The Lights of Pointe-Noire

by Alain Mabanckou

  The name ‘Three-Hundreds’, according to some, refers to the war waged between the Zairean prostitutes and those from our town, who, way back when, had fixed the price of a trick at five hundred CFA cents. The Zaireans changed the rules by lowering the price to three hundred. A rumour went round the town that the Zaireans were more ‘competent’ and knew how to keep hold of their clientele, so much so that many men with wives and children were handing them most if not all of their salary. People had lost count of how many wives had come looking for their husbands in the Three-Hundreds. But how could you hope to find your man in this web of backstreets, passages, culde-sacs and dark dives, joining one plot to the next, one house to another, when he was probably fast asleep in the bed of some Amazon from the ‘Other Congo’?

  The battles between the sex professionals sometimes spilled out into the Avenue of Independence, where the two camps attacked each other with hammers, sometimes even throwing caustic soda in their adversaries’ faces, a final solution designed to send them into retirement. We passed prostitutes with corroded faces who, even so, still continued to work in dark corners, where their features would be mostly hidden from the clients.

  The public authorities became increasingly concerned by this situation. Probably because of certain practices said to be used by the Zaireans, particularly the use of gris-gris and poison with delayed effect, with the intention of wiping out their colleagues. And when sorcery and poisoning didn’t work, they would engage crooks – usually compatriots – who were paid in kind to assassinate the Pontenegrin girls, and dump their bodies in the River Tchinouka, or on the Côte Sauvage. The ineffectiveness of the police, in addition to the prevailing mood of fear, led the Pontenegrins to abandon the territory in the short term, and move back towards the town centre. The result was a considerable loss of income, as the town centre, though busy during office hours, emptied after nightfall. They had no choice but to fall in line with the prices of the Zaireans, or shut up shop. The tariff of three hundred CFA francs eventually became the norm, and the two camps buried the hatchet. The only difference between them now was technique, and woe betide anyone who failed to take note of the words declaimed by Brassens in ‘Le mauvais sujet repenti’:

  There’s an art to how you walk the streets,

  and how to shake your arse…

  Depending who you’re out to catch,

  The chemist, the sexton, the clerk…

  When you walk alone in the Three-Hundreds district, the women watch you from their booths. They sense, just by looking, what brings the ‘passer-by’ to their fiefdom. There are men who hesitate, pretend they’ve lost their way, retrace their footsteps and then do exactly the same all over again a quarter of an hour later. The bravest walk confidently, putting up a smokescreen by whistling a happy tune; they never look behind them, and slip, swift as predators, into one of the lots, emerging only half an hour later.

  Venturing this far myself, I don’t know how the watching women will classify me. The fact remains that as I leave the Avenue of Independence, taking the first alleyway down to the heart of the district, I feel a presence behind me. I go past Koblavi’s place, then turn around: a woman with legs like a wading bird’s and brightly painted red lips comes towards me and shouts:

  ‘What you looking for here? You a journalist?’

  I start to walk faster, and try to reach the rue de Loukenéné, on my right. But the woman knows where all the little side roads in her neighbourhood come out, she cuts through the rue Moe-N’Dendé, and I find her standing in front of me again, determined, this time, with a piece of paper in her hands.

  ‘I want you to read that, it’s my story, I told it to another journalist, like you…’

  Her prominent eyes have the look of someone who hasn’t spoken in a long while, on whom life has weighed heavy for many years. She points to a plot a few steps away. Without hesitating, I go in with her, and in the yard find other women too, who all look me carefully up and down.

  ‘I was the one who got them all to leave our native village and come here to work…’

  Then, turning to the silent shadows, she exclaims:

  ‘Don’t be scared, girls, this gentleman is a journalist who works with the whites! I saw him yesterday near the Cinema Rex, and I promised myself I wouldn’t let him leave without hearing my story. Then at last the whole world will know about our troubles. There’s only one thing we want in this district: no sex without condoms!…’

  The other girls all chorus:

  ‘No sex without condoms!!!’

  And in the lots behind us, like a rallying call they were waiting to hear, voices cry:

  ‘No sex without condoms! No sex without condoms! No sex without condoms!’

  I unfold the piece of paper the woman has handed me. It’s a press release from the Syfia agency, dated 19 September 2009, entitled: Congo-Brazzaville: Prostitutes care more for their lives than for money. To this woman, this piece of paper is more important than her own birth certificate.

  ‘Read that, monsieur, that’s my story, and the story of all the women you see here!’

  I smooth out the piece of paper and start to read out loud, with the woman nodding at every word:

  Sex without condoms is a thing of the past. The sex workers of Pointe-Noire, Congo, now understand the dangers of their profession, in particular Aids, thanks to an organisation set up by a group of the women involved. These days they are intransigent with their clients, however much money he offers. This woman, who has asked not to be named, lives at present in the Rex district, in Pointe-Noire. A professional sex worker since 1990, she sees her clients at home, or rents a room. Her children live elsewhere, since ‘they must be spared this ugly spectacle’, she says. At 500 CFA francs (0.76 euros) a time, she earns over 80,000 CFA francs (122 euros) a month, enough to keep her family. She speaks about her profession without shame: ‘Some of my family know. Life is a choice. You just have to make sure you stay safe when you work.’

  While I’m noticing that the price of a trick is now fixed at five hundred CFA francs and that the district hasn’t changed its name to reflect this, the prostitute points out:

  ‘The woman who won’t be named in this article is me. I’m not going to tell you my name either, we know what you journalists are like! You come here to get us to talk, and then when you go back to Europe what people read is the opposite of what we’ve told you, and of what you’ve seen! If you want to give me a name when you write the article, call me Madame Claude…’

  ‘But madame, I’m not a journalist…’

  ‘Yes you are! Why not be proud of your profession? Is it worse to be a journalist than a tart like me?’

  ‘I’m actually here to retrace my childhood…’

  ‘Oh, we’ve heard that before! That’s like the clients who come by and make out they’ve got the wrong street and are only looking for directions! Bullshit! They want to get laid, but their conscience won’t let them be! I know you’re a journalist, I saw you with my own eyes yesterday, outside the Cinema Rex, with a man and a white woman, then you went and had a chat with old Koblavi in his lot, am I right?’

  ‘Yes, but I…’

  ‘Don’t interrupt me, if you please! Did old Koblavi say bad things about us here in the Three-Hundreds?’

  ‘No, not at all…’

  Somewhat reassured, she hands me a stool and sits down herself on the ground. With a nod of the head she tells the other women to go, and one by one they leave the lot, without saying a word.

  ‘I’ve nothing to offer you, Mr Journalist… Switch on the recorder on your phone, I’m going to tell you my story and please don’t interrupt…’

  I take my phone out of my pocket. She clears her throat, wipes the sweat running down from her brow with the back of her hand and folds her arms:

  ‘I’m no little girl, Mr Journalist. I’m a woman who’s lived, and let me tell you, this body you see here has been touched by filthy rickshaw pushers as well as the most high-up people in my
old country, and yours too. This business is my life, it’s what I know how to do best, and it’s what has brought me here to this country. The day I can’t do it any more, I’ll pack my bags and return to my native land, way back to my village of Bandundu, where I’ll work the soil. I told the other journalists I had children. It’s not true, I made lots of things up, to shock people…

  ‘I never had children, my seven brothers all left Kinshasa. Three of them live in Brussels in the Matongé district, and are married to white women; two of them manage to make a living in Angola, in the food trade, and the last two wander about the metro in Paris busking illegally, or so I’ve gathered from people back here on holiday. It’s as if there’s a wall between us, in their eyes I’m just the disgrace of the family. I never hear from any of them, perhaps because they resent me for following in the footsteps of our mother. Was it really her fault? I’m not judging, only God can judge our acts. Does anyone ever stop and wonder how a woman comes to sell her own body? Do they think it’s an activity you choose like any other, like becoming a hairdresser, or a carpenter, or a journalist, like you? I studied at school, I even got my baccalaureate, but what use was it to me? A woman isn’t born a tart, she becomes one. There comes a day, you look in the mirror, there’s nowhere to go, you’ve got your back to the wall. So you cross the line, you offer your body to a passer-by, with an empty smile, because you have to seduce the client, like in any business. You tell yourself, you may debase your body tonight, but tomorrow you’ll wash it clean, and restore its purity. So you wash it once, you wash it twice, but your scruples wear thin through habit, then you stop washing altogether, you accept your acts as your own, because no water on earth, including the Ganges, ever gave anyone back their purity. If it could, surely with all the streams and rivers and seas and oceans there are on earth, all men and women here below would be pure and innocent. I simply followed the destiny God saw fit to give me, even if all anyone sees in me is the pimp who controls the girls she’s brought over from her own country. I’m the woman they throw the stone at, it’s even written down in black and white in the Bible, I believe, but didn’t Jesus protect tarts? I make a few of the men round here happy, at least that’s something. My father had abandoned us when I was a child, and my mother brought me up to this trade, which she plied herself till the end of her days. Thanks to that we had a roof over our heads, my seven brothers and I. While the girls in our village were playing with their dolls, my mother was already explaining to me how to hold on to a man: cooking and sex, she said, the rest is an illusion, including beauty and diplomas. A beautiful woman with a diploma who can’t cook and yawns in bed will soon find herself supplanted by an ugly ignoramus who can make a good dish of saka-saka and give her lover a great time in bed. I want you to put that in the article you write about us. I’ve never said any of what I’ve said to you to any journalist, but something makes me think you’re different, you won’t betray us, or old Koblavi wouldn’t have invited you into his lot, I know him. But don’t forget, call me Madame Claude… now, switch off your mobile, that’s the end!’

  I put my phone away. The women who had left the lot now came back, gradually, as though they had been listening behind the corrugated iron that defines the limits of the property.

  I stand up and hold out my hand to Madame Claude. She keeps it a moment:

  ‘Old Koblavi’s a good man, he’s never considered us tarts, he respects us. You mustn’t say I said anything bad about him, you understand?’

  ‘I understand…’

  I look at my watch; it will soon be midday.

  Leaving ‘Madame Claude’s’ plot, I notice another group of women opposite, watching me, wondering why I don’t come over to them.

  I head for the Avenue of Independence to look for a taxi.

  Footnote

  * abacost: abbreviation of ‘A bas le costume’, ‘down with suits’. The Western jacket was perceived as a symbol of colonialisation. Mobutu, who was obsessed with ‘Zaireanisation’, imposed the abacost, a jacket worn next to the skin, between 1972 and 1990.

  War and peace

  The taxi drops me outside Chez Gaspard. I almost turn back: it’s a rough-and-ready restaurant in the Grand Marché district, and it’s full and very noisy. A few customers have been waiting patiently for a while at the door. I’m surprised to see a guy sitting alone, thin as a rake, nod his head at me to come on over. Seeing me standing there, unmoving, undecided, he yells in a powerful voice:

  ‘Come on! Be my guest!’

  I go over to the stranger and sit down opposite him.

  ‘I know you’re thinking we don’t know each other. But I know you! You’re a writer, I’ve seen you sometimes on the TV! All these people sitting eating here are ignoramuses, they don’t know who you are! But you’re looking at someone who actually follows the news!’

  ‘Maybe you were expecting someone who…’

  ‘I belong here, I invite who I like. Two days ago I had lunch with a white journalist, yesterday with a colonel in the army, and this evening I’m with a writer! A word of advice: don’t have the boar today, I’ve been told it’s not fresh…’

  He waves a hand in the direction of the waitress. She brings us two Primus beers and takes the tops off, her face expressionless, as though put out by the presence of this stranger. She goes back to the counter while my host eyes up her rear:

  ‘I’ve got the file on that girl, and it’s closed. She can sulk at me if she likes, I’ve already slept with her… Did you see the arse on her?’

  I look round and nod.

  ‘This country’s changed, my writer friend…’

  The stranger notices me looking at the scar that cuts his face in two, and touches it with his hand.

  ‘Yes, I know, it comes from the war, the oil, I mean…’

  He looks over at the customers sitting behind us, then at those sitting opposite us, to make sure they’re not listening, then goes on:

  ‘God gave us oil, even though we’re only a little country with less than three million people. Why did he put all the oil in the south, instead of giving a bit to the north, so everyone would at least have a slice of the cake and we could stop fighting each other? But you know, I’m not complaining; when I think of some countries and the mess they’re in and they don’t have a single drop of oil, in the ground or out at sea!’

  He raises his glass, empties it in one, and fills it again:

  ‘Oil equals power! Where there’s a war, there’s oil. Otherwise, tell me this, why don’t countries fight over water? Imagine a country without water, would its people survive? Oil has screwed everything up between the north and the south. And like the fuckwits we are, we’ve had a civil war over it!’

  The waitress comes back to take our orders. I avoid the boar and go for the antelope with peanut butter. The stranger hesitates for a moment, then opts for the salted fish with mushrooms and glances again at the waitress’s rear as she moves away:

  ‘D’you see that? When I think I’ve had my leg over that and now she’s playing up! Ah well, it was a bad idea anyway, the girl doesn’t move in bed like she should, she makes you do all the hard work… what was I saying before that?’

  ‘The civil war over oil…’

  ‘Ah, yes, the war was all about getting control of the oil, to sell it in secret and buy villas in Europe! The oil here doesn’t belong to the people, it belongs to the President of the Republic and his family. I won’t name names because the walls here have ears like rabbits… The problem is that the president works with the French. The one who got overthrown didn’t want to work with the French any more, he wanted to work with the Americans. So the French helped their friend, so he could stay in power, but the Americans didn’t protect the new president, who was democratically elected. The Americans aren’t stupid, they know they can go and make war somewhere else – in Iraq, for example – and get lots more oil than they would here. Why would they fight for a little country that has less oil than Iraq?’

 
Two women dressed in very short skirts enter the restaurant. High-heeled shoes. Heavy make-up. They walk across the room as if they’re in some fashion show, and stop at the counter.

  Suddenly the stranger addresses me as ‘tu’, like an intimate friend.

  ‘See that? They’re on the prowl! They’re tarts from the Three-Hundreds, but Pontenegrins, not from Zaire – those girls hardly ever come here! The war destroyed everything, now you have to do what you can to get by! What was I saying a minute ago?’

  ‘The war, the French, the Americans…’

  ‘Yes, we had a civil war here, you must know that, it was in the papers all over the world. The north of the country fighting the south. The northerners were in power, they didn’t want to let go of the oil. I’m telling you, it was bad, the civil war. Weapons came in from everywhere. The northerners asked for help from the Angolans and the French, who came and invaded the south. The people in the south ran off into the bush to hide. We were dying of hunger, and from the mosquitoes, and other tropical illnesses. Some got eaten by crocodiles or lions. There was war on Earth and in Heaven too, believe me…’

  He notices some of the customers are listening to us. He draws his chair closer to me and whispers:

  ‘We saw military planes skim the tops of the forests. The people who ran off into the bush were called “refugees”. The international community said we must help them, give them food, even if you can eat anything in the bush, like the Pygmies. But the Pygmies, they’re a joke, I don’t like them, they’re too small and their stomachs don’t get hungry every day like us big guys do, normal people, I mean. Pygmies are bastards who can go without eating or drinking for months on end, while people our size need to eat every day. Isn’t that unfair? Who do they think they are, these Pygmies, going without food like that? And what do they do all day, hiding out there in the bush? They don’t even know TV exists, that every single person has a mobile phone, and that for a long journey you take a train, or a plane! I don’t like them at all, but you have to make do…’