* * *
Words couldn’t do justice to Original Colour’s B-side, but she had a face of stone to discourage someone approaching her for the first time. Not that I had anything to lose, her stony face was hardly Mount Everest, and her scornful expression was just her natural way of protecting herself, like porcupines brandishing their spines to scare off predators. I took my courage in my hands, walked towards her, saw her smile — I’m guessing it was my get-up because she looked me up and down — and that’s how we started chatting in front of Soul Fashion.
I quickly sensed that I shouldn’t ask her too much about Africa, she wasn’t familiar with it. Or with the Congo either. She dreamed of going there one day, whereas I just had to remember my eventful arrival in France fifteen years earlier and my life before that as a packer in the port of Pointe-Noire to know that I never wanted to go back. Although I kept it to myself, I was shocked to discover that she was born here given how dark she was. I was this close to asking to see her identity card, but I didn’t want to offend her. She saw I couldn’t take my eyes off her backside. As a buttologist I was trying to figure out her behaviour, but for once I was out of luck because surgeons don’t operate on themselves. Clairvoyants can’t read their own futures. Better still, to use a ready-made phrase, cobblers are always the worst shod. So I settled for studying that black well-oiled skin, it was glowing: “My God,” I wondered, “how has she managed to end up as dark as that, when we’re not short on winters in this country …?”
That day I already wanted to stake out my territory, get the words flowing between us. I wasn’t going to ask her the kind of questions Big Poupy used to teach us when we were very young and wanted to chat up girls. Over all, I didn’t handle it too badly. My pals at Jip’s gave me a round of applause when I returned with Original Colour’s telephone number. But they were just winding me up, especially Yves the just-Ivorian who pointed out that I’d never make France pay back its colonial debt with a girl like that …
* * *
We found ourselves talking more and more, almost every other day — I’d let at least a day go by, sometimes two, I didn’t want her to feel pressurised in any way. The girl I was getting to know was kind and sweet and attentive. I invited her out to different bars and cafés around Les Halles because my pals were getting on my nerves now, applauding me as if I’d won a world record in I don’t know what sport.
We visited everywhere in the 1st arrondissement: Le Père Tranquille, Le Baiser Salé, La Chapelle des Lombards, Oz Café and I can’t remember where else. Sometimes she really made me laugh. Back then, just as later on when the Arab on the corner used to tell us his jokes about the Israelis feeling blue or “mo’ sad” because of the gloomy weather, or the North Africans using the “Kabyle” telephone to call home, I was mainly laughing at the way she laughed, she sounded like a clappedout car that couldn’t manage a hill-start any more, she really went for it and the tears would pour down her face. Sometimes she would come and have a drink with me up at the counter in Jip’s. The guys stared at her backside from a safe distance and reckoned that, for a buttologist, I’d made a boob, that I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for.
“Why are they laughing like that?” she would ask me, tilting her head in the direction of Roger the French-Ivorian, Willy the barman and Yves the just-Ivorian.
“They’re being kids,” would be my answer.
Despite their jibes, I approached the girl’s penalty area, and I kept going, eyes closed, convinced I was in the right, and that the others were blind men without white sticks. Did Bosco the Chadian Poet and Pierrot the White from the small Congo really have anything to teach me on the subject? I didn’t appreciate it when Yves the just-Ivorian gave me a hard time in front of everybody:
“Wake up, Buttologist! We’re in France here and you’ve got real goals to score because an away goal always counts as two points, my friend. But you’ve chosen the easy path, going for a compatriot. Is this how you intend to make the people of this country compensate us for everything they inflicted on us during colonisation, eh? They stripped us of our primary resources, so we’ve got to steal their treasures, and by that I mean their women! So ditch that fat-arsed sun-roasted woman of yours and bag a pretty blonde with blue or green eyes, you can’t move for them in the streets of Paris and beyond. And another thing, those White girls won’t give you a hard time compared to our sisters who are first-class pains in the neck. It’s her butt that’s making you lose your head like this, isn’t it? Well then pay a visit to where I come from, in the Ivory Coast, and you will see what a real woman’s backside looks like, how it moves, how it trembles, how it rotates like the blades of a helicopter. The girl I see smoking in front of Soul Fashion is just a tiny mirage, you’ll be disappointed the day she takes off those trousers of hers because her butt will collapse all the way down to her calves …
I didn’t take kindly either to the remarks of Vladimir the Cameroonian who smokes the longest cigars in France and Navarre. He made it clear that in order to satisfy Original Colour my thing down there would have to be as long as two of his cigars stuck together.
“Buttologist, have you seen how long my cigar is, eh? Does it remind you of anything?”
I didn’t react.
“Now, I’m going to take another cigar out of my pocket and I’m going to stick them end to end like this. Look …!”
And then Vladimir finished off with:
“You’ll need a tool as big as that, you see, or the girl will laugh in your face. And you can count your lucky stars I haven’t managed to get hold of the longest cigar in the world yet, made by the Cuban José Castelar and measuring eleven metres and four centimetres! You’re just a Sapper, a dandy, a lover of Westons and suits from the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. Back in the Cameroon, we say that length isn’t so much of a Congolese attribute. My advice to you is get fit!”
But I decided to go with the advice of Paul from the big Congo, who told me I should do the business and then beat it at the first opportunity …
Later on, I would find out from Original Colour that her parents lived in Nancy where they had a lawyers’ practice, that only French was spoken at home and that she didn’t understand a single one of the hundreds of languages in our country. Her father was opposed to the regime in power, and consequently he was banned from entering the Congo, but he hoped that one day it would be his turn to become President of our Republic, and then he would snatch our oil from the hands of the French and give it to the Americans instead. He would crush all the northerners and throw them into the Congo River because he believes his tribe has been experiencing nothing short of genocide for decades now and that this has been met with indifference from the international community. According to the lawyer from Nancy, the only hope for the Congo is for half the country to break away, or else the extermination plain and simple of those from the North who have confiscated the reins of power since Independence and who steal the gas from the South in order to sell it off at a knock-down price to the French. According to Original Colour, her father still had a big grey beard like most African rebels who copied the look of the Angolan resistance fighter of the day, Jonas Savimbi, a charismatic man who, right up until his death, prevented his rival, President Eduardo Dos Santos, from sleeping soundly at night.
Original Colour harboured a grudge against her father. And that spark of hatred would flare up as soon as I tried to find out a bit more about him. She sounded very vexed on the subject. She used to say: “That proslaver”, “that creature”, “that tribalist”, “that person I don’t know” and even “that man who calls himself my father”. According to her, this lawyer was just a Southern extremist, a man who cultivated intolerance even in his own home, a political fanatic whose wife soaked up his words without raising her voice. He would receive at home the bosses of our former regime, which was now shot to pieces following two civil wars. The lawyer and his frustrated guests would ponder a new political party in order to win back power, by force if needs be. He was waiting on the green light from America because, he maintained, these days you can’t have political change in any French-speaking country in Africa without the help of the Yankees given that the French kept everything under lock and key in their former colonies …