Broken Glass (13 page)

 

 

 

I must say Diabolica did not understand my penchant for alcohol, she tried to account for it, she put it down to my mother's death,
but what did she know about her death, really, she knew no more than the wagging tongues of Trois-Cents, I preferred her not to mention my mother's death, it really made me mad, I could even turn aggressive, and I've always been in control of my impulses, I've never let anger get the better of me, did she ever hear me criticize her mother, with her one eye bigger than the other, did she ever hear me criticize her father, with his clubfoot and his hernia dangling down between his legs, tell me that, but Diabolica didn't let that bother her, she went on and on about it, waking up my mother's corpse, disturbing her in her search for eternal rest, death's not to be played with like that, we need to put things back in context here, and I actually started drinking well before my mother kicked the bucket, even if I have to admit that her disappearance speeded things up somewhat, but it saddened me to hear Diabolica linking my passion for alcohol to the death of my poor mother, and I felt I really mustn't allow her to draw that particular conclusion, in fact I think I actually consumed rather fewer bottles during the weeks following my mother's disappearance, it was my way of mourning, a mark of respect I owed her, and I only resumed normal activity once I was sure that my mother's corpse had rotted away, and her soul had arrived at last in the garden of Eden

 

 

 

let's say my mother died by drowning in the dirty water of the river Tchinouka, it wasn't her fault, it was all very mysterious, and I'm going to just say a few quick things about it so that things are a bit clearer than the water of the river Tchinouka, because it's important never to confuse one dead person with another, even if the dead all have the same color skin, I mean, just a little word, even if it means my bicycle chicken goes completely cold,
I'll still eat it later, so on the night of her departure for the next world, my mother had a terrible dream, she got up from her bed, eyes closed, mouth wide open, arms stretched out before her as though driven by an invisible force, the shades of the night, and she opened the door of her shack, and went down to the river, hoping to find my father, whom I never knew, it seems he was a highly regarded palm wine tapper in Louboulou, it seems in fact that he had two passions, jazz and palm wine, so those guys like Coltrane, Armstrong, Davis, Monk, Parker, Bechet, and the other negroes who played trumpet and clarinet, he knew all their tunes, which they say were invented in the cotton or coffee fields, to deal with the deep melancholy of their ancestral homeland, and in response, as well, to the whiplashes of their slave-driver masters, who could never understand why the caged bird sang, so anyway, my father was mad for these black men's tunes, it was even said that he collected 33s and 45s of these guys on their trumpets and clarinets, and they say he died from witchcraft at point-blank range, they say someone shot him with a bullet he'd need to have had eyes in the back of his head to avoid, they say he was shot in the back while he slept, because he always slept on his front, even though several sorcerers in Louboulou had warned him not to, and they say it was his uncle who did it, so as to inherit his palm wine tapping tools, not to mention his 33s and 45s of the black men playing their trumpets and clarinets, but the whole story as my mother tried to tell it was too complicated, she wanted to justify her decision to leave the village of Louboulou for the town, she had decided to leave the village where these fine folk lived chiefly to protect me from the witchcraft at point-blank range and from the people who still had it in for my father even though he was dead, and she could see I had my doubts about the story of the nocturnal, mystical gunshot, well, I was
less than two years old at the time, and I don't know if I look like my father, people say I look more like the cowardly wretch who killed my progenitor in cold blood and who inherited my father's collection of 33s and 45s of the black men playing their trumpets and clarinets, so my mother's death seemed to me every bit as mysterious as my father's, and at the time she died, the papers called the good woman's death, which was just a small news item, a nocturnal accident, and they ran a headline about the body of an old woman being found on the banks of the river Tchinouka, and that's why whenever I walk by the river I shout abuse at the water, I spit on the ground, I throw stones far, far out, right down into the depths of these vile waters, and rail at the injustice of it all

 

 

 

I set out to talk about my mother, but then the fugitive shade of my father appeared, so to get back to the point, I was saying how my mother's death was also a mystery, she rose from her bed at midnight, in the clutches of a dreadful dream, walked down to the river Tchinouka, and there reenacted in every last detail a scene from the Bible, she walked on the dirty water of the river Tchinouka, as though she might cross over to my father in the other world, and then the dirty water of the river Tchinouka gulped her down into its belly, then spat her back out again like a piece of flotsam on the bank, saying it didn't want her skeletal body in its watery belly, and the local cleaning workers came across her disfigured corpse, nibbled here and there by the small fry in the river and by other fish with no sense of decency, who were hanging around getting bored on the tide of the slimy wave, and the funeral wake was held at our place, on our lot, my mother's body was laid out in the open air, according to the
custom of Louboulou, and for this I must thank Diabolica, she looked after my mother very properly, and it was she who sent the contributions card around the neighborhood so that people could support us in our time of grief, and it was she who went to the morgue to identify the body because I don't like looking at corpses, and it was she who led the chorus of women beneath the shelter made of palm leaves, and while they vied in their weeping and their wailing for the dead, Diabolica chased away the nasty flies with their worm-eaten feet, hoping for a look in at my mother's remains, and it was she who supervised the washing of the body, because not just anybody knows how to wash a stiff, and it was she, as well, who sent an obituary notice to the radio station, to announce my mother's death, and it was she who sent out a second communication, thanking everyone who had assisted us during this difficult time, and throughout these days of sadness, Diabolica dressed in black and daubed her face with white clay, and insisted on fasting throughout the funeral time, walking barefoot, leaving her hair uncombed, not looking at men, not talking to me, not saying hello, because that was the custom, and I can only conclude, in all honesty, that from this point of view, she was a woman I have nothing to reproach for, to this day

 

 

 

but it turns out Diabolica always thought that being an only son, who had already lost his father, I took refuge in drink, hoping somehow to get even by drinking red wine, since I'd never be able to save my mother's memory by drinking all the dirty water of the river Tchinouka, and I swear, I wanted to build my life again, fit back together the broken pieces, and mend the holes, and stop spending all my time with the bottle of Sovinco red, but
it wasn't my fault, was it, that I'd been fired from my teaching post, I swear I loved teaching, I swear I loved having all my little pupils around me, I swear I loved teaching them their times tables, I swear, too, that I loved teaching them their past participles conjugated with
avoir
, and whether you have to make them agree or not, depending on the time of day and the weather, and the poor little things, dazed, confused, sometimes even angry, would ask me why the past participle does agree today at four o'clock, but didn't yesterday at midday, just before lunch break, and I would tell them that what mattered in the French language was not the rules, but the exceptions to the rules, I would tell them that if they could understand, and memorize all the exceptions in this language, which was as changeable as the weather, then the rules would automatically become apparent, they would be obvious from first principles, and when they were grown up they could forget all about the rules and the sentence structure, because by then they would see that the French language isn't a long, quiet river, but rather a river to be diverted

 

 

 

by rights I should never have been a teacher, I haven't got a secondary-teaching certificate, I never went to teacher-training college, but diplomas can often distort the business of living, a true vocation arises from a combination of circumstances, it's not usually the ones who wear out the seat of their pants at school who become good teachers, and in my case, I was forced into the profession, when I' d only just completed my second year of study at Kengué-Pauline, and the government decreed that since there was a national shortage of teachers, all the poor sods who'd got their elementary-education certificate should go off and teach, and that's how I fell flat-footed into
teaching, that's how I came to learn on the job, but in actual fact I taught myself, even though some egghead wearing spectacles came from the political capital to give us intensive training in pedagogy, he fancied himself as an intellectual, said I had no talent, that I didn't speak or pronounce French properly, and the government had made a real blunder, letting ignoramuses like me set our children on the path of life, ever since then I've always hated intellectuals of all kinds, because it's always like that with intellectuals, they talk and talk, but nothing concrete ever comes out of it, only more and more discussions about discussions, then they quote some other intellectuals who said this, that, or the next thing, and who saw it all coming, and then they have a good scratch of their own navels, and they think everyone else is stupid, and blind, as though no one could get through life without philosophizing, and the problem is, these pseudo-intellectuals, they philosophize without actually living, they know nothing about life, and life goes on anyway, following its own course, countering all their second-rate Nostradamus predictions, and they all go round congratulating each other, but what you notice is, pseudo-intellectuals all love suits, and little round glasses, and ties, because an intellectual without a tie is basically stark naked, incapable of proper thought, but I'm proud of how I got here, I did things myself, I'm a self-made man, I don't even know how to tie a tie, but I've read whatever I've been able to get my hands on, and it's obvious no one person could ever read everything, life's not long enough for that, and I've also noticed that there are far more people who talk about bad books than there are people who actually read and talk about real ones, and the people who talk about bad books are merciless about the other ones, well they can just go and get lost, there's more to this world than their little navels, that's not
my problem, this book isn't about teaching anyone anything, each of us must cultivate his garden as best he can

 

 

 

I could see why they wanted to fire me from my teaching job, the pretext was alcohol, so, just two months after they did fire me, Diabolica started sleeping at her parents' place, which meant our house was left empty, as we had never had children, and the local thieves and bandits dropped by and looted everything, my TV, my radio, my dining table, my bed, and my books, including my San-Antonio novels, which meant much more to me than the books those people detached from real life told us were the unit of intellectual measurement, and the thieves looted everything, they even took the last book I'd been reading,
Diary of a Thief
, I'm sure they thought there would be stuff in it about learning to steal without getting caught by the police, and Diabolica said the whole thing was my fault, she said it was my drunken friends who stole our things, and I said my friends were drunks but they weren't thieves, and she said I was covering for them, I was their accomplice, and then she left for good, leaving me a scrap of paper on which she'd written, possibly at midnight, “I'm off” and when I turned the paper over, I saw she'd added, possibly also at midnight, “finding an ending,” neither of these telegrams meant anything to me, and I looked for her everywhere, in all the backstreets of the district Trois-Cents, in the town center, at funeral wakes, and then one day I saw her walking past Credit Gone West, I thought I was dreaming, and I ran after her and pleaded with her, I said “we were happy,” and I also said “I can't live without you, if you leave me I'm fucked, come back home” but she wouldn't change her mind, she looked me up and down and said “you're already fucked, you're not going to change, leave me in peace, you old tramp”

I turned into one of Credit Gone West's most loyal customers the year I got thrown out of teaching, I consolidated my friendship with the Stubborn Snail, and became so much part of the fittings and furnishings that the boss said to me “you know, Broken Glass, if you'd been a bit more together, I'd have taken you on as a bartender here” and I replied that I was together and if he doubted the clarity of my mind he could test me on my times tables and he said “no, Broken Glass, business isn't about times tables, it's about clarity of mind” and I said I was perfectly clearheaded and he laughed and we had a drink together and then we laughed some more, there was one tree I would always go and piss under, and tell it my wanderer's tale, and the tree would weep to hear me, because, don't let them tell you otherwise, trees also weep, and sometimes I would shout insults at Diabolica under this tree, and at her mother too, with her one eye smaller than the other, and her father, with his clubfoot and his hernia hanging down between his legs, and when it was really tough, only the tree understood me, and moved its branches, to show that it cared and whispered low that I was a loser, but a nice one, and that society just didn't understand me, and the tree and I would have these long conversations, as the negro would say to his admiral when bringing the water for his coffee, and I promised my leafy friend that when God called me back the next time I would choose to be a tree