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must pick up the slack, although the little girl who entered Mount Pleasant, shivering as she passed through the corridors of the compound, could never have imagined that she’d come to play such a role.
    How could Sara imagine it, especially when, in the matron’s darkened room, she spread her legs and discovered that her vagina would swallow up an egg that was supposed to be too big for it? When she got up afterward, she met Bertha’s glowering, shame-filled eyes. There are falls from which no one expects to recover. Happily, the world also holds the secret of bounces.

 
    8
    Girl-Boy
    Here are the facts: if Sara hadn’t swallowed her tongue, she might have found the words to express her emotions. Every time Bertha’s hands touched her legs, she bit her lips. She stomped her feet. She tore at her skin. She felt as if a hand were going right through her flesh. Oh! She didn’t cry out, but her eyes just filled with tears all the faster.
    If Bertha had shown a little compassion here; if she had asked one or two questions; if, in short, she had opened her own ears, she certainly would have opened the floodgates of this most frantic of silences: the silence of Sara’s uncle Owona when the chief’s men came to drag the girl away from her mother; the silence of that shadowy man who hadn’t held on to his niece, but had instead used his hands to trap Sara’s mother’s, to keep her from protecting her daughter.
    And what of her father?
    What father? Hadn’t Uncle Owona become Sara’s father after her own father died? Hadn’t he inherited Sara’s widowed mother? Ah, let’s forget about this father for a moment: it would have taken just one word, one step, one move—yes, with one simple move Bertha could have discovered the depth of Sara’s trembling silence. But all girls are liars : that was her opinion. Only a mother’s ravaged face could have understood the horror Bertha was unable to comprehend. It wouldn’t have cost Bertha a thing to get to know her girls a little more, that’s what the doyenne told me.
    And yet, and yet:
    â€œWhat did anyone really know in those days?”
    There are families that offered up their youngest born to the sultan in the hopes of a reward. For whom a daughter was merely a step on the ladder of their slow ascent to power, a tree that grew in order to protect them with its generous shade. Fathers who dreamed of moving closer to the palace, whatever the cost, certainly advocated most eloquently in defense of this convoluted logic. Sara’s story, however, differed from the classic scenarios someone like Bertha could imagine among the Bamum in Foumban, for the girl was from a different ethnic group—a different world. She was Ewondo. And the sultan’s matron, who had grown old watching over and judging the Bamum girls who were brought to her on the basis of their potential alone, would have benefited from being just a tad more curious in this specific case, from pushing a little harder on the locked gates of the girl’s whispered words, from, in short, asking questions in the past tense.
    â€œPeople are strange, but that’s an argument with very short legs, isn’t it?” Sara said to me, shaking her head.
    Because Sara went from silence to wild convulsions, the matron was forced to pay closer attention to her. Soon her eyes began to follow the girl along the corridors of the house. And often Bertha’s voice was heard calling Sara’s name through the passages. When the old woman let go of the girl’s legs on the day of the infamous egg test, Sara ran and hid, naked, in the first open room she found. Only a mother is able to cover up a shameful story under a cloak of love. And so the boy, yes the boy whom Bertha dragged from the room where Sara had disappeared would soon understand that the reason for the matron’s increasingly labored breathing was that she had suddenly,