People wouldn’t stop looking at me. Naturally, I assumed it was my suit, my shoes and my aftershave. So I adjusted my tie and straightened my trousers until they fell neatly over my shoes. I undid three of my jacket buttons, which is a special technique I have for showing off my Christian Dior belt to its best advantage. And then, all of a sudden, a man broke free from the crowd like a rugby player hoping to score a try in a space as narrow as a telephone box. He was filthy enough to have stepped straight out of The Dirty Havana Trilogy by Pedro Juan Guttiérrez, a novel I’d borrowed when I was round at my friend’s, the Haitian writer Louis-Philippe, and which I’d been reading for a few days now on public transport.
The man came up and shouted at me, point-blank:
“Hey, you, why are you on strike? Don’t you think you’re going too far this time? You’ve got your welfare benefits and the whole package, but you’re still ruining our lives! People complain there are no more jobs in France, when the state has to keep slackers, praying mantises and snails like you on its payroll. Do you get your kicks out of taking people hostage, eh? If you ask me, we should clean up the SNCF and the RATP with bleach! Let’s get rid of all those idiots loitering in the street with their placards, when they should be in the ticket office or at the controls of their train. Right, now tell me what time the next RER is due because these shitty screens have stopped working too!”
I had no idea what was going on. Everyone was shouting at me and agreeing with my assailant:
“Too right, let’s get rid of the bastards! They’re on strike twenty-nine days out of thirty!”
“Well said. I’ve had it up to here with these strikes!”
“Slackers, the lot of them!”
“Take early retirement. Make way for the young!”
“Why are you on the platform instead of finding us a train, eh?”
And seeing as I just stood there saying nothing, the original angry man disappeared into the crowd while calling me every revolting name under the sun that would have infuriated and outraged anyone who still has free time in their life to sing the praises of Negritude, but not me.
It took me a while to realise why they were laying into me. Then I spotted an RATP official. And that’s when I noticed our suits were the same colour …
My ex is a girl from back home, but seeing as she was born in Nancy, you could say she’s also a bit French. That’s why she never really got it when our people started screeching in the streets around Château d’Eau and Château Rouge. You could see some of them yelling into a telephone box on Rue Strasbourg, shouting themselves hoarse, probably thinking that if they spoke normally then nobody would hear them on the other end of the line. This drove my ex crazy, she used to say she had no time for people like that. It suited me that she got in a huff because I could play on it to go to those Parisian nigger-trash parties on my own, where I’d hunt the wild gazelles turning up for the first time in the capital.
“There’s a Congolese party tomorrow night at Gargeslès-Gonesse,” I’d say to her, sounding downbeat. “Oh, it won’t be anything special, I’ll go, but just to show my face, I don’t want to get a bad name for myself as a compatriot who thinks he can go it alone now that he’s in France. A reputation like that is a serious matter, because the day I die the Congolese won’t come to the morgue, they won’t club together to repatriate my corpse to the fold. Of course I’d like you to come too, but it won’t be your scene, they’re expecting several tribes, and not just any old tribes, we’re talking the Bembés and the Laris! That lot come straight from the bush, where there’s no electricity. I swear they’ll be shouting all night until the cops show up, they’ll urinate in the main entrance, and that’s before we’ve even got started on them smoking a minimum of two hundred cigarettes an hour, and seeing as you’re pregnant, I just thought that …”
She cut me short:
“Listen, you can go and see your brothers for yourself! But whatever you do, don’t count on me coming or I’ll tell them what I think of their boorish behaviour! How can people urinate in front of a building and smoke like that?”
We used to have big arguments about what she took to be fixed truths on the subject of our condition as negroes, when they were just clichés in black and white. It’s true I often played up the caricatured version of our customs to my own advantage, so I could go it alone to those crowded parties. But I also set the record straight when I needed to. And bringing down the concrete walls in her mind was no walk in the park. She was convinced, just like Roger the French-Ivorian, that our ancestors were courageous Gauls and that we were all the black grandchildren of Vercingetorix. I’m the one who told her that the muscular, blonde version of Tarzan she’d loved since she was a little girl and who leapt with such ease from creeper to creeper in the company of wild animals was not in fact the king of our jungle; and even that nice, brave, clever Tintin with his quiff had told porky pies about the Congo because, I mean, let’s be objective here: do I look like anything like the negroes you see in The Adventures of Tintin in the Congo? Those big fat pink lips they stuck on us weren’t real Congolese lips, even if certain history books at the time reported we hadn’t quite completed the evolutionary process of turning from monkeys into men and that we still scratched our backs with our toes.
But my ex wasn’t persuaded by my explanations. She argued with me, saying the opposite was true, she quoted those history books written by Whites between a couple of colonial expeditions and a few battles lost to Shaka Zulu who enjoyed ensnaring them using the old burnt-earth tactic. She would give me a whole patter about beaten earth huts, tree houses and African black magic, about witchcraft that could turn human beings invisible, about swamps that gobbled up trees, about animals roaming free, about the red earth that filthied the faces of children with distended bellies. I replied that we didn’t live in that heart of darkness, that there are some Africans who have never seen an elephant or a gorilla, including those who had only ever spotted those kinds of animals in the zoos of Europe or in King Kong. So she shouldn’t go picturing us keeping wild animals on a leash to take to school with us, and playing with them at break-time before politely accompanying them back to the jungle where their parents would be waiting for us by the banks of the Congo River, so they could thank us for being so kind.
Seeing as she relished my stories about being a kid back in the home country, I also told her about how we survived without toys at Christmas, how we played football with a ball that wasn’t round at all, but you still had to shoot straight, and dribble past a group of eleven players, and score goals as if the ball was round. We beat the living daylights out of that ball made of old rags, we wanted to be champions one day because the grownups had told us that King Pelé started playing with a flat ball like that and he’d gone on to become the youngest champion at seventeen. He had scored six goals during the World Cup in Sweden in 1956, the grown-ups used to tell us, as if they’d been present in person when the young Brazilian boy-wonder had pulled off that feat. And so we were all Pelés, we dribbled, we made dodgy passes, we tackled imaginary legs, we trapped the ball with our backs and not our chests, we executed volleyed back-heel flicks, our imaginary lines didn’t even mark the halfway point, we entered invisible penalty areas where we hoped the opposing team would mow us down so that we’d be granted a penalty which we’d miss because we didn’t believe enough in what we were doing. There was no red card because red was the colour of our one and only Party which banned us from showing it to the four winds. So there were only yellow cards, and some players got at least thirty per match because nobody knew what colour card to show a player to get them off the pitch for good. And I explained to my ex how, before those matches, we would go first to the fetish man who made us grigris and promised us that we would be unbeatable. He used to make us sleep in the Mouyondzi district cemetery where the devils don’t trifle with football and they come out of their tombs to play in place of the living. And so there was a devil behind each player, and our goals went into the back of the net all by themselves before we’d even touched our flat ball. Sometimes it went in, sometimes it didn’t. But when it didn’t go in, we wouldn’t blame the poor fetish man. He wasn’t God. He had done his work and the devils had done theirs. It was our own fault because we never observed what the fetish man had advised us to do on the eve of the match: to wake up in the morning by opening first the right eye, then the left eye; to get out of bed putting the right foot down first; not to touch the genital area for twenty-four hours; not to greet any girls — especially sisters and mothers — until the match was over; not to turn around when someone calls your name, but always wait until they’re level with you even if it’s your father or your mother; not to let a single drop of rain fall on you — even though our matches only took place during the rainy season. That’s how we were, we used to tell ourselves that other youngsters in foreign countries couldn’t possibly have more fun than we did, and we were happy in our own world, with our tattered shirts, our worn-out sandals tied to our feet with bits of wire; that’s how we were, with holes in our shorts and the whole bazaar of what passes for everyday life among those who had never invented anything, not gunpowder and not the compass, among those who had never known how to tame steam or electricity, among those who had never explored the seas or the sky.