Broken Glass

First Part

let’s say the boss of the bar Credit Gone West gave me this notebook to fill, he’s convinced that I — Broken Glass — can turn out a book, because one day, for a laugh, I told him about this famous writer who drank like a fish, and had to be picked up off the street when he got drunk, which shows you should never joke with the boss, he takes everything literally, when he gave me this notebook he said from the start it was only for him, no one else would read it, and when I asked why he was so set on this notebook, he said he didn’t want Credit Gone West just to vanish one day, and added that people in this country have no sense of the importance of memory, that the day when grandmothers reminisced from their deathbeds was gone now, this is the age of the written word, that’s all that’s left, the spoken word’s just black smoke, wild cat’s piss, the boss of Credit Gone West doesn’t like ready-made phrases like “in Africa, when an old person dies, a library burns,” every time he hears that worn-out cliché he gets mad, he’ll say “depends which old person, don’t talk crap, I only trust what’s written down,” so I thought I’d jot a few things down here from time to time, just to make him happy, though I’m not sure what I’m saying, I admit I’ve begun to quite enjoy it, I won’t tell him that, though, he’ll get ideas and start to push me to do more and more, and I want to be free to write when I want, when I can, there’s nothing worse than forced labor, I’m not his ghost, I’m writing this for myself as well, that’s why I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes when he reads these pages, I don’t intend to spare him or anyone else, by the time he reads this, though, I’ll no longer be one of his customers, I’ll be dragging my bag of bones about some other place, just slip him the document quietly before I go, saying “mission accomplished”

I’ll start by describing the row that broke out when the bar first opened, explain a bit about the sufferings of the boss, some people wanted to see him taking his final breath, drawing up his Judas testament, it began with the church people, who, noticing their Sunday congregations had dwindled, launched a holy war, flinging their Jerusalem Bibles at the door of Credit Gone West, saying if things went on like this it would be the end of Sunday Mass in our district, there’d be no more trances during the singing, no more Holy Spirit descending on Trois-Cents, no more crispy black wafers, no more sweet wine, the blood of Christ, no more choir-boys, no more pious sisters, no more candles, no more alms, no more First Communion, no more Second Communion, no more catechism, no more baptism, no more anything, and everyone would go straight to hell, and after that the Weekend-and-Bank-Holiday-Cuckolds Club waded in, claiming it was largely due to Credit Gone West that their wives no longer cooked for them properly, or respected them as wives did in the old days, they said respect was important, that no one respects a husband like a wife does, that’s always been the way of things, ever since Adam and Eve, and as good family men they saw no reason to change, let their wives continue to grovel and cringe, to follow men’s orders, all this they said, but it had no effect, and then we had threats from some old club of ex-alcoholics, who’d gone over to water, Fanta, Pulp’Orange, syrup, Senegalese jungle juice, grapefruit juice, and contraband Cola lite traded for hashish in Nigeria, a righteous band of brothers who set siege to the bar for forty days and forty nights, but again all in vain, and then there was some mystical action from the guardians of traditional moral values, the tribal leaders with their gris-gris, which they flung at the door of the bar, casting curses at the boss of Credit Gone West, summoning up the voices of the dead, bringing forth prophecies, saying the barkeeper would die a slow and painful death, they would nudge him gently toward to his own scaffold, but that didn’t work either, and finally there was direct action from a group of thugs who were paid by some old assholes from the district, nostalgic for the days of the Case de Gaulle, for the life of a houseboy, the life of the faithful negro with his service medal, for the days of the Colonial Exhibition and the negro balls, with Josephine Baker leaping about in a skirt made out of bananas, and these paragons of respectability set snares without end for the boss, with their thugs in hoods who came at the dead of night, at the darkest hour, armed with iron bars from Zanzibar, with clubs and cudgels from medieval Christendom, poisoned spears from the time of Chaka Zulu, sickles and hammers from the Communist block, catapults from the Hundred Years’ War, Gallic billhooks, pygmy hoes, Molotov cocktails from May ’68, machetes left over from a killing spree in Rwanda, slings from the famous fight between David and Goliath, with all this heavy arsenal they came, but again, in vain, though they managed to destroy one part of the bar, and it was the talk of the town, and all over the papers, La Rue Qui Meurt, La Semaine Africaine, Mwinda, Mouyondzi Tribune, tourists even came from neighboring countries to get a close look, like pilgrims at the Wailing Wall, taking masses of photos, like tourists, I don’t know what for, but all the same, they took photos, and some of them even came from our own town, people who’d never set foot in Trois-Cents before, and were amazed to discover it, and wondered how on earth people could live quite happily surrounded by rubbish, pools of stagnant water, the carcasses of domestic animals, burned-out vehicles, slime, dung, gaping holes in the roads, houses on the point of collapse, and our bartender gave interviews all over the place, our bartender became a martyr overnight, and our bartender sprang up on every TV channel overnight, and spoke in the Lingala of the north, in the Munukutuba of the people of the Mayombe Forest, in the Bemba of the inhabitants of the bridge of Mouloukoulu, who settle their quarrels with knives, and now everybody knew him, suddenly he was famous, people felt sorry for him, they wanted to help him, and even sent letters of support and petitions on behalf of the good guy they started to call “the Stubborn Snail,” but the ones who really backed him were the drunks, who always stay loyal till the last bottle runs dry, and they decided to strike back and rolled up their sleeves to put right the damage caused by the people nostalgic for the days of the Colonial Exhibition, the Case de Gaulle, Josephine Baker’s negro balls, and for some this trivial matter became a national issue, they called it “the Credit Gone West Affair,” the government discussed it in cabinet, and certain leading politicians called for its immediate and permanent closure, while others opposed such a move, for scarcely more convincing reasons, and the country suddenly found itself divided over this petty spat until, with the authority and wisdom for which he became renowned, the minister for agriculture, commerce, and small and large businesses, Albert Zou Loukia, raised his voice in a memorable contribution to the debate, a contribution now regarded in these parts as one of the finest political speeches ever made, Minister Zou Loukia spoke, saying several times, “I accuse, I accuse,” a remark so stupifyingly brilliant that at the slightest excuse — a minor dispute, or some slight injustice — people in the street started saying “I accuse,” and even the head of government told his spokesman that the minister for agriculture was a fine speaker, and that his popular catchphrase “I accuse” would go down in history, and the Prime Minister promised that in the next reshuffle the minister for agriculture would be given the portfolio for Culture, all you had to do was cross out the first four letters of agriculture, and to this very day it is widely agreed that the minister’s speech was quite brilliant, quoting entire pages from books by the kind of great writers people like to quote at the dinner table, sweating as he always did when he was proud of having seduced an audience with his erudition, and that is how he came to defend Credit Gone West, first praising the initiative of the Stubborn Snail, who he knew very well as they’d been at elementary school together, and then summing up by saying — I quote from memory: “Ladies and Gentlemen of the Cabinet, I accuse, I wish to distance myself from our current moribund social climate, I refuse to condone this witch hunt by my presence in the government, I accuse the shabby treatment meted out to a man who has done no more than draw up a route map for his own existence, I accuse the cowardly and retrograde machinations we have witnessed in recent times, I accuse the uncivil nature of these barbarous acts, orchestrated by men of bad faith, I accuse the indecency and insubordination which have become common currency in this country, I accuse the sly complicity of all those who arm the thugs, I accuse man’s contempt for his fellow man, the want of tolerance, the abandonment of our values, the rising tide of hatred, the inertia of the individual conscience, the slimy toads in our midst and all around us, yes, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Cabinet, just look at how the Trois-Cents has become a sleepless fortress, with a face of stone, while the man we now call the Stubborn Snail, quite apart from the fact that he’s an old school friend of mine, and a very intelligent man, this man who today is being hounded is the victim of a cabal, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Cabinet, let us concentrate instead on the pursuit of real criminals, whereby I accuse those who with impunity paralyze the proper function of our institutions, those who openly break the chain of solidarity which we have inherited from our ancestors, the Bantu, I tell you the only crime of the Stubborn Snail is to have shown his fellow countrymen that each one of us, in his own way, can contribute to the transformation of human nature, just as the great Saint Exupéry has shown us in his work Wind, Sand and Stars and that is why I accuse, and will go on accusing forever”

the day after Minister Zou Loukia’s speech, the president of the republic himself, Adrien Lokouta Eleki Mingi, flew into a rage, stamping his favorite daily dessert of grapes beneath his feet, and we were informed by Radio-Curbside FM that President Adrien Lokouta Eleki Mingi, who also happened to be General of the Armies, was jealous of the minister of agriculture’s phrase—“I accuse,” indeed, he wished he had said it himself, and couldn’t understand why his own advisers hadn’t come up with a similarly short but snappy slogan instead of feeding him turgid set pieces along the lines of “All things, like the sun, rise on the distant horizon and set each evening over the majestic Congo River,” so President Adrien Lokouta Eleki Mingi, in his vexation, mortification, degradation, humiliation, and frustration, called a meeting of the supposedly devoted bunch of negroes in his cabinet and bid them slave as they’d never slaved before, he was through with turgid set pieces dressed up in so-called lyrical language, and the Negroes in his cabinet leaped to attention and lined up, from the smallest to the tallest, like the Daltons in Lucky Luke, when he’s tracking them through the cactus plains of the Wild West, and the negroes all said as one man, “yes sir, Commandant sir,” when in fact President Adrien Lokouta Eleki Mingi was a general of the armies, and was longing for civil war to break out between north and south so he could write his war memoirs and give it the modest title Memoirs of Hadrian, and the President and General of the Armies called on them to find him a phrase that would be remembered by posterity as Minister Zou Loukia’s “I accuse” would be, and the negroes in the presidential cabinet worked all night long, behind closed doors, opening up and looking through — for the first time ever — encyclopedias which stood gathering dust on the presidential bookshelves, they looked in large books with tiny writing, they worked their way back to the dawn of time, back through the age of some guy called Gutenberg, and back through the age of Egyptian hieroglyphics as far back as the writings of some Chinaman who it seems had a lot to say about the art of war and was supposed to have been alive in the days before anyone knew that Christ was going to be born by the power of the Holy Spirit and lay down his life for us sinners, but Adrien’s Negroes could find nothing as good as Minister Zou Loukia’s “I accuse,” so the President and General of the Armies threatened to sack the entire cabinet, unless they found him a phrase for posterity, and said: “Why should I go on paying a bunch of idiots who can’t find me a decent enduring and memorable slogan, I’m warning you now, if I don’t have my slogan by the time the cock crows tomorrow at dawn, heads will roll like rotten mangoes, that’s all you are, the lot of you, rotten mangoes, let me tell you, you can start packing now, go into exile in some Catholic country, take your pick, exile or death, d’you hear me, starting now, no one leaves this palace as of this moment, I’m going to sit in my office and I don’t want to pick up even the slightest whiff of coffee, not to mention cigars, Cohibas or Montecristos, there’ll be no water, no sandwiches, nothing, zilch, niente, it’ll be healthy eating all round, till I get my personal slogan, and anyway how did this little nobody of a minister Zou Loukia come up with his “I accuse” that everyone’s talking about, eh, the Presidential Security Services tell me people are even calling their babies “I accuse,” and what about those young girls on heat getting it tattooed onto their backsides and the clients who, in an ironic twist, demand that the prostitutes have it, you’ll appreciate, I think, what a colossal fuck-up this represents, it’s not even as if it was rocket science to think up in the first place, a phrase like that, are the minister for agriculture’s negroes better that you, eh, do you realize, I wonder, that his negroes don’t even have an official car each, they get the ministry bus, they live off pitiful salaries, while you loll about here in the palace, swimming in my pool, drinking my champagne, sitting about watching foreign TV on cable, listening to their lies about me, eating my petit fours, eating my salmon and my caviar, strolling about in my garden, taking your mistresses skiing on my artificial snow slopes, I’m surprised you don’t sleep with my twenty wives, I’m beginning to wonder why I even have a cabinet, is that what I pay you for, to sit around here all day doing nothing, eh, why don’t I just hire my own stupid dog as head of cabinet, tell me that, you bunch of good-for-nothings,” and President Adrien Lokouta Eleki Mingi walked out slamming the door of cabinet behind him, still shouting “you bunch of negroes, things are going to change in this palace, I’ve had it with fattening up slavering slugs like you, let’s start judging by results, to think some of you went to ENA and the écoles polytechniques, ENA my ass!”

* * *

the negroes of the cabinet set about their arduous task with a Chaka Zulu spear and a sword of Damocles dangling over their heads while the palace walls still echoed with the president’s final words, and around midnight, since they still hadn’t thought of anything — there’s plenty of gas in this country, but not many ideas — it naturally occurred to them to phone a well-known member of the Académie Française who was apparently the only black in the history of this august assembly, and everyone applauded this last-minute idea, and everyone said the academician in question would consider it a great honor, so they wrote him a long letter full of smoothly phrased imperfect subjunctives, and even some particularly moving passages composed in classical Alexandrines with identical rhymes, they checked it carefully for punctuation, they didn’t want to be sneered at by the academicians, who would take any opportunity to prove their usefulness to the world, beside handing out the Top Prize for Best Novel, and the president’s negroes almost came to blows over it, because some of them said there should be a semicolon in place of a comma and others didn’t agree and wanted to keep the comma to move the phrase up into fifth gear, and those in the latter camp stuck to their point even though it was contradicted by a certain Adolphe Thomas, in the Dictionnaire des difficulteś de la langue française, whose view supported that of the first camp, and the second camp refused to yield and the point of all this was to get on the right side of the Black academician who, as they were humbly aware, was one of the first ever doctors of French grammar from the African continent, and everything might have passed off smoothly if Adrien’s negroes hadn’t then said that the academician would be slow to reply, the spear of Chaka Zulu and the sword of Damocles would come down on them before they received word from the Coupole, which is the name given to the onion dome beneath which these immortal sages sit listening to the distant babble of the French language and decree absolutely that such and such a text is the degree zero of all writing, but there was another reason why the negroes beat a retreat, one member of the cabinet, who’d come in top in his year at the ENA and owned the complete works of the black academician in question, pointed out that he had already produced a phrase for posterity, “emotion is black as reason is Greek,” as an ENA graduate himself he explained to his colleagues that actually the academician couldn’t come up with a second slogan because posterity isn’t like the court of King Petaud where nobody’s boss and anarchy rules, you only get one chance to coin a phrase, otherwise it’s all just hollow chatter, much ado about nothing, that’s why phrases that go down in history are short, sharp, and to the point, and since such phrases survive through legends, centuries, and millennia, people unfortunately forget who the true authors were, and fail to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s

undaunted, the negroes of the President and General of the Armies came up with something else at the last minute, they decided to put all their ideas and everything they had found into a hat, they said it was called “brainstorming” in the smart colleges some of them had been to in the United States, and each of them wrote down on a piece of paper several phrases that had gone down in the history of this shitty world, and started to go through them, like they do in countries where you have the right to vote, reading each one out in a monotonous voice under the authority of the chief negro, beginning with Louis XIV, who said “I am the State,” and the leader of the negroes of the President and General of the Armies said “no, that quote’s no good, we’re not having that one, it’s too self-regarding, it makes us sound like dictators, next!” Lenin said “communism issoviet power plus the electrification of Lenin said “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country,” and the chief black said “no, that’s no good, it’s disrespectful to the people, especially in a country where they can’t even pay their electricity bills, next!” Danton said “Boldness, and again boldness, and always boldness!” and the chief negro said “no, no good, too repetitive, besides, people will think we’re not bold enough, next!” Georges Clemenceau said “War is too serious to be left to the generals,” and the chief negro said “no, no good, the military won’t like that, we’ll have a coup d’état every five minutes with that one, the president himself is a general of the armies, don’t forget, we need to watch our step, next!” Mac-Mahon said “I am here. I shall remain here,” and the chief negro said “no, no good, sounds like a man unsure of his charisma clinging to power, next!” Bonaparte said, during the Egyptian campaign, “Soldiers, from the height of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on you,” and the chief negro said “no, no good, it makes the soldiers sound uncultured, as though they’ve never read the works of the great historian Jean Tulard, it’s our job to show people soldiers aren’t idiots, next!” Talleyrand said “This is the beginning of the end,” and the chief negro said, “no, no good, they’ll think we mean the end of our regime, and we’re meant to be in power for life, next!” Martin Luther King said “I have a dream,” which irritated the chief negro, he hates any mention of MLK over Malcolm X, his idol, so he said “no, no good, we’re fed up with utopias, everyone’s always waiting for their own to come true, and I can tell you they’ll be waiting a good few hundred years yet for that to happen, next!” Shakespeare said “To be or not to be, that is the question,” and the chief negro said “no, no good, we’ve got past wondering whether we are or whether we aren’t, we’ve already settled that one, we’ve been in power here for twenty-three years, next!” and the President of Cameroon, Paul Biya, said “Cameroon is Cameroon” and the chief negro said “no, no good, everyone knows Cameroon will always be Cameroon, it’s not as though any other country’s going to even try to steal its identity or its Lions, who are, in any case, unbeatable, next!” The former Congolese President, Yombi Opangault, said “A tough life today for a sweet life tomorrow” and the chief negro said “no, no good, don’t take the people of this country for fools, why not a sweet life today and to hell with tomorrow, hmm, besides, the guy who said that lived in the most disgraceful luxury of all time, come on, next!” Karl Marx said “Religion is the opium of the people,” and the chief negro said “no, absolutely not, we spend all our time trying to persuade the people that our President and General of the Armies is God’s elect, and everyone will get steamed up about religion again, don’t you know every single church in this country is subsidized by the president himself, come on then, next!” and President François Mitterand said “Time will take care of time,” but the chief negro got cross at this, you mustn’t mention Mitterand to him, and he said “no, no good, that guy took all the time in the world for himself, he spends his whole life riding roughshod over his friends and his enemies, then bows out to take up his seat at the right hand of God the Father, no way, next!” Frédéric Dard alias San-Antonio said “Fight your brother when he’s shorn” and the chief negro said “no, no good, too many bald people in this country, especially in the government, we mustn’t rub them up the wrong way, I’m bald myself, next!” Cato the Elder said “delenda Carthago,” and the chief negro said “no, no good, people in the south will think it’s some phrase in northern patois and the people in the north will think it’s a phrase in southern patois, best to avoid misunderstandings, on we go, next!” Pontius Pilate said “Ecce homo” and the chief negro said “no, no good, same applies as to Cato the Elder’s flights of fancy, next!” as Jesus was dying on the cross he said “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and the chief negro said “no, no good, too pessimistic, too whiny, really, for a guy like Jesus, he could have really fucked things up here below with all the power he had, next!” Blaise Pascal said “if Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter it would have changed the face of the world” and the chief negro said “no, no good, we’re talking politics here, not plastic surgery, move on, next!” and so the president’s negroes looked through thousands of quotations and all sorts of other historic sayings and found nothing suitable for the country’s most important citizen, because each time the chief negro said “no, no good, move on, next!” and then at five in the morning, before the first cock crowed, one of the advisers who’d been flicking through some black-and-white documentaries at last hit upon a historic phrase

at exactly midday, just as the entire population sat down to a delicious meal of bicycle chicken, the President and General of the Armies took over the radio programs and the only TV channel in the country, it was a solemn occasion, the president stretched taut as the skin of a Bamileke drum, it was hard to choose exactly the right moment for leaving a phrase to posterity, and on that memorable Monday he was dressed in his Sunday best, wearing his heavy gold medals, looking from then on like a patriarch in the autumn of his reign, in fact he was so much dressed in his Sunday best, on that memorable Monday, you’d have thought it was the day of the Feast of the Goat, which we celebrate in memory of his grandmother, clearing his throat to overcome his nerves, he began by criticizing the countries of Europe, who dazzled us with the sun of independence, when in fact we’re still dependent on them, since we still have avenues named after General de Gaulle and General Leclerc and President Coti and President Pompidou, but in Europe there are no avenues named after Sese Soto, or Idi Amin Dada, or Jean-Bedel Bokassa or any of the other fine men known personally to him, and valued for their loyalty, humanity, and respect of the rights of man, in that sense we are still dependent — they take our oil but withhold their ideas, they cut down our forests to keep themselves warm in winter, they educate our leaders at ENA and the Polytechnique and turn them into little white negroes, the Banania negroes are back again, we thought they’d disappeared into the bush, but here they are, ready for action, thus spoke our president, his breath short, his fist punching the air, and this speech on the ills of colonialism led him on to a denunciation of the cruelty and challenges of capitalism, he said all that was utopia, and worst of all were the homegrown lackeys of the colonialists, the guys living in our country, who eat with us, dance in our bars, sit next to us on public transportation, work in our fields, our offices, our markets, these double-edged swords who do things with our wives which the memory of my mother who died in the river Tchinouka prohibits me mentioning, these men are actually moles of the imperial forces, and let’s just say the President and General of the Armies’ anger shot up by ten notches at this point, because he hates those lackeys of imperialism and colonialism, as one might hate chigoes, bugs, fleas, or worms, and the President and General of the Armies said they must be tracked down, these criminals, these puppets, these hypocrites—“Tartuffes,” he called them, “Malades Imaginaires,” “Misanthropists,” and “Paysans Parvenus,” he said the proletariat revolution will triumph, the enemy will be crushed, driven back, wherever he may appear, he said God was with us, that our country was eternal, as he was himself, he called for national unity, the end of tribal warfare, he told us we were all descended from a single ancestor, and finally he came to the “The Credit Gone West Affair,” which was dividing the country, he praised the Stubborn Snail’s initiative, and promised to award him the Legion of Honor, and finished his speech with the words he was determined to leave to posterity — and we knew these were the words because he said them several times over, arms stretched wide as though clasping a sequoia, he said “I have understood you” and his phrase too became famous throughout the land, which is why, for a joke, we common folk often say that “the minister accuses; the president understands”

as he had told me himself many years ago, the Stubborn Snail first got the idea for opening a bar when he was in Douala, in the downtown district of New-Bell where he saw The Cathedral, the Cameroonian bar that had never closed its doors since the day it first opened, and the Stubborn Snail turned into a pillar of salt and settled in, ordered a bottle of Flag, a man came up and introduced himself, saying he had been the boss right from the start, they called him Steppenwolf, he said, and according to the Stubborn Snail the guy looked like something on the road to extinction, an Egyptian mummy, nothing mattered but his bar, even brushing his teeth or shaving the cactus stubble on his chin was a waste of time, he chewed kola nut, smoked moldy tobacco, it was as though he moved about on some kind of magic carpet, like you get in fairy tales, so the Stubborn Snail asked him about a thousand and one questions, to which he willingly replied, and the Stubborn Snail realized that the Cameroonian had managed to keep his bar permanently open thanks to a loyal team of staff, rigorous management, and personal commitment, he was there at The Cathedral in person, every morning and evening, and his employees, seeing him turn up regular as clockwork, decided The Cathedral was truly a place of worship, with morning and evening prayers and since, as you might expect, Steppenwolf had his lair just opposite, so you couldn’t even mention the devil without seeing the flash of his tail, and slept with one eye open, he could tell you exactly the number of people in the bar, who was drinking, who wasn’t, the names of those who were just there chatting and not buying, he knew exactly the number of bottles of wine sold, just by keeping an ear out from his bolt-hole and in the middle of the night he’d wake up and walk across Shit Alley to see off some troublemaker, telling him this was a bar and not a boxing ring for Mohammed Ali fans from Zaire, he drew attention to the customer’s charter scratched onto a plank of Gabon wood facing you as you came into the bar, you couldn’t fail to see it, which declared, among other things, the customer’s rights — to order any drink he chose, without fear of contradiction by the bartender, to keep a half bottle behind the bar for the next day, to receive a free bottle for every ten days uninterrupted presence — as well as his obligations, which included not to fight, to vomit strictly in Shit Alley only and not inside the bar, to acknowledge that he entered the bar of his own free will and not because Steppenwolf forced him, to refrain from insulting the staff and to pay for his drink as soon as it was served

throughout his stay in New-Bell, the boss sat around in this bar, closely observing the behavior of the clients and the staff, chatting with Steppenwolf, who had quickly become a friend, at which point he rushed back home, full of enthusiasm for this unusual enterprise, determined to replicate the New-Bell model, but he needed cash, words won’t make a dream come true, the Stubborn Snail was determined, he emptied his piggy bank, borrowed money wherever he could, everyone laughed at him when he talked about his plan, said it was like trying to find out how to slip through customs with a salmon in your luggage, but he gradually got it off the ground, with four tables and a counter less than two meters long, then eight tables, because a lot of people came, then forty tables and a terrace outside, because people were lining up waiting to be served, it was the talk of the town, news quickly spread by word of mouth, particularly since everyone knew that the Stubborn Snail was always above board, paid his taxes on time without quibbling, paid for his license, for this permit and that permit, had produced all the necessary paperwork, including his baptism certificate, his proof of vaccination against polio, yellow fever, beriberi, sleeping sickness, multiple sclerosis, his license to drive a wheelbarrow and a bicycle, he had been subjected to rigorous inspections not applicable to bars which close at midnight, on Sundays, bank holidays, for the funerals of close friends or relatives, or at the drop of a hat, they had threatened to make him go bust, soon, they said, they’d be calling his bar-that-was The Titanic, they swore he’d be eating boiled potatoes, become a beggar, one of God’s bits of wood, sleeping in a barrel, like a certain ancient philosopher, and still the Stubborn Snail stood firm, determined as a chess player, and the years went by in dubious battle, till his envious opponents got bored of nitpicking, he resisted the confederacy of dunces, and the other barkeepers all called him names — witch doctor, Houdini, Al Capone, Angoualima, the twelve-fingered assassin, local Lebanese, wandering Jew, and particularly, capitalist, which you’ll understand is a serious insult round here if I tell you it’s worse than insulting your mother’s cunt, or your sister’s cunt, or the cunt of your aunt, maternal or paternal, and it’s thanks to the President and General of the Armies that we hate capitalists, you call anyone anything in this country, except a capitalist, it can justify the duty of violence, it can justify a good fistfight between social classes, a deadly settling of scores, because a capitalist in these parts is the devil incarnate, he has a fat belly, he smokes Cuban cigars, he drives round in a Mercedes, he’s bald, selfishly rich, is involved in all manner of shady deals, in the exploitation of men by men, women by women, women by men, and men by women, sometimes even the exploitation of men by animals, since plenty of people round here are paid simply to feed, tend, and exercise the capitalists’ animals, so they called our bartender a capitalist, but he let it pass, though it was a terrible insult, the Stubborn Snail resisted, he hid in his own snail spit, like a true gastropod and it all blew over, the hurricanes, the tornadoes and the cyclones all subsided, the Stubborn Snail bent but he did not break, which was partly thanks to those of us who supported him from the start, because without us he’d have spent the first few months after the opening of the bar dozing behind the counter, he had no loyal staff at the beginning, so he had to get his dishonest cousins to help him out, and they pilfered his paltry takings at first cock’s crow, so he’d wake up in the morning to a half-empty till and a mountain of empty wine bottles polished off by the customers, and he quickly realized he mustn’t mix family and business, he’d have to hire some responsible, hard-working people, and he was lucky enough to come across two incorruptible guys, simple, good-hearted men, let’s say one of them was called Mompéro, he had been an undertaker, he never cracks a smile unless he absolutely has to, you shouldn’t even try to tell him a joke, he thinks laughter’s unnatural in the human species, and don’t even try asking him for credit “you pay up here and now or I kick you out the door,” that’s what Mompéro will say, I’ve never seen him argue a point, and I mean never, he’s got a face of stone, eyebrows like a circumflex, lips like a sink plunger, muscles like a wrestler, they even say that once when he was really angry, he took a whack at a fruit tree though the fruit tree had done nothing, and every single leaf of this innocent tree just fell to the ground, and they also say that when he’s angry, really angry that is, you have to get him to drink two liters of palm oil and a cupful of boa fat, and chew on two kilos of onions, just don’t pick a fight with him, that’s what everyone says, or you’ll come off badly, very badly, and the other bartender, his name’s Dengaki, he used to keep goal for the Bembe team, more skillful with a knife than a butcher-turned-serial killer, he can catch a bottle in mid-air, is nice sometimes, but not that nice, sometimes his colleague Mompéro has to put him in his place, and tell him there’s no point getting in a tangle with the clients, or taking liberties with them, and whenever there is a problem, Mompéro’s the one who flexes his muscles, while Dengaki first plays the diplomat plenipotentiary then threatens to get out the pocketknife hidden in the pocket of his pants, so these two guys have been there since the bar opened, they love their job, no doubt about that, when one works the day shift, the other does the night shift, they take it in turns, sometimes Mompéro works a whole week of days and Dengaki a whole week of nights, they’ve never disagreed on that front, it’s a well-oiled machine that’s run for years, so Credit Gone West is open all hours, and people are happy, they don’t have to clock watch, they’re not worrying about last orders from some bartender eager to get home, a bartender who comes along shouting that they’re closing in a few minutes’ time, “empty your glasses and get off home you bunch of hopeless drunks, go back to your wives and children and try to get down a good bowl of fish soup to sober yourselves up!”

how could I ever forget the man who’d been turned out of the family home like a mad dog, I got a good laugh out of him a couple of months back, a pathetic guy who now goes round wearing Pampers diapers, like a newborn baby, far be it from me to laugh at his condition but that’s the sad truth and I hadn’t asked him for anything, all I did was look him in the eye and he said, like it was a declaration of war, “What you looking at me for Broken Glass, you want my photo, or something, leave me alone, go and look at those others down there, chatting in the corner,” I kept my cool, kept my serenity, there’s no point answering back with nohopers like him, but I did just say “hey man, I’m just looking at you like I look at anyone,” “yeah, but you’re looking at me strange, you don’t go round looking at people like that,” and I said, still keeping calm and cool, “how d’you know I’m looking at you if you’re not looking at me” and that seemed to really fix him, he was caught in his own trap there, because he said something like “not gonna speak, not gonna tell you nothing about my life, my life’s not up for auction,” and from then on I knew he was sunk, I wasn’t going to listen to that, there are people like that, there’s something they want to spit out, so they get to teasing you, pushing you about so they can convince themselves they had no choice but to talk, I’ve been analyzing customer psychology at Credit Gone West for years now, I’ve seen that kind of behavior before, “I’m not asking you to talk, brother, you don’t know me, you should ask around, the name’s Broken Glass, no one ever saw me ask a man for the user’s manual to his life, or to sell me his life at auction” and he wound up by saying “Broken Glass, life is so complicated, it all began the day I came home at five in the morning, I swear, and that day I noticed the lock had been changed, because I couldn’t get the key in, so I couldn’t get into my own house, which I’d rented myself, even found it myself, put down the deposit, I swear on the life of my mother and my father and my six children, I stumped up twelve months of rent including this one before I moved in a single fork, and I’ll tell you this I was the only one with a job, I’m not even going to talk about my wife now, or I’ll get mad before I’m started, she’s not a wife, she’s just a pot of faded flowers, a tree that bears no fruit, she’s not a woman, I tell you, she’s just a whole sack of problems, and there she was, living as easy as a potato from Bobo Dioulasso, easy as a capitalist, just sat there waiting for me to bring home the readies, there she was hanging about all day long, chatting from morning till night with divorced old bags and widows from Trois-Cents, old witches wrapped in stinking pagnes, evil bitches who whiten their skin, shrews who straighten their hair to look like whites, while the whites braid theirs to look like the black women, you see my problem, Broken Glass, there was my wife, hanging out with all these tarts who make out they’re going to church when in fact they’re off to meet their shitty little lovers, I’m telling you, the amount of casual fornication in the churches down there, they don’t even respect the house of God, I don’t know where God’s got to anyway, He’s not in those churches, I tell you, those shrews and viragoes are convinced if God does exist, he forgives everything, whatever the sin, and whoever it is has done some idiot thing forbidden by the Jerusalem Bible, I tell you there’s some serious fornicating going on in our local churches, no better place for an orgy, some group sex, no better place than the so-called houses of God that sprout up everywhere, everyone knows, even the government people, some of whom actually finance these holy sex dens, but they’re not real churches, they’re run by religious nuts with shaved heads who exploit, pervert, rewrite, dishonor, seize hold of, abuse and profane the Jerusalem Bible and organize real-life orgies with the faithful, men and women, yes, not to mention the homos, the pedophiles, the zoophiles, and the lesbians, all going at it between prayers, between two Hail Marys, they do it when they go on pilgrimage too, to the high peaks of Loango, Ndjili, and Diosso, when they’re meant to be meditating, away from us sinners here below, we of little faith, we philistines, we lost sheep, Pharisees, you’re kidding, they go there for casual fornication, and what I say, loud and clear, is “Come down Moses” they’ve gone mad, doing this stuff on a pilgrimage to the three mountains, and my wife got caught up in all this shit with their guru, she just worships him to death, I tell you this guru, he’s been spawning children all over the place, with young girls who can’t even change their own tampon when the Red Sea tide comes sweeping in, I tell you this guru guy, he’s got money, lots of it, he could keep this district fed through a whole century of American embargo, it comes from you, this money, and it comes from me, and it comes from every single person in this country, I tell you he’s superrich, he’s a charlatan, he knows all the high-up guys in the administration, he’s got some photo of himself with the prime minister, and one with the President and General of the Armies, with the colonels in our army, and it seems he’s also the one who provides half the animals distributed to the poor at the festival of the goat, he has his own TV program every Sunday, looking all serious, talking like a black American preacher, and when he speaks on TV he threatens wrongdoers, tells them they’re bound for hellfire and the Last Judgment and the rest, that’s how he recruits his followers, that’s how he rakes in these massive sums of money, there’s a telephone number goes up on the screen while he’s talking and he has children sitting round him, dressed in white and singing songs of praise to him instead of to the Lord, and people compete to give more than the next guy because they think the more you give this crook, the closer you get to the gates of paradise, but I don’t like the way he looks, this guy, he looks like a statue of a fat, mean little Buddha, vicious even, how can you oppose a crook like him, when the army’s supplying him with soldiers for his personal security, eh, even if you want to see him you have to make an appointment weeks in advance, and his secretaries won’t let just anyone near him, so you see it’s not a simple tale of God the Father, it’s business, pure and simple, let’s speak plainly here, it’s a successful business and another thing, this guy has a whole harem up in the mountains of Loango, Ndjili, and Diosso, and it’s one big sex spree up there, everyone’s at it, and so my wife abandoned the marital home for a week, and went off up into the mountains, not even sacred mountains, they weren’t, though to her they were “mountains of the soul”

the Pampers guy seemed to be struggling for words that day, but all at once he got into his stride and went on with his story, without even checking I was listening: “so you see, Broken Glass, my wife has the nerve to say I’m not allowed out, when I’m telling you, she had no right to tell me what to do, I paid all the bills, but she made all the rules, who ever heard of a thing like that, in this crumbling world, eh, no one, that’s who, she thinks she can stop me from spoiling myself a little from time to time, as a man has a right to, with the hot little numbers down in the Rex District, you know what I mean, what was I supposed to do with myself while the guru was giving my wife a going over in the high mountains of Loango, Ndjili, and Diosso, eh, what was I supposed to do, fold my arms and watch from the sidelines, reading my Jerusalem Bible, eh, keep the house nice, eh, make her meals, eh, make me a cuckold, okay, but a posthumous cuckold please, make me a cuckold, but not with the connivance of the church brigade, not with the connivance of people who are meant to be showing us the way to the gates of paradise, you know some days, I wonder if some of my kids, all except the girl who looks like me, aren’t the guru’s kids, anyway, what am I supposed to do with myself, eh, it’s true I love those hot little things down around the Rex District, yeah, I love the taste of young girl, especially from down there, real belles du seigneur, they are, they know how to handle the Ding-an-sich, they’re born with it, you’ll never know fear and trembling like that in the marital bed, they’re amazing, Broken Glass, they’re little volcanoes, they promise you the earth and then they give it to you, all gift-wrapped, while the women back home are just one big disappointment, those hot little numbers from the Rex District, wow are they hot, they’re like rubber, like elastic, it’s sharp, it’s sweet, it’s frenzied, they whisper in your ear, they’re with your erection every fraction of the way, they know just where to touch you to wake the slumbering alternator, they know how to keep you from stalling at the roundabout, how to get your turbine turning, slip through the gears, accelerate, you feel happy, like you got your whole life before you, and you know how it is, Broken Glass, it was my money, I had a right to spend it as I wanted, I reckon, why’d she go breaking my balls like that, eh, I’ll tell you something, she was no good at it anyway, my wife, if she had been I’d have stayed at home like the other assholes in the district, but she just lay there, my wife did, staring up at the roof, got no choice but to pick my nails and think about the slender little bodies of the Rex girls, she could at least have tried to fake a bit of pleasure, while I was pumping away on top of her like some mediocre cyclist in the Tour de Trois-Cents, I’ll tell you an open secret, while I’m at it, Broken Glass, one day she literally forced me to leave off squirming about on top of her, because she was determined not to miss the last episode of Santa Barbara, well then my engine just cut straight out, no life left in it, batteries flat, nothing working, I mean nothing at all, I was impotent, just watching my tool losing altitude and turning into a poor little flag at half-mast, then finally a tiny little thing no bigger than a premature baby’s, by which I mean to say I was seriously disconcerted, discombobulated, disoriented, and derailed, I swear to you, I got dressed in a flash, I was yelling my head off, shouting shit! Shit! Shit! I told her I wasn’t going to pay any more bills till she started shifting her ass during sex and what’s more I said, she could stop counting on me, I’m no sucker, no asshole, no cretin, I got to protect my pride against those slings and arrows, I think maybe I may have slightly hurt her feelings when I said I got married to a plank of wood, she didn’t know the first thing about giving a man pleasure, I said the only thing she knew how to bring off in triumph was the act of procreation, and any wild beast could do that, yep, I said all this while I was getting dressed in a flash, I said it in anger and stormed out of the house, slamming the door, and once I was out I ran like a madman escaping from the asylum while the guard is taking a piss, I jumped into a bush taxi, the driver wanted to talk, I gave him the brushoff, because I couldn’t think what we could have to say to each other, and he said he reckoned I was worrying about something, it was plain as the nose on my face, and I said he could spare me his reckonings and zip it, just drive me direct to the Rex District, but he went on chatting away, working me over, trying to find out the reason for my despair, but I wasn’t telling him, I said if he didn’t shut his foreigner face I’d get out of his old jalopy, and he sighed and said it must be about a woman then, I didn’t look like a man who enjoyed a happy home life, and I gave a start like “what d’you know about it then?” and he sniggered, and turned round and said “all the guys looking like you do and asking for the Rex District are either cuckolds or have a wife as stiff as a plank of Gabon wood,” and I told him again to shut up, “they sure are hot, those girls around the Rex District,” he said, I was angry, I just yelled “leave me alone and drive, man,” but he wouldn’t stop, the asshole, he just kept right on saying “hey, life is beautiful, man, laugh a little, you’ll be flying high in a little while, relax, stay cool, breathe easy” and since I’d stopped talking to him, he added with a laugh, “please yourself man, I was only making conversation, still, it’s strange the way clients these days, they got no sense of humor, I’ll take you to the Rex District, but you spare me a thought when you’re getting it on” and he didn’t say one more word, just smiled this sly smile all the rest of the way, till at last we got to the Rex District, I paid the asshole driver, but I threw the notes in through the window at him, and he drove off, giving me the finger, I shouted “imbecile!” he shouted “cuckold!” but I didn’t give a fuck, I was in the Rex District, where the girls are so pretty, and available, open to all the usual and some of the less usual propositions, so there I was, in my natural milieu, the school of flesh, district Eros-hima, and all the girls knew me, because I worshipped their bodies, their beauty, and didn’t just treat them like tarts, I would do the things with them that you do with any normal woman with an ounce of eroticism in her and not one frozen stiff like mine, and one of them asked me that evening if I’d like a special massage, known as the “master’s flesh” and I immediately said yes, because this Haitian friend of mine who lives in Montreal now told me it was great, even if it was twice the usual price, I said yes indeed to the “master’s flesh” and I sure did fly, and when I got back home at dawn I found my wife had changed the lock, yeah, that’s what I said, Broken Glass, after fourteen and a half years of marriage, and then some, fourteen years of deadly boredom, fourteen years in the wilderness, fourteen years of pretense, sham, and faking it, fourteen years of calvary and the missionary position, she’d gone and changed the locks,

now I wasn’t going to sleep out in the street just because she’d changed the lock with the help of her brother-in-law, a well-known locksmith, I wasn’t going to sleep in the street like a bum, no way, so I knocked on the door, got no answer, I shouted my wife’s name so loud I woke the neighbors, she didn’t open up, I threatened to kick the door in, I would count up to five, I counted real slow, she never came, so naturally enough, I called the fire brigade, since I didn’t want to break down the door of my own house, and when the fire brigade arrived with all their gear, thinking they’d been called out to a real bush fire, I explained my house wasn’t on fire, but I needed to find a really good excuse for calling them out, because these guys get really bored when there’s no fire locally, they often get fed up doing practice runs, some of them reach retirement without ever having put out so much as the flame of a match, and I lied and said the children were locked in the house and their mother had passed out, and they were a bit disappointed that there was no fire, the firefighters asked why I didn’t have the keys to my own home, and I said that I’d gone to work a night shift and I’d left them in the house, so my keys were in the house and not on my person, then one fireman pointed out that I really was a complete idiot, and I told him they were his words not mine and the firefighters charged at the door like a band of madmen all trying to get through the eye of a needle at once, and they broke down the cruddy door after a hell of a struggle, and my wife came bursting out of the bedroom, roaring, with her claws at the ready, and flung herself at me like a tigress protecting her two-day-old babies, tackled me to the floor, she’s twice my size, and yours too, Broken Glass, she’s a real fury, my wife is, believe me, I shouted for help, the firefighters separated us, asked what was going on with us, I wanted to speak first because I’m the man, but my wife slapped me and told me to shut my filthy womanizing mouth, and she lied and said I should stop hanging out round the marital home because the matrimonial judge for Trois-Cents had ordered me out of it months ago, and the firefighters called me a sad liar and a sad mythomaniac and a sad troublemaker, and just totally sad, and told me to get my ass double quick out of the marital home, “the law is tough but it is the law,” that’s what they said, and I refused to get out because I didn’t see what business the law had being tough with me, so I said anyway, I was the one who paid the bills, I’d bought the TV, and the Duralex plates, and I paid for the food, I paid for the children’s school things, and I paid for the water, and I paid for the electricity, and so on and so forth, and at that point they called the police because firefighters don’t normally carry handcuffs with them, they always turn up with pipes and stretchers and great big engines that disturb everyone and all because someone, somewhere, has struck a match, and it’s not their job to send people to prison, they’re supposed to put out fires and resuscitate the half-wits and the suicides and people who’ve had accidents and pass out, and so the police turned up straight away, because the station’s only two hundred meters from the house, the one I’ve rented with my own money, and, get this, my wife told the police I was a dangerous man, more dangerous even than Angoulima, the well-known serial killer who decapitated his victims and stuck up their heads on poles round the Côte Sauvage, and my wife said I was an ex-convict, and a thief, that I dealt in cannabis and Colombian cocaine, and she said I’d stopped sleeping at home, I never washed, that I beat our children to death, that I’d stopped paying the rent, that she was going to be turned out of the house herself, that I slept with the tarts around the Rex, and that I slept with them without wearing proper condoms that come from Central Europe, because according to her condoms from Nigeria are no good, they’ve got a hole at the tip, which allows a man to cheat on a woman, taking his pleasure as if he weren’t wearing a condom, and the poor woman underneath thinks he is using a condom, when in fact it’s just a thing with a hole in the top, you know what I mean, Broken Glass, so my wife said I could well be HIV extra-positive and not know, and it was probably quite far gone, because I was getting weirdly thinner and thinner and I had a face like a fish, and my head now looked like a Hottentot’s skull and I had constant diarrhea and I groaned when I pissed, and that I often vomited, and she said I gave away my salary to the girls from the Rex District and I had two mistresses young enough to be my granddaughters or the granddaughters of the firefighters, or of the policemen outside our house, God help us, and that’s when the situation began to go downhill, particularly when my wife made out I also did disgusting things to our daughter, Amelie, she called me sorcerer, barbarian, caveman, and worse, she told all the people gathered at our house that I got up every night to lay my hands on our daughter, do disgusting things to her, indecent things, and she claimed that I would give Amelie sleeping pills so she wouldn’t realize the disgusting, indecent things I did to her, now you tell me, Broken Glass, can you see me doing that, d’you see me sullying the cloakroom of childhood, do you see me nipping buds, can you see me shooting at a child, its impossible, after all, Amelie’s my own daughter, isn’t she, and I was so shocked, I didn’t even defend myself against her false accusations, and in among all the people in uniform there was a cop of the female persuasion with the muscles of a docker and her hair cut short, like a normal cop, I mean a male policeman, and this cop of the female persuasion pushed me up against the wall and called me a bastard, a pedophile, a sadist, she said she’d crush me under her boot, she’d trample on my corpse, and spit on my grave, I was like a sailor washed up in the tide, I should know there was a punishment for every crime, and this cop of the female persuasion swore she’d get me banged up, she promised to do everything she could to make sure there was no fair trial, she said I didn’t deserve the honor of a legal trial, besides which they’re a complicated business, and she was the one who put the handcuffs on me and her colleagues all took a kick at me, booting me in the balls, as I lay dying at the intruders’ feet, I can show you the scars, marks I bear to this day, and I began to cough up petals of blood, petals of blood the size of potatoes from Bobo-Dioulasso, petals of blood the size of dinosaur turds, and they dragged me to the local police headquarters and when they heard there that I was a pedophile, the other policemen all agreed I should be taken straight to Makala, there to spend the next half of my life, Makala is the place all the criminals in this town dread, and that’s where they took me, I swear, Broken Glass, it was a bad situation, you wouldn’t think it to see me sitting here now, but I spent over two and a half years in Makala and two and a half years in a prison like that is no joke”

I listened to him in silence, he had tears in his eyes and took a good gulp of his drink before continuing his tale, “two and a half years in Makala, it’s an eternity, specially when the other inmates have been told you’re in there for doing obscene things to your daughter, when it wasn’t even true in my case, simply because I could never bring myself to sully the cloakroom of childhood, nip the buds, shoot at a child, and unhappily for me I went through torture, what I went through in that place was worse than what you get if you go to hell, it was dreadful, intolerable, Broken Glass, I don’t know how I survived it, can you imagine, the prison wardens, how could they let the gang leaders in the other cells fuck me from behind like that, giving me what they called “the middle way,” I promise you, that’s what they did, I was their object, their plaything, their inflatable doll, I let them have their way with this little body you see before you, what could I do, nothing that’s what, there were too many of them, all clamoring for a go, and when I cried out, because they came so thick and fast these “middle ways,” the wardens in Makala just laughed at me and told me to think of the harm I’d done to Amelie, when it wasn’t even true, I could never bring myself to sully the cloakroom of childhood, nip the buds, shoot at a child, and every day they took me up the middle like that, grabbing me from behind, I never got any sleep, there was always some guy behind me, whipping me, calling me filthy tart, a piece of tax-free household waste, a vegetable from Tipotipo Market, a cockroach, jellyfish, moth, rotten fruit of the breadfruit tree, all that and more, and sometimes one of the wardens at Makala took a personal hand in the negotiation of the middle way, a nervous young man who told me he’d never done that in his life before, not to a man, he was no queer, just wanted to make me pay for the disgusting things I’d done to Amelie, when it wasn’t even true, and he was the one who whipped me while he shoved himself up my hinterland like a trucker, I tell you, he was hung like King Kong, so that’s what they did to me in Makala, they destroyed me, I can show you my backside, you could make a fist and put it up me, no problem, that’s the truth, I never even got a trial, in this shit-hole of a country”

when he’d finished telling me his life story, the guy in Pampers raised his glass and said “ciao” and drank it down, poured another one, and drank that down too, then stood up saying “okay, okay,” and then I got a close-up of his backside, bulging with four layers of Pampers, a damp backside, buzzing with flies, and he saw fit to tell me “don’t worry about the flies, it’s always like that, Broken Glass, flies are my best buddies these days, I don’t even bother brushing them away, they always find me again, wherever I go, I get the feeling it’s always the same flies following me,” and then he nodded a last farewell, and I did the same, and off he went to beg in the nearby streets, while I sat there, staring into the distance, watching him disappear and I thought, one day he’ll completely flip his lid, he’ll come back here and say “tell me who to kill,” not that I would go along with anything like that, not for one moment, I’d never be an accessory to murder, that’s a different thing altogether, I don’t know how anyone can kill, life is essential, that’s what my mother always told me, and even if she’s dead now, I’ll always stick to that rule of thumb, so if the Pampers guy ever takes it into his head to commit a crime, he’ll have carry it out himself

I met the Printer the same way I meet most of the new characters in the bar, they just pop up out of nowhere, suddenly there they are, with tears in their eyes and tremors in their voices, and this one, the Printer I mean, had been looking for me, for a chat, ever since the day he first set foot in Credit Gone West, he really wanted to talk to me, no one else would do, and he kept calling out “I want to talk to you, I want to talk to you, you’re the one they call Broken Glass round here, aren’t you, I want to talk to you, I’ve got so much to tell you, let me sit down at your table and order a bottle,” I just pretended I had no interest in his story, I’d heard so many stories, you couldn’t fit them all in just one notebook, I’d need several volumes to tell the tales of all these accursed kings, so there was the Printer, all eager to talk, and I just went on staring into my glass of red wine like a philosopher wondering what deep, dark secret a liquid might conceal, and let me tell you a secret right now, if you want people to talk you have to stand back, feign indifference, pretend, in a word, not to care, it’s the oldest and best strategy in the world for setting things in motion, people looking to confess get upset then, they think their story the most extraordinary, most astonishing, the weirdest, most surprising, most action-packed ever told, and they want to get you to believe the tale they’re going to tell is of a gravity and seriousness equaled only by the death penalty itself, “why d’you want to talk to me,” I made out I was surprised, when in fact I did want to hear him, and he replied “because people say you’re a good guy,” and I laughed, then lifted my glass of red and drank from it, “and what have they told you about me?” I asked the Printer, “they say you’re the top man around here,” and I laughed again, then told him “if wisdom could be measured by inches of beard, billy goats would be philosophers,” the Printer stared at me and leaning toward me said “why you talking like that, Broken Glass, I’m looking for someone to understand me, what’s all this stuff about billy goats and philosophers?” and I told him to calm down, I was taking him seriously, and I added, “they must have said other things, what else did they say about me?” and he nodded “yeah, they said you were in here right at the start, that the Stubborn Snail’s a close personal friend, that he listens to what you say,” I smiled, flattered by these kind words, I like to hear things like that, the guy began to interest me, “and what else, they must have said something else,” and he thought for a moment, casting his eyes upward, “well, it seems you’re writing something about the people who come here, you’re keeping a notebook, it must be that one there beside you, is it?” and I didn’t answer, just placed my hand over the notebook where it lay open, because the guy was trying to read my scribble, I don’t like that, and I gave the bottle a good shake and poured myself another glass, and drank it off then asked him “so what is it you want then?” and he suddenly raised his voice saying “I want to be in your notebook too, you’re going to make some assholes famous when actually I’m the most interesting case round here,” some arrogance, who did he think he was then, “okay, okay, calm down, so what makes you think you’re so interesting, then, you got no grounds to say that, just give me one reason, go on, just one, why you’re more interesting than anyone else around here” and he said, without hesitation, “I’m more important than the rest because I’ve been to France, not everyone can say that, believe me” and he said it quite naturally, as though it was obvious, France was his yardstick, the height of achievement, he’d set foot in France, therefore he was always going to be right, well, what could I say, after that, I tried to think of a counterargument, but none sprang to mind, so I capitulated and said “okay, then, sit down, my friend, let’s hear what you have to say,” and he sat down at my table and filled up the empty glass he’d just taken from the neighboring table and drank from it, and cleared his throat three times, before warning me “I’m telling you, Broken Glass, if you don’t put me into your book, it won’t be worth the paper it’s written on, I tell you, they could make my life into a film,” and eventually he calmed down and there was a long silence in which we listened to drunken angels drifting overhead, and I kept on looking at him “okay, where shall I start, what comes first,” he said, in a resigned sort of voice, and I said nothing, and he went on “to be honest, I don’t hate the French — men or women, but I do hate one French woman, just one, I swear” which was good for a beginning, I like that kind of statement, so I just kept up my silence, I wanted him to come out with it now, I bore down on him with my eyes, and he brought out his big artillery, saying “ah, France, don’t talk to me about France, Broken Glass, it makes me want to vomit” and he spat on the ground, and his face went hard like the face of a gorilla who’s seen a poacher cross his patch “okay, I’ll start at the very beginning, but listen carefully, what I’m telling you now is important, very important, so you pay attention, I want to see you writing while I talk, and you’ll see, you should never ever trust anyone, I’m telling you that as a friend, Broken Glass,” he really knew how to spin it out, I wanted to tell him to get to the point and stop dithering around in the penalty area, and while I was scribbling down some of what he’d begun to say he said “in fact I’m going to tell you about a woman, how she killed me, ruined me, reduced me to a piece of nonrecyclable rubbish, so she did” and I leaned over toward him and he moved back a few centimeters, as though to keep some distance between us, I didn’t see why, and he said “Broken Glass, don’t mess with white women, if you ever cross paths with a white woman, go your own way, don’t even look on her, she’ll stop at nothing, I don’t even know how I came to be back here, when my place is in Europe, in France, and here I am, either in this bar or on the beaches of the Côte Sauvage” and he took a drink of his red wine and wiped his mouth with his bare hand and went on “to tell you the truth, it’s her fault I drink like I do, the white witch’s fault, she sucked out my blood, Broken Glass, believe me, I was a decent man, I don’t know if you understand what’s meant by a decent man in France, but I was a man who earned his living, a man who paid his income tax on time, a man with a post office savings account, a man who even had shares on the stock exchange in Paris, a man who was saving for his pension in France — because pensions in this country are nothing but a pile of shit, a road to ruin, unreliable, a lottery, you need to have some cushy job in a ministry, there are civil servants in this country who do business with the pensions of poor people who’ve worked all their lives, but anyway, I was somebody in the black community back there, people knew me, I was a worker, a real hard worker, not a layabout like some black immigrants who hang around in the lobbies of their apartments, waiting for the family support checks, I didn’t need all that shit, no, yours truly worked in a large print works on the outskirts of Paris, I ran my own section, I even hired and fired the other guys, because I could tell a lazy sod from a hard worker, and I didn’t just hire negroes either, because, between you and me, Broken Glass, there’s more to life than negroes, for fuck’s sake, there are other races too, negroes don’t have a monopoly on misery, or on unemployment, I also hired miserable, unemployed people with white skin, and yellow skin, I mixed them all up together, just so you know, I had real status, and not every black gets to hire and fire white men, who, after all, were the ones who colonized them, Christianized them, flung them into the holds of ships, whipped them and trampled them, burned their gods, put down their rebellions, wiped out their empires, so I hired people with white skin and people with yellow skin, and I mixed them together with the other wretched of the earth, and there weren’t many Negroes doing that, you could count us on the fingers of a fatwa victim, check it out, anyone will tell you, so there I was with a good job, a well-paid job, we printed Paris Match, VSD, Voici, Figaro, Les Echos, I was a decent man, I was married to Céline, a woman from Vendée with a terrific ass on her, an ass like a real negress’s from back home and Céline was secretary to the head of a pharmaceutical lab in Colombes,” and at this point in his confession I began to wonder if the Printer wasn’t having me on, but he spoke with such assurance I had to believe him, and he went on “I should tell you I first met Céline at Timis, a well known black nightclub in Pigalle, in the Eighteenth Arrondissement of Paris, I don’t know what she was doing there, surrounded by vulgar black women in heat, even if you could make out the odd other white woman among them, but the other whites were all lumbered with backsides as flat as an ironing board, and Céline immediately caught my eye, with her butt and her waist, and the two great big watermelons grafted onto her chest, so that no one else dared approach her on the dance floor, and I just went straight up to her like a soldier who’s just been given a medal, I crossed the Rubicon murmuring to myself “alea iacta est ” and without a flicker of hesitation I plunged in there, praying that it would all run smoothly because the worst thing for a man trying to get a girl to dance is being turned down in the middle of the dance floor in front of the competition, who all piss themselves laughing, anyway, thank God, I was well dressed, I had on a dress shirt by Christian Dior that I bought in the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré and an Yves Saint Laurent blazer I’d got in the rue Matignon, and some lizard-skin Weston shoes I got somewhere near the Place de la Madeleine and I wore this really good perfume called The Male by Jean-Paul Gaultier that I’d mixed together with Lolita Lempika for men, and as for my haircut, it was pure black American actor at the height of his success, Sydney Poitier style, so all in all I was okay, I was in good shape, I held out my hand to the girl, who’d been dancing and was now sitting on the velour-covered pouf finishing off a cigarette as long and slim as a reed in a sweeping brush, and the girl stood up at once, as though she had been waiting for this moment, my heart began leaping and bounding, I couldn’t quite believe it, I saw the disappointment in the faces of the competition, knowing they’d lost a fine chance this time, I told myself I’d better give it my all, dance as I’d never danced before, and make a once-in-a-lifetime impression on this girl, so that she’d be the one left asking for more, and we danced all night and then, you won’t believe this, Broken Glass, she came back to my place, no discussion, none of your ‘well, we’ve only just met, I need some time, let’s get to know each other, I’m not one of those girls who open their legs on the first date, I need to talk about it, let’s have a coffee, meet up a few times, then we’ll see,’ no, none of that, she just came back to my place without getting all fancy about it and I was in my Renault 19, and she drove behind in her Toyota, and when we got to my place we parked outside the building and kissed in the corridor and in the elevator, and on the landing, and in front of my door, which I couldn’t get open because I was actually drunk as a skunk, and I didn’t waste any time, we got down on the carpet and I made a really thorough job of it, I worked on her from every angle, under every layer of her haute couture, and there we lay entwined at dawn, a little dazed by the speed of things, but so what, it was so good, we soon got over that, and Céline left, saying she’d had a wonderful evening, the best evening ever in her whole life, and I was a really nice guy and she took my phone number and I took hers, and since days are long and nights are short we called each other regularly, for hours on end, we exchanged the latest details of the night, we said a whole heap of stupid things, the kind of stupid things lovers come out with when love is new, so I had to tell her I loved her, had to be open with my feelings, had to express them without reserve, she told me, and that was the first time I really learned how to tell a woman I loved her, not like here where you don’t say it because you don’t want to seem weak, here you get your rocks off at night, don’t bother with the romantic fairy-tale stuff, but it’s different in France, they take feelings seriously there, you don’t play games with love, and very soon I made the marriage proposal she’d been waiting for since the day we met, she said she knew instinctively I was the man she’d spend the rest of her life with, as though God had said we should be one, and Céline quickly talked her parents round, they’re not racists, they always voted Communist in municipal and regional elections, or for the Greens in the presidential, so we went to visit them in some little place in Vendée called Noirmoutier, an island with a bridge connecting it to the mainland, and Céline’s parents said I was a fine young man, distinguished, intelligent, refined, ambitious, respectful of republican values, and I was pleased to hear this description of my noble qualities, they admired the way I was dressed, which isn’t surprising because I was actually wearing a made-to-measure Francesco Smalto suit, and they also said how they loved deepest Africa, the real Africa, mysterious Africa, the bush, the red earth, the wild animals skipping about in the wide open spaces, adding that only fools thought that black Africa was heading for disaster, or that Africa was antidevelopment and they apologized personally for the mistakes of the past, in particular for the slave trade, colonization, the problems with independence and all the other shit some black fundamentalists have made their thing, I didn’t want to get into those worn-out arguments, I made it clear to them that stuff to do with the past was not my thing, I was a man with my eyes fixed firmly on the horizon, and that horizon was not aflame, I said I was looking to the future, then I began talking to them about the Congo, and they asked which Congo I was from originally, the father asked if it was the Belgian Congo, the mother asked if it was the French Congo, and I said the Belgian Congo no longer existed, and I said the French Congo no longer existed, I explained that I was from the Republic of the Congo, i.e., the smaller of the two Congos, and the father exclaimed ‘of course he’s from the little Congo, our beautiful, illustrious former colony, General de Gaulle even declared Brazzaville the capital of free France during the occupation, ah, the Congo, land of dreams and freedom, it’s the country where they speak the purest French, you know, better even than in France, let me tell you,’ and Céline’s mother, who was a bit embarrassed, told her husband he shouldn’t be using the word colony in reference to my country, “now then, Joseph,” she said, “it doesn’t do to say colony, you know that,” and the father said it was a mistake and what he meant was territory and the mother said that colony and territory were completely interchangeable and Céline flew into a rage and said we hadn’t come to talk about interchanges or geography or history, and old father Joseph said ‘good, let’s drink to that with a decent bottle of claret, shall we’ and he opened the claret and we drank, and seeing as how the atmosphere was now relaxed, Céline and I announced our imminent nuptials and the father was caught short by this and almost choked on his wine and said ‘you don’t hang about do you, you young ones, in our day you had to take your time about it, get to know the family, what is it you want, a TGV marriage, or what?’ and Céline’s mother kicked her husband under the table then said ‘love is love, you know that Joseph,’ and they gave us their blessing despite everything, since Céline wouldn’t have allowed them to say no anyway, it was take it or leave it, and her parents came to Paris for the happy day, there were only about fifty or so of us, in a little registry office in Chatenay-Malabry, some friends of Celine’s, my work colleagues, and a few acquaintances, most of them Sappers, and when I say ‘Sappers,’ my dear Broken Glass, I do not mean the guys who put out fires, no, Sappers are boys from the black milieu in Paris, who belong to SAPPE which is the Society for Ambience and People and Persons of Elegance, and among the Sappers present that day were influential guys like Djo Ballard and Docteur Limane, Michel Macchabée, Moulé Moulé, Moki, Benos, Préfet and a load of others”

“I hope you’ve been noting down what I’m telling you, I was up to where we’d got married, we now had our whole lives in front of us, we now had to work out where we were going and what we wanted, and as we both had good jobs we decided straight away to take out a mortgage on a large house, a nice, proper detached house, in the comfortable suburbs, half an hour from Paris because we wanted a pleasant life, and above all a life well away from negroes, I’m no racist, but believe me, the worst enemy of mixed-race couples isn’t always the white next door, it’s usually a black, no really, I’m not racist, Broken Glass, I’m just telling you the facts, if people don’t agree with me, they can keep their moral judgments to themselves, to hell with them, not that I’m going to sit down and write a Letter to Black France to lay the blame on anyone, in fact if other negroes see you with a white woman they think they can get off with her too, they think if a normal sane white woman is shacked up with some gorilla from the Congo, she might as well get shacked up with the whole wildlife park, the entire reservation, you know what I mean, anyway, let it drop, I’m not here to rub salt into the open wounds of my race, my race is what it is, the fact is, Céline and I wanted to live well away from the hubbub of Paris and the envy of other negroes, and the whole classic comedy, we thought that privacy would bring happiness, and it was a fine life we lived, a vie en rose, with our two daughters, twins born two years after we got married, little mixed-race girls with blue eyes, believe me, ours was the best of lives, we were a model couple, even if the mean-mouthed blacks back in Paris were always saying that black-white couples never last long, you never see husband and wife grow old together, and that it will only last if the black guy gives up being black, and changes altogether, does an about turn, makes concessions, denies his own people three times before the cock crows, turns his back on his overdependent family, in short, if he keeps his black skin but wears a white mask, whereas our marriage was a good one, Broken Glass, I couldn’t imagine anything coming to spoil it, I didn’t need to wear a white mask to hide my black skin, I was actually proud to be a black, I always will be, till my dying day, I’m proud of my black culture, you know what I mean, Céline respected me for that, everything was going fine, I was a good father to my family, the sky was blue with little brightly colored birds in it, hopping from branch to branch in the trees outside our house, which I had painted green, a color I’m very fond of, which is why the neighbors called it “the green house” and everything was going swimmingly, Broken Glass, and when the sky is too blue, like that, you have to remember that one day something might come along and turn it grey, if the sun shines too brightly it can kill your love, and that’s what I was about to find out to my cost”

“then one day our bright blue sky clouded over, the little birds with their multicolored feathers flew away without a goodbye, and the next morning they didn’t turn up to sing in the dawn, and birds of ill omen, birds with heavy wings came to replace them, cawing and pecking with their wizened beaks at the tree trunk of our deep-rooted union, this was the time when the whole story of my son came out, who I’d had with a West Indian woman when I first arrived in France, and I was still studying at the Centre National des Arts et Métiers, now this West Indian woman was threatening me with a lawsuit because I owed her four years’ maintenance and all that stuff, and I went on a counterattack with all the force of a bull seeking to cut short the spectacle the aficionados hope for, I got myself a good female lawyer who was able to show that in fact it was the West Indian woman who was preventing me from fulfilling my obligations as a father, I managed to get my son to come and live with us because I wanted to take charge of his education myself and give him a future, there was room enough in our nice green house, Céline agreed with me, had even encouraged me, saying blood was thicker than water and I shouldn’t abandon my offspring like an irresponsible father, so that’s how I played it, my son came to live with us, but unfortunately he fell in with the local riffraff and I did my best to get him back on track but it was no use, he yelled at me, wanted nothing to do with the fine future I was offering him, he tried to attack me, can you believe, and I was suddenly all at sea, since when did a child raise his hand against his father, but I knew he despised me, I could tell, he’d never been able to accept my leaving his mother and marrying Céline, especially since she was white, he said I’d been bought, that I’d gone over to the other side, I was a Banania black, I was all fucked up, just a slave to white meat and pig’s trotters, it was pretty awful actually, but he was my son, after all, and what really riled me was when he came and announced that he’d seen Céline with some local Africans, and one of them, called Ferdinand, was my wife’s lover, now that really did upset me seriously, I took it he was just trying to wind me up because Céline would never dare do anything like that to me, she knew what I thought about other blacks, even if I’m not racist, I want you to know that, so anyway, my son was just a first-class liar, I told myself, and I decided to ignore it, I reckoned it was just another of his little outbursts, and I didn’t even check it out, it seemed so obviously made-up, it’s true I didn’t keep a tight rein on Céline, I let her get on with her own life, you don’t mess with a white woman’s personal freedom, she takes it seriously, I was more relaxed than in the early days of our marriage, I let her go out with her girlfriends, and sometimes I even looked after the children while I wasn’t at work, that was how we managed things, now, stay with me here Broken Glass, this is where it starts getting interesting, one day my heart practically stops beating when I find a condom floating in the toilet in our green house, a really big condom, about twice the size of my own dick, which is itself enormous, I can show you if you like, so I thought it must be my son who’d brought back some local white slut, or maybe a black one, though I had warned him not to, even if he was eighteen already, what would have happened if he’d got some girl pregnant, eh, where did he think he’d find the money to look after a poor kid, that’s the kind of thing I was thinking, I couldn’t imagine my son having it off with a girl, it just wasn’t possible, I’d never seen him show any interest in a girl, I even wondered whether he might not be a bit slow, sexually, but you should never take anything as certain, you should never think that just because a kid is quiet they’ll never do something dreadful, and I also thought that it was pretty disrespectful toward me to give rein to his basest impulses in the family home, if you see what I mean, Broken Glass, so while I was thinking it over, with the image of this enormous condom fixed in my head, like some image from a surrealist painting, I started get weird ideas about things, I stopped sleeping at night, I thought maybe someone had been in the house, Céline’s lover, perhaps, or maybe the local African guy, this Ferdinand my son had mentioned, and at that point I saw red, I could see everything falling apart, my happiness gone, it didn’t make sense for some devil to come and screw up everything in my private paradise, I was way out of control, I considered murder — with a knife, a screwdriver, an axe, a hammer, Céline was no longer my Céline, she felt dirty, debased, impure, criminal, I would have to kill her and her lover, the two of them, I was sure she was the one who’d gone running after said Ferdinand, wiggling her ass in that obscene way of hers, I’d have to kill them both together, set an ambush for them, it’s not hard to catch a white woman who’s two-timing you with a negro, you just have to say something insulting about Africa and negroes, that all negroes are starving, mud-hut-dwelling idle good-for-nothings with their civil wars and their machete brawls, and a white woman will instantly give herself away, but I decided it wasn’t a good idea to go down that route with her, I’d look like a racist, however justified, and besides, I had no proof, so I let the incident pass, and life went on as usual, I was angry with myself for being so paranoid, things were okay, though I still couldn’t understand how that condom came to be in my house, and since God always has one eye open, after a few days of deceptive calm I found another huge Manix condom floating in the bidet because the problem with condoms is, you think you’ve got rid of them by flushing them down the toilet, but then they pop back up again, and this time I decided I wouldn’t just ignore it, I’m not stupid, after all, I wasn’t prepared to just give them the green light, say “after you, Africans!” so they could come and screw my wife in my own private shag-o-drome, I opted for the high-risk strategy of direct action, I would conduct my own investigation, like a real detective, I wasn’t going to let my entire life be poisoned by a Manix condom, I needed a proper investigation, to understand exactly what was going on in my house while I was out, I decided, so one day, a Monday, a grey Monday morning, I told Céline I was going to work and I’d be back very late as we had a new magazine to get out in the next twenty-four hours and she swallowed my story because I never lied to her, never ever, I was always straight with her, I left the house, took the car and went and hung around in town for an hour, drinking bitter coffee and smoking like a chimney, I called work and said I was taking the day off because of a serious family matter, and I knocked back my coffee like water, I even picked up a half bottle of gin, because I needed to be in another world at the moment when I caught Céline with this Ferdinand guy — who had the nerve to come and prey on me as I imbibed my humble beverage — and there in that little bar, I kept rerunning the film of our first meeting in my head, I saw her once again, the night we met at Timis, drenched in sweat, kissing me, I saw us once more in the lift, and on the carpet, heard her screams of pleasure, and in a sudden burst of rage I banged my fist on the steering wheel and set off the horn, and I bit my lower lip and said to myself ‘what if she screams with pleasure when she’s making love with this Ferdinand?’ and I said to myself, ‘deep down I’m just a poor saddo, till now I always thought I was the only one who could send her to seventh heaven, now some bastard negro brother comes along, maybe he’s better than me, maybe he sends her to eighth or ninth heaven, well we’ll find out this evening,’ and I got back to our neighborhood thinking all these black thoughts and I parked several blocks from our house, and said a quick prayer, it was almost six o’clock in the evening, I walked about for a few minutes, the green house was just a few yards off, I went through the yard and then, as I’d had too much to drink, I had a job tiptoeing through to our bedroom, I kept bumping into things, but it didn’t matter, I was getting there, I saw the door was slightly open, I pushed it, there was no one inside, so I crept down the main corridor, that goes through the dining room, till I got to my older son’s room, my heart was pounding, part of me wanted to know the truth, part of me was terrified, and I heard some sort of rumpus coming from inside the room, laughter, and a bed creaking, then moaning, the sound of a whip lashing, and suddenly I bounded forward and the door opened like in a Columbo or a Maigret film, and there, Broken Glass, bet you won’t believe me, I saw Céline and my son in the bed, all tangled up in the poor Christ of Bomba position, but Céline was the one on top of my son, holding the whip, and they were drenched in sweat, the sheets were on the floor, I swear to you, Broken Glass, I immediately let out a scream like the cry of a mad bird, yaaaahhhhhhhhhh, I didn’t know what to do, I just stood there shaking, the world seemed to come crashing down at my feet, then I lunged at my son and flung him to the floor so I could cut his throat, but he flipped me over and punched me in the guts and as I tried to get up, Céline, who was over on the other side of the room, screaming, came to his aid, then the two of them pushed me up against the wall, I was too drunk to put up a proper fight against two adversaries whose flesh had been joined in the act of original sin, and my son set about me with the whip they used for their disgusting sport, then punched me in the guts and in the head, honestly, all over, Broken Glass, and then I passed out and they called the police, and they told the police I’d gone mad and my two daughters, who were playing out in the backyard were crying, Broken Glass, and I swear to you, when I woke up the next morning I didn’t know what was going on, I was in some kind of madhouse, an asylum, yeah, an asylum where time passed really slowly and people dressed in white coats were in constant attendance, pushing me round in a wheelchair like an Australopithecus, and they’d shaved my head and bound my hands because they were afraid I’d smash the place up, and the other inmates were all making fun of me saying ‘hey guys, come and listen to this one, look at that lunatic over there, never stops shouting, thinks his kid’s screwing his wife, heh, heh, he really is crazy,’ and they put me in the special section for dangerous lunatics who spend the whole day shouting, so I did start shouting, because in the special bit for dangerous lunatics you have to shout or the other lunatics beat you up, and I tried to explain that I wasn’t mad, my older son was screwing my wife, that my Nether Regions were his Nether Regions, that I had come across my wife and my son naked, naked as earthworms, one on top of the other in the poor Christ of Bomba position, and I said they even had a whip and my wife was the one holding the whip, like someone practicing philosophy in the boudoir, I heard people laughing in every corner, and that was when a negro woman in a white coat came up and gave me a glass of water which, on a sudden impulse, I upset, which sent my wheelchair hurtling down to the far end of the main room of the building, and the chief doctor came running up, followed by at least a half-dozen nurses, and I heard the chief doctor order, with all the lofty authority bestowed by his State doctorate in psychiatry, ‘tighten his restraints, I told you not to leave him alone for a second, we’ll double his medication, give him a jab, that’ll quiet him down once and for all for God’s sake’ and then gave me a jab to send me to sleep because they reckoned I was delirious, repeating the same thing over and over, they thought I’d made up the story about my wife and my son, because Céline told anyone who would listen that I’d gone off my head, I was a drunkard, I beat up my son, who had of course backed up Céline’s lies, and so I was given an injection to stop the ranting and raving, and I must have slept for a long time, because when I woke up I couldn’t remember anything, I really thought I must have died and gone to heaven, because there were clouds everywhere, and butterflies of a thousand different colors fluttering about at low altitude, so I said I wanted to speak to God in person, not to his angels, I said I’d only speak in the presence of God the Father, and all these angels and other celestial underlings could fuck off, and they looked at me askance and told me to calm down, they said God the Father would be ready to receive me shortly, that was the plan, I had made it to paradise, and then I saw before me a black man the size of a sculpture by Ousmane Sow, no longer young, dressed in a white coat, he walked in solemnly, like someone about to say mass, and told me he was God Almighty and I started like a young goat when I heard that, I became angry and said that was a serious insult, an unpardonable heresy, I said this guy was not God, no way, I said God was not black, and they all looked at me very shocked and sent for another man in a white coat, and he was tall too, also with grey hair, and a thick beard, blue eyes, and very white skin, and I felt myself going into a real trance, with real shuddering and shaking, like I was possessed by the Holy Spirit, and I began to speak as though I were talking to God himself and after my confession my voice suddenly failed me, I couldn’t say another word, I’d gone quite mad, I tell you, I couldn’t speak, and everyone began to look blurred, and I felt like there was constant noise all around me, and everyone was talking too loud, and my wife didn’t visit me, nor did my son, and I didn’t even recognize the colleagues who visited me with flowers and the latest issue of Paris Match, and I insulted them all so badly that after a month they all stopped coming to see me in the asylum, and my wife went to see an African lawyer from this country to ask for a divorce, who better to defend her than some guy from my own place, a guy who was born in this very neighborhood, I tell you, and I’m quite sure that shit of a no-good lawyer got down dirty in bed with Céline, because the minute she has a black man in front of her she has to get her teeth into him, I swear to you, she knows how to make love to a negro without getting tired, she got her divorce, apparently the law was quite clear on that point, she had no obligation to stick with a nutter who was known to be dangerous, a husband who wasn’t right in the head, page and paragraph number whatever of the Code civil of 1804, so she was given custody of the children, and most importantly she got me repatriated, helped by the fact that my family back home had been asking for the same thing ever since they heard about the whole unpleasant episode, and in the months leading up to my return I still said nothing, in fact I only recovered my senses the day the plane landed, when I saw my entire family gathered together, the sadness and the shame in their eyes, believe me, they were not happy, so then I started drinking, to get away from the ghosts that were haunting me, I refused to live with my parents, that humiliation I did refuse, and I started to walk, day and night, which is how I came to be here now, bowed and bent like an old man, I roam the shore, I talk with the ghosts that haunt me, and in the afternoons I come here, unfortunately, but tell me honestly, Broken Glass, in your heart of hearts, do you also think I’m mad, do you think I’m an idiot, do I sound to you like a madman, talking the usual rubbish people talk, go on, tell me the truth, promise me you’ll put down what I’ve told you in your book, you won’t tear up what you’ve written there, let me tell you again, if you don’t put all that in your book it’ll be worthless, completely worthless, you do know, don’t you, out of all the guys who come here, I’m the most important, and I’ll tell you why, because I’ve done France, that’s why, and it’s not every idiot who can say he’s done France”

I come across the Printer every day now, spilling out his story to someone or other, what he calls his ambiguous adventure, though he made out to me I was the only person he’d ever told, I do think there’s something not right in his head, sometimes what he says makes perfect sense, especially in the afternoons, but I really think this story’s scrambled his head

I like chatting with the boss of Credit Gone West, everyone knows he’s not married, and has no children, he thinks all that’s just a burden, that it’s not easy being a married man, too many problems, too much bother, that’s why he often says he’s married for life to Credit Gone West, has been already for many years now, and it’s true that sometimes he’s been seen disappearing upstairs with a woman, often a well-endowed woman, flat-chested women don’t interest him, so yes, sometimes, he’s been seen to shut himself in up there, and then come back down again later all out of breath, a smile on his face, and then we’d all know that the Stubborn Snail just got laid, then suddenly he’d get wildly generous and buy a drink for anyone who asked, sometimes I glimpsed his aged parents, back from Ngolobondo, his native village, the Stubborn Snail and his father are like two peas in a pod, but he never said anything to us about his parents, I know they’re alive, they must be even older and wearier by now, but they chose to go back and live in their village after the whole controversy over the creation of their son’s bar broke out, people who were close to them say they love their only son, and did everything to enable him to go to school and get a job in an office or become a full-time civil servant, but things turned out differently, fate chose otherwise, I don’t mean the Stubborn Snail was a dunce at school, he was at school with the present agriculture minister, Albert Zou Loukia, so no, the boss of Credit Gone West was no dunce at school, far from it, it’s even been said he was brilliant, a quite brilliant pupil, he loved dissertations, geography, arithmetic, all that jazz, and he can still recite whole poems from memory, without a single hesitation, which really blows my mind, I’ve often tried it myself, but I never get beyond two verses, and our boss particularly loves “The Death of the Wolf,” by Alfred de Vigny, he’s always reciting that, and when I hear the last verse it always brings tears to my eyes, you’d think this Alfred de Vigny guy had written the words in advance especially for him, you should hear the Stubborn Snail when he murmurs “groaning, weeping, praying — these are the coward’s way, / With energy and strength face your long and heavy task, / Tread the path which Destiny has called you to, / Then, like me, suffer and die in silence,” he recalls proudly how he got his baccalaureate at the first attempt, he could have studied further, but, alas, without warning his parents, he gave up his studies, which was the thing to do at the time, you had to go abroad and make your mark there, those were the years of the lean cattle back then, high-up people were already finding jobs for their relatives, however incompetent, and the Stubborn Snail began to work his way round Angola, Gabon, and Chad, he had always wanted to be a businessman, answerable to no one, and in the end it was during the trip to Cameroon that he got the idea of setting up his bar, with all the repercussions I described earlier, I won’t go back over all that because even when I’m drunk I hate useless repetition or padding, as used by certain writers known to be first-class drivelers, who serve up the same old stuff in every new book and try to make out they’ve created a world, my eye

“how about you, Broken Glass, how are things with you these days?” the Stubborn Snail asked me a few days ago, not for the first time, “oh, not too bad” I replied, and he said, seriously, Broken Glass, I think what you need is a bit of affection, you should find yourself a nice girlfriend, get laid once in a while, it would really do you good,” “I don’t see the point at my age,” I replied, “I tell you, you need to start over, age has nothing to do with it,” “no, who’d take on a wreck like me, you’d better be kidding, Stubborn Snail,” “I’m not, I’m quite serious, what would you say to Robinette, then, she’s a juicy mouthful, don’t you think?” he went on, “my God, not Robinette, she’s more than a mouthful for me, I’d never manage to swallow her!” I said, and I started laughing, and we both laughed, I’d just remembered Robinette’s last appearance at Credit Gone West, the boss was trying to hitch me up with a real iron lady, I thought he must be joking because Robinette drinks more than I do, she drinks like those barrels of Adelaide wine that the Lebanese sell at the Grand Marché, Robinette drinks and drinks, and never gets drunk, and when she drinks like that she goes to piss behind the bar instead of in the bathroom like everyone else, and when she pisses behind the bar she can urinate nonstop for ten minutes, it just flows and flows as though someone had turned on a public fountain, and it’s not a trick, it’s incredible, but true, men have tried to compete with her at endurance pissing, but have been forced to say farewell to arms, defeated, crushed, wiped out, mocked, rolled in the dust, in cornstarch

the last time Robinette dropped by, she came on to a guy we’d never seen before at Credit Gone West, it began with a direct attack from Robinette, the kind of invisible blow dealt by Muhammed Ali to Sonny Liston in the sixties, when he was defending his world-champion title, “hey you there, strutting about like a barnyard cock, if you can piss longer than me I’ll let you shag me, any time, any place, free of charge, I give you my word” she said, and the guy replied “show off, you don’t know what you’re taking on, I accept your challenge, Robinette, but I’m going to give you a proper going-over when we’re done, I like a fat ass with big tits,” and we all laughed, because the guy was truly a first-class braggart, he had no idea what he was up against, if he’d known the first thing about her he would have thought twice about what he was saying, there we all were, killing ourselves laughing, imagining the fellow’s corpse already, flat out on the ground, and the newcomer’s words certainly irritated Robinette, the inconquerable, the piss queen of the town, of the neighborhood, so she answered “are you mad, or what, my boy, before you start calling me fat, you win your contest, you’re just talking rubbish, no way you’re gonna beat me, not the way I see you standing here, Mr. All Mouth and No Trousers,” “oh yes I am gonna beat you, my fat lady,” says he, “oh no you’re not you jumped-up midget, you gotta be mad to try and beat me at my game, you ask any of these guys here, they’ll tell you who you’re up against” answered Robinette, “I’m no braggart darling, you’ll find I always do what I say I’m gonna do,” he riposted, “you boaster, you, you think just because you talk smart like that you can do just anything you say you can do, I say you can’t do nothing” said Robinette, and from where I was watching, some way off, I thought it must be a joke, that they knew each other already, and we were being treated to a brief scene from Three Suitors, One Husband, some hilarious farce, at any rate, I thought they really must be thick as any two thieves in this town, weird kind of people, but no, it wasn’t a play at all, and the boasting guy was actually putting up a brave show, an unknown on the circuit, unaware of what was waiting round the next river bend, dressed like a man of substance, in his black jacket, white shirt, red tie, and polished shoes, what did he take us for, beggars, bumpkins, in short, a band of workers of the world who wouldn’t unite, and we couldn’t figure how he’d got his hair, which he’d straightened and fastened behind at the neck, to shine so bright in this dry white season, when the August sunshine barely shone through the layer of cloud, but a peacock’s a peacock whatever the season, it still struts and preens in the dry white season, the fact was, even at dead of night, this guy’s hair would still have shone as bright as it shone that day, he must spend hours in front of the mirror, the straightening iron was his fetish, in a country where frizzy hair is the greatest of curses his own straight hair brought him just that little bit closer to the white man, and he smoked a lot, in an elegant way, and he introduced himself to people, saying “for those who don’t know, my first name is Casimir, I am Casimir, the unstoppable, known far and wide, I live the high life, you know, I’ve only stopped off here for a quick drink, that’s all, I’m not an old soak like the rest of you, it’s the high life for me” and I said to myself, “holy shit, who is this guy, shooting his mouth off, does he understand what kind of Vietnam he’s signing himself up for here?” and we all felt pretty antagonistic toward this Casimir, boasting about his high life, and calling us sad old soaks, why didn’t he go somewhere else for a drink, then, with all the high lifers, eh, why turn up here to remind us we were nothing but wretched upstarts, Robinette was right to say he was talking rubbish, I reckoned the guy deserved a good lesson, a bit of proper punishment, and I said to myself “in any case, so be it, the chips are down” else what’s he think he’s doing here, in his fancy get-up, like a lawyer, or an undertaker, or an opera maestro, opera being the pain-in-the-ass sort of music that people living the high life like Casimir like to listen to and applaud, even though they don’t understand a word of it, what kind of music is it that that you can’t even wiggle your butt to, when you can’t even say to the people around you “watch me dance!” what kind of music is it, if it doesn’t make you sweat, and rub at a woman’s love mound, to bring her mind round to the fatal act, but when I used to dance, I mean, when I was still a man like other men, I liked to get myself into the kind of state where I felt like I was floating down into paradise, seeing those drunken angels carry me on their wings, I was a good dancer, when I could put my partner in such a spin she’d collapse in my arms and let me decide how the night proceeded, but I’m not ready just yet to talk about myself in case you think I’m some ego-tripper with his nose stuck fast in his naval, so anyway, Robinette and this guy disappear round the back of Credit Gone West to fight out the war of the end of the world, and out the back of Credit Gone West there’s a sort of culde-sac, the perfect setting for a wide variety of lewd sexual acts, where people come from far and wide to do their dodgy business, and where our two contestants now withdrew to, followed by the rest of us, as eyewitnesses, as voyeurs, really, eager to see Casimir, he of the high life, take his tumble, and learn a little humility at last, and keep his mouth shut in company, we were all on Robinette’s side, cheering her on, applauding her efforts, and so, out the back of Credit Gone West, in a grubby corner stinking of cat’s piss and mad-cow dung, Casimir, he of the high life, slipped off his old man’s jacket and his medal, took off his fluttering tie, carefully folded up his things, put the whole lot down on the ground in a corner, then — ultimate piece of vanity, which really irritated us — checked his face in his polished shoes, who did he think he was then, asshole, why was he peering at himself when his mashed-up fig face was about to get another pounding when Robinette had finished making a fool of him, but there he was, preening away, running his hand over his hair, which he’d smoothed with a straightening iron, and which shone even in the pale August sunlight, we’d never seen a guy so full of himself, so first of all, Robinette took off her bodice wrap, which was not exactly a sight to rival La Reine Margot unhooking her corset, then she lifted her skirt wrap to just below her waist so we could see her great big behind, like a perissodactyl mammal’s, her huge plump thighs like those of a woman in a naive Haitian painting, her calves like bottles of Primus beer, she wore no panties, naughty girl, perhaps because no panties exist large enough to contain her mountainous cheeks, then, after a long, repellent belch, she raised her voice and said “God willing, the truth will be revealed at the first light of dawn, to have and have not, that is what we are about to discover, my friends,”

and then as she parted the twin towers of her buttocks we saw her sex, and all applauded, and curiously, I and all the other witnesses at once got huge erections, I’m being honest here, I’m trying to speak the truth, yeah, I got an erection simply because a woman’s backside is a woman’s backside, be it small, large, flat, or fat, striped like a zebra’s, splashed with neuralgia-inducing pigments or palm-wine stains, or pox scars, a woman’s backside is a woman’s backside, first you get a hard-on, then you decide if you’re going to go for it or if you’re not, so then we all watched Casimir High-Life take off his trousers, revealing his little legs, skinny as a wader bird’s, and knees like a web of Gordian knots, he was wearing tomato-red pants, which he pulled down to his ankles, and there was his sex, his original indivisible element, at which we all burst out laughing, and wondering where his puny piss would come from, but there he stood, calmly displaying this insignificant object, with its hairy appendages hanging down like the fruit of a breadfruit tree at the end of a dry white season, and began to knead his original indivisible element, handling it like a greasy pole, talking to it quietly, like a snake charmer before a crowd of tourists in the marketplace, he settled down to the serious task of getting it into a catholic shape, which was no easy task with all these people looking on in derision, all supporting Robinette, no easy task at all, with them all trying to put him off by whatever means possible, because of his feeble little member, but he concentrated hard, as though we didn’t exist, aware that he was on his own here, that the rest of us were all for Robinette, but it didn’t shake his confidence, far from it, he had a kind of calm assurance, paid no attention to his opponent, went about his preparations with the serenity of a professional in this kind of contest, and he shook his original indivisible element, and tugged at it and twisted it this way and that, summoning up his urine, and then suddenly off he went, whoosh, we were off, the contest had started, Robinette spread wide her elephantine legs, her entire Nether Regions now smack in our faces, and we certainly saw her sweet little pea begin to swell and suddenly there she was, giving out an animal squeal, like a hyena giving birth, we almost got sprayed with the steaming yellow liquid, spurting like a sac of water that’s suddenly been pierced, we just managed to step back in time, while in the other corner Casimir High-Life was liberating the contents of his bladder, but Robinette’s stream was heavier, hotter, more majestic, and above all had a longer range, while her cocky opponent’s came out in little fits and starts, like a baby kangaroo, a frog hoping to turn into a bull cow, a crow emulating an eagle, it wiggled and staggered and zigzagged about, tracing strange hieroglyphics on the ground, enough to give a headache to that guy they called Champollion, who enjoyed racking his brains over those drawings that look like they’ve been done by a three-year-old from the time of the pharaohs and other mummies, and this guy’s irregular output landed only a few centimeters from his feet, to the amusement of Robinette, who couldn’t resist taunting him with “you’re rubbish, go on, piss harder, piss away, you gonna fuck me like that then piss face?” and the two opponents went on pissing, each after his or her own fashion, two whole minutes is a long time to piss, but the two opponents were committed, and although his flow was in no way unorthodox, Casimir High-Life held a steady course, if I’d been in his shoes I’d already have finished pissing and have put my original indivisible element back where it belonged, while this guy had been determinedly flying his flag for over five minutes now, had closed his eyes and tilted his head back, like someone happily humming a requiem for a nun, imperturbable, deaf to all intimidation, to Robinette’s many and varied provocations, as gradually she began to step up her urinal output, and suddenly flung at him “come on, crack, you piss pot, crack, you know you will, you don’t even know how to piss, crack now, I got liters left in my reservoir, man, I’m warning you now, you watch out now, you better stop pissing if you don’t wanna be humiliated in front of all these people, you better stop now, say thank you and goodbye!” she shouted, and the guy just answered “shut up and piss, you old fat hen, the true master does not speak, why should I say ‘thank you’ and ‘goodbye,’ not me, not ever, you’re the one who’s gonna crack, Robinette, and then I’m the one who’s gonna fuck you” and he gave a squeeze of his two hairy balls, and the flow of his urine increased several notches, and we all stretched our eyes and stared, because this braggart was now pissing with much more conviction, and we could see that his original indivisible element was twice, three times its original size, and we rubbed our eyes in disbelief, as his pouches swelled up and hung there now like two old gourds filled to the brim with palm wine, and there was jubilation in his pissing, and as he pissed he whistled a snatch from an anthem sung by the scum of Trois-Cents, and after that a baroque concerto, and then a heavy metal Zao number, by which time he had everyone’s attention, meanwhile, Robinette was giving it her all, she farted several times, till we had to stick our fingers up our noses and in our ears, it smelled so bad, and ripped through the ear like fireworks at the Feast of the Goat, with an odor of contraband Nigerian camphor, sounding at times like a Mardi Gras trumpet in New Orleans and while we were closely focused on Robinette’s elephantine rear quarters, a witness informed us that on the other side, High-Life had turned a decisive corner, a miracle deserving of papal beatification, and we all dashed over to get a closer look, you should never miss a miracle, even if it doesn’t take place at Lourdes, you’ve got to try and witness those moments that people will be talking about centuries from now, better to witness it in person than have some parrot tell you a story of love in the time of cholera, so we all went hurtling over to Casimir High-Life to get a look at his historic miracle, we were all knocked sideways, something unbelievable was happening right before our eyes, you had to be there to believe it, we saw how Casmir High-Life had sketched in the dust with his urine a perfect outline of the map of France, his unremarkable output was now falling in the very heart of the city of Paris, “this is nothing,” he said, “I can do China, too, and piss on any given street in the city of Peking” and Robinette, thrown into disarray, turned round and threw us a glance before shouting “hey come back here, you lot, come back, what you all looking at down there then, you all a bunch of homos, then, or what?” but we were all quite captivated by the mysterious boastful contestant and began to applaud him and call him Casimir the Geographer, and he began to rise to the challenge “I’m a marathon man, I am, not a sprinter, I’ll screw her, I’ll wear her out, just you wait and see” he said, and whistled some more of his Trois-Cent riffraff’s anthem, and his baroque concerto and his number by Zao, and we applauded more and more as he added the various regions of France to his map, while alongside his magnificent drawing there was another little drawing, “hey, what’s that thing he’s drawn next to the map of France, what’s that then?” asked one witness, distracted by Casimir High-Life’s artistic flair, “that’s Corsica, idiot” the artist replied, without interrupting his flow, and we all gave a round of applause for Corsica, and for some the word Corsica was a new discovery, and people started mumbling, and arguing, till one guy who was seriously confused asked who the president of Corsica was, what kind of state it was, what its capital city was, whether the president was black or white, and we all shouted him down saying “idiot, imbecile,” and by now the two of them had been locked in urinal combat for over ten minutes, and I began to want to have a piss myself, often when one person’s pissing it makes you want to do likewise, that’s why when you go to the hospital the doctor says to leave the tap running to make you want to go, so anyway on they went, but in the meantime, one of the witnesses, who’d been staring at Robinette’s butt the whole time, suddenly whipped his thing out of his pants and began to paw at it feverishly, and we heard a great orgasmic bellow, like that of a decapitated pig at the Feast of the Goat, and the two contestants, still concentrating hard, still focused intently on their task, went on pissing, “hang on, if it’s going to be like that I’m stopping, I’m stopping right here and now, I can’t work in these kinds of conditions, who do you take me for, eh, I’m serious, I’m stopping now, the show’s over” and everyone turned round, and there was Robinette, and she had indeed stopped pissing, claiming that we were putting her off by behaving like infant schoolkids, but at least she had the grace and sportsmanship to go over to Casimir High-Life to finger his thing affectionately and say “you did well, my boy, you win today, you are a true pisser, now let’s see if you can come for as long as you can piss, just tell me where and when and I’m all yours” and we all gave her a clap because it was the first time we’d seen her concede like that and indirectly ask for a ceasefire, so Robinette and Casimir High-Life arranged a meeting in a rented room over by the place des Fetes, in Trois-Cents, we weren’t too pleased about the private nature of their rendezvous, we would have preferred them to do it there and then, in front of us, and we all went back into the bar feeling a bit disappointed, while Robinette and the victorious Casimir High-Life dived into a taxi and went off to their rented room, and no one knows what happened between the two of them, Casimir High-Life was never seen again, Robinette turns up occasionally, but she won’t tell us what happened, my guess is, she probably took a real hammering in bed with Casimir, and wasn’t quite up to the mark, otherwise she’d have got us all drunk and given us all the details of her victory over swanky Casimir and his high life

in fact I wouldn’t mind screwing Robinette, I haven’t had a good screw for a while, beggars can’t be choosers, I don’t even know if I’d go the whole way with her, women like Robinette must brew up seismic orgasms, you’d have to keep jogging away for hours, whip her up well till she squeals, and one reason I said no to the Stubborn Snail’s proposition, much as I’d have liked to take him up on it, was because I didn’t want to tread on the Stubborn Snail’s toes, it wouldn’t have felt right, perched on top of her, imagining the Stubborn Snail himself jigging around on her like an epileptic rabbit, and anyway, what if the boss himself got jealous, and I wouldn’t like to mess up my relationship with the Stubborn Snail with that kind of complication, I don’t want to fall out with him when he’s like a brother to me, and in any case, would Robinette actually let me take a ride on her, a wet dishcloth like me, and there’s a big technical problem, I don’t think I’m that well endowed, let’s be realistic, and considering all the excess baggage she’s carrying behind, I’d probably spend the whole day scouring her Nether Regions for her G-spot and only ever get as far as her B-spot, if that, and still have her spots C, D, E, and F to go, so I’d never satisfy her properly, I’d better just forget it, what I really need at this point in the story is a good rest, I don’t want to write another word now, not for a while, I just want to drink, do nothing but drink, take huge big gulps of drink, the last I’ll ever have, and if my mental arithmetic’s up to scratch, I reckon I must have been writing flat out for several weeks now, some people like to make fun of what they call my new occupation, there’s even a rumor that I’m working for an exam that’ll get me back into teaching, they say that’s why I want to stop drinking and stop coming here, but that’s nonsense, I’m hardly going to go back into teaching aged sixty-four, am I, in any case, I need a rest, I need to put my pen down, not read back what I’ve written, and carry on when I’m ready, whenever that may be, but I will carry on, I just don’t want to spend all my energy on it, and when I’ve finished the second half I’ll go, go somewhere far, far away, I don’t know where, but I’m going, and I don’t care what the Stubborn Snail says, I’ll be far away by then, far from Credit Gone West