Tram 83 (16 page)
Authors: Fiston Mwanza Mujila
“You call that justice?”
“Yes.”
“I deplore ⦔
“One vodka and ten dollars, and freedom beckons.”
“I won't sing from your hymn sheet!”
The chief of police began to laugh.
There was a knock at the door.
“Come in!”
Gilberto with a bottle.
“For you, sir.”
“Fall out!”
The chief of police rummaged in the garbage bag. An old cloth. He took two glasses that he wiped in the twinkle of an eye.
“You know, I'm the only one on this earth to still have his head on his shoulders. Sometimes I wonder how I do it. You deserve
the gallows, all of you. You can go tell the dissident General that. I didn't study law to show off, and I deliver justice in my own way. Do you know how much â”
“No thank you.”
Lucien pushed away the glass the chief of police held out to him.
“Do you know the pain I must endure when I find myself with individuals like you? Potentially innocent.”
The chief of police knocked back the first glass in one go. He picked up his portable radio and a cassette tape,
The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya
, by Rimsky-Korsakov.
“I love classical music. Each note contributes to a work of speleology, the speleology of the soul. What sensitivity, what depth! I was saying ⦠I don't know if you understand me ⦠I am a father and you are not unaware that we no longer receive anything from this government. If I don't make a move or if you refuse to budge, how do you expect me to make ends meet? I'm not like you guys and I don't have the time to stroll about the mines. I am torn by my conscience. I accept gratuities from those I reckon innocent and I release them immediately. When I saw you, a spirit told me you were innocent, hence your presence in my office. The others, we don't even do any paperwork. We chuck them in, period. But your family must have some clue regarding the initial steps to take. They should already set aside a nice, fat bribe. No nonsense, I'm serious. And if you've got sisters, don't think twice. They can get your case progressed quite fast, I mean really fast!”
“I understand, butâ”
The chief of police remained motionless, right hand over his heart.
“I love this part, listen to the spoken chorus, the splendor ⦔
He put down his glass, energetically rubbed his head.
“I can feel something truly ⦔
Lucien took advantage of his rapture to pour himself a shot.
“This music, it's quite insane! It's his masterpiece, just listen to that dialogue between the singing and the orchestra. The Russian Revival exhilarates me. He completed this monumental work after five years of hard toil. Can we go now?”
“Where?”
“You said no to my gratuity.”
“⦔
Lucien stood up.
The music lover closed his files. He switched off the device. Opened his drawers. A belt.
“Hold this.”
He asked his prisoner to follow him.
“Thank you.”
They walked along damp, gloomy corridors, at the end of which â¦
“If you ever feel like discussing music, just let me know. Come and we'll chat. I'm sure you'll muddle through, you're a winner, that's obvious.”
⦠a dark room with bars. The very smell of a slave ship. An infernal noise.
“I beg you!”
Arms, legs, insults, wailing, shrill laughter, preaching, the self-assurance, warmth, pride, and majesty of a piano's brushed ivories.
“My pleasure to have made your acquaintance.”
A salsa variant belted out by an individual as a sign of protestation.
“I exempt you from all torture.”
He wanted to explain himself but the police officers didn't give him time.
“Sir, chief ⦔
In the blink of an eye, they opened the metal gate and pushed him in.
The guy shrieking his salsa broke off his rebellious lyricism to present his compliments, amid an unimaginable hubbub:
“Please accept, dear newcomer, our most harmonious and heartfelt greetings!”
Around six in the evening, five vans came to remove them to the former central prison.
The chief of police whispered a few words to him.
“You'll muddle through, my man!
“I hope so.”
He was regularly overwhelmed by this crowd of villains and pathetic innocents he had to deal with before transferring them to the thirty-eight or so jails of the City-State, including the famous Penitentiary Center. In one day they locked up six, sometimes even ten people in a grimy cell forty-five feet square, where they would have to wait a good week before giving way to fresh arrivals.
Quite apart from the cramped conditions, they suffered from several diseases and were dying of hunger, desperate for a vodka accompanied by a leg of dog or simply the eternal need to renew oneself with a baby-chick with massive-melon-breasts.
The chief of police had been so keen to share his weakness for classical music that he had eventually rigged up some speakers
down in the hole, and adhered to a strict broadcast schedule. Monday, from midnight, Stravinsky and Bach. Tuesday, round about eight in the evening, Tchaikovsky followed by Dmitri Shostakovich. Wednesday, after work-duty weeding his sugar cane plantation, Mozart's
Vesperae solennes de confessore
. Thursday, time for the Strauss family. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, either Gregorian chants or the Beatles or Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov or Chopin or Sergei Rachmaninov.
The tragedy is that in such a situation, they experienced no urge to lend an ear to this music lover's collection: his jail was appositely nicknamed the Vienna Conservatoire, and the music had nothing to do with the national salsa, hence this new race of prisoners who sang at the tops of their voices in a show of protestation.
“I recommend the last Sergei Sergeevich Prokofiev. You'll muddle through, believe me.”
Lucien gave a forced laugh and replied.
“I hope I will.”
“I'm only doing my duty.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The chief of police stood watching the prisoners, their wrists handcuffed, stuffed into the vans like sacks of gravel. Like on platform 17, the station that is essentially an unfinished metal structure, gutted by artillery, train tracks, and locomotives that call to mind the railroad built by Stanley.
IN PRAISE OF TORTURE
.
Torture is one of the demarcation points between an organized banana republic and a chaotic, or in other words disorganized, banana republic. Lucien was not unaware of this. Hence his fear at finding himself in the police chief's ramshackle office. The former country, which now exists only on paper, was an organized banana republic. The torturers officiated in very good conditions. They had several implements of torture to hand, including racks and wheelbarrows. They were sent on training courses and work experience placements outside the country. These monsters viewed the detainee's body as a thing, a doodad, an apparatus, even a work of art. They mastered every recess of the human anatomy and applied their torture with genius and finesse. Over time, a certain rapport developed, a mutual respect or grim trust between the jailer and their victim. The latter even became superior to their wrongdoer once they realized that their torturer was at their service, was not torturing at random, and had been hired for this nasty job, often from among the intellectual cream of society.
The City-State possessed all the characteristics of a disorganized banana republic. The guys who tortured in the various jails were all minor upstarts, plucked from here and there in the course of the many wars of liberation. They were, for the most part, university-less students, self-trained journalists, diggers, former child-soldiers, desperados, and lazy mercenaries. They owned no torture instruments, no rack, no cable worthy of the name. They were ignorant of the basic techniques, with the exception of water-boarding, which they applied in approximate fashion.
Often they restricted themselves to hitting detainees with sticks and stools. Yet torture is above all an art, an artistic discipline just like literature, cinema, or contemporary dance. All the detainees in the City-State ghettos bitterly missed the torturers of yesteryear, those monsters who worked with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker. Lucien, who in times past had joined every single protest march, could not bear the idea, even in his most fleeting dreams, of ending up behind bars, whatever the torturers.
If it wasn't for Ãmilienne, he would have remained in his dingy cell till kingdom come.
AT THE TRAM TO IDENTIFY WITH THE MUSIC OF THE WHITES, TO SPEND HOURS IN ENDLESS DEBATE, AND TO SNACK ON DOG AND MUSHROOM KEBABS, WITH BRAZZA BEER TO WASH IT ALL DOWN
.
Ãmilienne suggested a meeting at the Tram, where the friend-enemies could defuse the bomb between them over several rounds of beer.
Requiem refused.
“I dislike Lucien!”
She tasked Mortal Combat with undertaking the negotiations. He had to convince the protagonists of the necessity of this evening of boozing. He willingly agreed, nurturing wild ideas about those breasts of hers that fueled so many debates regarding the anatomy of the female body.
Requiem recanted, on condition he be accompanied by his whole gang, who drank your beer like you have no idea. Lucien dithered as usual.
“Do you have the time?”
This was the atmosphere in which they agreed a night and time, coinciding with the Railroad Diva's concert. Mortal Combat got there first, to request a rapid service from the busgirls, in light of the circumstances of the meeting.
The drink was served. Ãmilienne excused herself.
Requiem and his disciples addressed the writer:
“Dickhead.”
Their conversation turned to the detainees and writers who wheel and deal in Hope Mine, get caught, are freed by women, and lack the energy to end up in the sack with them. They laughed like little kids while applause rained down upon the Diva.
The publisher came and sat at their table. He plied the victim with questions, leaving him no time to respond.
“And my stage-tale? What did you do with my characters? Have you managed to reduce them by half?”
Poor Lucien; in the middle of all this he remembered his buddy, Paris, 18th Arrondissement, Porte de Clignancourt, who was waiting for these same texts.
“Foreplay is like democracy, as far as I'm concerned. If you don't caress me, I'll call the Americans.”
He rang from a call shop. Since he was forever crippled by debt, he sought to control his costs by endeavoring to remind Lucien of all his obligations in less than a minute. The phone conversation therefore lasted only fifty-six or fifty-eight seconds at the most, for as a rule, in France and everywhere else, the manager of the booth adds a minute for any excess seconds. He had to spit it all out in under sixty seconds for fear of using one minute and a bit, and being forced to pay for two. To avoid any unpleasant surprises,
he scrawled his message on a scrap of paper. As soon as Lucien picked up the phone, the Clignancourt man started yelling as fast as possible, like a journalist commentating on the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman boxing match. The message was blunt, stripped neatly of any frills such as “hello,” “how are you?”, or “speak soon.” Each second equated to fifty words. A thousand words per phone call to galvanize this damned Lucien. Before dialing the writer's number, he gulped some water to quench his thirst, concentrated, breathed deeply, focused on the functionality of each of his muscles, and withdrew from the world. He was right to do so.
The call shop he patronized was always overcrowded. Distinctive characteristics: women with sniveling infants demanding tits and other appetizers. The hardest to brave was not the baroque concerto of brats but the clamoring of their mothers and other customers incapable of yakking on the phone at less than full volume. He was a sight to see, the Clignancourt man, telephone jammed fiercely to his left ear, forefinger of the dextral hand plugging his right.
Meanwhile, the Negus and his disciples let rip with the jeers.
“He says he's a writer even though he sponges off a decrepit-former-single-mama!”
The Diva, bursts of â¦
Only Mortal Combat stood up for him.
“You're shooting a dead horse.”
“Someone is slogging their guts out to give you a leg up, and you're content to sleep on your little laurels.”
“The stage-tale, Lucien, do it quick!”
God didn't forget his own. The carnival passed by the Tram,
after the Cuba Club and the Singapore bar-restaurant.
“I'm never taking my eyes off you!”
The publisher vanished.
As did the Negus's gang, but without the Negus.
