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I was biting my nails, bemoaning the fact I had not sought the object of my desire sooner, when I heard a man cry out. He was doubled over and running away as fast as possible, straight in the direction of my house. I saw Cécile’s window open slightly. In the time I lost looking for her silhouette the man fell, riddled with bullets. Two tiny devils, their weapons slapping their backsides like tails, leaned over the body and smashed its face in with their red boots.

Cécile’s window was closed again. I plugged up the wall with a piece of soap and took off my sweat-soaked shirt. On the ground, the crucifix gleamed in the half light. I stretched out on the floor again. I am on the floor with all of them now. On the floor with Jesus. On the floor with the loas, for it is said that the spirit of the gods of Africa descends upon the offerings for nourishment. On the floor, like a pariah. I burned my last mat to get rid of the bedbugs busy eating me alive at night. Before being reduced to this, I knocked on every door: Mme Fanfreluche’s door, and M. Potentat’s, both with businesses on the Grand-rue, both passing for rich people around here. I knocked on every door, repeating myself like a parrot in a voice growing weaker and weaker from rising hunger:

“Please give me some work.”

They would whisper something to each other that I could not hear and would put a twenty-centime coin in my hand for an errand I had agreed to run. But what can a man do with a Haitian coin of twenty centimes?

I am thirsty! My water pitcher is half-empty I will need to ration myself. Ah, if only I had enough courage to go cross the yard to get some coal and the little stove and make a bit of coffee! Thank God for the day my mother had the good idea to buy me this chamber pot.

Here I am alone as I have never been. Alone with my memories, my regrets, my remorse. Why remorse? Is it always there? After my mother’s death, I reproached myself for cutting short my mourning, though I had shut myself in for a month, even refusing to see the good Dr. Chanel. The doctor was the only one, apart from Father Angelo and Brother Justinien, who made sure I did not die of hunger. But, like the Haitian saying goes, the good ones don’t last. And it is true that death always picks off the best. Dr. Chanel is dead. So is Brother Justinien. As for Father Angelo, just as good but now old, he can barely walk and, cassock or no, he does seem to live by begging just like me. For there is more than one way to beg.

To witness a man murdered makes you heavy with remorse. The body in front of my door is beginning to mean something to me. He haunts me. Was he running to me? Now I am standing in front of the wall, scratching away the soap to open up the hole again. Who is he? His clotted blood has stained his yellow shirt with large blackish blotches: the blood that gushed out red has become black. Black like the devils’ uniforms. Are devils black or white? Who am I, I who was born of a father mulatto enough to pass for white? Saffron skin, mahogany skin, sapodilla skin? No, rotten coconut skin.

“The color of farts,” as my mother used to say, “all mulattoes of your kind are the color of farts.”

This irresolute color with which I have trouble identifying makes whites lump me with blacks and blacks reject me as white. The mixed-blood race! Birds forever without branches, but of late especially unwanted.

When did I really begin to feel ill at ease? And for whose sin am I paying? They haven’t taken a good look at me, they haven’t seen my troubles, for the love of God!

The bloodbath that my friend Jacques, a poet like me, has predicted will come to pass. Although I still devour whatever palliatives life offers to help pass the time, it comforts me to think that if they should suddenly force open the door and step over the body of Christ to kill me, I would still know how to die bravely. That last jolt of pride, the guilty pleasure of a malcontent. Is death near? I have been letting myself sink into my past with too much