Behold the Dreamers(34)

“Don’t worry,” she said, still laughing at his serious demeanor, which she found both cute and unnecessary. “I won’t disgrace you. It’s not like I’ve never been around rich people.”

Which was true—her family used to be rich in the eighties and early nineties. Back then her father was a customs officer at the seaport in Douala, and, thanks to all the gratuities (not bribes—her father swore he never once got his palms greased) he and his colleagues took from merchants bringing goods into the country, he was able to multiply his annual government salary by ten and ensure that his family lacked no good thing. They lived in a brick house with tiled outer walls and floors, and running water. They owned electrical appliances and a working telephone, and her father even owned a car (a dilapidated blue 1970s Peugeot, but still a car and thus a symbol of prosperity in Limbe). They were the first family in their Down Beach neighborhood to own a TV set. Neni still remembered those early days of television in the late eighties, when CRTV broadcasted only from six o’clock to ten o’clock in the evening. By five-forty-five every evening, the neighborhood children would be in their living room, sitting on the floor, waiting for “telleh” to begin. When the TV static, which the children called “rice,” slowly disappeared to reveal the Cameroonian flag, the children would giggle with delight, and the adults, packed on the sofa and chairs all around the living room, would tell them to be quiet. Television was on. No one was allowed to make noise when television was on. Children were supposed to watch the news in silence while the adults discussed the atrocities in South Africa every time a picture of Nelson Mandela came up, wondering when those bad white people were going to set that good man free. Children were supposed to watch documentaries in silence; watch fast-talking cartoons, which they called “porkou-porkou,” in silence. They had to be quiet during whatever British or French or American series CRTV was broadcasting, soap operas and sitcoms which they barely understood but nonetheless giggled at whenever kissing scenes came on and groaned whenever someone was punched. The only time children were allowed to talk was when a music video came on. Then, they were encouraged by the adults to stand up and dance to Ndedi Eyango, or Charlotte Mbango, or Tom Yoms. And every time they would stand up and bust out their best makossa moves, twirling tiny buttocks and moving clenched fists from right to left with all their might, smiling to no end. To be able to see their favorite musicians singing in a black box, what a privilege.

Neni smiled at the memories as she sat in the train. She was a teenager back then, but as a middle child she wasn’t allowed to touch the TV—turning it on and off were rights reserved for her father and oldest brother. Nowadays even three-year-olds in Limbe could turn a TV on and off. Every third house in town had CNN, though, funnily, her parents’ house didn’t.

Her father had stopped working at the seaport in ’93, forced out by a Bamileke boss who wanted his tribesman to take Neni’s father’s job. With no warning, he had been transferred to a far less lucrative position at the Treasury Department in Limbe, and six months after that his widowed sister had died, leaving behind three children he had no choice but to take in and raise alongside his five. With the loss of his prestigious job came the loss of some of the power and respect he’d had as a rich man. Folks still greeted him with both hands, but many stopped coming to his house to visit, knowing that upon leaving they wouldn’t receive five or ten thousand CFA francs to “pay taxi.” These days he was retired, living on a meager pension, without much to his name besides an ancient blue Peugeot in the garage of his brick house.





Eighteen


THE EDWARDS SUMMER HOUSE WASN’T MADE OF BRICKS, BUT IT DIDN’T need to be; all the brick houses of New Town, Limbe, put together couldn’t compete with one of its rooms. When Neni had first gone there with Anna to learn her duties, she had tried not to show Anna how awed she was, but Anna must have seen it on her face: Her eyes couldn’t stop roving from the moment they stepped out of the cab in front of the two-story warm gray stone-and-wood-shingled house with meticulously manicured boxwood spheres on both sides of the four-columned portico. It wasn’t only the size that astounded her (why did they need such a big house for only a few months a year? why five bedrooms when there were only two children? didn’t they understand that no matter how much money a person had, they could sleep on only one bed at a time?) but also the profuse elegance. Even on her third day there she was still flabbergasted by the sumptuousness of her surroundings, especially the living room, with its all-white decor and large windows as if to never lose a view of the sky. She was astonished by its spotlessness, which Anna had told her was because Cindy hated dirt even more than she hated cheap things; its plush white carpets and wool rugs, which she almost feared stepping on; and its black chandelier and glass accents, so delicate-looking she dusted with tenderness, worried she would leave a mark.

The afternoon she arrived, Vince had given her a hug and told her to make herself comfortable, though she couldn’t see how she could possibly do so if she was in a constant state of unease about ruining something. She spent all evening of that first day in the kitchen with Mighty, too circumspect to go anywhere besides her bedroom after Vince left for the city (to meditate at Unity; Jende wasn’t exaggerating) and Cindy went out to dinner with friends. Even in those first hours in Southampton, she could tell Mighty would be her only true source of joy there—he reminded her of Liomi, thanks to his abundant eyelashes and the way he never seemed to lack something to laugh or smile about.