Eve Out of Her Ruins (11 page)

Leave me, I tell her.

I'm not letting you do that, she says.

She thinks that I'm going to try to kill myself with these stupid scissors.

I'm not going to butcher myself, I tell her. I just want to cut off my hair.

I saw my hair in the mirror: bursting out of my head like fireworks. Like comic-book characters when a bomb's exploded in their face.

She sits on the bed next to me. She strokes my hair. Maybe she's thinking about how often people grabbed it. As if that was the strongest part of my body, the place where my energy could be grasped and absorbed.

My hair's the most visible part of my femininity. That's why they all start there, that's where they hurt me most.

I can almost hear her whispering: I've abandoned you.

I must be hearing wrong. But she says it again, more clearly: I've abandoned you. No mother should ever do that to her children. I've been cowardly, I've gone weak.

She takes pajamas out of the armoire and helps me put them on. Then she says, give me the scissors, I'll do it.

She takes them and begins cutting my hair. It's hard, it's difficult, the hair squeaks, the scissors grind. The clumps fall, strand by strand. The sound suits me, dries the tears that could have fallen. This contact seems strange, my mother's nearness, after so many years. I try to remember when we had been this close. But it's too far away. The feel of her hand on my scalp is pleasant. There's something special about motherly hands, I think. But it's too late for me. I can't
surrender to them. I don't want to be consoled.

When she finishes cutting the thickest clumps, she goes to find her husband's razor and shaves my head bald.

I look in the mirror. This time, I manage to smile. I really do have a funny head. I've metamorphosed. I think I look like what I wanted to be: a lioness. A starving lioness in a godforsaken zoo rather than a queen of the savannas, but it doesn't matter. I'll take it anyway.

My mother can't bring herself to look at me.

When she leaves, the lioness puts on pants with a grimace. She takes her bag and goes out without making a noise, as she knows how to do, so that nobody will notice.

Outside, even though I'm limping, nobody pays me any attention. I've become invisible, barely human, the incarnation of a will that, all by itself, manages to keep me upright and urge me forward.

He waits for
you. He knows you will come. He knows it with the apathy of the next breath. Things have gone too far. He doesn't see the point of his actions anymore. He knows you will know sooner or later; the spark in your spirit, in your memory.

He is sitting in front of the television, bathed in its white light, fidgeting in silence. You have been to his place before, to get books. You know where he lives. You will open the door and you will breathe in the scent of rat poison. You will think that he might have opted for this outdated way of committing suicide, such a difficult, painful way, and that you will see his green body contorted in pain, his face twisted into a grimace at life. But don't worry: he will not offer you such an image of himself.

He will say to you, sit down. You will look at the armchair's flowery, worn fabric, and you will stay standing.

He will walk toward you and hold you in his arms. Your head will not reach above his chest. Despite himself, he will feel a stirring in his gut and want to pull you in closer while remembering you; already a memory, already past, already too late.

Most of all, he will think of that time, that night, when things skittered and time turned inside out. When his face was deep down within you, you began to bleed. He saw this outpouring still warm as the depths from where it came, this fluvial offering with such a strange texture, at once thick and liquid, with a coppery taste, reddening his lips. He pulled away. He saw the trickle flowing slowly, not like a wound, but like a stigmata that had simply opened. Wholly unexpectedly, this woman's blood, this flow from a buried volcano, seemed sacred to him.

When he got up, you looked at him. You put your fingers on his mouth.
His lips were red. Red from you, you thought. As he looked down at you, perhaps he looked like a vampire. Perhaps he looked like a member of a diabolical sect that drank blood. Perhaps he looked like a truly primitive being that drank its mother's milk and blood. But you only thought of a child with lips reddened by guava juice.

Despite the confusion he was experiencing, he saw the smile that had come so quickly to your eyes. He told himself, this is the first time you've shown something, even if it's just a hint of a smile. The first time that something passes between the two of you. Something more than what usually goes from body to body.

All sorts of possibilities that he had never envisioned until now—a future, a sun that you cracked open in his life, a curtain of darkness he had thought permanent being raised—all appeared to him in his idiocy, out of nothing more than this reflection of a shadow of a smile.

And then, at that moment, there was a movement close to the door. He turned and saw the light in the slit of the half-shut door turning dark. (How had he failed to check the door?) He immediately saw himself as if from outside: his mouth reddened by the intimate blood of a woman. His reversal was immediate. Shame had overcome him all at once.

Shame in himself, in having come this far. Shame in being ridiculed, if the story spread. Shame in humiliation, if he was fired. Undone by a simple story. What little he had made out of his life was about to fall apart.

He waited until you left. He looked through the window and he saw the two of you walking away. He followed you both. Then he followed Savita. He killed her without hatred, almost without violence. At one point, he felt as if she was willing. But maybe she was simply too weak.

The weakness of a female body, its lack of fighting strength. At the very first blow, they give up. What remains is a passionless thing, maybe not even a thing. An annihilation. A disappearance. But she was already dead long before, this little girl who was your friend, long before he put her in a trash bin while thinking that this was what they did, those guys who lived in this neighborhood, if they had to kill. (Careless, irrevocable contempt.) She died at the moment she saw a red flower bloom on his mouth. She died when she saw his sad eyes and she knew that he was not killing her out of hatred.

No, not out of hatred. But indifference is far, far worse. He didn't even regret it.

And now he waits for you. He knows you will come. He only wants to hold you in his arms as a gift in his final hours. He will inhale the vanilla of your skin and touch the light T-shirt you are wearing and shudder while thinking about everything under it. He will know that these are his last sensations as a man before dying in his turn.

CLÉLIO

The public defender they assigned me is so young I thought it was a joke. I didn't say anything, but she could see it on my face that I didn't think there was any point getting a lawyer if they were going to pick a baby with a brand-new bib and a baby bottle, who wouldn't even get dirty while eating or defending her clients.

Sure, she's cute, with her little bangs over her eyes, I didn't want to get her mad. After all, she would definitely be the first one I saw when I got out. Or maybe, whispered a nasty little voice like my own except cleverer, she'll be the last one I see before being locked up for good. Would I actually be sentenced to death? I can't remember anymore if they still kill people here. I don't think there have been executions since I was born, but what do I know? Has the death penalty been abolished? Well, has the death penalty been abolished in Mauritius?

She smiles at me: reassuring, fake. She whispers something about a mandatory sentence of forty-six years, but they'll be lenient, especially if you're
juvenile
, she uses the English word as if to hide the tremor in her voice. Then she looks at me to see if I've understood. Yes, I've understood, chère mademoiselle. I'm not a kid anymore, I'm a
juvenile
, as in a juvenile delinquent.

Once the pleasantries are over, she starts explaining things, and I can see that she knows what she's talking about. She's serious, focused, attentive. Suddenly, I start listening to her more carefully. She frowns when I tell her that my only witnesses are birds and rats, but when I tell her that I was in the middle of carving Carlo's name in my ass that night, she doesn't raise an eyebrow but says,
that just might help us…If we want to plead insanity, for example. But I'm not crazy, I tell her. She says in a soothing tone: No, I don't think you're crazy, but only a bit psychologically unstable. With good reason.

What do you mean, with good reason?

She doesn't answer right away. Her little face scrunches up, goes almost as gray as the prison's walls. This silence is like a secret she's sharing with me. I don't understand it, but it shocks me. I'm about to respond without thinking, despite my precarious situation.

I know where you come from, she says. I came from there, too.

I blink slowly. I can't imagine her as a little girl from Troumaron or anyplace like that. I look over her body for the markings that show us for the losers we are, the proof that her dreams have already started to go to shit, but I can't see it anywhere on her. I only see a good girl who's done something with her life. But then again, anything's possible. That doesn't mean I'm going to tell her my secrets, though. Maybe she made it all up to get me talking. Besides, if she wants to plead insanity, it's all over. I'm not an actor. I can't pretend to be crazy.

After she leaves, the lights go out. The air she'd made a bit more bearable solidifies around me. She can't do anything, I know. I don't believe in anything anymore. The papers have already begun my trial. The warden gleefully reads snippets of articles out loud while clicking his fake teeth. I'm described as “a dangerous thug who's already been behind bars several times.” Reliable sources come out of the woodwork to say as much. One of the headlines is: “From Petty Theft Straight to Murder?” They interviewed my mother. She started by saying
Ki mo pu dir u…
When a mother
begins with What can I tell you? then there's no hope. I can just see how the talk fell apart after that. Even when he was a kid, he was hard to control. I tried everything, I'm telling you. His father and me, we did everything we could to set him on the straight and narrow. But he was sucked into this gang of lowlifes. Once they had him, we couldn't do anything.
Piti-la inn sanze, mo dir u
. We don't recognize him anymore. And so on. She doesn't know how much she's hurting me, my poor Mam. She thinks that the
missié ziz
will have more compassion for me and it won't be so painful.

But at least, Mam, at the very least you could have told them that you didn't think I was guilty. You could have told them that.

There isn't a single voice speaking up for me. And I've been hearing voices since I've been in here. The voices in my head won't stop. But I'm not crazy, nor a Saint Bernadette. When there are too many walls around you, and walls beyond those walls, then the voices start talking to you to keep you from falling apart.

I just hope it won't last too long. I don't know how much longer I can hold out.

I hope they'll give me a second chance.

If anyone's listening out there, I'd really like a second chance. Even if I have to become a priest.

SAAD

They stream out, one after another, they follow each other with the sound of shrill music, unmelodious but still hypnotic. They buzz like bumblebees on the hunt. Hungry wasps, angry bees, furious insects who have just sighted a rare blossom not far off: a whole summer gathered into a single moving body that the horde senses from afar using some sense unavailable to men. The man-insects, bumblebee-machines, sketch large circles, dance their zigzag dances under the damp moon.

On their motorbikes, mopeds, and bikes, they set off in search of Eve.

I turn around in my room, armed with my black marker. I feel absolutely useless and powerless. I keep trying to describe my state of being while I think, which distances me from my thoughts. I do my best, as if the person writing was outside myself, using metaphors and similes, stylistic devices that just gussy up the truth. Why not just write, the gang's gotten on their bikes and left the city? Why not just say, I'm scared that they'll find Eve? Why not just say, I'm scared?

I write in order not to go crazy. I think that I've already said that, too. I want to cry. About this and about everything, about my need to live at all costs, me, the child of Troumaron, about my calls for help that nobody hears, about everything bearing down on us, about everything we're being accused of, about everything that's silencing us, about everything that's gagging us, to say to say to say to say, for that I'll kill them myself, I'll go on the hunt, I'll destroy every person who wants to hurt Eve, and I'll make myself a news
item they talk about on the television and in the papers, and then, once I'm in prison, I'll write my story and I'll write poems and I'll send them to a publisher and they'll take notice, the distance between myself and my writing will command everyone's respect and they'll all say isn't that delightful, isn't that marvelous, this disadvantaged kid who's taken Rimbaud as his model, isn't that a brilliant media and literary stroke, I'll become a media sensation, and on top of that they'll feel like they're taking care of people's needs, they'll use me as a model for the other neighborhood kids who completely fuck up, but most of all, I'll be heard and read, which is what counts, no matter how they take it and what they make of it, even if they exploit me, if that's what they want, all I want, personally, is to get my head out of the water, to escape my fate, to simply be.