ONE
THE SURVIVOR AND THE MOTHER
I head home with the smell of the old woman’s withered flesh on my fingers. The vision of her form sprawled limply on the bed like a nameless doll accompanies me through the streets of Paris. Why had they added that room to my list?
“Whatever you do, mademoiselle, don’t reveal her name. No one should know who she is. Besides, we have no official confirmation. I thought you were only a child when you left your country. The dictator—I’m talking about the father, of course—was already dead when you were born, so you mustn’t get carried away. Management has not authorized us to say that this woman is really his widow. In any case, this is no concern of yours.”
Who does he take me for, that idiot of a director with his conspiratorial air? Even if I weren’t the daughter of Marie- Carmelle, who suffered all her life from the horrors of the Doréval era, I would have recognized that woman’s face. How could I forget it?
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Silence is ultimately the surest means of control. She realized this one morning at sunrise when the first sounds of the cleaning staff infiltrated the dreams of the patients still slumbering in the nursing home. The only solution lay in her ability to curtail all communication with the outside world. And so she withdrew into the silence of her thoughts, determined to resist the confusion that was threatening every shred of her ideas, intruding into her reminiscences and into the slightest empty space between word and image. She was content to delegate the tiresome everyday ministrations to the people paid to perform them. Like that well-built Algerian given the task of lifting obese patients who were too heavy for the young female aides. Or the African doctor who looked in once a week or not at all. Like that nurse of around sixty whose elegance reminded her of the good old days, when from beneath her fine silk petticoats she would gracefully reveal her Italian shoes. Or that dark-eyed young woman who often scowled furtively at her. And so, without regret she abandoned to them the responsibility of bathing, feeding, and caring for her.
It was their problem if they all took her to be more senile than she really was. They would stop trying to worm secrets out of her, stop regarding her as the strange beast of the facility. The one they point out to the relatives of the other patients. The one they mention in their phone calls as if by chance. The one around whom the mutterings linger long enough for the words “widow” and “dictator” to reach her. From now on, she would let them attend to her without a word. She would take refuge in her memory, but she would need a structure, a method, so that her thoughts would not tatter like the dingy sheets that covered her body.
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No doubt I should consider myself fortunate to have this lousy job. After all, I’m not a Frenchwoman by birth. What excellent luck to be able to wipe the wrinkled backsides of these old ladies that somebody has decided to put away in this nursing home, where life enters only on the sporadic occasions when an employee opens the door to breathe the outside air, smokes a cigarette near the window, or leans out over a sidewalk that taunts him to jump.
Yes, I do think about dying. I’m not a fighter the way you were, Maman. You who, despite your passport with its unloved colors, showed more determination and fighting spirit in your little finger than I’ll ever have. Yet I was educated in the French Antilles, and I have a passport with the tricolored emblem of the French Republic. I can travel almost anywhere I like without a visa. I can certainly return to your island of a thousand problems and visit your grave without fearing in the pit of my stomach that I’ll be refused entry on my return trip. But still, Maman, I can’t stop thinking about nothingness, about the oblivion that could be mine, that lies so near and tempts me.
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Above all, avoid dwelling on the colors of the sea, which she used to observe from the palace window while a luminous arc crowned the horizon in shades of orange and blue. She loved pausing there, if only for a moment, and it seemed to her at those times that she could catch the salty tang of the Caribbean. Wafting up to her above the old iron-roofed market with its intricate web of retailing and wretchedness, above the lower city with its streams of movement between the chaos of the avenues and the tranquility of obscure dead-end alleyways. Drifting over the stench of rancid sweat and foul water. Overpowering the moist scent of the freshly watered lawns and arriving at last to salute her. The sea, extending in the distance from north to south. Yet so near. Always at the limit of her vision. Always at the core of her memory.
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I don’t even have the option of refusing to care for this wizened old lady and taking the risk of being fired from this job: it’s nothing special, but it allows me to survive with a semblance of dignity. Still, seeing and taking care of her keeps me awake at night. My nightmares have returned since you left. Latifa says she hears me moaning in the night and that my eyes look like two butterflies in a cage. I’m the perfect candidate for the advice she takes straight from her psychology textbooks. But my roommate doesn’t grasp the scale of my distress. She thinks I’m just anxious about the monthly rental deadlines that roll around too quickly, in spite of all the yogurts and cheese sandwiches I eat in the guise of lunch and dinner. That I’m depressed because it seems less and less likely I’ll ever have a little apartment all to myself, even one as cramped and dark as the one we share. Or because you left my life so abruptly, after taking up so much of it! All those reasons do enter in, especially the last one, but unfortunately things are more complicated than that. In a pinch, if I went to a lot of trouble, I might find a job a little better suited to my qualifications, but why make the effort, and how would I go about it?
I know you owned several scraps of real estate in Quisqueya and that you would have liked me to go claim them. Seriously, Maman, can you see me turning up in your native city, Descailles, and wrangling with my cousins over a few scraggly plots of land and a tumbledown shack? You always overestimated my abilities, as if with my little degree in communications I could aspire to God knows what important position. You did so much with so little. But I’m not you, Maman.
Even if I’ve inherited some of your dreams in spite of myself.
All your stories of the dark years of the Dorévals come back and fill my mind. All those reminiscences poured out while you tucked me into bed at night, and as we made our way between home and school, from the kitchen to the bedroom, from Port-du-Roi to the French Antilles, and I from Martinique to continental France—“la Métropole,” you called it. From the perspective of more than 150 years of Quisqueyan independence, you always pronounced that word with an indefinable blend of scorn, regret, envy, and resignation in your voice, bathed in anger and pride. Each emotion deeply embedded in its strongbox of memories, anecdotes, and appropriated incidents. Your country’s tangled history came through to me in a tone that was at once aggressive, plaintive, and dignified. Like a desperate and beautiful murmur. In the image of your life.
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But for her own peace of mind, she has to return to that narrative. To reconstruct it, tell it to herself, without straying into sentimental or romantic digressions. And, most important, in an orderly way. Therefore, she will not begin with the Deceased. His was a presence so encompassing, so weighty, that she will save it for later. If time permits her to continue the voyage. In her own manner, without pressure or constraint of any kind. Like those cruise liners where the passengers are supposed to amuse themselves as they wish, eat as much as they want, and have a good time, even when the rolling of the ship makes them seasick, or suicidal impulses call out to them from the bottom of the sea. She would proceed at the pace of a distinguished woman, a Guardian of the Revolution, a first lady who does not hurry, though death intently awaits her. But she learned very early to keep a cool head at all times. At the end of her life, she would not dishonor herself before the image reflected in her mental mirror—the one we all consult when we look with closed eyes at our shriveled flesh. The Deceased would wait his turn. She would begin with her children, all four of them. Despite all the gossip, the rumors and conflicts, she never felt, never manifested, a preference for one or another. She loved them all. From the oldest daughter, so similar to her father in her excesses, to the second one, whose placid exterior concealed her need for special attention and who bonded more with her older sister than with her mother, to her third daughter, whom she called “the little one,” and of course to her son, by four years the youngest. The Deceased landed the post of Minister of Public Health and Social Affairs two years after their son was born. At the time, who would have expected to see him become president of the country only a few years later?
But she should follow her own command: tell of her children at the outset and before all else. “Loving and Devoted Mother.” A perfect title for the first chapter of the book that was unfolding in her head. The populace had never regarded her as an attentive mother. No doubt because of her austere countenance, her fixed smile, her upraised chin, and her ceremonious gestures that made so many demands, first of all on herself, but likewise on other people. As if her portrayal of first lady took precedence over every other role.
And yet, tender feelings toward her four children overflowed from her in gigantic, powerful, and unpredictable waves. The people had never wanted to view her as a mother like all others. Even when enemies tried to kidnap her children, her one and only son and her third daughter—named after her at the Deceased’s insistence—no one mentioned her maternal suffering. No one seemed to understand what it meant to learn that the flesh of her flesh had skirted death, that a human form she had carried for nine months might have ended up as no more than a lifeless bundle.
Here, in this magnificent Republic of France, where she lives in exile and where, it appears, all is good, all is beautiful, because republican values prevail, there are nonetheless madmen who snatch other people’s children. Perverts and sex maniacs abuse children right under the noses of law enforcement agents, right near the shopping malls where everything for the well- being of mother and child is available for purchase, in this country so protective of the rights of the individual. How many times have the media broadcast sobbing appeals for the return of a kidnapped child? How many posters tacked up, how many police checkpoints on the highways? How many alerts launched, in colors keyed to the level of hysteria?
Should her children have had any less importance in the grand scheme? No one thought about her despair that morning. While she and the Deceased were following the latest news, and rumors were flooding in from everywhere, while she was waiting with her heart pounding for them to bring her children back unharmed. As for those who dared to strike at her children, had they not foreseen that they would provoke her anger, frustration, and hostility? Standing next to the Deceased, who was equally enraged, she approved the planned reprisals with all her heart, as well as the measures to be taken against the guilty parties. If they had so much as laid a finger on her son, many other children would have perished. Even nailed helplessly to this bed, she felt the fury of that day surge through her limbs and turn her fingers into claws. The mothers began screaming when the Deceased blocked school dismissals and ordered the confinement of all primary, intermediate, and secondary students in their school buildings. A hair of her son’s head touched and they would all have been annihilated. It was so easy to label those measures as barbaric and ruthless, whereas the Deceased had only wanted to deter further actions of the same kind and to teach the abductors a memorable lesson. To send them a clear and effective message that no attack against his children would be tolerated and that the culprits would be punished in the harshest and most extreme manner.
All the more so because these craven individuals had attacked their son! The Deceased had always wanted a son. On the day of the little one’s birth, he had approached the bed and nervously run his hand over the newborn’s head. An unforgettable Monday. Behind his glasses, his eyes seemed pensive, almost melancholy. “He’ll be a lawyer,” he declared, and they had smiled at each other, too overcome to speak.
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You used to say in a voice full of sadness that you detested the people of your island. In the face of poverty, dictatorship, disease, and malnutrition, murky drinking water and clouds of dust, you would murmur, “How disgraceful! To have set out from such heights and to end up there.” And you’d add, “The conditions in Quisqueya bring tears to my eyes. Since we left, everything has gotten worse.”
I was only four then, you say. Still, you almost reproach me for having forgotten the date of our permanent departure, that Sunday in 1980, several weeks after the mournful date that goes unmentioned. You know perfectly well you left me no choice, Maman, since you punctuated my childhood with your lamentations, your rage, and your pain. You made sure to tell me about events I hadn’t lived through, and you kept repeating them until my memory latched onto them. Hiding only the circumstances of my father’s death, as if to protect my childhood, though you had already contaminated it forever. Your only daughter, a living relic of your one true love—who was tragically killed. Me, the one for whom you chose to leave your country, the one with whom you shared until your dying breath the slightest events of your daily existence, the one whose life was reduced to giving a meaning to your own.
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Is it so hard to understand that a mother is attached to her children and cannot endure anyone threatening them or making targets of them? Naturally, a mother must not be confused with a woman who merely opens her legs to give life and then abandons the child to its fate. For reasons of seemliness, such women claim, or out of necessity or lack of choice. Nonsense. Only adults can manage to explain away the abandonment of children. The child perceives nothing but the pain of the rejection, which burdens her all through life. It is fortunate that in our poor and miserable country, in which the Deceased did everything possible to improve the people’s lot, women of that kind were not often encountered. In contrast, there was no shortage of absent fathers. Always somewhere else, running after other potential mothers and leaving behind the consequences of their promiscuity. But the women clung to those bits of flesh that had emerged from their bellies. Mothers quick to dispense slaps, spankings, and abusive language, but nonetheless present for their children, except when death stopped the carousel and plucked another victim from her ill-fated existence.
In the orphanage where she found herself one fine morning, most of the other girls were talking about their mothers, adorning them with virtues, and no one dared question the truthfulness of their fervent declarations. On Mother’s Day, all of them were required to attend Mass, and the majority of the orphans, in keeping with their status, wore white ribbons as a sign of devotion to a deceased mother. She pretended to have lost her ribbon, but she had secretly crumpled it up and thrown it away. Her sisters born of different fathers disapproved, condemning her stubborn coldness toward their mother. How could she blame them for failing to understand her? The families of their respective fathers had welcomed them. But why would she have venerated a mother who had shunted her off to an orphanage at an early age? The institution had shown her no leniency. Everything had to be done correctly, perfectly, without blemish. The orphans had no right to moodiness or emotional attachments. The beds properly made, the plates washed, dried, and put away, nothing left lying around. Neither undergarments, smiles, tearstains, nor urges to smash things. She put her life on hold while awaiting her release from this sterile, tidy prison. Though miserable and wretched, she made herself the ideal pupil, intelligent, well-behaved, and respectful. She had to learn patience. She did.
An orphanage is not a place for children whose parents are living; parents of that sort deserve to be seen as irresponsible and abhorrent creatures. Like that middle-class father, a brilliant and internationally known intellectual, who got her mother pregnant while she was working as a domestic in his family’s home. As a sordid tale, it is impossible to do better, even if the storyline is totally unoriginal. The only advantages Odile derived: her light-colored skin, the aristocratic contours of her face, and the lofty stature that became legendary in national and international press coverage. The exceptional height that attracted the Deceased and always allowed her to appear stately and glamorous in photos. A pity that none of her children had inherited her beauty! But each of them resembled her in some way, and she loved them boundlessly.
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No, Maman, I can’t blame you for the morbid chaos my life has become. How could I hold you responsible when my wounds seem so minor compared to yours?
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Mothers are surely worthy of honor. The Loving and Devoted Mother caught on very quickly to her fellow citizens’ penchant for placing maternity on a pedestal, dedicating love songs to her, buying her brand-new furniture on New Year’s Day, giving her perfume and flowers as tokens of their gratitude. She understood it so well that she felt privileged when the populace called her “Maman Odile.” Especially at the beginning, she gratefully accepted this nickname, which seemed to represent a communal reflex of kinship and acceptance. At the orphanage, it was customary to evoke the family during evenings of intimate conversation, between a skimpy, unsatisfying serving of cornmeal mush and a mug of lemongrass tea, at the hour when a defeated hunger resigns itself to going to bed. At this moment when her peers could no longer conceal their misery, she always turned quiet. She never displayed her unhappiness in a way that would cause her companions either to pity or to humiliate her. Why would she have revealed the burden that was so heavy in her memory, only to intensify her already abject shame? Instead, she watched the others expectantly await the sympathy of their audience and the illusory comfort it would bring.
Sometimes she cried in her sleep, incensed that she could not stop herself from experiencing the dream that came floating behind her closed eyelids. Blurry enough to retain its surreal character, but discernible enough to make her shudder with pain and longing. Hostage to the dream, she wept without knowing why, and submerged beneath a spate of afflictions, she was unable to stifle her sobs. Tears covered her face. An accumulation of woes, crammed together, beyond counting. She foundered beneath their weight, and her breathing came in uneven spasms. With each gasp, she descended a bit lower, toward the bottom of an abyss that was like an interminable well shaft. Then a soft, enveloping light spread through the space. Seeped into her. She inhaled and rose toward the surface. Always this hope, each time intense, marvelous. And each time she let herself be drawn in. She groped for the wall. Encountered only a void. The light passed over her indifferently. She resumed her descent toward nothingness. Two very black arms, drifting within the space, advanced toward her but did not grab hold of her. Each time, she sank to the depths of the abyss and then awoke with moist eyes. Always, she violently wiped away the tears. Certain sufferings are not to be discussed.
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I remember very little about the day of our departure, but I do recall the passport with its red and black cover, made of stiff, scratchy plastic. A passport bearing assumed names. Marie-Gisèle Lallemand and her four-year-old daughter, Marie-Alice, formerly Marie-Carmelle and Marie-Ange. You had prepared me well, and I was so scrawny that the immigration officers suspected nothing—even though fear glued my new name to my lips. Does my love of silence stem from that experience? I sensed myself protected from prying questions. Later on, you quickly sorted things out, regularized our papers, and obtained French nationality for me. You believed that a French passport would open doors for me, allowing me to leave the Antilles for France. You shook me out of my little girl’s lethargy and disorientation so that I could adapt quickly to their school, their curriculum, and the local Creole, which was different from yours yet similar in its origins.
Even then, I retreated into silence when confronted with the taunts and rude remarks of the other children. From preschool to elementary, from middle school to high school, with my former name restored to me yet tainted with a fleeting illegality, I learned to surround myself with an impenetrable haze. When life brought too much hardship, I retreated into your memory, almost as if I wanted to return to your womb. You never understood how much I carried your country in my wounded expression, in my posture made sullen by misery. People looked my way without noticing me, and I slipped invisibly past them.
“Say, you—you come from Quisqueya. You smell like wild grass, the woods, and something else I can’t place. Three hundred boat people landed in Florida last week, but dead bodies washed up on the shore. The dead ones were so bloated that no one could identify them. You think maybe you knew them? After all, they came from your country. What about you, are you one of those boat people, too? The teacher said not to ask you that, she said you came on an airplane, but we’d really like to know.” When I tried to tell you about my childhood troubles, you shook your head irritably. You had seen so many horrors; my little woes seemed insignificant to you.
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Why should the regime have shown any mercy to conspirators? Nothing but severity could have kept the revolutionary regime in power for so long. The best course was to be unyielding and forceful when confronting an ignorant populace and a self-serving clique who were just waiting for an opportunity to seize control. Who would stop at nothing. To shoot at a child as he is leaving school? How monstrous! Then they dared to brand the Deceased and his supporters as oppressors.
She had always loathed the unjust depiction of them as ruthless profiteers: they were doing their best to spare the people the pain and humiliation of seeing the international press, always eager to drag the country through the mud, vilify the Deceased and his cabinet. After all, how could the Western countries ever forgive or forget Napoleon’s debacle, the sorry defeat of the French army in Quisqueya, and the rout of the French colonizers at the hands of an army of former slaves? That history remains in their hearts like a gaping wound, never to be closed. Everything serves them as a pretext for making a proud and courageous people pay for its glorious past. The Deceased understood this perfectly. He didn’t mince words, and he always stood up to the former colonialists, the one-time occupying power, and all those who wanted to use the country as a springboard for their global ambitions.
But try explaining that to the plotters who craved power! He had to battle against conspiracies. The military commanders never stopped fomenting them; likewise, in their way, the Catholic clergy, not to mention the god-awful Communists. One year the Deceased counted six foiled coups and assassination attempts. In the end, however, he died in his bed! What God has done, only God can undo. The motto of the three Ds fits perfectly: the Divinity, great architect of the universe; Desravines, the supreme artisan of liberty; and of course Fabien Doréval, master builder of the New Quisqueya. One and indivisible.
When the members of her entourage began to profess their sympathy and loyalty after the attempted kidnapping of her son, she refrained from telling them to go to hell. Distrusting their fearful, hypocritical, and evasive glances, she stared at them distantly and inscrutably, concealing the implacable fury which filled her and to which she clung to control her panic.
It is never wise to toy with a mother’s anger. So said Mademoiselle Germaine, superintendent of the orphanage. In the evening, the girls would surrender to their need for human warmth, revealing their most secret fears, snuggling against one another to listen to Mademoiselle Germaine. She gorged them on tales of wantonness and revenge that her years of embittered loneliness had gradually nourished. Although dedicated to God, Mademoiselle Germaine managed to reconcile her old maid’s piety with these very human emotions. She exuberantly launched into her repertoire of indecorous stories, stained with meanness and squalor, with vulgar sentiments and unbridled passions, making a pretext of her intention to educate her poor young orphans and prevent them from succumbing to the temptations that brought glints of desire to her eyes. The girls were not taken in. In the evening, as they lay curled up in their clean and solitary beds, each one called to mind the image that was the most provocative for her, the one most certain to give her body that pleasurable tingle of venial sin.
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You focused all your energy on becoming familiar with our new way of life and on using French in everyday conversation. In Martinique, that language crept into every corner of your life, insinuating itself into mundane exchanges in the street or marketplace. Sometimes, though, you resisted this invasion, holding fast to the Creole that you particularly wanted me to retain. As if my clumsy stammering would bring back to me the father you never wanted to talk about, restore you, Maman, to wholeness, or heal a flayed country. You used to croon very softly in Creole, as if asking loved ones for forgiveness. You, who in your native Quisqueya never saw white people except from a distance, in department stores, airport counters, and televised ceremonies, became accustomed to multiple and frequent contacts with white Frenchmen in Fort-de-France, both Zoreilles* and visitors. You looked at them from your own particular perspective. I would have preferred that you drop your constant comparisons between the French Antilles and your native country, but your whole existence was wrapped up in the stories you endlessly recounted to me.
You began with the terror that overwhelmed your mother after the attempted kidnapping of Jean-Paul Doréval, the dictator’s son. I relived the scene with you, as if I had been there.
As soon as reports were confirmed of shots fired at the president’s two youngest children, all mothers sprang into action. The news that students would be held in their schools spread with the dizzying speed of a catastrophe: mothers who worked in the city rushed to collect their children and warn their neighbors. Paying no attention to their appearance, many clad in slippers, the women tumbled down the hillsides, dove into taxis and vans. Men sprinted along without a care for motorists’ blaring horns and the shouted rebukes of passersby. All parents wanted to retrieve their children before the blade of vengeance fell. The whole city took on a gray cast. Without really understanding the adults’ fear, the children ran to keep up, their young feet tripped up by the uneven sidewalks. The luckiest parents had time to remove their daughters or sons before the enraged dictator’s order reached his zealous hellhounds.
At the school of Notre-Dame du Mont-Carmel, attached to the health center of the same name, tearful mothers tried to take their children away. Sinclair, the administrator of the health center and formerly a bricklayer’s assistant, had been promoted for his unswerving devotion to the revolutionary government. When mobilized by the great leader, he rushed there immediately and ordered the headmistress to detain the schoolchildren until he received confirmation that Jean-Paul and Ti Odile were out of danger. For fifteen interminable minutes, the head nurse at the center tried to persuade Sinclair to change his mind.
She was used to his headstrong whims. One Friday he’d forgotten to refrigerate the doses of anti-typhoid vaccine, and the following Monday he claimed that putting them in the freezer for a day would make them usable again, even though the outside temperatures had reached 90 degrees over the weekend. The nurse had succeeded in persuading him to discard the ampoules by mimicking his mode of thought. “Have you forgotten that Papa Fab fought against tuberculosis? He won’t appreciate your putting the lives of the people’s children at risk; it would be like working against the revolution.”
In the same way, on this April morning in 1963, the nurse summoned all her wits and her full powers of persuasion to convince Sinclair. She invoked his ailing mother, whom she had seen one day in the chapel of Mont-Carmel. “What would she think of you if she knew you were responsible for the deaths of all these children?” Grumbling and threatening her personally with grievous punishment if an opponent of the regime should harm Papa Fab’s children, Sinclair finally let the children leave.
In those days you attended a school run by the Sisters of Divine Wisdom, and your mother, no less panic-stricken than other parents, went there to find you. That same evening the cleaning woman, whose twelve-year-old daughter, Nicole, was a student at Mont-Carmel, told you of Sinclair’s reaction to the attempted abduction of the Doréval children.
I tried several times to escape from your memories, or to choose the happiest ones, like those games of jacks between Nicole and you in the late afternoon. Your fingers moved quickly and precisely as you tossed the jacks and then caught them. Since the two of you were equally adept, you would take turns winning for hours at a time. I, too, tried to master the game, but I was never able to attain your level of skill, and I could see clearly that I was disappointing you. In the end, my only inheritance from you was your torment.
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Walled up in her silence, the Guardian of the Revolution could not rid herself of a sense of failure; ultimately, she did not succeed in imbuing her children with her vision of things, her dreams for the newly enfranchised middle class. And yet, those people’s rights had to be fought for and stoutly defended. The right to an education. The right to realize their potential. The right to plant their feet with pride in a country where for too long the sole determinant of an individual’s prospects had been skin color.
She had constantly witnessed the injustice of the status quo in that orphanage run by a Frenchwoman, funded by patrons from the top of the social scale, and located in a well-to-do section on the hillsides of Alexandreville. In those days Alexandreville flaunted its affluence. As proof, it sufficed to count the number of citizens with darker skin than hers. Very few, or rather, none! Peasants didn’t go there except on their way down to the city with freshly picked vegetables from Karkoff and Fancy, those villages where families who were smugly protective of their light complexions had built vacation homes, carefully sheltered from all contact with the impoverished masses. Luxurious stone houses, well-endowed with flowering shrubs and guard dogs to ward off those who might risk going there despite every indication that they were not wanted. After more than a century and a half of cohabitation in the same island nation, anyone who didn’t feel the rejection would surely have to be obtuse. If you are not of the proper hue, you become invisible in certain settings. Without deliberate malice, people look right through you. Furthermore, you lose substance in your own mind, you blend into the background. You no longer exist, it’s as simple as that! It’s a pity that none of her children grasped the magnitude of the problem. Most of all, it’s a pity that they found another way around it.
What does it matter! Despite the disgraceful failings of her own brood, she knew that a mother invests herself in each of her children and embraces the whole experience: good and bad moments, betrayal and devotion, tenderness and indifference. Yet when she was young, no hint of a sacrificial spirit marked her out for motherhood, not a drop of martyr’s blood flowed in her veins. On the contrary, a determination to avenge life’s disappointments and a drive to succeed possessed her constantly, outweighing all feelings of warmth or attachment. Until she found in her arms a tiny individual, helpless and at the mercy of her omnipotence, who transformed her into a she-wolf stupefied by the magnificence of her love. Astonishing even to the Deceased! She, so guarded in her affections, abandoned herself unconditionally to this feeling of adoration and self-denial that took hold of her when her first child was born and didn’t lessen with any of the three that followed.
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Latifa insists I should see a shrink. In the beginning, she thought my nightmares were linked to the grieving process, because they started shortly after your death, but their persistence frightens her a bit. I felt so guilty after those months of estrangement from you. Also guilty for not crying, for not being able to wail with grief, for staying devastated, too crushed by the suddenness of the loss to protest out loud. But these dreams, your dreams, invade my existence both day and night. I feel drained, too bruised for modest diversions, an evening at the movies with old college classmates or an intimate dinner with a guy I like well enough to bother seeing, since it is indeed necessary from time to time to go out and to make love. Latifa says she’ll take me to the shrink herself if I don’t go on my own. “Things can’t go on like this, honey. It’s not normal.” Nothing is normal. Why should my dreams hold such sway over me? In them I appear as lead actress or spectator, primary victim or simple passerby, but always, always, aware of the horror and unable to escape it. Besides your stories, you left me your notebooks covered with frenzied jottings of memorable dates, anecdotes, and passages filled with the drabness you endured yet bursting with your zeal to live. For my part, unbeknown to you, I scribbled numerous notes accumulated since adolescence, culled from my reading of works on the Doréval dictatorships, from old Quisqueyan magazines discovered at the Schoelcher Library in Martinique, from films and documentaries, and from the accounts of relatives and friends gleaned here and there. My nightmares are like hybrid monsters that restore all those things to me in a horrifying and always unexpected jumble.
1960. The student strike. You were just a child, Maman. A child fascinated by the stories of your older cousins and your big brother. More than thirty years later, I carry this load of memories folded and refolded into a thousand bloody origamis. Lives upended amid the atrocities. The sudden flarings of insurrection, the stirrings of rebellion against oppression. The irrepressible yearning for liberty.
For you, the year marked the beginning of your primary education against a backdrop of precautions and prudence. Injunctions and warnings. Discipline and rigor. Only girls were admitted to the sisters’ school, where life ran up against the black-clad nuns. Covered from head to toe, their hands fingering rosary beads, the nuns crossed themselves as they passed in front of the chapel. Overwhelmed by the enforced silence of the corridors, you weren’t as good at whispering as the other girls. Talking too loud was your earliest sin.
1963. A pivotal date. Year of the attempted kidnapping of the Doréval children, the ensuing reprisals, and the string of conspiracies both before and after. A mosaic of blood, crackling firearms, men in dark glasses, and children in tears. Children everywhere screaming or too appalled to make a sound, their eyes wide with horror. In one of your family albums, you showed me a photo of you in your school uniform and white socks, your braids tied with ribbons and a schoolbag in your hand. A mischievous smile on your lips, still carefree and happy, an almost defiant Marie-Carmelle who has not yet taken the airplane with me, a Marie-Carmelle I will never know.
On the bed with its whiff of approaching death is this washed-out old woman who hides her haughty expression from the world. Seeing her makes me relive your last days, Maman. Being obliged to bathe, touch, and feed her takes me back to your blighted youth and to all those memories you held tightly in your grip until the end.
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Notwithstanding her decision to remain in her interior world, everyday demands sometimes invaded her mind and dragged her back to this seedy nursing home where she was ending her days. So far from the sea. Then she would turn her impassive gaze on the caregiver who had dared to disturb her silence while she was deep within herself. She itched with the urge to display her annoyance and displeasure. Malevolent thoughts arose in her mind. Was it her fault that these people—the majority of them immigrants—could snag only menial jobs in those suburbs created as dumping grounds for blacks and Arabs? Was it her responsibility if their faces bore the scars of neighborhood brawls in dingy locales with pathetic names? Compound names, saints’ names, with noble sonorities, yet they were bywords for instability and segregation: Épinay-sur-Seine, Clichy-sous-Bois, Neuilly-sur-Marne, Noisy-le-Sec.
She had heard stories of Quisqueyan immigrants working clandestinely, earning next to nothing, living in foul conditions, with a nagging, visceral fear of being deported to their homeland. Why had they wanted so desperately to leave Quisqueya? Spurning the Deceased’s efforts to haul them out of poverty, they had let themselves be caught in the trap of the French Antilles or Barbados, or even worse, that of the island’s other republic. No sense of history! How could they forget the infamous massacre of Quisqueyans at the beginning of the century? Some say nearly twenty thousand perished, others claim thirty. And yet they persist in flocking to the border, toward the ba- teyes,* toward humiliation and death.
Why have they not adopted as their model the Deceased’s proud and uncompromising demeanor? She remembered the time when he kept the adjacent country’s great general waiting for an hour. What an affront! What delicious revenge! The generalissimo was sweating inside his well-cut uniform. That traitor, that man without a history, who denied his own origins. To conceal his own mother because she was black was truly a sign of a pathological mind. She and the Deceased spoke several times about this neighboring head of state and his overblown ambitions. The only good qualities the Deceased saw in him were, first of all, his skill in at least partially foiling the plans of the Americans, who were always interfering in other countries’ domestic affairs, and second, his sense of family. Because in all honesty the Deceased had to admit that the generalissimo took care of his mother even while he kept her under wraps.
On that score, the general and the Deceased resembled one another. The family came before all else. As soon as the Deceased had enough influence, he used it to benefit his father, Dorcas Doréval, who was named justice of the peace in Grande-Plaine. A locality destined to give the Deceased plenty of trouble, it would figure later in the conspiracies and intrigues. But what did it matter whether Dorcas Doréval had been born in Quisqueya or Martinique? The Deceased wasn’t going to let a detail like that disqualify him from the presidential contest.
Even before the election, as a loyal son he had helped his father retain his pension. Or at least, to be frank about it, the Joris brothers had looked after things. They had likewise intervened to help the Deceased acquire an old pickup truck so that he could start a transportation business. Without their support, that would have been harder. On several occasions, the Jorises had bent over backward to do them favors. It was a shame that things had turned out as they did and that the regime had been forced to liquidate the brothers. Who would have believed it? If you can’t trust such good friends, how does life make any sense? But the revolutionary government had to punish them. In such cases, personal attachments don’t enter into the calculus. Gratitude is no excuse for weakness. And if someone refuses to understand this, it isn’t worth belaboring the point.
Over the years, she and the Deceased were tested by several attempts to sow discord within the ruling family, to plant seeds of jealousy or dissension among the children, or to heighten the Deceased’s suspicions regarding his close associates. Fortunately, she never hesitated to put her children’s interests first, ahead of anyone else’s. Thus, she had managed to prevent the banishment of her son-in-law, which would surely have occasioned a bruising quarrel with Marie-Danielle. To think that the Deceased had not appreciated how much she resembled him, this daughter who as a very young child would clench her fists in rage when someone stood up to her! To take excessive measures against her husband would have led directly to a falling-out with Marie-Danielle and to the estrangement of both their grandson and their second daughter, who followed her elder sibling everywhere. It would have created a permanent breach within the family. The grandmother in her could not have borne it.
An old adage says that the parents of a daughter cannot predict what animal she will bring to dine at their table. Her eyes closed and her mind intent on the still-raw memory of her humiliation, she questioned the wisdom of the proverb: a son can cause just as much parental heartache as any daughter. She could not overcome her bitterness. Events had proved her right, and though it had all happened a very long time ago, she knew she would die with the memory of the gangrenous feud between her son and herself.
It’s true that the daughters have also given her their share of anxieties and difficulties. Especially the eldest, always quick to challenge authority, to second-guess instructions. Yet Marie-Danielle’s regal bearing had earned her a goodly number of admirers, some more promising than others. She welcomed their ardor as no more than her due. In that regard, if she had behaved in a more ingratiating manner, she could have made more headway with that Arab. On the other hand, the Deceased, concerned about his image as a nationalist, did nothing to facilitate things, going so far as to demand that Fakim adopt Quisqueyan citizenship. Like father, like daughter, you’d have to say of those two. As if it was customary for his eldest daughter to receive flowers from an Arab sheik! Each time he left the country, he sent her some. Sheik Fakim! At least that’s how he introduced himself, and he had been treated as such, until the day he absconded with millions of gourdes from the public treasury. The Deceased threw a fit over it . . .
How would he have reacted to the wedding of his son and the Foreigner? Would he have turned over in his grave before the conspicuous show of luxury, the crass display of bad taste, the resurgence of a caste who were eager to vindicate their sense of entitlement, dragging in their wake a whole panoply of outmoded instincts, of prejudices that had not been permanently buried?
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You were barely ten in 1964, the year of the “Presidency for Life” and the grotesque, bloodthirsty antics that surrounded it. The prearranged mob in the street, the referendum orchestrated to a score of terror. The catechism of the revolution that derided a people’s intelligence in order to satisfy one person’s megalomaniacal cravings. “Who are Desravines, Alexandre, and Vénérable? Desravines, Alexandre, and Vénérable are three founders of the Nation who live on in Fabien Doréval . . .” The persistence of my questions irritated you a little. “Did you repeat that catechism, too, Maman? But didn’t you learn a different catechism at school when you made your first communion?”
Your memories of the following year always brought tears to your eyes because of the fate of the uncle I never knew. Jean- Édouard, your big brother! The kind of brother everyone dreams of having, the one who wipes the tears you try to hide, applies a gentle pressure to urge you forward, leaps to your aid in times of need, and smiles tenderly when you brush away his hand. You had such a gleam in your eyes when you spoke of him that I, as an only child, wanted an older brother of my own to cradle me in the solidity of his love. How envious you made me with those rare, poignant images of brief, noisy family discussions, of false quarrels, of outings to the weekend matinee at the Paramount Theater. Under Jean-Édouard’s vigilance, you would turn up in your Sunday best. This was invariably the outcome of a long battle against the anxieties and restrictions of your mother, who was tormented by her fear that things could turn out badly. Sometimes your father would intervene in a gruff tone: “Let her go, they’re kids, you know.” He must have thought, but didn’t add, “Despite the dictatorship, despite the terror.” To keep you at home would be to capitulate for the umpteenth time, to admit his defeat.
As you recalled your father’s throaty laugh booming in the background, you would describe those excursions as your moments of freedom. I imagine the atmosphere of those Sunday mornings with their exquisite savor of liberty, the young people clustering by gender and age, the candy sellers, the whispers, one hand brushing another, the sly winks. A band of young boys swirls around Jean-Édouard as he holds forth on mini-jazz,* the hottest new musical groups, and the pop hits of the day.
After Jean-Édouard’s death, your father never laughed again. He hid behind his drink and his cigarettes, and silence filled the house.
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The Deceased understood that to remain in power, he had to rely on the masses, give them renewed confidence in the form of rifles, pistols, or wads of dollars, and in that way assure their loyalty. To tell the truth, it wasn’t just the uneducated classes who swore fidelity to the revolution: doctors, renowned lawyers, journalists, merchants, and industrialists, dark-skinned or light, also understood where their main chance lay. For glory, power, wealth. Everyone has a weak spot. As an intelligent man, the Deceased knew how to deal with human nature. He brilliantly neutralized the student movement. He offered positions to one or another, favoring those whose academic performance left something to be desired. He successfully induced them to change sides and denounce their former comrades who were less ambitious, more courageous, or just plain unlucky.
If an individual did not yield to temptation, other means of persuasion were available, some of which might be deemed harsh, but governing a nation entails sacrifice. As their great friend Lambert Chambral used to say, “A good Dorévalist is always ready to murder his children, the children to eliminate their parents.” Nor did the Deceased hesitate to set aside his personal feelings for the collective good. She was thinking of her sister Clara’s husband, Léonard Daumier, who was executed during the 1960s. Fiery and idealistic, he had fought stubbornly against Loiseau in 1946. The Deceased counted on him in the very beginning for speeches and other services, but Léonard refused to abandon his leftist views; like bones stuck in his throat, they distorted his behavior. Endangering the common good. Fortunately, Clara was able to divorce him quickly. They had done everything to spare her this ordeal, but it became necessary to resolve the situation. That’s what it means to be a revolutionary: to make the necessary sacrifices without hesitation. To pay the price, whatever it may be. In fact, she wondered whether the revolution didn’t demand the same level of sacrifice and selflessness as motherhood.
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I don’t know why I’m so affected by the death of an uncle who passed away long before I was born, but I feel it like a keen and haunting ache. Like a song heard by chance that can never be recaptured. Perhaps because your voice betrayed such depths of dejection that I had no choice but to descend with you into the pit of hell. Waiting in the early morning with your whole family in the entry hall of the military headquarters, and later at the perimeter of Fort Décembre. To recover the swollen corpse. The silent anguish of your mother, who, the same month, suffered her first attack of high blood pressure and lost what little remained of her zest for living. Your father choking back his tears and swallowing his pride in order to gain the right to bury his eldest son, a student in his preparatory year of law school, because any hint of indignation could provoke dreadful consequences. The responsibility for the family’s survival rested on the shoulders of a man who’d been honest and proud all his life and who now felt a sudden urge to kill. And you, Maman, the abandoned little sister, sensed the impossibility of asking questions, for the voices of the adults were brutally silenced. The family cut short the funeral to protect the corpse from any kind of assault. A grief sentenced to concealment. In the obscurity of the bedroom, or in the nauseating odor of the latrines, a grimy desolation, stained with shame, frustration, and rage. A mute distress, life reduced to a scorched earth, never to be as it was.
In a rare anticlerical impulse, your father emerged briefly from his despondency to enroll you in a nonreligious, coeducational school for the three years following elementary school. It was his final intervention before handing on to your mother the responsibility for all decisions concerning the family now bereft of its eldest son. That was the year of your first love. You admitted this to me with regret in your voice, as if you were somehow reproaching yourself for the crush you had on one of your classmates. His name was Richard. A fellow student entwined your names in the center of a heart drawn prominently on the blackboard. You indignantly erased it, as if you had lost the right to fall in love. As if you were renouncing all aspirations of happiness. You were not yet fifteen.
Nevertheless, you kept a diary until 1968. Every evening you retreated to a corner of the living room to scribble your thoughts in it, everything that was passing through your head. All the things that couldn’t be said out loud. One evening your mother wanted to read it. “Just to know,” she said. “After all, you’re only a child, Marie-Carmelle.” That diary was your open door, your wings, your shallow breathing, the ballroom where you whirled endlessly. How could you have shared it? You threw the notebook into the latrines. Your mother wouldn’t have understood any of it.
1969. Some peasants rebelled in a little village in the center or the south. The flames of revolt blazed for hours on end before being snuffed out. Dozens of confirmed deaths. Hundreds missing, both notable figures and anonymous ones. Those who could leave the country did so. Those who stayed, always the greater number, fought, kept silent, bore the wounds of their daily life in their own diverse ways. At least ten students from your class emigrated before the end of the school year. The director quickly put the empty benches into storage. His establishment could not afford to be seen as a breeding ground for dissidents, a training center for exiles.
The Corbières, a family as old as the community, also left. Three married sisters, their husbands, and their children, all living under the same roof. I don’t know whether I truly remember this immense house with its courtyard and garden or if I imagine it from what you told me about it. They came often, especially the two youngest sisters, to visit your mother at the end of the day. The three women would chatter over a cup of coffee or herbal tea. You used to play at their feet while eavesdropping on their conversations, stocking your memory with bland-seeming remarks to be deciphered later. Sometimes your mother would signal you to go play somewhere else. You knew then that they were going to broach a touchy subject: a sister’s unfaithful husband or a political question. You dragged your feet in hopes of catching a few snatches of conversation, but a stern look from your mother sufficed to compel your obedience. The women’s laughter or whispers followed you, and you imagined stories full of salacious details and intriguing dilemmas. With their children and their husbands, the three sisters left for the United States, one after the other, like grapes plucked from a bunch by an invisible but inexorable hand. Soon none of the family was left except an old aunt who until her death spent her days waiting for the mail to arrive.
You barely mentioned the major events of the following year. Somehow your near silence terrified me even more.
1970. Silence weighs still more heavily on Port-du-Roi. Daily life hurries along, but large areas of the city are shrouded in terror.
You insist on leaving to join your cousins who emigrated to Montreal at the beginning of the year. In their letters, they discuss their university studies, the snow, and the TV shows. They mourn Jean-Édouard’s memory, but they mention him less and less, already far removed from a state of bereavement. You envy them and come close to disliking them. Your Aunt Élise promises to take care of everything: you could finish secondary school in Montreal and go on to university there. To everyone’s great surprise, the Canadian consulate rejects your visa application. In any case, your parents refused to leave the country. Knowing you as I do, Maman, you would not have abandoned them. As time went by, you said, you stopped thinking about it. I will never know if, deep inside, you regretted staying. But you always asserted that destiny reigns over everyone. You met Papa. In due course I was born. Me, Marie-Ange, your very own angel.
1971. You go down to take the exam for your secondary school diploma, along with thousands of other candidates. It’s the year of the dictator’s death. In the social sciences test, one of the optional questions calls for comment on a famous statement of Fabien Doréval: “One of the fundamental missions of the Quisqueyan elite is to lift up the social level of the common people so that the masses can follow the elite in their ascent toward the light.” Sensibly enough, you opt instead to analyze the famous Southern War, in which the partisans of Alexandre opposed those of Kristof. You later learn, however, that the candidates who chose to discuss Doréval’s pronouncement automatically received thirty bonus points.
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An incident returned to gnaw at her, even though she thought it had been erased from her memory after so many years. Few people knew it, but she used to love listening to Edith Piaf. That captivating voice, capable of translating any song into an avalanche of strong sensations. A journey out of the self. An intense pleasure, with no consequences except unbridled happiness and a little sigh when the sound of the voice ceases, though it can be brought back with a slight movement of the hand. On one occasion in their rather rundown lodgings, long before the presidency, she was listening to Piaf on an antiquated turntable bought from a friend who was moving away. She was spellbound by that voice, and the final notes of La vie en rose had just filled the room where she had taken refuge, alone and free. While she was delicately setting the needle on the turntable to hear the song again, two of her daughters burst in with a saga of broken dolls and taunting words. Of petty bickering. Her hand twitched, and the needle skidded across the record with a screech, marring it forever. Ruining one of her favorite songs. Naturally, she later obtained other recordings of Edith Piaf, but at that particular moment she was livid with rage. She glared at her children without saying a word, and a violent impulse to be rid of them surged within her.
Today, old and bedbound, she finds herself alone. She knows we are always alone at the end of life, even when relatives are holding our hand, even when those who love us are shedding genuine tears. We must confront death all alone. There’s no longer any way to hide behind plans, intentions, or dreams. It’s necessary to look at the life behind us and say good-bye to it. We can pretend otherwise, but what good would it do? Along the way, illusions and self-deception help us to continue, but at the end of the road, they become useless masks that we must discard, for whether we like it or not, the flesh is laid bare and revealed for what it is.
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In spite of myself, I can’t stop blaming your death on that feeble octogenarian, a half-senile nursing home patient. I realize that the leap is illogical, since I am, after all, an intelligent young woman with excellent training. I have a degree in communications and cultural studies. As you repeated to me so many times, I drift along in this miserable job “until I find another more suited to my qualifications.” But in spite of all the rational arguments I wield against myself, I see this impotent patient as an evildoer. Responsible in some measure for the shadows that enveloped your life.
You were only forty-seven, Maman. The fact that people under fifty can die of heart attacks does not lessen my despair. That vile scourge is the same one that dealt an early blow to the dictator but spared him until striking him down for good eleven years later.
I wonder what would have happened if Doréval had succumbed to the first attack. How many lives would have been spared, how many families would not have experienced the disappearance of a brother, a cousin, a daughter? How many nightmares would no longer have their reason for being? Like running a film backward, I take the liberty of reworking history: I restore life to the young man gunned down one rainy evening because a Tonton Macoute* wanted to kiss the man’s fiancée; I return a smile to the careworn face of the mother who, for six years until her death, went to the police headquarters every morning to inquire after her two sons who had been arrested for their communist views. Humbly, I restore the dignity of his funeral to Claude Joris, candidate for the presidency at the same time as Fabien Doréval; I rehabilitate the image of this ceremony that became a scene of horror when men armed with machine guns sprayed the floral wreaths with bullets and dispersed the dead man’s friends, relatives, and sympathizers who had come to pay him final homage. Like a sculpted Madonna, I restore calm and peace to the Church of the Sacré-Coeur and quietude to the assembled mourners. Solemnly, I return the stolen body to the Joris family. Serenely, I cover the walls of the city in blue to hide the stains of the blood spattered there with no regard for aesthetics, and I transform the huge prison of infamous name into a massive history museum. Fort Décembre, bastion of shame, of ravaged corpses, crippled backs, mangled fingers, and broken hearts. I rededicate it as a place of commemoration for the victims, the martyrs, for all those who are remembered, but above all for those men and women who are never spoken of. Always more numerous. The anonymous multitude so often remains invisible to the eyes of posterity. But even on days of unaccustomed boldness, I don’t dare confront the fateful date for fear of implicitly undermining your story. Your taboos bind me to the transmitted memory and override my own recollections. My absent father remains irretrievably dead, an unknown in my eyes, in spite of the lovingly preserved photos and the sketchy allusions you reluctantly offered.
In any case, I tell myself that even if the tyrant had not survived his first heart attack, he would still have accounted for an impressive number of crimes. In less than two years in power, he had already established violence as a means of control and deterrence against any and all attempted opposition. I can quickly dredge up certain facts that have become an integral part of my memory. First of all, the failed attempt to overthrow the regime during the summer of 1958. Once captured, all the conspirators, both Quisqueyan and foreign, were put to death. Doréval seized the occasion to create his Presidential Guard, purge the armed forces, and eliminate several enemies, real or imagined. Among those massacred were the Joris brothers, whose principal crime resided squarely in their being related to Claude Joris, a former presidential candidate who at the time could not be found. A despicable act, a carefully contrived charade that fooled no one on that August day. The corpses of Clifford and Duquesne Joris placed on the highway like conspirators caught in their own trap. Flagrantly staged, a deed of primal simplicity and savage cruelty. Two men actually murdered in their beds, without trial or defense. The entire family of the former presidential candidate would become victims of Doréval’s thrusts. Then the carnage that made me wet my bed every night for a week after you described it: the decimation ordered by Doréval to solidify his accession to power. Two nights in June, bloody and hallucinating. Under the glow of searchlights, thousands of people shot down by troops commanded by Carabine Cabral. An onslaught against the slums. The bodies spirited away. The streets hosed down. Two crimson nights, followed by so many days of silence.
I wonder if someday I’ll be able to free myself from the forlorn and agonizing shell in which you raised me. When I look at the figure stretched out on the bed, I can’t let go of my hostility, because I’m afraid that dejection will take its place and leave me with no defense against despair.