“Get your alibis ready, and make a note of them one by one on a piece of paper,” he advised us.
At this point, a man who lives on the seventh floor, Staircase A, brought it to our attention that he could be ruled out for a start, none of this had anything to do with him, he had what is called a “cast iron alibi”: he’d been away for a month, he had only got back two hours before the accident, he’d been in the Dordogne staying in Champagnac-de-Belair with his mother, who had been suffering from cancer for years.
“And anyway I live on Staircase A, whereas the incident happened on Staircase B, so it’s clearly got nothing to do with me. If Colombo’s German cousin so much as sets foot in this building to hassle me, I swear I’m filing a complaint, I’m hiring Jacques Vergès as my lawyer and I’m passing the details on to the relevant human rights bodies in this country!”
The nice fellow who watches the detective films pointed out that Colombo’s German cousin would drive all the way to Champagnac-de-Belair in his old banger and that he wouldn’t give a monkey’s whether it was Staircase A or B, that he would summon the sick mother in question, cancer or no cancer, because in criminal law sickness is no excuse for murder and vice versa, and that in any event there would be all sorts of upheaval in our building. His conclusion was that we shouldn’t touch the corpse, the investigation would take at least two to three and a half years to establish the cause of the fall and if some of us were implicated in this story …
All the same, we stood there staring at the corpse because it isn’t every day you get to examine a fresh stiff in your own building instead of in those films where people lie to us and take us for kids by pretending to be dead when you can see they’re breathing, and the blood on them is that ketchup they sell at La Chapelle market.
We surrounded the corpse and were still figuring out what to do when the man who lives on the first floor reminded us:
“Look here, he’s stopped breathing!”
“He’s not a pretty sight, we should cover him up quickly with a white sheet,” added the man just back from Champagnac-de-Belair.
He’s peed his pants, and there’s dribble coming out of his mouth,” said the man from the third floor, going one further.
“That’s weird, can you see how he’s got one eye bigger than the other now?” chipped in a woman from the fourth floor.
“Don’t touch him! Don’t touch him!” bellowed the man who watches the detective films.
And that’s when the neighbour suddenly woke up with a jolt and roared at us:
“I’m not dead! I’m not dead!”
We shrank back because he looked like a ghost in a horror film, Night of the Living Dead for example.
“Who just said I’ve got one eye bigger than the other, eh? Was it that slut from the fourth floor? Don’t you dare lay a finger on me, you bastards! Someone pushed me, and you’re all in it together! You’re going to hear me out!”
He had blood on his face, he had several battered ribs, and he was grimacing with the pain. We tried to get close to help him stand up.
“Don’t touch me, you murderers! Someone left a banana skin on the stairs, and he’s going to hear me out! I know who did it!”
We all looked at each other and raised our hands in the air, as if a firearm was being trained on us, to show we had nothing to do with this banana skin story. Then the neighbour barricaded himself in his apartment and spent the day phoning every doctor in town and raining down insults on them, because they didn’t understand how a normal person could fall from the fifth floor to the ground floor without someone pushing them.
The neighbour wouldn’t stop snorting and muttering to himself:
“Goddammit! I’m telling you an African laid a trap for me with a banana skin! And we’re not talking any old banana skin! That banana came directly from Africa!”
The thing I wanted to know was what on earth was he doing up on the fifth floor, when he lives on the ground floor like me. Anyway, that’s why he’s got a bandage on his head now and spends his days sniffing at a little bottle …
* * *
Unluckily for me, my studio is slap bang next to the neighbour’s apartment. I can hear him cackling like a hyena in front of his telly and bellowing into the phone when the doctor on the other end of the line explains he won’t be able to pay him a home visit. The neighbour reminds the doctor about the Hippocratic Oath and promises to get him struck off professionally:
“Don’t betray the Hippocratic Oath! You swore that oath, Doctor! You promised to treat the poor and needy and whosoever seeks your help!”
Because he keeps going on about the Hippocratic Oath, we’ve ended up nicknaming him Mr Hippocratic. Seeing as he can’t insult the whole earth, he takes it out on me instead. Mr Hippocratic likes to cultivate his garden at my expense. He says, for example, that like most Blacks he knows, I always put the cart before the horse, I’m not worth peanuts, I’m a cabbage head, with an artichoke for a heart, I don’t have a bean to my name, I’m knee-high to a grasshopper, and pea-brained to boot, I lead people up the garden path, I might think I’m the biggest pumpkin on the patch but I’ll be pushing up the daisies like the rest of them …
When his anger gets the better of him he pounds on the wall, complaining there are too many visitors coming by my place, that I’m the one who’s digging the hole in the social, that my studio is turning into Château Rouge market, into the headquarters of the African underworld, that nobody has any idea what we’re getting up to inside, that for all he knows we’re holding man-on-man orgies — that there may even be wild animals involved — that we’re printing fake money, that we’re smoking the devil’s lettuce or the wacky baccy, that we’re illegally dealing I don’t know what new drug, that we’re running riot in “his building” which used to be a calm and pleasant block to live in before the mass influx of the Senegalese soldiers together with the natives of the Republic. He says the settlers didn’t finish off their job properly, that he’ll always hold this against them, that they should have whipped us harder in order to drum good manners into us. That the trouble with those French colonisers was never seeing things all the way through …
* * *
Mr Hippocratic is only a tenant, but from the way he behaves you’d think he owned the place. People mistake him for the caretaker because his apartment is just by the main entrance and the postman has been known to leave parcels and recorded delivery letters for other residents in front of his door. The poor tenants in question have to track these down to the bins in the basement.
I couldn’t tell you how he’s managed to find out that I’m a month in arrears with the rent or that I haven’t taken out household insurance with his insurer at the end of the road. Not to mention the noises and smells he claims get produced by me and my friends when we’re cooking our food and listening to our music from back home, so as to forget our everyday worries for a while. He doesn’t know the first thing about nostalgia. France is his country, and he boasts to me about how proud he is to be French by birth. I’ve heard him complaining, for example, that France can no longer shelter all the destitute in the world, especially the Congolese who are forever turning up at the border even though they’ve got oil and aphrodisiacs like bois bandé back home. There are other countries in Europe, so why don’t we go and live there instead, or else head back to our huts of beaten earth. And he spouts this drivel while staring defiantly at me. One time, when he got a bit tipsy, I convinced myself he was going to slit my throat down by the bins. But he’d only laid into the booze so he could bring up everything he’d been harbouring a grudge about for ages.