SIX

I’m hardly able to drag my thoughts away from the metallic object on top of the cupboard. I hardly dare put a name to it in my head. Too many questions torment me and threaten to become an obsession. Why this gun? Does Fignolé believe he’s in danger right now? Why hasn’t he spoken of it? Why did he leave it in that cupboard if he’s in fear of his life? Perhaps he’s not himself a target but he’s protecting a friend? Who knows? I open my bag quickly, thinking to find an answer to my questions in those few bits of paper left by Fignolé. There is a telephone number, Ismona, the forename of his girlfriend, written in capitals, the district of Martissant underlined in red and a line of verse: The heart yearns for a bullet while the throat raves of a razor. Beneath, in small, fine writing, Mayakovsky. Knowing Fignolé as I do, none of it is written at random. Everything has a reason, which I will come to decipher. Fignolé learned all these grand, fine words on a few forays into gatherings in Pacot, Laboule or Pétion-Ville where, seated on comfortable sofas, they enacted the Revolution surrounded by glasses of wine and the sounds of the trumpet of Miles Davies or Wynton Marsalis.

Fignolé, why make us breathe at such giddy heights? Recalcitrant, rebellious Fignolé, inhabited by poetry, crazy about music. Fignolé has no place on this island where disaster has broken spirits. Fignolé, can you hear me? Pass through the lightning and the fire of this city unharmed if you will, but come back to us… Come back to us soon. Unhurt, uninjured. More alive than a living soul in this land ever was. Fignolé, can you hear me?

I leave the house at the same time as Mother, who refused to wear the dress with little sun-yellow flowers that I bought for her during the last sales at Madame Herbruch’s shop. Not content with merely refusing to wear this dress, Mother tied a scarf round her head like a peasant. I didn’t dare say anything to her. She had that expression I know so well, that ‘you don’t want to cross me’ expression. No loa had yet ridden her, but even so, she had already escaped me, her mouth firmly shut like a tomb. Her eyes turned towards the Invisibles.

This evening I’ll do her hair and that’s all. My fingers moist with Palma Christi oil, I’ll take pleasure in undoing her little plaits one by one and then putting her hair up in a single braid above her nape. She’ll protest at first, but she’ll let me do it. As always. This is an established ritual between us, which ultimately pleases us both. It always has, since childhood when, as night fell, she would invoke Grandfather Saintilhomme, whose legends bind us all to one another. Grandfather, whom the god Agoué came to find one day to take him to Guinea underwater. Or the tales in which the fish are clothed in phosphorescent seaweed. Where ogres devour children. Where stars can be caught in the palm of your hand. She would tell these stories until the day the blood ran between my thighs for the first time. Looking me right in the eye, Mother asked me to be on guard with boys from that moment on, and stopped talking to me. I mean, really talking to me. It was a parenthesis of silence.The truce of adolescence.The end of those hours, warm and so full of sweetness. She was content to reassure herself that each new moon brought me my share of moist, warm blood.

One day she inserted an authoritative finger to reassure herself that my body had not yet been breached, was no wound open to the breeze. She never did it again. I understood quickly that there was a connection between this blood, the shadowy triangle of my thighs, and the men who made Mother appear more beautiful sometimes, a dancing flame in everyone’s eye, her hips as if released, when I would get home from school and our bed would exude a scent of amber and kelp.

I also experienced the discomfort, the unease of having a place in that school among girls who were strangers to me. Mother was jubilant at the idea of her daughter’s unexpected advance towards that world of stucco, lace and frills, but never imagined the violence it would imply for her, never. Right from the start, I had refused to assume the role of an innocent who would steal cheap jewellery and only realise too late. I had chosen to be a thief of stones of deceptive brilliance. One who knows it and continues to do it, with no regrets, without useless nostalgia. In my adolescence I had a volcano inside me, which I ignited myself, without saying a word, every morning. Now this volcano will never be extinguished, Mother and I have merely changed places and roles.

I’m twenty-three years old and I’m the strongest.

Mother lets me do her hair and listens, sitting between my knees or with me standing behind her. We have reemerged from our silence. I talk to her of my twenties which are like an itch, of my great hunger for life, of my certainty that there is no-one to complain to about the battering and hurt the world will bring.

Mother knows like no other how to keep to herself in her silence. She knows how to love us in her silence like the warmth of the earth. Like the light which enwraps the world. Hers is a love against which all the fury, all the noise of others are as nothing. I know it as I know that no-one will love Ti Louze. No-one. As I know that hard, cold cruelty also lives in the hearts of the defeated – a certainty that Fignolé always opposed with a hundred explanations and a thousand boastful answers.

Madame Jacques stops us on the threshold of her shop. She wants to reassure us about Fignolé.

‘He’ll come back later,’ she says sharply. ‘Paulo is sure of it.’

This morning, Madame Jacques does not look good. The cares of the last few weeks have given her a sunken, tattered appearance. This morning, Madame Jacques is older than all the women who walk barefoot in the dust of the Old Testament. Older than Rebecca. Older than Judith. Older than Jezebel or Sara. Further on, Maître Fortuné rushes up in front of Mother, contenting himself with taking her clammy hands into his and inclining his head towards her breast. Apart from Madame Jacques and Maître Fortuné, mother does not confide in the other neighbours. Certainly not in Madame Descat, our neighbour on the right, recently moved in to the neighbourhood. A woman with an opulent bosom, she has visibly lightened the skin of her face with lashings of abrasive creams. Madame Descat is one whom we don’t know well enough to take into our confidence but know too well to share our misfortunes with. Madame Descat receives visitors who are no doubt enthralled by the falseness of this grimelle who has arrived and who looks down on us with an air of authority. Mother gives Madame Descat broad smiles, which are returned with the same hypocrisy. Not me. She can see from my expression that I’m not afraid to get in with my teeth first before I can be bitten.

The present-day mistrust creeps through their veins like a seeping liquid, thicker than that of the mistrust there has always been – the mistrust that the older people always obliged us to maintain towards those who resemble us like peas in a pod. Together with misfortune, this mistrust is the only inheritance to which we, the defeated, are truly entitled. It certainly does not count among our losses, but our gains. It’s not hard to see why!

Mother endlessly repeats that the neighbours are not what they were. And that we are fortunate to have Maître Fortuné.

‘Without someone like Maître Fortuné you couldn’t last in this city. There would be no future here.’

Maître Auguste Fortuné is able to set you up with a clandestine source of water or electricity in less time than it would take you to ask for it, or to procure for you a certificate of birth, death or any kind of qualification.Tall and strong like the trunk of a mapou, with stooped shoulders and furtive eyes, he makes his way through hardships at a steady pace. Maître Fortuné is not a master of anything but muddling-through and trickery. Maître Fortuné exists only to satisfy himself that not a single centime will line the pockets of the State. Not a single one. A great usurer, Maître Fortuné lends on the black market. Maître Fortuné is the fruit of a blend of races, all the virtues of which we have rejected, retaining only the faults. He has made his place in our great disorder like a fish in water and revels in having the whole wide ocean to swim in. He has thrown a thick veil over his past, a veil that no-one lifts. Malicious tongues say that he embezzled the funds of a minister and came out of it by a feat of conjuring. Others claim that after making a living by running a brothel in Cap-Haïtien, he stripped a few forsaken widows in Curaçao of their assets and entertained a number of bored housewives in Fort-de-France. So why did he end up among us? We will never know.

A true chameleon, Maître Fortuné knows how to assume the colours of whoever is in power, tinting his tongue and his brain. But it is impossible to talk of his soul. For activities of the kind he undertakes, Maître Fortuné is not burdened with a soul, fortunately! Fortunately for him, and for us who live in this neighbourhood of houses that are permanent but twisted, half-finished, half-painted, displaying their metal guts like shaggy hair. This neighbourhood to which we have escaped but only just, with the fetid breath of alleyways which, elsewhere, further downtown, among the shanties, are sickening. We live in a place like a fruit that is half worm-eaten, half rotten, where eager teeth may yet bite. But all the same, we live in a neighbourhood of the defeated.With plenty of cause for unblemished, rich, deep happiness and with other things that are ugly, terrible and yet so human.

Now I think on, Paulo has not mentioned Vanel, the young drummer in the band. I love Vanel, I love his fragility. Vanel licks a great internal wound, like an injured dog; a great wound that no-one sees. A few years ago now, Monsieur Perrin, a teacher at the Toussaint school, praising his intelligence and his talent to his mother and his aunt, offered to take him in to his house on the pretext of shaping a great future for him. Once under the roof of this benefactor, he was taught neither grammar nor multiplication tables, even less drawing or music, but intimacy with someone of the same sex. Monsieur Perrin swore to him between breaths, shorts around his ankles, penis extended in his fingers, that this would be better than with girls. Ever since, Vanel has vacillated between the two sexes. And he hides his game from everyone – especially the boys of the football team who meet at Théolène’s. He knows full well they’d give him a hard time if they learned that men sometimes ask him to play the man and often the woman. Only my friend Lolo and I know. When Vanel is not making my head spin with confidences or giving me an account of the latest episode of our favourite TV soap beneath the cramped gallery in front of the house, we are laughing like two accomplices who don’t believe in Hell, who believe that the earth is a brutal paradise. I love Vanel, I love his fragility, his long lashes which make his eyes look moist.

I put one foot in front of the other. But my questions chase their tails like a trese ruban dance and come to worry at my secrets, rake out my grey stone. Fignolé, where are you? God, I want to know where you’re hiding!