Nikolski (21 page)

That is the reason why Noah never tried to lay claim to the title of Simón’s father. He would have preferred a simple avowal from Arizna to the crass materialism of DNA. But in the face of his many queries on the subject, she steadfastly denied, contested and refuted any involvement of a Chipewyan
gamete in the conception of her little boy. “Simón is 100 per cent Venezuelan,” she affirmed. The child’s eyes forcefully contradicted this assertion, but Noah chose not to press the point. Arizna jealously protected this strange independence of hers, and he was bound to respect it, at least insofar as he wished to avoid being deported to some far-off Aleutian island. One day Simón would be in a position to understand certain things—in particular, that despite its complex workings, the machinery of sex remains the simplest aspect of that great piece of handiwork so pompously referred to as Our Civilization.

In the meantime, Noah preferred to piece together a small, quotidian paternity comprised of knowing winks and smiles, lazy breakfasts, and days at the beach. To do this he had to stay on Margarita Island, and to stay there he needed a pretext, a complicated pretext if at all possible, with numerous detours and dead ends, so as to fend off questions.

He remembered an article he had read several years before, in an old
National Geographic
that he’d found behind the refrigerator while cleaning up. He discovered in that article a story so complicated as to be perfectly suited to the circumstances, a story that could have been titled:

THE DISTRESSING SAGA OF THE GARIFUNAS

It all began in the year of grace 1635, when a Dutch slaver, sailing in from Africa with its human cargo, ran aground in the Grenadine archipelago.

The slaves took advantage of the mayhem to wipe out the ship’s crew and escape. They found refuge on the nearby island of Yurumein (subsequently renamed St. Vincent) and threw their lot in with the Caribs. The tribes stemming from this intermingling, neither wholly Amerindian nor entirely African, soon took on the name of Garifuna, although, depending on the circum stances, the location, and the subtleties of the prevailing grammar, they were also known as Garinagu, Carifuna, Kalypuna, Garif, Karif, Caberne, Cabre, Calino, Calinya, Calinyaku or Callinago, these being nothing more than an ongoing deformation of the name Carib.

The Maroons of St. Lucia and Barbados soon joined the Garifunas, drawn by the prospect of living in freedom on this island that was still unoccupied by Europeans. But it was a tenuous freedom, for ever since the massacres of St. Kitts in 1626, the French and British had been embroiled in an intense rivalry over control of the archipelago. During the next two centuries, the Lesser Antilles became the theatre of countless battles, associations, betrayals, invasions, uprisings, treaties, edicts and other more or less diplomatic altercations.

The Garifunas would surely have remained on the
periphery of this conflict if not for the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763.

When France ceded the island of St. Vincent to the British, it placed the islanders in a delicate position, especially the Garifunas, whose ambiguous historical situation must not be forgotten: neither wholly Aboriginal nor entirely descended from the African slaves.

Political uncertainty put revolt back on the order of the day.

The Garifunas wanted to expel the British from the island, and to this end they made the mistake of allying themselves with the French. For its part, France, which had never been weaker, had been reduced to fomenting insurrections among the local populations as an inexpensive method of driving out the British. The manoeuvre turned out to be futile since, in the absence of solid French bases elsewhere in the archipelago, each island won in this way would subsequently be returned to Great Britain under the next treaty.

The last insurrections took place in February 1795, when the French attempted simultaneous landings in Grenada, St. Lucia and St. Vincent. The results were disastrous, and by 1796 only the Garifunas continued to resist. British troops overran the island and succeeded in crushing the rebellion in St. Vincent, thus putting an end to two hundred years of war in the Caribbean.

In January 1797, the administration of St. Vincent ordered the deportation of the insurgents. The operation
was carried out with devastating efficiency—Acadia had clearly provided the British with a prodigious training ground. They burned the pirogues and the crops, and more than four thousand islanders found themselves crammed into a processing station on the minuscule island of Baliceaux, where they were left to starve for a month. The survivors were then classed according to skin colour. The fairest were sent to St. Vincent (where cheap labour had suddenly become scarce), while those with darker complexions—that is, the Garifunas—were once again herded into the holds of ships and deported.

On the night of April 12, 1797, after several weeks at sea, they were abandoned on Roatán Island, off the coast of Honduras.

Enfeebled by their living conditions over the recent months, the deportees were bound to die of exhaustion, mosquito attacks or the onslaught of the Spanish colonists. That, at any rate, was what the British believed. Against all odds, they survived, crossed the continent and spread out from Nicaragua to the British Honduras. Two centuries later, the Garifunas still inhabit Central America. They continue to fish, cook cassava, speak their ancestral language, and mistrust the spirits haunting the river mouths, where the fresh water and the salt water mingle.

And no one, not even the greatest ethnologists, can properly explain the intricate mechanism that allowed
these orphans, though uprooted and exiled, to hold on to their identity.

Noah’s life on this island essentially boils down to telling stories. At night he invents evolutionary fables about Charles Darwin, while during the day he claims that the reason he is in Margarita is to write a doctoral dissertation on the Garifunas.

To the inquisitive, he states that he is interested in the relationship between the Garifunas’ oral tradition and the colonial archives. And, he asserts, many early archival holdings have remained on Margarita Island, more precisely at the National Archives of La Asunción, barely a ten-minute walk from the Burgos residence, which, fundamentally, provides him with an ideal pretext to live under the same roof as Simón.

Arizna has taken the bait. She precisely remembers their first discussion on the fifth floor of the university library in Montreal, and it makes perfect sense to her that Noah would be interested in issues of relocation, traditional territories and identity. She has even asked him several times to write an article on the Garifunas for
El Pututo,
but each time he has cleverly managed to push back the deadline.

He has developed a genuine talent for storytelling.

So long as a bona fide Garifunas expert does not alight on Margarita and unmask Noah, he can enjoy life to the fullest. He pretends to study, earns a little
money teaching English and French, basks in the sun. And whenever he has the chance, he takes Simón to the beach.

HALF
-
PAST MIDNIGHT
. In the space between the skyscrapers, clementine-coloured patches of cloud drift by. A few snowflakes flutter through the air. The atmosphere is that of a Japanese animated film, five minutes before the end of the world.

Joyce adjusts her scarf. Standing in the entrance to an underground parking lot, she feels strangely indifferent as she observes the scene bathed in a yellowish light. This garage is truly an Ali Baba’s cave, with its inadequate surveillance, plentiful trash bins and the treasures that can often be found here. Tonight, however, all she sees is an icy crypt that reeks of concrete and motor oil.

This sudden lack of interest leaves her perplexed. Is it a sign that she should consider retiring? She looks at her watch. The last Metro leaves in ten minutes. She could go back home, take a hot bath, empty her bottle of rum—and just forget about the memory of Herménégilde Doucette.

Two blocks south, a police siren can be heard wailing down the street. Joyce shrugs and walks into the parking garage.

No sign of life. Here and there, a few vehicles have been left behind, surrounded by puddles of oil and litter. The car owners must be doing overtime, twelve floors up.

Joyce glances scornfully at the surveillance cameras. She knows how to go unnoticed. She edges along the walls, cuts over to the third pillar, crosses the garage following a specific angle, skirts another section of wall and ends up directly in front of the dumpsters.

She opens the first one and shines her flashlight inside.

A face appears in the beam.

Joyce stops herself from recoiling. She quickly regains her poise and proceeds to examine the situation with a cool head.

A woman is lying among the garbage bags—most likely an employee tossed out due to downsizing. Under the sensible beige suit, her body has become perfectly mummified. The limbs have atrophied and the skin has taken on the shiny tautness of smoked herring. With her arms crossed over her chest and a tense smile, she waits for the garbage to be collected with the serenity of an Egyptian queen.

How long has she been there? Joyce takes a whiff. No noticeable odour. She presses the tip of her forefinger against the corpse. As light as papier mâché.

In the course of her nocturnal outings, Joyce has come across many oddities, but nothing remotely like this. She sweeps her flashlight over the body from head to foot, fascinated by its angularity, its empty eye sockets. She has the impression of looking at a distorted mirror image of herself.

Then she comes back to earth. Best not to hang around.

Just as she is about to lower the lid, she notices an ID card pinned to the mummy’s blouse. Under the black-and-white photo, an ordinary employee: Susie Legault / No. 3445.

Joyce carefully removes the card and slips it into her coat pocket. Then she closes the container ever so gently, as if afraid of waking the mummy.

The incredibly cluttered state of the apartment would suggest that an insane hostage-taker has just spent three days holed up within these walls. But there is no one here, no one but Joyce, and she has assumed the roles of both captor and hostage.

No sooner had she returned from the centre of town than she took refuge under her work lamp, with a bottle of rum on the port side and the tools of her trade to starboard. It is nearly six in the morning, yet so much remains to be done.

She pulls an identity card from her pocket and examines it carefully. Then, with three strokes of a razor blade, she shucks the plastic sleeve and excises the photo. She glues her own in the blank space, deftly forges the expiration date and slides the whole thing into the lamination machine. The smell of melted vinyl instantly floods the room—the aroma typical of a change of identity. The machine spits out the card, hot and glistening like keratin.

Voilà!
Joyce’s name from now on will be Susie Legault.

A shiver runs through her as she examines her new skin. She thinks back to the woman lying amid the trash, her bones jutting out under her business suit.

From a shelf, she takes down a shoebox stuffed with IDs recycled from the rubbish: baptismal records, certificates of civil status, student cards, magnetic or bar-code passes, library cards, video-club membership cards, ISIC cards, health insurance cards and even a quite credible passport. The same picture is repeated dozens of times, always hastily taken in the automatic booth at the Berri-UQAM Metro station, a cheap portrait of a nice young girl auditioning for a lookalike contest.

Joyce nonchalantly adds her new card to the collection.

She rubs her eyes, swollen from lack of sleep, unplugs the laminator and pushes the work lamp away from her eyes. The light falls on Leslie Lynn Doucette.

The newspaper clippings, always pinned up in the same spot, have turned a shade of amber.

Joyce has combed the Internet repeatedly, looking for the missing link that might elucidate the ties between her and this distant cousin. But what she has learned from her research amounts to nothing more useful than Michael Doucet’s prolific contribution to the Cajun group Beausoleil, the address of Elvis Doucette Muffler Service (4500 Road 67, Lafayette, Louisiana) and the existence of Neimann-Pick type D disease, a hereditary condition widespread among the Acadian community of Yarmouth County in southern Nova Scotia, which has been traced back to the seventeenth century and is attributable to marriages between blood relations.