‘But I saw her myself! She’s terribly sick!’
‘Don’t worry, she’ll be fine. Thanks to a few little “Moroccan” interventions, I managed to have her admitted to a clinic run by the Red Cross. She must rest, and above all, she must live a cleaner life, poor dear — she’s been abandoned, and has let herself go very badly. I even told her that before anything else, she would be wise to take a bath. To look at her, you’d have thought she was at death’s door.’
After a pause, Gabriel added, ‘You hurt Miguel a lot, you know.’
‘Oh, let’s not be dramatic: I helped myself to a few of his knickknacks because I had a debt to pay, that’s all. Miguel was very generous to my family, but I’ve lost everything, I’m ruined. I’m the one to be pitied, not him.’
‘Well then, at least listen to what I’m going to tell you. Miguel is not the man you think he is. He is a self-made man, but in a way, he took the same path as you. The family he was born into was quite poor. His father had to go abroad to Morocco and then France, where he worked in the port of Marseilles. His mother was a concierge in a residential neighbourhood, and to survive, she was forced to surrender her children to the child welfare authorities. At your age, Miguel was in much more desperate straits than you are today. He left Spain as soon as he could, to save his own skin. To do that, like you, he had to follow a man, a rich and powerful English lord, a stern and complicated person. Because Miguel was so handsome, this lord took him under his protection and set him up in one of his homes after his return to London. Miguel was his lover, his devoted slave, his servant, his valet, and the lord even required him to sleep now and then with his sister, an old hag no one wanted. Unlike you, Miguel had already had sexual relations with men in Spain; he liked that and had no problem with it, even though society viewed such matters harshly at the time. Miguel submitted to his master and satisfied him, knowing that one day he would be rewarded for his service. So, being sly and intelligent, he took as much advantage as possible of those few occasions when the lord would refuse him nothing. Miguel’s sole objective was to escape from misery and poverty once and for all. That’s why he even used the sister to obtain what the lord was most reluctant to part with: a small Picasso that Miguel absolutely adored. It took strength, let me tell you, and incredible energy to play this game to the end and above all, come out a winner. In short, when the lord died, he left his vast fortune to Miguel. The lord’s sister contested the will, and even started a rumour that Miguel had poisoned her brother, but the law ruled in Miguel’s favour. After that, he moved to Tangier, where he bought a magnificent house. He set his parents up in a little farm in Málaga, and put some order in his own life. He began by changing his name. He found a husband and a job for his sister. He made overtures to the Spanish royal family, and some people even say that the queen took a liking to him, which opened up some doors. Miguel loved to shine, to give large parties, spend money, and do everything for those he fell in love with. So you see, Azel, I think that with you he was reliving a part of his youth, and you deeply disappointed him.’
Azel was stunned. He couldn’t help thinking about what Miguel might leave him when he died. He even considered approaching him to ask for forgiveness, to get back into his good graces and slip him the famous little pill that stops the heart without leaving a trace…
Now that Gabriel had reassured him, and he was less worried about Soumaya, Azel thought about his own troubles. Just as he was about to say goodbye to Gabriel, he hung his head and stammered nervously, ‘Listen, I can’t get a hard-on anymore!’
‘So? It happens to everyone, like getting a flat tyre. All men go through it sooner or later, it’s nothing, don’t get upset about it.’
‘It’s not physical — it’s my head that’s screwed up, I feel lost, my self-confidence is completely gone, I’m done for, so ashamed…’
‘Then call me next week, we’ll talk seriously about this.’
33. Flaubert
THROUGH SOME STRANGE turn of events, the paths of Azel and Flaubert crossed one cold morning on a park bench. Azel was smoking; Flaubert was not.
‘Hey, you! You’ve got a killer way of smoking!’
‘What’s that mean, “killer”?’
‘You’re sucking in the smoke full strength to keep all the tars in your lungs. Ev-er-y bit. You’re trying to get rid of yourself. Well, that’s none of my business, but like they say back home in Cameroon — more precisely, in the land of the Bangangte, in the Nde — it looks like you’re afraid you’ll have a dry wake.’
Azel looked at him, smiled, and clapped him on the shoulder.
‘You’re a weird guy! Who sent you to lecture me? My mother, my sister, or my benefactor?’
‘Nobody, I’m just passing through, came looking for André Marie, a cousin the family’s searching hard for, over some problems with a tontine. André Marie’s a tall black fellow, I think he’s over six feet, left one day determined to find work in Europe, got into Morocco over the border with Mauritania, spent a few months in Tangier — where he had a tough time of it — then finally went over the water. At least, that’s what he claims in the message he sent one day through a cousin who came back home.’
‘I see, another of those Africans so hard up they’re eating all of Tangier’s cats! People say they’re why the rats and mice have reappeared in the harbour neighbourhoods. And you, where’re you from?’
‘I work for a Franco-German NGO. I was in Toulouse when the family phoned me, asking me to go look for him, said I’d find him in Barcelona, in the African quarter. So I took the train and here I am hunting for André Marie. You wouldn’t happen to know him? Big six-footer, hard to miss!’
‘No, I don’t know any Africans. Well, yes, I know Azziya, a whore from Nigeria.’
‘Azziya — that’s no African name!’
‘Right! It’s the Moroccans who nicknamed her that. Where I come from, the blacks, they’re often called Azzis, a rather nasty name, sometimes even Abid, which means “slave.” But back to you: what’s this business about a “dry wake” and a “tontine”?’
‘At home, in the Bamileke country, we live with the duty to respect our word and never disgrace our family honour. The worst shame for a Bamileke, it’s that people won’t come to the wake, you know, the funeral. If you don’t keep your word, you are no longer part of the family and the tribe. A dry wake, that’s when folks show up at the funeral but don’t drink, or eat, or stay very long.’
‘But the dead man, he couldn’t care less if people come to his funeral or not.’
‘Not so — because with us, the dead are never dead: they change their status and become ancestors we consult when there’s a problem.’
‘And this “tontine,” what’s that?’
‘It’s a system of credit. Some people get together in a small group and each person promises to pay a certain sum every month into a common fund. Then, everyone in turn has access to the complete amount on credit. The money is loaned without papers, or signatures, or anything, just a promise. If one member of the group doesn’t repay the loan, the honour of the entire family is at stake, so the person’s brothers and sisters will be obliged to repay the debt to cleanse the family name. I’ve come looking for André Marie because he took a loan to go work in France and then disappeared without reimbursing the tontine. His father isn’t dead but he’s sick, and he fears that because of his dishonoured son, his wake will be dry. They called me to remedy the situation before the rainy season comes. I have two or three weeks to take care of the problem. Or else there will be a tragedy: he won’t be able to say he’s from Nde anymore.’