Broken Glass (3 page)

 

 

 

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”