Dirty Feet - Edem Awumey [9]
She went upstairs to her room to make a telephone call. He focused his attention on the photos hanging on the walls, which had spoken to him the first time he had set foot in the apartment, the pictures of famous negroes. They lived on Olia’s walls, she who worshipped the time when the negroes of the Sorbonne and the Collège de France were friends of Jean-Paul Sartre, Robert Desnos, André Breton. They had made a name for themselves in the Latin Quarter, on the sidewalks there, in the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. They had raised their glasses at the Deux Magots, trading toasts with the light. Bantu philosophy had flirted with Cartesian thought. He flirted with Sidi, an image thinner than a thought, a myth, a phantom father.
11
BEAUBOURG AND its square had become familiar to him. Its beautiful crowd as well. There were those going in and those leaving through the museum doors. Where a pair of guards kept watch. A few brave souls had set up their easels long enough to pass as portraitists and earn enough to warm their bellies.
The old man with a slight stoop had called out to him, “Good Lord! You haven’t aged a single day! Though it’s been a while. Thousands of seasons gone by and forgotten. Don’t tell me you don’t remember! Nigeria, 1969. You were walking on a country road. Biafra was not far away. You stopped my Jeep and asked me flat out, ‘Do you sell weapons? I need one. To clear my reputation and regain my title as prince.’ You do remember, don’t you? You wanted to pay me with your ring. It was gold. And as if the gold were not enough, you unknotted your turban, where you’d concealed a few crumpled banknotes. Nigeria, 1969. No doubt about it! But what’s scary is that you haven’t aged at all! I apologize again. I had nothing to sell you that day. I didn’t deal with individuals.” This is what Petite-Guinée had said to Askia the first time on the museum square. His silver-headed, spare little body trembling with emotion. Askia too was shaken, but he had managed to say, “Biafra — that wasn’t me.” And it could not have been Sidi either. In 1969 he was still with his family. He hadn’t yet disappeared.
Petite-Guinée was a mercenary. He had filled contracts in various places: Arabia, Sudan, Guinea, Uganda, Biafra, Angola. As far as Askia was concerned, those contracts were wars, faces, photographs of the distant territories where Petite-Guinée had plied his trade, an envelope in the folder of his memory. After packing it in, he had lived in Conakry. With a woman. She had died in jail there in the wake of a political conspiracy incident. That was during the mid-seventies. He said he bore that woman, that country, inside him like an unhealed wound. Hence the name Petite-Guinée. They became friends, and Askia would go visit him whenever he could to listen to old recordings of Bembeya Jazz from Conakry. And the old man would point out to him, “They don’t make albums like that anymore! What do you say? That today’s music is different? Even if the violence is about the same? And also the prayers for all of it to stop?”
Askia saw Petite-Guinée frequently. At night before starting his taxi shift. In the basement studio of the old man’s bar in Montmartre. Over time he had become a painter. He wanted to map out on canvas all the roads he had travelled throughout his restless life as a mercenary.
Askia entered quietly. The old man confided to him that he had felt sick the whole bloody day, a fire scorching his soul, his insides smelling of something burnt. So he had taken out his box of brushes and colours, unfolded the easel that had been leaned up against the wall next to the frames, and tried to paint something. Anything, a scene, a figure, an emotion, his malaise. Carried along by the brush dancing on the canvas. He had painted a nighttime background, and within this preliminary void he wanted to draw