I hear a car pulling up on the gravel outside the house, I hear a shout The police! and we’re running, climbing over metal fences, leaping into other gardens, and we’re running and running, grass asphalt mud earth stones cement beneath my feet barking shouting car horns squealing brakes the muezzin my own panting in my ears, I’m scratched hit punch drunk beaten pushed thrust aside but I’m running and I’m putting a distance between myself and the house and I know I’ll never go back there.
When we came to a halt it was in the woods on Moya Hill. Beyond its farthest slope lay Moya Beach and the memory of Sunday afternoons with Marie, but that was when I was a child, when I thought I was white, when I thought she’d be staying with me all my life. I gave all the money to Bruce, I promised him next day I’d go and get more notes from the cash machine. I emptied the rucksack in front of him, he divided up all the stuff and took what he wanted: what was left was Marie’s identity card, her silk scarf, and the book, The Boy and the River. I thrust them into the bag.
Night was beginning to fall. I was scared but I stuck close to Bruce.
Bruce
I guess you think it’s easy to be the Don of Gaza.
You don’t get to be king just like that, it’s a jungle out here, you need to be a lion, a wolf, you need to sniff the air, track down your prey and show your claws. I showed mine at the time of the big strikes. Who lit the first bonfire at the Kaweni crossroads? Me. Who decided to put up barricades? Me. Who threw the first stone at the firemen? Me. Ha, ha. Everyone took my lead, adults, civil servants, street vendors, the unions, they all shouted No to high prices! but I couldn’t give a shit what they were shouting, the one who’d lit the fire was me and that’s what makes a warlord, he leads the pack, he lights the fire and, when he decides, he puts out the fire himself. And everyone knew that. I heard the wind speaking to me with the voices of people everywhere. It was Bruce who barricaded the Kaweni road, it was Bruce who decided, it was Bruce who said the word, you need to ask Bruce, where’s Bruce? Even the wind spoke my name and it was like Gotham summoning up Batman.
You need to know Gaza like it was your wife. You know where she’s wrinkled, where she’s curvaceous, you know when she’s crying out and when she’s in pain, you know what she likes and what she doesn’t like, you know what music she likes, you know how to please her and how to make her grovel, you know where she’s dry and where she’s dripping wet. You know her head from her pussy, and her hands from her feet. No one knows Gaza like me.
You need to be strong, you mustn’t be scared to fight. In Gaza they know Bruce is like Batman, he dominates everyone. He doesn’t grovel either to the law or to politicians. He can turn anything into a weapon, a stone, a stick, a sheet of corrugated iron, the lid of a cooking pot. You need to know how to strike and you need everyone to see you win.
What you did to me yesterday I’ll never forgive and neither will my wolves.
You need to have an army. Youths to keep watch on all sides, and you send them to beg from the muzungus. You set up competitions between them, you send some to Caribou Café, some to the exit from the ferry and some to Banana Café, then you wait. They come back to Gaza smiling as if you’d invented the most wonderful game for them. Do you think you could have thought up that game, fool? Youths are useful too for climbing all over the place, into trees for fruit, onto roofs when you want to pinch a TV cable, that kind of thing.
You need your homies your age to help and protect you. The hardest part is choosing them. They need to be strong, but not as strong as you, brave but not as brave as you, they need to respect you enough to follow you and even die for you, you must know their secrets, their vices, their little weaknesses. I’d seen your secret and your weakness. You left your mother to snuff it on the kitchen floor and you’re a scaredy-cat. You put us in danger that day, didn’t you, Monsieur Mo-ïse who said he had money at his house but didn’t tell anyone there was a body quietly rotting on the kitchen floor and for that you had to pay, that’s how it is if you want to be in Bruce’s gang, you’ve got to prove yourself, you’ve got to give blood. If you didn’t want that you shouldn’t have stayed all night at my place and followed me like a dog. You shouldn’t have begged me not to leave you there at Moya, you little homo.
To be king you need to have people on your side, ones you’ll give a cigarette to, a spliff, a piece of advice, protection, and who, in return, tell you things. Tell you who’s leaving Gaza, who’s coming back to Gaza, who’s saying things about you, what they’re saying about you. Tell you what houses are empty for the holidays, what warehouses have had fresh deliveries. What you do is you listen, you listen carefully, you listen to everyone, even to the ones who tell you nothing but bullshit because you never know and then you use your head.
Most of all you need to have the dough, cash, moolah, money money money, you need it coming in and going out, you need it to get drunk and to get high, stuff needs to be sold on. You need to be the one who has the best spliff and the one who shares it with the others. You need to be the one who has the best sound and when Saturday night comes around people need to hear boom boom from your system, and they need to know it’s coming from your place.
For you to stay on top, hang on in there, the rules need to keep changing. No one should get used to Gaza and stop being scared. Even if there was money at your place, even if the carte bleue worked for a couple of days and I was able to get a decent stash of cash, you put us in danger and the law got on our tail. To stay Don you have to punish, and I punished. I’m not like you, I don’t open my mouth to say nice things, to say I’m sorry I’m very sorry. No, I speak the truth. Three days after that trip to your place you felt like you were my brother, didn’t you? You started talking as if you knew better than everyone else, you said you didn’t like stealing, you didn’t want to smoke or drink anymore and for a couple of days I let you carry on. You even started talking to me the way the guys from the NGOs talk to me. Why do you do it Bruce? Why don’t you want to change your way of life? Why do you live a life of violence? You told me the story of your life and, for fuck’s sake, I don’t know how I stopped myself from smashing in your face that day. You told me how your mother, your real mother, that whore, gave you to the muzungu woman and how that one got a certificate of paternity for you. You told me how happy you were with her, you used that word happy, like the whites, like in schoolbooks, like those elegant white teachers and the headmaster who told my father He’s not happy here, he wouldn’t be happy at secondary school and I thought it was the djinn who’d sent you with your eye as green as the trees they live in and that I needed to do something to stop you talking like that about school and your picnics by Lake Dziani Your favorite place in the world but what fucking world are you living in? This is Mayotte here and you say it’s France. Fuck off! Is France like this? In France do you see children hanging around the streets from dawn to dusk, do you? In France are there scores of kwassa-kwassas arriving with people landing on beaches, some of them already half dead? In France are there people who live all their lives in the woods? In France do people cover their windows with iron grilles like here? In France do people shit and sling their trash into gullies like they do here?
I’m the king and I needed to punish you, Mo. I needed to change the rules, I needed to show that when it comes to people like you, with skins as black as mine but whose words are white and insipid like those of the muzungus, I needed to show I knew how to settle the score with people like that.
I put out the word in Gaza. On Saturday night there’s going to be mourengué fighting on the hill. On Saturday it’s punishment time. I’ve seen my father doing mourengué fighting, I’ve seen my uncles, my cousins, and, in my dreams, I see my ancestors battling and dancing in the ring formed by the crowd. Saturday came. The drums were set up. There were drinks and cigarettes. There was dancing, there was bare-handed fighting the way we Mahorians know how to do it. When I came into the ring the drumming grew faster and I was stripped to the waist while you still
had your old T-shirt on and you were already stoned out of your mind, you’d been smoking too much and you were laughing and all at once I jumped on you, I can’t say you didn’t defend yourself it was simply amazing, you amazed me, Mo, you kicked out, you flung your hands about but you didn’t know how to fight while dancing around, you didn’t know how to be both strong and light, you didn’t know how to call the ancestors to help you, and didn’t know how to follow the rhythm of the drums. You didn’t know how to imitate Muhammad Ali when he leaps into the ring and he’s so light on his feet that you think he’s going to kiss you but bang bang that’s how I jumped on you and when you began yelling, your green eye opened wide like never before and in it I saw my father, I saw the djinns, I saw this hill before Gaza existed, I saw my childhood and the green of the trees and the fruits that mustn’t be picked at nightfall and the leaves that mustn’t be touched and I made a sign and my machete appeared in my hand and I drew it across your face from above the eyebrow down to the jaw like that, the way you draw a pencil across paper, gently but firmly the elegant white teachers used to say, without pressing, without hesitating, a fine, firm line and the blood pissed out the crowd yelled, and I felt the weight of the king of Gaza’s golden crown on my head I’m not lying. I don’t open my mouth to tell lies, but you didn’t cry out you didn’t move maybe you didn’t feel anything, after all you’re the child of the djinn and my father had told me to beware of the djinn.
What’s the time? At this hour of the day I’m often in my banga or underneath the breadfruit tree behind the tinsmith’s workshop. I like people to come to me if they need to but I shouldn’t be seen too much. I listen to music, smoke a little but not too much, I collect the money from the youths, I figure out our weekend plan of action. It’s in the evening that I go down to the entrance to Gaza. Ah, Mo, it gives me a hard-on sometimes, to know they’re all afraid of me, to see them all salivating over the notes in my pocket and the words coming out of my mouth and they all want to talk to me, to ask me what I think, and want to get close to me because I’m Bruce, king of Gaza. That’s not all I wanted, I’m only seventeen for fuck’s sake, I wanted to become king of Mayotte, king of the Comoros, I wanted my name to be on the prefect’s lips, on everyone’s lips, all the muzungus, the sailors, the firefighters, the bureaucrats, the law.
What’s the time? It’s not real life here, is it? Hey, Mo, answer. I’ll wake up and feel something again, won’t I, this wall I see myself touching, yet I can’t touch it for real, it’ll stop soon, this business, Mo, tell me, I’m still king of Gaza, aren’t I? I’m telling you, I miss my hill and all my homies, I miss the late-morning sun and the smell of the gully, I miss the metallic smoke from the tinsmith’s workshop and the clang clang sounds beneath the sun and the noise of their saws and the clatter of their hammers. I shouldn’t be here, I’ve got to get out of here, get back to Gaza. Back there’s where I belong.
Moïse
It was an old white man called Dédé who stitched me up. He wears a loincloth and a sleeveless T-shirt and has the TV on night and day. There’s a photo of him in military uniform in his living room.
I stayed at his house for several weeks. Time had ceased to matter. I’d wound up in a secret place, a dark night without end from which it would be impossible for me to escape.
Even though, according to Dédé, the cut was not deep, the scar remained pale and long, my right eyelid had collapsed so that all the time it feels as if my eye’s misted over but it’s simply the effect of my eyelashes. On occasion in the evening, when I was feeling bad and all that had happened to me was prowling around me like a predator ready to pounce once more, I imagined that this haziness was a supernatural and benevolent presence bringing me word from Marie and Bosco, giving me news of everything and nothing. From time to time Bruce would come and see me at nightfall. He’d stand beside the bed saying nothing and studying me. I don’t know what he was looking at, maybe he was checking that I was still scared of him? The old white man changed my dressing regularly, checked the stitches, took my temperature. I had fresh clothes, new shoes, my brown rucksack was at the foot of the bed. I was allowed to move freely inside the house but I didn’t have the right to leave. Dédé spoke little and when he wasn’t looking after me he watched TV and drank. His daily consumption of alcohol was incredible yet he was never drunk. Sometimes when I refused to eat, he would feed me with a spoon, saying Come on, kid, just one more and maybe I cried a little, then, I don’t know.
When Bruce came to get me, Dédé said I should come back to see him once a month. Bruce handed him a bag filled with bottles of booze, the old man closed the door without giving me another glance. I heard the sound of the TV. I’m guessing that, as with all of us, Bruce knew Dédé’s dark secrets and weaknesses. I never saw him again.
When my scar irritated me, I went into the woods in search of aloe vera leaves and spread their glutinous sap over my face. I’d seen Marie doing that long ago with a scar on her leg that sometimes irritated her on humid days.
For a long time after that I didn’t speak. I held everything in and my whole body became an enclosed space where I stored up words and thoughts and sometimes there was a bubbling in my stomach pop pop pop like rice cooking. They all said that after the mourengué I’d lost my mind and I let it be said, I let them talk. And maybe they were right because sometimes, very early in the morning when I was climbing right to the top of the hill of Mamoudzou, I’d utter a cry and even though I knew this cry arose from my own gut, it was so deep, dense and dark that I didn’t recognize it.
For a long while after that I was a trusty soldier in Bruce’s army. I kept watch when I was told to keep watch, I counted the numbers of unfamiliar cars coming into Gaza, I went out and tore up cassava roots and boiled them up, I pinched shoes and slippers from the mosque, I went and picked fruit, and stole clothes hanging out to dry on walls, I guarded Bruce’s banga when he was away, when he was fucking, occasionally I cleaned it as well. In the daytime I kept thoughts, memories, and questions at bay. At night I would try to find a place to get a few hours’ sleep but sometimes all I did was walk the streets, walking in my sleep.
One day, as I was going in search of bananas in the little plantation located above the two flights of stone steps, I came upon Bosco. For the previous two days it had been raining and Gaza seemed to be trying to cave in on itself. Whole masses of earth were coming adrift from the hillside. The tinsmith’s workshop had subsided, a torrent of mud flowed through the gully. I had no idea where Bruce had gone and I was left there watching the rain, the mud and things that were slowly disintegrating and sliding down toward the sea. In my head I was praying for a void to open up where the gully was and engulf the whole of Gaza.
But the rain stopped, the sun came beating down once again and Bruce returned with his homeboys. He’d caught sight of me under the deck of the veranda of a house where the shutters and door were always closed, he called me over and said Mo, go get some food, you’ll have to manage on your own. Since the day I’d returned to Gaza he always addressed me in firm but never aggressive tones. He simply gave me orders and I was a good dog, go, fetch, sit, on guard. I never looked him in the eye now. I kept my cap on night and day and my brown rucksack on my back.
So I’d gone up toward the top of the gully hoping to find an untouched bunch of bananas, I scrambled up as best I could, finding hand holds here and there, orientating myself from the two great black stone staircases built against the side of the hill. If those stones could speak what tales would they tell about life here before Gaza? Maybe it had been a paradise, and children came out to run and play here without fear and then went home and ate as much as they wanted and slept in clean sheets?
The path that ran along beside the banana plantation had disappeared, there was a mass of earth, scraps of metal, corrugated iron, various bits of detritus. Just as I was wondering what I should do to get to the other side I saw something yellow protruding from the ground and my heart missed a beat. It was a part
icular yellow that glowed in the darkness, fluorescent yellow, Marie had told me, when she bought that leash for Bosco. I thought that Bosco, whom I’d not seen again since that first evening must have been buried in a mudslide and I began tugging at it. It wouldn’t come, so I dug, I scraped away with my hands, I got the leash free, saying over and over Bosco Bosco good dog and suddenly something emerged that was dessicated yet dripping wet, its skin cracked and torn, half skeleton, half monster, its jaws agape with the leash still attached to what was left of its neck. I didn’t cry out, I didn’t back away, I simply collapsed and wept there in front of Bosco who’d died a long time ago, I don’t know how, but it must have been while I was smoking that first spice spliff and imitating American rappers and dancing and drinking from his coconut shell.
I’m fourteen or maybe fifteen already, I no longer know. What difference does it make after all, since every day is the same as the last. Fear, hunger, walking, sleep, hunger, fear, walking, sleep. I ate what I came across, washed when I could, slept under the decks of verandas with one eye open. I often had to keep watch at the entrance to Gaza and I collected the takings from the youths to hand on to one of Bruce’s homies. On some evenings I’d see the poisonous quartet coming down the hill, Bruce surrounded by Rico, La Teigne, and Nasse. They were off on the prowl, to break into houses. I wasn’t with them because, as far as they were concerned, not only was I out of my mind, but I also brought bad luck. For a long time I never went outside Gaza. For a long time I must have been dead, for I guess this is the emptiness you have in your belly and in your heart when you’re dead.
One day just like the others, the same sun, the same harsh sky, the same red dust, the same clang clang from the workshop, the same stink of metal and shit, there was an election campaign. A youth came to fetch me. Bruce was waiting for me at his place, he was very smartly turned out, Bermuda shorts with pockets on both sides, a Lacoste polo shirt, a consular corps shoulder bag, a gold chain. He gave me fresh clothes to wear, not exactly like his own, but clean, new stuff that his soldiers steal from the illegal market that’s set up every day on the edge of the mangrove swamp. There are black market street traders and black market thieves. Bruce gave me new flip-flops as well and said You’re coming with us.
Tropic of Violence Page 7