Читать книгу Tram 83 - Fiston Mwanza Mujila - Страница 9

2.

FIRST NIGHT AT TRAM 83: NIGHT OF DEBAUCHERY, NIGHT OF BOOZING, NIGHT OF BEGGARY, NIGHT OF PREMATURE EJACULATION, NIGHT OF SYPHILIS AND OTHER SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES, NIGHT OF PROSTITUTION, NIGHT OF GETTING BY, NIGHT OF DANCING AND DANCING, NIGHT THAT ENGENDERS THINGS THAT EXIST ONLY BETWEEN AN EXCESS OF BEER AND THE INTENTION TO EMPTY ONE’S POCKET THAT EXHALES CONFLICT MINERALS, THIS COW-DUNG ELEVATED TO A RAW MATERIAL, IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE STONE …

“We walked through the darkness of history. We were the cash cows of a system of thought that profited from our tender age, that crushed us completely. We were a piece of shit.”

“We had an ideal, innocence …”

“Innocence,” echoed Requiem, bursting into laughter. “You really mean innocence? Innocence is cowardice. You have to move with the times, brother.”

“You haven’t changed a bit.”

“You don’t age here. You simply exist.”

“Requiem …”

“It’s New Mexico, here. Every man for himself, and shit for all.”

Tram 83 was one of the most popular restaurants and hooker bars, its renown stretching beyond the City-State’s borders. “See Tram 83 and die,” was the regular refrain of the tourists who blew into town from the four corners of the globe to conduct their business. During the day they wandered zombie-like through the mining concessions they owned by the dozen, and at night they ended up in Tram 83 to refresh their memory. This gave the place every appearance of a true theater, if not a massive circus. Here’s the kind of thing you might hear as background noise:

“I want to massage you by way of foreplay, then slowly suck you off, suck your whole body, suck you till my mouth runs dry.”

Not only at Tram 83, but even at the university and in the mines, unmarried women didn’t hold back from accosting potential clients with the same psalms.

Inadvertent musicians and elderly prostitutes and prestidigitators and Pentecostal preachers and students resembling mechanics and doctors conducting diagnoses in nightclubs and young journalists already retired and transvestites and second-foot shoe peddlers and porn film fans and highwaymen and pimps and disbarred lawyers and casual laborers and former transsexuals and polka dancers and pirates of the high seas and seekers of political asylum and organized fraudsters and archeologists and would-be bounty hunters and modern day adventurers and explorers searching for a lost civilization and human organ dealers and farmyard philosophers and hawkers of fresh water and hairdressers and shoeshine boys and repairers of spare parts and soldiers’ widows and sex maniacs and lovers of romance novels and dissident rebels and brothers in Christ and druids and shamans and aphrodisiac vendors and scriveners and purveyors of real fake passports and gun-runners and porters and bric-a-brac traders and mining prospectors short on liquid assets and Siamese twins and Mamelukes and carjackers and colonial infantrymen and haruspices and counterfeiters and rape-starved soldiers and drinkers of adulterated milk and self-taught bakers and marabouts and mercenaries claiming to be one of Bob Denard’s crew and inveterate alcoholics and diggers and militiamen proclaiming themselves “masters of the world” and poseur politicians and child soldiers and Peace Corps activists gamely tackling a thousand nightmarish railroad construction projects or small-scale copper or manganese mining operations and baby-chicks and drug dealers and busgirls and pizza delivery guys and growth hormone merchants, all sorts of tribes overran Tram 83, in search of good times on the cheap.

“Would you gentlemen care for some company?”

Barely sixteen, trussed into a couple of tiny corsets, the two girls welcomed them with inscrutable smiles. Requiem settled on the one with hair like wooded savannah.

“Your breasts quench my thirst.”

“Sir.”

“How much for a massage session?”

The girl stated a figure.

“You know the Tokyo stock market is in freefall?”

She held him by the wrists.

“Profit equals retail price plus wholesale price minus packaging.”

A large sign on the Tram’s frontage stated:

ENTRY INADVISABLE FOR THE POOR, THE WRETCHED, THE UNCIRCUMCISED, HISTORIANS, ARCHAEOLOGISTS, COWARDS, PSYCHOLOGISTS, CHEAPSKATES, MORONS, THE INSOLVENT, AND ALL OF YOU UNLUCKY ENOUGH TO BE UNDER FOURTEEN, NOT FORGETTING THE ELECTED MEMBERS OF THE TWELFTH HOUSE, PENNILESS DIGGERS, SADISTIC STUDENTS, POLITICIANS OF THE SECOND REPUBLIC, HISTORIANS, KNOW-IT-ALLS, AND SNITCHES. Requiem took the girl’s phone number. They entered the establishment. There was nothing special about Tram 83. It was dark all around, like the Lascaux Caves. Men. Women. Children. All with glasses and smokes. At the back, a combo was shamelessly massacring a Coltrane number, “Summertime,” no doubt. They headed toward the bar. Two girls with massive-melon-breasts immediately followed them; it’s called “shadowing.”

“Do you have the time?”

Nothing. Requiem’s eyes patrolled the brassieres. One of them was the girl who’d accosted him at the station whose metal structure …

“Do you have the time?” hammered the single-mamas, stern and resolute.

It was a mammoth task to identify all the women who entered Tram 83. They struggled fiercely against aging. Difficult to venture a distinction between the girls under sixteen, called baby-chicks, the single-mamas or those aged between twenty and forty and referred to as single-mamas even when they don’t have children, and the ageless-women whose fixed age begins at forty-one. None of them wanted to gain a single day. They piled on the makeup from morning till night, wore fake breasts, employed strong-arm tactics to entice the clients, and used foreign-sounding names, such as Marilyn Monroe, Sylvie Vartan, Romy Schneider, Bessie Smith, Marlene Dietrich, or Simone de Beauvoir, to make their mark on the world.

“Go check your papa’s watch!” Requiem retorted.

They took the third table on the left, at the corner of the bar, which afforded an unbeatable view over the front doors and the jazzmen continuing to prostitute music and the restrooms and the bar counter and a row of antipathetic, aggressive, and somewhat mature single-mamas. In his moments of madness, Requiem would tell anyone who’d listen that in order to monitor the comings and goings, and the baptism albums, it was preferable to choose a table affording a panorama of the aforementioned areas, to recap: the bar counter, the sanitary facilities, the lone women, the front doors, the musicians, even when they rushed into the dressing rooms to smoke their marijuana, the waitresses, the busgirls, and so on. They remained for several minutes without speaking to each other. It was a feat of courage to attempt a dialogue amid this pandemonium created by a deviant music and the yelling of the tourists and other upstarts who identified with the atmosphere, waxing ecstatic, grooving, whispering, howling, and pulling out money they threw in the direction of the musicians. “Give me a real cuddle.” “Do you have the time?” “I give you my body, chain me up, make me your slave, your property, your private hunting ground.” All of which fueled the fervor of the band, and consequently the lynching of that beautiful melody. In the labyrinths of the City-State, you don’t listen to jazz to get a whiff of sugar cane or reconnect with Negro consciousness or savor the beauty of the notes: you listen to jazz because you have to listen jazz when you make your bed on banknotes, when you deliver your merchandise daily, when you manage an extraction plant, when you’re cousin to the dissident General, when you keep a little mistress who pins you to your bed in a dizzy haze. Jazz is a sign of nobility, it’s the music of the rich and the newly rich, of those who build this beautiful broken world. Such people don’t listen to rumba, which they find dirty, primitive, and unfit for the ear. Between rumba and jazz lies an ocean, they say. You don’t listen to jazz the way you’d fling yourself into a Zairian-spiced rumba. Jazz is above all a precipitous slope, a cliff you can only climb if you possess a notion of its origins, its development, its major figures. Jazz is no longer the story of the Negroes. Only tourists and those who master money know the foundations of this music. It’s the only identification for a certain bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie of the eleventh hour. Consequently, when the musicians get jazzing, all of Tram 83 stirs from its sleeping sickness. The slightest saxophone, and it’s the great masquerade. The diggers and the students adopt the manner of the tourists. They watch, smile, raise their beer glasses, walk, blaze a trail to the dance floor, hail the waitresses and busgirls in the manner of the tourists, take on the haughty bearing of samurai, the gestures and attitudes of a Maharaja, the poise of the Dalai Lama. The honeys, the waitresses, and the busgirls don’t let themselves be browbeaten. Smiles like the Queen of England, they mime imaginary empresses. Jazz is the only lever used by all the riffraff of Tram 83 to switch social class as one would subway cars.

“Me, you, love, it’s me, make love to me, you and me, love make …”

The two companions looked at each other without a word. Lucien was amazed at the bureaucratic slowness of the service. Requiem held the password, the rules of the road, the attached document, the riddle. The waitresses and busgirls tried to make themselves seem important by dragging their feet, sulking, and aggravating the clientele.

“Do you have the time?” insisted other young women standing around, come to assist the first pair, chests jutting, ready and willing to administer massage sessions, cuddles, and other ingredients of the night.

A genuine postcolonial couple sat beside them. The man, who looked about twenty, his hands all over the bust of his spouse, a seventy-eight-year-old lady, as Requiem confirmed, recited his breviary: “You have a smile that perturbs me deeply. I love you day and night. I love you Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday …” He could only be a student, or a civil servant in a small state firm gone bankrupt. It’s a waste to be young in this part of equatorial Africa. The under-thirty-fives are potentially embittered, xenophobes, crooks, hucksters, capable of using any ploy, be it jazz or a balancing marriage, to escape the prison that is poverty.

“The phenomenon of rebalancing, of matching, and of corporeal integration relates to both cases,” Requiem continued, between two smokes. “I spent some six months managing an agency that facilitated meetings between young men and adult women, or baby-chicks and tourists.”

“Do you have the time?”

“Go check your papa’s watch!”

The clientele smoked like crazy, identified with the jazz, groped each other in the dark, and grabbed at the single-mamas. A sullen-faced waitress finally came. Spitefully, she placed on the table the two bottles of beer she was supposed to have served them an hour and a quarter ago. They paid the check but she stood there waiting for her tip. They made as if nothing was up. She cottoned on to the strategy and cunningly counterattacked by refusing to open the merchandise. Lucien took out a coin but Requiem stayed his hand.

“RULE NUMBER 1: never let yourself be intimidated by a waitress struck with hysteria. We’re not in Moscow. Tipping is obligatory here. But we who are familiar with the New World are an exception. We crush any attempt to make us tip by force. Let the waitresses file a complaint! The mines and their tourists know me. They know me, the tourists and mines.”

She was having none of it.

“Gigolo!”

“Tipping is an archaism, I give when I like.”

To close the case, they decided to open the bottles with their teeth. Offended, she insulted them, threatened them with a penknife, picked up the glasses, and vanished. They began to drink straight from the bottles. The musicians continued their ramble, the tourists too, the young man and his ageless-woman, the girls with the round-juicy-breasts trotting out their one and only hymn:

“Do you have the time?”

“Maybe …”

Lucien took out his notebook, wrote: “This is not a bar. Where will they go to let off steam when there’s no more women to match their fantasies? Where will they go to deposit their seed? Where will they go to drown their misfortunes when there’s nowhere left to get hammered? Where will they go to shake their hips when there’s no more salsa? Salsa and jazz are not eternal; what will they do to identify with the Azerbaijani tourists?”

Requiem received phone calls, which he answered before continuing: “Good evening sir, good evening lieutenant, would Madame like, good evening citizen, RULE NUMBER 10, you-touch/you-play, double or quits, loser wins, the legend round here says the City-State dies on its feet, is sir Belgian?”

As the beer flowed, they held fast to the obvious. The backwash had cleared the way for them. They could no longer sing from the same hymn sheet. They were just two life forms adrift in a city become a state by force of Kalashnikovs.

“Tip!”

The government army and the dissident rebels fought each other day in, day out. To get things back on track, the international community had sponsored nineteen sovereign national conferences which had all come to less than naught. Despite its soldiers trained in China, Sudan, Angola, and Cuba, the central government had failed to wring the neck of the rebellion, which reproached the central government for hanging on to the lion’s share. “Without our province, this country is a masquerade,” thundered the dissident General. “We can’t make do with crumbs when it’s we who are feeding you.” The rebels fought with arrows, machetes, and slingshots. They brought a witch doctor up to the front line with them, and observed all sorts of prohibitions supposed to render them invulnerable: sexual abstinence of unlimited duration, no bathing, or eating beef, or wearing shoes, and so on. Exasperated by the length of the conflict, the rebels retreated to a small stretch of land in the extremely wealthy and coveted province they called the City-State. And as if that weren’t enough, they gave the former national territory, which was pointlessly vast, as barren as one could wish, and crossed by a wide river that served practically no purpose except to flow toward its ocean suicide, the name Back-Country.

The varyingly moneyed tribes stormed the capital of the City-State, the smallest capital in the world, barely comprising a bar, the famous Tram, and the station whose unfinished metal structure brought to mind the figure of Henry Morton Stanley. The legend places these tribes into three categories.

First category: individuals who live by day, most of whom are civil servants saddled with many months’ worth of non-payment, the detail of which they alone possess, but they’re all up to their necks. They lived miserably even before the secession.

“Do you have the time?”

The second category comprises sleepwalkers. They’re scared of croaking in their sleep, it seems. Reason for which they guzzle a potion that keeps them on standby, day and night. This group includes the students, the diggers, the baby-chicks, the for-profit tourists, and the friends and close collaborators of the Dissidence.

Finally, the most hardheaded category, in which we find the single-mamas, the human organ dealers, the child-soldiers with their Kalashnikovs, the apostles, the night waitresses and busgirls, the musicians from the former Zaire, the bandits, and other burglars. They sleep during the day. They know, more than any man, how to make both ends of the week meet. Honorary doctors in all fields (corruption, drugs, sex, looting, minerals, embezzlement, serious drinking …), the night is their main stock-in-trade.

The jazzmen retired to a Gillespie tune, “A Night in Tunisia.”

Three Nigerians, sagging at the knees, thick prescription glasses, Afro hair, bell-bottom pants, striped shirts, took over. Tree that obscures the forest, their only song, “Life Cries Out, When Will You Wipe My Tears?,” stretched away on its thirteen verses till daybreak.

“We’re in for four hours of balladry,” whispered Requiem, staring at the young lady appraising them from the gallery.

The Nigerians, who hailed from Ogbomosho, recounted the adventures of a princess “who alighted in the City-State one January night and succumbed to the charms of a married digger with two children. She befriended the wife of her lover, whom she showered with gifts.” The rest of the saga remained a mystery to all, since the final six verses were in Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa.

“Tip …”

“Why do you keep going to the restroom? You’ll piss your brains out.”

“Do you have the time?”

This second part of the song triggered weeping and gnashing of teeth. One of the trinity shattered the ceiling with his husky voice honed by second-lip cigarettes, electrifying the entire Tram. While the Nigerians wailed, a bare-breasted-single-mama, armed with a shopping basket, walked between the tables. The for-profit tourists, the miners, the students, the waitresses, the busgirls, the itinerant Pentecostal preachers, the high priests of the Second Republic forced back from their golden exile, and other derelicts of life repented, opened their hearts, and chucked in some coins.

“Do you have the time?”

Requiem sipped from the bottle, his left hand stuffed down his pants.

“You’re never safe from some kind of poisoning,” he trotted out, as if to denounce the austere demeanor of the waitresses and busgirls.

Requiem and Lucien carried on downing their beers, exchanging glances, brief phrases, hollow laughs. They had nothing, or nearly nothing left to chat about after ten years of estrangement. They avoided mentioning Jacqueline. Weird, all the same. Lucien, once so talkative, stumbled over his words. Every now and then, he pulled a notebook from his satchel. Wrote up Tram 83 and its girls with elastic breasts. Wrote up the stink of the diggers mad for rear-entry sex. Wrote up the madness of the suicidals. Wrote up the anxiety of the tourists. Wrote up the over-zealous greetings of the baby-chicks.

“Do you have the time?”

Wrote up the jazzmen, the Nigerian jazzmen, hailing from Ogbomosho.

Lucien pushed himself desperately to converse.

“What do you do in your spare time?”

“You remember our first performance, the room full to bursting?”

Requiem remained evasive, reticent, and churlish.

“My past holds no interest for me.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Maybe.”

“Time flies.”

“I like money.”

“You work hard, as far as I can see.”

“You’re stepping on my turf.”

“You …”

“I don’t like this jazz.”

“I’m just scribbling a text.”

“The New World, the baby-chicks eat by the sweat of their breasts.”

“I’m happy to see you again.”

“You’re getting on my nerves.”

In the meantime, he assessed the curves patrolling the sector. Steatopygia remained the epitome of beauty. All the honeys swore by Brazilian buttocks alone. You had to have those buttocks, or nothing. They would desperately slug a particular soy-based drink, take pills, and swallow food intended for pigs in order to increase the area of their rumps. The results left much to be desired: buttocks shaped like pineapples, avocados, balloons, or baseballs; one buttock excessively more pronounced than the other; oblique, square, or rectangular buttocks; buttocks that pedaled all by themselves, and so on. A young lady came up to them. They debated in Morse, about the price no doubt. The young lady drifted off toward the restrooms. Requiem stood up and followed the prey. The restrooms at Tram 83 were mixed, and were not categorized by sex or by the provenance of the tourists. They lacked lighting, the better to facilitate the dance of bodies. Requiem and the girl entered the cave, and exited faces streaked with sweat. The young woman hurriedly pulled up the zipper of her skin-tight jeans, while Requiem took a phone call, told them to “take the car and collect the merchandise, asshole!”

“Tip …”

“Do you have the time?”

“What do you do in your spare time?”

“The New World …”

“Doggy-style, I can even suck you off.”

“I love to give head.”

A tourist scooted into the Tram, half drunk.

“See that guy there, I’ve got him in my pocket,” said Requiem, looking the man up and down. “It’s always useful to hold on to the pictures of someone. I’ve had his pictures for two years now, and for those two years he’s been my slave. He’d even suck my cock if I wanted.”

“What pictures?”

“I’ll explain. What’s more, I’ll manage to get yours too.”

The tourist headed over to Requiem and Lucien as soon as he saw them, and greeted the pair with considerable effusion.

“Stuff your bellies, eat your fill, drink as much as you like, tell them to put it on my tab. I’m just going to let the owner know.”

Requiem burst out laughing.

Lucien, his nerves in disarray, was seized by a pain in his abdomen. The train journey had wrecked him. He forced himself to remain upright so as not to displease Requiem, who was in no mood to chat. They left the premises as the angelus rang. Outside, nothing but high society. Two beauties suggested a deal. “We can get you hot!” Lucien stammered, professing exhaustion. Requiem recommended a medicinal potion. Requiem sweet-talked the girls, who were already demanding a down payment for the time lost “in pointless debate, given that you want to go with us.” Requiem mollified Lucien, who continued to gripe. Requiem took command of the situation.

“The New World, New Mexico, the contemporary era …”

“I’m married.”

“There’s no such thing as a faithful man.”

“But Requiem …”

“I don’t wish to be rude.”

“Think of Jacqueline …”

“She can find a man to bone.”

One of the two girls: “We give good head.”

A boy ran up to them, carrying a container. They got themselves some peanuts, lemons, and kebabs, as well as kola nuts and other aphrodisiacs. In the distance, between two melancholic calls of “Do you have the time?”, the imprecations of the diggers, a fatwa, hurled from a minaret, demanding the summary execution of the proprietor of Tram 83, a slot machine out in the open, run by a bunch of Mozambicans, the throbbing of old jalopies, the monologues of a Kalashnikov, the mournful and nostalgic lamentations of a bitch in heat.

“Do you have the time?”