Grand Menteur Read online

  The literature contained within the so-called Sous-Futura sent my father into a paranoid tailspin, doomed him to repeat past glories and maraud through a catalogue of memories in which he shared centre stage with famous Mauritian vandals. His adventures effectively ended, while the feats of derring-do folded in upon themselves like a Casela turtle guarding itself against mounting riders. He became obsessed instead with Sous protocol, engaging with it almost in an academic sense, detached and no longer applying its tenets to the thick of the shit of actual criminal enterprise. Even his charity work did not escape an early demise.

  Most dramatically, it led to an exit from the island that he had called home for thirty-odd years. And while I recall very little from our tumultuous departure – a slew of boats, planes, way stations, and a ham-fisted pledge to a judge – I do recall that something had taken root in Serge’s mind with a hitherto unknown fervency. No longer willing to engage himself in questionable behaviours, he instead began to recount the incidents of his youth, to me and to others alike, hoping to augment his stature in the eyes of the vaguely interested: how he, for example, once provided the voice of Doctor Koma on the banned wartime radio-serial “Narcoleptic Jenny” – whose shrill voice was heard echoing the lines at points of acute irritation, “Courts, sports, and genital warts! It’s all gone to pieces!” – proved a noteworthy favourite among his new European neighbours in the early sixties, after he had made England our home for a few months.

  Of course, a voice of contradiction scarely existed for this well-heeled English audience – I couldn’t say otherwise, remembering very little from my time in the country of my birth, cruel circumstance having cheated me of my birthright. Mauritius remained for them a locale of charming primitivism, Edenic by nature and uniquely out of reach. The array of well-wishers (most of whom were women that worked for the civil service, and who Sergent obsequiously courted in order to secure connections to gainful employment, improve my educational standing, and perhaps even provide me with a maternal influence), forced to endure the harsh scintillations of detail, found his pouring of a quart of milk down the small of his back to alleviate certain intolerable discomforts in poor and discreditable taste, however, and the dissonance of clinking glasses soon enlivened their disapproval. These missteps alienated my father’s new associates, and he found himself more at home with Britain’s own disenfranchised populace, its underclass helping the world turn from the shadows. An inspired storyteller is one thing, but the upper crust of society will not endure chicanery when they have nothing to gain from it.

  One of those gaudy public showcases must have shaken me out of whatever childhood torpor I had been in and turned me on to the exact nature of my father’s delicate psychic imbalance. His “condition” worsened, and it suddenly alarmed me that my father actually appeared incapable of commenting on new experiences because he became unwilling to put himself into new situations, beyond going to work anyway; his world was populated with episodes from the past, but no present could render the same service to the future. I wanted to know why he had uprooted us to go to a strange and unfamiliar country, why his mien took on the colour of the downcast penitent. Here in Brixton, he had no real possessions, preferring instead to live out of a Wheary wardrobe, a lifestyle which I had never been asked or consulted about how I felt on the matter, and being a far cry from the standard set in Port Louis. Why did we live this way? To go on his word on this matter was an exercise in vulgarity. Yet it was not uncommon for me to pursue an answer that seemed to lie with the unmentionable Futura:

  “Where is the document? I wish to see it for myself.”

  “The document, as you call it,” his common answer being, “has been destroyed.”

  “At least tell me what the final pages said.”

  “There are certain things a man hopes never to see, the decline of his triumphs chief among them.”

  Sensing his irritation, I would press on.

  “Where did it come from?”

  “From where does fate deal its deathblow? It does not matter – the damage is done.”

  “Malbar. He was trying to humiliate you. He was never a friend of yours.”

  “Old Faithful? He received the same document, but concerning him.”

  “Or someone is playing games with your lives,” I suggested. “A common enemy. Or you both had the same idea at the same time for each other. Perhaps there was no document to begin with.”

  “You give us too much credit.”

  “Tell me the truth about what has gone on between you two. Why did you bring us here to this hateful country? Think!”

  After an agonizing period of introspection, which I would often mistake for the end of our discussion, my father would resume, on occasion many hours later, with small, almost unnoticeable explanations, such as,

  “There is nothing to tell. I was a criminal one day, a citizen the next, just as he was once an officer.”

  “Evasion is your strong point.”

  “It should be yours. I could help.”

  I could have gone along with our peregrine unsettlements at first, but I needed a reason to go on. With my father’s revelation of the existence of the Futura, I now needed to know if he knew about my mother’s illness years before her symptoms first surfaced, and if the Futura could have allowed for time I could have made use of had he not squandered it. This was paramount and trumped any concern of where I fit in Serge’s life, outside of a gangly-limbed inconvenience.

  “Let me speak to Malbar.”

  “You are like an ant in an elephant’s ear, pestering me unceasingly.”

  “The problem isn’t that you are lying, but that you aren’t say anything at all. Subtle difference.”

  “You think I obscure the truth. But what I do is arrange reality in doses that are manageable. And I have learned to live with disappointment. You will learn to do the same.”

  “That is what you call manageable.”

  Eventually everything does come out, and the Futura, I would later be told, accounted for every criminally significant action he had taken since he was a child – even such actions that received no documentation by police. I recalled that in the first few days following his possession of the article in question, Serge had no personal interactions with Malbar or the Sous, refusing even assignments from the ganglords above him in the chain of command.He denied requests for alibis from other members, fearful of exciting the exactitude of the document’s terrible scope. Later I heard that the Sous members spoke of it in hushed tones, positing that its danger lay not only in the mystery of its origins, but in the obstinacy of its purpose; in its ability to characterize the future to some implicit, exhortative end, before it was, as it were, inclined to happen. “Go straight,” it seemed to beckon from beyond. “Go straight or face the teleology of the dirt nap!”

  But nonsense has about itself the annoying ability of encouraging its own monolithic renewal: how typical then, that what began as little more than a rumour of predestination was now being handled with the care of the back-looking historian. There was even talk of this prognosticating document being distributed among the more resilient of the Sous Gang upon the completion of a “term in office.” Cool heads here prevail against the assumption that there existed retired Souse around the world adhering to sacred itineraries and holy Baedekers, evolved from, some Sous could surely say, “divinely intervening effluences at work.” Such a notion becomes too farfetched to entertain even for one’s amusement.

  It was only a matter of time before I ran into Malbar again, and I knew in advance the questions I’d put to him if he complied with my request for an audience. He had borne himself extremely well with me in the past, mild-mannered courtesy having in a way freed us from the bonds of unfamiliarity. So often had he been described to me as the knuckle-dragging sort of man – who preened when individuals condemned the drubbing their friends received by his hands, but ventured never so far as to come to blows with the steamrolling giant – that I must admit the p
rospect of a private meeting made my hands tremble. I was fortunate in never being confronted with this aspect of his personality in the past, and therefore enjoyed a liberality of language and insinuation. I would not go so far as to say that he took pleasure in our exchanges. I do not think it presumptuous, however, to think that he benefited from the exercise I afforded him: I mistook him neither for a child nor a fool.

  I found him stepping out of a travel agency in Market Row, finalizing preparations to make his yearly return to Mauritius – a curious, unexplained habit that did not go unnoticed by the Sous who had witnessed firsthand his scornful remarks about his adopted country. He greeted me respectfully and invited me to dine with him at a nearby restaurant that we had both been fond of. I imagined that he would know all along that I had misgivings about bringing forward the subject which lately consumed my life, and that he would obviate windy formalities by breaking the ice. I imagined an interrogation along the familiar lines of

  Question: Explain something to me, about the two of you.

  Answer: What’s troubling you?

  Question: For starters, what business does a policeman have socializing with a base criminal? I don’t understand the logic.

  Answer: I hardly consider your father a criminal. For that matter, I hardly consider myself an officer of the law these days.

  Question: He’s told me some rather interesting things. You sent him the document?

  Answer: You needn’t take elaborate steps with me. You are referring to the Futura. Whether he has or has not divulged certain elements of our lives to you is not a consideration of mine when I am faced with your questions. I have nothing to hide. If you have a question, ask it directly, without guile.

  Question: Will you tell me then if the Futura exists?

  Answer: Yes.

  Question: And?

  Answer: It exists. It most certainly exists.

  Question: Well, who was it that sent it?

  Answer: Another man in uniform, undoubtedly.

  Here Malbar would take a pinch of some rusty-coloured tobacco, or alternately pepper – depending on the particular turn of my imagination that day – to his nose and snort harder than I would think humanly possible. The conversation here would wax melancholic:

  “Ti Pourri,” I would recommend for indictment first. “That would make the most sense.”

  “Oh, it’s never the easiest way, never the answer we’re most looking for with Sergent: Ti Pourri, the Derwish, the Bowling Green, all of whom I’d like to add live in the UK now. Given the subject under discussion, it’s not very helpful or necessary to discuss matters possessed of sense, now is it?”

  “It changed things between you, that cursed Futura. Can I ask you how exactly?”

  “I think it would be more exact to say that we were placed on the axis of an upheaval that would have happened anyway. Over a barrel. The state of affairs we knew suddenly and impractically shifted. We had to adapt.”

  “It’s as if you were never at opposite ends of the law. Like a right pair of Milk Duds.”

  “You realize that there cannot be one without the other. As soon as he was on his way, I was on mine.”

  “I don’t believe that to be true. If there is no crime, I can appreciate that a policeman would be, as a matter of course, out of work. But the reverse can’t be upheld. It doesn’t work both ways. You’re not saying everything.”

  “That’s similar to something silly I once heard about the nature of truth and falsity, a subject with which you are more than superficially familiar. If there is no falsity, so the argument starts, then there can be no room, no reason, for truth; truth, as we are using it anyway, as that which corresponds to fact, buttresses itself against untruth. Truth as a derivative of the condition of not being false. You can imagine that your father could make a valid statement about his childhood only because he could alternately have made a false one. You follow? That is a simple point. To say that the opposite can exist, as you have just said, for the reason that there could be the condition of being false in the absence of truth – of being a criminal without my being an officer, if you prefer – is invalidly preposterous. A life of crime has meaning only in relation to the law. Put your reservations away. Even in telling the truth about telling a lie, or stealing so that you children will not grow hungry, there is in that both an element of truth and falsehood, law and chaos. To affirm that one can exist without the other is, with respect, a fool’s comfort.”

  “I can only defer to your wisdom, naturally, but it’s a mistake, I think, to associate truth, deceit, with policing and with illegality, as you have just done.”

  “Well then,” he would say, growing very cross with me. “You can have it your way or you can have it mine; take my word that when your father stopped being a criminal, or when I stopped being a policeman, the other threw in the wet, dribbling towel. Or you can, if you feel it serves any purpose, leave it. What’s your next bloody question?”

  “It’s as if you’re proposing that if my father were to ever tell the truth . . .”

  “Your father does tell the truth – granted in a very limited sense of the word. If I tell you the sun is blue, and you believe that what you behold before your very eyes is blue – and even if you don’t – if I tell you and you affirm that you believe, when in point of fact you don’t, then for the two of us, the sun is blue. You see? Because we can both experience the consequences of affirming that the sun is blue. We will be ridiculed like elephant ears together; we will be laughed at, drawn, quartered, carted away. There is truth, but not always happiness, in that – in consequence.”

  “That’s a grim thing to believe in.”

  “You look at your father, and the extent to which you see truth is in the proposition, ‘My father is a liar.’ Li content sali nom dimoune; ça meme qui banne-la finne casse so la guelle. Does your father lie to get at truths or to get at fictions? That is at the heart of your questions.

  (1:1.1) Your father lies on his Home Office skilled-worker application package.

  (1:1.2) Your father is unqualified to work overseas.

  (2:1.1) Your father receives his immigration papers.

  (3:1.1) Therefore, your father is a qualified overseas worker.

  “Tell me dear girl, which truth do you want? The world has not been sparing in that regard. I can give you economic truths, political truths, eternal truths even. But these will do you no good. Because in the end, there are no Truths, and there are no Falsities. There are no letters from forsaken enemies from a bygone era, no accounts of actionable behaviours. Only facts. Cold, falciform, drooping facts. And those disposed to use them.”

  Of course, the actual convention with Malbar proved far less illuminating, such was my dratted luck. I had correctly guessed that the Futura could be little else than a trumped-up reference to immigration papers – this much Malbar confirmed after a mouthy preamble that described the “conspiring forces casting their accounts with impunity, rolling loaded dice behind animated whistling, and engineering the perils of a thousand thundercracks lashing the earth’s hide from the penumbral distance.” He was not quite the muscle-bound brain my father had made him out to be, his reflections given life only when he sputtered about cutlets and strippers. Neither was he by any means unnaturally tall – childhood reminiscences having failed me once again – standing as a rather squat mushroom amid a gallery of weird, vegetative diners. No philosophical enquiry into the nature of truth, no mention of Sous pups or fruit gambits was forthcoming from his chapped lips. I devoted extra effort to understanding his Kreol, as he spoke barely a word of English (though his French was impeccable, strangely enough). The curdling arrangement of Kreol syllables swirled thickly like a bowl of porridge that had been left out too long, its surface belying a misshapen fragility. I asked which of my father’s stories were true, which false, and he professed he knew nothing to that effect. There was little of the policeman left in him, no doubt dashed to smithereens, along with every other dream he’d harbou
red, by the asperities of disqualification. That my inquisitive nature was met with such industrious shoulder shrugging confirmed my belief that some element of his police training desperately remained intact within him.

  His only remark to me before we parted was, “Li koze pou so la bouche pa senti pis” – roughly, “He speaks so his mouth don’t stink.” I never heard Malbar take a critical stance in my father’s company, so I did not see why he’d start now in mine. A dig, no matter how true with regard to the subject of volubility, or however slight, was still at heart a dig. I knew what my father would say if the words had been spoken directly to him and the exact manner in which he would espouse them. That is more than what some get with their fathers, but the substance of a consolation should not rest in its ability to make one feel inadequate, I should think.

  The meeting with Malbar had left me ample reason to take stock of what I knew: I had learned that there was nothing remotely extraordinary about the facets of the man I knew by a handful of different names, at least in the sense that he ate, slept, had, within reasonable limits of the word, “normal” relationships, and could be killed without recourse to silver bullets, the Gáe Bulga, or other miscellany salvaged from the world’s scrap heap of ideas. My father did at one point take on for me greater proportions than existence willingly allowed him, stretching through his exertions the limits of life through dishonesty and a mastery of language. What struck me most, reading between Malbar’s words, was that my father’s decision to leave Mauritius wasn’t entirely the result of a forced hand. Malbar described the immigration papers without the scantest trace of Serge’s desperation, feelings which would naturally proceed from a hurried state of exigency.

  I turned over the trivial question of what the greatest lie my father ever told was. I had heard some contend that convincing half the youth in Port Louis that virginities could only be lost on a single rumpled mattress in the Sous Gang’s possession to be his crowning achievement. There are even those who would argue that Sergent’s brilliance lay in persuading others that the Sous existed at all, that they were a vile surrogacy on which he could heap action after crime after lie, with something that could resemble ease. It’s a trivial question because you cannot get a liar of this calibre to believe the truth, any more than you can one of his own lies. A liar usually gags on the truth, responds to its pungency with lurid outbursts. But Sergent thrived on truth too – or whatever popular consensus presented as truth – as well as on the ignorance of what it was. This was a man who would lie about knowing he was being lied to if it would somehow work to his advantage, who anticipated in turn people lying about lying about knowing they’d been lied to. His was a word that could not be trusted, or for that matter doubted, so strong was his devilish conviction.