I wish I were my Indian grandmother who would have followed him to the funeral pyre. I would have thrown myself onto the flames licking over his body, and our ashes would have mingled as our souls never did. I wish I were my Indian grandmother who would have died for him. That’s what I wish I were.
Our happiness did not have time to bud. Perhaps if he had lived beyond his allotted time, I would have managed to nurture that fragile plant which heat withers and rain devastates. Such as it is, our story is a sad one. He took me in; you could say he kept me out of pity because I had come to seek refuge and he was not the type of man to leave a dog out in the rain.
Yes, I wish I were my Indian grandmother who would have followed him to the funeral pyre. Our ashes would have mingled and rained down on the Ganges.
If you want to know why I took refuge with him, a disreputable man, who one wretched morning loomed up in the middle of Rivière au Sel, you’ll have to go back far, far into time to the day I was born, when the midwife shouted:
“A girl, Madame Ramsaran! The Good Lord has taken pity on you.”
She never held my hand.
When she soaped me down as I stood naked under the sun, the palm of her hand was rough. When she took me to school, she walked three paces in front, and I’d stare at her black braid twisted into a chignon, held in place by a long tortoiseshell pin, while she presented me with her back under the black calico dresses that she wore every day the Good Lord made, in mourning for my sister Shireen. Shireen, dead at the age of three months, suffocated by the worms that had crawled up her insides to her mouth.
There was never any room for me in her heart. Nor for the boys either. Not even for Alix, the youngest, so handsome people called him “pitite a Bon Dié” (the Good Lord’s child). But the boys had their papa who, as soon as school was out, took them across the fields, to soccer matches on Saturday and to the beach at Viard on Sunday where they hunted for gray clams in the gray sand.
I had nobody. I had nothing. Only my books.
“Where did she get all that intelligence from?” the school mistress marveled.
The other children refused to play with me. Out of jealousy they called me “Kouli malaba.” Yes, all I had was my books. As soon as I got back from school I would lie down under my mosquito net and read and read until her rough voice found me where I had gone and brought me back to earth.
“Can’t you hear when I’m calling you?”
That’s why I can remember as if it were yesterday the day my father took me out of school, and I think I shall remember it until the day I die. For me it was the beginning of the end. It was a few weeks before school was due to start again. September had been fine, relatively dry for our region, smitten with the wind and the rain. The leaves glistened green under the golden rays of the sun. The fireflies danced in the dusk. The nights were humid with the dampness of our sweat. One of my cousins from the Grands-Fonds had spent the holidays with us and we’d been walking in the woods, going as far as the pond at Bois Sec, whose waters, it is said, turn to blood when the sun goes down and where the spirits come to drink.
That day we were finishing lunch.
She was fussing around Father, as she’d been doing for years and years, peeling a juicy, sticky brown sapodilla. Then she cut it into pieces and arranged them on a white saucer edged with blue. Without taking the trouble to thank her, Father stopped me as I was getting up from table.
“Let me tell you: you’re not going back to school. It’s a waste of time, I’ve got other plans for you!”
Nobody looked surprised, as if it were perfectly natural. I was speechless.
I ran out to my room, threw myself on my bed and started to cry. Leaving school for me was tantamount to dying! After a while she came in and sat down on the bed.
“Listen,” she said. “Your papa knows what he’s doing. A woman is like an orange tree or a litchi. She’s made to bear fruit. You’ll see how happy you’ll be when your belly swells out firmly in front of you and your child starts to kick in its haste to come out and warm itself in the sun.”
Her eyes contradicted her words. You could sense she didn’t believe a word, that she was reciting a lesson.
“I’m not interested in having children,” I replied. “I don’t want to get married.”
She shrugged her shoulders and her mouth curled up in spiteful joy.
“But that’s what’s going to happen to you. I’m telling you so that you know, your father’s made an arrangement with Marius Vindrex.”
My tears dried instantaneously.
“What!”
Marius Vindrex is a sad-looking yellow man, as long as a rainy day, whose languishing eyes have not let me alone ever since I’ve been able to walk on my own two feet. He’s got money, that’s for sure! After having studied something or other in Canada, he started up his family’s sawmill again. The logs arrive from Guyana, since our forests have been decimated, and all day long his machines whine, sawing wood, blackening the air with their smoke. He’s Carmélien’s good friend. Always talking politics with him. Last year, when a bomb killed that American, he was in seventh heaven; you’d think he’d placed it himself!
“Marius Vindrex?” I screamed. “But I don’t love him!”
She sighed, then said in a tired voice:
“You watch too much Dallas and Dynasty. What does that mean: ‘I don’t love him’? Do you think I loved your papa when I married him? And in India, in our country, don’t you know that husband and wife didn’t meet each other until they slept in the same bed, under the same sheets?”
I couldn’t sit there listening to all her silliness. I went out. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. The sun was hammering down on my head. I felt madness running behind me, about to grab hold of me. I ended up on the Saint-Charles forest path, and at a turn I stumbled into the gully that was always cool and inviting with its dark, almost invisible waters, singing their little song under the ipecacs and the ferns:
“Syé bwa
Légowine kasé
Syé bwa.”43
A man was sitting on a rock watching the water. On hearing me, he stood up and stammered:
“Is it you? Is it you?”
Then his face closed up again.
“I’m sorry! I mistook you for someone else.”
Considering how long I’d been hearing about the color and state of his clothes I had no trouble recognizing Francis Sancher and needed no introduction. I knew he’d just given a belly to Mira and that everyone was out for his blood. Personally, I don’t like Mira Lameaulnes and I’m not afraid of her either. People believe her green eyes can turn them into dogs. People also believe that she can give hernias as big as banjos and erysipelas as heavy as yam seedlings. I just think her heart inside her breast is hard and gray as a rock. When she was at school, before they ended up expelling her, even though she was Loulou Lameaulnes’s little darling, she used to arrive late after having roamed God knows where, sit down in her place, and while the other children recited their multiplication tables she’d hum the weirdest songs that nobody had ever heard before:
“Chobet di paloud
Sé an lan mè
An ké kontréw.”44
What she had in her belly wasn’t my problem.
“Who were you waiting for?” I asked Francis Sancher.
He stuck his bakoua hat on his hair that looked as though it hadn’t seen a comb for months, and disappeared without even bothering to answer.
It was the wind. Blame it on the wind.
In the dark the mountain was sound asleep and the wind was lying at its feet. Suddenly, it shook itself and got up. It pressed up against the candlewood trees, then with one leap it rushed down to the savanna, overturning everything in its way. In its fury it blew into our house, throwing open doors and windows. She got out of bed to close them, and I heard Father order her to go and check the gate.
I felt anger and revolt boil up inside me. What’s the point of a mother if she doesn’t temper a father’s egoism and cruelty? But for her, only Shireen counted. I could be sold like the last lot of hogplums in the market for all she cared! I had to make her ashamed, I had to hurt her, take my revenge. But how?
Then, laughing like a madman, the wind whispered me the idea. Blame it on him! Blame it on the wind!
When I arrived at his house, the ferocious Dobermans, with their red muzzles, were fighting over a carcass. They left off to run towards me. But he made them lie down. He was sitting behind his typewriter.
“What do you want?” he asked, not in the least bit agreeable.
“Would you have a little job for me? Cooking or washing?”
He laughed. But even when he laughed, his eyes were as black as mourning.
“Here you are looking like an apsara,45 and you want to work for me? It’s the world upside down!”
I went closer.
“What are you doing?”
He laughed again.
“You see, I’m writing. Don’t ask me what’s the point of it. Besides, I’ll never finish this book because before I’ve even written the first line and known what I’m going to put in the way of blood, laughter, tears, fears and hope, well, everything that makes a book a book and not a boring dissertation by a half-cracked individual, I’ve already found the title: ‘Crossing the Mangrove.’ ”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“You don’t cross a mangrove. You’d spike yourself on the roots of the mangrove trees. You’d be sucked down and suffocated by the brackish mud.”
“Yes, that’s it, that’s precisely it.”
He gave me the smaller of the two bedrooms. For a whole week I heard him scream and struggle with invisible spirits, call for help and cry. I prayed the Good Lord would help him. Finally, at first light, he came to find sleep in my bed.
I didn’t expect to love this man I had chosen in the great wind of madness. Love took me by perfidy. It crept stealthily into my heart and took possession of it …
But Francis Sancher was never mine. He was never Mira’s either, that I know. The creature he belonged to was hiding in the shadows amid the sounds of the night.
The days were spent more or less peacefully. He wrote pages upon pages on the veranda. When he was tired of tearing them up, he went off into the woods, sometimes with the dogs, who returned with their tongues hanging out and their coats soaked. He didn’t speak to me, he ignored me.
But as soon as darkness fell, everything changed. He drew close to me as if I could protect him.
Shaking, he would ask me:
“Can you hear him? Can you?”
I shrugged my shoulders and answered:
“Yes, I can hear the laughter of the wind that the night cannot keep under lock and key as it scours the countryside. Yes, I can hear the cavalcade of mangoes in a hurry to sink their stones into the belly of the earth so that they in turn can become eternal. I can hear the sea there in the distance endlessly quarreling with the rocks.”
He found no consolation in these words. He went up to the window, peered into the night and said:
“Can you see him? Can you? He’s standing there under the ebony tree. He’s waiting for me. He’s counting the days.”
I went up to stare into the night over his shoulder and I could see nothing but high, dark, smooth walls.
“Come to bed,” I begged him. “Doesn’t my body taste nice?”
He wouldn’t listen to me and went off to Chez Christian to search for solace in rum. I stayed alone praying that one day he would find peace. When he returned he lectured me in a hollow and meaningless way. He told me about towns, he told me about all sorts of places, and I tried to find my way through his words without a guide.
“When we left Balombo it was dark. We had been fighting over this village for months. We had finally cleaned out the rebels. I had this smell of fresh blood in my nostrils that I couldn’t get rid of. I had the death rattle in my ears of all those whom I let pass over to the other side without being able to provide comfort. There was this young girl, this child, I should say, with her legs torn off, who at the height of her suffering kept repeating: “Long live the Revolution!” But I was past believing in it. I couldn’t take it any longer. It was that evening I put one foot in front of the other and became a deserter. The desert was white like salt under the moon.”
I wanted to ask him questions. But he dozed off without even thinking of waiting for what I had to say. I watched him with his eyes closed and his mouth open, and I wondered through what wretched, arid lands this man’s mind was roving. He never told me anything about himself, and I wouldn’t know what truth there is in all those stories the people of Rivière au Sel tell.
When I was pregnant, I told him. He didn’t say a word. Over our heads the rain continued to drum on the iron roof that the branches of the trees scraped every time the wind breathed. I touched his shoulder.
“Did you hear what I just said?”
He turned his back to me in answer and faced the wooden wall. From the shaking of his shoulders I realized he was crying. From that day on, he no longer took me in his arms, and we lived like father and daughter. When I was alone I made up sentences to soften his heart: “Why are you angry because my womb is fertile? For someone who is so afraid of death, don’t you know that a child is the only cure?”
But when he returned, my words took fright at his impenetrable face, as hard as a rock, and flew away.
And now he’s dead! All I have left is the memory, cold as ashes, of a little pleasure and a lot of pain. I confuse the past and the present.
I think I’ve never been closer to Francis Sancher than tonight, now that he has nothing left to say, now that he has gone and will never come back. Our ancestors used to say that death is nothing but a bridge between humans, a footbridge that brings them closer together on which they can meet halfway to whisper things they never dared talk about.
Amid the patter of the rain on the roof, the scraping of the trees, the rustling of the grass and the whistling of the wind as it steals between the badly joined planks of this house, I seem to hear his voice speak mysterious words I never heard before, lifting the enigma of who he was.
I wish I were my Indian grandmother who would have followed him to the funeral pyre. For then we would have gone on talking and talking.