The Lights of Pointe-Noire by Alain Mabanckou

vomited, then their skin dried up. My mother did not develop any of these symptoms over the next few days. So I decided to believe her version, and let drop Papa Roger’s, even though somewhere deep down I still wasn’t sure.
    Papa Roger was convinced Marcel was still after my mother and that something was going on between them, something lasting, perhaps, since he seemed to reappear every two or three years. When I was eight or nine years old, a really memorable fight broke out between the two men in the rue de Louboulu, in the Rex district. This was Uncle Albert’s turf, he worked as a civil servant for the National Electricity Company and had been the first person on my mother’s side of the family to emigrate from the village of Louboulou to Pointe-Noire. It was because of him we had all come to live in Pointe-Noire, with the exception of my mother, who made her own way here, to try to forget my natural father. Uncle Albert had come first, and once he’d set himself up he sent for his younger brother, Uncle René. After that his younger sisters arrived – my mother’s older sisters – Aunt Dorothée and Aunt Sabine. When my mother arrived she brought with her the youngest of all the brothers and sisters, Uncle Mompéro. And as my maternal grandfather Grégoire Moukila was polygamous – twelve wives and more than fifty children – Uncle Albert gradually assembled them all at the rue de Louboulu, as his own professional position became more secure. Another of my uncles, who I was very close to, arrived by this route, Jean-Pierre Matété, who had the same father as my mother. With so many members of the family living in this street, Uncle Albert got the authorities to agree to change the name to rue de Louboulu, in honour of this small corner of the Bouenza district, of which our grandfather, Grégoire Moukila, became chief in the mid-1900s. In a way the street was like our own village. Most of the houses had been built by people from our district, though in later years some of them had sold their homes, gradually allowing people we didn’t know to move in. Because my uncle worked in electricity everyone got free power. A wire simply had to be passed from one household through to the next, and suddenly we went from storm lantern to light bulb, from coal iron to electric iron.
    The city council agreed to Uncle Albert’s request, after he’d paid backhanders to a few of the government employees who then came and raised their glasses, shamelessly, at the renaming ceremony for the street. Every week members of the family would drop in to see Uncle Albert, and when he withdrew into his bedroom you knew he would re-emerge with some money to give the visitor. Broadly speaking, though it was not to be said out loud, you went round to Uncle Albert’s in the hope of leaving again with a few thousand CFA francs. If people arrived while he was having his siesta they would hang around in the yard, pretending to chat with Gilbert and Bienvenüe, my uncle’s twins, my cousins, with whom I spent much of my childhood. The twins understood what was going on, and sensed that their father was basically the family bank. Sometimes, so he wouldn’t be disturbed while he was resting, Uncle Albert would place a packet of banknotes on the table and leave it to his wife, Ma Ngudi, to distribute them to the various visitors.
    My mother would also stop off at the rue de Louboulu. Not to pick up money, but to hand some over to Ma Ngudi, because I sometimes lived at my uncle’s for a while. Maman Pauline had requested this, ‘in the interests of Albert’s nephew’. Ma Ngudi was said to be good with children who didn’t eat enough – sometimes I would eat only the meat, and leave the fufu and manioc.
    One evening my mother came to pick me up at Uncle Albert’s, and Marcel, my father’s bête noire, just happened to be hanging around close by.