Broken Glass

by Alain Mabanckou

  a few days ago when I walked out of Credit Gone West having resolved to take a break, stop writing, not read back what I’d written for a while, I wandered down toward the Rex District, in the shade of those young girls in flower the Pampers guy was so fond of until he turned into a wreck with a leaking butt, I felt like treating myself for the first time since the good old leap years, I probably had the idea that a quick fuck with the girls would thaw me out a bit, but not a single young girl in flower was prepared to give me even a quick little screw, not even a tiny one, they all said: “you’re too old, you can’t get it up, you’ll be wasting my time, go and try somewhere else, watch some porn, get yourself to an old folks’ home, you’re a drunken boat, you stink, you talk to yourself in the street, you never shower, you can’t stand up straight,” and I said “don’t care,” though at sixty-four I can at least get an erection like a once-glorious racing stallion who’s been put out to graze, it’s frightening the way people think they can go round underestimating dinosaurs like me, sending them back to Jurassic Park where they came from, never let a donkey kick an old and feeble lion, I don’t know who said that, but the girls made it clear, at any rate, that I was past it, time was up, though I can tell you one thing, time has nothing to do with it, and I felt belittled, like a piece of wreckage tossed about on the sea, even though I had ready money in my pocket that I’d been given in the street, even though I could pay for my trick in cash, it really makes you wonder in the end if it’s money these girls are after, or just fresh first timers, they should make their minds up, or all’s up with the world, it just goes to show prostitution’s not what it was, these days girls handpick their clients, soon they’ll be demanding to be paid in sterling or Swiss francs, now in the old days if you wanted some fun you could spend an excellent evening in exchange for a can of headless sardines produced in Morocco, but the days of the welfare state are long since gone, it all comes down to looks these days, appearances are everything, if you’re off to see a tart you need to spray yourself with perfume by Larazzo, wear a suit by Francesco Smalto, a dress shirt by Figaret, it’s the end of an era, and since that was the way of it the day I went down to the Rex, and since I’d been turfed out, like a carpet seller, I gulped back my pride and bid farewell to arms, “I don’t care” I said, and I continued to prowl about the district, and as there was a power cut all over the city I couldn’t see what was in front of me, there weren’t even any cars driving past, then suddenly, as luck would have it, in one of those tacky little streets in our district, just at the top of the rue Papa-Bonheur, I saw the flickering light of a torch, someone was signaling to me from the other side of the street, I walked toward it and saw that it was a prostitute nearing retirement age, perhaps with one foot already in the grave, and I did hesitate for a moment, wondering if the game was worth the candle, or even the candelabra, but I stopped anyway, my curiosity aroused, and said abruptly “how much for a trick?” and an old crone with a face riddled with lines looked me up and down pityingly and said “where’ve you been, eh, if you don’t know how much a trick costs around here, it’s the same price as usual, nothing’s changed, times are hard for everyone” and I felt embarrassed, because I really didn’t know the exchange rate for a trick, so I stammered out “it’s true, I must admit, I’m not a regular here, I’ve just come along for something to do, I mean, for some company, it’s one hundred and seven years now, since last I saw the moon” and she looked me up and down again pityingly, “come on then, poor old man, don’t have a heart attack on me” and she beckoned to me to follow her down a winding, pest-ridden alley leading to the furthest reaches of the district, and went after her, like a desperate shadow because she hadn’t said no, so it must be okay, so I could pay according to my mood, and my pleasure and my own rate of exchange, and we walked for about ten minutes, in the blinding absence of light, and for a moment I thought she might be leading me into a trap with her pimps and other accomplices, you can never tell with ladies of the night, but we came to a patch of wasteland and she said “this where we have to do it” and I asked her “is this your place then?” and she said “hey what am I getting into here, have you come to get laid or to hear my life story?” and she pushed open the door of a prehistoric-looking shack built in the corner of the plot, a close-knit family of black cats suddenly scattered, meowing insults at us in slang, and I said to myself “if someone slits your throat in a dive like this, no one can hear you scream, goodness me, there aren’t even any neighbors around, what a fine fucking mess I’ve got myself into here!” then the old crone disappeared inside the prehistoric shack, lit a storm lamp and called to me “you coming or not, for fuck’s sake, I haven’t got all day,” those were her words, so I went on into the prehistoric shack, attempting to conceal my misgivings, or should I say my mounting apprehension, and the old crone flung her bag into the far corner of the room, coughed, cleared her throat, before laying herself down on a mattress that smelled of garbage collectors’ armpit combined with moldy mushrooms, she lifted her skirt, the kind worn during the German occupation, and said, gnashing her false teeth, “Alice is what they call me, if you want to go to Wonderland, ask me, not one of those young misses still sucking at their mothers’ breasts, come on now darling, come close to me,” but of course my desire was gone, I just wanted to run for it, get the hell out of there, then I thought maybe that was a bit rude, maybe this was the only trick she’d turn that day, and with a face like the thirteenth fairy at the feast she was unlikely to have clients lining up on the pavement, more likely they’d be crossing the road to avoid her, with her wig covering only about a third of her pate, her overdone make-up, the whiff of granny about her, and her false teeth protruding out of her mouth like a vampire’s, and I just wanted out of that prehistoric shack, the smell was so sickening, I’d lost my inspiration, but you should never humiliate a tart, old or not, it always comes back to haunt you one day, you have to remember, tarts, in the end, are human beings like the rest of us, with their pride, and their dignity, and when humiliated, they’ll stop at nothing, they turn into furies, I can’t think why some people say they’ve got no brains and only think with the instrument of their trade, it’s not true, there’s none so sly as a streetwalker, so I decided to stay in the prehistoric shack, and lay down next to old Alice, she smelled of that powder they use to delay the process of decomposition in mortuaries, and the veins in her neck looked like the ribs of an age-old tree, around whose roots hyenas come to piss, and I saw Alice’s legs, thin and bowed, “how are you feeling darling?” she said, I didn’t reply, she must say that to all her clients, if, that is, she really ever had any, so then Alice with her old and bandy legs removed the string I wore for a belt, and unbuttoned my shabby trousers, and plunged in her hand with its misshapen fingers, and found my somewhat shrunken thing, “I’ll take care of it darling, your thing’ll stand as straight as it did when you were twenty, I’m used to it, believe me,” and she began reminiscing about her days as a young prostitute, when her hands could still drive some miserable, suicidal wretch wild, but her movements were as weak as those of an albatross captured for a joke by the crew of a ship on the high seas, so this old crone, she kneaded, rather than caressed me, and seeing that nothing very concrete was coming of it, she got all agitated, like a mosquito on a swamp, at which I grew more and more ill at ease, I tried to think about the last time I’d done a spot of mountaineering on a mound of Venus, but my recollection was so cloudy, I could only catch the occasional sunny spell, and a sunny spell is not enough to pump back the life into a poor old thing that’s running on empty, so then the old crone stood up in a huff and put on the wig that smelled of palm oil, and the skirt from the 1940s, and picked up her bag and said “you’re wasting my time, you’re just a poor, sad old fool” so then I stood up too, and held out two ten thousand Congolese franc notes and she said “keep your cash, cretin, the humiliation you have just subjected me to does not cost twenty thousand Congolese francs” and Alice practically pushed me out the
door

  yesterday, at four in the morning, I walked along the banks of the river Tchinouka, the water was dirty grey and silent, I counted several animal carcasses, thrown in the water by the bank dwellers, I talked to myself at length, I expect people thought I was mad, a lost soul who saw windmills at every turn and pitched himself into epic conflict with them, “I don’t care,” I thought to myself, and I went on talking away to myself, and memories began to float back to me, as in a rising of the ashes, and I thought I really hate this river, it’s a lagoon of death, the cause of all my grief, the reason for my anger, my irritation, I would love to get back at this river, to tell it to give back my mother’s soul, which it swallowed up one day, a day of deepest silence, but I don’t want to talk about that chapter of my life just now, I’ll come to it a bit later, I don’t want to start crying now, and as these were the dog days, it was their season, I saw some dogs mating, I picked up a stone and threw it toward them, and the dogs barked loudly and angrily, then fled, calling me every rude name they could think of, loser, scum, rogue, pathetic biped, and I said “I don’t care, I don’t understand your canine patois, you go ahead and bark if you’re angry, it doesn’t bother me,” and I pursued my famished road, I thought I must sit down for a moment, then I folded my legs beneath me like a gazelle who kneels down to weep, in fact I was dizzy with hunger, I could feel a hard knot moving about in my stomach, I started to spew up clots of wine, but “I don’t care,” I said, and while I was at it I had a shit at the foot of a mango tree, though the poor tree had done nothing, and just at that moment some bank dweller who happened to be passing said “poor bugger, sad old fuck of yesteryear, polluter of public spaces, shitting at the foot of a tree at your age, have you got no shame?” and I said out loud “I don’t care, the sad old fuck of yesteryear says fuck off yourself!” and the bank dweller was furious and added “don’t you speak to me like that you old pisshead, fuck off and die then, shithead!” so I said again, out loud, “I don’t care, you’ll die before I do, the cemeteries round here are stuffed full of young idiots like you!” and the bank dweller said threateningly “pick up your shit or I’ll throw you in the river,” and he was serious about it, and I didn’t want to meet my death by drowning over some silly shit at the foot of a mango tree, and as it was actually my shit I began to pick it up, and the bank dweller said “what are you doing, old man, you can’t go picking up your own poop with your bare hands, you should do it with the end of a stick, for Christ’s sake” but I ignored him, because actually there’s nothing sickening about picking up your own shit, it’s other people’s shit that’s revolting, so I plunged my hands into my excrement, and the bank dweller threw up and scarpered, revolted by this scatological scene, and I began to laugh and laugh and laugh

  my wanderings brought me at the stroke of five in the morning to Credit Gone West, I was still haunted by the image of Alice’s thin, bandy legs, and of her prehistoric shack, and then I recalled the scene with me picking up the shit with my bare hands instead of using the end of a stick, so that when I got here at five in the morning I still stank of shit, and I dozed for a while on a stool at the bar and was woken up by the smell of coffee Dengaki had made for me, he said it was from the boss, and I glanced upstairs and there was still a light on in the Stubborn Snail’s room, and I accepted the coffee, though they don’t serve coffee here, the boss must have made it himself upstairs and had it sent down, I started on a bottle of red, it was the beginning of a new day, but a day unlike any other, I said to myself