“He won the Nobel Prize in 1911 …”
He looked me up and down before going back to join the others. I heard them trying unsuccessfully to pronounce Maeterlinck, then talking about bees in general, and in particular the ones from Africa. I stood up and left.
Three days later, I came back with a different book. This time it was Yves the just-Ivorian who shouted at me:
“I know how to pronounce the name of your guy who writes about bees!”
I smiled at him. Of course he made a dog’s dinner of the Belgian Nobel laureate’s name. I noticed he couldn’t take his eyes off the book I was holding.
“So what are you reading now after that business with the bees by that … Mae … Maerink … Matae … I mean, that Belgian author?”
“Béatrix Beck …
“Means nothing to me.”
* * *
Sarah has introduced me to the poems of Henri Michaux. But given she couldn’t always pick my Belgian authors for me, because there were some books I didn’t like, I’ve clawed myself a bit of freedom.
So I was the one who discovered Divine Madman by Dominique Rolin, for example, and that author has fuelled my hang-ups, given I’m still trying to write a book in the style of George Simenon, because he’s the Belgian writer I like the most, whatever Sarah thinks.
I’m proud of one thing: it was me who insisted that Sarah finally get around to reading Hygiene And The Assassin by Amélie Nothomb.
To start with she said:
“Not on your life! I don’t like bestselling authors. Plus I’ve seen that girl eating revolting things on telly!”
She couldn’t put that book down in the end …
I haven’t left my studio since this morning and I’m writing even more fervently than before. It must be two or three o’clock in the afternoon.
I got a phone call from work yesterday. It was Mr Courgette, the grumpy-guts from human resources. I recognised his voice because it sounds like a broken guitar string:
“Do you recall that you’ve still got a job at our printing works?”
I hadn’t been there for weeks. I’d given the excuse of my paternal aunt dying, then I’d added that I had a serious disease which the doctors couldn’t diagnose and only the healers from back home could treat.
“Now listen here, you have already buried several members of your family in under six months, and it’s been three times now that the same aunt has kicked the bucket!”
Seeing as I’d forgotten about recycling the same lies several times over, I tried to dig myself out:
“Mr Courgette, perhaps I didn’t express myself very clearly, I’m talking about a different aunt … In Africa we have so many aunts we’ve got them coming out of our ears and sometimes they die in the same week, in the same place, in the same house and nobody bats an eyelid …”
“Look, we’re just wasting time here, when are you coming back to work?”
“I’ve still got this disease the doctors can’t …”
“Fine, go right ahead and be ill for a hundred years! I no longer require the services of a sluggard like you!”
I said that was fine by me, that next week I’d come and collect my gloves, my overalls and my hat because I was the one who’d bought them and there was no chance of me leaving my belongings to a capitalist who refused to make work tools available to his employees. Plus it was his job to sack me, not mine to hand in my notice!
* * *
Sarah came over to mine at the start of the evening and caught me in the middle of a writing frenzy.
“Where are you up to?” she asked me.
“I’m nearly at the end,” I replied, not sounding very convinced.
For the first time since we’ve known each other, she picked up a few pages that were on the floor and starting reading them out loud. It was a tough test for me, my throat suddenly went very dry. I was worried my words wouldn’t belong to me any more, that they would escape from the pages to die between Sarah’s lips. I wanted to explain to her that I hadn’t got a clean version yet, that Louis-Philippe hadn’t read the manuscript, that it was still a first draft, that this or that was still missing. Too late, she carried on reading, her expression became more and more serious, she’d found my description of Original Colour, of her dark skin …
She tidied up the pages, put them down by my typewriter and said to me:
“There’s a big problem in your Black Bazaar …”
“Oh yes?”
“Is my colour also an original colour?”
She burst out laughing and then she looked at me in this serious way I’d never seen before.
“I was waiting for you to finish your book,” she whispered, “so I could say: I’d like you to come and live with me …”
Sarah Ardizzone was born in Brussels in 1970. She currently lives in Brixton, London. She won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for her translation of Just Like Tomorrow by the young French-Algerian writer Faïza Guène. While training in theatre in Paris she lived on the Rue Myrha opposite the Marché Dejean, where much of the action of Black Bazaar is set.
Acknowledgements
The translator would like to thank Anna Shepherd, Milly Taylor and Emma Tubman, without whom …
Also, Daniel Boulland and Alison James-Moran for the Rue Myrha days.