We rounded the corner to the right, and I could scarcely believe my eyes when I saw what lay opposite the ruined house. There, intact and imposing, was a huge multistory residence—a fucking mansion. It was surrounded by a high wall, over which we could see the tops of two tall palm trees. The remarkable thing was that except for a big shell hole in the perimeter wall, the place was unscathed. Even more remarkable was the fact that despite the large hole left by the rocket, the wall was still standing! The masons who had built it must have been incredible—real masters of their trade. There was no doubt in my mind: they must have been experts from abroad.
I wasn’t very familiar with the Kandahar district, and never knew that any of its residents had such fine villas. Whoever had built this one was surely a wealthy businessman, with millions of euros or dollars and not just paltry CFA francs. But if, like so many others, he was merely a bureaucrat on the government’s payroll, then there were only two possibilities: either he had siphoned off large sums from the state treasury, or he was mixed up in politics and was an active member of the party in power (anyway, in our country the two always went hand in hand). I was determined to find out which. Luckily for us, the other militias hadn’t yet come this way—we were the first.
We employed our usual tactics: volleys fired into the air, shouts and threats, kicks and blows with the butts of our guns against the front door and the windows, sudden and violent intrusion into the living room. I almost fell over when I saw the man who was cowering in a corner with his wife. Mr. Ibara! Ibara the customs inspector! The man who got a ten percent commission on all imported goods, the man who bought a new Mercedes every year, the man with the beautiful wife. People said he skimmed off more money from the nation’s customs revenues than our president did from its oil revenues. There wasn’t a soul in the country who hadn’t heard of him. And I was the one who would have the privilege of looting his house!
I hadn’t yet recovered from my surprise when Piston shouted from the garage: “He took the tires off the Lexus, and the Toyota is missing its battery!” Then he joined the rest of us in the living room, screwdriver in hand, and explained the situation to me. I turned to Ibara.
“Where are the tires for the Lexus and the battery for the Toyota?”
“I . . . I . . . They were stolen . . . Some militiamen came before you got here . . .”
“You think we’re stupid? Militiamen came through here and instead of taking the Mercedes they just took the tires? Instead of stealing the Toyota . . .”
“Yeah!” said Piston excitedly. “A Toyota Hi-Lux Double-Cab!”
“. . . they took nothing but the battery? You’re a thief yourself, Mr. Ibara. Would you have done that?”
I raised the muzzle of my weapon and he immediately dropped all pretense.
“Take everything, but please—spare our lives! The tires and the battery are buried behind the garage. Here are the keys to the vehicles. I beg of you—help yourself to anything you want, but don’t kill us . . .”
“I don’t like it when people take me for an idiot!” I shouted, whacking him with the butt of my gun. “Who else is hiding in this house?”
“I swear there’s no one here but us! Our children fled to the western districts. We stayed behind, just the two of us, to look after the house.”
“We’ll see about that,” I said.
I wasn’t about to be tricked again, after we’d found that kid hiding above the ceiling. Little Pepper and I fired a number of volleys into the wood ceiling, which wound up looking like a sieve. We checked under the beds, peered inside the cupboards and closets, poked into every nook and cranny of that huge villa. We didn’t turn up any people, but you could hardly say we didn’t find anything.
Two trunks filled with pagnes—waxes, superwaxes, batiks, java prints from Holland. Embroidered dresses from West Africa, a TV with a giant screen, a CD player, a DVD player, a computer. So many things, I can’t remember them all. We helped ourselves, took everything we wanted, ransacked the entire house. The Toyota truck was piled to the brim with our loot. We went into the kitchen. The freezer was crammed with food and the fridge contained bottles of cold beer—not the cheap local brew, but the real stuff, imported from Europe and even from Asia! I didn’t even know they made beer in China and Japan! No shit, that Mr. Ibara was rich. While we were dying of hunger, he could feast every single day. We went back to the living room, Piston knocking back a Tsingtao and me sipping Chivas Regal straight from the bottle. The only one who wasn’t drinking was Little Pepper—he was still struggling to get the corkscrew into his bottle of Dom Pérignon. I immediately saw why he wasn’t having any luck.
“You’ve got to take off the wire that holds the cork, stupid!” I said in my commando-leader’s voice. He untwisted the wire and again tried to get the corkscrew in.
“A champagne cork will pop out, you know.”
All three of us looked up. It was Mr. Ibara who had spoken these words, with a condescending smile. I didn’t like that at all. He seemed to be looking down his nose at us, as if we were Pygmies who’d just stumbled out of the forest, or bushmen who’d just seen a bottle of Coca-Cola fall from the sky to land at their feet and didn’t know what to make of it. Well, what the fuck! Did he take us for his Mayi-Dogos brothers—those village hicks who’d never seen a toilet and who pissed into the river over the sides of their canoes? Okay, so I’d never opened a bottle of champagne—but did he know how to dance the ndombolo like me? His scornful expression didn’t sit well with the others, either. Little Pepper took the bottle of champagne and hurled it at him. It grazed his ear and exploded against the finely lacquered wall.
“Somba liwa!” shouted Little Pepper, and began beating Mr. Ibara, kicking him savagely and clubbing him with the butt of his gun. The poor guy had a split lip and was bleeding all over the place.
“Please, please, stop!” begged his wife. “I’ll give you all the money we have, and all of my jewelry, if you’ll go away and leave us alone!”
“Come on, hand them over!” ordered Little Pepper.
She took down one of the paintings and slid back a panel in the wall—perfect camouflage to fool the eye. The Ibaras had a safe! Never in my life could I have imagined that anything was hidden behind the wall. She opened the safe and drew out a large envelope, which she tossed over to me. It was full of money—bills of ten thousand CFA francs, as well as American dollars. Mr. Ibara was filthy fucking rich. And everything he had was ours. He didn’t know that all his life he’d been working for us.
His wife handed me her jewelry box. Gold, diamonds, opals, rubies, and other precious stones I couldn’t even name. I took a good swig of Chivas. Lovelita, you were going to be spoiled beyond belief! I’d give you superwax pagnes, diamond necklaces, gold chains. And my other girlfriends would be showered with gifts, too. Little Pepper and Piston watched me with big eyes, as if I were going to make off with all the loot. I reassured them.
The woman joined her husband on the sofa, where he was sitting with his shoulders hunched. There’d been a rumor in the city that Mr. Ibara had imported a set of furniture all in leather—some said it came from South Africa, others from the United States—in a special cargo plane. Well, it was true—everything was leather: the sofa, the armchairs. I dragged over one of the armchairs and sat down in it, facing the couple. It was cushy and comfortable. I lit up one of Mr. Ibara’s cigars, a Davidoff. Being a militiaman was really nice—gave you a chance to sample the finer things in life.
“We’ve handed over everything—now please go!” begged the wife.
Despite the beating we’d given him, Mr. Ibara still radiated that sense of superiority he’d displayed when he realized we didn’t know how to open a bottle of champagne. The guy didn’t know that unlike Piston and Little Pepper, I had been to school, and he shouldn’t make the mistake of lumping us all together. As for him, he might be rich but he certainly wasn’t an intellectual, since the first thing you see in an intellectual’s home is always books—book
s overflowing onto the floor and spilling out of a library too small to hold them. Now, I had counted and recounted, but he didn’t have more than ten volumes (which I had immediately swiped for my own future library), a number far too paltry to make him an intellectual. I had to show him that he wasn’t more intelligent than me just because he was rich and could guzzle champagne anytime he wanted. The best way to demonstrate this was to give him a test.
Through the fog and fumes of the Chivas, I thought hack to the subject that had given me the most nightmares at school. And I decided that I’d ask him to state, right off the top of his head, the Pythagorean theorem. After slogging through many punitive exercises assigned by my teacher, I’d finally succeeded in memorizing that theorem, which says that the square of the sum of the hypotenuse . . . that the sum of the two sides of a triangle is the square . . . that the sum of the squares . . . Shit! I couldn’t remember it! Fortunately, I hadn’t yet uttered the question. Since I was a quick thinker, I instantly replaced the Pythagorean theorem with something more solid--a formula I knew like the back of my hand. Looking him straight in the eye, I asked him point-blank:
“Mr. Ibara, what’s the area of a triangle?”
He stared at me, surprised. I’m sure he was prepared for anything from me, but he wasn’t expecting this—a question of such high intellectual caliber. He no longer knew which of the two of us was off his rocker. Piston, who was uncapping a bottle of Sapporo, looked at me with his stupid cow-eyes. Normal for him. He’d never been educated and obviously didn’t understand a damn thing—any more than Little Pepper, who’d been defeated by his inability to open the bottle of champagne and was making do with a bottle of Smirnoff’s vodka.
But to tell the truth, as soon as the question escaped my lips I panicked—for all of a sudden I couldn’t remember the answer. Such things often happen to extremely intelligent people, you know. Our brain works so quickly, performing so many operations per second, that sometimes the circuits become overloaded and information can no longer flow to the seat of our memory, the way cars are unable to move in a traffic jam. So I racked my memory in vain. I retrieved the equation for the area of a square, the area of a rectangle, and even the area of a complex shape like a cube—but for the area of a triangle, nothing! With all possible speed I had to deflect the missile I’d just launched, before it turned like a boomerang and exploded in my face with a thousand stabs of humiliation. Fire another question to make him forget the preceding one.
“Mr. Ibara, tell me this instead: What is ten to the third power?”
Here, at least, I knew the answer: one thousand. While he continued to stare at me, wondering what on earth was going on, his wife spoke up:
“Ten to the third power is one thousand. Ten to the sixth power is one million. And if you want to know, the area of a triangle is equal to the base times the height, divided by two. And now leave us in peace—we’ve already given you everything we have!”
People had always warned me not to trust chicks—I should have remembered. This one was dangerous not only because she had the balls her husband lacked, but also because she was more intelligent. There’s nothing in the world more dangerous than a woman who’s smarter than her husband. But how could she know the area of a triangle, while I, who had been to school, had forgotten it? That annoyed me, and I got angry.
Abruptly I got to my feet and stubbed out my cigar on the arm of the chair. Cloud of smoke, smell of burned leather. Mr. Ibara trembled as if his own flesh were burning. I couldn’t see myself, but I knew that my eyes were madder than Giap’s when he was in one of his rages. I grabbed the woman and pulled her roughly toward me.
“What do you do, aside from being Mr. lbara’s wife?”
“I’m a high school teacher.”
Okay, now I understood everything. An intellectual. There was nothing in the world more dangerous than a woman intellectual.
“Whether you’re a teacher or not, I don’t like Mayi-pogo women!”
I picked up my gun.
“No!” cried the husband. “My wife isn’t a Mayi-Dogo! She’s a member of your tribe—she’s a Dogo-Mayi. Don’t hurt her! I’m the one who’s a Mayi-Dogo!”
When someone speaks to you in flawless French at the crack of dawn, before even drinking a cup of coffee, you have to take the person back to the village and pose a few simple questions, such as: Which one—the rooster or the drake—covers the female longer when he mates? Or: When growing on the tree, do the bananas in a bunch point up or down? Or, if you have no imagination, just ask the person to speak the tribal tongue.
I turned to the woman.
“Prove you’re a Dogo-Mayi! Say something in the tribal language.”
“I wasn’t born in this country and I didn’t grow up here. I don’t know the language.”
“Every good Dogo-Mayi was born in Dogo-Mayi Land and speaks the tribal tongue!”
“My father was the ambassador to Senegal, and I grew up speaking Wolof.”
“I’m a kind person,” I said. “I’ll give you one more chance to make up for your mistakes and save your skin. Can you at least understand our language?”
“Yes.”
So I asked her, “What’s a moughété? Is it a fish or a bird?”
She didn’t know—and small wonder! In our language, it was one of those rare words that someone who’d been born and raised in the city couldn’t possibly know. A moughété was a fire-resistant tree. It was the proud, solitary form you saw on the savannah after all the other vegetation had been destroyed by a brush fire. I’d learned the word by chance, during a conversation in which my grandfather and his wife were lamenting the destruction of their fields.
“Too bad for you! Who told you to be born in a foreign country? Next time, you should be born here. And even if you’re really a Dogo-Mayi, you’re no longer one anyway, because you’ve let a Mayi-Dogo suck your tits. You’re a traitor to your homeland and your tribe.”
“I don’t give a damn what you think! I love my husband!”
Furious, I shoved her away from me and she fell to the floor.
“Let’s kill the pair of them and get out of here,” said Little Pepper. “We’ve still got lots of houses to search.”
I picked up the bottle of Chivas, brought it to my lips, and took three good gulps. Here I was, in the home of Mr. Ibara—one of those high-and-mighty types who would drive past us in their luxury cars and sneer at us, ignoring the misery around them. One of those bigshots who embezzled state funds to build their villas and support their mistresses; who had no need to build hospitals or schools in this country, because as soon as they felt the first twinge of a headache they could hop on a plane to America or Europe and get medical care. Yeah, I was in the home of one of those bigshots. I’d parked my ass in the armchair of a bigshot. I’d drunk from the glass of a bigshot. In a minute, I was going to take a piss in the toilet of a bigshot. And then, as I gazed at Mr. Ibara’s wife sprawled on the floor, I had the urge to fuck the wife of a bigshot.
I threw myself on her, just like that, without warning. In no time, the only thing left for me to rip off was her panties. Mr. Ibara, who tried to come to her defense, got clubbed in the head for his pains. He fell back onto the leather sofa, firmly restrained by Piston and Little Pepper, who were snickering. He kept shouting, “Kill me if you want to, but don’t touch my wife!” The woman fought like a fury, trying to kick me and bite me. I gave her a few slaps, and after a while she got tired and ceased to struggle.
I rode her good—I pumped and I pumped. I was fucking the wife of a bigshot! It made me feel like a bigshot. And for the first time in my life, I was fucking an intellectual. I felt more intelligent. Finally, I came. “My turn!” cried Little Pepper as soon as he saw me get up. But he was so excited at the thought of screwing the wife of a rich and famous kingpin that no sooner had he dropped his pants than he shot his wad, which spurted all over Lady Ibara’s body. Immediately, his thing shrank and got soft. Piston, who was also looking on eagerly, c
ried, “Hey, let me have a turn!” Quickly he wiped away Little Pepper’s mess with the woman’s blouse and went at it, plunging his thing in the right place. Probably because he was so used to forcing in screws with his screwdriver, he didn’t pump back and forth like other guys—instead, his buttocks bored in as if he were driving a corkscrew into the woman. “Okay, I’m ready!” cried Little Pepper, who was now less delirious at the thought of making it with the wife of a bigshot, and was easily able to do the job as soon as Piston had withdrawn his corkscrew. I wish Stud had been with us—I’d have liked to see how he went about it, with his thing the size of an elephant’s trunk.
All this time, Mr. Ibara was literally weeping at his own impotence. Nothing humiliates a man more than seeing his wife violated before his eyes while he is unable to do anything about it. Mr. Bigshots of this world, don’t forget that little guys exist, too! And know that they’ll get you whenever they can. Remember this for your own good.
“I can’t leave without having some champagne,” said Little Pepper. “I’ve had a taste of a bigshot’s wife, and now I want to know what champagne tastes like, too.”
He was holding a bottle that Mr. Ibara had bought from a widow who’d written her name on the label—her name was Madame Clicquot. He handed the bottle to Mr. Ibara.
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