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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 the outlines of a concrete, palpable, sustained mass. Solid to the touch and the eyes. He wanted to reproduce the concreteness of a landscape or a human face, a pattern that would take over from the cracking, the shattering, the interior chaos he was experiencing. He was a mess because he had never been able to untangle all the roads that he carried within. He wanted to see something linear and solid on the canvas: a stone house by the side of a perfectly straight road, a picture reflecting a standard existence, smooth and unbroken. The kind that Petite-Guinée would have wanted for himself. A life exactly like all the others. But for Askia it was the life of the mercenary, the pilgrim, the conqueror that was standard. An adventure like all the others in every respect. Since the Exodus, the Hegira, the Crusades, the yellow, white, or black gold rush. And all the invasions yet to come. The latest illegal alien, coming dirty-footed from the South to dig for bread-gold in Lampedusa, New York, Montreal.
    Petite-Guinée swept his brush over the canvas. It scurried over the rough outlines, searching for shapes. He drew some haphazard lines but was soon disappointed. There emerged bits of architecture, demolished faces, shards, a stretch of road obstructed midway by a large black hole, debris, fragments of some unidentifiable ruin. In the loneliness of his nights, Petite-Guinée practised the art of exploding forms, destroying lives and roads. It could not be said that the colours on the canvas amounted to no more than an impression, an idea of failure, a concept, an elaboration. There was truth there. The debris on the canvas was necessary, like the