2

The train is a long reptile slithering through the night jungle. Ito Baraka hunkers down in his seat. To anyone who happens to walk through the empty wagon at that particular moment, he will appear a shady character, an old pile of skin and bones covered with a coat that’s too big and makes him look like a fallen god. Through the closed window, he thinks he can make out eyes peering at him, the inquisitive gaze of big black cats, cruel creatures whose claws are raking his flesh. He looks like Hamm, the grumpy blind old cripple in Beckett’s play Endgame. He thinks about Hamm, and about Beckett, because that’s where it all started for him.

The train is a noise and a dull ache running through his veins. He coughs and bends down and grabs the backpack between his legs. He starts to take out his big notebook, but then changes his mind and pulls from the inside pocket of his coat the flask he always carries, and takes a sip from it. His hands trembling, he gets out the notebook, opens it in the middle, and begins to read. He shivers. He knows he won’t have time to complete this book. He reads over the paragraph he finished when the train pulled out of Quebec City.

***

Nineteen eighty. There would continue to be only one way of thinking in the country, in keeping with the directives of the party. I remember we had to stand stiff-necked, all looking in the same direction, the direction of the wind, and after long days of immobility, our joints would ache, and an army general would appear out of nowhere and make us turn our heads in another direction, the direction of emptiness. And my father didn’t see how we could survive between those two poles of wind and emptiness. In our neighbourhood there was an old man they called the Walker, a wretched creature scarred by a series of failures and misfortunes. He would walk the streets of the neighbourhood heaping insults on everyone he met, calling the passersby wimps, losers, nutless, gutless, goddamn niggers, jackasses. At six in the morning, we’d hear the guy in the north end of the neighbourhood, and his voice would gradually move towards us and his volley of insults would once again disturb the more sensitive of the good citizens and fail to impress the old people, who had been through it all, and worse, since the sky of lead and misery had fallen on our heads. And they pronounced the man a madman and philosopher and said he’d spent twenty years in jail for affront to public decency, slander, treason, and other crimes. And the better informed of our fellow-citizens confirmed that he had said things against the powers-that-be, nobody knew exactly what, and one day a sergeant and his detachment came out of the watchtowers of the city and tossed him in jail. There are watchtowers there, right in the middle of the city. Watchtowers, army camps, men in fatigues, green jeeps, and a sergeant sitting in the rear seat of his patrol car, an Uzi across his skinny chicken legs. Also airplanes in a gloomy sky.

Very often, my father, a surveyor who worked in the fields with his tripod and transit and other optical instruments, would catch sight of a flying object in the sky. It might be an army helicopter doing reconnaissance on our hotheads, and my father, to avoid trouble, would move his field of observation, while the neighbourhood madman continued insulting us in his voice of an opera singer who has seen better days, the shrill notes of rage and frustration finally catching in his throat, cutting off his breath, and throwing him against a wall darkened with the piss and spittle of idlers. His words were the morning refrain that answered the crowing of a noisy rooster perched on the roof of the neighbourhood movie theatre. The Walker, calling us chickens, toadies, and losers, philosophizing about what he called our duck walk, ranting that we would never get further than the boundaries of our henhouse-neighbourhood, drawing a parallel between our daily promenade of the living dead and the gait of the few web-footed birds that strayed into the Bé lagoon. And he walked fast, exhorting passersby loud and clear to join the ranks of what he called The Revolution, the real one and not the one of the men in fatigues who had gotten us into such deep shit. The man would raise his fist, his whole body stiff. My father didn’t want me to end up like him if that’s what philosophizing was, asking for trouble and a boot in the ass! I enrolled in philosophy anyway, and got into Plato, Kant, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre. My favourite, though, was Diogenes the Cynic, because, like him, the swindling brats around the dumps at the Train Station Market would search in broad daylight for light, light that was irremediably corrupted by the veil of cruelty covering their malaria-yellowed eyes.