Tram 83 Read online

  Back at university, he’d been told: “If you have difficulty concentrating, imagine yourself on a cot with an outrageously well-stacked girl, curves in all the right places, who begs you to thrust your cock into her. Hold, hold, hold fast to that idea, for God’s sake, and that’s maybe where you’ll find salvation.” He imagined himself with a buxom creature on Requiem’s divan. The abuse crescendoed. The Tram, the whole Tram as one, then disjointed voices, then as one, then disjointed voices, then as one …

  Requiem laughed until he cried. Quite normal, considering the animosity that bound the two bastards close. The publisher, at a loss to know what to do, stoically downed his vodka. Seized with pity, the busgirls and the waitresses enjoined him to beat it. The single-mamas took advantage of this incident to break ranks, push through the crowd to hunt down a potential client, entice others, or go change — either in the mixed facilities, or in the darkest corners of the room. No harm in a little digression: the girls arrived wearing dignified attire which they modified as the night drew on, or according to the mood of the clientele, in such a way that they appeared almost naked at strategic times, three in the morning, say, or four. The guys who’d been singing up the Cuban revolution bluntly began retuning their instruments. But Lucien held out, raising his voice above the din.

  “Do you have the time?”

  “You’re cute!”

  “Do you have the time?”

  “Come sleep with me!”

  A digger smashed a bottle and overturned a table in protest. The dogs bark, the trains move on. Lucien had corralled himself for good. He continued to read. The baby-chicks swayed their booties over to the mixed facilities. The students, initially friendly, suggested he lay down his arms. The single-mama-chicks washed their dirty linen, not in public, but with the mother superior, the den mama of the waitresses and busgirls. A young man sweetly left his seat, stepped up on the stage, and let fly with a left uppercut. An unusually violent punch. Lucien tottered, crashed to the floor. He remembered his third dream. He was giving a geography lesson to some pupils dressed all in green who asked him to go polish his shoes with condom lubricant. He persisted, and carried on reading them an article about cumulonimbi until a pupil stood up, gave him a thrashing, and ordered him to get back to the Northern Station, and jump aboard the first train for the Back-Country … The pages of his text lay on the stage. He made a superhuman effort, and stood himself up. A right this time. Bursts of applause.

  “Another beating, teach him he’s not here to show off!”

  The publisher tried to intervene. A slap despite his boss-man appearance. “That’ll learn you to respect guys who’ve really experienced life,” the attacker had said. The euphoria of a train entering the station. The jubilant shouts of the survivors of another cave-in. The jabbering of the slim-jims. They set to parodying the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (for whites). The students carried him by the sleeves and threw him outside. Émilienne sobbed.

  Requiem headed toward the mixed facilities.

  Outside, they continued to manhandle him. Someone picked up a tire. Someone suggested he be burned alive. Someone said he was a spy, a police inspector, a secret agent, friend of the for-profit tourists. A girl with breasts wrinkled like socks even accused him of attempted rape one Thursday evening when she was strutting about not far from the railroad tracks. They continued to manhandle him. In the distance, the angelus bell, the fatwa from the minaret, the shrieks of a student gone mad from having used black magic to further his aim of resembling the tourists used to paying everyone a round. Blood, drool, tears, surely he’d just lost his legs in trying to grab ahold of a freight train! They continued to manhandle him, hauling him across the rails.

  10.

  REQUIEM, MY MERCHANDISE IS SACRED.

  The beating he’d received outside of his performance at Tram 83 had confined him to bed. Seventeen stitches by the doctors’ count. Lucien momentarily halted the writing of his stage-tale. The ambitions he entertained disappeared with every passing nightmare. Headless men appeared, advising he climb aboard the first train or risk ending up in the morgue, his guts exposed, his eyes scraped out. The texts just couldn’t make any headway in such a climate. He no longer felt the pertinence of Che’s lines, or even Gandhi’s in negotiations with George Bush Junior, tableau 10, entitled “Baghdad Boogie And Other Lives To Come.” The dramatist’s drama remains the distractedness of the characters on whom the plot depends.

  “Requiem, my merchandise, don’t you dare try and stiff me, or you’ll see what I’m really capable of!”

  His day had got off to a bad start. Four dreams he’d had, the first two in the morning and the other two in the afternoon, common denominator: a railroad without tracks, miners engulfed, cherry-popped baby-chicks, and students wasted away by the strike, for-profit tourists heading back home, the busgirl with the fat lips stabbed by a mercenary … From the very first dream, he had a foreboding that something bad was going to happen to him.

  He hung up without saying a word. He closed the shutters. He picked up a volume lying on a shelf of the small bookcase. Buried his nose in it.

  Another phone call.

  “Requiem, my merchandise is sacred!”

  Ever since he’d been bed-bound, he regularly received calls for the Negus laden with death threats. He had even gotten adjusted to this rain of blackmail that fell every half hour. He hung up, returned to the publication. 7:16 P.M. Another phone call. He continued his reading. The telephone was insistent. He hesitated, then picked up the receiver, exhausted by these gymnastics.

  “Good evening, Ferdinand Malingeau. May I speak with Mr. Lucien?”

  “What do you want with me?”

  He answered, after rather a long silence:

  “Yes, Mister Lucien, I must first of all beseech your forgiveness for the other evening. Your friend gave me to understand that you were going through a bad patch and needed a little more money.”

  “So?”

  “I am still interested in your literature and I would like to meet to discuss things.”

  “Can you leave me the hell alone?”

  “Sir … It is for your benefit. Your friend told me all about the difficulties you’re currently experiencing. I thought, after the five thousand dollars, to come to your aid again.”

  “What five thousand dollars?”

  He was dumbstruck.

  “The five thousand I gave to your friend as compensation!”

  He was speechless.

  “Do you have any other texts?”

  Five thousand dollars, damn that Requiem! He shook with rage.

  “Can you hear me, sir, see you at the Tram at 11 P.M. at the latest?”

  “That’s perfect.”

  He collapsed onto the couch. The phone rang:

  “Hi, Lucien, Requiem here, I won’t be back this evening.”

  For the past week, Requiem had been ringing to apologize for not being able to come home, on the pretext of some deal to tie up.

  “Ok.”

  “Hi, Lucien, what’s with you, my blood brother?”

  “Nothing.”

  He hung up surreptitiously for fear of uttering some idiocy. He nodded off.

  The phone rang:

  “Requiem, my merchandise or nothing, it’s a matter of life or death …”

  He suddenly had a crazy idea. A leap into the void. He thought of Jacqueline, and replied without mincing his words:

  “Requiem, my merchandise, Requiem, my merchandise, shut it!”

  He got back to his reading. 7:47 P.M. He stood up, took the only beer sitting in the fridge, went out, his imitation-leather bag under his arm, and tried the broken-down elevators.

  11.

  IF EVERYONE WERE LIKE REQUIEM, THERE WOULD NEVER BE ANY POVERTY. HE KNEW WHERE AND PRECISELY WHEN TO STRIKE. WHETHER HE RETURNED WITH A CRIPPLED LEG AND A RIPPED EAR, HE SET OFF AGAIN THE FOLLOWING MORNING, HEAD HELD HIGH: REQUIEM, FOR AN IDENTITY REGAINED.

  Requiem brought Lucien ten newspa
pers a week. He went without his smokes to provide him with “food for the mind,” as he liked to banter. Lucien was terribly ashamed when he saw him reach into his haversack and pull, from between two sandwiches, the newspapers he triumphantly handed him like a poker player laying down his last cards. Lucien paid no mind to the joy Requiem procured from this humanitarian service, but, over time, the Negus started to go too far. He used his actorly qualities against him. His little performance was mechanical, yet not without purpose: that Lucien would tire and eventually move out!

  Requiem often returned home around 11 P.M., sometimes even later, much later, pushed open the door with his left foot, leered at him, greeted him, set down his near-sighted glasses, questioned him about the health of his characters, wanted to know if Lucien had got himself something to eat, if Lucien actually read the ads, took off his grubby vest, his scuffed kicks, his socks, and trained his little eyes on him for a long while before continuing with the stage that tortured him the most. With a writer’s sensibility, Lucien grasped the four sequences of his choreography:

  1) Arrival of the angel, heaven is lower than earth.

  2) Undressing as the stage preceding creation.

  3) Trial by ordeal or the survival instinct of a sleepwalking, lazy, wretched king.

  4) Assassination and the bagging-up of my bones.

  It was this last sequence that finished him. Picking up his Pandora’s box, or haversack, Requiem set it right down on the dining-room table. He mastered Lucien’s psychology as he did that of his prostitutes. He heckled him: “You writers, I wonder what you write about!” When Lucien attempted to escape to the sanitary facilities or the kitchen, he rushed after him, pursuing the interrogation, blow by blow, about what was afoot in the Back-Country, while extracting from his chow bag the newspapers he triumphantly handed him with a sarcastic air, insinuating every thirty seconds that Lucien didn’t read the ads, all the new ones.

  “RULE NUMBER 74: this is how you snag a job here, you sniff out the ads, you phone and they hire you, no pity for centipedes like you who twiddle their thumbs. Me here, Requiem, I hate jerks who don’t want to find work.”

  As his temper flared, Requiem stood there like a foreign-language teacher, reading aloud to him the ads he thought suited his profile:

  Waiter or waitress:

  to work every day of the week except Saturday and Sunday.

  Work attire is compulsory: pants or skirt, white blouse, black jacket.

  He piled it on: “You gotta grab any opportunity, jobs are fought over, it’s another world here, New Mexico, fall asleep and they’ll fall on you!” Continued in a neutral tone: “Gotta know how to land on your feet anyplace, there’s not just your literature can earn you a crust, statistics prove in black and white that these days studies only serve to boost your pride. And you know what? It’s you intellectuals who’ve wrecked this country!”

  Requiem was loath to spruce up his studio apartment since Lucien would be the prime beneficiary. He left home early in the morning and returned only late at night, head held high, chest puffed out, pants up over his bellybutton. Then skedaddled that same night to deliver some merchandise or sling back the booze at Tram 83. Requiem knew that Lucien suspected him of being mixed up in shady dealings. He knew that Lucien was not unaware that he purposefully kept his kennel in a pitiful state.

  “We’re never at home, what point is there in us getting any furniture,” he said every thirty seconds.

  It wasn’t for lack of money.

  12.

  HAWKERS OF SECONDHAND COFFINS.

  In the time it took to reach the stairs, a thud, blackout. He hurried down. The young boys of the building took advantage of such circumstances to dump in the stairwell. Vigilance and perceptiveness were required, or else risk tramping through waste. RULE NUMBER 25, as reiterated by the Negus: the stairwells of New Mexico sometimes serve as public latrines.

  “My arm, my arm.”

  He had stumbled during his frantic dash, and fallen on his left hand, which was barely healed. He picked himself up, furtively gathered his texts, tiptoed downstairs, and knocked shoulders with the girls on the fourth floor who were blocking the way.

  “Do you have the time?”

  Outside, no decent lighting of any kind. He hesitated to take shortcuts, for fear of running into a gang of hoods. Requiem had been walking down Authenticity Street one day when he fell into the clutches of some armed men, who snatched both his merchandise and his clothes. He’d managed to get back to Vampiretown thanks to a single-mama-chick who’d lent him her spare dress.

  People used to have power twenty-four-seven, before companies started sprouting like mushrooms. The term “blackout” didn’t appear in the dictionary. People were not dependent upon electricity. Then came the rush, the for-profit tourists, and their companies excavating for raw materials. Then the rebellions and mutinies. The first talk of blackouts appeared around the 1990s. Buoyed up by his victories over the regular army, the rebel leader of the time, half-brother of the dissident General, key shareholder in some seventy-six firms, and brother-in-law of an investor renowned for his largesse, burst onto the airwaves and declared: “You will receive power four days a week, to ensure that businesses can operate at full tilt.” As time passed, he adjusted his decree to two days, then one, then two hours, reasoning that the processing plants for the minerals so dear to the tourists require more electrical power, that the inhabitants of the City-State don’t have much need for it, and that the machinery meant to be supplying this power is rusting under the weight of the years: it dates from the building of the station, which is essentially an unfinished metal structure, gutted by artillery, train tracks, and locomotives that call to mind the railroad built by Stanley. Lucien strode along Independence Street. He took the curve of International Armistice Street, then turned onto Gravedigger Street in spite of himself, but avoided venturing too far down this narrow thoroughfare. Two men approached him, beaming.

  “What size would you like, sir?”

  The little street was full of commission agents, hired mourners, gravediggers, and hawkers of first and second-foot coffins.

  “My condolences, sir, is it your daughter who’s just …”

  They laid out their wares on either side amid unrivaled pandemonium. Their trade drew so-called businesswomen who erected straw shacks from which they slung grub, hemp, and traditional beer, which in turn drew musicians, baby-chicks, itinerant Pentecostal preachers and other rubberneckers of that ilk, open-air concerts, striptease shows, and simulated orgasms and fellatio, as the chronology would have it.

  “How old was he when he passed?”

  Their strategy was to welcome with open arms, to commiserate with the potential client, to explain that they were there to cry with him, to pass themselves off as a friend, to suggest a product.

  “Ebony wood, negotiable …”

  A horde of kids ran after him.

  “Sir, we work for less.”

  Eyes shriveled by cigarettes and alcohol. Potbellies full to bursting with roundworms, amoebas, earthworms, and assorted mollusks. Heads shaved with knives. Arms and legs stiff with digging graves from morning till morning. They were close to ten, maybe twelve years old. They toted the same justifications: “We’re doing this to pay for our studies. Dad’s already gone with the locomotives. He doesn’t write no more. Mom’s sick. The uncles and aunts and grandmothers say we’re sorcerers and it’s because of us that dad got married a third time and that our sorcery comes from mom and that we should go see the preachers who will cut the links by getting us to swallow palm oil to make us vomit up our sorcery and prevent us flying around at night.” They lived off a multitude of rackets, like all the kids in town.

  “We’re not expensive. Our condolences first!”

  They worked as porters at the Northern Station, and on the Congo River and at the Central Market, as slim-jims in the mines, errand boys at Tram 83, undertakers, and gravediggers. The more sensitive ones stood guard at the greasy
spoons abutting the station, whose metal structure recalled the 1885s, in exchange for a bowl of badly boiled beans.

  He stopped, got out his notebook, wrote: “Childhood, zero to two years old. Puberty, three to seven years old. Adolescence, eight to twelve years old. At fifteen, you already start scribbling your will.” “There’s no shortage of dead,” Requiem was fond of saying; he who regularly traded his merchandise for coffins he sold on to tourists when they lost their workers in cave-ins. Lucien felt bad when he saw those poor faces ready to do anything to survive. RULE NUMBER 23: every day is a pitched battle. As soon as dawn breaks you wonder what you’re going to eat, and then, with the sun, you reintegrate the cycle of the City-State, you fish, you dig, you scavenge, you glean, you devise, you fuck, you sweat, you sell, you trade, you peddle, you abuse, you corrupt, you drink, you shit in the stairwell, you identify with the jazz, you taunt the white tourists. Everything can be liquidated, each devises their own system. He thought about his Clignancourt friend: “I’m making contacts with all the theaters, and you, you wander about in the open air, how’s that a way to live, Lucien!” He thought of Gandhi’s face at Karl Marx’s commentary on the expropriation of the rural population. He thought about the Negus justifying himself: “Life expectancy here is forty-one years, whether you like it or not! I’m filling the four years I’ve got left as I see fit.” He stared at the coffins, on either side. Wrote in his notebook: deaths corresponding to professions.

  MINERS

  Cave-ins

  OR DIGGERS,

  Suicide (hanging, overdose, etc.)

  IT DEPENDS

  Radioactivity

  Drugs or traditional alcohol

  Vendetta

  Sexually transmitted diseases

  BABY-CHICKS

  Abortion

  Childbirth