Alain Mabanckou - Broken Glass

now I wasn’t going to sleep out in the street just because she’d changed the lock with the help of her brother-in-law, a well-known locksmith, I wasn’t going to sleep in the street like a bum, no way, so I knocked on the door, got no answer, I shouted my wife’s name so loud I woke the neighbors, she didn’t open up, I threatened to kick the door in, I would count up to five, I counted real slow, she never came, so naturally enough, I called the fire brigade, since I didn’t want to break down the door of my own house, and when the fire brigade arrived with all their gear, thinking they’d been called out to a real bush fire, I explained my house wasn’t on fire, but I needed to find a really good excuse for calling them out, because these guys get really bored when there’s no fire locally, they often get fed up doing practice runs, some of them reach retirement without ever having put out so much as the flame of a match, and I lied and said the children were locked in the house and their mother had passed out, and they were a bit disappointed that there was no fire, the firefighters asked why I didn’t have the keys to my own home, and I said that I’d gone to work a night shift and I’d left them in the house, so my keys were in the house and not on my person, then one fireman pointed out that I really was a complete idiot, and I told him they were his words not mine and the firefighters charged at the door like a band of madmen all trying to get through the eye of a needle at once, and they broke down the cruddy door after a hell of a struggle, and my wife came bursting out of the bedroom, roaring, with her claws at the ready, and flung herself at me like a tigress protecting her two-day-old babies, tackled me to the floor, she’s twice my size, and yours too, Broken Glass, she’s a real fury, my wife is, believe me, I shouted for help, the firefighters separated us, asked what was going on with us, I wanted to speak first because I’m the man, but my wife slapped me and told me to shut my filthy womanizing mouth, and she lied and said I should stop hanging out round the marital home because the matrimonial judge for Trois-Cents had ordered me out of it months ago, and the firefighters called me a sad liar and a sad mythomaniac and a sad troublemaker, and just totally sad, and told me to get my ass double quick out of the marital home, “the law is tough but it is the law,” that’s what they said, and I refused to get out because I didn’t see what business the law had being tough with me, so I said anyway, I was the one who paid the bills, I’d bought the TV, and the Duralex plates, and I paid for the food, I paid for the children’s school things, and I paid for the water, and I paid for the electricity, and so on and so forth, and at that point they called the police because firefighters don’t normally carry handcuffs with them, they always turn up with pipes and stretchers and great big engines that disturb everyone and all because someone, somewhere, has struck a match, and it’s not their job to send people to prison, they’re supposed to put out fires and resuscitate the half-wits and the suicides and people who’ve had accidents and pass out, and so the police turned up straight away, because the station’s only two hundred meters from the house, the one I’ve rented with my own money, and, get this, my wife told the police I was a dangerous man, more dangerous even than Angoulima, the well-known serial killer who decapitated his victims and stuck up their heads on poles round the Côte Sauvage, and my wife said I was an ex-convict, and a thief, that I dealt in cannabis and Colombian cocaine, and she said I’d stopped sleeping at home, I never washed, that I beat our children to death, that I’d stopped paying the rent, that she was going to be turned out of the house herself, that I slept with the tarts around the Rex, and that I slept with them without wearing proper condoms that come from Central Europe, because according to her condoms from Nigeria are no good, they’ve got a hole at the tip, which allows a man to cheat on a woman, taking his pleasure as if he weren’t wearing a condom, and the poor woman underneath thinks he is using a condom, when in fact it’s just a thing with a hole in the top, you know what I mean, Broken Glass, so my wife said I could well be HIV extra-positive and not know, and it was probably quite far gone, because I was getting weirdly thinner and thinner and I had a face like a fish, and my head now looked like a Hottentot’s skull and I had constant diarrhea and I groaned when I pissed, and that I often vomited, and she said I gave away my salary to the girls from the Rex District and I had two mistresses young enough to be my granddaughters or the granddaughters of the firefighters, or of the policemen outside our house, God help us, and that’s when the situation began to go downhill, particularly when my wife made out I also did disgusting things to our daughter, Amelie, she called me sorcerer, barbarian, caveman, and worse, she told all the people gathered at our house that I got up every night to lay my hands on our daughter, do disgusting things to her, indecent things, and she claimed that I would give Amelie sleeping pills so she wouldn’t realize the disgusting, indecent things I did to her, now you tell me, Broken Glass, can you see me doing that, d’you see me sullying the cloakroom of childhood, do you see me nipping buds, can you see me shooting at a child, its impossible, after all, Amelie’s my own daughter, isn’t she, and I was so shocked, I didn’t even defend myself against her false accusations, and in among all the people in uniform there was a cop of the female persuasion with the muscles of a docker and her hair cut short, like a normal cop, I mean a male policeman, and this cop of the female persuasion pushed me up against the wall and called me a bastard, a pedophile, a sadist, she said she’d crush me under her boot, she’d trample on my corpse, and spit on my grave, I was like a sailor washed up in the tide, I should know there was a punishment for every crime, and this cop of the female persuasion swore she’d get me banged up, she promised to do everything she could to make sure there was no fair trial, she said I didn’t deserve the honor of a legal trial, besides which they’re a complicated business, and she was the one who put the handcuffs on me and her colleagues all took a kick at me, booting me in the balls, as I lay dying at the intruders’ feet, I can show you the scars, marks I bear to this day, and I began to cough up petals of blood, petals of blood the size of potatoes from Bobo-Dioulasso, petals of blood the size of dinosaur turds, and they dragged me to the local police headquarters and when they heard there that I was a pedophile, the other policemen all agreed I should be taken straight to Makala, there to spend the next half of my life, Makala is the place all the criminals in this town dread, and that’s where they took me, I swear, Broken Glass, it was a bad situation, you wouldn’t think it to see me sitting here now, but I spent over two and a half years in Makala and two and a half years in a prison like that is no joke”

I listened to him in silence, he had tears in his eyes and took a good gulp of his drink before continuing his tale, “two and a half years in Makala, it’s an eternity, specially when the other inmates have been told you’re in there for doing obscene things to your daughter, when it wasn’t even true in my case, simply because I could never bring myself to sully the cloakroom of childhood, nip the buds, shoot at a child, and unhappily for me I went through torture, what I went through in that place was worse than what you get if you go to hell, it was dreadful, intolerable, Broken Glass, I don’t know how I survived it, can you imagine, the prison wardens, how could they let the gang leaders in the other cells fuck me from behind like that, giving me what they called “the middle way,” I promise you, that’s what they did, I was their object, their plaything, their inflatable doll, I let them have their way with this little body you see before you, what could I do, nothing that’s what, there were too many of them, all clamoring for a go, and when I cried out, because they came so thick and fast these “middle ways,” the wardens in Makala just laughed at me and told me to think of the harm I’d done to Amelie, when it wasn’t even true, I could never bring myself to sully the cloakroom of childhood, nip the buds, shoot at a child, and every day they took me up the middle like that, grabbing me from behind, I never got any sleep, there was always some guy behind me, whipping me, calling me filthy tart, a piece of tax-free household waste, a vegetable from Tipotipo Market, a cockroach, jellyfish, moth, rotten fruit of the breadfruit tree, all that and more, and sometimes one of the wardens at Makala took a personal hand in the negotiation of the middle way, a nervous young man who told me he’d never done that in his life before, not to a man, he was no queer, just wanted to make me pay for the disgusting things I’d done to Amelie, when it wasn’t even true, and he was the one who whipped me while he shoved himself up my hinterland like a trucker, I tell you, he was hung like King Kong, so that’s what they did to me in Makala, they destroyed me, I can show you my backside, you could make a fist and put it up me, no problem, that’s the truth, I never even got a trial, in this shit-hole of a country”