Read Online Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty by Alain Mabanckou - Free Book Online Page B

Revolution who might wipe us out and win the final struggle. Out of the three of us, Maman Pauline is the tallest. I’ve got a glass of beer in front of me, but not to drink, just for the photo, because my mother told me if I didn’t have a drink in front of me the photo wouldn’t work out because the neighbours would think we’d only gone into the bar for the photo. So there’s a glass of beer in front of me, And so no one could say I was just pretending to drink, Maman Pauline took a sip from my glass. So if you look carefully at our photo, you’ll see my glass isn’t quite full, and you’ll think I was drinking beer that day, but it’s not true.
    While Lounès is looking at the photo, I go into my parents’ bedroom, fetch my father’s briefcase and come back into the living room.
    I have to do it like Papa Roger. I open the briefcase carefully and take out the tape recorder. I press a button, the little windowopens. I pick up the only cassette we have and put it in the little window, then I close it, still being very careful. I press ‘Play’ and the singer with the moustache starts singing.
    So there we are, listening to Georges Brassens and looking at his photo on the cassette box. Each time, Lounès tells me to be quiet, and replay the song once it gets to the end. On the cassette player there’s a button with an arrow pointing left. On the button it says ‘RWD’, that’s where you press to go back to the beginning of the song. I saw Papa Roger doing that before. I don’t like arithmetic much, but by my reckoning I’ve pressed this button at least ten times to get back to the start of the song.
    We’ve stopped talking, we’re just listening now. We’re beginning to know the words, but from time to time I have to ask Lounès what some of the difficult words mean. He knows more words than me because he’s in fifth grade at secondary school. For example, I don’t understand it right at the beginning of the song when the singer with the moustache says:
    I left my old oak
    My saligaud
    My friend the oak
    My alter ego
    What’s a
saligaud
? I don’t know. Lounès doesn’t know. We give up, it doesn’t matter.
    But then, what’s
alter ego
? We won’t want to give up on that one,
alter ego
may be what the song’s actually about.
    â€˜â€œ
Alter ego
”’s not French,’ says Lounès.
    â€˜What language is it then, if it’s not French?’
    â€˜It must be a kind of dialect, of some European tribe.’
    â€˜A tribe?’
    â€˜Yeah, some really small European tribe that still speaks real French, because that’s where French started.’
    That’s what he says, but I can tell he’s not sure. It can’t be that, and we go on trying to work it out, and Lounès tells me that
alter ego
means someone really egotistical, like Monsieur Loubaki, who owns a bar called Relax, and makes the clients pay up the same day as they drink, whereas in the other bars you only pay at the end of the month.
    â€˜Yeah, Monsieur Loubaki, he’s
alter ego
!’
    I say the singer with the moustache can’t be saying the tree is his
alter ego
, his selfish person. Because why would you be weeping for a selfish person and missing him? You wouldn’t, you’d be being rude to him, the way people are to Loubaki in his bar.
    Lounès promises to ask his teacher at school, I mustn’t ask mine, because if by any chance he doesn’t know what
alter ego
and
saligaud
mean I’ll get into trouble. The teacher will be embarrassed in front of the pupils and think I’m trying to make fun of him, and whip me with a bicycle chain. At Trois-Glorieuses they don’t hit the pupils, they’re too big, some as big as the teachers, sometimes a lot bigger. So Lounès is safe.
    I don’t know why, I feel like going up to Loubaki and saying ‘saligaud’