Best European Fiction 2013 (30 page)

Madame Zabée lives, as I do, in the attic of her guesthouse. She insists on saving the loveliest rooms for her boarders. She has made up a very cozy little apartment for herself, with embroidered draperies on the walls and decorative objects from all over the globe displayed on shelves—souvenirs from her trip around the world. It’s hard to guess her age because it seems to change throughout the day, from one moment to the next, depending on her constantly changing hairstyles and outfits. Her smooth face is always perfectly made up. She wears exotic clothes that give her a certain flair. She also likes jewelry; she has a whole collection, from all the countries where she’s lived. Throughout her long trip, she always worked in hotels. She is proud to say that her guesthouse is her first home and that she worked hard to buy it and then fix it up the way she wanted. She wants her boarders to feel at home, too. Her guesthouse is very well maintained. She watches over everything, conscientious about the comfort of each tenant. She spares no effort and seems to live only for her guesthouse. She likes to play at keeping whomever speaks with her off balance, so that it’s impossible to have a stable image of her. With her, I can be sure of nothing, even if everything appears to be so well established.

My schedule isn’t very different from the one I kept in Loisy. I go back up to my room around eight in the morning after waiting for Madame Zabée to come and tell me that my shift as the night watchman is finished. She is usually punctual and respectful of my time. Then I sleep until the early afternoon. The boarders get up at the same time that I do, and I have breakfast with them at the host’s table. Madame Zabée takes advantage of the sleeping guesthouse to do the chores, buy groceries, and cook. Always thrifty, she has no household employees. She wants to do everything herself.

After lunch, I go for a walk. I cross the Quartier des Perles and go up the boulevard as far as the Gare du Nord. Then I go down toward the Seine. I walk softly along the quays. I find it so moving to walk alone in Paris. I need to walk, to walk without stopping. I don’t go far from the Seine, which is my landmark, much as the Canal Saint-Martin was for Amid when he lived in Paris. I don’t dare to sit on a bench or go into a café. With my false papers, I feel as criminal as an illegal immigrant. But as long as I walk, I have a sense of security because I melt into the crowd. Madame Zabée insisted that I should always keep my papers on me, in case I’m stopped, to have my identity verified, but that doesn’t reassure me, because the papers are forged. At Saint-Michel, I get on the metro and go up to the Gare du Nord, and then I come back on foot to the Passage du Soir via the most direct route, as it’s time to go back for dinner, just before I begin the night watch. I almost always dine alone because by then the boarders are already busy in their rooms. The night for them begins earlier than it does for me.

When I get back from my walk, I take care always to greet Ali. He’s finished his nap and is always in his shop at the end of the day. I buy what I need from him. You can find everything in his corner store. He comes from a small village located in the south of Tamza. What a coincidence that it was in precisely this town, in the teacher’s house, that I was arrested while I slept peacefully in Ama’s arms. I don’t tell Ali because I don’t want to remind him of my past. Unlike Madame Zabée, he has never been sympathetic toward the failed revolutionary movement that I was a part of. He made that very clear to me. According to him, there is no better regime than the one in Tamza. If he chose to live in Paris, it had nothing to do with politics, but with business. He tells me, laughing, that his shop is like a hive—it makes the best honey. I wonder what he does with the money he’s made from his honey, as he works hard and seems to live modestly. Every man has a secret, and to penetrate this secret would be fatal: that’s part of one of the Chinese poems that I meditate upon during my night watch, while I think of Mateo. It feels like he left a long time ago. I don’t want to admit that I miss him. I don’t want to think about the old train station at Loisy.

Ali always invites me to have a cup of tea in the back of his shop. He doesn’t drink alcohol and doesn’t offer any to his friends. He says to me: “I obey all the precepts of my religion. So far, I have had
baraka,
blessings. God is great and merciful. He protects the Quartier des Perles and its foolishness. Without Him watching over us, we would be lost.”

I am friendly but reserved with Ali. I don’t want him to try to indoctrinate me. It wouldn’t work and he would blame me for it. I don’t want to know with whom he spends his time in the neighborhood, aside from Madame Zabée. He lets me know that he is in contact with immigrants from Tamza who have been successful in Paris and to whom, if I wanted, he could introduce me. “They need a guy like you.” I thanked him, declining his offer. Out of the question for me to meet the legitimate Tamza network, whose reputation is known even in Fort Gabo prison! I want to lead my life alone, even if I have to forgo certain protections and advantages. With Ali, I maintain good relations while keeping my distance. I’ve asked him several times about Madame Zabée, but he pretends not to hear me. He won’t talk to me about her.

Madame Zabée’s guesthouse lives for the night, like the aptly named Passage du Soir—the Evening Passage. I understand now why Madame Zabée is so demanding of her night watchman. The boarders need me constantly. They call me incessantly. I have to bring them coffee or a drink, go buy them cigarettes, or maybe medicine, or oils with which to massage their backs, I have to fix sandwiches for them, comfort them on the nights that work weakens them and when one or two are sick or having a nervous breakdown. I learn to be a jack-of-all-trades: errand boy, waiter, counselor, psychologist, nurse. There are often little incidents that need to be handled carefully in order to keep things from going sour, such as a dishonest client with demands that can never be satisfied, and who starts threatening one of the boarders. Then I have to come and help the boarder so that his client can leave the hotel without doing him any harm. I must never call Madame Zabée unless there’s a serious incident. She only works during the day. At night I take the baton. So far I’ve managed to avoid any real trouble. I’ve had to be smart and cunning. I’ve discovered talents in myself that I didn’t know I had. I’ve entered into an unknown world that seems mysteriously familiar to me. The boarders are satisfied with me.

But why did I say “his” client, when I should have said “her”? As a matter of fact, I call them all by their nicknames, which are always feminine. There are seven men, or rather women: Sophia, Ingrid, Macha, Jeanne, Greta, Lauren, and Marylin. They keep their true identities secret; only Madame Zabée and the inspector know. The inspector tried all of them before deciding on Marylin as the only one worthy of taking care of him. I can tell that having been rejected by the inspector is a relief for the others. At the guesthouse, nobody ever says his name, as if to allow him his anonymity. They just call him “the inspector.” As a client, he has a terrible reputation. As an inspector, though, the girls have nothing to complain about. He lets them work without any drama. He’s too attached to Madame Zabée to risk spoiling the relationship with her. It’s impossible to tell who is more indebted to the other.

Each boarder has a painful history, and each one lives in unstable circumstances. Sophia is originally from Mozambique, Ingrid is Lebanese, Jeanne is from Brazil, Greta comes from Ukraine, Macha from Turkey, Lauren grew up in a Palestinian camp, Marylin was born in the Caucasus. Madame Zabée’s guesthouse is a temporary refuge for each of them. They dream of changing their lives and living somewhere else. They feel close to me since they know my background, even if they lead such different lives. I may be a stranger in their world, but I am nonetheless a part of it since I am the watchman. I never could have imagined that such a thing would happen to me. Before becoming night watchman in Madame Zabée’s guesthouse, I had never met a transvestite. In the Movement, nobody even joked about that kind of thing. And in prison, a transvestite who revealed himself as such would not have survived.

Even when they exasperate me, I feel fondly toward them. I find them funny, imaginative. They like to act out scenes inspired by cult films whose scripts they know by heart. Their nicknames are a wink to the actress of their dreams. They were born for the stage. I like the provocative way they dress and make themselves up. I like their gestures, their glances, their hoarse and seductive voices. They all borrow one another’s dresses, accessories, and even accents, vocabulary, and roles. They play at resembling one another so that the clients mix them up, or else they’ll change their nicknames just to create pandemonium. They take stimulants and soft drugs to give themselves the courage to face the nighttime clients of the Evening Passage. They certainly don’t work for their own pleasure, I can attest to that. The clients allow themselves total license with the girls, at least to the extent that this is permitted. They spare them nothing. The girls are left to the clients’ mercy. Despite their toughness and their cynicism, they are fragile. And yet, they expose themselves to danger, as if to scorn their own lives.

Madame Zabée has forbidden hard drugs in her guesthouse. Any boarder who violates the ban is immediately thrown out. She repeats the rule regularly in a solemn tone: “No hard drugs in the guesthouse.” She asked me to keep an eye on the clients and to throw out anyone who’s shooting up, because the serious problems always start with them. It’s on account of this prohibition that the inspector turns a blind eye to the nocturnal activities of the boarders. And if one of the boarders should happen to go into withdrawal, she has only to leave. There’s no shortage of similar guesthouses in the Quartier des Perles. I pretend to enforce Madame Zabée’s orders, but I have no illusions. The residents and their clients do what they want in their rooms; I’m not there to watch them. The important thing is that there is no evidence, and no drama.

To amuse themselves, the boarders try to seduce me. Marylin is my favorite. She invites me into her room whenever she has a break. She needs to unburden herself. She talks to me about the village in the Caucasus where she was born, which no longer exists because it was bombed on the pretext that it was harboring terrorists. She lost all of her people. Now she has nowhere to go. She goes where chance takes her. Playing at changing her sex is her way of responding to the drama of her life, of mocking her life, all the time. That’s the only thing you can do, she says, shuffle the cards and throw off the game, get dizzy and pretend, and never stop, because that’s when everything would crumble. I never get bored listening to her repeat her stories. I find her magnificent in her sequined dress and the boa thrown around her neck, with her false eyelashes and her platinum hair, lying on her bed where she takes breaks as she waits for a client to call. She rolls her
R
s outrageously and everything about her is excessive and alarming. She spends all her money on having dresses made for her that are copies of the ones that Marilyn wore in her classic movies. She wears them for her clients who are Marilyn fans. But she also goes out of her way to botch her impersonation, to ridicule her clients. Deep down, all the way deep down, there’s a small lost girl, softly crying. Marylin may eventually come to identify with her heroine, even if she pretends the contrary. She intimidates me, so I stay in my role of attentive and protective night watchman. I don’t want to take advantage of my position to gain her favors. I also don’t want to incite any jealousy among the other residents. They love each other even as they hate each other. Their complicity does not exclude cruel rivalries.

Madame Zabée respects them, and perhaps more than that. I don’t know exactly what kind of rapport she has with each of them. She never unveils her true identity, even in her moments of abandon. The boarders are grateful to her. Thanks to her, they can work in good conditions without being harassed by the police. Certain mornings, when the clients have left, and there’s been some small, happy reason to celebrate (a birthday, a holiday, a gift offered by a client, an upcoming trip), there’s suddenly a festive atmosphere at Madame Zabée’s guesthouse. Ingrid and Macha play music to accompany Marylin and Lauren, who take turns singing songs about their villages. Marylin’s was destroyed by a Russian bomb, and Lauren’s was scratched off the map after being razed by Israeli tanks. Their voices rise miraculously, bearing no relationship to their regular tones. When they sing, they seem like twin sisters. Sophia dances a little apart from the others to a melody that she alone can hear. Greta and Jeanne mimic the grotesque mannerisms of their nighttime clients. Madame Zabée appreciates these moments of intimacy with her boarders. She reserves special tendernesses for each girl, like a suitor. She loves spectacle and revelry. Despite my fatigue, I join the party, dressing myself up as the Queen of Sheba and offering extravagant gifts to Greta and Jeanne. Madame Zabée likes my little number. She feels I’ve adapted well and quickly to my work at the guesthouse. It’s been a success; this probationary period has been conclusive. I’ll do just fine as the night watchman.

When there’s a moment of calm and nobody needs me, I turn on the TV and flip through the foreign news channels. I try to understand the state of the world from which I’ve been severed since my detention at Fort Gabo. What I see is total upheaval, as if all our ideas had drowned in the sea, and the Movement, like an old ship that’s rotted from the inside out, had sunk into the bottomless depths. I feel like I no longer understand anything that’s happening.

Like Madame Zabée and the other boarders, Marylin is interested in my plans to become a filmmaker. She wants to be an actress in my film. She says that she would prefer acting in a movie to playing the role of Marylin with her clients. Playing around, she begs me: “Please, Diego, write a part for me so that for once in my life I can appear on the screen just as I am and I won’t be forgotten. All the roles that I play here are false. I want finally to play a part that’s mine and that’s still unknown even to me. Please, do it for me.”