“When I think how mistaken I was about him! I took him to be a barbudo53 from the Sierra Maestra, a builder of worlds, whereas in fact he belonged to that highly dangerous species who has lost all illusions and demolishes what he once adored. Yet I loved him like a friend.”
Lucien Evariste had remained a long time with the men under the tarpaulin during this night that was the color of rain. He now stepped into the room where the dead man lay, not to pray, but to warm himself from the heat of the candles and litanies. Lucien hadn’t recited a Hail Mary for years, even less a Confiteor Deo, even though he had been a choirboy, and his mother had dreamed of giving a priest to the church as she looked at him lovingly in his surplice. She had given birth to her boy late in life, and wondered what she had done to the Good Lord, tired as she was of accumulating over fourteen years of sperm for nothing from her fiery husband, the Dr. Evariste, who had his surgery next door to the presbytery and the cathedral, but who at night paid scant attention to God’s commandment: thou shalt not be lustful. A latecomer, Lucien had grown up wrapped in lace and linen. He had been fed on fine wheaten flour and soothed on orange blossom. At the age of seven, sitting in pew no. 32 in the cathedral between his mother and father, he would turn the pages of a big missal and sing the hymns in tune:
“O God, our conqueror,
Save our France,
In the name of the Sacred Heart.”
You can imagine how his parents suffered when he became a revolutionary and an atheist!
It had all begun quite by chance. While he was quietly studying for a classics degree in Paris he had gone along with a friend to a demonstration out of pure curiosity. He hadn’t gone a hundred yards along the rue des Ecoles when a ruffian from the police riot squad tore off half his ear with a billy club. This unjust mutilation had determined his future, and from that day on he had become one of the pillars of student protest, whatever the cause. Back home, his mother was upset. But his father shrugged his shoulders and told her over and over again she was wrong to get into such a state. Once their son was back in the warm Caribbean sun, he’d soon forget all about those ideas. Hadn’t those who’d refused to fight in Algeria now returned to the fold and drew their salaries from the state budget? But for once, his father’s knowledge, infallible in cases of duodenal ulcers or inflammation of the pleura, proved him wrong. When he returned, Lucien refused to live under the family roof, and after making a great fuss about joining the patriotic cause he became an editor at Radyo Kon Lambi in charge of the program Moun an tan lontan (People of Yesteryear), in which he told the stories of the heros, martyrs, patriots, leaders and major figures who had died naturally, or more often violently, in their struggle to get the wretched of the earth to rise up and march. For every word he uttered, his mother—glued to the radio—asked for the Good Lord’s forgiveness. For her, to talk about the class struggle or the exploitation of man by man was as bad as talking about fornication or adultery. To symbolize his break with his family, who believed that you marry people of the same color and the same-size bank account, Lucien moved in with Margarita, a black-skinned girl he met at a market stall in Petit-Canal. Margarita couldn’t put three words of French together, but was now desperately trying, much to the amusement of their neighbors.
Lucien was glad to be back home as soon as he had finished his MA. More often than not, though, he poignantly bemoaned the torpor of this sterile land that never managed to produce a revolution. If only he’d been born somewhere else! In Chile! In Argentina! Or just a stone’s throw away, in Cuba! Triumph or die for freedom!
In order to occupy the evenings that Margarita spent thrilling to the television adventures of American heiresses, Lucien got it into his head to write a novel. But he could get nowhere, wondering whether to write a historical portrait tracing the heyday of the Maroons or a romanticized saga of the great slave revolt of 1837 in the South. His patriot friends, whom he widely consulted, were just as hesitant, some in favor of the Maroons, others in favor of the revolt in the South, but all bidding him to write in his mother tongue, Creole. Lucien, who at the age of six had been slapped by both parents for having said out loud the only Creole expression he knew: “A pa jé?” (Are you joking?) was in a dilemma and, without daring to admit the fact, looked helplessly at the expensive electronic typewriter he had just bought. It was Carmélien Ramsaran who told him about Francis Sancher living in Rivière au Sel.
Carmélien and Lucien had become friends from grilling themselves in the Saturday afternoon sun at the soccer stadium and cursing the local team’s goalkeeper. They often got together and annoyed Margarita with the noise of their squabbling, for Carmélien took after his father, Sylvestre, who boasted he had never voted in his life. Whenever Lucien started off on one of his ideological speeches, Carmélien would bring him back to earth in a mocking tone of voice: “Open your eyes, man. We’re already European. Independence is a sleeping beauty that no prince will ever wake up.”
A Cuban in Rivière au Sel! A Cuban! Lucien, who knew all about Fidel Castro’s adventures in the Sierra Maestra, who had taken his side in his quarrel with Che Guevara, who had watched admiringly La Ultima Cena dozens of times during Third World Film Festivals and who knew the number of Soviets in Cuba down to the last man, had never seen a Cuban with his own two eyes. Except perhaps the musicians of the Sonora Mantecera orchestra who were all the rage in the Latin Quarter when he was a student. But they were Cubans living in Miami, exiles, counterrevolutionaries!
A Cuban in Rivière au Sel! What was he doing there?
Carmélien made a face.
“He says he’s a writer.”
Lucien jumped, thinking of Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima, and already saw himself discussing style, narrative technique, and the use of oral tradition in writing. Usually, such a discussion was impossible, since the few Guadeloupean writers who did exist spent most of their time holding forth on Caribbean culture in Los Angeles or Berkeley. However hard Carmélien tried to dampen his enthusiasm, adding that in his opinion Sancher was one of those undesirables Castro had thrown out of the country because of their vices, Lucien wouldn’t listen. A Cuban in Rivière au Sel! How could he get to meet him?
After thinking it over, Lucien decided to send him a detailed epistle inviting him to one of the programs on Radyo Kon Lambi. Many weeks went by without an answer. He would watch for the postman’s yellow van, walk as far as the post office and tell everyone in hearing he was expecting an important letter—all in vain. Against the advice of Margarita who, for her part, had heard nothing good about Francis Sancher, Lucien made up his mind to pay him a visit, a common practice to welcome newcomers in the villages and hamlets. Thank goodness they were not in La Pointe where the slightest visit had to be preceded by a telephone call.
Lucien made feverish preparations for this meeting. He had a copy made of his best programs, in particular the one broadcast the day after Cheikh Anta Diop54 died, with an elementary school teacher from Benin, who miraculously was teaching at Anse Bertrand. He spent nights drafting outlines of his two novels, only to tear up in the morning what he had gone to great lengths to devise during the hours of darkness. Finally, fearing that he would look pretentious, he decided to go empty-handed. He arrived in Rivière au Sel one evening on the stroke of six, with his heart thumping as if he were about to take a test.
Despite his beard, Francis Sancher looked nothing like a barbudo.
With his shirt wide open, showing the curly hairs of his chest, Sancher was staring at his typewriter as if it were a rival with a familiar temper. He looked up at Lucien with magnificent misty eyes floating with dreams and derangement and exclaimed:
“A letter? What a strange idea! I only open my bills. And what did it say?”
Paralyzed by emotion, Lucien floundered with the short speech he had prepared in the bus. Francis Sancher listened with a fatherly grin on his lips, went and fetched a bottle of rum and two glasses, then said:
“You’ve knocked on the wrong door, my son. May I call you that? The person you see standing in front of you can only tell of men and women whose lust for life has been cut short. Just like that! No glorious struggle. I’ve never heard the names of those you mention. I’m not what you think I am. I’m more or less a zombie trying to capture with words the life that I’m about to lose. For me, writing is the opposite of living. I confess to impotence.”
Lucien cried out in indignation, ascertaining that literature was the necessary extension of a struggle, calling Césaire and his miraculous weapons to his rescue. Francis Sancher burst out laughing.
“I used to speak like that.”
“When?”
He poured himself a glass of rum big enough to make a good-size fighting cock lose its head, and then continued:
“And first of all I’m not a Cuban. I was born in Colombia, in Medellín. When she was seven months pregnant my mother left the plantation, as was the custom, and went and waited for my birth at her parents’, two old bourgeois fossilized in their prejudice, living in one of the few lovely old houses of that horrible industrial city, next door to the church of San José. She almost died giving birth, and while they were fighting for her life, they left me in a corner covered in blood and fecal matter where the midwife forgot about me for forty-eight hours. I should have died there and then!”
“But you did go to Cuba?”
“Cuba? Later, much later!”
“Did you fight? Did you fight?”
In the middle of that question Moïse the Mosquito arrived and was greeted by the furious barking of the dogs who, strangely enough, had hardly wagged their tails at Lucien. Lucien was not the type to listen to gossip, but he thought the newcomer had a sour face, like the one Margarita put on when he talked for hours with an intruder. Francis Sancher ignored Moïse and continued on his tangent:
“My father had a large wine-colored mark on his face that washed around his cold little shark-like eyes. I always think of him as being dressed in black, probably because his whole being reminded me so much of death. In fact, he most likely wore heavy white cotton suits, starched stiff by our numerous servants. Every evening my mother made my brother and myself kneel down at the foot of his bed in his big, red-tiled bedroom and pray for him with our eyes staring at the crucifix. We knew a curse was hanging over the family.”
At this point Moïse stared at Lucien as if to say:
“Completely nuts! Don’t you think he’s completely nuts?”
While Lucien, who had more or less recovered his wits, jibed:
“A curse? You’re talking like a field nigger!”
“A curse, I’m telling you! That takes the form of a sudden, unexplained death, always around the same age, in the early fifties. My grandfather was struck down on horseback while he was coming back from a card game where he had been cheating as usual. My great-grandfather died the morning after a night when he hadn’t even made love to his favorite mistress, Luciana. My great-great-great-grandfather drowned the morning after his second wedding in the swamps of Louisiana, where he had taken refuge after fleeing from Guadeloupe …”
Lucien jumped.
“What’s that you’re saying? Guadeloupe?”
“Oh, I haven’t told you anything yet. Papers prove that it all starts from here.”
“Here?”
“Have you heard of the Saint-Calvaire Great House?”
“Saint-Calvaire? I’m not a historian. Ask Emile Etienne.”
Their first meeting ended with everyone rolling drunk, and Lucien almost plunged into the river Moustique on his way back to Petit-Bourg.
Two days later he came across Emile Etienne down on the rue Frebault in La Pointe, and asked him about it. But Emile Etienne shrugged his shoulders and called Francis Sancher’s remarks “bullshit” with no historical basis.
Eaten away by curiosity, Lucien had gone back to see Francis Sancher to try and piece together the puzzle of his life.
“So you were a military doctor?”
“You could call it that. You know when they started to be wary of me? When I started taking pity on the Portuguese. I too used to think they were a bunch of bastards who had bled the country white and deserved what they got. And then in a room next to mine at the Hotel Tivoli, Doña Maria was dying of cancer. Using the excuse that she was doomed to die, her husband had grabbed all her jewels, necklaces and aigrettes and taken the first plane to Lisbon. During the very rare moments when she wasn’t suffering torture I stole up to her bedside and read to her from her favorite novel, The Brothers Karamazov: ‘A man must remain hidden in order to be loved.’ ”
What should he make of all these cock-and-bull stories? Lucien asked himself. What should he make out of them?
He couldn’t solve the enigma. But through drinking glass upon glass of straight rum with Francis Sancher, his liver gave him hell, and Margarita cursed him when she received the full blast of his breath.
Soon information began circulating from another source, from Sylvanie, Emile Etienne’s wife, who reported or distorted her husband’s words. Going by what she said, Francis Sancher thought himself the descendant of a white Creole planter, cursed by his slaves, who had come back to haunt the scenes of his past crimes. Although the intellectuals were skeptical about such stories, common folk reveled in them, and everyone spied on Francis Sancher when he came down to the village to replenish his supply of rum, finding that in fact he did have the look of a cursed man. The women secretly had a soft spot for this mastic-bully of a man, so tall and straight under his silvery head of hair. But the men couldn’t stomach him and called him all sorts of names.
“It’s true, man. It’s true. Before he was washed up here, body and soul, he dumped his load of dirty business in the world, like his father before him!”
At night when Margarita told this gossip to Lucien as they lay in bed together, he got angry.
“How can you repeat such nonsense?”
For as time went by, and weeks turned into months, Lucien forgot the original ideological reasons for his interest in Francis Sancher and quite simply grew fond of him. He was the big brother and young father he never had, joking and tender, a cynic and a dreamer. During the so-called rape episode with Mira and the seduction of Vilma there was no more ardent defender of Francis Sancher than Lucien.
“In this country, a man’s sexual life is a swamp which it is better to steer clear of. Why do you want to drain this one?”
And he would remind all and sundry of the girls they had got pregnant, the virgins they had had and the papaless children they had sowed to the wind.
The friendship between Lucien and Francis Sancher was not to everyone’s liking. The Patriots living in the area found a way of taking offense and complaining. Instead of preaching an example here was the editorial writer of Radyo Kon Lambi making friends with a suspicious character. For by adding two and two together you could get a certain idea of Francis Sancher’s dubious life. Consequently, Lucien was summoned in front of a genuine tribunal and asked to explain himself, which he did.
“Listen, gentlemen! For a long time I thought like yourselves that you had to eat patriotically, drink patriotically and screw patriotically. I divided the world in two: us and the bastards. Now I realize it’s a mistake. A mistake. There’s more humanity and riches in that man than in all our lecturers in Creole.”
Following that, the program People of Yesteryear was taken off the air, but Lucien didn’t give two hoots, since he spent almost every evening hanging on Francis Sancher’s every word.
“The ground was dry and white under the moon. We knew that death could come from any direction, and we waited for it, philosophically. I closed my eyes and made a film go through my head. I saw the face of a woman I’d met one Carnestolado Fiesta day in Sinaloa.”
“A woman? I thought you didn’t like women?”
“I said I’m leery of them, it’s not the same. I’ve screwed more women than you’ll ever screw, even if you live to a hundred and seven. My finest memory, you know, was the time when we recaptured a village. Exhausted, I entered a compound thinking it was deserted. A girl, almost a child, her breasts hardly showing, was huddled up on a mat. On seeing me she uttered a cry of fright. I can still smell her virgin blood in my nostrils.”
“Where was this?” Lucien asked in a very Cartesian fashion. “When you were in Angola?”
But Francis Sancher was already far away and not answering.
The flames of the candles melting slowly into the saucers cast animal shadows on the wall. Lucien couldn’t believe his friend—silent for once—was there in this roughly-hewn, cramped wooden box, and a stream of salt water surged up to his eyelids. He went up to the coffin as if Francis Sancher was about to tell him through the glass that the joke was over and he was coming back to take his place in the world and reveal what he had hidden for such a long time.
It’s true, death is amazing! One day, a man is here. Talking, laughing, looking at women with passion uncurling in his crotch. The next, he’s as stiff as a board.
What tribute could he pay to his friend who had disappeared so suddenly?
Then an idea germinated in Lucien’s bruised mind. Shy and hesitating at first, as if preposterous, it soon came into its own and wouldn’t leave him alone. Instead of hunting down Maroons or nineteenth-century peasants, why not, as an urban son of the twentieth century, put together Sancher’s memories end to end, as well as snatches of his personal secrets, brush aside the lies and reconstitute the life and personality of the deceased? Oh, this idealist without an ideal was not going to make it easy for him. He would have to reject the power of generally accepted ideas. He would have to look dangerous truths in the face. He would have to displease. He would have to shock.
And to write this book, wouldn’t he have to track down his hero? Check out the footprints he had left along the paths of life? Put himself in Sancher’s shoes?
Europe. America. Africa. Francis Sancher had traveled all these lands. So shouldn’t he do the same? Yes, he too would leave this narrow island to drink in the smell of other men and other lands. It seemed to him that this was the opportunity he had secretly been dreaming of since his return home, since he had buried all his energy and led a hopeless struggle. With renewed enthusiasm he felt in a conquering mood, ready to leave on a great adventure, and he cast a triumphant look around him.
He saw his book published by a leading publisher on the Left Bank in Paris, acclaimed by the press, but coming up against local critics.
“Is this novel really Guadeloupean, Lucien Evariste?”
“It’s written in French. What kind of French? Did you ever think of writing in Creole, your mother tongue?”
“Have you deconstructed the French-French language like the gifted Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau?”
Oh, he’d know how to defend himself and answer them back!
A healthy impatience burned through his veins. He looked feverishly across the room where the women had ended up dozing off, their rosaries hanging loosely from their fingers, their lips huskily mouthing:
“We give thanks unto Thee, O God;
We give thanks for Thy name is near:
Men tell of Thy wondrous works.”
It was then that Emile Etienne the Historian, who had discreetly stayed outside with the men, entered the room, the glow from the candles reflecting off his receding forehead. He took hold of the small branch, dipped it in the holy water, and clumsily sprinkled the coffin. Impatient as he was, Lucien almost walked over to him and demanded he tell everything he knew about Francis Sancher. Was it true what people were saying? Had he been his confidant? Lucien gained control of himself in time, casting Emile Etienne a threatening look that puzzled Emile, since they had often worked together on People of Yesteryear and were generally on excellent terms.