Augustino and the Choir of Destruction

Augustino and the Choir of Destruction Page 2

by Marie-Claire Blais

  I could do nothing about it then, Désirée, nor now. You have your God, I have what was mine, and Samuel, working out at the bar, heard his teacher Arnie’s voice urging him to the lightness of Japanese masters Samuel had seen dancing in the interpretation workshops that had so disoriented him, these masters were able to show our western world the refinement of dance so slow and other-worldly, when the body evolves into serenity, but the relentless atmosphere of the world heralded to Samuel a heavy footfall, no longer capable of slowing down, whose echo he heard under his window at night, if he wanted others to understand what he was feeling, he would have to dance wearing fibres with the texture of flexible metal, like the biological suits worn by hazardous-materials teams in post offices or any strategic point where a troublesome bacterium might have insinuated itself beneath a stamp or onto letter-paper, living in symbiosis with the written word and travelling with the letter, this bacterium would distance itself from its host organism and any other secret information, these trackers would spray the area with antibiotic powder, cleansing one hand after the other of typhoid and diphtheria, Samuel would dance through the streets of New York with a disturbing dressing over his mouth, held over his nose by two threads around his ears, he’d wear the outfit he had just learned the term for, Tyvek, which would be needed for his safety tomorrow, like those worn by rescue teams in the worst epidemics, dancer or mailman, he would be ready to resist infection, from the minute he got up in the morning, he’d remember that even his own shower could produce contamination, who knows what harmful substance ran into the wells and seas and rivers, especially if an envelope holding a card or letter could propagate pustules of smallpox or traces of chicken-pox, even more insidiously, the postal worker might contract something as harmless as a cold, plan a picnic on Sunday with his family, being a health enthusiast, drink eight glasses of water a day and stay away from communion wine, Samuel too would be kept in this trap of healthy living and false security, and wouldn’t even know what was ailing him, colic or nausea, he’d go to class and be found at noon the next day lying on the bathroom tiles, not breathing, or again he might be exercizing on the bars, a butterfly of a dancer as light as he was graceful at one instant, thinking of unencumbered grace, free of ornamentation, of the Japanese dancers, or the unclean cast out by all, quarantined like so many others, whichever way it was to be, he had to live cautiously, especially being Samuel, it meant that his life and growth would forever be punctured, yet still he would be determined to live well, like his father and grandfather, thus it was with his home computer, Samuel thought, he communicated daily with his friends, and like him, they tried wriggle out from under the conformity of fear that could have destroyed the will to live in each of them, one poet from Argentina wrote that lately he couldn’t sleep at night, a visual artist in India did a gouache of a lion emerging from a man’s head, from Uruguay came red circles on the glass page of the computer, a composer in South Africa sent the opening pages of a piece with notes so tightly squeezed they seemed illegible, the art of combining sounds had also become the art of being seen and heard, however unmusical the combination of signs and notes might be, art put all its urgent preoccupations out there, as though a hand of iron had written in the sky over a calm countryside of mountains and hills, beware, can you not see me coming, and it was the voice of the red tumult heard by them all, thought Samuel, his musician friend wrote that his piece for violin and orchestra was to remind people of a lost perfume, a brief sparkle of light through a crystal, like us and our history, and as Samuel listened, it seemed that the crystal was odd and tarnished, in this light emerging from the earth in cacophonic music and videos — sometimes highlighting a scene from a past in conflagration — Samuel had the impression his friends saw the world as from a flying saucer where nothing could be pinpointed, it could not be labelled archival or propagandistic, was this a Vietnamese village, the morning after a deep night with all the villagers fled, the green smoke of a raid in Rwanda after a genocide in which even the children they carried on their backs were killed, mothers still alive then finished off with a machete as they ran with the little ones one their backs, this mother’s race had been revived in the unvoiced terror of all mothers whose panting and running feet only could be heard, the race form all misfortunes in the shadows, but which ones, all terrible, all nameless, gliding towards the abyss, the killing-fields with millions of crushed skulls, so many fields on fields that no one knew who was in which, men or animals, so many genocides that they had no names or graves, and henceforth no commemoration, an occasional trial or improvised tribunal, perhaps, would underline the assassins’ actions, but neither killer nor victim actually put in an appearance, no commemoration or jurisdiction, Samuel thought, just evanescence and smoke, the world as the artist discerned it on his radar, you could only go on as though this world was ours and go forever forward, but what kind of progress or advance was it for the artist, knowing how to paint a grey pigeon lying dead in an alley among the garbage, that abandoned bird would show our lack of respect for life and our obsession with death, a charcoal drawing of a fan on a table, as though the pigeon or the fan had provided the same purposeless energy, both mistreated and misused, tossed in a corner amid a limitless choice of objects, Samuel and his friends no longer knew what to remote-control, the almost weightless portable phone with a memory, or some other compact digital instrument, or the remote with pre-programmed keys, the only energy came from these tools, as easily tuned to us as we to them, comfortable, pleasing in format, easy to sip into a coat pocket, useful as a deliberate distraction, the stubborn determination to cut oneself off from whatever was happening out there, thought Samuel, every evocation of places where torture reigned over the lives of women and men was wiped out by the Leviathan authority of a VCS or a DVD, who wanted his Samsung SCH-i600 phone whose digital code, so new, so mysterious, with instant messaging, he thought, a whole range of virtuoso phones he’d have liked to own, though his father kept saying one was enough, he’d have liked to see on the diaphanous blue screen, not today’s messages, often love-letters from the several women he loved at one time, he didn’t seem to have time to get attached to just one since he’d broken off with Veronica, but what was happening in those forbidden hidden places his father wrote about, the gulags, the re-education camps, maybe it would have been too troubling to know so much about these catastrophic realities, sure they still happened, but it was so far away in North Korea or China, Hitlerian or Stalinist regimes where men and women took pleasure in torturing one another, they even said they enjoyed torturing children, women and men wherever this duty was required by their superiors, jailers who coldly used choking gas on those they called opponents or had carried out chemical tests, who would want to know all these macabre details on opening their e-mail, better maybe to forget all about this great terror machine and be a dancer-choreographer like Arnie Graal, possibly the real manifesto was in this staging, and you had to serve your art with rigour, the silent rigour that took time for love away from a young man, yes, said Caroline, my soldier fiancé was my first death, then the sadness fades till one feels nothing, but it was never like that for Charles, I can still see him when he returned from India, he came to see me in my villa by the sea, before this censorship that kept my friends from visiting, I’m no fool, I never was, as soon as Charly came into the house, people stopped seeing or phoning me, even dear Jean-Mathieu, I know Harriett, you’ll say it was her all along, I don’t know what Charly did to keep me apart from Jean-Mathieu, she may not fool me, but I can’t hate her for it, sure poor Charles was in tears, but for all his pitiful air he never wrote so well, he paid for his genius in tears, so my dear Caroline, what do you think of this, Cyril likes promiscuity, hanging out with scum, I can’t put up with it, what’s going to happen to us, does he even realize what kind of world we’re living in, I’ve never been so worried about any of my partners before, a friend who has contempt for any and all rules, what can you do, I told him, unaware that I too would have t
o undergo this same promiscuity and disregard for any rule one day, he is young and sensuous, that’s all, isn’t it more like debauchery, said Charles, these words, debauchery and sexual promiscuity, were as foreign to him as to me, so long had we observed the world from our ivory tower, so honest, so perfect before the temptation that overflows the bounds of respectability, nor taking account of the fact that Cyril’s flaunting our relationship everywhere hurts Frédéric, Charles went on, I took his sweet, delicate head in my hands and comforted him, what you’re going through, Charles, may hurt you, but it feeds your work, so you needn’t be so unhappy, oh what should I do, he asked, love him more or less, more, I told him, always more, what I believed was that Charles, being a spiritual creature, ought to become more of this earth and learn, like all of us, the implacable lesson of modesty in love, and this is just what Cyril was forcing him to do, Charles’ fleshly rebirth was happening before my eyes, he loved, he cried, another man entirely, through all this very palpable turbulence of love, which humbles even the proudest and breaks the spirit, I watched him grow, Cyril forces me to anger, oh why did I ever meet him, and instead of taking that trip to India, I should have taken care of Frédéric instead of leaving him to others, though there were some angelic people looking after him, besides I’m too old for Cyril, young people should be with their own, what bothers me the most is that Cyril wants it all and despises my attachment to Frédéric, in fact he begs me not to see him any more, can you imagine that, dear Caroline, not see Frédéric any more, never have him to go back to, and when you think about it, we’ve never been able to live without one another, really a brilliant marriage, I told him, a very successful one you had, until Frédéric began to go downhill, Charles said, until we both realized our own mortality, that day that Frédéric fell by the pool and he began to suffer memory loss, that was intolerable, and then along came Cyril, the demon of youth and dark light, what could I do, and now it’s too late, I’m in to stay, so all I can do is love even more, as you say, they had had this conversation a long time ago, I was feeling strong in those days, it was not yet that fateful time when I was no longer to see Jean-Mathieu, on his return from Italy from which there was no return, ever, it wasn’t yet the time of scattered ashes off The-Island-Nobody-Owns, I went out in the evening arm-in-arm with Jean-Mathieu, sometimes his tone held a note of reproach, he said I was too proud, maybe it was an air of patriotic arrogance that he had always disliked, we were from different social classes and different countries, you can’t build a country on servitude or the enslavement of some for the shameless profit of those who have the upper hand and hold them down, Jean-Mathieu was one of those thousands of child labourers exploited in a period from which I’d collected photographs, I couldn’t help feeling shame at seeing those kids in black boots carrying heavy loads, just like in Dickens’ time, a curse on us who allowed it, I said to myself, knowing that it was not just my ancestors who needed to be judged, but all of them, was it my fault if Jean-Mathieu was so vulnerable sometimes and compared himself to those sons of immigrant farmers living in a nameless misery, that tone of his upset me, and yet I felt no bitterness, Jean-Mathieu always seemed ready to pardon me without being patronizing, but I hear his voice in my ear, so close it’s as though he’s here in this room where you’re keeping me captive, all of them, I can hear all their voices, Charles’ is melodious, and Frédéric’s, Suzanne’s laughter, you never die, she says, they just tell us we do, hey, courage Caroline, come back and join us, what are you doing with that black nurse, you’ve bored the poor woman with all your stories and now she’s asleep in her armchair, you mustn’t refuse to eat, that could be bad for you, come back to us, Caroline, let’s go out to the tennis court at dawn, I’ll expect you there tomorrow, it will soon be day, Caroline, or is it the voice of my cousin telling me the pony is shying at the fence, we’ll soon be trundling down the dunes and the grass, the sand will still be wet, I’ll say shivering in warm daylight, maybe I’ll keep quiet, or maybe I’ll say, listen, dear cousin, this is my secret, I was with a man, my mother’s lover yesterday afternoon; maybe I’ll see a line of all those poets I’ve photographed coming towards me pushing aside the leaves in an arbour, and they’ll say to me, prepare to follow us, and one says, the thing I regret the most is the night I left at age thirty-nine, I had drunk so much I don’t even know how it happened, just a stupid mistake, I wish I were still there with my wife and children, especially the youngest whom I haven’t seen growing up, a mistake that can’t be fixed; the young painter from London, still shadowy and desolate, says, yes, it was an absurd suicide, remember, a few days after we met in London, I said goodbye to the earth, you took a picture of my hands clenched around the pencil, one must never say goodbye to the earth, because the earth reclaims us, all of them, I can see and hear all of them, that laugh of Suzanne’s that her husband never was able to tame, a laughter so fresh it just might convince me, we’re having a party for Esther’s eightieth, do please come with us, Caroline, but I have to tell her I haven’t got a dress or shoes anymore, just that ridiculous hospital gown I can’t go out in, and my hat, I’ve asked Harriett, my servant, over and over where she’s put my hat and gloves, but she’s just a servant, Charly would have scolded me soundly, Harriett was my nurse’s name, not a servant any more, I’m your friend says Miss Désirée, and that is God’s will, not mine, now Harriett’s gone without telling me where she’s put my hat and gloves, my cousin and I have a beautiful pony, his name’s Beauty, but has the hour struck when the falcons fly to their prey, no, I don’t think so, it’s not yet dawn, though the sun is pale, the falconers have pitched their tents in the desert and lit the braziers, the deer have heard the dogs barking in their sleep, and the gazelles tremble when they hear the squeal of tires on the country road, they can sense us coming, my husband and I, and our accurate shooting from the convertible, we’re afraid of nothing; my mother was a rebel, when we have our picture taken together, she wants me to sit next to her on the lawn in front of the entrance to a grand hotel, she looks sleepy, and so do I, she is distracted as she’ll often be, perhaps she’s thinking of her nightime lover and his charming smile, she seems to be saying, like a woman use to luxury, listen my dear, I’ll never be a submissive woman, nor the kind of mother you might want me to be, no, I move with a kind of magnificence that makes me unapproachable, that, no doubt, is why she left me from birth in the care of her servants, of aunts and uncles whose houses were often filled, tender uncles filled with goodwill who rape their nieces when the mothers are away, is it time for the falconers to urge their rapacious hawks to the skies . . . already? A star glitters in the paling sky, Harriett is sleeping noisily, head on chest, it really is the time when there is no one around, even vigilance sleeps, and my mother has brought a more-than-viable girl into the world, hard and conquering, the hardiness and courage were hers, I didn’t want a merely viable daughter, for she would hardly have survived our massive insanity, barely more than few years, like the brothers and sisters in one family who were slaughtered slowly by the Red Guard after their father had been fired, humiliated in front of a crowd, a time of dissoluteness and madness, or perhaps I’m wrong, maybe she would have fought like me, one of the first to do so, she would have been a friend and ally, not that vain and cruel Charly who hurt me so badly, please realize she is not the main cause of the catastrophes in my life, no, she would have been the non-viable daughter, the first surgeon as good at heart transplants as any man she admired, an enthusiast, an astronaut, her footprint venerated, honoured in twenty-two countries, would she be repudiated in her dazzling abilities on unknown planets as she had been on the one she knew so well, would she still be that question mark in one world and another, in the reign of mass insanity, or taking the first invincible step of man on the moon, or flying one-by-one to the other planets, then would she still be marginally viable? She’d have fought as I did, for the right to legal abortion, been excluded amid controversy like Norma McCorvey as she overthrew the outdated laws of Texas that
January Monday in 1973, she’d have lived in a time of exiled prophets, miracle babies fertilized in test tubes, sidestepped the laws of our species, committed the bold strokes and dangers of freedom before ever being born, viable to see so much, belonged to so many alliances, witnessed the falling of walls as well as the erecting of new ramparts to separate nations, been on the other side of the barbed wire in Berlin with no one to hear her name, been an activist with a gas mask, shouted, been viable and alive, mine, my child, my daughter, if I had never felt so strongly in the time of hostilities that she could never be born of a woman, scarcely viable. Timidly affable, Mère had approached Nora and her husband Christiansen, shaking hands with them, she’d said how much she wanted to get to know them better, but when would that music Chuan’s son had chosen be over with, these young people, she thought, do they always have to hammer our ears with those loud noises, soon this night would be over and she wouldn’t have anything to complain about, in this evening scented with jasmine and frangipani, Nora’s face, thinned since her return from Africa, expressed the same sudden fatigue as Mère’s, so it wasn’t age, Mère observed, but an ascetic way of life Nora had adopted in Africa: a sort of moral exhaustion, Nora looked around her, wondering if this was a celebration or something else in a disgraced and ruined country, there are birthdays and anniversaries for people, but not many for tragedies that have shaken the world, Nora thought, victims don’t speak, we treat them as voiceless, forgetfulness or silence, what point was a tormented conscience, maybe Nora should have listened to her children and not left, while her husband Christiansen had strongly advised going back there, how edgy it was with your father already doing medicine in the bush, but now the soil of Rwanda was so weighed down with the dead — although the newspapers and TV rarely talked about it, about Tutsi children killed by the thousands — who would Nora be tomorrow, the same person or someone else, it was so easy to get comfortable again and forget what she had seen and smelt, the intoxicating perfume of jasmine, the burning brush, landing in Kinshasa with lights on in the rain, seeing the southern Sahara again from the window, an expanse of white sand I’d have liked to go running in, the smell of smoke so close choked me, was it a gold-coloured or a whitish sea that blinded me, a chauffeur and a porter asked me if I was the nurse they’d been expecting for days, no, I said, I was just there to revisit the country, but I was available if they needed me, I had no particular role, mother, artist, how could I explain to them who I was, Nora, I am Nora, coming back to a disgraced and ruined country, there were so many people around me, so many kilometres from town, the smoky smell was from all the votive candles that had been lit, merchants and vendors sitting on chairs along the road, all of them with ridiculous things to sell, since we’re travelling by car, there are checkpoints everywhere, one truck is piled high with huge sacks of rice, children with their mothers, hunger in those eyes feverishly staring at us, should I stay or go, the girls said, don’t leave tomorrow, have you forgotten that at fifty you need to accept the state of the world as it is, wasn’t it a sneaky manœuvre for the girls always to keep her close to them, Nora thought, maybe just a form of legitimate self-concern, for what else can they do, even as we grow old and suddenly feel unable to offer them what they demand of us, they still do, yet we can offer it to others, we’d like to give whatever is left to those kids crouching over sacks of food that thieves will come and steal from them before they get to town, stay or go, a grandson was on the way, and Nora had thought long and hard about them at night in Kinshasa, her three daughters and two sons, having a light dinner of samosas by the hotel pool, tomorrow Nora would be knocking on a schoolroom door, she knew people thanks to her diplomat husband who had often stayed in the region before, no, it would be better to act alone, already there in the deserted hotel, she’d written to them, my angels, each one of you is unique, tonight I’m sending you these few words, I love you, Dad must not forget to transfer some money, please believe, all of you, that I am serene and happy, your were all together for Thanksgiving, all my love, Christiansen, you who often understand better than I do myself the overall direction my life must take, if I myself have any doubt, dear Christiansen, it is that am afraid your limitless confidence in me might be disappointed, then I would falter, yes, I’ll go to the African party at your friends’, I hug and kiss you my unique children, stay or go, it was dizzying, Nora explained to Mère, I didn’t know what to decide, look at that heat-mist over the sea, and those purple-and-pink waves which will soon wash away the night, that smell of smoke and water, like the brush fires of my childhood, we used to have a couple of little monkeys, then one night they disappeared, my brother was devastated, my father said owning toys was a frivolous thing anyway, he was on call night and day and didn’t have much time for my mother and us, and Mère told Nora, it has been a long night, I was going to ask my daughter if I could excuse myself and go to bed, but listening to you now, Nora, I don’t feel like sleeping, at last they’ve turned that music down, the malaria has weakened you quite a bit, you must take good care of yourself, Mère said recovering her maternal instincts with Nora as if she’d been talking to Mélanie, my poor girl, women seem so brave, stay or go, Nora shouldn’t have come back, she should have taken time there to get better, why did her daughters get worried so quickly, there was an African party where they had spent all day making chicken in peanut sauce, fish in manioc leaves, lots of music and tons to drink, some drinking themselves into a stupor and dancing, do white women come here with their husbands and drink and dance this much so as to forget the country’s devastation and the mute pain of their African servants? What was that awful malaise I’d already started to feel myself those first days and nights, Mère said, I’d be very sad too if someone had taken away the little monkey or lion-cub who kept me company during the night without my knowing why, growing up alone like that, one certainly can be inconsolable, how can one imagine it, Nora said, going to school meant a boat-trip for days and unstable planes, my brother and I went away for months, far from our family, he was six, and I was eight, he started throwing up and wouldn’t stop crying, he was so afraid, hand-in-hand we spent Christmas holidays with the nuns, all of them very loving to us, when are Mummy and Daddy coming to get us, soon, the nuns said, when the school year is over, patience my treasures, patience, your parents will be back, oh how sad you are, come on now, be brave, blow your nose, big boys don’t cry, they said to my brother, and he was always crying, they’d taken our monkeys away a long time ago, a roving hyena had eaten them during the night, we’d heard strange noises on the mosquito-screen, Mummy had said not to get up, kids can feel such awful things, Mère said, I had a French nanny I adored, and when I came back from Europe — I remember a huge luxury liner and being seasick — the French nanny wasn’t at home, I never saw her again, I don’t know what kind of plotting or manoeuvring my parents had done to take her away from me, I never did find out, Mère became morose as she reflected on it, this first betrayal was to be followed by many others, she admitted, oh well, such is life, I wanted to work with street-kids in Kinshasa, Nora said, I felt guilty when I read my daughter’s e-mails, and what about us, Mama, couldn’t you take care of us, we need you here at home, I’m expecting a baby, Mama, and the waiting is awful, why can’t you be here with me, Mama dear, we are women, Mère said, and sometimes I feel it’s a sort of curse, I love all my grandchildren, but I’d so have liked it if Mélanie had only her career to think of, that would be quite enough, Nora said, this is where I have so much to do, that’s what I said to my daughter Greta, my dear, my only, believe me, I don’t think any of my letters and calls from town reached them for a long time, my darlings that I’d willingly left behind, even the one in which I told Greta, I’m flying to Gemena, Kindu, tomorrow, it’s a reconnaissance mission to assess needs in orphanages, maternity clinics, lack of support, prevention, and you know, Greta, how I’m thinking of you every day in this difficult pregnancy, what I mean, my sweet, is that every one is difficult, when it was you, I was too
nervous with anticipation, and despite what I thought, there were no complications, conceived in Africa during one of your father’s missions, there you were, beautiful and blonde, and Dad said, this will be my little Norwegian, I’ve got to meet the experts, doctors especially, I’ll be living in a guest-house with four rooms and a shared kitchen and bathroom, that is why I have left, dearest, we’ve got to the point where two or three bathrooms are essential, more than one car too, we could live with so much less, especially the things we have in duplicate, and even so, I’m so sorry about leaving you feeling hurt, but we will have central air conditioning and filtered water, I’ve bought a chair and a hot-plate, but I’m afraid I’m boring you with all these details, my treasure, kiss Dad for me, your father’s a model, my dear, the directress is lending me a table and a foam mattress that will just go on the ground, think of all those rooms and beds we have in the house, we really are spoiled, as Dad often says, after seeing so many sad things in his work overseas, has he transferred the money, I’ve had no news from any of you for days, I’d really like to have that money for the orphans’ Christmas, I know your father will be in touch with the charitable organizations right away, my kisses to you all as I eat my first African corn right here in the street, I used to feel that my childhood shared with my brother gave me all possible happiness, it was just for an instant, that school you visited in the bush, what was it like, Mère asked, her gaze riveted on Nora’s intense expression, and I couldn’t believe it, she replied, all those groups of kids and only two teachers, now my kids have all been to private schools where they had plenty of space and attention, how moving they were those hundred-and-fifty children, all so hungry to learn despite the awful conditions, in a hut made of matiti, manioc-stalks, with a roof of palm-branches covered with a tarp, a school in the savannah, the soldiers have taken a part of the roof, so when it rained there was no school, the families pay for school uniforms, as well as books and exercise-books, which is a lot for them, but still it’s the least every schoolchild must have, I don’t think I even gave a thought to the cost of uniforms and notebooks before I came to Africa. Never, that’s the truth, so many things I didn’t know or just forgot, like the teacher taking the blackboard with him after class so it won’t be stolen. I thought of my own kids, each with his or her own desk, table and board . . . benches for these children are just planks nailed to uprights, Mama how can you go on making comparisons all the time, Greta wrote me, come home for Christmas, my dearest, every day I worry about the baby, is it normal to be this way, come home, we’re waiting for you, Nora was thinking that she had not yielded to Greta’s demands, nor any other, that might have distracted her from her goal, after the school in the bush, she’d visited a hospital, and there, she wrote Christiansen, we’ve got about sixty beds, almost all with no mattresses or covers, one clean operating-room, only one maternity room, and it was also used for patients with sleeping-sickness, mentioning only the ways in which she felt well off and serene, Nora did not say she was beginning to feel the vague effects of paludism, of course malaria was very common here, and Nora wrote to her husband that she had been especially moved by a patient who ran towards her with a foam of blood on his lips, begging her for money to buy medication, this scene often came back to haunt her dreams in endless torment, she felt disgusted by the twenty-five-dollar donation she’d made to the doctor on the ward, and if she couldn’t do anything remotely helpful here, she’d go to Mount Ngafula and help out with the orphans, lots of abandoned babies, this was the only place where she had felt fulfillment and joy, giving the bottle to a couple of the newborns found during the night at the door of this refuge for abandoned children, she’d at once written to Greta, you know, my dear, everything’s going to be fine for your baby, and it’s perfectly normal to feel the way you do, what was stupid of me was not to have brought the candies the older ones asked for, oh, if only you saw these kids with nothing, so tiny, playing in the dirt, and through it all, still able to laugh, I’ll say it again, you have nothing to worry about Greta, everything will go just fine, it’s often like this the first time, when I was expecting your brother Hans, I was just like you, and now look at him, he’s a flight-attendant, already a man, oh the older ones in Room 8 held on to me, asking, where are the candies, how stupid I felt, how worthless, I was the volunteer in the shelter run by an Italian doctor-priest, I learned how to give a blood transfusion to a three-year-old boy, so underdeveloped he hardly looked two, no running water in this hospital, it has to be brought in by tanker-truck, the volunteer I replaced had malaria, then typhoid, and wouldn’t be able to work again for several weeks, Nora did not tell her daughters nor her husband about the skin-inflammation at night that felt like worms crawling around underneath the surface, she’d have been self-indulgent to complain, these infections came from washing the bodies of kids found lying on piles of filth, then reanimating and feeding them, pathetic little creatures so quick to come back to life, that was the miracle, every day we saved some, all of a sudden the child would be healthy and happy, the little girls are often adorable, Nora cared for them so much she’d have liked to adopt them right away, while the inflammation or nest of worms under the skin continued, she wasn’t sure which it was, the volunteer wanted to adopt one of the little girls as soon as she was better, the miracle was that joy in their eyes, were her letters and faxes getting through to her husband and children, alone with the magnificent sunsets, Nora waited in silence, suddenly startled by the song of the toads, this was when she missed her family most and reminded herself this was where she was meant to be, Christiansen supported her when the work was most dangerous, how she would have liked to feel his hands on her shoulders, when would she see him again, would she leave these tropical swamps intact or with jaundice, no, this was where she was meant to be, that was certain: the nights were warm, and she was behind window-bars and locked doors, under mosquito-netting, when she would rather have slept with windows open onto the valley, this same song of the bull-toads she’d heard before in her parents’ house when they’d left her brother’s monkey outside, her mother saying the air was less oppressive for monkeys when they spent the night outside, and Nora always added at the end of her letters how much she was with her children in thought, never forgetting them, it had rained for several days, she wrote, and on her way to the post office in Kinshasa the roads had turned to mud, beggars emerged from everywhere, grabbing hold of the truck, but the driver had said, we’re not stopping, it was only an impression perhaps, but there was such ruin and dilapidation in the streets of Kinshasa, it is said that malaria grows here in drains buried under garbage and filthy water, it certainly didn’t spare the eight-year-olds working in the streets like adults selling cans of oil, there are also traffickers who take advantage of them, beggars and children crying out with hands reaching for our truck, Nora was afraid one of them might get run over as the driver kept saying, faster, we can’t stop, Mère said, I think you must have felt joy and even fulfilment, Nora my dear, in Kinshasa you were in charge of your own destiny, that’s a great delight for a woman, perhaps, Nora had allowed, but a mother who really is a mother as I am can never feel that kind of satisfaction away from her husband and children, there was always that shadow, Nora said, and her eyes darkened as she began to see herself as Ibsen’s Nora, torn between an almost-primitive longing for freedom and a conventional set of familial attachments that had prevented it; furthermore, unlike Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House, she could not blame her husband for any masculine egotism, she thought, Christiansen loved her free and even more self-affirming in her convictions of freedom than she actually was, and she told herself that any selfishness was probably her own in the unrealistic expectation of combining her family life and household with her bohemian life of humanitarianism, still nothing can ever be full harmonized for us women, Mère said, and here come the first rays of sun on the ocean, Nora remarked, and there was a smell of fried plantain and smoke over the water, no doubt Jermain and his friends had decided to have br
eakfast by the pool after a night of dancing, at last the music had died down to a vague rumble, Mère said, we can hear each other talk, it’s going to be a hazy sun in that heat today, Nora went on, I was independent, I had a place to live while I was working in the daytime, I asked nothing of anybody, except to be allowed to volunteer, the feeling of freedom and fulfillment was delicious, I’m sure it was, said Mère, so many authoritarian attitudes made me feel hemmed in, Nora replied, like when I was kid, the way foreigners — whether black or white — talked to servants was unbearable, they had to be venerated and obeyed, especially those with high positions in embassies, and I suppose nothing has changed since those days, eh? I’m afraid nothing has changed the way we wanted it to, said Mère, her right hand apparently trembling more since she’d been talking to Nora, maybe paying so much attention to what she said had exacerbated it, she was sorry now to see daylight after finding the night so long, I love listening to you, Nora, she said, it’s as though your busy life and commitment underline how inactive mine is, except with my family of course, now why didn’t I set up hospitals like your friends, the women doctors who rescue children and the handicapped from the streets where they have nothing but awnings for shelter in the rainy season, all I do is bring up my grandchildren, oh I’ve been cultural director of some museums, but it’s not much, Mère’s cheeks reddened, she was proud all of a sudden, of herself and Nora, women often being strong and loyal, her life would be prolonged by Mélanie and Nora, for what was a successful life if not a serene extension into the lives of others, since all things came to an end, and one has to resign oneself to that without a struggle, seeing churches bothered me just as it did when I was a child, said Nora, a shameful abuse of a credulous populace too poor to fend off the hold of religion on their lives, as long as they pray they don’t rebel, instead of giving out bread and rocks and cement to rebuild the roads, instead of recovering a little dignity through work and education, it’s anaesthesia through prayer and hymns, Nora fell silent, afraid of boring Mère with her laconic remarks, how could Nora judge the power of hymn-singing after making friends with a doctor-priest in Kinshasa, only too happy to load the trunk of the car with powdered milk, candy, cocoa, marmalade and cookies for the kids with tuberculosis in one of the hospital wards, when every piece of bread and every drop was so precious, the least effort by a woman or a priest, however small it might be, had meaning, Nora thought, you couldn’t really measure their value, and after the party was over in the tubercular ward, she followed the doctor-priest into Room 6, for which she would be responsible, they had assigned her a sixteen-month-old baby with AIDS and weighing so little it seemed almost weightless in her arms, no longer really a baby, she said to Mère, just a small thing with skin that seemed to be eaten away with scabs and fleas, so tell me, where is God in all this misery, I asked the priest, he didn’t answer, what’s the point in this epidemic of churches springing up everywhere, Nora had brought her own children up in atheism and certainly didn’t regret it, she said to Esther, and Mère felt in her that fierce will not to depend on any phoney spirituality, though it seemed amazing when Nora had self-doubts and needed that faith, or at least that hope from which she distanced herself, they had to look to the management of things, and in the evening, older orphans in Room 12 who were taken to school several kilometres from the hospital, another mission run by nuns, and without these stalwart women there would be no schooling, said Nora, when they lent me the jeep, the kids would not have to walk home from school in the afternoon, I’d buy some dried fish and some sugar, always berating myself for things not done, so why were there no young idealists here, engineers and doctors, it’s as though I’d never brought it up with our influential friends, the hospital was on the side of a mountain and something had to be done to stop the erosion in the rainy season, rainwater collected in gutters would have irrigated the vegetable garden and the orchard instead of ruining what was once a beautiful country, all that corruption, individuals as well as fraudulent organizations, multinational corporations and politicians, angry words that Nora wrote to Christiansen every night from her locked room, reminding him how much she loved him, restraining her anxiousness to see him again, underlining how much farther she wanted to go, you know, Christiansen, this country’s so divided you need permits to get to the Equator — Ituri, Maniema, Kivu or Shaba, kiss all the kids for me, dear Christiansen, and tell each of them how much they mean to me, and please tell Greta to have more trust in the future, we’re going to have a wonderful grandson, you must reassure her, dear, because you’re there with her, as I promised you all, I hope to be there in time for the birth, but, thought Nora, what exactly was that promise but the expression of a visceral doubt, she wouldn’t have promised anything if she’d been in less doubt about the genuineness of her volunteer work in Africa, she who so wanted to be free and unattached, she always had to go and contradict herself, no doubt because she never had enough patience and plunged hastily into way too many life contests, always wanting to outdo herself, while for many life was a slow and much-delayed process, Nora could not wait, no, she told Esther, it’s a serious failing, I have no patience, mission mandates arrived slowly, meanwhile people died because of me, those handicapped from war and babies I’d held in my arms, they said every mission was too dangerous for me, whether in hospitals or the bush, but nothing was, none of it, and as a heat-haze blotted out the horizon over the sea, now turning mauve in the dawn, Nora felt herself vacillating and stunned, it was the smell of smoke and jasmine perhaps, when her mind overflowed with so many images and memories, like white and orange frangipanis bent under the weight of their brilliant branches, she no longer knew if she was in Chuan and Olivier’s garden or back there with the doc-tor-priest who was saying, oh if only you’d seen what I saw in the war-zones, everything destroyed with machetes and burnt, the malnutrition is even more widespread, if you knew, the priest’s voice saddened her the way her father’s had done before when he said there were so many lepers and so few doctors with him in the bush, and now here was Nora spending the night out joyfully celebrating Esther’s birthday with Christiansen, as though of a sudden she’d been relieved of any perception she had of the suffering, so close up, like her father before her; the red-eyed turtle-doves could be heard cooing, and she again saw the grey or Gabon parrots flying over Kinshasa, she thought she heard their whistling imitation of other birds, that is where her home was, she thought, she had to go back, if her father was the saint they said he was, why was he so intolerant with his wife and children at home, God was no more present in his thoughts than in Nora’s, but he shared his daughter’s failing of impatience, always pressed by work, he ordered them to do everything instantly, meals, sleep, what was this laziness of the kids who didn’t always get top marks at school, his wife and nursing-aide was never appreciated, Mama worked so hard for that man, Nora thought, sometimes said, my life will be a failure because of that man, I’ll avenge you, Mama, I used to tell her, but she quickly smoothed it over, you know Nora, I love your father, I’d just like to do better, that’s all, and that’s what Nora wished for, a productive ability to cure, now where had she got to, once back from Africa, she had spent too much on clothes, this was her particular way of dressing, and there was nothing she could do about it, Christiansen liked her looking this way, sweet and ravishing, her ribbonned straw halt tilted forward over her forehead, a slightly androgynous touch to her very feminine outfits, that was Nora, not saintly like her father, nor exuberant and rational like her husband, complex, disturbing, she had to live fast, paint everything she saw with the same vivid alertness, love everything with an ever-more-lively passion, she thought, how disappointed she’d been when she found out that her mission to Kindu had been cancelled, the departure for Lubumbashi with an ambassador friend delayed, too much time wasted on discussions of protocol, she’d written to Christiansen, still nothing from you, my darlings, I’ll try for the plateau where perhaps you could wait for me, waiting for a mission is so very lonely, I’m
thinking of each one of you, my darlings, Greta, do be careful, on the local TV I saw an unscrupulous bishop tell his flock about damnation from his ecclesiastical throne on high, I know what you’re thinking dear, I’m just the same as I always was, these shameless preachers still make me so enraged and cynical, as I write this, I can see a cloud of hummingbirds enjoying the nectar from the flowers, and every day outside my window, I can see my passeriformes suspended in flight, motionless in this palpably humid air, I was able to draw a few of them for an African tableau I started before I left, remember Christiansen, I only like painting outside, and I’d forgotten it in the garden during the rain, it was you that brought it in and said I’d been careless, and why was I, maybe because I didn’t really take my talent as a painter seriously, so when am I going to be able to convince you how little confidence I have in myself, not in you, my dear ones, in me, I paint outside so I can be surrounded by light, everything’s beautiful then, but I am glad you saved it from the rain and that you like it, sweetheart, I’m afraid to return to what once was my homeland, now a dying one, I can’t yet leave it because of that, now the sweet nectar that delighted the hummingbirds was intoxicating the air that Nora breathed from Chuan’s garden, and this is what made her tipsy, wobbly on her feet like when she’d shared a hash joint with Bernard and taken on a daring air for one who’d never even had cannabis before, you’ll see, Bernard, I won’t even get high, these artificial paradises are just an illusion, and just as she said this, she had almost fainted onto the garden fence amid the perfume of acacias, so quickly had the intoxication overcome the resistance of her brain, and Bernard had laughed and taken her in his arms before she fell, a benevolent and tender laugh she remembered, and she was amazed at her body’s being so rubbery all of a sudden, a slow elasticity that altered the collapse of her limbs onto the grass, oh what a sudden and unpleasant feeling of emptiness, Valérie disapproved of this habit her husband Bernard had of giving joints to his friends following an after-dinner cognac, she was afraid they’d have to bicycle home wavering and euphoric, the way Bernard sometimes arrived home, head in the clouds, hands barely touching the handlebars, you’re not supposed to do that at our age, she told him sternly, but he wasn’t listening, a complicit smile on his lips for Nora whom he’d helped out of the acacia bush saying, here, Nora dear, let me drive you home, Christiansen’s been gone to the Niger Republic for weeks, don’t stay on your own, come and see us, it may have been at that instant she had thought about the monkeys stolen by thieves or killed by hyenas during the long African nights a while ago, as Bernard guided her through the night arm-in-arm, she had the impression she had mumbled confusedly about how much she loved his books, but wasn’t sure he heard, Nora was not a creature of civilization like him or Valérie or all the others, not regimented or gifted by the touch of civilization, she had only come to know Europe when her parents had sent her to school in France, but maybe it was too late by then, a child of Africa, she could not be reborn elsewhere in a web of societies where she would always be an outsider, in that rapid euphoria she’d known while talking to Mère, and still stunned by the weakness of her body after overcoming tropical diseases, Nora wondered, is it true, one day will I too belong to civilization or at least be accepted in it, no, I can’t, I’m too wild, when will I see my country again, I wonder if my kids will let me leave again, and Marie-Sylvie heard the cock-crow in her sleep, when the first was over, others echoed it in reply, she was with Jenny in the Chinese province where the hills rose in a choking mist, pushing the wheelbarrow her brother, He-who-never-sleeps, was struggling to get out of, you can’t bury me, he was yelling in his insane voice, I’m still alive, Marie-Sylvie would have liked to bury him under one of those stones that lay over so many anonymous coffins, but there was too much mist, a sulphurous mist that stuck to your skin, no, you can’t, you can’t, he screamed just as Marie-Sylvie awoke and cursed the crowing cocks, she was covered in sweat, these regions of the dead that Jenny had told her about were terrifying, why would she abandon her brother here, you could even smell the dead who’d been buried in a rush, soon it would be daylight and still Daniel, Mélanie, and Esther weren’t back, the light still shone from under Augustino’s door, Marie-Sylvie was going to chase those cocks out of the courtyard, they were the neighbour’s, and Daniel put up with them, but he was too tolerant, she thought, hens and cocks in the yard at all times, like Augustino’s parrots and parakeets that also made a racket in the garden, and those cats that slept with Mai, now how could you keep the house clean when you had to give in to everyone’s whims, even in the nightmare she’d just awoken from feeling agitated, He-who-never-sleeps had seemed far too much alive, in a pile, arms and legs swung out from the wheelbarrow, around his mouth and eyes — one of them partly open and glassy — a thick coating of flies like those she’d often seen on children’s face in the Cité du Soleil, surrounding their eyes and mouths drooling black saliva, doing who-knows-what damage to their skin, or was that just something sulphurous sticking to their skin, in Marie-Sylvie’s dream, these flies were so close to the tongues and lips that the kids could-n’t even spit anymore, they were so close to the whites of their eyes that they couldn’t close their eyelids anymore, this cock-crowing would just not let up, while Marie-Sylvie washed her face and eyes, she kept wondering, where can he be hiding, why does he have to persecute me that miserable brother of mine, He-who-never-sleeps, I can’t stand to see him, the hospitals in Port-au-Prince were overflowing with kids just like him, why does he go on haunting me? The funny, clean-shaven young man was there again, in Mai’s room, his head a dark shadow against the rows of bookshelves, once more he’d managed to get in through the window, taking out the screen with his knife, getting slowly closer to Mai’s bed, I’m here, he said in his smooth voice, even if you’re asleep, don’t pretend you can’t hear my voice, I’ve come to get you for Colombia, for the Cause, the one and only, you’ve got to get dressed and come with me because we really need little girls like you, headstrong child, you can’t be locked up in your parents’ house with a nanny who doesn’t even like you, you’ll have your own gun and be able to work like all my other recruits, your own group, your own unit, you’ll be queen of the mine-fields, the younger girls will follow your orders for the Cause, the one and only, I’m not just a predator, I’m a fighter bringing along the youth, and what could be more tender and youthful than you, you can be ready and useful for all kinds of kinds of expeditions, you open the way to fields men fear to die in, there’s nothing you won’t do because you have no idea yet what you’ll be forced to do, we used to take only boys, and that was a mistake, we need girls in our groups too, come on, wake up, please, we’ve got to leave for Colombia, they’re waiting for us, your gun will take care of you, even defend you against rape, you’ll be completely unaware of explosive charges under the earth and follow the paths where antipersonnel mines sleep waiting for your step, Mai, I’m waiting for you to open your eyes and see me, my head’s shadowed against the bookshelves, I cut through the mosquito-net with my pocket knife, I don’t like screens and curtains they sometimes put around kids’ beds, anytime now your nanny will come in and chase me away, please Mai, I’ve come to take you to Colombia, there are so many countries where thousands of little girls fight with cool calm, they’re every bit as good as boys, come on, let’s go to the minefields, the sky is grey right now, but I can see dawn beginning to show, Caroline said, Harriett, Miss Désirée, time to wake up, let’s go down to the port and look for the first glint of day on the water, my father’s down there with one of his many wives, elegantly dressed, glass in hand, he’s still actually a colonel, but they call him Captain, always navigating to his pleasure-spots, his home in the Bahamas, with servants, a cabin under the palms, he’s a man of the world who sometimes likes to be a hermit, fishing alone on his island, suddenly disappearing for months, I wonder if the wind will whip the waves up to the windows today, splashing against the glass, the tide is up, way up, into the doorways and windows, crack
ing like whips at windows, shutters, masts on yachts dipping into the ocean, each time my parents got married I wondered who would adopt me, would it be you, Harriett, they said, or an aunt or a grandfather, what do we do with the little one, you say you’re the one, Harriett, you’ll keep me close, I’ll take care of her, you say, it is God’s will, you go on and on about it’s being God’s will that I be with you, there’s still a crescent moon in the sky, and the sea will calm down, these lashing winds in December, like all men of his class, my father wears white pants and a blazer, I hide behind you while you serve cocktails, what will we do with the little one, this crescent moon can drive women out of their heads, women like me who ask this grey hour why they are here, one is a great sculptress and remembers the name of her master better than her own, was she drugged or poisoned so she no longer knows who she is, or why she is in this asylum in Montdevergues, she remembers her fingers getting worn on some sharp, rocky substance, but what is she doing here, she has been poisoned by the bitterness of betrayal, everyone remembers her master better than her own name, one of them recalls a brother-in-law called Manet, she herself has the merest shadowy recollection of him, that’s right, she was an impressionist painter, yes, betrayed perhaps, locked up here with me, she doesn’t know how or when she’ll get out, and the sea continues to rise, cottages and houses lose their roofs in the violent winds, fleeing the coast and going upstream on the boiling rivers, the gulls and seagulls, all the marine birds have gradually deserted the shores, and from my window, I photograph the sky and the waters, I would so like to go out in this weather, Harriett, instead of being shut up here with these moaning, visionary women, one futilely hooking her nails onto a block of marble, where are my sculptures, she asks me, where are my children, what treachery was used to take them away from me, and if they’re visionaries the way I once was, why weren’t they able to survive, as I did, by avoiding all sentimentality in my relations with men, I wouldn’t associate with them except as an equal, perhaps they said I was seductive but hard, but what else could I do, if they moan and cry, it’s because they were forced to silence for a long time, the one whose brother-in-law Manet never commented on her work, even though she was an essential member of the Impressionist movement, well maybe, he observed condescendingly, Berthe, my sister-in-law Berthe Morisot, can paint, sure, but she’s still just a woman, it may not have been said, but Berthe heard it anyway, just the murmur of a suspicion, but audible to her nevertheless, a murmur and thus a defeat, another, an American artist who had lived all her life in Paris, apparently painting the joys of serene motherhood, still nothing was more troubling than that appearance over submerged, shifting, burning floes of ice, this painter had been advised by Degas, but in what manner, friendly or authoritarian, and how had she received it, no one knows, only maternal happiness seems to have made a lasting impression and set limits on the self-expression of this genius, a woman knowing how to paint the exclusive and fleeting happiness of motherhood, just this, portraitist of mothers with pink-skinned children, they don’t say who this woman was, Mary Cassatt born in Pennsylvania in 1844, a master of chalk and pastel drawing, that much perhaps is said, all the pastel drawings laying bare the clear, pink skin of the faces, critics praised her work, adding treacherously, it is too bad that such a remarkable artist, with such mastery of colour and supple technique, too bad that she became blind after a botched operation on her eyes, she might have overcome the fact that her work bore too much resemblance to Degas, those last pastels of his, free and tormented at the same time, so it was not enough to be a master colourist, even blind, her eyes mutilated by bad surgery, Mary Cassatt had to be the perfect pupil to Degas, otherwise insignificant in a style limited to her experience as a woman and mother, shouldn’t she just be contented with that, her expression, perhaps inwardly tormented, looked like Degas, so what did the work of a woman born in hostile times amount to, the waves on the ocean continued to rise with no let-up, the masts on yachts bending and curving in the wind, Harriett, you say I can’t go out, it wouldn’t be a good idea, so here I sit and wait in my chair in the portico near the bay window, Adrien and Suzanne are coming for dinner tonight, have you ironed the black outfit you’re going to put on me, I don’t want any tea or bouillon, nothing at all, I loved the English poets I photographed, Jean-Mathieu wrote their stories next to me, travelled with me, two painters of souls and the landscapes their bodies were going to, so beloved that I felt the inexpressible thoughts and desires of these poets were my own as well, one day in the exaltation of being alive, the next with despair tightening one’s throat, was it them or was it me, I was the pet dog that consoled them, the woman who took them in her arms, I was also Jean-Mathieu reading their thoughts, just as he was the photographer of their disordered poses as well as their real lives, and the branches entwined about their chests, crucifying them all, men with no future, their houseboats built on fragile rocks and slipping into the waves at Laugharne, the poet sends out a lifeboat, I recognize it, no wine glass, no bunch of blue grapes, take nothing that is offered, for it will be poison, I tell her, and Harriett stupidly says that it was Charly that offered me the glass that I drank from without any fear, Harriett said, that was your downfall, having her in your house, or perhaps it goes back even further, with its roots in Jamaica, where Charly herself decided to follow me and be my chauffeur, after all those hours in the darkroom, I couldn’t see well and had to give up driving, but the real truth is that, whether it be Charly or Cyril, fate knocked on my door as usual, and there was nothing I could do, not a thing. Mère noticed Nora was walking more quickly, racing along, which showed her impatience, outside the house and along the path that Chuan had decorated with bouquets of red roses in glass vases, she walked towards the sea saying to Esther, come on, come on, look at that flame of colour under the fog, Mère was thinking and walking slowly towards the beach path, turning to listen to Jermaine talk to his friends, to her the voices of all these young people sounded like a nearly incomprehensible choir, for she didn’t really know what they were talking about so fervently after dancing all night, it’s my world, he or one of his friends was saying, electronic music, DJ-ing, that’s my thing, first you mix the styles and rhythms, then bang, no need for words, words are my father’s thing . . . he writes, electronic music for raves doesn’t need words or hot melodies, it’s a question of technique, especially for dancefloors, and bang, hey let’s wake up the sleepers, even electro will soon be out of date, keyboards, synthesizers, all that can be junked with the past, who’s going to want to remember the 2000s, even electro music, all of it gone, listen to me, we’ll have walked on the Red Planet and be living there, just like on earth, maybe things will be just as bad as here, you are totally the best DJ in the club, bang, no words — that verbal stuff that sticks you with a way of seeing things, raves, all-nighters, that’s a cacophonic language like the music Samuel listened to when he was with us, Mère thought, deplorable, that’s what it is, still Jermaine is a good son, certainly his parents’ pride and joy whatever his language, they’re good kids, as Jermaine and his friends passed by her on their way to the beach, he greeted her with respect, happy birthday, he said optimistically from a way off, and she responded with a nod of her head, as if to say, why are you pretending to be polite, as though I were an old lady, which I am not, then she pressed on to catch up with Nora on the beach, happy and encouraged at the thought of talking with her, so Nora, you finally got authorization to go to Lubumbashi, you can see the river the second you step off the plane, Nora said, so much mist on the water, just like today, I saw the same hills again, the river widening and then narrowing again, those red waters you see all over equatorial Africa, I was home, then came the sadness of areas of Lubumbashi where I again saw orphans in the camps for war refugees, there were some representatives of donor countries with me, I am ashamed as I say this, of course they say they’re helping the displaced population, but do they really, or is it just official posturing, they were amazed when they saw kids in school
s and maternity wards dancing and singing to the drums for them, I just wanted to weep, even at that well-kept Methodist orphanage with freshly repainted walls, where teenagers sang in long robes, I wanted to cry, saying to myself, what’s going to happen to these refugee kids, when I went to the delivery-rooms in a hospital, I asked, why can’t I come work here right away, the tables were rusted, why no linen in the cribs, they said, yes, you can stay till tomorrow and help our nurses, I didn’t want to go back to the hotel with the others nor have the evening buffet, no, all of a sudden, in the middle of the day, I saw an ibis running across the light, a sacred ibis, I couldn’t believe it, I really was there, I had to be, I told myself, it was a miraculous vision, why did I have to feel so badly when my daughter Greta wrote me, what are you fighting for, Mama, and against whom, dear Don Quixote, tilting at windmills when you ought to be with us, your family and kids, Dad hasn’t got much time for us, his work in New York takes up nearly all his time, besides it’s not the same, he’s not a woman, Mama, come home, Esther, was it selfishness for me to want to scream at my daughter whom I love so much, don’t write to me anymore, leave me alone, all I want is to be here alone without you, let me live these private moments of mine, life is so short, do we really have the time we need to better know humanity and all it suffers from, of course not, no, said Mère there was no selfish complacency on your part, it’s intelligent to want to understand in a world like ours, that’s all, your daughter was wrong about you, it often happens, sometimes our children really don’t know us well at all, but she was careful not to mention her sons to Nora, she immediately added, with the privileged feelings she had for Mélanie, I don’t mean to be unjust, but my daughter is so intuitive she knows a little too much about me, and I can’t blame her, it seemed as though Nora was not listening but just looking at the sky, I was able to go back to the bush in the Lower Congo, she said at once, I was being stubborn after what Greta had said about the absurdity of my battle, I’m sure I did resemble that ridiculous Don Quixote, but that was who I was after all, Nora felt so mortified by the memory of Greta’s words that she longed to rest her head in Christiansen’s arms, as she often did in a silent gesture of confidence, and he would write or read with her nearby, a bird in its nest, he felt less stricken by the report or exposé he was working on when Nora was near, then, once calmed, she would take flight again, she had three paintings to work on outside under the eucalyptus leaves where she painted all morning, three pictures before the town bell rang noon, because the afternoon would be taken up with shopping for her future grandson and getting surprise meals ready for the beach-wanderers, what did Christiansen think of the African painting still outside after two storms, that was clumsy, I may have to start it again for a third time, only then did her husband lose patience, I’ve already told you how much I liked that picture, don’t touch it, you don’t want to say so, she said with her usual self-doubt, but that gold on a black sky is overdone, isn’t it, oh sweetheart, are you really sure you like it, I really am an awkward woman, how can you possibly love me, that was who she was, Nora, it couldn’t be any other way, she thought, the child on whom her father had impressed doubt and clumsiness forever, when I needed to win the right to feel at ease each morning, my dream was to revisit all those places we had lived in, my brother and I, the way you do in a picture when you paint those subconscious regions from the past, but it seemed even more important to revisit the tubercular children’s ward where I might be of some help, Nora said, because you have to do what you can, however little, even if it has no impact, that meagre contribution is what gives life its value, how else can we know who we are, Mère felt Nora was asking these questions of herself alone, for a long time I was with the kids in Building 8, Nora went on, I bathed them early in the morning, they told me to do it in cold water, but I heated the water when no one was looking, these poor little things should have been in incubators, all of them premature, often their mothers had died a few hours after giving birth, their fathers left them at the hospital entrance, I often had one of the babies in my arms, because in the cradle their atrophied limbs could not stretch out, and they suffered from scoliosis, I can still see those tiny thin limbs, Hugo his name was, I finally found him an orthopedist, though there’s little hope he’s still alive, the soldiers had found him on a garbage can, he was eight days old then, you can’t imagine how these little kids suffer, another newborn I was changing was so lacking in vitamin A that his skin was raw in places, you can’t imagine, I wrote to all my kids, though I didn’t tell them how revivifying it was for me to be mother to a second family, Hugo or Garcia, I loved them like my own children, and nothing seemed more natural, Garcia, my orphan suffering from tuberculosis of the bone, he had to stay lying down, held to a board with straps, we got him to smile, though I knew his heart would eventually stifle his lungs, as the doctor explained it to me, death was everywhere, waiting, the only thing was life, everything to hold onto it, there was still the smile of life on Garcia’s dry lips, though I did feel terribly cut off from the world, alone with my distressed kids, now I am far from Garcia and Hugo, once again in the social whirl, the hospital kitchen was a rudimentary shelter with a corrugated tin roof, no light and very little food, worn out as we were, the evening meal of beans and cold noodles seemed like a feast, and I just can’t say how happy I am to be with you all again, Esther, how do you account for such contradictions, probably because we’re children at heart, and we adapt easily to sadness and to joy, still I wish I could have contributed, just a little, and then, as though embarrassed by having confided too much in Mère, Nora walked faster in the direction of the sea to put distance between them, pelicans were diving headlong into the waves, putting her cell phone to her ear, she thought all of a sudden she heard her son’s voice, Mum, it’s me, Hans, sounding lost, Nora could hear his laboured, staccato breathing, Mum, our plane’s been hijacked around Ohio, I don’t know where exactly, it’s nearly eight in the morning, can you hear me, the other flight attendants and me, Mum, can you hear me, I don’t know what direction we’re going in now, a bump, another bump in all this fog, we’re going down, we can’t descend any farther, we served breakfast the way we always do on this morning flight, everything as usual, listen, Mum, kids are sleeping in their mothers’ arms, and we can’t say anything yet, especially not now, because it’s too soon, I’m sure, our plane, Mum, hug Dad and my sisters for me, they’re wolves in sheep’s clothing, we were fooled, I’m not saying everything’s gone bad for us on Flight 88, but listen, above all, don’t panic, just listen, first, you’re going to need to be very patient, and you aren’t, you know that, don’t let your pain and grief and impatience get the better of you, Mum, I’ll always be your son, whatever happens today, we’re not over Ohio any more, those are shouts you hear from the back of the plane, we’re going to reassure the passengers, none of us can be afraid, only brave, I always told you I wanted to be a hero, didn’t I, well now’s the time, we’re going down, we’re going to fight and defend the passengers, all those fields in the fog, we can still avoid cities, going down, yes, we really want to pull this off, no shouts, now, Mum, nothing, just something like a prayer, I don’t know how to do that, because you never showed me, not shouts, something like a prayer that says, above all, Mum, don’t lose patience, I know what you’re like, you know, darling Mum, they’re not screaming any more, they’re singing, listen Mum, kids are waking up and asking why, they’re not screaming any more, they’re singing, listen Mum, they’re saying, we’re going through the valley of the shadow, be not afraid, we have nothing to fear, can you hear me Mum, it’s me, Hans, your son, we’re coming down to the fields, the valley of the shadow, they’re saying, it’s me, Hans, we’re landing on time, we won’t be late, Mum, on time, either with an irreversible slowness or a deafening noise, I can’t hear anything anymore, Mum, breakfast has been served, hijacked to where, I don’t know, I don’t know anything anymore, that’s what we had to do, serve breakfast, a razor blade to the pilot’s throat, brea
kfast, all polite, that’s what we have to do, we already knew about the pilot, we knew, what you’re hearing, Mum, aren’t shouts, those have stopped, it’s more like a prayer, the Lord is my shepherd, that’s what they’re singing in those heartbreaking voices, I go on working, that’s what you asked of me, they’ll tell you I was a hero, freeing the pilot too late, taken hostage, Mum, all of the others are heroes too, even the little kids who don’t know what’s going on, every one, where is the valley of the shadow of death, we’re flying low over it, so low we can see the grass and raspberry fields, low without wanting to, we’ve lost all control, the real hero was Dad, a child resistance-fighter in Norway under siege, and you, Mum, sacrificing your art for us, first prize at the School of Fine Art, for us, just us, please be patient, we’ll make it, soft green and dirt-yellow fields all around us, the sky’s gone white all of a sudden, state of siege here, like in Dad’s time, heroes, everyone here praying, me last of all, the man you gave birth to is no hero, just a man, what was it Dad said that evening when we were all together in New York, Dad said that one day there was an awful, dark moment in our history, we were with him after he came back from Jordan — he’s been all over, more than seventy-five countries, he said — and what was that dark moment in your country’s history, I asked him, nothing specific, he said, but I picture myself as a little boy running with evil joy behind trucks with crying women whose heads were shaved, a terribly dark moment, and so you commit your first act of cruelty, Dad said, I didn’t know then that all the children born of those who had collaborated would undergo the same fate as their mothers and be punished forever, I knew none of that running happily behind the trucks that way, no, I wanted to be a hero like Dad, although he said he never was because of that terrible, dark moment, and you’ll see, Mum, everyone here is a hero without knowing it, it seems like the valley of death we are in, but don’t you believe it, there’s nothing else we can do, Mum, I’ll be on time, but don’t wait for me at the airport the way you usually do, our crew’s courageous and will go on that way, we’re going down, I’m kissing you, Mum, how green the fields are, how green the autumn is, Mum, but hearing only the song of the waves, Nora put her cell phone away in its case, thinking, of course Hans will be on time at the airport, unless there’s turbulence from the fog, no storms are expected, and Mère plodded on in Nora’s direction, a little out of breath and tempted to take her shoes off too, but she didn’t, it was more appropriate for Nora, who was still young, svelte and a bit tomboy, maybe a veneer of upbringing she had missed, Mère thought without judging her, for Mère admired her primal instinct for freedom, then Mère thought about all the money this birthday party of hers had cost, it must surely have cost Chuan and Olivier thousands of dollars for such a fabulous party and banquet, she thought, too much, too bad Mère had not thought of this before this conversation with Nora that changed her view of everything, even the cost of her celebration, maybe she should have turned it down, and why had she willed so much money to museums and cultural institutions, when the African hospitals . . . oh, what’s the point, she thought, as she saw her right hand trembling, it must be too late, this stupid tremor, when you think about it, she’d done what she had to do, and Mère thought back to the boy Chuan called Lazaro, almost a second son to her, the caterer who often went out fishing with the men for months at a time, with what heavy resentment he had dumped the tray of seafood on the kitchen table, he seemed sinister in his white apron, there was no mistaking the look of hate on his face, and why was that, since Chuan welcomed into her house like a son and was friends with his mother Caridad, bought handicrafts from her, knowing she often cried, saying she had lost her son, he’d lost his way, his hostile face confronted Mère and seemed to say, you ought to be ashamed of all this money spent on your celebration, you’ll repent this, on Bahama and Esmerelda Streets, we’ve got our gangs about which you know nothing, nor about us, I, Lazaro, am not alone on Bahama and Esmerelda, then Mère dismissed this concern, for that’s all it was, her friends had fêted her, and she was happy, even if this tremor in her right hand worried her constantly, Nora came back up from the beach, smiling, you know what Bernard says, that we can’t be responsible for everything that happens, it’s already commendable to look out for friends and relatives, she said, and for Bernard, friends means writers, which is why he’s so generous to colleagues of his all round the world, that’s pretty wise, I wish I were like that, it’s the sort of thing a man would think, said Mère, Bernard is a man who’s more sure of his qualities than you or I, Nora, and his wife Valérie too, she’s more like us as far as that goes, sometimes I wish I were him, she continued, I’d own a few more certainties, but I don’t want to be him, because he either negates or downplays the number of women philosophers, fortunately Valérie stands up to him on that, I mean, women writers and philosophers have always existed and always will, whatever our delicious friend Bernard thinks, the most learned among us, but did you know I can beat him at poker, she said, thinking that the tremor was fairly slight after all, no one, except Mélanie perhaps, had noticed it, and why had critics not attentively considered that Valérie’s novels were essentially philosophical, the work of a moralist rigorously examining the drama of individual responsibility, all they ever talked about was the ambivalence of her characters without getting through to their motivation, be they cowardly or destined to contempt and condemnation, Valérie had written that crimes of cowardice were human too, and why did she frequently get up at four in the morning, sneak out of the house, and stand alone at the far end of the beaches, where, she said, the structure of her books was developed gradually a hundred times over and synthesized in a thousand details, in the calm of dawn by the ocean, and in a mind no longer agitated, it was that philosopher’s thought that took flight like an incantation that would give shape to her novels, who should be held to account in this drama of responsibility which everyone shared, it was wrong, Mère thought, that Bernard and his friends rarely let women play poker with them, they were wrong to think that a new Descartes might spring from the mind of a woman, Valérie was not a mathematician or physicist like Descartes, and she never claimed to have reconstituted the foundations of learning, as a woman she would never have a notion of absolute certitude, but her humanity was her science and her field of inquiry and reflection, she often woke up by Bernard’s side, heart beating wildly, she said, that’s when she had to go and quietly get her bike from the garden, followed by her cat, how precious that solitude by the sea with no one to see her, and the illumination of thought took on solid form in the last traces of night trailing away on the water, instead of seeing Valérie as a writer unconcerned with praise, as an unpretentious philosopher, Bernard’s friends surely only saw in her the dark-haired woman who might have been one of Goya’s models, someone they ran into early each morning during their workout, a great companion for men and women doing their workout or aerobic dance, Valérie, whose joie de vivre, better yet, her appetite for enjoyment, seemed inexhaustible, so why had these critics not noticed who Valérie was beneath the sobriety of her writing, Mère wondered, and Charles still kept the image of Frédéric before him, Caroline said, and that’s why I must not let myself get to that point, and why you need to understand my abstention from food, Harriett, Miss Désirée, who wants to hit rock-bottom, reach the last degree of abandonment, in the pleasure of being held in Cyril’s arms, their gaze melting into one, that’s the image Charles had of Frédéric in the arms of his black nurse after his fall by the pool, Charles recalled that Pietà, the Black Virgin of pity, leaning over Frédéric’s body, he had suddenly lost balance, no freezing rain or surface slippery from pool water, no special reason for a sturdy body to skid like that, it had been melting away for a while now, Charles had always known Frédéric to be hefty and ready for any and all wildness and excess, he didn’t realize that his friend was depressed by the onset of old age, the sound of his fall was like something being broken, a machine misfiring, would this difficulty functioning also be mental,
even in a man whose genius was well-known, he was the child prodigy, the precocious pianist, the Mendelssohn of the Los Angeles concert-hall dead, there was no way to know, as to the slowly progressing muscular deficiency, this apparition of the Pietà was a recurring one for Charles, the ageing infant Frédéric in the arms of his young Black Virgin who had washed and bathed him, everywhere this image replayed itself for him, the young, voluptuous nurse who arrived at the house on roller-blades and humming a tune, Charles was washing and bathing Frédéric who suddenly said, leave me alone, I just want to sleep, no visitors, I want to sleep for a while, that fall by the pool hurt a bit, and Charles had not thought that love could slip away like that in an image of the Pietà, he needed to go to his ashram to gather himself a bit, perhaps the time for gloomy reflection had come when the soul begs for a resting place, the strengths of the body crying out, no, not yet, it’s too soon, and thus arrives an avenging angel that was not expected, exacting all latent, violet-tinged death and decay, the lover who was more than love, the imperishable guardian of declining vitality, Harriett, you think, seeing me struggle no longer, that I’d like to crumble like Frédéric in the arms of a divine nurse, for you do have such patience, I barely let you assuage my thirst with a little black tea, for this body of mine will soon accommodate itself to all its failings without complaint, one must die in harmony, though they want us to think otherwise, the wood is dry and hard, and can’t take any more punishment, the bones of the carcass, I dreamed as I was dozing, that I had got dressed up in my black outfit, I don’t know why black, because I don’t like it, and then you lowered me into a very hot bath, I fought you, for a light snow was falling, oh how I fought you, but you wouldn’t listen, why not let me go out in that hospital gown, Adrien and Suzanne will be here after tennis, they’ll help me get dressed, but you say they can’t get here in this sea-storm, but they’ll come, because they know how to get here by boat, get the coffee ready, Harriett, Désirée, quick, get to the kitchen and stop watching me, there’s a light snow falling, I recovered quickly, because all of a sudden I was able to run along a snowy road in the night, but still I could hear familiar voices, and at the end of the road was a reunion of friends, the night was not clouded but lit by huge bonfires on the snow, and all of a sudden I saw Jean-Mathieu coming towards me with his red scarf over his shoulders, come, dear friend, all this snow will be shovelled by morning, and we can get out the sleds and horses, come, we never finished our discussion of the painting of the Madonna and Child by an unknown French artist around 1480, she wears a royal crown, sapphires and pearls I think, as you first said, or perhaps rubies, a Madonna both childlike and sovereign, with a mocking smile as she strokes the feet of her child, yet the child seems older than the mother, laid bare, bald head under the halo, appearing to sink into the folds of her ample blue robe, nothing holding him up from the void but the fingers warming his feet, this is how we come into the world, hanging by a caress of the feet, this picture, dear Caroline, was painted in 1480 or 1490, and I’d really like to talk about it with you, come now, and let’s get out the sleds and continue our journey, you and I together at last, Caroline, but why are you hesitating to give me your hand, think about the painting you liked, that’s how we set ourselves apart from the rest of the world, like that little bare-headed child, a bit ugly and alone in the arms of the Madonna holding him only with a subtle caress of the feet, yes, you were right to say it was painted in1480 by an unknown French master, I have to tell you now, you were often right, it was a dream, said Caroline, I’ll never see Jean-Mathieu again, or if I do, when do you think, Harriett, when will I see him, will it be a cloudy night lit up by huge bonfires on the snow? In the Vendredi Décadent Bar, Petites Cendres saw the boy with straight blond hair, he must have been set free during the night, and he thought, my boy, mine, he’s even charmed the cops, a magician, an enchanter, Petites Cendres saw him in the street, as he walked with a heavy heart, not having come up with anything that night, he’d probably have to meet the man from the hotel, the one in whom a beast lurked, though he was used to this kind of customer, this one repulsed him, or maybe it was fear of outrage or humiliation, look at that little treasure with his round face like a little boy, and so well brought up, affable, almost chivalrous toward a companion who was at least thirty years older, that’s what happens when kids are left alone, they prove attractive to adults and then inflict redemptive love upon them, if you have to show up in the New York office wearing a nice suit, then I’ll dress up too, the boy said, anything suits me, if I have to show up nude, I’ll do that too, how do you like that, he laughed, kids now aren’t afraid of anything, I really liked going out in the boat with you, I didn’t even know about those barges with young prostitutes, isn’t it risky, I don’t think I’d go for that, I’d rather be with you, I’m safe with you, in fact, my parents would be impressed by your taste and culture, that silk shirt really suits you, do you trade in those, I think it would look good on me too, I like smart things, boy, we sure have got a tan out here on the bridge, can I have a taste of your martini, oh you’re giving me one, great, I mostly like the olives on ice, thanks, another one would be nice, especially the olives, it’s true, I’m going to get a shirt like yours, touch my skin, see how hot it still is from the sun, I feel sorry for those girls lost out on the water, you know, a nut-job, any kind of nut-job might attack them, it’s not legal what they’re doing, it’s better to stay on the right side of the law, I mean you never know, what if someone decide to throw them overboard, what mother would go into town and say, yes, that’s my daughter you’ve killed, who’d dare do that, eh, you think there’s any future for them in a profession like that, cruising around out in the open, I feel sorry for them, hey you got tanned too, it suits you, pink cheeks, we have all the time in the world, we could take one cruise after another if you didn’t have to be in the office by Thursday, how cool you look, I will too, you’ve got to do what you want in life, I liked that dangerous swim we took in the shark bay, young people, what do we really worry about except not having money, nope, I really don’t like that, I need lots of it every day, I’d really like to have shorts and a camera like you do, is it way too expensive, if you can’t, just say so, our skin is glowing, you seem years younger since we’ve been together, even if it’s only been a few hours, most of all, I want you to be satisfied, absolutely, your satisfaction is all that counts, you have to say what you want, said the boy with straight hair, Petites Cendres seeing his round cheeks and the way his hair moved around his face from far off, leaning his elbow on the bar window, he listened sadly to the monologue of dizzying material greed from the boy he called his own, having got a nice smile from him, the kid does alright, Petites Cendres thought, if he was materialist first and foremost, he wouldn’t fall victim to his own naïveté, people who plucked his flower knew the price, and it didn’t grow everywhere, despite the moment of grace in a smile, Petites Cendres was saddened that this fresh-petalled rose was not for him, poor junkie that he was, who wanted an undernourished junkie with broken teeth, often broken by other junkies and nude dancers, often wearing the socks they tossed to the audience at the end of the show and trod underfoot on the dancefloor, there was no one quite so hard up as Petites Cendres, a dope addict inhaling the brown sugar no one else did anymore for lack of anything better, who’d want to take that crude brown powder, this generation of nude dancers stayed clean, didn’t fool around injecting poison into their veins, once in while, not like coke, Petites Cendres would clumsily line up the spoon and syringe, sick of this burning furnace of want, nothing, empty pockets, stuck with the thug that looked like a boxer, such rotten conditions, but he felt he had no choice but to go to this man and just see what happened afterwards, brown sugar, smoking heroine made you want to throw up, while . . . where was Timo anyway, probably somewhere down by the keys, waiting, this would be when they started dancing and shouting and carrying on, closing time, we’re closing in a moment, and in the wee hours the sun would be burning everywhere, ligh
ting on faces and faded sheets in the rooms, an indecent sun when night had honoured, not persecuted, the hungry unfortunates, so much the better if the kid, my kid, has that self-assurance, he’s tough, and he’s only here on the island for a few days, then he’ll follow his companion to New York or somewhere else, this hell, this furnace of want is mine, I can’t leave, Petites Cendres thought, still everything might still work out with Timo, I wonder if my boy cries when he’s alone with his multiple-choice video games, a virtual kingdom based on the real world, with the same corruption, the same serial rapes and killings, the gamer giving vent to his worst impulses, did the languid boy cry, stretched out on the sofa with his games, round cheeks on his hands, saying to himself, I watch because I’m bored, give me porn or give me crime, manipulate me, anything so I’m not bored, I quit school too soon, why is that my fault, I’m just waiting for my lover to get back from the office, and tonight we’re going out, so what did he do all day waiting for his friend, hang out in the streets, work as an escort, already into high-tech, what didn’t he have, whereas Petites Cendres was just a poor transvestite junkie with nothing going for him, he thought, with sunrise, life became a handicap, a setback, but at night, everything was the same colour, so did rust-coloured men and lost dogs, jazz sextets improvised in bars on the theme of the soul lamenting its fate with the soft growl of metal, Petites Cendres listened as he thought, spirit, soul, keep going, don’t die, all you want is a little more powder, an electric guitar duet, drums, soul, go forward, not back, I’ll go see Timo, he must be down on the jetty with a cigarette hanging from his lips, now the percussionists, good group this, I’ll be back for a beer, two floors for dancers and one downstairs for skaters, you’d hear the brass at daybreak, forward, soul, onward, Petites Cendres thought, daybreak would mean a handicap, a setback, God who made the world, the earth and the flowers, and me as I am, me, Petites Cendres at the Porte du Baiser Saloon, where’s my powder, I sometimes wonder if he cries when he’s alone in men’s luxurious apartments, that boy of mine, suddenly Petites Cendres felt himself rocking, won over by the music, sliding languidly on the soles of his sandals, he’d go all the way to Atlantic Boulevard, he thought, it was the end of a night like all the others, too bad there was no antidote for the impulse to love or want powder, a night like any other in the furnace of want, except that this boy, his boy, had smiled at him one day, still maybe it was in vain, and I still remember the clouds of flies on the foreheads and eyes of the little kids found by the side of the road, Nora thought, and the lack of running water, even in the hospital, other wings badly needed to be opened, one was donated by an Italian doctor, but charity from benefactors like that was precarious and very rare, a washer and dryer were essential, nothing ever dried by itself in this terrible climate, and because of Cayor worms, everything had to be ironed, diapers, bed-linen, kids’ clothes, what miraculous sunsets and starry nights, yet still the devastating image of children being eaten up by worms was forever present, worms and bouts of diarrhea on beds and sleeping-mats, the same distressing spectacle everywhere, sometimes there was a bright spot in the afternoon when Nora brought milk with banana-, mango- or papaya-quarters to the bigger ones in Room 7, some of them suddenly came to life and pushed a wooden scooter with one wheel missing around in the dirt, others played with sticks and bits of metal, the little girls stretching the fabric of their shoes when they had them, Nora was pained by their weight-loss and thinness when she checked on them, she remembered the cloudbursts that fell on the corrugated tin roof over her room at night, the breeze on her sweaty body through the mosquito-netting, and the death one morning of a child with severe Vitamin A deficiency, another suffering from Pott’s disease had been saved, or when she had made funeral clothes in the laundry for the little child who had died, and what was to be done about those babies on perfusion who weren’t eating or taking in anything anymore, kids infected with AIDS, an entire population was infected and arriving with all these dying children, wasn’t it? Nora fetched water in buckets along with the mothers of the children, or those that remained, sick mothers who nevertheless went on working, clouds of flies covered the baby bottles, this was the despairing picture Nora saw there every day and never forgot, even back home with her own family, or were they still her own, my family and friends living out their lives so far from all this misery, maybe they’d have felt sickened by these revolting diapers just tossed on the floor before carting them off to the straw hut near the playground used by the orphans in Room 9, perhaps they would all have felt some repugnance for the fact that humanity had sunk so low, with no hope of progress or resources, for they did not know what Nora did, they knew nothing of it, despite being told and shown what she had seen, not the reflection of a nightmare, but inexorable reality, and in the glimmer of dawn on the blinds, the odd, well-shaven young man was there in Mai’s room again, from one instant to the next, he’d disappear, he said, because the nanny would waste no time coming in to wake Mai up, since she always slept in too long, listen Mai, the young man said, I’ve served out my sentence and now here I am, a free man, that’s what the court decided, and I can’t change that, I’d already done ten years in prison out on the California coast, wasn’t that enough, the sentence was twenty, it was my good conduct that influenced the court and the judge, I was once a kid just like you, back in Idaho, always had a dog held close to my chest, small and fluffy he was, and was I a monster, no, my father was a monster to me, and I was just a kid like any other in Idaho, at twelve I was convicted of making obscene phone calls, I learned martial arts, Haïkido and Kendo, so I could get even with a father who beat me up, tied me up with rope, you should have seen me at that age in my white kimono, I remember rope, because I used it later in my rapes and murders, first it was only students, too bad they decided to take the bridges back to campus, bridges and ropes, those were my fascination, when was it my father forgot me all night on a bridge in the cold, when was that, I don’t know, but better not stare at my shadow on a bridge when I had on my Hallowe’en mask, the bridges were called Jennifer or Rachel, the names of the ones I strangled, ropes and bridges were all I could think of at home in my bungalow, first the wrists, then the ropes and silence, a real Feast of All Saints, Jennifer Bridge, Rachel Bridge, I had them all, one by one I buried them under the floorboards of my bungalow with a pile of wood I’d cut, sometimes I’d knock on doors and say I was a carpenter looking for things to repair, and then quick, I’d run down to the bathroom and wait and wait, so, if I’m not a monster, what am I, tell me Mai, what’s going to happen to me, I’d wait behind the shower curtain, the court decided, and now here I am with you, so close you could hear my breath, want to come to the bridge with me, want to follow me, I’ve got a Hallowe’en mask in my case, you’ll see this scar on my face, when I rape them I get scratched, like in a blackberry bush, their nail-marks, it does me good, if I’m not a monster, who am I, but it isn’t me, it’s him who never had to face a sentence or a court, who tied me to chairs with ropes, stifled me and my cries with pillows, from then on, ropes were my fixation, you should have seen me at twelve doing martial arts, that was me, the tough guy no one felt sorry for, come with me, I don’t want to hurt you, I’m just your brother in his white kimono, I can hear the cocks crowing, soon it will be time for you to wake up, Mai, you’ve wet your pyjamas again, what will your mother say, I told you not to drink all those glasses of water your nanny gave you yesterday evening, you’ll get scolded, they’ll call your pediatrician, I got punished too and look what happened to me, Mai, tell me, am I a monster in my white kimono, what will happen to us, you and me Mai, when we’re free, and Olivier after hours of writing in his hut, raised his head to the red line over the ocean, how reviving it felt to feel the immensity of water around him, and the silence after all the noise of the party, why hadn’t he listened more attentively to Mélanie, especially since she confided so rarely in others, this doltish silence men use to cut themselves off, was that how he’d been with Mélanie in his fear that she would
get hurt like other women activists as devoted as herself, even though the house was protected from vandals and thieves, he thought he heard footsteps nearby, there were all kinds of gangs and networks on Bahama and Esmerelda Streets, could they burst in from the park or the street or the suddenly unoccupied space around the pool, were those shots Olivier heard, five maybe, black bandannas over their foreheads, running their knives over him in his sleep, furtive aggressions, drug deals, where were Chuan and Jermaine, although Olivier felt he knew his son, could he have dealings with them anyway, one of them, Carlos, had been accused of homicide, though involuntary, although he had not caused the death of Lazaro, voluntarily or not, he tried to kill me, Lazaro had cried, Chuan welcomed him into her house, and as for Carlos, who, by belonging to a gang had shown his will to kill, even if it was just play, because he thought the gun wasn’t loaded when it was, besides, who knows whether Olivier, also a child of the African and Haitian ghettos, might not have been accused of murder himself, voluntary or not, just like poor Carlos, who was now imprisoned by mistake if you thought about it, right, by mistake, the community ought to protest but said nothing, knowing how the town was divided into zones of violence, from the Bad Niggers to the Latino Gang, ten of them with black bandannas around their foreheads, and Lazaro would be one of these, saying, I’m just biding my time, my arsenal’s all ready, first Jermaine and his mother, then the man, while he’s at his table writing, that black senator no one listens to, just writing out his anger in lacklustre prose, but for us, life is a blood sport, just that, an act of pure violence, Olivier thought he heard footsteps very nearby, although the immensity of water was all-enveloping, and he saw the red line of sun on the horizon from his window, and he heard nothing but bird-song at this hour, he where Chuan and Jermaine were, mother and son had danced the night away, was this the time for frivolity, for laughing and dancing while on the alert, everywhere the tolling of gunshots, alert for the gangs on our doorstep, on Bahama and Esmerelda Streets, Carlos or the others, had anyone really taken into account that they were the sons of slaves, like Bigger Thomas, the hero of novelist Richard Wright, although Olivier wasn’t much for reading novels, in fact he was embarrassed that there were so many around him whose books he had not read, he remembered Bigger Thomas, the one they called nigger, and his descent into crime in a white world, for a long time, he thought, wasn’t that the only way, that hellish route through betrayal, those with no country, ashamed of petty crime, rape or theft, whether in Chicago, or here in this town, Bigger Thomas or Carlos, all sons of slaves and unable to get over it, although it had been abolished long ago, no, there were still plenty of slavers at work in the world, yesterday Bigger Thomas, trapped and defenceless, today Carlos; whole museums were devoted to the numberless slaves of the past, built along riverbanks, reminders that not long ago, along these same rivers, women, men and children had been bought and sold, these structures and buildings recalling the fate of black merchandise, its price often less than that of a chair or a stove, sold in the public square like livestock, what impact would this memory of the shadowy part of themselves have had on Bigger Thomas or Carlos, if not that an entire lifetime was not enough to get away, really free themselves from it, still guilty in the white world that had given them a chance, a historic chance, that they inherited without gratitude, cursing that fortune called racial equality, at long last the triumph of justice, for where was that justice when Emmett Till died at the hands of two white assassins, Emmett Till, another Bigger Thomas from Chicago, but innocent, taken from his bed late at night, beaten, tortured with a Colt .45 in the face, by two men beside themselves with rage who ended up killing him and throwing him into the river, what would Olivier have done if he’d had to identify the disfigured face in his white school shirt and tie, like Emmett’s mother, no, he wouldn’t have recognized his son Jermaine either, the two men were acquitted by a white court, acquitted and bragging of their victory to their wives, united in this base betrayal of justice, deceitful and victorious, and what would Olivier have done if they brought him Jermaine’s body by train, like Emmett’s to his mother, upon returning from a family visit to Mississippi and being shown her son’s body at the station, who is that, she had asked looking drawn, who is that, what have you done to him, that isn’t my son anymore, but this is what she said, you are going to be shamed, because the coffin’s going to be open for several days, so nothing can be forgotten, and they said to her, you know, if your son came to this sad end, though he was only fourteen, it is because he whistled at a white woman as she passed by, and that just isn’t right, and that’s why you’ve got your son in this awful state, the coffin will be open so the world can see and never forget his dishonour, Emmett’s mother said, and pilgrims came by the thousands, joining hands around his martyred body, what would Olivier have done at the open coffin of his son, surely he would have wept every tear in his body like Emmet’s mother, but Jermaine was alive, and by noon Olivier would be seeing his son slicing through the waves on his sailboard, fascinating because so different from his father, not an intellectual but a high-liver who rejoiced in physical existence and sought out the joy in life, while his father was more taciturn, his son with wide, slanted eyes under his dark glasses, the living Jerome was the image of his mother, Jermaine, so beloved, Samuel thought a time for life and for love would be time taken away from dance, he wouldn’t be just the disciple of Arnie Graal the master, one day he’d be the master and teach choreography himself, wouldn’t it have been better for Vincent to dance at day-camp on the mountainside or on a sunny beach than under the close watch of his doctors, he’d have learned to design costumes, he would have been supported by his strengths instead of just being considered too weak, he would have lived in a musical theatre, and Samuel would have helped him learn some basic steps, first tap-dancing, he would have done anything for Vincent to be cured of his cough and bouts of pain, Vincent would have been amazed to hear the metallic clink of tap-shoes, he’d have sung and danced, the forest air would no longer rasp at his lungs, and although Arnie’s choreography was admirable, it was exhausting for the dancers as they dropped one by one from high scaffolding into the void, turning over in a gradual but impressive slowness, arms and legs, then head, still more softly, a structural choreography that evoked admiring dread in the way the subject took hold of something in the dancer that became more real than reality when expressed in thunder and blood, Samuel pondered what had been left out, all those high-rise windows suggested by the choreography, glass should have been added to the labyrinths, every window suddenly as mobile as stained glass, with tableaux of characters in the last scene of the sacrificial jump, bustling, alone or in groups toward the jump that ended on cement in the streets, it needed the thousands of faces stuck to the glass and transparent plexiglass forever in an immutable expression of terror so that none could ever forget their imprint, the shroud of their features etched by fire and ash into the melting glass and gradually given a patina by the sun, the rain and the snow, those faces need to be there constantly, between frames of plaster, so the parents, spouses, and children of those caught so unexpectedly under beams and glass liquefied into fiery larvae can make heard to those ears and brows and cheeks in their bloody cut-outs the immense call of their choir, the diffuse lament of their prayers in every voice and language, for what words could say these words, and the wave, the narrative waves of all these faces, for they would have spoken if they could, and one could practically feel the trembling on their lips, the ravaging astonishment on their faces, the pressure from the impacts on their tear-glands, but most of all, they would forever be there in the joints of the glass-work, all those face hoping for deliverance and another life, as if each one were saying, remember, it’s me, your neighbour, brother, child, keep the vigil a long time, our faces like those of the saints, don’t forget us, but Arnie Graal had been annoyed at Samuel’s idea of memory ongoing into the dramatic present, what was one to think of all those who should have been there and all the glassed-in
hallways in the buildings, towers and skyscrapers, Arnie Graal’s entire people swallowed up into forgetful sleep, though some did not forget and had since rehabilitated by law what had once been a series of massacres against an entire race, so many swollen faces, hundreds of thousands, an incalculable number should have been there, Arnie said to Samuel, including the sacrificed perpetrators of the suicide mission, they too had been duped by their superiors and obsessed by the thought of all those faces, walls of icons, all incinerated, yet still breathing, like images painted onto ivory with eyes that would have cried, all those faces coming toward him while he walked the streets of New York and making his sleep a restless one, Samuel thought that only the art of dance could embody and communicate the amount of lamentation for which he had become the unwilling receiver, he who was born to happiness, this joy of living was part of him along with all those faces, bodies hoisted to windows amid the red-and-white flags or any other funereal drapery, their hands waved from the windows, he would have to live in their place from now on, dance for those who no longer could, and Mère said, as she lay her arm next to Nora’s, it’s going to be a calm day out on the water, I don’t feel the least bit like sleeping now, while you were walking alone lost in thought, I was thinking about my grandson Augustino, you know, he writes, like his father, he writes a lot, oh I really ought to remember more of what he wrote that upset me so much, what was it, I don’t remember, it’s silly, memory often plays tricks at my age, and what if it isn’t just that, she said, relieved that her words were masked by the sound of the waves and Nora didn’t seem to have heard her, absorbed in the flight of birds, and Nora said, during my years in boarding-school and those long months away from my parents, I had only one childhood wish that never came true, it’s hard to know why such simple wishes can’t come true, it was to have a bird sleep in my hand, we had monkeys, lion-cubs and snakes, so why not a little bird to sleep in my hand and go to around with me all day at school and everywhere, my brother and I felt so abandoned there, but I couldn’t have a little bird, a small thing to stroke, always gentle and soft and feathery and good-natured, yet much later on, when my son Hans said, Mama, I’d like to have a bird, at last my wish came true, and I bought him a cockatoo, we already had dogs and cats, and Hans became a Australian-parrot breeder, the house was soon full of them, is that what happens, after a long wait our wishes come true exaggeratedly, in an excess of abundance and joy, yet I still remember how desolate I felt when they refused to let me have a little bird to sleep in my hand and go to school with me, the easiest of pets was denied me because I was not being reasonable, they said, little girls couldn’t live in a convent or a boarding-school with birds, otherwise what would happen to the rules and order of the place? There was a place for everything, animal, vegetable and mineral, and we humans over them all, however imperfectly, the nuns asked me why I had to mix everything together, forgetting I was only five and my brother four, Mère was listening to her more attentively than Nora usually did in turn, awkward socially and too readily absorbed in her own thoughts, Nora was thinking she had brightened up the house with happy moments with the happy chattering of children and birds all day long, that was not the truth, she thought, because she had moved with her doll-house and animals so many times, like a nomad’s tent, from one country to another, depending on her husband’s diplomatic duties, getting used to new customs again, learning a new language, as though the childhood exile from Africa were constantly renewable, though it was also an opportunity for rebirth whose benefits and diversity she acknowledged, a cancerous growth had cast a shadow on her thirty-fifth year, coming through the treatment period, the upheaval in her family life when all at once the presence of Hans’ birds, the ones she had so longed for, weighed on her, when she had rebelled and told the doctor, I can’t die, my children are young, and they need me, we’ve got to stop this cancer from growing, and I’ll do it, serenely and hopefully exercizing her rights over her body, she had beaten cancer once, gathering her loved ones around her, children and birds, and ready to leave for Italy, Australia or Africa with Christiansen, saying she’d celebrate her cure with the birth of another child, conceived in Africa, fortified by Christiansen’s love, then suddenly Nora said to Mère, I met Christiansen in Europe you know, when we were medical students, though that wasn’t what we ended up doing, to Christiansen’s despair, he had to spend over a year in hospital after a motorcycle accident, and he had to give up medicine and competitive tennis, though he’d won several trophies at home, and I switched to painting, since medicine had been forced on me by my father, when I met him, I was afraid he was too good-looking for me, what a nasty turn of fate, not to deserve this man in any way, she fell silent, since Mère’s expression had suddenly turned irritated and preoccupied, that’s bad, very bad, she said, to feel inferior to your husband, my dear Nora, I’m speaking to you as a friend, you are wrong, think of the trials you have gone through with such courage, not only are you a very talented painter, but you speak several languages, a very gifted woman, Mère asserted, like my daughter Mélanie, and Bernard’s wife Valérie too, a very free-spirited writer, yet still they’re a close couple, just like you and Christiansen, these feelings of inferiority are really not good for a woman, Mère repeated, I don’t want you to feel that way anymore, my Nora, because you’ll end up believing them, yet still, if Esther was right about this, why was Nora feeling so dissatisfied with her work in Africa since her return, it’s because I wasn’t able to save anyone there, she said, not the kids with AIDS under perfusion and unable to eat, of course I recognized the bad results of blood-tests, my father had treated, operated on and cured lepers, but where I was, the population had been deliberately infected to wipe them out, a nurse even told me the Ugandan, Rwandan and other militias that occupied and robbed a large part of the country had been systematically made up of AIDS-carriers so the entire population would be infected, when a virus becomes a weapon of war, I guess you can expect a worldwide calamity, so how do we go about centralizing our aid and feeling useful, I wondered, here’s a criminally infected population which is helpless, my father never gave up on his patients, he was never put off the way I was, once I was confronted with misery, I never stopped feeling this disgust and nausea, eating the same food as them, cassava and cassava-leaves, I couldn’t get it down any more, I thought about the diapers waiting for me in Room 9, the flies on the baby bottles, honestly, Esther, my father would never have given way to disgust the way I did, where he surpassed me was in never letting himself get discouraged, just being effective and miraculous, but I couldn’t get myself to believe in these miracles, when I saw a doctor trying to find a vein to transfuse in a child who would be dead at any moment like a glimmer of light in a wind, all their lives went out like that, I was beyond disgust, I was dispirited, and although I’d once learned to speak Lingala like a native, I suddenly felt myself a complete beginner faced with pain, war is a poisonous energy, evil, hard to combat, and I didn’t know how much longer I could hold out with all these dying children around me, there again my father would have been more resolute, I put in twelve-to-thirteen-hour days, my father would never have stopped, he wouldn’t have slid under the netting and used perfume to blot out the nauseating odours of the day, he would have been uncompromising, though he still would have been just as furious as me at the priests and the growing number of churches, especially in their pernicious enthusiasm to convert a populace so impoverished and weak, I should have known on this temporary return to Africa I’d never be as strong as he was, when I got a chance to phone Christiansen and the children, which wasn’t often, I was in tears and telling them that Amos was gone, he was one I’d especially watched over, and so was little N’suzi, they were names and faces in my mind, suddenly no more; mine were warm and cared for, well-fed, and all they could say over and over (and how wrong they were) was, we told you so, Mama, don’t go, we knew you’d be unhappy, come back right away, Mama, I didn’t feel any better until I heard the voice of my dear Christiansen
saying, you did the right thing, you had to follow your heart and go, try and get some rest, you’ll feel better tomorrow, you know I’m with you, how did you celebrate Christmas, and I plucked up courage and said, yes, well, we gave out presents to the little ones, I was now friends with a thirteen-year-old boy called Jerome, even though his ex-parents had left him at the orphanage saying he had the evil eye, I told Christiansen that I still had some belief that I could be useful here, and I remembered as I spoke to him as though he were right there with me and so warm, that I remembered coming home from town the night before and seeing three funeral processions with drums amid the choking air as I passed by in the car, why this moment of faith, because after giving baths to the eight kids in Room 10, I had delayed for a few hours, or maybe even a few days and even months, who will ever know, the inevitability of all these deaths, feeding Joël a little milk or a little camomile through a small syringe every fifteen minutes, I had also bought some ointment for chapped skin and some soap at the pharmacy, and ironed the diapers that hadn’t dried because of the rain, I’d also laid in a supply of cookies, diluted milk and milk-powder, I also had to listen to the doctor tell me that as soon as the kids were better fed, they soon felt much better, I’d thought Joël wouldn’t make it through the night, though he wanted to live and went on to the bottle after the syringe, I didn’t tell Christiansen how afraid I was in the hospital at night when I heard starving wild dogs roaming around, and nothing about the insects either, I was all wrapped up in his voice as it said, good night now, good night, my love, you know we’re thinking of you, then Nora interrupted herself, saying, I know, Esther, I know it’s a sign of weakness to always seek approval and love, especially approval, Mère smiled back at her saying nothing, she felt all at once that Nora’s spirit had been inoculated with doubt so far back that it couldn’t be undone, if only Nora had more contact with women like Mélanie, perhaps solidarity would have stimulated her to suppress this doubt little by little, though her timidity or unsociability and her longing for domesticity when she was home and waiting for Christiansen, perhaps that held her away from others, if Mère had many more years to live, she would have made friends with Nora and advised her, and then who knows, besides, maybe she did have those years in front of her, but why speak of tomorrow when we know we only have today, and suddenly Mère found that today very palpable though frozen, as though she were standing in front of a painting, nothing moving around her, her brain the repository of entire images, an emerald-green sea out at the horizon, and blue-grey closer to the beach where she was standing, Nora’s profile set against the rose-pink of the sky, the straight-line legs of the birds, herons and gulls at daybreak, beach chairs piled on one another like pages in a book, and far off the quays, long jetties with the shadows of strolling people not moving, stopped with their bikes when the beauty of dawn stretched out as though there were no more morning or evening, Mère thought, was this the sign that that one’s spirit was pausing too, no, not yet, it was surely just an overflowing of delight, a life well-lived, though a life that passed like all others, hers or Nora’s, even Marie Curie who had also known doubt, or might it be Valérie getting up at dawn by herself to think about her books, alone with the ocean, the full extent of what she knew belonging to no one but herself for a few moments, not to the husband she admired, nor to her children, Christiansen had told Bernard the night before that women had been taking part in politics in his country for a long time, Valérie’s men, Bernard and his friend Christiansen, had spent a long time talking about luxury cars, plush Rolls-Royces, like little boys comparing toys, and avoiding what really played on their minds, knowing that the politics of men was the politics of disaster or at least came very close in its risky tensions, how sweet that lukewarm breeze, was this the hour of the world’s beginning, Mère thought, of course, how Christiansen and Bernard, two serious men, bragged about the construction of cars inherited from family members, well, these are the frivolities they chewed over, old-fashioned convertibles, coupés, sedans, bodywork and accessories, this flow of enthusiasm masking what they both felt at the edge of the abyss, what Valérie openly referred to as men’s politics of disaster, look at the times we’re living in, and they talk about cars, about durability and conserving them, male strength in their voices, making less audible Valérie’s voice, or at least what she wanted to say, after they’d gathered around Esther in Chuan’s garden during the night, both men knew that dust was their cars’ future, though straight out of a rich man’s mythology, one of them once so heavily commercialized, but now ageing so badly it had no value anymore, the other, Christiansen’s, sold years ago to pay for Hans’ studies in botany and zoology, so fascinated was the boy with animals ever since his mother gave him a gold-combed cockatoo, I suppose you’ll be a bit like a bird, Christiansen said, when his son finally decided to become a flight attendant, his inner wings always longing for the free flight of birds on high, who knows what dreams our children get from us in our wild imaginings, during the night Mère had thought, so now I’m an octogenarian, and who’s going to listen to me now, or will they just think, who is that charming old lady and when’s that know-it-all going to shut up, what was a life well-lived, however long it may be, and Caroline said, Miss Désirée, I’m sure it’s because I haven’t eaten and hardly drunk anything for days, but even during the little sleep I get, I have this nightmare, I am approaching a wooden bridge dangling over a narrow waterway, an obstacle I was afraid of but had to overcome, for I could hear my own heartbeat, even though I’m locked up here, then I see, or rather hear, a woman coming towards me, limping on the wooden floor of the bridge, thump-thump, towards me, hard sounds, it’s her, an invalid, coming slowly towards me, I knew that even if I yelled, you wouldn’t hear me asleep in your armchair after reading your psalms, can’t you hear her yourself, the sound of her leg as it drags along the boards of the bridge, can you hear her calling me, Miss Désirée, Harriett, can’t you hear me, Miss Désirée, Harriet, no, how could you, when there’s a sign between us, like in the old days, that says, only Whites allowed here, though my family rebelled against that vicious law, and my mother said to me, we’re against racial segregation, I hold out my arms to you on the other side of the gate, how dare you separate a child from her black nurse, how dare you, shouted my mother, I’m here with you, said Harriett, you must sleep, say with me, the Lord is my shepherd, and I shall fear no evil, repeat it with me, Harriett said, I can’t hear you Caroline, you and those prayers of yours, you wrote on the walls, where will you spend eternity, when the Whites used to laugh in the streets and on the sidewalks, only Whites allowed here, they’ve separated the two of us, yelled insults, is the hour that Whites call eternity, and the gazelles return as quickly as they left, the antelopes my husband and I shot in the desert, then cut off their arched horns and opened their snow-white bellies, who, who is it, the falconers have trained their birds of prey against me, but I don’t know where to run, Harriett, Miss Désirée, will they feast on me, and I remember that bullfight I filmed in Lima, are there three horses I harness and ten men waiting for me with the clean-up crew to remove my beaten body from the arena like a bull turned over on its side while the crowd exults, they snatched the box, the case with the ashes from my hands, and Adrien still whispers in my ear, we know how much you loved him, come on, the boat will take you into port, come now, and on board the boat I saw the young man I had photographed in the night before his suicide, he was standing, and he too said, with graceful, welcoming gestures, you know they talk a lot about it, but there’s almost nothing to it, here, do you recognize that music the Academy of Music played in the ruins, Così Fan Tutte, Così Fan Tutte, the dark mourning over all Europe, Così Fan Tutte, but dear, why are you wearing black, you hate black, Jean-Mathieu tells me, I do hear him though I can’t see him, come dear friend, he says, we have so much to tell one another, why such silence between us, is it Charly, violent and jealous, is it her drugging you by degrees, a little more each day and each night, is she the c
ause of so much unhappiness, Charly, I told you to beware of whatever seemed new or fresh, didn’t I, Caroline my dear, for when the falconers send their birds of prey after us, what can we do, what? Oh really now, what’s all this fuss about, said Miss Désirée, Harriett, I’m here, how can I make you feel better, not by taking me in your arms like Frédéric with his Black Madonna after his fall by the pool, said Caroline, oh no, Harriett, do you hear the bell, should I change for dinner, Adrien, Suzanne, Bernard, Valérie and the others must be here already, how thoughtless, Harriett, what a mess the house is in, Charly’s been out all night, you see, do you think you could wash my dress and my hair, what an untidy mess when Charly’s out all night with that uncouth bunch of boys and girls, she’s so young I can’t forbid everything, has she fed the cat and the dog, that’s a bad habit she has going out at night, but I can’t stop her, and Chuan went into the cabin her husband was writing in, too bad he’d missed so much of the party, she thought it was a great success and was smiling with joy in the red dress, which was by now a bit wrinkled from going to-and-fro the kitchen and dancing with her friends and towards the end, with Jermaine, whose love she shared of music that was not passive, jarring and unnerving maybe, that was his way of expressing himself, she looped a strand of very short, dark hair behind her ear, was this a little bold and intrusive to surprize him like this, or just affectionate, if she didn’t, he’d get into one of his dark moods, write all day and be rude to his guests, except for Mélanie, who had he talked to, really, it would be impolite not to say goodbye to them all, at least to shake a few hands, her feet were cramped in these patent-leather shoes, perhaps they were too tight and low-heeled, and she was going to say to her husband, as she placed her diminutive hands on his thoughtful head, come on, we have to get out of here, have you forgotten that this morning’s the flotilla, there will be yachts, schooners, all kinds of sailboats from far off, more than a thousand, she’d say to him, your friends are on the beach already, and you’re shut up here in your office, Esther told me how delighted she was, the party was a great success, what more could anyone want, except maybe for these shoes slung too low, by noon Jermaine would be on his surfboard, his vacation from university would soon be over, then how long would it be before she saw him again, would they always be close, not like Christainsen and Nora’s son, always in flight, she’d have been very apprehensive to see Jerome go off like that, does our child need to love books the way his father does, is it even that important, her husband even declined to read his friends’ novels, she’d have to point out to him it seemed rude, honestly, you’ve got to read the novels your friends write, the poets too, we’ve got quite few among our friends, what are you going to talk about when you meet them and haven’t read their work, he’d scowl back, only history interests me, what we’ve been and what we are, that’s concrete and irrefutable, the very life we’re made of, this whiff of lemon under the trees, a splendid party, Esther had said, modestly adding, I really don’t think I deserve all this when you consider the world as it is, my dear Chuan, oh why think about it all the time, came the answer as Chuan cast a limpid eye on Mère, as long as you’re alive, it’s only today that matters, these night even, as far as I’m concerned, Esther, there is you, that’s all, you and the friends I want to see around you, and if I thought any differently, I suppose I’d already be with the things that are laid waste, and that’s not what I want, no, absolutely not, come dance with me, do you think I’m not too stiff for that, Mère asked, I won’t let you have time to hesitate, Chuan said, see, here we go you and I, and Mère had danced with Chuan’s son holding her by the shoulders, so they all laughed, Chuan, Esther and Jermaine, all three dancing together, definitely a wonderful party, Esther said, and Chuan, despite being tired but also a little tipsy, smiled with joy, perhaps it was the smell of the acacias, the African lilies, the lemon-trees, and all that wonderful champagne they had drunk, though she’d forgotten to eat some of the wonderful things at the banquet, so busy she’d been with her guests that night that she hadn’t noticed the time go by, and she’d danced so much, shaking, eyes closed when she danced alone, closed to fleeting electrical sensations, though she enjoyed their density, as though dancing had inflamed every one of her senses, leaving no room for stiffness or for rest, Chuan simply had too much to do for that, a demanding husband, a bit tyrannical and demanding, she thought, her career as a designer, of course, he wouldn’t mind her visiting him in the cabin, well perhaps just a little, he’d be morose at first, but almost tender afterwards, she’d place her hands on his head, and he’d say, you know, Jermaine has larger, stronger hands than mine, but you’ve got hands like a little girl, where does he get them from, that smell of acacias was what made Chuan feel so good, just a little tipsy perhaps, very little, but as Mère had said, the party was a huge success, a triumph, they did say that Chuan could pull anything off, Mai felt she’d wet her pyjamas again, not having woken up at cock-crow as she often did, in daylight everything shows, her nanny would say as she took her to the bathroom to strip, in daylight everything shows, Marie-Sylvie de la Toussaint would say, where’s Mama, thought Mai, of course it’s always me that has to clean up and fix things, Marie-Sylvie would say as she pushed Mai toward the bathtub, this can’t go on, no, it can’t, are you still a baby, Mai, the boy with the hat came into my room and I got afraid, Mai would say, what boy with a hat, oh no, this is not going to go on, I’ll have to tell your mother, this time I will, it’s got to stop, I’m going to have to wash your behind and your back, you ought to be ashamed, Marie-Sylvie would say, what would happen if I weren’t there, and Mai whimpered with sadness and shame, the boy with the hat came into my bed, she’d say, the soap and the blue foam mixing with her tears in the bathtub under Marie-Sylvie’s rough hand, clean but dressed in shame, Mai would say through her tears, he got into my bed and wanted to sit on me as he always does, but because he was heavy . . . stop lying, Marie-Sylvie would cut her off, you have to look good for your parents, this time I won’t tell them, don’t you ever do it again, I told you, when you hear the cock crowing, you need to get up right away, Mama, where is she, when all at once Marie Sylvie asked, it isn’t true is it, this story about a boy with a hat, it’s just one of your fantasies, isn’t it, she couldn’t dismiss the fear that her crazed brother had come back again, He-who-never-sleeps and his Mexican sombrero, tell the truth, you’re making it up, aren’t you, she would say, shaking Mai hard with her bony hands, but get no answer, nothing from Mai, too bad she wasn’t a boy like Augustino, she’d have beaten adults, especially this nanny Marie-Sylvie who didn’t even like her, thrown her out, put her back in her boat out onto the ocean, right to the bottom, for Mai recalled what her father had said, you must share, share Marie-Sylvie with Vincent, but I don’t want to, I don’t want anything chopped up, I want it all, she’d sighed, not to share my fruit ice-cream with Emilio, though he was so brown and so cute when they played on the beach together, that was a few years ago when they were both only three, the Cuban Emilio and his father, athletic and brown himself, with a sudden white flash of teeth, like Emilio himself and like a mystery solved on both their faces, Emilio, pensive and looking for seashells while his father played volleyball, the most agile of the six players reaching for the ball over the net, Emilio’s father and Emilio, Mai said, he’s the one, he’s my father, will you play with me, the best volleyball player in Cuba, and your father plays volleyball too, right, no, I don’t want to play with you, Mai had answered Emilio, ashamed all at once of her father as the man on the restaurant terrace in white shorts, looking distinguished and writing outside in a notebook or on a sheet of paper, everywhere, as though seeing him write all day around the house were not enough, or going off on some solitary retreat in Europe, saying, I’m off to write, as though it were not already unbearable for Mai to be forbidden to touch his papers or his computer, even when he took Mai to the seaside, he skipped away to do some writing, forever writing, then suddenly her father’s voice would ring out, come on over here
, I’ve got ice cream, both of you come on, and Mai had thought, why not two ice creams, because there’s Emilio and me, two ice creams, but Papa had said just one, and when it was time to have some fruit-flavoured ice cream, Papa had said, here are two spoons, but there’s only one ice cream, Mai had complained, two spoons and one ice cream, I want mine all to myself, Papa, and he had said, that’s so you share, that’s why there’s only one, understand, Mai, you have to share, that’s the very first lesson in life, by which time Emilio had swallowed the whole thing himself so fast it hurt him and he made a face, I said share, her father had said again, I hate that word, she said, look Papa, Emilio’s eaten it all, and Emilio, recovering his breath, said, I can eat it all by myself because my father’s the best volleyball player in Cuba, I don’t like that word share, Mai told her father, although she had long ago pardoned Emilio when she saw him on the beach with his father, he’s the one she’d have liked to lick all over like an ice cream, him and his salt-water-and-sand smell, his brown torso, almost naked, while Mai had to put on a dress for dinner, she’d have liked to be encrusted under the salt on his skin, winnow through the envelope of his muscles in the sunlight, hold between her fingers the shells he took home in the evening when the sun sank on the sea, or was it home, when night fell on the net and on the players, and the swings stopped in the children’s park on the other side of the street where the cars still went by in a cloud of sand, or was it home, sharing Emilio, dividing him up, no he was hers, all hers alone, she told her father, my Emilio, just mine, well, he won’t be if you don’t stop biting his ears, her father told her, be kind to him, you have to share him with others, what others, Mai asked, Emilio’s all for me, that word, share, when she thought about it, was really awful, Papa said it often, in fact that’s all he seemed to say, maybe, though, Marie-Sylvie would be easier-going and say to Mai playfully the way she talked to Vincent, don’t worry about it, these things happen, don’t think about it anymore, it was going to be a fine day, and Mai could go to the beach and play with Emilio, both of them wearing trunks so the sun would burn her chest, and the pyjama would end up in the laundry, and Marie-Sylvie would talk to her the way she would to Vincent, don’t think about it anymore, I won’t tell your mother, go play now, your father’s waiting in the car to take you to the ocean and see Emilio, no, Chuan thought she wouldn’t want her son always up there in those planes like Nora’s son, nor have him learn to fly like those young people flying a light plane with only a few seats along the Connecticut coastline in the thickening fog, then suddenly losing control and crashing into the sea, the precious human cargo scattered over the water, whether princes or children adulated in glory, each one suddenly the poorest of all, drowned and without fortune or baggage, whose fresh flesh was suddenly corruptible and reduced to tatters by sharks, good thing Jermaine was the practical type, feet on the ground, Chuan thought, when you realize how quickly disaster can strike in our lives, whatever it might be, no telling, before Chuan had been born, how many mothers, parents, lovers like her and Olivier, had waited for their daughters and sons to come home from school in Hiroshima, wondering, will he come back alive in this August heat like an oven, when a black fog rose to the heavens with bodies awash, will Jermaine come back alive, but imagining those horrors from before Chuan was born was to slip over to the side of desolation, never to know calm again, never be peaceful or pacified, Chuan claimed for herself and for all victims of that August day in what was once her country, Japan, peace, pacification for herself or for Olivier, no, she thought, it was for Jermaine, anything for the present in this life, Jermaine, the only line of pacification amid the extent of desolation, if one dared to look, but Chuan did not dare anymore, simply rejoicing in the success of that night’s celebration, Chuan in her red dress was smiling in satisfaction and joy, now all that remained was to hope Olivier was in a pleasant mood, not uneasy or anxious, that arrangement of green apples in a crystal vase would certainly please him, she’d also decorate his office with orchids, when she told him, Olivier, maybe it would be a good idea to join our friends on the beach, it will soon be time for the flotilla to sail past, yes, it would be spectacular, haven’t you worked too much all night as it is, you know it was a big success, this party for Esther’s eightieth birthday, really, and he would grumble in a neutral voice, being elsewhere, oh yes, it was fine, just fine, and Chuan would be a bit disappointed but say nothing, putting everything into the pretty arrangement of green apples and orchids she would use to brighten up her husband’s office, and on the quay, the silhouettes of people out strolling and cyclists barely seemed to move when seen from afar, from where Mère and Nora walked side-by-side on the beach, these silhouettes in the distilled light of dawn on the water seemed almost motionless, I’m not the man you want, Timo was saying to Petites Cendres, I use, but mostly to make the customers feel good, rich folks are into that, you’d be better off going to Bogotà, you’re not going to survive Bahama Street, besides you’re so badly got-up with that corset over your jeans, it’s really ugly, I told you before, Ashley, appearance is everything for customers, it’s my top, Petites Cendres said, you know I can never quit Bahama Street, no choice, Petites Cendres thought, in an hour I’ve got a date with the old sadist, and he’ll say, be a dog, lie down in front of me, and I’ll hit you a few times, I love seeing your stinking kind suffer, you’ll do anything for a little stuff, won’t you, a brutal, low-down kind of guy he is, and Timo was smoking with the cigarette dangling between his lips, you look like a banker, Petites Cendres said sadly, I’m just the way the Lord made me, even if the street-girls laugh at me at night, high-heel divas, he said, I know you don’t hang out with them, especially for the flotilla, they’re going to get themselves up as pink flamingos and swans, Timo said with a note of disdain, my going with men too is just coincidental, and I don’t choose just anyone, right, Petites Cendres said, I saw Reverend Ézéchielle in her church, and she said, pray little man and you’ll be saved, I heard her singing voice say, I bear you in my heart’s faith, if you are downtrodden and nobody’s son, think of Ézéchielle, the pastor of your church who bears the unfortunate that you are in her heart’s faith, take the hands of the people to the right and the left of you, for in my church, all are equal, and we sang hymns, Ézéchielle said, blessed be you, can you not hear the sound of trumpets in the sky or the voice of angels, for I’ve come to this church to tell you about the land of blessings from which all suffering is banished, and she held me to her huge bosom, Petites Cendres said, and she exclaimed, blessed are those like you, Petites Cendres, the forgotten of the world, for you will see God before I do, for I, Reverend Ézéchielle may have the sin of pride in me as I go everywhere preaching, and your heart may be humbler than mine, for every day you are in the mire, and I am honoured as the pastor of the church you come to, whoever you may be, blessed be you, Petites Cendres, you, rejected of men, how can you believe that crap, said Timo, condescending, religion’s a fraud, that’s what I’ve always thought, every Sunday I go to the temple at the Cité du Corail, and I pray, and dance with the Reverend Ézéchielle, that’s how they put the miserable people to sleep, Timo said, you’d better go meet your client at the hotel, I am expecting someone, another pusher, no one shoud see us together, better get going Petites Cendres, Timo said with his cigarette between his lips, I don’t want to play doggy for that filthy creature, thought Petites Cendres, I don’t want him to order me, let me mount you like a horse, nigger, I picked you up in that hotel once, and you were going around the hallways with a trolley of soiled sheets, I said come in here to my room for a minute, take those sheets off my bed, and I practically grabbed you by the throat to kiss you, pathetic, they only let you do the lowest jobs in that hotel, hierarchically inferior, as they say, you and the other negroes, I told you, give up on dignity, and I’ll give you all the money you want, you obeyed, because you knew I was stronger, then said that thing that earned you a slap, I think all the men who put up flaming crosses in front of black houses and the huts the
y live in the South, where I come from, haven’t been put in jail, like you, the Ku Klux Klansmen are still out there free, yeah, you’re still free with your torches and your guns, I give up, I’m through, but one day you’ll get your punishment, you had the nerve to talk to me that way, Ashley, Petites Cendres, and I told you you’ll regret it, I can make you spit blood if I want, you despise me, well watch out, I could make a sacrifice out of you and leave you in a garbage bag, your life means nothing to me, I can fix you good, so you’d better give up, I don’t want to see this guy who humiliates me, Petites Cendres thought, it’ll be pathetic, I know, and suddenly Petites Cendres felt better thinking of the round-cheeked boy, a vision of paradise, he held onto his dignity, even between two policemen, yellow cap on his head, upright, hiding the handcuffs under his cotton shirt, proud and dignified, and he’d been freed so quickly he was already in the arms of another lover, leaving for New York, or about to this morning, he was the immersion of love and had smiled at Petites Cendres as if to say, patience my friend, I’ll be back, patience, I’m thinking of you, a vision of paradise in this pale light of day on the ocean, thinking about him, Petites Cendres marvelled, Timo said, I told you, leave me alone, that’s how it was, Timo slapped him on the back, there was nothing left but for Petites Cendres to go back to the hotel and the man who was waiting for him, dragging his sandalled feet to the moorish-styled hotel amid coconut-trees and palms, he knew all about the basements under that imposing façade, for a long time his shadow had inhabited those subterranean places among the sheets and bed linens, transporting them from one floor to another in heavy, grey canvas bags on trolleys, that’s how he had met the perverted stranger, he thought, and started losing his soul, because that’s what happened when you were a slave to a master and his perversions, still sometimes he had no choice, he thought, he’d probably die without his powder in the morning, and I also had this dream, said Caroline, standing on a rock out in the ocean, I saw Charly set fire with her cigarillo to the letter I had given her for Jean-Mathieu before he left for Italy, though it was a dream, it was very detailed and fantastic, so exact I’d have thought it was true, I could smell the smoke from the cigarillo as it burned the paper and those words where I told Jean-Mathieu, I beg you, my friend, come back and see me, I admitted my feelings for him, it was all there, stopped by flames, and I even felt myself burning, I too was damaged and altered by fire, it was torture, is it possible this crime really was committed against Jean-Mathieu and me, that Charly was actually insane enough to burn that letter I gave her for him, in my dream, I asked her, and she answered insolently, I had no choice, it was Jean-Mathieu or me, what’s done is done, and then yesterday in the mail you placed on my table, there was a letter from Cyril, saying, if Charles has decided to go back to Frédéric, it’s because of you, your friends and you are the cause of our break-up, you think you had a right to interfere and split us apart, what can you know of our relationship in your little circle of snobs looking down their noses at what isn’t theirs, what Charles was escaping from with me, Charles, whose extreme sensitivity you know well, would have loved to have your approval, but we didn’t get that, did we, because to you I was unworthy of him and his genius and his aristocratic air, I was nothing but an actor, maybe even a mediocre one, because you never saw me act in the theatre, did you, as I read this letter, I felt flung to earth, the earth of conflicts in words where no one is ever right or wrong, Cyril, the young man in anger, was confusing me with one of my friends, maybe Adrien, who had hurt him with some ill-advised remark, for Adrien had said to Charles, you’ll stop writing with this boy around, do you even know who he is, do be careful my dear Charles, but I did know who Cyril was and had actually seen him act in a theatre where he was both actor and director, but it’s as though for a long time I hesitated to see him as vulnerable as myself since he’d fallen in love with Charles, I blamed myself for having let Charly make me vulnerable too, it was time, old age that played against me unfairly, I told myself, how could this ardent young man, arrogant and awkward, have felt his dignity hurt? Nevertheless it was true, he was persecuted within that famous circle of friends who subtly, almost imperceptibly, held him at arm’s length, but Cyril quickly felt brushed aside, maybe I was the only one to invite both Charles and Cyril to my villa, a new couple, misunderstood and about to feel personally devastated like me, no one tried the way I did to love them, but I couldn’t figure out how, everything I did seemed awkward because I was thinking about Frédéric at the same time, and I had to be loyal to him, so Cyril and I got into the muck of word-conflict, odd places, often on comfortless theatre sets, he’d produced Phaedra, a street version done as a musical with the songs played and sung by marginal people like bikers emerging from dark alleys and subway stations, that was how the handsome and rustic Cyril saw it, as if to say, that leather-clad Hyppolitus is me, this is what I am, none of this vulgarity works for me, Adrien announced, and other critics joined in, no doubt crushing the young man and putting him into such anger that Charles could do nothing to reason with him, what Cyril accused me of was really the fact that Adrien was my friend, a false friend of Charles, so none of us in our brilliant bourgeois circle had understood a thing about their fiery union, Cyril wrote me, we were self-involved narcissists: Adrien and Suzanne, basking in outdated glory, Jean-Mathieu and me, just as complacent and stuck in the past, I cried when I read Cyril’s letter in words that this leather-armoured Hyppolitus used without nuance to slice me up, country boy, no, alright, he was not a country boy nor crude the way the others saw him, he was like me, vulnerable and torn, when Charles left him it was in pieces, he was life’s fresh beginning, so he got carried away with telling us who were at our end, of course, that was it, the end, and as Charles would say, he alone was right, being young, that’s what we all refused to admit in our jealous fears. You touch on taboo subjects, Adrien said to Daniel as they walked along the beach, Suzanne strolling along behind them and humming to herself as though remote from the weightiness of their intellectual debates, oh how this splendid dawn air gives me a lust for life, she seemed to murmur as she hummed and freed her hair from its turban, I mean the will to live a long life, very long, don’t pay any attention to my wife, Adrien said at once, she denies the existence of death, these subjects are what are sometimes so unpleasant in your book Strange Years, he went on imperturbably, you know what I mean, when you write at length about what you call scatalogical art, or what nowadays you might better call scatophilia, but that’s what it is, said Daniel, sensing the breath and embarrassment in Adrien’s voice so close to him, it’s a form of commercial art, I talk only about what I see, Adrien went on, I confess it disturbs me, these words and images you come up with, wishing Daniel would walk a little faster and keep up, is it really necessary to write down absolutely everything you see and feel, like for example, the story of that young English artist you met in the Spanish monastery and who does performance art with his stomach rumblings, a whole show made up of sounds from the gasses in his digestive tube, is it really appropriate for this artist, if he deserves to be called that, to make a living from the exploits of stomach and intestines, to be invited to play in different countries, do you really feel the need to write down every manifestation of what you call scatalogical art, you say yourself it is everywhere, but what I don’t understand is that you don’t condemn these aberrations, instead you describe these manifestations in minute detail, but they’re constantly there in our faces, Daniel said, thinking of the lofty verse written by the older man, indeed what a contrast it was, the English student’s stomach noises, all the gurgling in his guts, of course it was normal for Adrien to be disturbed, even shocked, Daniel thought, but still more scatalogical was the page in a circular that defined the couple, man and woman, by their proximity in the bathroom: he, not visible, to the left, but represented by the raised toilet seat against a backdrop of clean tiles, some big, brown, unlaced boots beneath the bowl; she represented by a bowl with the toilet seat down, prettied up with a c
rushed and faded bouquet of roses, and open wardrobes with an array of shoes and accessories, and thus lived man and woman side by side, with their intimacy exposed for all to see, well, I don’t want to know anything about all that, Adrien said, I’d rather hear about Rembrandt and his water colours, you do that too in your books, and let man and woman be as they are, Adrien suddenly felt himself getting tangled up in words, no longer knowing just how to explain what he felt so vividly, not bathroom creatures and primary objects, that’s not what men and women are, but something sacred and indestructible, there you have it, he went on, the man-woman couple cannot be compared to any other thing, but just then, Suzanne caught up and started smiling, what are you going on to Daniel about, my dear, she asked, what do you want to educate him about this time, the truth of course, said Adrien, just the truth, here in this town we have all kinds of multi-formed couples and marriages, you know how tolerant I am about that, even our friends and loved ones, but the solemn couple made up of a man and a woman, the celebration of their union in marriage, surely that’s the strongest relationship, the most unshakeable, the most naturally convincing union, he said, but Suzanne could not help laughing provocatively at her husband’s emphatic speech, at that instant it seemed unforgivable that they had so rarely seen or invited Charles and Cyril to their house, such an exceptional couple they seemed, despite the fact that Charles was still unalterably attached to Frédéric, just as she had been for years to Adrien, she was thinking she’d have liked to have a lover like Cyril, still with Adrien there, perhaps she was just tired of Adrien’s moralizing about love, twenty years earlier, before they were married, he’d said the contrary, hadn’t he, he’d proclaimed the freedom of their living together, allying himself with all those marginalized couples, maybe, she thought, love was as sudden in its inspiration as poetry, a state of heightened consciousness one should not fight against, besides, how could Charles have refused the combined inspiration and fecundity that was Cyril, that of the poet and his friends reviving inextinguishable flames, the same way that thirst is inextinguishable, living on infertile soil was the anomaly, not thirsting after an intelligent and gifted creature like Cyril who fixed you with his azure gaze, still an anarchist and an incendiary thing, Adrien added, look at the ravaged life of poor Frédéric, and look at what Cyril does on the stage, having Phaedra played with insidious ambiguity by a man, a Phaedra dressed as a soldier is who we see, man or woman, well, there’s no doubt about it, I translated Euripides myself, and Phaedra is the daughter of Minos and wife to Theseus, it bothers me a lot to see an actor just fool around with it out of pure vanity, wanting nothing so much as to draw attention to himself by provoking people, Suzanne thought it was abominable not to give in to the thirst to hug Cyril and travel by his side, so much more so because he could recite bits of Charles’ work from memory, to refuse his presence, indeed, why was it they had never invited Charles and Cyril to their home, what sign of mistrust was it on Adrien’s part, Suzanne herself had often invited Cyril to breakfast with her on her terrace by the sea, but remembered now that he had politely declined, surely because of Adrien and his review in a town newspaper, it really is inadmissible, she suddenly said to Adrien, that we’ve never invited Cyril and Charles here this summer, but, my dear, he said, we hardly get to see them, they’re always on the go, I worry about Charles’ health with all those trips, he’s not a young man like Cyril any more, it was as though Charles had forgotten all about how delicate his health was when he and Cyril had left for India, Suzanne said again, it was a mistake, an irreparable one not to have them here, who knows what will happen next, or when we’ll see them, oh come on, Adrien said, nothing’s that irreparable, they’ll be back soon, and Charles will be just as head-over-heels about that boy he hardly knows, unlike us, whom he’s known since his youth, but Adrien’s mind had already moved on from Charles and the couple he formed with Cyril that had so haunted him, and was observing Daniel and wondering why the writer let himself look so rundown, still polite, Daniel had rolled up his jeans and the sleeves of his shirt open to a vigorous torso, Adrien saw his coal-black eyes shining beneath the blue-grey glasses reflecting the colour of the sea, neither a smug nor a pretentious writer, he was just disarmingly natural, but managed to irritate or annoy Adrien without knowing why, surely it wasn’t Daniel himself that got to him, serenely striding along the shoreline, but his book Strange Years that rubbed against Adrien’s self-esteem, I feel somehow annoyed when I read you, Adrien said, pulling his hat down to his nose to block out the sun, although there wasn’t much this early at daybreak, one gets lost in your maze like the twists and turns of medieval churches, there seems to be no way out, you skip from one subject to another till we don’t know where we are, in these meandering constructs and interwoven paths it is all there, but we don’t know why, music by the Viennese Alban Berg, paintings by the Frenchman Georges Seurat, and the anxiety of time arrested and slowly dissolving into a reddish mist in Un dimanche à la Grande Jatte, that same dissolution of time we are sensing this morning, all of us soon to be together here by the sea, dawn or morning, time already seems to be ahead of us, we appear and disappear like oil stains on a canvas, that’s what you write, isn’t this the inspiration of Charles and that corrosive salt of his, the salt of dissolution and disappearance, or of that thinking I detect behind Seurat’s painting, quite ironic, as though a walk on the beach or a picnic were a prelude to a one-way trip to eternity, and all of a sudden you inundate us with your legal and political ideas, as if we hadn’t thought about all that already, Kandinsky’s painting, you talk about that too, first you confess to your fears that there are dictators who are barely getting started, just gearing up before making torture constitutional, an allowable necessity, and in the end there is nothing you don’t get us to believe, of course, sometimes you’re right, unfortunately it’s certainly true that for more than four thousand years men have been executed in Iran because of their sexual orientation, people are killed every day for the misdemeanour of being different, what sort of world are we living in, he sighed finally, but don’t go writing that all this might happen here, in our society, Daniel’s musical ringtone went off, and Adrien turned to Suzanne, as though she had saved him from the meanders and mazes in Daniel’s book, and feeling tender that she was still close and listening to him, he took her hand, and mopped the sweat beading on his brow with his handkerchief, how hot it is, dear, he said, and Daniel heard Vincent’s thin voice saying, Papa, come and get me, when am I going to see you, Papa, remember that Sunday on the sailboat when the sky turned black and I had this violent, hacking cough, you saved me just in time, Papa, you carried me to the hospital in your arms, you’re a hero for saving your son just in time, one second more, and it took so long to tie up the boat, and you kept saying, breathe, son, don’t stop, we’ll soon be at the hospital, one second more, and in that second I knew you were the hero to save me, it was a very long second, because tying up the boat in the rolling waves wasn’t easy, you said, above all Vincent, don’t stop breathing, you must know, Daniel said, what saved you son was the oxygen tank the doctor handed me, not me myself, it was life he had in his hands, Daniel was unhappy that his son’s voice was practically a whimper, Papa, where are you, where are Mama and Marie-Sylvie, when am I going to see them and Samuel’s boat Southern Light, Will in the wheelchair is happy because we got a visit from some actors, there’s even a kid on a gurney because he had a bad attack during the night, really bad, like me on the boat, when you saved me, Papa, they say it’s an independent theatre company with actors from all over who’ve come to entertain the kids who are sick, but I’m feeling better, Papa, I don’t want to stay here anymore, it’s fun when we play-act, or sing and dance, and I was OK enough to dance with a black musician wearing necklaces of all sorts of colours that tinkled in my ears, I felt for sure I was cured, Papa, will you come all the way to the mountains in Vermont to get me, Papa, with this homesick refrain, his voice went out like a little silver bell to his father and Marie-
Sylvie, Papa, Southern Light, had the phone actually rung, had Daniel really heard the voice of his son, were the waves already drowning out Vincent’s hesitant voice, his contained tears and his cough, it must be unthinkably hard to hear that your twenty-year-old daughter or son or both at once had been killed in the front of their armoured Hummer, a sheet over their remains, to hear it from a suspicious voice no parent wants to hear, in a murderous month with treacherous combat, to hear from this suspicious voice that you will never see them again, son or daughter, they had enrolled, and you couldn’t stop them, in other times they had done it to pay for university, they’d fight forest fires, then suddenly safe, or so they thought, in their armoured Hummer, enrolled to fall in combat, killed in an ambush, what would Daniel have done if this shadowy voice had said, we regret to inform you that Vincent, the weaker one, and Samuel, we regret to inform you that your children, peacekeepers in the front of their armoured Hummer, have succumbed to their injuries, they left their unified families, Daniel thought, a world of model students, of playing in the schoolyard with their blonde Labrador, hoping one day to go to university, often poor or sons of workers, just kids, they left for the horror, stiff in the uniforms they would be buried in tomorrow, experienced in their warlike tasks, serving without knowing who, and dying without knowing why, just sensing in their fragile limbs, at the back of the neck, in the front of their armoured Hummer, that they were falling under enemy fire with no crowd to attend to them, a mother and father in a stupor, maybe a twin sister to survive them, suddenly deprived of identity with the other, as though having lost the use of an arm or leg, they would say she was the hundredth or two-hundredth to die, never this many girls since World War Two, never, fifteen-year-olds, sixteen-year-olds, twins, still close, flirting and wild, then suddenly the laughs shared with the brother or sister were gone, so was the flirting, so was the drinking, one wrote to her father, Dad, it’ll soon be nightfall on the Tigris, forget about the fun and games when I was fifteen and wanted to go out with a different boy every night, I’m afraid, dear Dad, but I have an ideal, and it tells me there are things worth dying for, if I were to have an accident on patrol, remember these words I’m e-mailing you, I’ll write tomorrow, now I can hear the crackle of firearms nearby, you have to expect, Dad, that all convoys will be attacked, though not every night or day, don’t forget I’m going to register at university, that too is my ideal, more than any other, and as you often say, a family with lots of kids has no other choice, I’m not a soldier, I’m a peacekeeper, tell my twin sis I miss her a lot, I’ve never lived without her, even if we are always fighting, I miss sleeping in the same room with her at night, I want us both to register at the University of Madison, Julie wrote that she wanted to come out here with me, that we’d be safe together behind the lines, tell Julie, my dear twin sis, please, don’t come out here, it’s no place for you, there’s too much burning near this post right now, too many suicide-bombs, I’m sending you a picture, Julie, the person you saw on TV targeted and shot on duty wasn’t me, more gunfire, I’ve got to go now, dear family, till I see you on Easter furlough, what could a mother or father think re-reading these words, knowing now that the Easter visit had never happened, that they would never see their kids again, did it all have to replay over and over like the shootings of the cousins in Poland in 1942, when Great-uncle Samuel, for whom Samuel was named, died in the village of Lukow, Lublin, did it have to replay like that with a girl falling far from her sister in her armoured Hummer under enemy fire, and why was there always to be fire and enemies, with the young guard, her unwilling surrender and death, the rabbis prostrated themselves over and over, and near them, Great-uncle Samuel with bullets in him, if death gave way to life, why continue firing ceaselessly until the very seed is gone, thought Daniel, the root that still held firmly to the earth when tenacious life could not be put an end to, Suzanne thought she’d write to her daughters tonight, and she’d do it behind the Chinese screen so Adrien would not see her from his workroom and ask her, as he often did, for advice on one of his translations, dear girls, she’d write, your parents are in top health, and my hip fracture’s no longer causing me problems, so we go to the tennis court every day, but I often think of Jean-Mathieu and Caroline, I love life and your father too much to . . . no, she’d write this instead, do you remember that letter I wrote you to tell you about my decision, or was it our decision, I don’t remember, because I never really got to discuss it clearly with your father, well, anyway, today I’ll tell you my decision, do you recall that the freely chosen end of a beautiful and enlightened life is not suicide? Daleth, a door open onto a shining sea in Hebrew, is a word that opens up to light, even if it sounds sombre and final, it isn’t, believe me, and the drawing of a white lotus on this letter represents Chinese Buddhism, still Suzanne had only just said to Adrien and Daniel in a radiant burst of sincerity a few moments ago, what a splendid dawning this was, how it gives you a taste for life, long, very long life, and her friends had rejoiced in her good humour, which seemed stable and constant in her, well, not quite yet, one of her daughters was in England, the other in Germany, and the son, still a bit lost and dreamy, with no profession — and this caused his father to despair — no, Suzanne just could not inflict this solution on them all, even though she’d planned on it, this was not the time to write to them when they were scattered far and wide, and her journalist daughters were doing so well, no, this isn’t the day or time she would choose, because, because, ah the birds were singing, and her husband was looking at her tenderly, yes, I must say again, what a dawn, what a splendid day, but we ought to get a nap before going out for tennis, Adrien, seeming to note the unusual intonation in her voice, repeated it too, yes splendid, and another among many, that’s what’s amazing, he exclaimed, suddenly relaxed by the sea air, all of a sudden, when you think about it, isn’t every instant miraculous, though he did regret not being at his worktable and leaning over his dictionaries the past few hours, each of these children, Nora told Mère, for however brief an appearance they made in my life, was like a little sun, perhaps no ray or light from within their heads, sometimes no real brain function, like Thérèse, age four, who couldn’t walk or talk for several months, making us think she was autistic, but she wasn’t, she started to sing when you rocked her a little, one night we were sitting together, the nurses and I, with babies on our laps near the door to catch some badly needed air, when we heard her sing, there were lots of patients everywhere, on straw mats, on the floor, we had so little space, but we all heard her singing like a stream in the night, at that instant, as she sang, it’s strange that I did not have more faith in myself, in that minimal effort that was not futile in the face of the desperate fate of what once was my country, I knew that I should have devoted my entire life to them all, yet still Greta begged me to return before her baby was born, I knew I’d never have time, Thérèse needed rocking day and night, needed to be held up a few seconds every morning so her little legs didn’t buckle, needed to get her over the scoliosis, needed to have an operation, but already she was happier to be alive, our little sunshine, I’d have so little time, one evening I suddenly got a forty-degree fever, the start of malaria, I was in the laundry, thinking we needed more than a hundred diapers a day, I was criticized for wasting them, but these sick kids were constantly having diarrhea, and they needed them, whenever anyone made the slightest reproach I just fell apart, I’d even bought diapers in town on my own, then suddenly as I was ironing in the laundry room, the fever hit, I also felt there was very little cooperation or organization, in the kitchen, for example, the two hotplates for the baby bottles were out of order, the pots and pans were worn out, and the bottles or the semolina would burn, so I bought a saucepan in town, and I got blamed for that too, and I told myself maybe I was the biggest defect, I talked about buying a pot in town in a country where a father earned sixty-five dollars and had to feed a family of six, still, I suppose because I was a mother, the most afflicted children around me felt something li
ke a will to live, some even held on a long time, I was just there for lack of strength in lives prematurely eclipsed, the courageous efforts that would eventually prove vain, but, said Mère, you were there that’s all that matters, Nora said, it might have been only thirty-seven at first, but I had a bad cough, and I thought, it’s nothing, the kids have passed their colds on to me, I’ll feel better tomorrow, I had such little patience, when the Italian priest called for me to get some water to baptize one of my dying kids, I told him, maybe you should treat them instead of inflicting this idiocy on them, a baptism for a two-year-old, he will go to heaven, said the priest stunned by my fury, no, it wasn’t patience I lacked, it was pity, I should have felt sorry for this priest so tormented by the misfortune he saw all around him, he said, you’ve been working since dawn, go and get some rest, he had God, I had nothing, not even feelings of pity, I had witnessed, helpless, the child’s baptism, the water running over his wounds, he would die in my arms that afternoon, you can’t imagine how long it seems when a child dies in your arms, baptismal water or witches’ relief, it just prolonged the agony, then next day, there was another little sun to help me forget, Jerome, I sometimes gave him a can of sardines in secret, or a piece of bread, hoping to improve his diet, telling him all the while how he warmed my heart, I felt bereft of everything, the voices of my own children, of music, of beauty, of culture, isn’t it scandalous to feel that, like Ibsen’s Nora, far from her loved ones, imprisoned with nauseating smells, even a fan wouldn’t have helped reduce the odour of curdled milk and dirty diapers, and above all, my fever kept up, and I was so dizzy I couldn’t stand up, I didn’t dare tell anyone, in a kind of fog I asked the priest, I’m so thirsty, has the tanker-truck come yet, go and rest, he told me kindly, we’ll have water tomorrow, the truck couldn’t get down the road, the driver’s on holiday till tomorrow, so go get some rest, then you won’t have to worry about the children’s baths, see, no water, that is hell, I told the priest, just one chamber-pot full of water for nine babies, no, there is worse, he said, having to cut sixty Cayor worms out of the feet of little Daniel the way I did yesterday, or watch strips of skin fall off some of them like scales off a fish, but that’s not hell, malnutrition that can be treated, he said, and skin treated with tetracycline can be brought back, and of course mosquito-netting to keep the flies out, I listened feverishly, feeling myself curl up inside, how had I come to this, I said to myself, so useless in every part of my body when I was needed, how, why, I needed to speak to Christiansen, explain it all to him, I knew the almost maternal understanding he could express, something my friends benefitted from as well, I remember once Valérie went to see him in his New York office and consulted him as a friend whose past experience would have been soothing support, I wasn’t born yet when you were a child resistance-fighter in Norway, Valérie said to Christiansen, but what disturbs me is that time of false peace, our country house with little sisters and their father bombarded, I was still going to have a comfortable life alone with my mother, Mother said, you’ve got a future ahead of you, no point looking back to the past, you’ll only find pain there, get hold of yourself, but I rebelled and said, those before me are responsible for the state of the world they’ve left behind, nothing but destruction, what a sinister inheritance, and if nothing changes in human politics, it will be just as bad for my children, we do each inherit that notch in the flesh that is our responsibility, don’t we, Valérie asked Christiansen, if it really were a time of peace, things wouldn’t be falling apart all around me, life gets cut down, a crime, isn’t it, what would my father and sisters have become if the knot of their lives hadn’t been slit, the dishes and crystal glasses were still on the dinner table, one wall was cracked and burnt where they all sat, my mother was in Paris, and that wall had to become a crater, this link between you and me, Christiansen, has been buried for years while you were a little boy fighting, buried under the same ruins that cover my family, yesterday and today, Bernard, who knew nothing of all this, and our children are the result of the uncertain, threatening peacetime, a very happy family nevertheless, but what if there were an opening for those who still don’t admit their guilt to come back through, wouldn’t we be wiped out like my family, orphaned, my mother and I, Christiansen listened to Valérie, his experience of the past never without its uses and sometimes helpful if possible, could only tell her, Valérie, we live in the present, that is where you are a writer, but you are right, when some inherit a world of blue skies, while others nearby have foundered, there is very little peace with this pain and mystery from the past, but these are your tools for casting light, thus I knew I could explain to Christiansen as Valérie had done, my feelings of defeat and my desire for tranquillity and a world of blue skies, a place to heal myself, now was the time to settle this, Christiansen simply said, come home dear, but Greta and the others got worked up and said, we told you it would be too much for you, Mama, you always act as though you’re twenty, Christiansen was coming to meet me in Europe where I’d go into hospital, God what a mess, I thought, I was leaving my second family, second set of true children, Garcia, Jerome, all the others, living or dead, I was infected with malaria and who knows what else, I suddenly seemed like one of my father’s lepers, I’d stay away from too many tearful farewells, where is Africa now, will I be going back, though I felt so incompetent, I forgot to tell you, Esther, I’m now the grandmother of a little boy, Greta had no great difficulty with the pregnancy, my universe was well-ordered and intact, then at once Mère said to Nora, could we stop and look at the sky, it’s all so beautiful and peaceful when people are asleep in town, but Mère felt she should put her trembling hand on Nora’s shoulder, Nora didn’t notice a thing, a thin shoulder it was under the lace dress that seemed to float around her body, a body that, as Christiansen said, had changed a lot, and Nora herself was no longer the same, she wanted to console her and say, Nora my dear, believe me, I have intuition, and you will go back to Africa where you believe the work is not done, Nora was so delighted to hear this that she embraced Mère, wondering why Esther seemed to tremble a bit, perhaps it was all the excitement of the party, perhaps she’d caught cold in this heat, or was it Nora’s fever returning to her temples, would she come out of this fog feeling as alive as she did before, running here and there with inexhaustible energy, Mélanie heard Marie-Sylvie’s voice from the tiny, phosphorescent green phone, Mai wasn’t in bed or even in her room, Mai, where was she, Marie-Sylvie asked, Mélanie was going to catch up to the group on the beach, but Daniel, Adrien, Suzanne, Chuan and Olivier were already so far ahead, their shadows melting in the first misty rays of sun, so far along the shore she’d do better to head back to the house quickly, if it was true this time that Mai had really disappeared, not just hid in the shadows of the black almond-trees with her cats or up a tree eating fruit, Marie-Sylvie had said, I don’t see her anywhere in the house, the backyard by the pool, or the garden, but she was right there when she woke up, I had to change her pyjamas because . . . Marie-Sylvie wouldn’t say what Mai had done, I haven’t seen her since then, she said, Mélanie went quickly to start the jeep and hit the accelerator, faster, faster, traffic was smooth at this hour, not many cars and pedestrians, that’s how it happens, they’re up in the morning and then disappear God-knows-how, you see them playing on a carousel at kindergarten or at nursery-school, then suddenly nothing, too bad there were no passersby, Mélanie would have asked every single one, have you seen her, she’s my daughter, perhaps she’s just run off again, maybe she’s gone to the stadium again, you can meet the wrong people there, it’s happened before, yes, no, I forbade it so strongly, Mélanie thought, so where is she, that’s how it happens, there’s no one around, then someone shows up in a car and opens the door, the worst thing would be some secret meeting at that enormous stadium, so long that Mai could easily get lost in it, like that day on The-Island-Nobody-Owns, she’d fallen asleep under the Australian pines, but in the hour before her father found her, what had happened, no one knew, and
even with the help of a psychologist and a pediatrician, they still knew nothing from her about that day, mustn’t alert Daniel or Mère yet, above all, it might just be another one of her games, there was that brother of Marie-Sylvie’s who’d been spotted hanging around the gate wearing a Mexican sombrero, although Mélanie wasn’t worried about He-who never-sleeps, they would still search everywhere under the trees with Augustino, who was rubbing his eyes, because he hadn’t slept either, and with the dogs, OK, probably none of it was true, and Mai was probably close by, and her mother would smother her with kisses and say, my angel, I’m sure this has been a long night for you, but it was such a happy one, especially for your grandmother, you’re convinced she’ll be there for you and Vincent and Augustino tomorrow and always, but it just isn’t so, why weren’t you sleeping, Mai, I put you to bed and read you a story myself, maybe it was nothing, Mélanie thought, maybe just a moment of fright that we sometimes get thinking of our children, a sense of imminent danger, Mai, where was Mai? Mama, I’ve done everything I could, Vénus wrote to her mother, I defended my brother like you told me to, the minute I saw his hairy head in the mangroves, the minute I saw my brother, I said, God have pity on you, Carlos, even if you hide on the Captain’s boat, I’m afraid for your life, because there’s a traitor here, an informant, and it’s Richard — Rick, Mama, you don’t know this awful guy, but he was the manager of the estate for my devoted husband William before he died at sea, he turned Carlos in, Perdue Baltimore, who works at the Department of Corrections and Probation, and I will do all we can for my brother, Mama, right now at the Juvenile Detention Centre, he’s beaten and mistreated, Perdue Baltimore says we have to do everything we can to make sure he isn’t transferred to adult prison in Louisiana when he turns twenty-one, because that will be the end of him, he won’t just be a delinquent accused of manslaughter, locked up with other convicts often younger than he is, some of them twelve or thirteen, but an inmate in an adult prison he can never get away from, you remember Perdue Baltimore, Mama, born in Barbados to George and Rita, university graduate, she says she can put a word in for Carlos at the Department of Corrections and Probation, she’s already done a lot to reduce the mistreatment he’s getting from the prison staff, once an officer tried to choke him for refusing to obey, but you can’t tame Carlos with violence, you know that, Mama, even the Correction Centre, though it’s a prison for young people to be held until they’re twenty-one, it’s still a hellhole, airless cells made of concrete, dark, stinking corridors, the sound of water dripping from the showers day and night, the endless shouts of the guards and of prisoners fighting, they use sticks too, Carlos along with them, he had to be in solitary confinement for twenty-four hours to calm down, do you know, Mama, how many fights there were between guards and boys last year, nearly four hundred, Mama, no, it’s inhuman, sure Carlos shouldn’t attack the guards the way he’s done to get even with them, they call the twenty-four-hour cell the Hole in the Rock, Perdue Baltimore says there’s no way Carlos can be rehabilitated if the guards are so violent with him, Carlos is so young that violence will just breed fear, and there’s no future for him, and when he’s twenty-one, he absolutely must not be transferred to adult prison in Louisiana, because it’ll be hopeless, I’ve done everything I can, Mama, remember a long time ago, I held a charity bazaar, and now the kids on Bahama Street have been inoculated for smallpox and meningitis when they reach school-age, I sold my house for Carlos, the home of my husband, Captain Williams, I sold his boat too, but still I’m in debt, even if Perdu has helped me with credit, I don’t know what will happen to my brother without her, because there was no one to help us, they all said he was a criminal who deserved to be in jail, never mind that he was innocent, he thought the gun that Cuban cook gave him wasn’t loaded, but no one believes me, especially because of all the trouble he’s been in with the law before this and his involvement with gangs on Bahama and Esmerelda Streets, when he was a messenger and drug-runner, remember, Mama, how it kept you up at nights and how you said that Pastor Jérémy and you were pious parents always ready to serve the Lord, how could this happen to our family, it’s not like we were in Chicago where so many black kids are lost in riots, and the judges are indifferent to what happens when they’re thrown into prisons and correctional centres, Perdue Baltimore says there is so much criminal activity on those streets, it’s hard to know everything that goes on, there are a few good sheriffs who do their job well and try to keep teenagers out of jail, but there are also a lot of unemployed fathers on Bahama and Esmerelda who don’t set a good example, you said, this isn’t Los Angeles, where you can get killed by some street thug while decorating your Christmas tree, but when they caught Carlos, they laid him flat on the grass in front of the house and handcuffed him behind his back, it was a shame, Mama, and while my brother, your son, was still down, a police officer put his knee on him while he raised his head to me and said, help me, Vénus, his mouth half open, he was so afraid, I remember the tattoo on one arm, it was Polly the dog, and on the other it was arrows and knives, I’ve done everything I can to help my brother as you asked, I have no house, and I now know my husband William died defending my honour when they laughed at him out on the sea for marrying a black, fifteen-year-old escort, Rick says it was about drugs and a settling of accounts between enemy captains, I know we loved each other, and he was a brave husband and captain, Perdue Baltimore says I’ve got to study the way she did, work days and study nights at Collège de la Trinité, my dachshund and iguana and I can live on a houseboat together, I’ve sold all the captain’s paintings except for one, he’s got quite a reputation as a painter on the Island, but a lot of our nicest household things have been stolen, and I know Rick is the one, he’s a low-life, I can’t tell you all the things he’s done to me, he was always harassing me, and I had nowhere to go except off in a boat on the canal, you have no idea, Mama, Papa forbade me to cross the threshold of your house because he was so put out about our wedding and my life as an escort, when I sang with Uncle Cornélius at the Club Mix, but what else could I do, I’d so love it if Papa would let me sing again in the temple where he preaches on Sundays at Cité du Corail, everyone says it’s Pastor Jérémy who brings the lost sheep back into the fold, to me it’s like Papa, Carlos’ father, who is in prison and has only us, his family, to stand by him, why have you abandoned him, you asked me to help Carlos my brother, and I have, justice is expensive, I have no house, nothing any more, if only I could sing at the synagogue or the Baptist church or the temple at the Cité du Corail, our father’s church, I haven’t seen anyone in the family for such a long time, not even the Toqué, Deandra or Tiffany, the twins must be big by now, and I may only be a sinner, as my father would say, but I’m your daughter, you’re living all cramped together, and I told you to come and live on my husband’s estate by the canal with the vines and water-snakes, while I still had it, when Captain Williams was still alive, and we fed the hummingbirds and passeriformes out of our hands each morning, it was a paradise here, real paradise till my husband got killed out at sea and his boat came back flying a black flag, and that crooked manager he put his trust in, Richard, Rick, turned the place into a serpents’ nest, day and night he harassed me, even though I had a gun under my pillow at night the way the captain told me to, I didn’t want to use it, I often thought I could get Rick out of the house, but I never did, then Mama had written to Vénus that it was true, that Pastor Jérémy judged his daughter as a sinner, he’d forgotten she was an escort at the Club Mix and didn’t really know what that word escort meant anyway, just as long as his daughter was decent, no, it was when she married Captain Williams and became an accomplice in his illegal cocaine and crack trade, surely she knew that, and besides the captain was an old man for such a young girl, and it made no sense, the sin was in the marriage Vénus should never have agreed to, the pastor acknowledged his sorrow at Carlos’ imprisonment, but his family had not abandoned him, they’d all go to see him soon at the Detention Centre, Toqué was makin
g progress at school, despite a congenitally infirm leg, and the twins Deandra and Tiffany, all would soon go and take packages of clothes and cigarettes for Carlos, he’d have liked to see Polly, but they couldn’t take her, nor Oreilles Coupées, the latest dog that Deandra had rescued from the Island animal-killer, but they would go and see him, it was awful for Pastor Jérémy to see what was written on his worn blue shirt, No. 340, Block 3, and to see his son behind bars, every Sunday he prayed for him in the temple, and weekdays too, and although the pastor was disappointed in his sinner-daughter, she was once again welcomed into the house, she could come back and see her family if she wanted to, she could sing on Sunday at the temple in Cité du Corail, for our children are indeed also the children of God, said Pastor Jérémy, of course she could sing in church, but Jérémy recommended she dress more modestly and less transparently than before, for all was vanity, and Vénus must be decent to sing the psalms, Carlos was a thorn in his father’s heart and an affliction to his mother’s spirit, those syringes and drugs, that was evil, said Pastor Jérémy, but saddest of all was that he had nearly killed Lazaro that day at noon, so what if it was a game of vengeance between boys from rival gangs, Carlos was paying for his foolishness now, a thorn in his father’s heart and an affliction to his mother’s spirit, unless Perdue Baltimore could pull off a miracle, he’d be sent to an adult penitentiary next year, they had to write to the governor and the Department of Corrections and Probation, to think that Carlos and Lazaro had been great friends before these gang fights, gone boxing together on Saturdays, Pastor Jérémy would pray in the temple for the governor to show clemency to his son and give him a chance at rehabilitation, Lazaro’s mother too was heart-struck about her son’s refusal to forgive Carlos and his dedication to revenge, what’s going to happen to our kids on Bahama and Esmerelda Streets, still Perdue Baltimore could accomplish a miracle, Venus thought, and she’s going to intervene with the Department on Carlos’ behalf, begging the judges for clemency, Carlos must not go to the Louisana prison with murderers, Vénus remembered selling all her husband’s paintings but one, and that she’d take her dachshund and iguana, for in a few hours she’d be leaving, saying goodbye to the estate by the canal, nothing left or very little, but that picture would go everywhere with her, her sensual husband had painted for her with so much love that the passion appeared proudly on the canvas, it was the one he’d painted on their wedding day, it showed them in an embrace, and Williams had lent his own sea-sunned pink tint to the body of Vénus and taken on her black skin colour for himself, to show her how inextricably linked they were, that picture was the sign of their permanence as a couple, each was the other and away with prejudices, yes, I’ve done all I can, and I’ll still do more, Vénus had written to Mama, and Pastor Jérémy had said to his wife, if I ask the governor to pardon my son’s offense, I must do so myself, let Vénus come back here to be with her brothers and sisters, and Vénus thought how, after all these years, she’d see the house low under the palm trees which had never been trimmed, the freezer that still hadn’t been moved away, although it was supposed to long ago, and the yellowing Christmas trees, well, they would still be there nearly fried by the sun, and the parasol over the games table, the dice polished by storms, under it the hens and chicks pecking away, for Pastor Jérémy had preached to all in his sermon that it was time for the lost sheep to return to the fold, even if it might pierce his heart like a thorn to think of Carlos and afflict Mama to her very soul, what future do Bahama and Esmerelda hold for our children, would there one day be an end to these gangs on the streets, and the millionaire captains who had invaded the town for the flotilla, Lazaro thought as he rowed his boat after shutting off the motor, the sea appeared smooth, hardly a ripple, and the movement of his oars and a soft rocking was all, in a few days he’d be with the men and their swearing and their nets on the shrimp boat, but it would only be for a while, he wasn’t going to spend his life here on this island with his mother Caridad that he no longer wanted to see nor hear her complaining, his mother, a convert to freedom and the moral deviance of the other women, imitating them when she should cover her head and face, saying like the others that women’s rights had been trampled on so often in Muslim countries, she took part in their conferences, listened to them and said, the time of the Inquisition is over, she was loathsome to listen to now, and as for Carlos, well, who knows when he’d get out of jail, but Lazaro would be back for revenge, he’d love to get into his cell and kill him by surprise, yes, but he’d wait, the time would come, and that’s what upset his mother still more, for, she said he was just like his father Mohammed, unable to forgive, irreconcilable, brutal like his father in Egypt, these millionaire captains from Europe and Scandinavia with their regattas, now they owned the Island like some country getaway, it was disgusting, Lazaro thought, I’d rather see nuclear submarines than these boats, these vacation ports for a few days, and these sailors drunk on beer every night, gorging themselves with women and rum, they’d all set sail and make ready on the horizon, boats like Anchor, Conqueror, Sea Pioneer, with their Pathfinders, Pelicans, Hydras and Yamaha models, speed and engines, it was outrageous to have them in town, this was the world of upstarts his mother was drawn to, rich and materialistic, forever complaining about archeological museums, treasures and statues being destroyed over there in the country that once was ours, she would say, they’re going to destroy all the treasures of antiquity, and that’s how it was at Sarajevo, antique works killed the way they kill horses, nothing, not a thing would remain, and how was humanity going to remember, no memory of vases and statuettes, nothing, no libraries, no monuments, tomorrow there would be no memory of Mesopotamia, nothing, what I worry most about, she said, are the vandals, but Lazaro thought this was a memory of humanity that should be lost or burnt, he too loved birds and only birds, pelicans and seagulls flying over the fishing boats, but this Western society his mother had chosen was not for him, it was disgusting that his mother Caridad didn’t realize that the laws of his father Mohammed were the only just ones, she wouldn’t wear a scarf, she dressed like all the other women in flagrante delecti, she never would be purified, and the fact she defended all the laws promulgated for the freedom of perverts was a crime, this woman was no longer his mother, nor the wife of his father Mohammed, in our society, my father’s and my cousins’, these evil elements are eradicated, it was just law, Lazaro would be a fighter for all laws designed to purge all that was harmful or degenerate in this world that his mother had chosen, renouncing her own in the process, on the beach appeared groups of people strolling nonchalantly, no doubt people who’d been partying all night, thought Lazaro, filled from their banquets at all the tables he had to wait on disdainfully in his white apron, saying to the masters of the house, I’ll just get the seafood you ordered, when he’d rather throw it at their feet, and their son looking down at him with false candour, underhanded no doubt under those slant eyes, what did this over-praised son know about child graves in neighbourhoods near the front lines, kids armed in towns under siege, nothing, not a thing, it was far away in some vague and dirty place abandoned to packs of dogs so hungry they would, they did, devour spent projectiles, no windows left in the houses, except maybe metal shutters and bars through which you could see still more packs . . . of kids wielding weapons, playing with them the way others might a guitar, lining them up along their bodies, what did he know about any of that, this papa’s boy and his friends laughing by the pool or on their surfboards in the afternoon, while Lazaro was out on the shrimp boat with coarse men, no truce in the captured towns, the strident noise of loudspeakers in the night, to no longer belong to this race, to flee from them and nonchalance on the beaches, on the water’s edge, look at them forming into groups to watch the boats sail past, elsewhere groups were forming for guerrilla tactics, in mountains or near the frontlines, and pretty soon they’d hear yells of attack right by their houses, let’s go, strike now, for there is joy in blood, but in their pools, out on the sea, in their g
ardens and at their well-laden tables, they wouldn’t hear any of the shouts, and here they were, huddling together for protection, forging shelter down there, the mountain camps were waiting to welcome Lazaro at the Irano-Turkish border, the march would be long and hard through fog and snow, some find their joy in blood, Lazaro thought in his boat, the sound of the water keeping time with the movement of his oars, it’s everyone’s tribal need for vengeance come true, they feel glorious humiliating prisoners taken in combat, dragging them by the feet along a muddy road, you poisoned wells with dead goats, you’re nothing but a Taliban, they don’t see the face turned upward and begging to live, blinded by the joy of blood, they force the man to take off his pants, then assassinate him over and over again, bloody legs inert on that muddy road, the prisoner’s chest filled with multiple holes, it’s a land of unjust suffering, it’s my land, desperate combatants with the same colour eyes as me, the same colour skin, Lazaro’s brown hands kept a calm rhythm as they rowed, fixing the shore with his gaze, eyes closed off and fleeing the shadows there, the people waiting on the wharf, like those prostitutes on the quays since early nightfall, soon to flaunt their disgrace in broad daylight, not one of them, he thought, really deserved to live, and Chuan, who had convinced her husband to come down to the beach with her, said, let’s go find our friends, knowing full well that Olivier was still thinking about his article on the fifties and the long fight for racial equality, what was it they said back then, separate but equal, that was before school integration in Boston, so Olivier could never be torn away from the seriousness of his thoughts, even on a day of celebration, he was one of those who can never forget, but Chuan thought forgetfulness a nobler faculty from which a compassion could emerge, perhaps even a form of generosity and magnanimity, she’d taken him by the hand, you know what I’d still like to have in the garden, she told him, knowing he wasn’t listening, but always enthusiastic when she talked about her floral arrangements, compositions she pictured in full detail, a cascade of images she rejoiced in, it would be a harmonious cascade of daisies called white swans and cinquefoil — that supposedly look like lambs’ ears or lobes — over by the fountain, wouldn’t that be charming, we’d also have tulips, and at nightime, those white flowers would all shine like the moon and perfume the air, we’d have borders of amaryllis, and Olivier thought that for him, angels were black angels, victims of arson in the night of October 16 in their house in Baltimore, but where would he be without Chuan’s floral pieces, her patience, her gentleness, what would he have done, a man forever living in the furor of the past or his ability to keep that lifelong fury going, without Chuan and Jermaine, all he possessed after what Chuan called the existence of things destroyed, yes, of course, he said, all those flowers would shine and smell sweet in the night, you’re right Chuan, and we could have a rosebush near the patio table, next to where the yellow frangipani flowers would bloom, there’s where we could have cocktails, and you could have your awful after-dinner cigars with Bernard and Christiansen when our friends come in the autumn, and winter would still be luminous, this is our future Olivier thought as he listened to his wife, there is always a future as long as we live, too bad we have so little faith, yes, you’re absolutely right about those white flowers, Chuan, he said again, breathing in the sea air, and you know, I think this night has come off beautifully, a fine party that our friend Esther will never forget, Olivier was feeling a sort of contentment with life, yes, that’s what it was, not simple forgetfulness or erasing of memory, Chuan’s richness and generosity were enlivening, he thought, and after saying he’d see the doctor, just a brief visit to get his eyes checked, Samuel’s teacher said he’d be back for the evening rehearsal, Samuel didn’t know where Arnie Graal was now, not in the set-storage warehouse, nor below stage, where Samuel was used to seeing him, nowhere, the sudden absence, a separation, was announced today on a colour telephone screen, thought Samuel, a fun menu over an integrated digital camera, a message list, this colour-burst of technology suddenly blended into black when Arnie wrote to Samuel his student, don’t try to find me but don’t cancel my production of A Survivor’s Morning in Berlin this fall, for you are my successor now, I told you one day I would lance the abscess, well it’s done, I’m going blind and won’t be able to dance anymore, I also told you my A Survivor’s Morning was conceived for those leaving us, but I do not want to leave like those I accompanied with my twenty dancers, my choir of women and children, I don’t want that because my whole life has been like a song, even when I worked in the hospital laundry at night, a song, because I danced all day from Amsterdam to San Francisco, as you will do later on, be bold and never stop dancing, Petite Graine, you said when you lost Tanjou, a family friend, as I lost my dancers in my last choreography when the walls and windows in my towers blotted out their shadows one by one, leaving us only with cut-out shadows, you prefer not to love any more, not Veronica, nor any other woman, always afraid that a beloved face will be swallowed up tomorrow or some time afterward, like these walls of icons, you said, all burnt up with Tanjou, you’re wrong, Petite Graine, you still have a lot of growing up to do, for in life, persecutions live among us, and you yourself don’t know if you’re on the side of persecuters or among those who could be persecuted for crimes committed by other generations, as you (286) told me too, your parents brought you into the world for happiness, so never stop loving or dancing, Petite Graine, don’t try and find me, I don’t want to fall like those I accompanied in A Survivor’s Morning with the choir of women and children, I want to be left alone and listen to some major works I’ve worked on: Stravinsky and Prokofiev, you can add some weightlessness to the Berlin performance of A Survivor’s Morning, so there’s no groping about, be brave then, Petite Graine, little seed of a man, go, persist, be tenacious, could it be true, thought Samuel, he’d never see the student Tanjou again, nor the itinerant Lady of the Bags, perhaps not his black dancer-friend Arni Graal either, Arnie had always said he did-n’t like being alone, an eye check-up with his doctor, they said, and Samuel would never again see the flamboyant artist in the theatre, nor in the set warehouse where Arnie hung out alone, nor in the murky depths below stage where he designed and conceived his shows, never hear his baritone voice, was it that of a preacher whose auguries were too direct and disturbing, with his bone amulet shining beneath his black shirt, but where would he go with everyone expecting him each night, how could you go on and love when the breath that has given you love and dance has left you, how could Samuel transpose an art that was not his own but Arnie’s, Arnie who had taught him everything, the dizzying heights of his dance steps, the long fall past the walls where the faces and bodies reappeared, Arnie’s blind fall to the concrete streets, to whom would Samuel explain that tied and bound bodies with covered faces slept with him at night, and that they were all living, their hands had been tied, and Samuel could hear them breathing beneath the rough fabric over their faces, they slept and breathed, Samuel thought, a convulsive sleep, were they awaiting interrogation, having nowhere to live, or were they ghosts held in chambers waiting to be whipped and tortured when they awoke, even they did not know why they were there, but wordlessly they begged Samuel to lend them blankets and the glass of water by his bedside, for they were thirsty but could not drink, they were hungry but could not eat breakfast with him, how can you go on like this, Samuel thought, when you think you’re fast asleep in your sheets, you dream you’re walking on water, weightless or almost, water finding its way, unwavering, beneath your feet, and suddenly heads fall from the wall onto your sheets, bodies wander some way off, tied and bound or sometimes seated with their feet out in front of them, closely watched by dark shadows, that must be how they’ve been photographed or filmed, if the eyes in these heads went out and the mouths cried out, I don’t want to, no, I don’t want to, call someone, I don’t want to, call my mother, my son, isn’t anyone in charge here, how can you go on with the rolling and rubbing of those heads in your sheets, and even when Samuel left his apartment a
nd ran down the stairs into the street, they were still there, all those naked bodies seemingly nailed to the front doors, as though the city were a prison colony, it rained and snowed on these soaking bodies, whether single or stickily clumped together in obscene positions they didn’t want to take, a shiver of fear ran through them all, up against door-and window-frames, pitifully tied to one another with electrical wire, and when Samuel awoke they had all disappeared, he searched through the sheets to see if there might be a head still unstuck from its body, the eyes begging him to let them live, but when he opened the blinds onto the street, he saw it was a beautiful summer morning, Veronica had written to him saying, come back, and his mother urged him to come home for a few days and see Vincent, who would soon be coming home, almost cured too, his mother wrote, Samuel, better to count the days when Vincent feels well than the others, then he can react since he’s been in the mountains, he coughs a bit less, and he swims now too like all boys his age, I still won’t let him go out to sea with Marie-Sylvie, though, I’m sure it’s too soon, his last attack really scared all of us on Papa’s boat, then walking in town, if Samuel were never again to see Tanjou or perhaps even Our Lady of the Bags, who’d been replaced by someone else, a girl without sweetness who had brushed him aside with some choice words on his way out of a store on some avenue where opulence reigned supreme, as she said, but it was true, so why blame her for saying what she thought, she who slept in cardboard boxes and dirty alleys, Samuel stopped by to say hello every day to her who’d been buried under the rubble with Tanjou, Our Lady of the Bags, and suddenly with the blossoming of the lilacs, tulips and roses in the parks, who could tell if what was tomb-scaffolding yesterday, or now had the appearance of smoking ruins with so many dead, might not be a fortress or fortification where, instead of a glass citadel provoking more attacks, trees and gardens and the perpetual flowering of lilacs and tulips and roses might rise skyward, so nothing would be bastioned and devastated anymore, this smiling geometry would take over the city, lush green in the sun, thought Samuel, and Petites Cendres turned back, all dishevelled and sad and still without his powder until Decadent Friday, he thought, when the bar was deserted, though you could still hear music in the street, a few notes from a piano and a man singing in a smoky tavern with nobody in it, just a sweeper picking out a few notes, haven’t you got anything for me, Petites Cendres called out to him, no, nothing, he said, hey listen to this song, son, Unchain My Heart, oh let my heart not be in chains anymore, son, and yours neither, hey, where you going, it’ll soon be time for the churches and temples to open, better go pray, son, I ain’t touched coke since I got old, not like in the old days when I played in Cornelius’ band at the Club Mix, look at the scarecrow I turned into with that powder, don’t do like me, Petites Cendres, everywhere they threw me out, even the Club Mix, now all I do is sweep up other people’s garbage, don’t let your heart be chained, son, that powder’s the devil, I’ll score some before 11:00 this morning, Petites Cendres said, I’ve got a customer waiting at the hotel, huge guy, monster belongs to an S-and-M crowd and masturbates alone with his porno films while he’s waiting for me, he’ll be ready when I get there, what gets him off is us Blacks, insulting us and messing with our heads with a lot of sharp demands, that’s what he wants, the sweeper repeated again, don’t let your heart be chained, I wanted to be Ray Charles, and look what powder’s made me, skin and bones, it swallowed everything I had, son, don’t you do like me, I’m lucky I can barely play a few notes, listen, Unchain My Heart, it’ll be carnage with that guy, you’ll come out of there all bloody, God help you, son, just go your own way, I got to sweep now, then as he got close to the imposing pink façade of the hotel, Petites Cendres felt tears on his cheeks, why am I playing doggie for this bastard again, he thought, why am I going to let him spit on me again, where was that vision of paradise, the round-cheeked kid who’d smiled at him, he’d have given anything to see him again, he had nothing to give, even that selfish Timo hadn’t given him a cigarette, yeah, but wasn’t today the day the cruiseship came into port with fifteen hundred sailors, deckhands and crew, red and yellow balloons going up, a regular deluge of visitors in town from Germany, Scandinavia, the world, under their collars handsome, muscular and bare-chested, and at the temple, Reverend Ézéchielle had said to Ashley, Petites Cendres, halleluliah, eternity is for the poor, the beaten down and the oppressed like you, Ashley, next to God, you’ll never be alone, and in that eternity there will always be powder, Petites Cendres thought to himself, and I’ll have my boy, he won’t be going off to see his silk merchant in New York, it’ll soon be time for the temples and churches to open their doors, the tears trailed down his cheeks as he dragged his sandalled feet toward the hotel with its imposing pink façade, do come down, Mère had written to Renata, we’d so love to see you, and it was aboard a flight like this one, Renata reflected, that ill-fated Flight 491 after it stopped over in New York, that all those kids in the French class had died so pitilessly on the Honduran mountain, who could tell why little girls in taffeta dresses, whose parents were waiting for them at the airport, had to disappear in the thick fog over the treetops that day, when Renata, getting off in New York for an international conference on the death penalty, would be spared their cruel fate, not thrown from a plane and robbed of her life, a life that already seemed long to her, while these little girls were not yet ten, of course nothing was fair in life, she thought, those who were spared were often incredulous that the life taken from the young and fresh could be turned over to themselves for a longer time still, is this really how it was, or was there some other tragedy still to come, Esther, who claimed to be a distant cousin of Renata’s, nor Mélanie her daughter, nor the grown children, and the youngest, Mai, whom Renata still didn’t know, none of them knew Renata would soon be coming to see them and telling Esther she wanted to surprise her for her eightieth birthday, the family was so small, the pretext would be a holiday by the sea with her husband, or maybe no pretext at all, just the wish to see them all again very briefly, not making a grand entrance like before in a satin vest revealing her tanned and naked skin, just to be that distant relation discreetly reaching out her hand before embracing each one, almost melting into Esther’s timid silhouette among the pink laurels around the entrance, saying, here I am, Esther, I know you weren’t expecting me, but I wanted to see you because it allows me to rekindle respect for the past, I remember our Polish cousins, Daniel’s father Joseph, it’s time to commemorate every one of you, your blood is mine, even if I don’t feel that I actually belong to anyone in particular, I know you see me as a little haughty and perhaps brusque, I know, I know, you’re not pleased that your daughter Mélanie is so close to me, but we have so much in common, or perhaps Renata would simply say nothing, they would all notice she’d started smoking again, though very little, they’d be aware of her old gesture when she fished out her gold cigarette case, though less ostentatiously than in the past, yet still the same defiant look, they’d be indignant, Esther especially had little tolerance, I’m not in convalescence any more, Renata would say, I’m entitled to life’s pleasures now, and I do control how often I do it, she most of all wanted to speak with Mélanie and relieve herself of some of the weight of her judicial responsibilities, Mélanie was an influential female leader also working with justice, especially with regard to women and children, but there were others like Nathanaël, narrowly spared a life sentence after being convicted at fifteen of the murder of a small boy when he was eleven, the clemency of a governor, whose own delinquent son avoided prison, had saved Nathanaël from too harsh a sentence and allowed him to be supervised in a juvenile detention centre, but what was going to happen to Nathanaël in future, and what about all the other accused minors, considered incorrigible by the judges who oversaw the support to their upbringing, applied the law, and incriminated them like adults for the damnable things they had done, and they were evil acts, Renata thought, but the perpetrators were children whose minds were not yet formed, how Natha
naël had wept when the judge said his actions were not just childish mistakes that got out of hand playing with a younger, more fragile child, a little girl defenceless against the strength of a teenager, no, they were acts of indescribable cynicism and brutality, when Nathanaël had acted without really knowing what he was doing, and with the multiplied strength of a boy his size, Nathanaël and his parents had cried, knowing he had killed by accident with sudden and exaggerated out-of-control force, what would happen in future to Nathanaël with no governor to take pity on him, and to his brothers facing down the judges in court, Mélanie, a delicate soul, would understand that Renata was one of the harassed and scrupulous judges, and was relying on her to help put things in perspective, what would she do as a woman and a mother, how would she judge Nathanaël and the kids from underprivileged backgrounds, born to the oppression and misery of the ghettos, later, at the open window of her room looking out at the Caribbean Sea, Renata was to recall the execution of a black by lethal injection in a Texas prison, it was so long ago, but she’d always been convinced of his innocence, since proved by DNA, so she’d not been wrong, and thousands of innocent people had mistakenly been executed by lethal injection or the electric chair, she’d realized that day that no court could ever come to grips with these crimes of negligence, crimes of a justice system designed not to see, what tears were in store for Nathanaël’s parents, Renata thought, how many poor people who had committed no crimes would be subjected to the death penalty, what tears, Renata thought, and Caroline asked again for her chair to be brought closer to the window so she could see the sunrise over the water, no, it won’t be night, and I won’t wear that black outfit you ironed for me this morning, you know, Harriet, Jean-Mathieu and I will be replaced by others, that’s the way it is, the friends I use to have over, Bernard, Valérie, Chistiansen and his charming wife Nora . . . Christiansen, a Nordic god, it was so good to have them around, all of them, writers and humanists, Valérie in particular, the philosopher-novelist who knows all about the drama of living; Nora’s a mysterious, secretive painter; Bernard and Christiansen are so full of learning and humanism, and the friendship that unites them all, life and the friendship that enlightens their painstaking work, yes, they will supplant us, Jean-Mathieu and I, and it’s good that it should be so, if I’m stepping out onto the bridge now, standing upright before the crossing, yes, if I have to . . . leave, then I’d like them all to come and live here in my villa, write and eat at my table, and you must always be ready to welcome them, Harriet, and where will Frédéric, Charles and I go, what will happen to Charles now that he’s let Cyril go, tell me, where are we all going to go now we’re being replaced, but you have to believe it’s for the best, and it is for the best, but tell me the truth just this once, Charly’s in the house, isn’t she, you just didn’t let her get near me, did you, but she is here, isn’t she, just behind the door, be truthful with me, I heard her footsteps and her voice saying, Caroline, now we’re even, out of each other’s debt, let me back in to take care of you, lay my head in your lap like when I pretended to serve you, though I lied to you and didn’t really, Caroline, it’s true I burned your letter to Jean-Mathieu like in your dream, please let me back in, Caroline, I heard her, she was there, Caroline said, and you told her, shut up liar, get out, we don’t want you here, where are my hat and gloves, I’ve got to go out, they’re all expecting me, Adrien, Suzanne, Frédéric, and as for dear Charles, why take Cyril away from him, his life, there he is alone at dawn to write, he describes it as he lives it, dawn and his fountains to quench all thirsts, beyond the Gates of Hell that Botticelli painted as if he were right here with us, the living through an immense fall, tumbling one on top of another from the walls that were supposed to shelter us, to a death they know nothing about, and Charles will write and write, heart-struck with these spiritual torments that Botticelli and Dante in his violent poetry shared, he will write, and why take Cyril away from him, the dawn and the rivers to slake all thirsts, and I even know how Charly was dressed, Caroline said, even if you won’t tell me, Harriett, she was like those characters of Newton’s, impenetrable and sophisticated in their indolence, did she show up in her black evening jacket with purple nails, the way she did when she went out dancing with her friends night after night till she dropped, tell me now, is that how she looked when you saw her, and Harriett — Miss Harriett — answered with cautious slowness, yes, she was wearing her black evening jacket, she came, but I didn’t let her in, I couldn’t, she would have hurt you, in fact, I escorted her back out into the street, and do you know what I saw, a beautiful new car and a frail elderly man waiting for her, she’s a chauffeur again, that girl is evil through-and-through, said Miss Désirée, she’s going to abuse that old man the same as you, Caroline, you were so good to her, oh no, I wasn’t, Caroline said, I wasn’t all that good to her, but perhaps I could be if she agreed to see me again, I’d be another woman, but I’ve got to get my best things on, someone’s waiting for me on the bridge, who knows, maybe it’s her, not that sordid, lame old woman who’s waving to me, how dare she call me, they’ll all come and live in my house, and you’ll make them welcome, won’t you, choose the best wines for Bernard and Valérie, for every thirst must be satisfied, and that will be your role, Harriett, when I’m no longer there, I’m sure it’s time to go toward the bridge while the sun is still out to find my way, then, when night falls, remember, the birds of prey will return, is it already the hour of the predators, Harriett, Miss Désirée, when no one, not even you, my faithful nurse, can watch over this child of yours, is it already the pale hour when I must go to the bridge? Even you, most faithful Harriett, Miss Désirée, cannot follow me, Adrien, burning hot under his hat and annoyed by all the sand in his shoes, was saying to Daniel, you really do walk fast, I know you’re used to running several hours each day, I used to do it once too, isn’t this the wharf where your wife is supposed to meet us, oh yes, about your book Strange Years,I still wanted to say this, believe me, I’m speaking in all honesty as a friend, in all this illuminated foraging there is very little echo of hope, you call Andy Warhol one of the most amazing portraitists of our time in his obsessive multiplicity of portraits and self-portraits, but why, what is the point of soup cans and his self-portrayal as a bourgeois woman, I have to admit he has a fine hand for plasticity, but as a pop artist he might have more of the attitude and aptitude on the counter-cultural scene he’s so good on than actual talent, and do we really need to know that Stalin had a weakness for gangster and cowboy movies, perhaps out of prudery, to get away from anything sexual, or that he talked about literature during decadent banquets with his friends the torturers, all of them monsters as sentimental as himself, you remember what Dostoyevsky wrote about this sentimentality of the worst members of our species, I mean, what are you getting at, that even those who gave rise to the Great Terrors in this world can fall victim to this revolting sentimentality that moves them to tears in a gangster movie, while they can kill ten million Ukrainians with famine and not shed a single tear, well, yes, that’s partly it, said Daniel, suddenly seeming impersonal beneath glasses reflecting the sea, for he’d not been listening to Adrien for the past few moments, where is Mélanie, he asked with concern, weren’t we supposed to meet here by the wharf, over there, I can see her, said Suzanne, it’s going to be a magnificent day, and look at the boats all lined up on the horizon, oh it’s too bad Caroline can’t get out to join us, I still think of Jean-Mathieu each morning when I re-read his books, the most important thing is that we think about one another, that’s eternity, isn’t it, Daniel dear, it’s the only way not to die, I’ve always said to Adrien, I’m a believer in death, Daleth, a door opening out onto the bay, and the light like this morning, and Mère said to Nora, I remember now what it was Augustino wrote at the very beginning of his book, or at least he said it would be a book, he often writes all through the night, which drives his parents crazy, not me, though, I’m not bothered by it, he wrote, we might get up some morning and recognize not
hing around us, wonder if this country is our country, and even if it is still there, we might get up some morning and think, where is the familiar terrain, where is Cleveland or Cincinnati, where are our cities by the Pacific Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico, where would we go if we had no cities or houses or fire or bread, where would we go, and who would open the door to us, one morning as we get up, we could discover that we had nothing, and say to people around us, will you open your doors to us, and if nobody does, because they’re afraid we’ll steal the little that remains of their cities and houses and bread and fire, then what will happen to us, and Mère fell silent, for the sky was hot and shining, it seemed so sweet to be alive that she forgot the increased trembling in her right hand, Nora was kneeling by the water, it was a sublime summer day, and she said, I’m going back to Africa soon, touching the green water with her hand and refreshing her eyelids and her brow, an accomplished life would surely be one like Nora’s or Marie Curie’s, Mère thought, an unknown adventure ahead of one, or would it be existence in the face of uncertainty and hope for happiness, or all of this together, it would soon be time to go back up to the house and see Marie-Sylvie, Augustino and Mai, it would soon be time, thought Mère, and Mélanie was starting up the jeep, pressing the accelerator, Mai, where was Mai, but why was she so nervous, Marie-Sylvie had asked, she’s on the swing in the garden with her cats, I scolded her a little bit, look, there she is, not even washed or combed, and she’s ignoring me, and Mélanie hugged Mai, saying, why do you always have to scare me, you didn’t go back to the stadium, did you, you know Papa and I told you not to, I don’t want him to come back, Mai said definitely, though her face looked pathetic and frowning, I don’t want Vincent to came back, no one talks about anyone but him, I’m the baby, not Vincent, and Marie-Sylvie’s just going to spoil him again, but Papa and I love you every bit as much as Vincent, said Mélanie, thrown into confusion by Mai’s words, it isn’t true, Mai replied with the same assurance that so disarmed her mother, it isn’t true, you’re all lying, except Augustino, he doesn’t, but he says I’m too young to be his friend, he’s afraid I might wreck his books, Mélanie took her daughter in her arms, now, now, she said, caressing her hair, why don’t you go play on the beach with Emilio and forget about all this, it’s a little early, but do you want me to take you over to his house, now Mélanie and her daughter were headed for the beach in the jeep, and the radio was playing Britten’s War Requiem, Mélanie said it was their friend Franz who was conducting, did Mai remember him, listen to those choirs and soloists, she told her daughter, who seemed to be asleep on the seat and didn’t answer, it’s so moving, Franz is a musician who has gone through so many states of being to give us this music, and you know, they say that in the most beautiful music like this there is often a note left out, but I don’t think there’s one, some great musicians live such crazy lives that they end up getting killed, or they die in extreme poverty, the missing note, because they’ve given over their lives to music, Mai woke up in a leap of joy and opened the door, shouting, Mama, that’s him, Emilio, over by the volleyball net, and when she caught up with him, all at once laughing and gay, Mélanie felt relieved, now she really knew where Mai was, in a circle of sand she was making around Emilio, his skin brown from the sun and his teeth sparkling more than ever in his delicate face, see how cute he is, Mama, and in this circle he’s all mine, Mai exclaimed to her mother, at last Mélanie stopped being afraid that her daughter was not really there, not at the stadium nor walking the streets telling passers-by that she had no mother or father, Mélanie was thinking about seeing Renata that evening, unbelievable, wasn’t it, that they were executing kids of sixteen, kids with parents like Mélanie and Daniel, who didn’t know when they would see their children again, if ever, or perhaps see them die stoically in the glassed-in execution chamber with flames shooting through their sons’ electrocuted bodies, maybe sometime soon even their daughters’, look Mama, it’s the flotilla, Mai cried, look, and Mélanie tilted her head to the sun, thinking about a life of struggle that was just beginning, how sweet it was still to be young, willing, determined in such a virulent world, and Ari told Lou, who was sitting on his lap, isn’t it great to be on your own boat with Papa, it is our boat, you know, and I’m going to show you how to sail it, Lou’s Slipper, listen to the waves, hear that, Lou had on the same outfit she wore when Ari took her to the gym each morning, where’s Mama, I want Mama, she said, you’ll see her on Thursday, Ari said, you see her every day from Thursday to Sunday, but today and tomorrow you’re here with your papa, Mama, I want Mama, Lou sniffled reaching her arms out toward the marina where she had seen her mother head for the car, I want Mama, those were big birds on the wharves, she thought, and kittens she’d run around with, slapping her feet on the planks of the wharf, the marina, Mama’s car, Mama’s reddish hair, the litter of kittens, the landscape was receding, while Ari’s boat — soon to be hers — moved seaward, the ocean that felt like nowhere, the huge place she didn’t want to go, even on her father’s lap, then she stopped crying, maybe he was right, she would be with her mother and her brother Jules on Thursday, her father kept saying, look how beautiful it all is, so beautiful, and in front of Pastor Jérémy’s low, flat house amid the yellow grass, there were cocks and hens and chicks pecking away, Deandra and Tiffany were taking pictures for Carlos of Polly and Oreilles Coupées the dogs, if only they would stop wagging their tails, Polly should remember, they’d see Carlos and give him the picture on Sunday.

 

‹ Prev Next ›