Love, Anger, Madness_ A Haitian Trilogy - Marie Chauvet [143]
Tonight, I will act alone. I will get André drunk and leave the house to haul the water and the coal. Once I’ve had a nice cup of coffee, I’ll feel better. Coffee appeases hunger and stimulates the nerves. I don’t want to fall asleep. Eating so little since my mother’s death has depressed me enough. Poor black woman who died, as she used to say, of raising her mulatto of a son like a prince! My palms are softer than the petals of wild orchids.
“Don’t touch that pot,” she would protest whenever I wanted to help. “I’ll wash it myself; leave that broom alone, you’ll get calluses. I’m not slaving away so you can end up a servant boy.”
She died the year I came home triumphantly to give her news of my successful completion of the exams for the second baccalaureate. “I can die now,” she had said. And die she did, too soon. I had learned to count on her and not on myself. What I knew was how to read the classics and to speak French like a Parisian.
“Good diction, very good diction,” Brother Justinien would say, rubbing his hands together.
I was already writing poems and reciting those by French authors and sometimes my own, but I didn’t know how to do anything else. “Lazybones!” they cried after me in the street. Lazy? I sometimes spent whole nights with my notebook, writing, crossing out, ripping it up to start again, over and over. Lazy? My mother left me her shack, the furniture now blocking the door, and her loas ! Lazybones! I tutored a few students that Brother Justinien sent me, but nobody thanked me because I stank of clairin.
“Stop drinking, don’t drink anymore,” the good Dr. Chanel kept repeating to me. “You’ll ruin your health and your reputation.”
Why do they rebuke me for my one vice? If I’m doing my job properly, if I am conscientious in teaching their sons, stubborn asses interested in nothing, then why are they meddling in my private life? If I drink, it’s my business. Ah, I remember my first spree at Saindor’s, who had his place on the shore, before the devils murdered him. May he rest in peace! I was hunting a poem that was torturing me sadistically as it fled. I saw it run, turn around, thumb its nose at me, stroke my cheek, lean on my shoulder, look me seriously in the eye and burst out laughing. So I drank. I began drinking because of this poem I never wrote. I staggered down the Grand-rue in front of Cécile’s door, staggered before her maid Marcia, who laughed and got the kids to throw rocks at me. I never raised my eyes to see Cécile. My heart quickened with loud beating. I know how to be prudent. That prefect who sent me speeches to correct for a few piastres but still called me a loser in public, I will take his name to my grave. To my grave, the name of a certain popular writer who returned my poems with a slight look of distaste, telling me: “Poets are all the rage now, so keep writing, my dear, if you like.”
But I was soft and they knew it. They went at me ruthlessly. I have since witnessed the undeserved triumph of the grandiose and the mediocre. Machete in hand, I will climb the hill of dreams on my own. I will hew my way through the undergrowth of tangled creepers. Alone at the broken ground for the edifice that my hands would have been the first to trace, I will lift my face to the rising dawn, machete in my fist, soaked with sweat and blood …
I am getting used to this terrible silence reigning over our town. A town mired in terror! We have become the half-dead residents of a dead town. I am taking on the foul stench of the corpse outside. André snores, lying stretched out on the floor beside the crucifix. He has taken off his shirt and his prominent ribs stab at his skin. He