When the métro stopped at Etienne Marcel, the guy waved at me as he got off. He didn’t realise I was getting out at the same stop. I watched him rush into the nearest Arab on the corner’s and grab a bottle of red wine, which he started necking before my eyes. What a swindle, I thought, this guy hasn’t put my cash to good use. I won’t allow myself to be hoodwinked ever again by beggars in the métro.
So that’s why I prefer the beggars at the mosque in Château Rouge. They won’t get blind drunk like that. The eye watching Cain will prevent them. They’re not aggressive, they don’t insult anybody, they don’t ask, they wait to be given something. And when you give, there is only the beggar and Allah witnessing this heartfelt act …
* * *
I’m not a fearful person, I don’t lack courage or open-spiritedness. It’s a question of strategy: a living coward is worth more than a dead hero. This was a very sensible piece of advice given to me by my deceased uncle who had deserted the army camp during the Biafran War because he wanted to defend his humble being and die a slow death rather than for ideas that’ll be obsolete in a few years as Georges Brassens, the singer with the moustache, puts it. I’ve realised that desertion runs in my family because I too fled military service in my country of origin. Weapons and all that, it’s not my thing. In fact, when I spot a man in uniform — even the security guards at a shopping mall or for the cash machine of a local bank — I cross over to the other side, I pick up the pace and I don’t look back. I imagine World War Three is at hand, that troops are moving towards Porte de la Chapelle, that the famous Senegalese soldiers will be called to the rescue as they were in the old days. That’s why I hate war films, however brilliant the director. The last one I saw was Saving Private Ryan. Yes, it was a bit different from The Longest Day which was in black and white, but it was still a war film, there were uniforms, weapons and all that, explosives, detonations and human flesh galore and all tightly plotted, but in a proper war there’s no plot, there’s no close-ups, there’s no wide-angle shots, there’s no classic dialogue, people shoot themselves and the dead get counted so the historians from the Sorbonne and future generations won’t bicker about the exact number of victims.
One of my childhood friends who advised me to do my military service over in Angola — and even to get myself recruited as a soldier — claimed that being in the military was a cushy number because during wars the soldier has a better chance of survival than a civilian who, on top of everything else, will die without honours. But I love peace, I’d far rather die a civilian and be buried in a communal grave. Someone once recommended if you wish for peace, prepare for war. I don’t agree with him. For me the person who wishes for peace must prepare for peace, end of story, the word war is surplus to requirements. And on that subject I have a photo of Martin Luther King somewhere in my suitcases. And in that photo, the black preacher is standing in front of a picture of Gandhi …
But back in the home country they were making us go to Angola to fight the war — they tried to cover up this up by saying we were going there to do our military service, and that we needed to be ready in case our neighbours the Zairians, who are a lot more numerous than us, attacked us to steal our oil, our timber and even our Atlantic Ocean.
It was at the time when we had to help the Angolans who were fighting against their rebel Jonas Savimbi and his men hidden in the maquis. So our government sent our young men to Luanda in their masses. We saw this as a punishment since the children of prominent citizens and other powerful figures in the regime didn’t have to go, not them. And Jonas Savimbi’s rebels hadn’t done anything to me to make me hunt them in the bush where they survived by hunting, gathering and fishing. Better still, I admired Jonas Savimbi’s big beard, his big nose and his green mamba eyes. I was happy when he routed the Angolan armed forces, and I crossed my fingers for him to win the war. Why go and fight against someone you like?
If us plebs were in a hurry to go to Angola it was in the hope of clearing off to Europe from our neighbouring country, which was a den of traffickers working hand in glove with the airlines. All you had to do was raise the tidy sum of three hundred thousand CFA francs, and you could fly off to Europe. I managed to get the hell out for good from Luanda.
I first arrived in Portugal before washing up in Belgium, and then in France with the ID of a long dead compatriot whose brothers had sold his residency card to Angolan traffickers. I go by the surname and first name of this disappeared person, so you’ll understand if I haven’t revealed my real name up until this point, still less the name of the street where my little studio in the 18th arrondissement is located. Obviously, the day I kick the bucket my little brother who lives in the home country will rush to sell my papers to the Angolans who will, in turn, sell them on to some idiot keen to make the journey to Europe.
But look, I’m in good shape and good health, and my wake isn’t set for tomorrow …
* * *
I don’t enjoy recalling those times of sacrifice, the work I did well in spite of myself before going to Angola. I would get up in the morning and wait for a truck in front of a bus shelter opposite Studio-Photo Vicky, on Independence Avenue. I would climb up onto the truck together with some other guys. The truck would purr its way along the Avenue, stopping every two hundred metres to pick up more packers. By the time we reached the town centre, day would be slowly breaking. We could hear the waves roaring. The sea was just metres away. The fish sellers in the Grand Market would be parking their old bangers at the entrance to the port and waiting, anxiously, for the return of the Beninese who had the monopoly on fishing the Côte Sauvage. The natives thought it was a humiliating job. That was the sea for you. Fights breaking out between fish sellers, arguments that ended in fisticuffs in the middle of the ocean …
This was where I worked, having failed my baccalauréat in Letters and Philosophy and my father having concluded that school wasn’t for me, that in any case it was a factory for turning out the unemployed along with people who wanted to become President of the Republic when in our country if you wanted to become President all you had to learn was how to execute a coup d’état and put your tribe in charge.
The truck would tip us out on the roadside like sardines, and we would walk up to a barrier where men in uniform would check our identity, confiscate our bags, and only then let us through in single file. And so the hard day’s work began, with the unloading of containers watched over by foremen. We were endlessly being accused of stealing objects from abroad in order to sell them on in Trois-Cents. At the slightest theft, the guilty person would be marched to the main customs office where he was stripped before being whipped with barbed wire and then a final settlement would be drawn up making him a debtor for life. With so many objects from all over the world the temptation to steal was there, no doubt about it. But it was the customs officers who indulged in this trafficking, we were just scapegoats. We the subordinates, we the less-than-nothings could only covet those marvels from a distance …
At one o’clock in the afternoon we were finally allowed to stop for a bite to eat. But even during our break, the foremen stuck to us like leeches. On each table they put a monster of a guard with a weightlifter’s physique, who chewed big chunks of cassava, had a swivelling eye and was listening out for the slightest whisper. We didn’t leave the port until evening, after interminable searches during which each worker was made to wear his birthday suit and put his hands in the air in a hut we nicknamed the “Screening House”. When we stepped outside, we felt as if we’d passed a tax inspection with flying colours.