Eve Out of Her Ruins (3 page)

I am your brother.

I am your double. I am your single. I have split completely and totally in two: I was Saad, sitting transfixed in my stiff chair (or stiff in my transfixed chair), and I was someone else, unmoored, observing things but pushing them away through his thoughts, his defiance, his mortality.

That night, lying in bed, I took a marker and began writing on the wall by my head. Of course, I wrote about Eve. She alone occupied my thoughts. I began talking to her directly, saying
you
instead of
she
, guessing where she's going, what she's thinking, what she's living. She doesn't know that I've figured her out. I've written so much about her that sometimes I think I'm actually writing her life, and other people's lives, and all our lives.

I read in secret, all the time. I read in the toilets, I read in the
middle of the night, I read as if books could loosen the noose tightening around my throat. I read to understand that there is somewhere else. A dimension where possibilities shimmer.

EVE

The water and its swirls. Its lines, its marbling, its abrupt changes in direction. I spend hours watching the stream run endlessly. Colors slip beneath its clarity when the sun hits it straight on. And I do too, I slip forward, carried by time, by nothing.

The buildings are straight ahead. I'm not afraid of them. I dare them to look back at me. All of us born there are fated to die, but that doesn't mean anything. Everybody is born to that fate. The babies' eyes are drained of color and sky. I've known for a long time the coldness of metal. It's imbued me with its liquid strength.

This neighborhood was a marsh at the base of the mountain. They filled it in to build these streets, but they couldn't do anything about the smell of wrack or the unsteadiness of the ground where only the corpses of brambles and dreams are still growing. Several buildings are starting to tilt. Soon, we'll have our own Leaning Tower of Pisa. The eighth wonder of the world: Troumaron.

Seated on a mound not far off, I'm smoking and watching them. There's a guard at the end of each street. The fiery tips of their joints dot the closed circle. The boys swear oaths, declare rules, make alliances: a pack mentality. If you care about your life, your body, if you're a girl, if you're old, you'd do best to give them a wide berth. They spread a pool of oil around them in which their bored faces and their footsteps are reflected. Now, nobody walks. Everybody runs. It's a dance to the death. According to them, most females carry the same heaviness: this hole that is an impassable yet open door that keeps its secrets. So they go and hunt, like the
hundreds of feral dogs raging through the city and tearing it apart.

Even Saad, who's a little different, who thinks about something other than spreading our thighs, is part of a gang. He's afraid to stand out, to be alone, to go off in another direction. He has no idea what's in us.

This troubled water, this murky world, this faraway smile like a moonlit night, when the wind comes to whisper things that make us pensive and sad.

Saad talks about poetry when we're alone. But he has no idea about the poetry of women.

The poetry of women is when Savita and I walk together step by step to avoid the ruts. It's when we pretend to be twins because we look like each other. We wear the same clothes, the same perfume, as if we're dancing together. Our earrings chime. Her nose is pierced with a tiny jewel like a star. The poetry of women is laughter in this lost place, laughter that opens up a small part of paradise so we don't drown ourselves.

But those moments are brief. When I am alone, I sink back into my darkness and I know I will die.

I decide to go back. The stream isn't deep, but I'd rather stay there and listen to its voice than the jeers I'll hear as I walk past.

I see Saad among them. He pretends not to see me. I know he's ashamed. I smile.

A hand has closed around your ankle and is slowly pulling you down. Your eyes skitter. At first, you thought that these gestures and actions were circumscribed. You thought that they were delimited by the rush of desire. But violence came into the equation. And the hand is pulling you, and desire is turning into something else. The act takes on other forms, other furies. There's always more. Possibilities proliferate.

No more hasty couplings behind trees or in bathrooms. You're caught in secret places you never knew about beneath the veneer of ordinary life. A hand drags you along. In the darkness, you don't recognize mouths or shapes. In the darkness, the pain is unexpected. Or in the red light of a bare room you see who has been waiting for you, and your heart falters.

When you go back out you walk in the city slowly, as if you've been knocked off-center. You walk to rid yourself of memories. You open your mouth and let in a hot wind that burns away the danger of remembering. You go back in to sleep, believing you've forgotten it all. You can do it again, without knowing why.

The hand around your ankle doesn't let you go. Its grip tightens. You have no choice now. You can only scrub your burdened flesh again and again, without realizing that you're also erasing your own self.

Forgetfulness is the common link between day and night, the smooth wall that protects you from yourself. You go deaf. You no longer hear the roaring that once tormented your ears. You no longer hear the music in total contradiction to what you see.

SAAD

Baby won't you give it to me, give it to me, you know I want it.

They shake their hips to the song, hardly a movement, a wave that pulls them together, pulls them away, pulls them together again. As they sway, their jeans hug their butts like two hands glued to their curves.

              
Baby won't you give it to me…

They both wear tank tops, one of them red, the other white, over their small, juicy breasts.

I sit deep in an armchair as their movements blur with the music and the beer, all coursing through me, a liquid pulse surging in my torso. The bass tones reverberate in my groin. If I move at all I'll get hard.

Eve and Savita are dancing together. They aren't looking at us. They aren't looking at anyone. An arabesque of cigarette smoke escapes their lips. Their shoulders shake in rhythm. Their jeans tighten in the same rhythm. I imagine them slipping into the fold, into the crease.

I can't take it anymore. I get up and run down the stairs to the bathrooms. I step over bodies. At the top of this nightclub in Grand Baie there are rooms. I can't stop thinking about Eve and me going up there. We'd open the window because the room would reek of old bodies. Grand Baie's salty air would flow in, turn the brothel room into a small honeymoon suite, everything in red. I'd slip my hand into her jeans. I'd slip music into her legs, onto her shoulders. I'd slip a cigarette between her lips. I'd be the wind, everywhere within her. I'd leave a sheen of salt on her skin.
The music changes, becomes more pressing, but in my head it stays
won't you give it to me, give it to me, you know I want it
, I hum
I want it I want it I want it
, and my hands are furious.

My face is covered in sweat. I walk out of the bathroom, and I'm the one who's reeking. But I feel better. I go back to the nightclub where they're still dancing, unaware that a volcano has just erupted.

I pick up my beer again. The others make fun of me. They talk about her, mock her, sing dirty songs. Eve takes her pants off faster than her own shadow, they say. I don't listen to them. I'm the only one who knows what Eve really is.

Nobody knows what pulls Eve and Savita to each other. Eve and Savita are the two sides of the moon. Savita also lives in Troumaron, but there's a gulf between the two families. Savita's family acts like they don't belong in Troumaron, as if they were only there by accident. The accident of poverty, of course. It's always the same story: the father betting on horses, the mother scrubbing hospital floors. He inhales the stallions' sweat, she smells rotting bodies and blood. Savita doesn't seem to worry about any of that. When they run into each other on the street, Savita's family looks away from Eve as if they'd just seen two dogs in heat, but still the two girls' eyes meet and lock on one another. There's a smile so vague and discreet that you'd have to be looking for it. This smile between the two of them, bronze eyes meeting black, a quiver of light that disappears before it starts to gleam, almost a shared rivulet linking their lips, this smile is a doorway toward a place only the two of them know. Just between girls: we sparring cocks wouldn't know anything about it.

At night in Grand Baie, the world flips inside out like a glove.
The small beachside town swarming with tourists and bonhomie during the day teems with these insects who only come out at night. With scantily clad girls and men turned into wolves, the hunt can begin. The nightclubs turn into labyrinths where deals are made in all languages—English, French, Italian, German, Russian. The identical girls get younger and younger. The smallest ones are from Madagascar or Rodrigues; they can't be more than thirteen. They wait patiently, some without moving at all, others trying to entice the first tourists who come in. I'm ashamed and angry.

They don't have any choice.

But her? Don't tell me there isn't a way out for her. Don't tell me there aren't any possibilities. She's roaming around, looking for the seediest parts, the trenches. I've tried to imagine the horizon as she sees it. I'm sure that's what's driving her, an illusion of light, a country only she can see. I know she's not a station where every bus stops. If everyone else talks about her that way, it's to pull free of her spell, because they're all obsessed with her but no one can have her.

I go back home and sulk over her for days on end. She acts like she doesn't notice anything at all.

              
Baby won't you give it to me…

No, after all that, I'd rather go back to Rimbaud:
The girls always go to church, glad / To hear the boys call them sluts
.

Slut, slut, slut.

It's a beautiful word in French:
garce
.

Later, I copy out another line for her on the wall in front of her apartment:
This is the rag of disgust that has been shoved in my mouth
.

I don't know if I'm talking
about her or me. Or even Troumaron.

CLÉLIO

After the soccer game, a bigger guy shoves me. I grab him by his shit-yellow collar and push right back. If he falls, it'd be a fight in the stadium. And it'd be old enemies facing off, as if our teams were still called the Muslim Scouts or the Hindu Cadets. But my friends run over to hold me back and pull my hands off this stinking heap of flesh. I stare at him like I'll rip his face off. They're dragging me away before I set off a fight. But I'd love to. The feeling of hitting someone, taking a blow, enjoying my fury in full force like an acrid wind rushing through me and wiping away my memories.

They won't let me. They drag me toward the city, toward our prison. I get on Kenny's moped. Before he can stop me, I'm gone. I take a long winding route through Port Louis, lit up by its hot dust, I go along the Rue la Corderie where the smell of salted fish fills my nostrils, take a shortcut up the Rue Wellington, go down the Rue la Poudrière where I wave to the old ghosts of whores behind the stone walls, and I come back along the Champ de Mars, where the Citadel watches me with its black eye. On the way, I bang into people, ride on sidewalks, weave past cars, manage not to get knocked over by buses belching black smoke. All the insults blur together. I laugh, people notice, everyone's staring at me. I flip them off, I scrape an SUV, its bumpers big enough to push off nonexistent buffalo, with a little lady behind a steering wheel bigger than she is. She sees me dragging a key across the brand-new car, rolls down her window, but once I get to her and smile, she doesn't say a word, I lick my lips and she blushes, yes, I'm
telling you, she blushes and rolls the window back up to shut out the cool air that had been blowing across my face. Her face crumples up like she's about to cry, it's not pretty at all, the lady in her arctic monster with a heart so soft she can't even yell at me. I blow her a kiss with my fingertips and memorize her license plate and go my way with a smile.

Things are swirling around in my head. Port Louis is sucking something out of me. Too many people, too many cars, too many buildings, too much smoked glass, too many nouveaux-riches, too much dust, too much heat, too many wild dogs, too many rats. I don't know where to go. I keep going round and round. Like I'll bite off my tail.

My older brother Carlo is gone. He went to France ten years ago. I was little. He was my hero. When he left, he said: I'll come back to find you. I'm waiting for him. He never came back. He calls sometimes, but only to make small talk. I don't know what he's doing over there. But when I hear his voice, I know he's lying, that he hasn't done well. When I hear his voice, I know he's dead.

And I'd love to kill, too.

EVE

The rag of disgust. Yes, it was shoved into my mouth when I was born, too.

Standing by the window, I spit cigarette smoke into the night. I watch it dissolving as if it was carrying part of myself away. My mother, when she comes into my room after agonizing in front of the closed door, won't say anything, won't feel anything. She's deliberately insulated herself so as not to feel or regret life. She'd like to be protected from all the mess. But maybe that's all anyone born in the pits of poverty can ever hope for.

Her attempts to cover up the apartment's ugliness with cutouts from old calendars or magazines are pitiful. All over the cement walls are pictures of Mount Fuji with a charming Japanese woman in the foreground, Swiss hills with cows cleaner than most people I know, an etching of Napoleon crowning himself, a photo of young Queen Elizabeth holding a sweet pinkish baby in her arms, and several of Johnny Hallyday all sweaty in leather, leaning crookedly into his microphone. The plastic chairs are red, blue, yellow, and green, the colors of the Mauritian flag, and in the corner is a faux leather couch from her mother. On a Formica table is the one thing that makes her happy: a TV with VCR that fills her days with its yapping. In the kitchen there's practically nothing but cans of corned beef and Glenryck pilchards, some stale bread and macaroni and sardines. She doesn't cook for the family. Everybody feeds themselves. I barely ever eat anything myself. I toast a piece of bread right over the stove flame until it's nearly burned and I eat it after dipping it in some tea. Or maybe it's a few sugar cookies
with a little butter spread on. I don't really care.