Tram 83
Page 14
The astrologer sang and played djembe in a metro station. Singing and playing djembe is an overstatement. It was sickening. He sang grossly out of tune and chafed his palms from striking the instrument. Given that certain tender souls consider reason to be always Hellenic and emotion eternally Negro, or, more explicitly, that any black guy with dreadlocks is an excellent artiste, the passersby stopped, applauded, and chucked him some coins which allowed him to phone Africa and mend his spirit with the aid of wine costing one euro fifty centimes a bottle. It was very possible he’d been drunk when he barked down the phone. True he had lent Lucien a hundred dollars for his wedding to Jacqueline but that was not a valid reason to continue harassing someone. Moreover, Lucien had long since reimbursed him.
“Gents, I take my leave of you.”
Requiem set to chewing the fat with one of the baby-chicks.
“Listen, Lucien, if you’ve got a bit of time to spare, produce a collection of poems on Mauritania too. It’s publishable, is Mauritania. Oh, the Mauritanian imagination!”
He hunched over, wrote: “The girls are like the mines which are like the railroads which are like the diggers which are like the students with their strike lacking timed longevity which are like their necktie-less pasts, an endangered species. But I admire the gaze with which they perceive life and death.”
“Yes.”
“Do you have the time?”
“Free verse on Mauritania.”
“I’ll see. Sir, I take my leave of you. The Diva and I will be performing together soon. We would welcome your presence.”
“Love me forever.”
“Take me to your country and love me more than your children.”
The publisher raised his eyebrows!
“Stop trying to get in that kid’s skirt.”
He left with his pages of texts. On his heels, a stream of young ladies, but not all of them. The publisher stuck his hand in the air:
“Rum!”
Requiem, to the single-mamas who’d stayed put:
“Come!”
They headed toward the mixed restrooms.
They crossed the threshold. Mewing. Crescendo. Extended mewing. In the Diva’s railroad crucible. Ephesians 18.
27.
THE DEPARTURE OF THE NEGUS.
Requiem said he worked in the health sector, but there wasn’t a single living person in the City-State who knew what he was really involved in, outside of kidnappings and incursions in the Polygon. He always returned with a considerable sum of money that he spent all night counting and packing away in garbage bags. Sometimes he came back bleeding like a sponge. Sometimes he showed up virtually naked. And one night he even interrupted Lucien’s sleep:
“You know that I owe a Greek ship-owner $5,765,000 in two mornings’ time. What to do? He swears he’ll have my hide.”
But what the hell was Requiem up to with that kind of money? He’d never been seen in a three-piece suit, nor driving a carriage, nor straddling a mount, nor approaching the daughters of the thirty-odd consuls on which the whole burg, including our Mexican, South Ossetian, Pakistani, Belgian, French, Indochinese, Hungarian, Romanian, Chilean, Canadian, Ukrainian, and Tibetan brothers, most of them undocumented or holding a work permit illicitly obtained, had their eye.
Requiem eventually weighed anchor. He was incapable of living with an individual unable to land a job and who clung to his literature as to a family heirloom passed down from generation to generation. He took his things away late one Monday night. It had been raining and windy all day. Following his latest choreography of misfortune, which lasted, as the Gods were his witnesses, around two hours, he had decided for the umpteenth time to demonstrate his Negus power.
“Evening, Requiem!”
Soaked through and through, Requiem found Lucien kicking back reading the latest gossip rags and refusing moreover to place his characters in a Colombian context.
Swansongs are eternal. Final choreography. Last installment. Without batting an eyelid, he handed Lucien a stack of newspapers, so wet they were crumbling away in his hands. He gave him a banknote. He kissed his forehead. He stared at him hard before taking the stairs down, his suitcases, his garbage bags, and his face that was going to the dogs like the station that was essentially an unfinished metal structure, gutted by artillery …
“You leaving?”
“I don’t like the look of you. You won’t work for me even though you owe me everything. Furthermore, you insist on getting that thingamajig of yours published, and by whom? Malingeau, my all-time enemy! You won’t manage to pay the rent, I bet my dick on it!”
28.
IN PRAISE OF A NIGHT OF TRANSGRESSION, FOLLOWED BY LUCIEN AND THE DIVA’S READING.
Not all nights had the same chronology of beer, music, dancing, single-mamas in the first flush of youth, dog kebabs, and madness. Those who went out at night knew the plot, the prosody of events, the convulsion of circumstances, the gloomy processions toward the unknown. Sometimes they began with the decrepit-single-mamas, followed up with poetical dancing on the paltry beds at Body-to-Body Granny’s brothel — the Face-to-Face — continued with some jazz, prefaced with some mulled wine, sampled some cat and olive stew, boiled rice, and dog kebabs with saffron potatoes, smoked some Indian hemp, and raided the Polygon of Hope Mine armed to the teeth. Nights were a delight for those who knew how to make the most of them. True nights were long and popular. True nights were always eventful. True nights were no longer free from corruption and other low blows. True nights stank of neuralgia, the spit and traumas of those who built this broken beautiful world.
“It’s during the night that the giants of this world manufacture our misfortunes with the zeal of self-taught bakers,” laughed the girls with eggplant-breasts crammed into the mixed restrooms of Tram 83 with their desire to satisfy vast as the sea, to deal a second death, Gehenna, Revelation 19, verse 20, Revelation 20, verse 14, Revelation 21, round about the eighth verse, or even the books of Corinthians. These girls were extraordinarily beautiful and they reprised the same psalms.
“We are warm and welcoming, inventive, flexible with our flesh that devises delights of other ages for you, and in this your wives are not even half the women we are, they’re too traditional, don’t know how to set their hips a-swaying, they’ve forgotten how to thrust with their left leg, and spend the night asking you for pocket money, university registration fees for the children, this and that, whereas us, we’re eternal, we proffer ourselves body and soul, just long enough to drive you, to drag you, to ecstasy.” Meanwhile the negotiations regarding rates always pushed upward, the legs giving way, the urge to be done with the pleasures of the underbelly, the beer that answers back, and the body bristling with nostalgia for dumping, soiling one’s pants (dump = transgress = expel = jettison = evacuate = download = release on bail = defecate = shit, and, not to sink into silliness or appear less crude, let us say crying need, or even transfer).
The for-profit tourists, the Chinese tourists, the second-class tourists, the young ladies of Avignon, the waitresses and the busgirls, the strikemongering students, the diggers, the suicidals, the mercenaries, the slim-jims, all of the City-State poured into the Tram.
The Diva and Lucien mounted the podium to the applause of the Tram. The writer was trembling. He couldn’t bring himself to look at the audience, or even communicate with the prima donna, who smiled to reassure them about their act.
The rumors that spread from the Cuba Club to the Polygon by way of Vampiretown recounted the detail of his abundant lovemaking with the diva after each concert. The busgirl with fat lips confirmed these below-the-belt doings. She became hysterical when refused a tip and, to regain control of the situation, described at the top of her voice the way in which Lucien pumped the Diva. These revelations saddened every man who only had eyes for the fine body of the queen of these nights of boozing.
When Lucien showed up at the Tram, the mercenaries, the second-rate tourists, the slim-jims, the baby-chicks, and the dig
gers rushed over and begged him to spill the beans. He answered with silence. Not only did this heighten our curiosity but it made us extremely cross. We at least had the right to know the truth.
The Diva danced the same bolero. Upon hearing the question, she opened her arms and let rip a magnificent laugh. The most sensitive among us ejaculated in their pants. We spent the rest of the night picking over the prima donna’s laugh until, weary of suppositions, we fell back on the baby-chicks.
The Diva is eternal. You don’t forget her with one or even two baby-chicks. The next day, the desire to hump the opera singer returned, refueling the speculations and the gossip even more intensely. As a counterbalance, the diggers and the second-rate tourists therefore suggested holding a Miss Baby-Chick contest, since the first-rate tourists were threatening to quit coming to the Tram. The Diva is eternal. Even those who plotted against her are the same who covered the podium with flowers at each of her concerts.
“Where there’s beer, there’s cheer.”
As a prelude, the Railroad Diva performed “This Life Is Longer Than The Train To Nowhere” over the crescendoing noise of boxcars newly acquired by the dissident General in return for some as yet undisclosed merchandise. The depth of the queen’s voice paralyzed us, her delicate features in the half-light, a voice to plunge us into unbearable moods, to fill us with the impulse to run out and jump aboard the first train to nowhere, what depth, what timbre, her voice soared, pirouetted, descended, walked with the paralytics, ripped the vile stench of the rails from the frozen-hearted, the tourists (arm in arm) swore to never recommence their dirty work, the baby-chicks wiped away sobs and tears as they told us they’d be back beneath their father’s roof at dawn, the busgirls softened and gave us the fastest service in the world, Malingeau downed his ninth beer, the students buried their hatchet long as their strike, the miners bought bottles of beer for the desperados, everyone in tears, the mist, the sea crashed down, the darkness lifted from every face, the dog meat passed from table to table as in a depiction of the Last Supper, desires rose, certain tourists left their private conversations to shake hands with the diggers who whispered to them with teeth as dirty as the rails of the station whose metal structure … that a new world was coming, the Railroad Diva, beers were passed around, we trembled from head to toe, we dumped in our pants, we masturbated, we climbed on the tables, we banged our head against the walls, we gathered at the doors to the mixed facilities, that voice, that voice, that voice, it penetrated us, flayed us, trampled us, shredded us, voyage, birth, dream, we thought of those whom the earth had swallowed up, all those whom the trains had taken following a derailment, the bitterness and the eyes riveted on those who’d left to seek new lives across the ocean and who’d never got there betrayed by the waves, that voice, Requiem sniggered arrogantly, Lucien clung to his pen and scrawled joy is a violent dream and you need this violence in your dream to give it flavor, the publisher flung down his glasses, got up, walked back and forth across the Tram, that voice, that voice, that voice, joy is a diminished smile, we experienced a waltz of magic urges, dreams escaping in smoke wreaths from cigarettes, a voice that lacerates you, time had lost all purpose, we were in 2069 or 1735 or 926 or the Paleolithic era, filthy faces, bare feet, wearing loincloths, speaking unknown tongues, that voice, the tourists viewing their past, the diggers yelling that pride would prevent them going to Beach Ngobila and diving into the ocean with vodka and rotten mangoes for provisions, forget your wounds in a chorus of acoustic rails, walk the length of your thoughts and, despite death and the trains that depart and return empty, speak of the cracks within, of joy, joy as a rusty jalopy that carries you to your grave mine where you enter with no hope of leaving, in the beginning was a diva and her freight-train voice, that voice, that voice, that voice, that voice, that voice, that voice, joined by fatwas, angelus bells, the droning of the boxcars on platform 13, that voice, that voice, the Diva, joy means drowning your tears, your failures, your languor in a little music that is simply human, that voice, that voice, that voice …
“Foreplay spoils the fun.”
Lucien began to read a text dealing with the fortuitous meeting between a man and a woman on board a train, common denominator: loss of memory. They fall in love. But how to tell each other this? How to love each other? How to talk of their previous life? Toward the end, while the man tried to fashion a language to say love with the five words he had left (history, tonsillitis, truce, shame, and weld), the Diva, who was playing the role of the woman, against a background of prerecorded sounds, unreeled a song, long and mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, and at the same time celestial with her voice, bursts of applause and applause and applause …
Within and without the Tram, a convulsion of incompleteness. Within and without the Tram, cries and yelling. Within and without the Tram, the songs and texts of the sacred couple, united by the same momentum, time’s wasting, the thirst for archeology, solitude.
29.
FROM DUST YOU WERE TAKEN, TO DUST YOU SHALL RETURN, GENESIS 3:19.
Lucien didn’t dig in the mines like ordinary mortals. He preferred to live off his pen or maybe work in a large office all to himself. That was impossible in a jungle like the City-State. All activity revolved around the stone. Everyone depended on it directly or indirectly. We didn’t know what the hell else to do except head underground, moles that we were, that we are, that we shall remain. You don’t mess with your destiny, the Negus liked to say. It is written: born in the mines and the trains, you shall spend your whole existence swarming about the quarries until the prophecies come to pass. Poverty is hereditary just like power, stupidity, and hemorrhoids. It’s even contagious, this locomotive life.
Unable to pay his rent, he decided to contact Émilienne:
“Come over, don’t fret, you should have said ages ago that Requiem was making life so difficult for you! Ask anyone to show you the way to The Guerilla, a little bar-restaurant-cinema a few blocks from the station. They call me Aunty Émilienne.”
Had Émilienne really meant it when she’d told him to call her if he was ever in difficulty? She’d exerted all the pressure she could to get him released. She loved him, showered him with her affection, even reproached him for abiding forever in his shell when she only required a little attention in return.
The Guerilla was a little house, its walls pitted by bullets, relics of the third — sorry, fourth — war of liberation.
Diggers, inside and out, hobo style, dirty, disdainful, laughing like crazy, with their smokes, their picks, their shovels, their spite, and their way of belittling you as if you weren’t made of the same flesh. A standing parliament of post-adolescent baby-chicks roaring with laughter.
“Do you have the time?”
Musicians with their guitars, acrobats, tourists, cooks, waitresses, busgirls, students, you’d have thought it was Tram 83 in miniature.
“I’m happy you came.”
“Do you have the time?”
“Foreplay is exhausting.”
She helped him carry his suitcase, steered him toward the counter near to which a table was waiting just for him.
Lucien, egoist, there you are focused on your belly, without even bothering to check if Jacqueline is able to survive, what with all these crashing stock markets that are hitting the headlines.
“Yes,” he replied, with an intellectual’s arrogance.
A fresh band took their places.
A tourist, perhaps the group’s sponsor, introduced them. Two talented guitarists. A saxophonist in his fifties. A drummer, and proud of it, with dreadlocks, piercings, tattoos, and a booming laugh. Attacking-vocals: two lead singers, four backing singers. The dancers were five baby-chicks, well fleshy, their midriffs exposed. An atalaku, or shall we say a shock-emcee. And the bandleader, the high priest, spiffed-up Kasamoto style. They dominated, bewitched, possessed the place, you could feel it. Zairians no doubt, given the zeal with which they beguiled the audience, their dexterity, the way they looked at people, their shouts, their singing, their liveliness. They kicked off the show with two fine rumbas from the 1960s. Followed up with their own repertoire, a contemporary repertoire seasoned with some Coupé-Décalé, revised and corrected, the new kotazo dance, also known as the dance of the mpomba (meaning strong men, Kinshasa bandits who’ll slit your throat at the drop of a hat) accompanied by a type of ndombolo called lopele (fishtail), throwing some merengue and conga steps into the blend, occasionally summoning to the rescue a remixed kotazo called kotazo 2 — a question of universality no doubt. You can imagine the effect triggered by good music, good dancing, fit guys, great girls, an audience switched-on and captivated 100% — but Lucien (Tintin in Zimbabwe) went on writing his crap as if nothing was happening!
After close to an hour of balladry, a different music began to pound out, right across from The Guerilla. It was, apparently, a different band, different Zairians apparently, who knew full well that their brothers across the way were performing a concert but who, for the sake of provocation, perhaps to prove they were capable of doing the same, began playing good music too. They opened the hostilities with “Débarquement,” lead single off King Kester Emeneya’s album Le Jour le plus long. In the background the “pigeon pigeon” dance that was, we learned, a massive hit in Central Africa, particularly the Belgian Congo. The diggers who had previously fought in Zaire, Rwanda, Uganda, and Angola in the ranks of Jonas Savimbi and who knew all these songs and dance steps by heart, prattled on about how they weren’t at all surprised that the competition took on such proportions. Same music, same dancing, same vocals, same get-up, same midriffs, same nationality, face to face, body to body.