I nod while wondering when he’ll finally bring his rant to an end.
“Today, it’s on me,” he declares. “The bottles of Pelfort are a gift from me, and so are these bananas, my brother, we are all Africans together!”
“Thanks very much …”
“How are your wife and your daughter? Still on holiday in the home country?”
“Still there, yes.”
“Lucky them. With this shitty weather we’re having, if I were in their shoes I’d stay in the sun for a long time … She’s a real go-getter, your wife! Very brave, very obedient, always working or looking after your little one!”
“Thank you …”
I must get used to the idea that Original Colour is back in the home country with the Hybrid who plays the tom-toms in a group nobody’s ever heard of here, but from what I hear it’s a hot ticket over there and normal girls have fainting fits during its shitty live gigs as if they were at a James Brown concert.
Do people from the home country know what real music is? All they do is writhe, go into a trance as soon as the drum beat starts. Is playing the tom-toms in a group a respectable activity, eh? Can you come home at the end of the day and say to your woman, honey, I play the tom-toms, that’s my job and here are my payslips? Is that what’s going to fill the hole in the social and take the brakes off social mobility? And to think that Roger the French-Ivorian wants me to write about the tom-toms or drums in my diary. I ask you! The tomtoms are for people who like a night-time racket, end of story. That’s why, unlike the Arab on the corner, I have respect for the Chinese and the Pakistanis. They’re decent guys who’ve unfairly got a bad reputation for working like dogs and never saying a word when they’re not harming anyone. At least they don’t play the tomtoms in this country. The day someone invents silent tom-toms, a lot of old negroes will lose their reason for living. The tom-tom is something we should get rid of for good because its time is up. In the past they used to have fun sounding this instrument in the cotton fields of the American South to tell the other slaves watch out the master’s coming with his dogs, make it look like you’re working or else he’s going to whip you or sell you to another master who’s even more wicked and who’ll chop the legs off any slave who makes a run for it. It was also with their tom-toms that these slaves wept for the faraway suns of the black continent when they had the blues. And it was also with the tom-toms that the Africans greeted the suns of independence, but what they didn’t know was that they’d find themselves going from Scylla to Charybdis. Now is no longer a time for having fun and working in the cotton fields, now is no longer the dawn of independence, but we beat those tom-toms from morning to night, to the point of leading happily settled women astray …
* * *
Of course, I could always have gone for the Hybrid, sent a few friends his way who would have rearranged his face back in the home country. But what good would that have done? I’m not a man who enjoys trouble. I’m polite and, unlike Mr Hippocratic, I’m very sociable, I’m open to all sorts of debate and I’m conscious of the way our society of the spectacle is evolving. I am familiar with the ways of the world. But not with fighting and conflict. I don’t like arguments and disputes. In fact, when a fight breaks out among the guys from the banlieues at the Gare du Nord or métro Marcadet-Poissonniers, I don’t separate the fighters, I distance myself from the battlefield, I let the belligerents fix up their self-portraits the way they want to. You should never disturb contemporary artists, just leave them to express the madness of their art when they paint their Guernica. Let them fight according to their rules, I’m not going to play at being referee. Fighting often amounts to a lack of communication, by which I mean ignorance about the ways of the world.
So when there is an argument or a fight I take off because just one word from a bystander, and they stop arguing or waging war, and turn on you instead, as it says in one of La Fontaine’s fables, your ears will be mistaken for the horns of the animal that wounded the Lion and you will endure the wrath of the king of beasts. It’s thanks to my extreme cautiousness that my criminal record is still clean, and it’s not everybody who has a record like mine. It’s so clean they could use it when they’re short on forms at the ministry of justice. Not only that but I don’t hang out with delinquents, I don’t keep company with criminals, I don’t know any judges and I’ve never sat opposite a lawyer …
That Congolese minstrel doesn’t even come up to my ankles, he doesn’t even come up to my Achilles’ heel. Has he got a moustache like me or like my friend the writer Louis-Philippe? Has he ever worn Weston shoes in his life? Does he know how to knot a silk tie? Does he know why some shirt collars have three buttons? Could he recognise one hundred per cent lambswool? Does he own a Francesco Smalto suit with a topstitched lining? Has he ever seen the film Three The Hard Way with Jim Kelly, Jim Brown and Fred Williamson? Has he ever read The Dirty Havana Trilogy by Juan Pedro Guttiériez? NO, NO AND NO AGAIN!
I’ve got to calm down here or I might end up punching my typewriter. I’ve got to remember that the Hybrid is short even when he’s standing up. Plus he’s got one eye bigger than the other, and his calloused hands look like the claws of a crab from the Côte Sauvage at Pointe-Noire who can’t decide whether to go back into the sea or to scuttle across the sand. His head is like a rectangular parallelepiped. His skin is like very dark laterite, and if you take a good look there’s no difference between him and those famous sculptures of fighters that the Senegalese artist Ousmane Sow exhibited on the Pont des Arts, and which frightened some Parisians so much that the poor things were forced to cross the Seine using different bridges where joy wouldn’t come again after each sorrow …
Original Colour will be sorry one day. When you’re lucky enough to have a guy like me you don’t leave him, you hold on to him.
Sometimes I wonder what people are looking for in life. What on earth is she going to do with the Hybrid, eh? Listen to the tom-toms night and day? Tag along behind for his concerts in the back of beyond? What is this business of restoring drumming to the poor Africans of Africa? These days the Africans over there don’t give a monkey’s about traditional African drumming, because it’s something they’ve left to the Whites who take lessons in it, who dress up in African textiles to look the part and who are rather pleased with themselves because they reckon they’re doing their bit for integration and cross-cultural exchange. I can understand a White learning to play the tom-toms, it makes him look cool, the kind of guy who is open to all the cultures of the world and who is not in the least bit racist. But a Black who plays the tom-toms is dodgy, it’s too much about returning to his roots, to the beginning, to the natural state, about having a sense of rhythm. It’s not for nothing that the Europeans are so interested in African drumming. It’s because they want to find out how things worked where we came from, when it was the only means of communication.