ONE

Stealing a march on the dawn, I have opened the door onto the night. Not without first going down on my knees and praying to God – how could I not pray to God on this island, where the Devil has such a hold and must be rubbing his hands in glee? In this house, where he has stealthily established himself as each day passes.

Three times in succession I have recited a psalm of David, taking care to emphasise each syllable so that, in speaking so intensely to God, I am doing something that counts, ensuring that the sky above my head is more than an empty half-gourd:

When the wicked advance against me
To devour my flesh…

All night my eyes peered into the shadows. All night my ears strained to hear the crackling of gunfire in the distance – something you always want to imagine distant, very distant. Until that day when death comes, bleeding, to our door. Until the day it spatters our walls. Like the others, all the others, I am waiting.

Fignolé, my younger brother, didn’t come home last night. I didn’t hear him carefully opening the front door, nor noisily relieving himself in the backyard, as he so often does. And his bed, which serves by day as a couch in the living room, is untouched. For several months now I have been worried about Fignolé. I’m not the only one. How could anyone not worry about Fignolé? Fignolé, who has always held our lives on a string to the point of strangulation, whom fear has not yet succeeded in bringing to his knees. Where could he have spent the night? Where…?

It’s precisely half past four… This moment, between darkness and light, is my favourite time. The time when my thoughts can turn freely to those who occupy this house, to all those whose whereabouts are lost to me, or who are too far away. The hour of my accumulated resentments, the hour of my numerous hatreds, my expectations ranged before me, my hardships that are enough to make me cry with rage. Resentments, hatreds, hardships – I will soon have gathered them all, without exception, like a gaggle of chattering gossips. I carry inside myself so many other women, strangers who dog my footsteps, who live in my shadow, restless in my skin. Not one of them will be deaf to the call of this young woman, not yet thirty, on whom time has left its mark. A young woman struck down some years ago who pretends to carry on living as if nothing had happened.

Ti Louze has already gone to fetch water from the neighbourhood fountain. She has tucked away in a corner the rush mat she lays out as a bed, right by the door to the backyard, together with the rags she piles up to sleep under every night. Let’s hope she will return unscathed from those inevitable riots around the water, where we learn to cut our teeth, sharpen our fangs, at a very early stage.We are devoured by rage like dogs. Soon we will grow tails, walk the ground on four paws. It’s only a matter of time.

God, it’s cold! I put the coffee pot on the gas stove in the backyard and carefully raise the collar of my bathrobe that was once red but has long since faded to an indistinct brownish colour. The channel that runs along the far wall of this tiny courtyard gives off a persistent stench of decay and urine. It was wreathed in indistinct wisps when I opened the door. And to cap it all, Fignolé has not come home. One of us should help Ti Louze to carry the rubbish to the foul-smelling corner where all the neighbourhood’s residents pile up their garbage again and again without any hope of the public services coming to collect it.

The February dawn is enough to freeze the blood. Wedged into the rocking chair, arms folded over my chest, legs stretched open in front of me, I reign over this backyard as if it were a great palace of solitude where I can allow myself a few moments of madness. A mad queen, my body in turmoil, shaken from the tips of my toes to the roots of my hair! I can still believe my body has a purpose. Look, there beneath my left breast, my life beats in secret like a captive bird. I sometimes feel it flutter until it is enough to stifle my breath. Sitting like an abundant cow, I await an attentive hand that knows what to do, to awake it in a noisy beating of wings.

To draw it from its slough of despond.

To help it recover from this futile wearing-down.

I wait…