I looked at the commissioner’s phiz, hesitated, and then, curious despite everything, stood aside and waved him in. His expression was noncommittal. I didn’t give a damn what he thought. My opulence was pretty overwhelming, especially for him, who had known me before: I was wearing a Chinese bathrobe, pure silk in a dark purplish red, over ink-black collarless pajamas, and I had put my shades on to open the front door.
Me aside, the dump had not changed much. The decor of Papa’s life moldered in the dimness then just as it did now.
Goémond accepted a cup of coffee, which was not so bad, I told myself, but here he came with his stern paternal patter.
“Whenever I come to see you it’s because you’ve screwed up. Believe you me, I wish it were otherwise. I like you fine, Butron, you know. But you have seen Colonel Battistini again. When you think what good that did for you last time . . .”
I said nothing.
“I tell you,” said Goémond, “I’d go so far as to grant that what you were doing before was defensible at the time, even if you were in the wrong. This time though, you know all that, and there’s no use revisiting it, wouldn’t you say? Now he is nothing, this Battistini—he is screwing around over in the Belgian Congo, with mercenaries and all the rest of it. You need to watch what you’re getting into.”
“Frankly, Goémond,” I said, “I don’t know what you’re driving at.”
I smiled ingenuously. I had learnt how to smile. Too late. He was examining the surroundings.
“Don’t you ever air this place? It smells like a rabbit hutch.”
The stinking bastard.
“You stinking bastard,” I said aloud.
He affected not to hear me.
“Oh, right,” he said, “you’re never here, are you? I suppose you’ve never even been down into the cellar since your poor father died?”
He gave me a piercing look. Piercing eyes like Persian carpets?* I don’t know why, stupid jokes like that always make me laugh.
But at that moment I was not laughing. The stinking bastard was the one laughing.
“We can go down together,” I broke in, “so long as you have a warrant.”
He bristled, then immediately assumed a mournful air.
“Come on, Butron, come on now. What good does it do you to be impolite?”
“I’m not impolite. You haven’t seen anything yet, dickhead.”
The commissioner’s nose turned purple. His proboscis was thickening as he got older. I had not noticed it before.
What a treat it was to insult a cop!
To kill one would be even better. I read somewhere that during the last century, in periods of social upheaval, the inhabitants of certain Paris neighborhoods merrily organized robust police hunts. Those were the days.
As for Goémond, he soon left, muttering in his beard, something about stocking firearms. Pig.
This incident roused me. Because I had been asleep. Strange how certain periods produce a sort of slumber of the soul. I was snoozing for fourteen hours a day, whether here at home or in Paris. Business was rolling along. I had my Scandinavian contacts for moving the goods and, through Battistini, the man with the balaclava whose presence I mentioned earlier when talking about my slipups with the OAS, I could get explosives and popguns. The MPLZ paid cash on the barrelhead. My finances were sound. This dead calm for months had made me oddly sleepy. I spent my days in my elegant quarters reading books and answering the phone—except when I unplugged the thing on account of all the people calling. Like Eddy looking for a place to crash. Or a chick who had gotten herself knocked up. I was known for my generosity; I have always been generous to those who deserve it.
So I was asleep. A somnambulist. When I went out I barely knew where I was going. I drank gallons of Guinness. I wandered through my neighborhood at night, pissing on statues, especially those of stone geezers with shitty little plaques: ART IS THE TRANSCRIPTION OF A SYMBOL INTO A DOCTRINE or some such sinister dictum.
Anyway, right then, the Goémond incident woke me up, and, since one good thing always leads to another—assuming that being woken up was a good thing, which I doubt—no sooner was I back in Paris than the Admiral suggested I meet him at La Coupole, where he asked in an unpleasantly conspiratorial tone if I would care to serve as bodyguard to a well-known revolutionary figure who was visiting Paris incognito.
Bodyguard? Had he taken a good look at me? I suppose it was all the tales about machine guns that had given him the wrong idea. Another one. Would it never end? I said yes, because he asked me to do it as a favor. And that was the start of the N’Gustro affair.
I swear I’m telling the truth. Which is in my interest, by the way. It should be made clear. It needs to be known what happened and what Butron went through.
When I said yes to the Admiral about playing the armed guard, I knew nothing about the man I was to protect. N’Gustro was just a name to me. I knew just what anyone knew about him before the news broke. Maybe a tiny bit more, but not much. I’m sure a lot of people could not have said whether he was a minister or an opposition leader or where he came from. I had heard talk about him at the Paris HQ of the MPLZ, and from the guys who helped me take delivery of the weapons supplied by Battistini and store them in my cellar in Rouen, then later convey them from there to big freighters so they could continue on to enormous Africa, and, like that earlier time, first by truck and later by porters, be transported through the brush and bring death to the humid jungle for the delectation of the TV audience of the news magazine Cinq Colonnes à la Une or similar.
The name of N’Gustro was often pronounced in my presence. I hardly paid attention. I was not a listener when it came to politics. So I was just vaguely aware that he was on our side, the sort of leader that the Third World now produced, had traveled to China, Zanzibar, Cairo. Photographed behind a long table, smiling alongside Mahomed Babu, embraced by Guevara, hosted by Chou En-lai, garlanded with flowers at an airport.
As for his precise ideology, even now I couldn’t really tell you. You only get to know a caged bear when it is cornered. N’Gustro was never able to show us that side of him. His affection was bestowed on peoples of color struggling, as they say, against imperialism. Which meant nothing, because the same might as easily be said of Castro, Boumédiène, Mao, Ho, Malcolm X, or even Hourgnon and Jean Ferrat.
Anyway, he was the person concerned. He popped up all over the place, with sojourns in Zimbabwin, supposedly clandestine visits to guerrilla bases—those nearest a frontier no doubt, to make flight easier should things heat up. Actually I don’t know this for sure, I’m just bad-mouthing him, but I doubt I’m wrong. He was a leader, nothing more.
Let me say why I accepted, even if it goes without saying. The Admiral seemed to take me for a resourceful man. He was just like the chicks at Lycée Corneille when I was taking applied science after returning from war or jail. Rumors were enough to make me seem larger than life. And I was flattered.
“I like you better than my young inexperienced Negroes,” the Admiral told me as I was once again marveling at the uncanny resemblance between one of La Coupole’s waiters, poor guy, and Léon Zitrone.
“You need to know,” the Admiral then whispered to me. “We are talking about Dieudonné N’Gustro in person.”
As I say, I scarcely knew who he was, so I shrugged and said fine in an even tone; the Admiral must have taken this tone for nerve. He seemed satisfied, which I was too.
Six days later, to the airport and the whole deal, a large black car, actually a fairly late model Mercedes, to take us into the sticks, not far from Ozoir-la-Ferrière in eastern Paris, or rather to the east of Paris, an enormous country house, a sort of weekend place belonging to the MPLZ. Apparently this was where the movement held its secret meetings.
The tall, bearded Admiral was standing on the lawn wearing a boubou for the occasion, vile snob that he was. Other people dotted the grass, among them the little tough guys from the fifteenth arrondissement; I spotted my pal Goyésmith in a white suit with incredible stains under the arms, at the crotch, in fact all over—sweat was obviously his trademark.
As for me, I was in the car wearing a hard face as required. A completely retarded Negro who spoke only his home patois was at the wheel. I sat next to him. At my armpit in a Mexican shoulder holster (courtesy of Eddy) I was toting a hefty rod (courtesy of the Admiral), a Colt automatic, a copy of the 1915 Browning, I believe, but in any case it weighed a ton and would never help you draw Western-style, pardner. Never mind. Sweat ran down from under my hat, oiling my chiseled features, highlighting the smooth areas. There was something of Lee Van Cleef about me. Perfect.
Behind, in the back seat, squeezed together, were N’Gustro and two women, one on either side of him. Ghyslaine was a little eighteen-year-old blond with wise eyes who surely sucked cock like a real slut and who was very short and narrow-hipped—you had to wonder how ever the leader could get inside her, but I suppose there are those who like that. To his left was Doudou, a pretty quadroon with secretarial eyeglasses, his business assistant. I know, I sound as if I was describing the talent lineup in a brothel. Can’t be helped. Doudou with the briefcase, and her airs . . . Her coffee-colored skin excited me. The strange fact is that those guys are excited by white girls and we are excited by Negresses. A curse!
Perhaps though, when you think about it, this could be worked out as kind of fair swap. They could send us all their ebonies and we would toss them all our cute blonds. You have to say the antebellum Deep South mustn’t have been boring.
Ghyslaine was holding his umbrella.
Wait! I didn’t mean to be obscene. It really was his umbrella she was holding. His black umbrella. Oh, screw it! Between the legs. Oh, forget it!
Thank goodness I can joke right now. My morale is fine. With me, morale will be the last thing to go. I have my cigarillo between my teeth; I am looking at the white ceiling. There is a smell of mold and the clock is ticking. I am not armed. I turned down Eddy’s gun. Anyway, I can still laugh.
As I say, we arrived at that country house. All those guys on the lawn with rods bulging under their jackets. We got out of the car, no problem, and went in after the mandatory exchange of kisses. The Admiral in his boubou was determined to embrace the big chief, so they smooched and shared their sweat. N’Gustro in his oh-so-white suit.
Coffee and liqueurs were served. I only smelled them and was pissed off because, being in the rear, I missed out.
Right after that, foreigners were shown in and I was back on point, sharp-eyed and imperious.
A kind of press conference followed outdoors: journos all over the lawn, petits fours and sorbets. All set to leave for Havana, for the Tri-Commie Conference, if you get my drift. The Tricontinental, I should say—no need to pretend to be dumber than I am, but things really get under my skin sometimes.
“Mister President, what do you think of the Peking regime?”
“Let me answer the question you are asking me, then I’ll answer the one you are not asking.”
Laughter.
“First of all, I don’t care for the expression ‘Peking regime.’ You don’t talk about the Washington regime when referring to your government. I don’t believe that anyone outside official meetings would deny that the People’s Republic of China is an entity and a fact, whereas the Taiwan regime—well, you can’t call it anything else: it is the Taiwan regime. Now then, you ask me what I think of the People’s Republic of China, and my answer is that its government received us in a friendly and intelligent manner after having looked upon our existence with a like intelligence and friendliness. As much cannot be said of a certain number of other regimes even though they are no more legitimate than that of the People’s Republic of China. How can this difference of attitude be explained? I’ll let you answer that question yourselves.
“Now let me also respond to the question that you have not asked. Is the People’s Liberation Movement of Zimbabwin inspired by the Chinese and does it intend to follow policies copied directly from those of China once it has liberated our country?
“My reply is this: we take inspiration from nobody save the suffering masses of Zimbabwin. And we identify with no one. The experience of others across the globe can be of benefit to us. And I mean other countries just as much as the People’s Republic of China. As much Sweden as Cuba.
“But we shall imitate no one, no more Sweden than Cuba.
“Because Zimbabwin has its own problems. So Zimbabwin says that it will find its own solutions.”
N’Gustro raised his finger and his chin. Silence.
“Of course there is one thing that we shall never relinquish, because the masses have clearly shown that they do not wish us to relinquish it, and that is socialism.
“Therefore, on that account, if I had briefly to define the program of our movement, and state the desire expressed by the masses of Zimbabwin, I would say socialism, but a socialism adapted to the conditions to which it is to be applied, to the problems that it addresses. A socialism that is neither Cuban nor Chinese nor anything else but a Zimbabwinite socialism. And as for our friendships, they will be forged with those who show friendship toward us.”
Abrupt end to his response. Appreciative murmurs. Personally I found it pretty good for its type. That type being horseshit.
•
All this went on for a long time.
I wandered around. Things became less formal after a while. I offered petits fours to newspaper people.
“Mister President, if you came to power, seeing that you are considered rightly or wrongly to be a partisan of totalitarian rule, capital investment would be withdrawn from Zimbabwin. How do you envisage a Zimbabwinite economy left entirely to its own devices?”
This was no Roger Priouret. The man seemed even less intelligent than that.
“Cuba figured it out,” said N’Gustro. “Guinea too. Why not us?”
This answer did not satisfy at all.
“Mister President, how do you feel about racism?”
The questioner was a Jew, [pas du tout ami des chattes?] believe it or not, an anti-Semitic Jew with round glasses and a plastered-down mop of hair.
“It’s an enormous problem for whites,” said N’Gustro. “But now it’s their turn.”
Nervous laughter.
“I suppose you approve of riots?” the man continued. “So why don’t you say so?” He seemed to be beside himself.
“I am in favor of riots,” answered N’Gustro, “so long as they’re well organized.”
“Thanks a lot!” shouted the guy.
He was getting ready to leave. I was stirring the ice in my scotch next to another American.
“That’s Defeckmann,” my neighbor told me without my having asked him anything. “Gutter press.”
“Gutter or not, I don’t give a hoot,” I told him, and moved away.
I watched Defeckmann from a distance getting back into his car, a Nash. He no longer looked beside himself in the slightest. It had all been an act, the angry-right-wing-journalist act, a persona he must be cultivating. His business, though. Everyone has to eat.
“The guy’s a sicko.”
It was the other Yank back again pestering me. I gave him the once-over. Forty-five max, inexpensive Tergal suit much rumpled, eyeglasses—all he needed was a pipe to be the perfect portrait of himself. I eyed him with amusement. A variety of left-wing intellectual I had hitherto been spared. More cinematogenic than our homespun version. McCarthy and all that gave them cachet; and naturally, when compared with McCarthy, they seemed less idiotic.
“Are you Henri Butron? If you would allow me . . .”
I nodded. He introduced himself without further ado. He seemed pleased with himself. You had to wonder why.
“Ben Debourmann.”
A firm handshake, as they say. His teeth were yellowed by tobacco, and he smiled continually. I hate people who smile all the time.
“Mister President,” he said then, taking advantage of a lull. “Mister President, do you think that American policy might change? I am referring in particular to what can only be described as the colonial policy of the United States.”
“There are people everywhere who long for peace,” said N’Gustro. “Not least in the United States.”
He then echoed this sentiment in a dozen different ways. He even went so far as to say a friendly word about the late President Kennedy, that dog. Which depressed me.
More questions, more answers—a mishmash. It was getting hotter and hotter. Debourmann was talking to me but I wasn’t listening. The conference was over. A handful of people had stayed behind for amiable chitchat. Things were coming to a close en famille, drinking. Debourmann was still there. I wondered if I ought not to search him, but then I saw Doudou, N’Gustro’s business assistant, pumping his hand; they even kissed, so, okay, he belonged to the household, and I went back to my scotch, which was excellent. I had been drinking too much all day. I was completely drenched in a thick, sticky sweat. My mind was a blank; I didn’t know what was to become of me; I contemplated old age.
Dusk came on, bringing a breath of air, and we went back inside. The French windows were left half-open to let in the evening cool. We had a light meal, just a dozen of us by now, and this time I was not lumped with the domestics. The Admiral played master of ceremonies. He looked like a Druid with his whiskers and boubou. N’Gustro was friendly toward everyone, five minutes of affability for each particular ugly mug. He had cordial words for me, how happy he was to see white faces, signifying solidarity; he was referring to me and Debourmann, but my plug for solidarity was to ogle Ghyslaine. It was incredible how much she could scarf, the delicate little whore. I would have loved to get into her pants, but she was far away, and anyway it would not be politic. So I turned my attention to Doudou, who was seated next to me. She was a strapping creature, and the pelvic thrust had to be robust. I stayed where I was, chatting idly, eating Roquefort, still drinking, and distractedly palpating my prick under the table with the side of my thumb. None of this gave me much of a hard-on. Just as I had feared.
After the meal, the java, and the digestifs, while weird long narrow greenish cigars were being smoked, the Admiral, completely out of his mind, lit a roaring fire in the hearth. To see the self-satisfied little smile on his countenance, rimmed with white and repulsively sweaty, to see him leaning against the fireplace, made you realize what his thing was: he would have made a perfect tourist guide. He was very proud of the house, but for him the finishing touches to this superb pile would not be put until flames were licking up the chimney in the European hearth beneath the room’s exposed beams. What a pathetic exoticizing Negro!
As a result we were sweltering. Nobody complained. On the contrary, everyone seemed to be anticipating some kind of delightful event and—wait for it!—good old N’Gustro soon got to his feet with a little sigh, because he had stuffed himself fit to bust his belt, and struck a pose near the fire.
“I feel like saying a few words,” he murmured.
Everyone began to chafe at the bit.
“Oh yes, Mister President! Oh yes, Dieudonné! A poem, a poem, Dieudonné, a poem!”
The broads were jumping up and down with enthusiasm. Debourmann was applauding already, the Admiral ditto. I clapped too so as not to be the odd man out. A lethargic and avuncular smile began to light up the distinctive noble features of the big ape. He closed his eyes and clasped his hands over his paunch and the laboring guts within.
“I’m not sure whether it will be a poem,” he said, “or just words. Perhaps, who knows, it could be an action.”
And he proceeded as thus announced, halting slightly now and then for a coughing fit, for it must be said that the fireplace was a smoky one.
“Yesterday!” he began in a stentorian voice.
Yesterday . . .
Yesterday they came pale monkeys from the water
Squawking and stamping and stinging pale parachutists
And sea fusiliers who shoot and who swear
And we made big juju magic
But . . .
But they went on squawking and stamping and stinging and shooting
Until today . . .
And today and today and again today . . .
The pale monkeys from the water faded away
Went back beneath the water of Agwé-Tawayo
Snakes in disguise, not fish Agwé
Leaving their representatives the big juju men of before in their stead
In their stead squawking stamping stinging fucking and shooting
Until tomorrow . . .
But tomorrow . . .
Tomorrow we will fish with grenades
Tomorrow oh Agwé we will purge the waters
Tomorrow we will make big juju magic that will cook the pale fish the monkey fish oh Africa
Tomorrow . . .
We will make peoples into broth!
That was it. He had finished. Ovation.
*The French words perçant and persan are homophones. (Trans.)