I let it drop that I’ve got a character who plays the tom-toms, and that I’ve nicknamed him the Hybrid. He’s the guy who’s gone back to the home country with my partner and my daughter.
“Mention drums or tom-toms again and I’m walking out of this bar!” I bellowed. “I’ve had enough! I’m off!”
And I made a swift exit from Jip’s, because Roger the French-Ivorian was getting more and more drunk. I told him I’d never talk to him about any of my projects again, and that he’d be better off forgetting what Paul from the big Congo had said to him.
My parting shot was:
“You don’t understand anything. I write the way I lead my life, one moment it’s one thing and the next I’ve moved on to a whole different kettle of fish, and that’s called living too in case you didn’t know. Buying me a few Pelforts doesn’t give you the right to shit all over me with your white sheep and your old men who like going to sea and reading love stories. I’ve got a real friend who listens to me, he’s called Louis-Philippe and he’s from Haiti. Now that’s what I call a writer, not some loudmouth like you waiting to retire before you produce your masterpiece for all the world to read. Go and find someone else to pick on!”
Just as Paul from the big Congo walked in, I heard Roger the French-Ivorian answer in a metallic voice:
“Down here, Buttologist, everything has already been written! Everything! Take it from me, I’ve read all the great books in the world. So don’t go thinking you can change things. And you’d better make sure I don’t find my name in your diary of a cuckold! Speaking of which, where are your woman and daughter now, eh? You can’t put that into writing because you’re ashamed of people finding out. Call yourself a writer? You’re just vomiting up your anger against your ex and the minstrel who stole her off you. Serves you right!”
I
It’s definitely not me who’s digging the hole in the social security. It was already around when I got here, everybody had been talking about it for decades. Some people even claimed you could fall into it just from walking in the street, because there were no warning signs, so I had nothing to be ashamed of and, to boost my morale, I kept telling myself this hole story was made up by a few opposition politicians who wanted to stop the government from doing its work so it would have a disastrous track record when it came to the elections …
But the people debating it on telly a week ago declared that at this rate we were heading straight for “a spectacular and unprecedented collapse”. They’ve got me feeling very worried again, especially since even Roger the French-Ivorian is making it clear he thinks I am personally making matters worse by only working part-time and spending the rest of my time in front of my typewriter …
From listening to those well-informed people on the telly talking about it, I was led to believe that the situation was worse than serious, it was hopeless. The country had lost the battle and the war. They talked about the deficit, about bad management, about calamitous governance and lots of other things too. I scribbled notes on the labels off the Pelfort bottles I’d bought the day before from our Arab on the corner, who’s very friendly and always starts talking as soon as I walk in:
“‘For too long the West has force-fed us with lies and bloated us with pestilence’ … Do you know which black poet had the courage to say that, eh?”
I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen during that heated debate. Which was an achievement for me. I generally prefer to watch romantic movies or shows that promise me a chance of winning an automatic car if I dial the telephone number at the bottom of the screen. Oh, and I used to like watching those shows with couples who get catapulted to an island in South America where they’re separated and exposed to the temptations of other men and women twenty-four seven, for twelve days. It’s true, back then I never missed an episode, I used to joke with my ex and dare her to set off with me on one of those adventures, because apparently it’s when they’re far away from home that couples realise how unshakeable their love is. You’d keep watching to find out whether the man and the woman would head back home together, arm in arm at the end, or whether they’d be calling each other every name under the sun and never speak again. My partner didn’t find it funny when I suggested going for it, she was convinced I was just dreaming of getting down and dirty with all those blondes, redheads and brunettes with nice curvy backsides like the women from back home, the ones I go wild for. She said that the women we saw on telly weren’t real, it was all down to the make-up, because she’d never met a woman who looked anything like that when she was out shopping in Franprix or Monoprix at the end of our street. She also gave me a hard time because some of the men and women who were stranded on the island gave into the sins of the flesh from day one, and you could see them fornicating in the pool; while others observed a brief period of abstinence before making up for lost time and doing the business in every grove of that paradise. Now according to her, I belonged to the first category of sinners who were in a hurry to take a bite out of the first apple that landed in their lap. It’s been a while since I stopped watching those kinds of shows, because I found out they’ve often got fake couples leading viewers up the tropical garden path. Is that any way to go about things …?
So this time I was watching something else, a debate that was indirectly laying the blame at my door. Up on stage, a fight was about to break out among the guests. They said the words “hole” and “social security” nine hundred and twenty-five times. We watched a report from a health insurance office and one from a chemist. As chance would have it, the reports had been filmed in our neighbourhood, a bit further off, towards the town hall. The men and women featured were openly criticising our social security system, they didn’t realise the place was bugged with tiny microphones and cameras, or that they’d be watched throughout France, including in Corsica and Monaco. They were explaining how they often turned a blind eye to false claims because they couldn’t give a monkey’s, and anyway the money that got squandered in reimbursements for this or that didn’t come out of their own pockets …
We needed answers at the end of the programme, but all we got were generalisations. “The State must play its part,” boomed a bald guy, pulling his last two remaining hairs up from his neck and down over his jutting forehead. “Urgent times call for drastic measures”, said a badly shaven guest, who had probably been using his wife’s hair-removal cream. “We need a Marshall Plan hic et nunc” proffered a man who, to camera and in profile, looked like a sole. “We need to tighten our belts”, added a woman wearing glasses with lenses thick as bicycle wheels from the early years of the Occupation. “We need … we need, we need to look at … to look at … the behaviour of … of those on so … so … social … benefits, git … git … get … them to change their habits and useless … get them to use less medishit … shit … medicine. And we also … we also … need to organise a crackdown on fraud”, was the response of a man who stammered from the off and had trouble finishing his sentences. The theme music started up, the debaters smiled and congratulated themselves, pleased at putting in a good performance.
I knew my neighbour had been watching the same programme. I could hear his telly from my studio. What I didn’t know was how much of a pain in the neck he was going to be about this story …
* * *
The next day, when I was still red-eyed from watching that spat on the telly, my neighbour from across the hallway ran into me down by the bins and accosted me in a sarcastic tone of voice:
“You hardly need me to tell you, this situation is serious! Very serious! They’re saying the hole in the social security is getting deeper and deeper because there’s riff-raff out there, with no sense of republican values, threatening our democracy. Now, I’m naming no names here, but something has got to be done!”
Why was he saying this to me? We don’t get on, the two of us. We barely speak, and there’s never been a good feeling since the day I set foot in this building with my suitcases of clothes to live with the wom
an who would later become the mother of my daughter.
I took my time before answering, I didn’t want to lose my temper. I told him that I understood what he was talking about, that I had watched the programme too. And that yes, the hole in the social certainly was deep and there were already plenty of victims who had fallen into it. That I’d been asking myself a thousand and one questions since that debate. And that I wanted to get a clearer picture of what was going on.
“Yes, but something needs doing right now! Enough is enough, I’ve had it with people like you who are always waiting to get a clearer picture, and all the time that hole just keeps growing. Tell me, while we’re on the subject, is it your new vocation to stay at home and type every day on a goddam typewriter that makes the whole building shake? Does that really put bread on the table or is it because you don’t want to admit to people that you’re unemployed?”
Having failed to get a rise out of me he paused, before leaving the basement, to examine my shoes and my Cerutti 1884 suit. I was convinced I must have trodden in something or that there were dirty marks on my clothes.
“When you’re taking your rubbish down to the bins, is it really necessary to dress up like a dandy going to a wedding, eh?” he rattled off, sounding vexed. “Those clothes must have cost a king’s ransom!”
I don’t know what makes him think I buy my clothes using state benefits, in other words his money. He’s the one who is popping pills all day long, stocking up again when the fancy takes him, getting various doctors to make home visits. The fact of the matter is he’s become more and more insufferable since his accident on the fifth floor. If he’d been happy to cultivate his own garden, nothing would have happened to him. But his problem is that he spends all his time going up and down the stairwell, spying on the residents’ every move, finding out what people get up to in their own homes, keeping tabs on their comings and goings in the corridors.
It’s two months ago now since he fell and hit his head, and I can still remember how everybody in the building was scared that day because a nice fellow from the second floor who watches a lot of detective films explained to us how an inspector would lead a lengthy police investigation, that we would be on the evening news on the telly, and that people would see us in flesh and blood across all of France, including in Corsica and Monaco …
And I remember how, when the neighbour slipped on the stairs, I stopped writing and opened my door because from the screeching up there you’d have thought a wild boar was having its throat slit with a chainsaw like something straight out of Scarface. We could hear him going thud on each step like a sack of potatoes, from the fifth floor all the way down to the ground floor where I was. He blacked out in front of my door, arms splayed. The tenants came rushing down, some of them barefoot, others with towels wrapped round their waists. We could see he was dead for good, so we decided we’d better call the emergency services. But someone from the sixth floor, who knew what to do in situations like that, announced it wasn’t an ambulance we needed but an undertaker or a pathologist. He warned us that the emergency services these days wouldn’t stand for being messed around, they’d had enough of being called out for nursery school bumps and bruises every thirty seconds, and now their union was threatening to make people pay for crazy call-outs.
“The person who rings pays the call-out fee, not me!” he emphasised.
So we dropped the idea, but the corpse was still there, in front of us. The nice fellow from the second floor who watches too many detective films warned us that we would soon get a visit from someone cantankerous, a German cousin of Inspector Colombo, that he would wear a raincoat and drive an old banger which he’d park in front of our building, that he’d smoke a smelly cigar, that he’d talk to us about his wife and his dog, that he’d pretend not to notice anything, that he’d lay traps for us, that he’d tire us out with his questions about this, that and the other, that he’d look for clues on the soles of our shoes, on our cigarette stubs, our beer glasses, our dusty doormats, in our condoms and our jacket pockets, in lipsticks, on badly knotted ties, on our grubby front door knobs, down by the bins, that he’d have a word with the Arab on the corner, then with the Chinese, then with the Pakistanis, then with the Indians, then with the Greeks, then with the Polish plumbers, that he’d take fingerprint samples from every landing, that he’d want to know what we’d been up to before the drama took place, what we ate two days before, what we drank a month before, that he’d look into what relations were like between the residents, that he’d spend time down in the basements, that he’d pay close attention to all the numbers we had dialled – even Freefone numbers – that he’d also take his time over the calls we had received, even if it was just someone trying to sell us a second-hand vacuum cleaner or to make us switch telephone suppliers. Not only that, but Colombo’s cousin would summon everyone who had paid us a visit over the last twenty and a half years minimum. And after all that, some of us would still have to spend hours in custody, in a police station with a stuttering lawyer appointed by the court, and officers who would treat the suspects like guinea pigs for new torture methods from the United States that are used to worm information fast out of people who try it on during the interrogation sessions.
“Get your alibis ready, and make a note of them one by one on a piece of paper,” he advised us.
At this point, a man who lives on the seventh floor, Staircase A, brought it to our attention that he could be ruled out for a start, none of this had anything to do with him, he had what is called a “cast iron alibi”: he’d been away for a month, he had only got back two hours before the accident, he’d been in the Dordogne staying in Champagnac-de-Belair with his mother, who had been suffering from cancer for years.
“And anyway I live on Staircase A, whereas the incident happened on Staircase B, so it’s clearly got nothing to do with me. If Colombo’s German cousin so much as sets foot in this building to hassle me, I swear I’m filing a complaint, I’m hiring Jacques Vergès as my lawyer and I’m passing the details on to the relevant human rights bodies in this country!”
The nice fellow who watches the detective films pointed out that Colombo’s German cousin would drive all the way to Champagnac-de-Belair in his old banger and that he wouldn’t give a monkey’s whether it was Staircase A or B, that he would summon the sick mother in question, cancer or no cancer, because in criminal law sickness is no excuse for murder and vice versa, and that in any event there would be all sorts of upheaval in our building. His conclusion was that we shouldn’t touch the corpse, the investigation would take at least two to three and a half years to establish the cause of the fall and if some of us were implicated in this story …
All the same, we stood there staring at the corpse because it isn’t every day you get to examine a fresh stiff in your own building instead of in those films where people lie to us and take us for kids by pretending to be dead when you can see they’re breathing, and the blood on them is that ketchup they sell at La Chapelle market.
We surrounded the corpse and were still figuring out what to do when the man who lives on the first floor reminded us:
“Look here, he’s stopped breathing!”
“He’s not a pretty sight, we should cover him up quickly with a white sheet,” added the man just back from Champagnac-de-Belair.
He’s peed his pants, and there’s dribble coming out of his mouth,” said the man from the third floor, going one further.
“That’s weird, can you see how he’s got one eye bigger than the other now?” chipped in a woman from the fourth floor.
“Don’t touch him! Don’t touch him!” bellowed the man who watches the detective films.
And that’s when the neighbour suddenly woke up with a jolt and roared at us:
“I’m not dead! I’m not dead!”
We shrank back because he looked like a ghost in a horror film, Night of the Living Dead for example.
“Who just said I’ve got one eye bigger than the other, eh? Was it
that slut from the fourth floor? Don’t you dare lay a finger on me, you bastards! Someone pushed me, and you’re all in it together! You’re going to hear me out!”
He had blood on his face, he had several battered ribs, and he was grimacing with the pain. We tried to get close to help him stand up.
“Don’t touch me, you murderers! Someone left a banana skin on the stairs, and he’s going to hear me out! I know who did it!”
We all looked at each other and raised our hands in the air, as if a firearm was being trained on us, to show we had nothing to do with this banana skin story. Then the neighbour barricaded himself in his apartment and spent the day phoning every doctor in town and raining down insults on them, because they didn’t understand how a normal person could fall from the fifth floor to the ground floor without someone pushing them.
The neighbour wouldn’t stop snorting and muttering to himself:
“Goddammit! I’m telling you an African laid a trap for me with a banana skin! And we’re not talking any old banana skin! That banana came directly from Africa!”
The thing I wanted to know was what on earth was he doing up on the fifth floor, when he lives on the ground floor like me. Anyway, that’s why he’s got a bandage on his head now and spends his days sniffing at a little bottle …
* * *
Unluckily for me, my studio is slap bang next to the neighbour’s apartment. I can hear him cackling like a hyena in front of his telly and bellowing into the phone when the doctor on the other end of the line explains he won’t be able to pay him a home visit. The neighbour reminds the doctor about the Hippocratic Oath and promises to get him struck off professionally:
Black Bazaar Page 2
