Alain Mabanckou - Black Bazaar

At the time, he used to drink like a sponge. He stopped drinking the year I left for Angola, following a heart scare that nearly cost him his life. When he got drunk back then and started rowing with my mother, I’d hear him saying over and over again:

“If I’d known, I would have married a White woman from Bordeaux! At least with her I’d be able to drink my bordeaux without people giving me grief …”

But he was destined to spend his life with our mother. He had found a stall for her at the Grand Market, and she sold groundnuts, salt fish and palm oil. I am the first fruit of this marriage arranged by the notables from our village of Louboulou. My brother was born five years later. They all live back in the country, in Pointe-Noire.

I haven’t set eyes on any of them for over fifteen years, but I can still remember my mother’s last words to me, as she wept:

“Go to France, work and send me a little money so that I can rent a big stall at the Tié-Tié Market. And then, give me a grandson or a granddaughter before I leave this earth for ever …”

Seeing as I’ve gotthe time now, when I’m not writing or having my drink at Jip’s I like to lose myself in the Marché Dejean, at Château Rouge, and to remember it was here that Original Colour and her friend Rachel used to sell salt fish on the sly. I spot some characters from the home country. Plenty arrive on foot from the Gare du Nord. In summer the sun seems to roast them, poor things, but it takes more than that to change their habits. They walk, they like to take their time getting there. They’re unlikely to buy anything at the market but, like me, they will feel as if they’re back in the home country, listening to our rural languages, exchanging banter about life in France, about dictators sucking the continent dry and inciting different ethnic groups to tear each other’s guts out before the cameras of the international community.

My Gare du Nord compatriots step off the trains from the banlieues, survey the Boulevard Magenta, peer through the windows at the mind-boggling jobs on offer at the temping agencies: skilled workers are currently being sought, security guards, road sweepers, packers. They jot it all down on scraps of paper. They often linger around Barbès-Rochechouart before walking up Rue Myrha and into the heart of the market.

Then comes the inescapable ritual of reunions. Embraces that seem to go on forever in the middle of stalls piled high with smoked fish, mangoes, guavas and soursops. Full-throated laughter and jostlings without any apology to the victims, even if their toes have been stamped on.

They have their own style when it comes to striking up a conversation:

“Is that you I’m seeing? No, I don’t believe it! How are you?”

“Have you seen me even catch flu here?”

“And what about our friend Makaya, what’s he up to?”

“He is on a trip back to the home country to test the waters.”

“Really?”

“Oh come on, he’d been gathering dust here for fourteen years! In this country white hair falls like snow in the mountains. And you end up having to use Pento hair gel to put people off the scent …”

“Do you think he’ll come back?”

“In theory, yes, if he’s got his wits about him. When the mouse strays too far from his hole, it’s a battle to reclaim it! Anyone can leave France without something to fall back on. And the police don’t give a monkey’s because you’re scarpering at your own expense. But coming back to Paris is another story! They’ll pick up on it straight away if your face isn’t a proper match for the ID you show them!”

“What, you mean he hadn’t fixed his papers before leaving?”

“No, the whole point is he went back to buy an ID. He said he’d use the opportunity to lower his age as well so he could carry on living in the hostel for young workers in Châtillon. Because in those hostels, you must be fresh-faced and under twenty-five, but he was thirty-two with a beard so long it reached the ground!”

“So he’s going to be a rich man when he comes back with all those IDs! You know him well, tell him to reserve a driving licence for me, I’ve failed the Highway Code for the past five years.”

“You can count on me, he’ll do you a good price, he’s a childhood friend. We led the wild life together …”

* * *

And then there are some compatriots who don’t make their way from the Gare du Nord, but from the Gare de l’Est. The Marché Dejean is a detour, but they don’t care. They like drifting towards Rue de Strasbourg. They’re in no hurry. They know how to ponder time. But they can also pick up the pace when they need to, suddenly turning into crazy dromedaries. They walk along Rue de Strasbourg to soak up the atmosphere of Château d’Eau, the temple of hairdressing and negro cosmetics. There are always crowds in front of the métro station where skanky touts hassle passers-by with Jackson Five bushy hair. They offer them speedy cut-price haircuts in dimly lit basements or on the ninth floor of a nearby dilapidated building with no lift. These touts know how to make prospective customers feel like they have no choice, they lead them down winding corridors and up dark stairwells where the sound of scissors and the sputtering of secondhand clippers can be heard all day long.

Once I came across a character who wasn’t from the Congolese milieu — he was Central African. He was just about to cross the road when a tout, licking his lips with relish, pounced on him like a cat jumping on easy prey:

“What is that you’ve got on your head, my brother? Follow me, we will fix that with two snips of the scissors, a good job, double quick! You won’t believe your eyes! You will look like a real Sapper, oh yes, a proper one!”

“No thank you, my brother, I haven’t had my hair cut for a long time now, and anyway I …”

“What do you mean? So you are happy to stroll around with a crow’s nest on top of your head? Did no one tell you that French water is full of limestone, you wouldn’t believe how much since the Left fell from power? Look at your shoulders, anyone would think it was snowing every day in your hair! My god, it’s people like you who give us a bad name in this country! How can a White lady who is healthy in mind and body even look at you with hair like that? Come on, I’m giving you this advice as a brother, don’t spoil things for our race, our people have already suffered too much for four hundred years!”

The harassed man ended up giving in and following the tout, who pocketed a commission after making his sitting duck perch on a dirty chair with legs that were out of all proportion. He closed the door behind him and headed off again out into the street in the hope of harvesting another dazed victim. Now, was the hairdresser going to attack the frizzy vegetation he was eyeing scornfully? Was he going to comb it? He was shilly-shallying. He risked breaking his comb, because this customer’s hair was a dusty, unassailable mop of dry grass …

* * *

Château d’Eau is a place of transit for us before reaching Château Rouge. There’s Luxure, a shop where they sell all sorts of female wigs that smell of naphthalene and baby vomit. Girls who want to be on a par with blue-eyed blondes flock to the shop from morning to night, while the blue-eyed blondes go there to get their hair braided so they’ll look like Africans.

Sometimes you’ll find influential personalities from our community hanging out in the area to gauge how well their reputation has taken root. It’s a varied line-up of personalities: businessmen staying in Formule 1 motels on the outskirts of Paris, compulsive liars who claim to be great travellers but are incapable of locating on a map the countries they say they’ve visited, the legitimate or illegitimate sons of Heads of State, of ministers, of political refugees and opposition members who only represent their ethnic group, international footballers we’ve never seen playing on the telly, musical stars overtaken by the latest developments in instruments and the proliferation of tracks in recording studios …