Since my ex was often incredulous by this stage in my stories and in need of concrete examples, well, I told her that I’d seen with my own eyes how a love fetish had worked well for my childhood friend Placide, whose girlfriend Marceline had cleared off without saying goodbye and taken up with one of our classmates who always got nought out of twenty in Mérimée’s dictation, two out of twenty for history and geography, and nineteen and a half out of twenty for physical education thanks to his Beninese fisherman’s muscles. Placide, unlike us, had been lucky enough to hear about a proper fetish man who came from a faraway village in the north of the country. This fetish man didn’t want a cent upfront, you’ll pay after the result he said, I’m not in this for the money. Without saying anything to us, Placide went to see this man who gave him a little seed and told him to plant it in a bowl when he got back home, and to water it every day at around midnight while invoking Marceline’s name. Our friend rose at midnight, knelt down in front of his plant, and called out Marceline’s name for at least an hour. One week later, when the seed had produced a small shoot, we were all surprised to see Marceline strolling once more in front of the plot of land belonging to Placide’s parents. She brought him food now and said she couldn’t sleep any more without seeing him, without touching him, without smelling him, without gluing her lips to his just like in the movies we watched at The Rex. None of us in our district got it at all, because what did Placide have that we didn’t to turn the head of a beautiful girl like Marceline? The more the plant grew, the more the girl clung to Placide.
A group of us went round to our friend’s house so he could at least tell us what district his fetish man from the north lived in because we wanted girls to throw themselves into our arms as well, and to bring us food on our parents’ plot of land and to glue their lips to ours just like in the movies. We wanted girls to tell us they couldn’t sleep without us any more. But Placide refused to reveal the name of his fetish man, he said it was a secret.
So we all chorused:
“You don’t want to give us the name of your fetish man from the north? Well, if that’s the way it is, just wait and see what’s going to happen to you!”
So that night while he was asleep, we destroyed his plant, we urinated all over it, flattened it and broke the bowl it was in, just like that.
The next day the sparks really started flying between Placide and Marceline. They bickered like two strangers, hurling insults at each other in front of everybody.
Marceline took up again with her guy who scored low in Mérimée’s dictation, as well as history and geography, but high in physical education. We never owned up to destroying Placide’s plant. And anyway he never suspected us, because he was convinced it was the muscular dunce himself who was exacting his revenge and who had gone to see the same fetish man to win Marceline back …
And lastly, I didn’t hide it from my ex that later on, when we were sixteen, we thought you had to write beautiful love letters if you wanted to sweet-talk the girls. The trouble was, you already needed to have read some books with those sorts of letters in them. But what kind of books? Novels? Oh no, they were too long. They never ended, the authors waffled on for hundreds of pages. Plus the characters in the novels we tried reading got on our nerves because they took too much time about it, and they only kissed towards the final pages. We wanted to get there fast, not waste our time describing a blue sky, the birch trees or a migrating bird that doesn’t know which branch to land on when it’s flying over an entire tropical forest. Luckily, there was The Perfect Secretary. That book was our bible. We used to go and read it at the French Cultural Centre in Pointe-Noire, towards the Côte Sauvage. And you had to get up early to be the first to borrow it because we’d noticed that old men came along to copy down things from it as well so they could chat up the local elderly widows …
My ex was now sitting up in bed and she wanted to know the name of the author of The Perfect Secretary. I told her I’d forgotten, that at the time we didn’t bother with the authors’ names, we thought they were all dead so what was the point? I explained to her that The Perfect Secretary was a collection of letters to help people write their CV or a job application letter, or a letter of condolence in which they were saddened by somebody dying, albeit at the grand old age of a hundred and two. The bit that interested us was at the end of the book: examples of love letters to send to girls. We would copy them out word for word and send them to the girls just like that. But in those template letters from The Perfect Secretary, the girls were always white, sometimes they were blonde with blue eyes, or brunette with green eyes or redheaded with freckles. And we sent our letters without even tropicalising them. We told ourselves that love had no colour, and good luck to the person who wanted to give a colour to words and emotions. We wrote about winter, we described the snow, we stuck pine trees into every paragraph. And seeing as our girls liked these words, we ended up thinking that nothing could be more poetic than to call a particularly black girl “My Snowy White” …
I even admitted to my ex that my first love has stuck with her pet name of “Snowy White”, and that she isn’t alone in laying claim to that appellation of uncontrolled origin.
All the girls of my youth were, truth be told, Snowy Whites …
My ex had stopped moving. I leaned over and realised she’d been asleep for a while and that I’d been telling this last story to an audience of one.
I switched off the light and soon I was fast asleep too …
I had nicknamed her Original Colour on account of her very black skin. Back in the home country, we still believe that negroes born in France are less black than us. But no, as bad luck would have it, before we met I’d never clapped eyes on anyone as black as my ex. There are some people, when you see them, they’re black as manganese or tar, so you figure they must have roasted under the tropical sun, but then out of the blue they tell you they were born in France. When it’s like that I insist they show me their identity card on the spot. And if I see to my great surprise that they’re right, that they really were born in France, even in the middle of a savage winter like Abbé Pierre’s winter of 1954, then I fly off the handle. I’m thinking: what world are we living in if people are busy demolishing the little things that keep our prejudices alive, eh? Am I the kind of fool who swallows stories hook, line and sinker? How can you be as black as that and born in France? It’s unthinkable. It’s outrageous. It shouldn’t be allowed. It flies in the face of nature. What is the point of braving the winter and the snow if it’s not to wash the skin of the Blacks and make it a bit whiter?
So anyway, my ex — who I’m going to call Original Colour from now on — really was born that dark …
* * *
I saw Original Colour for the first time opposite Jip’s, three and a half years ago. It never crossed my mind that a few months later we’d be living together, and that she would become the mother of my daughter. At the time she was working at Soul Fashion, a ladies’ underwear shop with fluorescent thongs on display right out into the street — something else that would have shocked our Arab on the corner.
From the counter in Jip’s, you could see what was happening at Soul Fashion — sometimes we even caught a glimpse of girls trying on thongs, we’d give a running commentary and smirk when they walked in front of the bar …