Colour of Dawn (3 page)

Gabriel had trouble waking this morning and going over his lessons for school. No doubt there were other images playing out behind his eyelids.There was nothing to be done about it; my fear that night must have crept in between the folds and furrows of his sleep. However, when he woke I was ruthless with the whip. God knows why! A malicious spirit took pleasure in whispering like burning coals: ‘The whip never did any harm to a little Negro boy or girl. The whip never did any harm…' And I hit him. And I hit her… ‘Fignolé can say whatever grand words he likes about suffering and injustice, but Ti Louze should consider herself lucky that we've taken her away from her peasant life.' And I hit, and I hit. ‘A life where she would be dead by now from eating roots and drinking the stagnant water of the ponds.' I hit them until my arm ached, until I was exhausted.

Now I regret using the whip. I regret that I can't undo what I did. This violence was all I had to distance myself as far as I could from my fear. This violence that leaves me with the taste of mud and ash in my mouth. Because of the whip Gabriel appeared not to recognise me – me, his mother – when I made him kiss me as he left the house. It was not until he disappeared at the end of the road that I could resign myself to taking my eyes off him.

Gabriel devours me in silence and he doesn't know it. No-one knows. Gabriel was the beginning of my sleepless nights, my desolate mornings. Gabriel was the beginning of my solitude. A child is the beginning of solitude for all women… But enough of these grand sentiments. This is the turning-point where I, Angélique Méracin, await Joyeuse, my sister Joyeuse, so free, so free…

Walking down the road, I greeted neighbours as I passed: ‘Hello, Madame Jacques, Maître Fortuné. Hello Boss Dieuseul, Willio. Hello Wiston, Jean-Baptiste, Altodir, Théolène, all of you.'

Madame Jacques' shop stocks everything we could want in this every-man-for-himself neighbourhood: sugar, which she pours into little paper bags, needles and thread, Palma Christi oil and honey that leave the shelves sticky, antibiotics, products for straightening the hair, lightening the skin, school notebooks and rice, supplied by food for the poor but sold to us by Madame Jacques. Just like she makes us pay for the telephone calls we receive or make on the filthy, malodorous receiver on her counter. Madame Jacques keeps notes beneath her voluminous bosom and impassively deals out strong words to recalcitrant customers, surrounded by the sticky flight of the flies.

Jean-Baptiste was wearing a jacket too narrow for his broad shoulders. He has had a job for a while at the Customs office. He is blessed with luck – the men of the Prophet-President, boss of the Démunis party, don't employ but recruit. Jean-Baptiste imposes the same regime on this collection of houses, like a boss. On Théolène, Altodir and Louidon who, sitting on this pavement, watch the passers-by from sunrise to sunset, picking their teeth, scratching their ears, whistling at girls and laughing as they rub their knees. Slapping their thighs. Opening and closing their legs. Boss Dieuseul, taciturn and with a sombre regard, is the only one to spend the brightest part of the day claiming that whatever will happen, he has already seen it. That what has already happened is nothing compared to what awaits us.

Here, every smile has its measure, every word its weight. In this neighbourhood we play out muted wars. Wars without victory, without outcomes and without glory. These are petty wars. Wars in which, every day, we examine our defeats a little more closely. Wars of the vanquished, whose history is nothing but a great dark play, full of noise, fury and blood. A history that makes us hate our very presence in the world, the black humiliation of our skin.

In the central space between the beds aligned on either side of the ward, I move with a steady pace, chest squared, feet turned slightly outward, to prevent myself from being caught by the exhaustion that I drag behind me like a convict's ball and chain. This stiffness in the way I walk comes also from everything my nostrils breathe in between these walls, these images like a release of wild birds. From all that my ears have heard expressed by mouths twisted by pain. From that which my hands have touched, living or dead. A great tangle of nerves constantly re-awoken beneath my skin. It's amazing that I'm still sane. Surprising that madness has not devoured me to the marrow.

Joyeuse says I must have swallowed a broomstick, the way I walk so straight, without the slightest sway of my behind, without that rowboat roll that is expected of a woman, a real woman, so she says. Especially a woman from round here. She often seasons her own bitterness with a hint of contempt.

‘Unbelievable,' she repeated again this morning, as she applied her lipstick and twirled in front of her mirror.

SIX

I
'm hardly able to drag my thoughts away from the metallic object on top of the cupboard. I hardly dare put a name to it in my head. Too many questions torment me and threaten to become an obsession. Why this gun? Does Fignolé believe he's in danger right now? Why hasn't he spoken of it? Why did he leave it in that cupboard if he's in fear of his life? Perhaps he's not himself a target but he's protecting a friend? Who knows? I open my bag quickly, thinking to find an answer to my questions in those few bits of paper left by Fignolé. There is a telephone number, Ismona, the forename of his girlfriend, written in capitals, the district of Martissant underlined in red and a line of verse:
The heart yearns for a bullet while the throat raves of a razor.
Beneath, in small, fine writing, Mayakovsky. Knowing Fignolé as I do, none of it is written at random. Everything has a reason, which I will come to decipher. Fignolé learned all these grand, fine words on a few forays into gatherings in Pacot, Laboule or Pétion-Ville where, seated on comfortable sofas, they enacted the Revolution surrounded by glasses of wine and the sounds of the trumpet of Miles Davies or Wynton Marsalis.

Fignolé, why make us breathe at such giddy heights? Recalcitrant, rebellious Fignolé, inhabited by poetry, crazy about music. Fignolé has no place on this island where disaster has broken spirits. Fignolé, can you hear me? Pass through the lightning and the fire of this city unharmed if you will, but come back to us… Come back to us soon. Unhurt, uninjured. More alive than a living soul in this land ever was. Fignolé, can you hear me?

I leave the house at the same time as Mother, who refused to wear the dress with little sun-yellow flowers that I bought for her during the last sales at Madame Herbruch's shop. Not content with merely refusing to wear this dress, Mother tied a scarf round her head like a peasant. I didn't dare say anything to her. She had that expression I know so well, that ‘you don't want to cross me' expression. No loa had yet ridden her, but even so, she had already escaped me, her mouth firmly shut like a tomb. Her eyes turned towards the Invisibles.

This evening I'll do her hair and that's all. My fingers moist with Palma Christi oil, I'll take pleasure in undoing her little plaits one by one and then putting her hair up in a single braid above her nape. She'll protest at first, but she'll let me do it. As always. This is an established ritual between us, which ultimately pleases us both. It always has, since childhood when, as night fell, she would invoke Grandfather Saintilhomme, whose legends bind us all to one another. Grandfather, whom the god Agoué came to find one day to take him to Guinea underwater. Or the tales in which the fish are clothed in phosphorescent seaweed. Where ogres devour children. Where stars can be caught in the palm of your hand. She would tell these stories until the day the blood ran between my thighs for the first time. Looking me right in the eye, Mother asked me to be on guard with boys from that moment on, and stopped talking to me. I mean, really talking to me. It was a parenthesis of silence.The truce of adolescence.The end of those hours, warm and so full of sweetness. She was content to reassure herself that each new moon brought me my share of moist, warm blood.

One day she inserted an authoritative finger to reassure herself that my body had not yet been breached, was no wound open to the breeze. She never did it again. I understood quickly that there was a connection between this blood, the shadowy triangle of my thighs, and the men who made Mother appear more beautiful sometimes, a dancing flame in everyone's eye, her hips as if released, when I would get home from school and our bed would exude a scent of amber and kelp.

I also experienced the discomfort, the unease of having a place in that school among girls who were strangers to me. Mother was jubilant at the idea of her daughter's unexpected advance towards that world of stucco, lace and frills, but never imagined the violence it would imply for her, never. Right from the start, I had refused to assume the role of an innocent who would steal cheap jewellery and only realise too late. I had chosen to be a thief of stones of deceptive brilliance. One who knows it and continues to do it, with no regrets, without useless nostalgia. In my adolescence I had a volcano inside me, which I ignited myself, without saying a word, every morning. Now this volcano will never be extinguished, Mother and I have merely changed places and roles.

I'm twenty-three years old and I'm the strongest.

Mother lets me do her hair and listens, sitting between my knees or with me standing behind her. We have reemerged from our silence. I talk to her of my twenties which are like an itch, of my great hunger for life, of my certainty that there is no-one to complain to about the battering and hurt the world will bring.

Mother knows like no other how to keep to herself in her silence. She knows how to love us in her silence like the warmth of the earth. Like the light which enwraps the world. Hers is a love against which all the fury, all the noise of others are as nothing. I know it as I know that no-one will love Ti Louze. No-one. As I know that hard, cold cruelty also lives in the hearts of the defeated – a certainty that Fignolé always opposed with a hundred explanations and a thousand boastful answers.

Madame Jacques stops us on the threshold of her shop. She wants to reassure us about Fignolé.

‘He'll come back later,' she says sharply. ‘Paulo is sure of it.'

This morning, Madame Jacques does not look good. The cares of the last few weeks have given her a sunken, tattered appearance. This morning, Madame Jacques is older than all the women who walk barefoot in the dust of the Old Testament. Older than Rebecca. Older than Judith. Older than Jezebel or Sara. Further on, Maître Fortuné rushes up in front of Mother, contenting himself with taking her clammy hands into his and inclining his head towards her breast. Apart from Madame Jacques and Maître Fortuné, mother does not confide in the other neighbours. Certainly not in Madame Descat, our neighbour on the right, recently moved in to the neighbourhood. A woman with an opulent bosom, she has visibly lightened the skin of her face with lashings of abrasive creams. Madame Descat is one whom we don't know well enough to take into our confidence but know too well to share our misfortunes with. Madame Descat receives visitors who are no doubt enthralled by the falseness of this grimelle who has arrived and who looks down on us with an air of authority. Mother gives Madame Descat broad smiles, which are returned with the same hypocrisy. Not me. She can see from my expression that I'm not afraid to get in with my teeth first before I can be bitten.

The present-day mistrust creeps through their veins like a seeping liquid, thicker than that of the mistrust there has always been – the mistrust that the older people always obliged us to maintain towards those who resemble us like peas in a pod. Together with misfortune, this mistrust is the only inheritance to which we, the defeated, are truly entitled. It certainly does not count among our losses, but our gains. It's not hard to see why!

Mother endlessly repeats that the neighbours are not what they were. And that we are fortunate to have Maître Fortuné.

‘Without someone like Maître Fortuné you couldn't last in this city. There would be no future here.'

Maître Auguste Fortuné is able to set you up with a clandestine source of water or electricity in less time than it would take you to ask for it, or to procure for you a certificate of birth, death or any kind of qualification.Tall and strong like the trunk of a mapou, with stooped shoulders and furtive eyes, he makes his way through hardships at a steady pace. Maître Fortuné is not a master of anything but muddling-through and trickery. Maître Fortuné exists only to satisfy himself that not a single centime will line the pockets of the State. Not a single one. A great usurer, Maître Fortuné lends on the black market. Maître Fortuné is the fruit of a blend of races, all the virtues of which we have rejected, retaining only the faults. He has made his place in our great disorder like a fish in water and revels in having the whole wide ocean to swim in. He has thrown a thick veil over his past, a veil that no-one lifts. Malicious tongues say that he embezzled the funds of a minister and came out of it by a feat of conjuring. Others claim that after making a living by running a brothel in Cap-Haïtien, he stripped a few forsaken widows in Curaçao of their assets and entertained a number of bored housewives in Fort-de-France. So why did he end up among us? We will never know.

A true chameleon, Maître Fortuné knows how to assume the colours of whoever is in power, tinting his tongue and his brain. But it is impossible to talk of his soul. For activities of the kind he undertakes, Maître Fortuné is not burdened with a soul, fortunately! Fortunately for him, and for us who live in this neighbourhood of houses that are permanent but twisted, half-finished, half-painted, displaying their metal guts like shaggy hair. This neighbourhood to which we have escaped but only just, with the fetid breath of alleyways which, elsewhere, further downtown, among the shanties, are sickening. We live in a place like a fruit that is half worm-eaten, half rotten, where eager teeth may yet bite. But all the same, we live in a neighbourhood of the defeated.With plenty of cause for unblemished, rich, deep happiness and with other things that are ugly, terrible and yet so human.