Tram 83 Read online

  “No.”

  Downstairs, they went their separate ways, delighted to have made each other’s acquaintance.

  “You got any dough on you?”

  “I’m poor.”

  “Married?”

  “Not so much.”

  He had somewhat mastered the chapter on “Discussion with a young woman you meet in the elevator.” Requiem had given him the code: “Try by any means to remain neutral, cold, and forlorn.”

  “Do you love me?”

  He crossed the street.

  5.

  SECOND NIGHT: THE NIGHT WORE HER SWIMSUITS AND UNDERSHIRTS SHE FORGOT TO WRING OUT.

  Jalopies out of gas, deep-frozen products from the Galapagos Islands, knickknacks, ceiling fans, oil changes, sheep, sarcastic remarks, hearses on alert, eggs contaminated with melamine, relics, minarets as far as the eye can see, bistros, baker-deli-linen-fish-lumber stores, phone booths, internet cafés, criminal records, pools of stagnant water, garbage bags at the mercy of beggars, stray dogs, no-entry signs, mountains of refuse, black market in the merchandise and its derivatives, discotheques, abandoned locomotives, born-again Christian evangelist churches, cockfights, settlings of scores, boxing galas, mosquitoes resistant to all pesticides, booing, trolleys, wimps bankrolled by mercenaries, Neanderthals, laundries, desires, beverages, arranged widowhoods of wives of soldiers declared missing, ringworms, jeers revised and corrected by the foreign press, daydreams of dissident rebels prepared to open another front because of an oilfield, magic potions to treat unidentified diseases, backwash and backwash, cannibals, bleeders, baby chicks with their “do you have the time?”, idols with feet of clay, smoking rooms, palimpsests, cathedrals, repeat offenders in custody released on bail who return to the scene of the crime with the weapon of the crime, oriental tapestries, suicidals, the comings and goings of naked-men diddlers, assorted gaffes, superfluities, prolegomena, dark looks, erections paraphrased and channeled into paper tissues … The night came on with her swimsuits and undershirts she forgot to wring out.

  All nights have this particularity: they are long and popular.

  They teem with the rabble. They stifle awareness and accrue neurosis. They bind a straw mattress and a clock into an unrecognizable muddle. They come from the heart, improvise, and facilitate multiple partnership agreements between foreign bodies.

  Lucien walked straight ahead. He crossed two alleyways. He stopped at the Industries traffic circle a moment, to catch his breath. Dashed into the first greasy spoon.

  “I’m hungry, sir.”

  “What will you have?”

  “A piping hot soup, followed by veal kidneys with a bell pepper coulis.”

  “Sorry, sir, we do Chinese food here.”

  He trembled, just like a kid learning to pick pockets. He had but one concern: to fill his stomach.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  RULE NUMBER 34: watch out for hunger! Toddlers, barely weaned, have been known to take entire trains hostage, including the merchandise and everything that moved inside and out. Remote cause: the hunger that dissolves any possibility of escape. Direct result: armed robbery with bloodbath.

  “One soup, two bowls of rice with any sauce.”

  He sat down. They served him the food in a sort of cup.

  “Enjoy your meal, sir.”

  His throat burst into music with the rhythm of each mouthful. His shirt became spattered with stains, but so what! People stared at him as he wolfed down his food.

  “My tip, sir.”

  Lucien left the place the same way he’d entered, like a shot. He dove into the darkness in search of an unknown bliss. He was thinking of nothing. He took random streets. Stopped to admire some jugglers.

  “Do you have the time?”

  He soliloquized. He probed tentatively at the fog of his past. He stepped over the sleepers stretched out on the sidewalk. The city was filled with these boys who held the record for the longest slumber. The kids drugged themselves and thus glided for weeks without seeing the light of day. (A few women ventured to emulate the strategy. They didn’t last long. They were raped. Abused in their long sleep.)

  He envied these kids. If only he could arm himself with the courage to do as much! If only he was that young man, covered in muck from head to toe. Maybe he was happier than those people who hide their nervous tension and attempt to take on situations they can no longer handle.

  “Do you love me or don’t you?”

  The City-State is one of those territories that have already broken through the barrier of internal suffering. You share the same destiny as everyone else, the same history, the same hardship, the same trains, the same rot, the same Tram beer, the same dog kebabs, the same narrative as soon as you come into the world. You start out baby-chick or slim-jim or child soldier. You graduate to endlessly striking student or desperado. If you’ve got family on the trains, then you work on the trains; otherwise, like a ship, you wash up on the edge of hope — a suicidal, a carjacker, a digger with dirty teeth, a mechanic, a street sleeper, a commission agent, an errand boy employed by for-profit tourists, a hawker of secondhand coffins. Your fate is already sealed, the route marked out in advance. Fate sealed like that of the locomotives carrying spoiled merchandise and the dying.

  Death holds no meaning since you’ve never really lived. You cheat life. You devise a life that’s bogus. You devise a life on the basis of porn film tapes. It’s the only thing you can get hold of easily in the City-State. To escape the monotony, fever, sleeping sickness, earthquakes, cholera, and cave-ins, everyone, with the exception of those who hang out in Tram 83, gets into American porn or Russian porn. Long live globalization! Long live American porn! Long live Russian porn!

  “Do you have the time?”

  “No.”

  “Foreplay is important but it kills love to give it too much credit.”

  He stopped, struck up a conversation with a child who was selling guava at that late hour of the night,

  “You a tourist?”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s tourists who speak kindly to us, and take pictures of us that they go and sell back home.”

  “I am not …”

  “Give me some money.”

  took a motorcycle taxi, direction: Tram 83.

  6.

  MEETING A PUBLISHER SENT FROM HEAVEN IN TRAM 83.

  Lucien walked into Tram 83 around three in the morning. Men with multiple pronunciations, always the same. Ditto the single-mamas, shorthand for women. Darkness. A band dispatched from Acapulco was performing a revised and corrected Marvin Gaye opus. The instruments could barely stand. Two strapping lads on drums. Three on attack-vocals. Two hairy fellows on lead guitar. A saxophone. And the band’s supremo himself, in braces, complicating the basic vocal quartet (now soprano, now alto, now tenor, now bass and backing vocal). When he raised his voice, a young, almost naked tigress came forward, a strategy to win over the already seduced crowd. Euphoria. And indeed they succeeded in electrifying the room without the slightest effort. Nobody playing court tennis. Nobody playing poker. Nobody playing chess. Nobody bowling. Nobody even in the sanitary facilities. At university, he and Requiem used to implement the same method. Before the show proper, a dessert: either a circus number, or else a quick striptease turn performed by five volunteers. It caused quite a stir. The ecstatic students disrobed, climbed right up on stage and swore by the delights of forbidden fruits. Requiem, who was a good, a very good actor, couldn’t stomach the idea of holding out a hand to the audience. “What a waste,” he cried vehemently, “we came for texts, not for orgiastic sessions of any kind!” Of course this Requiem was of a different tune in his youth, calm, sincere, and loyal. Time makes brutes who wait for just the right moment to draw their pistols. That doesn’t mean Requiem was a brute — a necessary nuance.

  “Do you have the time?”

  Lucien headed toward the table they’d occupied the previous night. A man, school principal type, past fifty, was already sat there
. Alone with his cigarettes and a fine row of bottles, portents of an inveterate alcoholism. When you got wasted, you didn’t return the empties, in order to avoid misunderstandings. The waitresses and busgirls were inclined to tell you ten bottles instead of the three or five you’d actually ordered. No surprise to come across a guy with fifty empty bottles on his table and even the floor.

  “Evening, sir. May I sit here?”

  Standing before the seemingly very pleasant man.

  “As you wish!”

  Hardly sat down:

  “Where are you from?”

  “Vampiretown.”

  “And before, I mean, before Vampiretown?”

  Lucien stammered. Remembered his friend, Porte de Clignancourt, putting himself through the ordeal of contacting Paris theaters, and he there, in the middle of watching a botched concert. Remembered the girl from the elevators. Remembered that abrupt power cut.

  “I just came from the Back-Country.”

  The man’s curiosity intensified. Clasped his hands together as if invoking higher deities. A gold bracelet on his left wrist let Lucien guess at his interlocutor’s pecuniary caliber. Behave and maybe he’ll help you get on your feet again, he wondered softly to himself.

  “How so?”

  “I’m passing through. I don’t know if I’m going to extend my stay.”

  “I can see life’s treating you well here.”

  He told him this with all the pride of Archimedes discovering his “any body partially or completely submerged in a fluid at rest is acted upon by an upward force equal to the weight of the volume of fluid displaced.”

  “Yes, I’m enjoying myself.”

  The image of his friend, Porte de Clignancourt, flitted through Lucien’s brain a second time: “I’ve got the Festival des Francophonies en Limousin, the Tarmac and other Paris theaters, the contacts in Brazil. And what about you? Are you enjoying yourself with this guy shooting questions at you?”

  He sighed.

  “Do you have the time?”

  A band from the Amazon, composed of Indians, readied themselves to go on stage. The interrogation continued. The man was surely someone influential. He wanted to know everything and was not to be offended. Who knows, perhaps his future Good Samaritan? Good intentions can be found even in the lion’s den. Each answer stirred his curiosity further.

  “Married?”

  “…”

  “Divorced?”

  “No.”

  “What line of work are you in?”

  He hesitated to go on.

  “I hold a bachelor’s degree in history.”

  The interlocutor slammed his glass down on the table and erupted into laughter. As if that weren’t enough, he got out of his chair, took a few steps, asked the musicians to lower their voices, and pointed his finger at Lucien:

  “Dear friends, you’re not going to believe me: this man you see is a historian!”

  General hilarity.

  The whole Tram as one:

  “Didn’t you give a shit, or what!”

  Then as a scattered choir:

  “And you earn a living doing history?”

  “Look what can happen by dint of imitating the tourists!”

  “You study girls too, or just history?”

  “You’re an embarrassment to us, with your wallowing in art history!”

  “I’ll throw myself onto the tracks if dad insists I study history and stuff,” exclaimed a kid, barely ten years old, who was with his father.

  He returned to his table and half mouthed an apology at Lucien, who still didn’t understand what had just befallen him.

  “I couldn’t help it. I just didn’t imagine there were any brainy people left in the City-State. This country’s been knocked flat, it’s all got to be rebuilt: roads, schools, hospitals, the station, even men. We need doctors, mechanics, carpenters, and garbage collectors, but certainly not dreamers!”

  “Do you have the time?”

  The music had resumed with even greater intensity. Lucien had lost the courage to give the man who had just humiliated him a withering look. He did, however, wish to get himself off the hook.

  “You can’t do anything about a passion. But I’m not just a historian. I’m also a writer.”

  A guy at a neighboring table butted in:

  “Writer or historian, same difference.”

  “I’m in writing, he insisted.”

  “Writing. Writing. Writing.”

  His interlocutor pronounced this word in a guttural voice. He remained circumspect, as if victim of an apparition. Lucien remained on his guard, for fear of being made a fool of a second time.

  “I’m a writer but …”

  “Young man, you are looking at Ferdinand Malingeau, director of Joy Train Publications.”

  Lucien was speechless. He felt a kind of relief. The busgirls and the waitresses balked at bringing them their blasted beer, which, by the way, remained in the mixed facilities — RULE NUMBER 94: reality of life, when you drink, you piss, and when you piss, it remains your beer in your toilet. Lucien recalled Requiem’s “I prefer to piss at home.” He wanted to order a beer but not a single pair of eyes fell on him. It required the direct intervention of Joy Train Publications to resolve the situation. Finally, the first beer. The busgirl came over, vexed. Slammed the drink down. Stood back, bottle-opener in hand. Several seconds. Made up her mind, and opened the merchandise. A single verse:

  “Tip!”

  Lucien took out a bill.

  “Here.”

  She snatched the money and turned her back without a word. The traffic grew thicker. Our Indian friends, performing an anthem against global warming, child labor in the mines, deforestation, and the poaching of tilapia, pythons, piranhas, and white rhinoceroses, sowed panic among the common people. The women dissolved into tears. The men — tourists and other dropouts taken unawares by the sad saga of existence — shook their heads in repentance.

  Lucien swiveled his head in the hope of glimpsing Requiem.

  “How long you been in the writing game?”

  “Do you have the time?”

  “Ten years.”

  “What or who do you write about? Got a target audience? Expectations? How many copies? Any literary prizes? What genre?”

  He felt trapped. Questions shooting from all sides. He hadn’t even taken a sip!

  “Anything you’re working on?”

  He had to answer in the hope of getting published by Joy Train.

  “Let’s just say a stage-tale that considers this country from a historical perspective. The Africa of Possibility: Lumumba, the Fall of an Angel, or the Pestle-Mortar Years. It is highly likely that this text will be performed in Europe. Characters include Che Guevara, Sékou Touré, Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Lumumba, Martin Luther King, Ceauşescu, not forgetting the dissident General.”

  The publisher ordered a glass of rum and some ice cubes. Comings and goings to the restrooms: single-mamas, baby-chicks, students, office workers, tourists, musicians, Pentecostal preachers, jugglers, ex-convicts …

  “I’m no communist. I don’t buy it. I know Lumumba is an emblematic figure of the independence of Congo-Zaire, but I feel that instead of Lumumba it’s best to depict our own heroes, such as a resistance fighter who paid the price for this city, instead of getting bogged down in the history of Congo-Zaire. And as for ‘The Congo for the Congolese,’ leave that part of history to the dramatists of this country! Here, as in the Back-Country, there are surely men who have left a mark on their era. Leave these great men to their dignified repose! Turn your mind to texts that talk of railroads, mines, or I don’t know what.”

  “Let me explain …”

  “Otherwise you restrict yourself to churning out an essay instead of blending genres.”

  “I trained as a historian. I think, unless I am mistaken, that literature deserves pride of place in the shaping of history. It is by way of literature that I can reestablish the truth. I intend to piece together the memo
ry of a country that exists only on paper. To fantasize about the City-State and the Back-Country with a view to exploring collective memory. Historical characters are my waymarks. But baby-chicks, diggers, famished students, tourists, and …”

  “I’m familiar with that view of things. We’ve already had enough of squalor, poverty, syphilis, and violence in African literature. Look around us. There are beautiful girls, good-looking men, Brazza Beer, good music. Doesn’t all that inspire you? I’m concerned for the future of African literature in general. The main character in the African novel is always single, neurotic, perverse, depressive, childless, homeless, and overburdened with debt. Here, we live, we fuck, we’re happy. There needs to be fucking in African literature too!”

  Lucien made the most of his interlocutor’s fervor to guzzle his first suds. As he raised his glass, he noticed the two girls from yesterday who were eyeing them up from afar. He attempted a friendly gesture, poor thing. The single-mamas took the gesture for a code, and came down to them without waiting to be asked twice.

  “I’m interested in your stage-tale.”

  The Amazonians left by the back door, having been begged by the busgirls, the diggers, the Pentecostal preachers, and the rest of the audience, who’d just wiped away their crocodile tears, to vacate the stage.

  “You’re a handsome pair. Good evening, for starters.”

  The two girls got settled. A rap group set to blazing up the joint. The rappers, a cantankerous and disreputable bunch of ex-students, ex-rebels, and ex-diggers, screamed, barked, moaned, haggled, and jabbered.

  “I’m going to organize a rehearsed reading. Joy Train Publications is honored to present … what was the name of your stage-tale again?”

  “The Africa of Possibility: Lumumba, the Fall of an Angel, or the Pestle-Mortar Years.”

  “On this magnificent evening, Joy Train Publications are deeply honored and truly pleased to give you Lucien, a contemporary author whose work teaches us to overcome walls, train tracks, wars, and oceans, and which we shall publish one of these fine days.”

  “You know …”

  “I am Swiss, by my father and mother. Anyhow, you’d have found out sooner or later. I prefer to tell you this before any collaboration. To avoid possible confusion. All these whites you see here are not necessarily Swiss.”