The following day after I went to buy a typewriter from Porte de Vincennes because I don’t like computers, and because I wanted to be like a real writer who rips up pages, crosses things out, and has to interrupt his creative flow in order to change the typewriter ribbon …
* * *
When Original Colour nagged me for spending too much time writing, hanging out at Jip’s and only working part-time at the printing works, I’d just get up and take my typewriter for a walk in the park. I would sit on a bench under a street lamp along with the tramps who were knocking back bottles of red, and I’d keep on writing.
I think I must have been hitting the keys too hard because even the tramps were giving me funny looks, as if they thought I was losing the plot and would soon be joining them. I kept on writing, I was writing more and more. When I saw a bird moving in a branch, I would write it down. When it flew off to another tree, I wrote that down too because Louis-Philippe who knew a thing or two about inspiration had told me that writers noted everything down and then went through their notes so they only kept the stuff that really mattered. Thanks to him I was now reading like a bookworm, I wasn’t just reading dead authors, I was reading living ones too, I really wanted to become a writer in the vein of Georges Simenon whose Maigret adventures had been all the way round the world. But then I realised that I could only write about what I’d experienced, about what there was around me, and that it would have to be every bit as chaotic …
If I had several encounters only a month after Original Colour left, it was because I felt very angry and I wanted to get my own back. I’m not the kind of person who thinks that revenge is a dish best eaten cold. I don’t like all that biblical patter about how you’ve got to turn the other cheek when someone slaps you. I grab the bull by the horns.
So off I went hunting in our community’s nightclubs and at the concerts of Koffi Olomide and Papa Wemba. But I came home empty-handed and started to feel despondent, it was as if I had lost my charm and I wondered about the sand slipping through my fingers. I risked becoming a man of the past. There were good-for-nothings out there who knotted their ties better than me, and they were more forward too. I started believing my misfortune was written on my forehead where Original Colour had put a curse on me.
And then someone rose to the bait one evening at the Keur Samba nightclub, in the 8th arrondissement. That’s where I ran into Rose. She had arrived from the Congo a month earlier, and there was no mistaking it when you saw her on the dance floor, she looked like someone who, instead of being descended from the apes like everyone else, was heading back that way for good. She hopped about, opened her arms and legs wide before landing down on the ground. At the end she was sweating so much I was turned off by the sweat stains on her white blouse. There were a few compatriots chasing after her, and she was playing hard to get, she’d lead them into a corner before coming back to dance opposite me. It was all a show, I’d clicked that she was available and that I was the one she was enticing with this dance of the spear-wielding caveman hunting the mammoth.
What have I got to lose, eh, I thought to myself, by indulging in a bit of pleasure this evening? I’m being provoked, so I have to defend myself, and attack is the best line of defence.
I stood up and tried to dance a few centimetres away from her, imitating her prehistoric movements. I held out my hand, she turned her back to me: it was all about proving she wasn’t an easy catch.
I sat back down again, what else could I do, I’d rather have died than carry on following her jerky moves and strops.
My withdrawal strategy paid off, Rose came over to me:
“Is that how they try to pick you up in Paris? The girl gets a bit stroppy and the man goes to sit back down again without putting up a fight? Come on, come and dance the tchakoulibonda with me!”
She could see that I wasn’t familiar with that particular dance. You had to shake your shoulders, grab your partner by the waist and simulate a violent penetration from the B-side. Apparently, it was all the rage back in the home country. I’ve never felt so ridiculous in my life. The entire nightclub was looking at me and I thought I could hear people creasing up with laughter.
Towards two in the morning I suggested to Rose that we go and drink a last glass back at my place.
“Cut the patter, you want do the business, I can tell! I’m not a little girl any more, I’ve got a sixteen-year-old kid back home!”
I thought the game was up, but she went to fetch her bag which her cousin was looking after. I heard her say to him:
“I won’t be coming home this evening, but don’t worry, the guy I’m leaving with is a big brother. He’s a softie, he’s not going to cause me any trouble.”
We caught a taxi not far from Fouquet’s. I didn’t say anything as we were crossing the city, and nor did she. I was picturing Original Colour again, and wondering what she was up to right then back in the home country with the Hybrid.
The taxi dropped us off in front of the Arab on the corner’s, which was closed at that hour.
I was praying that Mr Hippocratic wouldn’t wake up as I opened the door to my studio.
Rose just stood there on the threshold.
“Aren’t you going to turn on the light?”
“We don’t need it,” I answered, “come in.”
“We don’t know each other well, and I’m not happy being in the dark like this with a stranger, I’ve heard lots of weird stories …”
She flicked the switch and the light dazzled us. I got a good look at her close-up and wondered if this was the same woman as before. At Keur Samba she’d looked so young, her skin as soft as a suckling babe’s. And in the violet light of the disco club her wraparound skirt showed off her B-side nicely. What I hadn’t noticed was that her skin had been put through some kind of chemical peel, and her hair and nails were fake.
“Turn the light off, please,” I said.
“How are you going to know I’m beautiful if there isn’t any light?”
So we left the light on. She got undressed quickly. I didn’t want my eyes to spend too long on her breasts, which were covered in stretchmarks like the slashes you find on the Téké faces back home.
I lay down on the bed but leaving a big gap between her and me, and I just stared at the ceiling.
“When are we starting? Anyone would think you weren’t hot for me any more … Come here!”
I started to touch her.
“No, no, no, don’t stroke me, I’m not a White girl! That doesn’t arouse me, it just makes me giggle and then it gets annoying …”
When she said that, my thing down there didn’t want to rise any more, it contracted into my testicles and I couldn’t imagine what extraordinary event might bring it back out of its storeroom.
Rose asked me if there was a problem.
“No, everything’s fine, everything’s fine …”
“So what are we waiting for?”
“Let’s sleep, we’ll do it tomorrow, it’s better that way.”
“What? There won’t be a tomorrow with me! Not on my life! Who do you take me for? You aroused me at Keur Samba and now you want to leave me in this state? Why did you bring me back to your place if you can’t go through with it? Do you know how many people wanted to do it with me today, eh, people I sent packing because I wanted it to be with you?”
“Listen, I’m not feeling on form, and I’m not going to force things!”
“So what does it take? When a normal man sees a naked woman it starts up right away. Are you a man or not? So let me touch your thing down there, you’ll soon get in the mood, you’ll see …”
“No!”
“Are you saying NO to me???”
She leapt out of bed like a wounded tigress. She put her clothes back on as quickly as she’d taken them off.
“Idiot! Jerk! I thought time-wasters like you only existed back home, not here in Paris. You were well dressed with a suit and tie but you can’t even give a girl a good poking. What’s the
point of your thing down there? Just for pissing, is it? Stupid bastard! Give me my taxi fare or I’ll smash everything in here and scream out in the hallway!”
I stood up to take a note out of my jacket pocket. I held it out to her, she tore it off me while spitting in my face.
“That’s so you’ll remember me! I’m Rose, and I’ll say it again, you’re a stupid bastard, I don’t know what kind of woman goes out with a guy like you!”
She slammed the door. Luckily, Mr Hippocratic didn’t bang on the wall …
* * *
And I also remember the day when, together with Vladimir the Cameroonian who smokes the longest cigars in France and Navarre, the two of us played at being princes at Atlantis, a club in the 13th arrondissement on the Quai d’Austerlitz. It’s Vladimir the Cameroonian’s stronghold, he gets the red-carpet treatment there, and he’s even allowed to smoke his cigars inside. So I could make out I owned the place too. Seeing as Vladimir never does things by halves, we hired a Mercedes and a BMW that evening.
Once we’d been seated in the VIP corner, Vladimir brought over a girl who was tall and skinny as a broom handle and he whispered in my ear:
“This one’s a real daddy’s girl, I want you to whip her ass tonight! Drink some gin and tonic, you’re going to be up ‘til dawn and, believe me, this girl won’t forget it …”
Gwendoline was the daughter of a Gabonese minister. As soon as we’d been introduced she started talking about her daddy’s second homes, and about her own travels around the world. There wasn’t a corner on earth she hadn’t set foot in, she told me.
“When I’m at my father’s house I don’t touch a thing, not even a plate, we have servants, I have a driver, the hairdresser comes specially to our house with her six assistants.”
And so Vladimir left me in the claws of this daddy’s girl. She made me want to sneeze with her perfume that stank of the Mananas we use on corpses back home. I could spot my friend winking at me from a long way off, between the swirls of his cigar smoke. But there was no stopping Gwendoline. I let her carry on with the stocktaking of her paternal inheritance. I even got to find out what kind of plates and forks they had at home. Then she fell quiet because she could see I wasn’t impressed.
“You’re not very chatty, are you? You haven’t told me your name …”
“Buttologist.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“My friends call me Buttologist …”
She nearly swallowed an ice cube as big as a ping-pong ball.
“Are you joking or what? Right, well, I’d better call you what everyone else does! Vladimir told me you’re not just anybody. I understand that Mercedes Kompressor convertible in front of the night club is yours?”
I didn’t tell her we’d rented the car. I pretended to be the owner. I jangled the keys while whistling Another Day in Paradise by Phil Collins. I was smoking a Cohiba cigar and blowing smoke rings above my head.
She asked me what my line of work was.
“Businessman …”
“Really? What kind of business?”
“I sell diamonds to jewellers on the Place Vendôme. In a nutshell, I sell eternity because diamonds are forever …”
“My mother adores diamonds!”
I had scored a point. During the zouk love numbers, she clung to me like a leech. I’d never had anybody hit on me this hard. By the end I’d had enough, and I wanted to hover around two or three other girls who were tall as wading birds and kept on giving me lighthouse signals from across the dance floor. Nothing doing, Gwendoline had found her diamond dealer and she wasn’t going to let him out of her clutches.
“Diamonds! And do you sell gold as well?”
“Now and then. But frankly, gold is for small-timers. It’s not like diamonds, which are forever. And another thing, even if people say everything that glitters is not gold, they still go for the glitter. But diamonds don’t glitter, they diffuse light, and that’s why they’re the preserve of connoisseurs …”
“Aren’t you the smooth talker? I’m not buying a diamond now! But since you’re in the trade, perhaps you could finally explain something to me because I’ve never understood this business of twenty-four carats which everyone talks about but no one …”
“We’re here to have a good time … If things carry on like this, I’ll sell you a diamond and this evening could end up being very expensive for you!”
I wanted to catch my breath, but there she was behind me, staring at me as if I were a god. She shot envious looks at the Congolese women who recognised me. And I chose to pour oil on the flames. I zoned in on the ladies I knew, and threw myself into long conversations with them to prove I had my harem about me. Behaving jealously, as if we went back many a full moon together, Gwendoline came over to separate me from my little crowd. Even when we were dancing with our arms wrapped round each other, I was still treated to the fast-track biography of “The Minister” and his unstoppable ascent to power.
She wouldn’t let it drop:
“My father? He’s a very important lawyer, the most important lawyer in Africa! He is respected by the Whites! At the time when he did his studies, you could count the Blacks in French universities on the fingers of one hand. Of course there were Blacks in France, but they were road-sweepers, packers, gardeners, dockers in Marseille or Le Havre, factory workers for Simca, Peugeot, Citroën and Renault …”
I nodded, which only encouraged her.
“My father? You’ve got to meet him to understand what a truly exceptional man he is! He paid for my studies in this country’s elite establishments. I couldn’t love a man more than him! He is everything to me. He knew Pompidou, he knew the black members of the National Assembly at the time, your Senghors, your Boignys and others who would go on to become president in their own countries. My father was so brilliant that high office was thrust upon him straight away, and he’s been in government for more than twenty-five years now. He is the only minister the president can’t fire because he’s responsible for the country’s politically sensitive files. And if he opens those files, even the French government would come toppling down in less than five minutes!”
What she didn’t realise was that like most Africans who followed the continent’s current affairs a bit, I knew that Mr Bigshot Lawyer had been named Minister of Justice in order to carry out a specific mission: changing the country’s constitution every time the dictator president asked him to. He wrote the Constitution of his country in a single session because their president was obsessed with overtaking the French Constitution of the Fifth Republic. According to this Head of State, de Gaulle, who was applauded by everybody in Africa, had messed up his Constitution, and the French had taken advantage of this by showing him a lack of respect at the end of the sixties. Mr Bigshot Lawer had the original idea of giving all the powers to the President of the Republic. And so the President is at the same time Prime Minister, Cabinet Minister, Minister of Defence, Minister of the Interior, Finance Minister and above all Minister of Oil and Hydrocarbons.
While Gwendoline was bragging about daddy’s villas and fleet of cars, I was listening to her with one ear, and telling myself that the hour would strike when I’d make her be quiet and we’d finally get down to serious business. She would no longer be the minister’s daughter, with her taste for fancy cars and travels. She would be a naked woman in front of a naked man, and there, all human beings have the same weapons …
Looking back on it, I think what matters is that I managed to get Gwendoline into the car and that we slept on the fifth floor of the Novotel in Porte de Bagnolet, in a suite. I gave the excuse of having left my card in the car, so she was the one who guaranteed the room.
“Tomorrow, after lunch, I’ll get the money out at a cash point,” I promised her.
The minister’s daughter kept disappearing off into the bathrooms, drinking champagne and letting out idiotic peals of laughter in front of a television programme about the laborious mating rituals of the Zimbabwean rhin
oceros.
She started up again with her question about the twenty-four carats. I explained to her that a carat was the amount of gold contained in an alloy and that amount was expressed as a twenty-fourth of the total weight. She stared at me, wide-eyed. But I knew we’d never see each other again. Because I didn’t like her derrière that only wiggled on one side. And because the way she went on about her old man would get on my nerves …
At five in the morning, while she was sound asleep, I tiptoed out of the hotel. All she’s got to do is call her father, I reasoned, and he can settle the bill from Libreville …
I still go and visit Louis-Philippe because it makes a change from my pals at Jip’s. Talking of which, I must remember to give him back his copy of The Dirty Havana Trilogy, I’ve had it for a while now. He’s a real writer, and it’s not just the regulars at the Rideau Rouge who enjoy what he writes. I’ve got him to read a good chunk of what I’ve written so far. He’s told me I’m not there yet, that I’ve got to learn how to structure my ideas instead of writing when driven by anger or bitterness.
“We don’t write to take our revenge, you have to master your anger and contain it so that your prose flows naturally. Deep down, I’m sure you really loved Original Colour, and you still do love her, don’t you?”
There was nothing I could say. I looked at him for a moment, this man who was so far away from his island, who had taken leave of his nearest and dearest years ago. I wondered why Haitians are either brilliant writers or taxi drivers for life in New York and Miami. And when they’re writers they are in exile. Do writers always have to live in another country, and preferably be forced to live there so that they’ve got things to write about and other people can analyse the influence of exile on their writing? Why doesn’t Louis-Philippe live in New York or Miami?
Sometimes I sing Armstrong to him, in which a famous singer from Toulouse, Claude Nougaro, has almost the same trouble as me with inspiration, except it’s about skin colour for him:
Armstrong, I am no black man
Black Bazaar Page 12