“It’ll make you agitated,” André says.
“Yes, but I won’t feel hungry anymore. When I drink, I go crazy and when I’m crazy, I’m not hungry.”
André furiously scratches his scar and passes the bottle to Jacques.
“Shit!” he exclaims, “it’s like fire.”
He starts writing again. He suddenly seems very far away from us, as if in one leap he had jumped the fence into an invisible world. Ecstatic, he stares at one corner of the room and writes. How can he write without looking at his hands? His lips are moving slowly. He’s fallen into the snare and can’t get out. He can’t run anymore to escape the rhymes. His legs have been maimed. The mechanism of the snare has been triggered and has sheared off his legs to the thighs. A thousand, ten thousand, a million poets with empty bellies have been snared by the rhyme traps sown on the road. A hard rocky road, full of ruts and ditches, that we keep ascending, exhausted and worn-out, a road that wears holes into our beggarly shoes, but a road we cannot resist. The Road of Haiti framed here and there with green hope, red victory, white purity and yellow saffron. Rainbow colors wafting indifferently above the rocky road designed by the profaning hands of men. Nature, forever merry, giving birth without pangs amid the joyful polychromatic foliage, giant butterflies whirling madly around it. Merry, merry, making merry! And here we are, locked up, sweating the last bit of moisture out of our bodies, starving. All because of the devils. It’s high time for me to take action. André and Jacques are in my way. I need to be alone to think. Jacques’ blind gaze and his hand running over paper distract my thought from its objective. André’s dazed inaction gets on my nerves. He is always sitting, arms dangling, mouth gaping, unless he’s clasping his hands and mumbling prayers. I am alone. More alone than before. No matter how much I focus, I can’t recover my train of thought. And yet I had come up with a plan to defeat the devils. I’m trying to find it. Trying to find it. I’m turning in circles. I am stuck on the wrong trail. Still trying to find it. Suffocating. As though a leaden hand is keeping my head in a sea of tar. I’m struggling. It’s dark, dark. I can’t see a thing in front of me. Wrestling with truth. It’s luminous but I don’t understand it. Empty! Empty! I am going to sink. I’m wallowing in unspeakable darkness. The glimmer returns. I reach for it. It slips away. Ah! My head is going to explode. My heart is going to give out!…
I would sometimes go to the market on Saturdays with my black mother. She would make me sit beside the goods tray and I would help her set up the cheap cloth swatches, the Creole hoop earrings, the lace trim that I was learning to measure by the ell, the silver medals, and the calico scarves. She was proud of her big goods tray that she carried on her head as night fell. Around us, the servants and the beggar-cripples came and went, as did the beggar-thieves whom we watched out of the corner of our eye. Mama would say to me:
“Don’t let them leave your sight, they’re more cunning than cats.” But all I could pay attention to was Alcindor, an old drunk who would roll on the ground and get up again in a moldy old frock coat-a gift from the prefect-white with dust, and do a banda dance. [54] His toothless mouth tied in a grin to his ears, he would sway his hips and we would clap to the rhythm to get him going. Bam bidim, bam bidim, bam bidim… bap! At noon, we would buy our meal from my mother’s cousin Justina, Aunt Justina as I called her, but whom others including my mother called strictly Mme Macius after her marriage in deference to the new wedding band on her finger.
When did I leave the common people behind? When we walked by, people used to say to my mother:
“How’s your mulatto boy Sister Angélie?” And my mother would reply:
“Praise God, he’s growing, my sister; he’s growing, my brother.”
“Oh, cousin!” Aunt Justina would cry out, squatting before her huge pot, “he’ll be a man soon!”
“God is good!” my mother would be quick to say, warding off bad luck.
For she feared the evil eye would fall on her mulatto boy like the plague. And especially because he was different from all the black boys. When did I abandon the people? She had hung around my neck the scapular medal Father Angelo had offered me at first communion. And the scapular hung near a large evil-eye bead on a red string that she wouldn’t have taken off me for anything in the world. I wore the scapular on the outside and the evil-eye bead underneath, and I could feel it bounce against my navel with every step. When did I lose my evil-eye bead? It was no ordinary evil-eye bead. Gromalin, the houngan my mother visited once in a while to make sure things went well for her, had endowed it with the miraculous power to keep all evil spirits away from me. When did I get rid of my evil-eye bead?
I grew up listening to the French writers talking in the books Brother Justinien lent me.
“You are very bright, René,” he would say to me. “I will keep pushing you in your studies.”
But he was seventy-three and died a short time before my mother did. And I cried, for I have a tender soul and all poets are tender-souled, sensitive types. I am talking about the true poets, not the false ones who write because it’s fashionable, to get attention. I wrote verse in French about Christophe, Dessalines, Toussaint and Pétion. I am clinging to the colonial legacy like a louse. Why not? Dessalines thought he had uprooted it when he yelled:
“Off with their heads, burn down their houses!”
His Declaration of Independence, did his secretary Boisrond-Tonnerre [55] write it in Creole? What about Toussaint? What language did he learn to parry wits with Bonaparte?
“Do you want a séche?” [56] our French friend Simon said recently offering me a cigarette.
I stared at him without understanding…
I can see the town’s houses dancing. They’re going around my shack. As they file past, I hear good Dr. Chanel’s piano and then Mme Fanfreluche’s radio. A Mozart concerto rises up from the former, a popular merengue from the latter. Mozart breaks the spell of the drum over me. Who taught me to love Mozart? One day, I had opened the door to Dr. Chanel’s living room without knocking and he caught me standing very still, listening, arms crossed, serious and attentive. He said to me:
“Now, that’s what we call music, my son. Mozart alone is an angel among spirits.”
I felt the notes penetrate my flesh, mingle with my blood. I understood only later that on this day I had encountered something universal, out of the depths of a shared humanity, something that legitimately belonged to me as well, for the ties between it and myself had already been established. Mozart, the German, was my brother, beyond blood and distance, beyond centuries. A hyphen between races, as with Villon, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud. Mozart’s biography, which Dr. Chanel had me read, gave me ambitions.
“I will write,” I exclaimed, “poems that will shake the world.”
And thereafter, I discovered that such a task demanded one’s blood, drop by drop. I opened my veins and vainly dipped my quill in blood. Accursed poet! A poet on layaway! A French-minted black poet! Where is your tongue? Give me the clairin! I got drunk night and day to forget. Like Villon, like Baudelaire, like Rimbaud…
“Brotherhood of mad poets!” Commandant Cravache sniggers.
Hearing that we’re crazy, again and again, will make us so. In any case, he’s tried everything he can to make that happen, our Commandant Cravache. How many times must we get our heads bashed in? How many months in jail? And why, oh gods? Who are they trying to frighten by attacking us, hunting us down, persecuting us, beating us up?…
[54]