Eve Out of Her Ruins
Read Eve Out of Her Ruins Online
Authors: Ananda Devi
THE SUN'S GOTTEN INTO MY BODY
.
It's the core of what I'm writing. A portrait of Eve in the echoes of my room. Sentences that describe her, that draw her out. I'm in love.
I believe in possibilities. Yes, even here. Even hurtling down our slopes. A word described her for me that day when we raced downward on bikes from the Virgin Mary. That day, right when she told me she would never say I love you, I saw the word that described her, a word at once resonant and foreign in this place: grace. If this grace is part of my possibilities, I thought, I can do anything.
Port Louis looks at me differently. I believed dark, ugly Port Louis, disfigured by grotesque shapes, insurmountable in its waves of humankind, was beckoning to me. Its black pigeons dotting every roof agreed to decipher its moods for me. The city told me: if there are moments like this one and faces like your own, then, you have to love me, if only for this.
I know this, that I'm only a simulacrum. But a drop of blue ink has gotten into me. I transform it into a black child's ink, lacerating the walls. This story you're reading on my walls, its words will only disappear when the buildings born out of the cyclones' waters have disappeared.
ALSO AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH BY ANANDA DEVI
Indian Tango
translated by Jean Anderson
Deep Vellum Publishing
3000 Commerce St., Dallas, Texas 75226
Deep Vellum Publishing is a 501C3
nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013.
Copyright © Ãditions Gallimard, Paris, 2006
Originally published in French as
Ãve de ses décombres
in 2006 by Ãditions Gallimard, Paris, France
English translation copyright © 2016 by Jeffrey Zuckerman
Introduction copyright © 2016 by J.M.G. Le Clézio
First edition, 2016
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-941920-41-1 (ebook)
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2016939553
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Cover design & typesetting by Anna Zylicz ·
annazylicz.com
Text set in Bembo, a typeface modeled on typefaces cut by Francesco Griffo for Aldo Manuzio's printing of
De Aetna
in 1495 in Venice.
Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution.
Table of Contents
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FOREWORD BY J. M. G. LE CLÃZIO
The island sometimes fades away like a stain. The island of gilded coastlines, hotels like royal palaces, luxury shops, and dreamlike villas. But it is another island that Ananda Devi describes, an island of dryness and drabness, neighborhoods bereft of hope, areas nobody dares to go: Rochebois, Karo Calyptus, Troumaron. This island never fades away; it is
peyi Moris
, an island of violence and promiscuity, where teenagers have nothing to do but lie in ambush, zip around town on mopeds, pretend to be adults. It's an island where girls are doomed from the start to become “turtles”âwomen crushed under their husbands' oppressionâor to slide into the bottomless ravine carved by prostitution and drugs. Mauritians have coined for those living on this island a name that says everything:
population générale.
Neither this nor that, neither black nor white, neither Creole nor Hindu.
But there is Eve. Eve with a child's body, thin and dark, with a face bearing a small comic-book smile, with a wild mane of hair, thick and tough. Eve who does not accept, who does not submit, who defies her father and the world, who laughs while toying with men's desires. Eve who like a woman knows everything and like a child forgets everything. Eve who gleams because she is the star deep within Troumaron's darkness, a
marrone
escaping from
slavery into unfriendly forests and towering buildings. And she is the living, beating heart of this broken world; she is desired by everybody, and she belongs to nobody, except Savita, who took her into her arms one day when she couldn't go home, and who soothed her until she fell asleep, until pure, unchangeable love in all its beauty was born within her.
What can the others, all the others, the teenagers and adults and witnesses and actors, do? The island is their prison, the beautiful coastlines tug at their heart, even as they dream of escaping someday, going far away, to the other shore, going where people drive beautiful new cars and live all alone in houses with ten rooms, far from the ugly slums and rusted buses, away from the streets where heat sticks to bodies and ennui flows through veins like cruelty. The bars of their prison are made of envy and hate. Someday they will get up, and they will demand answers. Or take empty bottles and rags soaked in gas and make Molotov cocktails to throwâat who? for what? Clélio will stay in jail, despite his lawyer, despite his witnesses who took wing over his building's roof, even as deep within a cellar Savitaâ¦And so everyone will stay put, the beautiful coastlines will keep on shimmering like a frilly dress around royal palaces, the IRSâthe Integrated Revenue Systemâwill go on helping those
gran mounes
, pretentious people with pretentious lives, and men will go on stalking barely pubescent girls' bodies and pushing them down to the ground, down to their knees.
Yet Eve has truth on her side, and so she overcomes everything, truth is her ally even in her final revenge. For her, those who have eyes can see the truth, a thing worth far more than all the images and
all the legends of the world. Before doing what cannot be undone, the murder that puts an end to the adults' abuses and her father's punches, she cuts off her mane to look like a lioness. For her, Savita will do anything, even die, and Saad will bear the responsibility for her crime, because he loves her as if nobody's serious at seventeen. Ananda Deviâwho knows the cost of waging war against institutional wrongs and capricious fate as she delineates this battle in every one of her booksâmakes her island a fiery star on the maps of the Indian Ocean.
She forces open a door in darkness's wall. This opening indeed reveals the beauty of the island, of this gift from the gods that is Mauritius, this gift that humans do not deserve but only a few innocents may ever see. “To the west,” says Saad, “there's the harbor, so calm in the morning that we can't see the least ripple in the water. That's the first miracle: water that could almost be walked on.” Come and join them, take off your useless finery, forget all your prejudices; only then will you experience these other miracles and one day, like Saad, pull Eve out of her ruins.
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman
Walking is hard. I limp, I hobble along on the steaming asphalt.
With each step a monster rises, fully formed.
The urban night swells, elastic, around me. The salty air from the Caudan waterfront scrapes my wounds and my skin, but I go on.
I clear my own path. What was once deep within meâthe slow drip of life that has slipped away and turned me into this livid creature sucking the night dryâno longer matters. The silence that fills me takes my breath away.
I'm getting into my stride. I no longer have a choice. I can only hear the stuttering beat of my footsteps. I hoist my schoolbag on my right shoulder; there aren't just books in it tonight. There's a reassuring bulge right next to my armpit: the blaze of false starts and missed arrivals. Soon enough it will no longer be a rhythm coursing through my veins. I'm going to leave my mark on a forehead, right between the eyebrows. I was born for this moment.
I wipe my neck. The coarse feel of it surprises me. The lack of hair makes me feel more naked than ever. Then I remember: my mother sheared it off. When I saw myself in the mirror, I saw that I had a lioness's head. I had a mane of hunger.
I walk, even if I'd rather run toward myself. The night quivers. The city trembles. I have gone. Nothing can stop me now.
PART ONE
SAAD
I am Saadiq. Everybody calls me Saad.
Between despair and cruelty the line is thin.
Eve is my fate, but she claims not to know it. When she bumps into me, her gaze passes through me without stopping. I disappear.
I'm in a gray place. Or rather, yellowish brown, which better suits its name: Troumaron. Troumaron, a sort of funnel; where all the island's wastewaters ultimately flow. Here is where the cyclone refugees are rehomed, those rendered homeless by tropical storms and who, two or five or ten or twenty years later, still have their toes in the water and their eyes pale as rain.
I've always lived there. I was born a refugee. Like everyone else who's grown up in the yellow shadows of these buildings, I've never understood their monstrous edges. I never saw the gaps born beneath our feet, separating us from the world. I played with Eve. We called her the skeleton because she was so thin, but also to mask an unspoken affection. We played at war until we found ourselves at war.
We are at the bottom of Signal Mountain. Port Louis grabs our feet but we are stuck here. The city turns its back on us. Its muted magma stops at our borders. The mountain blocks our view of other things. Between the city and the stone are our buildings, our rubble, our trash. The eczema of paint and the tar beneath our feet. A children's playground has become a battleground teeming with needles, shards of broken glass, hopes snaking into nothing. Here, boys clenched their fists for the first time, and girls cried for the first time. Here, everyone has faced up to their realities.
One day we wake up and the future has disappeared. The sky hides the windows. Night makes its way into our bodies and refuses to leave.
Night and our hormones gone wild. We boys are bundles of frustration. We start following girls to the shuttered factory that devoured our mothers' dreams. Maybe that's also what's waiting for them. There's nothing left of the factory but an empty metal shell and hundreds of sewing machines that carved into their shoulders that curve of despair and into their hands those nicks and cuts like tattoos. The remnants of every woman who worked here linger. We see that they tried to bestow some humanity on this desolation. Beside each machine, there's a mauve plastic flower, yellowing family photos, postcards from Europe, and even a forgotten red barrette, a strand of hair still caught in it. And religious symbolsâcrucifixes, Koranic verses, Buddha statues, Krishna figuresâthat would allow us to guess which community they belonged to, if we wanted to play such guessing games. When the factory closed down, they weren't even allowed to retrieve their things. It was that abrupt, that unexpected, but I realized, later, that they hadn't wanted to see any of it. I wonder what use all this piety was to them. In any case, all of it was left to rust and to our perverse games behind the moldy curtains. These are our traces, in these stale, dingy rooms. Stains of so many virginities lost here.
