“I don’t get it,” was her only comment.
She does not get it.
“It’s not easy.”
“I just can’t understand such a thing.”
She just cannot understand such a thing.
“It’s just that way.”
“Can’t you explain it?”
“Can it wait till tomorrow?”
As if I had refused a drowning man a life preserver. How can I tell her that this cultivated, concerned young man with whom she chatted away the afternoon nourishes in his heart of hearts a deep and abiding hatred of milk, steak, cheese and eggs? (“Believers, do not forbid the wholesome things which Allah has made lawful to you.” Sura V, 89.) Would she believe me? Or at least understand? It goes back to the embryonic stage of the blackman. For Bouba, these foods are and will forever be malevolent devils working to reduce him to slavery. Bouba is a brave man engaged in constant warfare in his very chamber. Warring against dark forces of blackest despair. He knows he doesn’t stand a chance. His body is covered with scars. Wounds, some still bleeding. Blows that would prove mortal for most. But every night (and tonight was no exception) he continues to match swords in hand-to-hand combat with the hydra of the Stomach.
I really laid it on thick. And immediately regretted trying to explain this very private combat to a girl from Sir George who’s been following the Scarsdale diet since her first period. She told me that the Self must have another destiny than to gulp down carbohydrates. For a famished Negro, Hegelian man is one of the sickest jokes in the Judeo-Christian panoply.
THE COTTON CLUB ORCHESTRA launches into “Mood Indigo.” I hear Bouba whistling in the dark. Miz Sophisticated Lady is sitting on the bed in the higher biped position. Upright, proud, pathetic. Miz S.L. is literally bursting with indignation. I don’t know exactly when I committed the fatal faux pas. But it was monumental. Irreparable. It must have been when I said that Negroes are still at the Big Feed stage and that for them eating a bowl of rice is sometimes preferable to the mysteries of love. Normally, the Negro should be upset, indignant at still being in such a terrible situation. There’s no reason for an English girl to get upset. Besides, comparing a Westmount girl to a bowl of rice is a philosophical reflection beyond my means. Mao did not make the revolution so that every Chinaman could enjoy a Chinawoman, but so that every China-man and Chinawoman could enjoy a bowl of rice a day. Therefore, for the Chinese, man or woman, rice is a sacred thing. Whereas for Miz Sophisticated Lady, a bowl of rice is a bowl of rice. She won’t let me call a cab. The pride of the powerful. She exits. And the more I think about it, the more I believe that it really wasn’t a fight over rice, but an old historical misunderstanding, irreparable, total and definitive, a misunderstanding over race, caste, class, sex, nation and religion.
IN THE hollow of his palm! Bouba assembles the frail chicken bones that were lying on the table. I settle in on the couch with Borges and thirty seconds later the first notes of “Take the A Train” fill the room. The music insinuates itself into my sinews, casting me into that moist, tropical sound jungle as old Duke looks on with cool, ironic eyes. While Bouba keeps time with two Chinese chopsticks.
“Hear that, man?”
“I hear it.”
“‘Hot and Bothered’—you like that?”
“It’s okay.”
“Admit it’s genius, admit you’ve never heard anything like that in your whole lousy life.”
“I admit.”
“And there,” Bouba goes on. “Stravinsky took the line and ran with it.”
“What’s that?”
“You didn’t recognize it?”
“No.”
“‘Sophisticated Lady,’ man. Pure symphonic jazz.”
Negroes at the Exile Cafe
BISTROT À JOJO. Noon. Warm temperature.
We’re sitting at the back. In the shadow of filtered light. Armchairs. Soft soundtrack. A bar for the well-off.
We order zombies.
The man across from me is from the Ivory Coast. He’s been in Montreal fifteen years. He went through the October Crisis.
“What was it like?”
“You mean October?”
“I’m not talking about that.”
“You mean the ‘decline,’”
“That’s right,”
He takes a lungful of air.
“You know something, brother, there was a time when black meant something here. We picked up girls just like that.”
He snaps his fingers. A black angel moves across the field.
He looks at me with his parchment face, a delirious sage under a baobab tree on a full-moon night.
“Yes, brother, it was the golden age of black.”
The ivory age, I’d say.
The waiter finally arrives with our drinks. A big tip.
“The tip is very important, brother. It’s your respect, your dignity, your survival.”
The man is totally disillusioned. As if he had let go a long time ago. And been falling ever since. Free fall.
I get things going again.
“What percentage?”
“You mean the tip?”
“No, the girls.”
“One black for six white girls. And there, brother, I’m talking about your average black man of average height and appetite. In the smaller towns, we were king of the castle. Those were the good old days, brother, if ever there were any.”
A tall Senegalese (six feet six) walks across the café to our table.
“Brothers.”
“Hello, brother.”
Another round. Three beers this time. The Senegalese is as tall and thin as a bamboo stalk in his dashiki.
He sits down.
A long silence.
We drink. Another round. Three more beers.
“How many do I have?”
“Two, like the rest of us.”
“Don’t take me for that kind, brother.”
He shows me a tuft of white hair in the middle of his head like a cockade.
“How many?” he asks again.
I still don’t understand.
The Ivory Coast man emerges from his silence to translate for me.
“He wants to know how many winters you think he’s spent here.”
“Ten,” I say to avoid offending him.
He bursts out laughing.
“Exactly twenty, brother. We’re burned up inside. Ice burns up everything here, brother. After twenty years here, you turn into ash. Look at that guy coming in. Looks hearty, doesn’t he? A strong wind will blow him over.”
The newcomer does look a little wind-blown. And furious too. He sits down and orders a beer and a pack of Gitanes.
“You know,” he says after listening to our conversation a while, “I can’t stand this talk about white girls any more.”
“What happened to you?”
“We blacks need to be left alone,” he declares.
“Of course,” I say.
Everyone nods his head.
“You can love me or you can spit on me,” he continues. “I couldn’t care less. It’s all the same to me. The same hypocritical bullshit. I’m fed up, brothers, fed up.”
A respectful silence. The man drinks from his beer and shakes his head. He smiles sadly.
“I met a girl here once, in this very bar. We drink together. We go to another place. I live near here. You know, the classic progression. I bring her to my place. Two days I’ll never forget. She eats spicy— very good. She fucks hard — even better. Everything’s fine. Smooth as silk. I let her leave. I have to, right? She’s supposed to go canoeing with her family. I like people who have a sense of family. She swears she loves no one but me. I didn’t ask her to say that. She leaves. Not even a call. Nothing. I’m still waiting. Not a word. Three months later I meet her on St. Denis. ‘Hello, there.’ ‘Oh, hello,’ she says. ‘Why didn’t you call?’ She couldn’t. Didn’t have time. Three months and no time to call. When I think of what that girl said to me when we were fucking. ‘And what have you been doing all this time?’ ‘I learned to play the congas. With a marvelous teacher. Maybe you know him. He’s a wise man. He’s taught me all kinds of secrets. His throne is a couch, and he lies down on it. He’s the greatest sage in Montreal.’”