I Never Read Paul Auster

The American writer Paul Auster is dead. I know very little about his work, having never read any of his novels. On the other hand, the author provokes in me an overwhelming melancholy. He makes me think of the tragic race of time, which nothing and nobody can stop. I have a strange attachment to Paul Auster without ever having managed to read anything by him. This situation stems from an anecdote that I will relate in the following lines. May the reader please forgive this somewhat immodest account, which circumstances compel me to recount. We were between 15 and 16, in Pikine, at the tumultuous end of the Abdou Diouf years. The country was old-fashioned, fed up with nearly forty years of socialism. In the working-class neighbourhoods, we were difficult, restless teenagers, between school, soccer and fighting.

We went to our first parties at Bideew Bi nightclub. It was a time of first love affairs, nawettans and soul rap, soon supplanted by the hardcore imposed by the mythical group Rap’Adio. I’d spend weeks at a time with the Laobés, where my friend Ilimane lived. We slept on the same bed, alternately at his place or mine, when he came to stay.

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He was better than any of us at soccer, the team’s number 10, a nimble striker and very talented. He knew how to make people laugh, had joie-de-vivre and a sensitive intelligence to words. He knew how to pay attention to people. We were poor, fragile kids, but happy and unaware of our fate, to tell the truth.

One day, IIimane left a book by Paul Auster at my place. A French friend of his father’s, a tourist guide in Saly, had given it to him. It was a collection of two of the author’s screenplays: Smoke and Brooklyn Boogie. They were adapted for the screen by Wayne Wang in 1995.

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When I started the book, it was a period when I read everything, I could get my hands on, from magazines like Onze, Femme Actuelle, OK Podium, France Football, to communist works like the awful productions of Kim Il Sung or the gentle novels of Boubou Hama. With this book by Auster, I was somewhat intrigued by this type of writing, in which stories were not told, but rather the time, the weather and the comings and goings of characters were told with extreme coldness. But I quickly stopped reading because the text was so boring. Without knowing it, I was discovering screenwriting.

Years later, we moved. So did Ilimane’s family, as the waters of the 2004/2005 floods tore away our homes. President Wade had come up with the idea of a retention basin, but our soccer pitch was destroyed.

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I went off to study and work for the government. Ilimane, who had dropped out of school in middle school, changed his life. He pledged his allegiance to a religious leader and decided to follow the Baay Fall path. The taciturn boy became a joker, even scurrilous.. Jeans and t-shirt gave way to njaxass and his head was now adorned with long dreadlocks.

We saw less of each other than we used to, because he spends a lot of time in his spiritual guide’s fields, but we remain almost blood brothers.

Ten years later, we were grown-ups. As luck would have it, he came to the house one day. We chatted, as we often do, and recounted our youthful follies. My parents adored him, as his parents had always shown me infinite tenderness. As we were leaving, he saw Paul Auster’s book and asked for it back. My attempts to dissuade him were in vain. I couldn’t understand why he, who had left school early and never read, suddenly needed to pick up his book. I gave in, too bad.

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I walked him home afterwards. We walked for a long time and, as we parted, before handing him the book, I had the crazy idea of writing on the first page “Forever”.

A few weeks later, I was suddenly told that Ilimane had died. Of tuberculosis, they say… In truth, I still don’t know. We never say what people die of here. We bury their bodies, not only with sand, but with a veil of modesty and faith. Allah has given. He has taken away. To Him we belong, to Him we return. It’s hard to mourn our dead. I still don’t know what mine died of, but I know I’ll never get over Ilimane Sow’s disappearance. I can still see him leaving in his caaya (baggy pants) and anango (boubou) in njaxas, his locks oppressed under a big cap. Paul Auster book in hand.

Paul Auster accompanied my adolescence. His memory cohabited with my sad thoughts about the injustice of death. I’ve never seen the films Smoke or Brooklyn Boogie. I’ve never read Paul Auster. But when I think of him, I always remember this word: forever.

By Hamidou ANNE / hamidou.anne@lequotidien.sn