The Words That Stay

The bookshop smelled of old paper and cold coffee. Seated behind a rickety table, Kofi N'Guessan adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses. He was seventy-seven, but his fingers still trembled like a young man's the night before a recital. Before him lay a single copy of his first collection, self-published in 1978, its pages yellowed by time and lagoon humidity. The bookseller, a woman in her forties named Aïssata, watched him in silence. She had opened this space ten years earlier, on Rue des Cascades in the Plateau district. It was an improbable place, a quiet resistance against the digital age. Here, people still came to touch books, to open them, to smell them. "Are you sure you want to sell it?" she asked gently. Kofi did not answer right away. He turned the pages as one flips through a family photo album. There were poems written under the Houphouët regime, others born during a self-imposed exile in Paris, still others composed on a beach in Grand-Bassam, feet in the sand, the sound of waves as a metronome. "This book," he said finally, "is my youth. But youth is not meant to be kept in a display case. It is meant to be given." The silence of the bookshop was broken only by the distant hum of an air conditioner. Outside, the street was coming alive. The vendors of beignets, the shared taxis, the laughter of children leaving school. Kofi remembered the day he wrote the poem that gave the collection its title: "The Words That Stay." It was 1976, in a maid's room in Montparnasse.