Love, Anger, Madness_ A Haitian Trilogy - Marie Chauvet [98]
Interrupting his reading, Paul looked at the invalid, his brow wrinkled as he considered a thought that this childish statement had randomly inspired in him. How difficult it is to escape, no matter how hard one tries, he thought. The noises outside entered into me, as did the voices of the grandfather and the child. They pursue me in my sleep and torture me. Now I know that, just like human beings, things have their own lives. Despite the screen that my will has imposed, I hear the noises of the picks and trowels, the heavy pounding of the stones. They ring in my brain, relentlessly. I have to get away from here, make myself forget for a moment. Neither Papa nor Rose will be able to accomplish anything. They can fool themselves all they want. Why was Rose crying? It’s the first time I’ve seen her like that. What is she up to? What about Grandfather? Why is he always whispering to the child? We have split up into two factions. And maybe Mama and I are in a third without realizing it. Is this what it means to take courage? To live. To go on living. When life, from birth until death, is nothing but fraud! No, the cheating doesn’t start until later! From earliest childhood, pure and carefree, until death. That’s why, despite his whims and moods, Claude has never known childhood. And Grandfather, who has found a friend in him, doesn’t know why he loves him. Why did they come on our land? Why this punishment? Why this curse? Is it to force us to take stock of our cowardice that life tests us? Or, rather, is it to help us find ourselves? I have to stop thinking about them and come out of my state of prostration. Otherwise, I’ll become sick. See Fred again. Don’t take no for an answer, get back on the team, find a girl ‘willing to love me. That’s it, love, love! Yes, but which girl? Anna, Dr. Valois’ daughter. Beautiful, wise, intelligent. Is it possible for so many qualities to be gathered in one woman? Rose? A big question mark for me lately. She carries on like I don’t know what. If I get to know Anna, won’t I find that she crumbles under my very eyes like the others? So narrow-minded of me! I’m just like Grandfather and he doesn’t even know it … Can’t listen to any of this anymore. Got to get away! Forget! Forget!
The sentences coming out of him displaced those scrolling under his eyes in the book. From the window, the mother watched the wall go up. She had undone the top of her blouse and was breathing with difficulty. She remembered that one morning she had noticed a bird perched on her window. The presence of the man sleeping deeply at her side as she counted the hours from dusk to dawn reinforced her feeling of loneliness. And the bird had suddenly popped up as if answering her call. It stared at her with its round eyes and tilted its head to the right and then to the left as if mocking her. He has something to tell me, she had thought childishly. He came all the way here to show me what freedom is. For a good minute or so they had stood there looking at each other, each of them absolutely still. Then the bird twittered and flew off on swift wings trilling its happy song. Alone again, she had invented touchingly naïve myths to console herself: a leaf whirling in the wind, a butterfly whether black or alive with color, the hooting of an owl or the graceful song of a nightingale, everything seemed pregnant with meaning.
CHAPTER NINE
“Tell me what your father was like,” the invalid asked the old man that day.
“Very tall, very strong and very dark-skinned,” the grandfather answered. “He dressed like a peasant, in a long coarse blue tunic and sandals.”
“Tell me how he became master of this land.”
“It could only have been thanks to a miracle,” the grandfather said, “and woe to those who don’t believe in miracles, for God’s hand guides our actions. All right, listen carefully to my story: One day, my father went to Port-au-Prince to sell his cattle. His horse carried him three days and three nights, accompanied by goats, cows and sheep and the barking dogs that