Son of a Red Devil

4. Sister my sister

51 Chapter 4 Sister my sister t the turn of the century, I finally moved to Brussels where at first I stayed at the house of an aunt. Actually, she was a cousin of my biological mother. She was not really the first person I met when I came in contact with other siblings. This arrangement had come about via the Congolese embassy, which is the only thing I remember. I must have been about fifteen years old. Bruno and I had to wait in another room and, on my mother’s signal, go together to the living room where a sister of my biological mother, my Aunt Charlotte, was sitting with someone from the Congolese embassy. There was a lot of crying, mostly on the part of my aunt, and we received pictures of other siblings and my biological parents. Apparently, I had another brother and three sisters. Over the years I met more and more members of the family. However, it took more than a decade to meet some of them. I have a sister living in Tottenham who I still haven’t seen. My younger brother, Max, was born in London where he still lives and my eldest sister Doudou lives in Rio de Janeiro. The truth is that I am not so sure whether this was the first attempt at contact from biological family because around that same period, I remember to have received a letter from Italy of one of my sisters asking for money. She pretended to be stuck there and that she was in urgent need for help. The problem is that I cannot longer recall whether this took place before or after this ‘reunion’ came up. Anyway, my parents were right not to pay attention to her demand. I went to visit my eldest sister Doudou in Brazil just before the turn of the century. She came to live there with her husband whom she had met in Angola. I did not stay at her home but with some friends of hers. They lived in Barra da Tijuca, just fifteen minutes from the Copacabana. What more could I ask for? I stayed there for one month and lived like in some kind of dream. For a guy like me A 52 obsessed with bubble arses, this was an awesome place to be in. Basically it was like some kind of arse-paradise, and I certainly got my fair share of it. The Copacabana is quite a surreal place for anyone who goes there for the first time. It is acceptable for women to prance their arse around in a string, but forbidden for them to go about bare-chested. Another thing most people would never dare to admit despite all the hype surrounding this mythical beach: it is one of the dirtiest beaches I had ever seen. Quite disgusting really! There was no real need to go to the Sambodrome to enjoy carnival for it was everywhere. I even did some paragliding. This was not the first time I travelled though. I had already been to Ibiza, Italy, Portugal, Morocco, Turkey and Poland. My trip to Poznan in Poland has been by far one of the craziest adventures of my life. By crossing the border to go there, I had been hiding under our luggage behind the back of my friend’s jeep, a Flemish guy from my town. I was still a Congolese citizen then, and I did not want to go through all the administrative procedures required for a visa to go there. The year was 1994, and a country such as Poland barely got mentioned in the media. We were three young lads and stayed for at least ten days. Everywhere we went, we were looked at as curiosities and were even invited to sleep at people homes; only once did we have to go to a hostel. I still remember how weird it was looking at these Poles turned wild while listening to Rage against the Machine in the Jeep. We didn’t know that this music was so popular in a country such as Poland. Besides, who on earth would have gone there? I could never have imagined that these brave people, who once, without any sense of ridicule, attacked German tanks on horses during the Second World War, would come en mass to Belgium one day. People do not seem to get enough of these sob stories, like you see on the telly in which people...