Black Bazaar (22 page)

“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 prefer 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.

You wouldn't be able to pull off a feat like that with Miles Davis. But I can't say this to Sarah …

* * *

What exasperates me about the kind of music Sarah likes is that most of the time they don't even sing. I enjoy lyrics, but this stuff doesn't really have any. Nothing but cymbals and wind instruments that seem to work her up into a frenzy. She asks me to surrender to the genius of Miles Davis, because jazz is stronger than life. Jazz is the universe. It freed up the minds of ordinary people, she says, sounding thrilled.

Still, I've been listening to Miles Davis since then. I'm starting to like his “Venus de Milo”. But I've been careful not to mention this to Sarah, because she prefers “April in Paris”. You mustn't do anything to make Paris lose its mystique for her …

Sarah thinks it's
shocking that my friends at Jip's call me Buttologist. So she's nicknamed me “Léon Morin, Priest”. She says this is a tribute to Béatrix Beck, a great lady of Belgian literature whose work she subsequently introduced me to because she was annoyed I only read Simenon and the Latin-American novels Louis-Philippe lends me.

“You've got to free yourself up a bit from your fascination with Louis-Philippe! You only read what he tells you to read. Literature doesn't end with Latin America …”

She did a good sales pitch on Beck telling me that she had won the Goncourt in 1952 with her
Léon Morin, Priest
which I now recommend my pals read, even if this gets up their nose and makes me sound like a pain in the neck.

* * *

Apart from jazz and Miles Davis, where we don't see eye to eye, I've got to admit it's thanks to Sarah that I've been spending even more time in bookshops recently. I'm reading more books now than all the pairs of Westons, all
the Francesco Smalto suits and all the Yves Saint-Laurent ties that I used to wear for my Papa Wemba, Kofi Olomide and J-B Mpiana concerts. I can hold the floor for hours and hours, making people's heads spin with something that's not my sorry story with Original Colour and the Hybrid! Thanks to Sarah, I'm reading a lot of Belgian authors.

One day I turned up at Jip's with a book in my hand,
The Life Of The Bee
. As soon as I appeared in the doorway my pals eyed my book suspiciously, convinced I now had a thing for bees. I sat down in a corner and, since I've decided not to drink alcohol any more because I'm a changed man, I ordered a glass of ginger juice and started reading as if I were alone.

Paul from the big Congo came over to me:

“So you reckon you're some kind of intellectual now that you're with this Sarah girl who paints drunkards and bottles of red wine? What's this book you've come here to read, then?”

“An essay by Maurice Maeterlinck …”

“What kind of unpronounceable name is that? Is this writer more famous than Guy des Cars or Gerard de Villiers?”

“He won the Nobel Prize in 1911 …”

He looked me up and down before going back to join the others. I heard them trying unsuccessfully to pronounce Maeterlinck, then talking about bees in general, and in particular the ones from Africa. I stood up and left.

Three days later, I came back with a different book. This time it was Yves the just-Ivorian who shouted at me:

“I know how to pronounce the name of your guy who writes about bees!”

I smiled at him. Of course he made a dog's dinner of the Belgian Nobel laureate's name. I noticed he couldn't take his eyes off the book I was holding.

“So what are you reading now after that business with the bees by that … Mae … Maerink … Matae … I mean, that Belgian author?”

“Béatrix Beck …

“Means nothing to me.”

* * *

Sarah has introduced me to the poems of Henri Michaux. But given she couldn't always pick my Belgian authors for me, because there were some books I didn't like, I've clawed myself a bit of freedom.

So I was the one who discovered
Divine Madman
by Dominique Rolin, for example, and that author has fuelled my hang-ups, given I'm still trying to write a book in the style of George Simenon, because he's the Belgian writer I like the most, whatever Sarah thinks.

I'm proud of one thing: it was me who insisted that Sarah finally get around to reading
Hygiene And The Assassin
by Amélie Nothomb.

To start with she said:

“Not on your life! I don't like bestselling authors.
Plus I've seen that girl eating revolting things on telly!”

She couldn't put that book down in the end …

I haven't left my studio
since this morning and I'm writing even more fervently than before. It must be two or three o'clock in the afternoon.

I got a phone call from work yesterday. It was Mr Courgette, the grumpy-guts from human resources. I recognised his voice because it sounds like a broken guitar string:

“Do you recall that you've still got a job at our printing works?”

I hadn't been there for weeks. I'd given the excuse of my paternal aunt dying, then I'd added that I had a serious disease which the doctors couldn't diagnose and only the healers from back home could treat.

“Now listen here, you have already buried several members of your family in under six months, and it's been three times now that the same aunt has kicked the bucket!”

Seeing as I'd forgotten about recycling the same lies several times over, I tried to dig myself out:

“Mr Courgette, perhaps I didn't express myself very clearly, I'm talking about a different aunt … In Africa we have so many aunts we've got them coming out of
our ears and sometimes they die in the same week, in the same place, in the same house and nobody bats an eyelid …”

“Look, we're just wasting time here, when are you coming back to work?”

“I've still got this disease the doctors can't …”

“Fine, go right ahead and be ill for a hundred years! I no longer require the services of a sluggard like you!”

I said that was fine by me, that next week I'd come and collect my gloves, my overalls and my hat because I was the one who'd bought them and there was no chance of me leaving my belongings to a capitalist who refused to make work tools available to his employees. Plus it was his job to sack me, not mine to hand in my notice!

* * *

Sarah came over to mine at the start of the evening and caught me in the middle of a writing frenzy.

“Where are you up to?” she asked me.

“I'm nearly at the end,” I replied, not sounding very convinced.

For the first time since we've known each other, she picked up a few pages that were on the floor and starting reading them out loud. It was a tough test for me, my throat suddenly went very dry. I was worried my words wouldn't belong to me any more, that they would escape from the pages to die between Sarah's
lips. I wanted to explain to her that I hadn't got a clean version yet, that Louis-Philippe hadn't read the manuscript, that it was still a first draft, that this or that was still missing. Too late, she carried on reading, her expression became more and more serious, she'd found my description of Original Colour, of her dark skin …

She tidied up the pages, put them down by my typewriter and said to me:

“There's a big problem in your
Black Bazaar
…”

“Oh yes?”

“Is my colour also an original colour?”

She burst out laughing and then she looked at me in this serious way I'd never seen before.

“I was waiting for you to finish your book,” she whispered, “so I could say: I'd like you to come and live with me …”

Sarah Ardizzone was born in Brussels in 1970. She currently lives in Brixton, London. She won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for her translation of
Just Like Tomorrow
by the young French-Algerian writer Faïza Guène. While training in theatre in Paris she lived on the Rue Myrha opposite the Marché Dejean, where much of the action of
Black Bazaar
is set.

The translator would like to thank Anna Shepherd, Milly Taylor and Emma Tubman, without whom …

Also, Daniel Boulland and Alison James-Moran for the Rue Myrha days.