The Godmother

by Cayre, Hannelore; Smee, Stephanie;

  ‘He went back to his cell. The investigating magistrate will question him again. We’ve got time. Remember, criminal proceedings have been started, which means they can be held in pre-trial detention for a year, so nobody’s in any hurry. They’ll call you. I’ve put a note in the file… So, you didn’t answer me, where did you learn Arabic?’

  ‘Well, my nanny taught me to speak it between the ages of six and seventeen. After that, I studied it.’

  ‘My son had an Algerian babysitter too. She used talk to him in Arabic so he still knows a few words. But that’s a far cry from being able to speak it fluently…’

  ‘Well, my nanny was a man, and he didn’t just babysit me, he raised me.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, a man.’

  ‘So what was his name, this nanny?’

  ‘Bouchta.’

  I had not said that name for a very, very long time. Not out loud anyway, because sometimes I would call it out in my sleep if I was having a bad dream. Curiously, now this whole episode is behind me, I don’t do that anymore, but at the time, after twenty-five years of lethargy, while I was in the process of resuming my position in the Mafioso continuum of my family, my brain was behaving like an old sponge. If I squeezed it, a flood of memories would emerge…

  Bouchta…

  Oh, my Bouchta… my dear Bouchta.

  A mediocre homemaker at best, my mother did absolutely nothing around the house, and certainly didn’t do any cleaning. My father didn’t hold it against her, quite the contrary: the wife of a pied-noir upon whom fortune has smiled should not have to ruin her finger-nails scrubbing pots and pans. On the other hand, she ought to know how to manage her staff – which she didn’t do either. If I had to sketch a timeline of my younger childhood years, it would consist of a succession of maids, scoldings, accusations of breakages or theft and slammed doors. In the end, exasperated by the permanent state of chaos that reigned in our house – whether it was the Portuguese woman loathed by our Doberman, the deaf Polish woman, or the slob from the Creuse – my father decided to settle our domestic affairs once and for all, and left for Tunisia to buy Bouchta.

  His previous owner was one of his old colonial friends who had stayed in the bled after Independence. This guy still practised khemmessat, a type of medieval serfdom consisting of attaching a man to a bit of land by way of an inextinguishable debt. My father must have had to pay a lot to buy off said debt, since he used to complain to all his old Tunisian friends living in France that his Arab had cost him a pretty penny… The wives of these colonials, nostalgic for the Moorish women they had left behind, would turn green with envy at the luxury in which my mother basked; not only did she own electrical appliances, but she had a slave to use them.

  Bouchta didn’t work the land but instead took care of the housework and the cooking. He was what Malcolm X used to call the house Negro insofar as he accepted the authority of the Whites as the natural order. I simply can’t see any other explanation for the fact he didn’t murder us all, dog included, in our sleep after one too many exclamations of Bouchta, asba! on the part of my father; asba being the most vulgar expression you can imagine in Arabic – something along the lines of my cock up your mother’s ass – and universally used by the colonials to punctuate their speech.

  Bouchta, asba, the soup! Asba, fissa, the cheese!

  As to the question of poor Bouchta’s membership of the human species (and that of Arabs in general) my parents were, for once, in agreement.

  In my father’s racial hierarchy – which had room for anti-Jewish, anti-Maltese, anti-Italian and even anti-pied-noir sentiment – and at the summit of which, as a Tunisian colonial, he put himself, Arabs had no place whatsoever. How could they? According to this scheme, Arabs were not people, but inconvenient and rebellious pieces of farming machinery. They were known as burnous, after their traditional hooded garments, evoking an image of flesh sweating away underneath as the maximum amount of juice was extracted.

  At last, thanks to Bouchta’s presence and the power of the imagination to assimilate two utterly different places, The Estate became Tunisia, just as for Marguerite Duras the river Seine became the Mekong.

  My father would joyfully bellow abuse in his nursery Arabic to his new plaything, whom he had dressed up as Nestor from Tintin in a striped waist-coat and bow tie. He had planted a fig tree, and – despite his lower back problems – would sit perched atop an oriental pouf while listening to Lili Boniche and Reinette l’Oranaise, favourites from his colonial youth.

  For dinner, there would be roasted capsicums in oil and chicken with olives, with strudel for dessert – a sign of Austria’s continuing formal resistance.

  The first time my mother saw Bouchta, she’d just picked me up from school. When he greeted us with a broad smile as he opened the gate, she let out a little cry of horror: Oi gevald, ein negger! – Yiddish for ‘How awful, a negro!’ Because Bouchta, who had been born in Morocco near the Mauritanian border, in addition to being Arabic, was also black. And my mother, who had been born near the Yugoslavian border, had only seen her first black person dressed up as a cannibal at the age of fourteen at a travelling circus. Her racism was of a pre-modern sort; the subtleties of the Valladolid debate, when the Spanish conquistadors had at least considered the question of whether the Indians had a soul, would have been lost on her.

  From day one, she got on with the job of getting rid of Bouchta, like the nasty black spider he was.

  She began by accusing him of a thousand wrongdoings: his cooking was too heavy, which was untrue. He cleaned badly, he shrank the laundry – all also untrue. At the same time, she would say how terribly sorry she felt for him. To be the negro in this grim house next to a motorway, in the service of a madman who speaks to you like a dog and pays you a pittance, while making you bury bodies. It was awful!

  For eleven years, she desperately tried to find his breaking point, to no avail. Bouchta was gentle and servile. The cupboards were full of impeccably folded linen piles smelling sweetly of lavender and the soup on the table was the perfect temperature for my father to be able eat dinner in the way he liked, that is, in four minutes flat.

  And then one day, she found it.

  At the age of sixty-five, Bouchta asked to take Sundays off, seeing as he was getting older and needed more rest. Carrying a plastic bag, he would head off in the morning, from the hut that had generously been fitted out for him at the bottom of the garden, and having passed through the gate of The Estate, instead of turning left towards the station, he would bear right towards nowhere, disappearing until seven o’clock in the evening.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s odd that he turns right?’ ventured my mother one evening.

  ‘He must have found some other Arabs over that way,’ replied my father, gesturing vaguely towards the yawning oblivion of the motorway.

  Then one day, by chance, we spotted him overhead, on the A13 overpass, and four hours later, we saw him again in the same place but on the other side, looking in the other direction.

  My mother sensed a weak point. She asked him: ‘Why don’t you go to Paris so you can meet other people like you instead of looking at cars go by on the overpass?’

  ‘I don’t know how to read, so I’m scared I’ll get lost if I leave here,’ came the honest answer.

  The very next day, Bouchta had his own Daniel et Valérie reader and my mother began to fuss over him as if he were about to sit the entrance exam for France’s top university.

  ‘The geese are drinking at the pond… The donkey is in the stable…’ she chanted in her heavy Jewish accent.

  ‘The geese are drinking at the pond… The donkey is in the stable…’ Bouchta would repeat in his Arabic accent.

  He used to love those sentences, the first he had ever read and which reminded him of his farm in Tunisia. He would use them every opportunity he could, laughing, especially when he was talking to me, the sole person he used to see during the day.

  Within a month, he
was deciphering signs, within four he could read the newspaper. And six months later, one morning, without saying goodbye, with no warning, he was no longer there.

  He left to be with other people like him, he’s happy now, my mother used to say, the way you would console a child whose flea-ridden, nuisance of a pet had finally run away. How I hated her! She was speaking to me like I was some sort of imbecile about the man who had dressed me, washed me and fed me. Who had seen me grow up. Whom I had entrusted with all my joys and troubles. Who had been my father and my mother, too, the only person in my entire family endowed with any humanity. Everything pleasant I knew how to do in life, I owed to him, for he was kind and patient, with the patience of those who live in harmony with the trees and the seasons. As well as teaching me Moroccan and Tunisian dialect and showing me how to make gazelle horns cookies, he taught me how to care for animals and how to navigate in the dark using the stars.

  Even now, when I come across a chibani, an old guy from the Maghreb, I can’t help staring at him, searching for Bouchta in his features, even though I know it’s absurd, because he’d be over a hundred by now.

  The day after he left, my mother dressed up as a crime scene cleaner, in a raincoat, rubber gloves and with a mask over her mouth, and set about eradicating all trace of my darling Bouchta and the relationship between us – illegitimate in her eyes even though it was the direct result of her own apathy towards my upbringing.

  She washed the walls of the room where he had slept with a mix of St Marc’s household cleaning powder and bleach, and burnt all his furniture and the few meagre items he had left behind. All I had left of him was a pebble. An ordinary black pebble with a curious pattern that he had found when he was out walking. Even that she managed to steal from me and put in the bin.

  Then, as if he had never spent any time with us, she simply resumed her collecting of problematic house keepers.

  *

  That evening, a little drunk, I told Philippe a light version of this story and that made me happy.

  5

  YOU’LL BE HUNGRY AGAIN IN AN HOUR

  While stacking my wads of cash in piles, I came across a two-hundred-euro note with writing on it, slipped in with those Scotch had given me. Normally, notes like these were in small denominations of five, and on them would be handwritten messages in all sorts of languages – things like money is king, sovereign debt, the fallen people, or Politicos y banqueros, una disgracia para la nación, or In the name of the law, you are hereby indebted to me… Marks left by utopians who dreamed of breaking the machine, before releasing them back into the European currency market like so many grains of sand. There was no shortage of irony in the fact that these notes would end up in the hands of drug traffickers, those paragons of capitalism.

  I had never seen one worth so much. What was going on inside the head of the person who had written you’ll be hungry again in an hour on such a big denomination, thereby risking it being declined?

  Proudly I placed this very special two-hundred-euro note in the corner of The Little Fireworks Collector’s frame like a New York hot dog vendor who frames his first dollar. It was official: the Godmother was open for business…

  People were hard at work in Scotch’s universe, gathering my money.

  Intercept No. 8635 dated Sunday, 8 August. Intercept taken from the telephone device of the person under surveillance originating from line no. 2126456584539 the registered owner of which is not known to the Moroccan authorities. The person using the line is Karim Moufti alias Scotch. His interlocutor is Mounir Charkani alias Lizard.

  Words in Arabic have been translated by Madame Patience Portefeux, who has been engaged for this purpose and who hereby jointly certifies this transcript.

  Lizard: Yo’ salam aleikoum, you good or what?

  Scotch: Hard at it, hamdoullah, the usual (laughter), except that Brandon, that fucker, now reckons he wants 60. I’ve told him, it’s Ramadan, man, and I’ve asked the Godmother for a metre, see, with 70 for me and 30 for you and I dunno if she’s gonna be able to do anymore… If the stupid fucker wants more, he needs to already give me money for more. Plus the price is 4.7. And I mean now, ’cos the deal’s done.

  Lizard: Yeah, yeah… you’ll get the notes from me, bro’.

  The other dude, César, he’s brought me 9.

  Scotch: Is that it?

  Lizard: What d’you mean, is that it? Come on, man, I already got 80 and he’s bringin’ me the rest tomorrow, and after that I want my stuff. You better swear on the Quran you gonna bring it to me priority for 4.2.

  Scotch: You’s my brother, on the Quran. I know with you it’s satisfied or your money back. I asked for four bags plus twenty which brings it up to a metre. And there’ll be one for you plus ten, I swear on my mother’s life. And if you see that fucker Brandon, you tell him I need notes to get ahead in this life.

  Lizard: On the Quran of Mecca.

  Scotch: If not, he can keep doin’ business with his loser dole-bludger mate… You tell him that, on the Quran!

  Lizard: Soon as I have the stuff, I’m comin’ down and gettin’ a good 200 end of September for two bags.

  Scotch: Watch out for the size of the notes, man.

  Lizard: Relax.

  Scotch: Tha’s cool, bro’.

  Intercept No. 8642 dated Sunday, 8 August. Intercept taken from the telephone device of the person under surveillance originating from line no. 2124357981723 the registered owner of which is not known to the Moroccan authorities. The person using the line is Mounir Charkani, alias Lizard. His interlocutor is Rakir Hassani.

  Words in Arabic have been translated by Madame Patience Portefeux who has been engaged for this purpose and who hereby jointly certifies this transcript.

  Lizard: Hi, yeah, so…

  RH: So it’s not good. The guy, he told me it was good… but not right away…

  Lizard: Don’t talk to me about stuff that’s not good. Tell me somethin’ that is good. What you sayin’ is there’s still fuck all at your end.

  RH: Yeah, yeah, still nothin’.

  Lizard: Come on, cuz, even when you say you got a solution sorted, it’s shit! What do you want me to tell you… I need my notes! I got no time to wait and you just takin’ your time. You think it’s party time, but it’s not party time, bro’, it’s shit! I got payments to make.

  RH: Anyways, I still got one more dude to see who says he got 12 for me in his hands.

  Lizard: You call his mother, you call his grandmother, you call who the fuck you want, bro’ but I gotta get it!

  RH: It’s stressin’ me, too, believe me…

  Lizard: Still happy, man, that you stressed… You saw the photo, bro’, there be a million ass-holes lickin’ my ass so I get them some of this stuff, but I’m not given’ them nothin’ ’cos I’m waitin’ on you! So get operational, dude, and do it fast and don’t come tellin’ me no more that it’s just a matter of time.

  I had at least twenty odd conversations like these ones to translate each session, and from the interval between the numbers appearing in the corner of the reports, I deduced that over the past few days there had been more than two hundred of a similar type between the different protagonists involved in this deal.

  Unfortunately, in their hurry to make a profit, the cretins had stopped taking what they imagined were precautions in their communications, and were speaking in French, so there were fewer and fewer Arabic phrases in their conversations, meaning I was no longer able to monitor their activities.

  I organised a second delivery for 15 August, this time in a spot with an even stronger stench of the guillotine than the prison parking lot: the Quai de l’Horloge, outside the Palais de Justice, directly opposite the exit from the cells. Scotch had begged me to grant him an additional week to allow him to gather the full amount; a week I had naturally refused him, bringing his deadline forward by two days for good measure, just for having dared to ask. I knew, as they did, how the capitalist game played out: the more repugnant you were, th
e more respect you gained.

  Once again I took a taxi and again I told the driver the same story: I’ve got a meeting with my nephews. When I turned up at our meeting place, there were no longer three but five dealers waiting for me. All different versions of Scotch: bearded Islamist louts, heavy lids half concealing a breathtakingly moronic expression. One small fat one and another tall skinny one, one of whom would turn out to be – I recognised him by his voice – the famous Lizard.

  The exchange went unbelievably smoothly. I succeeded in flogging four Moroccan bags in two enormous wheelie bags of forty kilos each, plus twenty kilos loose, for four hundred and fifty thousand euros in five hundred and two hundred euro notes. Scotch was a fast learner, so I demonstrated my satisfaction with him by throwing in the ten kilos I had with me in a sports bag, as a gesture of good will. There was very little talking as they were all in such a hurry to disappear from this place that was crawling with cops looking benevolently on at the adorable little Arab family exchanging bags of laundry for some poor guy on trial.

  How sweet they were, those nephews of mine! When it was time to leave, I allowed myself the luxury of giving the two Moufti brothers a pinch on the cheek, doting auntie that I was – witnessed by the mobile guards – to show them just how much I loved them.

  I settled my mother back into her aged care facility as if she had never left, engaging the assistance of an extra pair of hands, Anta, a young woman from Madagascar, for whose devotion I could now afford to pay a fair wage. The manager returned the box containing her possessions, and Schnookie the soft toy resumed his place at her bedhead. I ran into Madame Léger again in the corridor. The poor thing was no longer speaking at all, and had ended up with a hip fracture following her escapade – which didn’t stop her from continuing to walk around and around in circles like an angry crustacean, pushing her aluminium frame ahead of her.

  As I left Les Eoliades, I found her two children sitting on a bench, in mid argument. The Léger daughter was weeping hot tears, while her brother shouted over her as he gnawed at the skin around his nails, his face undone with anxiety. An infinite sadness emanated from the two of them, both in their fifties, who had now been carrying their pain for nine months, like one of those heavy, two-handled baskets you lug around the grocery store. Their father had recently been moved to my floor and no matter what time I went past his room, he would always be leaning forward, strapped into his armchair, and weeping.