The title of the little book I’m looking through is A Season in Hell. There’s a title in it I really like: Bad Blood. It sounds like an expression we’d use around here. In lingala, bad blood means makila mabé. When Maman Pauline says in lingala that someone has bad blood it means they were born all wrong, luck’s against them, they’ve got no hope, even the birds passing overhead crap on them. I don’t know if that’s what the young man with the face of an angel meant too, but he must have been very angry to choose a title like that, it could be bad luck for anyone who reads the book.
I choose a page, I read out loud, almost as though I’m praying:
I abominate all trades. Professionals and workers, serfs to a man! Despicable. The hand that guides the quill is a match for the hand that guides the plough.
On the back cover it says it’s a book of poems, but there are no separate lines, no words that sound the same at the end of each line, like in the poem Lounès recited. Does that mean I don’t have to follow what Lounès told me? There are some words and expressions in this poem I find really difficult. I’ll have to ask Lounès what they mean, or Lounès can ask his teacher at school. For example, I don’t know what ‘the hand that guides the quill’ means. Perhaps it’s the hand of a white sorcerer who dresses up as a bird at night and comes to snatch children and take them to hell for a season. Yes, that’s probably it, because just before that the young man talks about his ancestors the Gauls, who were real gangsters, he says. He says that as ‘flayers of beasts, burners of grass’, they were the most inept people of their age. Which is odd because our ancestors were like that too. Maybe they are distantly related to these people called the Gauls. Now I understand why my father told me once that in his day, at school, they taught them that our ancestors were Gauls.
In the poem in question, I find the words ‘the hand that guides the plough’. I’ve already heard Uncle René use the word ‘plough’, when he talks about farming. When I want to get something done quickly, or I do it sloppily, he tells me off and shouts: ‘Don’t put the plough before the ox!’
The plough was always behind the oxen, so they could pull it. Now, the young man is talking about ‘the hand that guides the plough’. That really does make it tricky, what with the hand that guides the quill and the hand that guides the plough, I’m really confused.
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When you go into Monsieur Mutombo’s workshop it’s really like going into a tunnel, with clothes hanging up above your head. Lounès’s father has two silent young apprentices working away at the back, doing the same thing over and over again, like two robots. Their job is to put the buttons on the shirts and trousers once Monsieur Mutombo has finished sewing them. I’ve never seen them put a piece of cloth on the table, pick up the scissors and cut it up. I do rather wonder if they’d even know how to make a pair of shorts for a child at infant school. If you try to talk to them they just look at you with these huge eyes, if they dare open their mouths Monsieur Mutombo will shout, ‘Lazy good-for-nothings, I’ll send you back to your parents and you’ll have to pay them back the money they’ve spent on your training!’
The thing they like best is taking the women’s measurements. They tell them to take their clothes off, including their underpants, and they take a look at lots of other things that women normally only show their husband or their doctor. They measure the women up at the back of the shop, on the right. You can’t quite see what the apprentices are doing. You can just hear one of them saying to the woman, ‘Take your top off, and the bottom half, and your pants, stand very straight, hold your head up, close your eyes.’
It’s different for the men: they take their measurements in front of everyone. When that happens I always close my eyes, because most of them have great big bellies, even though they’re not bosses or proletariat-exploiting capitalists. They have long hair under their armpits, sometimes they’re all white, like they’ve put ash on themselves, or powder, that’s been there for at least a week.
It’s always dark in the workshop. It used to be the place where the priests from the Church of Saint-Jean-Bosco used to store their spades, their rakes and their picks. Besides, since the church is only a few metres away, when the bells ring, Monsieur Mutombo tells everyone to observe a minute’s silence because the priest gave him this little building free of charge. I don’t know how he manages in the dark not to prick his big fat fingers with the needle of the Singer sewing machine. Since he’s very bald, with only a few grey hairs around his ears, it feels like it’s his head that lights the place, because when he goes out for a smoke it gets even darker inside, and when he comes back it brightens up a little bit again. I’ve never seen anyone’s head shine like that, not round here. Maybe he puts palm oil on it or maybe Madame Mutombo rubs a special cream into it every morning.
The reason I’m in Monsieur Mutombo’s workshop this morning is I’ve come to get my shirt mended, the one Lounès ripped when we were at the Tata-Luboka stadium and I ran off before the start of the match. No, I’m not going to tell Monsieur Mutombo it was his son who did it. Lounès didn’t mean to do it. He just wanted me to stay with him to watch the match, even if Caroline had come to support the Tié-Tié Caids, who won in the end. I heard it was Mabélé who scored all three goals in the match. In any case, I knew their team would win because their sorcerer made it rain, so the fetishes of the Voungou Dragons would get wet and not work. And apparently whenever the ball got in front of the Tié-Tié Caids’ goal, the sorcerers put invisible players on the pitch, who blew on it, and the ball flew off somewhere else, so the goal couldn’t be scored. On the other hand, whenever Mabélé, proudly wearing his number 11 shirt, found himself face to face with the goalie for the Voungou Dragons and was about to shoot, the poor goalkeeper saw a javelin instead of the ball, and stepped to one side immediately because he didn’t want to die pointlessly, and then the goal went in.