Blue White Red

by Alain Mabanckou

  “Let’s get serious. How much is my cut going to be from this?”

  Préfet, who wasn’t expecting this, replied icily: “Around here, we never sell the bear skin before killing the bear.”

  “I don’t give a damn about that. I’m not moving if I don’t know how much will be turned over to me. I am ready to settle for 20,000 Francs for . . .”

  “Let’s say, 15,000 . . .”

  “I said 20,000.”

  “You forget that you owe me for the cost of your identity papers. You forget that I’ve got to pay the workhorse, who gave me the checkbooks. You forget that I have to pay Moki, who provided me with what I might call a hired hand. You forget that your work uniform, I bought it with my own money, that’s a Cerruti you’ve got there, my man, I don’t know if you were aware of that. And you forget all this? Like all the débarqués, you’re nothing but an ingrate. We can’t sell these passes for the same price they’re sold at the windows. On the black market, we lower the prices, otherwise, what’s the point of it? We’ll have more or less 45,000 Francs, and you want to claim 20,000!”

  “I find that an equitable division.”

  “Twenty thousand Francs, that’s the price of an identity paper; I wouldn’t have to give you anything if I held you to that. Once again, I’m indulgent. I reiterate my offer for you to take it or leave it. Think it over carefully: 15,000 Francs, and you won’t owe me anything more . . .”

  Silence.

  “Get going. Don’t lose any more time. Get to work!”

  I remained standing, next to the butcher shop.

  He left to take a seat on the terrace at the café down the street. From a distance, I saw him change seats. He gestured to me with his head.

  A moment’s hesitation.

  I made my decision.

  I wanted to get this business over with as quickly as possible so that I could breathe. A mental calculation made me understand that with 15,000 French Francs, in my country, I would be affluent, with a million and a half Central African Francs. I would be a millionaire.

  I would be satisfied with this amount. As happy as I would be to never owe anything else to Préfet.

  I took the first step.

  I left the café to move toward the customers . . .

  I had sold a few transit passes to more than a dozen customers, for the most part Blacks and North Africans, sometimes even some Hindus, whose exuberant smiles made clear to me that they were part of this imbroglio.

  I was amused to see how customers approached me without ignorant passersby suspecting a thing. They nodded their heads quickly. I replied and indicated with the same gestures to follow me to the end of the street. I walked in front. We took a narrow, winding side street that reeked of urine. The transaction took place there, in complete clandestinity, the street being nearly deserted. I haven’t forgotten the pigeons. In fact, we weren’t the only ones who appreciated discreet locations. In addition to the women who ran there, hiked up their skirts to their butts, and spread their legs to urinate, we visibly disturbed other creatures: pigeons who fled our approach and perched, quarrelsome and angry, on the decrepit buildings’ rooftops. They complained loudly in their language and came back the moment we turned around.

  Transaction accomplished, I went back down the street, this time with my customers in the lead. Before returning to the spot where I met my customers, I branched off to the right to deposit the take where Préfet was waiting for me, beady business eyes on of a glass of beer overflowing with foam.

  I had adopted an optimistic framework: in less than an hour, I could get rid of the remaining passes.

  The demand far exceeded the supply . . .

  I waited for customers.

  Night would catch hold of us in not much time. The market slowed down. So did my optimism. I had exaggerated a bit. But it was necessary to wait. Préfet had said: some customers quit work around six o’clock in the evening. They come from all over, even from the most faraway suburbs in the Île-de-France region. By the time they get to the market, night would surely fall upon them. Meanwhile, these coupons never went back with him. They were going to be sold, no matter what. In the worst case, we would have to adjust our price—after all, what use were these passes once the month had passed or was well underway?

  I had less than twenty transit passes left. Weary of standing on the street, my feet numb, I moved across the street to lean against a wall less fouled by urine.

  I crossed the street.

  Little by little, the marketplace emptied out. Market vendors consulted each other, establishing obscure accounts, exchanging merchandise with each other. The customers weren’t biting anymore. You had to take them by the hand, insist, convince them, negotiate the price. I didn’t have it in me to put up with skinflints at this point. Just by the way I was standing, they could sense that I was the one who sold coupons. A little like that very dark-skinned man, tall, who twisted his neck to show by impetuously nodding his head that he wanted a transit pass.

  I responded to him and indicated with my chin which way to go.

  He smiled at me.

  White teeth. Thick lips. A large mouth that led me to conclude, without other evidence, that he had more teeth than a normal man and his laugh, the least you could say about it was it belonged to a halfwit.

  I went down the main street; the man followed me without hesitation. He kept on making approving gestures with his head.

  I was at his service.

  The pigeons flew away from the street.

  They went back to screeching from the rooftops. A little further down, I noticed Préfet’s shadow on the terrace.

  Nobody.

  A man in a white apron swept the entrance to the café and lined the chairs up, one on top of another.

  Well? Where did he go?

  Taking the right fork, I realized that something had just happened in that side street. I should have walked as if I were going to visit someone in one of the surrounding buildings. I lifted my head instinctively: two men were coming toward me at a quick pace. A little further, a badly parked car took up the entire street.

  A white Mazda.

  It wasn’t there before. I remember clearly. It hadn’t been there. I tried to turn back the other way. The Black with the idiotic smile who nailed me just to buy transit passes ordered me, stone faced, to keep on going to the car. He dangled a set of handcuffs in the air and, taking long strides, caught up with me, while the other two men, one tall and one short, pinned me to the car and frisked me roughly. No resistance on my part. My feet stayed on the ground. My body weighed heavy, burning up inside while my heart beat violently against my chest.

  The pigeons ogled us from above . . .

  The two men seized my fake IDs, the checkbook stubs, the unsold transit passes, and my first photo in Paris. The short man, more aggressive than the tall one, took away my overcoat shook it out, and removed the clump of earth from my grandmother’s grave from my pocket. He unwrapped it and sniffed. I heard him ask himself, skeptically, “What kind of new drug is this?”

  I hear some noise behind the door.

  Someone is trying to open it. Practically break it down. He delivers a few kicks, turns the key in the locks, and mutters a stream of abuse.

  The same people as yesterday, no doubt. The ones who brought me here. The tall one and the short one.

  There they are. They’ve come back. I wonder what the meaning is of these comings and goings. With every commotion outside, I tell myself that perhaps the time has come. And then they leave again, without telling me a damn thing.

  Here they are . . .

  The light is going to daze me.

  The light? I don’t know what time it is. I’ve slept a lot, and I can’t figure out when I fell asleep. Is it a dream that has plunged me back into the past? Before closing my eyes, there were pictures. Moki. Préfet. Moki again. Préfet again.

  I can’t remember anything anymore.

  I must make the effort to remember. Just as I
had done up to now. I’m not dreaming. Things are going to happen fast. My situation surely depends on that door, which is opening.

  What happened?

  I’m going to remember. The white Mazda that cut off the whole side street. I’ve got nothing more than a shadow of the man who threw me in this room. The short man. The more aggressive of the two. His muscular hands on my shoulders. They slammed the door shut with a big bang. Then they left precipitously without telling me what was going to happen next.

  Now they’re here. Behind the door.

  I must remember.

  The car, parked badly, on the street. The two men walking toward each other. I didn’t run. I put up no resistance. Was that my mistake? Then they pinned me down. The Black was one of them. He was working with them. He had pretended that he wanted to buy transit passes. Who gave the game away? How did they know our gang’s signals?

  In the Mazda, it was the Black guy who drove.

  They had put me in handcuffs. I was in the back, flanked by the two other men, circumspect and sinister. They seemed to breathe in unison. They looked straight ahead. The taller one said to the driver:

  “Head toward the fourteenth arrondissement, rue du Moulin-Vert . . .”

  On rue du Moulin-Vert, the two men lifted me like a suitcase to climb the stairs of our building. The Black guy, violent, knocked down the door to the room with a blow from his shoulder and nearly fell on the wool blankets. Nobody was in the room. They were annoyed, pissed off, and made me sit on the floor. The shorter one barked, “Where’s Préfet?”

  His eyes were on fire. His muscular body looked like it was waiting for the right moment to deliver a fatal blow to my face.

  “I don’t know anything,” I said, protecting my face.

  The short man got annoyed and fumbled inside his jacket, pulled out an envelope and tore it open clumsily.

  “And this? What’s this?” he yelled at the top of his voice.

  He tossed two black-and-white Polaroid photos at my legs. In the first one, Préfet and I were talking in front of the Porte d’Orléans Métro station. He had a cigarette between his lips. I listened to him, attentively, just like a disciple drinking up the words of his master with blind devotion. In the second one, we were in a café at Château-Rouge. He had taken the transit passes out of a pocket of his jacket. He prepared to count them before giving them back to me. I wasn’t in a good mood. This was after the argument that we had had about how much I would make.

  “So you still don’t know where your accomplice crashes?” the short man said sarcastically while I looked guilty and confused.

  The specter of Préfet was there.

  He had woven a web of mystery about where he lived. That was his strength. I knew that. He didn’t live anywhere. Who among us could say where he slept? Préfet did not have an ordinary existence. He was equipped for that. To escape from the police. He imposed a severe discipline on himself. A complicated schedule. Many of us would refuse a life like that. He didn’t take the same route. His movements were never habitual. Didn’t see the same people. Didn’t give them the opportunity to set up meetings. Didn’t tell them when he was coming over. Arrived at their house unexpectedly. Never had his picture taken with the other Parisians. Avoided public places like Les Halles, the Champs-Elysées, and the Gare du Nord. At Château-Rouge, he stayed in the background, the grand orchestrator of operations. All his precautions made him claustrophobic. He didn’t like to come into our room. For him it was a dangerous trap. Every footstep on the floor made him nervous. He waited on the ground floor and predicted that one day we would be caught like dragonflies.

  A shadow darkened my thoughts: since we had been photographed with Préfet, why did they allow him to disappear instead of finally arresting him?

  The reply seemed blatantly obvious to me. They wanted to track the network back to its ringleaders. Learn how we operated. How many of us were there? Who was high up? Where besides Château-Rouge were we selling these transit passes? The police were not very satisfied with bribes. When they leave you time to breathe, it’s only to set the big trap. Don’t spread your wings in joy. Don’t ring the victory bell too soon. Somewhere, in putting it back together, an element of the puzzle doesn’t fit or was put in the wrong place. Then the police take their time to look into it, to remove it, to scrutinize it, to compare it with others, to put it back when the right place is established. That could take days, weeks, and more often than not, entire years. In our milieu, we joked that the French police were the slowest in the world but the most efficient. A praying mantis, not a fly agitated by the smell of defecation . . .

  Préfet sensed the suspicious atmosphere in the street and must have deflected the attention of these men. They would have let us keep on going until we were finished and then would have swept us up, just as Préfet had thought. They would go to where he lived and discover the materials for forgery and other compromising documents.

  That’s it: Préfet, having disappeared, left me alone, the only one in a position to tell them where he lived.

  “For the last time, where does Préfet live?”

  “I have no idea.”

  They turned the room inside out, threw the blankets out the window, tore the bits of wallpaper remaining on the cracked walls, turned over the plastic table, and opened the skylight to look on the roof.

  In frustration, the taller one shook his finger at me and yelled, “All right, get this one out of here!”

  While the black guy twisted my arms, the short man seized the opportunity he’d been waiting for to kick me in the butt.

  Several weeks had already passed since I’d found myself in the darkness of the Seine-Saint-Denis jail for the first time. I was alone, cloistered, in a cell in the A wing, B building, fourth floor. I had a view of the courtyard and a few nearby rooftops. I climbed onto the bed and gripped the iron bars of that little window. I saw guards making their rounds with bulldogs and prisoners from the facing building exercising and playing volleyball. Police vehicles came and went all day long with their captives.

  Within the four walls of the prison. I didn’t want to think about all the people from our world. I wanted to create a void around me. Not think of anything but myself, about nobody else.

  To listen to the internal voices of my conscience was a harsh test. I swept away with the back of my hand the thoughts that inflicted me with remorse. I didn’t succeed, despite that. I faced a mirror. The man I found there intimidated me. I couldn’t pull myself away. His big eyes stared at me without blinking. His stricken face pitied me. His drawn features emphasized that these events had exhausted him. I held out my hand to touch him. I noticed that I held out a hand to myself. I was far gone. I had been in a hole since the verdict fell on me like a cleaver.

  Nobody came to see me at the jail. And for good reason: the visitor would have met the same fate as me. I didn’t receive any letters either. That was one of the rules in our circle. We didn’t know each other anymore. I had become dirty. I had failed in my mission. I was not worthy of the milieu.

  Where had Préfet gone? Where had Moki gone? Had they sent news of my incarceration back home? I was sure that they hadn’t. It was in their interest to lie for the sake of keeping up appearances.

  The face my father would make!

  His wise words. Don’t listen to anything but the voice of your conscience: “Be careful, keep your eyes open, and don’t act until your conscience—not someone else’s—guides you. These will be my final words, I, your father, who has nothing and envies nothing belonging to anyone . . .”

  I had stayed locked up in that interminable night. I didn’t know what light or liberty meant anymore. I could only invent light with the gleam of memories. I hooked myself on a thread of hope. One day, the light would burst forth, illuminate the horizon. For now, the night reigned.

  To live in darkness changes a man.

  I knew that when I studied myself one day in the pail filled with water in the center of the courtyard of th
e jail. I gazed at myself like that. My features fluctuated in the liquid, meta-morphosed in the bucket. I discovered a strange man, a man who shocked me. The bony face, the shaggy beard, the hair cropped short by another prisoner.

  I was that man.

  I imagined the reflection of that face in the broken mirror of our room on Moulin-Vert. I wouldn’t recognize myself. I had a different face. Facing charges that kept me on my feet. Charges that immobilized me in this place.

  The indictment was a burden that outweighed my moral strength. Condemned for complicity in fraud, identity theft, forgery, and use of forgeries and other sprawling infractions whose juridical terminology made me leap out of the dock, I learned to my great distress that French law was tougher on the accomplices than the main actors. My lawyer, a court-appointed lawyer, replaced himself at the last minute with his trainee, a young person of mixed race, pretentious, who listened to himself talk so much, instead of defending me, that he spent the entire morning reciting his course on special penal code and criminology to the judges who were half asleep.

  Outside, they had forgotten me.

  I was a man without identity, me who, at one time, had taken on several. I didn’t know anymore who I really was. Massala-Massala, my real name? Marcel Bonaventure, my adopted name? Eric Jocelyn-George, my work name?

  To forget oneself.

  To be nothing more than an anonymous man. Without a past. Without a future. Condemned in the immediate present to carry on day after day, gaze lowered. A man who has lost his way, hounded by remorse, tormented by the night, devoured by exhaustion.

  I was another man . . .

  I had learned the virtue of silence.

  In the darkness, I discovered those shadows, faces, pictures of my homeland, the only loyal loves that exuded a joie de vivre in me, the hope of stepping past this cold wall one day. I dreamed, beyond this cell, of a space of happiness, sober and honest.