Dirty Feet Read online

  His passenger was still bent over her camera. He wanted to hear her voice again, perhaps assailing him with the music of her speech: Isn’t it a lovely night? Do you like chestnuts? He wanted her to tell him something, a word, a thought: You know, this technology makes things so easy. You can get rid of all the faces, I mean all the portraits, that aren’t to your liking! She raised her head, stared at him a second time in the rear-view mirror, and finally said, “You look like someone. But without the turban.”

  He shivered. What she saw in the mirror was not him. She saw someone else behind him, beyond his face. She lifted her head and introduced herself: “I’m Olia,” and instantly went back to deleting pictures, the ones she found unsatisfactory, furiously hitting the buttons of her camera. They were caught in traffic near the Gibert Joseph bookstore. The passersby were rifling through the books laid out on tables on the sidewalk, searching for buried treasure, their attention focused on the volumes that they flipped through before dropping them back on the piles.

  Askia was still stuck in the long line of cars with his passenger. In the meantime she lowered the window on her side and, leaning out her thin body, photographed the readers in profile.

  5

  FOR A LONG TIME he had sought to cleanse his mind of the memory of his father, that ghost, that stubborn shadow filling the film screen of his childhood, the screenlike wall at the foot of the bed where he slept in his mother’s hut. It was 1973, and already three years had passed since the family had been reduced to the son and the mother huddled in their tropical shanty. The father was this: a film that started up at the end of a run, when he found himself alone in the car, images streaming down onto the windshield of Askia’s taxi. In the film the father’s faithful shadow loomed up on the wall in front of him at night in the hut. The father would play with a clown who sported a broad pair of wings on his back. Sidi, the father, who must have become associated with the clown at a travelling circus, wore a large white turban and inhabited the world of the dreamy child that Askia had been. Time had passed since their flight from the Sahel. The father and the clown did their routine:

  Where are you going, big turban?

  I don’t know. I’m going.

  You’re going.

  I’m going.

  How far?

  I don’t know. As far as I can go.

  You’re going as far as you can go . . .

  That’s right.

  And how far can you go?

  If I knew, I would tell you.

  You don’t know where you’re going. But you’re going.

  But I’m going.

  And how long have you been going?

  I don’t remember.

  If you knew, would you stop because you’d say to yourself: “I’ve been going for a long time and I don’t know where, and I see this makes no sense?”

  Probably. Because it makes no sense.

  No sense . . .

  But maybe you can try right now to stay where you are.

  Where I am . . .

  Paris.

  6

  HE HAD OFTEN wondered why Sidi had chosen Paris. He pondered this, searching for the logic behind this curious choice before recognizing the plain fact that he could find none. The logic eluded him, slipped through his fingers. Paris. It could have been a city on the Atlantic or Mediterranean coast, because in Askia’s mind one of the reasons for leaving the Sahel had been to settle on the coast. Because the gods of the road had pushed them from the interior to the edge of those worlds. He thought that, logically, Sidi should have settled in San Pedro or somewhere higher, in Dakar or maybe Tangiers. It was hard to understand why Sidi had gone any farther.

  What exactly had attracted his father to Paris? There was no answer to that question, yet he could still see how Sidi might have made his way to metropolitan France, l’Hexagone. When they had already made it to the coast — Askia was eight years old at the time — his mother would talk of those old tubs that frequently plied the route between the Gulf of Guinea and the shores of the Mediterranean. Once she had mentioned the men who sailed to Marseilles, having managed to hire themselves out on fishing boats whose captains were all too happy to employ such solid, brawny young men, able to winch up a net in no time, haul the big fish to the freezer for storage, and clean the small ones that were to be cooked for the crews. The men were sturdy and versatile too, veritable jacks-of-all-trades: cooks, mechanic’s helpers, welders, maintenance men, and sometimes more. Sometimes lovers of sailors who found relief in their firm, smooth flesh.

  Yes, Sidi may have reached Marseilles by following a predictable course, a logical itinerary from the ports of Lomé, Lagos, or Cotonou towards the south of France. And from Marseilles? Would he have then gone up to Paris? Or had he perhaps embarked in the Gulf of Guinea as a stowaway, only to be discovered far offshore and thrown overboard?

  He reflected on the choice of Paris and he could see only that Sidi’s case had probably not been so unusual. That from Cordoba to Bilbao, Matera, Rome, or Paris there were thousands of aliens tramping farther north. Some of them travelled great distances, towards Moscow, looking for knowledge in the university named after a Congolese political leader. There was one, Tété-Michel Kpomassie, who had gone even farther, towards Greenland and the lands of the Inuit, back in the seventies, his black feet sinking into the powdered snow up to the intangible limits of his curiosity while the compact people of the polar latitudes watched in amusement. And there were those too who did not go very far, their purpose being to earn enough money in the orchards of Sicily to feed their families, but there were those more frivolous, the sons of Berbers and Arabs, who invaded Andalusia from Tangiers as if to turn it back into Muslim territory as in the days of the Almoravids, when the suras were recited in the homes of Almeria.

  Later, when Askia enrolled at the university in the eighties, he kept thinking about those different itineraries but never succeeded in placing Sidi somewhere, in a rural or an urban setting. Sidi evading all detection, pursuing who knew what mirage, driven by some obscure desire. His mother one day conjectured that Sidi had gone to France because he had a distant cousin from Guinea there. The cousin, Camara Laye, worked in a factory, which his mother believed was called Simca and was located in Aubervilliers, on the outskirts of Paris. In the early seventies, when Sidi had vanished, many people were migrating from black Africa and northern Africa to France, where they could work as labourers on construction sites or as employees in automobile plants. Yes, it was an acceptable explanation: in Aubervilliers Sidi had met his cousin Camara Laye, who had assured him there would be a job waiting for him at the plant the morning after he arrived.

  7

  MORNING. BACK IN his apartment, a squat discovered with the help of Tony, an old schoolmate from the Université du Golfe de Guinée, his only contact in the French capital when he landed there on that cloudless early morning of May 2, 2005. When his friend had found him a place to stay he had said, “Thanks for the squat, Tony. This way I’ll be ready to decamp on a moment’s notice. Anyway, I’m not going to stay here too long. I’m indebted to you for the squat, my papers, and the contact for the taxi I’m driving.”

  His taxi licence was bogus too. But he needed those scraps of paper to be able to circulate according to the standards and dress code of the profession. To share in the Wedding. To belong to the world of those who move and make things happen. The appearances may have been false, but what mattered was that his quest was not, that at the end of the dark nights there would be the reality of his chasing after Sidi’s shadow. For a few days he accompanied Tony, who worked as a deliveryman, on his runs through the city, thinking about his own route, the objective being not to deal out parcels and smiles to customers but to deal only with the road.

  His room. Aside from the dampness of the green cracked walls, there was a grimy carpet pocked with a thousand landscapes. Holes. In the corner to the left as you came in there were pots and the hot plate, a tiny metal square with a heating element in
the middle. Between the left corner and the right corner stood the radiator, which had never given off the slightest ray of heat. In the right corner was three-quarters of what had been a sink, where water still flowed, miraculously. The brass faucet poured out what he needed for cooking and drinking. And for shaving when he woke. On the wall above the sink hung a tiny blue cabinet. Opposite the kitchen utensils, the dead radiator, and the three-quarters of a sink was a mattress so ridiculously small for a man his size that he had had to extend it with his old valise, but even then his feet hung over the edge and threatened to punch a hole in the wall. His feet touched the wall, pressed against it, which was why Askia slept curled up on his side as if inside a belly. He was inside the cold, damp, dirty belly of an attic in Lutetia. Facing the front door, between the bed and the kitchen sink, was a window that overlooked his table, which consisted of a board placed on trestles that had been salvaged from the sidewalk.

  He had a cramped view of the roofs, the chimneys, the stars. And of a skylight in the roof across the way, where he could make out the familiar muzzle of a dog that he did not like very much. A mutt that resembled the one belonging to Old Man Lem, which he would torture back then at the garbage dump in Trois-Collines. The dog, he recalled, was called Pontos, and he would pitch stones at it, together with his playmates, cruel children, at the most beautiful of all wedding celebrations.

  8

  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.”

  9

  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.

  10

  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 o
ut 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.”