II

THE MONTHS PASSED. Things and people continued to slide along, some into truth, some into falseness. I’m beginning to write again in this journal, which is going nowhere. Sometimes life only moves inside of words. And when everything is going wrong, you should record it all. Writing is my way of moving my ass. Mam Jeanne tells me that I should keep writing everything down. “You have to record what’s happening now. One day you won’t be there anymore. The present will have become the past. And it will die out if no one has written down what was and what wasn’t.” So here is what was and what wasn’t. What is. And what’s waiting for its time to be over.

More and more funeral processions are marching down Burial Street. Mam Jeanne says that death has begun to chase the living faster. And that they—weary from a war they cannot win—are letting themselves be caught without much resistance, and lie obediently in their coffins. The funeral processions are growing in number. But they move forward sluggishly and more sparsely, one quantity canceling out the other. Maybe it’s because, whether the dead person was old or had just been born, their friends had already died before them. Or because those friends are refusing to walk up and down the entrance to the great cemetery multiple times per month, preferring instead to stay at home and drink tea and liquor and remember their dead on their own, because the ceremony has now been repeated so many times that it’s lost its meaning. There are so many dead that soon they will have to fight each other in order to find a spot in the great cemetery. Only Monsieur Pierre, the old retired accountant, persists in marching with everyone, coming now twice a week to accompany dead people he hadn’t known to their graves. He always wears the same suit and the same hat. When he dies, burials won’t be the same anymore. Monsieur Pierre has become an important part of the ensemble, kind of like the proof that someone has really died and that people are paying their respects. Sharp tongues say that it’s not because of his humanism, nor is it a sign of empathy. They say it’s a mania of a crazy person who takes himself for a genius, who spends his time crunching numbers with dead people, his presence at the cemetery serving no purpose other than to confirm his hypotheses. I know that there are people who always bet on the worst. I know some of those people. But when he joins processions, the old accountant will lay his hand on a boy’s head or let it be taken by a little girl who seems to have been forgotten by the other marchers. A hand that for a long time was poking around in other people’s financials and is now trembling with age can change its function. It can become—despite all the calluses and rough patches—as gentle as fresh water, and soothe a child’s pain, if only for a moment. The little professor likes to believe that we are what we do with our hands. The old accountant uses his worn-out hand to soothe children’s pain. So it’s no matter if he’s doing calculations. Everyone calculates and measures. Except those who play to lose. Who don’t calculate anything. Who just let things happen. Everyone calculates. And I don’t trust the words of people who distance themselves from other people. Oftentimes people talk without any knowledge, their eyes filled with self-interest. Maybe when Monsieur Pierre was an accountant he had kept corrupt officials in check, and they had spread the rumor about his obsession as revenge. Oftentimes reputations are made from what is false. I saw Wodné at work. And his gang. One of them is missing today. Victor, his most loyal lieutenant, had taken a position as a translator for the Occupation forces. There’s a scholarship for those who specialize in interpretation. Marcia, his girlfriend, had called a meeting. She denounced him as a traitor to the movement. It’s almost surely because she suspects him of going out with a foreign translator. This is indeed the case. The couple came to Kannjawou one night. At first, Victor had wanted to hide from Sophonie. But his companion wouldn’t stop asking him, in English, “What’s wrong, sweeeeetie? This place is wonderful.” And he finally gave in. Dancing with his sweeeeetie. Rock. Kompa. You can’t spend your whole life watching funerals and giving your time to organizations that are trying to change a world that doesn’t want to change. And simultaneous interpretation is good. From one body to another. From one mouth to another. Yes, sweeeeetie. They left the bar, already kissing. The next morning, very early, Victor went to see Sophonie on Burial Street to ask her to pretend she hadn’t seen anything. The meeting that Marcia had called for lasted a long time. Wodné and the others ignored the abandoned woman’s tears, arguing that the militant thinks only in general terms, and one particular case is of no interest to him. They defended Victor, claiming that the “revolution” will need specialists. No one believed them. In any case, their meetings are attracting fewer and fewer people. They can no longer fill the meeting room at the Cultural Center. More and more, they are beginning to resemble cult leaders, who predict the worst and vow to burn you at the stake if you aren’t a member of their church. Some of the girls had suggested a large meeting with students from other departments in the university. About their specific problems. No, says Wodné’s gang. Only humanities departments. Joëlle was their spokesperson. Why bother exchanging ideas with people studying medicine or architecture? They don’t have anything to say. It’s difficult for me to see her like this. Hard. Standing next to these children of terror, who spare nothing and no one. They’re frightening. Even for the professors. It reeks of cults and the Gulag. Terror in the service of a lie. As for Victor, he’s fleeing the neighborhood. Deception is too easy to see in his position. The children are good readers and give him military salutes, saying, “Give me five cents, Corporal Conzé.” It was Mam Jeanne who taught them about Conzé, who had betrayed the Resistance during the first Occupation. His victory: Charlemagne Péralte was crucified by the Marines, and the photo of him nailed to the door was distributed throughout the country by helicopter. She also taught them about the young people who would dive into the dirty water of the sea, hoping to find dimes and quarters there from the ships that had arrived at the docks. “At least they weren’t lying. They were going to look for those five cents themselves, at risk of drowning. While these lovely shit-talkers know only how to point fingers at other people and to hold out their paws. To betray and to beg.” She hasn’t yet poured cat piss onto Victor’s head, but she will. Monsieur Pierre doesn’t do any harm to anybody by following funeral processions. All things considered, I still prefer an old, slow walker to a gang of false prophets who create misfortune like other people create guitars, kites, or sailboats. In the little professor’s library there’s a collection of poetry titled I Don’t Forgive Misfortune.2 I haven’t read it. So I don’t know if the verses are good and the themes interesting. I like the title’s anger. I am nothing. Or almost nothing. As Mam Jeanne says over and over again, when you live on a street that ends with dead people, you’re well situated to know that the day when the sun rises without you is near. And that our absence won’t change anything in the grand scheme of things. The main thing is to fill this almost-nothing up with the right amount of something. Today, to fill up the nothing, I don’t forgive misfortune. I don’t forgive those who work for the creators of misfortune. Where they come from. Who they are. I envy the lunatic who stands in the middle of the street and spits on everyone who passes him. I envy Mam Jeanne and her bowl of cat piss. Sometimes I am ashamed of never having broken anyone’s jaw, of never even having thrown a stone. Mam Jeanne says that the only part of religion you should pay mind to is: never kill. All the rest is nonsense. “Loving your neighbor as yourself seems good in theory, but it’s not very realistic. It would be nice if we could just not kill.” There are all sorts of assassins in the streets. You can kill a country by signing the wrong treaty. You can kill a man by stealing his right to love. If all the nothings in the world arrested someone, the assassins wouldn’t be doing as well. A nothing plus a nothing does equal something. Yet it’s not the assassins who serve time. Halefort has been in the national prison, a few streets away from our own, twice. The neighborhood children arranged to bring him fresh bread, water, and candy. He smiles when he talks about that time. He was never fed so well as when he was in prison. Thanks to the children. But they didn’t bring anything to Jean, who had shut his wife up in a room to keep other men from looking at her. She couldn’t even go out onto the balcony to watch the dead pass by. And for two years, no living person could set eyes on her. Other than her assassin. Jean spent only two months in prison. The public prosecutor couldn’t prove that there had been gross negligence, not even violence or confinement. The good police commissioner abandoned the investigation and Jean returned home. But one night when he was passing in front of Mam Jeanne’s house she tipped a dose of cat piss onto his head. And the children never brought him anything while he was in prison. Nor afterwards, when he returned to settle back into the scene of the crime. Sometimes I look at Joëlle and I imagine that she’ll end up like that one day. Shut in. In Wodné’s shadow. Is it painful for me to think about this? I don’t know. Maybe I feel more nostalgia than true pain. A little as though she were already dead. And as though no one had yet come to pillage her tomb. As though she’s forgiven me. On Burial Street, we’re so close to the dead that we know they’ll forgive us for being less harsh towards those who rob their tombs than towards those who, with their words or with their fists, condemn the living to death.

THE OLD BOOKBINDER CLOSED HIS SHOP. Ever since the little professor stopped visiting our street, there hasn’t been anyone to bring him any work. In the evenings he plays cards with his buddy the shoemaker. Joseph and Jasmin. Since the bookbinder doesn’t see much anymore, the cobbler always wins. But I don’t think either one of them cares in the slightest about who wins and who loses. They drink a lot and have trouble standing up after the last round. They recruited Hans and Vladimir to accompany them to their respective beds. But the clever little imps sometimes put them into the same bed. When Joseph and Jasmin wake up, they chew the kids out. Why did you put me to bed here? You dirty old men! It’s a game between them. Maybe one day we’ll find Joseph and Jasmin interlaced in death. Hans and Vladimir call them the “ghosts.” When they pass by me when I’m sitting on my sidewalk curb, they say, “We’re going to take care of the ghosts.” But it’s not mean-spirited. It’s a way of looking forward, of assuring the two old men that they will remain in the street’s memory forever, now that they’ve each got one foot over the threshold of death. Of inscribing them in a time span much longer than the few months or few years that they’ve got left to live. Because a ghost never dies.

JULIO IS NO LONGER GOING OUT WITH THE YOUNG OFFICER WITH LONG HAIR. The handsome officers with long hair don’t stay long in the same position, or in the same place. And one day they end up losing their hair. He’s currently going out with a higher-ranking bald officer who must have had hair at one point. Julio seems less happy than before. When he was with the young officer with long hair, who was only at his second job, he could believe that he had been the one to choose him. And Julian loved to be with him, just as we all love our freedom. But everyone knows that the bald and high-ranking officer, who’s at his seventh job, is the only free one out of the two of them. When he wants sex, he goes in search of Julio. Whether it’s day or night. Bosses have flexible schedules. Julio no longer hurries to climb up into the white-painted Occupation vehicle when it stops at the end of the street. He walks towards it slowly, like he’s walking towards a terrible fate.

We all seem to be slipping into a terrible fate. In the mornings, Joseph and Jasmin listen to the news together. Since Jasmin is nearly deaf, they put the volume up as high as it will go, and we all hear what we already know. That this representative from this international organization has said that things are getting better, that the country is doing well. Or that that contingent from that country has been replaced by another contingent from a different country. That another body of some teenager has been found not far from a military base. That, like always, the investigators suspect it’s a suicide. That the electoral process is working well under the approving control of the Occupation forces. That the faculty at the state university has begun another strike. The loudmouth who practices in front of his mirror sometimes comes on the radio to talk about “scientific thought.” It must be because the comedians have had trouble finding jokes that make people laugh. Or because there’s a shortage of loud voices. They have to make up for the deficit, so they open their doors to clowns and usurpers.

THE LAST GOOD JOKE WAS THE ZOMBIE ATTACK. It toured the whole town, provoking laughs in homes and bars and even inspiring a few jokes on the radio. A theater troupe created a sketch from it that they performed in the public markets and on the steps of the chapels on festival days. Annoyed by this bit of ridiculousness invading his troops, the police chief put out a memo reminding everyone of the institution’s motto: to protect and serve, a job for which it’s difficult to gain respect. Impossible without the assistance and cooperation of the whole population. He then ordered stricter surveillance of the area surrounding the great cemetery. The lower-ranking police officers assigned to this task began making rounds that for a time slowed down the activities of Halefort’s gang. But the police officers were miserable and complained to each other about having passed the national exams to go to the capital, only to have to keep watch over dead people’s bedsides. The whispers grew louder. Put under pressure by this new surveillance, the pillagers asked Halefort, their boss, to make an arrangement with the unhappy guards. After all, even the guardian of Christ’s body abandoned his post. The police officers and tomb raiders sealed their deal one evening underneath Mam Jeanne’s window. The thieves agreed to share their profits and to be more discreet. For this they would be allowed to work in peace at regular hours, like office workers, and would receive a steady income. They would take turns allowing themselves to be arrested once a month for attempting to rob a coffin and would spend a few hours at the police station before being released with no charges. The agreement works perfectly and without any unforeseen problems. But the stability doesn’t necessarily make them happy. Halefort paid off his gambling and alcohol debts. He also cast aside his roguish persona, adopting a more respectable one instead. Even the old ladies in the neighborhood have begun to respond to his greetings. He doesn’t hide any more from his son, who has begun to see him regularly and seems less sickly and better clothed. But at night, while his subordinates are robbing the dead without any need to hurry, and loading the coffins into the cars of the national public transportation system, Halefort mopes around the streets and alleyways near Burial Street in a fit of nostalgia. Passers-by who are out late sometimes mistake him for a ghost. He has begun to disappear for a few days and return with a smile on his face. I suspect that he goes to open the tombs in suburban cemeteries to keep himself in the game and satisfy his thirst for risk. As for the police officers, whose job is less exciting than that of the grave robbers, they’ve won more hours of sleep. More time with their mistresses. And their prestige is growing in their respective communities. If one of their loved ones dies, they respond to calls for help from their community by bringing them a beautiful secondhand coffin, the proof that they’ve succeeded in the capital without forgetting their origins. At night, the noise of the pick-axes and shovels seems to me sometimes like something very far away, but also predictable, without the slightest surprise, and I feel even more alone when I write.

JUST AS BEFORE, ONE WEDNESDAY EVERY MONTH I GO WITH POPOL TO MEET SOPHONIE AT KANNJAWOU. We watch other people’s lives without speaking. Monsieur Régis stays faithful to the big gulps of whisky he drinks alone behind his desk. His wife calls him at all hours, inventing new insults each time. Sometimes the words are difficult and Monsieur Régis has to go consult Monsieur Vallières: “The Catholic Isabella called me a sybarite.” Monsieur Vallières is the only one of his customers to use words like that. Sybarite or not, Monsieur Régis sweats a lot. The more she calls, the more he sweats. One day he’ll slip in his own sweat. We can’t hear the words, but you can see from the courtyard that he’s losing all the water from his body and stammering, waving his arms like a drowning person.

In the Occupation forces and the NGO offices, new employees are constantly coming and going, in the name of democracy and the principle of rotation and also so that representatives from all countries can take advantage of the opportunity. One expert replaces another. And so the bar’s clientele changes, too, so quickly that Sophonie has a hard time memorizing the names of the customers. The tall blonde has left, replaced by a redhead in the same mold. The Three Musketeers, too. Other girls have come—girls who haven’t yet chosen between the local studs, who are always on the lookout, and the foreign executives. The local studs have in their favor their exotic shirts and their skill on the dance floor. Marc wears the same guayabera and has set his sights on an exhausted-looking psychologist who’s leading a project to reintegrate street children. The young foreign executives brag to the newcomers about how long they’ve been here and the safety they can offer. “If you want to better understand the culture of the country, to know the best beaches and to go hiking in the countryside, I’m your man. I already know the language and I’m used to the customs.” Soldiers have come, too, recognizable by their shaved heads and muscular bodies. But they’re rarer. Civil servants earn more money. Bars are like funeral processions: hearts are worn on people’s sleeves. At Kannjawou, the people don’t have any doubts, aside from Monsieur Vallières and the little brunette. As though they all have one-track minds. Happy are the bodies of the occupiers. The intellectuals who talk about structures and international events and the Occupation are first and foremost bodies. The children of Burial Street know this. At the Cultural Center, when Wodné asks them to draw something that has to do with the Occupation, they draw more bodies than things. It’s strange that Wodné has asked them to do this. He doesn’t like to draw anymore. It was a long time ago that he drew imaginary cities with Popol. These days, I believe that he doesn’t like anything except for hate and possession. And that improbable thing he’s been preparing for. As kids, we dreamed of a city in celebration. I don’t see Wodné organizing a celebration. He does, however, have a happy body, like the occupiers. At the university, he’ll show up at the slightest skirmish between a student and a professor or a member of the administration. Like the big tough guys at the front of the rival gangs during carnival processions who are hoping that some moron will be the first to throw a punch so that they can have the immense pleasure of hitting someone weaker than them. Wodné has a nose for sniffing out crisis and he gloats with joy whenever it directs him to a new one. A body arching in triumph. Especially ever since the professor stopped visiting the neighborhood. I’ve noticed that Joëlle always walks behind him and speaks in a monotone. One of the kids drew the couple, without labeling their names. You could see the man in front and the woman behind, with a rope linking them together. Wodné didn’t want to say anything about the drawing under the pretext that the kid had gotten distracted—it happens—and drawn something unrelated to the theme. Sophonie had intervened: “We have to respond to everything, or we won’t respond to anything. And then the powers are all alike.” Sophonie doesn’t often speak up at the Center. There are even some idiots who think that it’s better that way, because of her job. And because she abandoned her studies a long time ago. But Sophonie has the children’s confidence. Wodné gets tired quickly. The children are more malleable for indoctrination than the young adults. It’s not enough to tell them, “You’re traitors to yourselves,” giving them a bad conscience so that they’ll become scared and throw their hearts into the trashcan. They never miss a chance to ask, “Why”?

“Why are you the boss?”

“Why doesn’t the little professor come to read to us anymore?”

“Why don’t you ever laugh?”

“Do you ever cry? What does love mean to you?”

Yes, Wodné, why does Joëlle say, “He gives an order, I carry it out?” Why are you scared of children? Children are the uncontrollable force that walks into the middle of the wind. Popol likes them well enough without being very good with them. As for me, all I know how to do is to read them stories. But I’m ashamed of doing so in the little professor’s place. And I have a very hard time listening to their own stories. Children are capable of strange analogies, and woe to those who claim to understand or expect them. A child is never a stopped clock, except when misfortune strikes them too hard and they stop daring to move. Children are traveling all the time—rising up to the sky, descending into the depths of the sea, dancing with colors and words, bringing together the living and the dead and the young and the old, replacing reality with dreams whenever reality is bad, showing you a dream while saying, “Look, this is real” and looking at you with a challenge in their eyes whenever you’d like to say that their dream isn’t true. And then all of a sudden they become pragmatic and more realistic than you, saying that if Father Christmas did ever exist he must be quite dead, given that he’s never come to Burial Street. And if he’s not dead—you never know, there’s no dust-covered tomb bearing his name in the great cemetery—it must be that he’s busy elsewhere. They surprise you, explain to you that that all these stories with their fairy godmothers, snowmen, white dolls, and mermaids who live in the sea are things that are put in books with pretty illustrations to help us forget how dry the bread is, on the nights when we do even have bread. Children move you all the time, drag you places you don’t want to go, empty Pandora’s box, bring your old secrets to light, take your mask off, reveal your fakeries to you when you’re least expecting it, see the invisible rope between the man walking in front and the woman walking behind and the power struggles behind the nice-sounding words. Sophonie is the only one who manages to follow them without getting tired. When she speaks, they listen to her. Ordinarily, she lets Wodné and his gang be and doesn’t get mixed up too much in the Center’s affairs. But when it has to do with children, she’s the boss. Without wanting to be. The children chose her. The one who understands the words from our mouths before the others do, the one who does things because of us and for us, without taking the lead or treading on others’ toes—that’s her, our leader. And the leader said, “We have to respond to everything.” Joëlle stayed mute. In the silence, I heard the distance between the two sisters. And I wondered if Anselme had ever read in the cards that his two daughters wouldn’t follow the same path, that he would perhaps have two halves of a kannjawou. Two pieces of a party. Two life paths going in opposite ways. Poor Anselme. Anselme, with his worn-out body, hoping that his two daughters would support him, each one taking an arm to help him walk towards his homeland one last time. That a car would come to take them to Arcahaie, to the land that hadn’t belonged to him for a long time. That no longer belongs to anyone. Even the old soldiers and the shady lawyers who seized them don’t want it any longer. Land that now belongs to cacti and dust, where experts and foreigners on vacation stop their cars in order to photograph the barren landscape. Anselme, who’s preparing for an imaginary voyage to his native village where vaccines*, drums, dancing, and food are waiting for him and his daughters. Anselme, who believes he’s still rich enough to offer everyone a babaco* with cows, pigs, clairin, and liquor. Anselme, who has returned to childhood. Anselme, who believes that his daughters are taking care of the preparations. Anselme, the remnants of a body. With his useless legs. His ruined card games. Anselme, who knew how to say to a woman, “By the virtues of the ace of spades and the trickery of the jack of diamonds, a man will enter into your life, love you for a little while, and then leave you,” or to a young man, “By the power of the king of hearts and the beauty of the queen of clubs, you will love two women; the first will give you everything, but you’ll leave her for a pretty picture; the second one will take everything from you. You’ll wander the seas for a long time, and you’ll die at sea on the night of a full moon.” Or else, “You, the old man with the broken body: life still has surprises in store for you. If you’re a just man, justice will be served, and you will find again what you thought you had lost.” That’s Anselme talking to himself, pretending to talk to others. Anselme and his divinations. Anselme and his ramblings. Who hadn’t foreseen that others would take his land away from him. That he would be forced to sell it for a low price. Who hadn’t foreseen Port-au-Prince and the little house on Burial Street. Immacula and the little baby, who came too early. Before they had even adapted to the noisiness of the neighborhood. And then the second baby, three years later. Another girl. And the stress when the piastres* from the forced sale of the land ran out. The loans, Immacula’s little side job as a nurse’s aid. And then one day, just like that, with no warning, chest pains. And the older child returning from school, asking “Where’s Mamma?” And the response: “Be a very big girl.” And ever since then, she has been big enough for three people. Even bigger when her father began to lose his wits. Anselme, who had returned to living in his native village, without moving anywhere. Anselme, who doesn’t know that today, kannjawous are held in the bars of rich people, and that Sophonie carries glasses and plates in one of those bars. Anselme, who doesn’t need to know that the route to Arcahaie is lined with soldiers who don’t speak our country’s language. Anselme, who doesn’t need to know that these days, the fortune tellers are the gentlemen in suits, rich from per diems and risk premiums, who come and go, come again, leave again, decide on the best times to devalue the currency, to replace a bridge with another one, to blow up the side of a mountain with dynamite, to leave—but it’s not any time soon, because “There are so many things still to do here.” Anselme, with his legs of skin and bone. His drumstick legs, as the children say. They’re right. The whole world is bodies. Relationships between one body and the next. Between a body and itself. Between a body and space. In the streets, the children see more tanks and armored vehicles, more flags and emblems, than actual soldiers and officials. But an object that’s out of place surprises no one. You can move an object around yourself. For tanks and armored vehicles you only need an instruction manual to learn how to move them. As for flags, every time someone raises one, someone else takes it down again. Objects have no value in and of themselves; their value is in the strength of the hand that exercises power over them. But for a person, their presence is the proof of their power. When someone comes and settles down in your house, telling you, “Leave, you can’t stay here,”—or when they say, “Stay here. Don’t move. Be quiet and leave me be”—that’s the proof that they’ve asserted their power. And you’re nothing more than the object on which they’ve asserted it. The bodies of the occupiers are free. They can leave, stay, go away again, return. At Kannjawou, Sophonie witnessed a horrible thing that perhaps might be common, seeing as there are other bars and other embassies. One night, when not many people were there, a young officer had left the bar, slightly tipsy. Ten minutes later, he returned, his face distraught. He had rejoined his table. There were murmurs and telephone calls. Then a car from his embassy and a diplomatic official showed up looking for him. The next day, he was put on a plane. As he had been driving back to his apartment, the car he was driving had hit someone, projecting him into a ditch. The man had died from the shock. One pedestrian. One car that was driving too fast. One body in a plane. One body in a ditch. One guy, one ambassador. A living body and a dead body. One who will have the choice of remembering or forgetting. One who might possibly be forgotten by everyone. The identity of the dead man was covered up. Maybe he had children, a lover. But sometimes those who survive aren’t able to remember. Sometimes surviving is a full-time job that burns up all your energy. When you don’t know how your day is going to end, there’s no yesterday and no tomorrow for you, no dreams and no memories. Maybe this is why there aren’t as many people in the funeral processions. The living are too busy not dying; they don’t have the time anymore to accompany the dead.

AT KANNJAWOU, SOPHONIE IS NOW THE MOST SENIOR SERVER. Fritznel asked for special time off to visit his dying mother in a village in Grand’Anse. He never came back. The last anyone heard, the old woman lived for longer than expected, and so the prodigal son—who had to do something while he was waiting for her to die—took up working in the field again, regaining a taste for outdoor festivals and home-grown tomatoes. He announced that he would never set foot in the capital again, not for anything in the world. From time to time he’ll send the owner vegetables from his garden to remind him of his existence. He’s part of the latest wave of lunatics who have returned to the countryside. That’s what Monsieur Régis says. He takes the vegetables home for himself. Not everything is shared with the customers. Abner was serving himself beer a little too often and was beginning to stagger while at work. Finally, the owner called him out on it, telling him that a man should have a sense of moderation. Abner chose to hand in his resignation so as to avoid being fired, playing the indignant victim while stashing two last bottles in his backpack. He found a position in another bar and graduated from beer to whiskey. Two younger guys replaced him. Marcello, although that isn’t his real name. But he had looked for a job for a long time using his given name without finding anything. A name, as we all know, can give the wrong impression. After careful consideration, he decided to adopt the name Marcello due to a slight resemblance to the Brazilian soccer player, a resemblance that no one would have noticed if he had introduced himself as Boniface Beauséjour. “Marcello? It’s true, you do look a little bit like him,” and so the deal was sealed. To add to his story, he tells everyone that he plays left wing on an amateur team every Saturday morning, even though the only thing he plays is the Sunday lottery, using half the money he gets from tips. The owner also hired Franklin, who’s a little older but who comes across well and plays neither soccer nor the lottery. He’s very kind. Too kind, according to the cook, who has very strict ideas about manliness. Franklin tried to explain that it wasn’t his fault, that when he was a child, his parents had whipped him and his mother had recited novena prayers, even consulted a bokor*, but neither the spankings nor the nondenominational prayers had changed anything. He preferred dolls to soccer, except when the soccer players were very good-looking. The owner interrupted him then, saying that considering the number of homosexual customers he had, he might as well have homosexual servers, too. And at any rate, people’s sexuality was their own affair, as long as they didn’t leave condoms in his bathrooms.

MONSIEUR VALLIÈRES IS STILL THE MOST REGULAR CUSTOMER. Anyone who’s there for the first time says yes to his invitation, falling into his trap: he buys their first beer, and they sit down at his table. But quickly they grow bored of his ramblings and begin to throw desperate glances at the other tables, hoping that some good soul will come to rescue them from Alexander the Great’s contentions with death, or the usage of rhetoric in the Catiline Orations, or other topics of conversation that are of no interest to them. Finally they give in to the siren call of the party, leaving Monsieur Vallières alone with his ghosts and heading to the dance floor, beers in hand. He continues to lecture gloomily about the uncultured people who mix up Haiti and Tahiti, or the Catiline Orations and the new book by the trendy novelist whose name he can’t remember, or the people who believe that the myth of the Amazons came about at the same time as the New World…. He comes across as too old, and some of the young customers have complained to the owner about how he spoils the mood. Pleasure is no less totalitarian than pain. He wants to dominate the place. No other person can stand him. There’s a novel I borrowed from the little professor’s library, I no longer remember which one, in which a dictator bulldozes a shantytown, leaving standing only the little house of the woman he wants. He watches it from his palace using a pair of all-powerful binoculars. At the bar, there are dictators. Why is this old guy hanging out in a bar for young people, as though to remind us that there’s other things in life besides ourselves and the things we do? Kannjawou is ours. The owner reserves all his fear for his wife and has none left for others. Kannjawou is mine. He ordered the security guard to show the insolent complainers the door. Lifting his head from his whisky, he confided in Sophonie and the other servers. “Nothing lasts. They’ll all leave. And one day this bar will be nothing but a memory. A relic. Its popularity will end with the Occupation. No one will come here anymore. Except him. One day, only he and I will be left. They’re looking to gulp life down—here, elsewhere. Everywhere. They destroy the world in order to pay for their travels. But he chose my bar, and only death will chase him away. Pray that he lives for a long time, so you can keep your jobs.” But there’s not much chance of that. The employees will leave, surely, when the clients do. Or before. Franklin is saving up money to open up a hair salon and return to where he came from. Marcello hopes that his name will open other doors for him. With his experience, he might one day be offered a job at a fancy hotel. I don’t know what Sophonie’s plans are. But I believe that she’s given enough, and that one day she’ll decide that weakness is human and that she, too, has the right to be mean and greedy. To take more than she gives. Yes, soon the owner will find himself alone. And he’ll need pretexts other than the onslaught of clients and the emergencies of the job to escape his wife’s calls. Monsieur Vallières won’t hold on for very long. He’s acting more and more like a dying person. He left the management of his store to his eldest son. The younger son collects the rents from his buildings downtown. And his daughter forbids him from seeing his grandchildren whenever she decides he’s had too much to drink. One of the three has to come find him on the evenings when he falls asleep at the table, his face buried in his folded arms. I imagine they argue a lot beforehand about which one of them has to perform the chore of coming to collect the old man. It’s easy to believe that one night he won’t be able to lift his head again, and his children will bring home only a lifeless body to be buried in the new cemetery, in the northern part of the city. His funeral will feature a procession of new cars from which his heirs and old acquaintances, dressed up in new outfits, will descend. He won’t have the right to the “infinite laughter of the sea” nor “this quiet roof, where doves walk by.” After all, it’s his fault, Wodné would say. He only had to instill in them the taste of beauty, rather than a taste for business. But I doubt anyway that Wodné has read Aeschylus or Valéry. They’re too abstract, a waste of time in his eyes—just as they are for his businessmen, his supposed enemies. In his little circle of rebels without diplomas, he can condemn powerful businessmen without much risk. And yet there are two things he has in common with them. A complete ignorance of the principle of loss. And a fierce hatred for mystery and dreams. Or maybe just one thing, but it counts for everything: hatred, pure and simple.

SANDRINE IS GONE. She threw a party, her good-bye kannjawou, in an unremarkable bar. The owner is a former cooperation officer-turned-restaurateur who sometimes walks around with his dog, whom he clearly prefers to the customers. He doesn’t know anything about the business. The proof of this is that he hired Abner, who drinks as much as the customers do. Abner’s the one who told Sophonie all this. Parties happen one after the other and none of them are quite the same. For her good-bye party, the little brunette had chosen kitschy lamps designed to look like the moon, a neighborhood without passersby, and a new bar, and every guest had to pay for his own drink. Popol and Sophonie weren’t among those chosen to attend. Only her work colleagues, all foreigners, plus one Belgian and one Spaniard from her dance class, were invited. The sole local present stayed off to the side and didn’t mingle with the others. It was the jealous boyfriend of a cultural attaché; the man had once almost thrown the attaché out the window of their apartment—which she paid for in full—one evening when she accused him of saying nothing but insults in front of their guests. The embassy had covered up the whole affair, advising the attaché to get her ribs fixed at her own expense and with complete discretion and to choose better sexual partners next time. Ever since, the couple has come to an arrangement. The attaché continues to pay for the apartment. The stud has the right to the room in the back, where he shuts himself up whenever she has distinguished guests over. He can accompany her when she goes out on the condition that he remain discreet. As the little brunette and her friends were talking about the job that she would soon take in some Asian country, he was drinking a local beer at the bar. His eyes were staring vacantly into space, and no doubt his thoughts were empty, too. After a quick stop in Britain, enough time to see her parents and her first nephew, the little brunette would leave to offer her services to another sick country, where typhoons had inflicted damage that local leaders must be incapable of fixing.

EVER SINCE THE WEDNESDAY NIGHT WHEN I HAD COME OUT OF MY ROOM TO FIND THREE BODIES INTERTWINED— one of them must have opened the door at some point to let some air in—the little brunette hadn’t come back to Burial Street, nor had she spoken to Sophonie on any of the nights she had been at Kannjawou. Of course, she came to Kannjawou less frequently during the weeks preceding her departure. She wasn’t as frantic and frightened as she had been back when she was lurking in shadowy corners and trying to stay hidden, like a small animal venturing into a wide-open space where it knows that it will almost certainly be devoured by a more dangerous animal. Fearing the bite and yet still looking for it. She changed. Became less sad, more lighthearted. She was already elsewhere. As though in her head, she had already cast off everything she’d experienced in this country. The tears. Marc. That one strange night of love when she had received as much as she had given and given as much as she had received. On her last night, Marc had tried to ask her to dance. She refused, shaking her head. He insisted. She refused again. With a smile this time. I think it was the smile that killed him. He paused for a minute, motionless. Like a rooster without a comb, who realizes that his very presence is ridiculous and becomes ashamed of himself. The worst thing for a clown is to feel as though there is nothing left of himself other than his clown suit. That if you took off the suit, there would be nothing underneath. And there he was, a ghost sticking out his guayabera-clad chest. But a predator doesn’t stay dead for long. A hundred times consider putting on your guayabera again. I wonder what relationship he has with the woman who washes it. There must be a mother or a servant who takes care of his clothes for him and serves him coffee while he puts the finishing touches on his act. Maybe when it’s time for him to leave, he holds his arms out to the woman and says, “Pass me my clothes.” Like surgeons when they enter the operating room. A surgeon doesn’t die from having failed one operation. As long as there are still more bodies…So the guayabera-man pulled himself together, glancing around to make sure no one had caught him looking at himself in the mirror, then left to go to another party. Resuscitated. For some people, shame doesn’t stick around very long. Shame can kill. And they want to live. Their last will: to still be around tomorrow. To take advantage of everything. To eat up someone else’s ass, pussy, heart. To guzzle air, time, rivers, cities, highways, skyscrapers, paths, beltways, the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, archipelagoes, continents, bridges, the water that passes under the bridges, the humans who throw themselves into the water. To devour the world, taking ogres as their models. And yet Marc can’t be very rich. He must live in a house similar to those on Burial Street. If it’s a servant who washes his shirts, he must have trouble paying her at the end of the month without calling one of his conquests for help. If it’s his mother, she must do everything for both of them: laundry, work, dishes. Prepare the water for their baths. If it’s a servant, over time she must have developed the ruses and powers of a mistress, learning how to get by with the little he gives her. Inventing hot meals. Blackmailing him. Threatening to leave, or to burn his shirt. “Who else besides me would agree to work in these conditions?” Wait for him in bed, knowing that he’ll return to her after he’s chased after Sandrine, Corinne, and the others. If it’s his mother, she must be embarrassed when her friends ask her, “What is your son doing?” One day, she will die from grief while the son in question is strutting around in a guayabera in a trendy bar. Maybe one morning we’ll see Marc walking down our street at the front of a funeral procession. A procession made up of farmers ill at ease in their nicest clothes, and humble folk who’ve never set foot in a bar like Kannjawou. Nor in a bar like the one we went to with the little professor. Nor in any bar, for that matter. People who don’t participate in society life, who never leave their houses except to make a modest salary. If it’s a servant who does his laundry and prepares his meals, maybe one day she’ll put rat poison into his bowl of rice and watch him kick the bucket before taking off. Mam Jeanne tells a story about a servant-mistress who killed her lover-boss. Not because of all the paychecks she had never received because he could never pay them. Nor because of the real mistresses who spent the night in the bed she had to make in the morning. It was just because when they made love he refused to kiss her. I’m a woman, so kiss me. I have lips, too, just like your stuck-up mistresses. If it’s his mother, maybe one morning he’ll discover that her old heart stopped while she was sitting on a low chair in front of the portable stove, leaning over to light the coals so that she could make coffee for him. Will his current conquest walk at his side, dignified, pale, and concerned in her mourning attire? Or will he refuse to let her attend, so that he can keep death as his one area of truth? Or will she refuse to accompany him? She came to find joy, not death. Go grieve, and return to me afterwards.

THE LAST NIGHT SANDRINE WAS AT KANNJAWOU, DESPITE THE CUSTOMERS’ YOUTH AND THE INTENSITY OF THEIR SWAYING HIPS, AN OLD SONG THAT MAM JEANNE ADORES TO HUM CAME INTO MY HEAD. She uses it as shorthand for describing people who resemble things. They go, go, go this way, the little puppets… It makes me laugh to see her turn her old hands in circles when she hums it, looking suddenly like a little kid as she pronounces a final judgment on this man that she’s known since childhood or that public personality or this or that neighborhood boy or girl, all of whom share the same disastrous situation of having missed out on their truths. They go, go, go this way… Three little turns, and then they go away…

Mademoiselle, would you like to dance? But no one uses those dated phrases anymore. After sending Marc away, the little brunette agreed to dance with another man. They began spinning on the dance floor. Then, forgetting the man, she began to dance all by herself. Responding to the call of the music. There was nothing but her and the music. For the first time, she was no longer the pitiable sight of a body seeking indifference, begging for a partner who would treat her as though he were doing her a favor, touch her as one might touch an affectionate dog—with a distracted, forced caress before sending it back to its kennel. For the first time, her dancing was free instead of forced, pleading; it didn’t beg anyone: torture me, knead me, break me, manipulate me. For the first time, her body wasn’t crying out, “I want you to love me, I know you don’t love me, it’s okay if you just pretend, don’t even pretend, do whatever you want, but just do it with me, with my body.” People can also become respectable through their bodies. Freedom makes itself known through the body. Mam Jeanne tells how, during the first Occupation, the Americans participated in the white slave trade, importing Dominican prostitutes. One teenage girl brought here by force had sliced off the genitals of a U.S. Marine. The Marine nonetheless promised to bring her with him back to his country. Haitian women had helped the other prostitutes hide her. Proper and righteous mothers with their own daughters to raise had taken her under their roofs. Despite her whiteness and her profession. The little prostitute had become the most Haitian of all the Dominicans. At the end of the Occupation, she returned to her home country. She was less pretty than when she had arrived. But she was more beautiful. So yes, people become respectable through their bodies. Everyone at the bar was looking at Sandrine. I think Marc saw, like the rest of us did, how that body had learned to live for itself, to move for itself. To love itself, finally. Even Monsieur Vallières, lost in the history of the Latin world, sensed that something new—maybe even something exceptional—was happening. He lifted his head from his table and began to shout: Isadora, Isadora! At the end of her dance, the little brunette smiled at Sophonie. Popol was waiting on the wall. I had gone to sit down with Monsieur Vallières, for long enough to ask him, why Isadora? Her name is Sandrine. He told me about the American dancer whose body had been a revolution. I looked at him, stunned. It was because of his reference to the United States, where, according to him, no remarkable advancements in civilization had ever been made. And because of the word “revolution,” which ordinarily he used only in the plural, to denounce their barbarism. This positive usage of the word contradicted his hatred of plebeians. He smiled, telling me that he had nothing against revolutions, except that people never know how to do them, nor with whom, and so they were one of those things that he was content to like from afar, speaking of them only to himself. Especially not to his wife and his children. And he hadn’t talked to them in a long time about anything, anyway. They only appreciated the most vulgar components of the United States: fast food and superstores. Certainly they had never heard of Isadora Duncan. He also hated listening to them brag about the advantages and opportunities the Occupation presented for entrepreneurs. His sons are hoping to increase their sales revenue by getting involved in transporting equipment. “The traitors.” Hidden behind his soliloquies about what is inferior and what is superior, dance and revolutions, Latin and family life, is Monsieur Vallières’ misfortune of not belonging to any time period and of wanting incompatible things at the same time. He talks like the books that Joseph has bound, in which you find pages and subjects belonging to different books all jumbled together. “Don’t try to understand me. At times I don’t even understand myself.” It’s true that you can’t understand everything. Do I understand why, in my own notebooks, I sometimes write “Sandrine” instead of “the little brunette”? Does it mean that in my mind, she has become a person rather than a caricature? They go, go, go this way, the little puppets… But sometimes, on the third turn, the puppets become human. They throw off their strings and hold themselves up all by themselves, masters of their own movements. Sophonie won. Or almost. She taught us something. Taught Sandrine. Taught me. And without thinking about it, she continues to serve the customers. Without asking for anything. Her modest repayment was that smile, their last bit of contact. Freedom is also the freedom to forget. No one spends their life saying thank you. This was an idea close to Wodné’s heart, that you shouldn’t waste time calculating your debts. It holds you back from moving forward. That’s why he doesn’t smile at people when they shake his hand. The little brunette, Sandrine, at least had the politeness to smile. A month later, she threw the intimate party with its fake-moon lights. A stingy little party, with everyone calculating their portion of the bill: I had a beer, you had a kir, you had a whisky and soda. Not like the kannjawou that Anselme dreams about for his final voyage. A real party, to which everyone will be invited: parents, friends, friends of friends, people who live in the next town over, anyone. Sandrine or the little brunette—I’m not sure what I’ll call her in my memories—had a little two-square-meter party. The next day she returned the keys to her service vehicle to her old bosses, who surely must have then wished her good luck at her new job. A Haitian chauffeur drove her to the airport.

When we return home from the bar, Sophonie and Popol pass right by the street corner where we had found her that night—dirty, sad, ugly from her sadness—without stopping. Why would they stop? There’s no one there. No battered bodies. No sound of sobbing. There’s nothing but the closed doors of the houses on the street. They go, go, go this way…

A KID CAME BY TO TELL ME THAT THE LITTLE PROFESSOR WAS EXPECTING ME AT HIS HOUSE.

Not a hustler like Hans and Vladimir. A timid kid, who never participates in the conversations after the readings. The little professor had grown fond of him. I didn’t know that he was continuing to study with him in secret in his library. The little professor hasn’t visited us on Burial Street since Joëlle’s outburst, contenting himself instead with sending books from time to time for the little kids at the Center. I play the go-between, bringing the books back to him once a week. I don’t tell him that the books he lends us are often the subjects of impassioned polemics. Jasmine, an education student who sometimes talks as though she’s reading from a manual, thinks they’re too scholarly. She’s developing a theory of progression. From short sentences to complex ones, from simple stories to chapter books. Wodné takes advantage of the opportunity to denounce the arrogance of the intellectuals who wrote them, saying that they have lost all sense of moderation. When I go to return the books to the little professor and borrow some more, we spend some time discussing them. He receives me in his library on the second floor. I don’t find anything immoderate in what he says. I only see that he has grown older. I hear steps and sometimes voices coming from the guest room. One night I thought I saw the shadow of Monsieur Laventure. But it didn’t occur to me to ask questions. The little professor and I only ever talk about characters in novels or from history, avoiding the touchy subjects of the real-life people we both know. The exception to this is Mam Jeanne; with a smile, he asks if she’s still handy with a bowl of cat piss. And yet I know that everything he says about the world or love or any given character or philosophical position is based on whatever bewitching image of Joëlle he has in his head at that moment. The world and his relationship to it change according to whether his thoughts of her are fulfilling or sad. I can sense it whenever he’s about to break his silence, ready to ask me to lend him my eyes: How is she? Do you see her? The silly questions that lovers ask. Here’s what I would like to respond to the questions he doesn’t dare ask: It’s time for you to look elsewhere. She’s no prettier than her sister. And she’s lost the ability to imagine. Like most people, she can only see what’s right in front of her. Her head is a ghetto, without space for anyone or anything else. I can’t tell him these things. If I were to say those words, they would become too real. I wouldn’t be able to take them back, the way you can take it back when you say “I love you” or “I hate you.” Joëlle would become for me exactly what I’d said, and I’d lose out on smiles and dreams. I don’t want to lose Joëlle. I want to give her time to change, to pick herself up again, as though she were a character in a novel. And anyway, who am I to draw such conclusions about someone? I haven’t accomplished anything. Other than these notebooks, which I abandon, pick up again, destroy, rewrite. The little professor has grown older. He drinks too much. He always offers me a beer, which I don’t dare to refuse for fear of hurting his feelings. But I’m angry with myself for going along with it. Sometimes he dozes off, and I leave him to sleep sitting up in his office, walk down the stairs alone, close the front door behind me, head back towards my house, stop for a bit in one of the open-air bars at the Champ-de-Mars. Then, sometimes passing by military patrols, I continue my descent towards Burial Street. There I am greeted by the snores of ghosts, the two retired tradesmen, who have been put to sleep in the same bed again by Hans and Vladimir. I pass in front of the house of the girls, who barely talk to each other any more. In front of Mam Jeanne’s house. I imagine Loyal curled up at his mistress’s feet. Which one will betray the other by leaving first? Mam Jeanne doesn’t talk about death very often. Only once: My little one, a woman who has experienced two eras of Occupation in her lifetime has the right to die before the second one ends. No, Mam Jeanne, I don’t want you to die. Not while all your stories still don’t have a happy ending. It’s not a good time to die. You say yourself that someone who dies in a time of sadness brings eternal sadness with them into the grave, where it mixes with the earth, sullies it, defeats it, and sterilizes its heart.

AND SO AFTER THE KID’S VISIT, I LEFT FOR THE LITTLE PROFESSOR’S HOUSE. What emergency could he be having? I knew that he was supposed to teach that day, and he had never before missed a meeting with his students. Even the day after the incident with Joëlle, he had taught his class and answered the students’ questions, fulfilling the terms of his contract with the republic and the university’s board of education. I must be wrong in believing that people’s inner wounds or joy can be read on their faces. Maybe the best men are those who don’t let anything of their inner selves show. The ones who never bother their dining companions, ruin parties, walk through the streets with a flask supposedly filled with poison to impress young women. I thought about the little professor suffering and I put down my books about the era of railroad construction and the Bank of the Republic during the first Occupation to hurry over to his house. He came to open the door. He seemed tired. An ordinary kind of tiredness, with the same expression as always that betrays nothing. He led me to his library. There was nothing unusual there except for the mimeograph and piles of newspapers and magazines that I had never seen there before, fanned out in a semi-circle on the ground of his office. I glanced at them reflexively. Some old mimeographed papers and some badly bound pamphlets, nothing like what you would find in a bookstore. “Old memories that I’d like to get rid of. I was using them for a project I’ve just finished. A history of the left. For my teacher, Monsieur Laventure, who’s been asking for it for a long time.” And without paying any more attention to my curiosity, he moved on to other subjects. How were the papers I was writing going, both mine and those of the private university students? They were going slowly. The more I dig into the past, the harder it is for me to draw a connection to the present. I can’t seem to find the place where today’s state of decrepitude broke away from yesterday’s hopes. In response, he told me that the big difference was this: “You didn’t live the past. But things were probably a little cleaner. Stronger. The Occupation. The Resistance. Now everything has gone weak, and pretends to be something else. Now no one calls a spade a spade. Except Mam Jeanne.” At the idea of Mam Jeanne choosing her newest victim, we exchange smiles. I didn’t ask him why he hadn’t gone to teach his class. After all, at the state university, professors can grow weary of going even more often than the students. The strikes—or maybe I should say “our” strikes—happen just as regularly as normal working hours. Some of them are justified. Others… Wodné’s gang hadn’t gathered stones or pepper spray. There had been no threat of a strike that morning. The little professor had just wanted to straighten up his papers, restore a bit of order to his library. He had also wanted to give me two books. One that he was particularly fond of: The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. And the other one was Daughter of Haiti, which he didn’t think particularly good as a work of literature. But he thought the book’s intention was worth understanding. He had already lent them both to me, and we had spent long hours talking about them. He considered Finzi-Continis to be a true masterpiece about love and indifference. In response to my reservations about Daughter of Haiti, he said that it was about a merciless battle between a vow and an impossibility, an impulse fighting against gravity. “But Mr. Professor, the main character is nothing but a young, somewhat reactionary bourgeois.” “You don’t have to love the book; you have to love the idea that one day, she might turn around and go in the other direction.” I knew that all of his remarks about literature and philosophy were nothing but pretexts for talking about Joëlle, about the part of her that was like Micòl from Finzi-Continis, and about her subjugation to Wodné’s gang. That morning, he didn’t want to discuss the books, he just wanted to give them to me. He owned too many. Two fewer, or three, or even twenty, what difference could that make? So I took the books. He accompanied me to the front door, as he usually does whenever he’s feeling up to it. I didn’t pay attention to the sound of the key in the lock, even though he often protested the idea of locked doors. “A house should be a home, and every table set for guests. The passersby aren’t the ones missing.” I found myself on the street again, with the Italian novelist’s passionate romance and a young Haitian woman’s arguments with herself in my arms. I returned to the story of the banks. Banks are what run the world. They hold life by its guts. I wandered into the banks. There was one that a president had called the “rascal bank” at the beginning of the last century, a Trojan horse brought in by foreign capital to create the financial crisis that benefitted the first Occupation. There was another that had gone bankrupt. After an order of confidentiality, the State had given the bank’s building and land to the Catholic Church. The Council of Bishops turned it into a chapel. It’s still there, at the top of a hill, named after a saint said to be generous all the way down to the tips of his toes, to which hordes of beggars come to pray. The change was minimal. For the poor, it’s still a pilgrimage, a difficult climb, whether it’s a climb towards God or towards money. I wandered among the banks and the power they hold over us. The one that interested me the most was the Bank of the Republic, which is as large as a palace, still standing at the bottom of the city, immense, its prestige old-fashioned given its shabby surroundings, right next to the dirty water of the coast. When people on the street began to shout “Fire!” I didn’t turn back right away. I was lost in my own world. You can’t always trust the things crowds say or the choices passersby make. But all of a sudden, I understood. The shouts and voices reached my hands. I felt the books I was holding begin to burn, as though they wanted to join the others. The beautiful garden of the Finzi-Continis became hot with anguish and despair. I didn’t see the tennis players and the tender green of the plants, but before even turning around, I could see what was happening behind me. The fire was traveling from shelf to shelf, licking at the three Karamazov brothers to heal them from their obsessions and prevarications, snatching away all of Hugo, come down, little father, put an end to Olympio’s sadness and the epic of the humble; taking it all away, ancient and modern poems, speeches on this and that: method, voluntary servitude, science and art; gone are the kingdoms of this world, the beautiful, the ugly, the good, the bad; gone are the enchanted flutes and the musician trees; gone are the reveries of the solitary walkers and the summer afternoons in the shadow of young girls in flower; gone are the gardens, seeds, and grapes of wrath; the dance of the forests and the taste of nettles; gone is the froth on the daydream and the life before us,and a thousand other paper beings, which I may have loved or may have hated, but which nonetheless all deserved to live, to experience life, even if in the end we’re nothing but lumps of fat and human creatures, good for flies and nausea, deafness, and blindness, even if we’re nothing. And among these beings, right in the middle, must have been the man who had introduced me to all this, sitting in front of his desk, burning with them. His flesh melting into theirs. The books fell from my hands, I turned around, and I ran towards the house. But what house? The smoke and the flames, wild, enraged, had already caused the windows of the library to shatter, they were leaping outside, rising towards the sky, dancing over the heads of the passersby, who were running for shelter, or to escape the heat and the ash, or coming closer to see the disaster from up close. You couldn’t see any of the house anymore. The flames and the smoke were shielding it from view and you could tell that there was nothing but rubble underneath. I imagined his charred flesh forming a heap of ash with the pages. The little bed in the guest room, where Joëlle had gone only once. He had been so happy. And she, too, had looked so happy. I knew that there were no longer any books up there, nor the little bed, nor the little professor. Nothing but an amalgamation of words, objects, and flesh. A mish-mash of bread and sauce, tallow and grease, smoke and stench. I knew that it was hopeless. That I would never again see his smile. Nor his pain. But still we try even when things are hopeless, to pretend that the violent facts aren’t true, to refuse to accept reality. Shit, why does reality always make the wrong choices? It’s as though every time we let it choose by itself, it can’t make any choices that aren’t the worst possible ones! It’s as though we are born only to suffer, to relinquish our desires to its malice. I ran towards the front door and, flames or no flames, smoke or no smoke, I tried to break down what was left of the door with punches and kicks. Let me pass, you bastard. It remained standing and I struck it, pushing it against the fire. Like the people I’ve seen at the cemetery, who bang with rage on the coffins before the last shovelful in the hopes of awakening the dead person being buried. Like those who go so far as to bite on the wood, losing their teeth in the attempt to get the person they’d loved out. I would hit the door until it gave way. A man who’s burned alive in a closed room is a man who will enter the cemetery still alive. And all alone. Shit. Get out of my way, you bastard, let me pass. My teacher, my friend, my brother is in there. Get out of my way. It’s love that’s burning up there. And kindness, if it exists. It’s language that’s dying up there. The proper use of language and of the heart. It’s living that’s dying up there. Promises of a kannjawou, do you want them, here they are. For everyone has a right to celebrate. Taking only the part of life that will come back to you is enough. And inviting the other part to the party. It would be enough. Get out of my way. The fire had already burned up the ground floor, and the smoke was spilling out through the door onto the street. By the time the damn door finally fell, vanquished, my hands were covered in blood, and strange hands were pulling me away. In front of me was a huge mass of red and black. Another book. But what can books do? I was screaming. I knew that I was screaming but I couldn’t hear my screams anymore.