The day Original Colour came back home with a new hairstyle I nearly had a cardiac arrest. She was sporting green and white braids with cowrie shells like the ones Venus and Serena Williams wore when then played at Roland Garros. Her hairstyle wasn’t just ridiculous, it showed how stupid and blind I had been despite Carcass indirectly doing me a favour at Bar Sangho.
“Did you go to the hairdresser’s in order to charm your cousin?” I asked Original Colour:
“Why?”
“Because you’ve got to be beautiful for his concert this weekend!”
“I didn’t speak to you, I am not speaking to you any more! Leave me alone! Haven’t I’ve got the right to braid my hair the way I like? Is my head your head?”
“Where did you get the money?”
“It was Nicole …”
“Nicole?”
“She agreed to let me pay her back when I’ve got some cash.”
Nicole is a good woman. I know her. I owe her respect. She does a great job of running her four hair salons in Château d’Eau. She decided to go into that line of business ages ago when she was still a medical student. But none of this stopped my male pride from taking an uppercut.
That Saturday I got drunk on Barbancourt rum over at Louis-Philippe the writer’s and then I decided to go for a stroll around Château Rouge.
Soul Fashion did its main turnover at the weekend, the shop was always full from morning to night, but the boss had given Original Colour Saturdays off since the little one was born. She mostly stayed at home. This time, though, she was in a rush to go out. She got the kid’s bottle ready and wrote on a scrap of paper: “Henriette must have her bottle at seven o’clock on the dot.”
She gazed at her reflection for the umpteenth time and left without speaking to me.
I let an hour go by and then I went to drop off Henriette a few metres from our Arab on the corner, with the Cape Verdean mama who was overflowing with kindness to the point of giving us food even though she had seven mouths under her roof to feed. You’d think she was cooking for a whole tribe. She took the little one and asked where Original Colour had gone. I said I was off to meet her in Château-Rouge where we had an appointment.
“Are you sure you’re all right, my son?” she pressed me.
“Yes, everything is fine, mama …”
* * *
Louis-Philippe’s rum was too strong. He said it was because I’d gone over the top with the sugar. After leaving his apartment I walked to Château Rouge with my eyes fixed on the ground because I could barely find my centre of gravity. When I looked up, I thought the sky was going to cave in on me.
I went into Exotic Music, a shop run by a friend who sells music from back home. He was showing me the latest stuff from the big Congo even though I always went there to listen to albums from the seventies and eighties. He played “Liberté” by Franco Luambo Makiadi from Tout-Puissant OK Jazz. The song moved me, I was seeing the country again, that concert by the illustrious musician at the Joli Soir in Pointe Noire. We were underage at the time, and the doormen wouldn’t let us. We had to slip them something. But I didn’t have anything. So I climbed a mango tree and held onto a branch to get a view of the great Franco with his paunch and his guitar, which he strummed like a virtuoso. I wanted to grow up big and fat like him, to play the guitar like him, to wiggle like him. I admired his musicians who wore silk shirts and clingy trousers. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the couples taking over the dance floor. They were sweating, the men squeezed their partners tight, those without a partner waited in a corner, looking as sad as a dog with an ungrateful master.
Yes, this song always plunged me into the deepest sadness. The musician declared that he was free to do as he saw fit:
Na koma libre ehhh
Na koma libre eh …
Liberté eh eh na lingi na sala oyomotem’
elingi mama mama …
When the song came to an end I decided I’d better head for home. But as I turned around, my heart skipped a beat: Original Colour was walking into Exotic Music with the Hybrid, arm in arm!
I’ve never seen a man run so fast. The Hybrid just missed being run over by a car that was parking in front of the record shop. Original Colour took cover with one of her Nigerian girlfriends from the old days, and I walked as far as Les Halles to get a drink at Jip’s. My group of pals wasn’t there. There was just Paul from the big Congo. As he dozed off in front of his glass of Pelfort, he kept saying:
“Buttocks aren’t the only thing in life, there are breasts too …”
* * *
We never spoke about that episode at Exotic Music. Even though I sensed Original Colour wanted us to talk about it. From then on, I wasn’t allowed to hold our child any more. Original Colour dropped her off with the Cape Verdean childminder on her way to work and picked her up in the evening.
And then, one evening, coming back from Jip’s at about half-past midnight, I found the door to our studio open and the lights on. The Hybrid’s drums weren’t there any more. I could hear my footsteps ringing out as I walked across the floor because Original Colour’s things weren’t there any more either, and nor were the little one’s.
I looked in the Yellow Pages and found the office number for Original Colour’s father. I made up my mind to call him in the morning.
But when I got the lawyer from Nancy on the phone he sent me packing, he said that he didn’t know who I was and nor did he know the woman or the child I was talking about. He called me a ruffian and a rogue. I remembered the story about that minister Doyen Methuselah. In this lawyer’s eyes I was the person who had wrecked the marriage he’d planned between his daughter and the former minister, when it was probably the Hybrid who wrecked his plans at the time.
Yes, I think he must have mistaken me for the Hybrid because as he was hanging up he let rip:
“You pile of shit of an artist! I’ll send you back to prison for a second time!”
* * *
Original Colour didn’t call me until ten days after she’d disappeared, to tell me she was in Brazzaville. She was demanding a maintenance allowance and had set the level herself. I talked about it with Paul from the big Congo because I thought Louis-Philippe was too much of a writer to understand the things that go on outside books and the birds in the park trees.
At Jip’s, to my great surprise, it was Roger the French-Ivorian who seemed the most receptive. He told me that Original Colour was swindling me, that she was in fact making me pay double the amount as if we’d had twins. And not only that, but he still wanted to know what proof there was that Henriette was my daughter, apart from our toes looking alike? He advised me to pay up all the same because the child wasn’t to blame for coming into this world in such chaotic fashion, but I should negotiate the amount down to the last cent. I stared into my glass as I listened to him.
Willy told me he had friends back in the home country, highway bandits who had fought in Angola and Cabinda and who would kill for a piece of cassava or a Marlboro Light, that I shouldn’t let the matter drop, that for a fistful of cash those friends of his would be able to rearrange the Hybrid’s face, kidnap my daughter and bring her back to me here in Paris.
Yves the just-Ivorian started up again with his stories about the colonial debt.
“This is what it’s come to, Buttologist! What am I always saying? Now tell me what you’ve got out of this relationship! Have you advanced our cause? The colonial debt is still with us because of people like you!”
Pierrot the White said he knew someone who knew someone who knew the lawyer Jacques Vergès, that this lawyer always won his trials, and that he had even defended a Gestapo Chief from Lyon who had organised the deportation of forty-four Jewish children and tortured the Resistance member Jean-Moulin. So all I had to do was consult him …
I didn’t want to enter into legal wrangling we’d never see the end of. Of course I could go to Brazzaville and settle the matter with machete blows. But that’s not my style. I don’t like w
ar. I don’t like confrontation. Plus the country seemed a long way off to me. I’ve been gone more than fifteen years now.
And so I chose not to take the path of justice or to make the revenge machete trip. I just pay up without batting an eyelid. I do it for my daughter.
When Original Colour calls me from the home country it’s to remind me that in a fortnight it will be the end of the month and I mustn’t forget to send “her” allowance. I hang up on her shouting that I’m not a Crédit Agricole cash point, and that it’s not her allowance.
But each month I still head for Porte de la Chapelle to do a Western Union. I queue up with the Malians who are sending all their money back home and who, from what I hear, are building villas over there for their retirement …
III
Each time I sit down to write – at home or in the park nearby – I stare at my typewriter for a long while and think about how I came to buy it, because back when I was always falling out with Original Colour I got to know Louis-Philippe who did book-signings in our neighbourhood, at the Rideau Rouge bookshop. So Roger the French-Ivorian is wrong to think that I started scribbling this diary because of my ex and the Hybrid. Yes they triggered something off in me, and yes psychoanalysts would have tonnes to say on the subject, but I mainly owe everything to meeting Louis-Philippe …
I hadn’t heard of this writer before. I’m very wary when it comes to contemporary writers, I only read the dead ones, authors who are alive annoy me, they get on my nerves. When you see them on telly they hold forth on whatever they’re writing about and they’re so smug anyone would think that they had found the philosopher’s stone after managing to square the circle or fill the Danaides’ jar while standing on their head. Whereas with the dead ones – yes, I know it depends which dead ones – they’ve written their life’s work, they’ve taken their leave, they lie in peace in graveyards by the sea or at the foot of weeping willows, they let us say what we like about their output because they know that sooner or later we’ll have to read them if we don’t want to be labelled a dunce by the parents-in-law at the dinner table.
I didn’t go to the Rideau Rouge to meet Louis-Philippe, I just happened to be passing by, I was in need of some fresh air because Original Colour was waging a Trojan war against me for the way I’d behaved towards the Hybrid on the day he had worn my Marithé & François Girbaud T-shirt and I’d said it was worth more to me than her ass.
There was a crowd in front of the bookshop. I used to think people were often scared of going into bookshops, what with the risk of coming out with a book they wouldn’t read and then being harangued in their sleep by the characters from it who wanted to make them face up to their responsibilities.
So I walked in out of it curiosity. Too bad if I come out with a book I won’t read, I thought to myself, and the characters of that book pop up to give me a hard time in my sleep even though we don’t know one another.
When Louis-Philippe looked up between signing a couple of books I could tell from his smile that he was happy to see me there, probably because writers are all the same, I’ll never understand them, they’re good at making the people who are about to become their readers believe they even know the date of their birthday.
He winked at me, as if to say he’d clocked me, that I mustn’t get away. So I wandered around between the piles of books. There were girls eyeing him voraciously, and he was flashing his seductive smile. I was taking a good look at the backsides of these female readers, and trying to figure out if any of them had come for something more than getting their book signed. Louis-Philippe had a joke for each of them, he took his time choosing the words he scribbled on the first page of the book.
We could hear his deep voice:
“Should I be dedicating this to your husband as well?”
“Oh, I’m not married!” simpered the single woman.
The bookshop owner noticed that my gaze was on the rear assets of the reader standing in front of Louis-Phillippe. She looked embarrassed and, to help her out of an awkward moment, I grabbed Louis-Philippe’s book, Dream of A Childhood Photo, and went over to the till. She wanted to explain what the book was about, but I wasn’t really paying attention. She also caught me soaking up the B-side of a very fidgety brunette now standing opposite the writer. I was trying to work out if her butt was like Original Colour’s or if it just had a manual gearbox. Boy, was that brunette dragging out the conversation. No one else existed in her eyes. Given the way Louis-Philippe was looking at her, I thought: my god, this story is going to end up in the sack in a hotel on Rue des Petites Écuries.
To kill time I re-read the title of Louis-Philippe’s book that I was holding. It was warm and tender: Dream of A Childhood Photo …
* * *
Half an hour later the brunette was still narrating how her ninety-eight-year-old uncle had been to Haiti, how he had adopted a young Haitian who now works for the Post Office in Nantes, how he’d also helped several Haitians flee Papa Doc’s regime, and then Baby Doc’s, how he’d been initiated by the great voodoo practitioners, how he owned naïve paintings by some Pétionville artists, how his favourite book was Country Without A Hat by Dany Laferrière because it captures the spirit of Haiti, it’s chock-a-block with proverbs, and there are people in the street who are in fact zombies and all that kind of thing. The elderly uncle in question had met the author of Country Without A Hat in person, a brilliant, witty man who never knew whether he should be living in Miami or Montreal. Louis-Philippe didn’t want the brunette to think that he was in the least bit bothered by her flaunting the merits of another Haitian author, when he was there to sign his own books.
He forced a smile and said:
“Dany Laferrière is a great friend! I would urge you to read another of his books: How To Make Love To A Negro Without Getting Tired …”
A redhead cut short their conversation. She glared with blood red eyes at the brunette who realised she’d better scat and fast. The brunette left the bookshop muttering to herself, with one book by Dany Laferrière but none by Louis-Philippe.
The redhead had a more direct approach. She grabbed a stool, sat bang opposite the author and proceeded to tell him that she took some of his books to bed with her, especially God’s Pencil Has No Eraser. She even felt as if he was writing them for her, that she was one of his characters.
“I want a proper dedication, none of that ‘With best wishes from the author’ nonsense! I want a dedication intended for me and me alone. This is a book I’ll read every night before going to sleep, even if there’s a guy lying next to me …”
Louis-Philippe looked up at the ceiling and then wrote something. He held out the book to the redhead who immediately read the dedication. She blushed, kissed the author on the cheek and left the Rideau Rouge waving at him in a knowing kind of a way.
I was staring at her B-side and thinking to myself: “That one’s a dormant volcano!”
* * *
After taking his leave of the bookshop owner, Louis-Philippe made his way over to me. I had his book tucked under my arm. He called me “old buddy”.
When I told him that I lived in the area he nearly exploded:
“That means we’re neighbours! I don’t live far. We must swap phone numbers. Drop by whenever you want, you’ve got to try my Barbancourt rum from back home!”
We left the bookshop, walked up Rue Riquet and grabbed a table at the Roi du Café. I had my back to Rue Marx Dormoy, so I could see in his eyes the marks he was giving the backside of each girl as she crossed the road. This was all we talked about, the different kinds of B-sides. And he was having a good laugh with it.
That evening I arrived back home feeling lighthearted and it didn’t bother me that Mr Hippocratic was lying in wait. the Hybrid had already left for the night, I wasn’t interested in finding out why. I started reading even though Original Colour complained that the light would wake the little one. I was far away, I wasn’t in that studio any more. Everything around me stopped existing. I was
picturing Louis-Philippe’s island, Haiti. I was the character from the capital of Port-au-Prince which he had re-named Port-of-Filth. He had painted the portrait of Pointe-Noire, where I come from. The people looked like me. I underlined everything. I was in a state of wonder before the poetry of his language.
I called Louis-Philippe the next day. I went over to his place, and I got to drink Barbancourt for the first time. I admired his bookshelves, I leafed through each of his books that had been published. He teased me a bit about my outfit.
“Do the Congolese always dress like that?”
Black Bazaar Page 11