The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana

by Maryse Conde

  “You have no idea what winter is like in the desert. The wind roars and rages in every nook and cranny, howling ‘Faro dans les Bois.’ Crystals cling to the branches of the scant trees rigid as roadside crosses. They change color with the rays of the bluish sun and especially when the moon rises over the immensity of the desert, triggering a world of enchantment. Although my gandoura was too light and my cardboard boots too flimsy, I was not afraid of the cold. I loved that country more than my own because it was Alya’s. It was Alya who chose me, me the foreigner, black what’s more, and who didn’t speak a word of her language. Because of my color, her family, especially her brothers, did not want us to marry. They repeated their demands, which I endeavored to satisfy. In the end they demanded I become a Muslim. I accepted, not knowing that the circumcision would be so painful and cause so much blood. All that for such a tiny piece of flesh. But now that my member was patched up I could penetrate Alya as many times as I liked and make her moan beneath me. Our happiness lasted seven months. Seven little months. Then they killed her. They killed my beloved. One evening while I was in a bar drinking green tea with friends of mine, a crackling of gunfire made us rush outside. Facing us the entire neighborhood was in flames. Orange flames were already licking the sky. ‘They’re all dead!’ shouted those running to escape, covered in blood. That’s when my life came to a grinding halt.”

  The morning after Monsieur Ducadosse’s rather troubling visit Simone went to find her friend Father Michalou. He was called Father because he had a mop of totally white hair. In actual fact he wasn’t that old, fifty at the most. He had lived for a long time in France. Then he got tired of assembling cars, unable to pay for one himself, and tired of traveling on the regional express metros, which were always crowded, always late, and always breaking down. So he had returned home and taken up the trade his grandfather and father had practiced before him. There had been a time when he wanted to move in with Simone and live as husband and wife, but she had refused, claiming that her twins would never accept a stepfather. In actual fact she still had a stubborn dream in her head that one day Lansana would come back and they would make up for the lost years. Michalou didn’t mind since her bed was available whenever he liked.

  When she arrived he was mending his nets. He listened to her, shrugged his shoulders, then declared:

  “In our country there are some who say we would be better off if we went our own way, politically speaking. It’s not true, just look at the Haitians and the Dominicans, for example. Monsieur Jérémie is perhaps an activist for independence. Who knows? It might be wise to keep your son well away from him.”

  “But how?” lamented Simone. “What do you expect me to do with the boy? Where do you want me to send him?”

  “How old is he? You could put him to work somewhere. Even a small wage would help you.”

  Simone was not content with his opinion. She also went to ask for advice from her mother. Although Maeva, now in her sixties, seemed vacuous, she was once considered one of the most formidable women of her generation for she possessed the incomparable gift of second sight. It had swept down on her one day without warning. At the age of sixteen, while she was taking her siesta, she had seen her father, Ti-Roro, a stone mason, tumble off the roof he was building and land straight on the splintered rubble below, which was sharp as a saw. After that she had seen Hurricane Hugo wreak its desolation. Then she had seen the Blanchet factory’s sugarcane glow in the night and children suffocate from an attack of tape worms and men and women drain themselves dry with a green-colored diarrhea. From Basse-Terre to Pointe-à-Pitre people were frightened of her predictions. Then Father Guinguant had arrived from his native Brittany and drawn her into his confessional. “What did she think she was doing?” he asked her. Didn’t she know that God acts in secret and mysterious ways? She risked eternal damnation if she went on like this. From that moment on Maeva never said another word and blended in with the crowd of churchgoers dressed in black who took communion daily. But this did not mean her gift was dead. She could see her grandchildren wrapped in a thick red veil, oozing blood. What did that mean? What would be their fate? Maeva listened carefully to her daughter then shrugged her shoulders.

  “Take Ivan out of school? Why not?”

  Since the two women had come to an agreement, Maeva turned the key in her door and mother and daughter made their way to choir practice. Rehearsals took place every day and sometimes lasted for hours. When the singers dispersed of an evening the moon had often risen and its soft light bedecked the extreme ugliness of Dos d’ne with an unexpected charm. The toad-like shacks turned into chrysalises ready to become butterflies and take flight. Other times it was pitch dark. Stumbling over the rough stones as they felt their way home the women got the impression of pushing open the doors of hell and following their own hearse.

  The choir’s repertoire was a mixed bag. They avoided facile and hackneyed melodies such as “Ban mwen un tibo” or “Maladie d’amour” and delved straight into serious research on the island’s fundamental traditions. They were not opposed to modern composers such as Henri Salvador or Francky Vincent. That was how one evening Maeva introduced a song by a singer whom nobody had ever heard of: Barbara. The women listened to it with their undivided attention:

  One day

  Or maybe one night

  Near a lake, I had fallen asleep

  When suddenly, seemingly tearing the sky apart

  And coming from nowhere

  Appeared a black eagle.

  At the end of the song they all had the same expression.

  “That’s not appropriate at all,” one of them had the courage to declare.

  “Nobody will like that,” affirmed another.

  Maeva went into a fit of rage:

  “Why ever not? Barbara is one of the greatest singers of all times.”

  She was wasting her time for she never managed to get the others to change their minds.

  Years later at the inauguration of the Mémorial ACTe, the monument dedicated to the history of slavery, the choir met with huge success singing a well-known song by Laurent Voulzy; at the time it had caused an uproar and infuriated those who defended the Creole language. How come this sudden liking for French songs? Moreover the choir had the ridiculous name of Les Belles du Soir. This was ample proof the singers were alienated. The President of the Regional Council, however, had donated several thousand euros, which had enabled them to travel to Martinique.

  Simone, therefore, set about looking for a job for her son. On an island where 35% of the population is unemployed this was no easy task. However hard she climbed up and down stairs, rang doorbells, sent his CV, made constant phone calls, and waited for hours and hours in empty waiting rooms she was always met with the same answer: no job available.

  She was on the point of giving up when La Caravelle Hotel, which was opening on the Leeward Coast, accepted to interview Ivan. La Caravelle belonged to the Coralie chain, which had hotels all over the world. Its flagship undoubtedly was the hotel in the Seychelles. However, since tourism in Guadeloupe was of the modest, family kind, no major investment had been made. La Caravelle was a nondescript building set behind a garden. Standing on the lawn were two traveler’s trees with their rigid arms outstretched.

  Ivan was given a job as a security guard. Violence had now settled on the land. There were villages, areas, and neighborhoods where nobody dared venture after a certain hour. Parents told their children, who couldn’t believe their ears, that there was a time when nobody locked their doors and windows and when keys and safes were unheard of. Ivan was given a pair of blue, rough canvas trousers, a T-shirt, and a same-colored cap. Above all, he was given a gun, a Mauser. He had never imagined owning a weapon, even in his wildest dreams. Monsieur Esteban, a retired police officer, an expert under oath, came to teach the team how to shoot.

  “Never aim at the legs of the hooligans you’ll meet,”
he recommended. “Once they’re back on their feet they’ll return to the scene of their crime. Aim for the head, aim for the heart, so they’ll die and never come back to trouble you.”

  From that day on, Ivan had two passions: One for his sister whom he loved and desired more every day, to the extent he would wake up at night convinced the irreparable had been done. And the other for his weapon, his Mauser. He liked to feel the weight of this piece of cold, rigid metal, strike a pose, and pretend to aim at a target. He dreamed of lodging a bullet in a living prey. That’s how he killed a series of white hens that Simone was keeping to make ends meet and sell in the market. He felt he was God, a king, all-powerful.

  Alas, his happiness, as is often the case, was short-lived. First of all he learned that his Mauser was antiquated and wasn’t worth anything. It came from a miscellaneous batch, bought for next to nothing from a French man who took to his heels as fast as he could to leave Guadeloupe. One night he had fired at a burglar come to raid his house and had mortally shot him in the head. He had escaped a prison sentence but his house had been smeared with blood and graffiti with the words “murderer” written on his doors and windows. Consequently he realized he would be better off putting the Atlantic between him and Guadeloupe.

  This discovery deeply affected Ivan. His arm therefore was worthless, a toy, nothing but a cheap toy. The worst was yet to come.

  He hadn’t worked for more than a week at La Caravelle when the director of human resources, a fat, sweaty French man, summoned him to his office. He stared at Ivan with eyes as blue as the sky and asked, “Is your name Ivan Némélé? How old are you?”

  Ivan remained dumbfounded. He was used to fooling people about his age since he was strong and well-built. But this time he sensed danger.

  “We have information on you,” the French man continued. “Which says you are not yet sixteen. We cannot, therefore, entrust a weapon to a minor without running the risk of serious prosecution. Give me your gun! Give it to me!”

  Since Ivan remained petrified, the man grabbed the belt around Ivan’s waist. But they didn’t fire him; they simply changed his job. He was given a fluorescent-colored uniform and put in charge of the pool for children. Ivan took this as a terrible humiliation, trapping him like a force of evil.

  It was from this moment on that his radicalization began, a word that is bandied about today, rightly or wrongly. It does not originate from his time in prison as the experts would like us to think. Up till then Ivan had listened to Monsieur Jérémie’s tirades as a lot of hot air. Now he understood that the world was far different from what he had imagined; that the earth was not round but full of fissures and faults in which a defenseless individual without a foothold, such as himself, could lose his life.

  Now that he was no longer a security guard at La Caravelle he had time on his hands to visit the primary school teacher. The latter was fond of these visits and would chatter on, returning again and again to the wound that had cast a bloody shadow over his life.

  “After Alya’s death, bomb attacks, ambushes, and reprisals no longer meant anything to me. You understand, I’m not a real Muslim. I never believed I would see my beloved again seated in Paradise with everything I had lost. I knew I would never see her again. My happiness was gone. So I returned to France and laid siege to the Ministry of Education, who ended up giving me a job in a mediocre college in a godforsaken suburb. Surprise, surprise, the students began to worship me. They loved the meanderings of my life. They wanted to visit the countries where I had been. My lessons were spent telling them of my adventures and advising the most brazen among them where best to travel the world. Alas, the director of the college got suspicious and denounced me. You know the rest.”

  Yes, Ivan knew the rest. People content with happiness don’t make history, goes the popular saying.

  As for Ivana, she was happy. She was lovely. She was top of her class in French, Math, and even Sport since she had just been appointed captain of the school’s female volleyball team. She had also been gifted with a pretty, high-pitched voice and had been chosen as soloist in the school choir. One day while she was singing in the church at Dournaux, a small coastal town situated twenty or so kilometers from Dos d’ne, a retired music teacher had noticed her and taught her the “Ave Marias” by Gounod and Schubert, which earned her an invitation to Guyana to sing in the church at Apatou in front of an audience of maroons. We know, too, that in order to be happy on this earth we need to shut our eyes to a good many things—something Ivana was good at doing. That’s how she refused to confront the environment of extreme poverty she was growing up in and was convinced that one day all that would change. That’s how she refused to admit that Simone was languishing and working herself to the bone in the sugarcane fields at harvest time or behind her stall at the market. She was convinced that a time would come when she would be able to change the course of her mother’s destiny. There was only one point on which she was totally lucid: the nature of her feelings for her brother. She vainly attempted to put it down to their being twins, but deep down she knew it wasn’t normal. There were times when she was profoundly troubled such as when she saw him dressed in his old black undershirt sweeping the courtyard and around the house, or when their hands touched on a bowl of coffee or a braided loaf of bread. Of course they had never uttered an inappropriate word or made a single uncalled-for gesture. But she knew that this burning bush they carried deep down inside would one day flare up and consume them. Ever since Ivan began to leave early in the morning for La Caravelle she had seen less of her brother and was given a rest.

  One day when she was returning from the gully, a demijohn of water balanced on her head, a red moped drove straight towards her, almost making her fall over.

  “You shouldn’t be carrying such a load. You’re far too lovely,” a voice cried out. “Let me carry it for you.”

  Ivana was surprised to see Faustin Flérette, the son of Manolo, the baker. Manolo was a mulatto who had a place of his own in Dos d’ne. He was looked upon as being rich. He was on first-name terms with the mayor and hosted dinners for the regional and general councillors from Basse-Terre. He had grown up in Marseille, where his father had taken refuge during the war in order to save his Jewish girlfriend. He had not learned much and was expelled from the René Char College during seventh grade, having merely learned how to make focaccia and panisses. Nowadays on Sundays the cars of the well-off jammed the only street in town to buy up all his special pastries. Faustin, his oldest son, had passed his baccalaureate exam with flying colors. Nevertheless, owing to an administrative error, his file had disappeared and he didn’t get the scholarship he deserved. While waiting for this error to be rectified he worked at the college as a tutor and taught algebra and geometry to the children who were having difficulty in these subjects.

  “You’re saying you don’t want me to carry this load,” Ivana joked. “And you’re the one who’s going to put it on your head?”

  “No, of course not,” he protested with a laugh. “I’ll put it on the back of my bike.”

  From that day on a budding relation formed between the two teenagers that was not easy to define. From Faustin’s point of view there was no doubt a young man’s desire for an alluring young girl despite her inferior social class. He hoped to get her into his bed, without daring to allude to such crude thoughts. As for Ivana, she was flattered; but for her it was mainly a way to get away from Ivan, and an attempt to transfer to someone else what she felt for her brother.

  So Faustin now came to pick Ivana up every morning. She would strap on an admittedly ungainly helmet, sit on the back of his moped, and be driven to the college at Dournaux. Faustin would bring her back to Dos d’ne every evening. There is nothing more delightful than to drive along the Leeward Coast. When the powerful rays of a cruel sun have not yet emerged, erasing every shadow and flattening every contour, the landscape is bathed in a magical, milky light. Of an evening
it is the realm of pitch darkness. All you can hear is the vast, howling voice of the sea whose waves swell and roll in from as far back as the horizon.

  One evening Faustin and Ivana came face-to-face with Ivan who, for once, had come home for dinner. While Simone was cooking conch for her beloved son, Ivan was watching a football match on the extra-flat TV screen. Seeing the couple arrive he got up, eyes and mouth rounded in stupefaction. Ignoring the hand Faustin held out, he shouted at his sister.

  “Where did he come from?”

  Ivana launched into a confused explanation while Faustin cautiously headed for the door without further ado. Simone set down on the table plates with slices of avocado, creole rice, and a conch fricassee that looked extremely appetizing. Throughout dinner, however, not a word passed between the mother and her two children. Ivana was afraid. She had a terrible foreboding. And she was not mistaken. Around one in the morning, hiding his mother’s kitchen knife in his clothes, Ivan laid in wait for Faustin who was getting drunk with his friends at the local Rhum Encore bar. When he emerged, Ivan hurled himself upon him and chased him as far as the beach. Here the silhouette of the two teenagers disappeared into the darkness. What happened? We shall never know. But the fact remains that the following morning, two fishermen returning from Antigua discovered Faustin’s dislocated body lying in a pool of blood. There was no end to those who had witnessed the fatal brawl between the two boys, and Ivan was arrested around ten in the morning at La Caravelle. Some tourists took offense and immediately packed up and left. It gave the place a bad reputation. A helicopter flew Faustin Flérette as an emergency to the hospital in Pointe-à-Pitre where three doctors went to work on him.

  It was Ivan’s first conviction and the first time he “entered jail,” as they say in Guadeloupe. For having wounded Faustin he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. He owed this relative leniency to his court-appointed lawyer, Mr. Vinteuil. Mr. Vinteuil had already made a name for himself as a defense lawyer. Some thought him excellent. Others found him tendentious, bearing the mark of a total incomprehension as to the realities of Guadeloupe. He depicted Ivan as a furious maléré, enraged at seeing his sister used like a plaything, as flesh for the pleasure of the son of a semi-well-to-do family. In actual fact, nothing had gone on between Faustin and Ivana except for a few kisses and some necking. But how could you prove that?