Ollier Lemvo Dondedieu Richtel, originally from Congo-Brazzaville and now based in Geneva, Switzerland, has a deep passion for poetry and reading. His first play, Petite musique des damnés et leurs corps privés de bon Dieu, was a finalist for the Prix RFI Théâtre 2023.

The rain fell relentlessly. It had started some ten days previously, when Jonathan had been kicking a football around in the street, bare-chested. When he felt the first drops, his body welcomed them like fertile soil yearning for water to bloom - nothing filled him with more joy than playing in the rain, and football especially. Once he'd put in a few little bridges and hooks here and there, and celebrated goals by wallowing in the mud, the youngster had packed up and gone home at nightfall, to avoid a telling-off from a father who couldn't bear to see him hanging around outside too late. Days went by, and more days, a dozen or so, but the rain never let up. At times monotonous, even light, at other times torrential, Jonathan could still hear it pattering on the rooftop above his room. Except that the joy that had soaked him on that first day had given way to deep worry, for Jonathan thought this endless rain was a sign of the end of the world. As his father had told them yesterday in hushed tones, during the morning prayer session which he had insisted they all attend, willingly or otherwise: "God is going to rain down a deluge of forty days and forty nights to destroy the world, because of the sin that reigns there". Good enough at mental arithmetic, Jonathan knew that was still a long way off, and that the rain could well stop at any moment, but when his father had pronounced it in that deep, cavernous voice of his, the phrase had stuck in his head. It now played like a refrain in his head, despite all the subterfuges he'd used to chase it away: playing Game Boy, playing cards, doing his homework and so on. The phrase, especially at its climax "God will destroy the world" and so on and so forth, had etched itself into his mind like hieroglyphics on stone. So much so that it found an echo, with the lament over the rooftops of that ceaseless rain, while Jonathan, lying on his bed on the verge of tears, began to survey this world he thought would soon be swallowed up by the waters.

The first image in the mosaic that was forming piece by piece in his head, was that of the house on that marshy alley in his neighbourhood - sis Texaco La Tsiémé - which they called Lovebird Lane, because after dark, lovebirds of all ages came there to do things forbidden to those under eighteen. The house, nestled right there at the end of the avenue, was enclosed by a plastered wall, plants and a gate so imposing that you couldn't get a glimpse of what was going on inside. It was the home of an old man, one of those who had seen the neighbourhood spring up from nothing. Since his entire family had perished in a road accident, the man had become a rarely-seen ghost. On more than one occasion, news of his death had spread round the area, but it was just gossip, and any obituary would be cut short when the melancholy notes of a saxophone could be heard again, these days the only signs of life still coming from his house. No doubt it was for this harmonious reason that Jonathan kept revisiting the image of the old man's house, for he often passed by deliberately, before night came with its carnival of lust, in the hope of stumbling across his music. And when he did, Jonathan couldn't help but stop for a moment, pressing his ear as close as possible to the front of this house, and letting himself be carried far, far away by the old ghost's ballads.

Suddenly, the image of the old man's house faded from his head, and another house took its place, this time made of corrugated iron. It was that of his neighbour, a woman, also well into old age. Childless, there were local rumours that a sterility spell had been cast on her in her youth, for daring to sweep her house at night, even though this was forbidden in the village where she was born, out of respect for the spirits of the dead. And so she set off from her village, on an odyssey that had rivalled Ulysses', until she ended up - nobody ever really knew by what combination of circumstances - in this neighbourhood. What was certain, however, was that ever since her battered body had landed here, it was not just the cockerel who awakened the world at dawn but the bitter crowing of the old lady too. In a way, dawn was in her voice. And that was not everybody's cup of tea. There were even voices being raised against her and her hold on the dawn. Among them, the loud voices of this revival church, also made of corrugated iron. Adjacent to the old lady's house - separated only by a gutter that the locals had dug to drain away rainwater and which had since swollen, becoming a swamp and a virulent mosquito nest to boot, intent on spreading malaria - they resembled two worlds that nothing could reconcile. Noisy prayer sessions took place in the church, where the Lord was asked to make the old hag leave the neighbourhood, because not only had she monopolized the dawn, but she was also being blamed - the old hag was often pointed at by church folk - for why the locality had been forgotten in all the urban development projects in this city, Brazza, which still so proudly displays its colonial vestiges, like nameless scars. In short, the rivalry was so full of suspense, that when the old lady was defeated, it would be when she fell silent, which never lasted more than a day and often coincided with the most gloomy weather. But the very next day, the contralto of her voice, which Jonathan learned to know by heart so he'd wake up early and not be late for school, would put an end to the rumours, bringing a little light back into lives that were themselves already so gloomy that the sky had darkened in sympathy.

No sooner had these images disappeared from Jonathan's mind, than up came a vision of the bar that he passed on his way to school. A bar that was like a lung, breathing life into the neighbourhood - it was never empty, with its tables and chairs dotted around under an insubstantial light roof on a wooden surround, and resembled a large open-air shed, a shelter from the whims of the sky. Morning, noon and night, whether it was snowing, moonlit or raining, people were always seated there, drinking beers and storming the sandy track, where they performed moves that bordered on solitude for the lonely souls, and lust for the soul mates or brothers. All in a din of voices and shouts. All this, to the accompaniment of any music you could wish for: salsa, rumba, French pop, Beethoven symphonies, even gospel. It was all there, and all good for dancing. And as Jonathan walked this path every day, he had become, by dint of listening to all this background noise and exuberance, a veritable choirboy of this little corner.

And then, another image lit up in Jonathan's head. It was that of the house with the blue-painted walls. It stood right at the entrance to the neighbourhood, as if it were presenting its finest first, before laying out its bric-a-brac of other houses. Here lived a family, undoubtedly one of the wealthiest around. The father was a policeman, the mother a nurse, and they had a daughter, Martine, a real beauty, so beautiful that Jonathan had eyes only for her. He had dreamt of her so many times. Either in circumstances that caused him nocturnal emissions, when he'd wake up embarrassed. Or, as in those novelas he watched madly on TV, seeing himself serenading her from his window at night. Then you'd see how Jonathan would wake up with such a smile on his face that it would stay with him for the rest of the day. It would have been a real-life fairy tale, if in fact Jonathan hadn't been insignificant in Martine's eyes. For the one time he had tried to get close to her, offering her a rose in the middle of the street - who knows where he'd found it in this infamous neighbourhood - she had looked at him with a disdain worthy of a 16th-century duchess. So it was with this note of sorrow, that Jonathan wondered, inwardly, and with a tear in his eye: why was God, with his taste for carnage, suddenly going to destroy his whole little world?

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