The dark plunged me into a hypnotic state.
It’s impossible for me to separate dream from reality. Shadows walked in front of me. Faces. Places. Voices. I’m unable to associate this phantasmagoric universe with a specific situation. For me, all of this is still confused. I feel like I’m at the bottom of a cliff, slowly rising back up, deluded in the ascent by the prospect of false happiness, which I aim toward, flying through the sky. The wind gives me wings. I use them. All I’ve got to do is lift my arms to the sky to take flight. Is that why my eyelids grow heavy?
I stare at that smiling, reedy silhouette while I’m dozing off. I recognize the silhouette. I would recognize that one among thousands.
It’s Moki.
It’s him. Why does your face look a little thin to me? It’s really you, Moki. I recognized you. And that man next to you? Who drove him all the way here? I recognize him, too. His name is Préfet. He’s drunk. As usual. He’s looking at his watch. As usual. He sizes me up, deciding that I’m the man for the job, that I’ll do a good job with this business at the end of the month. I owe him that, I tell you, after everything he’s done for me. You tell me it’s also in my own self-interest; I should think about that, you add. Instead of staying put, not doing a damn thing, Préfet says. And you give him your agreement. I have nothing to say about that. My voice doesn’t count. Préfet will come back to rue du Moulin-Vert the day after tomorrow. Very early in the morning. We’ll make the rounds together. You made that decision together, a job for rookies, to use the words Préfet used that morning. Everyone has done this work. Even you, Moki, you assured me. Everybody started out with this. Later, I would do other things if I wanted to. It’s a job that shouldn’t be difficult for me to accomplish. You worked it out together—I know that, Moki. I’m talking to you. Why do you come after me even in my sleep? Do we remain connected even here? I make no mistake. It’s definitely your face.
Where are you now? . . .
I would like for everything to be in chronological order. At times, memory seems like a mountain of garbage that has to be patiently sifted through just to retrieve a miniscule object, the trigger that sends everything adrift, linked together in a succession of events irrespective of a man’s will.
The tangle of events burns my temples. I was surprised at how things happened. I would like for everything to be clear. That there be no ambiguity. I have nothing to hide. Not to mention nothing to lose. Much less, something to gain. I did not hurt anyone, as I will point out. I acted like all the others, those in our circle. I’m not one of those that holds back, and Moki knows that very well. Préfet is convinced of it, even though that guy is hard to please.
What’s important at this point is to understand.
To look at everything without truncating or falsifying the facts. I don’t want to relive the illusion that started me down this road. I figure I’ll be accused of being a false friend, accused of treachery, or betrayal, and the height of irony, of ingratitude, me who has never been presumptuous and who gave the best of myself. That’s what I expect.
It’s difficult for me to step back from this. Things are happening fast. Tonight? Tomorrow? Day after tomorrow? I have no idea what day it is. My reminiscence is an unavoidable internal examination to ease my conscience, freed from the sludge of remorse that crushes my thoughts . . .
With perseverance and dogged determination for a shovel, I’ll take whatever time it takes to exhume all those moments that catapulted me from near and far, all the way to this place, more than six thousand kilometers from the land where I was born.
PART ONE
The Country
It is better to dream one’s life than to live it, though even living it is to dream it.
—Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
MOKI AND HIS RETURN
MOKI’S SHADOW
MOKI’S FATHER
GENERAL DE GAULLE
THE WHITE VILLA
TAXIS
THE TALE OF ARISTOCRATS
THE NEWBORN
PARIS IS A BIG BOY
In the beginning, there was the name. A humdrum name.
A two-syllable name: Moki . . .
At the beginning, there was that name.
Moki is standing in front of me. I see him again. He’s talking to me. He is giving me instructions. He tells me to take care of the rest with Préfet. Don’t ask him any questions. Just do what he asks me to do. Moki is there, his gaze turned upward toward the sky. He rarely takes a good look at his go-betweens. I listen to him. Continuously. Rapt.
Am I ready?
Have I seen to everything?
He is in a hurry. He doesn’t have time. We have to hurry. Don’t sleep on your feet, that’s his expression. We’re supposed to cross paths at noon at the Arc de Triomphe. Don’t say a word to anyone. Come alone. Make sure that you’re not being followed. Take a different route than the one we usually do. Don’t get there too early. Waiting around is a bad sign. You’ll end up getting caught that way. Be there on time. Not one minute later. Not one minute earlier. Everything happens so fast. You have to shape up. That’s the way it is with Moki . . .
Moki is there.
I still don’t realize that he’s the one who made the arrangements to get me into France. I can’t figure out that he’s also the one who took me in and put a roof over my head in this country.
I was one of those who thought that France was for the others. France was for those who we used to call the go-getters. It was that faraway country, inaccessible despite its fireworks that shimmered even in the least of my dreams and that left me, when I awoke, with a taste of honey in my mouth. It is true, I had been secretly working in my field of dreams on the wish to cross the Rubicon, to go there someday. It was a common wish; there was nothing special about that wish. You could hear that wish expressed from every mouth. Who of my generation had not visited France by mouth, as we say back home. Just one word, Paris, was enough for us to meet as if by magic spell in front of the Eiffel Tower, at the Arc de Triomphe, and on the Champs Elysées. Boys my age seduced their girls, warming them with the serenade: I’ll be going to France soon. I’m going to live in the center of Paris. We were allowed to dream. It didn’t cost anything. No exit visa was necessary, no passport, no airline ticket. Think about it. Close your eyes. Sleep. Snore. And there we were, every night . . .
Reality caught up with us. The barriers stood insurmountably high. The first obstacle for me was my parents’ poverty. We weren’t dying of hunger, but a trip to France was nothing but a luxury to them. We could do without it. We could live without having gone there. Moreover, the Earth would continue to rotate. The sun would follow its course and would visit other faraway places; we would cross paths in the same places, in our fields or at the marketplace at slaughter time or when the peanuts were harvested. My parents would ruin themselves for no good reason by contributing to an adventure like that.
I imagined their response: “What the hell will you do in the white man’s country? You abandoned your studies a long time ago!”
The other obstacle was my negative opinion of myself. I was hard on myself. I did not accord myself a single positive quality. I saw the dark side of things and imagined only the worst.
Convinced that I was a good-for-nothing, lacking self-motivation, I thought of myself as a sluggish, spineless character, incapable of resisting the vicissitudes of life outside my own country. To travel in search of success required a mind that was always on the lookout. You can’t look back once you’ve stepped into the wrong river. You need to swim with a strong stroke, and then swim some more to reach the shore.
Leaving means, first of all, being able to fly with your own wings. To know how to land on a branch and continue the flight the next day all the way to the new land, the land that pushed the migrant to leave his footprints far behind in order to encounter a different place, an unknown place . . .
Could I leave? Fly with my own wings? I wasn’t certain. I was used to living with
my parents. I could count on a roof over my head there and meals. That’s how I could nestle in my laziness all day long without having to answer to anyone.
To my mind, France was not a good refuge for a dormouse or snails. I compared it to a world where the clocks were set ahead and where it was necessary to continually catch up with time, without a break, the only way to live. France needed quick, well-informed, resourceful people like Moki. France needed go-getters. Quick people, ready to bounce back from inextricable situations as swiftly as a pond mosquito.
I didn’t fit that profile . . .
I will remember.
It’s here and now that I have to crack open the shell in an effort to remember. Cast aside the night that blurs my vision. Scrape the dirt, find tracks, dust them off, and set them aside so I can put things back where they belong. It might be too late afterwards . . .
In the beginning, there was the name: Moki.
I don’t summon the name Préfet, the man that I knew through his go-between, a little later, when I was already on the rue du Moulin-Vert. I won’t summon his name. Préfet. I will have time to remember him. He’s not getting out of things this way. All I’ll need to do is blow on the embers of reminiscence. I will see his face reappear exactly as I saw it that day, in Moki’s presence. I will instantly remember that warm handshake, his shifty eyes, and the smell of alcohol . . .
For the moment all I see is Moki.
He is the one at the beginning of the whole thing. I’m sure that our lifelines are crossed. That my own personality was blurred and faded to his advantage. That we have the same breath, the same aspirations, the same fate. The same fate? Yes, so how is it that he doesn’t find himself in here with me?
And what if I were only his shadow? If I were only his double? I’ve asked myself that sometimes. We don’t look anything like each other. At least not physically. He is taller than me. Older, too. He’s a little heavier than me right now. Me, I stayed puny, despite the dishes made with semolina and potato starch that certain compatriots advised me to eat as soon as I arrived in France, in the hope that this skinny body would gain a few kilos and stop tarnishing the image of our country in the eyes of real Parisians: the men with chubby cheeks and white skin, who cut an elegant figure.
No, Moki and I bear no physical resemblance. I lived like his shadow. I was always behind him.
Especially in the days preceding my journey. I was nothing but a shadow. A shadow is nothing by itself. It needs a presence and a virgin surface on which to print its outline. Sometimes a shadow wants to make a big mistake. It wants to take the initiative. I know that. But a shadow molts at its own risk and peril.
I was Moki’s shadow.
He was the one who created me. In his own image. His manner of living bankrolled my dreams. A way of living that I will not forget . . .
I remember the many trips he made home while I still hadn’t set foot in France. The white man’s country had changed his life. Something had shifted; there was an undeniable metamorphosis. He was no longer the frail young man about whom we used to say, if he’s as thin as a dry stalk of lantana, it’s because he ate standing up and slept on top of an old mat. There was a yawning gap. It wasn’t the same Moki. He was robust, radiant, and in full bloom. I could take note of this, with a tinge of bitterness, because his parents’ home was next door to our own. This intimacy compelled me to see his comings and goings over the years. I studied his doings and his gestures with a magnifying glass. France had transformed him. It had chiseled his habits and prescribed another way of life for him. We took note of him with envy.
According to Moki, a Parisian should not live in a hovel like his father’s any longer—a shack made from mahogany planks topped by a corrugated sheet metal roof. Their hut was at the edge of a gully, just before the main street. Stunned passersby wondered by what miracle this home had survived the storms during the rainy season. It’s not as if Moki’s father was indifferent to the dilapidated state of his home. On the contrary, many years before, taking courage in his own two hands, the old man began building another house. This one would be solid, like the one he dreamed of having before retirement. He bought sand, gravel, and a few bags of cement. And that’s not all. He had to pay the labor costs and provide for the workers’ needs. Back home, skilled workers were fed and paid in red wine from France, invited into your home in the evening with their apprentices, for you to serve their every need with your body and soul. It was the owner who had to kowtow, to wait on them hand and foot, and to beg them for months on end. The numbskulls that challenged the way things were done watched their own projects drag on for ages.
Moki’s father was one of the latter.
First of all, he could not convince this union of slackers to drastically change their methods of work. The most obvious reason was mainly because of his cash flow. Without financial means, his best intentions were translated into pathetic and laughable creations. He simply piled up rows of bricks and traced the foundation. He quickly ran out of steam. His pockets emptied sooner than expected. He didn’t know which moneylender to turn to. They all slammed the door in his face. His hidebound workers would not work for credit. The work came to a halt. The old man threw in the towel. And so he began to experience the nagging headaches of small proprietors who abandon their projects before completion.
Bricks didn’t reach their destination. He counted on starting the work again someday, so he outlined his lot by piling one brick on top of another. He filled his Sundays—the day for small projects in the courtyard—by counting his bricks. He gathered and cemented together any bricks that had come loose. He underestimated the gangs that worked at night: some youths and other builders or future owners of solid homes who needed only two or three bricks to finish a facade, a window, a stairway, or water well.
Over time, the old man’s enclosure shrank, becoming smaller and more confined. His goods, if they hadn’t been stolen from him, were found in the street. Drivers of big trucks with bad brakes used them to brace their vehicles in place. And to top it off, greenish foam coated the bricks during the rainy season.
One day, he finally flew into a rage and went from house to house to complain and utter threats about this behavior, which in his opinion was a deliberate plot to keep him from finishing the construction of the most beautiful villa in the neighborhood . . .
We saw that it was Moki, during one of his trips back home, who decided to resume construction. The Parisian surprised his father. He surprised us. None of us had ever seen such an industrious undertaking in the neighborhood before. He hired a dozen masons who were enticed to work by getting paid in advance and in amounts that made our mouths water. They worked under their own boss from morning until very late at night by the light of lanterns held by apprentices who swayed with sleepiness. Moki closely supervised the work. He gave in to the workers’ whims. We thought he even spoiled them. He picked them up at their homes by car in the morning and drove each of them right to the front of their own homes at night. He tipped them every day. At the worksite he congratulated them over a small brick set just so, or even for pushing a wheelbarrow of sand from a little further away. He established a father and son relationship with the oldest, the lead worker. This one called him “my son” and Moki responded “my father.” He knew how to find that man’s soft spot and stroke his ego.
“My throat is dry, my son. . . .”
“My father, I’ll bring you some red wine from France.”
It didn’t take long to see the results.
After two and a half months, we woke up in front of an immense white villa. The doors and shutters were painted green. We were all bedazzled. We had no idea that those facades, those columns, the beams and paving stones, would fit together and turn into something so stunning. The whole thing developed the way a puzzle is pieced together. Bricks were lifted and broken in two or three pieces for the foundation; the apprentices rolled barrels of water from the river to the site; bags of cement were torn open with pointed sh
ovels; fine-grained sand and small stones were brought every other day by a dump truck belonging to the Pointe-Noire township; a hammer blow here; the strike of a pick there; the planing of a wood plank; a pinch of pliers on that ironwork; a coat of paint on the doors and windows; sawing rafters from limbs of trees famed for their strength to guarantee a solid roof. These workers were simultaneously carpenters, architects, cabinetmakers, ironworkers, plumbers, and well diggers. They worked on an assembly line.
One thing led to another, and the house was born.
There it was, in front of us. We could study it and get a measure of the toil of those workers who outdid themselves throughout that period of time. An immense villa. There it stood, majestic, on all four sides. Its aluminum tiles glistened in the sun’s rays. It stood out from far away and was taller than the nearby shacks that were nothing more than a Capernaum whose disorder was an eyesore, like a favela. There were two worlds. One belonged to the Moki family and the other to the rest of the neighborhood.
This sense of the dichotomy of these two worlds grew sharper when Moki installed electricity and a water pump on their lot. Houses with lighting and access to potable water were rare. Installing this water pump proved useful for the neighborhood. We paid a modest sum of money on days when we filled two or three casks of water. Young people hung out in the evening on the main street in front of the villa to take advantage of the light and talk the night away until Moki’s father came out and put an end to that.
There were more surprises in store for us . . .
A year after the villa was built, we saw two Toyotas arrive. Moki had chartered and sent them from France so his family could make a profit off them as taxis. That protected the family from utter destitution.
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