Fiston Mujila - Tram 83

“Foreplay spoils the fun.”

Lucien began to read a text dealing with the fortuitous meeting between a man and a woman on board a train, common denominator: loss of memory. They fall in love. But how to tell each other this? How to love each other? How to talk of their previous life? Toward the end, while the man tried to fashion a language to say love with the five words he had left (history, tonsillitis, truce, shame, and weld), the Diva, who was playing the role of the woman, against a background of prerecorded sounds, unreeled a song, long and mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, mournful, and at the same time celestial with her voice, bursts of applause and applause and applause …

Within and without the Tram, a convulsion of incompleteness. Within and without the Tram, cries and yelling. Within and without the Tram, the songs and texts of the sacred couple, united by the same momentum, time’s wasting, the thirst for archeology, solitude.

FROM DUST YOU WERE TAKEN, TO DUST YOU SHALL RETURN, GENESIS 3:19.

Lucien didn’t dig in the mines like ordinary mortals. He preferred to live off his pen or maybe work in a large office all to himself. That was impossible in a jungle like the City-State. All activity revolved around the stone. Everyone depended on it directly or indirectly. We didn’t know what the hell else to do except head underground, moles that we were, that we are, that we shall remain. You don’t mess with your destiny, the Negus liked to say. It is written: born in the mines and the trains, you shall spend your whole existence swarming about the quarries until the prophecies come to pass. Poverty is hereditary just like power, stupidity, and hemorrhoids. It’s even contagious, this locomotive life.

Unable to pay his rent, he decided to contact Émilienne:

“Come over, don’t fret, you should have said ages ago that Requiem was making life so difficult for you! Ask anyone to show you the way to The Guerilla, a little bar-restaurant-cinema a few blocks from the station. They call me Aunty Émilienne.”

Had Émilienne really meant it when she’d told him to call her if he was ever in difficulty? She’d exerted all the pressure she could to get him released. She loved him, showered him with her affection, even reproached him for abiding forever in his shell when she only required a little attention in return.

The Guerilla was a little house, its walls pitted by bullets, relics of the third — sorry, fourth — war of liberation.

Diggers, inside and out, hobo style, dirty, disdainful, laughing like crazy, with their smokes, their picks, their shovels, their spite, and their way of belittling you as if you weren’t made of the same flesh. A standing parliament of post-adolescent baby-chicks roaring with laughter.

“Do you have the time?”

Musicians with their guitars, acrobats, tourists, cooks, waitresses, busgirls, students, you’d have thought it was Tram 83 in miniature.

“I’m happy you came.”

“Do you have the time?”

“Foreplay is exhausting.”

She helped him carry his suitcase, steered him toward the counter near to which a table was waiting just for him.

Lucien, egoist, there you are focused on your belly, without even bothering to check if Jacqueline is able to survive, what with all these crashing stock markets that are hitting the headlines.

“Are you well, darling?”

“Yes,” he replied, with an intellectual’s arrogance.

A fresh band took their places.

A tourist, perhaps the group’s sponsor, introduced them. Two talented guitarists. A saxophonist in his fifties. A drummer, and proud of it, with dreadlocks, piercings, tattoos, and a booming laugh. Attacking-vocals: two lead singers, four backing singers. The dancers were five baby-chicks, well fleshy, their midriffs exposed. An atalaku , or shall we say a shock-emcee. And the bandleader, the high priest, spiffed-up Kasamoto style. They dominated, bewitched, possessed the place, you could feel it. Zairians no doubt, given the zeal with which they beguiled the audience, their dexterity, the way they looked at people, their shouts, their singing, their liveliness. They kicked off the show with two fine rumbas from the 1960s. Followed up with their own repertoire, a contemporary repertoire seasoned with some Coupé-Décalé, revised and corrected, the new kotazo dance, also known as the dance of the mpomba (meaning strong men, Kinshasa bandits who’ll slit your throat at the drop of a hat) accompanied by a type of ndombolo called lopele (fishtail), throwing some merengue and conga steps into the blend, occasionally summoning to the rescue a remixed kotazo called kotazo 2 — a question of universality no doubt. You can imagine the effect triggered by good music, good dancing, fit guys, great girls, an audience switched-on and captivated 100 % — but Lucien (Tintin in Zimbabwe) went on writing his crap as if nothing was happening!

After close to an hour of balladry, a different music began to pound out, right across from The Guerilla. It was, apparently, a different band, different Zairians apparently, who knew full well that their brothers across the way were performing a concert but who, for the sake of provocation, perhaps to prove they were capable of doing the same, began playing good music too. They opened the hostilities with “Débarquement,” lead single off King Kester Emeneya’s album Le Jour le plus long . In the background the “pigeon pigeon” dance that was, we learned, a massive hit in Central Africa, particularly the Belgian Congo. The diggers who had previously fought in Zaire, Rwanda, Uganda, and Angola in the ranks of Jonas Savimbi and who knew all these songs and dance steps by heart, prattled on about how they weren’t at all surprised that the competition took on such proportions. Same music, same dancing, same vocals, same get-up, same midriffs, same nationality, face to face, body to body.

To a tourist who still didn’t manage to grasp the ins and outs of this rivalry, they gave this example: “It’s like Bruce Springsteen giving a concert a stone’s throw from Johnny Hallyday who’s playing another concert but haughtily, not forgetting that Beyoncé, Foo Fighters, Depeche Mode, Manu Chao, Paul Simon, and so on are all playing concerts in the vicinity, and the town turns into a music stand.” In fact, different sorts of music were blasting out in the distance, same shouts, same solos, same instruments, same dances, same midriffs.

“You own all this!”

She nodded her head.

“You didn’t tell me you were so rich and powerful.”

Remark with no basis whatsoever. Lucien knew that she stepped out with tourists who excavated, so couldn’t he have thought about the matter a little more? Everyone knew that in order to attain a certain legality, to excavate without drawing the wrath of the Dissidence, or to pander to public opinion, certain tourists married and stepped out with an “indigenous” whom they cherished accordingly in due form.