Dirty Feet (3 page)

HE REMEMBERED.
The night his mother had made another of her strange pronouncements: “It must be a few months now that we have lived in this rotten district, my son. It must be a few seasons now since the muezzin's voice last resounded on our roof. Well, what you might call a roof. Months since we last prayed. We have always prayed in our family. But I see that nowhere here is there anything that could be called a mosque.”

And the following day his mother had taken him through the rainy morning to the only Christian church in their shantytown. “The Prophet or Christ — what difference does it make to you, my son? One must still offer prayers to one or the other,” she had said by way of justification. The church was a large shed. The rain clattering against the corrugated tin roof, the wooden corner posts overrun by termites so that, but for grace, the house of God could have collapsed at any moment without warning. The trellis walls breached by wide rectangular windows.

He remembered the animation of the throng of worshippers. The songs and the biblical text read by the pastor. Or the priest. What difference does it make? The text. Matthew 22:1–13: “The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king, which made a marriage for his son, And sent forth his servants to call them that were bidden to the wedding: and they would not come . . . So those servants went out into the highways, and gathered together all as many as they found, both bad and good: and the wedding was furnished with guests. And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment: And he saith unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? And he was speechless. Then said the king to the servants, bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Later he had asked his mother, “What's a wedding garment?”

“New, clean clothes.”

“What's a wedding?”

“A celebration with new, clean clothes.”

“And with people too?”

“With clean, nice-looking people in new, clean clothes.”

“Will we be invited to the Wedding some day?”

“Possibly. But many people are never invited.”

“Why?”

“Because of the clothes.”

“And what happens to them when they aren't invited? They die?”

“Sometimes.”

“Of what?”

“Of the cold. Or the sun. Of failure too.”

THEY HAD ALL
run aground on this square in the middle of the city, like a derelict rotting in the port of his childhood. Faces that Askia had met here, on the plaza in front of the Centre Pompidou. Intractable. Immortal mugs. That's how he described them. Adventurers, aimless runners, another incarnation of failure. A few such disreputable profiles were loitering in the agora: Lim, the portraitist who had fled Beijing in 1989; Kérim, with his slacker's muzzle, his background, and the roads he'd travelled well hidden inside his jacket; Big Joe from Marie-Galante, a municipal worker, in his green street-sweeper's uniform; Camille the whore in her skirt slit a thousand times on the front and sides, Camille swallowing bellyfuls of Lutetian flesh, Venus of the crossroads of their desires, her sex proffered to the city of a thousand lanterns. He had been here long enough to get to know them, having often come to stroll around this place where, as Tony had informed him a short while after his arrival in the capital, figures and shadows came to mope from every pole of our old planet: the pilgrims, the runaways, the curious, the unsatisfied, all the souls fated to spin their wheels in the direction of infinity. That is what brought him to the square — the hope of bumping into Sidi in the infinity of his flight, with or without the turban, which was surely worn out from all the winds he had faced.

On the square were all the others as well, those whom Askia did not know by name: the postcard hawkers, the police officers, the high school kids, the lonely grandmothers whose husbands rested in Père-Lachaise.

There was the museum, all colour and metal; the plaza, meeting place of the hour of exodus, filled with peddlers, vendors of odds and ends, knick-knacks, faces familiar or obscure, pretty little doll faces, girls stepping through the doors of the museum and its library at seven p.m., young ladies, their arms perennially laden with heavy books. At seven p.m. the heavy books spilled onto the pavement when they crossed the threshold of the library, and they would bend down to collect them. They squatted down as if for love, knees bent, and Askia could see their waists and the slenderness of their hips. Once a girl was holding a thick tome. It slipped out of her hands and lay unscathed on the square, and when Askia rushed to help her pick it up, he saw him. Sidi.

Sidi, serious and steely-eyed on the book cover, Sidi with a red cotton headdress coiled high over his tall forehead. The rest of the face sharply chiselled out of dry wood, straight nose, sweeping temples, supple bearded chin. Dry wood because the anxious face seemed impossible to soothe. Blurting out his question, he asked the girl where she had found this book with the portrait of a man he took for his father. She stared at him for a while, not understanding, before replying, “You mean the illustration on the cover? It's a portrait of Askia Mohammed, king of the Songhai Empire from 1492 to 1528. You think he resembles someone you know? Sorry, it's not who you think. Perhaps you are Songhai yourself? You have something in common with this picture? History is so fascinating, you know. It's part of us . . .”

Askia felt stupid standing frozen in front of the girl, who finally stepped into the museum on the heels of her delicate shadow.

SHE WAS A
real pain in the neck. Olia. Askia had met up with her again. Two weeks later. In the same blind alley at Châtelet. Before he finally resolved to go to her apartment to see her. As usual, he was sleeping in the driver's seat with its back tilted down, waiting for dawn to bring a miserly night to a close. At dawn he could get the early birds. She tapped on the back door as she had the first time. And as he was barely emerging from the fog, she followed through: “Same as before. Rue Auguste-Comte.” He understood. The drive was more relaxed this time around. It was late, Paris was asleep. She gave him her card again, thinking it necessary to add, “You may have lost the other one.” He answered that he would come by her place to see the photos that she had mentioned the time before. The pictures of the man in the turban. Along the way he came to understand that she had a contract for a job at an apartment in the blind alley where he regularly stopped for a break. So it wasn't purely coincidental. In his mind he had nicknamed her the Blind-Alley Girl.

She was open. Like a road. Askia had stretched out on her sofa. With one arm bent behind his neck, he tried to read the book of the ceiling, as pale as the walls but lined with big wooden beams. He made a game of trying to guess how old they were, those beams extending horizontally above him. They did seem quite old, and possessed of a kind of coarse stylishness, the brown stripes of the wood on the white ceiling. They put him in mind of a ribboned sky, of roads running overhead and on which he drove an imaginary taxi. He quite liked the pattern of the beams, the white walls, the apartment of his blind-alley stranger.

She sat facing him in a lotus position. She probably did this often. A custom. Taking up this position in front of her guests. Her loosened hair somewhat altered her appearance. She looked younger. He sat up too. She wanted him to talk about his travels, to open the psalter of his wanderings. And the obvious thought once again occurred to him:
She is crazy
. After all, he was a stranger in her house, and in the company of strangers it was best to be wary. It was a refrain he had often heard sitting behind the wheel of his cab. It set the beat of a city that was afraid. She urged him to open up.

“So, these travels of yours. Tell me. Because you, you're a battered ship lashed by the winds of many voyages.”

“My taxi plunges into the dark streets. That is a voyage, a dark journey.”

She did not understand. She insisted. “What are you talking about? The night is full of lamps. It's not dark.”

“There are other nights. Which are dark. Which were. The past.”

Still she did not understand. She said, “Yes, a few centuries ago this city was dark at night. The torches did a poor job of lighting the streets of Lutetia. But I find you mysterious. Obscure.”

They drained their coffee without speaking and then she admitted she had not yet found the portraits of the man with the turban. Perhaps, she went on, it was not important anymore to find them. She could do his portrait, a new version of the man in the turban. Askia thought there was nothing to tell about his four years of futile searching in Paris. On the other hand, about his past . . . what he had become in the heart of the tropical night.

She went upstairs to her room to make a telephone call. He focused his attention on the photos hanging on the walls, which had spoken to him the first time he had set foot in the apartment, the pictures of famous negroes. They lived on Olia's walls, she who worshipped the time when the negroes of the Sorbonne and the Collège de France were friends of Jean-Paul Sartre, Robert Desnos, André Breton. They had made a name for themselves in the Latin Quarter, on the sidewalks there, in the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. They had raised their glasses at the Deux Magots, trading toasts with the light. Bantu philosophy had flirted with Cartesian thought. He flirted with Sidi, an image thinner than a thought, a myth, a phantom father.

BEAUBOURG AND
its square had become familiar to him. Its beautiful crowd as well. There were those going in and those leaving through the museum doors. Where a pair of guards kept watch. A few brave souls had set up their easels long enough to pass as portraitists and earn enough to warm their bellies.

The old man with a slight stoop had called out to him, “Good Lord! You haven't aged a single day! Though it's been a while. Thousands of seasons gone by and forgotten. Don't tell me you don't remember! Nigeria, 1969. You were walking on a country road. Biafra was not far away. You stopped my Jeep and asked me flat out, ‘Do you sell weapons? I need one. To clear my reputation and regain my title as prince.' You do remember, don't you? You wanted to pay me with your ring. It was gold. And as if the gold were not enough, you unknotted your turban, where you'd concealed a few crumpled banknotes. Nigeria, 1969. No doubt about it! But what's scary is that you haven't aged at all! I apologize again. I had nothing to sell you that day. I didn't deal with individuals.” This is what Petite-Guinée had said to Askia the first time on the museum square. His silver-headed, spare little body trembling with emotion. Askia too was shaken, but he had managed to say, “Biafra — that wasn't me.” And it could not have been Sidi either. In 1969 he was still with his family. He hadn't yet disappeared.

Petite-Guinée was a mercenary. He had filled contracts in various places: Arabia, Sudan, Guinea, Uganda, Biafra, Angola. As far as Askia was concerned, those contracts were wars, faces, photographs of the distant territories where Petite-Guinée had plied his trade, an envelope in the folder of his memory. After packing it in, he had lived in Conakry. With a woman. She had died in jail there in the wake of a political conspiracy incident. That was during the mid-seventies. He said he bore that woman, that country, inside him like an unhealed wound. Hence the name Petite-Guinée. They became friends, and Askia would go visit him whenever he could to listen to old recordings of Bembeya Jazz from Conakry. And the old man would point out to him, “They don't make albums like that anymore! What do you say? That today's music is different? Even if the violence is about the same? And also the prayers for all of it to stop?”

Askia saw Petite-Guinée frequently. At night before starting his taxi shift. In the basement studio of the old man's bar in Montmartre. Over time he had become a painter. He wanted to map out on canvas all the roads he had travelled throughout his restless life as a mercenary.

Askia entered quietly. The old man confided to him that he had felt sick the whole bloody day, a fire scorching his soul, his insides smelling of something burnt. So he had taken out his box of brushes and colours, unfolded the easel that had been leaned up against the wall next to the frames, and tried to paint something. Anything, a scene, a figure, an emotion, his malaise. Carried along by the brush dancing on the canvas. He had painted a nighttime background, and within this preliminary void he wanted to draw the outlines of a concrete, palpable, sustained mass. Solid to the touch and the eyes. He wanted to reproduce the concreteness of a landscape or a human face, a pattern that would take over from the cracking, the shattering, the interior chaos he was experiencing. He was a mess because he had never been able to untangle all the roads that he carried within. He wanted to see something linear and solid on the canvas: a stone house by the side of a perfectly straight road, a picture reflecting a standard existence, smooth and unbroken. The kind that Petite-Guinée would have wanted for himself. A life exactly like all the others. But for Askia it was the life of the mercenary, the pilgrim, the conqueror that was standard. An adventure like all the others in every respect. Since the Exodus, the Hegira, the Crusades, the yellow, white, or black gold rush. And all the invasions yet to come. The latest illegal alien, coming dirty-footed from the South to dig for bread-gold in Lampedusa, New York, Montreal.

Petite-Guinée swept his brush over the canvas. It scurried over the rough outlines, searching for shapes. He drew some haphazard lines but was soon disappointed. There emerged bits of architecture, demolished faces, shards, a stretch of road obstructed midway by a large black hole, debris, fragments of some unidentifiable ruin. In the loneliness of his nights, Petite-Guinée practised the art of exploding forms, destroying lives and roads. It could not be said that the colours on the canvas amounted to no more than an impression, an idea of failure, a concept, an elaboration. There was truth there. The debris on the canvas was necessary, like the remnants of a life or of a failure that spoke the truth. His own. The basic setting of his painting was a roadway littered with the shards and rubble of lives. He grew despondent and eventually dropped his brush.

Askia left without saying a word and went back to his cab. A calm night. The girls on Saint-Denis were shivering. No customers in sight.

He drove towards Boulevard Haussmann, Gare Saint-Lazare. Two blocks away, the flames of a fire. The air was burning. A scarf of smoke choked the globular moon, hanging from the edge of a gutter. He thought of a chapter from Revelation. Pictured the remains of lives that would drop onto the sidewalk in front of the blazing building. As in Petite-Guinée's painting. Pictured the remains of a body once big, bits of toes worn out from tramping over the pavement, a shred of cotton once an article of clothing, the turban shrouding Sidi Ben Sylla Mohammed's exile, his retreat. He pictured Sidi dead.