We left the bookshop, walked up Rue Riquet and grabbed a table at the Roi du Café. I had my back to Rue Marx Dormoy, so I could see in his eyes the marks he was giving the backside of each girl as she crossed the road. This was all we talked about, the different kinds of B-sides. And he was having a good laugh with it.
That evening I arrived back home feeling lighthearted and it didn’t bother me that Mr Hippocratic was lying in wait. the Hybrid had already left for the night, I wasn’t interested in finding out why. I started reading even though Original Colour complained that the light would wake the little one. I was far away, I wasn’t in that studio any more. Everything around me stopped existing. I was picturing Louis-Philippe’s island, Haiti. I was the character from the capital of Port-au-Prince which he had re-named Port-of-Filth. He had painted the portrait of Pointe-Noire, where I come from. The people looked like me. I underlined everything. I was in a state of wonder before the poetry of his language.
I called Louis-Philippe the next day. I went over to his place, and I got to drink Barbancourt for the first time. I admired his bookshelves, I leafed through each of his books that had been published. He teased me a bit about my outfit.
“Do the Congolese always dress like that?”
The following day after I went to buy a typewriter from Porte de Vincennes because I don’t like computers, and because I wanted to be like a real writer who rips up pages, crosses things out, and has to interrupt his creative flow in order to change the typewriter ribbon …
* * *
When Original Colour nagged me for spending too much time writing, hanging out at Jip’s and only working part-time at the printing works, I’d just get up and take my typewriter for a walk in the park. I would sit on a bench under a street lamp along with the tramps who were knocking back bottles of red, and I’d keep on writing.
I think I must have been hitting the keys too hard because even the tramps were giving me funny looks, as if they thought I was losing the plot and would soon be joining them. I kept on writing, I was writing more and more. When I saw a bird moving in a branch, I would write it down. When it flew off to another tree, I wrote that down too because Louis-Philippe who knew a thing or two about inspiration had told me that writers noted everything down and then went through their notes so they only kept the stuff that really mattered. Thanks to him I was now reading like a bookworm, I wasn’t just reading dead authors, I was reading living ones too, I really wanted to become a writer in the vein of Georges Simenon whose Maigret adventures had been all the way round the world. But then I realised that I could only write about what I’d experienced, about what there was around me, and that it would have to be every bit as chaotic …
If I had several encounters only a month after Original Colour left, it was because I felt very angry and I wanted to get my own back. I’m not the kind of person who thinks that revenge is a dish best eaten cold. I don’t like all that biblical patter about how you’ve got to turn the other cheek when someone slaps you. I grab the bull by the horns.
So off I went hunting in our community’s nightclubs and at the concerts of Koffi Olomide and Papa Wemba. But I came home empty-handed and started to feel despondent, it was as if I had lost my charm and I wondered about the sand slipping through my fingers. I risked becoming a man of the past. There were good-for-nothings out there who knotted their ties better than me, and they were more forward too. I started believing my misfortune was written on my forehead where Original Colour had put a curse on me.
And then someone rose to the bait one evening at the Keur Samba nightclub, in the 8th arrondissement. That’s where I ran into Rose. She had arrived from the Congo a month earlier, and there was no mistaking it when you saw her on the dance floor, she looked like someone who, instead of being descended from the apes like everyone else, was heading back that way for good. She hopped about, opened her arms and legs wide before landing down on the ground. At the end she was sweating so much I was turned off by the sweat stains on her white blouse. There were a few compatriots chasing after her, and she was playing hard to get, she’d lead them into a corner before coming back to dance opposite me. It was all a show, I’d clicked that she was available and that I was the one she was enticing with this dance of the spear-wielding caveman hunting the mammoth.
What have I got to lose, eh, I thought to myself, by indulging in a bit of pleasure this evening? I’m being provoked, so I have to defend myself, and attack is the best line of defence.
I stood up and tried to dance a few centimetres away from her, imitating her prehistoric movements. I held out my hand, she turned her back to me: it was all about proving she wasn’t an easy catch.
I sat back down again, what else could I do, I’d rather have died than carry on following her jerky moves and strops.
My withdrawal strategy paid off, Rose came over to me:
“Is that how they try to pick you up in Paris? The girl gets a bit stroppy and the man goes to sit back down again without putting up a fight? Come on, come and dance the tchakoulibonda with me!”
She could see that I wasn’t familiar with that particular dance. You had to shake your shoulders, grab your partner by the waist and simulate a violent penetration from the B-side. Apparently, it was all the rage back in the home country. I’ve never felt so ridiculous in my life. The entire nightclub was looking at me and I thought I could hear people creasing up with laughter.
Towards two in the morning I suggested to Rose that we go and drink a last glass back at my place.
“Cut the patter, you want do the business, I can tell! I’m not a little girl any more, I’ve got a sixteen-year-old kid back home!”
I thought the game was up, but she went to fetch her bag which her cousin was looking after. I heard her say to him:
“I won’t be coming home this evening, but don’t worry, the guy I’m leaving with is a big brother. He’s a softie, he’s not going to cause me any trouble.”
We caught a taxi not far from Fouquet’s. I didn’t say anything as we were crossing the city, and nor did she. I was picturing Original Colour again, and wondering what she was up to right then back in the home country with the Hybrid.
The taxi dropped us off in front of the Arab on the corner’s, which was closed at that hour.
I was praying that Mr Hippocratic wouldn’t wake up as I opened the door to my studio.
Rose just stood there on the threshold.
“Aren’t you going to turn on the light?”
“We don’t need it,” I answered, “come in.”
“We don’t know each other well, and I’m not happy being in the dark like this with a stranger, I’ve heard lots of weird stories …”
She flicked the switch and the light dazzled us. I got a good look at her close-up and wondered if this was the same woman as before. At Keur Samba she’d looked so young, her skin as soft as a suckling babe’s. And in the violet light of the disco club her wraparound skirt showed off her B-side nicely. What I hadn’t noticed was that her skin had been put through some kind of chemical peel, and her hair and nails were fake.
“Turn the light off, please,” I said.
“How are you going to know I’m beautiful if there isn’t any light?”
So we left the light on. She got undressed quickly. I didn’t want my eyes to spend too long on her breasts, which were covered in stretchmarks like the slashes you find on the Téké faces back home.