Alain Mabanckou - Broken Glass

when I said all this to the Stubborn Snail, he was lost for words, he thought I must be angry with someone in particular, or that I was raving, and he said who was I talking about, he wanted names, but I didn’t reply, I just smiled and gazed up at the sky, and he kept at me to know if I was angry and I said no, why should I be angry, I had no cause to be angry, I was just setting things straight, just making a distinction between what I considered rubbish, and what I thought was good, and that was the day he gave me this notebook, and a pencil and said “if you change your mind you could always write in this, it’s your book, it’s a present, I know you will write, just write what you feel like, the kind of thing you were saying just now, about true writers and fake writers that congest the highway of literature, and about the people who turn down the Nobel prize and the nostalgic Senegalese riflemen, and the writers you saw in suits on TV in the bar on the Avenue of Independence, that’s all good stuff, you can work on that, find a way to grab me as a reader, yes, I want to read about all that, I’m not quite sure what you meant by it, but I still think you need to put down everything you’ve just said” so since then, to please him, I’ve been writing down my stories in the book, my rough impressions, and sometimes I do it for my own pleasure too, and that’s when I really feel like I’m hitting my stride, when I let myself go, and forget this is something I’ve been asked to do, I feel at ease in the saddle, I can buck and jump and I can talk to a reader other than the Stubborn Snail, a reader I’ve never met, because anything can happen, and the Stubborn Snail did say to me once “I promise not to read what you write until the day you reach the last full stop,” my book is always here ready for me, and there are days when I say to Mompéro or Dengaki, “bring me two bottles of red and my notebook” and they bring me my two bottles and my notebook and I drink and I scribble away and watch the world, let’s just say that until now I’ve been happy that way, a happy man, a free man, but it makes me feel pretty sad to think that in future I won’t be scribbling away in my book, and I won’t be turning up here in days to come, so I need to look back a bit over what I’ve written so far, and I mustn’t forget to finish my bicycle chicken, which has gone quite cold, because I took my time over the story of my life, when I should have been eating, but I think it was necessary, so now I’m going to just stop for a bite to eat, I’m actually starving, though I may not look it

I finally managed to eat my bicycle chicken, and now I have to go and give the plate back to the bald soprano on the other side of the Avenue of Independence, but first I’ll drink up my glass of red wine, which will only take a few seconds, besides, time doesn’t matter now, I see the Printer’s still here, still surrounded by people flicking through the latest Paris Match , well I don’t care, it’s nothing to do with me, I’m busy anyway, and I stand up and get ready to cross the Avenue of Independence, I’ll manage all right, there’s not two-way traffic, unless I’ve gone blind, and there are no motorcycles either, and no garbage trucks that I can see, ah, there we are, it’s done, I’ve made it, I can claim a victory now, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion, so I’m across the avenue, and I can see the bald soprano, she can see me walking toward her, she smiles, she’s always smiling, I’m standing before her, she smiles again and quips, “well now, Broken Glass, you took your time eating today, weren’t you hungry then, just look at you now, you’re fit to drop, ooh, how many liters you got under your belt there papa” and I say I’ve not started drinking yet, I’ve not touched a drop of alcohol since I got up this morning, and I laugh even as I utter this lie, which is as big as an African dictator’s second home, but I can see she doesn’t believe me, because she says “when d’you ever meet a drunk who’ll admit he’s been drinking, never, that’s when, papa, there’s a song about that, it goes “ momeli ya massanga andimaka kuiti te mama ,” it’s not a song I know, she says it’s by a band called Almighty OK Jazz, an amazing band from the country over the way, I don’t know much about this country’s music, just a few songs by Zaiko Langa Langa, and Afrisa International, that’s all, and I come clean and say “well, yes, Mama Mfoa, I did have just one little glass, a really small one, no more, I promise” and the look she gives me is full of kindness, I’ve never seen her look so serious in all the time I’ve known her and she shakes her head and murmurs “I told you to give up drinking, Broken Glass, you’re going to die with a bottle in your hand, papa, we all care about you here in the district” and I can’t think what to say to her right now, so I say, without thinking “I’ll stop tonight, at midnight, I give you my word, I promise, Mama Mfoa, and I’ll never show my face round here again” and I’d really like to tell her that I’m not stopping drinking because I’m afraid of dying, I’m not scared that I’ll die with a bottle in my hand, the truth is, it’s a good way to go, it’s what they call dying with your weapon in your hand, because when we pass through to heaven or hell we know anything can happen, when we get there everything depends on which strait gate we each go through, I expect some people will go in through the wrong gate, in heaven it’s all very serious, lots of white clouds and angels with the memories of elephants, asking you how many times you’ve read the Jerusalem Bible, how many old ladies you’ve helped across the Avenue of Independence, which churches you attended down below, no way you’ll get a drink up there, it’s one big oral exam, strictly no drinking in paradise, and in hell it’s much the same, it’ll be just as hard to get a drop to drink there, what with the devil hanging around between a rock and hard place prodding us with his trident, and if you ask him for a drop of wine he’ll turn angry and shout “what’s that, what d’you want from me, idiot pain in the ass, don’t you think you drank enough down below without coming pestering us here in purgatory, you should have aimed for paradise, aimed a little higher, beyond those dark clouds over there, well, bad luck, you should have drunk your fill on earth, while you still had the chance, all you’ll get here is your judgment, with no appeal, here the crackling flames of the apocalypse rule the day, incineration with no deliberation, no alcohol to be consumed on the premises, we just use it to light the flames and make them leap, come now, your turn to burn, poor fool, who believed hell was other people”

I’d just like to point out I’m not a bad man, nor hysterical, or anything like that, no, no one’s going to call me that, even if I do plan to throw in the towel at the stroke of midnight, I’m a sensible man, otherwise how come those people who say they’re not drunks can’t do their times tables, huh, I mean, anyone can multiply by two, but once you start multiplying by nine, say, it does get tricky, and then there’s decimals and all that jazz, but I’ve never given in to the temptation to count on my fingers, or with sticks, and I’ve certainly never even set eyes on a calculator, I don’t give a damn about modern math, to me life means a bottle and the multiplication tables, just as for my father, life meant jazz and palm wine, Coltrane, Monk, Davis, Bechet and all the other negroes, with their trumpets and clarinets, God himself told us to go forth and multiply, though he didn’t actually specify how much we should multiply by, but he did bid us go forth and multiply, I really like multiplication, even if I’ve always been keener on geography and literature, it’s true I couldn’t have taken literature any further, even if I’d carried on with my studies, literature leads nowhere, geography would have just about been okay, I could have traveled the world with it, I could have studied the great rivers in all their length and breadth, the river Congo, the river Amour, the Yangtze-Kiang, or the Amazon, but I’ve never seen these rivers with my own eyes, the only river I’ve ever known is dark red in color and comes in a bottle, and this river, of the color purple, will never run dry, no more than the ones I’ve just named, and when I think about the liters of wine I’ve drunk over the past twenty years, if that’s not a long quiet river, I don’t know what the world’s coming to, anyway, I’m not going to get bogged down in hydrographic detail here, water is a dangerous element, and it still makes me furious to think of my mother swallowing great mouthfuls of water before she finally surrendered her spirit, with no time even to say “ our Father, who art in heaven ”