Blue White Red

by Alain Mabanckou

  This is how those who had residency permits found themselves sans-papiers—undocumented—sandwiched between complex and draconian laws. This theme was used as a political football to win a vote or two from intolerant French people. The abandoned and undocumented horde was considered a pressure on French society. Foreigners in France, they would be equally foreign in their own countries. After all, one can’t just go back, impulsively, after an absence, which in some instances had lasted more than thirty years . . .

  Préfet was a shrewd person.

  He had changed his connections. Otherwise, he was heading straight to unemployment without compensation. He had tossed his friends aside. He had penetrated the Antillean world to such a degree that he spoke the creole of Martinique and Guadeloupe fluently. His summer visits to Guadeloupe and Martinique might have happened for a reason. Guadeloupe had particularly left its mark on him. He said he felt at home there. Old people who resembled our own. Tropical landscapes, that sea, like the Atlantic Ocean along the south of Congo. A municipality with the same name of the city where he was born, Pointe-Noire.

  Préfet had quickly realized that he could work differently. Get in contact with his friends overseas. Some already worked with him then. Others were interested in easy money, without declaring taxes. They sold him their identity cards for a price that left no room for duplicity. Préfet bought the cards; the sellers made arrangements to later initiate the procedures to declare a lost card and then disappeared from Paris for a while. They knew that their administrative existence would be split with another person whom they should not encounter. If they ran into each other some day, they had to swear on the honor of their mother and father that they did not know this person who had usurped their identity. Which was true, because they hadn’t established a relationship with anyone except the intermediary: Préfet . . .

  This was one of Préfet’s many tracks.

  I remember that he proceeded differently with me. He had bought a blank birth certificate that came from a French overseas ministry. He filled it out with a name that wasn’t mine, signed it, and put a seal on it with the tools of his trade, and we presented ourselves one morning at the town hall on the pretext that my French identity card had been lost. Préfet explained everything to me before going into those places that turned my limbs to ice. He waited for me outside. An affable employee, dynamic, so agile that she must have walked on her tiptoes, saw me, disappeared for a few minutes, came back, had me sign a pink paper, and handed me, with a toothy smile, the form to declare a lost card. I signed with such angst that my hand was sweating.

  I walked out of there with the document in my pocket. With this declaration, Préfet and I returned to our local police . . .

  I had a false birth certificate and a genuine declaration of a lost identity card. In less than one week, I had become a French citizen like any other, since they sent me an identity card in good time. My new name and surname was Marcel Bonaventure. I was born in Saint-Claude in Guadeloupe, a country I knew nothing about and couldn’t locate on a world map. Préfet, having visited there, indulged me with tales of Soufrière, the famous volcano on Guadeloupe, in such a way that I could conjure a very clear picture of it myself without having seen it.

  Of course, the name Marcel Bonaventure really did exist in the French territory of which I had become a national. Préfet kept silent about my Antillean double, who surely was out and about in Paris. This legalization was to lead me, without my even realizing it, into a vicious and irreversible circle.

  With this, Préfet would at last reveal himself and appear to be just what he had always been . . .

  I became clear-headed again. Several questions gnawed at my mind. They all came back to just one worry: why had Préfet been so diligent about me? I couldn’t lay out anything to pay him back for this. All these procedures were onerous and cost tens of thousands. Although he liked to be Santa Claus, it was still necessary to live. He refused to discuss money with me right away. His thoughts must have come to light very quickly during the conversation we had on the way out of the police station where we had gone to retrieve my identity card.

  “You’ll simply do me a favor,” he said.

  “What kind of favor?” I asked.

  “Work with me for a few months. That was the deal Moki and I made about you . . .”

  “What deal? Work?”

  “Yes, unless you’ve got another way to cover the costs that I’ve incurred for your papers,” he said, while rolling his eyes around in his head. “These papers cost an arm and a leg. Usually I’m paid twenty to thirty thousand francs in advance, depending on the case. I agreed to proceed differently with you because Moki is one of my best buddies. So are you coming to work with me or not?”

  I was no longer facing the Préfet that Moki had introduced me to. He was terse and spoke seriously.

  In this world, nothing was done for nothing. I had no doubt about that. I had forgotten that too quickly. He wasn’t joking. He was looking at his watch.

  “It’s a tiny job, no trouble at all. A job for rookies. The day after tomorrow is the end of the month, an appropriate date for this. You’ve got to be very early, six o’clock in the morning, OK?”

  I agreed, in spite of myself. He and Moki had decided everything. For Préfet, my opinion was an afterthought. If I said no, what would I do instead? He was capable of taking back my identity card and tearing it up. Whether I wanted to or not, I had to reimburse him for what he had just done for me.

  “For starters, you must get rid of this débarqué outfit. I’ll bring you a suit the day after tomorrow, for which you will reimburse me, of course. I’m not the only one who will make a profit in this business; you’ll see the results, and I am certain that you will beg me to do it again next month.”

  For the moment, I had all my papers.

  Yes, but I was haunted by doubt. I hadn’t started working with Préfet yet. In two days, he would come pull the wool blankets off me in our room on Moulin-Vert to lead me who knows where. I questioned myself all night long about what sort of work I would be doing alongside him. I didn’t see it. A job for rookies. The words came back to me.

  The duplicity of people within our milieu intrigued me. Préfet, at first glance less charismatic, in fact had an authoritarian character buried inside him. An obsession they all shared to say nothing beforehand. To let the situation unfold.

  I was in some sort of net. I adopted the same attitude: accept things as common sense.

  Deep down, I had no doubt that he had thrown me a life-saver. It was just that I had to be more careful. To know where my feet were going. My father’s words came back to me like a deep echo from a cave. His words that he had murmured when we were sitting on the grassy mound at the airport: “Be careful, keep your eyes open, and don’t act until your conscience—not someone else’s—guides you. Yes, it’s easier to correct a mistake committed by error of your own conscience. These will be my final words, I, your father, who has nothing and envies nothing belonging to anyone . . .”

  I had a conversation with Moki in the evening about this rendezvous set for two days later. Of course, he was the one behind this. He played down the situation and assured me that this was the same path everyone had taken. He cited the names of my predecessors who had gone on to fly with their own wings since then. For me, this was the only emergency exit. He explained to me that with the kind of papers I had, it would be better not to sign up with the national employment agency to look for any kind of job whatsoever. These identity cards were meant to facilitate my movement around the area and not to disturb the siesta of an already jammed administration, which would suddenly rub its eyes at the sight of one letter spaced too far apart from another, knit its brows, and quickly crosscheck through the traditional channels between official bodies. Then I would be asked a lot of questions. When did you become French? And your parents, do they live here or in Guadeloupe? What is your father’s profession? Your mother’s? What is your social security number? Do you
have a case number from the office for family welfare? Do you have subsidized housing? Where did you work previously? What is the name of your first employer? Could you provide us with proof of residency? A gas or electric bill, or a France-Télécom phone bill? And what about your tax return?

  Then an accumulation of too many lies would petrify my tongue until I confessed . . .

  I had to watch Préfet work, and one day I, too, would do it on my own. Don’t let him out of your sight. Follow his movements down to the smallest detail. Obey him, and don’t do anything except what he tells you to do. Don’t ask him any questions. He won’t answer. He will have drunk half a bottle of whisky to see the situation clearly and won’t hear anything else you say to him. I would have to keep my mouth shut, and that’s the end of it.

  “The trouble with rookies,” Moki said that evening, “is that you want to know everything before making a move. You have to go to work to earn something. It’s a job. A real job, like any other. There is no shame or scruples involved. Why blush about this? Who said that money smells? I do this once every four months, this job, to pad my wallet when my clothing trade slows down a bit.”

  “Take a good look at my hands. Are they dirty? Cash that falls from the sky just like that is a good thing; it gives you wings. You, you rookies, don’t see anything except the concrete achievements we established back home. You don’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. Our sweat is not visible to the naked eye like a warehouseman’s. It’s called risk because it’s well known that he who risks nothing has nothing. Every job done by man has its explanation and maybe even its justification in a certain time and place. It’s because I’ve also been the victim of my own dream, this blue-white-red dream, that today I don’t allow myself not to take advantage of circumstances that fall right in front of my feet. I bend down and I gather, that’s all.

  “I’m not a moralizer. I’m happy just to make my life and my family’s life the least miserable possible back home. You’ll achieve the same thing from here on out if you know how to take advantage of the opportunities you’re offered—I would say on a silver platter—such as the one the day after tomorrow with Préfet.

  “What will you buy with the first French Francs you get your hands on? I’ve seen everything here. Guys that went running the next morning to a garage to get themselves a set of wheels with their first earnings. Others who slept in a five star hotel. And still others who went to Strasbourg-Saint-Denis to grab a prostitute with big breasts and an ass like a brood mare. I figure you’ll go for that last form of rejoice . . .”

  I slept badly on the night before the rendezvous.

  I had a stiff neck. I felt the contraction of my neck muscles when moving my head.

  The room had emptied out of its occupants very early, as usual. Moki had gone to Milan. That’s what he had led me to believe at the end of our tête-à-tête.

  The air blew cold above the skylight. If the night always inhabited the sky, a few car horns outside announced that another new day was already up . . .

  I heard someone knock at the door.

  Someone from our milieu because he had honored the secret code. There was no need for me to look through the peephole. I thought it was Préfet.

  I opened.

  He didn’t come in.

  He remained planted in front of the door. He trembled from cold; the building wasn’t heated. In his right hand he held a full plastic bag. He gave it to me by tossing it on the floor.

  I discovered my work uniform. A grey suit, a sky blue shirt, a burgundy tie, and black loafers. He went down to wait for me on the ground floor while I got dressed.

  Before going out, I couldn’t keep myself from taking one last look in the broken mirror hanging on the wall. The mirror reflected a dismembered and fragmented image. One big eye. Two mouths. Superimposed teeth. Four arched eyebrows. Three nasal cavities. What difference did it make? I didn’t know who I was anymore. Nor where to find the true reflection of things . . .

  In lowering my gaze, I noticed my first photo in Paris, next to the Marie-Josée form letter. I was wide-eyed like an enchanted child. I didn’t like that photo. Still, I kept it. It was my real face.

  I was about to look away. I hesitated. Without thinking, I pulled the picture off the wall and slipped it into the inside pocket of my jacket.

  I hadn’t forgotten anything.

  Yes, the clump of earth my father had given me. The earth from my grandmother’s grave. Putting it in a pocket of my overcoat would protect me. I had hidden it in a corner of the room, under the rug. I dug it up. I brought it up to my nose.

  The country was there . . .

  At last, I could leave and close the door.

  The key, I would put it under the doormat. I had no idea what time I would be back. If we had gotten up early, it was to go all day long . . .

  Préfet was in his Sunday best.

  He had lit a cigarette. He rolled his red eyes, misted by smoke. He smelled of alcohol. He informed me that we had to go down the rue Pernety and take the number four Métro line all the way to the end, to Porte d’Orléans.

  I waited for his instructions.

  We got on the Métro at Pernety station and got off at Montparnasse. We took the long moving walkway to get to the platform to change trains. That’s where he reluctantly muttered a few words without taking the cigarette out of his mouth.

  “It’s mathematical,” he said.

  “Mathematical?” I replied, as rapidly as his enigmatic words, while letting a few hurried people pass in front of me.

  “Yes, think about it, Marcel . . .”

  This name bothered me. Préfet knew his craft. He had already assimilated it. He struggled to nail me. The gyration of his eyes became epileptic. He was going to collapse, yet he fought back, grabbing the rubber handrails of the moving walkway. How could we work under these conditions?

  “I said it was mathematical.”

  “That’s indeed what I had heard, but it’s not clear to me . . .”

  “I’m getting there, have patience, débarqué. He took some time to light a cigarette. The effort failed several times. I gave him a helping hand. The flame leapt forth from the lighter that I handed back to him.

  He analyzed his mathematical problem.

  “Suppose that I have two checkbooks, which happens to be the case at this exact moment, and that each checkbook holds twenty-five checks; in total, then, we have fifty checks, right?”

  A little lost, I mumbled, “I think so.”

  “There’s nothing to think about, Marcel, it’s completely stupid, it’s mathematical!” Fifty checks are more than enough to work with today.”

  “I still don’t see what it is I’m going to do and how we . . .”

  He cut me off, on the verge of being irritated, saying, “Stop your blah blah blah. That’s normal, you’re a rookie. You have to understand things before they are explained to you. In this line of work, there is just one secret: anticipation. The more you anticipate, the more you win.”

  He came closer to me to speak directly in my ear. I drew back, repulsed by the alcohol on his breath.

  “Listen up, débarqué, have you ever anticipated anything in your life? Otherwise, open your ears. Line number 4 goes from Porte d’Orléans to Porte de Clignancourt and includes twenty-six subway stations. OK? It’s simple. We have to cancel out one to have the exact number of a checkbook: twenty-five. If we make one round-trip, the sum will be correct: fifty stops, fifty checks. That’s phase one. We will have used up the checkbooks, but the work won’t be over yet. There’s still phase two, which is close to my heart. Come with me . . .

  We arrived at the Porte d’Orléans Métro stop. Préfet made me wait. He wanted to smoke another cigarette. He refused my help with the lighter. He walked away. I kept my eyes on him. I could see him playing a dirty trick on me in an instant. Was he pretending to smoke that cigarette to distract me and achieve his objective?

  No. He was talking to himself.

 
A monologue. A sort of meditation. I drew closer to listen. He stopped me and ordered me not to come closer. When he had finished his cigarette, he crushed the butt under his Weston and came back toward me, his eyes blazing and completely rolled back.

  “Listen to me again, débarqué. Today is your baptism, so perform good clean work for me. I’m counting on you. The work we are going to accomplish is simple. It’s about buying a maximum number of orange coupons, those monthly transit passes, which we will resell on the black market at Château-Rouge tonight for a good price. Do you get the picture?”

  He took me by the shoulder. We went separate ways at the Métro entrance. Riders entered and exited the station.

  “Hold this.”

  He handed me a large, slightly crumpled beige envelope. Opening it, I remained speechless. Another identity card, with my photo, identical to the one that I had pulled off the wall of our room. It was a little blurry. But it was me. I could be identified without difficulty. When had he taken this from my stuff? Moki must have been behind this, too. No question. I had a different name than Marcel Bonaventure on the identity card—my name was Eric Jocelyn-George. I couldn’t make heads or tails of this anymore. This new ID was manifestly false. Préfet hadn’t gone to city hall or to the police station. He had made the ID in a studio, with his own hands.

  Scrutinizing the checks, I saw they were in the name of this Eric Jocelyn-George. In other words, me.

  I pieced together the network in my mind. Soté the workhorse must have brought back these checkbooks in the name of Eric Jocelyn-George from the provinces. To make the means of payment operational, an identity card was necessary. That was not Soté’s specialty. Préfet was brought into the action. Give one of our people the identity of this unknown person. Make an ID in his name. Préfet and Moki had talked about it. I was the latest débarqué. The most naïve. My status found favor with Préfet, the great mentor. Moki gave him one of my photos. Préfet worked an entire night to make the fake ID. Everything was perfect: authentic checkbooks, a fake ID, but in the same name as the check holder.