There was a book that his mother loved more than any other. It was called The Miracle Man, written by a parish priest named Edmond Bourg. At first, I thought it was a prayer book. It was all about forgiveness, charity and solidarity, and Gino’s mother would cry over certain passages. It was so moving, my heart contracted like a fist as I listened. I wanted to find out more about the author: was he a prophet or a saint? Gino told me the story of Edmond Bourg, who had apparently hit the headlines in the previous century. Before becoming a priest, Edmond Bourg had been a railway engineer. He was an ordinary man, a bit of a lone wolf, but amiable and considerate. One evening, he caught his wife having torrid sex with one of his colleagues in his own bed. He killed both of them and cut them up into little pieces. The police found the pieces scattered in the woods. Every day, the newspapers would announce the discovery of a piece of flesh or an organ, as if the killer was deliberately trying to traumatise everyone. This macabre story fascinated and horrified the public to such an extent that the trial had to be adjourned several times because of the crowds wanting to attend. Edmond Bourg’s lawyers pleaded that he was insane when he committed the crime. The people demanded blood, and the court sentenced the murderer to death. But on the day of the execution, the blade of the guillotine jammed. As the penal code demanded that the operation continue until the head was separated from the body, the executioner pulled the lever again, without success. Curiously, when the condemned man was removed from the block, the mechanism worked, and when his head was once more placed on the blosk, the blade again refused to fall. The chaplain claimed it was a sign from heaven; Edmond Bourg’s sentence was commuted to hard labour for life. He was sent to Devil’s Island, a penal colony not far from Cayenne, in Guyana, where he was a model prisoner. Some twenty years after he was sentenced, a famous journalist revived the story of Edmond Bourg, and a national debate ensued, with articles and petitions, which resulted in his being pardoned. Edmond Bourg became a priest and spent the rest of his life doing good, spreading the word and helping people come to terms with their own demons. His book was a huge success when it came out in 1903. Souls in torment drew a great deal of comfort from it, and Gino’s mother always kept it on her bedside table, next to the Bible.
The story of Bourg had impressed me so much that I had asked Gino to teach me to read and write, just as Rémi and Lucette, Xavier’s children, had once taught me arithmetic … And then there had been that one mistake and everything had come crashing down. Since my stupid question, I didn’t know what to do with my evenings. Sometimes, without realising it, I caught myself walking up and down Boulevard Mascara. I would see the light on in Gino’s room and wonder if he too was thinking of me, if he missed me as much as I missed him. Sometimes, driven by an irresistible urge, I would stop outside the door of his house, on the verge of knocking on it, but didn’t dare go further. I was afraid he would close his heart to me once and for all.
Pierre could see how unhappy I was. To keep my mind off Gino, he undertook to wear me out with jobs as exhausting as they were badly paid. In the next few months, he made me do all kinds of things. I was in turn a shop assistant, a stable boy, an upholsterer, a wafer seller, a delivery boy and a coalman. I never did the same job two weeks in a row. Pierre would negotiate my wages without any concern for the trials he was inflicting on me. He would pick me up from my home, leave me at work, pick me up at the end of the day and relieve me of half my pay. When he had nothing for me, he would abandon me. I could knock at his door but he wouldn’t open. If I insisted, he would come out onto the balcony and yell at me. After quarrelling with Gino, I hated him for treating me like that. My pride was hurt, and I decided I wouldn’t take the bait any more. After a few instances of ‘insubordination’, he was the one who started running after me. Now I didn’t open my door to him. I’d look at him from the balcony and ignore his efforts to tempt me. He’d scratch his head, pretending to think, then offer me all kinds of benefits. He’d promise me the moon, but I’d just shake my head.
‘Be reasonable, Turambo. I’m your lucky star. Without me, you won’t go far. I know it’s hard, but we have to stick together. One day, thanks to me, you’ll stand on your own two feet.’
‘I can already stand, thank you.’
‘No, really, what is it you want from me?’
‘A real job. I don’t care what it is as long as it’s steady,’ I said in a firm tone. ‘I’m tired of going all over town for peanuts.’
He shook his head, unable to think of any more interesting propositions. ‘Can we still share everything fifty-fifty?’
‘That depends.’
*
Pierre introduced me to Toto La Goinche, who owned a shabby café nestling at the foot of Santa Cruz, below an old Spanish fortification. Toto was an unassuming man in his forties. When we arrived, he was carving up a pig in the courtyard of his establishment, a butcher’s apron over his naked chest. He asked me if I knew how to keep a register and I told him I didn’t. He asked me if I could hold my tongue and I told him I could. Those were the right answers.
He agreed to give me a week’s trial, without pay.
Then a second week to make sure he hadn’t backed the wrong horse; still without pay.
At last, he welcomed me into his fraternity.
In truth, the café wasn’t really a café, the kind you found dozens of on the outskirts of the city, but a clandestine brothel, a seedy inn stinking of adulterated hooch where elephantine whores lured sailors with strange accents and skilfully fleeced them after a botched attempt at lovemaking.
The first few days, the place gave me the shivers. It was in a dead-end alley overflowing with rubbish where, miraculously, cats and dogs amicably shared the contents of the dustbins and drunks got into fights over nothing. The owner, who believed in a certain decorum, wouldn’t stand for arguments under his roof, but was happy for disputes to be settled behind the courtyard, on a strip of earth leading to a precipice. Whenever things looked like ending in bloodshed, Toto would call on the services of Babaye, a huge ex-convict from the Sahara, a man so black you could barely make out the tattoos on his body. Babaye didn’t have an ounce of patience and didn’t bother to reason with the warring parties, who’d be yelling at each other and brandishing their knives; he would grab them both by the scruff of the neck, knock their heads together and dump them on the ground, certain they wouldn’t be heard from again before daybreak.
It wasn’t the fights that bothered me — I’d seen enough of them in Graba. The urban animals I feared were the women who worked there, like crocodiles in troubled waters; they were terrifying with their hair in curlers, their faces marked by degradation, dripping with cheap make-up, their eyes black with bad kohl and their mouths so red they might have been dipped in a bowl of fresh blood. They were strange, disturbing, syphilitic creatures, with their bare breasts and their hemstitched basques pulled up over their buttocks; they smoked like chimneys and belched and farted constantly; they were fierce and vulgar, misshapen by the age of thirty but still reigning supreme over the bestial desires of men. They smelt of rancid butter by day and cold sweat as soon as night fell. When they weren’t pleased, they would hit out at random, even throwing their clients out of the window and then drawing the curtains without a second thought.