TWENTY-NINE

From the four corners of the city fires rise from rubbish piles and burn our eyes. Every evening at nightfall, pyromaniacs crucify the poverty of Port-au-Prince to preserve its silence. We proceed, pacified, half-blinded, in a deceptive fog. It is the moment when night descends on Mother’s face.This unique face of one who will never leave, who will always stay near you, despite the storms over your life, despite the fire that lays it waste. Mother’s face is a piece of soft earth, the ground on which we place our naked feet without fear of being hurt. Mother’s desire to search through the night makes her a ship that cleaves through black water. She moves forward but goes nowhere. The silence inside her is as deep as that of the great belly of water beneath the sea. Has she lost the north? She is so afraid of capsizing.Yes, so afraid. From time to time the moon pours out its quicklime and, relieved, she scans the world in this white light. And once again she sets her course towards the wait for her son.

The night slowly tilts forward. I hear it falling with its music and its restraint. A night of Eden, a night from before the Fall. Huge emotions also fall with it. Mother speaks, perhaps, of her childhood that burned away so quickly, like a Bengal match. Whispers in ears in the dark, the sound of first steps towards the baskets gathered not far from the huts, the aroma of coffee made with a little water for Aunt Sylvanie and herself. Syrupy, black coffee as she still likes it, in the wispy colours of the old days. She walks in the footsteps of her mother, Sylvanie by her side. Three ebony candles sliding through the mother-of-pearl of the night. She does not refer to those who were broken in the sugarcane fields of the Dominican Republic. Those buried in watery graves who never reached the other side. Those who stayed in the country of their childhood, what has become of them? She will not say that all the demands they ever made on earth have been in vain, the earth has not responded to their supplications.

Joyeuse arrives and joins us, lost in thought. I tell her in a few words about my visit to the police station. We babble among the shadows. We, women of too many words, swollen with so much silence. God, even our gestures are silent!

The words finally arrive. From afar. From far away. They come from the depths of solitude, and from even further away. They make us want to hold them in our hands so they will touch us with a closeness greater than that of an embrace.

The two kerosene lamps have not yet been lit. In truth, no-one has felt like lighting them. There are enough words, silence and dreaming to see ourselves from the inside. Passers-by can hardly make us out, but greet us: ‘How are you, Ma Méracin?’, ‘Evening Miss Angélique’, ‘Any news, Joyeuse?’ The world moves on at its own pace. Deep in contemplation, we do not see Paulo arrive, but we hear him bellowing like a beast. On hearing Paulo’s cries, the three of us know that a great calamity is on its way towards us.

‘They’ve killed Fignolé!’ he yells three times in a row.

Ti Louze quickly lights the two lamps. The first shadows dance in their orange glow. We can make out Paulo’s features clearly. He is unrecognisable. His pain seems to have been carved into his bones with the point of a knife. Vanel, the drummer in the band, is holding him up like an old man at the end of his strength and says between sobs he can hardly hold back: ‘I was there.’

Mother doesn’t say a word but her mouth emits an indescribable sound that must have originated in her belly, made its way up through her chest, stifling her as it reached her throat and spurting out through her mouth. Then nothing. The help of two men is needed to revive her and to wind a cloth around her waist to bed the pain down in a nest inside her, let it begin to run its course like a child carried in her womb. Madame Jacques ties a scarf around her hair.

Vanel collapses onto a rickety chair and cannot hold back the story.

‘I was just about to help Madame Guérilus, Ismona’s mother, to close the double doors at the entrance to her house when four men came and stood in front of us. Civil guards, they were, in short-sleeved, sweat-stained T-shirts, wearing caps and trainers. Two of them were brandishing machetes and the older two each had an automatic rifle. The most forward of them, the one who must have been their leader, stepped up. He raised his Tshirt to reveal a nine-millimetre handgun next to his naked belly.

“Close up, close up quickly,” Madame Guérilus shouted. “Close up quickly!”

‘We had no time and I had to leg it away down an adjoining passage to the house and warn Fignolé and Ismona. Fignolé had no chance to run. Alerted by the cries of Madame Guérilus, he told Ismona to take refuge on the roof. It was too late for him to go back into the house and the balance of strength was hardly in his favour. So he decided to cover our escape through the nearby alleyways. Grabbing a machete, he hit the first of the assailants who’d forced their way into the back yard. Fignolé then jumped over a wall and joined us. We came up against a dead end at the other side of the neighbourhood, so we decided to separate to give ourselves a better chance of escape. I saw him disappear into the night, with no idea that I’d never see him again. The assailants divided into two groups as well. The first followed hot on our tails while the second went into the house, like professionals who were used to this kind of operation. One of them stood by Madame Guérilus and ordered her to be quiet. Immediately. The ringleader even said “I won’t tell you twice.”’

I am gripped by a deep despondency. My legs are trembling, my head spinning. I don’t hear the end of Vanel’s account. But I understand that there is a name he is reluctant to say out loud.

‘I saw… I saw…’

He is crying hot tears like a child but the syllables we are waiting for do not pass his lips.

‘Tell us, who?’

He is obviously terrified, so we do not insist. We all pretend not to want to know more. Except Joyeuse. She stares at Vanel. Joyeuse is reaching the end of her tether. Joyeuse is always at the end of her tether. Vanel knows he will not escape Joyeuse, even this evening as he avoids her gaze and cries with his eyes lowered.

The death of Fignolé is no longer something that is likely to happen. It has happened. This evening my wait, my anxiety, has ended. I am surprised to be almost relieved by this idea. Even with a great hole in my chest, I am relieved. Even though he is alone in his mystery and I am here in this thick fog with which his death had surrounded me. We will no longer stop him dying. We have not been able to find the words to persuade him to live.

Neighbours drawn out of their houses by our cries are arriving in a procession and gathering around the gallery and the back yard. We fill the night with a heartrending clamour. Willio and Jean-Baptiste, detained in the police station, will learn the news during the night or tomorrow morning. The house is full to bursting. Lolo holds Joyeuse in her arms and rocks her gently. Other neighbours continue to arrive with mournful, heavy steps, crossing the face of the night to celebrate death, eternal and forever encircling the city, as if this city were in a different time, an age from before the world began. As if this place were an idea born from Genesis.

Mother is rocking her upper body backwards and forwards after screaming as if her guts were being drawn out of her. She has begun a strange chant that emerges from the base of her throat, her lips sealed. Our neighbours, come to contribute their sobs and cries, follow her in this commotion of sounds and strangled cries.

I have to change my clothes. Boss Dieuseul and Maître Fortuné do not want me to go alone to reclaim my brother’s body from the authorities; they want to go with me. God alone knows what the beast is capable of! Joyeuse rakes through the bottoms of drawers to scrape up enough to buy a bottle of rum from Madame Jacques. Of course Madame Jacques refuses the money and offers the bottle, the giblets, the watercress and the plantains for the broth. Lolo wants to take charge of all the next day’s meals. Joyeuse has also thought of the tisane of ginger and cinnamon that the women will sip until dawn. Boss Dieuseul has set up the domino table by the entrance to the house himself. Once they have reached the necessary state of intoxication, the men will reminisce about Fignolé’s extravagances, his life in the face of death. In this sadness that eats us up inside. In the glow of the kerosene lamps which shed great shadows across our faces as if they have been half gnawed away by rats.

I move in a desert like Jesus and all my personal temptations merge into one: I want to cry out to God that I do not believe he exists. Instead of this I close my eyes and my mouth on my blasphemy. I hear myself saying in the voice of a stranger: ‘My God, let Your will be done!’