Blue White Red

by Alain Mabanckou

  My uncle was wearing an Adidas jogging outfit and flip-flops. He normally wore a suit. Not on Sundays. He didn’t alter his habits.

  My sister had loaned one of her dresses to Adeline. It was already stained. The baby had thrown up on her shoulder and was crying. Adeline was unable to keep him from screaming. The roar of airplanes taking off and landing must have scared him. The kid nervously pulled away the rubber pacifier that was put in his mouth to calm him down. My parents no longer held back their tears. Neither did my sister. Adeline feigned sobbing.

  My father took my hand.

  I was waiting for this. We left the lobby and went toward a quieter area of the airport. We were surrounded by tall dry grass. Butards, weary of flying high in the sky in dry season with its huge cumulonimbus clouds, practically shaved our heads and perched on nearby shrubbery. An airport security truck passed us. It jerked and coughed black fumes from a crooked exhaust pipe, eroded and beat up by ceaseless scraping against the airport tarmacs. The driver in a blue uniform waved his index finger at us. He wanted to tell us that we were in an unsafe area. That tall dry grass was an emergency landing strip. We didn’t follow his instructions. We walked. We kept walking. The plane wasn’t leaving until eight o’clock in the evening. We were plenty early. My father had wanted it that way, despite what Moki had told him.

  “I’ve never taken a plane in my life,” he said, “but I know that just like the train, it’s the traveler who must wait, not the reverse . . .”

  And so we were among the first at the airport. My uncle packed us into his car like a sardines in a can to get us there around four o’clock in the afternoon. We went through the neighborhood, then downtown Pointe-Noire. Friends waved as we went by. We had no heavy luggage to check in. That was the reason my father suggested that we go where it was nicer. We sat down on a grassy mound. The airport was on the other side, a little further away.

  My father began his speech with generalities. He beat around the bush, cracked a few jokes about the neighborhood girls, about how they wiggled their butts whenever they saw me lately.

  Suddenly he turned serious. He warned me to be careful in life. I saw where he was heading. Don’t touch White men’s women. He had heard from one of his friends, a cook who had lived in Europe, that a White man wouldn’t hesitate to use a gun or a chainsaw over business about a woman, while we, in our country, could marry several women if we wanted to.

  “Don’t marry a White woman. They also told me that men who marry White women disown their families. Is that what you want? Think of your old mother, of your father, of your sister, and now this child you’re leaving with us. If you get married, I have the right to come to your house whenever I want, without making an appointment. That’s not how it is with women over there. I’ve been told that. In their homes, when they’re in the middle of eating, instead of inviting an unexpected guest to the table, they give him a newspaper to read. No . . . not those women. They prepare food and count only the number of people that live under their roof. My mother and my grandmother have always cooked by counting on a surprise visit by a family member or a stranger. These are the values they passed on to us and that are part of us—my brothers and sisters, your uncles and your aunts. They should not be lost. Open the door for whoever knocks, whoever it may be, whether he does it for something to eat or to drink a glass of water. Food is nothing. We eat in the morning, we throw it out the next day, holding our noses because it smells so bad. Your conscience, your education, they don’t stink. They are odorless. I don’t know how it is, that White country. Be careful, keep your eyes open, and don’t act until your conscience—not someone else’s—guides you.

  “Yes, it’s easier to correct a mistake committed by error of your own conscience. These will be my final words, I, your father, who has nothing and envies nothing belonging to anyone . . .”

  He took a look around us.

  No one had wandered into this area. He rummaged in the pockets of his boubou and took out a dried palm leaf and a clump of earth wrapped in a scrap of paper.

  “Of course you don’t know where this red earth comes from . . .”

  I shook my head “no” and gave him an imploring look for him to tell me where he had gotten it. He told me that it was earth from the grave of his mother, my grandmother. He told me to get down on my knees. I did so without hesitation. He held my head and chanted, eyes closed. Then he told me to lie down on the ground with my eyes closed.

  I carried out his instructions.

  He stepped over me three times and then asked me to get up. He embraced me with all his strength and I saw tears pour like a storm down his wrinkled cheeks . . .

  Going back toward the airport, we encountered the airport security truck heading in the opposite direction. The driver stared at us through a spiral of smoke, and we heard the exhaust pipe grate along the pavement for a long time. We returned, my father and me, hand in hand, and suffered my mother’s terse pique. She was worried that we had taken our time to talk about who knows what when we had had the chance to do that back at the house. My father calmed her down with a severe look and asked if Moki and his parents had arrived. My uncle, taciturn and a bit withdrawn, pointed his head toward where the Parisian was weighing a heavy suitcase. He was there, not with his parents but with Dupond and Dupont. Those two, with their infamous brashness, rubbed my parents the wrong way more than a little when they blurted out in unison that their father and mother were used to this sort of travel and didn’t trouble themselves with it anymore . . .

  Night had fallen. We had to move on.

  Moki and I were on the other side of the concourse. We had passed through security control at the airport. They made us wait in a glass-enclosed room where we had to undergo final verification of our papers before boarding. From this room, we could only wave from afar to those who had accompanied us. I had embraced my family beforehand. My mother was speechless, her throat choked with emotion. She imprisoned me in her arms as if she would never see me again. I looked at her, stared at her closely. I, too, had the feeling that I was seeing her for the last time. This is the feeling all sons have when they leave their parents. Fear of the distance, of growing old, torn apart by regret—these make up so much of the pain that gnaws at the guts of the person staying behind as well as the one who is leaving. That brave and devoted woman, my mother, was from that point on another woman to me. The separation gave me stomach cramps. My mother wouldn’t let go of me. She offered no more words, leaving her tears to express the sadness she suffered. With my father, it was just a quick hug, while my mother kept an eye on him, still spiteful over our complicit jaunt in the fields around the airport.

  My uncle vigorously shook my hand and gave me a pat on the shoulder. My sister smiled, but she had tears in her eyes. Adeline kept her eyes fixed on the ground. She didn’t dare meet mine. In truth, I also avoided her gaze. I had taken the child in my arms to hug him. I did it for her as well. This released the tension among family members, who noticed my tacit act of recognition of the union between her and me . . .

  Next to Moki I was a skinny reed. The delay weighed on me in that room. All I had was a little gym bag. There was almost nothing inside it. Two pair of pants, a shirt, a pair of black shoes, my toiletries, a photo of my family, of my son, and of Adeline. I was lightly dressed and in light slippers, despite the fact that Moki had warned me that autumn could be tough for someone who knew only a tropical climate . . .

  Our identities checked out, and we boarded. My heart pounded. The dream was becoming reality. Moki and I were seated side by side. Out the porthole, I saw the country shrink and become nothing but a miniscule dot, sporadically illuminated.

  Did Moki notice the hot tears that misted my eyes without my knowing why I was crying? Where did they come from? They must have come from inside me. They clung to their course, somewhere in my unconscious. Take-off had messed up everything. The idea of being ripped away; of being tossed from a known world to another yet unknown. All these thoug
hts precipitated the outpouring of these tears.

  There I was. Me, the shadow of Moki.

  We went through the clouds and penetrated chasms of sky. Deep darkness, monotone and mysterious, slowly swallowed us. The feeling that the airplane wasn’t moving induced sleepiness that, unsuccessfully, I tried to evade so as not to disappoint Moki. Unfortunately, I could barely still listen to his voice. He spoke to me. Snatches of words. Names: Préfet, Benos, Soté . . . A place: rue du Moulin-Vert . . .

  We would travel all night long, it seemed to me I heard it said. Paris would not appear until the first glint of dawn. That was what he told me.

  I wasn’t listening to him anymore . . .

  PART TWO

  Paris

  It seems that the gates of hell

  border those of heaven.

  The great joiner designed them

  in the same coarse wood.

  —Abdellatif Laabi, Le Spleen de Casablanca

  RUE DU MOULIN-VERT (14th arrondissement, Paris)

  MARCEL BONAVENTURE

  ERIC JOCELYN-GEORGE

  CHTEAU-ROUGE (18th arrondissement, Paris)

  THE REAL ESTATE AGENT

  THE ITALIAN

  CONFORAMA

  THE WORKHORSE

  PRÉFET

  SEINE-SAINT-DENIS

  I must remember those days.

  It’s a must.

  I mustn’t let myself be distracted by a single dark cloud of forgetfulness. Everything flows in the slowness of memory. The past is not just a worn-out shadow that walks behind us. It can get ahead of us, precede us, bifurcate, take another path and get lost somewhere. We must find it, lift it on our shoulders, and get it back on its feet.

  I must remember.

  As if it were yesterday. As if I were reliving those moments back then, with the candor of the débarqué. The eyelids finally open up on those days, on those nights.

  Try harder.

  Resist easy abandonment, abdication, and resignation. Somewhere the clarity of rebellious truth awaits me, truth that refuses to lie low . . .

  I spent hours flagellating myself to punish these limbs, this head, these eyes, these ears that led my good judgment astray and abandoned me like cowards to my fate.

  To flagellate myself wasn’t a solution either. Tranquility does not reconquer the spirit until a man takes responsibility for his actions. I would simply like to find a passage, a way out of this abyss. I am not pleading for memory to help in order to beg for some sort of absolution. What was done is done now. All my thoughts are in motion, on their feet in Indian file. What concerns me is to direct their march such that they are not derailed on the slope of regrets . . .

  I must remember those days.

  Those days so long ago. So near. Those days that brought me here. Me, Marcel Bonaventure. You heard me right. Marcel Bonaventure . . .

  I say this name because over time I became accustomed to it, even though it isn’t my name. In reality, I don’t know who I am anymore. Here, one has an infinite ability to split oneself in two, to no longer be what one was in order to be what the others would like you to have been and even sometimes what they would like you to be. Of course, under the circumstances, they’re right. One can’t do otherwise. This is how one builds one’s own fortress. I don’t dare say one’s own grave because I’m counting on getting out of here, no matter what happens.

  Use another name.

  Forget his name because that’s necessary for the cause. Distance yourself from the ordinary world, the everyday world. Be on the margins of everything.

  Me, Marcel Bonaventure, I vow and reavow that up until the day that I landed on French soil, that Monday, October 15th, at dawn, my name was still Massala-Massala. The same name repeated twice. In our dialect, that means: those who remain, remain, those who stay will stay. The name carried by my father, my grandfather, and my great-grandparents. I thought the name was eternal, immutable. I thought the name reflected the image of a past, of an existence, of a family history, of its conflicts, its rifts, its grandeur, its decadence, and its dishonor. Yes, I thought that the name was sacred. Not something to change like clothing to dress appropriately for any given party. A name like that is not taken without knowing where it came from and who else besides you carries the name.

  But what is a name in our little world onto ourselves, here, far from our homeland? The name, a label on merchandise, a passport that opens borders, a permanent pass. The name is worth nothing.

  The name carries no history whatsoever for us . . .

  I am Marcel Bonaventure—that, I’ll remember. No matter what becomes of me. I can’t cross that name out of my memory anymore. I carry it like I carry the name Massala-Massala. I’m no longer just one person. I am several at the same time. Someone in the street says the name Marcel Bonaventure? I turn around. It has to do with having a split personality.

  I don’t even speak of the other name, Eric Jocelyn-George. No, I would rather not garble the intelligibility of my remembrance. It’s confusing enough as it is without speaking of this third name: Eric Jocelyn-George. It’s still me. Me, Massala-Massala. Every name has its own history. Every name is a time period, a fact of my existence.

  Where are they, the ones from our milieu?

  So where are they? I sound out the walls of silence. Why do I hear nothing but the echo of their voices? They all had wings to fly when the stone, thrown by a rowdy child, had fallen smack in the middle of the courtyard where we were arguing over a bread crumb, like birds. I wanted to fly away, too. I was nothing but a fledgling. You don’t fly all of a sudden without running into a void, the force of gravity. You have to proceed by steps. Climb the walkway of patience. First, stretch out the wings, then flap them to catch the wind. Curl up the legs and leave the nest for the first flight. I was just a fledgling. I flew by mimicry.

  So that’s why I ended up here . . .

  I had been living in Paris for a few months.

  I was getting over my bewilderment. The shock of reality gnawed away at me. Moki, for better or worse, made an effort to console me, sensing that I was sinking into disillusionment. There was nothing more he could do. I was annoyed with him for not being more explicit about a certain number of things. About the essentials. I certainly wouldn’t have made the same decision.

  I guessed his sin was one of omission. A voluntary omission. The most serious there was. One that so closely brushes up against lies, hypocrisy, and cowardice that it takes a long time to absolve.

  I didn’t speak to him during those first weeks. Then not for a whole month. I closed in on myself. I built a wall between him, his people that would come and go, and me—immobile, taciturn, brooding over the bitter leaves of resentment that inflamed my lungs. He could tell I was vexed. He and the others had all noticed it. A kind of bitterness with a brackish reflux that came up in my throat when I thought about my surroundings. My silence unsettled them. As for Moki, he expected a more virulent reaction in response to the scene that confronted me. A reaction of revolt. He thought that I would demand an explanation. But no. Silence. Only silence. None of those types of questions. Why? . . . How is it that? . . . But where are the? . . .

  None of those types of questions.

  Everything happened fast.

  Naked reality. The impossibility of backing out. The obligation to integrate myself in the milieu. Time itself seemed stubborn, suspended on branches of disillusionment. Sleep. Always sleep. Moki’s feigned sorrow, saying that he had done everything in his power for me to be in France. The rest was entirely up to me. And my will to succeed and to get out of this. He would pull a lot of strings for me. For now, I remained pensive, not knowing where to orient myself. I was hanging on Moki’s willpower and, as I realized later, on the will of others in that milieu . . .

  It wasn’t so much the idleness that hacked me apart but the desire to write letters home. It’s an urgent need in the minds of everyone who leaves a chapter of themselves thousands of kilometers away. From then on, words
are the only connection. A letter in the mailbox is the good news of the day or, rather, the month when there are longer intervals between those missives, as time erodes desire . . .

  I remember the story of the letter from Marie-Josée. It was that day I was seized by profound nostalgia. I felt this anguishing void, this desire to write home, to my parents, to a few friends, to give them news of me and to talk to them about our existence here. My mother’s face appeared before me—very emotional, ravaged by my absence. My father’s face, serene but brushed with well-disguised worry. The tearful laughter of my always carefree sister. I imagined that she was confident, sure of herself. Adeline had, in my thoughts, lowered her face. The child whimpered on her knees. My uncle was there with his sloppy clothes. Therefore, it had to be a Sunday. Otherwise, he would have been wearing a suit and necktie. The grass yellowed by sunsets of the dry season. Nostalgia made ramparts necessary. There is no escape from the call that rumbles from the underground of the soul like a stampeding herd of buffalo frightened by a brush fire. I had prepared several letters written in the ink of anger and exasperation. About a dozen. Our life in Paris was described in detail, without sugar coating. Names and places were referred to. Back home, they would know exactly what I was doing. Where I was living. In what condition. And with whom. What Moki was doing. What all the others were doing. They would know everything . . .

  I had to write.

  What compelled me to ask, at the last moment, what Moki thought? He insisted on opening the letters. He read them one after the other and declared that I was naïve, irresponsible, a poor hick.

  “Who do you think you are? You’re wasting your time; they won’t believe you back home. Those people back there have never changed, and they won’t take pity on the tears you will have spilled. They love the dream. You hear me, the dream. They are children. They go crazy for candy and don’t understand that to buy it, you need money that you get at the cost of tremendous effort and sacrifice. Don’t explain to them that Paris is a big boy. Everything you write is of interest to nobody but yourself, and you’ll be the laughingstock of the neighborhood . . .