— You’ve got to be kidding me! It tears me up inside to have to remember my own situation. And my memory has been bleeding during this whole relentless ordeal. We’ll call it purgatory, if it’s God’s stick that’s beating me — the horrors of hell, if it’s the evil of men! The journey we went through, no way I’d ever have believed something like that possible … Nine of us had paid one hundred and fifty dollars up front to the owner of the bathtub that was meant to bring us to Nassau. A clandestine voyage for which we had to take every precaution, exercise maximum discretion. Sails flapping, we’d left the shores of Gonaïves one Tuesday at dawn. The day went by without incident. In the afternoon, we came upon a big, oblong boulder, shaped like a big loaf of black bread, a few scrawny mangrove plants growing on its surface. The captain made clear that we were to get out there and wait for him for half an hour at most. To give him some time to contact his associate, he explained, a smuggler who usually assisted him in these sorts of schemes. In any case, he hastened to add persuasively, “My friend isn’t far from here; he lives in the area, on one of these little islands; he’s an experienced seaman; he knows his way around better than I do.” And so we peacefully disembarked to wait for him. An hour went by, followed by several others. The bathtub was taking a long time to come back. Our eyes searched the darkness. Our voices trembled with fear. In spite of the cold and the humidity, we were resigned to spending the night on the boulder. Huddled together on top of one another in a compact mass. In a common anguish. With no cover. Suddenly, since we weren’t sleeping, the sound of steps, like the rustling of dry leaves, caught our attention. We got up cautiously, guessing at what it could be. When we used our lighters, the horror of a bloodcurdling spectacle presented itself before us. A terrifying army of crabs had already invaded the entire surface of the boulder. Enormous, bulging, greenish crabs. Despite our screams, the noises we made to scare them, we were barely able to chase them away. Unbelievably, their numbers kept increasing. Incalculable hordes. They grasped at our pant legs. Scratched. Bit. I felt my legs swelling from their stings, bites, and scratches. We continued to battle them. But each time we managed to crush a few of them, more aggressive successors immediately launched an attack. A horrifying crunching of antennas, legs, blistering mouths. In the end, confusion took hold. Besieged. Disheartened. Panic-stricken. We jumped into the sea. Then, to top it all off, only five of us knew how to swim. We couldn’t save the others, weak as we were, depressed, and fearful that the worst would happen to us too. After more than three exhausting hours of swimming and painful paddling through the waves, we were rescued — half-dead — by a patrolling lifeboat. We were given first aid. A week later, still suffering from shock, I found myself in a dark room with only a basement window providing air. To my great astonishment, I’d been shut away in a Nassau prison where I was to await my imminent repatriation to my home country …
— For me, hell is right here on earth. I’ve lived and suffered enough to know that. No one will ever make me think otherwise. I can’t imagine a demon more intelligent, more ingenious than man in the perfecting of punishment and misery. And in the end, life is contained dramatically within the parentheses of an enigmatic choice. A miserable set of alternatives: furious wisdom or peaceful madness. Otherwise, of course, surely we’d be dead before we even started living.
Endlessly, the passengers speak whenever they aren’t sleeping. Two nights and two whole days of navigation. Long hours woven with stories of misery and wandering, drawn-out sighs and a spattering of complaints. Voices thick with weariness and sadness against the calm silence of the sea. Hundreds of broken-down bodies on the old, wheezing ship. At dawn on the third day, the reflected rays of the sun illuminated the Caribbean. Large birds gleaming black and pink flew diagonally and heavily over the boat. In a few hours … Haiti. Enormous sharks followed in the vessel’s frothy wake; their narrow, silvery fins cut through the blue waters of the Wind Canal. Everything seemed marvelous. The majesty of the ocean. The flapping flight of the birds that alight periodically on the yard. The leaping sharks. Nature’s splendor. Unchanging. Eternal. Indifferent. As if it had never had anything to do with the suffering of men.
Standing up toward the rear of the deck with twenty or so other wretches, the unfortunate souls being sent back with him, Raynand seems to be lost in appreciation of this simple beauty, in a confusing amalgam of sensations and thoughts. To see my mother again. The streets of Port-au-Prince. The smells of humanity. The erotic heat. To return to this little place differently, in less pitiful circumstances … How happy I’d be! But to land back in my country as a good-for-nothing. Without money. Completely derailed. A wreck. Wearing this threadbare suit. Flapping in the wind. How will I be welcomed by my country … by my neighborhood … by my home?
Raynand’s gaze floats above it all, faraway. Suddenly, he’s torn from his daydreams by a sound that makes him start. A real racket. A veritable panic. In the front of the ship, anguished voices, begging:
— My friends, please, come back here! You’re going to kill yourselves! Don’t do this! Come back!..
Raynand barely has a chance to catch something about the escape and possible rescue of some drowning men before he realizes that there’s a group suicide happening. Four passengers had dived brazenly into the tide full of voracious sharks. Immediately, on the captain’s order, the old piece of scrap iron slows down. The sea, a roiling abyss, becomes an electric drum set, beating out a frenetic jazz rhythm. Violent intake of air. Locomotive with buzzing mucous membranes pitilessly kneading their prey. Hand brakes engaged. Swirling funnel in which the sharks, in a great red disorder, share pieces of arms, legs, and jagged flesh amongst themselves. Entrails and chests torn to bits. Not one scream is heard. All is submerged in a grating tumult of fins and froth. A horrible shredding of jaws, teeth, fangs, and tails. A porridge of effervescent colors and bloody turbulence. A sudden brewing of living, active ingredients in full eruption. An unbearable lyricism of purplish-blue stained with scarlet stripes. A massacre of slashed meat and exploded viscera.
Eyes peeled and fingers tensed on some rigging, Raynand holds his breath. Vertigo. He turns away and can just make out the distant shape of the island of Haiti, indolent and desperately denuded on the horizon. That very day, they’ll all disembark on the wharf in Port-au-Prince. A long line of horrifying skeletons. Faces from beyond the grave. If it weren’t for the frequency of the spectacle of repatriated boat people, one would take them for strange zombies escaped from some marine cemetery. From the inner port of the city they file out, two by two. Heads lowered. Attached to one another. As if made up like plague victims to act, against a realistic backdrop, in some scene from a dramatic opera. Quotidian theater of island violence. Tragedy of a people torn between secular suffering and the uncertainty of a dream without moorings.
Of course, our classical university schooling and our independent studies had opened the door to the world of beings and things outside ourselves, although we often arrived at dead ends. We’d learned a lot from that. To the point where we began to have doubts. To become conscious of our own ignorance. To renounce. To break. Slow meandering of a river whose mouth seems to vomit up the sea. Fermentation of the brain that yearns to create because the body is suffering and the heart is raging. In flying over the vast forests of History, we thought we glimpsed through a window — or at least guessed at — humankind’s long itinerary. Thus fascinated by an impossible dream of a moon and a rainbow wound together in the deceptive, velvety darkness, feverishly drinking up the light planted behind a nameless day, caressing the breasts and the navel of a sexless woman, parodying the language of sewn-up mouths, seeking the raised lids of a face without eyes, dancing on the contorted legs of a broken puppet … why ever would we stop milking the midnight cow? We draw the new milk of anonymous days. We don’t worry about the vastness of the dome that opens onto absurdity and nothingness. It has been put there on purpose to discourage us, this incessant back-and-forth between sickness and relapse. Let us borrow the nocturnal eye of the phosphorous lamp. The fiancée is there, sewing her bridal gown in the next room.