Love, Anger, Madness_ A Haitian Trilogy - Marie Chauvet [146]
And in your moneyed homes, you amassed expensive knickknacks from France or the United States, collected jewelry and baubles to adorn your wives so they could strut past the beggars while holding their noses.
What am I guilty of? Me?
Well before the devils came, I felt I was being spied on, as if a mysterious presence was watching my every move, sniggering whenever it heard me recite my verses. And yet, I am just a minuscule creature! To you, I am nothing but a wisp of straw. I am nothing but a poor ox resigned to the stake, pulling his rope out of habit, docile, with no great desire to leave the meager pasture where it is attached. A Haitian ox, born in poverty, used to his poverty, lowing in the sun, his empty gut growling. But so be it, whether or not you’re an ox at the stake, each and every one of us needs to account for himself. Life is nothing but a usurious loan, and we still have to pay back the interest someday. We’ve abused the terms of the loan and the devils’ judgment day is here. Purification through the flames of hell here and now, and the triumph of truth afterward. We will confess our crimes in public this time, shouting: “Mea culpa!”
The devils speak. Listen to their bullets. Our overgrown gutters are red with blood. Cursed be the towns where poverty becomes a stone-faced routine. Where it no longer arouses pity.
It is said that the innocent will pay for the guilty. Oh! Yes, wait a minute, my God, after all, nothing has been bestowed upon me since my birth save the blessed love of my mother. Contempt, humiliation, cheap shots have been my lot. Of course the crippled beggars are in worse shape than I am. Thanks to my good black mother, I have a shack for shelter and some ordinary furniture. All of them naked like veritable zombies, gaunt, skeletal; they must be dying of hunger somewhere in the hills, the crippled beggars. But the devils’ bullets muffle their voices …
What am I guilty of? I keep asking myself but there is no answer. And yet incomprehensible remorse pricks at my heart. I try to exonerate myself in my own eyes as best as I can. I am guilty: of accepting injustice without protest, of wallowing in opprobrium and immorality and behaving like Pontius Pilate, offering smiles for the well-heeled to flatter them, groveling like a dog, tail between my legs, to make myself small in the presence of power, guilty of trembling before the district commandant, of indifferently witnessing Saindor’s murder, guilty of secretly rejoicing over his death because I owed him ten piastres. What else could I do? My God! It’s hard to know, hard to understand, hard to decide. Poverty has annihilated me. I saw M. Potentat and his red carpets, yellow carpets, white carpets. I saw all of his wealth and I looked the other way in order to accept the alms he gave me in exchange for running an errand. His wealth goes back as far as yesterday. How has he been able to accumulate so much in so little time in such a poor country? I don’t want to think about it. Not yet. Even my thoughts make me shiver. M. Potentat has scads of spies at his disposal and they could be roaming, invisible, around my house. But no, I am forgetting the devils. The devils have driven away M. Potentat and his henchmen. They are not afraid of anything, the devils! They are not afraid of anyone. So then why are they armed to the hilt? …
I knew my father by sight and reputation.
“Look,” my mother said to me one day, pointing out a man as light-skinned as a white man with a soft felt hat on his head, beautiful polished shoes, and, on his arm, a beautiful lady who looked like she could be Mme Fanfreluche’s sister. “That’s your father.”
A great landowner, who also had buildings on the Grand-rue, he wouldn’t give me an inch of thread for a pair of pants. My mother had been brought to him when she was fifteen by some of the farmers who had settled on his lands and who wished to get in his good graces. These farmers