THIRTEEN

I go down the aisle again, comforting the sick, administering drops, distributing tablets, ordering the auxiliaries to change dressings. On the right is the young woman who gave birth yesterday and whose baby is sharing the narrow bed. Since the mysterious disappearance of a baby girl three months ago, mothers have not wanted to be apart from their newborns. The administration has not insisted and has even been rubbing its hands in glee at the idea of staff reductions and fewer expenses.There is nothing left of the crèche but a name, the mattresses and the few remaining chairs that have not been stolen and are simply waiting for the vandals, who will also have been considering the fastest way to remove the cots, to finish the job. On the left I stop to take hold of the gnarled fingers of an old woman who is dying and try in vain to guess what her eyes are trying to tell me from behind the milky veil of a cataract. And then there is the strong, silent man. A man in his forties. Two beds down from the old woman. He arrived the previous week while I was on night duty, looming up suddenly like an apparition. Everything about him was of the night – his eyes, his courage, his silence.The effect was so striking that you couldn’t help but look at him, even in his pain. He replied to my questions without apparent distrust, but I knew that, deep inside, he was distrustful. As we all are. On this island we are made that way. It is a game to which we devote the brightest of our days, a result of living within reach of those whom we have good reason to distrust. Suffice to say that I know little more about this man than that his stomach ulcer had bled for the first time the day before he arrived in this hospital.

It is already a year since Fignolé left this same hospital, and cried out to me as he arrived back in Mother’s and Joyeuse’s room, ‘I will never go back within those walls, Angélique, you understand? Never!’

He went on to say that he would prefer to die at home or in the street like a beggar, like a stray dog, rather than stay one second longer within the walls of this hospital. That what he feared most was not so much dying as waking up in this white prison. Of experiencing the implacable return of the morning’s horrors, surrounded by twenty or so others who nursed the same fears deep inside. He said all this as he talked to Joyeuse, who put her arms round his shoulders and hugged him close. Sitting on Mother’s big bed, they were unaware of my presence. They didn’t even notice how they were tormenting me, wounding me with their whispered confidences, their embraces, their tears, like two young cats would worry a bird. The idea of holding Fignolé’s hands in mine suggested itself for a few seconds, a moment during which I felt their claws scratch a few words of wounded love into my skin. A moment in which I straightened my skirt and adjusted the neck of my blouse.

I then left the room with silent steps, creeping down the passage like a creature of the night.

I will soon breeze down to the end of the ward, past the two young boys injured by bullets. The first with damage to his collarbone and neck; the second, the younger of the two, with a pierced abdomen and bladder. They were brought here at daybreak. The youngest will die soon; it’s a matter of hours. He has lost too much blood. The other will come through it. But I won’t tell them. When she arrived early this morning, the youth’s mother slipped a rosary between his fingers and placed a scapular round his neck. As I approach, the youth raises a face with features distorted by pain and stupor. The stupor of one who is holding on and finds himself face to face with the ineffable. I give him a smile, as best I can. All these young men remind me of Fignolé.

Fignolé, who has never accepted the rules of any dogma, any uniform, any doctrine. Who at a very early stage began to wrestle with that which we call reality, without really knowing what it entails. And who lived in self-imposed exile in a solitude we believed to be radiant but from where he showed himself to be powerless against the setbacks of the world. Fignolé, who was incapable of becoming part of this life, of following its movements, its hours, minutes and seconds. Fignolé, incapable of growing up overtaken by a fast-flowing flood, preferring to sink. Fignolé now drags behind him a despair that burns his blood. The first trigger was without doubt the arrest of Uncle Octave.

I remember that incident, at which Fignolé was present, as if it were yesterday. The presidency of the son of the other Prophet-President, President for Life, was coming to an end. It was days before Fignolé was able to tell us about it, his voice a monotone. From the day of that incident on, he was never the same. Mother simply said to me one day: ‘Fignolé will burn himself out, char his flesh to the bone. And it will be one of us, if not all three of us, who will be forced to sweep up his ashes.’

He told us that a car came to a stop outside Octave’s house. Octave’s only crime was to be the assistant accountant for a paper no-one was supposed to write for and no-one was supposed to read. The incident took place in the district of Gressier to the south of Port-au-Prince. Fignolé was barely thirteen. He and Octave’s two sons immediately recognised Merisié, his high forehead and figure slender as a cane. A kind of legendary ogre whom many could describe but only a few knew. Great powers were attributed to him, and a capacity for inflicting extraordinary tortures. He started as a Tonton Macoute at Fort-Dimanche, the Dungeon of Death with the former Prophet, the President for Life. Some people swear by what they hold most precious that Merisié can turn himself into a cat, disappear or make himself immune to bullets, even those fired from point-blank range. Merisié was accompanied by Gwo Louis. It was the latter who deliberately made the tyres of the car crunch noisily on the gravel in the street.

Gwo Louis was Merisié’s bodyguard, an armoured regiment on two legs at the exclusive service of his boss. Ex-militia man Merisié had succeeded in surviving another Prophet-President for Life, with round spectacles and a black fedora. Part civil servant, part spy, Merisié was a grand master of base deeds. But just as there is no end to the servility of people on this island, so Gwo Louis was the grand master of deeds even more base than those of Merisié. The absolute low of the low. Gwo Louis, who had a chest substantially broader than the average, leaned his face out of the window, displaying his head for the three youths to admire. A head so big you could imagine it was sculpted from rock. Behind this face you could make out a terrifying reptilian venom, and beneath the thick layer of fat the power of a wildcat. And, of course, a great, boundless stupidity.

Eyes on fire like two beasts of the Apocalypse, they got out of the car and with their guns on display slammed the doors and advanced towards the boys. Merisié began by pacing up and down, hands behind his back, fixing each of the boys in turn with his stare. From the outset, Merisié accused them of wanting to threaten the safety of peaceable citizens at the instigation of Octave. From wanting to disturb the peace of the neighbourhood to a crime against the security of the State was a small step, which Merisié made in the following seconds, treating the boys as trouble-makers, opponents of an established government. He threatened to cut them up into pieces.

To break their bones.

To slit their throats.

To smash into their chests and gouge out their hearts.

To open up their stomachs and drag out their guts and intestines.

As for their genitals, their penises and testicles, he promised them with a gnashing of teeth that he would season them with salt and paprika and eat them with rice and kidney beans.

Standing at the entrance to the tiny gallery, Gwo Louis deterred them from any idea of running away. He punctuated Merisié’s demented speech with a noisy, vulgar laugh which shook his fat bulk. To the great surprise of his cousins, Fignolé moved towards Merisié and asked him why he was angry. His sole reply was to tell Fignolé in no uncertain terms that he’d be the first to be cut into pieces. And he mimed taking aim at them one by one as they did in cops-and-gangster films on the TV. Uncle Octave, who was visiting a neighbour, was alerted and ran back to his house. When Uncle Octave arrived, Merisié gave a sign to Gwo Louis, who shoved into him, then immobilised him by twisting his hands up behind his back. Octave was taken away by these two men and we never saw him again.

Fignolé, pure metal. Someone who has always wanted to think for himself. Who believes that freedom is not first and foremost a right, but a duty, a demand. Jean-Baptiste and Wiston did not understand him. Even John, armed with all his qualifications, could not, would not follow him. Could not understand that in the name of this freedom he had turned against the head of the Démunis after his return to power and joined the new wave of insurrection on the streets. The last argument between them had been violent. Fignolé did not hesitate to shout out his anger at John, to tell him what he thought of him, an aristocrat from the well-to-do neighbourhoods of Philadelphia come to warm up his soul in the tropics. Come to dispel his rich kid’s boredom by sowing chaos among the poor whom he admired like exotic animals walking around on their hind legs. And because of this abrupt change in Fignolé, in the film he played in his head, John had to find himself a new role. We never saw him again in our house. His absence left me neither cold nor warm. It is so easy for someone like John to be nice and good and to invent stories for books and films. John has a future. We don’t. There are rich people, others are poor. We will always be poor, John always rich. John is not one of our own and never will be.

I turn before leaving the large ward and catch the surprised gaze of the stranger seizing mine like a pair of hands. God protect me from the expression of this man who wants nothing so much as to awake in me the greatest possible terror and take delight in doing so. Like those strangers on the look-out along the roadsides.

God protect me from the eyes of this man who could send me headlong into Hell.