Eve Out of Her Ruins (8 page)

CLÉLIO

The city's
swarming with suits.

Nobody likes that. We feel uncomfortable, even if we haven't done anything wrong. We're not cut out for suits.

I feel like everyone's looking at me funny. My mother starts crying like a Madonna as soon as she sees me. My father is like a live wire. But I haven't done anything. I'm not guilty. If I wanted to murder kids, I wouldn't pick the ones who couldn't defend themselves. I'd pick the ones hurting the others.

The sky's heavy. The wind prowls low. Everybody in the gang's hiding from me. I don't get why. I didn't go with them last night, but that's no reason to be pissed off.

They're all cowards. I try to sing, but anger swallows up my voice the minute it comes out. I'm not singing to feel happy, I'm singing to talk to Savita. Of course nobody understands it. They don't understand that it's possible to talk to shadows more alive than themselves.

Everywhere I turn, there are policemen. The trash bin is the center of their anthill. Do they actually think they'll find something here besides a girl's corpse? You think that an angel will come down to Troumaron to show them the way? No, all there is here is death. If they're astonished when death comes, it's because they didn't want to see anything. But I've got my eyes open. I know death will come and claim every one of us, in the worst way possible. That's why I've begun practicing.

EVE

The apartment smells like sulfur. As soon as I walk in, it begins burning.

They're waiting in the living room covered with calendar pictures. They ask the usual questions, edged with fear. I answer evasively. Then I figure it out. Savita's death has changed everything. Her parents have been openly saying what they've been thinking: that I dragged her down into the pit. If she's dead, it's my fault, they say.

My father asks me: Do you know anything about her death?

I would have liked to say, I'm not guilty, but I can't. Because I was her, because she was me, I'm guilty. We both died at the same moment. All that's left of me is useless. The words lodge in my mouth. The taste of my saliva nauseates me.

My father says: They said you set a bad example for her.

I answer: Do you know any good examples around here?

He immediately gets up and slaps my face. I was expecting it, of course. He has no other answer to my words. He has no other response to my presence. I moved as he slapped me, and the strike wasn't nearly so strong.

My mother has been reduced to almost nothing: a larva of a mother. I get up, tired. I don't care about them. I don't want to see them. They don't know anything about her. They don't have any imagination. How could they know what she lived through? She doesn't matter to them. All that matters is what people think, what people say, it's about appearances, the whole façade of normalcy, their pitiful pride. Their pride? There's nothing to boast about here. Their mouths are thick with the sludge of mudslinging.

Leave me the fuck alone, I say.

All I can think about is lying in Savita's calm sunlight.

But he sees I'm tired and punches me, a solid fist punch to my face. I fall onto the armchair in shock. My mother cries out.

He grabs my hair and forces me to look and listen to him. I shut my eyes and cover my ears.

He yells curses. He lashes out in such a red rage that even our neighbors and their own neighbors can hear him. His fury echoes further and further, like the aftershocks of an earthquake.

I'm not really paying attention to what he's saying anymore. He yells at my mother while he's still holding me by my hair. I wait, patiently, for him to stop.

The only thing I tell myself is that I need to think about cutting my hair. Cut it short, very short. Shave it until my skull can be seen. I'll go bareheaded. Like a lioness nobody would dare touch or even look at directly. Touch a lioness and lose a hand. Teeth sinking into skin, sharp and heavy teeth, teeth thick with blood. And then, digesting in the sun, the lioness will lick them gently to wash them. A lioness's breath is thick and bloody. The beauty of a lioness digesting, golden and luxuriant.

Finally, noticing my absent gaze, he yanks his hands out of my hair, pulling out several tufts as well.

I go into my room at last. I spit bitter saliva. I throw myself onto my bed, paying no attention to the pain in my scalp. Everything I might ever suffer is nothing compared to what Savita endured.

She was stripped of her body and her life by the sovereign man.

He refused her any dignity and threw her into a trash bin. He decreed: You are nothing. You don't exist. You've lived for nothing. You're
not useful for anything. You're over.

The man, in his uselessness, prevails. What does she say? What does she do? Does she cry? Does she accept the inevitable? Is she happy that she's been finished off? Does she think of me in her final moments? Does she ask me, why aren't you there?

On a table, somewhere, under a harsh light, her body waits to be decoded. To reveal what? Signs of death? There's no need to open her up to figure that out. Remnants, traces, incriminating liquids? And what about me? Will they find traces of me on her, traces of my hands, my lips, my pleasure? What will the autopsy say about her? Be your silence, Savita. They don't deserve anything more.

Outside, electricity crackles. More than Savita's death, the police presence strips bare the cables of tension crisscrossing the city. I feel like, now that she's left, I'm the only one facing the horde. Everybody's looking right at me. As if I'd broken the laws. I had disturbed the pattern, changed the space, broken open the locked doors. I sow discord. I give off a smell of greasy soot. I'm the fallen angel of the neighborhood, its ripped-out soul.

I'm so convinced of it that I start to doze off in exhaustion.

I grab the edge of a sheet and pull it over my face like a shroud. My body is so flat it's barely an eddy in the small ocean of the bed. My eyes are open beneath the shroud. I try to see the world through this soft grille, this mesh. What would I do if I had to hide from everybody? How would I live as a ghost? Or does invisibility free us from our fears?

I slip into a half-sleep under my shroud, looking at a white world. Soon, everything slackens. Even my breath, the rhythm of a broken pendulum, subsides.

CLÉLIO

There was no getting away from it. I was the first one to be questioned. The first suspect. Nobody said anything, of course. But there are plenty of ways to say something without saying anything. The old guys are just waiting for that. These kids are more or less okay, they say, but, sure, there's a couple of bad apples in there. One of them's been in prison, he's always looking for trouble. You know, if their hearts are black, there's nothing you can do.
Ki pu fer, ena, zott finn ne kum sa
. That's just how they were born, rotten to the core.

Fuck it, I'm not that shitty! Those men are the shitheads. Nobody says my name, but I feel like I'm hearing it everywhere, in the air, in the church bells tolling Sunday Mass, in the car tires screeching. Even my first name doesn't come out right when anyone says it. But the policemen aren't all idiots. They're doing their job. If one of us has been in prison, that simplifies things. What were you doing last night? Last night? Nothing. Nothing? Nothing at all. You didn't have anything to do? No, there are times when I don't do anything. Where were you? On my apartment roof. Who saw you? Well, the birds flying over my head, I don't know if they were finches or cape canaries or cardinals, and then there are bats flying around as soon as it's dark out. Stop messing with us!

If they're looking for proof, they'll find it in their little folders. Your honor, this boy is a repeat offender. Society has done all it can to rehabilitate him, but there are people who just can't be redeemed, Your honor, and the judge will look at me solemnly
and he will ask, in English, Are you beyond redemption? as if he were asking that question of himself, but I'll tell him,
Oui, je suis au-delà de la rédemption
, because I don't want to be redeemed or rehabilitated, and I haven't committed the crimes you're imputing to me, as they say in their legal jargon, I haven't done anything at all, other people committed the worst crimes, but the police won't dare to arrest these guys, or if they have to, it'll be with velvet gloves and they'll say excuse me, Monsieur, before locking them up and they won't lay hands on those guys, they'll smell as crisp and fresh as the millions of rupees they've laundered and just as unattainable, which will make these poor officers with their crappy salaries dream, you've got to understand them, there are things that go beyond poor people's imaginations but okay, they still have to be arrested because that's how it is, the people need to be shown that there will be justice even if they're released the same night and their trials don't go anywhere because they have to shut up all the activists whining about corruption in this country and slush funds and liquidated assets, and so I'm beyond redemption, and you can pin that murder on me without even saying please or showing any actual proof, I'm guilty of being me, I'm guilty of just being, and they'll shove me, and hit the back of my head and say, you have to talk, you little pimp, and if they have to they'll beat me up without leaving any signs, and then it'll turn into a story of race and communities, it's always like that, even if Savita, she joked about these things, when she died she became a racial symbol, and now I am, too, over the centuries we've been enemies, slaves, coolies, it's a nasty history, for sure, which is why it keeps happening
again and again, it's been going on for centuries now and it's not going to end anytime soon, believe me, even if we the children of Troumaron don't care about religion, race, color, caste, everything that divides all the other guys on this shitty island, we the children of Troumaron, we're a single community, and it's a universal one, this community of the poor and the lost and that, believe me, is the only identity that counts.

I'm leaving this place with handcuffs on my wrists. There's no way out.

SAAD

They took Clélio
away. I knew we shouldn't have left him alone. Whenever he's on his own, he gets into trouble. I know he didn't kill Savita. But he's the Perp. They'll try to make him say it and even if they can't do it, it won't make a difference. Clélio just has to open his mouth and he'll be sentenced. He's stupidly, totally innocent.

In the meantime, she, Eve, has a new obsession: she wants to see Savita's body. I don't know what she's hoping for, but I keep trying not to help her and she keeps pushing me to. But she's started talking to me again, and that's something at least. It's better than a poke in the eye with a blunt stick. I have some hope again. I take her
to the police headquarters.

The officers look at us indifferently at first, then, once they hear where we're from, suspiciously. Especially me. They take more kindly to her, she looks so young with her big T-shirt and her hair pulled back in a ponytail, yes, she seems really young, like she's fifteen years old. And then there's that dark splotch on her right cheek, isn't that a typical feature, isn't that the mark of life in those tormented places?

The officers buzz around her like fat bumblebees.

The inspector takes us into his office. He remains standing. He's huge and seems fatherly, but I don't entirely trust him. He touches her face, strokes the swelling there with his thumb, a thick brown thumb on this small face, I want to slap it and I can see in the way he's looking at me that he knows it.

Did your boyfriend do this to you? he asks.

My father, she says as she looks right into his eyes.

He lets his hand drop. She sizes him up. She asks what she has to do for him to let her see the body. They consider each other. I have no part to play here. There's a coded conversation in their silence.

She's in the morgue, he says.

So, is it far away? The morgue? she asks.

Why would you want to see her?

She was my friend.

We only let close family see the body.

I'm family.

We'll return it to you when the autopsy's done. It's best to wait.

He goes back to his paperwork with an air of finality.

I drag her out of the headquarters before she tries to do something else. I don't understand this ease she has in paying for things with her body. As if it didn't mean a thing. I think it's the most precious thing in the world.

I take her to the Caudan waterfront because I know she doesn't want to go back to Troumaron. She's devastated. We sit and look at the sea and wait. The bruise on her face has turned purple under the streetlights. It actually looks beautiful.

The sea by the luxury hotel gleams with hazy fire. Where we live, it looks like oil and smells like an armpit.

People walk past, sit at a café, take in the air, drink beers, enjoy the weather, and think about nothing. Eve once told me that we were on another planet. I think she's right. Our sun and theirs aren't the same.

She doesn't say anything. She doesn't see anything. She isn't there.
How can I reach her?

We walk on glass parapets, over the clear void. There are a thousand silences between us and all the distance of infinity.

I light a joint for her. She inhales sharply and her eyes turn to warm honey. Their colors mass on my tongue like the honey of voracious flowers from Rodrigues.
To lizie kuma dimiel Rodrig
, I say to her in my head. The ganja races through my body, shimmers in my veins. My words are simple and straightforward.

We'll get through this, I tell her.

Maybe you will. Not me. I don't have any energy. It's all gone.

But there are options. Pretending, persuading, that's what will help us get out.

She smiles.