Fanon (22 page)

No preparation for snow. Only island stories about
petite neige,
strange white flakes falling from the sky, white dust each morning after Mount Pelée grumbled at night, pale ash powdering roofs of villages and sleeping cows in the weeks before Pelée erupted and unleashed a pyroclastic blast leveling St. Pierre, incinerating in a minute the capital city's thirty thousand inhabitants in a firestorm rolling down the mountainside (a black prisoner in an underground dungeon cell the only survivor, the story goes).
Petite neige.
Little snow. Now he'd crossed oceans and found big snow. Or snow had found him. Not the snow of postcard France. The postcards lied like the smiling brown faces on postcards of Martinique. Winter besieged France as relentlessly as war. Trapped you in a kind of living death, a skin-cracking and -splitting zombie in-betweenness. No escape because snow squeezes inside you. Back home on his island, death turns things soft and runny. Things rot, stink, change colors. Here his flesh and blood would harden, become a transparent chunk of ice, exploding finally, the swirling particles of him swept up by the wind, then drifting slowly back to earth, indistinguishable from the snow, buried forever in a cold white sheet.

His first snowfall arrived obscured by darkness, mixed with freezing rain, cold blots on his cheeks, his eyelashes, pellets of icy rain pinging the column's vehicles as the men bivouacked for the night. Not until the next morning did he see big flakes hovering everywhere around and about him, countless particles descending in slow motion. The dust of his shattered, frozen bones floating in front of his eyes. How could he have slept through Pelée's fiery hands tearing him apart.

Was snow drifting down or was the entire earth rising, slowly, slowly, climbing into the sky like the fir trees crowning a ridge in the middle distance, feathery trees lifting themselves and drawing up behind them the hills in which they're rooted.

Snow falling slowly, thickly, unbelievably quiet as war before war starts up each day. He's the first to burrow from a jumble of tents pitched under a truck's giant, dragon-toothed tires, a truck whose canvas-covered bed is packed with frozen sticks of men, and for a moment he believes he's the only one awake in the world. But why him. Why here in a place so far from the green
mornes
and golden beaches of his island. Why is he imprisoned in this fortress Europe that has beckoned then betrayed him, this hell of killing and being killed. Peering up through the screen of snow, he sees a sky bright blue already at dawn, an unexpected, unnerving blue like the eyes many years ago burning cold in the face of an ancient, tarry-fleshed
martiniçaise.
Blue not a sign of the sky's presence but its absence, he decides. Nothing above the falling snow except a vast hole, a hole punctured by countless other holes to let through the white flakes surrounding him, this snow tasteless on his tongue, a net dissolving into nothing when his mittens bat it.

It is a year since I left Fort-de-France. Why. To defend an obsolete ideal ... If l don't comeback, and if one day you learn that I died facing the enemy ... never say he died for the good cause ... the idiot politicians must not delude us any longer. I was wrong ... nothing justifies my sudden decision to defend the interests of farmers who don't give a damn...

Crossing the chilly Atlantic he'd wondered if snow falls on the ocean. It must fall on the seas at the top and bottom of the globe. White bears, white seals, floating white islands. Snow must fall there. No snow on the Atlantic passage. Unlike his first run to Dominica,
the sea calm. No weather to speak of, except the restless weather inside him, the turbulence of a soldier's excitement laced with dread. From birth he had lived surrounded by water so his uneasiness the first days at sea surprised him, the water, water in every direction as far as his eyes could see, water close up too, constantly lapping the troop transport's side with the gross weight of its tongue. Water sloshing on deck, stinking of gasoline and salt, vomit, piss and shit. He was sure the shadow the ship dragged beneath its hull was also a black hole thousands of feet deep and any second the ship's ponderous bulk would be lifted then dropped by a wave, breaking the hole's seal, sending the ship plunging down, down, the sea instantly closing without a single pucker or bubble to mark its plunge. Almost sick the first few days, then the unease subsided. Surely the huge armada protected by size, its sluggish pace, its tedious routines, the obliging, neutral weather. The convoy just might steam on forever. Why would a foe attack ships sailing nowhere so slowly. Fanon imagines a giant naval operations table with a map of the seven seas painted on its surface, miniature ships nudged by inches east, west, north, south by officers with sticks like pool cues (maybe they are pool cues) who speak in low, secretive tones of grand strategies and tactics whose success depends upon the ballet of little ship-shaped, colored chips. No danger to his transport unless a steward (brown perhaps) carrying a tray of coffee and croissants bumps the board, knocks their convoy's marker to the floor, kicks it under the table. Forgotten, the convoy a Flying Dutchman. No destination, no home, no port, shuttling back and forth over the sea, ghost ships worn thinner and thinner by the elements till they're invisible, mired in the green Sargasso Sea or locked in the crushing ice of Antarctica. But one consolation of being stuck on the bottom of the globe, Fanon thinks, is yes, he'll be able to answer for himself the question about snow falling on the ocean.

***

White snow. Why doesn't it fall in other colors like leaves, Fanon asks the kind woman sitting next to his bed. White the color of ghosts. Of fear. White-hooded lynchers in America. White-wimpled nuns and nurses in France. Snowstorms scramble the hospital room's TV. White chaos sometimes silent, sometimes buzzing and screaming, limbo scenes neither alive nor dead. The lily-white chill of bloody France. White sheets shrouding blackened faces of the dead. White
beke
linens drying in the sun after washerwomen have beaten them against black rocks lining the riverbank. He narrates for her the story of a flash flood in Le Pilot that drowned two
blancheuses.
Howling wind drove water in a foaming rush through a river's narrow channel, toppling the women, ripping sheets, towels, pillowcases from their hands, sending the beke's whiter-than-snow laundry high into the sky. The bare-legged washerwomen, skirts hitched up brown thighs, never had a chance. Knee-deep in the water, gossiping, singing when the storm hit and then years later in a country where war rages Fanon hears their mourning voices. What else could snow be. The fiery breath of Mount Pelée frozen, drifting in the air, white ash on blackened corpses and charred stones of St. Pierre, a white curtain dropping to hide the carnage in France. Show's over, folks. Time's up. Shame, shame. Nature fed up with rumbling artillery, the screams of mangled animals, the bloody mud, the suck of marching jackboots, jeeps whining, tank treads crushing seeds stillborn inside the earth. Fanon's cold brown skin ashy, his feet dead lumps of ice in snow-encrusted boots.

Who promised you death by drowning in a warm, clean sea. Many maroons died sealed inside the chill fastness of mountain caves, icy caves turned to cooking pots by flame-throwers, Afghan caves mashed by percussive, bunker-busting bombs, an Algiers cave behind a casbah basement wall the paratroopers could not penetrate with their eyes but electronic listening devices inform them
terrorists crouch like mice behind the bricks listening to the paras' ultimatum, the countdown before plastic explosives blow them to smithereens ... seven ... six ... five ... four ... three ... two...

What do you do, Fanon asks Death, and Death answers, I connect the dots.

Perhaps Fanon's first snow also the first for many of his comrades who, like him, hail from tropical zones—Algerians, Malians, Moroccans, Tunisians, the island men of Guadeloupe, Martinique in this motley brigade of colonial infantry. Some of whom will be dead by nightfall. Is that why the day had dawned so miraculously serene and bright. A reward. A tease. This first snow your last, my orphaned children, so here's a sample of how beautiful snow can be. A taste of what you're going to miss you can take to your graves, my sons. See. Open your wide, hungry eyes. Look. See. Here's what you're not going to get, this spilling white rainbow of wonders never ceasing. Enjoy it before the brutal wind kicks up, before gusting snow blinds you and bullets of ice penetrate your layers of protection and you're sopping wet inside your uniform, as if bathed by sweat, good sweet tropical island sweat, until you begin shivering and freeze. Button up, gear up, move out, and hit the road, Jack, Jacques, Amin, Mohammed, Caesar, Abdul, Michel, Kwami ... Time to stop thinking dumb thoughts, trying to make sense of your first snow by comparing it to things familiar or frightening, Fanon, things desired, things lost and neglected during war. Forget love. Your sex exploding would shame you, a cold puddle in your drawers as you hurry off to more war.

Baptized doubly by the fire of battle, the winter of France, how could he explain to Joby, let alone any stranger, the fear, the beguiling ache of loneliness each rare snowfall since. Why is he
trying to tell this woman who sits beside him, touching his cold flesh with her warming hand. Is she the one humming the
blancheuses'
song.

You could insert something like the spooky
Twilight Zone
riff now and flash forward, Mr. Jean Luc, Mr. Lucky John, ringmaster and emcee, flash ahead to the end of the movie. Snowflakes we've been watching become a blizzard of leucocytes, a lynch mob of white cells attacking Fanon's body, stripping, choking, stomping him, hacking off souvenirs of his flesh, beating him black and blue, obliterating any trace that a man might once have dreamed and suffered in the hospital bed, vacant now, covered by a rubber sheet, a stack of snowy, folded linen at its foot. Depending on the meaning you wish to attach to Fanon's death in a Bethesda, Maryland, clinic, if you've taken my suggestion and segued from a screenful of gently raining snow to a frenzied storm of white cells, you might as well go ahead and bring on the angels at this point—pale, translucent, computer-generated special effects, like gigantic anthropomorphic snowflakes or diseased white cells that have metastasized and stylized themselves into vaporous, part-human, part-bird snow things, alien and scary almost but also graceful, even elegant as they descend, wrap Fanon's dark, limp body in appendages not quite arms, and then rise, returning through the hospital room ceiling that their unlimited powers render porous. Spectral, winged messengers. Snow angels. An intelligent viewer will make the connection and understand the meaning of the transition. In any case, if you think the scene's too supernatural, too Hollywood, later in interviews with the press, blame Fanon. Blame the patient dying in the bed, his feverish condition at the end, his delirium, his liminal not-quite-dead/not-quite-alive zombie consciousness, his convulsions, his body furiously evacuating itself from every orifice like a hanged man. Blame Fanon who can't manage
his own swollen tongue, surrounded by hostile strangers who can't speak his language even if he could articulate his thoughts, Fanon desperately seeking a way out and not surprisingly when a way out appears that might free him, free him at last, the imagery of escape figures itself in terms of the Catholicism remembered from his youth, his mother's religion, the holy relics and lithographs on her bedroom walls, the rites of confession, absolution, and salvation, those weirdly persistent, overheated, cross-cultural, multidisciplinary ceremonies so often evoked by his patients, the tortured and the torturers, Christian and Muslim, Fanon treated in Algeria at the Blida psychiatric clinic. You'll be off the hook if you blame Fanon. Sympathetic viewers won't exactly fault him, either. A real temptation at the end,
in extremis,
to revert to comforting childhood memories, to wishful thinking, to baroque fantasies and magic realism with their once-upon-a-time happy-ever-after promises. Why wouldn't Fanon go there during the few semilucid intervals when drugs liberate him for a minute or two from a constant drubbing of pain.

Or if you choose, Mr. Director, none of the above, score the end in a different fashion. Downplay it. Perhaps skip it altogether. Click. In the middle of the action the screen goes black. Click. After a decent interval, the house lights come up. No gory details. The end's the end—no intervention, divine, directorial, or otherwise. The end arriving at a different point each time the movie plays. Arbitrary. Random. Untranscendental. Unheroic. No end. Just letting go. Why not just let it go. Let it end. Click.
The end.
Fini. Always the same story. Leukemia, like life, no respecter of persons. An agonizing, relentless assault, the disease dispatching whomever it lays low, no matter how many surreal, special-effects angels dancing on the head of a pin or snow drifting down, covering a black iron fence, then all of Dublin, the whole wide world. No. There's nothing pretty, nothing worth saving in Fanon's last hours. Not anything that would fit on the
screen, anyway, emptying it or filling it with meaning. Certainly nothing to drop in an audience's lap as the film's final shot and expect people to rise in their seats and applaud. Let it go.

Instead of dwelling on the end, jump cut to the African wilderness. Stygian night. A fire burning bright—yes, yes—as a tiger's eye. It crackles, dances, throws up sparks, reassures Fanon, who pees and breathes deeply for the first time in days, sure no marauding mercenaries will visit the camp tonight. In the morning we'll be on our way. In four days the mission complete and we'll be back safely at headquarters in Tunisia. The senior staff, spotless in knife-creased khaki, will gather and listen to my plan in a different way now, with different ears and eyes because we will have demonstrated the feasibility of a supply line from south to north, through Mali to Algeria. Like Lawrence of Arabia in the film of the same name, when he returns from his mission of stirring up the Bedouins, I'll wear the map of the journey imprinted on my weary body, on the filthy uniform I won't change until after I brief the high command. The certainty of victory will blaze in my tiger's eye as I form each word of the story.