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

and is sulking in his coffin. Then you have to wait for the traditional chiefs to arrive from their village with their tam-tams and fetishers, to make
gris-gris
. The fetishers will ask the dead person to move on to heaven for good, and not come back haunting people round midnight. Some dead people are really tricky, they start bothering people on the day they’re to go to the cemetery: they jam the wheels of the hearse, so it can’t move forward, they throw thunderbolts around the
quartier
, make rain, and their ghost comes to the funeral ceremony to check no one’s making fun of the corpse, or that the men aren’t flirting with the women when they should be weeping. If the corpse’s ghost sees he hasn’t been washed properly, or that the sheets on the body are bargain sheets, the ones the Senegalese sell down at the Grand Marché, and that no one’s crying much, they’ll start pestering folk at night.
    When Maman Pauline went to the wake, I said to myself: ‘Let’s hope the ghost of this corpse isn’t too tricky.’ She came back two days later, the ghost in question had behaved properly, he was happy with the wake and was prepared to depart at the same time as the body, and leave people in peace.
    .....
    As soon as a mango falls off the tree, Lounès and I eat it. Since he’s bigger than I am, he gets first bite. He gets two bites, I just get one. That’s only right, his stomach’s bigger than mine.
    Sometimes we just sit there in silence, with our eyes shut, so we can hear the butterflies flying up above us. Most of all we like watching the planes flying overhead, guessing which country they’ll land in. If one of us says the name of a country, he has to say the name of its capital too. That’s how I know that the capital of Belgium is Brussels, the capital of England is London and Germany’s is Berlin. But Lounès does world history at Trois-Glorieuses secondary school and he explained that with Germany it was a bit complicated because it’s a country that’s divided in two, with a big wall to keep the people apart, though they’re all Germans. One part’s capitalist, the other’s communist. I didn’t know the name of the capital of the communist bit, though it’s a country that likes us because we’re all struggling against the capitalists. It was Lounès who explained to me that the capital of the other Germany which is communist like us is called Bonn.
    I watch him munching his mango, it takes me back to Monsieur Mutombo’s workshop, when Monsieur Mutombo’s saying, ‘My son’s name is Lounès, it’s a promise I made to my Algerian friend.’
    Then he explains that he lived in Algeria for a year and a half, in a
quartier
of the town of Algiers called Kouba. At that time he wanted to be a tradesman like the Arabs in our country, who are now the richest people in Pointe-Noire.
    I listen to him tell his story, waving his hands around: ‘I only went to Algeria because I believed we could be businessmentoo. We could make lots of money like the other tradesmen, or else one day they’d be selling us cassava, even though we’ve been producing it ourselves since the dawn of time.’
    If you go into Monsieur Mutombo’s workshop he’ll tell you his Algeria story at least ten times. The one thing you mustn’t say is, ‘You told me that last year.’ If you do that he’ll just down tools straight away and you won’t get your shirt or your trousers for at least another two weeks. You just have to hear him out, and he’ll start by telling you it was in the
quartier
called Kouba that he first learned the trade of cobbler, before giving it up to become a tailor. He’ll also tell you it was there he first met the man who’s like a brother to him: an Algerian called Arezki.
    The longer I look at Lounès, the more he reminds me of his father talking