Eve Out of Her Ruins (6 page)

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.

Sometimes, when the wind comes from Signal Mountain, when I see the fires burning on its slopes, the scrub fires, the trash fires,
I tell myself that under all that is beauty, even here, and something is sizzling, and a fire is sparking in the underbrush of my own mind.

I forget what I am, where I come from. The wind from the mountain erases the name Troumaron from my lips and from my memory.

I want to leave and I want to stay. Between the two, I do not move. But my body cannot stop wandering over our pool of dreams, at Eve's mercy.

CLÉLIO

The factory smells like engine grease, decaying waste, abandoned sandals, wasted bodies. Sometimes I come here all alone so I can see how life tells lies to the poor. Does me good. My mother, when she got a job here, she thought everything had changed. She took her first paycheck and bought me Nike shoes, she thought that would make me happy, she never saw that I was sick of Nikes, that we had all these tricks for getting these pointless things, I didn't need things, I needed a guide, I needed purpose.

After that, she changed, from one week to the next. The factory grew and got deep into our lives. My mother started bringing me defective sweaters. If I see another Ralph Lauren sweater with one sleeve shorter than the other I'll cut it up and stuff it down the mouth of this man who made lopsided beings of us. But for us, it's not sleeves. It's arms, or legs, or eyes that are uneven. We're defective humans.

She got smaller, grayer. She got less and less sunlight. At the end of the day, when she came back in, she was like a blurred copy of herself. Something had started rubbing away at her features. My father sat in a chair waiting for her. He spent his day waiting for her, like an old idiot, his eyes like a lost kid's, but all he could say when she got home was, Did you bring something to eat? He didn't bother to say anything else. Every time he said that I wanted to wring his neck. Let her sit down, take off her shoes, drink a glass of water, you shithead, I wanted to yell at him, go make your dinner yourself. Or tell her you spent all day in front of the window watching for her shadow.

She had rings under her eyes as deep as Père Laval's grave, her eyes were sunk that deep. Her hair had started falling out. It was like strings. I don't think she ate enough. Her hands look like the moon with so many craters.

Then they brought in Chinese workers who worked fast and good and without complaining. Or maybe they were complaining in their own language and nobody could understand them. They told the Mauritians they had to do the same if they wanted to keep their job. Some of them were fired. But my mother worked hard. She wasn't a loser. She was a fighter, like me. Well, not exactly, but more or less. It didn't matter. She was fired when the factory closed since it cost too much to make sweaters and shirts here. My father said that between the American and Chinese giants our country was an ant that nobody noticed, even when stepping on us. Would you even think twice before crushing an ant? he asked. It's all the same to them. It's not injustice, it's just economic rationale.

Sometimes my father isn't as stupid as he appears to be.

I'd have really liked it if Carlo sent us a little money, helped us, even if he didn't want to come back. But he still hasn't sent anything. He calls Mam, and her face lights up like a Christmas tree. It gets me so mad, Mam being excited for fake Carlo, believing all his lies, telling me,
li pu fer mwa vinn kot li en Frans, li ena enn zoli lakaz ek dis lasam
, yeah, I've never heard any Troumaron guys talking about having a ten-room house in France and promising their mothers for ten years that they'll bring them there and then not doing it.

Carlo, it's over. I'm done with the fake you. The real one's right here by me. We'll sit on the roof and laugh, we'll tell stories, like before, he's
my big brother, as handsome as a god and when he's here I'm not afraid of anything.

Tonight I have my guitar with me. I lie down as the last bit of sun stains my head and set my guitar on my belly, I play it easy. Going to sing songs I've been thinking up, songs I'm not singing for anyone else. Carlo would understand if he was here.

Ki to pe atann? Personn. Ki lavi finn donn twa? Nayen. Komye dimunn inn fer twa promes? Zot tu. Komye dimunn inn gard zot parol? Okenn. Dimunn pa gard parol, zot zis kass to leker, pa bizin per, fer kuma zot, kas zot leker, pas to simin, pa krwar nayen. Pa krwar nayen, to pa pu sufer. Pa krwar nayen to pa pu sufer.

I don't believe in anything. But I suffer all the same.

SAVITA

After school she tells me, I have to go. I try to convince her to stay, but she disappears into herself, like she always does just when I've gone a bit too far.

Inflexible Eve, that's what I call her.

I've gone with you so many times. I've taken you to your place so many times. It's like I'm always there at the right moment to pick you up. But it's because I always listen for you. You never call. But I hear you anyway.

But watching you run away like this, I feel sad. You could say no if you wanted to. Why do you have to give yourself up to them? Why do you always bind yourself to them? I don't understand.

I want to protect you. I want to keep you from losing yourself. I want to be the one who saves you from yourself.

Sometimes your voice breaks; sometimes my heart breaks just seeing you. Neither of us is innocent, and I hate the world for it.

I'd give my life for you.

It seems so easy. Only you would know what I mean. All the beauty and pain that those words carry.

Sitting on the balcony, I look your way. Here, nothing belongs to me except for you. I hear my father's impatience as he waits for the treasure chest to open for him. I hear my mother's incredulity as she listens to him daydreaming and sneers at him. I try to listen to myself, but all I can hear is the air going in and out of my lungs. The body's automatism. And the lack of life.

My little bag stays in my closet, still full, still waiting for my decision to leave.

The smell of food makes me think that you are hungry but do not know it, you who only nibble on bitter fruit.

Don't you think my face is shaped like a mouse's? you asked me one day.

I kiss your mouse-shaped face. You're the world's beauty, its light.

EVE

The sea surges, escapes, scatters. It moves a thousand memories and a thousand scraps. Papers, cans, broken glass, smells of death. The neighborhood's life is dragged away by stream waters, swelling and bursting its banks.

I wait for the stream to subside so I can go back. I don't want to see anyone. I wait for night to fall and cover everything, including the shapes of people nearby and even the shapes of things.

The other day, in the office I'd been called to, I looked at the city and I saw it as it had been that morning with Saad at the statue of the Virgin Mary. Pale and sleepy. From high up, everything was smoothed out. The sharp edges were worn down, the holes filled in. The air-conditioned office, cushioned with carpets, smelled like new leather. You wanted to snuggle up in the armchairs. There was a huge painting reflected in the window. It winked at me. I recognized it. A teacher had told us about the artist, Malcolm de Chazal. I could see within his potbellied dodos and cheerful flowers those childhood dreams that had long since been forgotten.

I could have slept here, sheltered, in this bubble at a remove from reality. I could have slept in the foreign leather and the hissing air conditioner and the smooth, monotonous light. I could have slept in this white place, where I would have been protected from sunlight and screaming. In this twilight, not of the day but of the senses, I feel all right. But I know that if I slept there I would wake up with my heart frozen. My body numb from the lifelessness. Maybe that's what the man drinking one glass of whiskey after another on the other side of the desk is trying to exorcise through me.
He needs a body to thaw himself in. He needs a life to make himself feel alive. I understand him: he struggled for so long to get here and now that he's here, he doesn't know what he wants anymore. He's made a life, but not a home.

He looks at the girl with childlike eyes, standing in front of the window. I'm not in a rush. I wait. I look. I'd look all night, if he left me here. The city, the night, the void.

What you're looking for isn't here, I wanted to tell him. But I can hear him replying: Nor is what you're looking for, either.

You're
calm. Your hair makes black splashes. Your face is serious. He's heard about you. He's been told, she's not like the others. He sees that it's true. He's been told, she does everything. He doesn't know if it's true. You don't ask for anything. You're stern and bewitching, that's what he thinks of you. But they also told him what they did to you. Parties where you were alone and they were many. How one morning they left you almost lifeless not far from your neighborhood.

It's not hard for him to imagine it. Your bones are so thin.

What do you want? What are you looking for?

At that moment, you turn around and he gets up, unbuckling the belt of his pants.

EVE

The stream quiets down. I do, too. One day, I was left here by men who had gone crazy, drinking from my body. They hadn't taken me to an air-conditioned office but to an island right by the island, an island full of winds, birds, scrub, and snakes.

They got drunk and the moon got into their heads. They did some kind of dance around me, they pulled off their clothes, they looked like heavy, clumsy birds on their tiny feet. When they pounced on me, I saw that I was something foreign to them. We destroy what's foreign to us. Then we gather it up like a bag of sand in a boat where the water washes it.

I wake up as that bag of sand, I look at the sky thick with stars, and I tell myself: This is the last time.

But the men hunt me down and life goes on and I'm so indifferent to myself that I don't resist.

I'm trying to figure out where life's limit must be. What color it would be. What exactly the point of no return would be, that would tell me what I am.

I keep walking forward. One step after another, but it's always the same step, repeated endlessly. Step after step in the same place, the only aim being to contradict itself.

My feet take me past other girls, other women, other boys, other men. Some rush ahead, their heads bent down. Others fall back. All of them vanish into the distance, leaving me alone.

My body is crushed by waves in all directions, by a tumult of winds.

They run to escape, swallowing the harshness of their future. I stay afloat.

By the open window, nobody answers me. I would have liked to know what was watching out for me, what was driving me. The root of this refusal. What planted this negation in me.

The school principal told me:
Vous vous devez de réussir
. Then she said it again in English: You owe it to yourself to succeed. And, finally, in Mauritian Creole:
Pa gaspiy u lavi
. In three languages, she told me the same thing. That I'm responsible. I have to forget the place I go back to each night, how the cockroaches follow the same path as me, how this path is littered with cripples. Parts of bodies, arms, legs, eyes. People reduced to their most invisible selves. Along my path curious, hazy eyes follow me and seem to ask me, who are you, walking with such aimless eyes?

They don't understand me, these people unused to life who slip and disappear through the neighborhood's cracks.

Trash hammers the road like shrapnel. The ruts seem dug by mortar fire. On TV faces are talking about war. But here, I feel like I'm living through a siege. We're at war, yes, against ourselves and against these bodies growing on us like parasites.

But this isn't just the city. The world is also fighting against everything that staggers forward, everything that doesn't walk in victory. Its distant rhythms aren't for us. It's better to be born blind so as not to see the rage in its eyes. Everybody's preparing for war. We're all born with this naked and open flesh. Then each of us fashions an armor of thorns and spiky brambles. But the two sexes don't have the same heritage. We're not born with the same burdens.

What do men give in exchange for a body? They don't give their own body; a man has to take. They protect themselves. They watch their shadows. We're butterflies caught in a net, even at our most exultant, even at our most resistant. We're stolen bodies.

The days follow one another. Savita tries to hold me back, to intertwine with me, to save me from myself, but it's too late. She's already like a happy memory. I know that she won't follow me where I'm going.

When I tell her I'm staying at school after class, she looks at me and doesn't reply. Her heart, weighed down with everything she can't say, giving out.

One day she told me, I'm waiting for you.

And since then, every time, she's waited for me, like she's waiting for me tonight.

SAAD

They slip between the walls like two little ghosts laughing at us. They dance in front of everyone as if nobody would notice them at all. They almost seem like two virgins, these two little ones, if their movements didn't have this slowness suggestive of night rather than day. I would have seen them as vestals if they had made me the object of their worship. All dressed in white, their veils barely hiding their gentle hearts, their swaying hips, their bronze backsides.

But they're like two hands on a body. They don't need a third. They are free to do whatever they like, whenever they like. Their smiles suggest no need for any boys. Their eyes bind them to each other. We are invisible.