Love, Anger, Madness

by Marie Vieux-Chauvet

  “Give him some clairin” I say to André.

  “No,” he replied, “alcohol excites him. Let him go. You’re choking him. Let him go,” he cried violently. “Come, little brother, you have nothing to fear. Look, the barricade is solid and no one can come in if we don’t open that door.”

  I free him. He gasps.

  “It’s your fault,” he tells us, “scaring me with all your talk of devils. You know very well that I’m a bundle of nerves.”

  “My mother told me she saw one,” André says. “She was going to early mass and she got the time wrong. Some sort of naked giant blocked her path, telling her: ‘Beware if you know who I am.’ She passed out on the road to church and that’s where she was found at dawn.”

  “The devils are in uniform,” I say to him.

  “There are all kinds of devils,” André replies. “I dreamed about one. He was white with red horns and tail. He was gesticulating in a funny way and threatening me with his pitchfork. After class, I told Brother Justinien about my dream and he said to me:

  “‘Do you have a voodoo shrine at home?’

  “‘Yes,’ I said to him.

  “‘Destroy it,’ he advised me, ‘or the devils will take hold of you.’

  “I went eight days without being able to sleep. My mother was already dead and it was to me, as the oldest, that she had entrusted her loas. I wasn’t doing anything wrong by giving them food and drink even if Jacques and I were hungry. And it seemed to me that Brother Justinien didn’t understand anything since he was French.”

  “There you go!” Jacques protests. “So you want to hear me scream again.”

  “Don’t scream, I’m begging you, you’re going to sit down in that corner like a good boy and keep quiet. There you are, some paper and a pencil, write us a nice poem.”

  “That’s it, I’ll write a poem about the devils. Unfortunately, I didn’t look at them. I did see a horde of strange people in the street who cheered as I went by but I couldn’t tell whether or not they were devils. I should have thought to take a good look when one of them called me a genius.”

  “Write about something else,” I recommend paternally “forget the devils. You’re safe here.”

  He sniffs around, glances around for a chair, and seeing that they are barricading the door, sits on the floor and, eyes raised, absorbs himself in the composition of a poem.

  André and I should be careful not to show our terror in his presence. He is frail and sickly. He had a nervous breakdown when he was fifteen and his mother, beating herself up for neglecting the loas, paid a houngan to treat him. She ruined herself. She died of consumption. She spit up every last drop of blood in her body. And the houngan was there by her bedside to accuse her mercilessly of treason and indifference toward the loas.

  This recollection makes me uneasy.

  What’s the use of religion if it oppresses instead of consoling? If it offers despair instead of relief? If it takes away instead of preserving? André is kneeling in prayer. Where does his mysticism come from? I saw my mother serving her loas constantly and I coldly received the sacred legacy from her hands. I pray to the loas and invoke them with the conviction of an actor in a play.

  “Hamming it up!” Simon once said to me, “you’re no more a believer than I am. You can’t reinvent yourself. We are both impervious to the notion of religion.”

  He’s wrong. I love Jesus, not as wonder-worker, not as Son of the Holy Spirit, but as man, because he preached love and compassion. Is that incompatible with religion? André prays. He prays furiously But something tells me that I am closer to God than he is. God is tired of prayers. God is tired of recriminations. God is tired of requests. God is tired of our resignation. Who knows if He didn’t open the gates of our town to the devils in order to make us come out of ourselves. The Grand-rue and its smugness! Mme Fanfreluche and her jewels! Mme Fanfreluche and her high heels, making her entrance at high mass, haughty and disdainful. Magistral’s widow and her daughter Cécile! Cécile! Cécile! As far as you’re concerned, I give you the benefit of the doubt. You received my poem with laughter, but in the depths of your eyes there was something like sunshine. And those who have a little sunshine deep inside them can’t be completely lost. I hold onto an imperishable memory of you. It was on Christmas Eve, at Brother Justinien’s. The tree was shining with multicolored lights. We sang “Silent Night” and “O Christmas Tree.” Brother Justinien said:

  “Everyone take one little bundle. They’re from Father Christmas.”

  We rushed at the bundles. I undid mine and was appalled: there were just a dozen marbles, but you, you were holding a beautiful pocketknife that I had so often admired at Mme Fanfreluche’s store. You looked at me and said:

  “Take the knife too. I’m a girl. I don’t need a knife.”

  And I took it. I was twelve and you ten…

  Would you love me if I were famous? Would you love me if I defeated the devils?

  André keeps praying and Jacques keeps writing. Peace be upon my poor head. I say peace be upon this poor head split by migraine. André may be convinced that the devils have not yet pushed in this door thanks to his prayers. But I know very well that its pathetic appearance is what protects us. Never will the devils guess that here lives someone whose mind is ceaselessly at work contemplating their ruin. My poverty is my protection because a discreet and humble beggar has a better chance to pass unnoticed than a cheerful-looking rich man.

  My eye pasted to the hole, I let my gaze wander outside. It goes from the corpse now teeming with worms to the corpses stacked in front of the church. I am gliding like the birds between splendor and squalor. I see part of the horizon where a sliver of sky and sea meet as though only for my sake. From evening to morning, I see them change according to the slow and indefatigable course of the sun. Its distilled heat now marks noon. A shadow moves behind Cécile’s window and I see Mme Magistral. She’s looking at my house and seems to be talking to someone I can’t make out. I can see this so clearly that I am afraid someone from outside might see my glowing eyes. All the same, I remain there, my eyes glued to that window where perhaps Cécile is also standing. What is her mother doing? Has she caught on to our game? The window opens wide and Cécile appears in a blue nightgown, her long black hair flowing over her shoulders. Close the window, careless girl! Even if you are worried about me, close it or the devils will see you! It’s over. She’s vanished. The window is closed…

  “I’m hungry,” André says.

  “Me too,” Jacques says.

  “Unfortunately, there’s no sugar for the coffee,” I reply.

  “Give me the bottle of clairin” André says.

  He drinks and spits. I drink too but don’t spit.

  “Give Jacques the jug,” I say to André.

  Jacques takes it and drinks.

  “I want to drink clairin too,” he says.

  “It’ll make you agitated,” André says.

  “Yes, but I won’t feel hungry anymore. When I drink, I go crazy and when I’m crazy, I’m not hungry.”

  André furiously scratches his scar and passes the bottle to Jacques.

  “Shit!” he exclaims, “it’s like fire.”

  He starts writing again. He suddenly seems very far away from us, as if in one leap he had jumped the fence into an invisible world. Ecstatic, he stares at one corner of the room and writes. How can he write without looking at his hands? His lips are moving slowly. He’s fallen into the snare and can’t get out. He can’t run anymore to escape the rhymes. His legs have been maimed. The mechanism of the snare has been triggered and has sheared off his legs to the thighs. A thousand, ten thousand, a million poets with empty bellies have been snared by the rhyme traps sown on the road. A hard rocky road, full of ruts and ditches, that we keep ascending, exhausted and worn-out, a road that wears holes into our beggarly shoes, but a road we cannot resist. The Road of Haiti framed here and there with green hope, red victory, white purity and yellow saffron. Rainbow color
s wafting indifferently above the rocky road designed by the profaning hands of men. Nature, forever merry, giving birth without pangs amid the joyful polychromatic foliage, giant butterflies whirling madly around it. Merry, merry, making merry! And here we are, locked up, sweating the last bit of moisture out of our bodies, starving. All because of the devils. It’s high time for me to take action. André and Jacques are in my way. I need to be alone to think. Jacques’ blind gaze and his hand running over paper distract my thought from its objective. André’s dazed inaction gets on my nerves. He is always sitting, arms dangling, mouth gaping, unless he’s clasping his hands and mumbling prayers. I am alone. More alone than before. No matter how much I focus, I can’t recover my train of thought. And yet I had come up with a plan to defeat the devils. I’m trying to find it. Trying to find it. I’m turning in circles. I am stuck on the wrong trail. Still trying to find it. Suffocating. As though a leaden hand is keeping my head in a sea of tar. I’m struggling. It’s dark, dark. I can’t see a thing in front of me. Wrestling with truth. It’s luminous but I don’t understand it. Empty! Empty! I am going to sink. I’m wallowing in unspeakable darkness. The glimmer returns. I reach for it. It slips away. Ah! My head is going to explode. My heart is going to give out!…

  I would sometimes go to the market on Saturdays with my black mother. She would make me sit beside the goods tray and I would help her set up the cheap cloth swatches, the Creole hoop earrings, the lace trim that I was learning to measure by the ell, the silver medals, and the calico scarves. She was proud of her big goods tray that she carried on her head as night fell. Around us, the servants and the beggar-cripples came and went, as did the beggar-thieves whom we watched out of the corner of our eye. Mama would say to me:

  “Don’t let them leave your sight, they’re more cunning than cats.” But all I could pay attention to was Alcindor, an old drunk who would roll on the ground and get up again in a moldy old frock coat-a gift from the prefect-white with dust, and do a banda dance. [54] His toothless mouth tied in a grin to his ears, he would sway his hips and we would clap to the rhythm to get him going. Bam bidim, bam bidim, bam bidim… bap! At noon, we would buy our meal from my mother’s cousin Justina, Aunt Justina as I called her, but whom others including my mother called strictly Mme Macius after her marriage in deference to the new wedding band on her finger.

  When did I leave the common people behind? When we walked by, people used to say to my mother:

  “How’s your mulatto boy Sister Angélie?” And my mother would reply:

  “Praise God, he’s growing, my sister; he’s growing, my brother.”

  “Oh, cousin!” Aunt Justina would cry out, squatting before her huge pot, “he’ll be a man soon!”

  “God is good!” my mother would be quick to say, warding off bad luck.

  For she feared the evil eye would fall on her mulatto boy like the plague. And especially because he was different from all the black boys. When did I abandon the people? She had hung around my neck the scapular medal Father Angelo had offered me at first communion. And the scapular hung near a large evil-eye bead on a red string that she wouldn’t have taken off me for anything in the world. I wore the scapular on the outside and the evil-eye bead underneath, and I could feel it bounce against my navel with every step. When did I lose my evil-eye bead? It was no ordinary evil-eye bead. Gromalin, the houngan my mother visited once in a while to make sure things went well for her, had endowed it with the miraculous power to keep all evil spirits away from me. When did I get rid of my evil-eye bead?

  I grew up listening to the French writers talking in the books Brother Justinien lent me.

  “You are very bright, René,” he would say to me. “I will keep pushing you in your studies.”

  But he was seventy-three and died a short time before my mother did. And I cried, for I have a tender soul and all poets are tender-souled, sensitive types. I am talking about the true poets, not the false ones who write because it’s fashionable, to get attention. I wrote verse in French about Christophe, Dessalines, Toussaint and Pétion. I am clinging to the colonial legacy like a louse. Why not? Dessalines thought he had uprooted it when he yelled:

  “Off with their heads, burn down their houses!”

  His Declaration of Independence, did his secretary Boisrond-Tonnerre [55] write it in Creole? What about Toussaint? What language did he learn to parry wits with Bonaparte?

  “Do you want a séche?” [56] our French friend Simon said recently offering me a cigarette.

  I stared at him without understanding…

  I can see the town’s houses dancing. They’re going around my shack. As they file past, I hear good Dr. Chanel’s piano and then Mme Fanfreluche’s radio. A Mozart concerto rises up from the former, a popular merengue from the latter. Mozart breaks the spell of the drum over me. Who taught me to love Mozart? One day, I had opened the door to Dr. Chanel’s living room without knocking and he caught me standing very still, listening, arms crossed, serious and attentive. He said to me:

  “Now, that’s what we call music, my son. Mozart alone is an angel among spirits.”

  I felt the notes penetrate my flesh, mingle with my blood. I understood only later that on this day I had encountered something universal, out of the depths of a shared humanity, something that legitimately belonged to me as well, for the ties between it and myself had already been established. Mozart, the German, was my brother, beyond blood and distance, beyond centuries. A hyphen between races, as with Villon, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud. Mozart’s biography, which Dr. Chanel had me read, gave me ambitions.

  “I will write,” I exclaimed, “poems that will shake the world.”

  And thereafter, I discovered that such a task demanded one’s blood, drop by drop. I opened my veins and vainly dipped my quill in blood. Accursed poet! A poet on layaway! A French-minted black poet! Where is your tongue? Give me the clairin! I got drunk night and day to forget. Like Villon, like Baudelaire, like Rimbaud…

  “Brotherhood of mad poets!” Commandant Cravache sniggers.

  Hearing that we’re crazy, again and again, will make us so. In any case, he’s tried everything he can to make that happen, our Commandant Cravache. How many times must we get our heads bashed in? How many months in jail? And why, oh gods? Who are they trying to frighten by attacking us, hunting us down, persecuting us, beating us up?…

  I don’t like this silence. It’s been weighing on our heads for too long. A terrible explosion will make everything disappear. The blast will come suddenly, lifting the houses and transforming them into torches, reducing human beings to dust. It’s coming. It’s coming. The wait is so awful! No respite from it, neither in oneself nor others. To know, to feel the creeping danger. Am I hungry? I don’t have time to think about it. I have to implement a battle plan.

  “I’m hungry,” André says.

  “Drink a little damn”

  “It makes me feel like vomiting.”

  “Bugger me!” [57]

  “You’re imitating Simon,” Jacques says to me, having stopped writing.

  “No. I’ve seen it in books. I can’t imitate Simon, white as he is.”

  “Do you think he’s a great poet?” André asks me.

  “What the fuck would a great French poet be doing in this mud-hole?” I replied, imitating Simon.

  “You’re imitating Simon,” Jacques repeated.

  “No. Whites in general call our country a mudhole. And so, imitor patrem. [58] Have you forgotten that my father spoke French like a Parisian?”

  “You’ll never admit it, but you’re imitating Simon.”

  Simon the bohemian. Filthy and flea-ridden like us. A bearded giant who lives off his “regular girl,” as he calls her. His regular girl is Germaine, a plump black woman, all dimples and more jealous than a wildcat.

  “You’ll never believe me, old man,” Simon once told me, “but I wound up on the Haitian shore, coughed up from the cargo hold of an American ship.”

  He’s been ha
ppily warming himself in the heat of our sun for the past six years, sick one day out of three. Puking his guts out from spicy food and booze, and vowing that these white pinkish innards of his will either get used to this or kill him…

  I hear the bells toll… dong… dong… dong…

  “Do you hear the bells, André?”

  “The bells!”

  “Listen!”

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “You’ve always been hard of hearing. Jacques! Jacques!”

  “What?”

  “Do you hear the bells?”

  He pricks up his ears attentively. His young, angelic face, black and beautiful, is lifted toward the ceiling, disfigured by fear.

  The room smells disgusting. Or is it the corpse?

  “Did you hear it?”

  “Yes,” he answers.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” André sighs.

  “Leave God and the saints in peace.”

  “You can’t stop me from praying,” he protests.

  “Let him pray,” Jacques says softly.

  It is high time to begin preparations for the struggle. Alone. I am going to do it all alone. What can I hope for from these two? They really seem to be dying. They’re my buddies, I pity them. But this is no time for pity. I have to act.

  The corpse is starting to scare me. It’s disintegrating there before my eyes as a reminder of what awaits me. I don’t dare unplug the hole. Dong… dong… dong… The bell keeps tolling in its mournful reverberation. Could that be Father Angelo burying the dead under the very noses of the devils? Bravo, Father Angelo! There’s a real man under that cassock of yours. I immediately get up. Now I am resolved. I am going to leave and rouse the town. As cowardly as they may be, they will have to come out of their lairs to listen to me. I am waiting for Jacques and André to fall asleep to open the door. Perhaps I’ll die. But no matter! First I will alert Commandant Cravache. He’ll have to prove his courage, justify his epaulettes and medals, and outdo himself, for fear of an official report. I will also notify the mayor, that fat bastard who does nothing but fuck Laurette, the prostitute on rue des Saints. Like it or not, he’ll also answer the call and for once work to save our town, along with the prefect and Dr. Prémature, who carry weapons as well. They seem harmless and absolutely hopeless next to the devils. All the same, I am secretly convinced that, once the fight begins, the devils will find in them the most terrible of adversaries. Unless, of course, they panic and run first. You never know what to expect from these monkeys. In any case, it falls to me to set an example, to make them come out of their torpor. I will have weapons of my own. Molotov cocktails that I will light but not throw at the devils. Who knows how they will react to fire? I am going to try to communicate with Cécile before throwing myself into this adventure-a dangerous one, I have no illusions about that. Though in my weakened state I’ve been rambling, frolicking in the past, I still feel that I am in possession of all my faculties. My black mother didn’t nurse me for two years for nothing. I am filled with no less courage and fervor than Samson leading his Israelite brethren. From the beginning, I’ve known that once my plan was ripe I would not back out. Only a Haitian, however well intentioned and determined, is unable to consider death without thinking for days about what could have been, what should have been and what will never be. A hairsbreadth away from death, I will dream of a final spasm on top of a juicy black woman’s soft round belly. I will close my eyes with Cécile’s braids flowing over my face. And death will be nothing but a game for me. I think of her black eyes, her black hair, her plum-brown skin, as I rip open my mother’s old pillow for cotton.