Eve Out of Her Ruins (7 page)

That scares the gang. I can sense something changing in them, even after they've tolerated Eve's escapades for so long, and Savita's distant prettiness, and even what drew them together at first. But they don't want these female bodies being dangled in front of them with no hope of a taste. Eve can move from man to man, but when she's with Savita, that's when she slips away. We're not yours, the two of them say. We never will be. On their tiptoes they slip and slide. The cigarettes flare with sharp inhalations and reveal malicious glimmers in the guys' eyes. Kenny whispers, it's time to teach those two a real lesson. The others just get hard. Yeah, what's their game? A girls' game, sure, but no way these sluts have any idea what's coming to them.

And they keep talking.

I try my best to calm them down, to change their mind. I have to
think up a hundred different ways to distract them. I say to Clélio, hey Clélio, remember that car you got the license plate number for, yeah, I have the address, my uncle handles vehicle registration stuff. But Clélio's in his own little world, he's biting his nails to the quick, and when that happens he doesn't have any time to listen to me. But everyone else is all for it: let's go slash the tires on that huge four-by-four, they say. Let's break the windows and give that little lady a scare.

Nobody really wants to go do it, but when you're a gang, you have to forget that you're a person, you have to be part of this moving, powerful, hot body that nothing can stop. Once you start moving, you have to go all the way.

Clélio doesn't want to come.

Leave him, says Kenny, he's got his head in the clouds.

We can't leave him alone, I say.

Leave me alone, says Clélio, as he's peeling away the dead skin on his soles.

And I do it, because I want to get the rest of them away from Savita and Eve. I want to distract them from the two women.

We leave the
cité
at the mercy of Clélio's breakneck fury.

EVE

Savita's
just left me in front of my place. I didn't go inside right away, as usual. Tonight, more than ever, everything's weighing down on me. The teacher's thrown me off. He was like a lizard; he seemed to actually be in love with me—as much as a man can actually know how to love. He stares at me for minutes on end and sighs, and then, suddenly, he unleashes a pent-up fury, but that doesn't even make me angry.

Tonight, something weird happened. Something I'd never experienced before.

Just when he realized it, he seemed shaken, as if he was about to start crying. I can't figure it out. I don't think he just wants my body, the way everyone else does. I think he wants me, too, the soft and warm thing beneath my icy crust. When he puts his hands in me, I feel like he's trying to find that. To find me right where it hurts so much to be touched. But maybe he's just like all the others and wants to see me wince in pain, and that's all it is. Maybe he's just a man the same way all the others are men.

Fortunately, Savita waits for me every time in front of the school. When I see her, I forget what's just happened. When I see her, I catch a glimpse of the moments to come and I can shut the door on what tears me apart.

I think of Savita tonight, she who saves me from myself.

SAVITA

I'm afraid tonight. I'm
walking her home again, but after what I've seen, I can't stop shaking. But she seems so calm, so distant from everything, even though her thighs are red.

I feel weak and dizzy. I have trouble walking. The air is heavy. It's so hot my body is sweating. I'm not the one holding her up anymore, she's the one guiding me. I'm thinking again about what I saw in the classroom. I didn't want to look. But she was late coming out, so I thought maybe she'd already left. I went up. The door wasn't completely shut.

I think he saw me, or smelled me. Not her. She was forgotten. I ran out. I went back down to wait for her. When she came, I could see in her eyes that she didn't know I'd seen her. She took me by the arms, as usual. I looked up. Someone was looking at us from above. That gaze bored into me. I felt its bite.

I started walking fast, but my feet were so heavy. She heard me gasping, and she said, what's wrong? But as usual, those nights, she was only half there. The other half was somewhere else. The other half tried to come back and disappear within herself.

I have to talk to her. We need to leave, to escape. The guys from the neighborhood are becoming men, with all their hatred. Soon they'll take it out on us. They can't bear to see us together, just the two of us. She doesn't pay attention to them. But I do. I see the anger growing in them. I see the heat rising in their thoughts. We have to leave.

But how can I run away when I feel so heavy? I have trouble walking. I have trouble breathing. The ground is stuck to my feet.
My feet are sinking in lava. Soon I won't be able to move anymore. The volcano will tear me to pieces.

Promise me you'll gather up my pieces, Eve, I say.

What are you saying? she asks.

I don't know.

She hugs me close.

My darling Savita, she says, I won't just gather up your pieces, I'll eat them so you'll always be in me.

I tried to joke: I always knew you were a cannibal!

She bit my shoulder lightly. I wanted her to leave teeth marks on my skin. That would be my only souvenir of her.

As we each went our way, I realized that I was crying, without really knowing why. Our apartments aren't far apart. I left her in front of her building. I just have to walk past where all the trash is, and I'll be at my place. But in the darkness, it feels like such a long way to go. As long as life itself.

PART TWO

SAAD

Last night was perfectly ordinary. Last night was another life. And then, in the morning, this. Nobody understands what's happened. Even in Troumaron, this has never happened, certainly not ever like this. The neighborhood is quieter than it's ever been. Everybody's hiding. Nobody dares to say that it had to happen at some point. We don't want to believe that about ourselves.

She was found in the trash, at the bottom of a trash bin.

Nobody heard anything. Everybody was looking the other way, of course. Ignorance is our only protection.

We, the boys, even if we'd known something, we wouldn't have said a thing. We don't snitch.

We know that some of us are monsters hidden behind ordinary appearances. That our seeming banality can mask murderous eyes. It's a legacy of childhood, this brutality, but it never comes fully to the fore. Usually it's the quietest ones, the sleepiest ones. Their eyelids seem so heavy. We can't see how their eyes are bloodshot. Something hazy clouds their decay. But most of us are normal kids. We play at being terrors, but deep down we're not doing anything really terrible. At some point we'll fall into line again, after feeling like we've had some freedom to be ourselves. So we don't understand.

What happened? Nobody had anything against her, Savita.

I think of the last line I wrote on the walls, last night: Your mouth in red memory opens for the sovereign man's blood.

I was riffing on Rimbaud, as usual. But it's true: man is sovereign. He will be until the planet changes its orbit.

When I see Eve again, I'm paralyzed by her face. She's gone completely blank. Obliterated.

Now I understand why she couldn't say I love you to a man.

Bloodless, bent over, broken down. She's sitting by the stream. She's not crying. She's curled up into herself like an egg in its shell. She's chewing over her grief. She's trying to spit it out, but it's stuck in her mouth, in her throat. She retches but nothing comes out, not the least drop of deliverance. I can't even try to touch her. She's so far gone.

I can only sit by her and watch her shaking. As the day goes by and the shaking doesn't stop, I see her drifting away into her memories, disappearing into her loss. She's lost. Eve will never be mine. I'll never stop loving her. But I, too, feel a sort of death. I will never be the same Saad. I didn't understand sadness until this day.

Off in the distance police cars are coming. There's noise in the neighborhood. The guys would rather hide. But the police change everything.

I take her balled-up fists and open them up. Her hand is studded with small red crescents, as if the new moon had trampled over it. I bring my lips to those red crescents. She pulls away her hands. She wants to hurt herself. She wants to cry. But she can't.

Talk to me, I say to her.

I saw her last night, right before, she says.

We said good-bye a few feet away from there, from where.

I didn't go inside. I could have followed her, held onto her a little longer, been with her.

But I came here, to the stream. I was here and I didn't see anything.

I didn't see anything.

I
was the last one. I could have. If I had. I should have. Why. If. But. Instead. She. And then.

She finally curls up into herself with a creak like an axletree. She pounds her fists against the ground. She pounds so hard that the earth squelches all around. She gets up and begins punching her fists in every direction, narrowly missing me. I get up and grab her. After a minute she calms down, even if her voice keeps lashing out.

She asks me:

Who did it?

I don't know. I have no idea.

That's impossible, she says. You're everywhere, you hear everything, you know everything. It was one of the guys from the gang who did it. You know it and you're not going to say anything, because you're all watching out for each other.

That's not true. Eve, I swear to you we weren't there last night.

Where were you?

On a drive. We weren't doing anything in particular. We were just looking for guys to scare.

She imitates me unkindly: We were just looking for guys to scare. You sure you weren't looking for someone to kill, too?

She's standing and looking at me with so much contempt that I don't know where to start.

You wrote “sovereign man,” she says. They're sovereigns for you, too. You don't dare to stand up to them. You'd never dare to tell on them. You have to fit in, no matter what. You're a coward and a show-off and a liar. Pitiful.

She runs off without waiting for any other explanation. But I didn't
lie. I might be a coward, but I'm not a liar. And she doesn't know that I'm protecting her from the wolves.

And then I start tearing up the ground myself, but nobody sees me. I'm the only one who knows what's twisting in my stomach.

EVE

The body is lying naked on the bench, like it's ready to be cut up. But this isn't an autopsy.

Lying, naked, on a bench in the biology room, I try to imagine myself wherever Savita is, spread out under the gazes of policemen and doctors, waiting to figure out her secrets. Waiting to splatter red on the white earthenware. But no, a dead body doesn't splatter. Only a living body gushes red.

Saadiq wrote, on the wall: Your mouth in red memory opens for the sovereign man's blood.

What did she, Savita, get from the sovereign man? Punches. Cuts. And maybe something else.

And for me, it's not blood I'll be getting, but a male's sperm that invades and drowns the female, that disperses within her millions of his potential doubles.

But I'll never carry his doubles. My body won't be colonized.

My body is lying, naked, on the table.

A thin body to treasure or tear apart, they say.

And right now he is treasuring me and tearing me apart at the same time. He struggles and staggers under the force of his urges. I have never seen him so destroyed. His shadow on the wall is gigantic. That of a monstrous creature overlooking me. It doesn't look like anything human, this stooped, wavering shadow emitting guttural, sucking sounds, the sounds of inhuman suffering.

Why did I come tonight? After what happened to Savita? I don't belong here. But I don't belong anywhere. I can't mourn Savita in my home, or in hers.

So I do it here, with all the force of my hatred. I hate your death, Savita, and I hate this man who relieves himself in me without caring about whether I'm alive or dead.

Afterward, when he's done slobbering, I'll get up and, the better to destroy him, sit on this table to do my work in the silence of the room, in the bodily smells all around, my clothes rumpled, my hair still wet, my mouth dry, my body emptied out, my soul worn out, my memories dirtied, my days paid for, my pride ripped open, my sex loosened, and the letters and words of my knowledge like lead on the page but still meaningless, without any illumination, displaying their powerlessness and indifference because Savita will not be out there waiting for me like always to tie the rope of my life together again within my body and without that, I don't have any life, anything to hold me up over the emptiness, anything to keep me from letting go.

Like her. But she never let go. Someone else did it for her. Someone thought she wasn't worth any more than the trash he threw her into.

As he's leaving, he says: What about this girl they found dead in Troumaron?

I wait a minute, and then I answer: I knew her.

I see the other question flickering on his lips, which he does not dare to pronounce. I answer it anyway: You did, too.

I know that when I leave, he'll stay at the window, in the darkness, he'll see me disappear in the schoolyard. He'll wonder whether he'll see me tomorrow. Or, as I head home in the dark, alone, whether I'll see the light of day tomorrow.

The street is etched by car headlights, by indifferent traffic. What about him? Is he indifferent to what's happened? Would he caress me as if I was a dead body, too, on the autopsy table? What difference would there be?

On the bench in the biology room, he dissected a human body, nothing more, nothing less.