No Other Life (21 page)

And so we stood there with Jeannot in that room, two who would go with him, two who had refused him. Jeannot made no difference between us. As he had embraced Pat Redmond, he now embraced Pelardy.

‘Pele, I want to thank you for all you’ve done. In a few weeks this will be behind us. You’ll be back in your old office telling me what to do.’

We went outside. A crowd of some fifty people waited, as though they expected Jeannot to make a speech. Instead, he waved to them and walked quickly to the car. People, seeing him leave, ran to him, crowding around him, touching him as though he were some sort of talisman. When we reached the car, Pat Redmond called out, ‘Jeannot, just a minute.’ He then unhooked the little portable radio from his belt. ‘Take this. At least you’ll know what’s going on.’

Then Redmond, who was a foot taller than Jeannot, bent down and scooped him into his arms as though he were a child. ‘God bless you, lad. Safe journey.’

And so we set off. I drove. Mathieu sat beside me while Jeannot, in the back seat, endlessly spun the radio dial. The stations of Ganae played mindless Java music. At last he caught a Spanish-language voice broadcasting from San Juan. Jeannot spoke Spanish. He listened, becoming more and more excited at what he heard. ‘Do you know what’s happened? Everyone – the American government, the OAS, the French – everyone refuses to recognise Raymond as premier! Americans say they will cut off aid.’

The Spanish-language station was now broadcasting other news. Jeannot again fiddled with dials. We heard a voice from Barbados. ‘The Port Riche International Airport has been closed and a Reuter’s correspondent was attacked by soldiers as he attempted to enter an area of the slums where the Army is shooting at rioters. The rioters are supporters of Father Cantave, the deposed president. Canada and France have responded to the OAS appeal and have withdrawn assistance programmes to Ganae totalling some forty-eight million dollars.’

‘You see,’ Jeannot said excitedly, ‘they won’t get away with it.’

‘Jeannot,’ Mathieu Clément said. ‘Listen to me. Pele was right. I think you should try to find asylum in one of the embassies. The world is on your side now. Let the OAS do your fighting for you.’

‘I will, after the broadcast,’ Jeannot said. ‘But first, people must hear my voice.’

Jeannot was listening again to a Spanish-language broadcast as I drove our little Peugeot off the gravelly side road and on to a pot-holed main highway which led towards Papanos. Soon, we overtook a local bus and passed it. But the road was curiously empty. No market women walked its rim bearing their daily burdens, no donkeys laden with charcoal impeded our passage. We stared ahead waiting for a sight of army vehicles. But even as we came within a few miles of Papanos, the road was deserted.

Now, on the horizon, we saw a heavy column of smoke.

‘What is it, a bonfire?’ Jeannot asked.

‘It’s bigger than that,’ Mathieu said.

At a turn in the road people came towards us on foot, carrying bundles and babies, a very old woman being pulled along in a makeshift cart, a man herding three goats. They were peasants. When they saw our car approaching they hesitated, as though afraid of us.

I stopped the car. Mathieu got out and went towards the people. After a few minutes, Mathieu came back and got in.

‘Soldiers have burned their village. They say people were shot and thrown in a ditch.’

‘But why?’ Jeannot said.

‘When the radio announced the coup, the village people came out of their houses calling for you. After a while army units drove in from Papanos. The villagers threw rocks at them. The soldiers opened fire, then burned the village down. They say the Army’s still there.’

‘Should we go on?’ Mathieu asked.

‘We must.’

I drove on. When we came to the village I saw that the huts had been reduced to smoking, skeletal frames. A few people sat in the middle of the ruins. We drove past them slowly. They did not look up. At the far end of the village three army trucks were zig-zagged across the road. From one of them we heard the static of an intercom. The soldiers, about twenty of them, were sitting on the ground, eating their midday meal. For a moment I thought they would ignore us, but as we drove up to them, a sergeant put down his plate, got up and pointed a rifle at me. I stopped. He slung the rifle over his shoulder and came towards us, unhooking a clipboard from his belt. I rolled down the window. He looked in, then handed me the clipboard and a pencil.

‘Put down your licence number. Where are you going? Papanos?’

‘Further. St Viateur.’

I wrote down the number on the line he indicated. The licence numbers of other vehicles were listed above mine, written in different hands. He looked at what I had put down, walked to the front of the car to check it against the licence plate, then waved us on. As we drove up the road, Jeannot said, ‘He’s calling in our number.’

Through the rear-view mirror I saw that the Sergeant was using the truck’s intercom. ‘Licensed to the Collège St Jean,’ Mathieu said. ‘Right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Driven by a
blanc
priest. They’ll know it’s you, Father.’

‘We got through,’ Jeannot said. ‘God is telling us: “Keep going.” ’

Ten minutes later we reached Papanos. At first the city seemed deserted, shops shuttered, streets empty of traffic. But as we drove closer to the centre we came upon overturned vehicles, shopfronts broken into, and, a strange sight, some fifteen pigs moving across a square, rooting in and eating from heaps of rubbish. Suddenly, there were soldiers everywhere, some in army trucks, some in a variety of vehicles which they had commandeered, camionettes, taxi-buses, private cars, delivery vans. They drove aimlessly through the streets at the city’s centre, blowing horns, firing off rifles at random. Sometimes, soldiers leaped down from a vehicle, to smash a shop window and loot its contents, sometimes they poked open guns from car windows and took potshots at chimneys, stray cats, billboards and lampposts. Because of this, the streets were empty and the few people who had been caught unawares huddled in doorways, trying to keep out of sight. Once, a soldier poked a gun at us and, grinning, fired over our heads. It was a scene of macabre carnival, fragmented as in a disturbed and senseless dream.

Jeannot turned on the radio and we heard a voice speaking in Creole. ‘We ask for understanding, we ask the people of Ganae to show, once again, their great patriotic virtues – ’

‘That’s Raymond,’ Mathieu said.

‘We ask that you, our honest citizens, abstain from demonstrations and public meetings during this state of emergency. We ask that each town and village of the nation observe the curfew which will go into effect this evening from eight p.m. until eight a.m. The Army warns that those who do not obey the curfew risk being shot as looters. We ask for healing – we ask for – ’

But I no longer heard the radio. I was deafened by a chorus of car horns demanding that I get out of the way. I pulled into the side of the road to let six army trucks rush by. Soldiers stood up in these trucks, drinking jugs of
usque
and shouting the lyrics of an obscene song. When they were out of sight, we drove on to the edge of town, taking the fork that led to Cap Gauche. As we left Papanos we saw, in a ditch at the crossroads, two dead men, a dead pregnant woman and two small, frightened children. The adults had been shot in the head, execution style. As we passed by, the children, seeing us, cowered down in the ditch, hiding behind the bodies, their hands covering their heads as though to ward off invisible blows.

I turned to look at Jeannot. He sat at the window staring down at the children. The excitement I had seen in his face when he listened to the Spanish radio was replaced by a look of desolation. What must he be thinking, he who was at the centre of these events?

As we drove on, Mathieu Clément said, ‘Those soldiers are like wild animals! My God! Why do they let them loose like this?’

‘It’s part of a plan,’ Jeannot said. ‘The soldiers are poor, they’re
noir
, they might turn against their masters and join the people. So the Army encourages them to get drunk and loot and fire off guns. When that happens, people hide from uniforms. The Army becomes lawless. And, all at once, it’s the only law in the land.’

I looked at him. His voice was calm as though he were explaining a lesson to a student. But he was weeping. He wiped the back of his hand over his eyes. ‘How far to Cap Gauche?’ he asked.

‘Another half-hour,’ Mathieu said.

I looked at the road ahead. I heard the radio crackling. Now, on the band, the only sound was music, coming from Radio Libre, Radio Mele and Radio Nord. Here, as we climbed into the mountains, the foreign stations were lost in static. Jeannot switched off.

‘Look out!’ Mathieu said suddenly. Ahead, coming around a bend in the road, were two army trucks. Soldiers stood up in them, singing. The trucks came rushing down the crown of the road as though our car were invisible. I swerved to the right, skidded, corrected the skid and, at that moment, the first truck passed by me. The singing soldiers were drunk. Someone fired off a rifle. The second truck was on me now and it was as though the driver wanted to force us off the road. Again I swerved, our old car running dangerously close to the ragged shoulder and the deep ditch below it. I was trying to keep the car on the road and, at first, did not hear the second round of shots. Part of my windshield shattered, coruscating into a maze of patterns. On the right-hand side of the car where Mathieu sat, I heard the ping of bullets as they struck the door.

‘Keep going!’ Jeannot shouted.

The soldiers in the second truck had also been taking potshots at our car but now, when I looked back, both trucks were disappearing down the roadway. At that moment Mathieu, sitting beside me, slumped forward, his forehead striking the shattered windshield. Blood trickled from his ear. I braked. Jeannot jumped out and came around to Mathieu’s door. He had trouble opening it because the bullets had forced it out of shape. Jeannot reached in and, staggering, lifted Mathieu out of the car and put him down by the side of the road. He took Mathieu’s bloodied face in his hands and I saw his lips move in prayer.

I did not know Mathieu as he did. I knew that Mathieu was twenty-nine years old, the son of a
neg riche,
a successful
noir
rice trader. He had studied at our college and won an American scholarship which took him to the Columbia School of Journalism in New York. Five months ago he had returned to Ganae to act as press aide in Jeannot’s presidential campaign.

I stood by his corpse, not in tears as Jeannot was, but sick, my mind filled with images of death: Mathieu, the corpse on the bonfire at Damienville, the mutilated body of Colonel Maurras in the college sacristy, the children hiding behind their dead parents in a Papanos ditch.

Ahead of us, the road was empty. Birds sang. Stormclouds scudded over the horizon. Large, heavy raindrops began to fall, warning of a downpour. We lifted Mathieu’s body and put it on the floor in the back of the car. I used a rock to smash the rest of the windshield and remove it so that I could see to drive. Then, rain pelting in our faces, we went on. We were now only minutes from Cap Gauche, a rocky peninsula joined to the mainland by an isthmus. When we reached the causeway we saw a group of people walking across it, coming away from Cap Gauche. To our surprise some were carrying bedraggled posters bearing Jeannot’s picture, holding them over their heads as shelter from the rain.

We drove on to the peninsula and came to the fishing town of Skele. The place seemed quiet, almost empty. There were no troops in sight. Jeannot, who remembered Skele from the time of his campaigning, gave me directions which led us to a hill above the harbour and a large Victorian gingerbread mansion with a widow’s walk and a rounded turret from which a radio antenna poked up into the rain-drenched sky. As we drove up, a bearded man waved to us from the bay window of the mansion’s front living room.

‘That’s Willi,’ Jeannot said.

Willi Narodny, a bachelor in his fifties, was one of those adventurers who exile themselves from European society to live among the people of distant lands. Some years ago he had started a factory here, making baseball catcher’s mitts, a factory which now employed half of the adult population of Cap Gauche. Through his ham radio station he promoted liberal and ecological causes. Now, shirtless, in cut-off jeans and hiking boots, he came hurrying out to meet us.

‘Quick! Get out of the car and give me your car keys.’

We stared at him, uncomprehending.

‘I just heard on the police radio that they’re looking for a white Peugeot. They have the licence number.’

I handed him the keys. He got into the Peugeot and, as he did, saw what was in the back seat.

‘Oh Jesus. Who is he?’

‘A friend,’ Jeannot said.

‘Wait here. I’ll hide the car in my garage.’

We watched him drive around to the rear of the big house. I looked at Jeannot.

‘Are you still going to broadcast?’

‘I hope so.’

Willi came hurrying up. ‘Come inside.’

He led us into a crowded front room of the mansion. I saw a jumble of radio equipment similar to the transmission gear at Pat Redmond’s place.

‘Do you want a drink?’