Broken Glass (6 page)

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