Alain Mabanckou - Broken Glass

so when he’s quit playing to the gallery, the Printer comes over to me and says “I don’t know if anyone’s told you this, my friend, but you stink of shit, you can smell it a mile off, have you crapped in your pants, or what, you ought to go and take a shower, look, you’re even attracting the flies,” and I don’t reply, I’m not going to tell him someone told me to pick up my own shit which I’d dumped at the foot of a mango tree, no way, and the Printer adds “okay, it’s your shit, nothing to do with me, what I really wanted to tell you was, I have here, in my hands, the latest copy of Paris Match , I bought it this morning, as I was taking my usual stroll down to the Côte Sauvage, go on, take a look, it’s got some ass in it, and it’s free,” so out of politeness I take the magazine and flick through it, and I come across a guy called Joseph, a black painter, who’s sick with something, terribly thin, in the picture he’s wearing an army-surplus shirt and he’s sitting with his eyes shut in a room in a hospital with all his canvases and work things next to him, he looks really eaten up by his illness, and at his bedside there’s even a book about the painter Picasso, and on top of this book the sick man’s laid out his paintbrushes, and I discover that no one knows the painter’s real name, or who he is, that he’s a Parisian street painter, a painter from the district they call the Marais, but most of all I’m shocked to read that he’s just died of cancer, and the article goes on to explain how he was hospitalized two months ago, and put on the respiratory ward at St. Antoine Hospital, living from one bout of chemotherapy to the next, homeless, living on the streets, drinking bottle after bottle of whiskey, smoking endless packs of cigarettes, and I feel a kind of tenderness for this character, he even looks a bit like me, and the journalist in Paris Match , whose name was Pepita Dupont, went and interviewed this black van Gogh just eight days before he died, and it turns out that the negro in question was a real walking library, he’s read his Arthur Rimbaud and his Benjamin Constant and his Baudelaire and above all his Chateaubriand, in particular the Mémoires d’outre-tombe , he talks like a book himself, he finds just the right expression, the journalist is amazed, he also talks about famous painters whose names I’ve never heard before, because I don’t know anything about painting, and he mentions painters called William Blake, Francis Bacon, Robert Rauschenberg, James Ensor, and lots more and the journalist says that this painter could easily have vanished without trace, someone just happened to discover him by chance and befriended him, and this savior is a lawyer who found Joseph lying on the pavement with his canvases, the lawyer was just moving into a new building, where the black van Gogh had lain down for the night, the lawyer almost tripped over him as he lay sleeping on his masterworks, and they got into conversation, and the lawyer fell in love with this man’s original art, and he examined the paintings closely, and bought several of them, and became a great friend of the black van Gogh and every day they talked together, and the lawyer couldn’t get over the fact that this original art had gone unnoticed all this time, but he knew that true art, the real kind, always meets with indifference, genius is often unacknowledged in its own time, victim of a confederacy of dunces, and the lawyer realized that what he had discovered here was an artiste maudit , so he decided he would help him, and bring him to the notice of the art scene, make him famous throughout Paris, in the closed and fusty world of art, and he introduced him to a decent guy who runs the Dubuffet Foundation, and this guy was bowled over too, and said that the black van Gogh was a genius, beyond all doubt, so the lawyer and the guy from the Dubuffet Foundation decided to wave a magic wand over Joseph’s life, but unfortunately Joseph departed this life rather soon after that, and he went instead to practice his art alongside his illustrious masters, the Picassos, the Rauschenbergs, and all the rest, everyone knows that truly great artists attain glory after their deaths, however hard the living hustle for recognition and acclaim, that’s only success, not glory, and success is to glory as a shooting star is to a sun, and when the sun sets in one place, it rises somewhere else, to bring light to lands anew, to send forth new rays of glory, and even the true van Gogh, it seems, sold only one painting in his lifetime, and since Joseph’s death, according to Paris Match , his stock rises every day, collectors call from all over the world, trying to get their hands on his paintings, the ones he did on old bits of cardboard, with inscriptions from The Count of Monte Cristo , apparently the black van Gogh knew whole passages of Alexandre Dumas’s novel by heart, and of Chateaubriand, Joseph says he’s awesome, and adds “he writes not with a pen but with a whip, he shouts at you, I couldn’t put Atala down, I wept when I found out afterwards that Chateaubriand’s father was a slave trader, he never mentions it in his Memoirs ,” and when I read that in Paris Match , the thing that struck me most was his courage in the face of the illness which would eventually kill him, he’s basically saying “this illness is devouring my life, and I can only deal with it by painting, I’m using my paintbrush to sweep away this fucking cancer” and while I’m trying to finish reading this moving article on Joseph the black van Gogh, the Printer starts to shake me and threaten me and even tries to snatch the magazine away “for fuck’s sake Broken Glass, get a grip, why are you wasting your time on the dead, he’s nothing, that guy, I don’t even want to see his photo, he’s a loser, a piece of garbage, come on, turn the page,” so I skip a few pages and he shouts “slow down, slow down, you just missed the page with the pussy on it, it’s on page thirteen” and I turn back to page thirteen, and there is actually a bare piece of ass on it, but quite honestly it’s a bit blurred round the edges, and I’m feeling really fed up, and I say “how do I know that picture’s not faked, I can’t make much out, it could be anybody’s ass” and the Printer gives an angry shout, he can’t bear it if anyone contradicts him on this subject, and he yells at me “what you saying there, Broken Glass, what you saying, you mad or what, a guy like you, over sixty, a wise man like you, how can you say something so stupid, eh, you saying this photo’s not for real, that what you mean, eh, you think a magazine like Paris Match is going to print photos that aren’t even true, can’t you see it’s in color, can’t you see these are professional photographers risking their lives, these are serious journalists writing this stuff, can’t you see that pussy is real pussy, the stuff your average Frenchman in his Basque beret dreams of, shit man, you must be blind” and I mumble, as though fearful of his reaction, “yeah, but you shouldn’t believe everything you read in some trashy magazine, those guys can sell you anything as long as there are people who’ll buy it” and then he gets really mad and says “listen to me, Broken Glass, first thing, this is not a trashy magazine, this is a serious publication, reinforced concrete, man, I can swear to that, because we actually printed it in France, and I can tell you everything that’s in it is true, and that’s why everyone buys it, politicians, superstars, big businessmen, famous actors, they all fall over each other to get themselves and their families into it, in front of their houses, with their dogs and their cats and their horses, and I’ll tell you this too, when the politicians over there get into trouble with the law, or for sleaze, or faked accounts, or allocation of government contracts, illicit use of influence, all that kind of stuff, they always try to get themselves photographed in Paris Match , to show what decent guys they are and anyone trying to make trouble for them must just be jealous, or a political opponent, trying to stop them standing in the next elections, you see what I mean, take a look at page twenty-seven, there’s a politician there, he’s totally corrupt, he’s got all sorts of dirty baggage, he’s involved in some of the worst scandals in the whole of France, but there he is, in Paris Match , and it looks good, let me tell you,” and I’m trying to concentrate on page thirteen, with the blurred pussy, “I’m sorry, but I still think it’s not a genuine photo, you can tell just by looking at it” and he snatches the magazine out of my hands, he’s really cross now, he feels personally affronted, and he walks away muttering nastily “sad old fuck of yesteryear, I thought you were okay till now, but I think old age must be rotting your brain, and you stink of shit, go and have a wash” and he spits on the ground and then says “we just don’t share the same values, you and I, you’re from different eras, you’re yesterday’s man, I don’t even know what you’re doing here, I never want to speak to you again, it’s over, I’m not coming near you, shit, it’s like you’re forgetting I’ve done France, no one here but me’s seen snow, no one here’s seen the Champs-Elysées or the Arc de Triomphe” and with this he walks off, flustered and furious, and I say darkly to myself “I just don’t give a shit, this old man of yesteryear says you go fuck yourself” and he goes and sits with a group of blind-drunks who are talking about the match between the formidable Southern Sharks and the tenacious Northern Reptiles, it seems the Northern Reptiles won a clear 2–0 victory, but it also seems that in the first leg the Southern Sharks won with the same score, so there should be another match in two weeks’ time, according to these idiots sitting round chewing the cud like a band of impotents with nothing to do, and the Printer interrupts their sporting banter saying “hey, you guys, what’s going on here, what is this place, you all going mad, or what, let’s just be serious for a moment, fuck it, there’s lots of things more important than these barbaric games of soccer” and he passes around his magazine, which some people like but not the ones who are crazy about soccer