Broken Glass

by Alain Mabanckou

  I listened to him in silence, he had tears in his eyes and took a good gulp of his drink before continuing his tale, “two and a half years in Makala, it’s an eternity, specially when the other inmates have been told you’re in there for doing obscene things to your daughter, when it wasn’t even true in my case, simply because I could never bring myself to sully the cloakroom of childhood, nip the buds, shoot at a child, and unhappily for me I went through torture, what I went through in that place was worse than what you get if you go to hell, it was dreadful, intolerable, Broken Glass, I don’t know how I survived it, can you imagine, the prison wardens, how could they let the gang leaders in the other cells fuck me from behind like that, giving me what they called “the middle way,” I promise you, that’s what they did, I was their object, their plaything, their inflatable doll, I let them have their way with this little body you see before you, what could I do, nothing that’s what, there were too many of them, all clamoring for a go, and when I cried out, because they came so thick and fast these “middle ways,” the wardens in Makala just laughed at me and told me to think of the harm I’d done to Amelie, when it wasn’t even true, I could never bring myself to sully the cloakroom of childhood, nip the buds, shoot at a child, and every day they took me up the middle like that, grabbing me from behind, I never got any sleep, there was always some guy behind me, whipping me, calling me filthy tart, a piece of tax-free household waste, a vegetable from Tipotipo Market, a cockroach, jellyfish, moth, rotten fruit of the breadfruit tree, all that and more, and sometimes one of the wardens at Makala took a personal hand in the negotiation of the middle way, a nervous young man who told me he’d never done that in his life before, not to a man, he was no queer, just wanted to make me pay for the disgusting things I’d done to Amelie, when it wasn’t even true, and he was the one who whipped me while he shoved himself up my hinterland like a trucker, I tell you, he was hung like King Kong, so that’s what they did to me in Makala, they destroyed me, I can show you my backside, you could make a fist and put it up me, no problem, that’s the truth, I never even got a trial, in this shit-hole of a country”

  when he’d finished telling me his life story, the guy in Pampers raised his glass and said “ciao” and drank it down, poured another one, and drank that down too, then stood up saying “okay, okay,” and then I got a close-up of his backside, bulging with four layers of Pampers, a damp backside, buzzing with flies, and he saw fit to tell me “don’t worry about the flies, it’s always like that, Broken Glass, flies are my best buddies these days, I don’t even bother brushing them away, they always find me again, wherever I go, I get the feeling it’s always the same flies following me,” and then he nodded a last farewell, and I did the same, and off he went to beg in the nearby streets, while I sat there, staring into the distance, watching him disappear and I thought, one day he’ll completely flip his lid, he’ll come back here and say “tell me who to kill,” not that I would go along with anything like that, not for one moment, I’d never be an accessory to murder, that’s a different thing altogether, I don’t know how anyone can kill, life is essential, that’s what my mother always told me, and even if she’s dead now, I’ll always stick to that rule of thumb, so if the Pampers guy ever takes it into his head to commit a crime, he’ll have carry it out himself

  I met the Printer the same way I meet most of the new characters in the bar, they just pop up out of nowhere, suddenly there they are, with tears in their eyes and tremors in their voices, and this one, the Printer I mean, had been looking for me, for a chat, ever since the day he first set foot in Credit Gone West, he really wanted to talk to me, no one else would do, and he kept calling out “I want to talk to you, I want to talk to you, you’re the one they call Broken Glass round here, aren’t you, I want to talk to you, I’ve got so much to tell you, let me sit down at your table and order a bottle,” I just pretended I had no interest in his story, I’d heard so many stories, you couldn’t fit them all in just one notebook, I’d need several volumes to tell the tales of all these accursed kings, so there was the Printer, all eager to talk, and I just went on staring into my glass of red wine like a philosopher wondering what deep, dark secret a liquid might conceal, and let me tell you a secret right now, if you want people to talk you have to stand back, feign indifference, pretend, in a word, not to care, it’s the oldest and best strategy in the world for setting things in motion, people looking to confess get upset then, they think their story the most extraordinary, most astonishing, the weirdest, most surprising, most action-packed ever told, and they want to get you to believe the tale they’re going to tell is of a gravity and seriousness equaled only by the death penalty itself, “why d’you want to talk to me,” I made out I was surprised, when in fact I did want to hear him, and he replied “because people say you’re a good guy,” and I laughed, then lifted my glass of red and drank from it, “and what have they told you about me?” I asked the Printer, “they say you’re the top man around here,” and I laughed again, then told him “if wisdom could be measured by inches of beard, billy goats would be philosophers,” the Printer stared at me and leaning toward me said “why you talking like that, Broken Glass, I’m looking for someone to understand me, what’s all this stuff about billy goats and philosophers?” and I told him to calm down, I was taking him seriously, and I added, “they must have said other things, what else did they say about me?” and he nodded “yeah, they said you were in here right at the start, that the Stubborn Snail’s a close personal friend, that he listens to what you say,” I smiled, flattered by these kind words, I like to hear things like that, the guy began to interest me, “and what else, they must have said something else,” and he thought for a moment, casting his eyes upward, “well, it seems you’re writing something about the people who come here, you’re keeping a notebook, it must be that one there beside you, is it?” and I didn’t answer, just placed my hand over the notebook where it lay open, because the guy was trying to read my scribble, I don’t like that, and I gave the bottle a good shake and poured myself another glass, and drank it off then asked him “so what is it you want then?” and he suddenly raised his voice saying “I want to be in your notebook too, you’re going to make some assholes famous when actually I’m the most interesting case round here,” some arrogance, who did he think he was then, “okay, okay, calm down, so what makes you think you’re so interesting, then, you got no grounds to say that, just give me one reason, go on, just one, why you’re more interesting than anyone else around here” and he said, without hesitation, “I’m more important than the rest because I’ve been to France, not everyone can say that, believe me” and he said it quite naturally, as though it was obvious, France was his yardstick, the height of achievement, he’d set foot in France, therefore he was always going to be right, well, what could I say, after that, I tried to think of a counterargument, but none sprang to mind, so I capitulated and said “okay, then, sit down, my friend, let’s hear what you have to say,” and he sat down at my table and filled up the empty glass he’d just taken from the neighboring table and drank from it, and cleared his throat three times, before warning me “I’m telling you, Broken Glass, if you don’t put me into your book, it won’t be worth the paper it’s written on, I tell you, they could make my life into a film,” and eventually he calmed down and there was a long silence in which we listened to drunken angels drifting overhead, and I kept on looking at him “okay, where shall I start, what comes first,” he said, in a resigned sort of voice, and I said nothing, and he went on “to be honest, I don’t hate the French—men or women, but I do hate one French woman, just one, I swear” which was good for a beginning, I like that kind of statement, so I just kept up my silence, I wanted him to come out with it now, I bore down on him with my eyes, and he brought out his big artillery, saying “ah, France, don’t talk to me about France, Broken Glass, it makes me want to vomit” and he spat on the ground, and his face went hard like the face of a gorilla who’s seen a poacher cross his
patch “okay, I’ll start at the very beginning, but listen carefully, what I’m telling you now is important, very important, so you pay attention, I want to see you writing while I talk, and you’ll see, you should never ever trust anyone, I’m telling you that as a friend, Broken Glass,” he really knew how to spin it out, I wanted to tell him to get to the point and stop dithering around in the penalty area, and while I was scribbling down some of what he’d begun to say he said “in fact I’m going to tell you about a woman, how she killed me, ruined me, reduced me to a piece of nonrecyclable rubbish, so she did” and I leaned over toward him and he moved back a few centimeters, as though to keep some distance between us, I didn’t see why, and he said “Broken Glass, don’t mess with white women, if you ever cross paths with a white woman, go your own way, don’t even look on her, she’ll stop at nothing, I don’t even know how I came to be back here, when my place is in Europe, in France, and here I am, either in this bar or on the beaches of the Côte Sauvage” and he took a drink of his red wine and wiped his mouth with his bare hand and went on “to tell you the truth, it’s her fault I drink like I do, the white witch’s fault, she sucked out my blood, Broken Glass, believe me, I was a decent man, I don’t know if you understand what’s meant by a decent man in France, but I was a man who earned his living, a man who paid his income tax on time, a man with a post office savings account, a man who even had shares on the stock exchange in Paris, a man who was saving for his pension in France—because pensions in this country are nothing but a pile of shit, a road to ruin, unreliable, a lottery, you need to have some cushy job in a ministry, there are civil servants in this country who do business with the pensions of poor people who’ve worked all their lives, but anyway, I was somebody in the black community back there, people knew me, I was a worker, a real hard worker, not a layabout like some black immigrants who hang around in the lobbies of their apartments, waiting for the family support checks, I didn’t need all that shit, no, yours truly worked in a large print works on the outskirts of Paris, I ran my own section, I even hired and fired the other guys, because I could tell a lazy sod from a hard worker, and I didn’t just hire negroes either, because, between you and me, Broken Glass, there’s more to life than negroes, for fuck’s sake, there are other races too, negroes don’t have a monopoly on misery, or on unemployment, I also hired miserable, unemployed people with white skin, and yellow skin, I mixed them all up together, just so you know, I had real status, and not every black gets to hire and fire white men, who, after all, were the ones who colonized them, Christianized them, flung them into the holds of ships, whipped them and trampled them, burned their gods, put down their rebellions, wiped out their empires, so I hired people with white skin and people with yellow skin, and I mixed them together with the other wretched of the earth, and there weren’t many Negroes doing that, you could count us on the fingers of a fatwa victim, check it out, anyone will tell you, so there I was with a good job, a well-paid job, we printed Paris Match, VSD, Voici, Figaro, Les Echos, I was a decent man, I was married to Céline, a woman from Vendée with a terrific ass on her, an ass like a real negress’s from back home and Céline was secretary to the head of a pharmaceutical lab in Colombes,” and at this point in his confession I began to wonder if the Printer wasn’t having me on, but he spoke with such assurance I had to believe him, and he went on “I should tell you I first met Céline at Timis, a well known black nightclub in Pigalle, in the Eighteenth Arrondissement of Paris, I don’t know what she was doing there, surrounded by vulgar black women in heat, even if you could make out the odd other white woman among them, but the other whites were all lumbered with backsides as flat as an ironing board, and Céline immediately caught my eye, with her butt and her waist, and the two great big watermelons grafted onto her chest, so that no one else dared approach her on the dance floor, and I just went straight up to her like a soldier who’s just been given a medal, I crossed the Rubicon murmuring to myself “alea iacta est ” and without a flicker of hesitation I plunged in there, praying that it would all run smoothly because the worst thing for a man trying to get a girl to dance is being turned down in the middle of the dance floor in front of the competition, who all piss themselves laughing, anyway, thank God, I was well dressed, I had on a dress shirt by Christian Dior that I bought in the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré and an Yves Saint Laurent blazer I’d got in the rue Matignon, and some lizard-skin Weston shoes I got somewhere near the Place de la Madeleine and I wore this really good perfume called The Male by Jean-Paul Gaultier that I’d mixed together with Lolita Lempika for men, and as for my haircut, it was pure black American actor at the height of his success, Sydney Poitier style, so all in all I was okay, I was in good shape, I held out my hand to the girl, who’d been dancing and was now sitting on the velour-covered pouf finishing off a cigarette as long and slim as a reed in a sweeping brush, and the girl stood up at once, as though she had been waiting for this moment, my heart began leaping and bounding, I couldn’t quite believe it, I saw the disappointment in the faces of the competition, knowing they’d lost a fine chance this time, I told myself I’d better give it my all, dance as I’d never danced before, and make a once-in-a-lifetime impression on this girl, so that she’d be the one left asking for more, and we danced all night and then, you won’t believe this, Broken Glass, she came back to my place, no discussion, none of your ‘well, we’ve only just met, I need some time, let’s get to know each other, I’m not one of those girls who open their legs on the first date, I need to talk about it, let’s have a coffee, meet up a few times, then we’ll see,’ no, none of that, she just came back to my place without getting all fancy about it and I was in my Renault 19, and she drove behind in her Toyota, and when we got to my place we parked outside the building and kissed in the corridor and in the elevator, and on the landing, and in front of my door, which I couldn’t get open because I was actually drunk as a skunk, and I didn’t waste any time, we got down on the carpet and I made a really thorough job of it, I worked on her from every angle, under every layer of her haute couture, and there we lay entwined at dawn, a little dazed by the speed of things, but so what, it was so good, we soon got over that, and Céline left, saying she’d had a wonderful evening, the best evening ever in her whole life, and I was a really nice guy and she took my phone number and I took hers, and since days are long and nights are short we called each other regularly, for hours on end, we exchanged the latest details of the night, we said a whole heap of stupid things, the kind of stupid things lovers come out with when love is new, so I had to tell her I loved her, had to be open with my feelings, had to express them without reserve, she told me, and that was the first time I really learned how to tell a woman I loved her, not like here where you don’t say it because you don’t want to seem weak, here you get your rocks off at night, don’t bother with the romantic fairy-tale stuff, but it’s different in France, they take feelings seriously there, you don’t play games with love, and very soon I made the marriage proposal she’d been waiting for since the day we met, she said she knew instinctively I was the man she’d spend the rest of her life with, as though God had said we should be one, and Céline quickly talked her parents round, they’re not racists, they always voted Communist in municipal and regional elections, or for the Greens in the presidential, so we went to visit them in some little place in Vendée called Noirmoutier, an island with a bridge connecting it to the mainland, and Céline’s parents said I was a fine young man, distinguished, intelligent, refined, ambitious, respectful of republican values, and I was pleased to hear this description of my noble qualities, they admired the way I was dressed, which isn’t surprising because I was actually wearing a made-to-measure Francesco Smalto suit, and they also said how they loved deepest Africa, the real Africa, mysterious Africa, the bush, the red earth, the wild animals skipping about in the wide open spaces, adding that only fools thought that black Africa was heading for disaster, or that Africa was antidevelopment and they apologized personally for
the mistakes of the past, in particular for the slave trade, colonization, the problems with independence and all the other shit some black fundamentalists have made their thing, I didn’t want to get into those worn-out arguments, I made it clear to them that stuff to do with the past was not my thing, I was a man with my eyes fixed firmly on the horizon, and that horizon was not aflame, I said I was looking to the future, then I began talking to them about the Congo, and they asked which Congo I was from originally, the father asked if it was the Belgian Congo, the mother asked if it was the French Congo, and I said the Belgian Congo no longer existed, and I said the French Congo no longer existed, I explained that I was from the Republic of the Congo, i.e., the smaller of the two Congos, and the father exclaimed ‘of course he’s from the little Congo, our beautiful, illustrious former colony, General de Gaulle even declared Brazzaville the capital of free France during the occupation, ah, the Congo, land of dreams and freedom, it’s the country where they speak the purest French, you know, better even than in France, let me tell you,’ and Céline’s mother, who was a bit embarrassed, told her husband he shouldn’t be using the word colony in reference to my country, “now then, Joseph,” she said, “it doesn’t do to say colony, you know that,” and the father said it was a mistake and what he meant was territory and the mother said that colony and territory were completely interchangeable and Céline flew into a rage and said we hadn’t come to talk about interchanges or geography or history, and old father Joseph said ‘good, let’s drink to that with a decent bottle of claret, shall we’ and he opened the claret and we drank, and seeing as how the atmosphere was now relaxed, Céline and I announced our imminent nuptials and the father was caught short by this and almost choked on his wine and said ‘you don’t hang about do you, you young ones, in our day you had to take your time about it, get to know the family, what is it you want, a TGV marriage, or what?’ and Céline’s mother kicked her husband under the table then said ‘love is love, you know that Joseph,’ and they gave us their blessing despite everything, since Céline wouldn’t have allowed them to say no anyway, it was take it or leave it, and her parents came to Paris for the happy day, there were only about fifty or so of us, in a little registry office in Chatenay-Malabry, some friends of Celine’s, my work colleagues, and a few acquaintances, most of them Sappers, and when I say ‘Sappers,’ my dear Broken Glass, I do not mean the guys who put out fires, no, Sappers are boys from the black milieu in Paris, who belong to SAPPE which is the Society for Ambience and People and Persons of Elegance, and among the Sappers present that day were influential guys like Djo Ballard and Docteur Limane, Michel Macchabée, Moulé Moulé, Moki, Benos, Préfet and a load of others”