Tram 83 (19 page)

“I want my tip, sir.”

“Allowing that I accept this text, with its ten characters, don't you see how they lurch between the lines?”

“Not too cooked, those kidneys.”

“If you don't give us a little money, we'll stay right here!”

“Hey little one, your bosom's making me lurch, ain't that so Lucien?”

“Tip.”

Imagine the atmosphere: the pantyless-girlies, the busgirl, Lucien, the publisher, the laughter of the surrounding diggers, and the murmuring of a row of baby-chicks by the mixed restrooms, hanging on the rails of our famous Diva.

“But sir, you've not even read the text and you're passing judgment on it.”

“Listen, my man, your characters don't seem like they can hold it together on stage!”

“You're already thinking about the staging?”

“They're not very believable, they're ashamed of existing. They shun us. I'm not saying there's no text …”

“Give us a hundred.”

“Tip …”

“Is it about you, that thing?”

“That's where we should be starting from. Look, you haven't even read it yet and already you're —”

“Listen, Lucien …”

“With respect, sir, your remarks are out of place, I mean really! The story takes place in a station. The play is divided into platforms. There are ten platforms, so ten tableaux. Ten characters who don't know each other are waiting for a single individual. Actually, one might say that they know each other through a third party. And the whole play builds with their plans, dreams, memories, sympathies, and hatreds vis-à-vis the guy who's coming.”

“Tip …”

“I'm not that keen on the plot and the characters. Or maybe if you extend to twenty characters for greater visibility.”

“Sir …”

“Gentlemen, we've got what it takes to give you crazy pleasure.”

“I'm saying that your text will corrode the train tracks and the history of the first mine. Literature is something other than what you see. People are fed up with this kind of drivel. We know
everything about trains, so go take shelter from your inspiration.”

“I thank you for everything, dear sir.”

He got up, to the delight of the baby-chicks who saw him as a potential client.

“I've got a proposition for you, a different proposition.”

“Meaning?”

“Africa is of no interest to many intellectuals; let's just say it's not as exotic as it was four hundred years ago. My proposition is that you resubmit this same text to me but with the action taking place in Colombia. FARC, the jungle, you see what I mean? Take that as your context. Set the story in the jungle.”

“If you're done, Lucien, I've gotta chat with this guy. You're not going to make us hang about just for literature? Wow, you (addressing the publisher), I didn't know that under your pith helmet you dwelled so much on …”

“Recreate the same characters; they need a heart in order to walk. Write with your guts. Invest in their trials and tribulations. Imagine some orgy scenes. Make their lives burlesque and realist at the same time: to strike the right balance, in a purely Colombian context.”

“I see what you mean. But what do I do with this text?”

“You're a writer and you're asking me what you should do with your text?”

He thought about his friend, Porte de Clignancourt, who ranted and raved each time because Lucien was lagging behind with his writing, while the guy exhausted himself making contacts with Paris theaters. Fair enough, but had anybody forced him into exile? Had anybody asked him to go study astrology? Does it serve any
purpose in a country where you only eat every two days? After his glittering university achievements, the guy found himself joining the ranks of the unemployed, like ninety percent of the Republic's population. A few months of resourcefulness later, he succeeded in reaching Europe. His older sister was sleeping with a renowned musician. Which brought its perks, apparently. She had a go at her lover to give her brother a job. Unfortunately, the latter was ill-suited to singing or handling a musical instrument. Finding himself in a tight spot, he begged the brother-in-law to take him along to try his luck in the north. Since he was going on tour, the brother-in-law brought the astrologer into his band, ostensibly as a saxophonist. A big black guy, dreadlocks, baritone saxophone slung over his shoulder, and a delicately expansive laugh to boot: the airport police didn't see anything out of place.

The astrologer sang and played djembe in a metro station. Singing and playing djembe is an overstatement. It was sickening. He sang grossly out of tune and chafed his palms from striking the instrument. Given that certain tender souls consider reason to be always Hellenic and emotion eternally Negro, or, more explicitly, that any black guy with dreadlocks is an excellent artiste, the passersby stopped, applauded, and chucked him some coins which allowed him to phone Africa and mend his spirit with the aid of wine costing one euro fifty centimes a bottle. It was very possible he'd been drunk when he barked down the phone. True he had lent Lucien a hundred dollars for his wedding to Jacqueline but that was not a valid reason to continue harassing someone. Moreover, Lucien had long since reimbursed him.

“Gents, I take my leave of you.”

Requiem set to chewing the fat with one of the baby-chicks.

“Listen, Lucien, if you've got a bit of time to spare, produce a collection of poems on Mauritania too. It's publishable, is Mauritania. Oh, the Mauritanian imagination!”

He hunched over, wrote: “The girls are like the mines which are like the railroads which are like the diggers which are like the students with their strike lacking timed longevity which are like their necktie-less pasts, an endangered species. But I admire the gaze with which they perceive life and death.”

“Yes.”

“Do you have the time?”

“Free verse on Mauritania.”

“I'll see. Sir, I take my leave of you. The Diva and I will be performing together soon. We would welcome your presence.”

“Love me forever.”

“Take me to your country and love me more than your children.”

The publisher raised his eyebrows!

“Stop trying to get in that kid's skirt.”

He left with his pages of texts. On his heels, a stream of young ladies, but not all of them. The publisher stuck his hand in the air:

“Rum!”

Requiem, to the single-mamas who'd stayed put:

“Come!”

They headed toward the mixed restrooms.

They crossed the threshold. Mewing. Crescendo. Extended mewing. In the Diva's railroad crucible. Ephesians 18.

27.

THE DEPARTURE OF THE NEGUS
.

Requiem said he worked in the health sector, but there wasn't a single living person in the City-State who knew what he was really involved in, outside of kidnappings and incursions in the Polygon. He always returned with a considerable sum of money that he spent all night counting and packing away in garbage bags. Sometimes he came back bleeding like a sponge. Sometimes he showed up virtually naked. And one night he even interrupted Lucien's sleep:

“You know that I owe a Greek ship-owner $5,765,000 in two mornings' time. What to do? He swears he'll have my hide.”

But what the hell was Requiem up to with that kind of money? He'd never been seen in a three-piece suit, nor driving a carriage, nor straddling a mount, nor approaching the daughters of the thirty-odd consuls on which the whole burg, including our Mexican, South Ossetian, Pakistani, Belgian, French, Indochinese, Hungarian, Romanian, Chilean, Canadian, Ukrainian, and Tibetan brothers, most of them undocumented or holding a work permit illicitly obtained, had their eye.

Requiem eventually weighed anchor. He was incapable of living with an individual unable to land a job and who clung to his literature as to a family heirloom passed down from generation to generation. He took his things away late one Monday night. It had been raining and windy all day. Following his latest choreography of misfortune, which lasted, as the Gods were his witnesses, around two hours, he had decided for the umpteenth time to demonstrate his Negus power.

“Evening, Requiem!”

Soaked through and through, Requiem found Lucien kicking back reading the latest gossip rags and refusing moreover to place his characters in a Colombian context.

Swansongs are eternal. Final choreography. Last installment. Without batting an eyelid, he handed Lucien a stack of newspapers, so wet they were crumbling away in his hands. He gave him a banknote. He kissed his forehead. He stared at him hard before taking the stairs down, his suitcases, his garbage bags, and his face that was going to the dogs like the station that was essentially an unfinished metal structure, gutted by artillery …

“You leaving?”

“I don't like the look of you. You won't work for me even though you owe me everything. Furthermore, you insist on getting that thingamajig of yours published, and by whom? Malingeau, my all-time enemy! You won't manage to pay the rent, I bet my dick on it!”

28.

IN PRAISE OF A NIGHT OF TRANSGRESSION, FOLLOWED BY LUCIEN AND THE DIVA'S READING
.

Not all nights had the same chronology of beer, music, dancing, single-mamas in the first flush of youth, dog kebabs, and madness. Those who went out at night knew the plot, the prosody of events, the convulsion of circumstances, the gloomy processions toward the unknown. Sometimes they began with the decrepit-single-mamas, followed up with poetical dancing on the paltry beds at Body-to-Body Granny's brothel — the Face-to-Face — continued with some jazz, prefaced with some mulled wine, sampled some cat and olive stew, boiled rice, and dog kebabs with saffron potatoes, smoked some Indian hemp, and raided the Polygon of Hope Mine armed to the teeth. Nights were a delight for those who knew how to make the most of them. True nights were long and popular. True nights were always eventful. True nights were no longer free from corruption and other low blows. True nights stank of neuralgia, the spit and traumas of those who built this broken beautiful world.

“It's during the night that the giants of this world manufacture our misfortunes with the zeal of self-taught bakers,” laughed the girls with eggplant-breasts crammed into the mixed restrooms of Tram 83 with their desire to satisfy vast as the sea, to deal a second death, Gehenna, Revelation 19, verse 20, Revelation 20, verse 14, Revelation 21, round about the eighth verse, or even the books of Corinthians. These girls were extraordinarily beautiful and they reprised the same psalms.

“We are warm and welcoming, inventive, flexible with our flesh that devises delights of other ages for you, and in this your wives are not even half the women we are, they're too traditional, don't know how to set their hips a-swaying, they've forgotten how to thrust with their left leg, and spend the night asking you for pocket money, university registration fees for the children, this and that, whereas us, we're eternal, we proffer ourselves body and soul, just long enough to drive you, to drag you, to ecstasy.” Meanwhile the negotiations regarding rates always pushed upward, the legs giving way, the urge to be done with the pleasures of the underbelly, the beer that answers back, and the body bristling with nostalgia for dumping, soiling one's pants (dump = transgress = expel = jettison = evacuate = download = release on bail = defecate = shit, and, not to sink into silliness or appear less crude, let us say crying need, or even transfer).

The for-profit tourists, the Chinese tourists, the second-class tourists, the young ladies of Avignon, the waitresses and the busgirls, the strikemongering students, the diggers, the suicidals, the mercenaries, the slim-jims, all of the City-State poured into the Tram.

The Diva and Lucien mounted the podium to the applause of the Tram. The writer was trembling. He couldn't bring himself to look at the audience, or even communicate with the prima donna, who smiled to reassure them about their act.

The rumors that spread from the Cuba Club to the Polygon by way of Vampiretown recounted the detail of his abundant lovemaking with the diva after each concert. The busgirl with fat lips confirmed these below-the-belt doings. She became hysterical when refused a tip and, to regain control of the situation, described at the top of her voice the way in which Lucien pumped the Diva. These revelations saddened every man who only had eyes for the fine body of the queen of these nights of boozing.

When Lucien showed up at the Tram, the mercenaries, the second-rate tourists, the slim-jims, the baby-chicks, and the diggers rushed over and begged him to spill the beans. He answered with silence. Not only did this heighten our curiosity but it made us extremely cross. We at least had the right to know the truth.

The Diva danced the same bolero. Upon hearing the question, she opened her arms and let rip a magnificent laugh. The most sensitive among us ejaculated in their pants. We spent the rest of the night picking over the prima donna's laugh until, weary of suppositions, we fell back on the baby-chicks.