Tram 83 (9 page)

“Do you have the time?”

Outside, no decent lighting of any kind. He hesitated to take shortcuts, for fear of running into a gang of hoods. Requiem had been walking down Authenticity Street one day when he fell into the clutches of some armed men, who snatched both his merchandise and his clothes. He'd managed to get back to Vampiretown
thanks to a single-mama-chick who'd lent him her spare dress.

People used to have power twenty-four-seven, before companies started sprouting like mushrooms. The term “blackout” didn't appear in the dictionary. People were not dependent upon electricity. Then came the rush, the for-profit tourists, and their companies excavating for raw materials. Then the rebellions and mutinies. The first talk of blackouts appeared around the 1990s. Buoyed up by his victories over the regular army, the rebel leader of the time, half-brother of the dissident General, key shareholder in some seventy-six firms, and brother-in-law of an investor renowned for his largesse, burst onto the airwaves and declared: “You will receive power four days a week, to ensure that businesses can operate at full tilt.” As time passed, he adjusted his decree to two days, then one, then two hours, reasoning that the processing plants for the minerals so dear to the tourists require more electrical power, that the inhabitants of the City-State don't have much need for it, and that the machinery meant to be supplying this power is rusting under the weight of the years: it dates from the building of the station, which is essentially an unfinished metal structure, gutted by artillery, train tracks, and locomotives that call to mind the railroad built by Stanley. Lucien strode along Independence Street. He took the curve of International Armistice Street, then turned onto Gravedigger Street in spite of himself, but avoided venturing too far down this narrow thoroughfare. Two men approached him, beaming.

“What size would you like, sir?”

The little street was full of commission agents, hired mourners, gravediggers, and hawkers of first and second-foot coffins.

“My condolences, sir, is it your daughter who's just …”

They laid out their wares on either side amid unrivaled pandemonium. Their trade drew so-called businesswomen who erected straw shacks from which they slung grub, hemp, and traditional beer, which in turn drew musicians, baby-chicks, itinerant Pentecostal preachers and other rubberneckers of that ilk, open-air concerts, striptease shows, and simulated orgasms and fellatio, as the chronology would have it.

“How old was he when he passed?”

Their strategy was to welcome with open arms, to commiserate with the potential client, to explain that they were there to cry with him, to pass themselves off as a friend, to suggest a product.

“Ebony wood, negotiable …”

A horde of kids ran after him.

“Sir, we work for less.”

Eyes shriveled by cigarettes and alcohol. Potbellies full to bursting with roundworms, amoebas, earthworms, and assorted mollusks. Heads shaved with knives. Arms and legs stiff with digging graves from morning till morning. They were close to ten, maybe twelve years old. They toted the same justifications: “We're doing this to pay for our studies. Dad's already gone with the locomotives. He doesn't write no more. Mom's sick. The uncles and aunts and grandmothers say we're sorcerers and it's because of us that dad got married a third time and that our sorcery comes from mom and that we should go see the preachers who will cut the links by getting us to swallow palm oil to make us vomit up our sorcery and prevent us flying around at night.” They lived off a multitude of rackets, like all the kids in town.

“We're not expensive. Our condolences first!”

They worked as porters at the Northern Station, and on the Congo River and at the Central Market, as slim-jims in the mines, errand boys at Tram 83, undertakers, and gravediggers. The more sensitive ones stood guard at the greasy spoons abutting the station, whose metal structure recalled the 1885s, in exchange for a bowl of badly boiled beans.

He stopped, got out his notebook, wrote: “Childhood, zero to two years old. Puberty, three to seven years old. Adolescence, eight to twelve years old. At fifteen, you already start scribbling your will.” “There's no shortage of dead,” Requiem was fond of saying; he who regularly traded his merchandise for coffins he sold on to tourists when they lost their workers in cave-ins. Lucien felt bad when he saw those poor faces ready to do anything to survive.
RULE NUMBER
23: every day is a pitched battle. As soon as dawn breaks you wonder what you're going to eat, and then, with the sun, you reintegrate the cycle of the City-State, you fish, you dig, you scavenge, you glean, you devise, you fuck, you sweat, you sell, you trade, you peddle, you abuse, you corrupt, you drink, you shit in the stairwell, you identify with the jazz, you taunt the white tourists. Everything can be liquidated, each devises their own system. He thought about his Clignancourt friend: “I'm making contacts with all the theaters, and you, you wander about in the open air, how's that a way to live, Lucien!” He thought of Gandhi's face at Karl Marx's commentary on the expropriation of the rural population. He thought about the Negus justifying himself: “Life expectancy here is forty-one years, whether you like it or not! I'm filling the four years I've got left as I see fit.” He stared
at the coffins, on either side. Wrote in his notebook: deaths corresponding to professions.

He remembered the article he'd read the previous day. On the front page, a ten-year old girl gives birth to a child weighing twenty-one pounds; the father of the newborn, a thirty-year-old digger carried off by the cave-in before last.

“I'm horny, take me far away from here, far from these vipers, and turn me on.”

“Missionary position or doggy-style, I'm ready to do the freakiest stuff.”

“I don't have syphilis, that's the only good news.”

He turned the page and scrawled: “They've lost their knowledge of hoe and fishhook. What will they sink their teeth into when the earth, for all its copper and diamonds, rejects them. Flashes of lightning initial the myths long maintained by these railroads that haunt the most wounded imaginations, the desire to see that other part of oneself sinking ever further.” He was reminded of his third dream: heavily bearded kids insisting he either pay them to dig his own grave or else flee aboard the first train for the Back-Country …

“Do you have the time?”

“I don't like banks. That's just my opinion.”

“I give marvelous head.”

“Let's go far away from here. Take me to Graz, or Moscow even. Yes, I love your country.”

He crossed a nameless street, lit a cigarette, Tram 83 in the distance.

13.

JOURNAL OF A RETURN TO TRAM 83
.

The Tram retained its botched-night splendor. It stayed the same, yesterday, today, and the day after. Beers were served fifteen minutes late. The waitresses and the busgirls, supported by the mother superior, mocked the world about them. The baby-chicks, all welcoming smiles, accosted the clients with no distinction. The mixed facilities remained overcrowded. The men entered and exited as happy as ever.

They shared the same aspirations: money and sex. They loved money and baby-chicks. They were all drawn to the mines and the Tram. Days, they roamed the mines, whenever they could excavate with the dissident General's authorization, and nights, they celebrated their good fortune at the Tram. They hit on the baby-chicks and the ageless-women, identified with the jazz, and drank beer till they threw up. Some claimed they required the Zambezi River to get properly drunk. Question: in that case, how many more nights of boozing?

“You're ruining the clientele. If you carry on latching hold of
the tourists like that, I'll kick you out of the Tram.”

In the Tram's early days, entry was barred to the baby-chick-girls. And then it was realized they could serve as bait, that they had a right to life and liberty, that they could rack up unhoped-for revenue, that they featured among the selection criteria, that it was their only means of survival, and so a kind of free rein was granted to any woman or girl who could entice an individual and make them spend. They were underestimated by the single-mamas and belittled by the armada of waitresses and other servers. The problem was that they were kind, open to negotiation, sincere, and intelligent for young girls of their age. They refused to wear underwear on the pretext that it restricted the curves of their bodies.

“Foreplay spoils the pleasure.”

The pantyless-girlies were possessed of a stage presence given to fueling rumors that they stuffed themselves with “love drugs” and fetishes of all kinds to enslave their tourist clients and make them their puppies, strategies inherited from their grandmothers and forebears who solicited at Tram 83 in the past, back when the joint was called Savorgnan de Brazza then San Salvador then Pool Malebo then Santa Rosa then Zanzibar … Certain tourists, we learned, became quite fired-up as they grew infatuated with the girls, spending some three hours of their nights and days enumerating, singing, screaming, yelling, reciting, and chanting the surnames of these unassuming pantyless-girlies, sometimes even complete genealogies. And thus you could hear, not far from the station whose metal structure … and in the vicinity of the burnt-ass mines, baying as long as a hangman's rope: Marie Mujinga Mbombo, daughter of Marcel Kalambay Mutombo and Jacqueline Ntuma,
paternal granddaughter of Jean-Pierre Tshimbalanga and Thérèse Kalenga, maternal granddaughter of Mr. Jean-Philippe de Sauvageon and Marie-Louise Kahenga, or perhaps Nelly Lomgombo, niece of Mr. Rolando Petuveria, offspring of a certain Mbuanga who worked as an odd-job man at the port of Beach Ngobila. The same legend specified that other tourists made over their wills to them, between two rounds of frisky frolics dispensed by our little-pantyless-single-mama-pre-baby-chick-sisters, giving up their stones or their apartments or their big cars and worse. Yet others, disoriented by that mysterious pleasure of intertwined bodies, forgot their Flemish, their French, their Portuguese, their Mandarin, their Czech, their Italian, and their Russian in favor of Lingala and Wolof; and so, according to the moralizing rumors, these damned upstarts, these social climbers, disturbed us in the chronology of our pleasure, interfered with our affairs, and lingered in bed with our sisters for a long while, when at the very same moment their brothers continued to speak their Flemish and their Russian, distorted our ancestors in favor of the Merovingians, knocked up hand over fist, escorted gold bars, Northern Station, platform 17, initialed worthless petroleum contracts, cloned a few nascent rebellions against a backdrop of mangled gospels, third-rate glossaries, phraseologies of an inveterate drunkard, a miner by trade or endlessly striking student or carjacker or pizza delivery guy of dubious and other origins. But the fact remains that the appearance of said rumors coincided with the sleeping sickness: imagine the Tram fast asleep, waitresses dozing between two shifts, diggers dozing, students of the endless strike dozing, tourists dozing, jazz musicians dozing, baby-chicks dozing, desperados dozing, and even
outside, dozing Syrians, dozing Poles, dozing Frenchies, doz —

“Do you have the time?”

These girls knew how to leapfrog certain stages of their lives, or rather they consumed their adolescence to the full. Their bodies, the kind of heavy artillery that gets you drooling. Requiem liked to go on about how they were the future of humanity.

“Do you have the time?”

RULE NUMBER
46: fuck by day, fuck by night, fuck and fuck some more for you know not what tomorrow brings. Lucien groped his way forward. Awful dark. But the few votive candles stuck here and there and the pounding band kept the temperature hot. Mr. Malingeau was sat close to the podium facing the musicians who were covering an Afro-American song of the 1950s. Lucien quietly joined him at the table. The publisher was so mad for sax that he didn't see him at all. His great passions were soul music, publishing, carnival, and merchandise. Lucien waited over an hour before addressing him.