Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [17]
“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 Mi-quette, 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, 50 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.”
“So they’re all wrong?”
“Maybe they don’t have the same god. Maybe there’ll be a war of gods at the end of time. Ever think of that, Rachid?”
“You’re blaspheming. There’s only one God. The imam says so.”
“The Jews and Christians say so too. So tell me why you’re not a Jew or a Christian, Rachid? And why Christians and Jews aren’t Muslims?”
“You’re driving me crazy, for God’s sake!”
“And what about the others?”
“What others?”
“Buddhists, animists, atheists, agnostics.”
“They’ll go to hell along with the Jews and Christians,” Rachid decided.
“That’s a lot of people. We’ll be in good company in hell.”
“Impossible.”
“If the god of the Jews is right, we’ll burn in flames, because neither of us are Jewish. If it’s the god of the Christians, then we’ll go to hell with the Jews.”
“Allah is the one true God.”
“One chance out of three, Rachid, once chance in three. It’s mathematical.”
“God doesn’t play with dice!”
“Einstein thought the same thing, Rachid. May He hear you both! Besides, maybe it isn’t the same one.”
Big Brother began to laugh as he looked at Notre-Dame over there, so near, and so far away. Sometimes seagulls would fly up the Seine and get lost. They were having fun too, in a way, they were playing as they flew over the work of Maurice de Sully and Louis VII. An endless project; its construction was still going on. It seemed to him that generations were disappearing into the limbo of history, into the nocturne of memories.
“What about people before us, Rachid? What do you do with the Arabs from before Islam? Will they go to hell? Mohammed hadn’t taught them Allah existed yet. Mohammed himself didn’t exist yet. What do you do with those men, Rachid?”
“They’re dead, that’s all.”
“That