Black Bazaar Read online

  “I think you need to go home now. In all the time I’ve known you, I’ve never heard you rant like this. You made that poor Breton, who looked like a very nice man, feel uncomfortable. He won’t be paying us another visit any time soon …”

  Epilogue

  A Year and a Half Later

  A year and a half already … I’m not dead despite Mr Hippocratic being convinced I would be. Quite the opposite, in fact, some good things have been happening in my life.

  I’m a different man now, and it makes my friends at Jip’s laugh when they see me wearing my seventies’ style flares.

  “So you’ve dropped the Sappe, and you’re turning hippie now?” teased Lazio the security guard.

  “Buttologist, you’re heading for the loony-bin,” concluded Yves the just-Ivorian.

  * * *

  I straighten my hair and pull it back in the style of the films from the thirties and forties that I watch with Sarah. She likes me this way, I’ve got to stand out, to create my own look even if it means going against the tide. It’s time-consuming because I have to track down the right products to a shop in Château d’Eau. Sometimes the shop-keeper is out of stock, and I have to wait for weeks on end with frizzy hair. While I’m waiting for the shopkeeper to get these products in from the United States, I avoid looking at myself in the mirror. When I go out I wear a hat to cover my hair.

  A Gabonese man who was hanging around in front of McDonald’s at the Gare de l’Est made it clear how pathetic he thought I was, that if I straightened my hair it was because I was uncomfortable with my own negritude, that I had a serious problem, that I brought shame on the finest race in the world, the one that is the origin of everything on earth. It wasn’t like I had to give him the time of day since I was waiting for Roger the French-Ivorian who was going to let me have Right To Veto, the latest album from Koffi Olomide. But seeing as the Gabonese man wouldn’t stop staring at me, I nodded at him thinking that perhaps he admired my new style of dressing.

  He didn’t reply but pulled a horrified face:

  “I’m not answering! And you know why!”

  So I told him where to go, I tried out a saying on him that I’d read somewhere and which sprang to mind: man is the baker of his own life. So it’s up to me to knead my body, to transform it the way I understand it, end of story. Why was he sticking his nose in? For one thing I don’t whiten my skin, so by rights the Gabonese man should be happy because I know plenty of Blacks who don’t hold back from doing that kind of thing to their faces with products imported by Original Colour’s former Nigerian lady friends.

  The Gabonese man added that I was just a poor Black who didn’t like cassava and that I straightened my hair to look like Whites.

  “Take a look at yourself, anyone would take you for a monkey! Is this straight-hair business to make you look like a White or something? I see that colonisation continues to wreak havoc on our community!”

  I burst out laughing because he was dressed like a bushman with his tie that resembled a penguin’s small intestines. He must have been one of those students who are still enrolled even though their white hairs are making them snowy-headed. Who did he think he was, eh?

  I decided not to wait around for Roger the French-Ivorian who is often an hour late, if not more.

  I spat on the ground and left …

  “That’s it, clear off, you lunatic! After your hair, you’ll still have your skin to whiten, and don’t forget your elbows, your heels and your knees!”

  “For too long Europe has force-fed us with lies and bloated us with pestilence. Do you know which black poet said those courageous things, my African brother? We must be honest in life, and say things to people’s faces. Take me, have I ever hidden anything from you? Don’t I tell you everything? So why did you do it to me, eh? I thought of you as a member of my own family. But you lied to me, you have lied to me ever since the beginning. Now I know that you’re like some of the other people in this neighbourhood, you think I’m just a poor Arab on the corner, that my life is played out behind this counter, that I’m worthless. Well, you’ve got another think coming! What kills me is that today I feel betrayed by a brother from the continent. You’ve always said that your wife and your child were on holiday in the Congo, haven’t you? Well it’s a lie!!! What kind of holidays last for over a year and a half? I know about everything. But if the Caribbean gentleman in your building hadn’t revealed the truth to me, would I have known these things, eh? How would I have guessed that it was your artist cousin who left with your woman and the little girl, eh? And what does that make me look like in this story, given that I used to say how respectful that man was? And another thing, you’ve changed, look at you wearing these hoodlum trousers, when you used to dress like the son of a minister! What are you doing straightening your hair, are you ashamed of yourself? And why don’t you come to my shop any more? I saw you yesterday with a White girl going to buy toilet paper from the Chinese when I’ve got stacks of it here. Is that any way to behave towards an African brother? If the Chinese shopkeepers have become powerful it’s because they’ve got more money than we have, it’s because people like you make them even more powerful by going to buy toilet paper from them when I’ve got stacks of it in my shop. Anyway, that is something I can still close my eyes to, but to hide the truth from me, no, no, no! And who is that White girl who comes in and out of your building with you, is that how we’re going to achieve the African Unity of our Guide Mouamar Gaddafi? When I was talking about R-E-S-P-E-C-T, you weren’t listening to me. Deep down, don’t you think that cousin of yours deserved to live with your woman? As I told you, I found him respectful, he wouldn’t have done what you’ve done to me …”

  * * *

  The girl our Arab on the corner is talking about is Sarah. She’s Belgian on her father’s side and French on her mother’s. She paints scenes of daily life in bars and cafés, and she says that Château Rouge and Château d’Eau provide plenty of inspiration for her work. At the beginning she made my pals laugh because they didn’t realise you could earn your crust by painting cans of beer and Black characters dozing off in front of their glasses.

  The day she walked into Jip’s we all got that it was the first time she’d set foot in there. She came over to us and said she was looking for someone who would pose for her. Preferably someone flamboyant.

  “A bit like you,” she added, pointing at me.

  My pals all laughed. Paul from the big Congo whispered that the White woman just wanted to get a negro in the sack. Yves the just-Ivorian was eyeing her greedily and drooling:

  “Did you see her butt? It’s like the gazelles back home in Abidjan. I bet she’s already had a Negro whipping it and he’s just ditched her, that’s why she’s come looking for another one who’ll take over from him because a White girl can’t have a B-side like that unless a good Negro’s already worked hard on it. And anyway, what about the will of the people, eh? She’s got to be made to pay for the cruel treatment inflicted on us by her ancestors during colonisation. Seeing as she’s French-Belgian, both France and Belgium need to cough up. It’ll be a double indemnity. What you call killing two birds with one stone …”

  Willy changed the music because the choral singing he’d brought back from Brazzaville was sending us to sleep and reminding us of those we’d lost. Olivier had already started sobbing.

  We knew Willy wanted to dance salsa with this girl, because he put on a Compay Segundo track when he’d rejected our earlier requests to change his funeral music.

  He said to Sarah:

  “I’m Willy, I’m boss of everything in this bar, and I’m lighter than a sparrow’s feather! When I dance I always take my partner higher than the seventh heaven, but rest assured I bring her back to earth very smoothly. Come on sweetheart, this is where the action is, and I’m the best salsa dancer around, the others are just first-class time-wasters. Can I pour you a little glass of ginger to get the engine going?”

  Bosco the Embassy Poet was a
lready quoting The Lake by Lamartine to her. He went over to the girl and whispered to her: “A single being is missing and the whole world feels deserted.” When he wanted to follow this up with The Sleeper in the Valley, everybody booed.

  Lazio the security guard looked even more muscular than before. You’d have thought he’d gone and rubbed oil into his biceps to impress Sarah. His shaved head was glowing and he flashed a smile that oozed confidence.

  The Embassy Poet confided in Paul from the big Congo:

  “If that hunk goes out with the girl, I’ll start bodybuilding tomorrow!”

  And Lazio was whizzing around, proving that he was the one who was boss of everything at Jip’s, not Willy, not even the owner Jeannot who’d gone on a road-trip to Morocco with his friends that particular week.

  Lazio grabbed the girl in the small of her back, he didn’t beat about the bush, he even promised to marry her while Pierrot the White stood back and signalled to me to get in on the action.

  I took a few steps, rescued the girl from Lazio’s clutches and told her I’d really like to see her paintings, that if she was looking for a model I was happy to give it a go. Her face lit up and, from then on, she directed everything she said at me.

  She tried to save face:

  “When I said flamboyant just now, I hope I didn’t offend you, I meant it in the artistic sense of the term …”

  I told her that I wasn’t at all offended, that flamboyance was an art, that if I understood her it was because I myself had been writing ever since I’d had a writer friend, Louis-Philippe, who was also into art.

  She added:

  “A writer is an artist too, he paints with his words …”

  She wanted to paint me at my place, in front of my typewriter, in the middle of all my piles of paper. I gave her my telephone number. She drank a glass of tomato juice and thanked me before leaving.

  I heard Willy hectoring me from the counter:

  “Buttologist, you stole my dance! If you think that girl’s serious, you’re mistaken. She’ll go looking for another flamboyant type at the Baiser Salé. She’s the kind of chick who solicits men in bars, and I know what I’m talking about …!”

  * * *

  Sarah turned up at my place three days later. It was the first time I didn’t hear Mr Hippocratic reacting behind his door, probably because of the ceasefire after his speech at the Roi du Café.

  I’d tidied everything up at home, but Sarah wanted it to look a bit messy, so I wouldn’t be creating a false impression. She asked me why I’d gone to so much trouble doing the housework, tidying my suitcases into one corner and burning incense in the room. I told her I hadn’t had anyone back to mine for a while. As I said this, Rose suddenly flashed into my mind. But I brushed her away.

  Sarah asked me to stand near the window and she stared at me for a long time before she began drawing me. She did a lot of rubbing out, she kept changing the angle, she told me to look up and to the left for the light. Did she realise I was glancing down too much because I wanted to get a good look at her B-side?

  * * *

  After she’d done her work we went for a drink at the Roi du Café. Seeing as I felt relaxed chatting with her, I ended up talking a lot about Original Colour and my daughter.

  “I’m the father of that little girl, and I won’t give up!”

  I railed against the Hybrid, his music, his tom-toms and his concerts. She looked me straight in the eye without interrupting me. Then I felt bad about taking up more that my fair share of the conversation.

  She stood up without uttering a word and said goodbye. I watched her going down the steps into the métro at Marx-Dormoy. She turned around and smiled at me.

  Later on, in the middle of the evening, she called me to say she’d had a nice time, and to thank me for being so open. I didn’t notice the time passing, we spent more than two hours on the telephone.

  She came back the following week with a picture that was all wrapped up. The portrait she painted of me is hanging on my studio wall now. You can’t miss it …

  I like Sarah’s paintings. The colours are vibrant. She knows how to express the joy and despair of the characters from Château Rouge and Château d’Eau. I can see her becoming a high-profile painter in the years to come. Her parents are good people. Her father lives in Pantin and runs a printing works and her mother is a beautician in Rambouillet. They adore their only daughter, unlike Original Colour’s parents who never want to see their offspring again. The father doesn’t say much. Sometimes I play pétanque with him when we go to visit. Her mother, who’s more chatty, often asks me for news from the Congo. And seeing as I don’t have anything particular to tell her, she keeps saying to me:

  “Above all, you must never forget your own country, never …”

  * * *

  Sarah often talks to me about the painter René Magritte whose mother drowned herself when he was fourteen.

  One day I said to her:

  “So when it comes to painting, you just need to go to the École des Beaux-Arts, learn the right techniques, and …”

  She cut me off, looked at me pityingly and answered with:

  “What are you saying? True painting transgresses all norms. Magritte himself said: ‘A painter doesn’t paint to put colour on his canvas, any more than a poet writes to put words on a page.’”

  My jaw dropped, because that René Magritte had foreseen all the arguments in order to stand his ground! Perhaps that’s what every artist should do before kicking the bucket. Don’t leave the business of defining your creativity to others. Toss the keys to your oeuvre here and there if you want to avoid professional pundits making a travesty of your life experience and the sweat of all your labour. I told Louis-Philippe about what Magritte had said the day I introduced him to my new friend. He and Sarah talked on and off about painting, and that’s when I found out that Louis-Philippe had a whole collection of paintings by artists from Haiti in his basement. We went down there with torches and spent a long time looking at each canvas and listening to the Haitian writer’s commentary. I felt afraid down in that basement, I kept imagining a monster lurking in the dark who would swallow us up in one powerful intake of breath. And anyway those pictures were scary to look at down there. Even the most minor characters seemed to have glowing embers for eyes as well as alligator’s teeth. The works where voodoo scenes were depicted made my hair stand on end. Sarah was in seventh heaven, and didn’t want to leave. It was when I yawned that Louis-Philippe pointed out:

  “There you go, the Congolese and painting is a whole other story! That’s why their great Gotene from the Poto-Poto School is dying of hunger and indifference …”

  As we were walking back up from the basement, I didn’t want to be the last in line. You can’t be too careful, what with everything I’ve heard about characters stepping out of painted canvases to slit people’s throats.

  I made sure I was in between Sarah and Louis-Philippe.

  Since then, Louis-Philippe has bought one of Sarah’s paintings. It’s of a tramp sleeping on the pavement of Rue Riquet, and you can see a bottle of wine poking out of his coat pocket …

  * * *

  Sarah claims I look like a black American jazz musician, Miles Davis. Which explains why I spent an evening studying his photo in a shop that sold cards and photos, not far from the café Au Père Tranquille. I don’t know how she came to compare me with him. Probably because of straightening my hair. Of course I salute Miles Davis’s genius, even if I don’t know his music inside out the way she does. When it comes to people who claim to know a lot about jazz and other hullaballoo music that is supposed to have been invented by black hands like mine, I take their word for it. But to be honest I think I’m cuter than Miles Davis. Sarah goes and adds that the one and only Edith Piaf declared Miles Davis was handsome as a god, that she’d never seen such a beautiful man. Straight up! If Piaf really did say that then all I can think is the kid Edith must have been free and easy with her compliments because I p
refer her Marcel Cerdan, world-champion boxer, he was definitely better looking. If Miles Davis had been an ordinary person, meaning without his trumpet and his black hands, would people think of him as a handsome man, eh? I don’t think so. When an artist is worshipped, then his fans consider it sacrilege for you to insist he’s ugly.

  I said to Sarah:

  “All Blacks look the same to you …”

  I watched her going red, and trying to explain that wasn’t what she meant, that she wasn’t racist in the slightest, look, she was going out with me when there were plenty of Whites in Paris who were chasing after her.

  “Your problem is that you’re not comfortable in your own skin!” she let out, turning her back on me.

  I repeated that I couldn’t see any resemblance to Miles Davis. Not only this, but I was convinced that genius was often an excuse for physical ugliness.

  “Hold on a moment, he’s not ugly, I mean are we really talking about the same person here?”

  “I’m telling you, he’s ugly!”

  I realised that I’d overstepped the mark. That I needed to calm down. That I shouldn’t let the demons get the upper hand. I had become a different man. So, to please her, and because I’ve also come to the conclusion it’s best to tell all painters that they have genius, I conceded he was a handsome musician, even though I thought the opposite.

  I shouldn’t have said that to her because she took me at my word and gave me one of his albums, Young Miles. She recommended I listen to “April in Paris” because it was unthinkable for a Parisian not to like that track.

  So there she was making me listen to blasts from the trumpet and the clarinet, when I like to listen to Koffi Olomide, Papa Wemba, J-B Mpiana and Werra Son, good stuff from back home that Roger the French-Ivorian gives me from time to time in exchange for me teaching him our language, Lingala.

  Our music from back home is something else. And we got rid of the trumpets and other saxophones a long time ago. If you like, there’s only Manu Dibango who survived with those instruments. It’s all about furious rhythms now. A few lyrics, for one or two minutes tops, and then more than twenty minutes of dance, of “hot stuff”. You sweat when you dance, you hold your partner nice and tight, you try and make her slip up so she brings her chest and lips right up close. And then, bam, you’re into direct action.