What she didn’t realise was that like most Africans who followed the continent’s current affairs a bit, I knew that Mr Bigshot Lawyer had been named Minister of Justice in order to carry out a specific mission: changing the country’s constitution every time the dictator president asked him to. He wrote the Constitution of his country in a single session because their president was obsessed with overtaking the French Constitution of the Fifth Republic. According to this Head of State, de Gaulle, who was applauded by everybody in Africa, had messed up his Constitution, and the French had taken advantage of this by showing him a lack of respect at the end of the sixties. Mr Bigshot Lawer had the original idea of giving all the powers to the President of the Republic. And so the President is at the same time Prime Minister, Cabinet Minister, Minister of Defence, Minister of the Interior, Finance Minister and above all Minister of Oil and Hydrocarbons.
While Gwendoline was bragging about daddy’s villas and fleet of cars, I was listening to her with one ear, and telling myself that the hour would strike when I’d make her be quiet and we’d finally get down to serious business. She would no longer be the minister’s daughter, with her taste for fancy cars and travels. She would be a naked woman in front of a naked man, and there, all human beings have the same weapons …
Looking back on it, I think what matters is that I managed to get Gwendoline into the car and that we slept on the fifth floor of the Novotel in Porte de Bagnolet, in a suite. I gave the excuse of having left my card in the car, so she was the one who guaranteed the room.
“Tomorrow, after lunch, I’ll get the money out at a cash point,” I promised her.
The minister’s daughter kept disappearing off into the bathrooms, drinking champagne and letting out idiotic peals of laughter in front of a television programme about the laborious mating rituals of the Zimbabwean rhinoceros.
She started up again with her question about the twenty-four carats. I explained to her that a carat was the amount of gold contained in an alloy and that amount was expressed as a twenty-fourth of the total weight. She stared at me, wide-eyed. But I knew we’d never see each other again. Because I didn’t like her derrière that only wiggled on one side. And because the way she went on about her old man would get on my nerves …
At five in the morning, while she was sound asleep, I tiptoed out of the hotel. All she’s got to do is call her father, I reasoned, and he can settle the bill from Libreville …
I still go and visit Louis-Philippe because it makes a change from my pals at Jip’s. Talking of which, I must remember to give him back his copy of The Dirty Havana Trilogy, I’ve had it for a while now. He’s a real writer, and it’s not just the regulars at the Rideau Rouge who enjoy what he writes. I’ve got him to read a good chunk of what I’ve written so far. He’s told me I’m not there yet, that I’ve got to learn how to structure my ideas instead of writing when driven by anger or bitterness.
“We don’t write to take our revenge, you have to master your anger and contain it so that your prose flows naturally. Deep down, I’m sure you really loved Original Colour, and you still do love her, don’t you?”
There was nothing I could say. I looked at him for a moment, this man who was so far away from his island, who had taken leave of his nearest and dearest years ago. I wondered why Haitians are either brilliant writers or taxi drivers for life in New York and Miami. And when they’re writers they are in exile. Do writers always have to live in another country, and preferably be forced to live there so that they’ve got things to write about and other people can analyse the influence of exile on their writing? Why doesn’t Louis-Philippe live in New York or Miami?
Sometimes I sing Armstrong to him, in which a famous singer from Toulouse, Claude Nougaro, has almost the same trouble as me with inspiration, except it’s about skin colour for him:
Armstrong, I am no black man
I am white of skin
When I want to sing on hope
My luck is not in
Yes, I can see the birds and the sky
But nothing, nothing glimmers on high
I am white of skin
Louis-Philippe tells me that without homesickness nothing comes out, even if you can see the restless birds in the branches. Now it just so happens that I am also far from my country, and I feel like I’m in exile, so am I going to spend my life crying about this? These Haitian writers are like hunted birds. They’ve had more than thirty-two coups d’état back home and not a country in the world has equalled this record yet. With each coup d’état, flocks of writers have emigrated. They left everything behind, setting out with nothing apart from their manuscripts and their driving licence. I wish I’d been born Haitian so I could be a writer in exile who understands the song of the migrating bird, but I don’t have any manuscripts, or a driving licence to become, in the worst-case scenario, a taxi driver in the streets of Paris …
* * *
When Louis-Philippe talks about his country, his eyes go moist with emotion. I’ve got received ideas, clichés in black and white, as well as colour snapshots too. Life there has its ups and downs. When he tells me about how their country was the first black Republic, I applaud, I feel proud as a Toussaint Louverture painted by Edouard Duval-Carrié, the most rated Haitian artist in Miami. But I stop clapping when Louis-Philippe talks to me about the Tonton Macoutes and company. Ouch, I screech, ouch, papa Duvalier and son? Uncle Aristide not at all Catholic?
I filled Louis-Philippe in on how, over in the Congo, we know a few tunes from his native country, we grew up with his music. You could hear the voice of their musician Coupé singing “Away with you” in all our bars. And when we heard “Away with you”, it meant it was dawn and the bar was about to close. But there were always those last remaining gentlemen who deliberately ignored Coupé Cloué even though he told them several times: “Away with you! Away with you! Away with you!” Coupé Cloué is a sort of Haitian Manu Dibango, the same shaved head, the same smile that reaches all the way to his ears.
I also listened to the rhythms of their group Skah Shah de New York with Jean Elie Telfort’s voice, because I’m an open-minded kind of guy after all who is thoughtful about the ways of the world. I enjoyed the song Camionnette by Claudette et Ti Pierre, and whenever I heard that summer hit it meant there was a burial or a party to mark the end of the mourning period in our neighbourhood, and sometimes even a wedding because we’re like that back home, in life and death we dance to the same rhythm for funerals, weddings, divorces and for the other joys and trials of everyday life. There is joy in pain, that’s the way it is in my small country …
* * *
I won’t easily forget how guilty I felt for not knowing how to dance the Haitian kompa properly. Not that there was anything fancy about this dance, all you had to do was grab your partner by the hips and make a compass with her, the way we used to in geometry at elementary school, that was it. Easy to say but difficult out there on the dance floor. And I admitted to Louis-Philippe that I’d had to make my excuses to the only Haitian lady in our district of Trois-Cents. This woman was stunned to see that a negro from the Congo didn’t know how to dance the kompa, even though everybody knows that all black music comes from Africa and there’s no point in teaching Africans how to dance because it comes naturally as soon as the music starts up. And this Haitian lady was called Mirabelle. She said she was going to teach me the basics. And I said great, at last I’m going to be able to dance the kompa.