Alain Mabanckou - Broken Glass

and then as she parted the twin towers of her buttocks we saw her sex, and all applauded, and curiously, I and all the other witnesses at once got huge erections, I’m being honest here, I’m trying to speak the truth, yeah, I got an erection simply because a woman’s backside is a woman’s backside, be it small, large, flat, or fat, striped like a zebra’s, splashed with neuralgia-inducing pigments or palm-wine stains, or pox scars, a woman’s backside is a woman’s backside, first you get a hard-on, then you decide if you’re going to go for it or if you’re not, so then we all watched Casimir High-Life take off his trousers, revealing his little legs, skinny as a wader bird’s, and knees like a web of Gordian knots, he was wearing tomato-red pants, which he pulled down to his ankles, and there was his sex, his original indivisible element, at which we all burst out laughing, and wondering where his puny piss would come from, but there he stood, calmly displaying this insignificant object, with its hairy appendages hanging down like the fruit of a breadfruit tree at the end of a dry white season, and began to knead his original indivisible element, handling it like a greasy pole, talking to it quietly, like a snake charmer before a crowd of tourists in the marketplace, he settled down to the serious task of getting it into a catholic shape, which was no easy task with all these people looking on in derision, all supporting Robinette, no easy task at all, with them all trying to put him off by whatever means possible, because of his feeble little member, but he concentrated hard, as though we didn’t exist, aware that he was on his own here, that the rest of us were all for Robinette, but it didn’t shake his confidence, far from it, he had a kind of calm assurance, paid no attention to his opponent, went about his preparations with the serenity of a professional in this kind of contest, and he shook his original indivisible element, and tugged at it and twisted it this way and that, summoning up his urine, and then suddenly off he went, whoosh , we were off, the contest had started, Robinette spread wide her elephantine legs, her entire Nether Regions now smack in our faces, and we certainly saw her sweet little pea begin to swell and suddenly there she was, giving out an animal squeal, like a hyena giving birth, we almost got sprayed with the steaming yellow liquid, spurting like a sac of water that’s suddenly been pierced, we just managed to step back in time, while in the other corner Casimir High-Life was liberating the contents of his bladder, but Robinette’s stream was heavier, hotter, more majestic, and above all had a longer range, while her cocky opponent’s came out in little fits and starts, like a baby kangaroo, a frog hoping to turn into a bull cow, a crow emulating an eagle, it wiggled and staggered and zigzagged about, tracing strange hieroglyphics on the ground, enough to give a headache to that guy they called Champollion, who enjoyed racking his brains over those drawings that look like they’ve been done by a three-year-old from the time of the pharaohs and other mummies, and this guy’s irregular output landed only a few centimeters from his feet, to the amusement of Robinette, who couldn’t resist taunting him with “you’re rubbish, go on, piss harder, piss away, you gonna fuck me like that then piss face?” and the two opponents went on pissing, each after his or her own fashion, two whole minutes is a long time to piss, but the two opponents were committed, and although his flow was in no way unorthodox, Casimir High-Life held a steady course, if I’d been in his shoes I’d already have finished pissing and have put my original indivisible element back where it belonged, while this guy had been determinedly flying his flag for over five minutes now, had closed his eyes and tilted his head back, like someone happily humming a requiem for a nun, imperturbable, deaf to all intimidation, to Robinette’s many and varied provocations, as gradually she began to step up her urinal output, and suddenly flung at him “come on, crack, you piss pot, crack, you know you will, you don’t even know how to piss, crack now, I got liters left in my reservoir, man, I’m warning you now, you watch out now, you better stop pissing if you don’t wanna be humiliated in front of all these people, you better stop now, say thank you and goodbye!” she shouted, and the guy just answered “shut up and piss, you old fat hen, the true master does not speak, why should I say ‘thank you’ and ‘goodbye,’ not me, not ever, you’re the one who’s gonna crack, Robinette, and then I’m the one who’s gonna fuck you” and he gave a squeeze of his two hairy balls, and the flow of his urine increased several notches, and we all stretched our eyes and stared, because this braggart was now pissing with much more conviction, and we could see that his original indivisible element was twice, three times its original size, and we rubbed our eyes in disbelief, as his pouches swelled up and hung there now like two old gourds filled to the brim with palm wine, and there was jubilation in his pissing, and as he pissed he whistled a snatch from an anthem sung by the scum of Trois-Cents, and after that a baroque concerto, and then a heavy metal Zao number, by which time he had everyone’s attention, meanwhile, Robinette was giving it her all, she farted several times, till we had to stick our fingers up our noses and in our ears, it smelled so bad, and ripped through the ear like fireworks at the Feast of the Goat, with an odor of contraband Nigerian camphor, sounding at times like a Mardi Gras trumpet in New Orleans and while we were closely focused on Robinette’s elephantine rear quarters, a witness informed us that on the other side, High-Life had turned a decisive corner, a miracle deserving of papal beatification, and we all dashed over to get a closer look, you should never miss a miracle, even if it doesn’t take place at Lourdes, you’ve got to try and witness those moments that people will be talking about centuries from now, better to witness it in person than have some parrot tell you a story of love in the time of cholera, so we all went hurtling over to Casimir High-Life to get a look at his historic miracle, we were all knocked sideways, something unbelievable was happening right before our eyes, you had to be there to believe it, we saw how Casmir High-Life had sketched in the dust with his urine a perfect outline of the map of France, his unremarkable output was now falling in the very heart of the city of Paris, “this is nothing,” he said, “I can do China, too, and piss on any given street in the city of Peking” and Robinette, thrown into disarray, turned round and threw us a glance before shouting “hey come back here, you lot, come back, what you all looking at down there then, you all a bunch of homos, then, or what?” but we were all quite captivated by the mysterious boastful contestant and began to applaud him and call him Casimir the Geographer, and he began to rise to the challenge “I’m a marathon man, I am, not a sprinter, I’ll screw her, I’ll wear her out, just you wait and see” he said, and whistled some more of his Trois-Cent riffraff’s anthem, and his baroque concerto and his number by Zao, and we applauded more and more as he added the various regions of France to his map, while alongside his magnificent drawing there was another little drawing, “hey, what’s that thing he’s drawn next to the map of France, what’s that then?” asked one witness, distracted by Casimir High-Life’s artistic flair, “that’s Corsica, idiot” the artist replied, without interrupting his flow, and we all gave a round of applause for Corsica, and for some the word Corsica was a new discovery, and people started mumbling, and arguing, till one guy who was seriously confused asked who the president of Corsica was, what kind of state it was, what its capital city was, whether the president was black or white, and we all shouted him down saying “idiot, imbecile,” and by now the two of them had been locked in urinal combat for over ten minutes, and I began to want to have a piss myself, often when one person’s pissing it makes you want to do likewise, that’s why when you go to the hospital the doctor says to leave the tap running to make you want to go, so anyway on they went, but in the meantime, one of the witnesses, who’d been staring at Robinette’s butt the whole time, suddenly whipped his thing out of his pants and began to paw at it feverishly, and we heard a great orgasmic bellow, like that of a decapitated pig at the Feast of the Goat, and the two contestants, still concentrating hard, still focused intently on their task, went on pissing, “hang on, if it’s going to be like that I’m stopping, I’m stopping right here and now, I can’t work in these kinds of conditions, who do you take me for, eh, I’m serious, I’m stopping now, the show’s over” and everyone turned round, and there was Robinette, and she had indeed stopped pissing, claiming that we were putting her off by behaving like infant schoolkids, but at least she had the grace and sportsmanship to go over to Casimir High-Life to finger his thing affectionately and say “you did well, my boy, you win today, you are a true pisser, now let’s see if you can come for as long as you can piss, just tell me where and when and I’m all yours” and we all gave her a clap because it was the first time we’d seen her concede like that and indirectly ask for a ceasefire, so Robinette and Casimir High-Life arranged a meeting in a rented room over by the place des Fetes, in Trois-Cents, we weren’t too pleased about the private nature of their rendezvous, we would have preferred them to do it there and then, in front of us, and we all went back into the bar feeling a bit disappointed, while Robinette and the victorious Casimir High-Life dived into a taxi and went off to their rented room, and no one knows what happened between the two of them, Casimir High-Life was never seen again, Robinette turns up occasionally, but she won’t tell us what happened, my guess is, she probably took a real hammering in bed with Casimir, and wasn’t quite up to the mark, otherwise she’d have got us all drunk and given us all the details of her victory over swanky Casimir and his high life