SEVEN

Joyeuse’s words do not reach me. She is deceiving herself and doesn’t know it. I often smile inside at the complacent pride of her ignorance. Joyeuse with her bird’s brain can’t imagine the experiences I’ve accumulated. No, she can’t. The experiences that the years have woven into the redness of my flesh and the darkness of my bones. I always make sure that the face I show people is that of an unharmed creature, one who has come through life like passing through the holes in a colander, leaving all the hardships behind. Even the keenest eye would have to look twice, several times before beginning to understand. I mean to really understand. To understand that beneath the apparent ingenuousness of my skin lurk the moving scales of a strange beast, that I’m a woman whose days are made up of a feverish waiting – feverish to the point of pain. A woman exhausted by desire for unknown men. A sinner! But I’m rambling, I’m rambling… What evil thoughts, Angélique! What evil thoughts! I don’t really know myself any more. Perhaps without the help of God and Pastor Jeantilus I would simply return to what I always was.

I know things I will not say. I also have my suspicions. Suspicions, observations, guesses, conclusions. My soul on edge, mouth closed tight, ears pricked like a listening trumpet. I don’t tell anything to anyone. With a naked madness, yet I have never been closer to lucidity. Cold and sharp like a knife. Sometimes I aim at my target totally unnoticed and allow myself a sharpened arrow, the type that arouses Mother’s curiosity. Which leaves Fignolé apparently indifferent, but which makes my sister Joyeuse howl. Only the day before yesterday she was in such a fury that she shouted at me that I was nothing but a sanctimonious woman prematurely aged where I stood, like a stunted tree. I put on my most innocent expression while gloating inside as I always do. There was nothing else for it; spitefulness soothes me. Powerless to drive out the true words buried in my night, incapable of making the exact gestures that would restore my life with a flick of the wrist, I’m caught up in a mechanism of hatred. And so I allow myself the spite which opens up my prisons, breaks away my chains.

This is the same mechanism that drove Fignolé, as a frenzied crowd gathered to herald the return of the leader of the Démunis, to plunder a wealthy-looking house uptown with a gang of friends from our neighbourhood, Paulo, Jean-Baptiste and Wiston. Their sincere belief was that they could escape for ever the hopeless pain of a country that was lost, debased, trampled underfoot.They finished up with a new injection of hope that was quickly forgotten. Visibly ecstatic, they rejoined the gang of wild down-and-outs. A noisy, foul-smelling, disobedient crowd. A crowd white-hot with alcohol and weed and goodness knows what else. Fires rose up from barricades thrown up in haste. In a fever. In the vibrant breath of the lambis, the conch horns. The drums filled the city with the warrior rhythms of ancient Africa. A powerful song like a river caused the crowd to sway, arms moving, hair in disarray, legs spread like people possessed. Men, women, children, old folk: all were going wild from that blend of anger with joy and hunger. Those who were running barefoot were indifferent to the pain caused by the smashed bottles, twisted pieces of metal and fragments of wood that littered the ground. In a furious tumult they carried off everything they could lay their hands on – mattresses, household appliances, works of art, like trophies from a great battle. It was said that one man’s body lay prone in the entrance to his house. Truth or rumour? Who knows? Executed, lynched. Or perhaps both. He was dead there, on the pavement, guilty beneath a harsh, stiff sun like fate. Intoxicated by that frenzied crowd, did Fignolé, too, throw a rock or step over the body without even noticing? I never knew that, either.

When he returned home at the end of the afternoon, a television set carried on his head, I laid into him. A flood of reprimands gushed from my breast. My anger had such a minimal effect on him that it ended up working itself out. And as my anger calmed, I looked at Fignolé with an admiration that surprised even me. Deep inside, a strange fire suddenly ignited and began to crackle. And I felt that it was crackling because I approved of him. Yes, I approved of him. I understood on that day that there is no wrong in turning malicious when you are enslaved. When there is no point to your life, nor to the lives of all those like you since the beginning of the world, and one day a moment will come when a man will show you the way out. And that way will be so narrow, so low, so dark, that it will swallow you whole, your head down. And I lowered my head. And perhaps I would do it again. Who knows?

The shame in the Bible, that of Pastor Jeantilus’ sermons, only came that evening to add itself to my hatred – slowly, but without ever succeeding in reducing it to silence. Ever. It was that hatred which, during the following days, fed my delight in knowing that the people beyond my reach had lost something. At least once, and at the hands of one of my own. I remember singing very loudly in church the following Sunday, eyes closed, my body reeling from side to side, arms waving above my head. In order to smother the spite with words and music and not to give it another chance. But it was in vain. Remorse had never been able to make its nest in the depths of my being, the place where no-one but me goes. The place from where a glimmer of light sometimes comes to dance, lighting up my eyes when I look at myself in the mirror and when I light a fire in my life. For a few seconds. Just a few magnificent seconds.

We still have no news of Fignolé. No phone call. No message. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Joyeuse has maintained that little self-satisfied expression and that false serenity that winds me up so much.Yet even though she has not been taken into her brother’s confidence, she must surely have her suspicions, must have noticed some clues. I slipped Mother a gourde note. She will use it to pay Madame Jacques for the phone call I will make to her from the hospital cafeteria. I’ve promised and I want to know…