Love, Anger, Madness_ A Haitian Trilogy - Marie Chauvet [152]
My eye pasted to the hole, I let my gaze wander outside. It goes from the corpse now teeming with worms to the corpses stacked in front of the church. I am gliding like the birds between splendor and squalor. I see part of the horizon where a sliver of sky and sea meet as though only for my sake. From evening to morning, I see them change according to the slow and indefatigable course of the sun. Its distilled heat now marks noon. A shadow moves behind Cécile’s window and I see Mme Magistral. She’s looking at my house and seems to be talking to someone I can’t make out. I can see this so clearly that I am afraid someone from outside might see my glowing eyes. All the same, I remain there, my eyes glued to that window where perhaps Cécile is also standing. What is her mother doing? Has she caught on to our game? The window opens wide and Cécile appears in a blue nightgown, her long black hair flowing over her shoulders. Close the window, careless girl! Even if you are worried about me, close it or the devils will see you! It’s over. She’s vanished. The window is closed …
“I’m hungry,” André says.
“Me too,” Jacques says.
“Unfortunately, there’s no sugar for the coffee,” I reply.
“Give me the bottle of clairin” André says.
He drinks and spits. I drink too but don’t spit.
“Give Jacques the jug,” I say to André.
Jacques takes it and drinks.
“I want to drink clairin too,” he says.
“It’ll make you agitated,” André says.
“Yes, but I won’t feel hungry anymore. When I drink, I go crazy and when I’m crazy, I’m not hungry.”
André furiously scratches his scar and passes the bottle to Jacques.
“Shit!” he exclaims, “it’s like fire.”
He starts writing again. He suddenly seems very far away from us, as if in one leap he had jumped the fence into an invisible world. Ecstatic, he stares at one corner of the room and writes. How can he write without looking at his hands? His lips are moving slowly. He’s fallen into the snare and can’t get out. He can’t run anymore to escape the rhymes. His legs have been maimed. The mechanism of the snare has been triggered and has sheared off his legs to the thighs. A thousand, ten thousand, a million poets with empty bellies have been snared by the rhyme traps sown on the road. A hard rocky road, full of ruts and ditches, that we keep ascending, exhausted and worn-out, a road that wears holes into our beggarly shoes, but a road we cannot resist. The Road of Haiti framed here and there with green hope, red victory, white purity and yellow saffron. Rainbow colors wafting indifferently above the rocky road designed by the profaning hands of men. Nature, forever merry, giving birth without pangs amid the joyful polychromatic foliage, giant butterflies whirling madly around it. Merry, merry, making merry! And here we are, locked up, sweating the last bit of moisture out of our bodies, starving. All because of the devils. It’s high time for me to take action. André and Jacques are in my way. I need to be alone to think. Jacques’ blind gaze and his hand running over paper distract my thought from its objective. André’s dazed inaction gets on my nerves. He is always sitting, arms dangling, mouth gaping, unless he’s clasping his hands and mumbling prayers. I am alone. More alone than before. No matter how much I focus, I can’t recover my train of thought. And yet I had come up with a plan to defeat the devils. I’m trying to find it. Trying to find it. I’m turning in circles. I am stuck on the wrong trail. Still trying to find it. Suffocating. As though a leaden hand is keeping my head in a sea of tar. I’m struggling. It