Alain Mabanckou - Black Bazaar

So that night while he was asleep, we destroyed his plant, we urinated all over it, flattened it and broke the bowl it was in, just like that.

The next day the sparks really started flying between Placide and Marceline. They bickered like two strangers, hurling insults at each other in front of everybody.

Marceline took up again with her guy who scored low in Mérimée’s dictation, as well as history and geography, but high in physical education. We never owned up to destroying Placide’s plant. And anyway he never suspected us, because he was convinced it was the muscular dunce himself who was exacting his revenge and who had gone to see the same fetish man to win Marceline back …

And lastly, I didn’t hide it from my ex that later on, when we were sixteen, we thought you had to write beautiful love letters if you wanted to sweet-talk the girls. The trouble was, you already needed to have read some books with those sorts of letters in them. But what kind of books? Novels? Oh no, they were too long. They never ended, the authors waffled on for hundreds of pages. Plus the characters in the novels we tried reading got on our nerves because they took too much time about it, and they only kissed towards the final pages. We wanted to get there fast, not waste our time describing a blue sky, the birch trees or a migrating bird that doesn’t know which branch to land on when it’s flying over an entire tropical forest. Luckily, there was The Perfect Secretary . That book was our bible. We used to go and read it at the French Cultural Centre in Pointe-Noire, towards the Côte Sauvage. And you had to get up early to be the first to borrow it because we’d noticed that old men came along to copy down things from it as well so they could chat up the local elderly widows …

My ex was now sitting up in bed and she wanted to know the name of the author of The Perfect Secretary . I told her I’d forgotten, that at the time we didn’t bother with the authors’ names, we thought they were all dead so what was the point? I explained to her that The Perfect Secretary was a collection of letters to help people write their CV or a job application letter, or a letter of condolence in which they were saddened by somebody dying, albeit at the grand old age of a hundred and two. The bit that interested us was at the end of the book: examples of love letters to send to girls. We would copy them out word for word and send them to the girls just like that. But in those template letters from The Perfect Secretary , the girls were always white, sometimes they were blonde with blue eyes, or brunette with green eyes or redheaded with freckles. And we sent our letters without even tropicalising them. We told ourselves that love had no colour, and good luck to the person who wanted to give a colour to words and emotions. We wrote about winter, we described the snow, we stuck pine trees into every paragraph. And seeing as our girls liked these words, we ended up thinking that nothing could be more poetic than to call a particularly black girl “My Snowy White” …

I even admitted to my ex that my first love has stuck with her pet name of “Snowy White”, and that she isn’t alone in laying claim to that appellation of uncontrolled origin.

All the girls of my youth were, truth be told, Snowy Whites …

My ex had stopped moving. I leaned over and realised she’d been asleep for a while and that I’d been telling this last story to an audience of one.

I switched off the light and soon I was fast asleep too …

I had nicknamedher Original Colour on account of her very black skin. Back in the home country, we still believe that negroes born in France are less black than us. But no, as bad luck would have it, before we met I’d never clapped eyes on anyone as black as my ex. There are some people, when you see them, they’re black as manganese or tar, so you figure they must have roasted under the tropical sun, but then out of the blue they tell you they were born in France. When it’s like that I insist they show me their identity card on the spot. And if I see to my great surprise that they’re right, that they really were born in France, even in the middle of a savage winter like Abbé Pierre’s winter of 1954, then I fly off the handle. I’m thinking: what world are we living in if people are busy demolishing the little things that keep our prejudices alive, eh? Am I the kind of fool who swallows stories hook, line and sinker? How can you be as black as that and born in France? It’s unthinkable. It’s outrageous. It shouldn’t be allowed. It flies in the face of nature. What is the point of braving the winter and the snow if it’s not to wash the skin of the Blacks and make it a bit whiter?

So anyway, my ex — who I’m going to call Original Colour from now on — really was born that dark …

* * *

I saw Original Colour for the first time opposite Jip’s, three and a half years ago. It never crossed my mind that a few months later we’d be living together, and that she would become the mother of my daughter. At the time she was working at Soul Fashion, a ladies’ underwear shop with fluorescent thongs on display right out into the street — something else that would have shocked our Arab on the corner.

From the counter in Jip’s, you could see what was happening at Soul Fashion — sometimes we even caught a glimpse of girls trying on thongs, we’d give a running commentary and smirk when they walked in front of the bar …

That first day when I met my ex, I was smartly dressed, with Westons on my feet and a made-to-measure Valentino Uomo suit. The girl was pacing up and down in front of Soul Fashion, a cigarette dangling from her lips. Most of my pals were there, some standing out on the terrace like me, others leaning on the counter, one eye on their glass and the other on the street. I can picture their faces as if it were yesterday. There was Roger the French-Ivorian, who likes to make out he’s read all the books in the world. There was Yves “the just-Ivorian”, who likes to shout it from the rooftops that he came to France to make French women pay back the colonial debt and that he will succeed by all means necessary. There was Vladimir the Cameroonian who smokes the longest cigars in France and Navarre. There was Paul from the big Congo, who likes to splash on aftershaves before they’re available on the open market — we also call him the ‘Holy Bust’ because he’s always going on about how buttocks aren’t the only thing in life, there are breasts too. … I can see Pierrot the White from the small Congo, the self-proclaimed “Word specialist” who reckons the Bible is lying to us, that in the beginning there wasn’t just the Word, but also the verb and the subject and the direct object, and it was Man who added the indirect object for he’d had enough of worshipping a divinity who could never be seen. And I can see Olivier from the small Congo, who’s got slanting eyes but who can still see everything coming from a way off, especially the girls. As for our other compatriot, Patrick “the Scandinavian”, he married a Finnish girl and they’ve got a kid I haven’t met yet.

And finally I’m seeing that nutter Bosco again, “the wandering Chadian”, who writes everybody off as ignoramuses because he’s convinced that he’s got the highest intelligence quota in Africa, and that he alone can master the subtleties of the imperfect subjunctive. How can a man who calls himself civilised go and urinate against the walls of Jip’s when there are toilets in this bar and even passers-by come to piss here without buying a drink? He calls himself a lyrical poet, he reads us dusty verses he claims to have written as a student at a lycée in Ndjamena where he got bored in the midst of all those dunces. According to him, it’s thanks to his flair for verse-writing that he won a scholarship from the French Embassy in Chad, the French having judged unanimously that his place was no longer in Africa but in France and that our poet was unequivocally the long-awaited “black Paul Valéry”. So we call him “The Embassy Poet”, and he talks with this Parisian accent that makes Pierrot the White declare our Chadian in search of lost time to be a paper negro who is still in the process of being colonised, which explains why he’s got black skin and a white mask …