Blue White Red

by Alain Mabanckou

  “This is what you are going to work with,” he explained, pulling me out of my walking daydream. “You are Eric Jocelyn-George. You go to the window and present your identity card with a check. You ask for five coupons for five zones, which must come to more than 2,450 Francs in all. And we repeat the operation at every station until the twenty-sixth, Porte de Clignancourt. Now multiply that amount by the number of stations and we’ll have an idea of what we’ll have in our pockets by tonight . . .”

  I wasn’t good in arithmetic. The sum seemed astronomical to me for one day’s work: more than 50,000 Francs and close to 60,000. He did the exchange rate for me of the amount in the currency of my country, the Central African Franc: more than five to six million. I remained skeptical.

  It was the truth.

  Once we were already inside the Porte d’Orléans station, Préfet held me back.

  “Final recommendation: Stay calm. Be cool. If the window clerk is fastidious and asks you why five coupons, you blow him off, jabbering about how us blacks have the right to have large families because of the losses we suffered during slavery and all the other stupidities throughout history. And don’t forget, we don’t know each other. We’re in business. It’s necessary to take risks. Before buying your coupons, let everyone go in front of you. If the window clerk goes to the telephone, get out of there fast, no hesitating. He could be calling the police . . .

  “I think I’ve told you everything. We can get going. I’ll wait for you on the platform while you buy the coupons. We’ll start at the next station. Alésia . . .”

  A colored woman was the ticket window clerk at Alésia station at the end of that month. I felt at ease, figuring that skin pigment solidarity was a trump card going back to the dawn of time. A man lost in a multiplicity of other humans is on the lookout for someone that looks like him. The gregarious instinct sleeps within us and wakes with a start to dictate this preference, this irrational inclination, which if not quashed, suddenly transforms itself into a blind and irredeemable racism.

  I smiled at the woman.

  She was on the phone. She put the receiver down, exploding from an inner joy that made me think the person on the other end of the line had touched her G spot with nothing but the magic of verbs. She took her time before returning my completely moronic, inopportune, and circumstantial smile.

  She was svelte, very thin, and must have thought her poise to be the eighth wonder of the world. The verdigris uniform and the fine cloth scarf around her neck suited her so well that one could hardly imagine her anywhere except behind this window, next to some maps of Paris, rolls of tickets, a credit card reader, two Harlequin romance novels, and that old telephone that she jumped to answer on the first ring, knocking down everything in the way.

  Her youth and clumsiness when she tore off the tickets convinced me she was fresh out of a training program, and she applied her instructions to the letter. I noticed her colleague who appeared in the background. A blond with a ruddy face and a cigarette butt stuck in the hairs of his mustache. He turned around and disappeared behind the service door that opened directly onto the platform where Préfet was waiting for me.

  An older woman jabbed me violently in the back with her elbow. I let her go in front of me. She looked me over from head to foot and focused on writing a check with a shaking hand.

  I straightened the knot of my tie and cleared my throat. I cast a furtive eye toward the platform. I didn’t see Préfet. A short man, he was drowning in the sea of riders. He was supposed to have me under surveillance. He saw me from where he was.

  “It’s your turn, monsieur,” cooed the window clerk through the speaking grill.

  “Uhm . . . yes, five . . . five . . . five-zone coupons . . .”

  I bit my tongue. What I had said rang false. That’s what I thought. All of a sudden, I was scared stiff. The impetus to flee. Why should I flee? Intuition. Inclination. These are things you sense.

  I heard a voice behind me.

  Another woman of rather advanced age was getting impatient and waved her priority card like a fan. I wanted to let her go ahead.

  “You said five coupons?” the window clerk asked.

  “Five, for five zones . . .”

  Silence.

  She used a calculator with her thin fingers and stated a total that was close to 2,400 Francs. I contained my astonishment. I tore off a check. She told me not to fill it out.

  So much the better for me—I suddenly remembered that Préfet hadn’t taught me how to fill out a check. This form of payment practically didn’t exist back home. Only a few functionaries brandished them in front of the rest of the population, who were envious but more loyal to the coin of the realm. To such a degree that, back there, a check was an external sign of wealth, a gauge of permanent solvency. Yet a bank account, in some people’s minds, remained an abstract invention by the state and certain shady merchants, their servants, to chisel the savings of the masses of poor people. Why entrust the management of your piggybank to an institution you didn’t know much about? And then the rumor went around that the state paid its own debts with the people’s money, and it would take centuries and centuries before the state would pay up its bills. It wasn’t understood how a country could be in debt. The conclusion drawn was that the president and his ministers paid for their parking garage and the cost of their lifestyle. Under these conditions, as a precautionary measure, back home, money was kept under the mattress in a corner of the house where children were not allowed and where the ancestors we fetishized kept watch night and day and would mercilessly strike every thief with an incurable illness . . .

  I couldn’t fill out a check, never having seen it done. Another hypothesis came to mind: Préfet had thought it pointless to explain this to me, knowing that checks were filled out only by machines now at these windows.

  The station lady scrutinized my identity card in the name of Eric Jocelyn-George. I watched the telephone.

  She turned her back to the phone.

  A wave of calm passed over me. I breathed. I exhaled so loudly that it visibly bothered the window clerk. She got up with my identity card and checkbook and headed into the other room, closing the door behind her.

  My anxiety came racing back.

  To flee or not to flee? My stomach was tied in knots. I wanted to go to the toilet. Cold sweat trickled from my armpits and ran down my ribs. I was suffocating in this winter jacket, and I unknotted my tie. The overcoat I carried under my arm became heavy to hold.

  Turning around, I saw a long, winding line of customers. I wanted to get out of there now.

  My strength abandoned me. I moved my right foot; the left no longer moved on my command. It was time for me to get away from there. And what if there were another telephone inside? Was she in the middle of asking for authorization from the bank or making a call to the police?

  To flee.

  Push my way through this crowd.

  Take the steps two at a time and get out of this station.

  No, absolutely don’t go out the exit.

  The police could only come from the outside. So jump the turnstiles and get on the platform in the hope that a train would arrive that very instant.

  And if the woman held up the train?

  Too bad, I would have to make a run for it.

  My foot finally responded to my multiple requests. A train approached the platform. I heard steps. A race. Riders going down the stairs, going out. Others who were climbing up the stairs. It was time to infiltrate myself into the crowd . . .

  I was already near the turnstile when the window clerk rapped on the glass to call me back. Her blond colleague had reappeared. He took note of me without a smile and rubbed his wispy mustache with the back of his hand. He held my identification out in front of his nose and compared me to the photograph on the ID. He nodded his head that it was me, and the window clerk slipped the coupons under the glass after I had signed the check . . .

  I met up with Préfet on the platform.


  He fired away at me with questions. I had dawdled too long. He lost his temper, threatened not to pay me, and refused to listen when I tried to explain how things had unfolded. There was nothing for him to hear, he yelled. He grabbed his coupons out of my hands and stuffed them in his jacket.

  He barked:

  “Next station: Mouton-Duvernet, and it better go more quickly than this one! . . .”

  Could I see this all the way through?

  Deep down, I doubted it. There were twenty-four stations left. Twenty-four moments of anguish. I didn’t have the right to back out anymore. Forward. Station after station. The whole thing was to keep a cool head and to work energetically. If Préfet was far from satisfied with my work, me, I figured that I had gone to the absolute limits of my capacity . . .

  It was almost three o’clock in the afternoon.

  We had arrived at Château-Rouge and were going to stay there until the black market opened. We had unloaded the twenty-five orange coupons . . .

  Before then, things had improved.

  The twenty-four stations followed one after the other in my memory. I was stunned by how smoothly things went despite the fright I had experienced.

  Even in my dreams, I didn’t convince myself that it had been me, Massala-Massala, alias Marcel Bonaventure, alias Eric Jocelyn-George, who was capable of seeing the job through from start to finish. Of course, the eye of the master lurked somewhere in the shadows. An eye that I sensed was behind me. That eye with the sanguine gaze was there. It was on the lookout for the slightest weakness.

  Préfet was there, at a distance.

  If his presence in the area revolted me, it also reassured me. Revolt because I was the only one working. Reassurance because I felt some sort of protection, almost the benediction of someone who had an entire past history of this type of activity behind him. His experience would be beneficial to me. In the end, I had pulled the chestnuts out of the fire.

  From one station to the next, the operation was nothing more than a game. Around eleven o’clock, we took a break. The anxiety, although more tempered than it was when we started, had burned a hole in my stomach. We ate Greek gyros at the Etienne-Marcel Métro stop. I ate enough for two because Préfet, who wasn’t hungry, had opened several bottles of Kronenbourg in rapid succession and emptied them like tap water. He belched loudly and had fun rolling his eyes around. He told me that he had no appetite for food until the money was in his pockets.

  Wandering around Les Halles, we sat down on a public bench near the boulevard Sébastopol. Then Préfet decided that I had to get back to work, because it was getting close to market time. By that point, we had already purchased more than a third of the coupons we needed. That was nothing. An incomplete job, amateur, Préfet hastened to make clear, having sensed my premature satisfaction.

  We had to get back to work as soon as possible.

  For a moment, I thought I was over the fear, but it came back again after that break we took on boulevard Sébastopol. It was as if I were back at the first station, in front of the colored woman and her blond colleague. But my reflexes came back. From then on I took the risk of making small talk with the ticket window clerks.

  We had gone to the end of the line, Porte de Clignancourt. From there, we made a second trip in the other direction, all the way to Porte d’Orléans, where we had started that morning. The last check was torn out at that station. We had to go back one more time toward Porte de Clignancourt, in the north of Paris, to get to the black market. We got out at Château-Rouge, the marketplace. What remained to be done at that point was to sell the transportation tickets we had purchased throughout that heart-stopping day. That didn’t faze me. There wouldn’t be that whole chaotic circuit we had run from the south to north of Paris and vice versa . . .

  It was only three o’clock in the afternoon.

  According to Préfet, the black market didn’t open until around five o’clock in the afternoon. So we sat down in a café. We waited for the right time. Préfet had another beer. He deigned to congratulate me, but half-heartedly. Still not there yet, he added. I had to rise to the challenge, I wasn’t quick, my gestures weren’t convincing. What was essential had been accomplished; next time, I would have to pull myself together better.

  We had to move on to the next phase. The most important, the bit that was close to his heart, in his own words. We were going to reap what we had sown.

  Once again, he got straight to the point. I would pull the chestnuts out of the fire. He wasn’t going to get involved at this stage, which he was making me do for my own good.

  “You have to see your mission through all the way to the end for your baptism to be real. I’ve always maintained great discretion in this milieu. Nobody must know that I’m here. Get it? It’s a question of prudence . . .”

  He explained how the second phase would play out. It was in my interest to sell all of the one hundred and twenty-five transit passes that night; otherwise, we would have a hard time finding clients the next day, since another month had begun and everyone, theoretically, had bought their coupon in a station. Primordial rule: absolute discretion. Don’t sell to Whites. Get a sense of the client. Watch him come. As soon as he seems suspicious, I shouldn’t have any dialogue with him. The client insists? Play dumb:

  “‘I don’t know anything. I don’t know what you’re talking about. What passes? Ah ha, those are sold here? Whereabouts?’ That’s how you’ll answer suspicious types. Me, I’ll be in a corner, near that butcher shop in the marketplace. If a colored customer wants to buy, he’ll know how to show it. He’s used to it. He’ll nod his head several times as if he’s in agreement, and you, you’ll make the same gesture and indicate with your chin where he should follow you. You’ll meet each other at the end of the street. The client will have his cash ready, and the whole thing will take place in a fraction of a second, without saying a word. You have to come back to the café where I am to bring the money from sales as it comes in. To keep a lot of money on you brings bad luck because the others carrying out the same thing get jealous. If, by chance, a police van turns up at the market, stay calm, go into the pharmacy across the street, and wait for them to leave. You mustn’t panic. It’s an everyday occurrence here. These police sweeps are completely routine. You must know that since you do your shopping here . . .”

  I had listened to him talk at length.

  He repeated himself, doubted my capacity to sell the transit passes. He was on his umpteenth glass of beer.

  The hour passed.

  Château-Rouge was full of people. The food market was open until six o’clock. Groups of people were standing around here and there for no apparent reason. The place was abuzz with noise. Comings and goings. Shoving. Mopeds without exhaust pipes. Dilapidated cars that illegally entered the pedestrian lane. Drivers who abandoned their cars on the road.

  Another parallel market, the black market, established itself little by little and blended in with the normal market.

  First, street peddlers with their cumbersome bags on their backs, leather belts rolled up in spirals in their hands, which they offered to all passersby.

  Watch salesmen, with their pants pockets weighed down like a donkey’s paunch. One hand quickly burrowed inside and pulled out, in a flash, the appropriate watch for the waiting customer. Other watches hung inside a jacket. The salesmen needed only to undo the buttons of their outfits to offer stunned customers a walking market stall, which made the shopkeepers jealous, those with ironclad faith in licenses and fiscal declarations of commercial and industrial profits.

  As for the vendors of cameras and radio cassettes, they sprang up cautiously in the side streets. The weight of their wares dissuaded them from carrying them around on their bodies. Above all, it was the fear of a massive police raid that made them skittish. The police would confiscate their merchandise, the presumed owners having no receipt that could legitimize their claim to ownership. They’d give their eyeteeth to have that. Instead, the vendors rented
rooms in the nearby hotel. When a buyer turned up, they showed him photos of their equipment. The buyer then followed them to the hotel where they could try out the equipment in total peace of mind.

  “You can go now,” Préfet said to me, emptying his last glass of beer.

  He left the café to head further down the street to a spot near an intersection where I would come wrap up my sales with customers. From there, he wouldn’t miss a single one of my transactions. He took a seat in a different café, the one that I could see from where I stood, one with a large terrace and chairs all the way out to the street.

  I got up, too.

  The anxiety that I had buried for a good long time came back. As if I were starting the same work over again. As if I were going to turn up in front of every window in the Métro stations, tear off a check, present the identity card in the name of that man I didn’t know, Eric Jocelyn-George, wait, sign, take five coupons, find Préfet on the platform, get on the Métro again to repeat it once more at the next station . . .

  I put a hand on my chest to feel my heart beating. Instead, I felt something that bothered me in the inside pocket of my jacket. Instinctively, I slipped my hand in to retrieve the contents . . .

  My first photo in Paris.

  Those big eyes of an enchanted child. The broken mirror. The wool blankets. The skylight in our room. The rancid odor. The clump of earth from my grandmother’s grave, there, in the outside pocket of my overcoat.

  I was dreaming on my feet.

  I had to get out of this café to wrap up this crazy day. I couldn’t take another step forward. In fact, I didn’t want to go ahead. Préfet was in front of me and challenged me with his eyes. I stayed put, like marble, jaws clenched in sudden exasperation. A revolt at the ultimate hour. Like an obstinate horse that abruptly tries to throw its rider. Préfet was facing me. I dared to look him in the eye, those eyes that rolled like white globes amid an invasion of hordes of unidentified microbes. I held my ground. I wanted to tell him everything that I thought about this affair. I wanted to capitulate. Lower my arms. Throw down my weapons. I was sick of it. Then a sentence took shape suddenly from the bottom of my throat: