His face is drenched in sweat. He is as thin as I am, and he looks so much like me we could be brothers.
“That body has started to stink,” he says. “It’s making me sick. Why don’t they pick it up?”
“Do you know him?”
“Who?”
“The dead man.”
“It’s probably Saindor, he runs the bodega by the sea.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“I owed him five piastres.” [41]
“And I ten.”
“Poor guy!”
“Yes.”
“They murdered him right under your very eyes?”
“Just about.”
“He screamed before he died.”
“Shrieked.”
André sticks two fingers into his stomach and a terrible belching pours out of him. He suddenly hiccups. He must be starving.
I watch Cécile’s house through the hole. I see her behind her curtains. She’s looking at my house. Is she worried about me? I quickly tie a handkerchief to a wooden ruler and slip it through the hole. I wave the handkerchief. Cécile’s window opens a little and she leans her head out to make herself visible and then disappears. I quickly withdraw my white flag and start pacing around the room, anxiously.
“Who were you making signs to?”
“To Cécile.”
“You’re still thinking about her?”
“I love her.”
“But she will never love you. She’s rich and you are poor. People like that, they’re snobs.”
“She did accept my poem.”
“She was laughing.”
“What does that prove?”
“She was making fun of you.”
He swallows more clairin and slams his glass on the table.
“It’s them, they’re the ones responsible for this. They made a big bonfire where every piece of kindling was soaked with hatred. They lit the fire and fanned it.”
“So write a poem about hatred.”
“Jesus preached love.”
“Then write a poem about love.”
I push him to the table blocking the door and give him paper and pencil. He begins to cry quietly, head in his arms.
“I can’t, I can’t write, there’s too much hate all around me.”
“Write, God damn it! Destroy hatred and sow love with your poems.”
“Don’t you remember, René? The market women who went down the hills at dawn, baskets on their heads! We would wait for them on the road to lift their skirts. And their endless chatter. And the rhythm of their rumps! The smell of the donkeys loaded with produce. The fragrance of the mangoes, quenepas drying under the quenepa trees that reminded us of Madame Fanfreluche’s imported plums, which Brother Justinien made us try one Christmas! Dawn to dusk, all the smells of the day! There isn’t a single scent, not even the smell of the fresh catch struggling in the fishermen’s nets, that I don’t miss right now!…”
He gets up and walks to the wall.
“Oh! The smell of the sea! Put your nose against the hole in the wall. Can you smell it?… To live here, locked up, waiting for death… This torment reminds me of something. We were once locked up somewhere, but where?…”
“Keep quiet!”
“Let me get out of here.”
“No.”
“I want to go.”
He starts trying to unblock the door and I grab him roughly.
“You’ve got to settle down,” I tell him.
He sits on the floor and starts crying again. There’s a large purple scar on his black forehead. He scratches it absentmindedly and wipes the blood that comes out with his shirtsleeve.
Is his presence going to complicate things for me? In any case, as I push up against his weakness, I feel like I’m going toe-to-toe with someone, like I’m being brave, not merely moldering away in resignation. Having to protect this being from himself increases my own instinct for self-preservation tenfold. Alone, I would have succumbed and resigned myself. Depressed and starving I would have welcomed death with open arms, with joy Only rebellion can nourish courage. Why did he start talking to me about Cécile? I want to live just to prove to him that she loves me too. I don’t want anyone’s pity. Once I free the town, Cécile will give me her hand. My name will ring out to the four corners of the earth. Have you heard of René? The great René who defeated the devils? Have you read his poems? I will beat the devils. What is courage if not a mixture of rage and despair? My stomach is growling from hunger and, at the same time, anger. I can feel it fermenting in my gut, this anger. When it reaches my heart, I’ll see red and I will cut the throats of those within my grasp in cold blood. Look out, devils, lest my anger explode. They are like walking arsenals. A veritable jumble of rifles, revolvers, bayonets, spurs, brass knuckles, studded whips, [42] machetes, coco-macaques [43] and stiff cowhide whips. Imported weapons, local weapons, nothing is enough for them as they prepare for a victory already theirs.
Tonight, I will act alone. I will get André drunk and leave the house to haul the water and the coal. Once I’ve had a nice cup of coffee, I’ll feel better. Coffee appeases hunger and stimulates the nerves. I don’t want to fall asleep. Eating so little since my mother’s death has depressed me enough. Poor black woman who died, as she used to say, of raising her mulatto of a son like a prince! My palms are softer than the petals of wild orchids.
“Don’t touch that pot,” she would protest whenever I wanted to help. “I’ll wash it myself; leave that broom alone, you’ll get calluses. I’m not slaving away so you can end up a servant boy.”
She died the year I came home triumphantly to give her news of my successful completion of the exams for the second baccalaureate. “I can die now,” she had said. And die she did, too soon. I had learned to count on her and not on myself. What I knew was how to read the classics and to speak French like a Parisian.
“Good diction, very good diction,” Brother Justinien would say, rubbing his hands together.
I was already writing poems and reciting those by French authors and sometimes my own, but I didn’t know how to do anything else. “Lazybones!” they cried after me in the street. Lazy? I sometimes spent whole nights with my notebook, writing, crossing out, ripping it up to start again, over and over. Lazy? My mother left me her shack, the furniture now blocking the door, and her loas! Lazybones! I tutored a few students that Brother Justinien sent me, but nobody thanked me because I stank of clairin.
“Stop drinking, don’t drink anymore,” the good Dr. Chanel kept repeating to me. “You’ll ruin your health and your reputation.”
Why do they rebuke me for my one vice? If I’m doing my job properly, if I am conscientious in teaching their sons, stubborn asses interested in nothing, then why are they meddling in my private life? If I drink, it’s my business. Ah, I remember my first spree at Saindor’s, who had his place on the shore, before the devils murdered him. May he rest in peace! I was hunting a poem that was torturing me sadistically as it fled. I saw it run, turn around, thumb its nose at me, stroke my cheek, lean on my shoulder, look me seriously in the eye and burst out laughing. So I drank. I began drinking because of this poem I never wrote. I staggered down the Grand-rue in front of Cécile’s door, staggered before her maid Marcia, who laughed and got the kids to throw rocks at me. I never raised my eyes to see Cécile. My heart quickened with loud beating. I know how to be prudent. That prefect who sent me speeches to correct for a few piastres but still called me a loser in public, I will take his name to my grave. To my grave, the name of a certain popular writer who returned my poems with a slight look of distaste, telling me: “Poets are all the rage now, so keep writing, my dear, if you like.”
But I was soft and they knew it. They went at me ruthlessly. I have since witnessed the undeserved triumph of the grandiose and the mediocre. Machete in hand, I will climb the hill of dreams on my own. I will hew my way through the undergrowth of tangled creepers. Alone at the broken ground for the edifice that my hands would have been the f
irst to trace, I will lift my face to the rising dawn, machete in my fist, soaked with sweat and blood…
I am getting used to this terrible silence reigning over our town. A town mired in terror! We have become the half-dead residents of a dead town. I am taking on the foul stench of the corpse outside. André snores, lying stretched out on the floor beside the crucifix. He has taken off his shirt and his prominent ribs stab at his skin. He looks so much like me we could be brothers. The room stinks. The chamber pot is full to the brim. I am suffocating. What are they waiting for to bury the dead? Where is the prefect? Where is the commandant in charge of the town’s security? Where is M. Potentat? Where is the mayor? Where are the police? Where are they all? Ah! Ah! Ah! So they too are afraid? Well, we’re no more cowards than they are, André and I. At least they have weapons, but us? Where are the church bells? I want to hear them ring. Poor Father Angelo! Your priests will be more useless than ever. We must fight the devils with equal force. This is none of your business. How is it our business, mine, André’s, Jacques’ and Simon’s? Unknown and malnourished poets. Poor unarmed poets abandoned to the cruelty of the devils. What was I doing the night before they came? I can’t remember. Something in the air must have announced this invasion. Something we didn’t know how to interpret. Perhaps the danger hovered over our carefree heads for a long time. What are we guilty of? What are we paying for? If Jesus was put to death, it’s because he offered something more. Where did I read that? What more have we said or done than the others? In history, details are always meaningful. Are we going to enter history? Once upon a time, voices would often rise out of the depths of my conscience that I would silence with blows of rhyme. Details. Yes, meaningful. What did these voices say? Did they reproach me for my indifference toward the rituals of my ancestors? Did they accuse me of laziness, treason, cowardice? Here I am, my nails scratching the varnish off my Latin education, clinging to the bosom of the superstitious terrors of my childhood. How much less dangerous it is to serve God! He has the patience of a forsaken lover, hanging around in case love rekindles to hold out his hand and forgive. Exacting loas! Insatiable loas of my ancestors!…
I went to open the trunk and I saw a rat lapping up the syrup in the dishes. I banished him with a kick and started laughing and screaming:
“Jesus, Son of God made man, lift up your hand over this town and cast out these devils.”
I’m delirious. It’s the hunger. The tension, too. When’s the last time I have either eaten or slept? And yet, I poured the syrup into the marassas dishes again and stopped up the rat hole.
André is asleep on his side now. He grunts and I go past him furtively I miss solitude. Decency is only necessary in the presence of a third party. And I don’t feel like being decent at such a time as this. Here I am looking through the hole studying the dead body again.
My eyes left him only when I saw Cécile’s curtains move. I wrote a poem in my head about her black eyes, her black hair, her brown plum-colored skin, and I told myself: “It’s true that she is beautiful and rich and will never be mine.” Nonsense! Fame awaits me. Wealth awaits me. I snuggle lovingly in the arms of sweet hope.
“Madame Magistral, may I speak to your daughter Cécile?”
“Cécile,” Mme Magistral will say, paying me no mind, “some beggar is asking for you. It’s that little mulatto, Angélie the trinket-peddler’s boy.”
And Cécile will appear, haughty, shouting in Creole:
“What do you want? Are you running an errand for Madame Fanfreluche?”
And I will run away, head down, Marcia scolding me.
Will they have the nerve to humiliate me, to keep being smug after everything we’ve suffered together? I’d rather the devils kill everyone. Let this town disappear! Let it be annihilated…
They’ve started again with the firing squad. It’s happening near the church. I wake up André. Now we’re both flat against the wall, looking through the hole.
“Beggars,” André whispers to me. “Never have I seen so many of them.”
“But those are peasants.”
“Oh!” says André.
The bullets crackle. A little girl runs from one house to the next. I see her fall. André doesn’t. It’s strange he didn’t see her fall. The sound of the bullets is terrifying. They whistle with a treacherously inconspicuous sound, a sound like nothing else in the world. Their whistling echoes in the distance for a long time, patiently, annihilating all other sounds, even the hoarse martial blast of the lambi [44] calling the peasants together for a coumbite, [45] even the rumbling of the rada drums calling hounsis [46] to the voodoo ceremony. Everything is drowning in a sea of blood. I would like to stare in the devils’ faces as they kill. From a distance, they all look the same in their uniforms. Neither black, nor white, nor yellow. Colorless! Like crime. Colorless! Like injustice and cruelty. You see nothing of them under their uniforms. Headless bodies. Faceless heads in golden helmets. Would I have the courage to stare at them even from behind the walls of my shack? They are anonymous, like stupidity and meanness. Their ugliness overwhelms me, demoralizes me. The way the surface of the face and its features decompose beneath the weight of sadistic cruelty-this is what I call ugliness. They enjoy killing too much. There are hundreds of bodies in front of the church. I hear another blast of bullets. These shots, I only understand this now, are their language, their voice. Here’s one of them now at the end of the street. I clutch at the wall and look at him. He’s just across from us. His face is cast in some kind of metal, like a blinding mirror in the sun. I close my eyes, suddenly feeling weak.
“What’s wrong?” André asks.
“Did you see?”
“Who?”
“The devil there, at the corner of Grand-rue.”
He throws himself on the floor and curls up trembling behind the trunk, hands clasped together.
No point talking to him. He only knows how to tremble and pray. His presence weighs on me. It seems to me that if I were by myself I’d be able to think of a solution more easily. His terror is contaminating me. I make vain efforts to turn inward, to focus. As in a dream, I feel like I am running after something that escapes me just as I think I am about to catch it in my hands. Oh! My God, the ugliness of that face! Could I ever forget it?
“Stop mumbling prayers,” I shout to André impatiently. “You’re not letting me think.”
“Hush! Lower your voice,” he begs.
I’m hunting down an idea. Surely it concerns the devils. To defeat them, but how? Fight them, but how? I’ve got it. I’m going to kill one of them, just one, I will slip on his uniform and then I will wedge myself among their ranks and keep my head down. An exterminating angel striking at hell’s minions with my blade! I will free the town from the devils’ clutches. God has designated me for this role. I will fulfill my destiny only when I obey Him. Each of us has a role to fulfill down here, otherwise how can we justify having been created? But one must not play dumb and blind, but obey. As for me, I have ears to hear with and eyes to see with, and I have heard and I have seen. What I experience cannot be merely personal. Will the others shirk responsibility? Are they going to close their eyes and ears like André? Until this very minute, I thought that the corpse was the source of the turmoil within me. But I see the light now. I feel lifted by an unexplainable force that paradoxically inclines me to great humility. I feel like a child who, one fine day, finally receives a long-coveted toy.
The body is teeming with ants, its eyes slowly disappearing into two deep orbits traced by the ravages of the merciless insects. I will stoically bear witness to its slow and irreversible decomposition.
Original sin is like a tattoo, we are cursed from the beginning. Where did I read that? Is this fair? If the devils have made ours their town of choice, it can only be because of original sin. What are we guilty of? Let each of us cry out: “Mea culpa, mea culpa,” and the devils will disappear. God has unleashed the devils upon us to punish us. Otherwise, how can we explain their p
ower? God is tired of us. God spits in our face.
God tortures us so that the punishment will bear fruit once and for all. Who has not felt the icy finger of remorse weighing on his heart at least once? Hedonists, exploiters, frauds, spies, torturers, all kneel and cry out: “Mea culpa!” “It seems begging has become a profession,” was your response to the one who implored and held out his hand to you. “Leave me alone, lazybones,” you cried to the cripple.
And in your moneyed homes, you amassed expensive knickknacks from France or the United States, collected jewelry and baubles to adorn your wives so they could strut past the beggars while holding their noses.
What am I guilty of? Me?
Well before the devils came, I felt I was being spied on, as if a mysterious presence was watching my every move, sniggering whenever it heard me recite my verses. And yet, I am just a minuscule creature! To you, I am nothing but a wisp of straw. I am nothing but a poor ox resigned to the stake, pulling his rope out of habit, docile, with no great desire to leave the meager pasture where it is attached. A Haitian ox, born in poverty, used to his poverty, lowing in the sun, his empty gut growling. But so be it, whether or not you’re an ox at the stake, each and every one of us needs to account for himself. Life is nothing but a usurious loan, and we still have to pay back the interest someday. We’ve abused the terms of the loan and the devils’ judgment day is here. Purification through the flames of hell here and now, and the triumph of truth afterward. We will confess our crimes in public this time, shouting: “Mea culpa!”
The devils speak. Listen to their bullets. Our overgrown gutters are red with blood. Cursed be the towns where poverty becomes a stone-faced routine. Where it no longer arouses pity.
It is said that the innocent will pay for the guilty. Oh! Yes, wait a minute, my God, after all, nothing has been bestowed upon me since my birth save the blessed love of my mother. Contempt, humiliation, cheap shots have been my lot. Of course the crippled beggars are in worse shape than I am. Thanks to my good black mother, I have a shack for shelter and some ordinary furniture. All of them naked like veritable zombies, gaunt, skeletal; they must be dying of hunger somewhere in the hills, the crippled beggars. But the devils’ bullets muffle their voices…
Love, Anger, Madness Page 33
