Alain Mabanckou - Black Bazaar

They were all there. They were making remarks about Original Colour under the complicit watch of Jeannot the owner and Willy the barman, who was pumping out furious music from I don’t know which squalid quarter of Abidjan, Dakar, Douala or Brazzaville.

They saw me heading over to Soul Fashion and having a chat with Original Colour. I was trying to read the name on her badge, she had a surname from back home and Willy enjoyed seizing every opportunity to make fun of it:

“I know that girl, she got hired not long ago. Her surname is so complicated you need an extra bone in the back of your throat to pronounce it …”

Apart from her tar-baby skin, which my friends gave me a hard time about — because back home we’re not so keen on skin like that — I noticed she had an amazing asset: her backside moved in an anti-clockwise direction. Now, it’s not any old backside that has a talent like that. To this day, when I’m out strolling in the street, I watch the girls’ backsides closely in the hope of seeing if God made another of the same build and suppleness. I’ve come to the conclusion that works of art are one-offs which can’t be imitated, especially if the artist in question is God himself. Later on, when we were out walking together, I would always make sure I was behind Original Colour, like her shadow, I’d pretend to be taking my time, to drop my keys, to pick them up and all that without taking my eyes off the show-stopper in front of me because I didn’t want to miss out on a single movement of her booty-crammed bodywork. Original Colour would turn around, smile at me, and speed up the movements of her B-side even more while my heart leapt like a baby kangaroo over-excited by a passing jeep. I thought about how lucky she was to have a backside with automatic gears because, and you may not have noticed this, but not everybody got provided for in that department. Mother Nature gave some women special treatment, and was a right bitch to others …

It’s definitely Original Colour who increased my obsession with backsides. From our first encounter, they were all I could think about. So, instead of walking with my head up like everybody else, I developed a thing for feasting my eyes on the lower backs of the girls walking by, followed by a full and in-depth analysis. I am now convinced that, as with neckties, you can understand human psychology from the way people shift their rear-ends. So it’s no big surprise that at Jip’s most of my pals call me “Buttologist”. It was Pierrot the White who came up with this neologism — although I don’t believe in neologisms given there’s nothing new under the sun. The science of the backside has been around since the beginning of the world when Adam and Eve turned their backs on the Lord. Each time Pierrot the White gets a new girlfriend, he brings her double-quick to Jip’s, buys her a drink, and whispers in my ear to have a good ogle of her rear extension and fatty-muscle tissues so that we can talk about it later on, because he doesn’t want to bark up the wrong tree and land himself a pain in the neck and all because of a non-starter of a backside. Then, once the girl heads off, Pierrot the White runs over and asks me what I thought. He adds that it excites him when I’m talking about it. And so I remind him about all the different types of B-sides. I tell him there are some backsides that disappoint when you see them move, you ask yourself: is this really a backside I’m seeing? You feel sorry for it because you can’t tell which direction it’s going in, because it hasn’t got a face, because it swings to the left but never to the right, as if that way danger lay, because it returns abruptly to its starting point, because it flattens out, because it comes to a stop without a hint of elegance. It’s like that when the girl is uptight, when she can never reach a decision without talking about it first to her girlfriends, who will always lead her astray. I point out there’s another type of backside, and its problem is moving up and down too quickly like an angry gecko, so the poor woman has to pull up her trousers or her skirt at every juncture. If you get chatting to a girl who has to lug that kind of fatty-muscle tissue around behind her, you’ll notice that she becomes aggressive for no reason, she arranges non-dates at the fountain by Saint-Michel or the Church of Saint-Bernard, she doesn’t show up and then she dumps you by sending a special delivery signed-for letter. I also point out to Pierrot the White that some backsides are even worse, they are clenched, and instead of moving they judder, they tremble, they’re epileptic, and then they stall. Backsides like that have manual gears and, in general, they’re flat as a spanking new motorway. You can find these types of backsides among certain intellectual women who drive you to distraction only to tell you at the end of the day that they need some time to think it over, to conduct their own internal review and to finish reading up on transcendental theories as postulated in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason …

As for me, I was one happy man, in Original Colour I had found the butt of my dreams, I was king of the hill and cock of the walk …

* * *

Words couldn’t do justice to Original Colour’s B-side, but she had a face of stone to discourage someone approaching her for the first time. Not that I had anything to lose, her stony face was hardly Mount Everest, and her scornful expression was just her natural way of protecting herself, like porcupines brandishing their spines to scare off predators. I took my courage in my hands, walked towards her, saw her smile — I’m guessing it was my get-up because she looked me up and down — and that’s how we started chatting in front of Soul Fashion.

I quickly sensed that I shouldn’t ask her too much about Africa, she wasn’t familiar with it. Or with the Congo either. She dreamed of going there one day, whereas I just had to remember my eventful arrival in France fifteen years earlier and my life before that as a packer in the port of Pointe-Noire to know that I never wanted to go back. Although I kept it to myself, I was shocked to discover that she was born here given how dark she was. I was this close to asking to see her identity card, but I didn’t want to offend her. She saw I couldn’t take my eyes off her backside. As a buttologist I was trying to figure out her behaviour, but for once I was out of luck because surgeons don’t operate on themselves. Clairvoyants can’t read their own futures. Better still, to use a ready-made phrase, cobblers are always the worst shod. So I settled for studying that black well-oiled skin, it was glowing: “My God,” I wondered, “how has she managed to end up as dark as that, when we’re not short on winters in this country …?”

That day I already wanted to stake out my territory, get the words flowing between us. I wasn’t going to ask her the kind of questions Big Poupy used to teach us when we were very young and wanted to chat up girls. Over all, I didn’t handle it too badly. My pals at Jip’s gave me a round of applause when I returned with Original Colour’s telephone number. But they were just winding me up, especially Yves the just-Ivorian who pointed out that I’d never make France pay back its colonial debt with a girl like that …

* * *

We found ourselves talking more and more, almost every other day — I’d let at least a day go by, sometimes two, I didn’t want her to feel pressurised in any way. The girl I was getting to know was kind and sweet and attentive. I invited her out to different bars and cafés around Les Halles because my pals were getting on my nerves now, applauding me as if I’d won a world record in I don’t know what sport.

We visited everywhere in the 1st arrondissement: Le Père Tranquille, Le Baiser Salé, La Chapelle des Lombards, Oz Café and I can’t remember where else. Sometimes she really made me laugh. Back then, just as later on when the Arab on the corner used to tell us his jokes about the Israelis feeling blue or “mo’ sad” because of the gloomy weather, or the North Africans using the “Kabyle” telephone to call home, I was mainly laughing at the way she laughed, she sounded like a clappedout car that couldn’t manage a hill-start any more, she really went for it and the tears would pour down her face. Sometimes she would come and have a drink with me up at the counter in Jip’s. The guys stared at her backside from a safe distance and reckoned that, for a buttologist, I’d made a boob, that I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for.