Eve Out of Her Ruins (2 page)

Sometimes, when the neighborhood is quiet, the island's sounds seem different. Other kinds of music, less funereal tones, the clang of cash registers, the dazzle of development. The tourists scorn us without realizing it. Money has made them naïve. We cheat them out of a few rupees until they begin to mistrust our pleasant, false faces.
The country puts on its sky-blue dress, the better to seduce them. A marine perfume wafts from its crotch. From here we can't see the island all dolled up, and their eyes, dazzled by the sun, can't see us. As things should be.

Mothers disappear in a resigned haze. Fathers find in alcohol the virtue of authority. But they don't have that anymore, authority. Authority, that's us, the boys. We've recruited our troops like military leaders. We've carved out our portions of the neighborhood. Once our parents stopped working, we became the masters. Everybody knows we can't be ordered around. And now nobody can look us in the eyes without shivering. From that moment, each of us began to live as he wanted to, free from everything, free from rules. We make the rules.

But something else has slipped into my dreams lately. I mark the walls of my room with my questions; I bloody them with the juice of words. I learn to be quiet. I learn to talk to myself. I learn to put myself together and to take myself apart. I suppose we're all like that; we go with the flow, like the others, but inside, each of us withdraws into himself and harbors his secrets. I follow in their steps and I act like I belong, as a matter of form, as a matter of survival. Eve doesn't understand that.

Eve walks by, her hair like foamy night, in her skin-tight jeans, and the others snigger and suck their teeth in lust, but I—I want to kneel down. She doesn't look at us. She isn't afraid of us. She has her solitude for armor.

At night, my hormones seize on her face and describe it in long arcs of desire. When I can't bear it anymore, I go out with the gang, our noisy mopeds tormenting the sleepy old folk. In the morning,
the others sink into the stupor of drugs and rage. But I go take a shower, I shave, and I go to class. This double life sucks me dry, yet nothing in the world could keep me from seeing Eve's profile in the morning at the bus stop, a sliver of sunlight playing on her ear.

And then, I swear, I love words.

I slip a poetry book into her bag.

Later, she bumps into me and her eyes bore through me. It drives me insane.

To her I dedicate all the sentences that have been darkening my walls. To her I dedicate all my bitter suns.

Our
cité
is our kingdom. Our city in the city, our town in the town. Port Louis has changed shape; it has grown long teeth and buildings taller than its mountains. But our neighborhood hasn't changed. It's the last bastion. Here, we let our identities happen: we are those who do not belong. We call ourselves
bann Troumaron
—the Troumaronis—as if we were yet another kind of people on this island filled with so many kinds already. Maybe we actually are.

Our lair, our playground, our battleground, our cemetery. Everything is there. We don't need anything else. One day we'll be invincible and the world will tremble. That's our ambition.

EVE

Pencil. Eraser. Ruler. Paper. Gum. I played blind man's bluff with the things I wanted. I was a child, but not entirely. I was twelve years old. I shut my eyes and held out my hand. My fingers closed on air. I shivered in my thin clothes. I thought everything was within reach. I made moonlight shine in the boys' eyes. I believed I had powers.

Pencil. Eraser. Ruler. I held out my hand because in my bag there was nothing. I went to school completely and totally empty. I felt some kind of pride in not having anything. People can be rich even in having nothing.

Because I was small, because I was thin, because my arms and my legs were as straight as a child's drawing, the bigger boys protected me. They gave me what I wanted. They thought a gust of wind would tip me over like a paper boat with a leak in its side.

I was a paper boat. Water seeped into my sides, my stomach, my legs, my arms. I didn't know it. I thought I was strong. I weighed up my chances. Assessed every moment. I knew how to ask without seeming to.

Pencil, eraser, ruler, it didn't matter. The boys gave me things. Their faces softened slightly, and that changed everything, it made them look human. And then, one day, when I asked without seeming to, they asked me for something in return.

I thought it would be simple, it would be easy. What could they want in return? I was the smallest one, the least important one. Everyone knew I had nothing. For once, they were saying I had something. My bag held many nothings: the nothingness
of my apartment, smaller and more bare than everyone else's; the empty nothingnesses of our wardrobes; even those of our trash cans. There was the nothing of my father's eye, which alcohol had turned oily. The nothing that was my mother's mouth and eyelids, both of them stapled shut. I had nothing, nothing at all to give.

But I was mistaken.

He wanted a piece of me.

He dragged me off to a corner of the playground, behind a huge Indian almond tree, he pinned me against the tree's trunk, and he slipped his hand under my T-shirt. I was wearing a red T-shirt, with a soccer player's name on it. I don't remember who anymore. His hand stopped at my breasts, slowly moved up and down, just over the small black points. There was hardly anything there. I heard other children shouting and playing. They seemed far away. It was another world. The boy had slipped his other hand in. His skin turned blotchy. His cheek was hot. He took his time, even though he was scared. But I didn't feel anything. I was out of my body. It was apart from me.

That day, he didn't ask me for anything else. He gave me an eraser, or a pencil, or a notebook, I don't remember. His lips came close to my ear. The next time, he said, we'll try something else.

I shrugged, but I stared with some curiosity at his eyes. They had a silver sheen like melted sugar. As if he had been erased. Now he only existed through his hands. Now he only existed through me.

For the first time my bag was no longer empty. I had something I could pay with: myself.

I could buy. Exchange myself for what I needed. Exchange morsels, bits, various parts of my body. I looked brazenly at the
taller boys when school was let out. You want to see something? I asked them. They laughed and said, Go away, there's nothing to see. But then they looked at me a long while and my eyes told them something else. I knew how to do it. Someone else slipped fluidly into my gaze, someone completely separate from my bony body. I refused to be small or weak. I contradicted myself. That changed everything. They stopped breathing. They flowed into the shadows on my face. They left caresses there, a slime of desire that oozed down my right cheek. They, the bigger boys, had something else to give in return: books, calculators, CDs. All I gave them was the shadow of a body.

I am in permanent negotiation. My body is a stop-over. Entire sections have been explored. Over time, they blossom with burns and cracks. Everyone leaves some trace, marks his territory.

I am seventeen years old and I don't give a fuck. I'm buying my future.

I am transparent. The boys look at me like they can see me inside out. The girls avoid me like a sickness. My reputation's been sealed.

I'm alone. But I've known for a long while the value of solitude. I walk straight ahead, untouchable. Nobody can read anything on my blank face, except what I choose to show. I'm not like the others. I don't belong to Troumaron. The neighborhood didn't steal my soul like the other drones that live there. This skeleton has a secret life sealed in its belly. It's carved by the sharp edge of refusal. Neither the past nor the future matter; they don't exist. And the present doesn't either.

Eraser. Pencil. Ruler. Beginnings are always easy. And then we open our eyes to a bleak world, to a universe under siege. The looks of others, eyes that judge and condemn. I'm seventeen and I've decided my life.

I'm braving the reefs all around me. I won't be like my mother. I won't be like my father. I'm something else, something not really alive. I walk alone, straight ahead. I'm not afraid of anybody. They're the ones who fear me, who fear what they can only guess lies beneath my skin.

The more they touch me, the more they lose hold of me. The ones who dare to look into my eyes feel dizzy. They're so simple. The inexplicable frightens them. They have fixed ideas. A girl to marry, a girl to conquer and toss aside. Those are the only two categories they can understand. But I don't belong to one or the other. So they end up baffled and angry.

At night, I haunt the asphalt. Meetings are arranged. They take me, they bring me back. I remain cold. Whatever changes in me, it's not the truest, innermost part of myself. I protect myself. I know how to protect myself from men. I'm the predator here.

They take me. They bring me back. Sometimes, they rough me up. No matter. It's just a body. It can be fixed. That's what it's for.

I sidestep the traps and the obstacles. I dance in evasion.

Shadow or wing, what you were no longer is. You become something else. In Troumaron, a reflection follows you. It taunts you. It tells you you're walking the wrong way. It transforms your surfaces, inverts your trajectory, reveals the other side of your silence. The paper boat is leaking everywhere and you don't know it. You watch as you sink but you don't see that it's you. Erasers, papers, pencils, rulers, books, heart, kidneys, toes. One day, you'll see yourself in the mirror, and nothing at all will be yours.

You see a face congealed under its lies. You ask yourself where you went. You were looking for a key—but something had broken in.

CLÉLIO

I'm Clélio. I'm at war. Fighting everybody and nobody. I can't get away from my rage. Someday, I know it, I'll kill someone. Dunno who. Maybe my parents, or some boss, or one of my guys, or a girl, or myself. Dunno who. I'm Clélio. You know who I am, so don't you mess with me. You shitheads have no idea what anger is if you've never met me.

I've done all sorts of jobs. The only one left is to kill someone. And then sometimes I sing. When I sing, people listen. Well, at least they stop. I stop their lives and their hearts. My voice pierces infinity, Saad told me. (He doesn't talk like anyone else here.) My voice makes metal shiver, apparently. The buildings stop crushing men, cement loosens its grip. Walls turn nostalgic. Girls go rosy. But I won't fucking sing for shit.

A couple of times they've asked me to sing at a wedding. Everyone just stares at me, beaming like idiots, and I want to punch their faces in. To see them standing around in their nice clothes. Their shoes so tight their toes look ready to pop out like horns. And they're acting like nothing's wrong, stuffing their mouths and boozing like they're not miserable and broke—it makes me want to shove those smiles down their throats. I tell myself that if one more old lady asks me to sing
Marinella
, I'm kicking her straight to hell. I'm no good when I drink too much. One beer and I'll knock over the tables and the bride. One time I even jumped on the bride to pull off her veil, because I knew it was a mask. If they hadn't held me back, I'd have pulled away her dress, too, and all the oaths she'd taken.

I must have been born that way. I must have seen the future and decided I didn't like it. So when I see nails, I feel like swallowing them or forcing someone else to swallow them.

I've been through prison for assault and battery many times. I wasn't ever there for long, since I'm a minor. Next year, when I'm eighteen, the punishments will be worse. The judges, if they're men, lecture me. If they're women, they go weak when they see how my eyes look like a kid's; they go soft and try to tell me, implore me to do better. I know I won't change, though. I'm a little snot. A little shit.

I am Clélio. Dirt poor bastard, swallower of everyone else's rusty nails. What can you do? Nobody changes just like that.

SAAD

They tell me I'll succeed. But success does not mean the same thing for everyone. It's a slippery word. In my case, it simply means that locked doors could open just a bit and I could, if I sucked in my stomach, slip through and escape Troumaron. Everybody knows poverty is the harshest of jailers. Still, the teachers say everything is possible. They tell me how they, too, once learned their lessons by candlelight. But I can see in their eyes just how dim their minds are as a result. They insist: seize your opportunities, don't hold back your country. But who do they mean by “your”?

Stereotypes were made for us. We fill them all. We are the champions.

The teachers allude to success, as if they were talking to me without entirely believing what they were saying. They look at me surreptitiously: You can make miracles happen. It's true, I have a good memory. I'm a sponge: I absorb everything. And I'm a bladder: I pour everything back out. Apparently that helps for success. Swallow and expel.

But I make good use of them. I go to class. I pass my tests. I lead a double life: night with the gang, day with the sages.

I can still remember the day I split into two. During French class, the teacher, a young woman with skin as jaundiced as her canary-yellow blouses and who didn't stay for long (and for that reason I say she was only there for me, at that moment, like fate knocking on my sleepy head), the teacher said: We're going to read poems by someone your age. As soon as they heard the word poetry, the boys pretended to retch and covered up their ears
while making rude noises. But she read those poems anyway, in the middle of this ruckus, and also this boy's letters, in her small, trembling voice. She started:
No one's serious at seventeen.
At first, I thought to myself, he's wrong; for us, seventeen is very serious. But then I heard, instead of her feminine voice, the harsh voice of a teenager talking about his hopes, his rebellion, his wounds, his wishes, and even more than that, he was talking about the world, his and mine, and suddenly I felt keenly that he was talking to me and only me. Yes, directly to me. He was saying, I am your brother. She read a poem where he was saying that vowels had colors, and the truth of it made me sit bolt upright: I, too, saw colors in words. Just as the island unfurled its blues and oranges, so the words unfurled still more vividly purple rages in my head. When she was done she said, this poet's name is Rimbaud.