Fiston Mujila - Tram 83

All nights have this particularity: they are long and popular.

They teem with the rabble. They stifle awareness and accrue neurosis. They bind a straw mattress and a clock into an unrecognizable muddle. They come from the heart, improvise, and facilitate multiple partnership agreements between foreign bodies.

Lucien walked straight ahead. He crossed two alleyways. He stopped at the Industries traffic circle a moment, to catch his breath. Dashed into the first greasy spoon.

“I’m hungry, sir.”

“What will you have?”

“A piping hot soup, followed by veal kidneys with a bell pepper coulis.”

“Sorry, sir, we do Chinese food here.”

He trembled, just like a kid learning to pick pockets. He had but one concern: to fill his stomach.

“Sorry, sir.”

RULE NUMBER 34: watch out for hunger! Toddlers, barely weaned, have been known to take entire trains hostage, including the merchandise and everything that moved inside and out. Remote cause: the hunger that dissolves any possibility of escape. Direct result: armed robbery with bloodbath.

“One soup, two bowls of rice with any sauce.”

He sat down. They served him the food in a sort of cup.

“Enjoy your meal, sir.”

His throat burst into music with the rhythm of each mouthful. His shirt became spattered with stains, but so what! People stared at him as he wolfed down his food.

“My tip, sir.”

Lucien left the place the same way he’d entered, like a shot. He dove into the darkness in search of an unknown bliss. He was thinking of nothing. He took random streets. Stopped to admire some jugglers.

“Do you have the time?”

He soliloquized. He probed tentatively at the fog of his past. He stepped over the sleepers stretched out on the sidewalk. The city was filled with these boys who held the record for the longest slumber. The kids drugged themselves and thus glided for weeks without seeing the light of day. (A few women ventured to emulate the strategy. They didn’t last long. They were raped. Abused in their long sleep.)

He envied these kids. If only he could arm himself with the courage to do as much! If only he was that young man, covered in muck from head to toe. Maybe he was happier than those people who hide their nervous tension and attempt to take on situations they can no longer handle.

“Do you love me or don’t you?”

The City-State is one of those territories that have already broken through the barrier of internal suffering. You share the same destiny as everyone else, the same history, the same hardship, the same trains, the same rot, the same Tram beer, the same dog kebabs, the same narrative as soon as you come into the world. You start out baby-chick or slim-jim or child soldier. You graduate to endlessly striking student or desperado. If you’ve got family on the trains, then you work on the trains; otherwise, like a ship, you wash up on the edge of hope — a suicidal, a carjacker, a digger with dirty teeth, a mechanic, a street sleeper, a commission agent, an errand boy employed by for-profit tourists, a hawker of secondhand coffins. Your fate is already sealed, the route marked out in advance. Fate sealed like that of the locomotives carrying spoiled merchandise and the dying.

Death holds no meaning since you’ve never really lived. You cheat life. You devise a life that’s bogus. You devise a life on the basis of porn film tapes. It’s the only thing you can get hold of easily in the City-State. To escape the monotony, fever, sleeping sickness, earthquakes, cholera, and cave-ins, everyone, with the exception of those who hang out in Tram 83, gets into American porn or Russian porn. Long live globalization! Long live American porn! Long live Russian porn!

“Do you have the time?”

“No.”

“Foreplay is important but it kills love to give it too much credit.”

He stopped, struck up a conversation with a child who was selling guava at that late hour of the night,

“You a tourist?”

“Why?”

“Because it’s tourists who speak kindly to us, and take pictures of us that they go and sell back home.”

“I am not …”

“Give me some money.”

took a motorcycle taxi, direction: Tram 83.

MEETING A PUBLISHER SENT FROM HEAVEN IN TRAM 83.

Lucien walked into Tram 83 around three in the morning. Men with multiple pronunciations, always the same. Ditto the single-mamas, shorthand for women. Darkness. A band dispatched from Acapulco was performing a revised and corrected Marvin Gaye opus. The instruments could barely stand. Two strapping lads on drums. Three on attack-vocals. Two hairy fellows on lead guitar. A saxophone. And the band’s supremo himself, in braces, complicating the basic vocal quartet (now soprano, now alto, now tenor, now bass and backing vocal). When he raised his voice, a young, almost naked tigress came forward, a strategy to win over the already seduced crowd. Euphoria. And indeed they succeeded in electrifying the room without the slightest effort. Nobody playing court tennis. Nobody playing poker. Nobody playing chess. Nobody bowling. Nobody even in the sanitary facilities. At university, he and Requiem used to implement the same method. Before the show proper, a dessert: either a circus number, or else a quick striptease turn performed by five volunteers. It caused quite a stir. The ecstatic students disrobed, climbed right up on stage and swore by the delights of forbidden fruits. Requiem, who was a good, a very good actor, couldn’t stomach the idea of holding out a hand to the audience. “What a waste,” he cried vehemently, “we came for texts, not for orgiastic sessions of any kind!” Of course this Requiem was of a different tune in his youth, calm, sincere, and loyal. Time makes brutes who wait for just the right moment to draw their pistols. That doesn’t mean Requiem was a brute — a necessary nuance.

“Do you have the time?”

Lucien headed toward the table they’d occupied the previous night. A man, school principal type, past fifty, was already sat there. Alone with his cigarettes and a fine row of bottles, portents of an inveterate alcoholism. When you got wasted, you didn’t return the empties, in order to avoid misunderstandings. The waitresses and busgirls were inclined to tell you ten bottles instead of the three or five you’d actually ordered. No surprise to come across a guy with fifty empty bottles on his table and even the floor.

“Evening, sir. May I sit here?”

Standing before the seemingly very pleasant man.

“As you wish!”

Hardly sat down:

“Where are you from?”

“Vampiretown.”

“And before, I mean, before Vampiretown?”

Lucien stammered. Remembered his friend, Porte de Clignancourt, putting himself through the ordeal of contacting Paris theaters, and he there, in the middle of watching a botched concert. Remembered the girl from the elevators. Remembered that abrupt power cut.

“I just came from the Back-Country.”

The man’s curiosity intensified. Clasped his hands together as if invoking higher deities. A gold bracelet on his left wrist let Lucien guess at his interlocutor’s pecuniary caliber. Behave and maybe he’ll help you get on your feet again, he wondered softly to himself.

“How so?”

“I’m passing through. I don’t know if I’m going to extend my stay.”

“I can see life’s treating you well here.”

He told him this with all the pride of Archimedes discovering his “any body partially or completely submerged in a fluid at rest is acted upon by an upward force equal to the weight of the volume of fluid displaced.”

“Yes, I’m enjoying myself.”

The image of his friend, Porte de Clignancourt, flitted through Lucien’s brain a second time: “I’ve got the Festival des Francophonies en Limousin, the Tarmac and other Paris theaters, the contacts in Brazil. And what about you? Are you enjoying yourself with this guy shooting questions at you?”