Tram 83 Read online

  Rape

  Pneumonia

  Sequestration

  Sexually transmitted diseases

  He remembered the article he’d read the previous day. On the front page, a ten-year old girl gives birth to a child weighing twenty-one pounds; the father of the newborn, a thirty-year-old digger carried off by the cave-in before last.

  SLIM-JIMS

  Cave-ins

  Radioactivity

  Roundworm

  Sexually transmitted diseases

  STUDENTS

  Mown down by trains

  Suicide

  Poisoning for those who try to show off

  Clashes with the miners

  (Hunger) strike

  Sexually transmitted diseases

  SINGLE-MAMAS

  Bad luck

  Sexually transmitted diseases

  “I’m horny, take me far away from here, far from these vipers, and turn me on.”

  “Missionary position or doggy-style, I’m ready to do the freakiest stuff.”

  “I don’t have syphilis, that’s the only good news.”

  He turned the page and scrawled: “They’ve lost their knowledge of hoe and fishhook. What will they sink their teeth into when the earth, for all its copper and diamonds, rejects them. Flashes of lightning initial the myths long maintained by these railroads that haunt the most wounded imaginations, the desire to see that other part of oneself sinking ever further.” He was reminded of his third dream: heavily bearded kids insisting he either pay them to dig his own grave or else flee aboard the first train for the Back-Country …

  “Do you have the time?”

  “I don’t like banks. That’s just my opinion.”

  “I give marvelous head.”

  “Let’s go far away from here. Take me to Graz, or Moscow even. Yes, I love your country.”

  He crossed a nameless street, lit a cigarette, Tram 83 in the distance.

  13.

  JOURNAL OF A RETURN TO TRAM 83.

  The Tram retained its botched-night splendor. It stayed the same, yesterday, today, and the day after. Beers were served fifteen minutes late. The waitresses and the busgirls, supported by the mother superior, mocked the world about them. The baby-chicks, all welcoming smiles, accosted the clients with no distinction. The mixed facilities remained overcrowded. The men entered and exited as happy as ever.

  They shared the same aspirations: money and sex. They loved money and baby-chicks. They were all drawn to the mines and the Tram. Days, they roamed the mines, whenever they could excavate with the dissident General’s authorization, and nights, they celebrated their good fortune at the Tram. They hit on the baby-chicks and the ageless-women, identified with the jazz, and drank beer till they threw up. Some claimed they required the Zambezi River to get properly drunk. Question: in that case, how many more nights of boozing?

  “You’re ruining the clientele. If you carry on latching hold of the tourists like that, I’ll kick you out of the Tram.”

  In the Tram’s early days, entry was barred to the baby-chick-girls. And then it was realized they could serve as bait, that they had a right to life and liberty, that they could rack up unhoped-for revenue, that they featured among the selection criteria, that it was their only means of survival, and so a kind of free rein was granted to any woman or girl who could entice an individual and make them spend. They were underestimated by the single-mamas and belittled by the armada of waitresses and other servers. The problem was that they were kind, open to negotiation, sincere, and intelligent for young girls of their age. They refused to wear underwear on the pretext that it restricted the curves of their bodies.

  “Foreplay spoils the pleasure.”

  The pantyless-girlies were possessed of a stage presence given to fueling rumors that they stuffed themselves with “love drugs” and fetishes of all kinds to enslave their tourist clients and make them their puppies, strategies inherited from their grandmothers and forebears who solicited at Tram 83 in the past, back when the joint was called Savorgnan de Brazza then San Salvador then Pool Malebo then Santa Rosa then Zanzibar … Certain tourists, we learned, became quite fired-up as they grew infatuated with the girls, spending some three hours of their nights and days enumerating, singing, screaming, yelling, reciting, and chanting the surnames of these unassuming pantyless-girlies, sometimes even complete genealogies. And thus you could hear, not far from the station whose metal structure … and in the vicinity of the burnt-ass mines, baying as long as a hangman’s rope: Marie Mujinga Mbombo, daughter of Marcel Kalambay Mutombo and Jacqueline Ntuma, paternal granddaughter of Jean-Pierre Tshimbalanga and Thérèse Kalenga, maternal granddaughter of Mr. Jean-Philippe de Sauvageon and Marie-Louise Kahenga, or perhaps Nelly Lomgombo, niece of Mr. Rolando Petuveria, offspring of a certain Mbuanga who worked as an odd-job man at the port of Beach Ngobila. The same legend specified that other tourists made over their wills to them, between two rounds of frisky frolics dispensed by our little-pantyless-single-mama-pre-baby-chick-sisters, giving up their stones or their apartments or their big cars and worse. Yet others, disoriented by that mysterious pleasure of intertwined bodies, forgot their Flemish, their French, their Portuguese, their Mandarin, their Czech, their Italian, and their Russian in favor of Lingala and Wolof; and so, according to the moralizing rumors, these damned upstarts, these social climbers, disturbed us in the chronology of our pleasure, interfered with our affairs, and lingered in bed with our sisters for a long while, when at the very same moment their brothers continued to speak their Flemish and their Russian, distorted our ancestors in favor of the Merovingians, knocked up hand over fist, escorted gold bars, Northern Station, platform 17, initialed worthless petroleum contracts, cloned a few nascent rebellions against a backdrop of mangled gospels, third-rate glossaries, phraseologies of an inveterate drunkard, a miner by trade or endlessly striking student or carjacker or pizza delivery guy of dubious and other origins. But the fact remains that the appearance of said rumors coincided with the sleeping sickness: imagine the Tram fast asleep, waitresses dozing between two shifts, diggers dozing, students of the endless strike dozing, tourists dozing, jazz musicians dozing, baby-chicks dozing, desperados dozing, and even outside, dozing Syrians, dozing Poles, dozing Frenchies, doz —

  “Do you have the time?”

  These girls knew how to leapfrog certain stages of their lives, or rather they consumed their adolescence to the full. Their bodies, the kind of heavy artillery that gets you drooling. Requiem liked to go on about how they were the future of humanity.

  “Do you have the time?”

  RULE NUMBER 46: fuck by day, fuck by night, fuck and fuck some more for you know not what tomorrow brings. Lucien groped his way forward. Awful dark. But the few votive candles stuck here and there and the pounding band kept the temperature hot. Mr. Malingeau was sat close to the podium facing the musicians who were covering an Afro-American song of the 1950s. Lucien quietly joined him at the table. The publisher was so mad for sax that he didn’t see him at all. His great passions were soul music, publishing, carnival, and merchandise. Lucien waited over an hour before addressing him.

  “Good evening, Mr. Malingeau!”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “I don’t know. I was absorbed by the beat, too.”

  He stammered. Truth be told, he was somewhere else. With the publisher lost in his own contemplations, he’d been wondering if it was credible to enlist the character of Lumumba alongside Napoleon and Christopher Columbus. He felt guilty at fiddling with history. Is there a limit to the imagination of a writer who takes real facts and uses them to construct a world where truth and fiction coexist? What right does one have to play around with collective memory? Is there any credibility in getting these sometimes-disparate characters in tune? The starting point for all these characters was the thirst in them. But the ending didn’t seem easy to stomach. Not by him but by the audience, who would already balk at his Che who only had five lines (“yes,” “no,”
“revolution,” “duty,” “struggle”), or the garrulous silence of a Mussolini Benito before the almost passionate eloquence of President Nicolae Ceauşescu.

  “I’m sorry, but music, you know, it’s another part of me.”

  “Me too.”

  A choir, a salsa variant with an aftertaste of funk for aural pleasures.

  “What would you like?”

  “Do you have the time?”

  “Vodka.”

  He hailed a waitress, who strutted over all insolent.

  “I really must apologize for the sad events of the other day. I thought it would be quite easy to breathe a certain view of the world into this city through literature. What a waste for intelligent folk like us!”

  A soprano took the stage to a round of applause. The Railroad Diva, she was known as. Her fair complexion suggested distant horizons, Thailand perhaps, Nepal perhaps, Afghanistan perhaps, Oceania perhaps, who knows. She too had come to seek her fortune no doubt (but from that to singing?). She performed all her compositions to a track of recorded noises of steam engines leaving the Northern Station. Her sublime voice sliced through the atmosphere, dissipated then reappeared amid the horns, whistles, grating, screeching, shouts of passengers …

  “We mustn’t give up,” the publisher continued.

  She’d had a smash hit with “My Trains and Me,” a song that stayed in the charts for nearly six years.

  “What do you want?”

  She didn’t go to sleep hungry, what with all the records she pumped onto the market. That’s a chick to marry, advised the Negus. RULE NUMBER 33: if you don’t manage to get yourself out of this hole, marry a girl to get you out, but not just any girl! She’s gotta sweat gold and cash; and that kind of girl is a critically endangered species.

  “Publish your stage-tale.”

  Émilienne was waiting for Lucien. She saw someone confused by life. Lucien didn’t dare even hold her gaze. He was dirty, distressed, stubbly, worn out by his own destiny.

  “Your stage-tale, I told you it interested me.”

  “Not that piece. It’s still under construction.”

  He placed his texts on the table. He thought, Porte de Clignancourt: “We’re working here while you have fun out there!”

  He picked up his pen, wrote some long sentences before continuing …

  Émilienne ordered two rums.

  “So you mean to tell me you don’t have any writing to publish?”

  “Tip …”

  “Foreplay wows me.”

  “I love myself and I love you.”

  “I’ve got a beautiful body.”

  “Come my sweet baby.”

  Lucien rummaged through his texts and pulled out some pages bound together.

  “Here, a version that’s a few months old.”

  Ferdinand lit a cigarette.

  “What was the title again?”

  Lucien didn’t reply.

  “Friday, same time, I’ll tell you what I think. Maybe I’ll bring the publishing contract with me.”

  Lucien stood up.

  “You don’t even thank me?”

  Lucien walked toward the exit.

  “Listen, Lucien …”

  Émilienne left too, hot on his heels.

  This was a girl apart, unbalanced. She was looking for true love. Lucien behaved courteously toward her. He was the man of her dreams, of that she was sure. And all the baby-chicks reproached her for it, since money was all that mattered to them.

  Requiem liked to say that every human has two cables in their head: a blue and a yellow. If the blue cable is cut, the person goes mad. The Negus continued in this philosophical vein: “Three-quarters of humanity have already lost the blue cable.” His gaze swept the Tram, as he spelled out the names of tourists, waitresses, busgirls, diggers, mercenaries, and baby-chicks who no longer had the cable in question. The name of the Tram’s owner, of Lucien, of Émilienne, and of the busgirl with fat lips never failed to appear on his list.

  Swinging rhythms, keyboards, clarinets, saxophones, drums, and electric guitars, a band come straight from Guadeloupe.

  14.

  REQUIEM AND MALINGEAU, OR WHEN TWO CROOKS DRINK TO EACH OTHER’S HEALTH.

  Tram 83, interior.

  In the background, a saxophonist performing a solo.

  Center-forward, the young ladies of Avignon in their vestal robes eyeing up all the masculine clients.

  Left-back, the Chinese tourists.

  Far-left, the Indo-European tourists.

  Front door, the busgirl with fat lips and her colonial-infantry patter.

  Leaning on the bar, Requiem and Ferdinand Malingeau.

  “It’s been suggested that you’re chasing after me.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What do you want with me?”

  “Stop raiding my henhouse.”

  “You should go see a marabout.”

  “I’ve heard you’d like to publish Lucien’s writings.”

  “What’s that got to do with you?”

  “I forbid it.”

  “By what right?”

  “I have no explanation to give you. It’s thanks to me that Lucien’s here in town. I used all of my influence to get the bastard out of that Back-Country cesspit. He’s under my guardianship and I won’t tell you twice.”

  “My dear friend, you are quite mad.”

  “But if you really want to publish his drivel, we could come to some arrangement. Do you know that Lucien has done me much wrong and that I am not ready to absolve him? As long as I live, I will strive to ridicule him, to belittle him, to destroy him.”

  It was hardly a secret. Requiem held Lucien responsible for everything: the rout of the government forces, his father’s death, his mother’s swift remarriage, his divorce from Jacqueline.

  “He took advantage of my absence to steal my wife. No, I shall battle Lucien until the end of the world. I pity you, Malingeau. If you really want to publish his writings, you must pay a five thousand dollar fee for authorization to publish. Otherwise …”

  The publisher burst out laughing.”

  “Listen, Malingeau …”

  “Go get some sleep, Negus!”

  The publisher drained his bottle and headed toward the young ladies of Avignon, leaving the Negus stranded.

  The publisher was a regular of Tram 83. He came here nearly every day of the week and was treated like a prince. His reputation had grown the day the dissident General mentioned him in one of his interminable speeches. They’d attended the same high school in Geneva and knew each other personally. In 1978 they lost touch with each other, the General having changed schools. It was through the press that Malingeau picked up the trail of his former classmate. At the time, the dissident General’s name was on everyone’s lips and provided extensive copy for foreign newspapers.

  Ferdinand Malingeau was one of those rare specimens, as his name suggests. Originally a nonprofit tourist, he was swept up by the ambience of Tram 83 and its bargirls. He held a master’s in theology, economics, and general agronomy, and had been a middle manager at a large bank in his native country. At least that’s what the gossip said. In a town erected solely upon guile, resourcefulness, Kalashnikovs, and the stone, it had become hard to discern the precise identity of the tourists. Which countries did they really hail from? Why had they come to Africa? What was their true motivation? Did they have wives and children? The fact remains that Malingeau, according to the grapevine, had given up everything to come feed off the soil of the City-State. He had initially hesitated between India and Tibet. Nearly all the nonprofit tourists were tired of the monotony and arrived with the hope of living in a world, a continent, as yet unpolluted by the excrement of globalization. He survived for three months without excavating. Which was a true miracle. As he himself said, he didn’t want to profit from Black Africa. His blunder was to start frequenting Tram 83. Life in Tram 83 is execrable if you’ve got no dough. The baby-chicks spurn you. The diggers spurn you. The waitresses a
nd the busgirls spurn you. The Chinese tourists spurn you. The for-profit tourists spurn you. The musicians spurn you. The students spurn you. The mercenaries spurn you. The slim-jims spurn you. All the traders spurn you. In short, a pestilential solitude. Humiliation took on a different form, particularly in the case of a white tourist. It was for this reason, so the rumors insinuated, that he had decided to excavate, to obtain the wherewithal to satisfy the baby-chicks who pursued him, and thus penetrate the kingdom of the first-class tourists.

  Those who’d run into him when he arrived in the City-State swell with pride when they speak of the man. Everyone recalls Malingeau’s irruption into their world. It was a Saturday night and the Tram was heaving as usual. The door opened and a dirty, scrawny, taciturn young man, with a face like that of a forlorn dog, entered the Tram, carrying nothing but a little suitcase. The Tram’s clients knew each other even if they didn’t always converse. It was immediately apparent that this was a newcomer.

  He’d wandered about some before winding up at Tram 83, which, like all places of socializing, operated according to a hierarchy. Individuals banded together according to geographical origin, the language they spoke, but above all their pecuniary state: the for-profit tourists, the colored tourists, most of whom were poor, the white tourists, and, finally, the Chinese tourists, who refused to mix with the others and always moved around in a tight bunch, even in the mixed facilities. These castes displayed their own internal subdivisions, often hinging upon money and fairness of skin. Thus the terms “second-class tourists” or “second-rate tourists” embraced both the whites and the blacks who were stuck for cash. The publisher could not therefore directly court the for-profit tourists possessing excavation rights. It was through hanging out with the African tourists that he met the Negus. Thanks to Requiem’s contacts, the publisher was received by his former colleague, the dissident General, who granted him the authorization to excavate, as well as the key to a mine that had been abandoned in the aftermath of decolonization. Malingeau appointed the Negus director of the factory he’d just established. Requiem ripped him off over a period of two years. He either fiddled the factory’s successful tenders or else brokered potential ones to the for-profit tourists. Which annoyed Malingeau, who fired him after several warnings. The Negus never got over this, complaining to whomever it might concern: “It’s thanks to me he can even open his mouth. He was a zombie when he turned up at the Tram, a revenant, living dead. But being as ungrateful as he is, when it came to payment he told me to go whistle for it. If I’m scamming this guy it’s because the minerals belong to us, they’re our minerals.”