It was a mammoth task to identify all the women who entered Tram 83. They struggled fiercely against aging. Difficult to venture a distinction between the girls under sixteen, called baby-chicks, the single-mamas or those aged between twenty and forty and referred to as single-mamas even when they don’t have children, and the ageless-women whose fixed age begins at forty-one. None of them wanted to gain a single day. They piled on the makeup from morning till night, wore fake breasts, employed strong-arm tactics to entice the clients, and used foreign-sounding names, such as Marilyn Monroe, Sylvie Vartan, Romy Schneider, Bessie Smith, Marlene Dietrich, or Simone de Beauvoir, to make their mark on the world.
“Go check your papa’s watch!” Requiem retorted.
They took the third table on the left, at the corner of the bar, which afforded an unbeatable view over the front doors and the jazzmen continuing to prostitute music and the restrooms and the bar counter and a row of antipathetic, aggressive, and somewhat mature single-mamas. In his moments of madness, Requiem would tell anyone who’d listen that in order to monitor the comings and goings, and the baptism albums, it was preferable to choose a table affording a panorama of the aforementioned areas, to recap: the bar counter, the sanitary facilities, the lone women, the front doors, the musicians, even when they rushed into the dressing rooms to smoke their marijuana, the waitresses, the busgirls, and so on. They remained for several minutes without speaking to each other. It was a feat of courage to attempt a dialogue amid this pandemonium created by a deviant music and the yelling of the tourists and other upstarts who identified with the atmosphere, waxing ecstatic, grooving, whispering, howling, and pulling out money they threw in the direction of the musicians. “Give me a real cuddle.” “Do you have the time?” “I give you my body, chain me up, make me your slave, your property, your private hunting ground.” All of which fueled the fervor of the band, and consequently the lynching of that beautiful melody. In the labyrinths of the City-State, you don’t listen to jazz to get a whiff of sugar cane or reconnect with Negro consciousness or savor the beauty of the notes: you listen to jazz because you have to listen jazz when you make your bed on banknotes, when you deliver your merchandise daily, when you manage an extraction plant, when you’re cousin to the dissident General, when you keep a little mistress who pins you to your bed in a dizzy haze. Jazz is a sign of nobility, it’s the music of the rich and the newly rich, of those who build this beautiful broken world. Such people don’t listen to rumba, which they find dirty, primitive, and unfit for the ear. Between rumba and jazz lies an ocean, they say. You don’t listen to jazz the way you’d fling yourself into a Zairian-spiced rumba. Jazz is above all a precipitous slope, a cliff you can only climb if you possess a notion of its origins, its development, its major figures. Jazz is no longer the story of the Negroes. Only tourists and those who master money know the foundations of this music. It’s the only identification for a certain bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie of the eleventh hour. Consequently, when the musicians get jazzing, all of Tram 83 stirs from its sleeping sickness. The slightest saxophone, and it’s the great masquerade. The diggers and the students adopt the manner of the tourists. They watch, smile, raise their beer glasses, walk, blaze a trail to the dance floor, hail the waitresses and busgirls in the manner of the tourists, take on the haughty bearing of samurai, the gestures and attitudes of a Maharaja, the poise of the Dalai Lama. The honeys, the waitresses, and the busgirls don’t let themselves be browbeaten. Smiles like the Queen of England, they mime imaginary empresses. Jazz is the only lever used by all the riffraff of Tram 83 to switch social class as one would subway cars.
“Me, you, love, it’s me, make love to me, you and me, love make …”
The two companions looked at each other without a word. Lucien was amazed at the bureaucratic slowness of the service. Requiem held the password, the rules of the road, the attached document, the riddle. The waitresses and busgirls tried to make themselves seem important by dragging their feet, sulking, and aggravating the clientele.
“Do you have the time?” insisted other young women standing around, come to assist the first pair, chests jutting, ready and willing to administer massage sessions, cuddles, and other ingredients of the night.
A genuine postcolonial couple sat beside them. The man, who looked about twenty, his hands all over the bust of his spouse, a seventy-eight-year-old lady, as Requiem confirmed, recited his breviary: “You have a smile that perturbs me deeply. I love you day and night. I love you Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday …” He could only be a student, or a civil servant in a small state firm gone bankrupt. It’s a waste to be young in this part of equatorial Africa. The under-thirty-fives are potentially embittered, xenophobes, crooks, hucksters, capable of using any ploy, be it jazz or a balancing marriage, to escape the prison that is poverty.
“The phenomenon of rebalancing, of matching, and of corporeal integration relates to both cases,” Requiem continued, between two smokes. “I spent some six months managing an agency that facilitated meetings between young men and adult women, or baby-chicks and tourists.”
“Do you have the time?”
“Go check your papa’s watch!”
The clientele smoked like crazy, identified with the jazz, groped each other in the dark, and grabbed at the single-mamas. A sullen-faced waitress finally came. Spitefully, she placed on the table the two bottles of beer she was supposed to have served them an hour and a quarter ago. They paid the check but she stood there waiting for her tip. They made as if nothing was up. She cottoned on to the strategy and cunningly counterattacked by refusing to open the merchandise. Lucien took out a coin but Requiem stayed his hand.
“RULE NUMBER 1: never let yourself be intimidated by a waitress struck with hysteria. We’re not in Moscow. Tipping is obligatory here. But we who are familiar with the New World are an exception. We crush any attempt to make us tip by force. Let the waitresses file a complaint! The mines and their tourists know me. They know me, the tourists and mines.”
She was having none of it.
“Gigolo!”
“Tipping is an archaism, I give when I like.”
To close the case, they decided to open the bottles with their teeth. Offended, she insulted them, threatened them with a penknife, picked up the glasses, and vanished. They began to drink straight from the bottles. The musicians continued their ramble, the tourists too, the young man and his ageless-woman, the girls with the round-juicy-breasts trotting out their one and only hymn:
“Do you have the time?”
“Maybe …”
Lucien took out his notebook, wrote: “This is not a bar. Where will they go to let off steam when there’s no more women to match their fantasies? Where will they go to deposit their seed? Where will they go to drown their misfortunes when there’s nowhere left to get hammered? Where will they go to shake their hips when there’s no more salsa? Salsa and jazz are not eternal; what will they do to identify with the Azerbaijani tourists?”
Requiem received phone calls, which he answered before continuing: “Good evening sir, good evening lieutenant, would Madame like, good evening citizen, RULE NUMBER 10, you-touch/you-play, double or quits, loser wins, the legend round here says the City-State dies on its feet, is sir Belgian?”
As the beer flowed, they held fast to the obvious. The backwash had cleared the way for them. They could no longer sing from the same hymn sheet. They were just two life forms adrift in a city become a state by force of Kalashnikovs.
“Tip!”
The government army and the dissident rebels fought each other day in, day out. To get things back on track, the international community had sponsored nineteen sovereign national conferences which had all come to less than naught. Despite its soldiers trained in China, Sudan, Angola, and Cuba, the central government had failed to wring the neck of the rebellion, which reproached the central government for hanging on to the lion’s share. “Without our province, this country is a masquerade,” thundered the dissident General. “We can’t make do with crumbs when it’s we who are feeding you.” The rebels fought with arrows, machetes, and slingshots.