Colour of Dawn (11 page)

It is precisely half-past three. Time stands still, the hours fixed at mid-afternoon. Mother's words over the phone are hardly reassuring. On her return from Aunt Sylvanie's she kept the front door of the house ajar. Mother caught Wiston by surprise, obviously on guard as he slowed his pace to peer through the half-open door, and saved him some unnecessary contortions, as she put it: ‘Wiston, there's no need to get a stiff neck; I'm here and Fignolé hasn't come home.' He gave a start and hurried away.

Mother's health has been getting worse for several weeks. Her knee troubles her mercilessly. Her dizzy spells happen more often and her ankles are swollen. She is worried about Fignolé but dares not say it. She attributes her complaints to the fact that Dambala, her master and her god, is not happy with her and feels neglected. Last year, because she had spent her money on Fignolé, Mother did not offer Dambala a ceremony worthy of his rank. And so she imagines he has remembered her, making her reel, her head heavier than a gourd full of water. When I told her I could do without gods who would take revenge on us poor creatures, she said, ‘Hold your peace, my daughter, be quiet.You don't know what you're saying.You may not see God, Joyeuse, but the loas, you feel them right there in your body. They speak to you, they make you dance, get you money. They lay their hands on you, silence your cares, give you love, wipe away your tears. And when you're tired of waiting, you can make them face up to their responsibilities towards you and threaten them, saying things like: “Dambala, if I don't get this money within a month…”.With them there is no cloud without a silver lining. No sin without forgiveness. No pain without healing. In this life of tribulation, of darkness and torment, the loas are your only morning dew, your only river of fresh water, your only window open to the sky.'

Unlike Angélique, Mother never expects anything of anyone. She responds to misfortune one step at a time, sometimes encircling it and embracing it. Angélique's life is a fruit of which she has eaten the best part without even noticing, without even tasting the juice. Those who get close to her sense in her a lukewarm indulgence that never leads to a deep, lasting relationship. Somewhere inside her she is marked with that sign that singles out the losers and ends up isolating them irreparably from the rest of humanity. Angélique has died that slow death that is the province of reprobates. Angélique has waited without getting that which she has been waiting for. Like many women, Angélique hoped for everything and, when it never came, lost it at a single stroke. Waiting for what you cannot have and realising too late that you will never have it makes for a life led in a narrow grind of sadness, the life of the defeated. Mother is exhausted but not defeated: ‘Exhaustion bends your spine but defeat is ugly.' From the day when I first understood that something made the world turn against me and all those like me, I chose to become precisely the opposite of defeated, the opposite of exhausted.

I was not afraid when I arrived at the Sisters' up town. They would not admit to their school a little girl born out of wedlock, those whose intake was limited to the daughters of the middle classes, those from the good districts. A little bastard who had usurped the name of my Uncle Antoine, I broke my way into this world that was not mine. I was therefore already a substantial step ahead of the others. I already knew a whole world of things that they would never know. I knew want and deprivation. I knew absence, that of a father. And I had a foot in their universe. Of life, of death, I already had my personal view, fixed, one that had nothing to do with any catechism. The world I had grown up in until then was full of mistrust, treachery and danger. But I have not learned fear. I have not become cautious. The Sisters believed me gifted because I progressed through the levels year on year. I was not gifted, but curious, keen to understand how far those who had written the history of the world would go; those who, in their history, wanted me to be the worm they could crush beneath their heels. School did not give me the explanations I was expecting to all these questions; I found my responses to this mistrust, this treachery, this danger, by myself. To the extent that I don't remember crying as I read about the sufferings of Cosette. Nor did I feel any compassion for Cinderella, and later on, the watery misadventures of Manuel and Anaïs left me above all with a feeling of the greatest perplexity. As the years went by some girls saw my deficiencies as a kind of strangeness. They were wrong. They were wrong but I never told them. I never told them that all these deficiencies, all these deprivations, these dangers and these ruses had forged my capacity to survive, to live without love. Perhaps it was that love could have conquered me, and so I have always mistrusted love.

My boss arrives at two on the dot in her son Mike's luxury car. Mike has two main qualities. He has inherited from his father a Nordic physique in a land of Negroes who don't like themselves and a fortune in the midst of desolation that is too great to be fully counted. But Mike has already surpassed his father in cleverness. Since secondary school he has learned to cheat like his father, and since his misdeeds have now increased in scope and intensity, he has reached his late twenties with a small fortune that even his father can only dream about.

I am not well-placed to judge anyone, but the more the Herbruchs – father and son – steal, the more they accumulate and the more they whisper prayers into the ear of God, every Sunday and in full view of all. Monsieur Herbruch's negotiating skills have led him to come to terms even with the anger of God. Like his father, Mike will be the kind of man with a narrow imagination whose intelligence is limited to matters of business and who will do a lot of wrong, the kind of wrongs that are denounced every day on the radio and in certain papers that still believe in the power of the written or spoken word. I don't.

Madame Herbruch's parents experienced a change in fortunes.When a lack of money began to spread its smell of rottenness through the house they married my boss to Frantz Herbruch, that ungainly, conceited, soulless man. However, a few weeks later, Madame Herbruch, née Bérénice Pétillon, ended up finding him as handsome as Croesus. All the better for the fact that Frantz Herbruch turned out to be an undemanding lover who soon ceased to seek either a child or his own pleasure between her thighs.To remind each other of their own existence, from time to time they attack one another with bombshells of truths hatched from the lies of banal married life. Blood does not flow, but the effect is more or less the same.

Madame Herbruch has never found out that one afternoon of heavy rain, Monsieur Herbruch wanted to accompany me to the tap-tap station. Despite the rain I could hear his thoughts like the ticking of a clock and was hardly taken by surprise when, stopping the car, he placed one hand on my left breast and the other up my skirt. No doubt he was hoping to take me back to have a bit of fun in some bachelor pad and add me to his list of victims. I had known the appetites of men for a long time. Another before him, a respectable gentleman and a friend of Uncle Antoine, had already played the car trick on me. Staring directly into the eyes of Monsieur Herbruch, I reached down and impassively removed each of his hands before opening the car door and disappearing into the downpour. Ever since he has avoided my eye, but dare not have me sacked. Rest assured, Monsieur Herbruch, Joyeuse Méracin has other fish to fry.

I do not want to tell Madame Herbruch of my worries about Fignolé. I simply complete the day's accounts and ask her permission to leave early. In any case she knows I'm not there for ever, that I'll be leaving her before long as I turn my fate around. She knows. We're quits.

The first thing she does is to pick up the phone and fill her friends' ears with gossip picked up the previous day. And your daughter? My son-in-law? My jewels? My pennies? A cackling of society hens with lukewarm excesses. Women hardened by money and characterless destinies. Frustration, vanity and pretension succeed one another in a bland, horrified, hopeless saraband. There is something depressing about these overfull but lacking lives.

After a long list of kidnappings, deaths and money stolen from the state coffers, a well-known journalist announces on the radio in a trembling voice that this island is home to an empire of evil. Unable to control herself, Madame Herbruch calls up two of her friends to comment on this news and consider departing for Miami. All her customers, all her friends want to flee to Miami. It has always been a good time to flee from this country, but who could really do it? I imagine Miami as a new Garden of Eden, the refuge for all those who have escaped an earthquake, leaving behind them the dead and the wounded.

When she wants me to rally to her cause I give her my wholehearted agreement. Perhaps a little too enthusiastically – she understands from my expression that I do not share her enthusiasm. That I am one of the dead and the wounded she would not hesitate to abandon. She understands that I am lying to her. My expressions have always betrayed me. From the start I have always reacted instinctively to things and to people. As I grew I did it as a matter of defiance. And then, deep inside, I came to know that the elation and pleasure of the conquerors will end up suffering a great fall as a result of always wanting more. That by always wanting more they have now reached a point of despair that they don't even realise themselves, a point of deep-down certainty that the kindness and gentleness of the defeated could at any moment turn and drive them, the conquerors, into a place of fear. The conquerors know this, and so do the defeated. And because of it we, both defeated and conquerors, are today equal in our despair.

I don't know what conclusion my boss draws as she looks at me, but she does not say a word. From the depths of her gilded cavern she seems to be calling for help. Her face is twisted into a grimace that she has invented on the spot, intended for me alone. Recovering possession of herself, Madame Herbruch applies her fuchsia-coloured lipstick, powders her face and leaves, hardly bothering to say goodbye to me. I savour the temporary pleasure of this brief victory. For the moment it's all I have. And I'm happy with it.

TWENTY-ONE

I
n the tap-tap we are pressed together thigh against thigh, flank against flank, forced despite ourselves into a malodorous, grudging embrace. People are talking nineteen to the dozen and this wild jaunt is soon transformed into a theatrical performance. They all have something to say about their prowess, their exploits, their cunning and that male or female wisdom that allows them to see further than ordinary mortals. How could anyone see that far and not have made their escape from this galley? I ask you. But none of us, myself included, has the courage to ask these comedians to be quiet, to call to mind the only subject that would make us come out with our truths like a decayed tooth pulled once and for all. Because another conversation, a silent one, is weaving its way among us – in the shadow of our guts, the redness of our blood, the obscurity of our bones.

We know full well what is being hatched by our flesh torn by suffering, our black-nailed hands, our gashed heels, our threadbare clothes, our gap-toothed gums, the sweat that sticks to our skin.We know. And so we continue the conversation elsewhere, in the intimacy of kerosene lamps whose glow makes our faces seem as if devoured by rats. When our shadows dance against the rough walls of our houses we will raise the subject of the secret evil that has been advancing over two centuries. Later, later, once we are within our own walls.

The time for stifled voices is back.
Le temps de se parler par signes.
The time of unbearable absences. Here we are, all three of us, caught between fear and anger. Hope and despair. We do not yet know that our first hardships are still within an inch of our happiness. We do not yet know that the waiting could kill with stealth.

When a man with a thick bull's neck and a T-shirt with the image of the leader of the Démunis gets into the taptap and sits down, the lively conversation seems to be inflamed. The more it becomes inflamed, the more it loses all savour, while the other, the silent one, comes to life, flares up in our chests. We want to jump onto the neck of this man, to shout out our exhaustion and to tear off his T-shirt. I take a deep breath and close my eyes. But we are weak. Some more weak than others. We are indignant, we stifle our shouts. But we are weak.

The events of the previous day, those of the morning, have shaken up our hearts a little more. Fearing as we pass the young, cruel faces of these children who already have death at their fingertips, we hurry on despite ourselves. Death has already filled their eyes so many times that they destroy to assure themselves of their own existence. Destroy or themselves be destroyed. Frighten or be frightened. Fear has become the most subtle vigilance, an implacable sovereign. The radios do not tell of it all. It is impossible for them to tell of everything. Death travels more quickly than the news, bulletins and the latest reports.

Who will ever know that a sixteen-year-old, graced with one of those nicknames from Hell, A-bullet-to-thehead, one day begged Aunt Sylvanie for help? Who will ever know? His emotion was such that his lips were trembling and words were pouring from his mouth as if he wanted to clear them out, like a poison that was scorching his tongue and his insides. When Aunt Sylvanie asked him what he wanted from her, he replied that he wanted to be able to sleep in peace. He could no longer shut his eyes at night, since he had severed with a machete the hands and legs of a youth in his neighbourhood who was trying to run away, before pushing him, alive, into the flames of his burning house. Since he had planted his member inside Marie-Laure, the daughter of the head of the only school there. Marie-Laure started out fighting like a young bird caught in a trap. She cried out, her head knocking against a wall at every thrust of the hips, then finally passed out when the third of the gang members, sated, gave a final grunt and left her for dead. Throughout this account, A-bullet-to-the-head was talking jerkily, gasping for breath. His chest was moving up and down as if he were winded, and he begged Aunt Sylvanie to surround him with the protection of the Invisibles because from that moment he was afraid – despite the interventions of a healer, a boko who had demanded a frizzle chicken, three grey tortoises and a black candle. Despite the blessed image he carried in his right trouser pocket, the one in his left and the one in his shirt pocket one to ensure that he does not miss his victims, another to make sure he gets paid on his return and the third to keep him from ever getting caught. At first he had been well stoked up, by the dope, the journalists of the Prophet President's radio and the authorities who were bigger than him.