Love, Anger, Madness_ A Haitian Trilogy - Marie Chauvet [150]
“You drink too much,” good Dr. Chanel used to say. “You’ll drown your talent in alcohol.”
Another ignoramus—after all, Baudelaire drank and Villon drank before him and Rimbaud drank too.17 The taste of it returns as I keep thinking about it, and I look for the bottle near André, who’s snoring away, just to get a mouthful, no more than a mouthful.
I feel sure someone just knocked cautiously on the door. I wake up André. He opens his red eyes and fish mouth.
“Someone knocked,” I say.
“Don’t open it,” he begs.
“Wait!”
I run to the wall but can’t see a thing through the hole. It’s dark as the devil’s lair.
“You must have been dreaming,” André whispers.
“I wasn’t sleeping.”
This time we both distinctly hear three little knocks. A voice whispers:
“René! René!”
“It’s Jacques! He’s not dead,” I say to André, shaking him. We clear the door and Jacques comes in.
“Oh!” he cries, seeing André, “I was sure I’d find you here.”
“Oh, little buddy! My little buddy! I thought you were dead,” André says, hugging him.
“Dead! Me! And why?”
“The devils!”
“What devils!”
“Why, the ones escorting you. René saw you going with them. You seemed so proud, so brave! You were reciting your poems and you were walking among them paying them no mind.”
“That’s right. I remember now. They said to me … You know what they said to me: Jacques, you’re a genius. We’ll leave you alone because you’re a genius.’”
He straightens his back and grabs the bottle of clairin.
“You pranksters! You guys are hiding out so you could drink without me.”
“We’re hiding because of the devils, you know that. We’re no geniuses, so they might kill us.”
“Anyway, I don’t want to see them again,” he says. “They’re awful, horrible …”
He shudders.
“Sit down,” I say to him.
“He looks so tired,” André says to me.
“Yes, he is as skinny as we are.”
“I’ve forgotten to eat,” Jacques admits.
“Alas, there’s nothing here.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter.”
“You didn’t see Simon?” André asks.
“The devils may have murdered him,” I say.
“I left him two days ago, no three … Ah, I don’t remember.”
“Let him be,” André tells me, “he seems exhausted.”
“Did you see the corpse?” I ask him.
“What corpse?”
“The one in the street, in front of the door.”
“Yes, that’s a dog.”
“But no, that’s Saindor, the one who runs the place by the sea.”
“It was dark,” he says. “I thought it was a dog.”
“The devils killed him right in front of René,” André says.
“And the other bodies? Did you see them?”
“Where?”
“By the church.”
“Yes. Piles. Hundreds of bodies. I saw them, I saw them …”
All of a sudden he starts to shriek, and I throw myself on top of him to keep his mouth shut. I put all my weight against his back, my left arm around his chest and my right hand muzzling him to the point of smothering him.
“Are you trying to draw them here?”
André was trembling so much that he staggered when he got up and would’ve fallen if he hadn’t held on to the table.
“Give him some clairin” I say to André.
“No,” he replied, “alcohol excites him. Let him go. You’re choking him. Let him go,” he cried violently. “Come, little brother, you have nothing to fear. Look, the barricade is solid and no one can come in if we don’t open that door.”
I free him. He gasps.
“It’s your fault,” he tells us, “scaring me with all your talk of devils. You know very well that I’m a bundle of nerves.”
“My mother told me she saw one,” André says. “She was going to early mass and she got the time wrong. Some sort of naked giant blocked her path, telling her: ‘Beware if you know who I am.’ She passed out on the road to church and that’s where she was found at dawn.”
“The devils are in uniform,” I say to him.
“There are all kinds of devils,” André replies. “I dreamed about one. He was white with red horns and tail. He was gesticulating in