Five people in military uniform come in and sit at the back. The stranger looks at them for a few seconds. He lowers his voice, knowing that if he talks loudly now we’ll both end up in prison.
‘Five years later we had new elections. The president from the south said he would stand a second time. But the ex-president from the north quickly came back from France to stand in the election too, with the support of the French. Unfortunately the elections never took place. The southern president claimed that the conditions for proceeding to the vote had not been met, and overran his mandate. The ex-president from the north said elections must be held. And that’s how we got into a second civil war, which the president from the south lost, and that’s how the northerners come to be back in power…’
I finished eating a while ago, and my head is buzzing with stories of civil war and my host’s hate-filled abuse of his sworn enemies: the northerners. It’s hard to get a word in, the stranger is so sure he knows everything, all conversation has to revolve entirely round him. My bottle of beer is still full.
‘Aren’t you drinking your beer?’
‘I won’t, thanks.’
He calls for the waitress and hands her the bottle.
‘Keep it cold, I’ll drink it myself tomorrow!’
He looks at his watch and exclaims:
‘Time flies! I’m sorry, I have to go to a mass at La Source du Salut in the Fouks district. Do you want to come with me? That’s where I pick girls up, at mass! You pretend to pray, and you go game-hunting while no one’s looking! Come with me!’
‘No thanks, I have to go and rest, I’ve got a busy day tomorrow, at my old lycée…’
He asks for the bill, and the waitress quickly brings it over. He fumbles in the inside pockets of his jacket, then of his trousers:
‘Shit! My wallet! Someone’s stolen my wallet! It’s those northerners, they stole it!’
‘But they came nowhere near us…’
‘I know these northerners, they can rob you long distance! Listen, brother, can you pay today, and I’ll buy you lunch later in the week?’
The waitress and the boss are standing behind the bar, and they snigger when they see me take out the money and place it on the table.
I leave the restaurant while the stranger, following behind, whispers:
‘Come by tomorrow, I’ll be here. Did you see those two prostitutes earlier? I’ll book them for both of us. You can have the one with the lighter skin, I don’t mind taking the dark one, it’s OK. I’ll pay, don’t worry…’
Dead poets society
Towards the end of the morning I’m standing outside the lycée where I spent three years of secondary school from 1981 to 1984. Of the visits I had lined up during this stay, this one was underlined in red in my notebook, along with my mother’s house and the Cinema Rex. Probably because in my mind there was an indissoluble link between these three places. I went to my mother’s house several times, for the sake of my roots and members of my family. I wanted to see the Cinema Rex — or what remained of it — for the collective fantasy we experienced there, the roar of the crowd, which still resonates in me.
I pass through the gates to the lycée, hoping to relive the moment when my spirit ventured far from our native land, in search of universal knowledge, through world history, the geography of far-flung countries, the convoluted grammar of mathematics, the phenomena of the natural sciences and the exploration of the imagination via literature.
My heart feels weighed down by a surge of inconsolable apprehension, exactly the feeling I had all those years ago when I turned my back on collège, on short trousers and plastic sandals, and first set foot in this place, dressed in a beige shirt and trousers, the school uniform of the day, with proper town shoes which my mother had polished the night before, before explaining how I should walk to avoid wearing them out too soon, since they had to last the whole of this school year and, perhaps, into the next.
I remember how I felt, in this lycée, as though I had been parachuted into a different world, like a nervous little fledgling, lost among other species of flying creatures whose wings are already properly formed. I generally took shelter under the shade of the coconut trees in the quadrangle, while waiting for the bell to ring for the end of break.
In class, for the first few weeks, convinced that I wasn’t as good as my classmates, I would go and sit at the back of the room, until one day the teacher of chemistry — a subject I dreaded — told me to go and sit in the front row because, he said, being tall, I could help him by holding up the test tubes to show the others when we were doing practical work. I had just turned sixteen and, unlike some other pupils of my age, who were starting to gang up on their parents, my own adolescent crisis expressed itself in a voice which whispered that lycée would prise me away from my family, because it was at lycée that they started to pick out the pupils who would leave one day, to go far from their country, never to return. This feeling was heightened by the presence of the Atlantic Ocean just behind the school campus, and the wind blowing in the coconut trees in the quadrangle. The constant presence of the sea, of Polish seamen with their crude tattoos, the Beninese fishermen, excited by a good catch, and the albatrosses startled by the height of the waves and the ships at anchor in the port with their worn-out sails gradually drew me away from the town. Deep down I dreamed of leaving, though I didn’t know where, or how, or when. I wanted to be a loner in a crowd, invisible, when in fact I stood head and shoulders above my classmates, so that I got teased for having been kept behind a year, when in fact I was one of the youngest.
Sometimes, to get away from the gibes, I would go down to the seashore for an hour, before lessons, and wander along the shore, barefoot. After walking for a few minutes, I’d turn round and go back, trying to place my feet in the footprints I had left on the way. I knew that the pupils who came by later would panic at the idea that a sea monster, half man, half beast, was wandering about, with feet that had toes at front and back, to shake off anyone minded to track him. They would all run off screaming at the tops of their voices, while I sat there in my corner, stifling hysterical laughter…
Written over the highest building in the school campus is an inscription that surprises me: Lycée Victor-Augagneur. Even though my memories are muddled with the emotion of being back here twenty-eight years on, I’m still sure it wasn’t called that back when I was here. So the town’s very first lycée has reverted to the name it had in the 1950s, in honour of Jean-Victor Augagneur, a doctor by training, mayor and elected member for Lyon, then governor of Madagascar, who went on to occupy various ministerial posts in the Third French Republic, before being appointed governor general of French Equatorial Africa (FEA) in 1919. The name of this man, clearly visible on the main building, looks out over the Atlantic Ocean. How many passers-by notice it, and bother to ask themselves who this individual might have been? For many, the building has been here all their lives, maybe even with these capital letters cemented up high on its façade. I allow myself to wonder what lies behind the ‘exhumation’ of this French colonel whose name is presumably virtually unknown in his own country, whatever positions he may have held. Admittedly the city of Lyon paid him homage in the 1930s by calling a road not far from the general hospital, in the 3rd arrondissement, after him, but that wouldn’t account for his name being as widely known as someone like Jules Ferry, that iconic figure in the creation of mandatory, secular state education, as well as an ardent defender of French colonisation.