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

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 atMaman 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.
    Before she left she said to me: ‘You’re going to Martine’s for a few days, I’ll come and collect you after the wake. Be good, and behave as you do with me. If I hear you got up to any tricks I’ll make sure you feel it.’
    A wake lasts at least two or three days, sometimes as long as a week, even two if the dead person’s not happy with his family