Her mother closed her eyes and bit her lips before answering.
“You really think I feel that old and close to death?”
“Look, how should I know? Forty-year-old women put up with everything! But us young girls, we have to have our say, we have to fight even if it’s over nothing. Maybe that’s because we still have our strength, because life hasn’t yet knocked us around. Even though we know that life isn’t all peaches, we want to struggle with it, see where it will take us, just to test our strength. Do you understand?”
“I was young too once. I beg you, my little girl, think twice about what you’re about to do.”
“Don’t try to frighten me, Mama, don’t do that.” She threw her book on the bed and got up.
“Don’t you feel like it has to be done? For Paul, if only for Paul.”
“Don’t go, Rose, don’t go…”
With these words she ran away, and Rose heard the door to her room close behind her.
She sat on the bed, eyes fixed in front of her. Her senses were recording every sound as faithfully as a tape recorder. From beyond the other side of the stakes, she could hear the men in black talking and walking around, and she shuddered in horror at the memory of the Gorilla whose hairy hand had touched her knee. If he ever touches me, I’ll die, she told herself.
When, at lunchtime, a truck dumped its first load of stones with a crash under the trees in the garden, they rushed to the dining room window. Under the watchful eye of the men in black uniform, twenty beggars dressed like convicts in striped shirts were digging around the stakes with picks, while twenty others mixed mortar.
“They are building a wall to cut us off from the land,” the father said calmly.
Paul, who in the past two days had only left the house to buy cigarettes, grew pale and bravely plunged back into his book as if he wanted to break all connection between himself and the noises outside that seemed to grow more intense minute by minute. The invalid asked to be brought to the window and stared at the trees with his strange, precocious and burning eyes:
“We’ll still see the oaks, wall or no,” he cried out. “It’ll never be as tall, never.”
Interrupting his reading, Paul looked at the invalid, his brow wrinkled as he considered a thought that this childish statement had randomly inspired in him. How difficult it is to escape, no matter how hard one tries, he thought. The noises outside entered into me, as did the voices of the grandfather and the child. They pursue me in my sleep and torture me. Now I know that, just like human beings, things have their own lives. Despite the screen that my will has imposed, I hear the noises of the picks and trowels, the heavy pounding of the stones. They ring in my brain, relentlessly. I have to get away from here, make myself forget for a moment. Neither Papa nor Rose will be able to accomplish anything. They can fool themselves all they want. Why was Rose crying? It’s the first time I’ve seen her like that. What is she up to? What about Grandfather? Why is he always whispering to the child? We have split up into two factions. And maybe Mama and I are in a third without realizing it. Is this what it means to take courage? To live. To go on living. When life, from birth until death, is nothing but fraud! No, the cheating doesn’t start until later! From earliest childhood, pure and carefree, until death. That’s why, despite his whims and moods, Claude has never known childhood. And Grandfather, who has found a friend in him, doesn’t know why he loves him. Why did they come on our land? Why this punishment? Why this curse? Is it to force us to take stock of our cowardice that life tests us? Or, rather, is it to help us find ourselves? I have to stop thinking about them and come out of my state of prostration. Otherwise, I’ll become sick. See Fred again. Don’t take no for an answer, get back on the team, find a girl ‘willing to love me. That’s it, love, love! Yes, but which girl? Anna, Dr. Valois’ daughter. Beautiful, wise, intelligent. Is it possible for so many qualities to be gathered in one woman? Rose? A big question mark for me lately. She carries on like I don’t know what. If I get to know Anna, won’t I find that she crumbles under my very eyes like the others? So narrow-minded of me! I’m just like Grandfather and he doesn’t even know it… Can’t listen to any of this anymore. Got to get away! Forget! Forget!
The sentences coming out of him displaced those scrolling under his eyes in the book. From the window, the mother watched the wall go up. She had undone the top of her blouse and was breathing with difficulty. She remembered that one morning she had noticed a bird perched on her window. The presence of the man sleeping deeply at her side as she counted the hours from dusk to dawn reinforced her feeling of loneliness. And the bird had suddenly popped up as if answering her call. It stared at her with its round eyes and tilted its head to the right and then to the left as if mocking her. He has something to tell me, she had thought childishly. He came all the way here to show me what freedom is. For a good minute or so they had stood there looking at each other, each of them absolutely still. Then the bird twittered and flew off on swift wings trilling its happy song. Alone again, she had invented touchingly naïve myths to console herself: a leaf whirling in the wind, a butterfly whether black or alive with color, the hooting of an owl or the graceful song of a nightingale, everything seemed pregnant with meaning.
CHAPTER NINE
“Tell me what your father was like,” the invalid asked the old man that day.
“Very tall, very strong and very dark-skinned,” the grandfather answered. “He dressed like a peasant, in a long coarse blue tunic and sandals.”
“Tell me how he became master of this land.”
“It could only have been thanks to a miracle,” the grandfather said, “and woe to those who don’t believe in miracles, for God’s hand guides our actions. All right, listen carefully to my story: One day, my father went to Port-au-Prince to sell his cattle. His horse carried him three days and three nights, accompanied by goats, cows and sheep and the barking dogs that herded them. For the country was wealthy and business was booming in those days. Have you ever seen sheep?”
“No, Grandfather.”
“They disappeared at the same time prosperity did. In the hill country, they say the malfinis, eagles with a taste for mutton, devour them at birth. See how they hover over our land.”
The grandfather pointed to a patch of sky right above the oaks where big black birds flew slowly, grazing the branches, diving beak-first, cawing and greedily eyeing the ground below.
“Grandfather, they look like the men in uniform who have taken our land.”
The grandfather lit his pipe, which he had been filling since he mentioned the sheep. He wedged it into the corner of his mouth and pulled on it until it caught.
“Then what happened?” the child asked.
“Then,” said the grandfather, “your great-grandfather arrived in Port-au-Prince surrounded by his sheep, his goats and his cows, and was on his way to the house of a very rich man who had long been buying his cattle, when he met a peasant on the way who said to him:
“‘My master will trade these parcels of land for your animals. Say yes and you won’t be sorry’
“‘Will he permit me to choose these parcels freely?’
“‘Yes, indeed. And you will become a great landowner in one of the loveliest quarters of Port-au-Prince.’
“So my father followed the peasant. In exchange for three cows, eight goats and twelve sheep, he got a tiny piece of land. Look over there, under the first oak.”
“I see,” said the child.
“My father had a rough life back in the countryside. Early to rise, late to bed, he was tireless caring for his animals, and each time he brought them here he got another piece of land. When he had enough, he had this house built where he set up my mother and me, for I was old enough to go to school. My mother was expecting a second child and father continued to go back and forth between the country and the city at the cost of his health.”