Broken Glass (14 page)

 

 

 

I was by now a real regular, and spent my entire time at Credit Gone West, I sat through the hours, come rain or shine, I never left my adopted home, I couldn't imagine being anywhere else, so there I'd be, in the middle of the night, dozing on my stool
after eating kebabs sold by an old Benin woman at the entrance to the bar, long before the reign of our dear bald soprano, Mama Mfoa, it was a fine life, and I must make sure to write it down legibly, that I'm proud of those moments of yore, never let it be said I was having a hard time, that I was bored, that I was sad about Diabolica leaving, that I was nursing a grievance, or was planning to write a letter to the friend who did not save my life or to claim a compassion protocol for my trouble

 

 

 

I heard it said, not long ago, that Diabolica was living with a good husband, and they had children, I don't care, there's no such thing as a good husband, I was the man she needed, the rest are just wretched freeloaders and liars who'll exploit her till they've used her up, I'm not jealous, even if I haven't had sex since then, I'm aware that my sex life is a bit like the desert of the Tartars, nothing in front, nothing behind, only the shadows of women talk to me, in truth I'm a man who longs for a distant love, don't expect me to speak to you of love and other demons, fortunately at this unhappy period of my life I still had my love of the bottle, the bottles understood me, they stretched out their arms to me, and whenever I found myself sitting in the bar, which I still love dearly, and always will, I would watch, and observe, and register the doings of the people around me, that's why it's important to explain more exactly why I'm writing this book, to be clear about how and why the Stubborn Snail compelled me to record, witness and pass on the history of this place

 

 

 

in fact the Stubborn Snail took me aside one day and said with a confidential air, “Broken Glass, I want to talk to you about
something that's been bothering me, in fact I've been thinking about this for a long time, it's important, I think you should write, I mean, I think you should write a book,” and I was rather taken aback and I said “a book on what,” and he pointed at the terrace of Credit Gone West and murmured “a book about us, a book about this place, there's no other place like it on earth, except The Cathedral in New-Bell, Cameroon,” and I laughed, I thought he must have some other reason, that this was some kind of snare without end, and he said “don't laugh, now, I really mean it, you ought to write, you know you can,” and the look on his face told me this was no two-Congolese-franc joke, and I answered “but you're the boss, you're the one who knows what goes on here, I wouldn't know where to start,” and he poured me a drink before bouncing back with “believe me, I've tried it a few times myself, but it never works out, I just don't have that little bug that writers have, you have, it shows when you talk about literature, your eyes light up and you look all wistful, but I don't think it's frustration, or bitterness either, because I know you're not at all a frustrated man, or a bitter man, you have no cause for regrets, my friend,” and I said nothing, so he went on, “you know, I remember once you told me about a famous writer who drank like a fish, what was his name again,” and I didn't answer and he continued “well anyway, since we had that talk, I've been wondering whether you didn't start drinking in imitation of the writer whose name I've forgotten, and come to look at you, you do actually look like a writer, and the reason you don't care much about your life is because you know you can invent all sorts of other lives and you're just one character in the great book of life, of shit and tears, you're a writer, I know, that's why you drink, you are not of this world, some days I get the feeling you're deep in conversation with those guys like Proust or Hemingway, guys like Labou Tansi
or Mongo Beti, I can tell you are, so you should just let yourself go, you're never too old to write,” and for the first time ever I saw him knock back his drink in one gulp, whereas normally he only ever drinks half a glass, and he said with a military air “Broken Glass, I want your inner anger out from inside you, go on, explode, vomit, spit, cough, or ejaculate, I don't care how you do it, just turn out something about this bar for me, about some of the guys who hang out here, and especially about yourself,” for a moment his words stopped the words in my mouth, I felt like crying, I couldn't remember which drunken writer it was we'd talked about, in any case, quite a lot of them drank, and some writers today drink lethal amounts, what had got into the Stubborn Snail that day, needling down deep inside me, huh, so in my own defense I said over and over, “I'm not a writer, and besides, who'd want to read about these people's lives, or mine, there's no interest in that, you'd never fill a whole book,” and he came straight back saying, “who cares, Broken Glass, you've got to write, it's interesting to me, for a start,” and I felt proud that he'd asked me, and actually the idea began to take shape in my head from that point on, fueled by one glass of red after another, I outlined my real thoughts about writing to the Stubborn Snail, and it was simple to express myself, because it is easy to talk about writing when, like me, you've written nothing, and I told him that in this crappy country everyone thinks he can turn his hand to writing, even when there's no life behind the words, and I told him that sometimes on the TV in a bar on the Avenue of Independence I'd see some of those writers who wear jackets and ties, bright red scarves, sometimes round glasses, smoking pipes or cigars, trying to look good, like smart young things, the kind of writers who take photos looking as though they've got great works under their belts and all they want people to talk about is their own
navels, the size of a clockwork orange, some of them even fancy themselves neglected writers, convinced of their own genius, when they've produced nothing but sparrows' droppings, they're paranoid, embittered, jealous, envious, always convinced there's some great conspiracy against them, and they say that even if one day they did win the Nobel Prize for literature, they'd categorically turn it down, they don't want to find themselves with dirty hands, the Nobel Prize for literature is a mesh, a wall, iron in the soul, the bets have already been placed, to the point where you start wondering what
is
literature, and yes all these crappy writers would turn down the Nobel Prize in order to preserve the road to freedom, I'll believe that when I see it, and I also said to the Stubborn Snail that if I was a writer I would ask God to grant me the gift of humility, to give me the strength to put my own writing into perspective alongside the giants of this world who have put pen to paper, and that I would say three cheers for true genius, and would keep silent rather than speak of the mediocrity all around us, and that would be the only way you could hope to write something remotely like real life, but I'd say it in my own words, twisted words, incoherent words, nonsensical words, I'd write down words as they came to me, I'd begin awkwardly and I'd finish as awkwardly as I'd begun, and to hell with pure reason, and method, and phonetics, and prose, and in this shit-poor language of mine things would seem clear in my head but come out wrong, and the words to say it wouldn't come easy, so it would be a choice between writing or life, that's right, and what I really want people to say when they read me is “what's this jumble, this mess, this muddle, this mishmash of barbarities, this empire of signs, this chitchat, this descent to the dregs of belles lettres, what's with this barnyard prattle, is this stuff for real, and where does it start, and where the hell does it end?” and
my mischievous answer would be “this jumble of words is life, come on, come into my lair, check out the rotting garbage, here's my take on life, your fiction's no more than the output of a load of old has-beens designed to comfort other old has-beens, and until the day your characters start to see how the rest of us earn our nightly crust, there'll be no such thing as literature, only intellectual masturbation, with you all rubbing up against each other like donkeys,” and to sum up I said to the Stubborn Snail that, sadly, I wasn't a writer, I could not be a writer, all I ever did was watch the world, and talk to my bottles and to my tree, the one I like to piss under, to whom I had made a promise to come back in vegetal form, and live a new life alongside it, and because of that I would rather leave the job of writing to the intellectually gifted, the writers I so loved to read in the days when I still read in order to learn, I would leave writing, I said, to those who sing of the joy of life, who struggle, and who dream without ceasing of the extension of the domain of the struggle, those who invent fancy ways of dancing the polka, those who can astonish the gods, those who wallow in disgrace, those who walk steadfastly toward manhood, those who create a practical dream, those who sing of the land without shadows, those who live in transit in one corner of the earth, those who see the world through an attic window, those who, like my late father, listen to jazz and drink palm wine, those who can describe an African summer, those who tell tales of barbarous weddings, those who retreat to the summit of the magic rock of Tanios, and pass their time in meditation, I told him I'd leave writing to those who remind us that too much sun kills love, those who prophecy the sobbing of the white man, phantom Africa, the innocence of the black child, I told him I'd leave writing to those who can construct a town inhabited by dogs, who can put up a green house like the Printer's
or a house on the edge of tears to shelter the humble and homeless, those who sense the compassion of stones, yes, I told him, I'd leave writing to them, and rule out the nutters and the live wires, the weekend poets with their threepenny verses, and it's just bad luck on the nostalgic Senegalese riflemen, who tear to shreds the very core of militancy, and the guys who think a black man shouldn't speak of birch trees, of stone, of dust, of winter, of snow, of a rose, or simply of beauty for beauty's sake, and rule out the integrationalist imitators that pop up like mushrooms, how many are their number, who congest the highway of letters, sully the purity of the universe, and pollute the true literature of our time

 

 

 

when I said all this to the Stubborn Snail, he was lost for words, he thought I must be angry with someone in particular, or that I was raving, and he said who was I talking about, he wanted names, but I didn't reply, I just smiled and gazed up at the sky, and he kept at me to know if I was angry and I said no, why should I be angry, I had no cause to be angry, I was just setting things straight, just making a distinction between what I considered rubbish, and what I thought was good, and that was the day he gave me this notebook, and a pencil and said “if you change your mind you could always write in this, it's your book, it's a present, I know you will write, just write what you feel like, the kind of thing you were saying just now, about true writers and fake writers that congest the highway of literature, and about the people who turn down the Nobel prize and the nostalgic Senegalese riflemen, and the writers you saw in suits on TV in the bar on the Avenue of Independence, that's all good stuff, you can work on that, find a way to grab me as a reader, yes, I want to read about all that, I'm not quite sure what you meant by it, but I
still think you need to put down everything you've just said” so since then, to please him, I've been writing down my stories in the book, my rough impressions, and sometimes I do it for my own pleasure too, and that's when I really feel like I'm hitting my stride, when I let myself go, and forget this is something I've been asked to do, I feel at ease in the saddle, I can buck and jump and I can talk to a reader other than the Stubborn Snail, a reader I've never met, because anything can happen, and the Stubborn Snail did say to me once “I promise not to read what you write until the day you reach the last full stop,” my book is always here ready for me, and there are days when I say to Mompéro or Dengaki, “bring me two bottles of red and my notebook” and they bring me my two bottles and my notebook and I drink and I scribble away and watch the world, let's just say that until now I've been happy that way, a happy man, a free man, but it makes me feel pretty sad to think that in future I won't be scribbling away in my book, and I won't be turning up here in days to come, so I need to look back a bit over what I've written so far, and I mustn't forget to finish my bicycle chicken, which has gone quite cold, because I took my time over the story of my life, when I should have been eating, but I think it was necessary, so now I'm going to just stop for a bite to eat, I'm actually starving, though I may not look it

I finally managed to eat my bicycle chicken, and now I have to go and give the plate back to the bald soprano on the other side of the Avenue of Independence, but first I'll drink up my glass of red wine, which will only take a few seconds, besides, time doesn't matter now, I see the Printer's still here, still surrounded by people flicking through the latest
Paris Match
, well I don't care, it's nothing to do with me, I'm busy anyway, and I stand up and get ready to cross the Avenue of Independence, I'll manage all right, there's not two-way traffic, unless I've gone blind, and there are no motorcycles either, and no garbage trucks that I can see, ah, there we are, it's done, I've made it, I can claim a victory now, it wasn't a foregone conclusion, so I'm across the avenue, and I can see the bald soprano, she can see me walking toward her, she smiles, she's always smiling, I'm standing before her, she smiles again and quips, “well now, Broken Glass, you took your time eating today, weren't you hungry then, just look at you now, you're fit to drop, ooh, how many liters you got under your belt there papa” and I say I've not started drinking yet, I've not touched a drop of alcohol since I got up this morning, and I laugh even as I utter this lie, which is as
big as an African dictator's second home, but I can see she doesn't believe me, because she says “when d'you ever meet a drunk who'll admit he's been drinking, never, that's when, papa, there's a song about that, it goes “
momeli ya massanga andimaka kuiti te mama
,” it's not a song I know, she says it's by a band called Almighty OK Jazz, an amazing band from the country over the way, I don't know much about this country's music, just a few songs by Zaiko Langa Langa, and Afrisa International, that's all, and I come clean and say “well, yes, Mama Mfoa, I did have just one little glass, a really small one, no more, I promise” and the look she gives me is full of kindness, I've never seen her look so serious in all the time I've known her and she shakes her head and murmurs “I told you to give up drinking, Broken Glass, you're going to die with a bottle in your hand, papa, we all care about you here in the district” and I can't think what to say to her right now, so I say, without thinking “I'll stop tonight, at midnight, I give you my word, I promise, Mama Mfoa, and I'll never show my face round here again” and I'd really like to tell her that I'm not stopping drinking because I'm afraid of dying, I'm not scared that I'll die with a bottle in my hand, the truth is, it's a good way to go, it's what they call dying with your weapon in your hand, because when we pass through to heaven or hell we know anything can happen, when we get there everything depends on which strait gate we each go through, I expect some people will go in through the wrong gate, in heaven it's all very serious, lots of white clouds and angels with the memories of elephants, asking you how many times you've read the Jerusalem Bible, how many old ladies you've helped across the Avenue of Independence, which churches you attended down below, no way you'll get a drink up there, it's one big oral exam, strictly no drinking in paradise, and in hell it's much the same, it'll be just as hard to get a drop to drink there, what with the devil hanging around between a rock and hard
place prodding us with his trident, and if you ask him for a drop of wine he'll turn angry and shout “what's that, what d'you want from me, idiot pain in the ass, don't you think you drank enough down below without coming pestering us here in purgatory, you should have aimed for paradise, aimed a little higher, beyond those dark clouds over there, well, bad luck, you should have drunk your fill on earth, while you still had the chance, all you'll get here is your judgment, with no appeal, here the crackling flames of the apocalypse rule the day, incineration with no deliberation, no alcohol to be consumed on the premises, we just use it to light the flames and make them leap, come now, your turn to burn, poor fool, who believed hell was other people”