Love, Anger, Madness_ A Haitian Trilogy - Marie Chauvet [162]
my love lives. I have kept the stone that was wrapped with her billet-doux, as a charm. I press the stone against my lips while watching for her behind her window. The guys are sleeping and snoring. I can think a little now. I like neither the color of the sky, nor this split lip smiling between the clouds trying to pass for the moon. The air smells of hypocrisy and treason. There are no more dead in front of the church since Father Angelo buried them, but there will be others tomorrow, alas! If we remain barricaded in our houses there will be fresh ones each time God makes the sun rise, until the complete annihilation of the town. Am I the only one to conceive of a battle plan? How can we join forces? How can we establish contact with others who like me are organizing the Resistance? Simon fought his war. He may curse it now, but he’s done it and he can live at peace with himself. What’s going on right now is none of his business. I’ve hurt him, insulted him for nothing. He’s right to feel detached from it. I will ask for his forgiveness. The grave responsibility that falls to me, and which I will proudly assume with courage, weighs heavily on my shoulders. I can always daydream, happily wallow in the past, spy on Cécile’s graceful and comforting silhouette, but I can’t escape from the noose slowly tightening round my neck. I will never sleep another night even if I were to live a hundred years. Am I hungry? I’ve gotten used to sleeplessness and hunger. Everything leaves me indifferent, except struggle and love. For one follows from the other. I will have Cécile’s love if I defeat the devils. The corpse shrinks day by day, hour by hour. The worms are finishing their work. No one to remove it from sight. Father Angelo himself has forgotten to inspect this alley. Our back alley where only the near-beggars live! My shack! Flattened at the feet of Grand-rue’s tall houses! My shack crawling like an earthworm beneath Cécile’s flowered balcony! My darling black mother, you earned it with the sweat of your brow and it means something to me. Had you told me: eat and drink, I would have eaten and drunk. I’ve lost my good angel since your death, since the mysterious disappearance of my evil-eye bead, since I starved the loas with which you entrusted me in my apathy, since I stopped kneeling before the crucifix, since I stopped prostrating myself before the holy tabernacle! I tried in vain to remain the trusting and pious child I had been. I kept my fists closed tight around my treasures. One day, I looked in my hands and they were empty. Whose fault, Mama? After your death, life jumped on my back and rode me like a horse. I galloped under the whip through deserted fields, through merciless cities, panting, sweating, feet bruised, nostrils dilated. The commandant raised his bludgeon and beat me. He raised his feet and trampled me. He spit in my face, called me a mulatto bastard, me, your son. He is black like you, my black mother, but he took me for the real thing, an eighteen-karat mulatto, as they call them around here, one of those beautiful, pretentious men, their heads covered with smooth hair and filled with prejudice. Is it for my chicken-shit color that they persecute me? Is it because of this rotten coconut color that I can’t go left or right? Simon says one has to forget this absurd issue of skin color and race. If that’s right, then why did the commandant call me a mulatto bastard? Setting aside the question of color, since as far as whites are concerned I’m a black man, why did the commandant think calling me a mulatto would be an insult? Do I call him black? This label, for it is used as a label, singles me out, makes me feel uneasy in my own skin, like a transplanted animal that’s forgotten its native country. Are the devils also versed in discrimination? Against whom do they bear a grudge? Did they attack us only to side with some of us against the others? Or are they trying once and for all to drown that old quarrel in a general bloodbath? No matter how diabolical, their intervention would then have a salutary result.