Dirty Feet (2 page)

THE FLAMES AND
the question in the girl's eyes — “Who are you? Who are you?” — kindled a scattering of reluctant images in the haze of Askia's memories. The outlines of a village, a red dirt road travelled by herdsmen, back there, near Nioro du Sahel. The ground, heated by the rays of a relentless sun, rising towards the thick clouds in a fine dust that stuck to the skin. Nioro. As far back as his memory could take him, it was the point of departure. He must have been five or six years old. Nioro, or a dry patch of land somewhere in the vicinity. The long red road and a bridled donkey led by his father, Sidi, who had sat his only son, Askia, on the animal's back. Behind the donkey, the father and son, walked the mother, Kadia Saran. On her head a basket of provisions, a bundle, a pouch holding vials with potions, amulets, and root sticks, a noria of remedies against all the ills of time — remedies to which only the herders of the great winds were privy.

All of them moved to the faltering tempo of the donkey, which could trot no faster than their flight over the sloping trails. Of this he was sure: it was there they had set off one opaque night steeped in a complicit silence. And when he hunted through his memory for the reason why they had departed, what emerged was the certainty that it could not have been in search of land for grazing. Because there had been no cattle left for a long while already. Only the donkey had remained, sole survivor of the epidemic that had mowed down their herd. This fact came back to him, and he saw their journey in a different light. A sombre light: the lack of rain in the Sahel, the burnt millet fields, the land covered with lizards through which despair crept in, the empty granaries, the stomachs hollowed out by hunger, and the gazes and prayers fixed on the horizon where the rain would come from.

He thought their departure had been because of that rain and the earth dying under their feet. He recalled those days spent crossing other arid lands, ravaged plains where a few souls hung on, resigned or reckless, full of hope or outright scorn. Scorn because the father, the mother, the son, and the donkey passing by their huts gave off a strange odour. The odour of many unwashed days. The mocking voices on the roadside:

“It's true we don't have any water left, but is that any reason to smell so bad?”

“Can it be that the wind's tongue may not have washed away their filth?”

“It's true that they are not to blame.”

“They have no water.”

“Still, is anyone entitled to stink like pariahs, like miscreants, like undesirables?”

“Can it be that the sand may have refused to scrub away their dirt?”

“Try to understand. The sand is hot. It's impossible to cleanse your body with . . .”

“Can it be . . .”

“That they . . .”

“Live on the long road . . .”

“Because the long road is all they have?”

Who are you?
Askia read in the photographer's eyes and camera lens. This was how those few scattered episodes, the starting point of the roads he had forever taken, came back to him.

PARIS. A RAW
month of February running its monotonous course. His first meeting with the girl. He had forgotten to lock the doors of his taxi. She said, “You must have been sent by an angel — taxis are so rare at this time of night, especially on such a small street.” And, without waiting for a response, she settled in and asked him to take her to Rue Auguste-Comte, by the Jardin du Luxembourg. Engrossed in the pictures she was deleting from her camera, she hardly looked at him. Their eyes met in the rear-view mirror, and he heard her explain, as if answering a question of his, that she used a digital for minor projects. She stared at him for a split second and returned to her business. She talked while selecting and deleting pictures. He followed her with his eyes, furtively spying on his customer as she purged her camera of portraits that did not please her. A bitter smile appeared on his face. Because it occurred to him in very precise terms that, four years earlier, before he had fled, he too had been wiping out faces with the click of a button.

He had taken boulevard Saint-Michel. There was nothing very complicated about this run. All he had to do was let his customer off farther along, near the Luxembourg gates. In front of the fountain bearing the same name as the boulevard: silhouettes gliding past, coats buttoned up against the dying winter, noises, moods, skins, a man standing alone with his back to a corner of the fountain, tending a grill and the chestnuts he sold to those scurrying over the cobblestones of Lutetia. The night had spilled its ink across the page of the day, the street had retrieved a light different from that of the old sun: signs glittering on the facades of the cafés, waffle shops, and newsstands. And another light streamed from the nimble fingers of a juggler, an artist throwing flaming torches, catching them and launching them back into orbit again. It was a beautiful performance, but he was afraid the juggler would get burned.

His passenger was still bent over her camera. He wanted to hear her voice again, perhaps assailing him with the music of her speech:
Isn't it a lovely night? Do you like chestnuts?
He wanted her to tell him something, a word, a thought:
You know, this technology makes things so easy. You can get rid of all the faces, I mean all the portraits, that aren't to your liking!
She raised her head, stared at him a second time in the rear-view mirror, and finally said, “You look like someone. But without the turban.”

He shivered. What she saw in the mirror was not him. She saw someone else behind him, beyond his face. She lifted her head and introduced herself: “I'm Olia,” and instantly went back to deleting pictures, the ones she found unsatisfactory, furiously hitting the buttons of her camera. They were caught in traffic near the Gibert Joseph bookstore. The passersby were rifling through the books laid out on tables on the sidewalk, searching for buried treasure, their attention focused on the volumes that they flipped through before dropping them back on the piles.

Askia was still stuck in the long line of cars with his passenger. In the meantime she lowered the window on her side and, leaning out her thin body, photographed the readers in profile.

FOR A LONG TIME
he had sought to cleanse his mind of the memory of his father, that ghost, that stubborn shadow filling the film screen of his childhood, the screenlike wall at the foot of the bed where he slept in his mother's hut. It was 1973, and already three years had passed since the family had been reduced to the son and the mother huddled in their tropical shanty. The father was this: a film that started up at the end of a run, when he found himself alone in the car, images streaming down onto the windshield of Askia's taxi. In the film the father's faithful shadow loomed up on the wall in front of him at night in the hut. The father would play with a clown who sported a broad pair of wings on his back. Sidi, the father, who must have become associated with the clown at a travelling circus, wore a large white turban and inhabited the world of the dreamy child that Askia had been. Time had passed since their flight from the Sahel. The father and the clown did their routine:

Where are you going, big turban?

I don't know. I'm going.

You're going.

I'm going.

How far?

I don't know. As far as I can go.

You're going as far as you can go . . .

That's right.

And how far can you go?

If I knew, I would tell you.

You don't know where you're going. But you're going.

But I'm going.

And how long have you been going?

I don't remember.

If you knew, would you stop because you'd say to yourself: “I've been going for a long time and I don't know where, and I see this makes no sense?”

Probably. Because it makes no sense.

No sense . . .

But maybe you can try right now to stay where you are.

Where I am . . .

Paris.

HE HAD OFTEN
wondered why Sidi had chosen Paris. He pondered this, searching for the logic behind this curious choice before recognizing the plain fact that he could find none. The logic eluded him, slipped through his fingers. Paris. It could have been a city on the Atlantic or Mediterranean coast, because in Askia's mind one of the reasons for leaving the Sahel had been to settle on the coast. Because the gods of the road had pushed them from the interior to the edge of those worlds. He thought that, logically, Sidi should have settled in San Pedro or somewhere higher, in Dakar or maybe Tangiers. It was hard to understand why Sidi had gone any farther.

What exactly had attracted his father to Paris? There was no answer to that question, yet he could still see how Sidi might have made his way to
metropolitan France,
l'Hexagone
. When they had already made it to the coast — Askia was eight years old at the time — his mother would talk of those old tubs that frequently plied the route between the Gulf of Guinea and the shores of the Mediterranean. Once she had mentioned the men who sailed to Marseilles, having managed to hire themselves out on fishing boats whose captains were all too happy to employ such solid, brawny young men, able to winch up a net in no time, haul the big fish to the freezer for storage, and clean the small ones that were to be cooked for the crews. The men were sturdy and versatile too, veritable jacks-of-all-trades: cooks, mechanic's helpers, welders, maintenance men, and sometimes more. Sometimes lovers of sailors who found relief in their firm, smooth flesh.

Yes, Sidi may have reached Marseilles by following a predictable course, a logical itinerary from the ports of Lomé, Lagos, or Cotonou towards the south of France. And from Marseilles? Would he have then gone up to Paris? Or had he perhaps embarked in the Gulf of Guinea as a stowaway, only to be discovered far offshore and thrown overboard?

He reflected on the choice of Paris and he could see only that Sidi's case had probably not been so unusual. That from Cordoba to Bilbao, Matera, Rome, or Paris there were thousands of aliens tramping farther north. Some of them travelled great distances, towards Moscow, looking for knowledge in the university named after a Congolese political leader. There was one, Tété-Michel Kpomassie, who had gone even farther, towards Greenland and the lands of the Inuit, back in the seventies, his black feet sinking into the powdered snow up to the intangible limits of his curiosity while the compact people of the polar latitudes watched in amusement. And there were those too who did not go very far, their purpose being to earn enough money in the orchards of Sicily to feed their families, but there were those more frivolous, the sons of Berbers and Arabs, who invaded Andalusia from Tangiers as if to turn it back into Muslim territory as in the days of the Almoravids, when the suras were recited in the homes of Almeria.

Later, when Askia enrolled at the university in the eighties, he kept thinking about those different itineraries but never succeeded in placing Sidi somewhere, in a rural or an urban setting. Sidi evading all detection, pursuing who knew what mirage, driven by some obscure desire. His mother one day conjectured that Sidi had gone to France because he had a distant cousin from Guinea there. The cousin, Camara Laye, worked in a factory, which his mother believed was called Simca and was located in Aubervilliers, on the outskirts of Paris. In the early seventies, when Sidi had vanished, many people were migrating from black Africa and northern Africa to France, where they could work as labourers on construction sites or as employees in automobile plants. Yes, it was an acceptable explanation: in Aubervilliers Sidi had met his cousin Camara Laye, who had assured him there would be a job waiting for him at the plant the morning after he arrived.

MORNING. BACK IN
his apartment, a squat discovered with the help of Tony, an old schoolmate from the Université du Golfe de Guinée, his only contact in the French capital when he landed there on that cloudless early morning of May 2, 2005. When his friend had found him a place to stay he had said, “Thanks for the squat, Tony. This way I'll be ready to decamp on a moment's notice. Anyway, I'm not going to stay here too long. I'm indebted to you for the squat, my papers, and the contact for the taxi I'm driving.”

His taxi licence was bogus too. But he needed those scraps of paper to be able to circulate according to the standards and dress code of the profession. To share in the Wedding. To belong to the world of those who move and make things happen. The appearances may have been false, but what mattered was that his quest was not, that at the end of the dark nights there would be the reality of his chasing after Sidi's shadow. For a few days he accompanied Tony, who worked as a deliveryman, on his runs through the city, thinking about his own route, the objective being not to deal out parcels and smiles to customers but to deal only with the road.

His room. Aside from the dampness of the green cracked walls, there was a grimy carpet pocked with a thousand landscapes. Holes. In the corner to the left as you came in there were pots and the hot plate, a tiny metal square with a heating element in the middle. Between the left corner and the right corner stood the radiator, which had never given off the slightest ray of heat. In the right corner was three-quarters of what had been a sink, where water still flowed, miraculously. The brass faucet poured out what he needed for cooking and drinking. And for shaving when he woke. On the wall above the sink hung a tiny blue cabinet. Opposite the kitchen utensils, the dead radiator, and the three-quarters of a sink was a mattress so ridiculously small for a man his size that he had had to extend it with his old valise, but even then his feet hung over the edge and threatened to punch a hole in the wall. His feet touched the wall, pressed against it, which was why Askia slept curled up on his side as if inside a belly. He was inside the cold, damp, dirty belly of an attic in Lutetia. Facing the front door, between the bed and the kitchen sink, was a window that overlooked his table, which consisted of a board placed on trestles that had been salvaged from the sidewalk.

He had a cramped view of the roofs, the chimneys, the stars. And of a skylight in the roof across the way, where he could make out the familiar muzzle of a dog that he did not like very much. A mutt that resembled the one belonging to Old Man Lem, which he would torture back then at the garbage dump in Trois-Collines. The dog, he recalled, was called Pontos, and he would pitch stones at it, together with his playmates, cruel children, at the most beautiful of all wedding celebrations.