Excerpt: The Lives and Deaths of Véronique Bangoura by Tierno Monénembo, Translated by Ryan Chamberlain

At the very beginning, it wasn’t my name: Véronique Bangoura. I had another one altogether, a completely different look. A separate omen. I was of the age when the mind can’t distinguish ash from flour, to borrow a phrase from the grannies back home. I couldn’t hit as hard as my friends, but the gods watched over me. At my birth, the seer read from a fortunate mouth: I would mature easily, immune to fate, another Moses saved from the current—this time crowned with braids and in nothing but a loincloth. Then came the day I had to jump down from the balcony and run away. Since then a lethal, implacable hand has pushed me forward, amusing itself as I falter and collapse at every ditch and gust of wind.

As soon as I left the house I knew I’d never come back. The bronze chain, the precious and invisible chain binding me to my parents, just broke. The door all my childhood fantasies came and went through—in the absence of my parents—was forever barricaded. I had just thrown myself from the balcony into the world, a place I knew nothing about. My parents wouldn’t let me go any farther than the zoo unless we were in the car, with tinted windows and the pedal to the floor. Outside was a shady universe: neighborhoods with bizarre names that reeked of depravity, murder, laziness, decay. An endless jumble of cinderblocks and rusted sheet metal where the unemployed were strung out on tambananya booze and girls in rags were surrounded by rat-bitten kids. Nothing interesting on that side of the world. I wasn’t allowed over there. Papa was adamant about that, and Maman saw to it as long as her lovers left her the time. They were far from thinking about what the good Lord had in store for me—for me only—that wild night from among billions that make up the moment. That wild night my life toppled over far beyond the zoo, far beyond the bridge of the hanged, far beyond the stadium, far beyond reason.

It was early May, the time of the first rains in a city where Nialèyo, the goddess of lightning, could thunder and piss for days and weeks without stopping. Under a starless sky, Conakry looked like a deep cave dotted along the walls with a few fireflies. I guessed at where I was going by the glow of lights glimmering in the shops and display windows. When I jumped off the balcony, I could have exploded with rage. Five or six hours later, fear replaced rage, and then disgust. Fear of waking up transformed into an iguana or a snake, like you hear about in stories. Wicked Inna Bassal wastes no time. That devil! She turns thieves into iguanas and killers into rattlesnakes—or the opposite, according to her mood or fantasy. Unless her thunder blows the city up beforehand. Sweating, my heart almost surging out my nose, I ran, zigzagging between rockpiles and muddy alleyways, jumping over holes and hurdling fences. The police sirens quit shrieking once I reached a wetland whose water had risen above the mangrove and water lily leaves. Stalkers and stray dogs took quickly over. Just the place to get molested or have your kneecaps busted. I’d lost my shoes and needed several minutes to find my footing. I wound up falling into a creek that had a little bridge leading over it to a market alley with a smell that made me want to repeatedly throw up. I collapsed on a mound of rotten mangoes scattered across the sidewalk.

Like everyone else, I had heard of old Ténin but never seen her. Still, I recognized her the second she woke me up. Sleepy, or because of the drink she’d offered that my throat refused to swallow, I tried staggering through a few steps. She took me by the shoulders and patted my back to stop the coughing.

“Your name on the radio, the police on your trail? I don’t know what you did, but it must have been serious.”

She dumped another glassful of her mixture down my throat, not caring if I might die from the hacking it started, then dried my mouth with the bottom of her shirt before lifting her index finger to the dark lowland that opened up between an abandoned factory and the ocean.

“Go, my child. There, in the unfinished house, you’ll find shelter from bad luck and thieves, you have Ténin Condé’s word!”

I skinned my knees and elbows going down the embankment, chased by her gloomy voice:

“A genie is in love with you! He won’t stand any man near you. He won’t stand for it!”

The witch was right: an abandoned pit lined the lowlands where machines were rusting near a roofless, decrepit building with moss-covered walls. You couldn’t hear anything out there, no sirens, no barking dogs, not even the apocalyptic clamor of basket cases and beggars. I was saved for a night or two, maybe more, waiting for someone to cinch a rope around my neck and haul me to the gallows. A room infested with spider webs that smelled like dead rats fully described the ground floor of my new home. The floor was littered with gravel, old syringes, and shards of glass. I felt my way around and miraculously found a gutted box that, in my tired state of confusion, was as good as a sultan’s love seat. I had nothing left, no rage, fear, no regrets or sorrow. Only a starry void that numbing, restful sleep hurried to wrap around me.