when I said all this to the Stubborn Snail, he was lost for words, he thought I must be angry with someone in particular, or that I was raving, and he said who was I talking about, he wanted names, but I didn’t reply, I just smiled and gazed up at the sky, and he kept at me to know if I was angry and I said no, why should I be angry, I had no cause to be angry, I was just setting things straight, just making a distinction between what I considered rubbish, and what I thought was good, and that was the day he gave me this notebook, and a pencil and said “if you change your mind you could always write in this, it’s your book, it’s a present, I know you will write, just write what you feel like, the kind of thing you were saying just now, about true writers and fake writers that congest the highway of literature, and about the people who turn down the Nobel prize and the nostalgic Senegalese riflemen, and the writers you saw in suits on TV in the bar on the Avenue of Independence, that’s all good stuff, you can work on that, find a way to grab me as a reader, yes, I want to read about all that, I’m not quite sure what you meant by it, but I still think you need to put down everything you’ve just said” so since then, to please him, I’ve been writing down my stories in the book, my rough impressions, and sometimes I do it for my own pleasure too, and that’s when I really feel like I’m hitting my stride, when I let myself go, and forget this is something I’ve been asked to do, I feel at ease in the saddle, I can buck and jump and I can talk to a reader other than the Stubborn Snail, a reader I’ve never met, because anything can happen, and the Stubborn Snail did say to me once “I promise not to read what you write until the day you reach the last full stop,” my book is always here ready for me, and there are days when I say to Mompéro or Dengaki, “bring me two bottles of red and my notebook” and they bring me my two bottles and my notebook and I drink and I scribble away and watch the world, let’s just say that until now I’ve been happy that way, a happy man, a free man, but it makes me feel pretty sad to think that in future I won’t be scribbling away in my book, and I won’t be turning up here in days to come, so I need to look back a bit over what I’ve written so far, and I mustn’t forget to finish my bicycle chicken, which has gone quite cold, because I took my time over the story of my life, when I should have been eating, but I think it was necessary, so now I’m going to just stop for a bite to eat, I’m actually starving, though I may not look it
I finally managed to eat my bicycle chicken, and now I have to go and give the plate back to the bald soprano on the other side of the Avenue of Independence, but first I’ll drink up my glass of red wine, which will only take a few seconds, besides, time doesn’t matter now, I see the Printer’s still here, still surrounded by people flicking through the latest Paris Match, well I don’t care, it’s nothing to do with me, I’m busy anyway, and I stand up and get ready to cross the Avenue of Independence, I’ll manage all right, there’s not two-way traffic, unless I’ve gone blind, and there are no motorcycles either, and no garbage trucks that I can see, ah, there we are, it’s done, I’ve made it, I can claim a victory now, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion, so I’m across the avenue, and I can see the bald soprano, she can see me walking toward her, she smiles, she’s always smiling, I’m standing before her, she smiles again and quips, “well now, Broken Glass, you took your time eating today, weren’t you hungry then, just look at you now, you’re fit to drop, ooh, how many liters you got under your belt there papa” and I say I’ve not started drinking yet, I’ve not touched a drop of alcohol since I got up this morning, and I laugh even as I utter this lie, which is as big as an African dictator’s second home, but I can see she doesn’t believe me, because she says “when d’you ever meet a drunk who’ll admit he’s been drinking, never, that’s when, papa, there’s a song about that, it goes “momeli ya massanga andimaka kuiti te mama,” it’s not a song I know, she says it’s by a band called Almighty OK Jazz, an amazing band from the country over the way, I don’t know much about this country’s music, just a few songs by Zaiko Langa Langa, and Afrisa International, that’s all, and I come clean and say “well, yes, Mama Mfoa, I did have just one little glass, a really small one, no more, I promise” and the look she gives me is full of kindness, I’ve never seen her look so serious in all the time I’ve known her and she shakes her head and murmurs “I told you to give up drinking, Broken Glass, you’re going to die with a bottle in your hand, papa, we all care about you here in the district” and I can’t think what to say to her right now, so I say, without thinking “I’ll stop tonight, at midnight, I give you my word, I promise, Mama Mfoa, and I’ll never show my face round here again” and I’d really like to tell her that I’m not stopping drinking because I’m afraid of dying, I’m not scared that I’ll die with a bottle in my hand, the truth is, it’s a good way to go, it’s what they call dying with your weapon in your hand, because when we pass through to heaven or hell we know anything can happen, when we get there everything depends on which strait gate we each go through, I expect some people will go in through the wrong gate, in heaven it’s all very serious, lots of white clouds and angels with the memories of elephants, asking you how many times you’ve read the Jerusalem Bible, how many old ladies you’ve helped across the Avenue of Independence, which churches you attended down below, no way you’ll get a drink up there, it’s one big oral exam, strictly no drinking in paradise, and in hell it’s much the same, it’ll be just as hard to get a drop to drink there, what with the devil hanging around between a rock and hard place prodding us with his trident, and if you ask him for a drop of wine he’ll turn angry and shout “what’s that, what d’you want from me, idiot pain in the ass, don’t you think you drank enough down below without coming pestering us here in purgatory, you should have aimed for paradise, aimed a little higher, beyond those dark clouds over there, well, bad luck, you should have drunk your fill on earth, while you still had the chance, all you’ll get here is your judgment, with no appeal, here the crackling flames of the apocalypse rule the day, incineration with no deliberation, no alcohol to be consumed on the premises, we just use it to light the flames and make them leap, come now, your turn to burn, poor fool, who believed hell was other people”
I’d just like to point out I’m not a bad man, nor hysterical, or anything like that, no, no one’s going to call me that, even if I do plan to throw in the towel at the stroke of midnight, I’m a sensible man, otherwise how come those people who say they’re not drunks can’t do their times tables, huh, I mean, anyone can multiply by two, but once you start multiplying by nine, say, it does get tricky, and then there’s decimals and all that jazz, but I’ve never given in to the temptation to count on my fingers, or with sticks, and I’ve certainly never even set eyes on a calculator, I don’t give a damn about modern math, to me life means a bottle and the multiplication tables, just as for my father, life meant jazz and palm wine, Coltrane, Monk, Davis, Bechet and all the other negroes, with their trumpets and clarinets, God himself told us to go forth and multiply, though he didn’t actually specify how much we should multiply by, but he did bid us go forth and multiply, I really like multiplication, even if I’ve always been keener on geography and literature, it’s true I couldn’t have taken literature any further, even if I’d carried on with my studies, literature leads nowhere, geography would have just about been okay, I could have traveled the world with it, I could have studied the great rivers in all their length and breadth, the river Congo, the river Amour, the Yangtze-Kiang, or the Amazon, but I’ve never seen these rivers with my own eyes, the only river I’ve ever known is dark red in color and comes in a bottle, and this river, of the color purple, will never run dry, no more than the ones I’ve just named, and when I think about the liters of wine I’ve drunk over the past twenty years, if that’s not a long quiet river, I don’t know what the world’s coming to, anyway, I’m not going to get bogged down in hydrographic detail here, water is a dangerous element, and it still makes me furious to think of my mother swallowing great mouthfuls of water before she finally su
rrendered her spirit, with no time even to say “our Father, who art in heaven”
I’ll just make a note here, without wishing to boast, that one way or another I’ve traveled the world, I wouldn’t want anyone to think I’m one of those guys who doesn’t know what’s going on outside his native country, that would be too narrow a view, just because I’m filled to the gills with red wine doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten the exploits of my youth, it would be fairer to say I have traveled widely, without ever leaving my own native soil, I’ve traveled, one might say, through literature, each time I’ve opened a book the pages echoed with a noise like the dip of a paddle in midstream, and throughout my odyssey I never crossed a single border, and so never had to produce a passport, I’d just pick a destination at random, setting my prejudices firmly to one side, and be welcomed with open arms in places swarming with weird and wonderful characters, was it perhaps by chance that all my wandering started with comic strips, perhaps not, because one day, I found myself in a Gallic village, alongside Asterix and Obelix, then another time out in the Far West, with Lucky Luke, the cowboy who shoots faster than his own shadow, I marveled at the adventures of Tintin, at his skill in giving people the slip, at his little dog, Snowy, an intelligent hound, ever ready to help his master should the need arise, now you don’t find dogs like him in Trois-Cents, the dogs around here are only interested in grubbing up knucklebones to chew from the public garbage heap, they have no power of reasoning, and then there was Zembla, who thrust me back deep into the jungle, as did Tarzan, that bundle of muscle, swinging from creeper to creeper, and then there was our friend Zorro, wielding his skillful sword, while the envious Isnogud longed to be caliph instead of the caliph, I shall never forget my first trip across an African country, it was Guinea, I was the black child, I was entranced by the blacksmiths’ toil, so intrigued by the creep of the mystical snake who swallowed a reed that I felt like I held it in my hands, then suddenly I’d be back in my native country, eating sweet, sweet fruit of the breadfruit tree, living in a room of a hotel called Life and a Half, which no longer exists, but where my father spent his evenings in a state of bliss, with his jazz and his palm wine, and I warmed myself by the fire of my origins, but almost at once I must be off again, I mustn’t get trapped by the warmth of my native soil, I must wend my way through the rest of the continent listening to the major elegies and shadow songs, and trail through brutal cities in the hope of meeting one last survivor of the caravan, yes I really must go, and travel northward, and experience the highest solitude, see the diverted river, and live in the big house filled with the light of an African summer, and leave this continent, to discover other hot countries, and live one hundred years of solitude, adventures and discovery in a village called Macondo, fall under the spell of a character called Melquiades, and listen entranced to tales of love, madness, and death, pass discreetly through the tunnel which leads to the understanding of human emotion, but first I had to open the greenhouse, and then even go to India to listen to Tagore, the sage, chanting his Gora, I must cast my net across the entire continent of Europe, so dear to our friend the Printer, I, the outsider, the rebel, the approximate man, I was just behind a guy called Doctor Zhivago who walked through the snow, it was the first time I’d seen what snow looked like, and there was this other guy in exile in Guernsey, I felt sorry for him, an old ancient with his face all riddled with lines, he never stopped writing, and doing drawings in India ink, he was inexhaustible, with bags of flesh beneath his eyes, he didn’t even hear me coming, and over his shoulder I read about the punishments he’d planned to inflict on the monarch who was looking for him, on whose account he couldn’t sleep, and whom he’d nicknamed Napoleon le Petit, I envied him his grey hair, he was truly somebody, I envied his flowing patriarchal beard, this man whose life spanned the century, apparently even as a child he said “I want to be Chateaubriand or nothing” and I admired his unswerving gaze, which I’d noticed before in an old Lagarde and Michard, which was my basic textbook back when I was a man like all the rest, and I found myself standing in his home, the Feuillantines, I had crossed the garden and hidden among the roses, and from there I was able to spy on the rebellious and womanizing grandfather, his back was stooped, his nose buried in a sheaf of scattered papers, which he was nervously correcting, sometimes he left off writing poems and began drawing hangmen, I was only a few steps from his house, I watched as he got to his feet, with difficulty, his work had exhausted him, he wanted to leave the house, walk for a while, just to stretch his legs, so I hid, not wishing to meet his gaze, and I left that place, and came back to Trois-Cents, from where I would often make a trip to the Atlantic Ocean, to cadge a few sardines from the Beninese fishermen, till the day I thought I saw an albatross, an ungainly bird, with wings which ached from his constant circling above the roaring waves, and who with his flight drew figures in the air, outlining the lands he had visited and the ships he had followed, and suddenly, close to the fishermen’s shacks, I saw a thin and wizened old man who said to me in a hoarse voice “young man, allow me to introduce myself, my name is Santiago, I’m a fisherman, my little boat is always empty, but I love to fish,” and alongside Santiago was a little boy, who was saddened to see him coming home each evening with an empty boat, but I had to go, I had to move on, that’s how I’ve always been, always searching for something I couldn’t name, I haven’t the stamina I used to have, my strength of mind has withered with the years, and now I drift like a lump of filth caught in the current of a diverted river
last time, I think it was the day I said I was going to have a bit of a rest and not write for a while, and before I left the bar I saw the Saviem truck that delivers our red wine arrive, I saw the racks of red wine stacked way high, and there were some enfants terribles running around it, and I thought to myself what a real shithole this country has become, with enfants terribles swarming round barrels of wine, and then one of the guys chased them away from the precious load, saying red wine wasn’t meant for enfants terribles, they’d have to wait till they were of age, and for the time being they’d have to make do with grapefruit juice, and Guigoz baby formula, or Bébé Hollandais or Bledilac and toys appropriate to their tender years, and the enfants terribles left in a terrible huff, and I began daydreaming about which of the thousands of bottles before me would be the first to wend its weary way down my gullet, while the man from the warehouse was unloading it with an air of detachment, which drove me crazy, in fact his attitude toward the bottles by means of which he earned his daily—and nightly—bread was downright disrespectful, I felt sorry for those bottles, there they were, rattling against each other, jostling for position, digging each other hard in the ribs, without getting out of line, and the man from the warehouse piled them all up neatly beside me, and I took a bottle at random and indicated to the Stubborn Snail that I’d pay for it later that day, not tomorrow, and he said “no problem, Broken Glass, if it’s you I’m not worried, if it was anyone else I’d say, credit is dead, it’s long since gone away,” now that’s real friendship, the friendship you get between me and the Stubborn Snail
Broken Glass Page 13