Love, Anger, Madness_ A Haitian Trilogy - Marie Chauvet [148]
“A message from Cécile!” I exclaim.
“What message?”
“There’s a piece of paper wrapped around the stone.”
“You are not going out!”
“I’ll have to anyway to get the water and the coal.”
“I am hungry” he confesses.
“So you see. Wait a little, until tonight.”
I’m upset with myself for having wasted the water and syrup on libations. I feel weak and starved. We each take a sip of clairin from the bottle and cough.
“This stuff scorches my guts,” André says quietly.
I go back to the wall to feast my eyes on the stone, harbinger of happiness. Nothing could stop me. I would snatch it from the very jaws of the devils if I had to. Cécile must see it from her window as well.
“Plug up the hole,” André tells me. “It stinks more and more outside.”
He angrily chases off a rat that jumped down from the roof to rummage for something to eat.
“What are you looking for?”
“Some cardboard to cover the chamber pot.”
He urinates holding his nose, then puts the cardboard on the pot.
“I’m hungry,” he says again.
“There’s syrup in the marassas dishes.”
“Are you crazy?”
The silence is strangling us. I even miss the whistling of bullets. Something terrible is coming, I am sure of it. Nothing moves, not even the leaves. The heat of a Haitian midsummer sets sky and earth ablaze. The road stretches out, lonesome and red right up to the church where the bodies have been piled. How can they kill as the sun is setting? How can they kill as the sun rises? Everything is so beautiful at all hours of the day and night! For the moment, the sea embraces the sky right where the sun has sunk dressed in saffron and crimson. An entire section of the sky has been set ablaze. Flames leak through the clouds and light them on fire. The sun is a centaur with a blazing mane. I am mounting the sun. I am clinging to two monstrous waves that have miraculously retained their immaculate color. I catch two clouds as they pass, thin as ribbons and red as bloodstains. I am standing atop the sun, in the midst of white waves, my muscles taut, head wreathed by the emerging stars, like a god on a chariot dripping with light.
“Plug the hole back up,” André tells me.
I am as startled as if something had bitten me; I’m panting, drunk on sun and clairin. I plug up the hole and go to bed next to him on the floor.
I am suffocating. I am thirsty and hungry. Oh God, let night come!
I’ve had three swigs of clairin one after the other and André has hung the jug around my neck, behind my back.
We cautiously took down the barricade and I pushed the door open. I threw myself to the ground and crawled up to the corpse with my eyes closed, holding my breath. I picked up the stone and I slipped it into my pocket. Then I went back to the yard and ran to the faucet, grabbed the coal basket, put the filled jug and the stove in it, and then ran back, this time ducking all the way back to the front door. In my slow and jerky dash, the water spilled on the coal. I was sweating profusely As I passed the dead body, rats came at me as if they wanted to make up for not having noticed me the first time around. I had to put down my basket to get rid of them. Their onslaught forced me to linger and look at the body. In the darkness, it seemed to me to have shrunk, more like the remains of a dog than of a man. Teeth jutted sharply from his lips, which had been gnawed by rats and ants. I hurried back. Trembling, André was waiting for me by the door he had cautiously closed. Together we rebuilt the barricade and filled the stove with coal. We had to search for a long time before we found the matches and the coffee, which I had inadvertently put back in the trunk with the dishes.
“Leave the trunk open,” André said.