African Psycho Read online

  Between us, I don’t mind looking like an unlicensed cab driver. Why not? Like them, I am not handsome, although I am far from being as repulsive as the Great Master Angoualima was when he was discovered on the wild coast, in the middle of a circle, arms crossed. Still, I do not experience my ugliness as despair. I have adapted to it to the point that I now feel a deep love for myself and even consider it is other people who are ugly. I have nothing to regret about my external appearance. Why wouldn’t I have the right to love myself?Why wouldn’t I be satisfied with my appearance, even if it is unattractive?

  I hate beautiful beings because they have done nothing to deserve it and because it’s society that decrees they are beautiful. Imagine a world where the ugly were in fact those we deemed beautiful and where people like us would be considered Adonises! Beauty is a value, and values only have the force that we accord them. This is why I have reason to console myself. This being said with complete humility, what I especially appreciate about myself is the fact that people listen to me and trust me right away, like this woman in white. She was hostile at first and then, all of a sudden, she was in. This particular strength is innate, and no one can take it away from me. Being good at making contact is an important skill in life.

  You will tell me that all this belongs in the realm of psychology only. Yes, but personally, when I am speaking about myself, this being said with complete humility once again, I’d rather look in this direction than dwell on the physical aspect, to which I can add nothing because I do not share society’s values. In society’s eyes, I am not tall, I have a rectangular head, I have a big nose, I have small eyes, I have skin that car grease has made all the blacker. Is anyone forgetting that my hands, while large, accomplish miracles when I tackle damaged vehicles? Never has any one of my clients complained to me afterwards. At most, crumbling under too much work, I am often compelled to turn down certain repairs, even for the most important characters in our city, no matter what tip they might wave in front of my nose. Okay, that’s not the point, I know…

  So the girl in white was behind me. After One-Hundred-Francs-Only Street, she suddenly stopped.

  “What are you doing here? Where’s your taxi, huh? You’re going around the neighborhood in circles!”

  “Take it easy, sister, I parked it just over in the next street, we’re here. It’s a red Renault 19.”

  “Don’t call me your sister, we don’t know each other! And what’s more, I don’t see your Renault there!”

  I didn’t want to argue, being of the opinion that we didn’t have the same IQ. If I had sought to elevate the level of our discussion, the girl would have gotten lost in the tortuous paths of her ignorance, I was sure of it. This being said with complete humility, I do have enough intellectual ammunition to disarm more than a few, and I keep it in reserve for worthwhile encounters.

  So now whores have started reasoning as well? Where are we going? I said to myself.

  I kept on walking. The girl mumbled insults but eventually followed me. We took Daddy-Happiness-It’s-Me Street and reached Heads-of-Negroes Street, which is in fact a sort of public dump in spite of the many signs saying:

  PUBLIC LITTERING IS PUNISHABLE BY A FINE

  Young people given to provocation had changed the word fine to line.

  In Heads-of-Negroes Street, the population defecates everywhere, by day as by night, especially in the stream that cuts the city in two and that our current mayor, in order to win the election hands down two years ago, baptized the “Seine” with much fanfare of drums and maracas. He explained to the inhabitants that the real Seine, in France, also cuts the city of Paris in two: on one side is the left bank, on the other the right bank. I won’t even try to explain our mayor’s gift for persuasion, for galvanizing crowds just like in our animistic churches. He had us understand that it was more than an honor for us to identify ourselves with this dream city, so that we would feel as if we were in Paris, and that it was not given to any ordinary third-world country to have the chance to have a body of water cutting one of its urban areas in two. Did we truly realize how lucky we were, we folks who didn’t see what was happening elsewhere, we folks who believed that this stream went through the city as a result of hydrographical circumstances, we folks who didn’t know how to profit from the advantages that nature had presented us with, and so on and so forth, he had argued during his election campaign’s last meeting. And he was elected right away in the first round, having promised us—a promise unfulfilled to this day—that the mayor of Paris, his personal friend, he assured us, with whom he talked on the phone every week, would come visit…

  As I was saying, our city has this specific character, with this stream, I mean with this “Seine” that cuts it in two. People on the Right Bank live on a slightly raised ridge whereas the other group, of which I am part, is crowded together lower down, on the Left Bank, where the “Seine” comes to die—with excrement wrapped in little baggies arriving for the most part from the Right Bank, even though the people who live there are said to be very civilized because they are not very far from the center of town…

  On the Left Bank, skeletal dogs fornicate along the banks of this stream where colonies of excited toads make their home. On the Left Bank, still, where the most populated neighborhood is He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot, water puddles do not dry out. Me, I live over near the last dwellings, in a concrete house that I built with my own hands, as I like to say over and over again. In the other half of my plot is a huge shed that serves as my sheet-iron and auto-body shop.

  “Are you on the Left Bank or the Right Bank,” I asked the girl.

  “What’s your problem?” she answered.

  “Well, I’m just asking, just to chat while waiting to…”

  “What do you mean, aren’t we there yet? I have no desire to chat with you!”

  “I only want to know where you…”

  “What are you, a cab driver or a cop, huh?”

  “Sister, I think that you yourself…”

  “Don’t call me your sister, I said!”

  “You must have problems.”

  “Me? I have problems? Me? Is it any of your business? What’s more you stink of alcohol!” she barked at me at the end of Heads-of-Negroes Street.

  There was no way to have a conversation with her. Right away I thought she was too haughty and well deserved the death I was planning for her. To dare speak to me like that, to me? To mention cops, people I abhor with the same animosity Angoualima bore them?

  She herself was now giving me reasons to hasten my gesture. If she’d at least shown some courtesy, I might have let myself be softened, I would have listened to the echo of human feelings and tempered my determination. However, that wasn’t the case. I believed that I was right to shut her up, to teach her how to speak to people she didn’t know. A girl is hanging around in the street at an hour when taxis are nowhere to be found, a Good Samaritan offers to take her back home, a Good Samaritan who bravely faces police controls, and this girl, she thinks she is a neighborhood queen and insults her savior, saying “You stink of alcohol!” Wasn’t this an attitude that would justify the final punishment awaiting her?

  Things deteriorated more and more because I started to laugh.

  “Why are you laughing like that, you’re a real idiot, you are!”

  “Is it now forbidden to laugh, sister?”

  “I’m not your sister!”

  “I try to be nice and…”

  “You’re just a drunk, and I’m not about to get into your rotten cab!”

  “What kind of language is that, sister?”

  “I told you not to call me your sister, you can’t hear or what?”

  “And so you say I’m an idiot, a drunk, is that it?”

  “Yes, an idiot, a real neighborhood drunk! And in which watering hole is it that you have membership, huh?”

  Oh, shit! Me, an idiot? Me, a drunk? Me, having membership in a watering hole? My cab was rotten? Had she even seen it, this whore wa
shed up in the last tide from the country over there? And what else now?

  The farce had lasted long enough. I raised my voice to set things straight and keep a female lacking in IQ from becoming arrogant.

  “That’s enough now, idiot! Follow me and shut your mouth, which stinks more than the alcohol I drank.”

  “It’s your own mouth that stinks, you drunk! Look at your head—what is that, a brick?”

  “I told you to shut your mouth, you dirty whore!”

  “Me, a whore? Did you take a good look at me, huh? Poor bastard, get to your taxi by yourself!”

  She turned around and started heading back in great strides. I ran and caught her left hand. Feeling like she was about to scream, with all my strength I slapped her face with the back of my hand. She resisted anyway, the bitch, and although I wasn’t expecting it, swung her purse into my face while letting out a howl from deep inside her throat.

  Well shit, what did she imagine? That she was going to escape? That I was going to let go? If that’s the way it’s going to be, we’ll see what happens, I told myself.

  I tackled her like I used to do in football when I was a kid and had to destroy the opponent who had ventured into our penalty area. She didn’t realize at what moment her feet left the ground and found herself in a sitting position, a bit dazed. I was behind her, trying to figure out how to immobilize her before she pulled herself back together. I grabbed a piece of dead wood that was lying on the ground. Oh, shit. I gave a sharp blow to the nape of her neck and saw her eyes roll back into their sockets. She passed out completely, legs and arms wide apart, calling her mother for help.

  I tore her flowery top, then her long skirt, its endless buttons popping one after the other. Then I moved on to her lace underwear, which was also white.

  She was naked now.

  I spread her legs wider apart and then I let my denim overalls drop to my ankles. I was breathing like a buffalo that’s short of breath. I almost tore my underpants. I felt fire in my lungs, but also at the level of my testicles, like when I caught a glimpse of notary–real estate agent Fernandes Quiroga’s young mistress’s behind.

  Yes, the girl in white was there, in front of me. Was I to have her on the spot? No, you had to be careful not to ruin a good thing.

  I turned her immobile body over to admire her frame loaded with goodies. That was it: I wanted to start by taking her by the frame, then I would see what would come to mind later. But no, I had to empty myself on her face, so that she’d wake up later with a coagulated puree that she would remember all her life, even if she washed her face with bleach. Yes, I was going to take her like this, and in such a bestial manner that I’d make her ovaries burst and her tubes turn inside out!

  Oh, shit. I didn’t understand why I could no longer, like any normal man, get a hard-on while looking at her chest endowed with two enormous watermelons, at her flat stomach, at her barely visible belly button, and her long and firm thighs.

  Okay. I had to go about it another way and not get discouraged. The solution was simple. I had to arouse myself with saliva.

  I spat into my hands several times and started touching my thing gently at first, then frantically, eyes closed, while thinking about the district’s most appetizing hookers.

  Nothing doing. My thing contracted and resembled a premie’s. I resented my idol with his twelve fingers. How on earth did this genius manage to get his big thing going at the right moment? Had he been faced with a breakdown similar to the one I was experiencing?

  All that thinking about him was perhaps getting me farther away from the likelihood of getting my own thing going. I felt humiliated and couldn’t explain this disappointment to myself. I was a good-for-nothing after all, and I restrained myself from crushing my testicles.

  I now found the woman’s sunken body in front of me exasperating. I was tingling from stroking my thing with my large workman’s hands. My scrotum, which had doubled in size, seemed to have risen up into the lower part of my abdomen.

  I had to try something else again. I am stubborn. In case of a breakdown, thank God, a blow job is the male’s last buoy. The girl was not in a condition to do it for me? She was unconscious? Well, I was going to do it myself, of course. I kneeled down to slip my disobedient thing in her mouth, telling myself that the warmth of the girl’s lips and tongue would awaken a trace of desire in me. I wasn’t mistaken about that, as my thing began to nod its head like a grey lizard stirred from its torpor.

  It was about time, I told myself, opening my eyes…

  At this very moment I noticed two blinding lights in the distance. A car was going to drive by. It could only come toward us because on the other side was the fetid stream, the “Seine” that had allowed our eloquent mayor to be elected with Stalinist numbers, so much so that for the next election his opponents had already thought of naming this same stream, in their turn, “The River of Love”! You don’t change an election tactic that’s already led to victory.

  With the car not very far from us, my thing, disconnected from reality and indifferent to the emergency, surprised me by hardening to the point that it was brushing up against my navel. I wasn’t able to get my clothes back on because it had straightened out so fully and was refusing to retreat before I used it. I nearly maimed myself while pulling up my overalls with great force.

  The girl coughed lightly several times.

  She was going to come to in the next few minutes. I vanished behind the houses nearby. I went through two or three lots, climbed lantana hedges without fearing the barbed wire or the barking packs of neighborhood dogs. I was running like a madman, breathless with alcohol.

  When I reached One-Hundred-Francs-Only Street, a taxi with a beat-up frame, which would have deserved my professional care, was waiting, I have no idea whom for. I forced the door open and rushed inside while the cab driver, stirred from his sleep, stared in amazement…

  Twenty minutes later, the taxi stopped in front of my house. I paid for the ride and pushed my plot’s bamboo gate.

  I headed straight for my workshop. I had a few wounds on my arms. They weren’t so important that I needed to tend to them that night.

  I slept in a damaged car that belonged to one of my latest clients, a retired customs officer who’d become a clerk in charge of renting market stalls at He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot’s Great Market…

  2.

  I now know what went wrong with the girl in white. Sure, random murder exists, but I don’t believe in it. In order to succeed you need willpower as well as, I will repeat it, preparedness. Except, of course, if you demonstrate an exceptional gift like my idol Angoualima.

  Take that day, for one, and it annoys me so much that I can’t stop blaming myself when I think back on it! Try as I might, day in and day out, to see what didn’t work out, I still can’t forgive myself for my behavior at the time.

  I have been talking in a choppy, almost winded manner since then, and without stopping. I talk to myself as I usually do, which is to say confusedly and with this vulgarity that, contrary to the education I received here and there in the wealthy families, attests to my street culture, the one in which I feel most comfortable.

  This is what I whisper to myself, more or less: what an idiot I was, I let myself get screwed like a greenhorn, yes, how can I explain to myself that, on that night, I left Take and Drink, This Is The Cup Of My Blood late, I told myself that I was just going to have a bit of a stroll in the heart of He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot to start on my way, on my consecration as unquestioned disciple of Angoualima, and I crossed paths with this woman I took for a whore and who in fact wasn’t one, and since I believed that she in fact was one the timing was perfect, well fuck, I had to kill her because I had to kill someone that very night, I’d had enough with postponing till tomorrow what I could have accomplished that instant, and even if this impertinent and haughty girl was not really a whore, tell me then, she shouldn’t have been waiting for her taxi at the spot where Left Bankers know it’s alwa
ys whores walking around there, so it was perfect timing for me, so it was bad timing for her, seeing that, as I had told Angoualima on his grave one day, I had sworn to myself that I was going to clean up He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot, that I was going to clean it up real good, give it back some dignity, rid it of its refuse, of its detritus, of its filth, of its germs, of its amoebas, of its bacilli, yes of its bitches who came from the country over there, its bitches who disloyally compete with our own girls, I hate these bitches because they sell off their tired attributes like secondhand chewing gum, I hate them because they sell them off to the despairing, to poor bastards lacking in affection who come out of watering holes called Drinking Makes You Hard, Take And Drink, This Is the Cup of My Blood, You Break Your Glass You Buy It, This Place Is Home, Drink And Pay Tomorrow, No Problem We’ll Worry About It Later, Even The President Drinks, and I happened to be coming out of Take And Drink, This Is The Cup of My Blood, this watering hole where I am one of the most highly-thought-of regulars because I’m always the one fixing the owner’s car when he puts a dent in it, and so I can drink entire bottles of gin on the house, what do you think, well fuck, and on that night I was convinced that I was going to kill at last, crush, wipe out, I don’t give a fuck about words, that I was going to exist at last, that’s it, exist, that I was going to be somebody, that I was going to follow in Angoualima’s footsteps, come out of the banality of my life as a poor sheet-iron man, a poor auto-body man with large hands, as a good-for-nothing, as a man who does the rounds of He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot’s watering holes, that I was finally going to hear the national press and the press of the country over there wonder who this new Angoualima was, who is this murderer, how far will he go, why did he kill a hooker not far from the “Seine,” is he a pimp, is he her husband, is he a family member, these are all the questions that make the criminal’s popularity ratings go up, and well fuck, on that night it was my day, my own day, my own day just for me, who else would have stolen it from me, what other criminal would have stolen the spotlight on the same day at the same time, well fuck, this was really my day, the day I would finally see the still-warm corpse of my first whore at my feet, I would have been the happiest man on earth, I would have forgotten all the little jobs of times past, the pierced eye of the traitor brother, Master Fernandes Quiroga’s smashed skull, the stolen cars, the wallets belonging to invalid, bed-ridden seniors, I would have forgotten all that because I would have been buoyed by a more sublime gesture, crowned from one day to the next, well fuck, like an imbecile, like a virgin, like a greenhorn, I let myself go, I let myself diverge from my plan, my strategy, my main objective, I told myself that Angoualima always used his big thing, his “fifth limb” as muscular as Mayi River fishermen, that he left twenty-five cigars in his female victims’ things, and why not, yes, why not me, sure I didn’t have any Cuban cigars, sure my thing was not as huge as my idol Angoualima’s, sure, sure again, sure always and always again, but with these sures how do you figure we’ll get anywhere, move forward, understand that every one of us has his own fingering, his trademark, as the Great Master of crime himself told me at the cemetery of The-Dead-Who-Are-Not-Allowed-To-Sleep, if this goes on I will go crazy, I will lose my head, I will walk naked into the streets of He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot, I am capable of it, and well shit, on that night, even without a thing as big as my idol’s, I could still have made the symbolic gesture, knocked this bitch out, taught her to respect my neighborhood’s alleys, this neighborhood where I spent my childhood, this neighborhood that’s my mother, this neighborhood that’s my father, this is where I played rag-ball, this is where I’ve always burrowed, this is my own neighborhood, this neighborhood that I know better than any Left Banker, this neighborhood that has become the entire country’s shame, and understand me, how can I stand it that the country over there points its finger at us as if it weren’t its own whores who tarnished the reputation of our urban area, these whores who arrive in our city in their canoes as if we were still in the time of the Gold Rush, for them this is Peru, this is Eldorado, these whores settle here like ordinary citizens, they blend into the masses neither seen nor known, they speak our languages, they go into our hospitals, they use our public transportation, they eat our food, they dress like our girls, and what’s more they’re more beautiful than our girls, and what’s more they do it better, and what’s more everybody knows they do it better but no one dares raise their voice, they do it better because they’ve been practicing since adolescence with their parents’ complicity, they do it better because they know where to put their hands, where to put their mouths to make us glide like paper planes, and you want me to cross my arms when these people over there dare lecture us on TV, on the radio, in the newspapers, they say that we’re lying because it’s not their girls who are whoring in our country but our own girls who are concealing their shameful activity, whose profits are nevertheless taxable, so people over there say that it’s our own girls who are trying to pass as their own girls, I mean, you think that with such an affront, at the time when Angoualima was still Angoualima, at the time when it was still worth committing a crime, you think things would have happened in this manner, you think that, at the time, my idol would have let these blasphemous remarks go without response, without reprisals, where are we going here, well fuck, given that people from the country over there doggedly maintain to the bitter end that it’s not their own girls who are whoring here and that it is ours who are doing it, I, Grégoire Nakobomayo, I am taking these people from the country over there at their word, and I am going to wipe out these hookers one after the other, and we will see if they are buried in our country or expatriated in their canoes to the country over there, their true country of origin, for the corpse, whore or no whore, must indeed return to its native ground, because the fruit must rot at the foot of the tree that bore it and not the other tree, we shall see indeed what is going to happen, that’s it, and so I made up my mind, I had to kill this impertinent girl in white who had dared criticize my rectangular head, who had dared tell me that I stank of alcohol, that my breath smelled of licorice, she may not have said it this way, with this very beautiful word, but for me it’s the same thing, she’d also said, listen to this, that my cab, which doesn’t even exist, was rotten, and so on and so forth, and me, instead of going straight to the point, instead of killing her nice and neat, suddenly there was this idiotic desire to ride her frontally, to understand what the Great Master Angoualima felt when he raped his victims with his size XXXL thing and stuck his twenty-five Cuban cigars in a woman’s strategic spot, this strategic spot that remained gaping for months because my idol wrecked all the natural rubber fibers that allow the woman’s thing to assume once again a serene air, an innocent face, the face of one who has never done anything serious, the face of one who has never cheated on anyone, the face of one who makes you believe that you’re the only one she does it with, so there was this desire that burned my lower abdomen, this desire to see the girl in white’s frame loaded with goodies, this desire to paw her two watermelons that had become cheaper at my feet, this desire to smear her everywhere, on her stomach, feet, thighs, watermelons, face, this desire to leave her my coagulated puree as a signature, this was the only way I could sign my gesture, still lacking a short and efficient nickname like Angoualima, whose name kept the police from closing their eyes, so I had to knock her down on the spot, and lo and behold my thing, which had always obeyed me until that night, unexpectedly indulged in contracting, rebelling, prancing, having an attack of nerves, refusing to stand at attention, and me in all this what do I do, yes what do I do, I could not rape the girl with a thing as soft as a Bateke palm tree caterpillar, so in any case it’s okay buddy, I am going to follow through with my plan, killing this girl who had the audacity to swing a purse in my face that may not have been a Chanel, that may not have been a Gucci, that may not have been a Vuitton, but certainly one of those bags in fake crocodile skin, fake lizard skin, fake anaconda skin that the Great Marke
t’s shoemakers sell, and I guarantee you that a fake bag like that, a bag for the non-bourgeois, always hurts your face really bad, so the objective was to kill this girl who had insulted me and there is no nobler reason to kill than to avenge an insult, Angoualima himself couldn’t stand insult and that’s why he decided to wipe out the city’s bandits who claimed they were the real Angoualima, so this girl had insulted me, and insult, you know this as well as I do, it used to cost dearly in centuries past, it even seems that people set things straight in duels, that they found themselves missing an eye, that they killed each other for it, it even seems that people went to war to win back their honor, their pride, well fuck, she had insulted me, the bitch, it was more than reason enough, I had to kill her to wash away this disgrace, because what would happen then if from now on you let whores from the country over there spit on people from over here who could be their potential clients, you give these girls this much and they want more, but listen up, would the people from the country over there cross the Mayi River in canoes just to have three minutes’ paid ejaculations in our country, when, we are told every day, there are plenty of girls over there, so you see I had to kill her, this girl in white, so that she wouldn’t open her mouth that stank more than the gin I drink, so that she would no longer deliver her insults to real Left Bankers like me, but then why didn’t I succeed, yes, why, well, because it was complicated, yes, I am an imbecile, all I had to do was tell myself that if only I had once again picked up the piece of dead wood with which I had knocked her down after tackling her like the time when, in my youth, I played football and, this being said with complete humility, I played formidable defense in the penalty area, if only I had kept on hitting the nape of her neck with this dead tree, I would have obtained an acceptable result, at least she would have been dead before the arrival of this damned vehicle that screwed everything up, and me, my only solution was to scurry off like a rat, I am ashamed of what the great maestro Angoualima might have thought in his grave if he saw me sneaking in and out of plots, exasperating packs of dogs, getting caught in barbed-wire traps and climbing lantana hedges, because he, Angoualima, had never scurried off and had remained master of the situation, and that’s why I told myself, the day after this bitter failure, that I had to go and seek his forgiveness in front of his grave at the first hour, to ask him for advice since, even dead, my idol listens to the prayers of those who follow in his footsteps, so I gave up on beginning the repair on one of my latest clients’ cars, this former customs agent who had become a clerk in charge of renting market stalls at He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot’s Great Market, in no time I made my way to the cemetery of The-Dead-Who-Are-Not-Allowed-To-Sleep, on the other side of town, where the “Seine” narrows more and more until it loses itself in a mess of ferns, this cemetery being designed to bury people the government decrees are the most dangerous in the country, and we know for these people there is no funeral procession, no flowers, there are no songs by old women, there’s no funeral oration, these people, they are buried at dawn, with complete discretion, you can visit them, but after a long ID check and after justifying your family relationship with them, so the day after my failure to murder the girl in white I successfully started the carcass of the Peugeot 404 the former customs-agent-turned-market-stall-agent had left me, and I assure you his vehicle braked when you wanted to accelerate and accelerated when you wanted to brake, fortunately I was an expert and was able to thwart the old jalopy’s whims by making it believe that I was going to brake when in fact I was accelerating, and that I was going to accelerate when in fact I wanted to brake, and that’s how I managed, and to think that in a normal car I would have gotten there in a half hour, with my former customs-agent-turned-market-stallagent’s car I arrived at the cemetery of The-Dead-Who-Are-Not-Allowed-To-Sleep an hour later, that’s right, and on that morning the groundskeepers must have thought they were dreaming or that I was just a ghost returning to its grave after spending all night scaring children who, instead of doing their homework, loiter in the alleys, steal papayas, steal mangoes, steal tangerines, steal grapefruits, and that’s why the groundskeepers looked at me with sympathy and commiseration, then let me through without asking too many questions, they said nothing, they went on with their morning snooze I fought to immobilize the Peugeot’s carcass near the first graves, then I walked along a lane of acacias, my hurried step disturbing the crows chatting in patois on the crosses of nearby graves, and it’s not by chance that Angoualima was buried at the other end of the cemetery, he had to be isolated at all costs, he had to be watched over from afar, because his resurrection is expected, we in this city all know that Angoualima’s grave is a mound of dirt with a ridiculous wooden cross, that it is the most visited in the cemetery and you can distinguish it by the number of cigarette butts, of joints thrown here and there, that only his name and the date of his death are on there because no one knows his birth date, and me, I stopped in front of the mound of dirt, and, since I only smoke Camels, well, I lit one up and threw it on the grave, I didn’t have any marijuana, that would have made him happier than a Camel, and I kneeled down, eyes closed, I wanted to talk, explain to him in detail what happened, but my mouth seemed sewn up and my tongue caught between my teeth, my heart was beating so hard I told myself I was going to collapse on the grave, and me, instead of speaking, I once again saw the actions of the day before, scene after scene, and I was convinced, as I am every time I make my way to this grave, that Angoualima was listening to me, and I wasn’t mistaken because after a while, there was this fog that I knew now, that at first I took for an illusion, oh shit, lo and behold the Great Master appeared before me, Imperial, Divine, Colossal, Powerful, Sublime, equal to himself, seated on the mound of dirt, legs together, and I saw his twelve fingers, and I saw his head bulging in the back, and I saw his bushy eyebrows, and I saw his old ram’s goatee, and I saw his harelip, and I saw the scars on his face, but I immediately lowered my gaze, this mythical character, this charismatic character is none other than my own God and consequently you don’t return God’s gaze, you are content with believing Him to be alive, eternal, unchangeable, omniscient, you tell yourself that He is the beginning and the end of time, therefore you grovel, you put knee to earth, you cross your hands, you agree with every word, that’s what I did, I tried to hold back my sobs, and the Great Master started speaking to me like he’s always spoken to me, perhaps also like he speaks to all the shady characters in our city who come beg for his benediction, for his mentoring for their next criminal acts: