Eddie Signwriter

by Adam Schwartzman

  Walking past their table, he noticed the unusual design of the set on which they were playing. The pips were carved from a polished hardwood. The board was surrounded by an inlay of small stones wound into curling S-vines that double-backed on themselves to form a series of loops, and caught in the light when the table was jolted. He later discovered from Mamadou that the set—which they would play on many times together—had been presented to him by the friends with whom he now sat, in honour of his escape the previous day from deportation.

  Given the circumstances under which they all lived in Paris, trouble of this sort could appear at any time. On this occasion, Mamadou told him months later, his wife, Juliette, had sent him down from the apartment to buy bread. As he turned from the door to cross the road he ran into a pair of gendarmes exiting the general store. They saw each other at the same time. Lowering his eyes and not altering his pace, Mamadou made his way directly to the télécabine on the corner, from which he phoned up to the flat to inform Juliette that he’d never stopped loving her from the moment he first set eyes on her in the shoe shop in Barbès where her cousin had been a sales assistant. He told her to hug the children and to wait to hear from him—as they had agreed she would do in such a situation. As he put down the telephone, the glass door of the télécabine was opened from outside and he was asked for his papers. He only laughed.

  News went round fast. Soon the house was crowded with friends. A day passed with no word. The next morning Juliette phoned some French colleagues from work, who went down to the detention centre to find out how the situation stood. Mamadou’s case had already gone before the tribunal. He preferred to defend himself than be defended by the advocate assigned to him, who had mentioned as they entered the tribunal that an aeroplane was already waiting on the tarmac in Roissy. His plea was rejected after a quarter of an hour. Every day Juliette phoned the centre to speak to him, dreading the news that a place had been found on an aeroplane bound for Guinea, and he was now somewhere over the Sahara desert, handcuffed to an official, with chemicals injected into his body to keep him quiet.

  But Mamadou had one last card to play. He had not had his passport on him when he was arrested and he refused to give the address of the house. The Guinean embassy would do no more than provide the French authorities with a stamped piece of paper confirming that Mamadou had lost his passport. In the end it proved impossible to move Mamadou without his identity documents, since it was impossible to move anyone without an identity.

  They had no choice but to release him from the airport detention centre. Without a centime, he made his way home on foot. Making sure he’d not been followed, he arrived home at midnight. Juliette opened the door and screamed with shock and happiness. The neighbourhood wives slipped out the back.

  Twelve hours later Mamadou was in the café among his friends again, not two blocks from where he’d been arrested, and this was when he first saw Mamadou.

  Surrounded by the noise of their company, Mamadou and his opponent—another of their friends at that time, an Algerian called Fawad—sat silent with concentration. Of Fawad, he noticed only his cheeks, which fell inwards into his face like the shadow of a hill. Mamadou, the African, with his strong coastal features, his high forehead and hair growing densely into a thick foam on his head, looked at Fawad from under his raised eyebrows. From time to time his top lip curled under the bottom in anticipation. His eyes smiled, even his skin, with its thick pores like small mouths, seemed to smile. He could not see the game, but he heard the tapping of the pips against the board and the fall of the die, and then the cheers of the small group, which accompanied the game to its end.

  Mamadou won, and a drink was bought for him, and as he turned to receive it, Mamadou saw him sitting on his own and invited him to join their group. “An English is among us,” Mamadou said as he made room for another chair, having noticed his accent. “Now let us see if you can play.” He won the game against Mamadou in under five minutes. He noticed some of the observers smile, and Fawad wink knowingly. Whether Mamadou had let him win or he beat Mamadou fair and square, he did not ask and never knew.

  Much of his time over the next few months he spent with Mamadou and Juliette, and their two small children. Their apartment was not too far away, and it was easy for him to stop over in the evening. If it was time to eat, Juliette and Mamadou would always invite him to stay. He would help them put the children to bed and then they would stay up eating and talking, and sometimes have a little too much to drink. Juliette would inevitably go to bed, and after clearing the table, Mamadou would take one of the video machines or radios or blenders from the pile in the corner, open it up and work on it with his tools while the two of them talked on into the early hours.

  Mamadou and Juliette were among the few families in their group. They had met in Paris. Juliette was Cameroonian—from a very good family in Douala, of civil servants, doctors and accountants, she was always pleased to remind Mamadou, whose family were migrant farmers making do in the shanties of Conakry. They talked of leaving, but as Juliette would say, Paris was the only place they had in common, and she didn’t see herself living in a tin shack with fifteen other people spending her days washing the clothes of Mamadou’s extended family. Mamadou suffered with good humour his wife’s condescension from the lofty heights of her good family in Douala, though he had privately hinted that Juliette was from a clan that had fallen out of political favour and lived less securely than Juliette would admit.

  And so Mamadou and Juliette were an exception. The risk of deportation generally discouraged people from starting families. “But I cannot help whom I love, and where,” Mamadou would say laughing, and if Juliette was in the room he’d wrap one of his enormous arms around her, from which she’d invariably try to disentangle herself, teasing him that he should not remind her of her weaknesses, in case she repented of her past mistakes.

  For this he admired them. He admired Mamadou and Juliette for the gentle, kind world they had created together. Those three rooms on the second floor of their building—with one window, little light, and rickety plumbing, but filled with humanity and generosity—seemed to him a rebuke of everything that made their presence there illegal.

  It was not something they talked about often. When they did, Juliette would only shrug. What could they do? Mamadou would say that he knew people who had stayed twenty years sans papiers. He’d been there four already. Juliette, it was true, might sometimes have a bitter word to say, especially since Mamadou’s failed deportation, but Mamadou would not. It was not that he did not recognize what Juliette did. But as he also once said, one night at the Refuge, when conversation had turned to heavier matters: All happiness is precarious, and that if one day a person finds themself sitting in darkness, would they not prefer to have enjoyed the daylight when they could, than to have spent their time fearing the night?

  It was a short time after this conversation that, on his way one night to Mamadou and Juliette’s, he met a young Congolese woman called Bernadette, who wore square black glasses and sang Jacques Brel songs about sad cities and was a cheese seller’s assistant in St. Germain. She’d been sitting with a girlfriend at a terrace bar, drinking glasses of cold red wine, and smoking long thin cigarettes she didn’t know how to inhale properly. He’d been walking past, thinking his own thoughts, when she’d called out to him—half in challenge, half in fun, “Hey you, why do you always walk this way and you never say hello? Where are you from?”

  A few hours later she had ended up accompanying him to Mamadou and Juliette’s. The four of them had stayed up until three in the morning and afterwards, walking Bernadette partway to the stop to take the night bus home, he kissed her close to the Tour Saint Jacques.

  From the time that they became a couple he would often sleep at her place, which was all the way over in the 16th arrondissement, in a chambre de bonne on Avenue Victor Hugo. It was a district he loved. The straightest trees he had ever seen lined the road outside the building in which Bernadet
te lodged. The road itself was made of small stones set in flowing patterns as if an immense curtain had been laid out along the ground. In winter, he would linger on the mesh grills on the pavement through which the warm rushing air from the underground trains escaped, letting it billow up his shirt to warm his chest and back.

  Bernadette, unlike most people he knew, was legally resident in France. She was one of the many children of a wealthy mine engineer in Katanga who, once bored with his girlfriends, had had them, and any associated offspring, shipped to France with papers procured through his contacts in the French government. He would be over to join them very shortly, her father would tell them.

  “Hundreds of women are waiting still,” Bernadette would tell people, laughing.

  She remembered her father vaguely—a fat man, with plump hands and wet lips, who wore safari suits and a leopard-skin fez, in imitation of his distant relative (so he claimed) Mobutu Sese Seko—a sight so ridiculous to see, Bernadette would say, laughing, that he would not have survived a moment had he made good on his promises to come to France, to join his wives and his abandoned progeny, there among the nobility of the “Société des Ambianceurs et Persons Élégants”—the extravagant sapeur dandies of the Zairian community in France.

  Not that Bernadette was much impressed with this nobility either.

  To her, a man who wore three-thousand-franc sunglasses at night but slept in a box in an alleyway was an embarrassment of a man.

  “Even if the box smelled of Yves Saint Laurent,” she would say.

  “While you,” she would tell him, “my funny-accented Anglophone, will do quite fine. I prefer that you spend your days washing plates. Look at these hands”—and she’d take his raw, calloused hands in hers—“what sapeur would take around a pair of these?”

  Of his past she noticed that he talked little. She told him she didn’t need to know, unless he thought there was something she should. He told her he’d say if there was, but he didn’t.

  Of Celeste, he said nothing directly, but for one occasion, when one morning in the early hours, he’d woken up suddenly from a dream of his last night in Accra, of Celeste asleep as he’d left her on the morning of his departure—how she’d stirred at the sound of his movement as he got up, reached out unconsciously with her hand over the ghost of his shape in the bedding, then fallen back asleep, confident that what was gone one moment would be back the next.

  Bernadette lay beside him sleeping. He had listened to the sound of her breathing for more than a minute before gently shaking her awake. Her voice was soft and heavy with the weight of sleep, but her mind was awake.

  “Tell me,” she said gently.

  “There was a girl,” he said. Il y’avait une fille.

  “Bien sûr,” she said, “mais elle était toujours là.”

  And at that moment he felt unable to talk and a very deep sudden sadness rose up and dissolved the possibility of his having to say anything else.

  After a while he noticed that she had fallen asleep again, but he could not feel angry that she had not remained awake when he cried. Nor did he want to be able to make the claim on her that anger would imply.

  The next morning when they made love she cried, and he cried afterwards too, though not out of love, but out of gratitude.

  Whenever he left Bernadette’s chambre he would take his time getting home. A little way down the street from her rooms was a flower shop, the inside of which reminded him of the abandoned houses he knew from his own country, in which the trees and bushes would grow up the walls and through the windows and roof. Inside this shop it was as if a garden of flowers had risen up against the city—against all the gentility and civilization. It teemed over the furniture, overran the molded fixtures of the front room, and colonized the good furniture and the piano and the side tables.

  There were flowers of all kinds in pots around the shop—on the black piano with the candlestick holders set into it, on an old cabinet, on marble and wooden tables: lilies and roses, irises, tulips and many others he did not know the names of. In one corner were statues of semi-dressed white women, their skin smooth as milk, in another were large pots the colour of dried clay, and the floor was made of thousands of small white stones as in the bathrooms of the Romans who inhabited Italy many years ago.

  He visited the shop irregularly, and at one point—when he noticed that he was not unwelcome there—more frequently. The owner of the shop was a French woman. But from the manner in which she dealt with customers, and also the way she seemed absorbed by tending to the plants and flowers in her shop, he could tell that neither had she been born here, nor was she entirely comfortable among those she served.

  He learned later that she’d come from the south of the country, from a small town in the Alpes-Maritimes, where her people had lived and farmed vegetables but also, from time to time, flowers for the local market. After a series of family misfortunes that she was reluctant to discuss, she made her way to the capital, as a young woman, and set up shop, with the help of relatives. This must have been some twenty years before he met her.

  It was she who first alerted him to the museums of Paris, where she told him the great art treasures of the world were stored. And so, for the price of a few meals at a time, he went to see the paintings and the sculptures in these museums, and he spent many hours in front of the art stored there. He learned much through Madame la Fleuriste and the books that she lent him, as well as those one can read on the shelves of the bookshops on the street or in museum bookshops, once one has bought a ticket, besides what he observed with his own eyes—which was a great deal.

  He saw Milon de Crotone—the man who got his head caught in a tree and was eaten by a lion, that sunk valleys into his leg with its claws and tore with its teeth into his buttocks, about to eat him from his anus upwards, entering into the guts in the soft cave of the stomach, as a lion eats an animal. He saw Valentine Balliani lying in her grave, leafing through a book while her puppies jumped on her dress. He saw sleeping knights praying to God and peeping out of their helmets at the heavens, as out of portholes. He saw the carpets and the jugs and the painted tiles of the Arabs, and the bulls of Mesopotamia and the flying horses with their men’s heads, their hair curled up like centipedes, and the men carrying chariots on their heads, and their prisoners bound to poles by their hands. He saw paper-thin Egyptian fish, little pieces of slate swimming across the walls, and shelves of those people’s jars and bottles and shallow dishes. He saw the inside of a church at night in Holland in the seventeenth century, where the poor sit on the stairs and become the colour of shadows. He saw their gods playing in their lakes and their landscapes made of hills and stringy trees. He saw the people in their villages dancing madly in circles, eating and drinking and falling to the ground, and suckling their babies while the dogs sniffed at their baskets and plates. He saw angels sliding down rays of light. He saw the studious astronomers in their quiet rooms, the light dropping in like a sheet and at the same time like a river, the table covered with papers and a flowing curtain. He saw the glass windows in a Dutch house, and the wooden doors and the white plaster walls, and the light spilling around like soft fires, and in the corner, the children entering and leaving through it. He saw Italy with its temples and castles rising up from the sea, with its beaches on which hawkers sat with their donkeys and their wares, and the servants waited around the boats. He saw men with the feet of goats jumping out of the reeds and catching the flimsy girls. He saw a city on water where the sea was as smooth as marble and was cut up by veins under its skin. He saw the naked ladies of northern Italy, the white bulls and the saints being whipped, the monks flying supernaturally through the air, the angels surfing down from heaven, the spiky red devils, the heads of saints grown round with gold, and the air that is so clear you can see every thread on the robe of a pope, and every grain in a plank of wood. He saw Saint Pierre with a machete in his head, and his forehead leaking blood. He saw a woman standing at a balcony with an umbrella, sta
ring past him, and poets sitting around a table set with flowers. He saw apples and cake set out for a picnic in the forest attended by men in clothes and women without clothes. He saw a small soldier playing the flute, and babies and angels tumbling down the doors of hell. He walked among centuries of statues, pure and white, with their eyes blind as eggshells. Occasionally he found images of himself, or from his world: at one time the statue of a Mauritian girl, caught smiling, half-flattered, half-shy, her eyes dropped, both her nipples plucked through her dress, the one an onyx bauble, the other still clothed, and wearing in her hair a beautiful flower that opened like a water jug, sticky with pollen. He saw himself in the same century, his face swimming out of a pink dress as he looked quietly upon the form of his mistress, the whore; and again, a slave holding up a quarter of the world.

  Outside, though, when he walked nearby through the streets by the river, past the shops full of artifacts from Africa, he was everywhere. The breasts of the women spirits were cones; the eyes and noses were scars carved into the face; their mouths were holes punched in and out of the flesh; and their hair was a flurry of scratches stabbing the wood. Never had he seen these things in such number until he saw them displayed in the shops of Rue de Seine—dolls for fertility and war and placation and honour to the spirits of villages long since cut down for the making of the great road, or emptied for the slave galleys.

  But the feelings of dejection and estrangement with which he came away from the museum in the old d’Orsay railway station—a world away from the enthusiasm with which he had arrived in the city—were also coloured by events that had just then begun unfolding across the river on Boulevard de Strasbourg, where by now he had been living for four months. The first of two police raids in the district during that time took place in the early hours one Sunday morning in November. He had slept the night before at Bernadette’s, and had gone directly from there to work the next morning, and so when he reached Boulevard de Strasbourg late on Sunday afternoon everything was already over.