I was disappointed. To put his honor above my delicious dishes, really! You had to be mentally defective! It didn’t make sense. You can’t leave such a dangerous thing lying within the reach of children. Even I wouldn’t have left the knife just anywhere! I saw myself in retrospect cutting my knee and then... then, I totally lost it.
But stay cool! The present was complicated enough, this wasn’t the time to get caught in the past; I had to think of the future. My ex would be showing up the next day with a full van. Great! He was going to like the Chinese guy all right. I hesitated. Should I let them do their dirty business together and go on a honeymoon all by myself? I had the money. I could go far away. To Shanghai even. They lacked women there. Okay then, I was on my way! On the other hand, I wasn’t
It was still nice out. One of the cherry trees thought it was young again and was brandishing its first flower. It’s only normal to have your sap rising a little in the spring! You’ll get treated for a little while and that’ll be that! But I had to admit once and for all that Chinese guys were exactly my type.
Before going to the drugstore, I ran into the kitchen and swallowed the last pill. The guy sure had done a great job.
Big brother[5]
by Salim Bachi
Quartier Latin
Man, it stinks in here.”
The commuter station at Saint-Michel did stink. Sour smells slithered along the corridors looking for their prey.
“Let’s get outta here.”
They were ugly, dressed ugly, but they didn’t give a shit, or at least that’s what they wanted you to think. Had to pass unnoticed, melt into the gray mass of the buildings in the projects. They didn’t change when they went to Paris. They were dressed in war clothes, psychiatric ER style. Watch out, high-voltage box! White Nikes, Sergio Tacchini tracksuits, international class. They were untouchable!
“Your ID!”
Not so untouchable. The cops lined them up against the tile wall of the corridor and began going through their pockets. Then they opened their backpacks. New shoes inside.
“You stole them!”
“No, officer. They’re ours.”
The younger guy even took out a receipt. One of the cops sniffed the paper as if he’d wiped his ass with it that morning.
“Yeah, sure. Buncha thieves, fuckin’ Ayrabs.”
The Ayrabs didn’t bat an eyelid. Nothing. So little reaction the cops wondered how to stir them up more, let’s have some fun. Too bad, really too bad we’re not in the middle of the Algerian War anymore when you could pitch the sand niggers into the Seine, not far away, right next door. For these policemen, no doubt October 17, 1961 was a happy day: four hundred towel-heads in the Seine, outta sight! Okay, times change and so do certain methods. But you can still get in their face, make it psychological. But here, nothing doing. You could feel them up, no problem, they were like sheep, the sweat-heads.
“Leave the women alone, Robert. Can’t you see they’re shy?”
The cops laughed and walked away, waddling on their big feet like belly dancers.
“Actually, they are the women,” said Big Brother.
The two guys closed their bags and walked to the exit on the Seine side. It was raining out. They walked along Quai Montebello for a bit, across from Notre-Dame cathedral. The elder spoke to the younger in this way:
“You see, Rachid, never, ever play those assholes’ game.”
“The po-lice?”
“You got it. Guys like us turn them on. Gandhi understood all that.”
“Gandhi?”
“What school did you go to?”
“Yours.”
“Gandhi thought force couldn’t accomplish a thing. All it did was legitimize the violence of the occupiers. The cops — they’re our English, get it? And we’re the Hindus.”
Rachid did not understand. In any case he obeyed Big Brother, did like he told him. It had always paid off and it was a lot simpler than getting your head twisted with stories of Indians and English. This guy was an enigma. Sometimes he’d go on for hours about stuff way over your head. To Big Brother’s credit, it had always paid off, you gotta admit.
“Do you know, Rachid, that we’re in the old student quarter — the Quartier Latin, if you prefer?”
“I don’t prefer shit. I don’t like nothin’.”
“Don’t be negative. And you know why it’s called the Quartier Latin?”
He had no idea.
“Because in the Middle Ages they talked Latin here and only Latin. All the literate men in Christendom spoke to each other in Latin. Do you know who lived across the river, behind Notre-Dame?”
“...”
“The monk Abelard lived near the Quai aux Fleurs. You heard of Heloïse and Abelard, Rachid?”
“Never.”
“Abelard was the son of a Breton aristocrat who gave up his birthright to learn to philosophize. Since the Notre-Dame cloister was getting too small for him, Abelard broke away from his masters and founded a school on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. His scholars followed him. He was young, handsome, and very eloquent. At night he would walk down the Montagne to the Seine and return to the house of Canon Fulbert, where he rented a room. The canon had a very beautiful niece, Heloïse. She became Abelard’s studious pupil. Naturally, she got pregnant. Abelard married her, but the canon thought he had been betrayed: He hired some thugs to break into Abelard’s room and castrate him.”
“Castrate him?”
“Cut his balls off, man. Abelard retired to a monastery and Heloïse to a convent. They wrote each other love letters for years. But it was all over, you understand.”
And Rachid did understand, for once. He loved Miquette, who would often give him blowjobs in the basement of his building. He went wild when she licked his balls, there, a little lower. Can you imagine having them cut off? He could imagine this guy Abelard suffered a lot after that, alone in the basement of his monastery writing letters to Heloïse. The story also taught him to watch out even more for Miquette’s father, the Fulbert in an undershirt who walked his German shepherd through the project every night before going out for a good chat with the crime squad so he could tell them about his Algeria, the one during the war. Her old man didn’t talk Latin; he growled at his mutt in French, blew his nose in a dish towel, and gave Rachid dirty looks when he walked by the door to their building. If he had any idea that his daughter and Rachid...
“Let’s keep going, okay?”
Rachid was beginning to like it there on the banks of the Seine across from Notre-Dame. He lacked the knowledge to put a date on the gothic building. Contrary to Big Brother, Rachid didn’t read books. He listened to NTM, Tupac Shakur, 5 °Cent, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Dogg, but he never opened a book, no way.
“You know who killed Tupac?”
“Society, Rachid, society.”
“They say he was still alive in his producer’s car.”
“Now he’s dead. Mozart is dead too. One day you’ll die.
No matter how, you will pass away. There are more dead people than living on this earth, Rachid. And Tupac is part of the multitude now.”
“But the imam in the projects says that on Judgment Day we will rise from among the dead.”
“Who’s we?”
“Muslims.”
“How about the others? The Jews? The Christians?”
“I don’t know.”
“For Jews, Christians and Muslims are dead for good and they won’t rise up at the end of time. According to the Christians, Jews and Muslims are damned because they have the bad luck not to be Christians. And for some Muslims, the Jews and Christians are going to burn in hell to the end of time.”