Black Bazaar

by Alain Mabanckou

I elbowed my way to the platform. It was airless down there, but nobody wanted to leave because during a strike it’s always when you decide to turn back that the train comes. You can’t trust the timetables, and the guys from the RATP and the SNCF play with the passengers’ nerves. They mutter incomprehensible messages into the loud speakers. They advise you to exit the station, to go back up to street level, to walk along Rue Magenta, then Rue Lafayette, then Rue de Strasbourg where, as if by magic, you’ll find a bus that will tip you out like torture victims over towards the east of Paris, and too bad if you were heading west because the workers over that way have been up in arms for the past ten and a half years.

  People wouldn’t stop looking at me. Naturally, I assumed it was my suit, my shoes and my aftershave. So I adjusted my tie and straightened my trousers until they fell neatly over my shoes. I undid three of my jacket buttons, which is a special technique I have for showing off my Christian Dior belt to its best advantage. And then, all of a sudden, a man broke free from the crowd like a rugby player hoping to score a try in a space as narrow as a telephone box. He was filthy enough to have stepped straight out of The Dirty Havana Trilogy by Pedro Juan Guttiérrez, a novel I’d borrowed when I was round at my friend’s, the Haitian writer Louis-Philippe, and which I’d been reading for a few days now on public transport.

  The man came up and shouted at me, point-blank:

  “Hey, you, why are you on strike? Don’t you think you’re going too far this time? You’ve got your welfare benefits and the whole package, but you’re still ruining our lives! People complain there are no more jobs in France, when the state has to keep slackers, praying mantises and snails like you on its payroll. Do you get your kicks out of taking people hostage, eh? If you ask me, we should clean up the SNCF and the RATP with bleach! Let’s get rid of all those idiots loitering in the street with their placards, when they should be in the ticket office or at the controls of their train. Right, now tell me what time the next RER is due because these shitty screens have stopped working too!”

  I had no idea what was going on. Everyone was shouting at me and agreeing with my assailant:

  “Too right, let’s get rid of the bastards! They’re on strike twenty-nine days out of thirty!”

  “Well said. I’ve had it up to here with these strikes!”

  “Slackers, the lot of them!”

  “Take early retirement. Make way for the young!”

  “Why are you on the platform instead of finding us a train, eh?”

  And seeing as I just stood there saying nothing, the original angry man disappeared into the crowd while calling me every revolting name under the sun that would have infuriated and outraged anyone who still has free time in their life to sing the praises of Negritude, but not me.

  It took me a while to realise why they were laying into me. Then I spotted an RATP official. And that’s when I noticed our suits were the same colour …

  My ex is a girl from back home, but seeing as she was born in Nancy, you could say she’s also a bit French. That’s why she never really got it when our people started screeching in the streets around Château d’Eau and Château Rouge. You could see some of them yelling into a telephone box on Rue Strasbourg, shouting themselves hoarse, probably thinking that if they spoke normally then nobody would hear them on the other end of the line. This drove my ex crazy, she used to say she had no time for people like that. It suited me that she got in a huff because I could play on it to go to those Parisian nigger-trash parties on my own, where I’d hunt the wild gazelles turning up for the first time in the capital.

  “There’s a Congolese party tomorrow night at Gargeslès-Gonesse,” I’d say to her, sounding downbeat. “Oh, it won’t be anything special, I’ll go, but just to show my face, I don’t want to get a bad name for myself as a compatriot who thinks he can go it alone now that he’s in France. A reputation like that is a serious matter, because the day I die the Congolese won’t come to the morgue, they won’t club together to repatriate my corpse to the fold. Of course I’d like you to come too, but it won’t be your scene, they’re expecting several tribes, and not just any old tribes, we’re talking the Bembés and the Laris! That lot come straight from the bush, where there’s no electricity. I swear they’ll be shouting all night until the cops show up, they’ll urinate in the main entrance, and that’s before we’ve even got started on them smoking a minimum of two hundred cigarettes an hour, and seeing as you’re pregnant, I just thought that …”

  She cut me short:

  “Listen, you can go and see your brothers for yourself! But whatever you do, don’t count on me coming or I’ll tell them what I think of their boorish behaviour! How can people urinate in front of a building and smoke like that?”

  We used to have big arguments about what she took to be fixed truths on the subject of our condition as negroes, when they were just clichés in black and white. It’s true I often played up the caricatured version of our customs to my own advantage, so I could go it alone to those crowded parties. But I also set the record straight when I needed to. And bringing down the concrete walls in her mind was no walk in the park. She was convinced, just like Roger the French-Ivorian, that our ancestors were courageous Gauls and that we were all the black grandchildren of Vercingetorix. I’m the one who told her that the muscular, blonde version of Tarzan she’d loved since she was a little girl and who leapt with such ease from creeper to creeper in the company of wild animals was not in fact the king of our jungle; and even that nice, brave, clever Tintin with his quiff had told porky pies about the Congo because, I mean, let’s be objective here: do I look like anything like the negroes you see in The Adventures of Tintin in the Congo? Those big fat pink lips they stuck on us weren’t real Congolese lips, even if certain history books at the time reported we hadn’t quite completed the evolutionary process of turning from monkeys into men and that we still scratched our backs with our toes.

  But my ex wasn’t persuaded by my explanations. She argued with me, saying the opposite was true, she quoted those history books written by Whites between a couple of colonial expeditions and a few battles lost to Shaka Zulu who enjoyed ensnaring them using the old burnt-earth tactic. She would give me a whole patter about beaten earth huts, tree houses and African black magic, about witchcraft that could turn human beings invisible, about swamps that gobbled up trees, about animals roaming free, about the red earth that filthied the faces of children with distended bellies. I replied that we didn’t live in that heart of darkness, that there are some Africans who have never seen an elephant or a gorilla, including those who had only ever spotted those kinds of animals in the zoos of Europe or in King Kong. So she shouldn’t go picturing us keeping wild animals on a leash to take to school with us, and playing with them at break-time before politely accompanying them back to the jungle where their parents would be waiting for us by the banks of the Congo River, so they could thank us for being so kind.

  Seeing as she relished my stories about being a kid back in the home country, I also told her about how we survived without toys at Christmas, how we played football with a ball that wasn’t round at all, but you still had to shoot straight, and dribble past a group of eleven players, and score goals as if the ball was round. We beat the living daylights out of that ball made of old rags, we wanted to be champions one day because the grownups had told us that King Pelé started playing with a flat ball like that and he’d gone on to become the youngest champion at seventeen. He had scored six goals during the World Cup in Sweden in 1956, the grown-ups used to tell us, as if they’d been present in person when the young Brazilian boy-wonder had pulled off that feat. And so we were all Pelés, we dribbled, we made dodgy passes, we tackled imaginary legs, we trapped the ball with our backs and not our chests, we executed volleyed back-heel flicks, our imaginary lines didn’t even mark the halfway point, we entered invisible penalty areas where we hoped the opposing team would mow us down so that we’d be granted a penalty which we’d miss because we did
n’t believe enough in what we were doing. There was no red card because red was the colour of our one and only Party which banned us from showing it to the four winds. So there were only yellow cards, and some players got at least thirty per match because nobody knew what colour card to show a player to get them off the pitch for good. And I explained to my ex how, before those matches, we would go first to the fetish man who made us grigris and promised us that we would be unbeatable. He used to make us sleep in the Mouyondzi district cemetery where the devils don’t trifle with football and they come out of their tombs to play in place of the living. And so there was a devil behind each player, and our goals went into the back of the net all by themselves before we’d even touched our flat ball. Sometimes it went in, sometimes it didn’t. But when it didn’t go in, we wouldn’t blame the poor fetish man. He wasn’t God. He had done his work and the devils had done theirs. It was our own fault because we never observed what the fetish man had advised us to do on the eve of the match: to wake up in the morning by opening first the right eye, then the left eye; to get out of bed putting the right foot down first; not to touch the genital area for twenty-four hours; not to greet any girls – especially sisters and mothers – until the match was over; not to turn around when someone calls your name, but always wait until they’re level with you even if it’s your father or your mother; not to let a single drop of rain fall on you – even though our matches only took place during the rainy season. That’s how we were, we used to tell ourselves that other youngsters in foreign countries couldn’t possibly have more fun than we did, and we were happy in our own world, with our tattered shirts, our worn-out sandals tied to our feet with bits of wire; that’s how we were, with holes in our shorts and the whole bazaar of what passes for everyday life among those who had never invented anything, not gunpowder and not the compass, among those who had never known how to tame steam or electricity, among those who had never explored the seas or the sky.

  And my ex, who was moved by this, asked:

  “Did you make that up, all that stuff about gunpowder, compasses, steam, electricity, the seas and the sky?”

  I told her it wasn’t me, that these were things we’d learned at school, back in the home country, things Europeans didn’t get taught. They came from a man who was angry, a black poet who used to speak courageous words. He had written them on returning to his native country and finding his people hungry, the streets dirty, the rum like dynamite exploding his island, a people who didn’t rise up against their condition or the invisible hand that was subjugating them. There could be no messing around with that angry man, since he had also written in black and white: Because we hate you, you and your reason, we lay claim to dementia praecox, to the blazing madness of inveterate cannibalism …

  At which point my ex became very sad. I felt guilty about leaving her in such low spirits, so then I had to entertain her with different stories about love, that way she wouldn’t go to sleep with our courageous poet’s ideas about dementia praecox, blazing madness and inveterate cannibalism.

  We were lying in bed, and it was nearly midnight as I talked to her in my deepest voice. I told her about how we learnt to sweet-talk girls for the first time. It was something we were dreading, so we paid a visit to a big brother in the district who was called Big Poupy because he was always surrounded by girls and his throat didn’t dry up when he was talking to them. He had chatted up all sorts of girls: tall ones and short ones, bantamweight, featherweight and even super-heavyweight. He claimed to have an all-areas pass. The girls filed past his bedroom door, which looked out on to Independence Avenue. We’d be down below, counting Big Poupy’s victories. He wasn’t afraid to touch the girls’ hair, to hold hands with them, and sometimes even to pinch those buttocks we dreamt about. And these girls laughed instead of going home to complain to their parents! At the time we could only stare at girls from a distance. Our stomachs were in knots, and we wanted to pee our pants as soon as one of them looked us in the eye. It was like being felled by an earthquake, and sometimes we’d cry because the emotion of it turned us into salt statues. Another reason for us watching the girls from a distance was that we didn’t want any trouble. Our parents had warned us about the wicked and evil scorpion they had in their sexual organ, and about how this scorpion could sting ours.

  Which is why all our hopes lay with Big Poupy. We paid him ten Central African CFA francs – he was the one who’d set the rate – for him to teach us what we had to say when we ran into a girl leaving her parents’ plot of land to go to the market. According to Big Poupy, you had to raise your head up high, stand straight as a soldier, hold your breath for ten seconds, breathe out gently, and then ask the girl:

  “So where are you off to like that?”

  And according to Big Poupy the girl’s answer would always be:

  “I’m going to the market.”

  We had to raise our heads up high again, stand straight as a soldier, hold our breath for five seconds not ten, and then say in an authoritative voice, while giving them a sidelong glance:

  “I’m coming with you! Give me your basket!”

  Big Poupy was right. More often than not, the girls agreed to this. But we quickly ran into trouble because we had to talk to them when all the questions Big Poupy had taught us had flown clean out of our heads, things like: How tall are you? How much do you weigh? Have you made love before? What did you have to eat yesterday? Did you sweep your parents’ yard before coming out? Are you smart at school? What is the capital of Nepal? What is the surface area of our country? What is a non-aligned country? Was Hitler German or Austrian? What is Victor Hugo’s first name?”

  We were so surprised to be walking next to a girl that our brains went blank. We tensed up and the way to the market felt very long. And the people who saw us sweating behind the girl assumed we were only carrying her basket because we were her parents’ house-boy …

  When my ex burst out laughing, I quickly added that, over time, we stopped believing in Big Poupy’s smooth-talk which cost us a lot for nothing. That’s why we ended up going to see a good fetish man in the Trois-Cents district instead, like for those football matches with the balls that weren’t at all round. The fetish man would ask us to bring him some hair belonging to the girl and so we’d go and loiter wherever our ladylove was braiding her hair with her friends. Sometimes there’d be half a dozen girls taking it in turns to braid each other’s hair. We pretended to help them, we’d do the sweeping up and then, when they weren’t looking, we’d steal their locks of hair without knowing whose they were because how can you tell the difference when it comes to a black woman’s hair? It’s easier in other countries where you’ve got blondes, brunettes, redheads with or without freckles and I don’t know what else. We stole any old lock of hair that was lying on the ground, on the basis that it doesn’t matter what colour the cat is provided it catches the mouse. We would run to the fetish man’s house with our plunder, he would mix the hairs up with some stuff of his own and chant things we never understood even though we were from the same ethnic group as him. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.

  Since my ex was often incredulous by this stage in my stories and in need of concrete examples, well, I told her that I’d seen with my own eyes how a love fetish had worked well for my childhood friend Placide, whose girlfriend Marceline had cleared off without saying goodbye and taken up with one of our classmates who always got nought out of twenty in Mérimée’s dictation, two out of twenty for history and geography, and nineteen and a half out of twenty for physical education thanks to his Beninese fisherman’s muscles. Placide, unlike us, had been lucky enough to hear about a proper fetish man who came from a faraway village in the north of the country. This fetish man didn’t want a cent upfront, you’ll pay after the result he said, I’m not in this for the money. Without saying anything to us, Placide went to see this man who gave him a little seed and told him to plant it in a bowl when he got back home, and to water it every day at around midn
ight while invoking Marceline’s name. Our friend rose at midnight, knelt down in front of his plant, and called out Marceline’s name for at least an hour. One week later, when the seed had produced a small shoot, we were all surprised to see Marceline strolling once more in front of the plot of land belonging to Placide’s parents. She brought him food now and said she couldn’t sleep any more without seeing him, without touching him, without smelling him, without gluing her lips to his just like in the movies we watched at The Rex. None of us in our district got it at all, because what did Placide have that we didn’t to turn the head of a beautiful girl like Marceline? The more the plant grew, the more the girl clung to Placide.

  A group of us went round to our friend’s house so he could at least tell us what district his fetish man from the north lived in because we wanted girls to throw themselves into our arms as well, and to bring us food on our parents’ plot of land and to glue their lips to ours just like in the movies. We wanted girls to tell us they couldn’t sleep without us any more. But Placide refused to reveal the name of his fetish man, he said it was a secret.

  So we all chorused:

  “You don’t want to give us the name of your fetish man from the north? Well, if that’s the way it is, just wait and see what’s going to happen to you!”

  So that night while he was asleep, we destroyed his plant, we urinated all over it, flattened it and broke the bowl it was in, just like that.

  The next day the sparks really started flying between Placide and Marceline. They bickered like two strangers, hurling insults at each other in front of everybody.

  Marceline took up again with her guy who scored low in Mérimée’s dictation, as well as history and geography, but high in physical education. We never owned up to destroying Placide’s plant. And anyway he never suspected us, because he was convinced it was the muscular dunce himself who was exacting his revenge and who had gone to see the same fetish man to win Marceline back …