African Psycho

by Alain Mabanckou

  “Great Master, I can’t stand it when people disrespect you, when I think that like me you were a picked-up child and I…”

  “Shut up, imbecile! You think you now have the right to call me a picked-up child because we are on familiar terms?”

  “I wouldn’t allow myself, Great Master.”

  “What do you yourself know about it?”

  “Nothing, Great Master…”

  “You weren’t even born when I was young, so don’t go spreading what the street says about me!”

  “I wouldn’t allow myself, Great Master…”

  “Was it you who crossed the Mayi River to reach the country over there?”

  “No Great Master.”

  “Do you even know how things work in the other country?”

  “No, Great Master.”

  “Do you know how the old bandits from over there gave me their powers?”

  “No, Great Master.”

  “‘Picked-up child!’ I don’t like this term!”

  “Neither do I, Great Master, I don’t like this term, which…”

  “In any case, wasn’t Moses picked up somewhere?”

  “He was picked up somewhere, Great Master. He was even picked up near…”

  “Was he called a picked-up child?”

  “No, Great Master, he was not called a picked-up child, on the contrary he was…”

  “Imbecile! My fate was sketched out for me, well sketched out with a precise objective. And when I understood that I had realized everything and that no one could be my equal, I killed myself to be in communion with those who passed all these powers on to me. Do you know all this, you?”

  “No, Great Master, your story should have been taught in our schools and…”

  “So be careful what you say, don’t irritate me!”

  “Great Master, I apologize for this, it’s true people say this, that and the other thing about you, but if you ask me to do so, I can kill all those who take your name in vain. I will kill all the women in this city, my mother included, if somebody would show her to me and…”

  “Words! Get some respect for your own name before you start making mine your business. I was very good at getting some respect for my name by myself, I am not expecting anything from anyone.”

  “No, Great Master, you are not expecting anything from anyone.”

  “By the way, last time you promised me something, no?”

  “What, Great Master? I’m afraid I don’t remember.”

  “Memory is the first quality of a criminal, and you don’t have any!”

  “Great Master, I beg you…”

  “You said you would take a murderer’s nickname, so what is it?”

  “Great Master I thought something along the lines of Greg the Rattler, Greg the Angry Wasp, Greg Storm, Greg Jack, Greg the Sicilian, Greg Butcher or Greg the…”

  “Stop your bullshit! All these names are for laughs! Rectangular Head would fit you like a glove!”

  “Great Master, you are in a better position to give me a name for work…”

  “Get out of my sight!”

  “Pardon, Great Master?”

  “Get out of my sight, I said, you’re deaf or what? Lousy good-for-nothing!”

  “Great Master…”

  “Yes, get out of here! Our conversation is over. From now on stop invoking my name in every circumstance, otherwise I will resuscitate myself just for the pleasure of slicing your throat with a Gillette blade and with the help of my additional fingers. Killing the girl in white from the other night, even a complete amateur could have done it. Now, vanish and come back here when you have some good news to bring me…”

  Footnote

  * Translator’s note: One of Central Africa’s national languages.

  Killing Germaine

  1.

  I don’t put much stock in knives. Anyone can acquire them and know how to use them, more or less. We use them every day and it is almost impossible for mankind to do without them. Would I kill Germaine with such an object? Better to abandon my project than lower myself to that level!

  A few days ago, to convince myself that the game wasn’t worth the candle with a weapon that had been used even by primitive men, I took a very close look at the broad-bladed knife I had bought at He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot’s Great Market. The salesman guaranteed that it was a unique specimen, used in olden days to cut off in one fell swoop the heads of animals offered in sacrifice to the gods of rain. Truth be told, I bought it more to cut short his chatter than because of the attractiveness of the sharp blade, with which you couldn’t even shave your beard. I make no secret of the fact that, having acquired it, I changed my mind and congratulated myself on the purchase, as it had to be used for something. This broad-bladed knife had cost me very dearly, and I wasn’t about to peel potatoes with it.

  And so it was that I firmly resolved to disembowel Germaine. First, I had to make it so she wouldn’t catch sight of the knife when she came back at night. That wasn’t a problem: all I had to do was store it away among my work tools, in my workshop. Germaine hardly ever comes into my shed, a place she finds sinister and untidy. I do not share this view. What will she come up with next? Who is she to lecture me? A whore I pulled off the street, talking to me in this manner? Because she thinks the alleyways of He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot where she cools her heels are cleaner than my shop? A shop I built with my own hands and thanks to my thrift! When you criticize my place of work, you are criticizing me as well, almost insulting me, and I have explained how unbearable insult is to me, how it has driven people to pierce each other’s eyes in duels or to launch wars to preserve their honor.

  Germaine doesn’t understand how I can manage to work in this graveyard for vehicular wrecks and this smell of grease. Do I ask her how she manages to sell her thing to people who only take showers in spite of themselves, when it rains? This work is my life. I get my rocks off banging on beat-up cars. I love this untidiness, and I am hostile to neat freaks. To have manias is one thing, but to impose them on others, I can’t tolerate! Come on, where are we going? I am trying to be calm, and every time she’s the one picking on me and pushing me to get serious…

  Since I was planning to use my broad-bladed knife, I arranged to hide it in my shop. All I had to do now was stage the way my deed would unfold. One scenario replaced the other. I tried my hand at stabbing the air, and I heard myself say “No! No!” every time. And so I returned to my gesture, my confidence increased. Still, it wasn’t right, because I was acting, and not in the real conditions for the deed. Slightly baffled, I told myself, we shall see. I kept on walking, walking up and down the lot.

  Never had I racked my brains so much. Angoualima’s prophetic words came back to me in an echo. I was going to bring him some good news at last, as he wished, and leave behind the ranks of the pathetic…

  Just because you own a weapon doesn’t mean that what follows becomes a formality. Where would the crime take place, then? A seemingly stupid question, yet I had two options: in my shed, or else in the house I’ve been sharing with her since I pulled her off the street and she joined me, apparently because she cannot live without me anymore, because she’s in love, because I am a generous human being, sensitive, understanding, altruistic, magnanimous, considerate, blah blah blah. Me, I always laugh deep down inside when I hear people venture blindly into unknown territory. I have noticed that people like us are usually kind because they find it easy to reconcile extreme human feelings. They can become monstrous but also demonstrate a sweetness that would surprise more than a few. I’m like that. Looking at me, you’d think I was a workman like any other, an everyman who earns a living from the sweat of his brow, who pays taxes without flinching, who respects the elderly, who gets his groceries from the Lebanese guy on the corner, who even throws a few coins into the bowls of He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot’s beggars. I believe in our republic, even if I don’t vote. I also believe in paper money, in Santa Claus, in man being descended from ap
es, and all that stuff…

  What Germaine doesn’t know is that the day I first took her into my house, I was wishing precisely that she settle in as soon as possible, that she build up trust, so I could fatten her up like you fatten a chicken to be eaten during a holiday dinner. I had seen to it that the decision to live with me came from her. That’s where she was headed and me, playing my part well, I told her that her work as a whore didn’t disturb me, that it wasn’t an obstacle, that my mother was a whore too, that whores were the kindest women on earth, that without whores, my God, the world would not be what it is today, that some men wouldn’t know what a woman is, that others, frustrated, would sleep with their own mothers or with sheep wandering the neighborhood, that whores were as necessary as notaries, as real estate agents, as ambulance drivers, as plumbers, as sheet-iron or auto-body workers, that I thought politicians should create a department for them because they paid taxes like notaries, like real estate agents, like ambulance drivers, like sheet-iron and auto-body workers, and I saw her smile with her angel face and dimpled cheeks, yes, she kissed me on the mouth and told me again that I was a kind man, a generous man, a magnanimous man, an altruistic man, and so on and so forth. Me, I couldn’t give a shit about all this. I fiercely opposed the idea that she stop whoring, which she’d announced while dropping her bag in front of my door.

  Please, can you just imagine if she’d stopped whoring?

  I had the broad-bladed knife, for sure, but the workshop as crime scene was not doing it for me. How could I possibly ask Germaine, back from her work late at night, to follow me into this sheet-iron shed brimming with vehicular wrecks, burned tires and all kinds of scrap metal? To show her what, exactly, inside it that would justify such eagerness on my part? No, that was no good. I could see her telling me that I thought only about my work, that we’d see tomorrow, and that there was no hurry. Yes, she would do anything not to come into this untidy place. And when Germaine doesn’t want to do something, she doesn’t budge from her position. I have come to learn this in the few weeks we have lived together.

  Germaine is a sensitive girl, romantic, as people say, and you’re not going to whisper sweet nothings into her ear in the middle of a scrap heap. As far as she’s concerned, she needs candles, flowers, a nice surprise, that’s what she told me right from the start. Where she acquired these habits, I don’t know. No doubt when she was whoring in the center of town. She told me one day that whites in our town liked to requisition her for the whole night and treat her like you treat a woman you love, and that we, the people of this city, we were barbarians, we went straight for the main course without even marveling at the variety of hors d’oeuvres. The whites in our town, for their part, pop open the champagne, order flowers and serve the girl breakfast in bed. But where are we going? Do you realize that these nuts want to do everything, including, my God, put their mouth on the woman’s thing though they are aware it’s a highway everybody tears through at two hundred kilometers per hour, the only condition being that they wave in the air a large bank note with several zeros for the toll! Do you realize that some whites in our town, God help me, coo things like, “I love you my pet,”“I want you to be mine and only mine tonight, tomorrow night and also the night after tomorrow,” and like, “I want you to show me what you can do, what you have never done to anyone else.” And so it may be with these people that Germaine learned these manners, which were really getting to me in the end, when I was riding on her and at every thrust she asked me whether I loved her, and if I did, could I tell her, and if I did, could I not remain mute like this, people can’t make love like sheep, I had to talk, say everything that crosses my mind, when in fact I don’t like to talk when I’m in the heat of action!

  No, I couldn’t kill Germaine in my workshop. All that was left was the house. A few weeks living together, and I now knew her habits. She arrived late at night, found me in front of the television, put her purse on a shelf near the entrance and sat down on the sofa-bed while waiting for me to bring her a Heineken.

  There was an opportunity, right there. I would not let her sit down on the convertible but have her sit on a chair in the middle of the dining room with lighted candles arranged in a triangle and flowers the way she likes it.

  “What’s happening?” she would surely say.

  “I have a surprise for you,” I would answer.

  I thought I would blindfold and gag her. The moment she started suspecting something, and therefore started jerking around to try and free herself, it would be too late: I would already have fastened her arms behind her back with cables taken from a moped. Beforehand, even before she came back from work, I would have made the broad-bladed knife red-hot, more than a thousand degrees, in my shop’s furnace. It would then be easier to slash her from the place that separates her anus from her thing up to her abdomen while holding her legs wide open with cords… Strengthened by this last idea, one afternoon, after Germaine left, I went through a simulation once again, not wanting to be clumsy when the time came. The mistakes of amateurism were a thing of the past, now was the time to be prepared, even if my first exercises were more discouraging than reassuring.

  Entrenched in my shop, I interrupted an urgent and very important repair job: the car belonging to one of the cousins of the mayor of He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot. I looked closely at the broad-bladed knife I was going to use as murder weapon. I started imagining how the blade would enter Germaine’s skin and puncture her intestines. I saw myself driving in even the handle while grinding my teeth. I smiled, because the idea pleased me all of a sudden.

  For a long time I talked to myself like I always do. I told myself, in this manner I have of expressing myself before or after dangerous actions: old chap, here you are now, about to be crowned, here you are a hair’s breadth away from your most important gesture, the one that will leave Angoualima speechless, flabbergasted, aghast, petrified, dumbfounded, yes, old chap, all you will need to do is gather momentum in front of this bound body and drive the broad-bladed knife in with the implacable determination of Sadilleck, the criminal butcher the criminology professor talked about in Listeners Speak Out in the old days, if need be you will repeat the gesture as many times as it gives you pleasure, you will not let yourself be intimidated by the flow of this puddle of warm blood, blood is nothing, it only frightens those who don’t like the color red, you yourself don’t give a shit, red or not, blood is nothing but a liquid, on the contrary, you will collect it and put it in a bottle and go pour it on Angoualima’s grave with the pride of a broken-down horse who’s just won a race everybody thought he would lose, yes, you can do it, your large hands are made for this, you must do it, old chap, what are you waiting for, why are you still hesitating, come on, keep on rehearsing it calmly until the scene seems so theatrical to you, so banal, that you could act it out without a weapon, keep at it in empty space like that guy who fought windmills by himself, be mean, show your fangs, roar, growl, implode while thinking solely about your goal, this girl truly deserves punishment with a broad-bladed knife, she had it coming, you’ve fattened her up enough already, and it may come back to haunt you, as you know full well that when we spend a long time fattening up an animal it ends up becoming familiar, we no longer have the courage to slice off its head, human feelings win over, pity makes the hand heavy, is that what you want, no, tell me that you will go the whole way, that the following day you will run to bring Angoualima the good news at the cemetery of The-Dead-Who-Are-Not-Allowed-To-Sleep, tell me that your idol will applaud you with his hands with twelve fingers, and you will feel your chest swell, you will have become a grownup, a real grownup, come on go for it, keep on rehearsing, old chap…

  I proceeded with the second phase of my simulation. I put the broad-bladed knife to redden in the furnace. It was a half hour before I saw the metal glow redder and redder and blend in with the flames. I picked it up with pliers and dipped it in a basin of water. The blade blackened immediately and roared in a blinding cloud of steam. I t
old myself the object would pierce Germaine’s skin with the same noise…

  I had become excited. The workshop seemed narrow. I could already see a body lying on the ground, its stomach open. I imagined myself putting it in the trunk of one of my clients’ vehicles and driving toward the stream that cuts our city in two. It would be nighttime, the middle of the night, a time when even the neighborhood’s prostitutes have left the streets. I would park along the “Seine.” I would pull Germaine’s body out, hidden in a bag. I would fasten an iron weight to the end of the bag so the body wouldn’t come up to the surface once it was in the stream, so that the water would one day take it to the other bank, toward the country over there, so that the fruit would rot at the foot of the tree that bore it…

  I swear to you I was a hair’s breadth away from going forward with this. Ah, let’s say that something convinced me this project would have buried me in ridicule. Every criminal has his pride. What would people have said about this crime? Would it have had the resonance I was hoping for?

  No. I couldn’t imagine myself in this banal, ordinary scenario fit only for small-time toughs, apprentice criminals. One doesn’t enter legend through the back door. Villains on both banks of our neighborhood would have been laughing for months. I would have barely dared to step out of my plot of land. I would have gotten stuck with a nickname like Chicken Little. It was as if I were stabbing my victim in the back. Now, a murder committed from behind does not count for the one who knows how to do things with professionalism. In addition, and this is what I feared most, the police and the courts would have concluded quickly that this was a rape committed by a psychopath. A rape by a psychopath! Words! More words. It’s not that being labeled a psychopath would have upset me. It was this rape thing above all. Do you see me raping Germaine, me, after what happened with the girl in white three months ago?

  In truth, the reason I did not proceed had to do with a question of principle and even of consideration of the object I was about to use as crime weapon.