Colour of Dawn (14 page)

My conversation with Uncle Antoine is brief. I'm always nervous of talking to this uncle who would receive us, the poor, between the backyard and the kitchen. The wealth of Antoine Nériscat was always a subject of wonder for those of us whom poverty sought to entrap. Antoine Nériscat thought deep down that all those who were poor were only like that because they were unable to manage the range of tricks and schemes that were actually within reach. Or because they had got bogged down in those useless, endless considerations, justice and injustice, the master and the slave, as if they imagined that these things could have any weight in the reality of the world.

I tell him in a few words about our anxiety. We call Madame Jacques immediately. We are told that Paulo returned from Martissant more silent than he was when he left. We try our luck with the mysterious phone number and we get a police officer. Uncle Antoine knows that he has to make up a pretext on the spot. I can feel the ceiling sinking down until it crushes me. My heart will no longer stay in my chest. Uncle Antoine hangs up, frowning. Uncle Antoine doesn't like what has just happened. He must be scared. But in his eyes I can also see a great anger. And so Uncle Antoine, not knowing which to choose, his fear or his anger, finally launches into a diatribe against Fignolé's morals, his idleness, his foolishness and goodness knows what else. I sense that Uncle Antoine is on the verge of passing out. He is drooling and his lips are trembling. I tell him I have not come to see him this afternoon to talk about Fignolé but to find him. He shows me the door and leaves me with a remark, like throwing a bone to a dog: ‘I'll have a word with my political contacts and keep you informed. Give my love to your mother and hurry home.'

Far from being solved, the mystery of my brother Fignolé is growing deeper.

TWENTY-SEVEN

A
fter Gabriel was born, when I understood that the man with his shirt open to his navel and the gold tooth was not coming back, I filled a basin several times a day and washed and scrubbed myself. Again and again. Standing in front of the mirror I would scrutinise my body that had only just left behind the awkward lines of childhood, feeling each area of flesh, sniffing at my arms, my armpits, my thighs, my ankles. I was amazed not to find a single visible mark of the disgrace that was gnawing away at me, that I could feel etched into me with the cutting edge of a knife. There was no trace of pleasure left. I had left it dormant beneath my shame. The scent of a man, the sweat he had left on my chest, the semen mixed with blood, all these animal secretions impregnated my skin, contaminating me to the marrow. Inside me, rot was spreading, decaying.

This evening I scrub my body to rid it of death, to wash away the blood, to forget the shame. I want to clear a space for another day bathed in light by the water's edge. My body has stayed young despite an old, heavy weariness. Standing in front of the mirror I look at my face once again as if I had lost the memory of it for a long time. As if I were a kind of mould into which a history that was not mine had been poured. As if I were seeing this body for the first time. Yet I have existed for twenty-seven years. Twenty-seven years.

A woman's solitude makes her unsociable. Too unsociable. I need a man around whom my life would take on other colours. Not a man who would set my life on fire but a man who would come to me clothed in sun and rain. A rainbow man. A man for whom I would beat the rage out of my heart. A woman myself, I could face up to all other women for that man. I have measured my strength and I know it well.

Time passes and I can't bear to feel it passing, to feel at my back the seconds of an implacable clock ticking away. It sometimes makes me want to close my eyes, to curl up and die pitifully the death of an abandoned animal. My past is made up of days and events that don't seem to belong to me, that I didn't choose.

What stranger is already on his way, will come to reawaken in me the taste for minutes, the thirst for hours and the impatience for days…? A gesture would be enough. A single gesture… All he would have to do would be to look at me, tear down the walls. A man whom I would accept like an offering.Who would eat my meals and nibble my skin.Who would leave every morning to go conquer the world and at night would return to bury his man's fears in me. Whose weakness I would accept deep inside, as I would his strength. And already I feel this desire to shout out to him: Are you ever afraid? Do you like making love? Who are the women in your life? If you have any children, what are they called? Will you dream of me? Of my voice? My eyes? My breasts bent over you?

I think of my stranger. And immediately afterwards I think that I am a woman. That I am alive as a woman, not as anything else. That I have a body which can still be of use. That I carry inside me, coiled between my hips, that sole rampart against the sky, the most beautiful riposte to death. And I smile and even feel inclined to burst out laughing. A laugh that would rise up from the small of my back to my lips.

TWENTY-EIGHT

T
here is torment in this city. There is also intoxication. And there is this man who came into the world to get me lost. I hate the fact that I've let my guard down. I hate myself for being held under the sway of Luckson. I hate myself for foundering. For falling down to earth, to this mattress laid out on the ground.

Luckson has never told me that he likes me or that he is attached to me. Luckson's silence is more profound than the silence of other men. And so the memory of our movements suffices; that of our skin, too. There is the strength of my spirit, the lightness of my body. My spirit does not want to bend. My body seeks his. Desire makes my knees tremble. I am excited by my moments of wonder at Luckson.This man awakes in me the crazy idea of letting myself go.

Luckson is waiting for me. He opens the door and takes me by the hand, authoritatively. Forcing me to follow. I look at him with the full force of my gaze.When he sees me watching him so closely, his face opens up as if he would split in two. I look at him even more attentively. And I feel as if I will sink into that face. Taken by surprise, Luckson reaches out a hand to caress me on the cheek. And when he slides his thumb between my lips, I seize it between my teeth in a moment of sweet confusion.

I can't stop looking at that hand which pulled me out of the crowd. The wound he received that day has left a scar. I examine it like something I have never seen before, never come close to. I am held by fascination for that hand, by its gentleness.

I stretch out against Luckson. I close my eyes. Luckson asks me, placing his finger between my breasts:

‘Tell me, how do you feel deep down inside, in the place where you keep your secrets?'

I say: ‘Be quiet.'

He insists.

I repeat: ‘Be quiet or I'm going.'

How can I tell him that I'm not wise? That my back is so fragile, so fragile…? That I'm burning up, destroying myself? That for all those who seek me out I agree to nothing but what they ask for, an outward appearance, a pretence – certainly not to this shadow that is calling inside me, this burial? That I have already gone beyond my blackness, well beyond? That this is the first time I have loved without caution? That I would lie at his feet? That I would want him to give me sleepless nights, days full of adventure, nights of ocean voyages and the exploration of deep forests. Days of wide-open spaces. Days in the belly of the sun. Instead of all this I murmur to him again,

‘Be quiet, be quiet.'

And Luckson gets angry. He catches me by the shoulders and forces me to sit. He has lost that habitual calm that I have always taken for the aloofness of a young god. In his anger he is once again mortal, vulnerable. His face expresses his anger at the same time as an intense curiosity. I do not unclench my teeth. I dare not speak those bare words, defences down and without the night to mask them. It's too soon, too much. Luckson reprimands me with a gentleness of which he himself is unaware. Just as he is unaware how far that gentleness has brought me.

We do not exchange another word. Silence invades our story. In this silence I know that I will never forget Luckson. Never. Just as I know that one day I will die. Just as I know that the moon will bathe the world in light, tonight, tomorrow night and all the other nights. Just as I know that Fignolé is missing and his absence is burning me up inside.

And then, Luckson, I reach out my hand to touch your face. Place my mouth on yours. I want to taste the salty breath of your life.You seek my lips to force out my secrets. My legs close tightly under the pressure of your hand. You do not sense my whole body recoiling. You don't see my desperate eyes open onto darkness. Even when, slowly, my body awakes beneath the gentle touch of your fingers, the force of your hips. Until that radiant disturbance floods into my belly. Until the vast, overflowing, terrifying silence arrives, a silence I can hardly endure. As if the rushes of your body have reached me, to open me, flood into me and heal my soul. I do not want to be healed. I want to run away and cannot. I plant my nails into your skin to stop myself foundering.

We are so stupefied by gentleness, so overcome by pleasure that we look at one another like two strangers come from a distant land. The world has been broken apart by violence in our absence. You fall away. I bite down on the end of the mattress. And we allow the exhaustion of loving to take hold of us.

I leave there reeling, intoxicated with the question that at once delights me but makes me feel so bad: ‘Luckson, why awaken a heart that nothing should be allowed to thrill? Why?'

Luckson has insisted on accompanying me because the streets are still not safe. The air outside is heavy. The sun has long since hidden its fingers in the crumpled sheets of clouds. And these clouds have invaded the world in a shadowy procession advancing on the impassive ground of earth, sea and sky. Luckson only breaks the silence to ask me to tell him if I hear the slightest news about Fignolé. He leaves me at the tap-tap station not far from the house. I do not turn to watch him go.

Night is already falling. I taste the night on my face and my hands, my arms and my legs. This taste that has taken a strange bite from my soul, leaving my senses in disarray. The dark night is full of murmurs, dreams, shouts and cries moving towards the heart of the dozing houses.

On the gallery I will sit between Angélique and Mother and I will say nothing for a long moment, or very little. And then, without us really thinking about it, a few words will arise from our dreams. In this silence and these words we will love one another deeply. We will also be all right. Almost despite ourselves. This is the only moment when Ti Louze will be given a brief respite, sitting on a step at the entrance to the house. She will finally bathe in the same humanity as we do. It is that moment of the day when we can listen to one another for hours. The moment of bald words, strong words. Without the trappings, without the props of the world. It is the hour when we will search for that word just out of reach or in the bloom of life. The words that come from these places are distant, sweet, shaken by laughter, ripped, burned, fragile, powerful, precious.

TWENTY-NINE

F
rom the four corners of the city fires rise from rubbish piles and burn our eyes. Every evening at nightfall, pyromaniacs crucify the poverty of Port-au-Prince to preserve its silence. We proceed, pacified, half-blinded, in a deceptive fog. It is the moment when night descends on Mother's face.This unique face of one who will never leave, who will always stay near you, despite the storms over your life, despite the fire that lays it waste. Mother's face is a piece of soft earth, the ground on which we place our naked feet without fear of being hurt. Mother's desire to search through the night makes her a ship that cleaves through black water. She moves forward but goes nowhere. The silence inside her is as deep as that of the great belly of water beneath the sea. Has she lost the north? She is so afraid of capsizing.Yes, so afraid. From time to time the moon pours out its quicklime and, relieved, she scans the world in this white light. And once again she sets her course towards the wait for her son.

The night slowly tilts forward. I hear it falling with its music and its restraint. A night of Eden, a night from before the Fall. Huge emotions also fall with it. Mother speaks, perhaps, of her childhood that burned away so quickly, like a Bengal match. Whispers in ears in the dark, the sound of first steps towards the baskets gathered not far from the huts, the aroma of coffee made with a little water for Aunt Sylvanie and herself. Syrupy, black coffee as she still likes it, in the wispy colours of the old days. She walks in the footsteps of her mother, Sylvanie by her side. Three ebony candles sliding through the mother-of-pearl of the night. She does not refer to those who were broken in the sugarcane fields of the Dominican Republic. Those buried in watery graves who never reached the other side. Those who stayed in the country of their childhood, what has become of them? She will not say that all the demands they ever made on earth have been in vain, the earth has not responded to their supplications.

Joyeuse arrives and joins us, lost in thought. I tell her in a few words about my visit to the police station. We babble among the shadows. We, women of too many words, swollen with so much silence. God, even our gestures are silent!

The words finally arrive. From afar. From far away. They come from the depths of solitude, and from even further away. They make us want to hold them in our hands so they will touch us with a closeness greater than that of an embrace.

The two kerosene lamps have not yet been lit. In truth, no-one has felt like lighting them. There are enough words, silence and dreaming to see ourselves from the inside. Passers-by can hardly make us out, but greet us: ‘How are you, Ma Méracin?', ‘Evening Miss Angélique', ‘Any news, Joyeuse?' The world moves on at its own pace. Deep in contemplation, we do not see Paulo arrive, but we hear him bellowing like a beast. On hearing Paulo's cries, the three of us know that a great calamity is on its way towards us.