Staring at the coffin, Sonny chanted the grief that was overflowing his heart. His mother, seated on his right, pressed his hand tightly and he tried to hold back the sounds of his pain. The others round about once again asked themselves why Dodose had insisted on bringing this unfortunate boy who upset the children and scared pregnant women. They maintained it was his fault that Luciana, Lucien the carpenter’s young bride, had carried a dead child around for months before giving birth one morning much to her husband’s great distress. She had come face to face with Sonny and had been taken with a seizure. After that, her baby’s blood had curdled in her womb!
Dodose, who had always refused to look the truth in the face—despite what the doctors in La Pointe had told her plus a trip to Paris to see a specialist at the Salpêtrière hospital—had taken Sonny to school when he was old enough. Mademoiselle Léocadie Timothée, who was still working at the time, had come to see her one evening to beg her to keep Sonny at home. He was bothering the other children.
While Dodose showered her with a torrent of abuse and called down the wrath of the Good Lord on this heartless woman who had never known the warmth of a man’s embrace and didn’t know what it was to be a mother, Sonny had cried his heart out. In what way did he bother the other children, he who sat at the back of the class, sang only to himself and drew pictures on his paper? To avoid being laughed at during recreation, he didn’t venture out into the school yard, but remained sitting at the same place, trying to make himself as small as possible.
So he made a resolution. Without telling anyone, he stuffed his satchel each morning with slates, crayons, exercise books and ballpoints and went off. Nevertheless he realized he had to remain at a fair distance from the school, near enough to see the little girls whose hair combed into “vanilla pods” and carefully brilliantined braids glistened in the sun, far enough not to draw the attention of the teachers or, worse still, of the boys who hurled stones and the word “estèbekouè.”21
He had soon discovered an excellent observation point: the veranda of the Alexis house. From there you could hear every shriek a child made until the bell rang and silence suddenly fell. Perched on the balustrade, you looked down on the row of classrooms.
Sonny had a stock of songs in his head and he himself didn’t know where they came from. He started in the early morning on opening his eyes, invariably full of sleep, and was hardly affected by his father’s yelling.
“Dodose, get your son to shut up!”
He continued through the hours of daylight. There were songs for every moment of the day; songs for when the sun was still stretching and yawning above the sea, for when it dazzled everything triumphantly high in the sky, when it sprawled lazily, mouth open, on the clouds, and when finally it descended to gorge itself on blood behind the mountains. The songs, however, stopped when night came, when Sonny was consumed by a raging fear.
When night came, Dodose was tired, very tired of repeating every day to comfort him:
“There, there, it’s nothing! That’s an ATR 42 flying to Martinique. That sound is the branch of the mango tree scraping against the top of the water tank.”
But her words had no effect! Sonny remained sweating and shaking, his eye following an invisible cavalcade into space.
The realm of daylight had nothing in common with that of the dark. It was an enchantment of light reflected in the puddles of the potholes, the dewdrops clinging to the grass and the secrets of the tall trees in the cool of the woods.
Sonny knew every forest path. When school was over he would walk up to the top of the hill at Dillon, puffing and sweating after two long hours. Up there, he felt himself a king, towering above the stunted vegetation poorly nourished by the laterite soil. He would pick armfuls of hog plums, thorn flowers and guavas that he couldn’t help taking home to Dodose, knowing full well that she would throw them all away sighing:
“Where have you been raking up all that muck?”
He loved nothing better than the days when the wind would get up without warning and the rain would sweep through like a warm blessing from the sky.
The untamed realm of the night, however, was dark and forbidding. Spirits hid there, betrayed only by the reflection of their big protruding eyes.
Sonny was certain his parents were at odds because of him. Emmanuel only spoke to Dodose to give orders or to level blame at her. To complain for example of a crease in his shirt. To demand a brush to polish his shoes over again. To question the freshness of the red snapper. Although Dodose had her chats with Madame Mondésir or Madame Ramsaran on the veranda, Emmanuel had nobody. Except for Agénor Siméus. Every Saturday, the double gates were left open and, at 4 p.m. precisely, Agénor Siméus drove up the drive bordered with dwarf coconut trees and parked his Peugeot 506 at the bottom of the steps. He would haul himself out, pat Sonny’s cheek in passing, even though Sonny was now a head taller than he was, throw him a hearty “How’s it going, young man?” and go and sit down with Emmanuel in the living room. Emmanuel would fetch two glasses and a bottle of Glenfiddich and then switch on the stereo that nobody was allowed to touch, which he had bought in Manaus at a meeting of rain forest experts. Then he inserted a compact disc with the precautions of a midwife handling a newborn baby. Madame Butterfly wailed a few moments, then Agénor Siméus asked:
“Have you read the latest issue of the Magazine Caraibe?”
“You know full well I don’t read that bullshit!” he thundered.
So Agénor would put on his glasses, draw out of his pocket a few crumpled sheets of paper and start to read some long-winded Open Letter addressed by an angry citizen to some politician or other. Emmanuel listened in deep silence and then concluded:
“There’s only ever been one honest politician in this country, and that’s Rosan Girard!”
“But you’re forgetting Légitimus!”
“Him honest?”
And the verbal sparring would begin; the Socialists, the Communists, the Patriots and the Assimilationists would each get a dressing-down.
At half past six, the shadows would start to fill the living room and Emmanuel would get his breath back to shout:
“Dodose, we can’t see a thing!”
While Dodose fussed about, Agénor Siméus would get up on his two feet and take leave of everyone.
This was the sign for the servant girl to come out of the kitchen and announce: “Manjé la pawé!” (Food’s on the table!)
One morning, the sun rose as brilliant and sparkling as it always did. The mountains were green. The sky, a faded blue. Sonny grabbed a bottle of kerosene, stuffed his satchel with rags and set off for the Alexis house. The more Rivière au Sel set about fearing and avoiding it, the more the Alexis house became his domain, his property. The spirits who lived there were all on his side and had never bothered him, even during the long siestas he took during the afternoon, curled up on the cool tiles of the veranda. He set off, hopping as usual across a copse carpeted crimson with herbaceous phanerogams.
When he came out onto the road, he couldn’t believe his eyes. The house, his house, was open.
A stranger was standing on the veranda beside Moïse, the postman, who, on seeing Sonny, savagely shouted:
“Clear off!”
Then went on to explain to his companion:
“That’s Dodose Pélagie’s son; she’s the biggest pain in the neck in Rivière au Sel. You’ll soon make her acquaintance. She can hear a safety pin drop in a bedroom!”
“What do they call you?”
And as Sonny stood there, mute, dribbling, fidgeting and grotesque, Moïse said:
“Can’t you see he’s crazy?”
Who knows why and how the little seed of friendship takes root and starts to bud? Sonny ought to have hated Francis Sancher for having burst into his kingdom and plundered it. Instead of which he found a friend. Somebody who tried to decipher his mumblings. Who wiped his brow and his lips compassionately with a handkerchief. Who painted life with the colors of travel and adventure.
Under the contemptuous gaze of Moïse, set on demonstrating that in his eyes Sonny was nothing but a repulsive worm, Francis Sancher would clap time in rhythm with the boy’s voice and declare:
“You’re a marvelous musician!”
Francis Sancher also liked his drawings.
“What an imagination you have! Where did you get the idea for this from?” he asked.
One day he exclaimed:
“Good Lord! Have you ever been to Italy? It looks like the Villa Melzi on the edge of Lake Como!”
Sonny was no longer ever alone! Clinging to his friend’s big warm hand, he would stride through the woods, looking up at the trees plumed with silvery leaves.
“Is it true what they say?” Francis Sancher questioned him as if he expected an answer for real. “Is it true that the gum tree is so called because it secretes a gum ideal for making pirogues for the high seas? Is it true that a tiny decoction of that tree’s bark makes our sword rise invincible?”
As soon as the shadows started to lengthen they would return to Rivière au Sel, for Francis Sancher shared his terror of the night. He would quicken his step.
“Hurry! Hurry! Soon they will be breaking their chains!”
They both had the same terror of Xantippe. Whenever he saw him prowling across the savanna or standing rigid under some bay tree Francis Sancher would stammer:
“Did you see him? Did you see him?”
Sometimes they found the poor devil along the rayo hedge, watching them hazily. Francis Sancher would then barricade himself inside.
“He’s followed me everywhere. When I forded the rivers he was there. When I was up to my waist in the swamps, he stuck to me like a leech. One night I pleaded with him: ‘Don’t you know the meaning of forgiveness? The fault is a very ancient one. I’m not the one to be blamed directly. Why do the children’s teeth always have to be on edge?’ ”
Moïse interrupted him with a glass of rum.
“Now, now! Stop talking through the top of your head!”
Francis Sancher emptied his glass, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and pleaded:
“It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me who shed his blood before hanging him from the manjack tree!”
At times like these, seeing him shake like a child, Sonny, suddenly tall, strong and handsome, felt torrents of love well up from his heart to comfort his friend.
Sonny had got into the habit of picking a few Bourbon oranges or starfruit still fresh with the dew from Dodose’s garden to go with their breakfast. One morning, as he arrived with his daily offering, whom did he see seated at the table on the veranda facing Francis Sancher? None other than Mira Lameaulnes.
There she was, proudly glowing with her light skin that made others ashamed of the color of theirs. Glowing with her dazzling shock of hair. Glowing with her scent of forbidden fruit.
If ever anyone had laughed at, martyred and hounded Sonny with her spitefulness, it was Mira. When she stopped in front of the church with her parents for the weekly gossip, her prying, alley-cat eyes would burn him with contempt. Once when she had met him up on the hill at Dillon, she had picked up a stick to threaten him with, although he was only looking at her.
Who had transplanted this poisonous manchineel onto his shores?
“Get out of here!” she had already started to bark.
Sonny took to his heels while Francis Sancher got up and shouted:
“Wait! Wait, let me explain!”
Explain what? What was there to explain?
After this betrayal, Sonny never saw Francis Sancher again. He never again took the road to the Alexis house. In fact, he hardly ever left his room and his bed, staring at the pattern of the beams above his head and singing himself songs of consolation.
When Dodose, worried out of her mind, had taken him to see a specialist in La Pointe, the doctor, a French Frenchman with eyes the color of rainwater, had examined him for one whole hour before pronouncing his case hopeless.
His friend was dead!
Amid the glow of candles around him the women’s faces grimaced, like those masks that used to scare him when Dodose took him to the carnival in La Pointe, thinking it would amuse him.
A piercing song burst forth from his lips, and Dodose, having pressed his hand in vain, resigned herself to taking him out onto the veranda.
Deafened by the noise of the rain, the men had drawn their chairs up close and were laughing, heads together. Leaning up against a column, oblivious to all the noise, Loulou Lameaulnes was staring into space.
21 Lunatic.