Yves the just-Ivorian was grinding his axe about the colonial debt again:
“You should have had a mixed-race kid! You haven’t understood the first thing about this country and here I am declaring until I’m blue in the face that the most urgent problem facing us lot from the nigger-zone is to seize here and now the compensation for what we were made to suffer under colonisation. We should sing along with the musician Tonton David that we come from a people who suffered a great deal, from a people who want to suffer no more. I’m fed up of sweeping the streets of Gaul when I’ve never seen a White sweeping the streets of my Ivory Coast. Since no one wants to know that we exist in this country, since they pretend not to see us, since we’re hired to empty the bins, let us not make things more complicated than they are, the maths is simple, my friend: the more we go out with French women, the more we’re leaving our mark on this country so we can say to our former colonisers that we’re still here, that they’ve got to come to an arrangement with us, that tomorrow’s world will be packed with negroes at every crossroads, negroes who will be as French as they are, whether they like it or not, that if they don’t repay us double-quick for the damages we’re seeking, well then we’ll go right ahead and bastardise Gaul by all means necessary! You really haven’t understood the first thing, you don’t listen to me, today you’ve just proved that the Congolese are the biggest fools on our continent and that they make a lot of noise instead of cutting straight to the chase. Is it with babies like yours that we’ll be able to advance our cause, eh? This baby doesn’t count in my eyes, it’s setting us back a hundred years. What future will it have in a Gaul that will treat it as an immigrant from dawn to dusk? I don’t mince my words, now if you don’t agree you can do what you like. For me this birth is nothing, it doesn’t count! Zero!”
Roger the French-Ivorian was pacing around the pram. He stuck his nose in as if looking for goodness knows what clues. Everybody watched him carry out his inspection. He wheeled the pram over towards the door for more light.
“What on earth’s that Roger doing?” asked Paul from the big Congo.
“Is he baptising the little one or something?” wondered Willy.
Roger the French-Ivorian took off my daughter’s woollen bonnet to get a better look at her. Then, pulling a face, he stood up again:
“Hold on a minute, Buttologist, this child in question, is it yours?”
“In your opinion, who else would make a child like that here, eh?” Yves the just-Ivorian fired back to his half-compatriot.
The two of them are always feuding, sometimes they go off to fight by the fountain at Les Halles.
Roger the French-Ivorian stood tall, giving a dirty look to his perennial enemy:
“Yves, am I even talking to you? Have you ever shown your child here? I am directing my comments at Buttologist, not you! You do not even exist in my eyes! Go and wait at home for France to pay you compensation for being colonised, as if your own parents hadn’t cooperated and benefited from the system! If I were the Minister for Immigration and National Identity in this country, I’d have taken away your resident’s card!”
Yves retaliated by insulting his half-compatriot as he walked out of Jip’s:
“This White-Negro is starting to get on my nerves! I’m going to have to leave, or things could turn out nastily for him. It’s not with half-castes like him that we’re going to win the case in this country. While we’re busy defending our rights, White-Negroes are auctioning us off the way they did back in the days of slavery. This man will never understand our struggle because he has sold out like all the other half-castes. When the system is anti-Blacks he calls himself White, and when the Whites remind him that a half-caste is just another negro he rejoins the negro crowd! This Roger you see in the bar is French by day and Ivorian by night, never the other way around! I want him to be Ivorian twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and for him to stop playing out his little hypocritical game! Sell-out! Pro-slaver brown-nose!”
Roger the French-Ivorian didn’t respond to these attacks. It was business as usual.
He turned towards me:
“Aren’t you warm-blooded, or what?”
“Why?”
“How can you have a child who doesn’t look like you?”
Calmly, I told him to have a good look at my daughter. I took off a shoe to show him my foot.
“Look, we’ve got the same toes …”
“Toes and all that nonsense is for when the grandparents want something to cling on to. We need something concrete, a signature that’s authentic and indelible. Are you sure this is your child, eh?”
Just then the little one woke up and started crying. I picked her up to soothe her …
Paul gave me several bottles of perfume for Original Colour and tried to cheer me up in a corner:
“Don’t listen to that crackpot of a French-Ivorian! It was King Solomon who said that a child is still a child, be he red, yellow or brown. I heard that in a Francis Bebey song. There is also someone who said that woman is the exact place of our birth, and he was right. I can’t remember who said it now, but it must have been someone with a brain in his head. People can always argue about the father of a child, there’s nothing new there. Take Roger, can he really say that he is his father’s son?”
Pierrot the White came over to join us in our corner with the three Pelforts he’d bought me. He put them down on the table:
“Down these three beers for me! One for the Father, one for the Son, and one for the Holy Spirit!”
He reminded me that in the beginning, there wasn’t just the Word, but also the verb and the subject and the direct object, and that it was Man in his wickedness who introduced the indirect object. And it was this same wickedness that motivated some of my pals at Jip’s. I couldn’t make head or tail of his argument, but I found his words comforting compared with what the others had thrown up.
I didn’t go back again to Jip’s with Henriette. If someone asked me to bring her in, I replied that my baby was not a specimen for some colonial exhibition …
II
I still haven’t told the Arab on the corner that my ex cleared off to the home country a few months back. I’ll have to come clean about it one of these days, I’m going to run out of excuses soon. If I’ve kept quiet about it until now it’s because I know he’ll have a heart attack when he finds out.
When I’m opposite him, he’s the one who always does the talking, he won’t let me get a word in edgeways. Once he’s finished with his rant he asks after my ex and my daughter, and I always tell him the same thing: they’re on holiday in the Congo. It’s like he’s delivering the same speech from the day before, he just adds a few new hand gestures here, a few new frowns there. As soon as I walk into his bazaar, I know he’ll want to bend my ear for at least twenty minutes’ worth. It won’t be long now before I need what our neighbour, the young man on the seventh floor, Staircase A, the one whose mother is poorly over towards Champagnac de Belair, calls a “cast-iron alibi”. But my tactic is to deal with the problem as it arises. I just can’t see myself saying, out of the blue:
“I’ve been lying every time you asked me for news about my daughter and my partner, it’s been ages now since they left for the home country with that good-for-nothing, the Hybrid.”