Blue White Red

by Alain Mabanckou

  I met Benos.

  He was a short compatriot who had stayed in his shell for eighteen years in Paris without going back to the country even once. His coarse, tattered clothes were the telltale signs of his devotion to a business that ate up all his time. He wore the same baggy clothes. A shabby boubou outfit with a red turtleneck pullover inside. His Palladium loafers were threadbare, and his toes, with hard, blackened nails, stuck out. He could have been taken for a pygmy parachuted into the middle of the city. Stocky, his face was etched in keeping with the traditions of his tribe, the Teke from the south of Congo. He smelled like sweat and could not have known what a good shower was. He scratched his head. Very curly hair, dusted a reddish-brown and infested with sediment of disgusting dandruff. He was bright-eyed. He was someone to be reckoned with. His grubby appearance fooled those who didn’t associate with him. He forthrightly proclaimed himself a businessman. We dubbed him Conforama, just like the box store in France. Benos was the household appliance and hi-fi specialist. He immersed himself in an activity coveted by the majority of Parisians. He knew all about the latest technologies in hi-fi and household appliances and walked around with a big bag stuffed with catalogs. If someone ordered something from him, he would deliver the merchandise to their home the next day. No paperwork to be signed. Or even seen. Or known of. His favorite expression was: “Short reckonings make long friends.” To the best of my knowledge, he never showed how he worked in broad daylight. Much less work with someone else who could have stolen his intel—those were his words—and jeopardized his business. He had to learn on his own. To teach his methods would be to give the business over to someone who one day would no longer be satisfied with his appetite for gains. Those who worked with him did as they were told. They were nothing more than intermediaries. They received, delivered, and deposited in Benos’s name. Someone had to teach him the tricks of the trade. I learned that he got his start with Préfet, the man who Moki was keen to introduce me to and who, to hear the number of times that his name was mentioned every day, was the most sought after man in this milieu. I didn’t meet him until after I had met Boulou, the real estate agent, and Soté, the workhorse.

  Boulou was the real estate specialist and was aptly nick-named “the real estate agent.” As his nickname indicated, he worked in the world of property. He worked with compatriots with the names of bulldozers as their surnames. Their mission was to comb through the buildings in an arrondissement to find unoccupied apartments, offering financial compensation to the squatters. They were paid in proportion to the size of the accommodation they were squatting. The Bulldozers acted under the meticulous orders of Boulou, the real estate agent. A real estate agent like Boulou ruled in every arrondissement of Paris, and he jealously guarded his exclusive hold of his fiefdom.

  The fourteenth arrondissement became Boulou’s only two years ago. He made sacrifices to attain this exclusivity. Sometime before him, a Zairian—with shoulders as wide as an armoire and who could bludgeon someone with his fists—was enthroned there. The latter was the type who would drown his adversary in the Seine as a sick joke. Having embarked for France in a ship’s hold, the Zairian hoped to pursue a career as a professional boxer in Europe. He was sidetracked from his ambitions by worship of alcohol and dope. He ran with a gang from the Les Halles neighborhood and was implicated in several robberies, and always managed to extricate himself. Rumor had it that he trained to be a professional security guard, a dog trainer, and that he worked as a bouncer in several nightclubs in Paris, where he threw as many punches as he wanted at people who tried to get in without meeting the dress code or without knowing the password. His reputation as an implacable tough guy and colossus had been established. It was said that he had gone so far as to devour, all by himself, a barbecued sheep that his North African friends prepared for him at Château Rouge, in thanks for the empty lodgings he had given them as a squat.

  Boulou had worked with this Zairian. Let’s just say that this apprenticeship was no cakewalk. He watched the Zairian work. He learned his secrets. He probed everything he knew. He got his jokes. He jotted them down in his notebook. He went to the confabs with the former dog trainer and his clients. He learned, little by little, how to negotiate a price, how to change locks, install electricity, gas, water, and a telephone line in a house that he didn’t own.

  He was punched out by the Zairian when he messed up. He put up with it. He hoped to one day get hold of maybe a quarter of the fiefdom. He didn’t get too close to the fanatic when the latter spoke to him; you couldn’t see his jabs and uppercuts coming. You found yourself suddenly on the floor, with an open cut on the eyebrow, bleeding.

  Moreover, he was not surprised when the Zairian told him that he was giving up the fourteenth arrondissement for the quieter neighborhood of Champigny, in Val-de-Marne. The strongman, Goliath, drew back and nestled into an anticipated retirement in the suburbs. The Zairian set the price of the arrondissement at thirty thousand French francs.

  “It’s an insider’s price for a friend; take it or leave it. I’ve got a compatriot of yours who has offered me forty-five thousand francs . . .”

  Boulou raised that sum by breaking his piggybank and soliciting help from Préfet and Conforama.

  The deal went down right away. Boulou had become the new master of property in the fourteenth arrondissement. He applied everything he had learned. First of all, always wear a suit to impress the clientele; act serious. Shake a bunch of keys. Look at your watch all the time. Go around in a small car. Speak in French and not in African languages. Carry a cell phone. Carry a briefcase full of files . . .

  He was well aware that to spot an empty apartment required sacrifices and considerable talent. You had to fight your way, even in your own neighborhood. He hired the Bulldozers for that work. They discreetly penetrated every building in his fiefdom. If they didn’t know the code to get into the building, they patiently waited out front for hours on end. A renter would eventually come in or go out. They rushed in.

  Once they were well inside the building, they got to work with used Métro tickets they had picked up from the stations. These scraps of paper proved to have unimaginable uses. They stuck them in keyholes and took off. They came back to those places thirty days later. If the tickets had been moved, the apartment was certainly occupied or visited regularly. If not, they waited another two months, after which they declared the apartment unoccupied—three months being the limit for someone to come back from vacation, if the occupant had really taken any vacation.

  The real estate agent Boulou then proceeded to sell the apartment. The eligible squatters were already on the waiting list, just like the housing allocations through the social welfare office. The families were landlords. The payment was counted in cash. See nothing, know nothing was the rule of the milieu. The clients occupied the premises and put up with the uncertainty of the possible return of the legitimate occupant. That’s where Boulou put the experience he had gained with Goliath to work. In order to hold on to his clients, he promised them a four-month warranty, so that if the legitimate inhabitant reappeared within the first few months after the squatter had moved in, then 60 percent of his deposit would be refunded. The remaining 40 percent covered the costs incurred by Boulou for drawing up a false rental contract—it was Préfet who took care of that—and the Bulldozers’ work. The latter broke down the door, changed the lock, repainted the walls, and installed a mailbox in the client’s name . . .

  Soté the workhorse was someone who you felt was treacherous from your very first contact. He accepted the image of himself as a despicable man and worked at it to the point of caricature. Maybe he didn’t want to run with a crowd that was not of his choosing, and he distrusted every foreign face.

  For me, he was the most unpleasant of all of them. No humanity. No heart. Profit dilated his mauve pupils. He never said a word about his activities. Tall, with bushy eyebrows like circumflexes, a face ravaged by pus pockets of pimples that he picked at in front of the pers
on he was speaking to, Soté didn’t take himself for a nobody. He was aware that he was a force to be reckoned with as much as Benos alias Conforama, Boulou the real estate agent, or Préfet, the man whose name was on everyone’s lips. They needed his services. It was that dependence that made him so self-important.

  His contact with me was limited to an exchange of inquisitive glances. I understood that he figured there was nothing he could get from me. In that case, he threw you aside like a sock with holes in it. He ignored you. I felt third-rate, worthless in his eyes. In any case, I recognized that he was an effective operator. His work was the work of a real professional. People said that he worked without leaving so much as a trace, without running into trouble, and that he worked with disconcerting ease. A specialist in mail boxes, he made his way around remote provinces where certain banks still trusted the mail with their clients’ checkbooks.

  The workhorse and two engineers traveled with their tool-boxes. The engineers picked the spots and shadowed the postman before the workhorse personally intervened. They rented a hotel room and worked for a week, sorting the mail in the mailboxes with a fine-toothed comb. When they returned to Paris, the fruits of their harvest were snatched on the market. Half the checkbooks were reserved for Préfet, who acquired them for his own purposes . . .

  When I met Préfet for the first time, I was enthralled. I had heard his name mentioned so often here and there, I was expecting an imposing, powerful, and charismatic figure.

  The man who stood in front of me was the opposite of all that. Despite the smell of alcohol that told me he readily raised his elbow, something inside me whispered that this man and I would one day be tied together as if we were married, for better and for worse.

  His personality radiated humanity and generosity, which was rare in our circle. Unless that was just an impression. The mask, in this milieu, surprised nobody. Préfet was short. As short as Benos. His hair was cut short. His cheeks and chin were mottled red with scabies. I found it difficult to look at him. His eyes rolled around non-stop in their sockets before settling on someone. He glanced at his watch. His time was precious.

  Nobody really knew his name.

  Maybe Moki. We only called him by this surname without knowing where he came from: Préfet. Many pronounced this nickname in Paris yet had never physically encountered the person.

  Convinced that elegance was the key to the universe, he wore luxury clothes with designer labels: crocodile Weston shoes. He took pride in having a whole collection of these shoes. He had the means. He bought them on the Champs Elysées in that famous store where his face was no longer unknown. It seemed like the salespeople bent over backward from the moment he walked through the door. He didn’t try on shoes in the main room. When he arrived, the sales help, dressed in penguin suits, smiled solicitously and escorted him to the second floor where Préfet could take his time indulging his fancies, ordering unique colors, for example.

  He and Moki were old friends. Since the renowned epoch of the Aristocrats. Préfet had been Moki’s assistant. Of all the youth from those days, he was the first to come to France. He loved telling how he had seen all his compatriots invade Paris and that he had arrived in this country when Pompidou had just come to power. He christened himself “the Savior of all.” Which was the truth. For the most part, the Parisians owed their sojourn in France to him.

  To whom had he not sold residency papers? He didn’t live by that alone. He knew the ropes. He had help from the white pipeline that provided blank documents. All he had to do was fill them out by referring to an authentic document. He had changed identities several times himself. At least twenty times. He was never the same. A chameleon. When he was caught with his hand in the cookie jar and jailed—which had only happened twice, in itself a remarkable feat here—he served his time, got out, and wove himself a new identity. He was reborn from his ashes.

  He said that he was the most sought after Parisian by the French police. He swore that he would never go to prison again, that he had not a sixth sense but an infallible seventh sense, that he knew some policemen, that he had influence, that the day they’d catch him there would be no tomorrow. Word was in the milieu that several Parisians ended up in prison because of him. They were mistaken for Préfet; meanwhile, he was running around town . . .

  Of all of us, he was the one who declared the most income. He earned at least fifteen thousand Francs per week. He asked the incredulous to multiply that amount times four to estimate his monthly revenue. Paradoxically, he was the Parisian who had no business at all back in the home country. Not even a house. Indeed, he hadn’t returned to the fold for a good twenty years. His family—his mother, his brothers and sisters, since his father passed away—wallowed in extreme misery, with no news of him. He was cut off from the reality of the country of his birth and childhood. Did he realize that when he left the country there were only three paved arteries: rue des Trois-Martyrs, rue Félix-Eboué, and then later, avenue de l’Indépendance in Pointe-Noire?

  In those days, television didn’t exist back home. We were a long way from imagining that life could be possible in that little box, which would repeat, without understanding what it blathered, words from poor images closed inside it, because its owner would press a button. Just one radio station, the State and the Party station, broadcast and rebroadcast the president’s live speeches, the yammer of government sycophants, and a few death notices. Did he also realize that to take the plane, we first had to take a truck ride for hours through the deep bush, cross the border with Angola where bullets from belligerents crackled nonstop in a fratricidal war between that government’s forces and the rebels led by Jonas Savimbi? That afterwards, we waited days, sometimes months, before seeing a plane land or take off?

  It was a bygone era.

  Préfet would have been surprised, arriving back in the country, to see downtown Pointe-Noire, the swanky neighborhood, and all along the wild coast where five star hotels sprang up: Novotel, Méridien, and PLM. He would have been astounded to find apples, strawberries, camembert, Bordeaux and Beaujolais, and butter croissants sold at Printania. He would also have been greatly stunned because now we have several airports more or less all over the country and asphalt roads in some large towns like Tié-Tié, OCH, and the Rex neighborhood.

  Did Préfet know this?

  He had voluntarily turned his back on the country. After the death of his father, we remember that to everyone’s great surprise, he didn’t come back, choosing to send a sumptuous zinc coffin and a white suit for the deceased. He admitted that he would not be able to accustom himself to life back there anymore. Was it for all of these reasons that he had become an unrepentant alcoholic? That was practically a form of punishment, a curse, imminent justice. How did he summon such a clear head to make his forgeries with the precision of a watchmaker?

  Another fact astounded me.

  I didn’t believe it: despite his shadowy high earnings, Préfet was reputed to be without a permanent address in Paris.

  At bottom, this was self-explanatory, if you thought about it for a moment. For him, this was a strategy. He didn’t want to have a home of his own, the better to shake the police who hounded him.

  Préfet could be the nicest one in our milieu. I sensed that from the start. He was ready to give his help to anyone who asked for it. A friend. That’s why Moki introduced us.

  Shaking hands with us, I felt electricity surge through my body. He was smiling. They had talked beforehand. He sized me up as if to assure himself that I had the stature of the man he was looking for. Yes, he had to look for someone. He didn’t stop nodding in agreement, in complicity with his friend from youth. I made a good impression on him. There was no doubt about it. I could sense that by all the nodding of his head.

  Moki had said to him: “Take care of the débarqué, give him a specialty because he’s not doing anything right now. I promised to introduce him to you. Voilà, it’s done. You’re his godfather.”

  They burst out
laughing.

  They discussed legalizing my sojourn. By that time, my visa had expired. Several weeks earlier. So I didn’t have the right to stay in France any longer. I was extra careful every time I went to the Château-Rouge market.

  I couldn’t go to the police station to ask for a residency permit. There was no justification for my presence in France. You had to have a reason. School, work, or family ties. I wasn’t a student. I didn’t have any work. My entire family was back in the country, and I wasn’t married here.

  As Moki had planned, the task of establishing my legality was entrusted to Préfet, who took it as an honor to take care of this. Still, it took him two weeks. His famous white pipeline became increasingly reticent. Business wasn’t working like it had in the past. The laws changed from one government to the next. One government would come to power and reopen the whole debate on the prior government’s legislation. When the other returned to power, the business would be turned upside down again. And so on and so on. In the end, the police precincts, swept along in a ceaseless legislative waltz, no longer knew which procedure to follow. In the morning, they determined your status was legal, and in the afternoon, with their fists on the table, laws, presidential decrees, and official newspapers in hand, they solemnly denied it and gave you an appointment in forty-five days and a list of documents to provide, some of which were in the possession of your great-grandmother or one of your mother’s three former husbands. A little more, and they would have demanded that applicants provide their baptismal certificates and bicycle permits.