Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty by Alain Mabanckou Read Free Book Online

disappear.
    â€˜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