Eve Out of Her Ruins (12 page)

But to do that I have to kill.

But before that, I have to find her.

I have to summon up my courage to leave. The air is still streaked by their departures. If they see me, they'll force me to say where she's gone.

Opening the door of my room is hard. Here was a corner where I could breathe. Here was my den and my dawn. But outside, there's no continuity. Everything's stopped. Everything is waiting. The world is closed off. We can't escape the circles etched by our needs. These circles that tell the rest of the world, we're not like you, our world isn't like yours, today, they imprison us more thoroughly than the state's own prisons.

There should always be the possibility of an exit. So I can dream of an escape, even by tricking myself, even by hoping against hope.

In
the neighborhood, everything's at a standstill.

The gang's spread out in Port Louis looking for her. They're armed with Molotov cocktails. They want to find her first. The only thing they'll listen to is the hammering in their heads and the bitterness in their mouths. The first strike will be the harshest in the city's silence. The others, after, will be easy. The noise and the screams will strike fear into people. Some will try to flee. Others will barricade themselves. And the wave will surge easily enough. They'll be attacked. They'll attack. The sparks will fly everywhere. And then the conflagration will begin.

They don't know this. They're blinded by their desire for the impossible. They don't understand just how fragile their world is. How this act of stupid, teenage rage, of throwing a rock at a store window can set off shock waves that will be all but impossible to stop. Kids breaking things, sure; but behind them, there are wolves waiting to come out and tear everything apart.

They choose to forget that here, they're all bound together. And that when people look at them, before seeing their faces, they see labels that are there for life.

I don't want to be one of those waking up the volcano. This island was born from a volcano. One eruption is enough. I have to start running to find her before they do. Besides, I know where she is.

EVE

I
limp, I hobble. Every breath is a door forced open. Each one lasts an eternity. Every breath awakens the numbest parts of my body. But this way, at least, I am sure I am conscious.

This will take as long as it has to. My time isn't like others'. The two things guiding me are freedom and the end.

All these broken breaths catch in my throat. There they begin to tighten. I think I can understand what Savita endured. Thinking of her hurts even more, now that I know that it really was because of me.

This man's hypocrisy makes me laugh, or scares me, I'm not sure. Oh, his tremors, his little jumps, his fears. A little, lizardly, spineless thing. He wanted me so much that he was able to overcome his shame. His courage was enough to bring him to the biology room and make his shadow on the walls into a naked monster; but being seen by someone else—oh, no, no. Another eye witnessing his degeneration, no. He could lay me flat on a table and shove me into the wood splinters, he could take me in every way, he could pretend to love me when we were alone in the prison of his fantasies. Until someone else sees us, and he denies everything. I can already hear him saying it, it was she who seduced me. She begged me. She threw herself on me. I ended up raping him, oh sure I did.

I think of the gun the inspector gave me, hitting my armpit every so often. He gave me a way to turn everything around. To wipe the slate clean. I've waited too long. There's a whole world beyond rules and regulations. Savita's body told me: burn your
bridges and run. The inspector told me: this isn't to bury you, it's to clear a path for you. He knows which way I've been going, and where my next encounter by stone walls might take me.

I'll leave my mark right between his eyebrows. Then I'll leave. Violence as my escape. There's no other way out. In my bag, under my arm, the gun bobs around. My bargaining chip with fate. I don't need to take everything with me. I was stupid, as we all are at seventeen. Now, I know. There's a place where the birds' cries are short and piercing, and where summer burns so vividly that you'll forget even the memory of maggots in your guts.

Death is in your hands, says the gun in my bag.

So is life, says Savita.

What will you choose?

I summon up all the memories I can before looking into these eyes grown old before their time, this man driven by shame and impotence to murder. He is far more disconsolate than I ever will be.

CLÉLIO

A softness
slips into her eyes, in the shadow of her bangs. For me?

Her name is Lauren.

Her name is Lauren.

I don't think I'll be sentenced to death.

I can take apart the bricks that buried me here. One by one, I can detach them from their mortar beds, even if I destroy my nails and my youth. As I keep staring at the walls, they become a dirty smudge, then a hole, then nothing. Open to everything. Collapse into nothingness.

Cry or laugh? The choices are limited.

But the most important thing is to be convinced: I didn't kill. The world can go to pieces. I didn't kill.

In the middle of the night, I make my way out of this sludge that passes for sleep here and I see through the bars that Carlo is looking at me. I jump to my feet. Carlo! You're back! He nods but he doesn't say anything so he doesn't upset me with his fake French accent. I look right at him and stick my hands through the bars. He holds my hands, but his are so cold that I shiver. Are you cold, Carlo? I ask him. He nods again. It's the prison air, I tell him. It'll chill you to death. Don't stay there. I'll come meet you outside. I take off my shirt and give it to him. When he puts it on, I see that he's naked and very thin. What's wrong, Carlo? And then I see he's also in a prison cell. I don't understand anything.

And then I'm outside. In a place that looks like Le Souffleur. I'm standing on the edge of a rocky cliff. The water spurts up and
the waves crash against the sides of the cliff, wearing away at it, nipping at it. It seems like earlier the wind was whistling like a horn as it passed through the tunnels the water had carved in the rock. It sighed, it groaned, it could be heard in the nearby villages like dead people's voices. Until these waves widened these holes more and more and took away these voices of the wind and of the dead. So I'm the one screaming, sighing, groaning, and awakening this place from its silence.

In prison, only my voice can be heard now.

Then the sludge of sleep overcomes me again.

At night, they say that the oceans sleep. But maybe they're already dead.

SAAD

I am Saad, and I am my name. I enter sadness's downpour. I am the only person who can walk under a cloud of his own name.

It's raining. I'm cold from all this rain. I want to go with her, to go down her path, to go into her suicide; a pact, between two dying beings, two beasts exhausted before even starting to live.

But I don't want to stop here, either. I still have a life to live. I'm not afraid of stumbling. I'm afraid of the fall. What will happen to these boys and girls like me, like her, when the blade falls on their night, on their laughter. Haven't we all come this far, to this moment?

It's all so brief. A few pathetic years, barely enough time to open new eyes to our life, and already we're staring at death. Our alternatives: either defeat or violent conquest. But this conquest isn't really one. It's the resistance of the hopeless. That's what I wanted to tell them, they who are ranging right now across the city with their angelic yet malevolent faces, caught up in their fake rhythm, their machines' sputtering portending failure. I don't know what ties us to these murderous cadences.

Maybe the gray sunlight of our birth?

It's raining. It's raining in my head. It's raining everywhere in my secrets. You could say I'm crying, but that isn't true.

I don't want to die.

I want to talk about these places that exist outside time, that murder us. I mean these places that stubbornly repress all that we are.

I walk through a succession of armored and padlocked doors.
The farther I walk, the more I feel as if I am the one they are locking out. Nobody will let me back in again. I have abandoned every permitted space, all the normal places. Eve's the one who's dragged me along her inward path, into her hurricane of wrath.

I bump into sleeping bodies in the doorways. On the steps slick with rain, their features stripped bare, they sleep. Drunkards, fallen under the weight of alcohol in their bellies. A very old woman, possibly dead, a pile of rags under her head as a pillow. A dog and a man together, breathing in rhythm.

They all have the same face, as blank as their rips and tears. It feels like I could enter them and live in the heart of their sadness. I could be each of the furrowed wrinkles on the old woman's face. I could be the sick dog's flank, entering through his sides and trying to keep life flowing within his body. I could be the man's hand, moving—closed, open, closed, open—so he wouldn't freeze completely. I could be the hem of his frayed shirt soaking beside him in a puddle of urine. I could be the wind's voice sighing without any violence and the island sleeping without trying to understand.

If I can be all that, I can also be her, Eve. I know where she is, what she's doing. I've always known.

And I'm this wan, wretched man who's destroyed the city's peace, whose cowardice and urges have led to this explosion.

And I'm the fathers and mothers asphyxiated by the airless void of failure.

And I'm the furious, thirsty boys who think they'll free themselves by sowing discord.

And I am, like him, the one who talks to me in my dreams, a thief of fire.

But now, I am me: become again simple and double and multiple all at once. I am Saad. Nothing else matters.

You look at him and you are astonished by the transformation he has undergone. He is crushed by remorse. Like a worm, he tries to hide in the corners. In the open door, in his resigned gestures when you enter, his hand raised and then quickly lowered, you see that he's been expecting you. In front of him is a half-empty bottle of rum, its vapors filling the room and masking other, more permanent smells. Around him, there are sheets of paper, some of them torn, others not. There are pictures of someone who vaguely looks like him, made unrecognizable by hope. This person is someone whose light has flared.

You feel, just before you kill him, a brief twinge of pity. Then you steel yourself: he never felt the least pity himself. Cowardly, humiliated, selfish: all the more reason for him to disappear.

He attempts to get up, but he doesn't have the strength. In his uneven breath, you can see he's afraid. He says:

Don't hurt me.

These words strike an icy chill in your thoughts. Every time you met a man, in your soul, in your flesh, there were these words: don't hurt me. You never said them out loud. But you could never have known beforehand the extent of the damage. And you were hurt, they didn't hesitate, didn't flinch, sometimes smiled, sometimes seemed not to care. It was just, you thought, part of the bargain.

But today, it's the man who says them, just because you have a gun in your hand. You accept this reversal of roles. You welcome the contempt that fills your gut.

You tell him: get down on your knees.

That, too, they said to you every time. Get down on your knees.
Open your mouth. Take it.

He is so worn out that he seems about to disappear. He doesn't understand. You repeat:

Get down on your knees.

He does it. You walk up to him, you lift up his chin and you look him in the eyes, so as not to forget this face, this moment. Then you set the mouth of the barrel on his forehead, between his eyebrows.

The gun is heavy, but it's not very big and fits comfortably in your hand. You wonder if the safety is switched off, if you know how to shoot. The waxy skin you're looking down at doesn't look human at all. It looks more dead than Savita's skin at the morgue.

You think about her again, as you saw her last. It's because of him that she had this purplish tinge, this rigidity, this absolute stillness. It's because of him that she contradicts everything she ever was: a girl who was laughing, thoughtful, warm, and alive—above all, alive. He was her final moment. It was this face—pasty, defeated, unaware of the very meaning of the word love—that she saw at the moment she died.

You will not forgive him.

EVE

I left his place, astonished that nobody heard the noise. I hadn't expected it, this noise. I thought I would go deaf. But my hand hadn't trembled.

He looked like all the others behind his closed eyes.

I walk out into the rain that has begun to fall. It is slow and warm. It dampens my bare scalp, presses my clothes to my skin. It is so heavy that puddles form around my feet, grow, and swallow them up.

I feel like I've walked away from the house, but I see I haven't moved. I stay there, standing, not knowing what I should do.

How does the rest of the story go? Saad, that's your job, to tell it. I myself don't know. Will mine finish here, at seventeen? Is life really that short?

SAAD

It's done:
I called the police to warn them about a possible riot. I hope they'll come in time.

I came running to the teacher's house. Eve is standing in front of the house. She's turned her back on it. She's completely soaked by rain. Even without her hair, I recognize her right away. Eve, it's Eve. She has a gun in her hand.

She's gripped by starlight. Her face looks like it's come undone. Odd colors, colors of blows and bruises cloud her features. Her eyes are so deep and their echoes so metallic that I have trouble meeting her gaze. They go beyond this house, beyond Port Louis, beyond the present. Her eyes see into tomorrow, and tomorrow doesn't exist.