Tram 83 (4 page)

“Do you have the time?”

3.

AT REQUIEM'S PLACE WITH THE SINGLE-MAMAS AND THEIR MASSIVE-MELON-BREASTS
.

Requiem lived in Vampiretown, a bourgeois neighborhood that stood on the road leading from the station to the town center. The apartment he rented was quite spacious for a modern day bachelor. Vampiretown dated from the colonial period. Built to demarcate the area, using sturdy materials and terra cotta tiles, its wide boulevards lined with flame trees, pines, and frangipanis. The first Europeans to settle here died from the effects

“You guys live alone?”

“Yes!”

“We give good head.”

of the dodgy sanitary and weather conditions, as they were wont to do. The place had to be adapted at all costs: build suitable walls, fight the feeling of exile and uprooting that adversely affected their “transactions,” guffawed Requiem, he who bore the blood of a Russian shipowner come to seek his fortune in the scorching tropics.
The Tram 83 gossip of July 1972 speculated upon his Slavic origins. The Tram 83 gossip of February 1982 speculated upon his Vietnamese origins. The Tram 83 gossip of September 1992 speculated upon his Comorian origins. According to legend, a foundry was established to

“Call me Astrid. I can't live without caresses.”

“Émilienne, I'm as free as the ocean.”

“Requiem …”

“Talk, I'm listening.”

extract copper ingots. And it wasn't far from this venture that they chose to site the new town. The foundry workers lodged in the surrounding area. Administrative offices, banking, postal services, all sprang up around twelve miles away. They … In the beginning the stone, and the stone, the railroads, and the railroads, and the arrival of men of diverse nationalities speaking the same dialect of sex and coltan. Drunk on sex and easy money, perverts they were, born adventurers, capable of trying any lead as long as it paid, as long as it earned them money and sex, and even more money!

“I'm not going to screw. I'm fucked for tonight.”

“That's a sleazy joke.”

Round about the years 1910-1920, the segregation between the Europeans and Africans translated into urban planning. The newcomers, shouldering their universities, schools, hospitals, and churches, were careful to stay in town,

“The Far West?”

“Why?”

“We are of the railroad civilization …”

“What is it with my breasts?!”

obliging the others, natives of their species, to live in the suburbs. The only ones to penetrate the closed circles were a few musicians, their repertoire spiced with gospel from Southern Africa, places like Northern Rhodesia or Nyasaland. Same for the lackeys and a few right-hand men. For reasons that were more or less vague.

“What is it with my breasts?”

They crossed a dozen rails, stepping from one to the next, and walked down the main road for a good half hour, groping each other.

“I love money. Who hates money?”

Arrived. Negotiated the rates, first up then down. Smoked nicotine after nicotine. Manufactured heaven in pasture and cloud. Even traced out straight lines and oblique angles. In other words, pleasures of the underbelly.

“Cuddle me …”

4.

MEN AND WINDS HAVE THIS IN COMMON: NEITHER HAVE THEIR FEET ON THE GROUND. NOMADS, THEY COME AND GO LIKE THE PAIN OF SHATTERED LOVE, NERVOUS TENSION, INDEPENDENCIES, WARS OF LIBERATION, THE URGENT NEED TO DEFECATE IN THE STAIRWELL OF A BUILDING BETWEEN TWO BLACKOUTS
.

Lucien got out of bed at three in the afternoon. Requiem and the girls had already taken leave of him. He was groggy, rocked by nausea and migraines. Lucien experienced this kind of malaise after drinking one too many. But why on earth had he let himself succumb to inebriation before rounding things off with some below-the-belt delight? He ascribed his tiredness to the latter, and his nausea and migraines to the alcohol. He tried to walk. His calves wobbled. Impossible to move.

“Requiem!”

He yelled out for him. Nothing. His companion must be busy sorting out some cash deal. Otherwise, why leave so early, with no concern for his own dramas? He went back to sleep, eyes half closed.

Lucien was susceptible to bad dreams. He'd had two, one after the other, without the slightest break. He set to analyzing them. There was nothing apocalyptic about the first dream. A metallic voice squawking from Jacqueline's face instructed him to grab his texts and climb aboard the first train leaving for the Back-Country, the land flowing with milk and honey. And he, in a sleeveless outfit, on a theater stage, balked, scoffed at the voice and the face, and held forth in a language lacking r's, z's, t's, a's, and s's. He defended himself, claiming that his life was his own, that he could fling it about wherever it suited him. But the voice and the features took on a different appearance. He noticed he was not on a theater stage but in a little boat leaving a misty port; between his legs, a cat was licking his left foot.

He shook his head, gave a hoarse shout, grabbed his satchel, took out his notebook, scrawled a few lines. He began to examine the characters from his dream step by step. The barking voice — God perhaps, or ancestors hungry for solitude. He was devoted to the souls of his ancestors, but his spiritual life had changed since the death of his daughter. Why only Jacqueline's face and not that of Requiem or even Émilienne? Perhaps because you've only just seen her nakedness, he told himself. Even so, what's that got to do with it? And how about the train evoking desertion and exile? And the little boat? And the cat with the same colors as Juventus?

Second dream. Like the prologue of the first, he's on a stage, but for music this time, accompanying Toumani Diabaté:
The Mandé Variations
. At the end of a song, everyone, musicians included, begs him to quit the City-State. In his dream he gets up to leave. Where to? He becomes aware of his nakedness, damp with sweat, dirty.
His shoes, clothes, satchel, notebook, and handkerchief, gone! He sets out to walk with nothing on. And that's when a huge, bustling crowd starts chasing him, gesticulating aggressively, uttering threats and parables. He leans down, plumps up the pillow, continues deciphering the riddle. He sighs and embarks on another sleep, another dream most likely.

Requiem was still not back. The man with train-track feet returned only to pick up more dough or stash some away. The neighboring tenants hated him with one eye and admired him with the other. Whenever he returned from his escapades, everyone in the building crumpled beneath his skyjacker charm. Requiem for a New World alias Local Boy alias Man and His Destiny alias Al Pacino alias The Myth of Sisyphus alias The Founder alias The Authorized Signatory alias King Nzinga Nkuwu alias His Serene Highness alias Ancien Régime alias The Lord of the Rings alias Marshal alias Supreme Leader alias Patriarch alias Man of Discernment alias Zambezi River alias Hitler alias Don Quixote alias Proto-Bantu alias Lino Ventura (full name Angiolino Giuseppe Pasquale Ventura) alias Neanderthal Man alias Venezuela alias Négritude alias Zanzibar alias Siberia alias Bertolt Brecht alias Demi-God alias National Identity alias Colonist alias Polish alias What More Could You Ask For alias No Entry alias Obama alias Away Goals Count Double alias Dostoyevsky alias The Most Mysterious Marquis alias Sultan alias Cousin of the Dissident General alias Pasha alias Mani Kongo alias Susuhunan alias Raja alias Minangkabao (generally shortened to Minang, or improperly called Orang Padang) alias The Negus alias Black Market alias Haile Selassie alias Prince-Provost of Berchtesgaden alias Maharajadhiraja
(meaning King of Kings) alias Shah alias Tika Sahib Bahadur alias Caliph alias Emir alias Fatwa alias Freiherr (German for Free Lord) alias Makoko de Mbe (king of the Téke) alias Saigon alias The Man Who Changes Water Into Vodka alias The Legitimate and Direct Heir of Sundiata Keita alias Fancy Footwork alias New Mexico alias Jet Lag alias Schengen Area alias TV5MONDE alias Taxis G7 alias Once A Drunk Always A Drunk alias Parchment alias Long History of The Emperor Mao Zedong alias Birds Hide When They Die alias The Tokyo Stock Exchange. His noble titles reflected the seasons and the raids on the labyrinthine Polygon of Hope Mine.

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.