Black Bazaar (6 page)

“I'm coming with you! Give me your basket!”

Big Poupy was right. More often than not, the girls agreed to this. But we quickly ran into trouble because we had to talk to them when all the questions Big Poupy had taught us had flown clean out of our
heads, things like: How tall are you? How much do you weigh? Have you made love before? What did you have to eat yesterday? Did you sweep your parents' yard before coming out? Are you smart at school? What is the capital of Nepal? What is the surface area of our country? What is a non-aligned country? Was Hitler German or Austrian? What is Victor Hugo's first name?”

We were so surprised to be walking next to a girl that our brains went blank. We tensed up and the way to the market felt very long. And the people who saw us sweating behind the girl assumed we were only carrying her basket because we were her parents' house-boy …

When my ex burst out laughing, I quickly added that, over time, we stopped believing in Big Poupy's smooth-talk which cost us a lot for nothing. That's why we ended up going to see a good fetish man in the Trois-Cents district instead, like for those football matches with the balls that weren't at all round. The fetish man would ask us to bring him some hair belonging to the girl and so we'd go and loiter wherever our ladylove was braiding her hair with her friends. Sometimes there'd be half a dozen girls taking it in turns to braid each other's hair. We pretended to help them, we'd do the sweeping up and then, when they weren't looking, we'd steal their locks of hair without knowing whose they were because how can you tell the difference when it comes to a black woman's hair? It's easier in other countries where you've got blondes, brunettes, redheads with or
without freckles and I don't know what else. We stole any old lock of hair that was lying on the ground, on the basis that it doesn't matter what colour the cat is provided it catches the mouse. We would run to the fetish man's house with our plunder, he would mix the hairs up with some stuff of his own and chant things we never understood even though we were from the same ethnic group as him. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

Since my ex was often incredulous by this stage in my stories and in need of concrete examples, well, I told her that I'd seen with my own eyes how a love fetish had worked well for my childhood friend Placide, whose girlfriend Marceline had cleared off without saying goodbye and taken up with one of our classmates who always got nought out of twenty in Mérimée's dictation, two out of twenty for history and geography, and nineteen and a half out of twenty for physical education thanks to his Beninese fisherman's muscles. Placide, unlike us, had been lucky enough to hear about a proper fetish man who came from a faraway village in the north of the country. This fetish man didn't want a cent upfront, you'll pay after the result he said, I'm not in this for the money. Without saying anything to us, Placide went to see this man who gave him a little seed and told him to plant it in a bowl when he got back home, and to water it every day at around midnight
while invoking Marceline's name. Our friend rose at midnight, knelt down in front of his plant, and called out Marceline's name for at least an hour. One week later, when the seed had produced a small shoot, we were all surprised to see Marceline strolling once more in front of the plot of land belonging to Placide's parents. She brought him food now and said she couldn't sleep any more without seeing him, without touching him, without smelling him, without gluing her lips to his just like in the movies we watched at The Rex. None of us in our district got it at all, because what did Placide have that we didn't to turn the head of a beautiful girl like Marceline? The more the plant grew, the more the girl clung to Placide.

A group of us went round to our friend's house so he could at least tell us what district his fetish man from the north lived in because we wanted girls to throw themselves into our arms as well, and to bring us food on our parents' plot of land and to glue their lips to ours just like in the movies. We wanted girls to tell us they couldn't sleep without us any more. But Placide refused to reveal the name of his fetish man, he said it was a secret.

So we all chorused:

“You don't want to give us the name of your fetish man from the north? Well, if that's the way it is, just wait and see what's going to happen to you!”

So that night while he was asleep, we destroyed his
plant, we urinated all over it, flattened it and broke the bowl it was in, just like that.

The next day the sparks really started flying between Placide and Marceline. They bickered like two strangers, hurling insults at each other in front of everybody.

Marceline took up again with her guy who scored low in Mérimée's dictation, as well as history and geography, but high in physical education. We never owned up to destroying Placide's plant. And anyway he never suspected us, because he was convinced it was the muscular dunce himself who was exacting his revenge and who had gone to see the same fetish man to win Marceline back …

And lastly, I didn't hide it from my ex that later on, when we were sixteen, we thought you had to write beautiful love letters if you wanted to sweet-talk the girls. The trouble was, you already needed to have read some books with those sorts of letters in them. But what kind of books? Novels? Oh no, they were too long. They never ended, the authors waffled on for hundreds of pages. Plus the characters in the novels we tried reading got on our nerves because they took too much time about it, and they only kissed towards the final pages. We wanted to get there fast, not waste our time describing a blue sky, the birch trees or a migrating bird that doesn't know which branch to land on when it's flying over an entire tropical forest. Luckily, there
was
The Perfect Secretary
. That book was our bible. We used to go and read it at the French Cultural Centre in Pointe-Noire, towards the Côte Sauvage. And you had to get up early to be the first to borrow it because we'd noticed that old men came along to copy down things from it as well so they could chat up the local elderly widows …

My ex was now sitting up in bed and she wanted to know the name of the author of
The Perfect Secretary
. I told her I'd forgotten, that at the time we didn't bother with the authors' names, we thought they were all dead so what was the point? I explained to her that
The Perfect Secretary
was a collection of letters to help people write their CV or a job application letter, or a letter of condolence in which they were saddened by somebody dying, albeit at the grand old age of a hundred and two. The bit that interested us was at the end of the book: examples of love letters to send to girls. We would copy them out word for word and send them to the girls just like that. But in those template letters from
The Perfect Secretary
, the girls were always white, sometimes they were blonde with blue eyes, or brunette with green eyes or redheaded with freckles. And we sent our letters without even tropicalising them. We told ourselves that love had no colour, and good luck to the person who wanted to give a colour to words and emotions. We wrote about winter, we described the snow, we stuck pine trees into every paragraph. And seeing as our girls
liked these words, we ended up thinking that nothing could be more poetic than to call a particularly black girl “My Snowy White” …

I even admitted to my ex that my first love has stuck with her pet name of “Snowy White”, and that she isn't alone in laying claim to that appellation of uncontrolled origin.

All the girls of my youth were, truth be told, Snowy Whites …

My ex had stopped moving. I leaned over and realised she'd been asleep for a while and that I'd been telling this last story to an audience of one.

I switched off the light and soon I was fast asleep too …

I had nicknamed
her Original Colour on account of her very black skin. Back in the home country, we still believe that negroes born in France are less black than us. But no, as bad luck would have it, before we met I'd never clapped eyes on anyone as black as my ex. There are some people, when you see them, they're black as manganese or tar, so you figure they must have roasted under the tropical sun, but then out of the blue they tell you they were born in France. When it's like that I insist they show me their identity card on the spot. And if I see to my great surprise that they're right, that they really were born in France, even in the middle of a savage winter like Abbé Pierre's winter of 1954, then I fly off the handle. I'm thinking: what world are we living in if people are busy demolishing the little things that keep our prejudices alive, eh? Am I the kind of fool who swallows stories hook, line and sinker? How can you be as black as that and born in France? It's unthinkable. It's outrageous. It shouldn't be allowed. It flies in the face of nature. What is the point of braving the winter and the snow if it's not to wash the skin of the Blacks and make it a bit whiter?

So anyway, my ex – who I'm going to call Original Colour from now on – really was born that dark …

* * *

I saw Original Colour for the first time opposite Jip's, three and a half years ago. It never crossed my mind that a few months later we'd be living together, and that she would become the mother of my daughter. At the time she was working at Soul Fashion, a ladies' underwear shop with fluorescent thongs on display right out into the street – something else that would have shocked our Arab on the corner.

From the counter in Jip's, you could see what was happening at Soul Fashion – sometimes we even caught a glimpse of girls trying on thongs, we'd give a running commentary and smirk when they walked in front of the bar …

That first day when I met my ex, I was smartly dressed, with Westons on my feet and a made-to-measure Valentino Uomo suit. The girl was pacing up and down in front of Soul Fashion, a cigarette dangling from her lips. Most of my pals were there, some standing out on the terrace like me, others leaning on the counter, one eye on their glass and the other on the street. I can picture their faces as if it were yesterday. There was Roger the French-Ivorian, who likes to make out he's read all the books in the world. There was Yves “the just-Ivorian”,
who likes to shout it from the rooftops that he came to France to make French women pay back the colonial debt and that he will succeed by all means necessary. There was Vladimir the Cameroonian who smokes the longest cigars in France and Navarre. There was Paul from the big Congo, who likes to splash on aftershaves before they're available on the open market – we also call him the ‘Holy Bust' because he's always going on about how buttocks aren't the only thing in life, there are breasts too. … I can see Pierrot the White from the small Congo, the self-proclaimed “Word specialist” who reckons the Bible is lying to us, that in the beginning there wasn't just the Word, but also the verb and the subject and the direct object, and it was Man who added the indirect object for he'd had enough of worshipping a divinity who could never be seen. And I can see Olivier from the small Congo, who's got slanting eyes but who can still see everything coming from a way off, especially the girls. As for our other compatriot, Patrick “the Scandinavian”, he married a Finnish girl and they've got a kid I haven't met yet.

And finally I'm seeing that nutter Bosco again, “the wandering Chadian”, who writes everybody off as ignoramuses because he's convinced that he's got the highest intelligence quota in Africa, and that he alone can master the subtleties of the imperfect subjunctive. How can a man who calls himself civilised go and urinate against the walls of Jip's when there are toilets in this bar and even
passers-by come to piss here without buying a drink? He calls himself a lyrical poet, he reads us dusty verses he claims to have written as a student at a lycée in Ndjamena where he got bored in the midst of all those dunces. According to him, it's thanks to his flair for verse-writing that he won a scholarship from the French Embassy in Chad, the French having judged unanimously that his place was no longer in Africa but in France and that our poet was unequivocally the long-awaited “black Paul Valéry”. So we call him “The Embassy Poet”, and he talks with this Parisian accent that makes Pierrot the White declare our Chadian in search of lost time to be a paper negro who is still in the process of being colonised, which explains why he's got black skin and a white mask …

They were all there. They were making remarks about Original Colour under the complicit watch of Jeannot the owner and Willy the barman, who was pumping out furious music from I don't know which squalid quarter of Abidjan, Dakar, Douala or Brazzaville.

They saw me heading over to Soul Fashion and having a chat with Original Colour. I was trying to read the name on her badge, she had a surname from back home and Willy enjoyed seizing every opportunity to make fun of it:

“I know that girl, she got hired not long ago. Her surname is so complicated you need an extra bone in the back of your throat to pronounce it …”

Apart from her tar-baby skin, which my friends gave me a hard time about – because back home we're not so keen on skin like that – I noticed she had an amazing asset: her backside moved in an anti-clockwise direction. Now, it's not any old backside that has a talent like that. To this day, when I'm out strolling in the street, I watch the girls' backsides closely in the hope of seeing if God made another of the same build and suppleness. I've come to the conclusion that works of art are one-offs which can't be imitated, especially if the artist in question is God himself. Later on, when we were out walking together, I would always make sure I was behind Original Colour, like her shadow, I'd pretend to be taking my time, to drop my keys, to pick them up and all that without taking my eyes off the show-stopper in front of me because I didn't want to miss out on a single movement of her booty-crammed bodywork. Original Colour would turn around, smile at me, and speed up the movements of her B-side even more while my heart leapt like a baby kangaroo over-excited by a passing jeep. I thought about how lucky she was to have a backside with automatic gears because, and you may not have noticed this, but not everybody got provided for in that department. Mother Nature gave some women special treatment, and was a right bitch to others …