Alain Mabanckou - Black Bazaar

Out of all the French restaurants we ate at together, her favourite was Le Pied de Cochon because she loved pork. I thought it was a shame the restaurant didn’t sell cassava because to serve pork without cassava is committing a heinous crime in my ethnic group. We used to eat there at least three times a week. The waiters knew us and would often give us a table on the first floor, by the window.

After the meal, our route was all mapped out: we’d chat along the banks of the Seine, and I’d tell her to open her eyes wide and admire the place where a poet had become very famous because he reminded these blind Parisians that under the Pont Mirabeau flowed the Seine. Otherwise they’d never have known, with their crazy rat-race lives.

On the way back, we’d have a last drink at the Sarah Bernhardt. We’d stroll a bit before catching the métro at Étienne Marcel. I’d get out at Château d’Eau, while she carried on to Marcadet Poissonniers where she changed for Marx Dormoy.

* * *

One day, when she wanted to find out at all costs where I lived, given that I’d remained silent on the subject and was always the one who went round to hers, I admitted that I hadn’t invited her back to mine because I’d been sharing a tiny studio in Château d’Eau with my fellow countrymen ever since I’d arrived in France. There were five of us in there living like rats, but not from the same family. Each of us had cornered off an area to store our things. We’d take it in turns to cook, or else head to the Congolese restaurants in the banlieues to eat food from our country and down the Pelforts until we’d forgotten the way home. I told her about how one time we’d walked all the way from Sarcelles back to Paris because we’d missed the last RER and the mini-cab firms we called sent us packing, saying their drivers often got bludgeoned by riff-raff in the area or else had teargas grenades thrown in their faces and their takings stolen. By the time we got to Château d’Eau we looked like corpses from the war of 1914–18, we couldn’t feel our feet any more and we slept for a day and a half.

“I’ve been living in a ground floor studio for the past fifteen years. I found it and the others came to join me because it was starting to get expensive living there on my own,” I explained to her.

She declared that living for fifteen years in a small room like that was intolerable. She wanted to know if any of my roommates were girls. I could see where she was heading. Another case of the green-eyed monster. I burst out laughing because I suddenly remembered our bumpy ride on that front. We’d had to put up a girl fresh from the home country who was in a fix, the people who’d encouraged her to come over were hot-air merchants who never showed up when she landed at Roissy airport. Her name was Louzolo and she wasn’t bad-looking, except for the fact that she had one buttock bigger than the other, which made it look like she was only walking on one side. We knew her from back home and we decided it would be inhuman to leave a compatriot to die in the middle of winter even if she did have one buttock bigger than the other. I don’t know what would have happened to her if we hadn’t taken her in. She’d been sensible enough to bring with her the telephone numbers of a few compatriots in Paris, and I was on the list. The other people on the list had moved on or else they didn’t pick up. So I was her last hope.

She called me at six o’clock in the morning, and I went to fetch her from the airport. We didn’t hear a squeak from those hot-air merchants for ten days, still less from the other guys whose telephone numbers she’d scribbled down in an address book that was crumpled from her thumbing the pages so many times. The guys who were meant to put her up had boasted about a large apartment overlooking the Champ de Mars and how when they were brushing their teeth or shaving they had a view of the Eiffel Tower. Since Louzolo was disappointed to see that I lived in a small studio despite leaving our home country more than a decade ago, I apologised in the first instance for living in a neighbourhood that didn’t have the Champ de Mars, and then I told her my motto: my glass may be small, but I can drink out of it. And so she stayed with us, but she did miss that view of the Eiffel Tower …

Having Louzolo in the studio made us change our habits. We didn’t sleep well any more because when she took her shower or slept on her front, half-naked, with her legs slightly apart, all we could think about was our thing down there. There were even those among us who went as far as sniffing her knickers, especially Lokassa aka “Centre Forward” who boasted about having a thing down there that was bigger than all the rest of ours put together. We got bored of him in the end because I couldn’t see how he did the business if he spent the whole time revealing his battle secrets, and making out he could draw faster than Lucky Luke and his shadow. Each time he laid it on thick about his performance and his exceptionally long thing down there, it reminded me of that clever man who once said a tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces on his prey and devours it. Centre Forward didn’t know about this because IQ wasn’t his speciality. You could see him laying his traps from a mile off. He would come home earlier than the rest of us just to be alone with Louzolo and wait for her to cave in.

“I will succeed,” he warned us, “because each time I look at that girl my thing down there rises up all by itself without my brain blowing the whistle! I know what I’m like, and it’s a sign that never lets me down. When I see a girl and I get a hard-on, it means she’ll end up in my arms. And another thing, between you and me, boys, she’s been here ten days already, so she’ll reach the point where she’s gagging for it. She’s not going to let her low countries down there freeze in the middle of winter. Central heating is all well and good, but natural warmth is better!”

Centre Forward waited for the girl to fall into his arms, but the moment never came. He became aggressive, and threatened not to contribute to the water and electricity bills any more. He used to sulk in the evenings and reckoned I was the one who was thwarting his plans, that I was pulling underhand tricks outside our studio, in the cat-houses on Rue des Petites Écuries.

But it was a guy from outside, a Central African with red eyes who finally won the game. He met Louzolo at the Marché Dejean and she bid us farewell one evening, to the great disappointment of Centre Forward who had at least succeeded in stealing a pair of the girl’s knickers …

I also told Original Colour the names of my roommates at the time. Lokassa aka Centre Forward worked on building sites. He didn’t have any papers and was using the identity card of Sylvio, a French Caribbean guy who I ran into sometimes at Jip’s. The trouble was that Centre Forward couldn’t receive his salary directly. It was paid into Sylvio’s bank account, and so the two men had to meet up at the end of every month outside Métro Château d’Eau. Sylvio would draw the money out from his bank and hand it over to Centre Forward, after taking ten per cent commission for the use of his identity card.

Serge was a section supervisor in a branch of Leclerc in the banlieue. Thanks to him we ate decent meat and didn’t have to buy light bulbs or toilet paper for our studio. He’d struck a deal with the security guys at his supermarket and could take whatever goods he liked.

Euloge was a security guard at the Bercy 2 Shopping Centre. In his spare time he played the guitar in an orchestra with folks from the big Congo. We didn’t like it when he smoked his joints in the toilet. The smell hung around for weeks.

Moungali was a packer in a shoe shop. We turned down the shoes he tried to give us because they weren’t Westons. Sometimes, he would fly off the handle about this. To keep the peace, we’d accept his presents and send them back to the home country.