Colour of Dawn (4 page)

Now I think on, Paulo has not mentioned Vanel, the young drummer in the band. I love Vanel, I love his fragility. Vanel licks a great internal wound, like an injured dog; a great wound that no-one sees. A few years ago now, Monsieur Perrin, a teacher at the Toussaint school, praising his intelligence and his talent to his mother and his aunt, offered to take him in to his house on the pretext of shaping a great future for him. Once under the roof of this benefactor, he was taught neither grammar nor multiplication tables, even less drawing or music, but intimacy with someone of the same sex. Monsieur Perrin swore to him between breaths, shorts around his ankles, penis extended in his fingers, that this would be better than with girls. Ever since, Vanel has vacillated between the two sexes. And he hides his game from everyone – especially the boys of the football team who meet at Théolène's. He knows full well they'd give him a hard time if they learned that men sometimes ask him to play the man and often the woman. Only my friend Lolo and I know. When Vanel is not making my head spin with confidences or giving me an account of the latest episode of our favourite TV soap beneath the cramped gallery in front of the house, we are laughing like two accomplices who don't believe in Hell, who believe that the earth is a brutal paradise. I love Vanel, I love his fragility, his long lashes which make his eyes look moist.

I put one foot in front of the other. But my questions chase their tails like a trese ruban dance and come to worry at my secrets, rake out my grey stone. Fignolé, where are you? God, I want to know where you're hiding!

SEVEN

J
oyeuse's words do not reach me. She is deceiving herself and doesn't know it. I often smile inside at the complacent pride of her ignorance. Joyeuse with her bird's brain can't imagine the experiences I've accumulated. No, she can't. The experiences that the years have woven into the redness of my flesh and the darkness of my bones. I always make sure that the face I show people is that of an unharmed creature, one who has come through life like passing through the holes in a colander, leaving all the hardships behind. Even the keenest eye would have to look twice, several times before beginning to understand. I mean to really understand. To understand that beneath the apparent ingenuousness of my skin lurk the moving scales of a strange beast, that I'm a woman whose days are made up of a feverish waiting – feverish to the point of pain. A woman exhausted by desire for unknown men. A sinner! But I'm rambling, I'm rambling… What evil thoughts, Angélique! What evil thoughts! I don't really know myself any more. Perhaps without the help of God and Pastor Jeantilus I would simply return to what I always was.

I know things I will not say. I also have my suspicions. Suspicions, observations, guesses, conclusions. My soul on edge, mouth closed tight, ears pricked like a listening trumpet. I don't tell anything to anyone. With a naked madness, yet I have never been closer to lucidity. Cold and sharp like a knife. Sometimes I aim at my target totally unnoticed and allow myself a sharpened arrow, the type that arouses Mother's curiosity. Which leaves Fignolé apparently indifferent, but which makes my sister Joyeuse howl. Only the day before yesterday she was in such a fury that she shouted at me that I was nothing but a sanctimonious woman prematurely aged where I stood, like a stunted tree. I put on my most innocent expression while gloating inside as I always do. There was nothing else for it; spitefulness soothes me. Powerless to drive out the true words buried in my night, incapable of making the exact gestures that would restore my life with a flick of the wrist, I'm caught up in a mechanism of hatred. And so I allow myself the spite which opens up my prisons, breaks away my chains.

This is the same mechanism that drove Fignolé, as a frenzied crowd gathered to herald the return of the leader of the Démunis, to plunder a wealthy-looking house uptown with a gang of friends from our neighbourhood, Paulo, Jean-Baptiste and Wiston. Their sincere belief was that they could escape for ever the hopeless pain of a country that was lost, debased, trampled underfoot.They finished up with a new injection of hope that was quickly forgotten. Visibly ecstatic, they rejoined the gang of wild down-and-outs. A noisy, foul-smelling, disobedient crowd. A crowd white-hot with alcohol and weed and goodness knows what else. Fires rose up from barricades thrown up in haste. In a fever. In the vibrant breath of the lambis, the conch horns. The drums filled the city with the warrior rhythms of ancient Africa. A powerful song like a river caused the crowd to sway, arms moving, hair in disarray, legs spread like people possessed. Men, women, children, old folk: all were going wild from that blend of anger with joy and hunger. Those who were running barefoot were indifferent to the pain caused by the smashed bottles, twisted pieces of metal and fragments of wood that littered the ground. In a furious tumult they carried off everything they could lay their hands on – mattresses, household appliances, works of art, like trophies from a great battle. It was said that one man's body lay prone in the entrance to his house. Truth or rumour? Who knows? Executed, lynched. Or perhaps both. He was dead there, on the pavement, guilty beneath a harsh, stiff sun like fate. Intoxicated by that frenzied crowd, did Fignolé, too, throw a rock or step over the body without even noticing? I never knew that, either.

When he returned home at the end of the afternoon, a television set carried on his head, I laid into him. A flood of reprimands gushed from my breast. My anger had such a minimal effect on him that it ended up working itself out. And as my anger calmed, I looked at Fignolé with an admiration that surprised even me. Deep inside, a strange fire suddenly ignited and began to crackle. And I felt that it was crackling because I approved of him. Yes, I approved of him. I understood on that day that there is no wrong in turning malicious when you are enslaved. When there is no point to your life, nor to the lives of all those like you since the beginning of the world, and one day a moment will come when a man will show you the way out. And that way will be so narrow, so low, so dark, that it will swallow you whole, your head down. And I lowered my head. And perhaps I would do it again. Who knows?

The shame in the Bible, that of Pastor Jeantilus' sermons, only came that evening to add itself to my hatred – slowly, but without ever succeeding in reducing it to silence. Ever. It was that hatred which, during the following days, fed my delight in knowing that the people beyond my reach had lost something. At least once, and at the hands of one of my own. I remember singing very loudly in church the following Sunday, eyes closed, my body reeling from side to side, arms waving above my head. In order to smother the spite with words and music and not to give it another chance. But it was in vain. Remorse had never been able to make its nest in the depths of my being, the place where no-one but me goes. The place from where a glimmer of light sometimes comes to dance, lighting up my eyes when I look at myself in the mirror and when I light a fire in my life. For a few seconds. Just a few magnificent seconds.

We still have no news of Fignolé. No phone call. No message. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Joyeuse has maintained that little self-satisfied expression and that false serenity that winds me up so much.Yet even though she has not been taken into her brother's confidence, she must surely have her suspicions, must have noticed some clues. I slipped Mother a gourde note. She will use it to pay Madame Jacques for the phone call I will make to her from the hospital cafeteria. I've promised and I want to know…

EIGHT

S
tanding on the front step of the house, as ever I have had to call Lolo several times before she finally came over to join us, Mother and me. Lolo is never on time, but Lolo is Lolo. She's my accomplice, my sister in the frenzy of living. Lolo is a vixen. No other girl in this fight-with-your-claws-out-to-stay-alive neighbourhood knows as well as Lolo how to benefit from every kind of situation. No-one knows as well as she does how to drive a bargain with such self-assurance and cunning on the pavements of this city as she does – a T-shirt, a pair of shoes, jeans, sandals. No-one can string together as quickly as she does a barrage of bad language forceful enough to strip you of your trousers or pants, enough even to shock a brothel-keeper. No-one can. I love Lolo because she is totally on the sunny side, her outlook totally on pleasure. And when I'm having a bad day, and tend too much towards the direction of the moon, she draws me towards her fire.

‘Too many books,' she likes to say to me, ‘too much thinking going on in that little head of yours, sister.'

When we were teenagers, our closeness was sealed by French songs, the lyrics of which we would write down in the pages of school exercise books. Lying on our stomachs, flat out on the ground or with our knees bent, legs swinging gently backwards and forwards, we would hum all those lyrics imbued with a blue-tinged happiness. We dreamt of a rich, handsome man, preferably white, who would come to take us away from this seedy neighbourhood in a luxury car, or why not a plane or a yacht?

If you didn't exist
I think I would invent you

Finding these songs too unrealistic, we swapped them for the reggae of Bob Marley and Janesta, the merengue of Djakout Mizik and the drums of Boukman Eksperyans and Azor. In the recent past, mothers, sisters and wives had found us charming, but that was no longer the case – not at all. Lolo and I are now a formidable team in the face of public condemnation. A tough duo. Adversity is the fire that heats us and welds us together. We're like two Sioux or Cheyennes who have sealed a pact, a bond forged from the blood of our wrists. Virtuous souls, sensitive souls, steer clear! We are two killers let loose on the streets of Babylon. Two wildcats lying in wait in this voracious city.

Since we have been of an age to attract the attention of men, the women of the neighbourhood have taken to pressing their lips together tightly as we pass, imagining excruciating tortures that would leave us hideous and twisted. But in vain – here we are, full of life, and determined to stay that way for a long time to come. Given over to their resentment and whispered allegations, they forbid their children, sons and daughters alike, from talking to us for too long. What stratagems would they not employ to steer their teenagers with their turbulent hormones towards nocturnal dreams that don't feature us? Instead of benefiting from our blazing otherness, young women of our age, Angélique included, prefer to add their sad voices to the cries of the pack. See them waiting for a man they will never have, going to church in the hope that one day God will grant their prayers. Lolo and I have not set foot in a church for years. However, we have known, but never once held on to, some of those men whom these women await in vain on bended knee with their eyes turned to heaven. Like Angélique, they still have not understood that God does not get involved in things, if He knows how to give at all. So we help Him, that's all.

With these thoughts in my head I walk on, one step at a time, Mother on one side of me, Lolo on the other. A yellow T-shirt shows off the shape of Lolo's breasts to good effect and a pair of jeans moulds her buttocks. Only a black woman could have such breasts, such buttocks, and yet be as slender as a reed. At the end of the road, the males of the neighbourhood, all ages together, watch us pass, licking their chops. It's a matter of being aware, senses on edge, waiting for the clacking of the pieces in a great domino game. Hours later, the noise of these dominos will be drowned out by stormy discussions at a football match, the appearance of supernatural creatures, men with goats' horns, a smiling bullock with a gold tooth, or by suggestive laughter about their masculine prowess. It is hard to hear these voices and this laughter without thinking of the pain which hides behind the eyes, beneath the chest, in the small of the back and along calves weary from running towards nothing. These voices and this laughter also explain why misfortune always finds as much space as it needs on this island to spread its wings and grow, but not enough space to be alone. And so we rock back and forth like the movement of a rocking chair. It's crazy, the things we wait for in this country! When there is nothing to be done about it. Crazy! And time goes by. And time goes by… And the earth gradually, slowly decomposes … But I, Joyeuse Méracin, I don't wait. I do and I undo.

Wiston and the others have set up a table and four rickety chairs right beneath the sign announcing Le Bon Berger, Boss Dieuseul's forge. From time to time one or other of them will leave the gaming table to go off and hang out beneath other roofs or sow their wild oats, then return an hour or so later. Or the next day. In three days. Or perhaps never. In any case, all the men on this island are just passing through. Those who stay longer are just a little more permanent, that's all. On this island there are only mothers and sons.

His back against a wall, right leg folded up beneath him, Jean-Baptiste draws slowly on his cigarette. Jean-Baptiste is seen to keep an eye on them. He reigns over this small kingdom. Jean-Baptiste is a petty king who likes the smell of the herd. His flock may be idle to the point of inertia, but the arrangement is that Boss Dieuseul works solely for him as blacksmith, painter, electrician and divine healer. Hammer in hand, Boss Dieuseul raises his emaciated face with its drawn-out chin. It is the moment when he will predict – a prediction that is met with indifference – that men will writhe in torment, women will wallow in the stench of their own suffering, rivers will be swollen with entrails and blood, and whatever else… Then his protruding eyes, which seem to bulge from his face as a result of some distant suffering, are once more fixed on his hands.

Jean-Baptiste turns his whole upper body. Passing before him on the arms of Mother and Lolo, I meet two eyes drunk with the force of looking at me. Jean-Baptiste can't resist looking at me, he just can't. Jean-Baptiste doesn't look at me, he undresses me. Deep inside himself, Jean-Baptiste thinks I don't choose. That I will lie down beneath the first man who comes along and snaps his fingers. He expects that all he has to do is click with his thumb and middle finger to have me fall at his feet. Mother's eyes linger on him as if to say, ‘You will have to dance on my grave before you can have this girl who walks by my side, young man.'