Some Dream for Fools Read online

  1st d8

  I fixed myself up for my date. I spent two hours in the bathroom. I put on mascara to lengthen my lashes, a padded bra to round out my chest. I used a blow dryer to straighten my hair, a mask to hydrate my skin, and a prayer to ensure my salvation. I thought about wearing a skirt, but I don't know how to carry myself in those things. I would have to constantly think about keeping my legs crossed when I sat and adjusting my walk if it rides up too high. In the end I opted for jeans, otherwise there's too much to worry about.

  Of course I don't forget the final touch and bombard myself with perfume. Objective for the day: remind him of his favorite childhood candy. I went all out, I'm even going to wear high heels. I have a knot in my stomach, I'm hurrying and so I bump into something and then I stop myself for a second and ask myself why I'm doing all this.

  On the telephone he told me to meet him at five o'clock in a café on the place d'Italie and then he added that he would be there at 4:45. So I'm clocking in at 4:40.

  The café's called Le Balto, like a lot of cafés. Maybe later this place will be "our" café. Maybe, in a few years, we'll remember this day, and we'll reminisce about it with great emotion. Yes, I'm getting carried away, so what? Don't I get to do it at least once?

  I settle in and order an espresso. Next to me, a very fat woman with an enormous bun is counting out some two-centimes pieces on the table. "Eighty-eight, ninety, ninety-two, ninety-four, ninety-eight, one hundred two ... uh ... oh crap! Shit! Two, four, six, eight..." I burn my lips with the boiling coffee while the barman methodically wipes the glasses. He whistles a song I don't recognize and then he starts singing some Brel, and then, that's when things get complicated. I feel the fat woman with the bun getting annoyed and then, all of a sudden, she tosses up into the air all the change that she has been carefully arranging into little piles in front of her.

  "Shit, Diego. Sing in silence, you're making me lose my concentration."

  "It's my bar, isn't it? I'll sing if I want."

  "You're bugging the shit out of me, I'm trying to count."

  "You just have to stop drinking, Rita, and you'll see, you'll count more quickly!"

  This fat, hysterical woman turns brusquely toward me.

  "And you, young lady? Do you count quickly?"

  Without leaving me time to come up with my response, she takes all the change by the handful and scatters it on my table. She puts it everywhere, a coin even falls into my cup. Rita plunges two of her fat, bulging fingers into my coffee to salvage part of her fortune. Then I carry out The Big Bun's orders. I conscientiously sort out the change and make the calculation: there is exactly four euros and thirty-eight centimes. Satisfied, the lady gathers the kitty into a plastic Monoprix bag, leaves eight centimes on the table, and throws me a "Keep that, beautiful, you deserve it."

  Right then Tonislav pushes open the door. Like a scene from a movie, he enters Balto's in a beam of light, I see everything in slow motion and I even hear music in my head. All the elements are there to make his arrival sensational. He has disheveled hair, a three-day beard on his face, jeans covered in holes, and the battered Perfecto he'll never give up. If with all that I still manage to find him attractive then it's well worth the trouble of spending weeks in the bathroom. I feel a little awkward and superficial now...

  After that everything goes very fast, he shoots me his romantic poet smile, comes over and kisses me like it's the most natural thing in the world, almost like it's something he does every day, a common thing like tying his laces or lighting up a smoke. You could say he's straight-out direct, this guy, he has me traumatized, in shock, on the spot. Then he installs himself near me on the banquette with an astonishing calm.

  I stay wide-eyed for a minute before The Big Bun explodes into a fat laugh that makes me feel like an even bigger fool.

  Suddenly it's all too much, I feel feverish. Then I see Tonislav's laughing and I start laughing too and the atmosphere relaxes.

  When I tell the girls this story, they'll never believe me because, and I swear on my mother's grave it's true, in normal circumstances I would never let myself be kissed on a first date! And then, holy-son-of-a-baobab-pipe, a guy comes and pops me one on the mouth as if it's no big deal ... No signing any papers first, no one sent me anything in the mail to warn me, and I was just not ready, not one bit.

  So then we talk for hours and I soak up his words like a true beginner. He tells me all sorts of crazy stories and I believe them the way you believe in Santa Claus when you're four. He tells me about his life in Belgrade, when he organized savage dogfights to earn his living when he was a broke teenager, or later, how he taught violin lessons at a school for girls. They must have drooled all over him like little slugs. If I had a teacher that looked like Tonislav, I certainly wouldn't have stopped going to school at sixteen.

  In fact he's a great musician, he's played the violin for years, and he learned all by himself, with his father's old instrument, according to what he told me. He stole scores from the national conservatory and managed to get along fine.

  What has me completely stumped is that in front of this man I barely know I completely lose my shit, not one point of reference left, content to laugh stupidly at everything he says. What the...? What's happening to me? This isn't me, this dumb bitch with all the makeup who clucks like a chicken in the yard.

  The Boss's Honor

  Today my father is no longer a man. Our world is collapsing.

  The Boss wanted to trim his generous mustache, he miscalculated his stroke, his mind must have been somewhere else, and he messed it up. When I got home I found that imbecile Foued rolling around on the ground laughing his ass off. As for the poor Boss, he was in his bed lying on his back with a piece of his mustache in his hand. Above his lips there remained only a formless patch. He was too pitiful, stretched out like that, you could say he looked like an old cancer patient on his deathbed.

  "What happened, Papa?"

  "Someone gave me el aïn! Someone gave me the evil eye!"

  "No, no one gave you the eye, you just shaved wrong, that's all."

  "And the other one is over there laughing!"

  From the living room we heard the little shit's high-pitched cackles.

  "Foued! Shut up! Papa, come here and I'll shave it all, that way it will grow back like new."

  "I am no longer a man! My son has more of a mustache than I do. I'm never going outside again and I'm not going to work anymore."

  "It's no big deal, your mustache will grow back."

  "I've lost my honor! All I had was honor! I carried the flag high! I was proud and looked toward the sky!"

  And so he started singing the Algerian national anthem while staring at the ceiling. Then he signaled at me to come closer.

  "Me, I prefer the egg on the plate when the white is well cooked and the yolk runs a little, so I can dip my bread into it. I always did that at Slimane's café at the Goutte-d'Or when I first arrived in Paris. There were eggs every day. At that time I had the most attractive mustache in the place, I was proud, you know ... I want to go back and see Slimane. As soon as I can, I'll go visit him at his café, soon, inchallah. But I'll wait for my new mustache. If Slimane sees me like this he'll make fun of me. Slimane smokes at least two packs of Gitanes a day, so he'll light a Gitane and laugh at me, and say: 'Monsieur Moustafa Galbi, without his mustache, he might as well be dead!' Listen to that spoiled ass still laughing, mocking his father, he has no shame! Tell him to shut up or I'll slit his throat, I'll take my Opinel razor and give him the Kabyle smile."

  The Boss is sad but, tomorrow, he certainly won't remember the sketch that he gave me about his mustache. And then he'll maybe tell me again about the first time he went to the movies in Paris.

  He and his friends Lakhdar and Mohamed got a kick out of sneaking in, entering by the emergency exit in order not to pay for their seats. It was the thing to do back then, it seems. Anyway that's what The Boss said.

  He spent all his free time there.
He loved American movies, Westerns, Robert Mitchum ... He would have liked to have been an actor too, or a musician, or something like that. In the '70s he played the guitar for his friends at Slimane's famous café at the Goutte-d'Or and called himself Sam. He had some success, the devil. From time to time, when the mood strikes him, he still sings to himself a little but all that is way in his past now...

  The next day I woke up tired. I didn't sleep enough because I spent the whole night consoling Linda who had a talk with her boyfriend. This sort of Big Talk always ends in a mess or even a slaughter in certain cases. While they had been together five years and engaged for a couple months, the guy explained to her that he wasn't completely sure of his feelings, that he didn't feel ready to commit. What a dumb move on his part ... I know Linda, she can be a true witch, and she will make him pay for this one over and over. Sometimes it's better to keep your doubts to yourself and pray that they're just temporary.

  Linda has loved Issam since middle school and she sees herself with him for the rest of her life, imagines him the father of her children, has fantasies about his socks and boxers and that she'll wash them by hand with "delicate wash" fabric softener, and especially, up until now, she placed a blind confidence in him. Seems like a mistake to me.

  "Fuck this shit! He's crazy, this guy, talking to me like that about commitment. What does he think? I'm a telephone operator? He must have thought he was going out with a phone company like SFR or Bouygues or something to talk to me about commitment like that!"

  I think that she still doesn't fully realize it, she's too mad right now.

  Linda works at Body Boom, a beauty salon that offers body treatments and hair removal. Since she was a little anxious today a couple of clients complained about her.

  She told me that she made one bimbo cry this afternoon. The chick came in to have some hair removed and asked for a Brazilian bikini wax, and Linda, because her mind was somewhere else, she did the job all crooked. This had me rolling because according to Linda it was more like a Nike symbol than a Brazilian wax.

  I think she needs to unwind and she's going to benefit from this little couple's hot flash to let herself go some. She even suggested that we take a ride out to the Tropical Club Saturday night. I like it when she talks like that because you can tell that it's going to be a good time. The Tropical Club is a real one-of-a-kind nightclub, there's nothing like it in the world, you have to see it to believe it. When the girls decide it's time to go there it's usually for a good laugh. There you have to forget about the chic, flirty end of the evening. A mass of losers in an exotic-provincial ambiance is a thing to experience at least once in your life. The deejay, Patrick-Romuald, a West Indian guy around thirty with an accent that fell straight out of a palm tree, has the art and the style to give the floor some atmosphere. He intros each piece and never forgets to rally the troops.

  "Come on, gentlemen, get up and move your booty. Go find the ladies, now is the time to ask the chabines to dance! I'm the emcee tonight, the life of this extraordinary evening, so let me introduce myself: Patrick-Romuald, aka 'the Alligator with teeth sharpened for grabbing chabine bumps...' Oooh! A little joke from Pointe-à-Pitre, West Indies ... Good night and I promise you some frotti-frotta tonight!"

  When you ask Patrick-Romuald why the nights he runs the Tropical Club end at four A.M. instead of six A.M. like most other clubs, he answers with a malicious smile:

  "Young ladies, you already know that the parties at the Tropical Club are nothing like 'most other clubs' and if Patrick-Romuald parties end specifically at four A.M. it's simply because anyone who hasn't found a piece to take home by four A.M. is a loser! And anyone who has found someone, after four A.M., well, he wants to do more than dance..."

  ***

  Now all we have to do is convince Nawel to unglue herself from Mouss, her leech of a boyfriend, whom I actually like but who's a little sticky-clingy for my taste. Never one without the other, even worse than a couple—they're like a pair of socks.

  Mouss, he's THE hot thing in the neighborhood, he's always provoked passions around Insurrection. When he walks by, the girls whip their claws out, rip their panties, break chairs over each other. One smile, one look from him and a crowd of women are at his feet, even more than for Claude François, more than Patrick Sabatier. You have to be brave to take on a guy like that and not be afraid of all the competition. Nawel was tough, she even fought with Sabrina Achour for this guy. And if you know Achour's record and animal physique you can consider Nawel's feat a proof of a great love. I hope she'll be on for the Tropical Club and that she won't play the little woman of the house this Saturday night.

  The Gibbon

  I spent the afternoon at Auntie Mariatou's house. She gave me braids flat on the top of my head, American style, with strands that cross each other. I ask for this hairstyle often, especially since I saw the clip of Alicia Keys on MTV, the one where she sings for the guy who's in jail while she's playing the piano with her eyes closed. While she's doing my hair we watch a program on TV about a couple torn apart by jealousy, Auntie's comments were so delicious I laughed until it made me tired. The man's name was Tony and his wife was Marjorie. Tony is tall, handsome, muscular, and he loves his mother very much. Marjorie is little, plump, stutters, riddled with complexes, and very, very jealous. She checks her man's cell-phone messages, calls him every five to eight minutes when he goes out with his boys, and when they walk in the street together she never stops watching him to make sure that he doesn't cruise other women, that is the ones who aren't little, plump, stutterers with complexes. If he ever had the misfortune of getting caught looking at a woman, there you'd have it, the drama of the century, a public scandal, a real bloodbath. Then, in the program, each of them tells the camera about their unhappiness, with the tears to prove it.

  Auntie was one hundred percent into the program. So when we were watching she was really irritating me and pulling at my head like a savage. I thought she was going to end up scalping me. She spoke to Tony like he was right in front of her.

  "But you're crazy for staying with a lunatic like that! She's really sick! Are you a man or not? You let her go, a handsome man like you, tomorrow you leave her, tomorrow you find another woman better than her ... Ooooh, and then he goes back to her, that's serious ... He's a victim, this guy, as they say, 'The lizard's tail is tough, the more you cut it the faster it grows.'"

  So we were in the middle of an intense, refreshing cultural activity when, all of a sudden, Papa Demba shot into the apartment like an arrow. He charged toward the bookcase in the living room, pounced on the dictionary, and started turning the pages like a wild man. Auntie and me, all surprised, watched him out of the corner of our eyes. He ripped through the dictionary pages with a finger he wet with his tongue, his eyebrows knit together, as if his life depended on the definition he was seeking.

  He quickly raised Auntie's sugar levels, irritated enough already, she couldn't stop herself from asking him what he was looking for in his frenetic quest.

  "What has you springing on the dictionary like a rabbit on the run? What are you looking for?"

  "I'm looking for the word 'gibbon'!" he said, carefully articulating this mysterious word.

  "Gibbon?"

  "Yes, exactly."

  "Starfoullah! And why? Where did this fever come from?"

  "Just now at the square near the Vitry city hall I was questioned by the police, they verified my papers, as usual, standard operating procedure and all ... fine, and then, when they let me go, they were snickering to each other and said: 'Go on, gibbon!' I would just like to know what they were talking about because I don't know that word."

  "And so, what does it mean?"

  "Wait a second, I'm only in the Fs."

  He didn't want to read the definition all the way through. "Species of anthropoid monkey from Asia that has no tail, with a large black face, they climb trees with agility due to their extremely long arms..."

  Papa Demba closed the French dicti
onary with a sigh that contained within it not a few other stories like this one.

  Then he left the room. And Auntie Mariatou said: "Well there you go. All that fuss for that! For some nonsense like that you got your whole body in a sweat ... Tell me what you gain from listening to this drivel?"

  To which Papa Demba replied from the other side of the apartment: "I gained nothing just like I lost nothing, but I'm used to looking things up, that's all!"

  Papa Demba, the gibbon in question, is a math teacher in a high school in Vitry-sur-Seine and he's pulled aside for questioning a little too often if you ask me. When the cops ask him where he's coming from, he responds that he's coming from the high school because he's a teacher. And so then comes the final play where they add: "For sports?"

  Auntie Mariatou went to join Papa Demba. "Listen to me! Monsieur Demba N'Diaye, teacher, son of Diénaba N'Diaye and Yahia N'Diaye, you are the glory of the village Mbacké, it is not worthy of you to give importance to a word you learn from a red face in a blue cap! Don't listen to them, those kou yinkaranto!"

  I love it when she gets up on her high horse. She said all this while holding her hand at her waist and rolling up her boubou with the other. She looked like a character on that comedy show The Clowns of Abidjan that Auntie loves to watch. Then she put on some music—Prince so she wouldn't have to change it—and finished doing my hair in some furious rhythm.

  I'm at the Café des Histoires now, a little bit beyond Porte de Choisy. I stupidly came here because I liked the name. I set out with my little spiral notebook and installed myself at the back of the room on the banquette, like Linda and Nawel. I ordered an espresso from the nice waitress and borrowed a pen from her. I've never kept a journal because I always thought it was stupid and egocentric. I prefer inventing stories, at least they're fun to reread.

  Actually, there are plenty of people who write. Even Linda writes when she's sick of everything. The day when she heard that her boyfriend had cheated on her, she wrote at least fifteen pages, it was called "The Travels of a Vicious Cuckold." She was touched by a real delirium that day, I was actually worried about her. Then she tore the pages to pieces and never spoke about it again. If I ever brought that up to her I think she would be ashamed.