Mount Pleasant by Patrice Nganang Read Free Book Online

demand! Yet there were ears to hear it, and hands willing to make it so. I had some trouble, I’ll admit, imagining a woman who had been introduced as a witch suddenly shedding a mother’s tears.
    Sara reminded me of this simple truth: “Bertha always called me Nebu.”
    The matron insisted, “I want the right to see him.”
    The right? You have to understand how affection grows in the belly of a woman when she belatedly discovers the child that could have been her own. Could anyone have imagined that after her breasts’ sudden reawakening, Bertha would vow to give birth to her son once more? Could anyone have suspected the pains she felt in her belly whenever her boy left for Njoya’s chambers? Was there anyone who didn’t hear the cries of a woman in labor coming from her room each time he did?
    Only Nebu could have known it had all started the day Bertha took in a girl given as a gift by the chief. If a boy was seen leaving her house every day, who could swear it was a girl who had entered? As for the chief’s men, they had come there only once and then disappeared, lost in the endless mystery of colonial violence.
    â€œNebu!” Bertha called. “Nebu, come here!”
    Everyone found it funny to see her chase her boy with the shaved head through Mount Pleasant’s courtyards. Everyone laughed when, out of breath, she called the child by his full name: “Nebuchadnezzar!”
    But call she would, until her son’s face appeared at her door. Sometimes an adult offered a helping hand and brought the recalcitrant child back to her: “Here he is!”
    Bertha also tried flattery: “Do you know that when you were a child, you ate a lot?” That’s how Sara knew that Nebu hadn’t died in childhood, but when he was an adult. She understood that ultimately, Bertha dreamed not just of giving birth again to the child she’d lost, but of giving him an entirely different life. Bertha thought that life would be possible if she could just tell her newfound son the full story—bit by bit, anecdote by anecdote—tell him all the twists and turns in the life of the one she had lost; if she could just breathe into this miracle child, word by word, the life of the one who had fallen on the path through hell. It wasn’t a problem for her that Nebu was the sultan’s shadow. No, far from it.
    From the doyenne’s story I deduced that the matron needed her son back in order to love the work to which she had sacrificed her life. A mother’s love has no limits, right? But Bertha rediscovered her purpose the moment she no longer had any girls to care for. Sara was the last one entrusted to her. She didn’t want to dwell on that. Like all the others, that girl had failed the virginity test—and in the end, she’d just as soon forget that, too. Her son, Nebu, on the other hand, gave her back an energy she thought she had lost for good. She told him all the details of the other one’s life: “Do you know that…”
    Here’s how it went. Sara would sit on the ground, with Bertha on a bench behind her, as if she were going to braid her hair. The matron would squeeze the little girl’s body between her knees and hold her head with her hands. She would speak directly into her ears, whispering and singing. She would tell her about Nebu’s life, all the details of his remarkable epic, his life in Bamum land, his travels in and around Foumban. She spoke to the child, but it was really one long monologue. She spoke until her voice gave out, until her words were emptied of life and burned her lips. She spoke as a mother speaks to her child, nourishing him with words and milk. At the end of her tale, it was as if suddenly someone else began to move within the little girl’s body, in her limbs. The long-lost Nebu had come back to life, and suddenly a new destiny opened up for Sara. Hard to believe that Bertha’s son