Uncle René folds away his paper, looks at the space where Victor Hugo’s photo used to be. Now there’s just a square gap on the wall. Inside the square it’s a bit lighter than the rest of the wall. You can tell there used to be a photo there.
‘In any case’, he says, ‘tomorrow the boy will paint that wall, and then no one will ever know that Victor Hugo used to live here. I’ll put up a photo of Ho Chi Minh or Che Guevara in its place.’
Uncle René wasn’t angry when he saw the toys had already been unwrapped. I thought he would be because he’s often the one who says when we should rip the wrapping off our presents. Even if I do get the same present every year, I take my present out of my bag and rip off the wrapping and pretend to be happy. That’s why today, since I’m not visibly happy, he asks, ‘Do you like your truck and your shovel and rake?’
I don’t say anything, I just stare at Sebastien’s car. Uncle René knows what I’m thinking and he adds, ‘If you get your primary school certificate this year you’ll get a car like Sebastien’s. But you must come in the top five in the country!’
Has Sebastien got his school certificate? No, he’s younger than me. So why did he get a car before he got his certificate, when I have to wait to get mine?
We play outside, behind the house. Edwige is in her room listening to music with the tape recorder Uncle René’s given her. I mustn’t tell them we got a tape recorder before Edwige. That’s our secret. Papa Roger has said we must be discreet. We can listen to Roger Guy Folly talking every evening from America. Edwige’s tape recorder is only for putting cassettes into, and listening to music. That’s all. And also, Edwige doesn’t have the cassette of the singer with the moustache weeping for his alter ego from dawn till dusk. Why would I be impressed with her present?
Miguel’s watching us from a distance. He’s tired of being tied up to the sour sap tree. He lies resting, one eye shut, the other half open. I feel sorry for him because he didn’t get any Christmas presents. He’s always getting forgotten, when in fact he’s the one who protects Uncle René’s riches. I wish I could give him my shovel or my rake. The problem is, if I give them to him he’ll probably bark, because dogs can’t be farmers, they don’t know that agriculture is the future of development in this country. They can’t hold a rake and shovel with their paws. They’re not to know you always put the ox before the cart. So there’s no point my giving my shovel or my rake to Miguel.
I also feel sorry for Miguel because with every year that passes, every hour, ever second, every degree of a second that goes by, he gets older faster than us humans. It’s not fair. And he looks at me with his one half open eye, as if he’s understood what I’m thinking. Yes, he knows what I’m feeling deep inside. He knows because dogs see invisible things, like ghosts and evil spirits which we humans can’t see in the flesh. Dogs can read men’s thoughts, from A to Z. Just because they can’t speak our language properly doesn’t mean they’re just idiots with a tail and fleas all over them. Besides, it’s not as if we know how to speak their language, which is much more complicated than ours.
In any case, it’s the first time I’ve seen Miguel this calm. Which means he’s not ferocious 24/7 after all. We should change the sign outside and put a different one up, with the exact time when Miguel isn’t ferocious. But if we put that on a sign maybe the bad guys from the Grand Marché will think: Let’s go and rob Monsieur René while his dog’s not being ferocious. Now I know the sign on the gate is a lie, it’s just there to scare off bad guys.
I’m jealous of Sebastien’s car. He let me try it and I thought: It’s a great thing to have, a car that does what you tell it from a distance when you press on a button, whereas when you drive a real car, you have to hold the steering wheel, so as not to bang into other cars. I dream about this car the whole time, and I don’t want to play with my truck, my shovel and rake. I’m sick of being a farmer. I really am sick of it. I think about Lounès. What present did he get? I think about Caroline. What did she get? Yeah, I want a car I can control from a distance. One day I’ll get one…
At the end of the day, Uncle René tells his boy to walk me home. I don’t even notice the cars going by as we walk. I don’t even look at the people we pass. I just glide past them, as though they were shadows. My thoughts are far, far away. I think about My Sister Star and My Sister No-name. Do they get presents up where they are?
Please let me pass my primary school certificate this year, and let Uncle René give me a car I can control from a distance, a car that follows me everywhere I go.
I’m going to put my little dreams in the boot of that car and drive them about till I’m twenty years old, and Miguel’s more than a hundred. Maybe he’ll die, but he’ll come back again as a little white dog, and then I can give him to Caroline.
~ ~ ~
One day I must ask Papa Roger why there’s only ever bad news when we listen to the news on the radio. You’d think every day was the end of the world, that when you switch on the radio in the evening, anything might happen. Even if it’s happening far from here, even if they’re not talking about people who live in our neighbourhood, it’s bad news for us too. I’ve never heard Roger Guy Folly laugh or make us laugh. Now I feel afraid every time I hear a journalist announce:
It’s twenty-one hundred hours, universal time, and you’re listening to the Voice of America. Coming right up, the evening news, with your faithful servant, Roger Guy Folly…
There’s a really bad guy in France called Jacques Mesrine who’s just been killed. He’d been sent to prison for twenty years, but someone helped him escape like in Lucky Luke, when the Daltons are able to escape from prison till Lucky Luke catches them again and then we can read the next episodes. If the Daltons really did escape, how could we ever read the next Lucky Luke episodes? What would Lucky Luke do without the Daltons? He’d just wander about the desert with his dog Rant-anplan and hunt little animals hiding under the cactuses.
Jacques Mesrine won’t be having any more adventures now, particularly since he attacked a judge’s daughter and held her hostage like the Iranian students who took the Americans hostage and shut them up in a cellar. Apparently they looked everywhere for Mesrine and no one could find him. People would say he was in such and such a place, but when they went there he’d left ages ago. Then other people said he was in this place that had been definitely identified, and then when they got to the definitely identified place they’d find Mesrine was already miles away.
So then the police killed him. They cornered him, the way you corner a palm rat in the bush. You ring all the holes, and the rats only have one hole to come out by, and you wait for them there.
Roger Guy Folly reports that Mesrine got away in his car and that’s when the police shot him. His wife was in it too, and she was injured. Now the people of France can breathe a bit easier, because Mesrine was their most dangerous enemy. According to Papa Roger, this Mesrine guy was stronger and more intelligent than our own famous gangster, who we called Angoualima, who had six fingers on each hand, four eyes, four ears and two willies. Angoualima cut people’s heads off, or stole from the Whites in the centre of town. But unlike Mesrine, he had no car he could escape in and get shot in with his wife. That’s why he didn’t get killed like Mesrine did. We don’t know how our Angoualima got killed. Who knows if he is really dead? It’s weird I get to hear the story of Mesrine just when round here people in the street are all starting to talk about Angoualima again, and some people are saying that there’s a gangster by the name of Grégoire Nakobomayo who’s following in the footsteps of our own public enemy number one. The problem is that Grégoire Nakobomayo is clumsy, he messes up his crimes and just makes the police in our town laugh.