Like a fool, I’d been looking after our daughter that evening while those two cousins were out eating and getting drunk at a Congolese restaurant on Rue de Suez …
One time the Hybrid stayed in Paris for over a month even though his group didn’t have any concerts booked. It’s true he didn’t sleep at ours, but I noticed Original Colour losing her head during that period, she was always getting dressed up, spending more and more time away from home and coming back very late. My cousin this, my cousin that. I won’t be back early tonight, don’t wait up for me. Pick up the kid from the Cape Verdean childminder and feed her at seven o’clock on the dot …
That same month I thought I was going to explode when I found the Hybrid sitting comfortably in our only armchair. This armchair was my place, I was the one who had bought it, and I sat in it to watch my programmes about those couples who go to an island to resist the temptations of handsome men and beautiful women. The Hybrid was holding the remote and watching The Young and The Restless. My daughter was fast asleep, and he was shedding a tear in front of the telly because of his soap involving a love story and an inheritance, as well as poisonings every two minutes and trite dialogue. All he was wearing was a pair of shorts, he was gobbling up my garlic saucisson with some cassava and a hot pepper, and drinking my beers that I’d bought from the Arab on the corner. He was surrounded by empty bottles.
I asked him what the hell he was doing in the capital instead of being with his fellow musicians in their remote corner of northern France. He replied that the whole group was in Paris to record a CD, and that he and the others had decided to go back to the home country for good. In the meantime, he was making the most of it by looking after Henriette while Original Colour was at work. All in all, he was helping his cousin and I should be grateful to him.
At this rate he was as good as living with us. How can you stay round at other people’s from morning to midnight? According to Original Colour, the cousin was doing a good job of looking after the little one. I’ll admit that when he used to sing things to our little girl, she held out her arms to him and burst out laughing. She was getting so used to him that when I wanted to hold her and sing her the things from here that people sing to little French children — things like Marlborough Has Left for the War and There’s Some Tobacco in My Snuffbox — she would blub as if she’d been stung by a red ant, she wanted to stay in the Hybrid’s arms and she would only listen to the songs from back home. This pleased him no end, I tell you he was taunting me …
I had really had enough by the end. But I couldn’t say this out loud. Original Colour kept praising the minstrel’s talents, which encouraged him to leave two of his drums round at ours on the grounds that Henriette loved the sound of our ancestral instrument. On Sunday afternoons he would make a bloody awful racket, giving me a migraine and making Mr Hippocratic bellow that we should go back to the bush we came from and take our accursed tom-toms with us.
“The Negroes say fuck you!” crowed Original Colour.
* * *
Since the Hybrid felt at home, this meant I was in the way, and Original Colour made this very clear to me. One afternoon I even came back to find the minstrel in my Marithé & François Girbaud T-shirt. He was making a big show of wearing it, and was stretched out on the bed with a Pelfort and the telly tuned to his soap involving love, beauty, glory, inheritance and trite dialogue.
This time, he really had overstepped the limits of hospitality even if it wasn’t me who paid the deposit on the studio. Have I lived but to know this infamy? I muttered, through Corneillean gritted teeth.
I vented my anger on him. He defended himself saying it was Original Colour who had lent him my T-shirt, otherwise he would never have taken the liberty of wearing it. And anyway, he added, this top looks like a floorcloth, there are holes everywhere, you can’t wear it outside the apartment. Did he follow fashion, this man? To say that about an item of designer clothing by Marithé & François Girbaud! What sacrilege! What ignorance! We nearly came to blows.
“Take that T-shirt off and fast!” I shouted.
He got up, his eyes went red, I could sense the anger rising in his chest. He warned me that if I laid a finger on him he would make mincemeat of me because he had been given a grigri at birth and if he head-butted me I would be out cold for twenty-four and a half hours:
“If you lay a finger on me, I’ll send you off to Accident and Emergency in Lariboisière with one head butt! I’m not looking for trouble here. I haven’t been in a fight for a long time, but if you want to test the force of my grigri from the village of Tsiaki, then just try touching a single hair on my head!”
On the basis that I didn’t want to be out cold for twenty-four and a half hours and end up in A&E in Lariboisière, and because I know that you don’t mess around with grigris from Tsiaki, I calmly repeated my request for him to take off my clothes and to pick up his shitty belongings, before finishing off with:
“That T-shirt is mine, it cost an arse and a leg, and we’re not talking any old arse here, not even a piece of Original Colour’s butt!”
* * *
Later on that same evening, before running to catch the last métro, the Hybrid told his cousin every word I’d said, and she wouldn’t let it drop all night.
“You criticised my butt in front of my cousin? Who do you think you are? These buttocks of mine that you’re insulting, aren’t they the same ones that turned your head that first day in front of Soul Fashion, eh? Have you ever seen any others like these in all your life? Do you know how many people would pay to have me? Do you look at yourself in the mirror before you start talking to people? I am asking you again: who do you think you are, eh? You do nothing in this house, you go drinking with the riff-raff at Jip’s, you work part-time, and you think you can play the boss round at my place?”
The Hybrid never did come back to our apartment and Original Colour stopped talking to me. At least, I thought to myself, we’ve got rid of the minstrel. But we still had two of his drums at home, and they got up my nose. When I looked at those instruments it was as if the cousin was there and our ancestors were talking to me, or even mocking me.
“So when is he going to pick up his things, that cousin of yours? We don’t have any space in this studio as it is!”
This question was the last straw. Original Colour turned into a wounded tigress:
“Enough is enough! Enough is enough! Enough is enough! If you won’t leave this studio then I’m the one who is walking out!”
She was roaring so loudly that Mr Hippocratic banged on the wall several times.
“Silence, you Congolese negroes, or I’ll call the police!”
I never did the business with her again after that. I took to sleeping on the floor, and eating out with my pals from Jip’s. I spent time with Louis-Philippe who kept saying to me:
“Write, write about what you’re feeling …”
I’d never taken my hat off for anybody before. If I found myself eating humble pie now, it was for the sake of my child’s education so that one day she would turn out a dutiful daughter. I was trying to get on top of things, to dilute my palm wine with water, and not to think about what Carcass had told me at Bar Sangho, I even stopped calling him so I wouldn’t have to suffer any more. I wanted to become a responsible man, I wanted to show Original Colour that I didn’t give a monkey’s about her history with the Hybrid when she was seventeen.