Broken Glass (4 page)

 

 

 

the Pampers guy seemed to be struggling for words that day, but all at once he got into his stride and went on with his story, without even checking I was listening: “so you see, Broken Glass, my wife has the nerve to say I'm not allowed out, when I'm telling you, she had no right to tell me what to do, I paid all the bills, but
she made all the rules, who ever heard of a thing like that, in this crumbling world, eh, no one, that's who, she thinks she can stop me from spoiling myself a little from time to time, as a man has a right to, with the hot little numbers down in the Rex District, you know what I mean, what was I supposed to do with myself while the guru was giving my wife a going over in the high mountains of Loango, Ndjili, and Diosso, eh, what was I supposed to do, fold my arms and watch from the sidelines, reading my Jerusalem Bible, eh, keep the house nice, eh, make her meals, eh, make me a cuckold, okay, but a posthumous cuckold please, make me a cuckold, but not with the connivance of the church brigade, not with the connivance of people who are meant to be showing us the way to the gates of paradise, you know some days, I wonder if some of my kids, all except the girl who looks like me, aren't the guru's kids, anyway, what am I supposed to do with myself, eh, it's true I love those hot little things down around the Rex District, yeah, I love the taste of young girl, especially from down there, real belles du seigneur, they are, they know how to handle the Ding-an-sich, they're born with it, you'll never know fear and trembling like that in the marital bed, they're amazing, Broken Glass, they're little volcanoes, they promise you the earth and then they give it to you, all gift-wrapped, while the women back home are just one big disappointment, those hot little numbers from the Rex District, wow are they hot, they're like rubber, like elastic, it's sharp, it's sweet, it's frenzied, they whisper in your ear, they're with your erection every fraction of the way, they know just where to touch you to wake the slumbering alternator, they know how to keep you from stalling at the roundabout, how to get your turbine turning, slip through the gears, accelerate, you feel happy, like you got your whole life before you, and you know how it is, Broken Glass, it was my
money, I had a right to spend it as I wanted, I reckon, why'd she go breaking my balls like that, eh, I'll tell you something, she was no good at it anyway, my wife, if she had been I'd have stayed at home like the other assholes in the district, but she just lay there, my wife did, staring up at the roof, got no choice but to pick my nails and think about the slender little bodies of the Rex girls, she could at least have tried to fake a bit of pleasure, while I was pumping away on top of her like some mediocre cyclist in the Tour de Trois-Cents, I'll tell you an open secret, while I'm at it, Broken Glass, one day she literally forced me to leave off squirming about on top of her, because she was determined not to miss the last episode of Santa Barbara, well then my engine just cut straight out, no life left in it, batteries flat, nothing working, I mean nothing at all, I was impotent, just watching my tool losing altitude and turning into a poor little flag at half-mast, then finally a tiny little thing no bigger than a premature baby's, by which I mean to say I was seriously disconcerted, discombobulated, disoriented, and derailed, I swear to you, I got dressed in a flash, I was yelling my head off, shouting shit! Shit! Shit! I told her I wasn't going to pay any more bills till she started shifting her ass during sex and what's more I said, she could stop counting on me, I'm no sucker, no asshole, no cretin, I got to protect my pride against those slings and arrows, I think maybe I may have slightly hurt her feelings when I said I got married to a plank of wood, she didn't know the first thing about giving a man pleasure, I said the only thing she knew how to bring off in triumph was the act of procreation, and any wild beast could do that, yep, I said all this while I was getting dressed in a flash, I said it in anger and stormed out of the house, slamming the door, and once I was out I ran like a madman escaping from the asylum while the guard is taking a piss, I jumped into a bush taxi, the
driver wanted to talk, I gave him the brushoff, because I couldn't think what we could have to say to each other, and he said he reckoned I was worrying about something, it was plain as the nose on my face, and I said he could spare me his reckonings and zip it, just drive me direct to the Rex District, but he went on chatting away, working me over, trying to find out the reason for my despair, but I wasn't telling him, I said if he didn't shut his foreigner face I'd get out of his old jalopy, and he sighed and said it must be about a woman then, I didn't look like a man who enjoyed a happy home life, and I gave a start like “what d'you know about it then?” and he sniggered, and turned round and said “all the guys looking like you do and asking for the Rex District are either cuckolds or have a wife as stiff as a plank of Gabon wood,” and I told him again to shut up, “they sure are hot, those girls around the Rex District,” he said, I was angry, I just yelled “leave me alone and drive, man,” but he wouldn't stop, the asshole, he just kept right on saying “hey, life is beautiful, man, laugh a little, you'll be flying high in a little while, relax, stay cool, breathe easy” and since I'd stopped talking to him, he added with a laugh, “please yourself man, I was only making conversation, still, it's strange the way clients these days, they got no sense of humor, I'll take you to the Rex District, but you spare me a thought when you're getting it on” and he didn't say one more word, just smiled this sly smile all the rest of the way, till at last we got to the Rex District, I paid the asshole driver, but I threw the notes in through the window at him, and he drove off, giving me the finger, I shouted “imbecile!” he shouted “cuckold!” but I didn't give a fuck, I was in the Rex District, where the girls are so pretty, and available, open to all the usual and some of the less usual propositions, so there I was, in my natural milieu, the school of flesh, district Eros-hima, and all the girls knew me,
because I worshipped their bodies, their beauty, and didn't just treat them like tarts, I would do the things with them that you do with any normal woman with an ounce of eroticism in her and not one frozen stiff like mine, and one of them asked me that evening if I'd like a special massage, known as the “master's flesh” and I immediately said yes, because this Haitian friend of mine who lives in Montreal now told me it was great, even if it was twice the usual price, I said yes indeed to the “master's flesh” and I sure did fly, and when I got back home at dawn I found my wife had changed the lock, yeah, that's what I said, Broken Glass, after fourteen and a half years of marriage, and then some, fourteen years of deadly boredom, fourteen years in the wilderness, fourteen years of pretense, sham, and faking it, fourteen years of calvary and the missionary position, she'd gone and changed the locks,

now I wasn't going to sleep out in the street just because she'd changed the lock with the help of her brother-in-law, a well-known locksmith, I wasn't going to sleep in the street like a bum, no way, so I knocked on the door, got no answer, I shouted my wife's name so loud I woke the neighbors, she didn't open up, I threatened to kick the door in, I would count up to five, I counted real slow, she never came, so naturally enough, I called the fire brigade, since I didn't want to break down the door of my own house, and when the fire brigade arrived with all their gear, thinking they'd been called out to a real bush fire, I explained my house wasn't on fire, but I needed to find a really good excuse for calling them out, because these guys get really bored when there's no fire locally, they often get fed up doing practice runs, some of them reach retirement without ever having put out so much as the flame of a match, and I lied and said the children were locked in the house and their mother had passed out, and they were a bit disappointed that there was no fire, the firefighters asked why I
didn't have the keys to my own home, and I said that I'd gone to work a night shift and I'd left them in the house, so my keys were in the house and not on my person, then one fireman pointed out that I really was a complete idiot, and I told him they were his words not mine and the firefighters charged at the door like a band of madmen all trying to get through the eye of a needle at once, and they broke down the cruddy door after a hell of a struggle, and my wife came bursting out of the bedroom, roaring, with her claws at the ready, and flung herself at me like a tigress protecting her two-day-old babies, tackled me to the floor, she's twice my size, and yours too, Broken Glass, she's a real fury, my wife is, believe me, I shouted for help, the firefighters separated us, asked what was going on with us, I wanted to speak first because I'm the man, but my wife slapped me and told me to shut my filthy womanizing mouth, and she lied and said I should stop hanging out round the marital home because the matrimonial judge for Trois-Cents had ordered me out of it months ago, and the firefighters called me a sad liar and a sad mythomaniac and a sad troublemaker, and just totally sad, and told me to get my ass double quick out of the marital home, “the law is tough but it is the law,” that's what they said, and I refused to get out because I didn't see what business the law had being tough with me, so I said anyway, I was the one who paid the bills, I'd bought the TV, and the Duralex plates, and I paid for the food, I paid for the children's school things, and I paid for the water, and I paid for the electricity, and so on and so forth, and at that point they called the police because firefighters don't normally carry handcuffs with them, they always turn up with pipes and stretchers and great big engines that disturb everyone and all because someone, somewhere, has struck a match, and it's not their job to send people to prison, they're supposed to put out
fires and resuscitate the half-wits and the suicides and people who've had accidents and pass out, and so the police turned up straight away, because the station's only two hundred meters from the house, the one I've rented with my own money, and, get this, my wife told the police I was a dangerous man, more dangerous even than Angoulima, the well-known serial killer who decapitated his victims and stuck up their heads on poles round the Côte Sauvage, and my wife said I was an ex-convict, and a thief, that I dealt in cannabis and Colombian cocaine, and she said I'd stopped sleeping at home, I never washed, that I beat our children to death, that I'd stopped paying the rent, that she was going to be turned out of the house herself, that I slept with the tarts around the Rex, and that I slept with them without wearing proper condoms that come from Central Europe, because according to her condoms from Nigeria are no good, they've got a hole at the tip, which allows a man to cheat on a woman, taking his pleasure as if he weren't wearing a condom, and the poor woman underneath thinks he is using a condom, when in fact it's just a thing with a hole in the top, you know what I mean, Broken Glass, so my wife said I could well be HIV extra-positive and not know, and it was probably quite far gone, because I was getting weirdly thinner and thinner and I had a face like a fish, and my head now looked like a Hottentot's skull and I had constant diarrhea and I groaned when I pissed, and that I often vomited, and she said I gave away my salary to the girls from the Rex District and I had two mistresses young enough to be my granddaughters or the granddaughters of the firefighters, or of the policemen outside our house, God help us, and that's when the situation began to go downhill, particularly when my wife made out I also did disgusting things to our daughter, Amelie, she called me sorcerer, barbarian, caveman, and worse, she told
all the people gathered at our house that I got up every night to lay my hands on our daughter, do disgusting things to her, indecent things, and she claimed that I would give Amelie sleeping pills so she wouldn't realize the disgusting, indecent things I did to her, now you tell me, Broken Glass, can you see me doing that, d'you see me sullying the cloakroom of childhood, do you see me nipping buds, can you see me shooting at a child, its impossible, after all, Amelie's my own daughter, isn't she, and I was so shocked, I didn't even defend myself against her false accusations, and in among all the people in uniform there was a cop of the female persuasion with the muscles of a docker and her hair cut short, like a normal cop, I mean a male policeman, and this cop of the female persuasion pushed me up against the wall and called me a bastard, a pedophile, a sadist, she said she'd crush me under her boot, she'd trample on my corpse, and spit on my grave, I was like a sailor washed up in the tide, I should know there was a punishment for every crime, and this cop of the female persuasion swore she'd get me banged up, she promised to do everything she could to make sure there was no fair trial, she said I didn't deserve the honor of a legal trial, besides which they're a complicated business, and she was the one who put the handcuffs on me and her colleagues all took a kick at me, booting me in the balls, as I lay dying at the intruders' feet, I can show you the scars, marks I bear to this day, and I began to cough up petals of blood, petals of blood the size of potatoes from Bobo-Dioulasso, petals of blood the size of dinosaur turds, and they dragged me to the local police headquarters and when they heard there that I was a pedophile, the other policemen all agreed I should be taken straight to Makala, there to spend the next half of my life, Makala is the place all the criminals in this town dread, and that's where they took me, I swear, Broken Glass, it was a bad
situation, you wouldn't think it to see me sitting here now, but I spent over two and a half years in Makala and two and a half years in a prison like that is no joke”

 

 

 

I listened to him in silence, he had tears in his eyes and took a good gulp of his drink before continuing his tale, “two and a half years in Makala, it's an eternity, specially when the other inmates have been told you're in there for doing obscene things to your daughter, when it wasn't even true in my case, simply because I could never bring myself to sully the cloakroom of childhood, nip the buds, shoot at a child, and unhappily for me I went through torture, what I went through in that place was worse than what you get if you go to hell, it was dreadful, intolerable, Broken Glass, I don't know how I survived it, can you imagine, the prison wardens, how could they let the gang leaders in the other cells fuck me from behind like that, giving me what they called “the middle way,” I promise you, that's what they did, I was their object, their plaything, their inflatable doll, I let them have their way with this little body you see before you, what could I do, nothing that's what, there were too many of them, all clamoring for a go, and when I cried out, because they came so thick and fast these “middle ways,” the wardens in Makala just laughed at me and told me to think of the harm I'd done to Amelie, when it wasn't even true, I could never bring myself to sully the cloakroom of childhood, nip the buds, shoot at a child, and every day they took me up the middle like that, grabbing me from behind, I never got any sleep, there was always some guy behind me, whipping me, calling me filthy tart, a piece of tax-free household waste, a vegetable from Tipotipo Market, a cockroach, jellyfish, moth, rotten fruit of the breadfruit tree, all that and more, and sometimes one of the wardens at
Makala took a personal hand in the negotiation of the middle way, a nervous young man who told me he'd never done that in his life before, not to a man, he was no queer, just wanted to make me pay for the disgusting things I'd done to Amelie, when it wasn't even true, and he was the one who whipped me while he shoved himself up my hinterland like a trucker, I tell you, he was hung like King Kong, so that's what they did to me in Makala, they destroyed me, I can show you my backside, you could make a fist and put it up me, no problem, that's the truth, I never even got a trial, in this shit-hole of a country”