Blue White Red by Alain Mabanckou

Author:Alain Mabanckou
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253007919
Publisher: Indiana University Press

PART TWO

Paris

It seems that the gates of hell

border those of heaven.

The great joiner designed them

in the same coarse wood.

—Abdellatif Laabi, Le Spleen de Casablanca

RUE DU MOULIN-VERT (14th arrondissement, Paris)

MARCEL BONAVENTURE

ERIC JOCELYN-GEORGE

CHTEAU-ROUGE (18th arrondissement, Paris)

THE REAL ESTATE AGENT

THE ITALIAN

CONFORAMA

THE WORKHORSE

PRÉFET

SEINE-SAINT-DENIS

I must remember those days.

It’s a must.

I mustn’t let myself be distracted by a single dark cloud of forgetfulness. Everything flows in the slowness of memory. The past is not just a worn-out shadow that walks behind us. It can get ahead of us, precede us, bifurcate, take another path and get lost somewhere. We must find it, lift it on our shoulders, and get it back on its feet.

I must remember.

As if it were yesterday. As if I were reliving those moments back then, with the candor of the débarqué. The eyelids finally open up on those days, on those nights.

Try harder.

Resist easy abandonment, abdication, and resignation. Somewhere the clarity of rebellious truth awaits me, truth that refuses to lie low . . .

I spent hours flagellating myself to punish these limbs, this head, these eyes, these ears that led my good judgment astray and abandoned me like cowards to my fate.

To flagellate myself wasn’t a solution either. Tranquility does not reconquer the spirit until a man takes responsibility for his actions. I would simply like to find a passage, a way out of this abyss. I am not pleading for memory to help in order to beg for some sort of absolution. What was done is done now. All my thoughts are in motion, on their feet in Indian file. What concerns me is to direct their march such that they are not derailed on the slope of regrets . . .

I must remember those days.

Those days so long ago. So near. Those days that brought me here. Me, Marcel Bonaventure. You heard me right. Marcel Bonaventure . . .

I say this name because over time I became accustomed to it, even though it isn’t my name. In reality, I don’t know who I am anymore. Here, one has an infinite ability to split oneself in two, to no longer be what one was in order to be what the others would like you to have been and even sometimes what they would like you to be. Of course, under the circumstances, they’re right. One can’t do otherwise. This is how one builds one’s own fortress. I don’t dare say one’s own grave because I’m counting on getting out of here, no matter what happens.

Use another name.

Forget his name because that’s necessary for the cause. Distance yourself from the ordinary world, the everyday world. Be on the margins of everything.

Me, Marcel Bonaventure, I vow and reavow that up until the day that I landed on French soil, that Monday, October 15th, at dawn, my name was still Massala-Massala. The same name repeated twice. In our dialect, that means: those who remain, remain, those who stay will stay. The name carried by my father, my grandfather, and my great-grandparents. I thought the name was eternal, immutable.

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