“A bit like you,” she added, pointing at me.
My pals all laughed. Paul from the big Congo whispered that the White woman just wanted to get a negro in the sack. Yves the just-Ivorian was eyeing her greedily and drooling:
“Did you see her butt? It’s like the gazelles back home in Abidjan. I bet she’s already had a Negro whipping it and he’s just ditched her, that’s why she’s come looking for another one who’ll take over from him because a White girl can’t have a B-side like that unless a good Negro’s already worked hard on it. And anyway, what about the will of the people, eh? She’s got to be made to pay for the cruel treatment inflicted on us by her ancestors during colonisation. Seeing as she’s French-Belgian, both France and Belgium need to cough up. It’ll be a double indemnity. What you call killing two birds with one stone …”
Willy changed the music because the choral singing he’d brought back from Brazzaville was sending us to sleep and reminding us of those we’d lost. Olivier had already started sobbing.
We knew Willy wanted to dance salsa with this girl, because he put on a Compay Segundo track when he’d rejected our earlier requests to change his funeral music.
He said to Sarah:
“I’m Willy, I’m boss of everything in this bar, and I’m lighter than a sparrow’s feather! When I dance I always take my partner higher than the seventh heaven, but rest assured I bring her back to earth very smoothly. Come on sweetheart, this is where the action is, and I’m the best salsa dancer around, the others are just first-class time-wasters. Can I pour you a little glass of ginger to get the engine going?”
Bosco the Embassy Poet was already quoting The Lake by Lamartine to her. He went over to the girl and whispered to her: “A single being is missing and the whole world feels deserted.” When he wanted to follow this up with The Sleeper in the Valley, everybody booed.
Lazio the security guard looked even more muscular than before. You’d have thought he’d gone and rubbed oil into his biceps to impress Sarah. His shaved head was glowing and he flashed a smile that oozed confidence.
The Embassy Poet confided in Paul from the big Congo:
“If that hunk goes out with the girl, I’ll start bodybuilding tomorrow!”
And Lazio was whizzing around, proving that he was the one who was boss of everything at Jip’s, not Willy, not even the owner Jeannot who’d gone on a road-trip to Morocco with his friends that particular week.
Lazio grabbed the girl in the small of her back, he didn’t beat about the bush, he even promised to marry her while Pierrot the White stood back and signalled to me to get in on the action.
I took a few steps, rescued the girl from Lazio’s clutches and told her I’d really like to see her paintings, that if she was looking for a model I was happy to give it a go. Her face lit up and, from then on, she directed everything she said at me.
She tried to save face:
“When I said flamboyant just now, I hope I didn’t offend you, I meant it in the artistic sense of the term …”
I told her that I wasn’t at all offended, that flamboyance was an art, that if I understood her it was because I myself had been writing ever since I’d had a writer friend, Louis-Philippe, who was also into art.
She added:
“A writer is an artist too, he paints with his words …”
She wanted to paint me at my place, in front of my typewriter, in the middle of all my piles of paper. I gave her my telephone number. She drank a glass of tomato juice and thanked me before leaving.
I heard Willy hectoring me from the counter:
“Buttologist, you stole my dance! If you think that girl’s serious, you’re mistaken. She’ll go looking for another flamboyant type at the Baiser Salé. She’s the kind of chick who solicits men in bars, and I know what I’m talking about …!”
* * *
Sarah turned up at my place three days later. It was the first time I didn’t hear Mr Hippocratic reacting behind his door, probably because of the ceasefire after his speech at the Roi du Café.
I’d tidied everything up at home, but Sarah wanted it to look a bit messy, so I wouldn’t be creating a false impression. She asked me why I’d gone to so much trouble doing the housework, tidying my suitcases into one corner and burning incense in the room. I told her I hadn’t had anyone back to mine for a while. As I said this, Rose suddenly flashed into my mind. But I brushed her away.
Sarah asked me to stand near the window and she stared at me for a long time before she began drawing me. She did a lot of rubbing out, she kept changing the angle, she told me to look up and to the left for the light. Did she realise I was glancing down too much because I wanted to get a good look at her B-side?
* * *
After she’d done her work we went for a drink at the Roi du Café. Seeing as I felt relaxed chatting with her, I ended up talking a lot about Original Colour and my daughter.
“I’m the father of that little girl, and I won’t give up!”
I railed against the Hybrid, his music, his tom-toms and his concerts. She looked me straight in the eye without interrupting me. Then I felt bad about taking up more that my fair share of the conversation.
She stood up without uttering a word and said goodbye. I watched her going down the steps into the métro at Marx-Dormoy. She turned around and smiled at me.
Later on, in the middle of the evening, she called me to say she’d had a nice time, and to thank me for being so open. I didn’t notice the time passing, we spent more than two hours on the telephone.
She came back the following week with a picture that was all wrapped up. The portrait she painted of me is hanging on my studio wall now. You can’t miss it …
I like Sarah’s paintings. The colours are vibrant. She knows how to express the joy and despair of the characters from Château Rouge and Château d’Eau. I can see her becoming a high-profile painter in the years to come. Her parents are good people. Her father lives in Pantin and runs a printing works and her mother is a beautician in Rambouillet. They adore their only daughter, unlike Original Colour’s parents who never want to see their offspring again. The father doesn’t say much. Sometimes I play pétanque with him when we go to visit. Her mother, who’s more chatty, often asks me for news from the Congo. And seeing as I don’t have anything particular to tell her, she keeps saying to me:
“Above all, you must never forget your own country, never …”
* * *
Sarah often talks to me about the painter René Magritte whose mother drowned herself when he was fourteen.
One day I said to her:
“So when it comes to painting, you just need to go to the École des Beaux-Arts, learn the right techniques, and …”
She cut me off, looked at me pityingly and answered with:
“What are you saying? True painting transgresses all norms. Magritte himself said: ‘A painter doesn’t paint to put colour on his canvas, any more than a poet writes to put words on a page.’”
My jaw dropped, because that René Magritte had foreseen all the arguments in order to stand his ground! Perhaps that’s what every artist should do before kicking the bucket. Don’t leave the business of defining your creativity to others. Toss the keys to your oeuvre here and there if you want to avoid professional pundits making a travesty of your life experience and the sweat of all your labour. I told Louis-Philippe about what Magritte had said the day I introduced him to my new friend. He and Sarah talked on and off about painting, and that’s when I found out that Louis-Philippe had a whole collection of paintings by artists from Haiti in his basement. We went down there with torches and spent a long time looking at each canvas and listening to the Haitian writer’s commentary. I felt afraid down in that basement, I kept imagining a monster lurking in the dark who would swallow us up in one powerful intake of breath. And anyway those pictures were scary to look at down there. Even the most minor characters seemed to have glowing embers for eyes as well as alligator’s teeth. The works where voodoo scenes were depicted made my hair stand on end. Sarah was in seventh heaven, and didn’t want to leave. It was when I yawned that Louis-Philippe pointed out: