Broken Glass

by Alain Mabanckou

  how could I ever forget the man who’d been turned out of the family home like a mad dog, I got a good laugh out of him a couple of months back, a pathetic guy who now goes round wearing Pampers diapers, like a newborn baby, far be it from me to laugh at his condition but that’s the sad truth and I hadn’t asked him for anything, all I did was look him in the eye and he said, like it was a declaration of war, “What you looking at me for Broken Glass, you want my photo, or something, leave me alone, go and look at those others down there, chatting in the corner,” I kept my cool, kept my serenity, there’s no point answering back with nohopers like him, but I did just say “hey man, I’m just looking at you like I look at anyone,” “yeah, but you’re looking at me strange, you don’t go round looking at people like that,” and I said, still keeping calm and cool, “how d’you know I’m looking at you if you’re not looking at me” and that seemed to really fix him, he was caught in his own trap there, because he said something like “not gonna speak, not gonna tell you nothing about my life, my life’s not up for auction,” and from then on I knew he was sunk, I wasn’t going to listen to that, there are people like that, there’s something they want to spit out, so they get to teasing you, pushing you about so they can convince themselves they had no choice but to talk, I’ve been analyzing customer psychology at Credit Gone West for years now, I’ve seen that kind of behavior before, “I’m not asking you to talk, brother, you don’t know me, you should ask around, the name’s Broken Glass, no one ever saw me ask a man for the user’s manual to his life, or to sell me his life at auction” and he wound up by saying “Broken Glass, life is so complicated, it all began the day I came home at five in the morning, I swear, and that day I noticed the lock had been changed, because I couldn’t get the key in, so I couldn’t get into my own house, which I’d rented myself, even found it myself, put down the deposit, I swear on the life of my mother and my father and my six children, I stumped up twelve months of rent including this one before I moved in a single fork, and I’ll tell you this I was the only one with a job, I’m not even going to talk about my wife now, or I’ll get mad before I’m started, she’s not a wife, she’s just a pot of faded flowers, a tree that bears no fruit, she’s not a woman, I tell you, she’s just a whole sack of problems, and there she was, living as easy as a potato from Bobo Dioulasso, easy as a capitalist, just sat there waiting for me to bring home the readies, there she was hanging about all day long, chatting from morning till night with divorced old bags and widows from Trois-Cents, old witches wrapped in stinking pagnes, evil bitches who whiten their skin, shrews who straighten their hair to look like whites, while the whites braid theirs to look like the black women, you see my problem, Broken Glass, there was my wife, hanging out with all these tarts who make out they’re going to church when in fact they’re off to meet their shitty little lovers, I’m telling you, the amount of casual fornication in the churches down there, they don’t even respect the house of God, I don’t know where God’s got to anyway, He’s not in those churches, I tell you, those shrews and viragoes are convinced if God does exist, he forgives everything, whatever the sin, and whoever it is has done some idiot thing forbidden by the Jerusalem Bible, I tell you there’s some serious fornicating going on in our local churches, no better place for an orgy, some group sex, no better place than the so-called houses of God that sprout up everywhere, everyone knows, even the government people, some of whom actually finance these holy sex dens, but they’re not real churches, they’re run by religious nuts with shaved heads who exploit, pervert, rewrite, dishonor, seize hold of, abuse and profane the Jerusalem Bible and organize real-life orgies with the faithful, men and women, yes, not to mention the homos, the pedophiles, the zoophiles, and the lesbians, all going at it between prayers, between two Hail Marys, they do it when they go on pilgrimage too, to the high peaks of Loango, Ndjili, and Diosso, when they’re meant to be meditating, away from us sinners here below, we of little faith, we philistines, we lost sheep, Pharisees, you’re kidding, they go there for casual fornication, and what I say, loud and clear, is “Come down Moses” they’ve gone mad, doing this stuff on a pilgrimage to the three mountains, and my wife got caught up in all this shit with their guru, she just worships him to death, I tell you this guru, he’s been spawning children all over the place, with young girls who can’t even change their own tampon when the Red Sea tide comes sweeping in, I tell you this guru guy, he’s got money, lots of it, he could keep this district fed through a whole century of American embargo, it comes from you, this money, and it comes from me, and it comes from every single person in this country, I tell you he’s superrich, he’s a charlatan, he knows all the high-up guys in the administration, he’s got some photo of himself with the prime minister, and one with the President and General of the Armies, with the colonels in our army, and it seems he’s also the one who provides half the animals distributed to the poor at the festival of the goat, he has his own TV program every Sunday, looking all serious, talking like a black American preacher, and when he speaks on TV he threatens wrongdoers, tells them they’re bound for hellfire and the Last Judgment and the rest, that’s how he recruits his followers, that’s how he rakes in these massive sums of money, there’s a telephone number goes up on the screen while he’s talking and he has children sitting round him, dressed in white and singing songs of praise to him instead of to the Lord, and people compete to give more than the next guy because they think the more you give this crook, the closer you get to the gates of paradise, but I don’t like the way he looks, this guy, he looks like a statue of a fat, mean little Buddha, vicious even, how can you oppose a crook like him, when the army’s supplying him with soldiers for his personal security, eh, even if you want to see him you have to make an appointment weeks in advance, and his secretaries won’t let just anyone near him, so you see it’s not a simple tale of God the Father, it’s business, pure and simple, let’s speak plainly here, it’s a successful business and another thing, this guy has a whole harem up in the mountains of Loango, Ndjili, and Diosso, and it’s one big sex spree up there, everyone’s at it, and so my wife abandoned the marital home for a week, and went off up into the mountains, not even sacred mountains, they weren’t, though to her they were “mountains of the soul”

  the Pampers guy seemed to be struggling for words that day, but all at once he got into his stride and went on with his story, without even checking I was listening: “so you see, Broken Glass, my wife has the nerve to say I’m not allowed out, when I’m telling you, she had no right to tell me what to do, I paid all the bills, but she made all the rules, who ever heard of a thing like that, in this crumbling world, eh, no one, that’s who, she thinks she can stop me from spoiling myself a little from time to time, as a man has a right to, with the hot little numbers down in the Rex District, you know what I mean, what was I supposed to do with myself while the guru was giving my wife a going over in the high mountains of Loango, Ndjili, and Diosso, eh, what was I supposed to do, fold my arms and watch from the sidelines, reading my Jerusalem Bible, eh, keep the house nice, eh, make her meals, eh, make me a cuckold, okay, but a posthumous cuckold please, make me a cuckold, but not with the connivance of the church brigade, not with the connivance of people who are meant to be showing us the way to the gates of paradise, you know some days, I wonder if some of my kids, all except the girl who looks like me, aren’t the guru’s kids, anyway, what am I supposed to do with myself, eh, it’s true I love those hot little things down around the Rex District, yeah, I love the taste of young girl, especially from down there, real belles du seigneur, they are, they know how to handle the Ding-an-sich, they’re born with it, you’ll never know fear and trembling like that in the marital bed, they’re amazing, Broken Glass, they’re little volcanoes, they promise you the earth and then they give it to you, all gift-wrapped, while the women back home are just one big disappointment, those hot little numbers from the Rex District, wow are they hot, they’re like rubber, like elastic, it’s sharp,
it’s sweet, it’s frenzied, they whisper in your ear, they’re with your erection every fraction of the way, they know just where to touch you to wake the slumbering alternator, they know how to keep you from stalling at the roundabout, how to get your turbine turning, slip through the gears, accelerate, you feel happy, like you got your whole life before you, and you know how it is, Broken Glass, it was my money, I had a right to spend it as I wanted, I reckon, why’d she go breaking my balls like that, eh, I’ll tell you something, she was no good at it anyway, my wife, if she had been I’d have stayed at home like the other assholes in the district, but she just lay there, my wife did, staring up at the roof, got no choice but to pick my nails and think about the slender little bodies of the Rex girls, she could at least have tried to fake a bit of pleasure, while I was pumping away on top of her like some mediocre cyclist in the Tour de Trois-Cents, I’ll tell you an open secret, while I’m at it, Broken Glass, one day she literally forced me to leave off squirming about on top of her, because she was determined not to miss the last episode of Santa Barbara, well then my engine just cut straight out, no life left in it, batteries flat, nothing working, I mean nothing at all, I was impotent, just watching my tool losing altitude and turning into a poor little flag at half-mast, then finally a tiny little thing no bigger than a premature baby’s, by which I mean to say I was seriously disconcerted, discombobulated, disoriented, and derailed, I swear to you, I got dressed in a flash, I was yelling my head off, shouting shit! Shit! Shit! I told her I wasn’t going to pay any more bills till she started shifting her ass during sex and what’s more I said, she could stop counting on me, I’m no sucker, no asshole, no cretin, I got to protect my pride against those slings and arrows, I think maybe I may have slightly hurt her feelings when I said I got married to a plank of wood, she didn’t know the first thing about giving a man pleasure, I said the only thing she knew how to bring off in triumph was the act of procreation, and any wild beast could do that, yep, I said all this while I was getting dressed in a flash, I said it in anger and stormed out of the house, slamming the door, and once I was out I ran like a madman escaping from the asylum while the guard is taking a piss, I jumped into a bush taxi, the driver wanted to talk, I gave him the brushoff, because I couldn’t think what we could have to say to each other, and he said he reckoned I was worrying about something, it was plain as the nose on my face, and I said he could spare me his reckonings and zip it, just drive me direct to the Rex District, but he went on chatting away, working me over, trying to find out the reason for my despair, but I wasn’t telling him, I said if he didn’t shut his foreigner face I’d get out of his old jalopy, and he sighed and said it must be about a woman then, I didn’t look like a man who enjoyed a happy home life, and I gave a start like “what d’you know about it then?” and he sniggered, and turned round and said “all the guys looking like you do and asking for the Rex District are either cuckolds or have a wife as stiff as a plank of Gabon wood,” and I told him again to shut up, “they sure are hot, those girls around the Rex District,” he said, I was angry, I just yelled “leave me alone and drive, man,” but he wouldn’t stop, the asshole, he just kept right on saying “hey, life is beautiful, man, laugh a little, you’ll be flying high in a little while, relax, stay cool, breathe easy” and since I’d stopped talking to him, he added with a laugh, “please yourself man, I was only making conversation, still, it’s strange the way clients these days, they got no sense of humor, I’ll take you to the Rex District, but you spare me a thought when you’re getting it on” and he didn’t say one more word, just smiled this sly smile all the rest of the way, till at last we got to the Rex District, I paid the asshole driver, but I threw the notes in through the window at him, and he drove off, giving me the finger, I shouted “imbecile!” he shouted “cuckold!” but I didn’t give a fuck, I was in the Rex District, where the girls are so pretty, and available, open to all the usual and some of the less usual propositions, so there I was, in my natural milieu, the school of flesh, district Eros-hima, and all the girls knew me, because I worshipped their bodies, their beauty, and didn’t just treat them like tarts, I would do the things with them that you do with any normal woman with an ounce of eroticism in her and not one frozen stiff like mine, and one of them asked me that evening if I’d like a special massage, known as the “master’s flesh” and I immediately said yes, because this Haitian friend of mine who lives in Montreal now told me it was great, even if it was twice the usual price, I said yes indeed to the “master’s flesh” and I sure did fly, and when I got back home at dawn I found my wife had changed the lock, yeah, that’s what I said, Broken Glass, after fourteen and a half years of marriage, and then some, fourteen years of deadly boredom, fourteen years in the wilderness, fourteen years of pretense, sham, and faking it, fourteen years of calvary and the missionary position, she’d gone and changed the locks,

  now I wasn’t going to sleep out in the street just because she’d changed the lock with the help of her brother-in-law, a well-known locksmith, I wasn’t going to sleep in the street like a bum, no way, so I knocked on the door, got no answer, I shouted my wife’s name so loud I woke the neighbors, she didn’t open up, I threatened to kick the door in, I would count up to five, I counted real slow, she never came, so naturally enough, I called the fire brigade, since I didn’t want to break down the door of my own house, and when the fire brigade arrived with all their gear, thinking they’d been called out to a real bush fire, I explained my house wasn’t on fire, but I needed to find a really good excuse for calling them out, because these guys get really bored when there’s no fire locally, they often get fed up doing practice runs, some of them reach retirement without ever having put out so much as the flame of a match, and I lied and said the children were locked in the house and their mother had passed out, and they were a bit disappointed that there was no fire, the firefighters asked why I didn’t have the keys to my own home, and I said that I’d gone to work a night shift and I’d left them in the house, so my keys were in the house and not on my person, then one fireman pointed out that I really was a complete idiot, and I told him they were his words not mine and the firefighters charged at the door like a band of madmen all trying to get through the eye of a needle at once, and they broke down the cruddy door after a hell of a struggle, and my wife came bursting out of the bedroom, roaring, with her claws at the ready, and flung herself at me like a tigress protecting her two-day-old babies, tackled me to the floor, she’s twice my size, and yours too, Broken Glass, she’s a real fury, my wife is, believe me, I shouted for help, the firefighters separated us, asked what was going on with us, I wanted to speak first because I’m the man, but my wife slapped me and told me to shut my filthy womanizing mouth, and she lied and said I should stop hanging out round the marital home because the matrimonial judge for Trois-Cents had ordered me out of it months ago, and the firefighters called me a sad liar and a sad mythomaniac and a sad troublemaker, and just totally sad, and told me to get my ass double quick out of the marital home, “the law is tough but it is the law,” that’s what they said, and I refused to get out because I didn’t see what business the law had being tough with me, so I said anyway, I was the one who paid the bills, I’d bought the TV, and the Duralex plates, and I paid for the food, I paid for the children’s school things, and I paid for the water, and I paid for the electricity, and so on and so forth, and at that point they called the police because firefighters don’t normally carry handcuffs with them, they always turn up with pipes and stretchers and great big engines that disturb everyone and all because someone, somewhere, has struck a match, and it’s not their job to send people to prison, they’re supposed to put out fires and resuscitate the half-wits and the suicides and people who’ve had accidents and pass out, and so the police turned up straight away, because the station’s only two hundred meters from the house, the one I’ve rented with my own money, and, get this, my wife told the police I was a dangerous man, more dangerous even than Angoulima, the we
ll-known serial killer who decapitated his victims and stuck up their heads on poles round the Côte Sauvage, and my wife said I was an ex-convict, and a thief, that I dealt in cannabis and Colombian cocaine, and she said I’d stopped sleeping at home, I never washed, that I beat our children to death, that I’d stopped paying the rent, that she was going to be turned out of the house herself, that I slept with the tarts around the Rex, and that I slept with them without wearing proper condoms that come from Central Europe, because according to her condoms from Nigeria are no good, they’ve got a hole at the tip, which allows a man to cheat on a woman, taking his pleasure as if he weren’t wearing a condom, and the poor woman underneath thinks he is using a condom, when in fact it’s just a thing with a hole in the top, you know what I mean, Broken Glass, so my wife said I could well be HIV extra-positive and not know, and it was probably quite far gone, because I was getting weirdly thinner and thinner and I had a face like a fish, and my head now looked like a Hottentot’s skull and I had constant diarrhea and I groaned when I pissed, and that I often vomited, and she said I gave away my salary to the girls from the Rex District and I had two mistresses young enough to be my granddaughters or the granddaughters of the firefighters, or of the policemen outside our house, God help us, and that’s when the situation began to go downhill, particularly when my wife made out I also did disgusting things to our daughter, Amelie, she called me sorcerer, barbarian, caveman, and worse, she told all the people gathered at our house that I got up every night to lay my hands on our daughter, do disgusting things to her, indecent things, and she claimed that I would give Amelie sleeping pills so she wouldn’t realize the disgusting, indecent things I did to her, now you tell me, Broken Glass, can you see me doing that, d’you see me sullying the cloakroom of childhood, do you see me nipping buds, can you see me shooting at a child, its impossible, after all, Amelie’s my own daughter, isn’t she, and I was so shocked, I didn’t even defend myself against her false accusations, and in among all the people in uniform there was a cop of the female persuasion with the muscles of a docker and her hair cut short, like a normal cop, I mean a male policeman, and this cop of the female persuasion pushed me up against the wall and called me a bastard, a pedophile, a sadist, she said she’d crush me under her boot, she’d trample on my corpse, and spit on my grave, I was like a sailor washed up in the tide, I should know there was a punishment for every crime, and this cop of the female persuasion swore she’d get me banged up, she promised to do everything she could to make sure there was no fair trial, she said I didn’t deserve the honor of a legal trial, besides which they’re a complicated business, and she was the one who put the handcuffs on me and her colleagues all took a kick at me, booting me in the balls, as I lay dying at the intruders’ feet, I can show you the scars, marks I bear to this day, and I began to cough up petals of blood, petals of blood the size of potatoes from Bobo-Dioulasso, petals of blood the size of dinosaur turds, and they dragged me to the local police headquarters and when they heard there that I was a pedophile, the other policemen all agreed I should be taken straight to Makala, there to spend the next half of my life, Makala is the place all the criminals in this town dread, and that’s where they took me, I swear, Broken Glass, it was a bad situation, you wouldn’t think it to see me sitting here now, but I spent over two and a half years in Makala and two and a half years in a prison like that is no joke”