Alain Mabanckou - Black Bazaar

I didn’t go to the Rideau Rouge to meet Louis-Philippe, I just happened to be passing by, I was in need of some fresh air because Original Colour was waging a Trojan war against me for the way I’d behaved towards the Hybrid on the day he had worn my Marithé & François Girbaud T-shirt and I’d said it was worth more to me than her ass.

There was a crowd in front of the bookshop. I used to think people were often scared of going into bookshops, what with the risk of coming out with a book they wouldn’t read and then being harangued in their sleep by the characters from it who wanted to make them face up to their responsibilities.

So I walked in out of it curiosity. Too bad if I come out with a book I won’t read, I thought to myself, and the characters of that book pop up to give me a hard time in my sleep even though we don’t know one another.

When Louis-Philippe looked up between signing a couple of books I could tell from his smile that he was happy to see me there, probably because writers are all the same, I’ll never understand them, they’re good at making the people who are about to become their readers believe they even know the date of their birthday.

He winked at me, as if to say he’d clocked me, that I mustn’t get away. So I wandered around between the piles of books. There were girls eyeing him voraciously, and he was flashing his seductive smile. I was taking a good look at the backsides of these female readers, and trying to figure out if any of them had come for something more than getting their book signed. Louis-Philippe had a joke for each of them, he took his time choosing the words he scribbled on the first page of the book.

We could hear his deep voice:

“Should I be dedicating this to your husband as well?”

“Oh, I’m not married!” simpered the single woman.

The bookshop owner noticed that my gaze was on the rear assets of the reader standing in front of Louis-Phillippe. She looked embarrassed and, to help her out of an awkward moment, I grabbed Louis-Philippe’s book, Dream of A Childhood Photo , and went over to the till. She wanted to explain what the book was about, but I wasn’t really paying attention. She also caught me soaking up the B-side of a very fidgety brunette now standing opposite the writer. I was trying to work out if her butt was like Original Colour’s or if it just had a manual gearbox. Boy, was that brunette dragging out the conversation. No one else existed in her eyes. Given the way Louis-Philippe was looking at her, I thought: my god, this story is going to end up in the sack in a hotel on Rue des Petites Écuries.

To kill time I re-read the title of Louis-Philippe’s book that I was holding. It was warm and tender: Dream of A Childhood Photo …

* * *

Half an hour later the brunette was still narrating how her ninety-eight-year-old uncle had been to Haiti, how he had adopted a young Haitian who now works for the Post Office in Nantes, how he’d also helped several Haitians flee Papa Doc’s regime, and then Baby Doc’s, how he’d been initiated by the great voodoo practitioners, how he owned naïve paintings by some Pétionville artists, how his favourite book was Country Without A Hat by Dany Laferrière because it captures the spirit of Haiti, it’s chock-a-block with proverbs, and there are people in the street who are in fact zombies and all that kind of thing. The elderly uncle in question had met the author of Country Without A Hat in person, a brilliant, witty man who never knew whether he should be living in Miami or Montreal. Louis-Philippe didn’t want the brunette to think that he was in the least bit bothered by her flaunting the merits of another Haitian author, when he was there to sign his own books.

He forced a smile and said:

“Dany Laferrière is a great friend! I would urge you to read another of his books: How To Make Love To A Negro Without Getting Tired … ”

A redhead cut short their conversation. She glared with blood red eyes at the brunette who realised she’d better scat and fast. The brunette left the bookshop muttering to herself, with one book by Dany Laferrière but none by Louis-Philippe.

The redhead had a more direct approach. She grabbed a stool, sat bang opposite the author and proceeded to tell him that she took some of his books to bed with her, especially God’s Pencil Has No Eraser . She even felt as if he was writing them for her, that she was one of his characters.

“I want a proper dedication, none of that ‘With best wishes from the author’ nonsense! I want a dedication intended for me and me alone. This is a book I’ll read every night before going to sleep, even if there’s a guy lying next to me …”

Louis-Philippe looked up at the ceiling and then wrote something. He held out the book to the redhead who immediately read the dedication. She blushed, kissed the author on the cheek and left the Rideau Rouge waving at him in a knowing kind of a way.

I was staring at her B-side and thinking to myself: “That one’s a dormant volcano!”

* * *

After taking his leave of the bookshop owner, Louis-Philippe made his way over to me. I had his book tucked under my arm. He called me “old buddy”.

When I told him that I lived in the area he nearly exploded:

“That means we’re neighbours! I don’t live far. We must swap phone numbers. Drop by whenever you want, you’ve got to try my Barbancourt rum from back home!”

We left the bookshop, walked up Rue Riquet and grabbed a table at the Roi du Café. I had my back to Rue Marx Dormoy, so I could see in his eyes the marks he was giving the backside of each girl as she crossed the road. This was all we talked about, the different kinds of B-sides. And he was having a good laugh with it.

That evening I arrived back home feeling lighthearted and it didn’t bother me that Mr Hippocratic was lying in wait. the Hybrid had already left for the night, I wasn’t interested in finding out why. I started reading even though Original Colour complained that the light would wake the little one. I was far away, I wasn’t in that studio any more. Everything around me stopped existing. I was picturing Louis-Philippe’s island, Haiti. I was the character from the capital of Port-au-Prince which he had re-named Port-of-Filth. He had painted the portrait of Pointe-Noire, where I come from. The people looked like me. I underlined everything. I was in a state of wonder before the poetry of his language.

I called Louis-Philippe the next day. I went over to his place, and I got to drink Barbancourt for the first time. I admired his bookshelves, I leafed through each of his books that had been published. He teased me a bit about my outfit.

“Do the Congolese always dress like that?”

The following day after I went to buy a typewriter from Porte de Vincennes because I don’t like computers, and because I wanted to be like a real writer who rips up pages, crosses things out, and has to interrupt his creative flow in order to change the typewriter ribbon …

* * *

When Original Colour nagged me for spending too much time writing, hanging out at Jip’s and only working part-time at the printing works, I’d just get up and take my typewriter for a walk in the park. I would sit on a bench under a street lamp along with the tramps who were knocking back bottles of red, and I’d keep on writing.

I think I must have been hitting the keys too hard because even the tramps were giving me funny looks, as if they thought I was losing the plot and would soon be joining them. I kept on writing, I was writing more and more. When I saw a bird moving in a branch, I would write it down. When it flew off to another tree, I wrote that down too because Louis-Philippe who knew a thing or two about inspiration had told me that writers noted everything down and then went through their notes so they only kept the stuff that really mattered. Thanks to him I was now reading like a bookworm, I wasn’t just reading dead authors, I was reading living ones too, I really wanted to become a writer in the vein of Georges Simenon whose Maigret adventures had been all the way round the world. But then I realised that I could only write about what I’d experienced, about what there was around me, and that it would have to be every bit as chaotic …