Red, black, gold!
Flames, abyss, ambition!
Captivating colors of damnation…
By the glory of our forebears, I’m going to do it, kick the door open and walk up to them. Dessalines! Pétion! Toussaint! Christophe! [38] I call on all our indomitable heroes for help. On God Himself! Yes, God! Why not! I unhook the crucifix, piously, I who had forgotten all about it for so long, since the day poetry replaced everything for me, since the day I tried, shut away in my Haitian Parnassus, to create my own god, a truly Haitian god, half-white, half-black, a blend of Christ and Legba [39] in whom I took refuge, wings dangling, eyes closed to better carve my way through an entanglement of traps, reversals, life’s one hundred thousand humiliations; to hack a path to freedom with an imaginary machete through the thicket of campeachy mahogany, and oak, and climb the unreachable hill of dreams. I must no longer dream. I must face danger. With what weapons? I put the crucifix on the floor, pointing its face at the front door. I, who haven’t believed in miracles in so long, here I am, today, awaiting one from God. My poem in the French manner has suddenly left me. Sad and nostalgic Creole stanzas have replaced it, and two astonishingly violent verses spring out of my mouth. Trembling, I yell them out, lying on the ground, hands lifting the crucifix. Then I put it back down, piously kissing its feet.
My black mother, before you died you told me:
“Serve the family loas and pray God you’ll never be in anyone’s debt.”
But I despised the loas and avoided the thought of God. I was hungry too often, and a man praying on an empty stomach is spitting in his own face.
I feel weaker before the devils who have invaded our little town, more inclined to seek divine protection. You can stifle hunger! but the devils…
I pull the trunk toward me and open it. Beneath the dusty layer of books and papers, I find a pile of sacred objects for a voodoo shrine: marassas dishes, [40] candles dressed in the seven colors of the rainbow, little pitchers stuffed with dried leaves meant for protection, the miraculous amulets I wore on a red string around my neck as a child. My black mother, who didn’t know how to read and who sold trinkets at the market, slaved away to make a scholar of her son. I left Creole and voodoo behind by going to school, and she, who was never able to say a French word to me, would beam when she heard me recite lessons she did not understand.
What are the good French sisters at the Sainte-Marie-de-Dieu school doing right now? Or the good French brothers at Saint-Valentin High School? They are on their knees, interceding with God on behalf of the cursed town, beseeching Him to vanquish the devils, to slay and crush them. And what if evil were to triumph over good yet again? Might as well wheedle the loas and have them on my side as well.
I take out the things from the trunk with ceremonial respect and pour water on the ground, offering drink to the gods of Guinea; then, I fill the marassas dishes with cane syrup and surround them with amulets and pitchers. I have nothing else to offer them, neither liquor nor candy, and in my generosity risk croaking from hunger while I wait for the devils to depart. Having pleased the loas, I lie sated on the floor, hands behind my neck. A thin trickle of light comes through a hole in the boards and I jump up and paste my eye to it. I would have preferred the whistling of bullets to this all-pervading silent torpor. From this observation post I have a wonderful view of Cécile’s tall house, the white railing of her balcony, her potted carnations, her lace curtains. I seek in vain for signs of life there. Where is she? What is she doing? What has happened to her parents? Their devious maid, Marcia, a pretty black girl, used to smile at me and shout:
“Lost your mind, heh! crazy mulatto, lost your mind…”
But the only woman I ever had eyes for was her mistress. And she knew it. What did I care about the insults of a poor, ignorant black girl mad with scorn to the point of throwing stones at me and making the kids of the Grand-rue chase after me!
I was biting my nails, bemoaning the fact I had not sought the object of my desire sooner, when I heard a man cry out. He was doubled over and running away as fast as possible, straight in the direction of my house. I saw Cécile’s window open slightly. In the time I lost looking for her silhouette the man fell, riddled with bullets. Two tiny devils, their weapons slapping their backsides like tails, leaned over the body and smashed its face in with their red boots.
Cécile’s window was closed again. I plugged up the wall with a piece of soap and took off my sweat-soaked shirt. On the ground, the crucifix gleamed in the half light. I stretched out on the floor again. I am on the floor with all of them now. On the floor with Jesus. On the floor with the loas, for it is said that the spirit of the gods of Africa descends upon the offerings for nourishment. On the floor, like a pariah. I burned my last mat to get rid of the bedbugs busy eating me alive at night. Before being reduced to this, I knocked on every door: Mme Fanfreluche’s door, and M. Potentat’s, both with businesses on the Grand-rue, both passing for rich people around here. I knocked on every door, repeating myself like a parrot in a voice growing weaker and weaker from rising hunger:
“Please give me some work.”
They would whisper something to each other that I could not hear and would put a twenty-centime coin in my hand for an errand I had agreed to run. But what can a man do with a Haitian coin of twenty centimes?
I am thirsty! My water pitcher is half-empty I will need to ration myself. Ah, if only I had enough courage to go cross the yard to get some coal and the little stove and make a bit of coffee! Thank God for the day my mother had the good idea to buy me this chamber pot.
Here I am alone as I have never been. Alone with my memories, my regrets, my remorse. Why remorse? Is it always there? After my mother’s death, I reproached myself for cutting short my mourning, though I had shut myself in for a month, even refusing to see the good Dr. Chanel. The doctor was the only one, apart from Father Angelo and Brother Justinien, who made sure I did not die of hunger. But, like the Haitian saying goes, the good ones don’t last. And it is true that death always picks off the best. Dr. Chanel is dead. So is Brother Justinien. As for Father Angelo, just as good but now old, he can barely walk and, cassock or no, he does seem to live by begging just like me. For there is more than one way to beg.
To witness a man murdered makes you heavy with remorse. The body in front of my door is beginning to mean something to me. He haunts me. Was he running to me? Now I am standing in front of the wall, scratching away the soap to open up the hole again. Who is he? His clotted blood has stained his yellow shirt with large blackish blotches: the blood that gushed out red has become black. Black like the devils’ uniforms. Are devils black or white? Who am I, I who was born of a father mulatto enough to pass for white? Saffron skin, mahogany skin, sapodilla skin? No, rotten coconut skin.
“The color of farts,” as my mother used to say, “all mulattoes of your kind are the color of farts.”
This irresolute color with which I have trouble identifying makes whites lump me with blacks and blacks reject me as white. The mixed-blood race! Birds forever without branches, but of late especially unwanted.
When did I really begin to feel ill at ease? And for whose sin am I paying? They haven’t taken a good look at me, they haven’t seen my troubles, for the love of God!
The bloodbath that my friend Jacques, a poet like me, has predicted will come to pass. Although I still devour whatever palliatives life offers to help pass the time, it comforts me to think that if they should suddenly force open the door and step over the body of Christ to kill me, I would still know how to die bravely. That last jolt of pride, the guilty pleasure of a malcontent. Is death near? I have been letting myself sink into my past with too much complacency not to be frightened by it. It’s fishy. This brew of memories is unhealthy. Malcontent! An arresting word. An arrogant malcontent, like all artists.
Arrogant malcontents!…
I don’t want to write. At least, not as I have before. I feel as if I am coming out of my apathy and beco
ming self-aware. Cornered, hounded like an animal, I take stock of my powers in silence and in fear, and plunge to the very bottom of my being. To find what there? Ah! Lord have mercy! Spare me from clutching at nothing yet again. Look at my buddies. Poets like me. Their empty gizzards stuffed with crooked rhymes, just like me. Poetry! The endemic illness of young malcontents, desperately embracing beauty, hog-tied to the tempting rhymes of a loaned-out language, tossed about between Creole and French like those rowboats over there on the sea I can hear but not see crashing from my shack. My senses grow sharp in this silence intermittently punctuated by cries or the whistling of bullets. I no longer need to look in order to see: the sea is raging. Raging against the devils, against our resignation, against our cowardice, against us. I listen to it holler, scold, protest, refute. Furious, her waves lift abandoned sailboats and make them clatter like teeth. Silver and pink fish jump high in the air and cast stunned looks at the shore; gaunt dogs pace along the beach, nosy, searching through trash and bodies. Closer by, multihued birds shake off the rain, gliding indifferently, wings fixed between heaven and earth. Between squalor and splendor. They whistle and sing cheerful sunny songs, the strident songs of island birds; and their unbridled effervescence, wafting on the warm noon breeze, that Haitian noon usually suffused with the smell of dishes spiced with garlic and hot pepper, accentuates our torment, poor prisoners that we are. We are indeed prisoners. Brave is he who ventures out. Even the beggars have deserted the streets. They have probably dug themselves in somewhere in the mountains. Let’s hope hunger doesn’t turn them into snitches and drive them to make a pact with the devils, those who just yesterday were praying at the gates of the church, arms outstretched in a cross. The church too has closed its doors and, since morning, the bells have been quiet. Is Father Angelo afraid? Is Cécile afraid? Let me put my thoughts in order, let me draw a battle plan, and I will fly to your rescue… Where have I read this?…
My shack is in a back alley that opens on the Grand-rue. A nameless back alley in the slums where near-beggars of my kind live here and there. It is near the Grand-rue and is even more despised for it. A disgraceful appendix of that main street with its heap of self-styled aristocrats, baptized by high society, as they say. Shopkeepers, businessmen, exploiters, thieves in the guise of respectable citizens, bursting with every sort of prejudice, living like pashas in this provincial small town, which, due to the terrible roads that link it to Port-au-Prince, seems forever separated from the rest of the world.
This Haitian province sung over and over in my French rhymes, province that I love because my mother and I grew up here, suffered and slaved here, I will free you from the devils’ claws!
The past is forever vomiting up regrets. Life is like a heavy cart slowly, implacably grooving a path straight ahead of itself. I turned my head to look back and was seized by discouragement. Why didn’t I keep begging for work? Why didn’t I have the courage to declare my love to Cécile? I ran away from responsibilities out of fear of the future and now I may no longer have a future. I am alone, shut up like a rat in his hole, I am gnawing at my solitude with every last tooth. Look at my buddies. André, Jacques, Simon! Malnourished poets like me. Hunted by the devils like me.
I heard gunshots and then furious running. And this time I jumped to the barricade to unblock the door. I opened it wide and the fugitive saw it and flew into my house like the wind: it was André. We put back the barricade before embracing.
“What were you doing outside?”
“Looking for Jacques.”
“Where is he?”
“Left two hours ago. He jumped out the window and I haven’t seen him since.”
“The devils might have caught him.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Did he not also predict in one of his poems that the time of the devils would come?”
“My God!” André says, putting his hands together.
And he kneels to recite a prayer.
The devils opening the gates of Hell
Will escape by the thousands
Black, red, sparkling with weapons and gold…
a voice outside recites. We listen carefully attentive and curious.
Nature herself would if she could
Hide in a shroud of mourning
Death glides to our door without warning…
“Jacques!” André hollers.
He rushes to the door and I block his way.
“No, André.”
“Jacques!”
I put my hand over his mouth, grab his shoulder and push him against the wall.
“Look, I say.”
The devils, a dozen of them, escort Jacques, who walks slowly and indifferently among them, declaiming his poems.
“Do you see them?”
“Who?”
“The devils. They are all around your brother. Circling around him. Pushing him ahead.”
“Where?”
“There, at the corner of Grand-rue.”
“So he might get killed?”
“Something strange is going on.”
“What?”
“Devils though they are, it looks like they sense they are in the presence of a greater force, something that seems to overpower them.”
“I see Jacques!” André cries out. “People are cheering him on!”
“Those are the devils!”
“They’re going to kill him, René, they’re going to kill him,” André sobs.
“Do you see them?”
“No. But I am sure they’re going to kill him.”
I run to get a bottle of clairin that I had completely forgotten about, since no Haitian poet can drink and toast unless he is in good company. I pour two glasses and lift mine:
“To the defeat of the devils,” I cry out.
“Shhh!” André motions to me.
I point to the crucifix lying on the floor and abruptly pour the clairin down my throat. It sets my stomach ablaze like a torch.
“May God and the loas protect us,” André says.
I’m completely euphoric. André’s presence and the heat of the clairin spreading in my organs lift my courage and I feel capable of confronting a whole army of devils. In the blink of an eye, a crackle of bullets destroys my vague attempt at audacity.
“They killed him,” I say to André.
“Why did you say that?”
“Didn’t you hear the sound of the firing squad?”
“No.”
“You’ve always been a bit hard of hearing. Listen to the bullets!…”
“They killed him!”
“Alas!”
“Let me leave. Let me go get his body.”
“So you too can get killed!”
I force him to drink his clairin, helping him hold the glass to his lips wet with tears.
“He was only twenty” he laments.
“Drink, drink.”
Night falls. I look around through the wall. Nothing moves. Dimming its lights, the sun dyes the clouds orange and shrimp pink. And the clouds deserting the sky gather voluptuously around the sun, which suddenly abandons them and disappears behind the sea.
We slept only an hour or two on the floor. At dawn, I was already flat against the wall, drinking up the least signs of life from the town like a starving man. Nothing stirred. All around, immutable nature seemed to mock our anguish. I listened to the nightingales modulating their clever trills. They were singing perched on a palm tree. While the fronds of the palm tree swayed in the breeze outside, in my room I was suffocating from the heat. Oh! To be able to just get out and run with open arms to the beach, fill my lungs with air, throw myself in the salty water, dive in without taking a breath, to drown!…
“Is there no one in the streets?” André asks me.
“No. Not a breath of life. It’s a siege. Either we turn ourselves in or we die.”
“Do we have what we need to make some coffee?”
“The coal and the gas stove are at the other end of the yar
d. There are two of us now. One of us will keep a lookout and the other will go get them.”
“What if they catch us?”
“We’ll be careful. Stop shaking. You’ve already crossed yourself a hundred times since you’ve been here. There’s no more time for prayers, only action.”
Love, Anger, Madness Page 32
