Eddie Signwriter (27 page)

It was a short time after this conversation that, on his way one
night to Mamadou and Juliette’s, he met a young Congolese woman called Bernadette, who wore square black glasses and sang Jacques Brel songs about sad cities and was a cheese seller’s assistant in St. Germain. She’d been sitting with a girlfriend at a terrace bar, drinking glasses of cold red wine, and smoking long thin cigarettes she didn’t know how to inhale properly. He’d been walking past, thinking his own thoughts, when she’d called out to him—half in challenge, half in fun, “Hey you, why do you always walk this way and you never say hello? Where are you from?”

A few hours later she had ended up accompanying him to Mamadou and Juliette’s. The four of them had stayed up until three in the morning and afterwards, walking Bernadette partway to the stop to take the night bus home, he kissed her close to the Tour Saint Jacques.

From the time that they became a couple he would often sleep at her place, which was all the way over in the 16th arrondissement, in a
chambre de bonne
on Avenue Victor Hugo. It was a district he loved. The straightest trees he had ever seen lined the road outside the building in which Bernadette lodged. The road itself was made of small stones set in flowing patterns as if an immense curtain had been laid out along the ground. In winter, he would linger on the mesh grills on the pavement through which the warm rushing air from the underground trains escaped, letting it billow up his shirt to warm his chest and back.

Bernadette, unlike most people he knew, was legally resident in France. She was one of the many children of a wealthy mine engineer in Katanga who, once bored with his girlfriends, had had them, and any associated offspring, shipped to France with papers procured through his contacts in the French government. He would be over to join them very shortly, her father would tell them.

“Hundreds of women are waiting still,” Bernadette would tell people, laughing.

She remembered her father vaguely—a fat man, with plump hands and wet lips, who wore safari suits and a leopard-skin fez, in imitation of his distant relative (so he claimed) Mobutu Sese Seko—a sight so
ridiculous to see, Bernadette would say, laughing, that he would not have survived a moment had he made good on his promises to come to France, to join his wives and his abandoned progeny, there among the nobility of the “Société des Ambianceurs et Persons Élégants”—the extravagant
sapeur
dandies of the Zairian community in France.

Not that Bernadette was much impressed with this nobility either.

To her, a man who wore three-thousand-franc sunglasses at night but slept in a box in an alleyway was an embarrassment of a man.

“Even if the box smelled of Yves Saint Laurent,” she would say.

“While you,” she would tell him, “my funny-accented Anglophone, will do quite fine. I prefer that you spend your days washing plates. Look at these hands”—and she’d take his raw, calloused hands in hers—“what
sapeur
would take around a pair of these?”

Of his past she noticed that he talked little. She told him she didn’t need to know, unless he thought there was something she should. He told her he’d say if there was, but he didn’t.

Of Celeste, he said nothing directly, but for one occasion, when one morning in the early hours, he’d woken up suddenly from a dream of his last night in Accra, of Celeste asleep as he’d left her on the morning of his departure—how she’d stirred at the sound of his movement as he got up, reached out unconsciously with her hand over the ghost of his shape in the bedding, then fallen back asleep, confident that what was gone one moment would be back the next.

Bernadette lay beside him sleeping. He had listened to the sound of her breathing for more than a minute before gently shaking her awake. Her voice was soft and heavy with the weight of sleep, but her mind was awake.

“Tell me,” she said gently.

“There was a girl,” he said.
Il y’avait une fille
.

“Bien sûr,”
she said,
“mais elle était toujours là.”

And at that moment he felt unable to talk and a very deep sudden sadness rose up and dissolved the possibility of his having to say anything else.

After a while he noticed that she had fallen asleep again, but he could not feel angry that she had not remained awake when he cried.
Nor did he want to be able to make the claim on her that anger would imply.

The next morning when they made love she cried, and he cried afterwards too, though not out of love, but out of gratitude.

Whenever he left Bernadette’s
chambre
he would take his time getting home. A little way down the street from her rooms was a flower shop, the inside of which reminded him of the abandoned houses he knew from his own country, in which the trees and bushes would grow up the walls and through the windows and roof. Inside this shop it was as if a garden of flowers had risen up against the city—against all the gentility and civilization. It teemed over the furniture, overran the molded fixtures of the front room, and colonized the good furniture and the piano and the side tables.

There were flowers of all kinds in pots around the shop—on the black piano with the candlestick holders set into it, on an old cabinet, on marble and wooden tables: lilies and roses, irises, tulips and many others he did not know the names of. In one corner were statues of semi-dressed white women, their skin smooth as milk, in another were large pots the colour of dried clay, and the floor was made of thousands of small white stones as in the bathrooms of the Romans who inhabited Italy many years ago.

He visited the shop irregularly, and at one point—when he noticed that he was not unwelcome there—more frequently. The owner of the shop was a French woman. But from the manner in which she dealt with customers, and also the way she seemed absorbed by tending to the plants and flowers in her shop, he could tell that neither had she been born here, nor was she entirely comfortable among those she served.

He learned later that she’d come from the south of the country, from a small town in the Alpes-Maritimes, where her people had lived and farmed vegetables but also, from time to time, flowers for the local market. After a series of family misfortunes that she was reluctant to discuss, she made her way to the capital, as a young woman, and set up shop, with the help of relatives. This must have been some twenty years before he met her.

It was she who first alerted him to the museums of Paris, where she told him the great art treasures of the world were stored. And so, for the price of a few meals at a time, he went to see the paintings and the sculptures in these museums, and he spent many hours in front of the art stored there. He learned much through Madame la Fleuriste and the books that she lent him, as well as those one can read on the shelves of the bookshops on the street or in museum bookshops, once one has bought a ticket, besides what he observed with his own eyes—which was a great deal.

He saw Milon de Crotone—the man who got his head caught in a tree and was eaten by a lion, that sunk valleys into his leg with its claws and tore with its teeth into his buttocks, about to eat him from his anus upwards, entering into the guts in the soft cave of the stomach, as a lion eats an animal. He saw Valentine Balliani lying in her grave, leafing through a book while her puppies jumped on her dress. He saw sleeping knights praying to God and peeping out of their helmets at the heavens, as out of portholes. He saw the carpets and the jugs and the painted tiles of the Arabs, and the bulls of Mesopotamia and the flying horses with their men’s heads, their hair curled up like centipedes, and the men carrying chariots on their heads, and their prisoners bound to poles by their hands. He saw paper-thin Egyptian fish, little pieces of slate swimming across the walls, and shelves of those people’s jars and bottles and shallow dishes. He saw the inside of a church at night in Holland in the seventeenth century, where the poor sit on the stairs and become the colour of shadows. He saw their gods playing in their lakes and their landscapes made of hills and stringy trees. He saw the people in their villages dancing madly in circles, eating and drinking and falling to the ground, and suckling their babies while the dogs sniffed at their baskets and plates. He saw angels sliding down rays of light. He saw the studious astronomers in their quiet rooms, the light dropping in like a sheet and at the same time like a river, the table covered with papers and a flowing curtain. He saw the glass windows in a Dutch house, and the wooden doors and the white plaster walls, and the light spilling around like soft fires, and in the corner, the children entering and leaving through it.
He saw Italy with its temples and castles rising up from the sea, with its beaches on which hawkers sat with their donkeys and their wares, and the servants waited around the boats. He saw men with the feet of goats jumping out of the reeds and catching the flimsy girls. He saw a city on water where the sea was as smooth as marble and was cut up by veins under its skin. He saw the naked ladies of northern Italy, the white bulls and the saints being whipped, the monks flying supernaturally through the air, the angels surfing down from heaven, the spiky red devils, the heads of saints grown round with gold, and the air that is so clear you can see every thread on the robe of a pope, and every grain in a plank of wood. He saw Saint Pierre with a machete in his head, and his forehead leaking blood. He saw a woman standing at a balcony with an umbrella, staring past him, and poets sitting around a table set with flowers. He saw apples and cake set out for a picnic in the forest attended by men in clothes and women without clothes. He saw a small soldier playing the flute, and babies and angels tumbling down the doors of hell. He walked among centuries of statues, pure and white, with their eyes blind as eggshells. Occasionally he found images of himself, or from his world: at one time the statue of a Mauritian girl, caught smiling, half-flattered, half-shy, her eyes dropped, both her nipples plucked through her dress, the one an onyx bauble, the other still clothed, and wearing in her hair a beautiful flower that opened like a water jug, sticky with pollen. He saw himself in the same century, his face swimming out of a pink dress as he looked quietly upon the form of his mistress, the whore; and again, a slave holding up a quarter of the world.

Outside, though, when he walked nearby through the streets by the river, past the shops full of artifacts from Africa, he was everywhere. The breasts of the women spirits were cones; the eyes and noses were scars carved into the face; their mouths were holes punched in and out of the flesh; and their hair was a flurry of scratches stabbing the wood. Never had he seen these things in such number until he saw them displayed in the shops of Rue de Seine—dolls for fertility and war and placation and honour to the spirits of villages long since cut down for the making of the great road, or emptied for the slave galleys.

But the feelings of dejection and estrangement with which he came away from the museum in the old d’Orsay railway station—a world away from the enthusiasm with which he had arrived in the city—were also coloured by events that had just then begun unfolding across the river on Boulevard de Strasbourg, where by now he had been living for four months. The first of two police raids in the district during that time took place in the early hours one Sunday morning in November. He had slept the night before at Bernadette’s, and had gone directly from there to work the next morning, and so when he reached Boulevard de Strasbourg late on Sunday afternoon everything was already over.

Around fifteen people had been taken. The searches had gone door to door. There must have been informers, Denis told him, as he moved around the floor, packing his things. Though their room had been raided, Denis had climbed through the trapdoor in the roof and escaped detection. Denis suspected the landlords they rented from.
“Ici c’est chaud,”
he said. Later in the day Denis left, for Barbès, he said, where he had friends he could stay with. Denis advised him to do the same.

He went down to see who was around, but the Refuge de l’Ouest was closed, one glass door crossed with masking tape where he could see the frame had been kicked. He stood there for a moment.
“Ils sont partis,”
Jean-Louis, the grocer from the general store across the road, called out from behind his back. He turned around. Jean-Louis stood squarely in his door, leaning against the frame. Then he turned and walked back into his shop.

At first it was difficult to know who had been taken and who was hiding, since those who escaped returned only in the next few days to collect their belongings and move on. Fawad, he knew, was among the unlucky. So were the Ivorian brothers, Sulaiman and Ali, who frequently joined them on their evening games in the Refuge. Monsieur Richard, who owned the café, and was naturalized, returned on the Tuesday. He’d been arrested, and could tell them the names of a few more, including the four to whom he had rented. Of their immediate group, only Denis, Mamadou and his family, and he had escaped. He moved his things to Bernadette’s. Mamadou decided to stay where he
was. Mamadou had been in Paris much longer than most of them and had seen these raids before. And then there were Juliette and the children to take into account, who he did not want to move if it wasn’t necessary. In any event, he estimated, the trouble was past (and to make sure, Mamadou had paid his landlord their next month’s rent in advance).

In the days immediately after the raids he would call Mamadou and Juliette every night, or drop by. Life resumed its more familiar rhythms. They all began to relax. But when, a fortnight later, the phone went unanswered at Mamadou’s, he cancelled his night shift and made his way across the river, fearing the worst. Mamadou and Juliette lived a short distance from Denis and his old lodgings, near the Metro Temple. He let himself into their building. The stairs had no light, and he climbed to the third floor in darkness. When he got to their landing he knocked on the door, though he knew it needed no more than a push to swing open. The lock had been broken for a while—at least his three previous visits—and the door was held in place by a piece of wood jammed from the inside between the latch and the frame. Mamadou had shown him how he’d cobbled it together a few weeks before, with an elaborate explanation of how it should work, although primarily for the benefit of Juliette, who stood in the middle of the room, her hands at her side, her usually wide smile folded into a thin line across her face in an expression of exaggerated disapproval. This was part of the game they played for ignoring poverty. Instead of turning away, and allowing herself to feel despair, she pretended to await appeasement. Mamadou pretended there was something to be done. “Look,” Mamadou was saying to him, “look how well this piece of wood is working,” and he shook the door in its frame, though not hard enough to dislodge the jam. Then Mamadou had him return out onto the landing to try to open the door from the outside (which earned Mamadou further scolding from Juliette, for sending their guest away the moment he arrived, and without food).