rush, as if she wanted to slow down the sudden emergence of a memory buried deep in her mind.

“Like who?” I asked.

Arouna looked perplexed.

That's how Sara began to tell me her story. Bertha was the matron into whose care she'd been delivered, as a child, by the chief's men. A slave, that's what Bertha had been: a slave entrusted with training Njoya's future wives, a job she held for most of her years. Though she'd been eaten up by life—left with a wide scar across her neck, a reminder of violence long ago—Bertha was not just another version of the Sara who sat before me, no. She had been aged, yes, “very old,” even, but still younger than the doyenne was now.

“What a coincidence!”

When Sara laughed, her whole body laughed, and her laughter drew her eyes out from the depths where they hid. That's how I discovered that she had lost none of her teeth. Sara was laughing because finally, after eighty years, Bertha had finally come back; and now she was ready to listen, to listen to the story she hadn't had ears for all those years ago. All her life Sara had been waiting for this reunion.

“It's too funny, isn't it?” she said at last.

None of the young people from Nsimeyong understood why the old mama found this so funny. Neither did I, in fact. It took me several sessions to understand that Mount Pleasant, the house Sara entered as a child after leaving her family, was in fact a labyrinth, as disorienting as the coincidence of names that finally untied the old lady's tongue. And it was in this House of Stories that Bertha took the place of Sara's mother and became the most important person in the young girl's life.

“I never liked Bertha, you know,” she told me, “but you're not like her.”

I sighed quietly.

“Listen to me,” she repeated. “You are not like her.”

What could I say in response to this unexpected show of confidence? One thing was clear: I had become an important part of Sara's life. With time, another thing became clear: since I had found a way into this story, I wouldn't be making my exit anytime soon. I wanted to know what happened, wanted to know it all. I was prepared to swallow up Sara's life, her whole world. The depth of her silence was an urgent invitation, and my questions were polite knocks at her door.

“So what was Bertha like?”

Sara cut to the chase.

“She was a witch.”

What could I say after that? It seemed to me that Sara had escaped from a story, from a myth. Her deep, trembling voice evoked for me the telling of age-old tales. Was I to believe that she hadn't spoken at all during the eighty years she had been waiting for Bertha? Or was this just another trick of Arouna's, designed to raise the price of his services?

“Don't worry,” Sara continued. “Later she'll become my mother. Can you imagine that?”

Then I burst out laughing, too. “The world is really something!”

While she again saw Bertha the matron, I was looking for Sara, the nine-year-old child hidden somewhere in the body of this ninety-year-old woman who was laughing at life's ironies. I wanted to know why that child had decided to stop speaking. What hell had made her keep silent for so long?

Soon I would find out. Sara would find the words to tell me. Together she and I would replay the scene of the prodigal mother: I would listen, and she would speak. We played this game so long that over the course of our exchanges, the doyenne relived her whole life. Yes, it was a
bayamsellam
—an exchange of confidences among market women—that allowed Sara, word by word, sentence by sentence, to reconstruct the House of Stories, to reconstruct Mount Pleasant. It was in a burst of laughter that Sara rediscovered her words. That's the long and short of it. Laughter, yes, what more to say?

“I'm sure she lied a lot,” she went on, swatting at a mosquito on her neck. “How could she have really known everything she told me?”

If Sara had asked, “Do you know who I mean?” I would have quickly replied “Bertha.” And yet how could I be sure that Sara herself wasn't just making up the stories she told me? It's just that I never found the courage to interrupt her—never. The idea that a ninety-year-old could lie struck me as simply outrageous. I shuddered at the thought of grabbing hold of her hands to interrupt her: “Come on, Grandma, aren't you exaggerating just a little?” I could see her face falling, its cavernous beauty fading, a lamp's flame snuffed out by a sharp breath. Yes, I could see her mouth closing up again for all eternity. The old woman would take her story to the grave, leaving me the assassin of her voice. One skeptical word is all it takes to kill off both the storyteller and her tale.

 

5

Bertha and Her Shadow

“Do you have any children?” Sara asked me one day.

“A daughter.”

I showed her the picture I kept in my wallet.

“A very beautiful child, isn't she?” she said after gazing at it for a few minutes. “How old is she?”

“Nine years old.”

“Hmm,” murmured the old mama thoughtfully. “Nine years old, too. What's her name?”

I told her. She smiled, slapped her leg, and put the photo down so she could get a pinch of tobacco.

“At least her name's not Sara.”

We both laughed.

“That would have been too much, huh?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“What a good girl,” the doyenne continued, picking the picture of my daughter up again and staring at it intently, her eyes ablaze. “You must be a happy mother, am I right?”

Only later would I understand that this was her way of distancing me from Bertha: I was the happy mother. When she said it, Sara closed her eyes, as if to drop the curtain on a scene that might have been glimpsed, mirrored in her eyes. She had seen my face tracing thoughtful questions that my stammering mouth couldn't ask, and she refused to reach out to me in my timid silence.

Ah, Sara!

Didn't she know that it is harder to listen to the truth than to tell it? Oh, she certainly knew that! Sara wanted me to listen to her story, that's all; and I would soon understand that her story was cobbled together from disparate pieces, each piece an echo of the many lives she held within her and joined into contrapuntal destinies. It was when her voice burrowed into my brain that I could see her eyes burning like coals in the hollows of her wrinkled face.

“Good tobacco,” she said after a long pause. “At your daughter's age,” the old mama continued, “I was already Njoya's wife.”

“At nine years old?”

“Nine years old. He taught me to write.”

Once again I looked at Sara in surprise: I had thought she was illiterate. My reaction amused her. How she loved to see me confused!

“Yes,” she repeated simply, “to write.”

There were moments when Sara was again the mischievous child she had been at nine: playful. I could see her sitting in a courtyard; perched behind her on a bench, her legs spread wide, Bertha, her matron, braided the young girl's hair, holding the strands between her teeth, forcing Sara to sit up straight. She'd quietly sing a lullaby to distract her from the pain.

“Do you also do your daughter's hair?” she asked me one day when I was watching a mother braiding her daughter's.

“No,” I said.

“How come?”

“I take her to the hairdresser.”

“Bertha never braided my hair either,” Sara told me that day. “She always cut it.”

“Why?”

Sara looked at me, as if surprised that I didn't know her story already. First, she demanded that I scratch out the image of the mother doing her daughter's hair from my notes: just a cliché. Her life in Mount Pleasant wasn't the life of a typical child, she told me. Once again I was the happy Bertha. Sara preferred to bury the sorrowful Bertha, that long-suffering figure, in the twisting pathways of her silence. I agreed to her strange game of avoidance, for as she played it out, I saw her rediscover the scent of ancient words even as she chose to shut her ears to their music, to feel the weight of stories untold even when she didn't want to taste them, and, most of all, to lose herself in the whispered phrases and nervous rhythms of the bodies she felt deep in her own flesh. The community she discovered in the sultan's courtyard was strange, for sure; and stranger still the matron, Bertha, who was charged with turning her into a woman.

The chief's men brought her into Mount Pleasant through the back door. One or two stifling corridors, one or two trembling voices, one or two surprised faces—and Sara found herself before the red eyes of this woman, as tall as a man and with the features of a Fulani, wrapped tightly in a pagne—blue, the color of widowhood. A woman whose sleepy breasts were like two flat mats hanging in front of an emaciated body, her haughty head covered with thick, closely shaven hair. She was a true temple of despair. Her eyes were those of a woman who has seen her husband fall dead several times. She wore her widowhood as if for all eternity, the sublime face of endless mourning.

“So that's the girl?” Bertha asked the men.

She untied her pagne and adjusted it under her armpits, revealing as she did another pagne in bright colors beneath her austere garb.

“Yes,” replied the man with the colonial cap, “this is her.”

The woman bent down to speak, for she was taller than her interlocutors. She barely concealed her natural impatience.

“Her name is Sara,” the man in the cap continued, his eyes scanning the scene.

“Sara,” his men echoed, as usual.

“Don't you have something for us to drink?” the leader of the group blurted out. “Nothing to drink?”

Bertha disappeared into the house, dragging a silent Sara behind her. She returned alone, a gourd of palm wine in her hands. The man with the colonial cap poured a bit of the wine on the ground, then drank down the cupful Bertha held out to him.

“No beer?” asked one of the others, sounding disappointed.

“No German beer?” added another.

The leader cut off their chattering complaints.

“Shut up and drink.”

One after the other, the men swigged down the cups Bertha poured for them, then wiped their mouths with the backs of their hands. One after the other they said, “Not too bad, huh?”

Bertha seemed to look right through them. They could have been shadows, these wicked clowns who shook the courtyard with their raucous laughter. Had she even glanced at Sara when she dragged her into the house, she would have seen the tears on the child's face, heavy tears.

Sara would soon learn that the actions of the old captive, who seemed oblivious to the young girl's suffering, were habits of blind obedience; each of Bertha's gestures reflected her eternal servitude. Sara would realize that the deep scar injustice had left around the matron's neck was the cause of her stony heart. As the doyenne would tell me later, Bertha had already seen it all.

 

6

Bertha's Shame

Clearly Sara wasn't the first! Bertha had prepared dozens of girls for their royal nuptials with the sultan. Still, she seemed to avert her eyes when she went about her work; the matron had no confidence in these young girls she was responsible for transforming into royal wives. Her bruised heart even shut her ears to the girls' stories.

Why had Bertha lost her faith in her girls? Was it when first one, then two, then three arrived, their faces dripping with tears for a virginity washed away by rivers they couldn't even remember? After five, six, or seven of them began inventing unbelievable stories in which the sultan played no part, though he should have? Or when dozens of girls she had trained disappeared into the forest and were soon spotted working as prostitutes in the city?

Or maybe it was years ago in Foumban, back in Bamum land? Bertha would remember this until the very end. It was when one girl, named—and this was the best part—Njapdunke, after the queen mother, hopped into bed with a certain Lieutenant Prestat, the local French official; she slept in his bed and then got right out and accused Bertha's own son, yes, Nebu, Bertha's son, of raping her. Ah, Bertha never did get over that old betrayal of her school of chastity: Sara would learn that soon enough, along with all the details of the infamy that was obviously still eating away at the matron's soul.

“She was still bleeding from it,” Sara told me. “It was plain to see.”

To tell the truth, the whole Bamum sultanate never really got over that business. Even if its fall from grace had actually begun long before, on the sixth of July, 1902, to be exact, when the first whites, three German representatives—Lieutenant Sandrock and Captain Ramsay, accompanied by the Swiss merchant Habisch—knocked at the southern gate of Foumban and Sultan Njoya asked his archers, who were ready to kill them, to lay down their arms.

Let me clarify, if I may: the fall of the Bamum sultanate formally occurred on the April 13, 1903, when Njoya himself, carrying a plate of eggs, greeted a certain Lieutenant Hirtler—how could anyone forget that awful name?—at the gate of his capital city. Ah! Did the sultan even realize that he was opening his court to a never-ending slew of calamities? First, the lieutenant had the eggs boiled and shared them with his men; second, when he arrived at the royal court, the stupid officer actually went and sat down in the sultan's own chair, the Mandu Yenu, which had been waiting all this time for his colonial behind, or so he seemed to think. Of course, Sara couldn't have known all the ins and outs of this shameful history—1903, 1914, 1931 …