They nicknamed him Gold Mine, for example, when he closed a deal with the South Ossetians, Fancy Footwork for his cool, particularly when on chilly terms with the law, New World, or The Most Impresario Yankee, when he floundered about in his English redolent of bottles opened with teeth not far from a broad who’d give you the clap, Ideologue when he recounted with panache his tales of trains that derail with their cargo of narcotics and the whole town helps themselves and the bottom falls out of the market in that particular merchandise and the nightclubs open subsidiary branches thanks to this affair and the students find what they need to get wired during their endless strikes and the diggers refortify their bodies to unearth the biggest-carat diamond and the girls with saggy breasts buy themselves growth hormones or adopt the audacity to look you straight in the eye and jazzmen find the strength to squander jazz and tourists take advantage of the ups and downs to fill their unsatiated bellies and the fatwa hurlers find justification and the itinerant Pentecostal preachers feed their trances and the militiamen grab their guns for the dozenth war of liberation and …
Requiem was still not back.
10:30 P.M. Time to go pray. Pray = worship = sacrifice your organs and your last pennies in honor of the gods of inebriation, of infidelity, of impotence, of debauchery, of fertilization in vitro, of fertilization in the mixed restrooms of Tram 83. He stood himself up, with difficulty. Damn, another nightmare. He dragged his feet as far as the kitchen. A glass of water. The fridge, empty and dirty. He’d not been told that Requiem lived according to the rhythm of the trains carrying the students and the miners condemned to eat dirt. RULE NUMBER 64: let them play the hardmen, for they paper over society’s dregs. RULE NUMBER 67: the mightier crush the mighty, the mighty defecate in the mouths of the weak, the weak sequestrate the weaker, the weaker do each other in, then split for elsewhere. Hunger crushed him. He hadn’t sunk his teeth into a single thing since leaving the Back-Country. He’d jumped on the first train, with some stale bread, potatoes, a few bananas. The dissident rebels had confiscated it all. (“War effort! We’re hungry, and you’re the grain store!”) As he crossed the living room, he noticed a half-blank page on the table. Requiem had left a few words: “Go munch something, got a mission impossible to complete, speak this evening, explore the town, live!” He stretched out on the couch. An odd smell. The other one, he’d slept here. He turned on the TV to a report about the clash between the students and the diggers in the station whose unfinished metal structure recalled the turbulent years of Leopold II. Entered the bedroom. His rumpled clothes. Pulled out his notebook.
He’d hardly added anything to the text since his journey. Twenty characters, and discharge the text in a few months. Not easy. He’d been keeping up a correspondence with a friend who lived in Paris. The friend was making contacts and had supposedly already secured the approval of a few French theaters, where his text would be staged before making a one-off tour of Brazil, Chile, and Cuba. He should have completed the text four months ago, but circumstances had prevented him from refocusing his characters.
The first version of the manuscript had been burned. In fact, he’d set light to it himself. You think he had a choice, with a Kalashnikov at the back of his neck? They’d paid him a visit during the night and told him, coldly, from under their red berets: “Chuck it over there. Burn it.” He’d resisted fiercely, but with a Kalashnikov at the back of his neck …
A few days after the incident, he received a phone call from his Paris buddy, who resided at Porte de Clignancourt — the neighborhood was a Mecca for impoverished immigrants and other outlaws — to inquire after the progress of the text: “Where are you at with it? It’s vitally important.” He stammered an excuse. In life, it’s a curious virtue to pay for your own mistakes. He’d done it, but paying doesn’t mean finding inspiration and rewriting your own literature, word for word, to the nearest comma. He’d fallen back on his guts for the rewrite, juggling the loss of his daughter with his wife’s illness, but the Clignancourt friend phoned again, fuming, cursing, reminding: “What you playing at, Lucien? I’m in a bind with these French dudes while you sleep in late, nice and easy!” He should have admitted he’d set fire to his stage-tale because a gun had been held to the back of his neck by a guy sporting a red beret, that his daughter had died, and so on and so forth.
A girl accosted him by the elevators.
“What do you think?”
“Nothing.”
“I’m Christelle.”
“Yes …”
“Chris to my friends.”
He was disoriented. The hunger. The fatigue. The heat. The Paris friend, at Porte de Clignancourt, who didn’t stop calling. The characters from his text, for which he’d lost all appreciation. His daydreams. The ruckus of Tram 83. Requiem, in whom he’d placed his trust and who swore only by the New World.
“I love to give head …”
Overtaken by events, he still retained a glimmer of hope and even of beauty. Highbrow. Uncool. Bearded. Unpolished shoes. Straggly hair. Stubbly. Surveys show that eighty percent of girls fall for such individuals. It’s exotic, African, contemporary, New Mexico … Girls increasingly prefer men with some dodgy baggage, a bulging criminal record, a dubious past, a deal with some Beijing tourists, for example.
“I can make you happy, just say the word.”
There was something prophetic about Requiem. Lucien had already been informed, at the Northern Station, as if in a parable: “The City-State works like this: the girls are emancipated, democratic, and independent. Poverty does away with shame and your courtesies. Here, it’s often the girl, be she baby-chick or the opposite, who takes the initiative. She slips you into her strategy. She looks you straight in the eye. She asks your name. She tells you that you’ve got a great body, that your voice gives her goose pimples. She telephones you, again and again. She clings to you like a leech. But not always from love and other affections. She sticks fast to you because you buy the drinks (given the price of beer at the Tram!), the food (outside of the Tram, itinerant restaurants serving dog-stew, cassava, and smoked rice with onion), and then, after bed, you give her a bit of cash for the work accomplished, transport, and so forth. It’s the girl who tells you the proper procedure when you screw. She manages the whole shebang, from Genesis to the Letter to the Corinthians: ‘Put your leg like this, place your right hand on my belly, ride me like I were your horse, stroke my curves, back, forward, back, forward slowly, stop, now start stroking my hair …’”
“My name, Lucien …”
“You live with the First Man?”
“The First Man, who’s that?”
“Requiem.”
“Since yesterday.”