“Don’t touch that pot,” she would protest whenever I wanted to help. “I’ll wash it myself; leave that broom alone, you’ll get calluses. I’m not slaving away so you can end up a servant boy.”
She died the year I came home triumphantly to give her news of my successful completion of the exams for the second baccalaureate. “I can die now,” she had said. And die she did, too soon. I had learned to count on her and not on myself. What I knew was how to read the classics and to speak French like a Parisian.
“Good diction, very good diction,” Brother Justinien would say, rubbing his hands together.
I was already writing poems and reciting those by French authors and sometimes my own, but I didn’t know how to do anything else. “Lazybones!” they cried after me in the street. Lazy? I sometimes spent whole nights with my notebook, writing, crossing out, ripping it up to start again, over and over. Lazy? My mother left me her shack, the furniture now blocking the door, and her loas! Lazybones! I tutored a few students that Brother Justinien sent me, but nobody thanked me because I stank of clairin.
“Stop drinking, don’t drink anymore,” the good Dr. Chanel kept repeating to me. “You’ll ruin your health and your reputation.”
Why do they rebuke me for my one vice? If I’m doing my job properly, if I am conscientious in teaching their sons, stubborn asses interested in nothing, then why are they meddling in my private life? If I drink, it’s my business. Ah, I remember my first spree at Saindor’s, who had his place on the shore, before the devils murdered him. May he rest in peace! I was hunting a poem that was torturing me sadistically as it fled. I saw it run, turn around, thumb its nose at me, stroke my cheek, lean on my shoulder, look me seriously in the eye and burst out laughing. So I drank. I began drinking because of this poem I never wrote. I staggered down the Grand-rue in front of Cécile’s door, staggered before her maid Marcia, who laughed and got the kids to throw rocks at me. I never raised my eyes to see Cécile. My heart quickened with loud beating. I know how to be prudent. That prefect who sent me speeches to correct for a few piastres but still called me a loser in public, I will take his name to my grave. To my grave, the name of a certain popular writer who returned my poems with a slight look of distaste, telling me: “Poets are all the rage now, so keep writing, my dear, if you like.”
But I was soft and they knew it. They went at me ruthlessly. I have since witnessed the undeserved triumph of the grandiose and the mediocre. Machete in hand, I will climb the hill of dreams on my own. I will hew my way through the undergrowth of tangled creepers. Alone at the broken ground for the edifice that my hands would have been the first to trace, I will lift my face to the rising dawn, machete in my fist, soaked with sweat and blood…
I am getting used to this terrible silence reigning over our town. A town mired in terror! We have become the half-dead residents of a dead town. I am taking on the foul stench of the corpse outside. André snores, lying stretched out on the floor beside the crucifix. He has taken off his shirt and his prominent ribs stab at his skin. He looks so much like me we could be brothers. The room stinks. The chamber pot is full to the brim. I am suffocating. What are they waiting for to bury the dead? Where is the prefect? Where is the commandant in charge of the town’s security? Where is M. Potentat? Where is the mayor? Where are the police? Where are they all? Ah! Ah! Ah! So they too are afraid? Well, we’re no more cowards than they are, André and I. At least they have weapons, but us? Where are the church bells? I want to hear them ring. Poor Father Angelo! Your priests will be more useless than ever. We must fight the devils with equal force. This is none of your business. How is it our business, mine, André’s, Jacques’ and Simon’s? Unknown and malnourished poets. Poor unarmed poets abandoned to the cruelty of the devils. What was I doing the night before they came? I can’t remember. Something in the air must have announced this invasion. Something we didn’t know how to interpret. Perhaps the danger hovered over our carefree heads for a long time. What are we guilty of? What are we paying for? If Jesus was put to death, it’s because he offered something more. Where did I read that? What more have we said or done than the others? In history, details are always meaningful. Are we going to enter history? Once upon a time, voices would often rise out of the depths of my conscience that I would silence with blows of rhyme. Details. Yes, meaningful. What did these voices say? Did they reproach me for my indifference toward the rituals of my ancestors? Did they accuse me of laziness, treason, cowardice? Here I am, my nails scratching the varnish off my Latin education, clinging to the bosom of the superstitious terrors of my childhood. How much less dangerous it is to serve God! He has the patience of a forsaken lover, hanging around in case love rekindles to hold out his hand and forgive. Exacting loas! Insatiable loas of my ancestors!…
I went to open the trunk and I saw a rat lapping up the syrup in the dishes. I banished him with a kick and started laughing and screaming:
“Jesus, Son of God made man, lift up your hand over this town and cast out these devils.”
I’m delirious. It’s the hunger. The tension, too. When’s the last time I have either eaten or slept? And yet, I poured the syrup into the marassas dishes again and stopped up the rat hole.
André is asleep on his side now. He grunts and I go past him furtively I miss solitude. Decency is only necessary in the presence of a third party. And I don’t feel like being decent at such a time as this. Here I am looking through the hole studying the dead body again.
My eyes left him only when I saw Cécile’s curtains move. I wrote a poem in my head about her black eyes, her black hair, her brown plum-colored skin, and I told myself: “It’s true that she is beautiful and rich and will never be mine.” Nonsense! Fame awaits me. Wealth awaits me. I snuggle lovingly in the arms of sweet hope.
“Madame Magistral, may I speak to your daughter Cécile?”
“Cécile,” Mme Magistral will say, paying me no mind, “some beggar is asking for you. It’s that little mulatto, Angélie the trinket-peddler’s boy.”
And Cécile will appear, haughty, shouting in Creole:
“What do you want? Are you running an errand for Madame Fanfreluche?”
And I will run away, head down, Marcia scolding me.
Will they have the nerve to humiliate me, to keep being smug after everything we’ve suffered together? I’d rather the devils kill everyone. Let this town disappear! Let it be annihilated…
They’ve started again with the firing squad. It’s happening near the church. I wake up André. Now we’re both flat against the wall, looking through the hole.
“Beggars,” André whispers to me. “Never have I seen so many of them.”
“But those are peasants.”
“Oh!” says André.
The bullets crackle. A little girl runs from one house to the next. I see her fall. André doesn’t. It’s strange he didn’t see her fall. The sound of the bullets is terrifying. They whistle with a treacherously inconspicuous sound, a sound like nothing else in the world. Their whistling echoes in the distance for a long time, patiently, annihilating all other sounds, even the hoarse martial blast of the lambi [44] calling the peasants together for a coumbite, [45] even the rumbling of the rada drums calling hounsis [46] to the voodoo ceremony. Everything is drowning in a sea of blood. I would like to stare in the devils’ faces as they kill. From a distance, they all look the same in their uniforms. Neither black, nor white, nor yellow. Colorless! Like crime. Colorless! Like injustice and cruelty. You see nothing of them under their uniforms. Headless bodies. Faceless heads in golden helmets. Would I have the courage to stare at them even from behind the walls of my shack? They are anonymous, like stupidity and meanness. Their ugliness overwhelms me, demoralizes me. The way the surface of the face and its features decompose beneath the weight of sadistic cruelty-this is what I call ugliness. They enjoy killing too much. There are hundreds of bodies in front of the church. I hear another blast of bullets. These shots, I only understand this now, are their language, their voice. Here’s one of them now at the end of the street. I clutch at the wall and look at him. He’s just across from us. His face is cast in some kind of metal, like a blinding mirror in the sun. I close my eyes, suddenly feeling weak.