“Yé krik, yé krak!
“Ladies and gentlemen, a good evening to you; a very good evening to you. A good evening to one and all! The person you see in front of you, looking like a bwa bwa35 that’s paraded through the streets of La Pointe during carnival, is no ordinary nigger. That’s what you were thinking, weren’t you? You were saying to yourself, Cyrille is not far off fifty and all he has to his name under the sun is a house made of breeze blocks, and it’s not even painted. The gutter’s broken and, when it pours, the water overflows from the roof, plop, plop, plop. But let me tell you, when I was twenty I was tired of kicking my heels against the hills and mountains of this tiny scrap of land and I said: ‘Fare thee well!’ I left for Marseille. There I took a boat that was waiting in the harbor and here I was tossing and reeling on the sea until we reached … until we reached Dakar. In Africa. Yes, Africa. And what did I see, ladies and gentlemen? Not at all what I had been told. There were no naked niggers eating each other up. No! There were Mercedes-Benz! Did you know that? How many are there on our roads? There were flags, their very own in yellow, red and green. Presidential palaces with presidents in tails. Whores dressed in silk and lamé cooing: ‘Like a good time, darling?’ Oh, Lord! I would have stayed on in Africa if the Africans hadn’t given me a big kick in the ass and shouted: ‘Go back where you came from!’ And here I am in front of you to tell you the tale I just had time to hear from them. ‘One day the hyena, the monkey and the lion …”
Standing under the tarpaulin that let in the rain, Cyrille was doing his usual antics and everyone was guffawing. Yet his heart wasn’t in it. When Alix Ramsaran had found him with both feet in his yam patch and announced that Francis Sancher had passed on and that he was needed at the wake, he had been flabbergasted. Only a few days earlier, less than a week in fact, he had come across Francis Sancher sitting on a tree trunk. It had been early morning, along the Saint-Charles forest path. Since he didn’t indulge in the gossip of Rivière au Sel and cared little about how many girls’ bellies had been made to swell up by Francis Sancher, he had greeted him politely.
“Sa ou fè?”
Francis Sancher had made a face, as if colic had tied a knot in his guts at that very moment, and motioned him to sit down next to him. Cyrille had obeyed, again out of politeness, and Francis Sancher had pulled a bottle of rum from Marie-Galante out of a bag, the very kind that bowls you over if your head isn’t screwed on tight to both shoulders. Cyrille had declined the offer. He was not one of those who start drinking as soon as their eyes are open, and Francis Sancher had pointed to the Soufrière, serene and well-behaved, with a gray veil knotted around its neck, and said:
“I wish it would erupt, that volcano! Set the whole place alight so I wouldn’t be the only one to go!”
Somewhat surprised, Cyrille had remarked:
“It’s a good volcano, there’s no denying that! The last time it got angry was in 1976. That’s over ten years ago. But what frightened us, really frightened us, was in 1956. I had just reached twenty. So I wasn’t thinking about death. One morning I opened my eyes and everything was black. A cloud of ashes had fallen on the flowers, the leaves, the animals tied up in the savanna, and the rivers heaved in mourning. Oh, it was no joke, that time!”
Francis Sancher looked around him.
“You know, it looks remarkably like home, this little corner!”
Cyrille couldn’t help being curious (there’s no sin in that), and had let out:
“Home is Cuba, from what I hear?”
But Francis Sancher had shaken his head.
“No, Cuba is the country I chose for my rebirth. You see, I was naïve about that. It’s impossible. You are never born again. You never come out twice from your mother’s womb. You can’t tell her: ‘It didn’t work, take me back!’ Once you’re up on your two feet, you have to go on to the end, right to the grave. I’ve walked until I’m exhausted! The marathon started a long time ago. It seems that my great-grandfather, a certain François Désiré, the first of this sinister lineage I want to end with me, was a Frenchman, the son of a wealthy family, who, after committing the first of his crimes, had crossed the sea and settled these islands with his vileness.”
Dizzy from all this verbiage and determined to demonstrate he could be just as masterful with words, Cyrille managed to get in:
“Let me tell you that from the first, the very first crossing my family has never left this patch of land. They’ve remained stuck in the ground like a rock. They’ve never even gone as far as that island as flat as your hand you can see over there on a fine day, the island of Marie-Galante! The farthest I’ve ever been is Deshaies on the other side. They called me in to sit up with Zéphyr, a master storyteller, who, between you and me, was too fond of the bottle. Don’t think I underestimate the powers of rum! It has to flow for the candles to shine and the women with watery eyes to pray. Our grandfathers used to say: ‘Si pa ti ni wom, pa ti ni lapwyè.’ (No rum, no prayer.) Do you hear what I’m saying? But too much is too much. And one day Zéphyr collapsed in his field. Dead.”
Francis Sancher had taken advantage of the moment when Cyrille let the word “dead” swell up in the silence to resume talking.
“It’s funny, isn’t it? Now that my time has come I’d readily plead for a few more days, a few more weeks, a few more months. The bitch hasn’t left me alone for a single minute. She’s waltzed me round and round without music, and yet now I’d willingly go on under her iron rule. Alas, there’s nothing to be done. I have only a few days left.”
A few days?
At the time Cyrille hadn’t paid much attention to these words. If anybody was bursting with health, it was Francis Sancher, with his bakoua36 stuck on his head right down to his eyes and his well-ironed clothes bursting at the seams, which proved he had a woman back at the house. Moreover, he had very quickly forgotten about him. He had met Xantippe with his mask of a face pretending to look for rabbit food, and he had told himself deep down that an eye would have to be kept on this vagabond, who was supposed to be harmless, but whose look gave you the creeps. Thank goodness Rivière au Sel had been spared those crimes that were common in the rest of the country: robbery, rape and murder! What were we coming to? Hadn’t he read in his daily copy of France-Antilles that three teenagers had held up a gas station in Le Moule? Back home he had had to deal with Sandra, his wife, who had started to prattle on because he had taken all this time to pick a few miserable taro leaves.
Yet when Alix had come to fetch him, he had recalled this meeting a few days earlier, realizing that this talkative and undeniably energetic man was waiting for his death. And that perhaps he had been the last person to see him alive, since Mademoiselle Timothée Léocadie had stumbled on his body at the end of this forest path, close to a small bamboo grove that the catchers of crayfish used to ransack but was now growing thick and healthy.
Yes, he had been waiting for his death, seated on a moss-covered tree stump, with a steady stream of soldier ants feverishly busying themselves between his feet. How had he met his death? Had he heard her step crush the damp grass? Had she loomed up unexpected out of the heliconias? Had she leaned against a wild cherry tree and warned him of her presence with the dry cough of a Gitane smoker?
Cyrille the storyteller, whose reputation was firmly established and much in demand from Petit-Bourg to Vieux Habitants, had seen some corpses in his lifetime! Fat ones, skin-and-bones ones, short ones, tall ones, red ones, black-black ones, almost white ones, Indian ones, all equal once they were cold and stiff. Yet he had never come face to face with death herself. He imagined her as a Negress with pearly-white teeth sparkling between her thick lips, the color of black beauty aubergine, swaying her hips seductively, stirring up a fire in the loins. Or else like Mira, a scorching high yellow girl who would set a church font on fire.
For if she was as ugly as sin, with an ugly grin and a scythe over her shoulder, why would everybody want to follow her? Everybody without exception. Francis Sancher was waiting for her. And perhaps if he had hung around he would have seen her too and they would have found two bodies in the mud. At the thought of this Cyrille’s teeth started to chatter and he began to stammer:
“Once-upon-a-time-there-was-a-pretty-girl-who-said-that-she-wouldn’t-marry-any-man-who-had-the-slightest-mark-I-mean-scar-on-his-body.”
Amazed, the audience looked at each other. What had come over their favorite storyteller to mistalk like that?