Alain Mabanckou - Black Bazaar

“Are you sure you’re all right, my son?” she pressed me.

“Yes, everything is fine, mama …”

* * *

Louis-Philippe’s rum was too strong. He said it was because I’d gone over the top with the sugar. After leaving his apartment I walked to Château Rouge with my eyes fixed on the ground because I could barely find my centre of gravity. When I looked up, I thought the sky was going to cave in on me.

I went into Exotic Music, a shop run by a friend who sells music from back home. He was showing me the latest stuff from the big Congo even though I always went there to listen to albums from the seventies and eighties. He played “Liberté” by Franco Luambo Makiadi from Tout-Puissant OK Jazz. The song moved me, I was seeing the country again, that concert by the illustrious musician at the Joli Soir in Pointe Noire. We were underage at the time, and the doormen wouldn’t let us. We had to slip them something. But I didn’t have anything. So I climbed a mango tree and held onto a branch to get a view of the great Franco with his paunch and his guitar, which he strummed like a virtuoso. I wanted to grow up big and fat like him, to play the guitar like him, to wiggle like him. I admired his musicians who wore silk shirts and clingy trousers. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the couples taking over the dance floor. They were sweating, the men squeezed their partners tight, those without a partner waited in a corner, looking as sad as a dog with an ungrateful master.

Yes, this song always plunged me into the deepest sadness. The musician declared that he was free to do as he saw fit:

Na koma libre ehhh

Na koma libre eh …

Liberté eh eh na lingi na sala oyomotem’

elingi mama mama …

When the song came to an end I decided I’d better head for home. But as I turned around, my heart skipped a beat: Original Colour was walking into Exotic Music with the Hybrid, arm in arm!

I’ve never seen a man run so fast. The Hybrid just missed being run over by a car that was parking in front of the record shop. Original Colour took cover with one of her Nigerian girlfriends from the old days, and I walked as far as Les Halles to get a drink at Jip’s. My group of pals wasn’t there. There was just Paul from the big Congo. As he dozed off in front of his glass of Pelfort, he kept saying:

“Buttocks aren’t the only thing in life, there are breasts too …”

* * *

We never spoke about that episode at Exotic Music. Even though I sensed Original Colour wanted us to talk about it. From then on, I wasn’t allowed to hold our child any more. Original Colour dropped her off with the Cape Verdean childminder on her way to work and picked her up in the evening.

And then, one evening, coming back from Jip’s at about half-past midnight, I found the door to our studio open and the lights on. The Hybrid’s drums weren’t there any more. I could hear my footsteps ringing out as I walked across the floor because Original Colour’s things weren’t there any more either, and nor were the little one’s.

I looked in the Yellow Pages and found the office number for Original Colour’s father. I made up my mind to call him in the morning.

But when I got the lawyer from Nancy on the phone he sent me packing, he said that he didn’t know who I was and nor did he know the woman or the child I was talking about. He called me a ruffian and a rogue. I remembered the story about that minister Doyen Methuselah. In this lawyer’s eyes I was the person who had wrecked the marriage he’d planned between his daughter and the former minister, when it was probably the Hybrid who wrecked his plans at the time.

Yes, I think he must have mistaken me for the Hybrid because as he was hanging up he let rip:

“You pile of shit of an artist! I’ll send you back to prison for a second time!”

* * *

Original Colour didn’t call me until ten days after she’d disappeared, to tell me she was in Brazzaville. She was demanding a maintenance allowance and had set the level herself. I talked about it with Paul from the big Congo because I thought Louis-Philippe was too much of a writer to understand the things that go on outside books and the birds in the park trees.

At Jip’s, to my great surprise, it was Roger the French-Ivorian who seemed the most receptive. He told me that Original Colour was swindling me, that she was in fact making me pay double the amount as if we’d had twins. And not only that, but he still wanted to know what proof there was that Henriette was my daughter, apart from our toes looking alike? He advised me to pay up all the same because the child wasn’t to blame for coming into this world in such chaotic fashion, but I should negotiate the amount down to the last cent. I stared into my glass as I listened to him.

Willy told me he had friends back in the home country, highway bandits who had fought in Angola and Cabinda and who would kill for a piece of cassava or a Marlboro Light, that I shouldn’t let the matter drop, that for a fistful of cash those friends of his would be able to rearrange the Hybrid’s face, kidnap my daughter and bring her back to me here in Paris.

Yves the just-Ivorian started up again with his stories about the colonial debt.

“This is what it’s come to, Buttologist! What am I always saying? Now tell me what you’ve got out of this relationship! Have you advanced our cause? The colonial debt is still with us because of people like you!”

Pierrot the White said he knew someone who knew someone who knew the lawyer Jacques Vergès, that this lawyer always won his trials, and that he had even defended a Gestapo Chief from Lyon who had organised the deportation of forty-four Jewish children and tortured the Resistance member Jean-Moulin. So all I had to do was consult him …

I didn’t want to enter into legal wrangling we’d never see the end of. Of course I could go to Brazzaville and settle the matter with machete blows. But that’s not my style. I don’t like war. I don’t like confrontation. Plus the country seemed a long way off to me. I’ve been gone more than fifteen years now.

And so I chose not to take the path of justice or to make the revenge machete trip. I just pay up without batting an eyelid. I do it for my daughter.

When Original Colour calls me from the home country it’s to remind me that in a fortnight it will be the end of the month and I mustn’t forget to send “her” allowance. I hang up on her shouting that I’m not a Crédit Agricole cash point, and that it’s not her allowance.

But each month I still head for Porte de la Chapelle to do a Western Union. I queue up with the Malians who are sending all their money back home and who, from what I hear, are building villas over there for their retirement …

Each time I sitdown to write — at home or in the park nearby — I stare at my typewriter for a long while and think about how I came to buy it, because back when I was always falling out with Original Colour I got to know Louis-Philippe who did book-signings in our neighbourhood, at the Rideau Rouge bookshop. So Roger the French-Ivorian is wrong to think that I started scribbling this diary because of my ex and the Hybrid. Yes they triggered something off in me, and yes psychoanalysts would have tonnes to say on the subject, but I mainly owe everything to meeting Louis-Philippe …

I hadn’t heard of this writer before. I’m very wary when it comes to contemporary writers, I only read the dead ones, authors who are alive annoy me, they get on my nerves. When you see them on telly they hold forth on whatever they’re writing about and they’re so smug anyone would think that they had found the philosopher’s stone after managing to square the circle or fill the Danaides’ jar while standing on their head. Whereas with the dead ones — yes, I know it depends which dead ones — they’ve written their life’s work, they’ve taken their leave, they lie in peace in graveyards by the sea or at the foot of weeping willows, they let us say what we like about their output because they know that sooner or later we’ll have to read them if we don’t want to be labelled a dunce by the parents-in-law at the dinner table.