Colour of Dawn (7 page)

Joyeuse feigned innocence that afternoon when I arrived home earlier than usual from the hospital and caught them by surprise, alone in the house. Mother had gone to Aunt Sylvanie's and was not due back until the following day. Fignolé must have been yet again at one of those high-school meetings learning how to remake Haiti and the world. Entering through the gate, I noticed John's bag on the porch. I was not wicked enough to open the living-room door even though I had a key. Out of a sense of modesty on their behalf, I went down the narrow passage to the backyard, where I intentionally made a loud noise rattling the large plastic bowl that held the pans and plates. Joyeuse opened the door onto the backyard a few minutes later and with all the boldness I'd always known she had in her, said to me, leaning against the door frame: ‘John's here. He's helping me with my English homework.'

‘Of course,' I replied, with the same straight face as hers.

But she couldn't care less whether or not I believed her. Joyeuse had already understood that music which spins men around, and had set herself to playing it with talent. Even now I don't know whether it was a matter of caution on John's part or calculation on Joyeuse's that saved us from raising a little mulatto bastard. I just don't know.

During these early visits, bent over his notebook, John had drunk in our every word and religiously taken notes. Our lives were summarised in hastily-scribbled letters, and would seem a world away to people force-fed with words and images. People who would suffer yet another shock and who would be quick to chase us from their hearts because we were no longer bearable – enough, enough!

I didn't particularly like this constant attention to our slightest movement. I got the impression that we were like those urine or blood samples that specialists examine in hospital laboratories for microbes, to confirm or tackle infections. He believed that there was some great complicity between him and me, simply because I cared for the sick and the poor in the only public hospital in the city. In fact I was only there because I hadn't found anything else to do and there were five mouths to feed at home. I only ever dreamt of being elsewhere, that place John had been born into, thousands of kilometres from that shabby hospital on this cursed island. And to make himself love us even more, John imagined us even poorer than we were, and thought of me as someone even more devoted than I was in reality. That was the wonderful film that John and many like him, born beneath benign skies in fine neighbourhoods, play in their heads. Every day, all the time. Mother and I were not fooled, but played along with it, each for our own reasons. But Joyeuse and Fignolé both played a role in John's film, even though they didn't realise it. And at the time it was better like that.

The years passed by. And as always, the euphoria of the first hopes had faded in the face of a world where everyone knew their place in the general hardship. In the eternal postponement of the seasons. With no tomorrows. As for John, he found reasons and scapegoats in all the excesses of the leader of the Démunis, full explanations for all the evils of our island. Today, Fignolé is up against John, up against those at whose side he risked his life for a dream he has left behind since the Démunis party, following the return of its leader, its prophet, has become ten times richer than all the parties of the Rich. Since too much blood has flowed. This blood has dragged Fignolé further into its night. And he sways in anger before that barbarism that wears the face of the Law. An anger from which he will not emerge unharmed. I can feel it.

I carry on with my morning shift. We have fewer resources each day. I'm not really sure what to say to the woman I'm standing in front of, whose back is peeling, the flies buzzing round her in a crazy saraband. She has not been able to move unaided for several weeks now. Several weeks during which the auxiliaries, whose heart is no longer in the job, have been overtaken by events.

TWELVE

P
acked into the tap-tap, a veritable disco on wheels, we finally make our way, half deaf, to the city centre. We are deceiving ourselves with this here-and-now, but we are happy with it. We are travelling behind a celebratory front, a carnival of pain, waiting for Port-au-Prince to swallow us up whole once again. The danger is there, lurking in the shadows. We thumb our noses at it. The day mocks us mercilessly, the blue of the sky looks down coquettishly on us. We reflect it all back, and more. We are out to lead life on, to grab from it more than it wants to give. We are out to get the measure of the sun.

My rage has melted away somewhat. But the anxiety is still there, fixing me with a great menacing stare. I don't want this snivelling distress. My tongue, my ears, my eyes, the palms of my hands – all have such a taste for life. I'll find out in the end where Fignolé spent the night. Perhaps he wanted to have Ismona all to himself, to find the taste of sand and stars in a city that has for so long renounced its enchantments, its magic.

As I turn all these questions over and over, I remember that morning when Fignolé asked me for money. I had just been paid and I gave in. The next day he came home with a packet under his arm. The colour of the paper this packet was wrapped in, its shape, the whole thing suddenly comes back to me. The questions take a crazy turn and end up racing away. They threaten to suffocate me. I breathe deeply three times in succession, wedged right into my seat, and I avoid their snares one by one. Anything is better than all these questions, even the wait for Luckson. The wait seems so trivial in the face of calamity, but it is mine. I allow the images, the smells and the light to awake in me another morning, hints of a morning so secret, so unexpected, so overwhelming in the deepest part of me.These images, these smells and this light from elsewhere are those of absence, of deprivation.

Of a man.

A man alone.

An ordinary man.

A man, the hope of my days. The desire of my nights. A man who is eating away my life. A man crouching in the languid space between my hips. A man whose absence descends sweetly down to the tops of my thighs.

A man who hasn't achieved anything special. Who hasn't discovered any unknown land. A man who will not be giving his name to any street, any square. Who is still alive, who breathes somewhere in this city, and who may have forgotten me. Whom I should already have forgotten. This light comes from deep inside his eyes. These smells are those of his hand right next to my face and the blood on that hand.

This light and these smells have not left me since that day when we had all been woken, like today, by volleys of shots and with the same resignation, the same ordinaryday anger beneath our breasts. Lolo, my friend, my accomplice, had joined me a few minutes before. She and I were waiting for the stream of cars and tap-taps to stop at the traffic lights at the bottom of John Brown Avenue, one of the rare sets of lights that were still working. Two youths in uniform, running full pelt, hurled abuse against the Démunis and the party's leader. A shiver ran through the crowd. Lolo and I exchanged looks and immediately feigned indifference. Good sense was paramount. However, I followed the young lads with my eyes, with blissful admiration, while all around me I saw that faces were closing up. The crowd speeded up visibly. Once at the other side of the road, Lolo and I ran until we were out of breath. Other voices, more and more of them, louder and louder, joined those of the students. Shots rang out. And a henchman, lying in wait in a passage, fired several shots to create panic and confusion. A roar of pain and rage rose up on all sides. Street vendors hurriedly packed up their junk, caught up in an indescribable hubbub. Stalls were crushed, others abandoned. Among the rebels, the police and the armed gangs it was impossible to tell who was spilling out of the nearby streets. Wails, cries, shouts were rising from the crowd. With a determination I didn't know I had, I elbowed myself a route through this flood of people spilling out onto the pavements. A moment later, Lolo grabbed hold of my blouse. And the crowd swept me along with her to the door of a clinic on Rue Capois.The shots were gaining in intensity. I stumbled against a body and stopped myself from falling by clinging on to a telegraph pole. A student, mortally wounded, stared at me, eyes rolling. The man who had killed him was standing right in front of me. In rags, wild to the core, he was hardly sixteen years old: with no past, with no future, with no relatives, nature stripped bare, a bloody wound rubbed raw. He stared at me unblinking with an icy irony. It was a great effort to stop myself from throwing up my breakfast. Three women rushed down a passageway, bumping into me as they passed. I felt a heavy panic take me over. I turned and had lost sight of Lolo. A hand seized me by the collar and pulled me through a gateway. And I clearly heard a man's voice.

‘Come on.'

THIRTEEN

I
go down the aisle again, comforting the sick, administering drops, distributing tablets, ordering the auxiliaries to change dressings. On the right is the young woman who gave birth yesterday and whose baby is sharing the narrow bed. Since the mysterious disappearance of a baby girl three months ago, mothers have not wanted to be apart from their newborns. The administration has not insisted and has even been rubbing its hands in glee at the idea of staff reductions and fewer expenses.There is nothing left of the crèche but a name, the mattresses and the few remaining chairs that have not been stolen and are simply waiting for the vandals, who will also have been considering the fastest way to remove the cots, to finish the job. On the left I stop to take hold of the gnarled fingers of an old woman who is dying and try in vain to guess what her eyes are trying to tell me from behind the milky veil of a cataract. And then there is the strong, silent man. A man in his forties. Two beds down from the old woman. He arrived the previous week while I was on night duty, looming up suddenly like an apparition. Everything about him was of the night – his eyes, his courage, his silence.The effect was so striking that you couldn't help but look at him, even in his pain. He replied to my questions without apparent distrust, but I knew that, deep inside, he was distrustful. As we all are. On this island we are made that way. It is a game to which we devote the brightest of our days, a result of living within reach of those whom we have good reason to distrust. Suffice to say that I know little more about this man than that his stomach ulcer had bled for the first time the day before he arrived in this hospital.

It is already a year since Fignolé left this same hospital, and cried out to me as he arrived back in Mother's and Joyeuse's room, ‘I will never go back within those walls, Angélique, you understand? Never!'

He went on to say that he would prefer to die at home or in the street like a beggar, like a stray dog, rather than stay one second longer within the walls of this hospital. That what he feared most was not so much dying as waking up in this white prison. Of experiencing the implacable return of the morning's horrors, surrounded by twenty or so others who nursed the same fears deep inside. He said all this as he talked to Joyeuse, who put her arms round his shoulders and hugged him close. Sitting on Mother's big bed, they were unaware of my presence. They didn't even notice how they were tormenting me, wounding me with their whispered confidences, their embraces, their tears, like two young cats would worry a bird. The idea of holding Fignolé's hands in mine suggested itself for a few seconds, a moment during which I felt their claws scratch a few words of wounded love into my skin. A moment in which I straightened my skirt and adjusted the neck of my blouse.

I then left the room with silent steps, creeping down the passage like a creature of the night.

I will soon breeze down to the end of the ward, past the two young boys injured by bullets. The first with damage to his collarbone and neck; the second, the younger of the two, with a pierced abdomen and bladder. They were brought here at daybreak. The youngest will die soon; it's a matter of hours. He has lost too much blood. The other will come through it. But I won't tell them. When she arrived early this morning, the youth's mother slipped a rosary between his fingers and placed a scapular round his neck. As I approach, the youth raises a face with features distorted by pain and stupor. The stupor of one who is holding on and finds himself face to face with the ineffable. I give him a smile, as best I can. All these young men remind me of Fignolé.

Fignolé, who has never accepted the rules of any dogma, any uniform, any doctrine. Who at a very early stage began to wrestle with that which we call reality, without really knowing what it entails. And who lived in self-imposed exile in a solitude we believed to be radiant but from where he showed himself to be powerless against the setbacks of the world. Fignolé, who was incapable of becoming part of this life, of following its movements, its hours, minutes and seconds. Fignolé, incapable of growing up overtaken by a fast-flowing flood, preferring to sink. Fignolé now drags behind him a despair that burns his blood. The first trigger was without doubt the arrest of Uncle Octave.

I remember that incident, at which Fignolé was present, as if it were yesterday. The presidency of the son of the other Prophet-President, President for Life, was coming to an end. It was days before Fignolé was able to tell us about it, his voice a monotone. From the day of that incident on, he was never the same. Mother simply said to me one day: ‘Fignolé will burn himself out, char his flesh to the bone. And it will be one of us, if not all three of us, who will be forced to sweep up his ashes.'

He told us that a car came to a stop outside Octave's house. Octave's only crime was to be the assistant accountant for a paper no-one was supposed to write for and no-one was supposed to read. The incident took place in the district of Gressier to the south of Port-au-Prince. Fignolé was barely thirteen. He and Octave's two sons immediately recognised Merisié, his high forehead and figure slender as a cane. A kind of legendary ogre whom many could describe but only a few knew. Great powers were attributed to him, and a capacity for inflicting extraordinary tortures. He started as a Tonton Macoute at Fort-Dimanche, the Dungeon of Death with the former Prophet, the President for Life. Some people swear by what they hold most precious that Merisié can turn himself into a cat, disappear or make himself immune to bullets, even those fired from point-blank range. Merisié was accompanied by Gwo Louis. It was the latter who deliberately made the tyres of the car crunch noisily on the gravel in the street.