“I was the first to know his real name.”
Moïse repeated the words to himself as if they gave him a right to the deceased, a right he was unwilling to share with either of the two women who had loved Francis or with the two children he had planted in their wombs, one who was already shooting up fatherless under the sun, the other who was getting ready to enter this world as an orphan with nothing but two eyes to cry with.
He also believed he was one of the few people to know why Francis had chosen to shut himself up in this little island calabash tossed by the ocean’s bad temper. Not that Francis had let him into the slightest secret. Oh no! He thought he had caught a glimpse of the truth through the flow of virtually incomprehensible words Francis would let loose every evening when, once they had drunk to saturation point at Chez Christian, they would return home and drink the remainder of the night away until the sun loomed up between the mountains signaling the approach of first light. When he was with Francis, Moïse kept his mouth shut. First of all, because Francis did not listen to him. Secondly, because anything he would have said, or even invented, would have seemed pale and insipid compared to the spicy plates of fantasies that Francis, always brimming over with words, dished up day after day.
Before he met Francis, Moïse was always chattering on about how the women were barring him from their hearts and beds, how the men were ridiculing him and how, as time went by, his dreams had withered like a tree during the dry season.
After meeting him, he began to think that life would take on a new meaning and that leaves would bud on the tree of tomorrow.
Until the day when he had to come to terms with the fact that he had worked himself up for no reason, that Francis was nothing but a creature with nowhere to turn burrowing himself in at the bottom of a hole to die! He recalled that noon, splashed with light, when he had seen him for the first time. He was finishing his daily morning round from the post office at Petit-Bourg to the Trou au Chien, then to Mombin, Dillon, Petite-Savane, Rousses, and Bois l’Etang, ending at Rivière au Sel where he had his own place and even a garage built of planks to house the yellow postal van. A postman, he’s everybody’s man.
After drinking shots of straight rum at every house he stopped at, either to pay out the money orders mailed by the children in French France or to hand over the mail order catalogs from Les Trois Suisses or La Redoute in Roubaix, he was a bit tipsy, not really drunk, just enough to forget the old wounds and race along the roads singing and honking his horn.
It was then he saw this burly, heavy-built man as tall as a mahogany tree crowned with a mass of curly, graying hair talking to Madame Mondésir, who was standing on her veranda. By Madame Mondésir’s face you could guess what she was thinking. Where did this man spring from? Do you answer questions from somebody whom you’ve never set eyes on before? Finally, the mahogany tree started to move off, bumping along the tarmac a green metal trunk on wheels. Moïse stepped on the accelerator and, when he caught up with him, shouted:
“Sa ou fè? Ola ou kaye kon sa?” (Hi! Where are you off to?)
The stranger gave him a look of incomprehension, which settled for Moïse at least one point: This was not a Guadeloupean, for even the Negropolitans3 who have been yellowing their hides for years from the sunless winters of the Paris suburbs know what these words mean. Moïse continued:
“Climb aboard! The sun’s hot! Where are you heading for?”
“Do you know the Alexis house?”
The Alexis house? Moïse thought he had misheard. Then it seemed to him an excellent augur that this man’s first words formed a bold, unusual question as well as a challenge. He opened the van door.
“Climb aboard!” he repeated.
It was in the 1950s, perhaps a bit before, just after the end of the war, once the Alexis boy had laid his parents to rest, that he sold off their entire assets bought with the fine salaries of two topgrade elementary school teachers. He didn’t have problems finding a buyer for their upstairs-downstairs house in Petit-Bourg, situated just opposite the fire station, into which moved the young doctor Tiburce, straight from the hospital in Toulouse. But as for the “change of air” house in Rivière au Sel set amid a 30,000 square foot orchard the deceased had planted with orange and grapefruit trees and which gave the sweetest, sugary litchis—no such luck. The “House for Sale” sign remained for years on end soaking up sun and rain, until one day it fell to the ground in pieces and was forgotten.
To begin with, the Alexis estate seemed a godsend. In the mango season, the children on their way home from school would make a detour to take aim with their stones at the Julie and Amélie mangoes. The poor would pole down the breadfruit for their migan4 or pick the green bananas for their pot of tripe. At Christmas, pigs were tied up there for fattening. Then suddenly everything went wrong.
Children and adults who ventured in took to their heels, shaking and stammering, unable to explain clearly what they had felt. They had had the feeling the evil eye of an invisible beast or spirit had bored into them. That an unknown force had shouldered them out and sent them flying onto the tarmac road. That a voice had silently screamed insults and threats in their ears. They started to avoid the place. It was then that three Haitian field-workers, who had found jobs at the nurseries but were probably unaware of all the rumors and scares that were starting to pile up in ominous clouds, broke down the front door of the house and spread out their bedding of rags on the dining room floor. When three days had gone by and they still hadn’t shown up for work, Loulou sent an overseer to box their ears. He found them stiff in their rags, their black tongues hanging out between their teeth. They had great difficulty finding a gravedigger to bury them as well as a priest to recite the De Profundis.
Moïse therefore supposed that this mahogany tree of a man had met and confronted far more disturbing spirits than those which haunted the Alexis house. The stranger began to speak, spiking each word with a strong foreign accent; Spanish, Moïse said to himself, who had heard Cubans talk in Miami.
“You’re the postman, right? I won’t waste time beating about the bush. My name is Francisco Alvarez-Sanchez. If you receive letters addressed to that name, they’re mine. Otherwise, for everybody here, I’m Francis Sancher. Got it?”
Moïse just missed a stupid hen that was running with its brood right in the middle of the road and dared to exclaim:
“Francisco Alvarez-Sanchez? In which country did you dig that name up?”
“Don’t ask questions! The truth might burn your ears!”
Moïse didn’t breathe another word.
When they arrived in front of the Alexis house, Francisco, or rather Francis, extracted his huge frame from the van and remained standing with all his height examining his property. Then he turned to Moïse and joked:
“It needs a good carpenter, right?”
Moïse got out of the van and the words jostled to get out of his mouth:
“No use, you won’t find one. Nobody will agree to work here. But I’ll help you! I’ll help you!”
People say that on the first night Francis Sancher spent in Rivière au Sel the wind in its temper screamed down from the mountains, trampling the banana plantations and throwing the young yam poles to the ground. Then it jumped on the back of the sea which was peacefully sleeping and lashed it, scarring it with troughs several feet deep.
But people will say anything.
Moïse can confirm that nothing of the sort happened. That night there was not even a breeze. It was as bright as day. The moon was admiring its chubby face in the mirrors of ponds and rivers. The toads, up to their necks in mud, persistently asked for water, over and over again. Moïse was smoking his pipe in his hammock. It was not his desire for a woman that was torturing him, as it did every night. It was those dreams that were taking root again. Around nine o’clock, he could stand it no longer. He jumped to the ground, grabbed a bottle of Montebello rum and set off for the Alexis house.
People began to find the friendship between Moïse and this Francis Sancher, who sprang from God knows where, a bit strange. The first evening the two men stepped into Chez Christian for a shot of rum the locals felt like shoving them out. However, since Francis’s shoulders were as wide as a carpenter’s bench, they merely whispered slyly behind his back. Some of them said among themselves that they would teach Moïse a lesson. Then they remembered that his family had always been slightly cracked. Sonson, the father, who had pretended to leave for Dominica to fight with the Free French Forces like all the boys of his generation, had, in fact, taken another direction and mooned away his time on another island while his parents lamented him dead or missing. Once the war was over he had returned with Shawn, a Chinese woman, who up to her death had never really known how to speak properly to her neighbors. Valère, the elder brother, had left to work in the oil fields in Venezuela and was never heard of again. Moïse himself had left school, where he was a hard worker, to become a boxer, of all things! Three times a week he would go down to La Pointe to take lessons from a so-called Doudou Sugar Robinson who said he was from Washington, D.C., but everyone knew he was born and bred in Le Moule. After a trip with his manager to Miami, Moïse began to accost every Tom, Dick and Harry and fill their heads with stories about America. A great and wonderful country where blacks laid down the law in the ring. People thought he was about to jump on the next plane and go back there when he passed his driving test and got himself hired at the post office.
Once there, instead of making a niche for himself, he got mixed up with the unions. You could see him marching in line at every demonstration brandishing placards that read: “The Struggle Goes On.” Until the day a disciplinary letter called him to order. After that he contented himself with looking after his mother, for his sister Adèle had left home to marry a good-for-nothing who was only attracted to her light skin, and it’s true he took great care of Shawn right up until she died.
In the end the inhabitants of Rivière au Sel shrugged their shoulders and watched as the two inseparable new friends climbed up ladders to patch the roof, rounded the bends on the gutters as best they could, cemented the tiles on the veranda, weeded the property and planted a kitchen garden. Tomatoes. Okra. Chives. Hot peppers. For Moïse was right. However hard Francis scoured the surrounding villages showing the color of his money, however much he wore his voice out phoning across the island, he could find nobody, not even an illegal Haitian, to help him repair his property.
In the very beginning, when the house was really uninhabitable and the rats were ensconced in their holes and the bats squeaked in the interstices of the corrugated iron roof, Francis slept at Moïse’s, sucking a pipe with him after sharing the meals Adèle cooked and sent over twice a day, in accordance with the wishes of her late mother.
Once the house had taken shape, although it wasn’t much to look at and Marval the carpenter openly laughed at it, it was Moïse who came to sleep over and drink the nights away. Dare we say it? There were some wicked sneers. There was something fishy about that friendship and the two men were makoumeh!5 That’s for sure.
Many of the inhabitants in this hardly God-fearing village, buried in the back of beyond, were ignorant of the vices common in towns and had never seen a makoumeh except for Sirop Batterie who dressed up as a woman at carnival time in Petit-Bourg. They inspected the two in disbelief. Moïse, perhaps! But Francis! He didn’t look like one. The poisonous plant of mischief, however, grew and flourished in the compost of the village and only wilted once the news of the affair with Mira broke out. Can a rapist of women be a makoumeh as well? Can one have a liking for both men and women? They’re still debating the issue at Chez Christian in Rivière au Sel. But what revolted the villagers of Rivière au Sel and set them against Francis was not his dubious relationship with Moïse. Not even that business of rape. It was the fact he did nothing with his ten fingers. Traditionally, the inhabitants of Rivière au Sel worked with wood. In the past, some would set off to attack the giants of the dense forest. They could cut you down and saw you up a candlewood, ironwood or a golden spoon tree in next to no time. Others were excellent builders and could set you up with a timberwork of red cedar. The rest were expert cabinetmakers, who whispered their secrets by word of mouth from father to son and could fashion you mahogany or rosewood chests of drawers, beds made of locust wood and pedestal tables of podocarp delicately encrusted with magnolia. Those days are long gone, alas, since Guadeloupe, that cruel stepmother, no longer nurtures her children, and so many of them are forced to freeze to death in the Paris suburbs. And yet, wherever they are, the sons of Rivière au Sel are religious about work. In the dreary workshops or automobile assembly lines where they labor, they remember where they came from and the respect their parents commanded. What was Francis doing?
He set up a white deal table on the veranda, placed a typewriter on it and sat down in front of it. When the villagers, who were intrigued and itching to know what he was doing up there, stopped Moïse’s van they were told he was a writer.
Writer? What’s a writer?
The only person they gave that title to was Lucien Evariste, and that was mainly a joke, because ever since he had returned from Paris he didn’t miss a single opportunity to talk about the new novel he was working on. Was a writer then a do-nothing, sitting in the shade on his veranda, staring at the ridge of mountains for hours on end while the rest sweated it out under the Good Lord’s hot sun? And yet Francis Sancher seemed to have everything he wanted. Every day a truck would rush through Rivière au Sel delivering him a refrigerator, a TV set or a stereo. To cap it all, a van bearing the red lettering “MAZUREL KENNELS—ANIMALS OF ALL KINDS” buzzed through the village one high noon and delivered the two Dobermans, at the time hardly bigger than kittens, but already rapacious and greedy for the fresh blood of innocent creatures, so the neighbors were forced to imprison their chickens in their yards. And that’s a writer? Come now!
The most outlandish stories began to circulate. Francis Sancher was said to have killed a man back in his own country and run off with his money. They said he was a dealer of hard drugs, one of those the police stationed on Marie-Galante were desperately looking for. An arms runner supplying the guerrillas of Latin America. Since nobody could ever substantiate these accusations, people got carried away. What did prove true was that Francis Sancher’s income was of dubious origin.
Moïse paid no attention to the dreadful things people were whispering and did not even take the trouble to tell Francis Sancher. The latter appeared to be unaware of the little esteem he commanded and went on handing out smiles and hellos, left, right and center. You need to have lived inside the four walls of a small community to know its spitefulness and fear of foreigners.
When he went back as far as he could remember and saw himself as a small boy trotting along on his bowlegs hunting butterflies, Moïse could hear the people on the other side of his parents’ rayo hedge, who had stopped to look at him, say loud enough for Shawn to hear: “Misbegotten freak! Ta la led pa mechanste!” (That one’s really ugly!)
At school the teacher forgot about him, half Chinese, half black, as he daydreamed, so that on the rare occasions she did turn to him he remained speechless, trying to open his eyes wide while the other children snickered. When he could no longer quench the desires of his body, he dropped in on Angelica, a dame-gabrielle,6 who had landed up in Rivière au Sel at the end of some long tangled career. But she rejected him.
“If I take you what will the others think?”
He had gone home heavy-hearted with rage and regret, and ever since he had lived alone.
Yes, that’s all he had ever known, the meanness of men’s hearts!
But for the time being he had a friend, more than a friend, a child! From the very first weeks of their life together he had realized that Francis Sancher was not at all what he had imagined. Not at all the tree under whose shade he could blossom! His mind was not cut out for the size of his body. Francis Sancher was weak and whining, as scared as a new boy in a turbulent schoolyard, like a newborn arriving in the world of the living. His sleep was not filled with voyages to paradise, but struggles with invisible spirits who, judging from his shouts, stuck their red-hot irons into every corner of his soul. Moïse was not prepared to forget the first night they had slept under the same roof.
He had given him the room looking south with plenty of sunshine where his mother had slept the sleep of a woman alone before passing on as quietly as she had lived. Sonson, his father, had never taken the trouble to explain why he had abruptly left his hotheaded companions off the coast of Roseau, who were going to give de Gaulle a helping hand against the Germans, and had gone on to Jamaica. Had he got scared? Had he realized at the last minute he was going to get shot up in white folks’ business? He had never taken the trouble to explain either where and how he had met this ageless Chinese woman who had bequeathed to her three unfortunate children her skinny body, her featureless face and slit eyes, and who was given no more consideration than the furniture in the house right up to the morning he left for work and never came back. Shawn had waited for him a week as silently as ever. Then with dry eyes she went to look for work at the Lameaulnes’. Moïse had grown up amid the smell of their dirty linen that his mother washed at home.
It was past midnight. One or two in the morning. The dogs and the cows had stopped chasing their echoes. The bats were still flitting back and forth, still undecided, worn out as they were, about settling down under the galvanized metal roofs. Suddenly he had heard a shriek that could make your blood curdle, followed by gaspings and groans. He first thought a neighbor had strangely chosen to slit his pig’s throat in the middle of the night. Then he had realized that the din was shaking the wall behind the head of his bed and was therefore coming from the next room. He had rushed in and found Francis, a crazed look in his eyes, shouting meaningless phrases:
“One can’t lie to one’s own flesh and blood! One can’t change sides! Swap one role for another. Break the chain of misery. I’ve tried and you see, nothing’s changed. After all, it’s only justice. If the sun rose on the other side of the world, lighting first the West then the East, how would the world work? Perhaps it would be like in the fairy tale where the flowers grow roots up, where man’s body grows warm only to grow cold and where speech is given to the wisest, in other words the animals? … You, do you believe we are born the day we are born? When we land up sticky and blindfolded in the hands of a midwife? I’m telling you we’re born well before that. Hardly have we swallowed our first breath of air than we already have to account for every original sin, every sin through deed and omission, every venial and mortal sin committed by men and women who have long returned to dust, but leave their crimes intact within us. I believed I could escape punishment! I couldn’t!”
Moïse had had to take him in his arms like the child he would never have and sing him one of those lullabies that Shawn used to sing him in times gone by:
(Up there in the woods, there’s an ajoupa.7 Nobody knows who lives there. It’s a kalanda zombie who’s eating …)
In the small hours of the morning, Francis finally went back to sleep, tossing and sweating like a person with the dengue fever. During a quiet moment over coffee Moïse had dared ask:
“Why don’t you tell me what’s weighing so heavily on your heart? That’s what friends are for! To share in the difficulties of this bitch of a life!”
Francis Sancher hadn’t opened his mouth. The next day, not in the least discouraged, Moïse had pushed the interrogation further:
“You told me you’d seen some places in your time. Have you been to Africa? They say that over there men and cows lie down to die of the same thirst on the corrugated earth … And America? Have you been to America? When I was seventeen I went to Miami with my coach because I wanted to be a boxer. Oh, it’s different over there. By kicking and biting, the black folks manage to get to the top of the ladder. Everybody’s got a car, you know, that takes them wherever they want to go, docile as a dog …”
Francis Sancher had interrupted him roughly:
“Don’t talk about what you don’t know, man! I’ve lived in America and I can tell you what goes on there.”
Hurt, as when the children used to insult him at school with a “kouni a manman-aw,”8 Moïse hadn’t said another word.
One afternoon, returning to Francis Sancher’s, to his surprise he found him in the company of Emile Etienne, known as the Historian. When and where had these two met? Moïse was eaten up by curiosity and was dying to join in the conversation. But the two men ignored him and he had to stick his nose into a week-old copy of France-Antilles.
People say it was Mira, Mira Lameaulnes as everyone called her though she had no right to the name, who brought about the quarrel between Francis Sancher and Moïse. They said Moïse had smelled a woman on his friend’s underclothes and got jealous. So he kept himself at home at the other end of the village behind the quickset hedge of his bitterness and ended up joining the camp of enemies of the man he had once adored.
But as I said, people will say anything.
The quarrel between Francis Sancher and Moïse had an altogether different cause.
After the visit by Emile Etienne, Francis Sancher began to step up his mysterious wanderings through the woods. He neglected his typewriter, getting up at the crack of dawn when the sun was still shaking itself awake in the sky, setting off to trample the dew and not returning home until the middle of the night, so exhausted you couldn’t get a word out of him, his clothes covered in stick weed. What was he looking for? Like a honeybee or a hummingbird that can’t make up its mind where to settle. This question haunted Moïse to such an extent that he began to follow him, but never managed to obtain any definite clues.
And that’s how he fell victim to the final temptation.
Francis Sancher owned a trunk. A green metal trunk that he had stowed away in the smallest of the two bedrooms and from which he drew everything. Money for meat, bread or cans of Pal for the dogs. The reams of yellow paper, all the same size, for his typewriter. Old clothes. His favorite books, all in Spanish, except for a Saint-John Perse in La Pléiade collection.
Francis Sancher kept the trunk locked, but illogically he kept the key in a candlestick holder at the head of his bed where anybody could lay hands on it.
Once he had opened the trunk, Moïse had had a rush of emotion. Money! Banknotes! More than he had ever seen since deserting Shawn’s womb. Not only the familiar, reassuring French notes, but foreign bills, American, green and narrow, all looking alike and, consequently, deceiving and treacherous. How many were there?
He couldn’t help thinking of all those nasty stories the inhabitants of Rivière au Sel made up about Francis Sancher, and his confidence wavered as he sniffed a wad, as if its smell could tell him more. Alas! However it’s acquired, money has the same dirty smell.
It was then that the rain started to hammer madly on the roof as if it wanted to warn of an impending danger. Almost immediately the floor began to shake and a voice boomed out:
“Well, I got in just in time!”
When Francis Sancher walked in with water streaming down to his shoes, Moïse was nailed to the spot with the wad of notes stuck to his fingers just like Brer Rabbit punished by fate. Francis Sancher looked him up and down with contempt before letting out:
“So that’s what you wanted! I was wondering why you clung to me day after day, sucking my blood like a real mosquito. That’s what they call you, don’t they? So you’re just a dirty little thief! If it was money you wanted, why didn’t you ask? If you only knew how little it means to me!”
Frantic, his heart crushed by a terrible pain, Moïse stammered out: “It’s not … It’s not what you’re thinking!”
Without giving him another look, Francis Sancher hurled:
“Get out of here!” and went on mopping up the water.
Moïse had little choice but to obey.
At Chez Christian the men, totally oblivious, were watching a soccer match on the television and chanting “Ma-ra-do-na, Ma-ra-do-na!” Dodose Pélagie, ensconced in a rocking chair on her veranda was reading a copy of Maisons et Jardins.
Moïse got back home, his bed still damp from his nocturnal sweats, and, like a defendant too poor to pay for a lawyer, began to prepare his own defense:
“You think I’m after your money. But if it was money I wanted, I would have gone on boxing. I would have become featherweight champion. Doudou Robinson said I had the makings of one. Money’s nothing to me. I was looking to find out who you were in order to protect you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Those were sad days.
The rain never stopped. The Ravine Vilaine overflowed its banks, swelled and in a flow of blackish silt delivered up the bodies of animals it had caught off guard in the savannas. A terrible stench rose up, and in order to drive it away enormous quantities of incense were burnt in the shrines built into the hillsides.
One evening, unable to stand the pain any longer, Moïse took advantage of a break in the clouds and ran to Francis’s, words upon words of explanation in his mouth, his feet going in and out of the mud with greedy sucking noises. Sated, the Dobermans were yawning at the end of their chain.
He was about to push open the gate when the silhouette of a woman appeared on the veranda, the golden mop of hair of a high yellow girl lighting up the evening. Unable to believe his eyes, Moïse recognized Mira and he stood watching her, paralyzed, as if he were seeing her for the first time, as if from one year to the next he hadn’t seen her grow and blossom among them like a forbidden plant whose stems, leaves and flowers exuded a poisonous perfume.
What was she doing there?
Shaking from head to foot, he had crouched down in the shadow of an ebony tree until the rain, which had started up again with a vengeance, had soaked him to the bone. He had then run home in a panic as fast as his legs would carry him.
A few days later at Chez Christian the men had talked of rape. Of course he hadn’t believed this rape for a single minute. If one person had raped the other, it was surely not the one being talked about. But that wasn’t the issue. What mattered was that ever since then his life had resumed its taste of brackish water. The trees of Rivière au Sel had once again tightened their hold around him like the walls of a jail. He would wake up in the night like he used to, sweating with pain and anguish. At the wheel of his van he would risk his neck by leaning out of the window and looking up at the limitless sky that was capping the heads of other men he would never know.
Leave. Yes, but this time in the direction of which American dream?
His colleagues at the post office often got themselves transferred to French France. You would see them on their annual leave, trailing along a blonde, a lake of sadness at the back of their eyes and the bitter swell of exile furrowing the corners of their mouths.
Leave. But if you were to believe Francis Sancher, who had traveled all over the world, there’s not a place under the sun that does not have its share of disillusions. Not a single adventure that doesn’t end in bitterness. Not a fight that doesn’t finish up in failure. So live in Rivière au Sel forever? End one’s days as lonely as a male crab in its hole?
Terrified, Moïse looked around him at the circle of praying women, as if every face was an unfamiliar one, from Mademoiselle Léocadie Timothée’s, which old age had kneaded, distorted, misshapened and flattened into a nightmare, to Mira’s, a radiant obsession of his nights, and Vilma’s, still undefined, emerging from adolescence. An unknown pain ripped across his chest and salty water welled up over his eyelids.
Dinah Lameaulnes broke into a new psalm:
“Praise ye the Lord!
Praise ye the Lord from the heavens:
Praise Him in the heights.
Praise ye Him, all his angels!”
He bent his head very low and mingled his voice with the choir of others.