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By Root 548 0

looks so much like me we could be brothers. The room stinks. The chamber pot is full to the brim. I am suffocating. What are they waiting for to bury the dead? Where is the prefect? Where is the commandant in charge of the town’s security? Where is M. Potentat? Where is the mayor? Where are the police? Where are they all? Ah! Ah! Ah! So they too are afraid? Well, we’re no more cowards than they are, André and I. At least they have weapons, but us? Where are the church bells? I want to hear them ring. Poor Father Angelo! Your priests will be more useless than ever. We must fight the devils with equal force. This is none of your business. How is it our business, mine, André’s, Jacques’ and Simon’s? Unknown and malnourished poets. Poor unarmed poets abandoned to the cruelty of the devils. What was I doing the night before they came? I can’t remember. Something in the air must have announced this invasion. Something we didn’t know how to interpret. Perhaps the danger hovered over our carefree heads for a long time. What are we guilty of? What are we paying for? If Jesus was put to death, it’s because he offered something more. Where did I read that? What more have we said or done than the others? In history, details are always meaningful. Are we going to enter history? Once upon a time, voices would often rise out of the depths of my conscience that I would silence with blows of rhyme. Details. Yes, meaningful. What did these voices say? Did they reproach me for my indifference toward the rituals of my ancestors? Did they accuse me of laziness, treason, cowardice? Here I am, my nails scratching the varnish off my Latin education, clinging to the bosom of the superstitious terrors of my childhood. How much less dangerous it is to serve God! He has the patience of a forsaken lover, hanging around in case love rekindles to hold out his hand and forgive. Exacting loas! Insatiable loas of my ancestors! …

I went to open the trunk and I saw a rat lapping up the syrup in the dishes. I banished him with a kick and started laughing and screaming:

“Jesus, Son of God made man, lift up your hand over this town and cast out these devils.”

I’m delirious. It’s the hunger. The tension, too. When’s the last time I have either eaten or slept? And yet, I poured the syrup into the marassas dishes again and stopped up the rat hole.

André is asleep on his side now. He grunts and I go past him furtively I miss solitude. Decency is only necessary in the presence of a third party. And I don’t feel like being decent at such a time as this. Here I am looking through the hole studying the dead body again.

My eyes left him only when I saw Cécile’s curtains move. I wrote a poem in my head about her black eyes, her black hair, her brown plum-colored skin, and I told myself: “It’s true that she is beautiful and rich and will never be mine.” Nonsense! Fame awaits me. Wealth awaits me. I snuggle lovingly in the arms of sweet hope.

“Madame Magistral, may I speak to your daughter Cécile?”

“Cécile,” Mme Magistral will say, paying me no mind, “some beggar is asking for you. It’s that little mulatto, Angélie the trinket-peddler’s boy.”

And Cécile will appear, haughty, shouting in Creole:

“What do you want? Are you running an errand for Madame Fanfreluche?”

And I will run away, head down, Marcia scolding me.

Will they have the nerve to humiliate me, to keep being smug after everything we’ve suffered together? I’d rather the devils kill everyone. Let this town disappear! Let it be annihilated …

They’ve started again with the firing squad. It’s happening near the church. I wake up André. Now we’re both flat against the wall, looking through the hole.

“Beggars,” André whispers to me. “Never have I seen so many of them.”

“But those are peasants.”

“Oh!” says André.

The bullets crackle. A little girl runs from one house to the next. I see her fall. André doesn’t. It’s strange he didn’t see her fall. The sound of the bullets is terrifying. They whistle with a treacherously inconspicuous sound, a sound like nothing else in the world. Their whistling echoes