‘The doctor did everything he could, but sadly, God has called your relative home…’
Passages leading nowhere. Some streets still have no name. Others wander off, hoping to come out by the Atlantic Ocean, but creep round the back of run-down houses and wind up in blind alleys dotted with piles of rubbish, mountains that block the horizon.
A mangy dog slinks about with its tail between its legs, and looks at me out of the corner of its eye before running off. Must have thought I was a ghost. And I thought he was that dog from my childhood, Miguel. So we’re quits…
Cinema Paradiso
There are no cinemas left in this town, not since the 1990s, when the spread of the evangelical churches hijacked most of the buildings dedicated to the seventh art. The Cinema Rex, once a mythical venue for the projection of films, became a Pentecostal church called ‘The New Jerusalem’, with pastors in their Sunday best heralding Apocalypses like there’s no tomorrow, predicting the flames of Gehenna for wrongdoers, and miracles and good fortune for their flock. Disillusion is written on the faces of the blind, the deaf, the dumb and the lame. They loiter outside in the hope of divine healing.
Here, though, we would gather and wait every morning for the poster to be put up for the film to be shown in the early afternoon. Here we applauded the adventures of Bud Spencer and Terence Hill in They Call Me Trinity and Trinity Is Still My Name or Super Fuzz. The doorman, a professional boxer with a face like a gangster in a Wild West movie, called all the shots, telling us where to stand in the queue. He worked with his boxing gloves strung round his neck and at the first sign of unrest in the crowd he pulled them on. We were his subjects, who must yield to his will, comply with his whims, or we’d get an uppercut that would send us straight to the Adolphe-Sicé hospital. He would eject you from your seat if he felt like it, to make room for a member of his family, or someone who’d bribed him, and you just had to sit on the floor. He let children in to showings reserved for ‘over 18s’, in exchange for a hundred CFA franc coin. As far as I recall, he was the person responsible for most of the brawls that took place outside and inside the cinema, taking advantage of the venue to apply what he learned in the training gym. Since he was ugly, we promptly nicknamed him ‘Joe Frazier’, Muhammad Ali’s most stubborn opponent.
With the arrival in the capital of the first martial arts films, our local Joe Frazier realised no one was scared of boxing now, because a fighter, unlike a karateka, couldn’t fly into the air — what we called ‘lift-off’ — landing behind his opponent, and dealing him a fatal blow. We didn’t realise these ‘lift-offs’ were just cinematic tricks, the actors were ordinary people like us. Overnight, posters of Bruce Lee in The Way of the Dragon, Enter the Dragon or The Game of Death replaced the ones of Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. We lost interest in the spaghetti western actors, with their guns, which we could never own, and their horses, which we’d never seen up close. To us, karate seemed more accessible, you just had to learn the different katas and the philosophy of Master Gichin Funakoshi, the inventor of Shotokan Karate-Do. A number of dojos opened, where we handed over all our pocket money to Master Mabiala, who had proclaimed himself a black belt, 12th dan, and promised to reveal the secret of Bruce Lee’s ‘lift-off’. We all eagerly awaited the crucial moment when we would fly into the air, emitting a cry that would terrorise our opponent, but the so-called master dwelt instead on physical exercises that left us so exhausted that the number of pupils diminished every day. The truth was, we were his servants, he made us sweep out the dojo and his house, prepare his food, do the washing up or wash his clothes in the River Tchinouka. When people grew impatient and asked him when we were going to actually learn how to do the famous lift-off he would reply:
‘You haven’t finished learning all Master Funakoshi’s katas yet, and even when you have, there’ll be more katas, ones that were added by his disciples, in memory of him! So stop complaining, a bird can’t fly the day it’s born, its wings have to grow! It’s the same with you, you have to allow the wings of your spirit to grow. One day you’ll lift off without even realising!’
The brave souls who continued to take his classes did finally manage lift-off: Master Mabiala put them up on the roof of his house with the aid of a ladder, and told them to jump, while doing Bruce Lee’s battle cry from The Big Boss…
Comedies did survive the breaking wave of the martial arts films, thanks to the energy and droll mannerisms of Louis de Funès in the saga of The Gendarme of St Tropez or in Fantomas versus Scotland Yard and Fantomas Unleashed. The French actor played the role of Commissioner Juve, who is obsessed with capturing Fantomas, public enemy number one. The anti-hero spends his whole time taunting Superintendent Juve, then melting into the crowd, to the applause of the cinema audience. It was one of the rare times we cheered a baddie; we would never do that in a spaghetti western, where everyone booed Clint Eastwood’s enemies, demanding their money back. We particularly disliked it when villains Clint Eastwood had killed in a previous film appeared again in the next one. Since we took what happened in the cinema to be real, we were shocked and decided they must think we were too stupid to realise this was a piece of trickery designed to get us to hand over our money.
The Indian films escaped unscathed, thanks, no doubt, to the interminable love stories that were their hallmark, as well as to the physical strength of the actor Dara Singh, not to mention the magical world of The Magician from Hell, and above all the music, which made us weep. We dreamed that we would one day go to India, where we would marry Indian girls, adorned with the same jewels as the actresses who adorned the screen. India was our Peru, the place where our dreams would come true, with a little bit of magic, learned from what we saw at the cinema. We would express ourselves with ease in Hindi or Urdu, since we already sang along in these languages with the actors from these countries, even if we didn’t understand the words. Of course we’d be poor, but we wouldn’t mind, because in these films the man with no money always ended up marrying the beautiful girl, beating the rich man to it. We would insist on kissing the women properly, none of that modesty we found so irritating, and which obliged you to work out for yourself that the main actor and his sweetheart must have finally slept together…
The projectionist at the Cinema Rex was a young womaniser who took a different girl up to his box at each showing. He picked them from among the young ladies who stood in line with us. In order to get chosen, they dressed up and put on lots of make-up, as though they were going to a party. We watched as they fluttered their eyes, to catch the attention of the technician, who took his time making up his mind. They’d bicker and insult each other over who would be the chosen one, privileged to watch the film through a little hole, right next to the one the images came through. Certain mishaps in the projection of the film were caused by the operator who, in order to impress the girl, explained all the tricks of the trade and what he called ‘the enchantment of cinema’. Since he talked rather loudly, the spectators at the back could hear him explaining that a film had twenty-four images per second, and that a shutter closed off the light beam in between them to create an impression of fluid movement on the screen. Suddenly the young woman would get overexcited and ask to be allowed to replace the reels, and send out the images upside down, by mistake. You could hear them giggling, running off into their hidey-hole and starting to make out, to the applause of the crowd. We bore no grudge against the projectionist, since we knew the enchantment came from him and his skill in handling the 35mm projector.