At night, you had to sleep to be in good shape again for the next day …
* * *
My father would often impress on me that nothing was easy in a man’s life. Earning my living at the port had the advantage of toughening me up, and of making me think before spending. And he cited the example of my uncle Jean-Pierre Matété who had spent years humping goods at the Pointe-Noire railway station. That was how he had succeeded in life. He had built a permanent house, owned a water pump, and had electricity. And to complete his happiness, he had gone to find the woman of his life back in the village because, as he reminded us, “women from the town marry the wallet”.
My father had ideas about success that I no longer shared as the years went by. For him, the ideal was to have a job, any job. You had to put money aside for a few years, and then build a permanent house before returning to your birth village to marry a submissive virgin and a good housewife. The money you had saved would be used for the dowry, of course. And indeed this was how he had married my mother. He had told me this story to buck me up, to give me courage for my job at the port …
I can see this man, my father, now. Stocky, kindly looking, he had been lucky enough to reach the second year of elementary school, which meant he could express himself in French at a level envied by many of his friends. His work as a houseboy for the Europeans in the town centre was a sort of revenge, an opportunity to prove to the old people in the neighbourhood that he had succeeded in life. What’s more, he used to label all those old folks as “Australopithecus” because in his view they had closed minds, with no culture or vision about the big problems in our world. He had often thought that serving, obeying, being in the company of, and listening behind the doors of the Whites had raised him to the pinnacle of western civilisation whereby he had an opinion on everything and nothing. As long as the Whites had said something, then it had to be true, and it was impossible to present him with evidence to the contrary, particularly if that evidence came from a negro.
He would lose his temper:
“The White man is not stupid! Believe me, I am in their company every working day.”
And so, unassailable, he would launch into his explanations:
“There are Whites of every colour! Some have strange marks on their faces, some have very white hair even though they are still young, some have skin as white as palm wine, some have a skin that makes you wonder if they even deserve to be Whites, some even turn blue instead of going red when they are angry or embarrassed! The Whites, they come in every colour, take it from me! I’d even go so far as to say that Whites aren’t white the way people think they are!”
He told whoever wanted to hear it that he could have married a White woman, a “real” one who would have taken him to live in France, in Bordeaux. Why Bordeaux and not another French town? Because of the wine. To this day he believes that the town owes its name to the wine and that all the wines on earth, as long as they’re red, are automatically bordeaux wines that come from Bordeaux. He still doesn’t know that there are white bordeaux wines. And another thing, when he went inside one of the refreshment stalls in Trois-Cents and wanted to have a drink, a “long” or a “short” red from the Congolese Wine Society, he would call out to the bar owner: “A glass of bordeaux!”
At the time, he used to drink like a sponge. He stopped drinking the year I left for Angola, following a heart scare that nearly cost him his life. When he got drunk back then and started rowing with my mother, I’d hear him saying over and over again:
“If I’d known, I would have married a White woman from Bordeaux! At least with her I’d be able to drink my bordeaux without people giving me grief …”
But he was destined to spend his life with our mother. He had found a stall for her at the Grand Market, and she sold groundnuts, salt fish and palm oil. I am the first fruit of this marriage arranged by the notables from our village of Louboulou. My brother was born five years later. They all live back in the country, in Pointe-Noire.
I haven’t set eyes on any of them for over fifteen years, but I can still remember my mother’s last words to me, as she wept:
“Go to France, work and send me a little money so that I can rent a big stall at the Tié-Tié Market. And then, give me a grandson or a granddaughter before I leave this earth for ever …”
Seeing as I’ve got the time now, when I’m not writing or having my drink at Jip’s I like to lose myself in the Marché Dejean, at Château Rouge, and to remember it was here that Original Colour and her friend Rachel used to sell salt fish on the sly. I spot some characters from the home country. Plenty arrive on foot from the Gare du Nord. In summer the sun seems to roast them, poor things, but it takes more than that to change their habits. They walk, they like to take their time getting there. They’re unlikely to buy anything at the market but, like me, they will feel as if they’re back in the home country, listening to our rural languages, exchanging banter about life in France, about dictators sucking the continent dry and inciting different ethnic groups to tear each other’s guts out before the cameras of the international community.
My Gare du Nord compatriots step off the trains from the banlieues, survey the Boulevard Magenta, peer through the windows at the mind-boggling jobs on offer at the temping agencies: skilled workers are currently being sought, security guards, road sweepers, packers. They jot it all down on scraps of paper. They often linger around Barbès-Rochechouart before walking up Rue Myrha and into the heart of the market.
Then comes the inescapable ritual of reunions. Embraces that seem to go on forever in the middle of stalls piled high with smoked fish, mangoes, guavas and soursops. Full-throated laughter and jostlings without any apology to the victims, even if their toes have been stamped on.
They have their own style when it comes to striking up a conversation:
“Is that you I’m seeing? No, I don’t believe it! How are you?”
“Have you seen me even catch flu here?”
“And what about our friend Makaya, what’s he up to?”
“He is on a trip back to the home country to test the waters.”
“Really?”
“Oh come on, he’d been gathering dust here for fourteen years! In this country white hair falls like snow in the mountains. And you end up having to use Pento hair gel to put people off the scent …”
“Do you think he’ll come back?”
“In theory, yes, if he’s got his wits about him. When the mouse strays too far from his hole, it’s a battle to reclaim it! Anyone can leave France without something to fall back on. And the police don’t give a monkey’s because you’re scarpering at your own expense. But coming back to Paris is another story! They’ll pick up on it straight away if your face isn’t a proper match for the ID you show them!”
“What, you mean he hadn’t fixed his papers before leaving?”
“No, the whole point is he went back to buy an ID. He said he’d use the opportunity to lower his age as well so he could carry on living in the hostel for young workers in Châtillon. Because in those hostels, you must be fresh-faced and under twenty-five, but he was thirty-two with a beard so long it reached the ground!”
“So he’s going to be a rich man when he comes back with all those IDs! You know him well, tell him to reserve a driving licence for me, I’ve failed the Highway Code for the past five years.”