Colour of Dawn (2 page)

THREE

A
few scattered lights are still shining as night drags its feet. I have switched on the radio, to continue my conversation with God. The journalist-preacher with his shrill, nasal voice has kept his appointment with the Creator and with us: ‘Brothers and sisters, open your hearts…'. I hardly hear the first words of his morning prayer before I am back on my feet despite myself, as if a strange force were drawing me towards Fignolé's empty bed. And I take Joyeuse by surprise, her shoulders slumped in stupor, standing before the same bed. She turns as I approach. Immediately I see in her expression that mix of feelings that she believes she can hide from me. As she sees me take several steps towards her, she suddenly changes her attitude, assuming the airs of a grandly-dressed uptown woman. A gesture here, a sigh there, her hands at her throat like a film star. When I remark to her that Fignolé hasn't come home, she does her usual trick of acting as if she knows everything and is not unduly worried about her brother.

‘Night must have come down before he realised and he had to sleep at a friend's.'

I don't believe a single word of her reply. Not a word. And nor does she. Carry on, my dear Joyeuse; you carry on taking me for the greatest fool of them all.

Joyeuse, with a backside fit for parading about all the pavements of the city, will soon choose a figure-hugging dress, apply eau de toilette scented with jasmine and ylang-ylang and make up her face with colours to stop passers-by in their tracks. Joyeuse has an unshakeable faith in her lipstick, her breasts and her buttocks.

As for me, Angélique Méracin, I give the impression of wisdom, great wisdom. A sacrificed mother. A submissive daughter. An exemplary sister. Devoted to the sick in a hospital that has nothing. No-one has known me go with a man, either, not one. A woman without appetites, Angélique Méracin continues to serve, to obey, to smile. And so she is full of anger, run through with bad thoughts, shaken by delirious outbursts. And I hate it all. I hate this house. I hate this street, this city, this island.

I listen. Ti Louze is returning from the public fountain. Here she is, barefoot, her plaits coming loose, her dress a little more torn than yesterday and clinging to her skin like seaweed. Bent beneath the weight of two large bottles of water, Ti Louze does not dare meet my eyes. And with good reason! She woke too late and will be hard pushed to make the three trips to the fountain to fill the large plastic tank on the other side of the latrines.

I have taken a few steps towards the bedroom I occupy with Gabriel, my son. Well, I call it a bedroom although it isn't in reality – I have merely put up a makeshift partition between this front room and the backyard to gain some privacy. Needless to say, the house is full to the brim. We can hear each other breathing. And of course, love has taken on the hues of our grudges, has become mixed and confused with our resentments. God obliges us to stay crowded together in all our moods, our resentments and our smells, as a way of putting us to the test, the better to serve Him.

In an hour's time I'll wake Gabriel to get ready for school. His soul nurtured in the splendour of the Scriptures, Gabriel should at this very moment be immersed in biblical dreams, glorious and epic. Sleeping with his hands curled into fists, legs spreadeagled, he can at last enjoy our large bed to himself. Standing on the threshold of my bedroom, I watch him from the corner of my eye, without ceasing to listen out for the sounds coming from the only real bedroom, the one that Mother shares with Joyeuse. Mother turned over a few moments ago, making the bedsprings creak beneath the weight of her bones that are beginning to get old. Her shoulders, I'm sure, will sag a little more in a while, when she realises that Fignolé has not come home. Then she will head slowly for the backyard and silently invoke her gods, her bold loas. Then, to the rhythm of the rocking chair, she will say her rosary, her eyes closed the better to see the other God, the one with the long white beard.You never know exactly which of these two universes is the one Mother moves in.

But at seven o'clock her ear is always glued to the radio; nothing in the world would make her miss the news, nothing. She gets a strange pleasure from listening to these voices that spell out our troubles every day, several times a day. Mother listens to them all: the strident and the clipped, the bass registers and the shrill, the drawling, the sing-song, the casual and the serious. Mother has been through rain, fire and blood. She says that, having lived for sixty years on this island, she is beyond the reach of shadows, beyond the reach of darkness. That her body may not yet exude the smell of a corpse but she is already dead.

And so when the journalist, with an appropriate and familiar voice, announces that an illicit gathering took place yesterday, Sunday, in the city centre, that armed men opened fire on some young people in a suburb to the north of the city, Mother just smiles a strange rictus of a smile, her jaw inflated with too many words, and flicks at the hem of her nightshirt with a swollen, arthritic right hand.

February has touched our daybreaks with cold hands. The pallid, milky light of the night dissolves into the colours of the horizon. I adjust Mother's shawl. Joyeuse, sitting on her heels, sips her coffee without saying a word – and with good reason. Joyeuse has not been one of us for a long time, not since Uncle Nériscat, Mother's cousin, paid for her to study with the Sisters of Wisdom, in the uptown district.

The three of us are thrown into turmoil by thoughts hard to bear, and I swear that we will avoid speaking openly of Fignolé's absence, despite everything. We are too afraid to do so.

FOUR

A
ngélique is already outside preparing Gabriel's meal. She often chooses this uncertain hour, away from our scrutiny, to unravel all the knots of kindness, reason and wisdom that hold together this gloomy, remote life of hers. Angélique's life is lived at a low level, barely taking off from the ground. Angélique skims the foam of the days. I can't remember the last time she laughed so the sun danced in her eyes. Truly, I can't remember.

Since Gabriel was born, Angélique's eyes have lost their ability to ensnare. Her body has laid down its arms. She keeps all her happiness tightly bound in a severe bun at the nape of her neck. I have difficulty coming to terms with this new Angélique; I find it hard to let go of the other Angélique who was lively and full of laughter, blazing under the sun. A notion of pure joy, of abstract happiness remains at the sound of her name. How I miss my sister, whose happiness and contagious bliss always went before her, who made me believe that the sun of my childhood would never set, who made every day a delicious flow of honey – despite the days when we went hungry, the days of pretence from just above the bottom end of the scale, the very bottom. We were always prepared to pretend, as if we went to sleep sated, our thirst quenched. As if our clothes were not held together by Mother's ingenuity and mending skills. As if we were not always a hair's breadth away from being expelled from school. As if, indeed, we hadn't sometimes been expelled. As if, as if…

Since my childhood I have been at war. Angélique knew how to make it a happy war. I learned from her the rough, wild strength of that pride. How I miss that Angélique, whom a crafty, boastful man with an ‘it's your lookout' attitude stole from me one ordinary day, against a backdrop of sky, earth and sea. This bully in the making must just have raised his head above the surface of our sea of poverty, for I recall he was wearing his shirt open to his navel and his smile revealed a gold incisor. Mother had clearly not had time to give Angélique sufficient warning, to remind her to be wary of strangers lying in wait by the roadside.

Angélique now has a great shadow on her heart. Between the church services and the petty cruelties she bestows on the household, she has no time either to receive the love of God or to give love.Yet Angélique has just one thing on her lips: ‘God and His love', ‘God and His works', ‘God, God, God…'. I even suspect she uses her profession to distance herself from the sufferings of us mortals, and uses prayer to measure the extent to which she can resist earthly pleasures. Her heart is closed and the space between her thighs has been flooded with sadness. The connection is obvious. She knows it as well as I do, but would never admit it, never.

Earlier, when I made to join her outside for coffee, I saw that Fignolé's bed was empty and the sheets had not been disturbed. This fact froze my blood, but I revealed nothing as I heard Angélique open the door to the backyard. She simply said to me:

‘Joyeuse, Fignolé didn't come home last night.'

And I replied, ‘I know.' Cloaking myself with the air of an eccentric diva that I use when my heart is set to race, I added, ‘He must have slept at a friend's place.'

Angélique made no comment, but I know she didn't believe me. For all her devout airs, Angélique is as sharp as an old monkey. When she moved away again towards the backyard, I took the opportunity of having a quick look behind the only cupboard in the living room, where a panel has worked loose. I know this is where Fignolé has taken to slipping the lyrics of the songs he writes, his desire for secrecy inspired by a lingering adolescence with its mysteries, its violence and its games. Without pausing to reflect for a second, I slipped my hand in. I didn't expect to find anything but papers, but my hand met with something cold and metallic. I knew immediately it was a gun.

‘What on earth can Fignolé be doing with a gun?'

I drew it out quickly to examine it and convince myself. The barrel, the trigger, the butt. I closed my eyes for a few moments to gain strength to bear the violent music in my blood, which threatened to suffocate me. My hand was shaking.

But I remembered the tale told to me as a child by Mother one evening at nightfall; the tale of a woman who had gained all the strength in the world by swallowing a sacred stone given to her by a mage. Since then I have kept beneath my breast a small imaginary grey stone as a talisman against the evil spells of this island. My thoughts were all on this little grey stone as I tucked the gun beneath my nightshirt together with the few papers that had also been hidden in that cranny. In the bedroom I placed the gun in a box on top of the wardrobe and stowed the papers in my bag next to the bed. Despite all my acrobatics, despite all these comings and goings, Mother didn't notice a thing. Lying beneath the sheets, she simply emitted a lengthy stifled moan as she turned towards me.

I have hardly begun to drink my coffee when Mother joins us in the backyard a few minutes later. She simply says: ‘Do either of you know where Fignolé spent the night?' and doesn't wait for a reply. Mother's suffering is obvious. She suffers in silence. Something has been torn from her. She submits totally to this void, this great empty space, submerged in suffering and the waiting for Fignolé, but she won't talk about it. Mother must have faltered by her son's bed and invoked her loas as if grasping a pair of crutches. Mother falters but never falls. While Mother lives, the end of the world will never arrive.

Despite a certain plumpness accumulated with the years, Mother is still beautiful, though it is not that same beauty that was considered a scandal some years ago. Mother is a sovereign in decline, and this morning a tragic sovereign. The waiting turns her mouth into a remote island in the middle of her face, with her eyes like far horizons. Her hands resting on her knees, she murmurs as her whole body sways:

Holy Mary, mother of God,
Pray for us, poor sinners…

She hasn't said a single word about the absence of Fignolé. Not a word. Instead she raises her voice against the whip, the rigoise that Angélique has used on Ti Louze's back and Gabriel's frail legs. I join Mother in this strange chorus and soon we are all three of us yelling. Deep down, we know that Ti Louze and Gabriel are strangers to these cries, to our anger. We yell all the same. We yell because we cannot talk of the only thing that would relieve us, the only thing that would restore us to our humanity. Our sufferings began a long time ago, and those we would wish them on are too far away. Ti Louze and Gabriel are within earshot of our voices, within reach of our hands. We are cruel by default. Wicked by obligation.

In the face of inextinguishable anger, Gabriel breathes jerkily as he examines his legs carefully. He fears that the lash has left visible traces; he fears his little friends will make fun of him at school.Ti Louze sniffs loudly. She no longer has the words to beg for leniency: ‘Please, please…' A trickle of blood runs from the two or three scabs she has caused herself by dabbing at insect bites with an old, worn cloth. Through her tears, Ti Louze calls on death but will have to wait for that wish to be granted. Ti Louze and Gabriel must think that the world is an unfair place, and they're not wrong. Gabriel will get used to it, sooner than he may think. For Ti Louze the game has already been played out, in full. Ti Louze, whose braids are no longer than finger-bones; a true African's head with no future on this island – Ti Louze, so black she is invisible.

A moment later, no doubt weary of this game, Mother asks me to call Paulo, the son of our neighbour Madame Jacques. She doesn't mention Jean-Baptiste or Wiston who live at the other end of the street. While waiting for Paulo, she ceaselessly slaps her lower arms to warm up her blood.

The sky is pink-hued mother-of-pearl, but the night's mood still freezes us to our bones.

Sitting at Mother's feet, I drink my coffee in silence. I think of Fignolé.Where could he possibly have spent the night? Why did he hide that gun behind the cupboard? Why? I think of Luckson. Of the jeans I'll put on this morning. I study my toe nails, my fingernails. My nail varnish, salmon-coloured, is beginning to flake off.

FIVE

I
begin my shift at seven o'clock as usual. On arrival, I carry out the same routine tasks, to distance myself from the pain that I always see in the sick who line both sides of the large communal ward as I walk down it.