Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty (14 page)

‘I'll go and make you something to eat.'

‘I'm not hungry now.'

‘Michel, it's a surprise: beef with beans, I've made it specially for you!'

‘I'm not hungry.'

I go to my room and lie down on the bed with my eyes shut, but I'm not asleep yet. I hear a slight noise: rain drops on the metal roof. A voice inside me exclaims, Oh no! Not rain! I don't want it to rain – if it does the Tié-Tié Caids will postpone the match. That's how they win so often. They go and see a fetisher, and he promises to bring rain to wipe out the other team's fetishes. If the Tié-Tié Caids win, Caroline will carry on being crazy about Mabélé because it's always the number 11 shirt that gets to dribble, always the number 11 people love, and cheer for, always the number 11 shirt the girls come to see after the match.

The Shah of Iran's become a kind of vagabond, wandering from country to country, while the Monster, Idi Amin Dada, is fine, no one's after him, he's just chilling out in Saudi Arabia. He used to be swimming champion of Uganda, so perhaps he's got a great big pool and goes swimming every day. He must have a room where he does boxing, because he also used to be Ugandan boxing champion. The people running his country are saying: let him stay there in Saudi Arabia, we haven't got time to go running after him, but if he does come back we're going to put him away, he can pay for his crimes. And I think: Even if he can't read and write, is he really going to be stupid enough to go back to a country where they'll kill him? So he'll just go on swimming up and down his pool all day, and doing his boxing training with his cook and gardener.

The Shah still hasn't found a place where he can live with his family without being threatened from Iran. He left his Prime Minister behind, but now he's done a runner too. He might get executed by the new government, who have it in for anyone who worked with the Shah. Besides, Papa Roger says that since the Ayatollah Khomeyni returned from exile in France he's been ruling with an iron fist and the only thing he's interested in is catching the Shah and sentencing him, not governing his country for the good of the suffering Iranians at home.

While my father's busy talking like Roger Guy Folly, I try to count in my head the number of countries the Shah's been to. Every time the American journalist named one, I made an effort to memorise it. First of all he went to Egypt to see his great friend the Egyptian president, called Anouar el-Sadat. His friend wouldn't allow him to become an international beggar, him and his wife, the empress Farah. Out of the question. So Anouar el-Sadat said to the Shah: Don't you worry, my friend, you come and hide out here in Egypt, it's your country too, you're my life-long friend, a friend of all Egyptians, I won't let you fall into the hands of those who seek to put you on trial and execute you, like they're executing your former ministers.

But then Iran made it clear to Egypt that they weren't happy about them sheltering the Shah. Anouar el-Sadat wanted to keep his friend anyway, and said to him: I won't hand you over to the Ayatollah Khomeyni, you're my friend. But the Shah chose to leave Egypt, so as not to be a nuisance to his Egyptian friend.

The Shah went to Morocco, where he had another friend, a king called Hassan II, who offered to take him in.

I'm still counting the countries when I hear Papa Roger yelling at the radio like he's really angry with Roger Guy Folly, who's still speaking. My father turns the sound down and turns to us: ‘The American president has abandoned the Shah! How can he do that? That's what they're like, these Americans! What do they think they're doing? It's them that's screwing everything up in Angola, because they're so scared of the Communists, and it was them and the Belgians that plotted to kill Patrice Lumumba and put that thug Mobutu Ses Seko Kuku Wendo Wazabanga in power, who for years has been making speeches
and robbing the people of Zaire. Maybe the Shah should have been a dictator like Idi Amin Dada, maybe then they'd have helped him!'

So then the Shah turned up in Morocco, but he didn't stay long because the Iranians warned him that if Monsieur ex-President didn't clear out of Morocco, they'd assassinate all King Hassan II's family. So the Shah himself said to King Hassan II, ‘Don't worry, I'll leave Morocco, I don't want them to kill your family.'

So then he left Morocco and went to some islands called The Bahamas because there wasn't a single country left brave enough to welcome him. And he didn't stay there long either, because Henry Kissinger (the American minister for what goes on abroad) suggested he should go and live with the Mexicans.

At this point I said to myself, ‘It's strange, why don't the Americans take in the Shah, why do they keep sending him to this country or that? Maybe it's because they're scared of eating hot potatoes, as Papa Roger puts it. The Mexicans are like us, my father remarks. They suffer as we do, but at least they're better than us at football because they've already hosted the World Cup, even if Brazil actually won it. I don't even know if one day we'll qualify to go and play with the best players in the world. If we can't even invite the Shah to come and live with us, how's anyone ever going to trust us to host the World Cup?'

Next Roger Guy Folly says that the Shah's adventures are not over yet. Soon he's going to have to leave Mexico because he has cancer and he really needs to be cared for in a country where he has a hope of recovering. Otherwise he might die.

So, some time in the next few days, the Shah will be sent to the United States for care. The Mexicans, who are very kind, have promised to have him back again after the operation. At
least this piece of information cheers my father up. Just now he was refusing to eat, and was about to go off and listen to the singer with the moustache under the mango tree, but now he asks Maman Pauline, ‘Is there any more to eat, a little piece of grilled meat, perhaps, with some cassava?'

I'm trying to read a book off my father's shelves. I've chosen this one because it was on top of the others and the smallest. On the cover there's a picture of a young white man. To look at he seems very clever, as though he knows about things even old people won't know till their dying day. He looks like an angel, with his left hand propping up his chin. His smile makes me smile too, even if it's just a photo I'm looking at, not a real person. I say to myself, ‘Like all white people, this young man has a lot of hair, and his hair grows faster than ours because they have a lot of snow where they live, and we don't. Very strange.'

On the back of the book they explain what it's about, and who wrote it. Then they tell you about the life of the young man with the face of an angel. When I read that I think: But how did he have time to do the things they say here, he's still so young? For example, they say his father abandoned his mother. That his mother looked after all five children on her own. That he wrote poems when he was very young and that even a grown up called Paul Verlaine loved him so much that he almost killed him with a pistol. He and this grown-up had some other kind of relationship, but they don't explain that clearly here: you get the feeling it would be shameful to go into it. This man Paul Verlaine hurt the poor young man with a pistol and he got put in prison for it. They also say the reason this Paul Verlaine behaved badly was because he had problems with his wife and
had drunk a lot of alcohol the day he was seeing the young man with the face of an angel. When you're drunk you can't control what you're saying or doing to people, you say stupid things, you do stupid things, you can't walk straight because you think the roads have gone all wiggly and that the cars going by are just plastic toys like the one Uncle René gave me to get me to play at farming at Christmas or on St Michel. Now when you're drunk you have long conversations with people who don't exist, invisible people that the people who make the alcohol that goes in bottles. You may also laugh out loud and shout rude things at passers-by who've done nothing. I know all this because Monsieur Vinou, one of our neighbours, is the biggest drunk on the planet. When he's been at the bottle, he directs his remarks over towards our house – you'd think it was us that drove him to drink his corn spirit or his red wine in the bars of Trois-Cents. The alcohol has turned his lips red and he's always getting into fights, though he's not a strong guy. He's always shouting, ‘Why's the whole neighbourhood turn against me when I have a tipple?' If he ever gets hold of a pistol like that Paul Verlaine, he'll shoot at anything that moves. But since he doesn't have a pistol yet, he shouts at his six children, calls them bastards, bush toads, West African crickets etc. He tells his wife she's not his wife, she's a public rubbish bin, where the men from Trois-Cents have dumped their waste and the waste is rotting her body and making it stink. When he needs to piss or do other stinky business, Monsieur Vinou leaves his yard, pulls down his trousers and does it all in the street, even though there's a toilet at the end of his yard. Would you say that was the behaviour of a normal man? If someone starts forgetting they've got a toilet in their yard, it must be the alcohol that makes them do bad things, and that's maybe why Paul Verlaine
fired a shot at the young man with the face of an angel.

The title of the little book I'm looking through is
A Season in Hell
. There's a title in it I really like:
Bad Blood
. It sounds like an expression we'd use around here. In lingala,
bad blood
means
makila mabé
. When Maman Pauline says in lingala that someone has bad blood it means they were born all wrong, luck's against them, they've got no hope, even the birds passing overhead crap on them. I don't know if that's what the young man with the face of an angel meant too, but he must have been very angry to choose a title like that, it could be bad luck for anyone who reads the book.

I choose a page, I read out loud, almost as though I'm praying:

I abominate all trades. Professionals and workers, serfs to a man! Despicable. The hand that guides the quill is a match for the hand that guides the plough.

On the back cover it says it's a book of poems, but there are no separate lines, no words that sound the same at the end of each line, like in the poem Lounès recited. Does that mean I don't have to follow what Lounès told me? There are some words and expressions in this poem I find really difficult. I'll have to ask Lounès what they mean, or Lounès can ask his teacher at school. For example, I don't know what ‘the hand that guides the quill' means. Perhaps it's the hand of a white sorcerer who dresses up as a bird at night and comes to snatch children and take them to hell for a season. Yes, that's probably it, because just before that the young man talks about his ancestors the Gauls, who were real gangsters, he says. He says that as ‘flayers of beasts, burners of grass', they were the most inept people of
their age. Which is odd because our ancestors were like that too. Maybe they are distantly related to these people called the Gauls. Now I understand why my father told me once that in his day, at school, they taught them that our ancestors were Gauls.

In the poem in question, I find the words ‘the hand that guides the plough'. I've already heard Uncle René use the word ‘plough', when he talks about farming. When I want to get something done quickly, or I do it sloppily, he tells me off and shouts: ‘Don't put the plough before the ox!'

The plough was always behind the oxen, so they could pull it. Now, the young man is talking about ‘the hand that guides the plough'. That really does make it tricky, what with the hand that guides the quill and the hand that guides the plough, I'm really confused.

When you go into Monsieur Mutombo's workshop it's really like going into a tunnel, with clothes hanging up above your head. Lounès's father has two silent young apprentices working away at the back, doing the same thing over and over again, like two robots. Their job is to put the buttons on the shirts and trousers once Monsieur Mutombo has finished sewing them. I've never seen them put a piece of cloth on the table, pick up the scissors and cut it up. I do rather wonder if they'd even know how to make a pair of shorts for a child at infant school. If you try to talk to them they just look at you with these huge eyes, if they dare open their mouths Monsieur Mutombo will shout, ‘Lazy good-for-nothings, I'll send you back to your parents and you'll have to pay them back the money they've spent on your training!'

The thing they like best is taking the women's measurements. They tell them to take their clothes off, including their underpants, and they take a look at lots of other things that women normally only show their husband or their doctor. They measure the women up at the back of the shop, on the right. You can't quite see what the apprentices are doing. You can just hear one of them saying to the woman, ‘Take your top off, and the bottom half, and your pants, stand very straight, hold your head up, close your eyes.'

It's different for the men: they take their measurements in front of everyone. When that happens I always close my eyes,
because most of them have great big bellies, even though they're not bosses or proletariat-exploiting capitalists. They have long hair under their armpits, sometimes they're all white, like they've put ash on themselves, or powder, that's been there for at least a week.

It's always dark in the workshop. It used to be the place where the priests from the Church of Saint-Jean-Bosco used to store their spades, their rakes and their picks. Besides, since the church is only a few metres away, when the bells ring, Monsieur Mutombo tells everyone to observe a minute's silence because the priest gave him this little building free of charge. I don't know how he manages in the dark not to prick his big fat fingers with the needle of the Singer sewing machine. Since he's very bald, with only a few grey hairs around his ears, it feels like it's his head that lights the place, because when he goes out for a smoke it gets even darker inside, and when he comes back it brightens up a little bit again. I've never seen anyone's head shine like that, not round here. Maybe he puts palm oil on it or maybe Madame Mutombo rubs a special cream into it every morning.