Black Bazaar (3 page)

I knew my neighbour had been watching the same programme. I could hear his telly from my studio. What I didn't know was how much of a pain in the neck he was going to be about this story …

* * *

The next day, when I was still red-eyed from watching that spat on the telly, my neighbour from across the hallway ran into me down by the bins and accosted me in a sarcastic tone of voice:

“You hardly need me to tell you, this situation is serious! Very serious! They're saying the hole in the social security is getting deeper and deeper because there's riff-raff out there, with no sense of republican values, threatening our democracy. Now, I'm naming no names here, but something has got to be done!”

Why was he saying this to me? We don't get on, the two of us. We barely speak, and there's never been a good feeling since the day I set foot in this building with my suitcases of clothes to live with the woman who would later become the mother of my daughter.

I took my time before answering, I didn't want to
lose my temper. I told him that I understood what he was talking about, that I had watched the programme too. And that yes, the hole in the social certainly was deep and there were already plenty of victims who had fallen into it. That I'd been asking myself a thousand and one questions since that debate. And that I wanted to get a clearer picture of what was going on.

“Yes, but something needs doing right now! Enough is enough, I've had it with people like you who are always waiting to get a clearer picture, and all the time that hole just keeps growing. Tell me, while we're on the subject, is it your new vocation to stay at home and type every day on a goddam typewriter that makes the whole building shake? Does that really put bread on the table or is it because you don't want to admit to people that you're unemployed?”

Having failed to get a rise out of me he paused, before leaving the basement, to examine my shoes and my Cerutti 1884 suit. I was convinced I must have trodden in something or that there were dirty marks on my clothes.

“When you're taking your rubbish down to the bins, is it really necessary to dress up like a dandy going to a wedding, eh?” he rattled off, sounding vexed. “Those clothes must have cost a king's ransom!”

I don't know what makes him think I buy my clothes using state benefits, in other words his money. He's the one who is popping pills all day long, stocking up again
when the fancy takes him, getting various doctors to make home visits. The fact of the matter is he's become more and more insufferable since his accident on the fifth floor. If he'd been happy to cultivate his own garden, nothing would have happened to him. But his problem is that he spends all his time going up and down the stairwell, spying on the residents' every move, finding out what people get up to in their own homes, keeping tabs on their comings and goings in the corridors.

It's two months ago now since he fell and hit his head, and I can still remember how everybody in the building was scared that day because a nice fellow from the second floor who watches a lot of detective films explained to us how an inspector would lead a lengthy police investigation, that we would be on the evening news on the telly, and that people would see us in flesh and blood across all of France, including in Corsica and Monaco …

And I remember how, when the neighbour slipped on the stairs, I stopped writing and opened my door because from the screeching up there you'd have thought a wild boar was having its throat slit with a chainsaw like something straight out of
Scarface
. We could hear him going thud on each step like a sack of potatoes, from the fifth floor all the way down to the ground floor where I was. He blacked out in front of my door, arms splayed. The tenants came rushing down, some of
them barefoot, others with towels wrapped round their waists. We could see he was dead for good, so we decided we'd better call the emergency services. But someone from the sixth floor, who knew what to do in situations like that, announced it wasn't an ambulance we needed but an undertaker or a pathologist. He warned us that the emergency services these days wouldn't stand for being messed around, they'd had enough of being called out for nursery school bumps and bruises every thirty seconds, and now their union was threatening to make people pay for crazy call-outs.

“The person who rings pays the call-out fee, not me!” he emphasised.

So we dropped the idea, but the corpse was still there, in front of us. The nice fellow from the second floor who watches too many detective films warned us that we would soon get a visit from someone cantankerous, a German cousin of Inspector Colombo, that he would wear a raincoat and drive an old banger which he'd park in front of our building, that he'd smoke a smelly cigar, that he'd talk to us about his wife and his dog, that he'd pretend not to notice anything, that he'd lay traps for us, that he'd tire us out with his questions about this, that and the other, that he'd look for clues on the soles of our shoes, on our cigarette stubs, our beer glasses, our dusty doormats, in our condoms and our jacket pockets, in lipsticks, on badly knotted ties, on our grubby front door knobs, down by the bins, that
he'd have a word with the Arab on the corner, then with the Chinese, then with the Pakistanis, then with the Indians, then with the Greeks, then with the Polish plumbers, that he'd take fingerprint samples from every landing, that he'd want to know what we'd been up to before the drama took place, what we ate two days before, what we drank a month before, that he'd look into what relations were like between the residents, that he'd spend time down in the basements, that he'd pay close attention to all the numbers we had dialled – even Freefone numbers – that he'd also take his time over the calls we had received, even if it was just someone trying to sell us a second-hand vacuum cleaner or to make us switch telephone suppliers. Not only that, but Colombo's cousin would summon everyone who had paid us a visit over the last twenty and a half years minimum. And after all that, some of us would still have to spend hours in custody, in a police station with a stuttering lawyer appointed by the court, and officers who would treat the suspects like guinea pigs for new torture methods from the United States that are used to worm information fast out of people who try it on during the interrogation sessions.

“Get your alibis ready, and make a note of them one by one on a piece of paper,” he advised us.

At this point, a man who lives on the seventh floor, Staircase A, brought it to our attention that he could be ruled out for a start, none of this had anything to
do with him, he had what is called a “cast iron alibi”: he'd been away for a month, he had only got back two hours before the accident, he'd been in the Dordogne staying in Champagnac-de-Belair with his mother, who had been suffering from cancer for years.

“And anyway I live on Staircase A, whereas the incident happened on Staircase B, so it's clearly got nothing to do with me. If Colombo's German cousin so much as sets foot in this building to hassle me, I swear I'm filing a complaint, I'm hiring Jacques Vergès as my lawyer and I'm passing the details on to the relevant human rights bodies in this country!”

The nice fellow who watches the detective films pointed out that Colombo's German cousin would drive all the way to Champagnac-de-Belair in his old banger and that he wouldn't give a monkey's whether it was Staircase A or B, that he would summon the sick mother in question, cancer or no cancer, because in criminal law sickness is no excuse for murder and vice versa, and that in any event there would be all sorts of upheaval in our building. His conclusion was that we shouldn't touch the corpse, the investigation would take at least two to three and a half years to establish the cause of the fall and if some of us were implicated in this story …

All the same, we stood there staring at the corpse because it isn't every day you get to examine a fresh stiff in your own building instead of in those films where people lie to us and take us for kids by pretending to
be dead when you can see they're breathing, and the blood on them is that ketchup they sell at La Chapelle market.

We surrounded the corpse and were still figuring out what to do when the man who lives on the first floor reminded us:

“Look here, he's stopped breathing!”

“He's not a pretty sight, we should cover him up quickly with a white sheet,” added the man just back from Champagnac-de-Belair.

He's peed his pants, and there's dribble coming out of his mouth,” said the man from the third floor, going one further.

“That's weird, can you see how he's got one eye bigger than the other now?” chipped in a woman from the fourth floor.

“Don't touch him! Don't touch him!” bellowed the man who watches the detective films.

And that's when the neighbour suddenly woke up with a jolt and roared at us:

“I'm not dead! I'm not dead!”

We shrank back because he looked like a ghost in a horror film,
Night of the Living Dead
for example.

“Who just said I've got one eye bigger than the other, eh? Was it that slut from the fourth floor? Don't you dare lay a finger on me, you bastards! Someone pushed me, and you're all in it together! You're going to hear me out!”

He had blood on his face, he had several battered ribs, and he was grimacing with the pain. We tried to get close to help him stand up.

“Don't touch me, you murderers! Someone left a banana skin on the stairs, and he's going to hear me out! I know who did it!”

We all looked at each other and raised our hands in the air, as if a firearm was being trained on us, to show we had nothing to do with this banana skin story. Then the neighbour barricaded himself in his apartment and spent the day phoning every doctor in town and raining down insults on them, because they didn't understand how a normal person could fall from the fifth floor to the ground floor without someone pushing them.

The neighbour wouldn't stop snorting and muttering to himself:

“Goddammit! I'm telling you an African laid a trap for me with a banana skin! And we're not talking any old banana skin! That banana came directly from Africa!”

The thing I wanted to know was what on earth was he doing up on the fifth floor, when he lives on the ground floor like me. Anyway, that's why he's got a bandage on his head now and spends his days sniffing at a little bottle …

* * *

Unluckily for me, my studio is slap bang next to the neighbour's apartment. I can hear him cackling like a
hyena in front of his telly and bellowing into the phone when the doctor on the other end of the line explains he won't be able to pay him a home visit. The neighbour reminds the doctor about the Hippocratic Oath and promises to get him struck off professionally:

“Don't betray the Hippocratic Oath! You swore that oath, Doctor! You promised to treat the poor and needy and whosoever seeks your help!”

Because he keeps going on about the Hippocratic Oath, we've ended up nicknaming him Mr Hippocratic. Seeing as he can't insult the whole earth, he takes it out on me instead. Mr Hippocratic likes to cultivate his garden at my expense. He says, for example, that like most Blacks he knows, I always put the cart before the horse, I'm not worth peanuts, I'm a cabbage head, with an artichoke for a heart, I don't have a bean to my name, I'm knee-high to a grasshopper, and pea-brained to boot, I lead people up the garden path, I might think I'm the biggest pumpkin on the patch but I'll be pushing up the daisies like the rest of them …

When his anger gets the better of him he pounds on the wall, complaining there are too many visitors coming by my place, that I'm the one who's digging the hole in the social, that my studio is turning into Château Rouge market, into the headquarters of the African underworld, that nobody has any idea what we're getting up to inside, that for all he knows we're holding man-on-man orgies – that there may even be
wild animals involved – that we're printing fake money, that we're smoking the devil's lettuce or the wacky baccy, that we're illegally dealing I don't know what new drug, that we're running riot in “his building” which used to be a calm and pleasant block to live in before the mass influx of the Senegalese soldiers together with the natives of the Republic. He says the settlers didn't finish off their job properly, that he'll always hold this against them, that they should have whipped us harder in order to drum good manners into us. That the trouble with those French colonisers was never seeing things all the way through …

* * *

Mr Hippocratic is only a tenant, but from the way he behaves you'd think he owned the place. People mistake him for the caretaker because his apartment is just by the main entrance and the postman has been known to leave parcels and recorded delivery letters for other residents in front of his door. The poor tenants in question have to track these down to the bins in the basement.

I couldn't tell you how he's managed to find out that I'm a month in arrears with the rent or that I haven't taken out household insurance with his insurer at the end of the road. Not to mention the noises and smells he claims get produced by me and my friends when we're cooking our food and listening to our music from
back home, so as to forget our everyday worries for a while. He doesn't know the first thing about nostalgia. France is his country, and he boasts to me about how proud he is to be French by birth. I've heard him complaining, for example, that France can no longer shelter all the destitute in the world, especially the Congolese who are forever turning up at the border even though they've got oil and aphrodisiacs like bois bandé back home. There are other countries in Europe, so why don't we go and live there instead, or else head back to our huts of beaten earth. And he spouts this drivel while staring defiantly at me. One time, when he got a bit tipsy, I convinced myself he was going to slit my throat down by the bins. But he'd only laid into the booze so he could bring up everything he'd been harbouring a grudge about for ages.