The Child from Dindefello Falls

Requiem

“Never!”

The child slammed the door and ran off.

The man in a long white boubou stood frozen in place, arms hanging limp.

He gazed open-mouthed as the child’s slim silhouette melted into the darkness and was soon nothing more than a tiny silver speck under the immensity of the starry night sky.

The child ran straight ahead without looking back. He didn’t even notice the rough grass of the savanna beneath his small feet. He ran and ran, but it seemed as if he was flying, propelled by the rebellious beating of his heart. He was free now, free as a bird soaring on the currents of the Harmattan wind, free to spread his wings and take flight…

But to where?

He had no idea. Never before had he left the Dindefello highlands, where no one would care for him anymore.

Why wasn’t that Western doctor able to save his mother—so youthful and lively only three days ago, but now laid out near the entrance of the darkened hut, her body stiff and cold, eyes frozen, deprived of that luminous life that had inhabited her for so long?

“The vaccine is mandatory,” the doctor had said as he rolled up his sleeves to administer those two doses of suspicious liquid.

As he inserted the long syringe into his mother’s arm, the child had hidden himself in the branches of the big kapok tree. A vague foreshadowing had warned him to keep his brothers and sisters away.

The next day, she felt nauseous and soon complained of losing feeling in her fingers. Unable to move on the second day, she collapsed on the third day in a desperate attempt to draw water from the well. Liwane, Awa, and his uncles had come running in alarm, forming a silent circle around the dying woman.

The child ran on and suddenly stubbed his toe against a big rock. He stopped and fell to his knees, crying his heart out in a flood of tears.

He cried for a long time and was chanting in a low voice when the hooting of an owl made him look up.

“Aio, aiolé, mamé ka mamé liambé.”

The Big Dipper looked down upon him, its enigmatic chariot swinging low.

The child gathered up a handful of ocher-colored earth and, raising his arms to the sky, declared: “Some day I will find out why Mama died.”

There were still so many things that were beyond him; he was too little to understand everything. But someday, he would be able to understand and would learn to shed light upon the mysteries of life and the darkness of humanity.

The night enveloped him in a great protective coat and the silence became heavy, punctuated here and there by the cooing of a turtle dove or the cry of a lanner falcon high above the cliff. The tall grasses had given way to a clayey plateau, and the child knew he was getting close to the cave. But how would he find the opening in the dark?

A ray of opalescent moonlight lit up the steep path that led straight through the lush vegetation. The child had come many times before to this cave to play with his friends and he had resolved to curl up near the opening, which he could just barely make out through the foliage.

Heart pounding, he covered his head with his arms and was poked, scraped, and bruised as he crept along, finally arriving safe and sound to the enormous mouth of the cave that was grinning oddly at him. Startled by the cold inside this mysterious lair, he stiffly swept a few dried leaves together into a makeshift bed and fell asleep immediately.

End of sample. From The Child from Dindefello Falls.