CHARLES-ÉMILE PACKED HIS BAGS when the anonymous midnight calls started getting more insistent and more threatening. I had published two articles in the weekly L’Aube, “Who shall be silenced?” and “When shall we drink from this overflowing cup?” In the first piece, I stressed the importance of freedom of speech—for men, women, and children. For all citizens.
Is it any wonder that such a small country has such high illiteracy rates? The reason is quite simple: those who have always had a monopoly on power, and therefore on what is said, have no interest in ensuring that everyone learns to read and write. But they don’t squander a single opportunity to brag, shouting from the rooftops that we live in a free country. It is a shameless lie.
In countries that claim to be free, countries where citizens are truly free, the fundamental freedom each person has is nothing less than the fruit of freedom of speech. In free countries, men and women are free without condition, and women have the right to speak by any means available—first and foremost the press and the newspapers. The acquired right to freedom of speech, this right women have won, is invaluable, and all credit is due to them. Year after year, century after century, despite the repression they suffer, if women had been content to remain locked in the smothering fold of family and friends, where they would have mouldered, if they had been forever content with the limits set for them by those who claim to guide them, they would never have known any other life than enslavement.
Can a society that bullies and shackles its people, which feels nothing but contempt for them, claim to be free? We are at a time when women’s struggle for freedom of speech has nothing to do with cheap feminism, based as it is solely on the values advocated by a caste of the blessed, by a handful of the well-to-do. We do not dream of utopia, we simply dream of speaking freely, to allow us to build a true society of free women and men. Free speech alone shall guide us toward the dialogue that is essential to accessing a more just and therefore a freer world. We do not seek free speech in order to sit among our sisters in petticoats beneath the arbour. We do not seek free speech as a facade. We shall speak out of duty and in the name of freedom to fight prejudice and to banish ignorance, that ignorance so carefully upheld on our island, the ball and chain that prevents us from moving forward. From now on, we shall occupy every space where speech may flourish, to be able to say a clear, resounding No! to all injustice in the name of all the voiceless women and men of this country.
The newspaper L’Œdipe called it “a declaration of war on the Supreme Leader and therefore on the nation.” Two days after the article came out, I found the envelope with my death warrant slipped under the fence.
Did I sleep? I have the horrible sense of having been unconscious, which feels nothing like the restfulness that sleep provides. My left arm is numb and I have a dull ache in my lower back. The curtains are drawn and the studio is dark. I don’t turn on the lamp just yet. I’m afraid of the night, but I’m also afraid of the day, I’m afraid even of the slap of my footsteps on the tiles. I fumble to the toilet, my feet finding their way. When I come back, I lift a corner of the heavy curtain, carefully. It’s already daylight, though the morning is grisly and grey. On a shelf in the library there is a photo of Charles-Émile and me. I take the frame in my hand and sink into his favourite armchair. I stare at the photograph, asking silent questions. Soledad took it, so long ago, one day when we were both reading in our bedroom. The window is open behind us and a breeze fills the curtains. Charles-Émile has an expression on his face that might be interpreted as tenderness. The snapshot is years old. As Clarisse would say, everything in life has an expiry date, don’t you know. Enough of this wordless conversation; I curl up in bed. A few minutes of rest will do me good. After a night on the hard floor, the softness of the sheets is a comfort, as always.
On my bedside table, there’s a copy of Don Quixote, a gift from Charles-Émile. He took great pains with the inscription, writing half a page. He thought it pertinent to define Bovarysm, to specify, there is, in this magnificent work, the world as it is and the world as Don Quixote wanted to see it. I usually open Don Quixote at random—any given page offers up all the comedy in the world, spinning free as the blades of a windmill. I appreciate the onslaught against religion, the straight-shooting, prosaic Sancho. Seething, I rip out the page where Charles-Émile waxes poetic—a real gem, or so he thought—insipidly mixing old rose, cardboard armour, orphans to rescue, and kingdoms to protect...
Today is the fifteenth of September. There’s a vernissage tonight organized by a group of painters, including Clarisse. I have to make an appearance, after filing my article. I’ll have to sleep at Bé and Jeanne’s, or at Clarisse’s place. I don’t know if I can handle Clarisse and her moods the night after an opening. Do I have the strength? I decide to stay at Bé’s.
I would gladly do without this outing, but Clarisse would hate me. She’s been so busy putting together the exhibit that I haven’t seen her for weeks. Tante Jeanne begged her not to participate. “This is not the time,” she pleaded, trembling. “This country has never seen a bloodier election.” All the more reason, according to Clarisse, to go on with our lives, with work, to say no to the persecution and the silence thrust upon us. Has Jeanne forgotten what we’re made of? “Her mind is starting to go,” Clarisse says. “Everything that lives softens with age.” The last time we saw each other, when we had lunch at Bé’s one Sunday, Clarisse was furious. “Cancel?” she screamed at Jeanne. “You might as well tell me to go hang myself!”
I’m incredibly emotional as I leave the house to go to the newspaper office to drop off my article. I walk around the house three times, making sure all the doors are closed, the shutters locked. Should I take the car or should I walk? I could take shortcuts to try to shake the men who are tailing me. The idea that they would catch me and tip my car over into the ravine has been nagging at me since morning. In the end, I slip on my flats. I will walk through the narrow lanes and alleyways that wind down to the bottom of the hill to get to the church square, and from there I’ll get a taxi.
In the garden, I look for what caused the thud I heard in the night, which gave me such a fright. It turns out it was neither a papaya nor a soursop, and in any event, they’re not in season. An object right beneath my bedroom window stops me dead in my tracks. There, under the bougainvillea, lies a large rock, one of those enormous stones polished by the sea. It must weigh at least four kilos. How could anyone have thrown it so far? I stand there for a long time, rattled, staring at the object. Two crosses are painted on the rock, in blood and tar.
On the road, I’m a robot, my knees are about to give way. I pull myself up stiffly, I fight against fear, I fight against my limbs, which somehow are no longer quite attached to my body. I fight against this body which itself is no longer flesh, not muscle and bone. I am no more than a bundle of raffia carried by the wind off the mountain. If they dared throw that rock right under my window, what will they do next?
When I finally get to the office, it’s hard to tell what my colleagues are thinking. They’re skittish, like prey. They all look constipated. Several are too busy to talk to me, flustered by the harshness of the daily routine, their personal lives, all their worries and concerns. It’s a heavy burden. There’s Jacques Lafontaine, whose wife left him. He hugs me without a word, but his body speaks for him—he’s a broomstick, floating in his rumpled suit. They say his wife, Andrée Claude, ran off with a makout, a man named Justin Bertrand, a real skunk, a rainmaker in Babiole. When Papa Dòk came to power he was appointed Minister of Health and got as rich as Croesus. Jacques is getting death threats, and suffering in silence: he can’t ask for divorce or see his children. One afternoon last month, he dropped me off at home and we had coffee. He told me a bit about what was going on. He blamed himself for not having been able to hang on to Andrée Claude. “What can we do,” I replied, “against their talons? The problem isn’t so much whether you’d have been able to keep her or not; those scavengers leave us the scraps they choose.” When I came back from the kitchen with the tray and the cups, I saw he’d laid out his treasures—photos of his children and his wife.
Salnave gets up from his desk to come hug me, to welcome me. I’d rather not think about what this act of courage will cost him; even here I’ve made enemies. Some people believe I’m jeopardizing the newspaper, that I should be more moderate now. Salnave asks for news from the street; he’s about to head home.
“Brace yourself. It’s no picnic. It took me almost two hours to get here!”
He looks surprised.
“You know, it’s not that it’s especially long. It’s just hard to get around. The streets are packed with people, everyone’s disoriented. There are crowds everywhere, people dashing out to get supplies as if they were afraid of a siege or a hurricane. And the military has invaded the square in the front of Saint-Charles. When I got there to take a taxi, there were four tarped army trucks in the square.”
Salnave is livid.
“This is a provocation!” he cries. “They’re trying to scare the students, keep them locked up at home night and day. They know they meet there, in the square.”
“Most of the women who run stands under the flamboyants weren’t there when I went by. They’ve fled the killings too, and the soldiers who robbed them or refused to pay.”
“It was the same craziness this morning at rush hour. People were panicking, everyone was afraid, looking up at the houses the night marked with tar and blood.”
I lower my voice and tell him about the stone I found under my window, the cars on duty at night, at the bottom of the hill.
Salnave goes pale.
“You have to watch out, Mika!” His voice catches. “They’re tightening the noose, and they’ll stop at nothing, you know that. Did you listen to the radio this morning?”
“No, I can’t take it anymore. I don’t want to listen to him! Any more and I’m going to throw the radio in the garbage.”
“Well, just imagine, all the stations have been ordered to read a chapter of Duvalier’s catechism every day on the airwaves.”
“Bastards! Fear gnaws at our bellies, and they’re celebrating.”
“Truer words, Mika. Never in their entire existence have these—these…subhumans experienced such joy. Apparently, two of them, two of Chambelland’s men, who’d just been recruited and appointed commanders of the Volunteers in their district, dropped dead, apparently struck down for having tested the extent of their powers, the boundless authority that sanctions the worst madness. It turns out that being aware of your own dominance, which these men abuse shamelessly, is a deadly drug.”
“May they all die of intoxication, drunk on the knowledge that they are so feared. And as quickly as possible, so we can be rid of them.”
“We’re not going to be able to get rid of these bastards so quickly, Mika. The propaganda machine is running full tilt. Devilish power like this is fed by fierce ideologues, we mustn’t forget that, and they’re propping up the regime. You wouldn’t believe the feathers this son of Lucifer has been able to tuck in his cap, without even really having to ask. His cabal is full of men who for some obscure reason want to earn their halo, that prestige—among them the two Blanchet men, another one, Berrouet, and Boyer, Bayard, Désinor, the goon Pomereau, and of course the infamous Mercier, the man of a thousand faces. And Jean Magloire, you must have heard of him; he runs L’Œdipe. He’s at the head of that team, who claim that their hands are clean.”
“Tell me, Salnave, is it true that those men helped create his…catechism?”
“Are you surprised?
“My sister Clarisse told me otherwise, that it was the work of an insignificant little group that calls itself the Sovereign.”
“The ones who bark away on the radio, singing Duvalier’s praises? You mean St-Lot, Dominique, Laferrière, that riffraff? Actually, they’re more like enforcers, maybe. Secondary propagandists? I’ve heard they’re recruiting students, luring them into fake revolutionary ambushes and then throwing them to the dogs. These marauders have some skills; long before Duvalier came to power, they helped put together Duvalier’s Essential Works. What a peculiar, mediocre book.”
Salnave and I chat, and around us the typewriters clatter as loudly as ever, drowning out our voices. The secretary tells me that a meeting scheduled for the following Monday has been postponed indefinitely. That the article I just filed, which I worked so hard on, will be published at some point in the future. I take it in, unflinching. The newspaper is on shaky ground, like everything else.
A swarm of insignificant, anxious bourgeois crowd the doors of the hall at Bas Peu de Chose: pursed lips, bowties, women in formal dress, stiletto heels and red nails, forced laughter. It goes either way, here; dread makes people either laugh or tremble. As soon as I get there, I want to run away. For a moment I think I might faint, and I begin to run out of air as Clarisse takes the stage on behalf of the artists’ group. But she’s spent and in the end says very little. Those who get it read between the lines, enthralled by one of her paintings—the largest, entitled Quand descend la nuit—as night falls, a reference to Apollinaire, who foresaw totalitarianism looming in Europe: Let night fall on our foreboding, unbroken path of blood. Clarisse’s paintings are becoming more and more abstract; every day her lines, her curves and colours are increasingly uninhibited, bound only by her mood.
I don’t stay long. I’m being watched, tracked. I can’t stop seeing the stone under my window. As I leave, I snap a picture of a poster on the front of the building: Ten Voices for a New Beginning, it reads. The whole group made it; it’s a huge canvas. There’s something oppressive about it, a ruthlessness redolent of the German expressionists.