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By Root 528 0

patiently, heels together, motionless, as if struck dead. In vain she waited for somebody to make a move, to know what to do, to know whether to speak, cry or scream, whether to clutch at the bodies and call out to them. Her legs were wobbly and she took a few steps back, moving with difficulty, like an automaton, as she slowly made her way upstairs. She recognized Paul’s footsteps behind her and went into her room, leaving the door open. He closed it behind them. They looked at each other in silence. Then Rose lifted her hand and stroked his face. He felt as if she were fighting off some sort of terrible exhaustion and that at any moment she would collapse before him, flimsy and disjointed like a puppet.

He watched her stagger.

For a brief instant, he could see the student who had fallen asleep beside him on the bench in the public square. He thought: Worn out, they’ve worn her out as well. He rushed and caught her on his shoulder. Then he put her in bed and sat by her side to wait for her to wake up. Dawn came and only then did he learn that Rose was dead.

MADNESS

There is no better role to play in the presence of the great than that of the fool. For a long time there was an official jester to the king, but there has never been an official wise man to the king. Me, I’m the fool of Bertin and many others, perhaps yours at this moment, or perhaps you are mine; a man who would be wise would have no fool, so anyone who has a fool is not wise; if he’s not wise he’s a fool, and perhaps, though he be king, his fool’s fool.

DIDEROT1

Book One

It was as if suddenly the earth, ravished and devastated by a horrifying cataclysm, had opened up to swallow us. People were running, shrieking. I leaped to open the door and, falling to my knees, looked outside. A taunting patch of tropical indigo sky caught my eye—an indigo stretched with water to the infinite horizon by the enormous brush of a tireless, austere and silent painter. Sky of Haiti, sky beyond compare, a custom-made frame for the giant mapou trees, for the unrelenting verdure of a landscape coddled by eternal spring. Bullets whistling by my ears quickly made me duck and close the door. Silence and trouble! Fearful silence. Deadly silence. Were they, like me, listening to their hearts leaping in their throats? The silence weighed like bricks upon us and we no longer dared move, lying low in terror, in our common terror where we clutched each other, invisibly, as if we were at the bottom of an airless pit. A stagnant agglomeration of cowards and curs! If only I could shake off my terror. I am going to shake off this repulsive terror of mine. They will see me show myself, a harmless poet and a dreamer, alone, in all the glory of our forebears, and offer my serene brow to their bullets. Lies. After many twists and turns, the poem crosses my field of thought and stops there as if to fool me about who I am. I am afraid. I’m stunned by the hammering of their boots. There they are walking past my house! I locked the front door and barricaded it with the old dresser rotting with wood lice, the four wicker chairs, the little pitch-pine table and the trunk where I keep my books and scraps of paper. I do all this, and yet by way of a peculiar doubling, I calmly go where I hear screaming, where I am certain the devils are committing murder. I avoid danger as I accuse myself of cowardice, loathing my own reactions. In the trunk, there are a few poems, unpublished, as are all of my poems about devils and hell. Enough of them there to get me pumped full of lead without anyone hesitating. No one until now has managed to describe them as well as I have, so intuitively. Before I even saw them, I pictured them booted, armed, dressed in resplendent red and black uniforms decorated with gold buttons. I understood the symbolic shorthand: incandescent flames burning at the bottom of an abyss out of which the damned, in a supreme and vile temptation, would see a rain of gold. Red, black, gold! Flames, abyss, ambition! No use trying. I can’t write. I will try to preserve in my memory