Alain Mabanckou - Black Bazaar

And my ex, who was moved by this, asked:

“Did you make that up, all that stuff about gunpowder, compasses, steam, electricity, the seas and the sky?”

I told her it wasn’t me, that these were things we’d learned at school, back in the home country, things Europeans didn’t get taught. They came from a man who was angry, a black poet who used to speak courageous words. He had written them on returning to his native country and finding his people hungry, the streets dirty, the rum like dynamite exploding his island, a people who didn’t rise up against their condition or the invisible hand that was subjugating them. There could be no messing around with that angry man, since he had also written in black and white: Because we hate you, you and your reason, we lay claim to dementia praecox, to the blazing madness of inveterate cannibalism …

At which point my ex became very sad. I felt guilty about leaving her in such low spirits, so then I had to entertain her with different stories about love, that way she wouldn’t go to sleep with our courageous poet’s ideas about dementia praecox, blazing madness and inveterate cannibalism.

We were lying in bed, and it was nearly midnight as I talked to her in my deepest voice. I told her about how we learnt to sweet-talk girls for the first time. It was something we were dreading, so we paid a visit to a big brother in the district who was called Big Poupy because he was always surrounded by girls and his throat didn’t dry up when he was talking to them. He had chatted up all sorts of girls: tall ones and short ones, bantamweight, featherweight and even super-heavyweight. He claimed to have an all-areas pass. The girls filed past his bedroom door, which looked out on to Independence Avenue. We’d be down below, counting Big Poupy’s victories. He wasn’t afraid to touch the girls’ hair, to hold hands with them, and sometimes even to pinch those buttocks we dreamt about. And these girls laughed instead of going home to complain to their parents! At the time we could only stare at girls from a distance. Our stomachs were in knots, and we wanted to pee our pants as soon as one of them looked us in the eye. It was like being felled by an earthquake, and sometimes we’d cry because the emotion of it turned us into salt statues. Another reason for us watching the girls from a distance was that we didn’t want any trouble. Our parents had warned us about the wicked and evil scorpion they had in their sexual organ, and about how this scorpion could sting ours.

Which is why all our hopes lay with Big Poupy. We paid him ten Central African CFA francs — he was the one who’d set the rate — for him to teach us what we had to say when we ran into a girl leaving her parents’ plot of land to go to the market. According to Big Poupy, you had to raise your head up high, stand straight as a soldier, hold your breath for ten seconds, breathe out gently, and then ask the girl:

“So where are you off to like that?”

And according to Big Poupy the girl’s answer would always be:

“I’m going to the market.”

We had to raise our heads up high again, stand straight as a soldier, hold our breath for five seconds not ten, and then say in an authoritative voice, while giving them a sidelong glance:

“I’m coming with you! Give me your basket!”

Big Poupy was right. More often than not, the girls agreed to this. But we quickly ran into trouble because we had to talk to them when all the questions Big Poupy had taught us had flown clean out of our heads, things like: How tall are you? How much do you weigh? Have you made love before? What did you have to eat yesterday? Did you sweep your parents’ yard before coming out? Are you smart at school? What is the capital of Nepal? What is the surface area of our country? What is a non-aligned country? Was Hitler German or Austrian? What is Victor Hugo’s first name?”

We were so surprised to be walking next to a girl that our brains went blank. We tensed up and the way to the market felt very long. And the people who saw us sweating behind the girl assumed we were only carrying her basket because we were her parents’ house-boy …

When my ex burst out laughing, I quickly added that, over time, we stopped believing in Big Poupy’s smooth-talk which cost us a lot for nothing. That’s why we ended up going to see a good fetish man in the Trois-Cents district instead, like for those football matches with the balls that weren’t at all round. The fetish man would ask us to bring him some hair belonging to the girl and so we’d go and loiter wherever our ladylove was braiding her hair with her friends. Sometimes there’d be half a dozen girls taking it in turns to braid each other’s hair. We pretended to help them, we’d do the sweeping up and then, when they weren’t looking, we’d steal their locks of hair without knowing whose they were because how can you tell the difference when it comes to a black woman’s hair? It’s easier in other countries where you’ve got blondes, brunettes, redheads with or without freckles and I don’t know what else. We stole any old lock of hair that was lying on the ground, on the basis that it doesn’t matter what colour the cat is provided it catches the mouse. We would run to the fetish man’s house with our plunder, he would mix the hairs up with some stuff of his own and chant things we never understood even though we were from the same ethnic group as him. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.

Since my ex was often incredulous by this stage in my stories and in need of concrete examples, well, I told her that I’d seen with my own eyes how a love fetish had worked well for my childhood friend Placide, whose girlfriend Marceline had cleared off without saying goodbye and taken up with one of our classmates who always got nought out of twenty in Mérimée’s dictation, two out of twenty for history and geography, and nineteen and a half out of twenty for physical education thanks to his Beninese fisherman’s muscles. Placide, unlike us, had been lucky enough to hear about a proper fetish man who came from a faraway village in the north of the country. This fetish man didn’t want a cent upfront, you’ll pay after the result he said, I’m not in this for the money. Without saying anything to us, Placide went to see this man who gave him a little seed and told him to plant it in a bowl when he got back home, and to water it every day at around midnight while invoking Marceline’s name. Our friend rose at midnight, knelt down in front of his plant, and called out Marceline’s name for at least an hour. One week later, when the seed had produced a small shoot, we were all surprised to see Marceline strolling once more in front of the plot of land belonging to Placide’s parents. She brought him food now and said she couldn’t sleep any more without seeing him, without touching him, without smelling him, without gluing her lips to his just like in the movies we watched at The Rex. None of us in our district got it at all, because what did Placide have that we didn’t to turn the head of a beautiful girl like Marceline? The more the plant grew, the more the girl clung to Placide.

A group of us went round to our friend’s house so he could at least tell us what district his fetish man from the north lived in because we wanted girls to throw themselves into our arms as well, and to bring us food on our parents’ plot of land and to glue their lips to ours just like in the movies. We wanted girls to tell us they couldn’t sleep without us any more. But Placide refused to reveal the name of his fetish man, he said it was a secret.

So we all chorused:

“You don’t want to give us the name of your fetish man from the north? Well, if that’s the way it is, just wait and see what’s going to happen to you!”