Tropic of Violence

by Nathacha Appanah

  I’m almost thirty-three, I close my book and maybe that evening I forget to close my heart. When I go down to the reception area, there are already a dozen people there, all soaked to the skin. Several heavily pregnant women, an old woman with one leg, an adolescent boy jumping up and down on the spot and clinging to one of the firemen and a very beautiful young woman with a baby in her arms. I notice her at once, she’s sixteen or seventeen, she looks very healthy, her gaze is that of a frightened animal, flitting restlessly from left to right. The emergency workers escort the pregnant women toward the maternity ward and, for once, my mind’s a blank. I wish them no ill. The fireman to whom the adolescent boy is clinging walks over to me, saying He’s nuts. Then the youth starts laughing and it reminds me of Cham’s laughter. Something strong, gentle, and infectious. I point out the floor for the psychiatric unit. The boy goes on laughing and his peals of laughter mingle with the sound of the rain. The fireman asks me to keep an eye on the others until the police arrive. He moves off quickly but for a long time I can still hear the boy’s laughter.

  Then the old woman with one leg stands up, leaning on a long stick that serves her as a crutch, and moves toward the exit. She gives me a sideways glance but I keep my hands in my coat pockets, I don’t stop her, I don’t assist her, I watch her hopping toward the door and disappearing into the Mamoudzou night, in the rain. She’s made it, she’s in France. I beckon to the young woman to approach and we go into cubicle number 2. Her baby is wrapped in a traditional red and yellow fabric. It’s not crying, doesn’t stir. Is it dead, maybe? Outside the rain falls with a noise like machine-gun fire.

  Deftly the young woman extracts the baby from its swaddling clothes and I realize that it’s been bandaged up like a mummy. Has it suffered burns? She undoes the strips that just partially cover its face. It’s a baby barely a few days old, it’s breathing, it’s not been burned, it looks perfect. He is perfect. I begin to speak but the mother puts her finger to her lips and goes Shh! She doesn’t want him to be woken up. She points to one of the baby’s eyes. I don’t understand, I can see nothing, the baby’s asleep. She becomes impatient, she points to her two eyes, then to mine, then to those of the baby. Oh, is your baby blind? She shakes her head vigorously and suddenly the baby begins to wriggle, smacks its lips once or twice, as if it is searching for the nipple, and the young woman holds it out to me as you might do with something that both frightens and disgusts you. I don’t know why I take this baby that’s being handed to me and the infant stretches out in my arms and this warm little body snuggling up to me is wonderful. The child opens its eyes. The mother shrinks back against the bed and what I see, now, is incredible, I’ve never seen such a thing in my life, it’s simply something I learned the correct term for during my training. The baby has one dark eye and one green one. It’s affected by heterochromia, a totally benign genetic anomaly. The green of its eye is like the green of the leaves of the breadfruit tree, no, of the mango, oh, I don’t know anymore, during winter in the southern hemisphere the greens of trees in this country are sometimes incredible. He looks at me with a bicolored gaze, I speak to him, saying Hello, pretty baby. Then the mother says to me, making wild gestures toward the little boy Him baby of the djinn. Him bring bad luck with his eye. Him bring bad luck. I place him gently in the crib and raise the bars and tell the mother I’m going to fetch a bottle. As I turn my back, I hear her say You love him, you take him. I don’t pause in my tracks, I let these words pursue me like a wonderful trail of stars in the night over Mayotte. During those few minutes as I go into the nursery to prepare a bottle, my thoughts unfurl like flowers in the morning, wide open and happy; I picture myself in my house with a baby, a crib, a whole array of games, of books for reading. The little mill turned the little hands clapped the little bird flew the little fish swam. I’m almost thirty-three and at last I have a child.

  I’m thirty-four and you must believe me when I say that I’m the maman of a boy called Moïse. When I came back with the bottle of milk the beautiful girl was no longer there. I remember what I did. I fed the child, I washed him, I dressed him in a stretchy onesie decorated with little gray elephants, I put him to bed in a cradle in the nursery. I put a little blue band on his wrist and I marked it M. I telephoned Cham. He picked up at the first ring and listened attentively, in silence, the way I used to listen in the old days to tales of his childhood. You must believe me. In the place where I’m speaking to you from lies are pointless. In exchange for a divorce I asked him to recognize this child, to give it his name and tell everyone he was a son he’d had with an illegal immigrant and that I, his ex-wife, had agreed to bring him up. A false certificate of paternity in exchange for a real divorce. He agreed.

  Let no one presume to judge me. I took advantage of all this country’s flaws, this island’s flaws, all those turning a blind eye. And it was so easy, believe me. How many men impregnate women from the Comoros Islands, from Madagascar and are obliged to recognize their children? How many men are professional frauds in the business of acknowledging paternity? How many children are abandoned by their parents? How many parents disown their children on board the kwassa-kwassas when the border police intercept them? How many children, with no parents and no papers spend all day here playing beneath the sun without anyone ever asking them anything at all?

  Let no one presume to judge me. I’ve known police, lawyers, judges and journalists all of whom came to this country with their great ideas and quickly, too quickly, succumbed, when confronted by the hosts of beautiful women lingering on street corners, in cafés, in discos. When Cham came to give me the certificate, I almost said to him Look at us Cham. Look how happy we are now.

  I’m forty-four and Moïse, my son, tells me his dearest wish would be to taste snow. That is quite strange. He asks me if it’s a good wish and I answer yes. I ought to tell him how I, too, loved it when the snow fell in my deep valley and when, gradually, everything became white and silent and magical. I ought to tell him how I ate great handfuls of snow, but I don’t, the words remain stuck in my throat, hurting me like fishhooks. Moïse is a boy who only laughs rarely and discreetly and whose grace moves me every day. When he walks, when he runs, when he does his homework, when he plays, when he’s asleep. Where does this come from, his mother or his father? Had I glimpsed it, this grace, that day when his mother offered him to me and he stretched out in my arms, so warm, so tiny? One day I must tell him about that moment, but I don’t want to think about it, not right away. I want to live this life which is sweet, which I relish a sip at a time, so as not to squander it. Moïse goes to the private school in Pamandzi, where there are only French children or the children of people from Mayotte who’ve spent a long time in France. Occasionally someone makes a remark to him about his eye but Moïse knows how to pronounce “heterochromia” correctly. Last year he even gave a talk about it to his class. He never asks anything about his biological parents. I like telling him he was born in my heart, that I crossed continents and seas to find him and spent a long time waiting for him. That pleases him. Moïse always finishes his food, leaving nothing on his plate and I think this comes from a long way back, the truth he carries within himself and which he’s not fully aware of. The truth that causes him to scrape his plate, eat an apple whole, seeds, core, and all, never make demands, make himself light, make himself invisible.

  I now work during the day at the hospital but I live on Petite-Terre on the hill above Pamandzi, from where I can see the airport, the lagoon, and at night, the lights of the fishermen’s boats. In our courtyard there’s a frangipani tree, an ylang-ylang tree, an allamanda, a mango, a papaya, and banana palms. Not far from us there are corrugated iron huts, bangas where illegal immigrants live and we double-lock our house, put iron grilles over the windows and padlocks on our gate. We have a dog now. We’ve called him Bosco because Moïse’s favorite book is The Boy and the River by Henri Bosco. Our Bosco is a mongrel I picked up near the hospital. He’s black with ugly gray patches on his body,
from a distance it looks as if he has mange, but no, they are just patches. I wondered whether he, too, had arrived on a kwassa-kwassa, along with his master, and a few goats and chickens. This dog hung around near the hospital for several days and in the end I adopted him. Cham lives on the island of Réunion with his wife and these days she has papers and three more children. During the summer holidays I occasionally see him but he looks away quickly and I think I’ve hurt him too much for him still to remember the young woman I once was and whom he married. I have no friends, I lead an isolated existence with my son that suffices. When I take the ferry home at the end of the afternoon, I gaze with fresh eyes into the depths of the water, at the women on the boat, at the little islands and the hill of Kaweni above Mamoudzou, where the shantytown spreads its tentacles like an octopus. I see the children wandering aimlessly about there, playing on the market square, and I think about those pregnant women who arrived here in the rain on the same day as Moïse and all the others who’ve come before or since. The maternity hospital in Mamoudzou has become the largest in France. What have they done with their children? Have they left them with a big brother, an uncle, an aunt? What will happen to the children in their teens? I don’t know.

  Outside a flying fox is moving to a different tree and its wingbeats remind me of another life. I smile. As I’m tidying up and Moïse is building what he says will be a whole town with his Legos, we listen to a little music, I put on some Barbara, the way my mother used to long ago. It’s strange how such things jog our memories.

  When “L’aigle noir,” “The Black Eagle,” comes on, we wait for our favorite bits of the track and sing along in chorus, me in the kitchen, him in the living room. Hey, bird, hey, take me far away. Take me back to that land of long ago, the way it was in my childhood dreams, catching at stars with a trembling hand. The way it was in my childhood dreams, the way it was on a cloud in the sky, the way it was to light up the sun, to make the rain fall, and make wonders unfold.

  That evening we reread The Boy and the River, which Moïse adores.

  When we first began reading it we had an illustrated dictionary beside us so he could see what reeds look like, or a duck, or a shad, or a May tree. Often Moïse is the boy, Pascalet. Sometimes he’s the river. This evening he’s lying on his back, his slim body motionless, eyes half closed. His left hand lies palm up in my lap. He’s listening, knows every sentence, every comma, he knows this book by heart. This evening can he hear my voice shaking and lingering over the words as I read the following passage?

  What country? From where had Gatzo journeyed to the island? Who was he?

  I asked myself these questions, but never dared to put them to him. He never asked me any. I, too, was a mystery to him. My presence on the island, my unexpected appearance must have puzzled him. But he showed no curiosity about these miraculous happenings which only I seemed to find wonderful.

  For there were moments when I told myself that I was living in a dream, a terrifying yet delicious dream …

  How, if it were not a dream, could I have found myself, after so many adventures, alone with a boy whose name was the only thing I knew of him, and on this boat, this hidden boat, lost from human sight among the reeds up a backwater which led nowhere?

  Here’s what I remember. Moïse had fallen asleep. I’m gazing at him and suddenly this extraordinary notion occurs to me that he looks like me. Yes, there, just where the glow from the nightlight rests on him, something in the fall of the eyelid, the arch of the eyebrow, the beginnings of the nose. I go up to him and I say to him Good night my son.

  I’m forty-six and I’m trying to write a letter but I can’t manage it. I’m leaning forward, the upper part of my body almost lying across the paper, as if I were hoping that not just my hand but the whole of my body might be forming the words. Things are not well with Moïse. He has nightmares and he’s full of anger. He no longer wants to go to school and sometimes I come across him in the corrugated iron shelter by the landing stage in Dzaoudzi, waiting for me to come home from work. I need to tell him about that night, that night when the whole island was awash with rain, that blessed day when he came to me. I can’t bring myself to tell him to his face, I look at him and the words stick in my throat. But I can’t bring myself to write it either. The night, the rain, the medical kwassa-kwassa that had landed on the beach down at Bandrakouni in the south, the swaddled baby. How can I tell him all that?

  I’m forty-seven and I remember having a persistent headache. I know I ought to go and see a doctor but I don’t do it. I’m in pain and I tell myself I deserve it. Moïse comes home late and when I hear Bosco making the noise he keeps only for him, something between a bark and a human cry, my shoulders finally relax, I can breathe a little. Sometimes I think about that house where I lived as a child, long since empty, and the absurd thought occurs to me that back there now I’d be alright. I’d escape from the heat drilling into my head, I’d escape from this country that I sometimes feel is boiling over with rage. I’d take Moïse far away from here. I finally plucked up the courage to talk to him. To tell him his story. I began like this It was May 3, it was raining, your mother arrived in a kwassa-kwassa on the beach at Bandrakouni. I thought all that would be enough for him but no, every day he wants me to talk about it again, to tell it over and over, to tell it more slowly, to remember colors, shapes, precise words, but I have such a bad headache that I no longer want to go back over the same thing and Moïse loses his temper, he calls me a liar, he wants to go and visit the beach at Bandrakouni, but how can I tell him that it’s only a beach, there’s nothing waiting for him there. Moïse, my son, no longer calls me Mam, he calls me Marie. He says I’ve brought him up as a white, I’ve kept him from living out his “real life,” and this was not what he was destined for. He plays hooky from school, he hangs around, he asks for money all the time, he resents me. I can see it in his green eye.

  I’m forty-seven and I’m listening at his door, he’s asleep. I knock It’s time to get up, Moïse. You’ll be late for school.

  I think about that house in the valley. It’s cold back there. I should be wearing a warm robe and thick socks. The deep, unbroken, mellow silence of the white mountains would reign there. What do we know of our hearts and of the things of our childhood that grab us by the ankle and suddenly bring us up with a jolt. I think about the baby with the green eye and the way his mother, that young woman, who seemed like a child herself, had swaddled him. What do I know of Moïse’s heart? What do I know of the invisible and powerful things that grab him by the ankle?

  I hear him waking up, maybe today he’ll go to school, and won’t wear that cap that covers half his face, maybe today he won’t hang around with that scruffy boy he met some time ago, maybe today he’ll bear his green eye proudly aloft, the way one bears a good luck charm? Maybe today he’ll call me “Mam” again? I put out his favorite bowl on the counter in the kitchen, the one with his name on, the pain’s like a white hot dagger boring into my head. I open the sealed container where I keep the cereals. I hear Moïse coming along the corridor and outside the window, all of a sudden, I see my mother. She’s standing there, looking in at me with profoundly sad eyes. I understand at once.

  You must believe me. In the place where I’m speaking to you from lies are pointless. I didn’t feel the artery bursting in my brain, I didn’t feel the last spasm of my heart. You must believe me when I say that I felt no pain when my head struck the ground and my arm became twisted under my body at a strange angle. You must believe me when I say that I stayed standing beside myself and that the worst is yet to come.

  Moïse

  It’s a big cell. It’s square. A concrete bench runs along the wall facing the door.

  On the same wall, high up, there’s a rectangular opening that might possibly let a cat through. Or a very thin dog, like Bosco.

  I’m sitting on the bench. If I look up I can see a fragment of sky that’s so blue and motionless that I wonder if it’s not a picture. There’s a word f
or them, those things, pictures painted to look like the real thing, I can’t remember it now, if Marie were here she’d have …

  My hands are starting to shake, I shouldn’t have thought about Marie. I try to steady them between my thighs, to squeeze them under my armpits, to cross my fingers as if I were praying with all my strength but it doesn’t stop.

  My name’s Moïse, I’m fifteen years old and at dawn I killed someone. I’d like them to know I barely squeezed the trigger, if Marie were here I’d have told her that, I’d have told her like this I barely squeezed it Mam and it went off, and she’d have believed me, but it’s more than a year now that Marie’s been gone. I’m alone and I killed Bruce in the woods at dawn. Bruce with his barbarian’s heart and his sick brain and his serpent’s tongue. Bruce, who did that to me …