African Psycho

by Alain Mabanckou

  “For sleeping, he has two options he uses during the same night: he sleeps standing up during even hours and on the side during odd hours, trust me!”

  “Unheard of! Really, unheard of! Well then, in the same type of question: when he sleeps, how does it work out, do the two faces sleep at the same time? Camera A or B but absolutely not C, I beg you!”

  “His faces take turns sleeping: one sleeps during one hour while the other face stands guard during that hour, and so on until dawn, trust me!”

  “Quite genius! Really, quite genius! Hmm. Excuse my emotion, dear viewers… Well then, the moment that we are all waiting for has come. Answer while looking into camera A for five seconds, camera B for five seconds and camera C for five seconds, because you must look all of this country’s television viewers straight in the eyes: can we know your name, given that you’re becoming famous from one day to the next, being the only person to have seen Angoualima?”

  “I will not tell you my name, trust me!”

  “Well then, why?”

  “That’s the way it is, trust me!”

  “Well then, tell us: is it because you’re frightened of Angoualima, frightened for your family, for those close to you, or is it out of simple modesty, which viewers would understand easily?”

  “No, I fear only one thing: that the sky will fall on my head, trust me!”

  “Well then, if Angoualima were listening to you at this very moment, when it is 11:58 GMT by my watch and viewers’ watches, what would you say to him?”

  “It is 11:58 GMT by my watch too, and I would say to Angoualima that he is a monster, a rogue, a coward, a peasant, a ghost without a cemetery and that he will die a tragic death, trust me!”

  “Well then, is Angoualima really a monster? Aren’t you pushing it a bit?”

  “Yes, he’s a repugnant monster, I am saying it again! The guy has no pity, trust me!”

  “Well then, really repugnant?”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m saying, trust me!”

  “Well then, are you responsible for what you are saying at this very moment when it has just turned 11:59 GMT by my watch and our viewers’ watches?”

  “Yes, I am responsible for what I am saying and it’s also 11:59 GMT by my watch, trust me!”

  “Well then, aren’t you afraid of Angoualima’s anger? You do know, don’t you, that this man listens to everything that’s being said with regards to his name in this city, hmmm?”

  “No, I’m not afraid of him at all, because I have told you that the only thing I fear is that the sky will fall on my head one day, trust me!”

  “Well then, you really are a good guy, a courageous guy, a hero. We can put it this way, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, you can put it this way, trust me!”

  “Well then, the interview is over, then, but don’t leave the three cameras yet because there may be viewers in the back country who have just come home and therefore have not seen the beginning of this exclusive interview.”

  “I thank you for inviting me, trust me!”

  “Well then, we thank you for your bravery, for your courage, and for your patriotic heroism. Stay with us to comment on the day’s news after a short commercial break…”

  The day after this memorable interview, this man and the journalist’s heads were found on the wild coast, each of them with a Cuban cigar screwed between the lips. From then on this part of the coast would be called “Well then? Trust me!”…

  7.

  When my idol began to eradicate the villains in this city who were usurping his reputation, the police were caught short and lingered instead of rushing to catch the man who was then nicknamed the “Judge of Darkness.”

  It’s true that he killed innocent folks, some said, but he made the work of our police force easier all the same. Wasn’t the government itself divided on that point? Didn’t the police prefect congratulate himself on the declining crime rate?What this representative of the local authorities ignored was that Angoualima had now decided to bring the rate of crimes and misdemeanors in our urban area up or down all by himself.

  When he was invited on television to deplore the murders of the “Well then?” journalist and his heroic and patriotic “Trust me!” guest, our police prefect commended the effectiveness of his men working in the field to push back crime. High on his own euphoria, he announced new measures, the most original of which he said concerned my idol and Great Master Angoualima: a special team, trained in Israel, had been put together to capture him dead or alive. The population was called upon to participate, with a huge reward for the person who could help authorities arrest the Great Master or, at the very least, find out where he slept.

  The office the police prefect opened and called Immediate Capture of Angoualima (ICA) had to close down after a week. Indeed, our city’s residents no longer wanted to play the national lottery—they preferred lining up in front of the ICA spinning nutty stories they said they’d heard from someone who had seen someone who had seen someone who had seen Angoualima!

  What in fact made the prefect decide to close down the ICA, we were to learn later on, was that Angoualima himself also lined up there several days in a row. And when, inside the office, he asserted that he was Angoualima, that they first had to give him his reward of several million CFA francs before capturing or killing him, the detectives convulsed with laughter each and every time, taking him for a bum from the banks of our stream. For all my Great Master’s explanations that he was Angoualima, no one wanted to believe him. He was then thrown outside, sometimes with a kick in the rear…

  Angoualima sent all our city precincts and the police prefect a humiliating letter, in which he said that there was to be absolutely no thanking him for all the work he was doing in the policemen’s stead, and that the policeman who would catch him wasn’t born yet, given that each time he had shown up in person at the ICA, the detectives had been incapable of arresting him. In the same letter, he said he was also curious to know how the ICA was going to capture or kill him when it lacked any description of his face or, conversely, when it had as many as there were people in our city, which is to say more than five hundred thousand souls, not counting people from the country over there who have settled in our midst! As a post script to the letter, he announced an action that would cover our police in unprecedented shame.

  A few days later, in spite of the prefect’s instructions to hush up the matter, there were leaks about a theft of ammunitions and firearms from several precincts. How could the envelope be pushed this far? My idol had signed his name on the precincts’ facades.

  Given the recklessness of this action, the whole country now believed that Angoualima was in fact none other than a rotten cop at the helm of a criminal organization. Our city now teemed with weapons, and the population barricaded itself at nightfall. The special team our police prefect boasted about turned the city inside out without picking up my idol and Great Master’s trail, and there was still no description of him.

  In the days that followed this historic theft in the precincts, policemen were booed as they went about walking their beats. They were reminded that they had better focus their efforts on finding Angoualima rather than strutting around the neighborhoods, armed to the teeth, hounding pathetic hemp dealers and second-hand dealers. Here and there people shouted, “Long live Angoualima!”

  Still there were no massacres, contrary to what the authorities feared. They had taken up the matter quickly, transforming it into a major election issue.

  My idol didn’t use the weapons that were in his possession. It took another couple of weeks before Angoualima sent letters to the precincts in question so they could reclaim their weapons and ammunitions on the wild coast, in the spot where one found heads without bodies, with Cuban cigars screwed between the lips.

  Oh I mean, talk about ridicule! The country watched on television as, tails between their legs, the policemen picked up the stolen weapons and ammunitions and packed them away in military trucks.<
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  Angoualima was still on the run.

  I counted a few jobs to my credit already. If I remember correctly, this was the time when my assault with a hammer on the notary–real estate agent Fernandes Quiroga was credited to Angoualima. I lived through this with frustration. And how!

  I rejoiced that people thought this act of enough importance that they would attribute it to my idol and Great Master. At least the city had become aware of it. Angoualima did not deny this offense. Even when a journalist dared conclude that the assault on Master Fernandes Quiroga was so low that it didn’t look like his doing, Angoualima let these analyses pass. This surprised me very much because, knowing him, he should have beheaded the first person to suggest his responsibility in this minor aggression. After that he should have gone after the analyst who got tangled up in risky comparisons, as if he really knew the way my idol and Great Master operated. His silence alarmed me more and more. There was no punishment for all this, no answer to it. Angoualima was no longer refuting the small acts of banditry people pinned on him even though he hadn’t perpetrated them.

  Thus, our city’s villains operated with complete immunity, aware that their heinous crimes would only be added on to my idol’s already much-revised tab.

  A vehicle was stolen? It was Angoualima! A bad driver ran over a pedestrian and fled? It was Angoualima! A body was found in the stream that cuts our city in two? It was Angoualima!

  One day, I think it was a Sunday night, but no matter, I was following Listeners Speak Out, a very popular radio show that even people in the country over there listened to. The guest of the day, who was visiting the city, was a professor of criminology at the only university in our country, Me-I-Know-Everything-Because-You-Don’t-Understand-Anything High University, which is located in the political capital, more than five hundred kilometers from my hometown. The show’s theme was enticing:

  Angoualima: Myth or Reality? React!

  And this professor got on my nerves because he brought everything back to himself, his own person, his intelligence, in front of journalists who were astounded by his knowledge.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. “I will tell you that in my position as a devoted follower of the Italian school of criminology, I have been fascinated by a book that I recommend to everybody, L’Uomo Delinquente (The Criminal Man), by Cesare Lombroso, and by its magnificent theory about the born criminal. Angoualima has his place in the pages of this mythical book, a foundational text for the manner in which we perceive the criminal being. The actions of Angoualima, this sadly famous son of a bitch, bring to mind a number of European cases I discovered while attending the Poitiers law school… I am thinking especially of a young criminal called Baptiste Laborie, who once brought his brother’s head to Saint-Louis Hospital to have a doctor embalm it! I am also thinking of Sadilleck with his butcher’s knife—because he truly was a butcher—who went after an unfortunate traveler on the Paris-Boulogne Express! I am not forgetting Henry Lestevens, the woman-killer who haunted Paris’s ring roads in search of his future victims, generally naïve working women to whom he promised marriage before killing them….

  “But we had better come back to Angoualima. I think your viewers are eagerly awaiting my views about this scoundrel… I am going to sketch out a detailed analysis of this madman’s behavior hic et nunc… If you will allow me, I will do so in two main parts, which themselves will be divided into subparts, which might call for diametrically opposed but not necessarily antithetical subdivisions and conclusions…”

  My God! And the Great Master’s name was being taken in vain. Angoualima’s actions were being compared to those of bandits, of famous European criminals whose names I was hearing for the first time. The journalists held back their laughter. Intervening in the most complete cacophony, listeners generally supported their arguments. I felt these attacks deep inside of me. I could not let my idol take these low blows.

  Furious, I ran outside my home until I reached the first phone booth. I manhandled an old man with a cane. He was calling his grandson to ask him to send a money order so that he could finish his roof, which had been blown off by the tornado.

  I had trouble getting through: the station’s switchboard was saturated with calls from all around our country and the country over there.

  After half an hour I finally succeeded and was on the line with the studio.

  “Yes, sir,” said one of the journalists. “Please introduce yourself. Where are you calling from, then? Are you in the back country perhaps? The line is really very bad. Do you want to ask the professor a question?”

  “I am Angoualima and you can go fuck yourself,” I said in a voice I had rendered sepulchral by wrapping part of my shirt around the receiver.

  There was a moment of silence, during which I heard moving chairs and whispered conversation.

  “Hello?” I raged. “Have you lost your nerve or what?”

  The whispered conversation went on with the buzzing of microphones. The star journalist cleared his throat and got ahold of himself.

  “Listen, sir, let’s be serious: you are not Angoualima! And besides, what would prove to us that you are? If you’re not bringing anything constructive to this respectable program, which is honored by the presence of a great professor who has studied and become a laureate in Europe, we are going to take another call. There are people waiting: the switchboard is red!”

  “Ah really? Okay, I am taking note of the fact that there are cretins out there who do not know what they’re talking about and whose memory is short,” I said, with menace in my voice. “Do you then want me to prove that I am Angoualima as early as tonight, when you leave the station, mister journalist of my ass?”

  “You’re just an impostor, a cowardly individual who hides behind a cloak of anonymity so that…”

  “Okay, at least those who are close to you will already know where to look for your warthog head with a Cuban cigar between the lips!”

  “Listen, sir, you are so vulgar that we might feel obliged to hang up on you and tell you to stuff your cigars you know where, and…”

  “Very good! Very good! I am going to hang up, then, and take listeners as my witnesses. From this moment on, you are a dead man, a corpse without a head, I am telling you! Good show, gentlemen!”

  “Mister, mister Angoualima, wait! Angoualima… er… can you hear us? Mister Angoualima, you understand that this program is a news show, and as a matter of principle we are only reporting the news insofar as…”

  “You have insulted me, you shithead! You have put my reputation in doubt, and that’s a crime, mister criminology laureate and mister journalist of my ass!”

  “I mean, er… Hello? Hello? Hello? Don’t hang up, please, mister Angoualima! Are you still on the line? Hello? Hello?…”

  “You have thirty seconds by my watch! I am waiting for your public apology, mister journalist, otherwise begin your prayers as soon as the show is over, because today’s prayer is your last, I’m telling you… !”

  “But I… in fact I…”

  “Well, fuck! Are you going to apologize or not?”

  “Yes, mister Angoualima, so… I want, I think, er, that…”

  “There’s nine seconds left and my twelve fingers are not made for tickling the phone!”

  “In the name of the radio station president, of all my colleagues, of the editor-in-chief, of the program director, of the musical programming director, of the special correspondents, of the technical personnel, of our advertisers, of our sponsors, of the secretary, of the interns, of the freelancers, of the cleaning lady, of the caretaker and of the professor, if we have made remarks that offended you, we would like to express our most sincere apologies and…”

  “This is too long, sir! Be brief, I’m in a hurry, there are people waiting to offer me their heads!”

  “But, what do you want me to say, mister Angoualima? Still I was very…”

  “Say: Forgive us, mister Angoualima, you are the Great Master of crime and the guardian
of He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot’s honor!”

  “But, mister Angoualima, do you realize that…”

  “That’s it for you! What kind of cigar do you prefer for your shithead, a Cohiba or a Romeo y Julieta?”

  “Wait! Wait! Forgive us, mister Angoualima, you are the Great Master of crime and the guardian of He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot’s honor!”

  “Thank you, sir, that’s very kind of you! You are forgiven, but just for now.”

  “We said what you wanted to hear, mister Angoualima!”

  “What? What do I hear? You’re now raising your voice against the Great Master Angoualima? Is that how I should take this, shithead?”

  “No, mister Angoualima.”

  “You say: No, Great Master!”

  “No, Great Master, I would not dare to…”

  “Very good, we understand each other!”

  “We in this studio are rejoicing, Great Master…”

  “That’s good! It’s amazing how cooperative journalists can be when they want to!”

  “You know, Great Master, the truth is, and our listeners know this well, that we are only doing our duty. What’s more, far from denigrating you, this program rather gives you a historic dimension that other criminals would envy…”

  “Silence! These kinds of speeches are not for me!”

  “Understood, Great Master…”

  “Good. Now do you know what you still need to do so that your insults are washed away once and for all?”

  “No, Great Master, we thought we had already done our best and…”

  “I ask that your shit theme music come on: this show is over!”

  “Sorry, mister Great Master, er, mister Angoualima, we haven’t followed very well. You are saying that…”