Tram 83 Read online

  The main entrance gave some idea of the nature of the place. Goats. Roosters. Turkeys. Doughnut stalls. Wheelbarrows. Vehicles from another era. Chairs without legs. Single-mama-pre-baby-chicks who laugh right in your face and heap abuse at you even if you don’t react: “You’re all impotent good-for-nothings, scaredy-cats, peasants, pussies, barely men at all. Come here and let’s see if you can make us moan!” Single-mamas cooked here and there. They crossed the yard filled with children running in all directions.

  Lucien wanted to know a bit more about the mission but,

  “Gotta see Pig Across Paris. He dominates the film like you’ve no idea.”

  Requiem suddenly began a conversation about Jean Gabin. He had his own peculiar way of dodging awkward questions through cinema and his weakness for gypsy music. Three in the morning … They entered the third warehouse on the left, a kind of utter mess revised and tropicalized.

  Great minds think alike. A well-built man, in camouflage fatigues, standing and cleaning a submachine gun, welcomed them with open arms. Requiem hurried through the introductions. 3:10 A.M. They took their places directly on the jerrycans. The man called out to a young lady, who brought bottles and a succession of joints. Requiem summed up the situation: “Impossible to enter the Polygon lately without being armed. This past month we got shot at by Death-Death’s gang. They opened fire on three of my men while we were taking the merchandise for washing, and vamoosed with it. Last week the desperados and the mine police laid into us.”

  “What do you need?”

  He continued swabbing the gun without even looking at his visitors. The Negus took out a scrap of paper and slipped it into his hand.

  “Anything that will allow us to fight our way through the rock.”

  The soldier got up, returned with Kalashnikovs, bayonets, explosives, and uniforms.

  “It’s the same gear as last time, please return it to me within two days.”

  They settled up. Requiem took a few notes out of his haversack. 3:50 A.M.

  “The deities quarrel over the heavens and us the earth. They can’t prevent us feasting on our own diamonds,” he moaned.

  His gun handling was flawless. Which is normal for someone who’d served in Sudan, Angola, Korea, the former Zaire, Israel, and even Rwanda. Like most young students of the time, he had enlisted supposedly to counter the advances of the second wave of the third war of liberation. Many flocked to join the army with the aim of changing the world, particularly since they enjoyed fantastic pay, as well as training abroad.

  Once outside, they divvied up the artillery. Lucien dithered. They made him pull on a uniform.

  “We must recover our sacks.”

  The dissident General ruled supreme over the City-State. He owned outright twenty artisanal-diamond purchase and export houses and was a shareholder in nearly all the firms run by the tourists. He sold off the mining concessions, or sometimes even gave them as gifts to whomever he liked. In his megalomania, he closed and opened Hope Mine as he saw fit, even though the whole of the City-State scrounged a living off this mine. At each closure, an indescribable crisis struck the country for the enjoyment of a minority of tourists authorized to excavate at any time. But adventurers and traders pissed all over the lunatic dissident General’s decree-laws concerning the closure of Hope Mine. At night they infiltrated the facilities, which were guarded by mercenaries, the chief’s personal militia, and other security outfits. Clashes ensued, lasting for hours, accompanied by corpses. The desperados colluded with the mercenaries, supplying them with information and straight-out attacking the diggers, from whom they confiscated the merchandise. The heavily armed diggers, dubbed suicidals for their determination, didn’t let themselves be intimidated in any way. They handled their Kalashnikovs wonderfully. Whether diggers or dissident rebels or for-profit tourists or students, the common denominator was the gold rush that began at the station whose metal structure …

  Lucien, Requiem, and his friends climbed into a jalopy, destination: Hope Mine. Requiem, who was snorting cocaine after cocaine, soliloquized: “Objective 1: we recover our sacks. Objective 2: beat the crap out of any imbecile blocking our way. Objective 3: vanish into thin air. Objective 4: night of debauchery at Tram 83.” Stoned out of their heads on cannabis, Requiem’s crew attempted to outdo each other through the bragging they unfurled, from the single-mamas with sausage-thighs they’d scarfed during burglaries, to the miner-guards slaughtered in cold blood, not forgetting the many cathouses, which they evoked with a nostalgic air.

  In his notebook, Lucien wrote: “The mouths are infected with a thousand thoughts of cannibalism modeled on the Second Republic. What will they munch on when the frangipanis yield guava and the eucalyptuses earthworms?”

  Hope Mine, situated not far from the town center, passed for a veritable Tower of Babel. It was the main bone of contention between the various protagonists, who fought over it until the last drop of sweat. The numerous security firms didn’t live together in perfect harmony. They functioned according to mood, the tourists, and the interests on that day’s agenda. They were hard to manipulate. They betrayed each other, battled each other, hit it off with each other, doggedly harried the suicidals, plotted on behalf of the dissident General, and gathered the scraps from the tourists of British descent.

  When they were a few minutes from the Polygon, Dragon and Mortal Combat went scouting ahead. They weren’t long in returning.

  “The way is clear.”

  Requiem cocked his gun:

  “Shoot at anything that moves!”

  Hope Mine was the oldest of all the mines in the City-State, and it drew the most prospectors. A high wall studded with barbed wire ran around it, enclosing an area twenty-one miles by twenty-five. It contained warehouses, prefabricated sheds, old locomotives, boxcars, and jalopies from the Second Republic. It was renowned for its subterranean galleries packed with all kinds of minerals. To the northwest of this site with its Martian soil lay the famous Polygon: mounds of stones and craters potentially rich in iron, cobalt, zinc, and cassiterite. The gossip drifting around Tram 83, the Singapore bar-restaurant, and even the Face-to-Face brothel run by Aunty, known as Body-to-Body Granny to her friends, highlighted the fact that even in the farthest lands, beyond Muanda and even Beach Ngobila, Brazzaville, and Gibraltar, there were to be found men who studied Hope Mine and knew it by heart. One must be wary of these unsubstantiated rumors reeled off between a pair of breasts, a salsa variant, and a vodka poured by a busgirl peeved at a baby-chick pinching from right under her nose a client upon whom rested her every hope.

  Once inside, Requiem scattered his men to go reconnoiter. The darkness and a constant fear of receiving a walloping made the procedure difficult to follow. They combed a few buildings, smashing them open with the butts of their guns. Not much to speak of, just some old clothes left by fugitives, and garbage bags half full of cow dung. They continued their search.

  “Low content,” remarked Requiem, who was already losing his temper.

  Lucien, holding a gun for the first time, was at his wits’ end, as he begged Mortal Combat and Invincible Measles to convince Requiem to hightail it. But the Negus persisted in checking out the premises.

  “Perhaps they’ve already removed my merchandise. If we trace an imaginary line, maybe we’ll run into another group all loaded up, and then we’ll teach them to comply without being asked twice.”

  He lit a cigarette rolled from cassava leaves.

  They went down into the second crater in the center of the Polygon, dug away, Zairian style, extracted two sacks of gravel to wash close by, exited left from the hole, and ran straight into a horde of desperados heavily armed with machetes. Greetings peppered with irony, furtive glances, they faced each other down, before deciding it wasn’t worth laying into each other for sacks with no obvious content.

  In the end, after being chivvied by Lucien and his friends into turning back, Requiem declared that it was amateurish to go carting their weapons around, a
nd suggested burying them and returning there that very evening, all fired up to loot the whole place.

  “Let’s head back to the Tram.”

  They ended their night of transgression at Tram 83 to the dismally tragic lamentations of the prima donna, the Castafiore, the Railroad Diva.

  Tram 83 had a soft spot for the Negus. He stayed the same on all his fronts. He knew what he was doing, that you can’t invent the wheel twice, that there’s no point fretting, that the rules of the game are clearly defined, and that the main thing is to live off anything that falls into your hands. “The tragedy is already written, we merely preface it.” From the moment this motto began to resonate consciously in his mind, he never held back from following his heart. He was simple and honest even in his mischief.

  Requiem was the opposite of Lucien, who irritated the whole of the Tram with his waffling, a hypocrite scribbling on scraps of paper instead of telling us the truth to our faces, and lazy regarding the girls. He tired us out, Lucien did. He was too much! What’s the point of playing the intellectual all the time if the equation must remain the same? The roads that lead to truth and honesty are cut by flooding, filth, dog turds, lies, and blackouts, but why did he obstinately maintain his belief that a better world was possible? Why did he strive to reduce humanity to the dreams and quotations he gleaned on the pages of his texts? It’s called cowardice, perhaps even amnesia, or indeed a combination of the two. The world is beyond redemption, as Requiem put it. But supposing … Putting aside our personal feelings, perhaps Lucien was right. Let’s think about it. What would we do if we found ourselves in the shoes of this poète maudit? Requiem’s answer: “The tragedy is already written, we merely preface it. So let us preface.”

  The Tram operated twenty-four-seven. They hung out there touching up titties, smoking, and drinking until around two in the afternoon. Lucien, who couldn’t stand it anymore, left the bunch earlier. He had concocted an explosive cocktail: wine + vodka + lemonade + whiskey brought in from Beach Ngobila.

  “Do you have the time?”

  Incapable of walking, Requiem let Lucien return to the flat on his own. He vomited, reeled … A desperado saw him back home in exchange for a few coins.

  Ideas to nourish his texts abounded. How, for example, to halve the characters of his theater piece without trashing the plot? Why not structure the text into two major movements, The Burnt Mornings and The Weeping Willows, to avoid losing historical credibility? Deep within himself, he hefted the monologue Lenin would deliver when told that Napoleon had left for Saint Helena accompanied by Mao Zedong. He tried to write in his notebook by any means. Waste of effort. His head spun. His limbs gave way. He remembered his wedding day. He rolled about on his miserable bed like someone suffering from syphilis. 4:10 P.M. He eventually fell asleep somehow.

  Immediately a series of nightmares. Nightmare 1: a locomotive crammed full of minerals makes an infernal drone as it leaves platform 18 for horizons unknown. Nightmare 2: his grandfather asks him to jump into the first boxcar, otherwise “you’ll die like a homeless dog for wanting to hang on to a town that is no longer suited to you.” Nightmare 3: dissident rebels confront striking students allied with diggers beneath a hail of stones not far from the Tram. Nightmare 4: child-soldiers ransack the shops of the City-State. Nightmare 5: soldiers pursue single-mamas, crackling, trucks, screams, firing into the air. Nightmare 6: suicidals break into the bank belonging to the tourist owner of the sheds opposite Hope Mine. Nightmare 7: a rape, some temple forecourt. Nightmare 8: a rape, Fanatics Avenue. Nightmare 9: a rape, platform 7. Nightmare 10: a gang rape, blowjobs, and pitched brawls, Boulevard …

  He woke up around ten in the evening. Hurried. A cold shower.

  Past eleven, just time to read his texts, then a phone call from Paris, Métro Clignancourt.

  “Where are you at with your piece on Lumumba? I’m killing myself to get the necessary contacts.”

  Lucien tried to reassure him.

  “Be patient, a few commas and I’ll send you the text.”

  His friend also wanted him to write an article about Abderrahmane Sissako’s latest film. Lucien paused, before deciding.

  “No, I don’t have enough time.”

  He remembered having watched it just before he left for the City-State.

  “Please!”

  Lucien rejected the request. But his friend stuck to his guns.

  “You know, the film was hailed by the international critics at Cannes.”

  “But.”

  Lucien reluctantly agreed.

  He found it a real job to get the first lines down on paper. He identified with the main character, a certain Abdallah who shows up in a small town to await his departure for Europe and who is obliged to live in isolation since he’s separated from the inhabitants by a language he doesn’t understand.

  He got down to the task. Impossible to continue the article. The verbs slipped from his fingers. The prepositions lay in wait then skipped out on him. The subordinate clauses screamed their independence. The adjectives frowned and took to the rails of oblivion.

  A phone call.

  “Requiem, my merchandise is sacred!”

  A feeling of guilt overcame him. He shouldn’t have left the Back-Country, he told himself, what a foolish thing I’ve done! He could have stayed and ceased his misadventures with littérature engagée, or had his palm greased — there is no lack of opportunities for potential seasonal writers: for each political regime, you produce your literature.

  You write an epic poem about the hairstyle of the president’s wife, they give you a house; a monologue rehashing the dreams of the Minister of Divination, Clairvoyance, and Prophecies, they buy you a trip to Venice; a novel about the president’s childhood, they appoint you Minister of Agriculture and Bovine Farming. Too late! He gathered chance snippets of sentences and arrived at a parturition he hastened to send off. His computer boycotted the transposition of the document to PDF. He bustled about. Bad luck, blackout! He’d forgotten that it was a Thursday, that the power had to meet the needs of a small local mining firm, that all the residents knew this, and that they had zero right to make the protests that, incidentally, were prohibited across the entire national territory. An idea came to him: maybe light a candle and start another text? Yes. Where to begin? He wrote a series of arabesques that he tried to read aloud. At twelve o’clock, the Negus turned up with three baby-chicks barely twelve years old.

  “Take one, if you like, help yourself.”

  Lucien got up.

  “And what’s your name?” (One of the three, with promising breasts.)

  Lucien picked up his jacket.

  “Give me five dollars.”

  Lucien left in a visceral rage.

  19.

  RELIGION OF THE STONE: WE DON’T KNOW THE WEATHER FORECAST, WE ARE THE WEATHER FORECAST, NOT TO MENTION THAT WE DEVISE OUR OWN SOLAR SYSTEM. THE SUN RISES AT THE NORTHERN STATION AND SETS AT THE TRAM BETWEEN TWO GRAPEFRUIT-BREASTS. WE ARE THE CLOUD PRINCES OF GUILE AND RESOURCEFULNESS, THE SONS OF THE EARTH AND OF THE RAILROAD. IT’S THE NEW WORLD HERE. YOU DON’T FUCK, WE FUCK YOU. YOU DON’T EAT, WE EAT YOU. YOU DON’T WRECK, WE WRECK YOU. IT’S THE NEW WORLD HERE. IT’S EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF, AND SHIT FOR ALL. IT’S THE JUNGLE.

  No running water these last two weeks for patriotic reasons, apologized the dissident General: “You know it’s difficult to resolve all the problems at once, the mines don’t yield what they used to, and if you’re without water and electricity, it goes to show how much those rascals in the Back-Country have brought the country to its knees, indeed that is the reason why we decided to take up arms, to sort the situation out ourselves, don’t hold it against us, we’ll regain our prestige, but one bit of good news: I am thinking of reopening Mine 15 so the students can work at night to supplement their expenses, they’ve demanded far too many study grants, too bad for those patriots in a hurry to get straight down to it …”

  It was with a heavy step that Lucien rejoined the bunch out
front of the Tram. Requiem was keen he join the group at all costs. The more there are of you, the more you can deal with assaults. The more there are of you, the more you can seize the initiative to attack. The more there are of you, the more sacks you can carry away. Unlike other mining sites that were chock-full of diamonds, or cobalt, or copper, or bronze, and nothing else, Hope Mine produced all of the above minerals. The region was so rich in deposits that a legend had grown up — and it happens to be true — recounting how the inhabitants of the City-State dug up their gardens, their houses, their living rooms, their bathrooms, their bedrooms, and even the cemetery. Yes, in the cemetery, funerals would sometimes turn festive following the chance discovery of a high-grade stone. They even dug at the station whose metal structure recalled the 1885s, particularly at night, sometimes even with the collusion of the local mayor, who wielded a pickax in his own offices, and busily scoured public buildings from top to bottom. It was said that in a single day dozens of sacks of heterogenite were carted off from huts and other makeshift camps. With such eroded, tampered foundations, houses threatened to collapse at the slightest rain. Will you consent to starve to death when there’s silver, copper, barium, tin, or coal lying quietly under your feet? From the area around Hope Mine to as far as the east side of Vampiretown, the city took on the appearance of an archaeological site. Even the goats and wheelbarrows smelled of the cobalt quarries. The fact remains that the City-State, focus of so many desires, was losing its northern suburbs, bought for a pittance by traders with foreign capital, tourists with multiple nationalities, cousins and nieces of the dissident General, the resurrected of the Second Republic.

  To avoid lugging their loads too far, the diamond diggers preferred to wash and sift their sacks of gravel a few sheds away, beside a little river, taking only the diamonds or low-grade dust away with them. The more enterprising ones, audacious and mercenary, slung the sacks over their shoulders, or even hired slim-jims and other desperados, then braved the carjackers and crossed the City-State in search of trading houses run by tourists. There were also the itinerant trading posts, people like Requiem who, with their perfect knowledge of the system, offloaded their products anytime, anywhere.