I know nothing no more.
What am I doing there on the ground, like that, like I’m dead? Why does that woman behind you suddenly look at me?
You’ll pay for this, Scarface Mo, hear me? You’re dead meat but I can’t get close to you, it’s like there’s an elastic in my back that pings me back here, to this dead body that still pisses blood.
Was it you that shot me, Mo? It makes me want to laugh, I didn’t know a corpse could laugh. Don’t think I’m a fool. Kids like me end up snuffing it sooner than the rest, that much I know. But if someone had told me on the day when I first saw you by the ferry, if someone had told me I’d be killed by a loser like you I’d’ve burst out laughing. Hey, can you hear me or what?
Mo doesn’t hear. He puts the pistol away in his bag and gets up. The weeping woman looks at me for a second then she follows him. I look down at the ground and suddenly I don’t give a fuck if I’m dead or alive.
Olivier
I can hear him speaking softly, I press my ear to the door but I can’t tell what he’s saying, it sounds like he’s singing.
I can’t stay here forever. There’s nothing I can do for him.
I’ve killed a boy up there in the woods, near Lake Dziani. The pistol’s in my rucksack.
That’s what he said to me at the gate this morning in perfect French. It was barely seven o’clock, it was already hot and he was clutching his bag to his chest and shaking. I looked at his long scar. My right cheek began twitching but apart from that I felt nothing. I felt no surprise, it was as if I’d already lived through this moment in another life and knew that one day or another the same thing would happen to me again.
I just thought so now it’s here.
I wanted to go and see for myself first. I didn’t want instant panic. I told two of my colleagues to put the young man in with the other guy, the one who had neither his wits nor his papers but whom the border police didn’t want to hold on to because he was “too unstable.” They didn’t want to keep him at the Dzaoudzi hospital either, the doctor on duty said to me This isn’t a mental health hospital, though if he harms himself bring him back. That was at one o’clock in the morning. I had no choice but to keep him.
I phoned the emergency services and by chance I got through to Bacar, who, like me, prefers to work nights, at a time when you can take a break from thinking and settle down to remembering. He quickly came to pick me up in a first aid vehicle.
I was relieved to see that Misba’s shop at the bottom of the slope that leads to the lake was closed. I didn’t want a lot of talk and crowds gathering. We climbed rapidly up the crumbling earth slope, puffing like the two men close to retirement that we are. When we got to the top I was surprised that there was no sign of the attractive traditional building and the big explanatory notice board greeting walkers, with a breathtaking view across the lake. All that was left in its place were four iron hooks in the ground.
“What happened to the shelter?”
“It’s been taken apart by illegal immigrants. You’ll find bits of it here and there in their huts.”
Before, we’d’ve exchanged jokes about how illegals pinch everything they find, a bit of wood lying around, a loose piece of paving, the landslide of stones at the foot of a slope after rain, your old underpants, your neighbor’s husband.
That morning we didn’t talk much.
“Do you know where to find him?”
The boy had given me such detailed instructions that you’d have thought he’d lived there all his life.
“Yes.”
The lake seemed greener than usual; it felt as though we were intruders in a sanctuary. Our boots made too much noise, stirred up too much dust, the light blinded me, the wind whistled in my ears. But I moved ahead noiselessly for I knew it was only my imagination, and that from now on everything would seem more intense, more painful, more desperate, heavier, noisier.
We found him easily, and for a moment Bacar and I remained standing beside him in silence. He had new sneakers on his feet, khaki bermuda shorts, and his T-shirt was black with dried blood. His eyes, open wide, gazed up at the sky. He was just a boy.
We couldn’t drag him, and had to call the chief constable who’d call the prefect. Reinforcements were needed. I could already see the headlines in the newspapers: FIRST GUN MURDER ON MAYOTTE.
I looked at the blue sky. Through the scattering of tree trunks I could see the deep green of the lake. Around us there were breadfruit trees, eucalyptus, mangoes, coconut palms. The soil was a mixture of sand and laterite. The locals say a powerful djinn lives here. I wondered if it was there beside us, trying to tell us something? Had it been there that morning at dawn when the shot was fired?
Bacar was staring at the dead boy’s face. I couldn’t tell if he was afraid, felt ill or was sad. Suddenly he said:
“It’s Bruce.”
“Bruce? Who’s Bruce?”
“He’s the big gang leader in Gaza.”
“Shit.”
The wind whistled in the branches and we looked at one another.
I don’t know who it was who gave that nickname to Kaweni, the run-down neighborhood on the outskirts of Mamoudzou, but it hit the nail on the head. Gaza is a shantytown, a ghetto, a trash pile, a bottomless pit, a favela, a vast encampment of illegal immigrants, open to the skies. It’s a vast steaming garbage dump that can be seen from a long way off. Gaza is a violent no-man’s land where gangs of kids high on drugs make the law. Gaza is Capetown, it’s Calcutta, it’s Rio. Gaza is Mayotte, Gaza is France.
I closed my eyes. Maybe I was hoping it would all turn out to be a bad dream. I thought That’s done it! There’s going to be war on Mayotte.
It’s been brewing for a long time, this violence, this wave of destruction, this blazing energy surging up from who knows where. Today all the dead people in the lagoon will rise up and yell in our faces and drive us mad. For a long time people have been predicting war, been on the alert for the sound of gunfire and the cries of wild animals. For a long time there have been articles, stories in the press, in-depth investigations, special assignments, visits, petitions, pamphlets, laws passed, campaigns, strikes, demonstrations, riots, promises. For a long time …
It’s the butterfly effect exploding right in our faces.
Sometimes, after an article has appeared in a French tabloid, or after a presidential visit received lots of media coverage, I’ve hoped that something would happen. That someone, somewhere in the teams of top civil servants who follow in the wave of ministerial visits, among the historians and intellectuals who read newspapers, that someone would truly understand what’s going on here and find a solution. I’m not a historian, I’m not a politician, I’m not an intellectual, I’m not a prophet, I’m only a cop, and if I knew how to heal this country I’d say it loud and clear.
When that Syrian boy was found washed up on a Turkish beach, it gave me hope. I told myself that someone somewhere would remember this French island and would point out that here, too, children are dying on beaches. I’m only a cop, but I’ve seen the foam washing over their little bodies and picked up some of them like this, gently in my arms. Sometimes when I hear that a kwassa-kwassa has sunk in the bay, I feel a weight in my arms, as if those little bodies had never left me.
But nothing ever changes and sometimes I feel as though I’m living in a parallel dimension in which what happens here never crosses the ocean and doesn’t have any effect on people. We’re alone. Seen from on high and a long way off, it’s true that what’s here is just a handful of dust, but this dust exists, it’s something real. Something that has its right side and wrong side, its sunlight and shade, its truth and lies. Lives on this land matter just as much as all those lives on other lands, don’t they?
But in the end maybe it’s just the same old story, one heard a hundred times before, one told a hundred times before. The story of a country that shines brightly, where everyone wants to be. There are names for it: El Dorado, mirage, paradise, chimera, utopi
a, Lampedusa. It’s the story of those boats that people here call kwassa-kwassas, elsewhere they’re known as barques, dugout canoes, ships, vessels. They have existed since the dawn of time, carrying people from place to place, willingly or against their will. It’s the story of the human beings aboard these vessels and since the dawn of time these are the names they’ve been given: slaves, volunteers, lepers, convicts, repatriated settlers, Jews, boat people, refugees, stowaways, illegal immigrants.
But what am I talking about? Me, I’m just a cop who enforces the laws of France on a forgotten island. Standing in front of his body, Bruce, gang leader of Gaza, tyrant, thief, villain, I kept my eyes shut and prayed.
Marie
In the old days, to keep calm, I liked to count things. Anything, the number of people on the ferry, the taxis waiting, the coconut palms on boulevard des Crabes. With my thumbnail, I’d touch the three inner rings of each finger. Little finger one-two-three, ring finger four-five-six, middle finger seven-eight-nine, index finger ten-eleven-twelve. If need be, I’d go back to the little finger thirteen-fourteen-fifteen.
I remember it, that endless unobtrusive ballet inside my hand, and the feeling of reassurance it brought me. I miss it because I can no longer do it. I can see him, that boy Moïse has killed, he’s trying to do something with his hair but it doesn’t work. In the place where I’m speaking to you from we think we have fingers, hands, arms, a body, but that’s not how it is at all, what subsists is like a picture, a memory of ourselves.
I’m watching Moïse on the cell floor. He’s asleep and dreaming of a volcanic island. The whole island is covered in ash and amid all this grayness only one corrugated iron hut has been spared. In the place of windows and doors there are broad strips of colored fabric with geometric patterns. Blue-and-white for the three windows, purple-and-white for the door. The motifs are spots and triangles. Beside the hut is a tree with leaves as green as Moïse’s eye. A baby is crying and its mother calls out. The woman can’t be seen, but I know her, she’s the one who offered me her child.
Moïse wakes up and looks straight at me. At first, when he did that, it gave me a start. I’d try to send him a sign, knock something over, come up close to him, but now I stay where I am, and do nothing. There’s nothing to be done.
Moïse goes back to sleep. Again he’s dreaming. He’s in his bed, he’s three or four years old and his leg is caught in the mosquito net. He’s trying to disentangle himself but the mosquito net takes on a life of its own, like a white frothy snake. It climbs up his thigh, squeezes his waist, slips along his back, between his shoulder blades, grips his neck, slithers up the back of his neck, his head, appears on his forehead, slides down onto his green eye. Moïse is petrified, he cries out and in his dream I appear, I take him in my arms and say It’s all over, sweetheart, it was just a nasty bad dream.
Me, I now know that it wasn’t just a nasty bad dream but a recurrence of what he’d felt when his mother swaddled him tightly like a mummy.
Sometimes when he’s asleep like this I go over to him and whisper in his ear. I tell him how much I love him, how brave he is and how sad I am at having abandoned him. I say to myself that maybe my dead woman’s words will mingle with the mists of his dreams and that by and by, when he really does wake up, maybe he’ll remember them.
Moïse
I used to think that on the day when I discovered the truth about my birth, something in my head would click into place. I’d shake, my mind would start racing, and all my ideas would come together, like a great jigsaw finally completed, and that suddenly I’d become an ace in my own right. And from that day on nobody would get the better of me. I’d know precisely who I was, what I was worth and what I was capable of.
Total bullshit.
When I learned the truth I felt I was less than nothing, a piece of shit, a kid that terrified its own mother when he emerged from her, a kid she handed over to the first person who came along, what do you call that? I was furious with Marie, I felt she was hiding something from me and made her repeat it over and over and over again.
It was May 3, it was raining, your mother arrived in a kwassa-kwassa on the beach at Bandrakouni. That’d be how she’d start telling it each evening and I was on the lookout for any mistake, sometimes she said kwassa-kwassa, sometimes just kwassa and that would make me angry, I don’t know why. She refused to take me to the beach, which is at the southern end of Grande-Terre and I couldn’t understand her refusal. Maybe I accused her of being a liar, or a child thief. Maybe.
Around then, I met La Teigne who used to hang around near school on Fridays because he hoped that Moussa who was in my class and who was his “cousin” might slip him some cash. Moussa and I were friends, even if we didn’t talk much. He didn’t make comments about my green eye, he didn’t ask me why my mother was white, he didn’t ask me if I was an adopted African. Moussa liked the local music, mgodro, which he listened to on an old cassette player that made a jumbled noise and that I pretended to appreciate. What I liked best of all was when Moussa stood up and began dancing, his knees bent, his bottom sticking way out behind him. He pranced around like that with jerky movements. Every time the rhythm of the music changed his eyes opened wide like he was in a trance, then he burst out laughing. Moussa’s parents had studied economics at Poitiers in France and it was agreed that, after Moussa had passed his baccalauréat, he’d do the same thing, in Poitiers. His home was just like mine. We drank Oasis and ate soft bread rolls spread with Nutella. On Fridays La Teigne often came and waited under a breadfruit tree down below the road that led to school. He seemed to camouflage himself in the shadows like a lizard. As we walked past the tree he’d suddenly appear. La Teigne spoke in a mixture of basic French and Shimaore. Moussa would give him one or two euros, if he had nothing on him he’d turn to me and I’d delve into my pockets. La Teigne would then walk away without looking back, his head held high, his shoulders thrust back. Moussa told me La Teigne, whose real name was Mahmad, was a distant cousin. Moussa’s parents didn’t like him spending time with La Teigne because he was an illegal immigrant. They were afraid the police might discover their distant relationship and insist on them taking him in. We’ve got loads of cousins and aunts and uncles like that on Mayotte, especially on Grande-Terre. They come from Anjouan or Grande Comore and my parents say that if you give anything to just one of them, you’ll end up having to feed a whole village.
This label illegal immigrant wasn’t something I could ignore. If Marie hadn’t taken me in isn’t that what I’d have been? Yet another La Teigne, dressed in shorts with dirty feet in old flip-flops and the same T-shirt for weeks at a time. Yet another La Teigne hanging around, begging. As the weeks went by it was me who gave him coins and even a note when I had one; I paid for him to have a burger, fries, and a Coke at Maoré Burger; we went to watch the planes taking off at Pamandzi. Moussa stopped going with us, on some pretext or other. I liked being with La Teigne, this thin boy who smelled of sweat and iron, and said almost nothing and walked about all day from dawn to dusk. His feet were thick, broad, with huge toenails. At night he went back on the ferry and slept in the open. He’d never been to school. When he wanted to wash he dived off the jetty at Mamoudzou. When he wanted to eat he went and picked fruit. He fascinated me, I saw him as my brother, my cousin, and pictured us as children running wild, eating wild fruits, bathing in rivers. When we went our separate ways at Dzaoudzi it seemed to me that he was going off into Life, Real Life, and I was going back to a house of lies where I was forever acting out a role in a play Marie had scripted for us.
Me: Hello.
Marie: Hello, sweetheart. Have you had a good day?
Me: Yes. I met an illegal immigrant today.
Marie: It’s terrible, this business of illegal immigrants. What about some supper? We’ve got pasta and ham.
I didn’t want any more of this sheltered life, a white person’s life, white people’s clothes, white music that doesn’t transport you and books with their talk of reed
s and willows. I wanted to sweat a black man’s sweat, I wanted to eat chili pepper and cassava the way I used to eat petit beurre cookies and jam, I wanted drumming and yelling, I didn’t want to be a muzungu, a foreigner. I wanted to belong somewhere, to know my real parents, to have cousins, aunts and uncles. I wanted to speak a language where the r’s are rolled and the s’s are hissed.
When I think back to that now, it makes me want to bang my head against the wall boom boom boom, like that guy who smelled of earth.
How long would it have lasted, that crisis? Several days or weeks? After I’d crossed the strait on the ferry, after La Teigne had revealed his true face to me, after I’d seen the shitty reality of Real Life, after I’d sweated enough, after I’d eaten and shat enough chili, I’d’ve quietly gone back to my solidly built house, my white person’s house.
But one morning Marie collapsed crash on the kitchen floor. I didn’t cry out, I didn’t weep, I crouched down beside her. I noticed her ear was bleeding. Her eyes were wide open, as if she’d seen a ghost just before she fell, which gave her face a different look. Inside my head my thoughts were racing this way and that, each of them telling me to do something: put the cereal packet away in the container so the ants can’t get at it; put the milk in the fridge otherwise it’ll go off; stick the pieces of the broken bowl back together; clean the counter; wake Marie; go to school; eat something before going to school; check the windows are properly closed, double-lock the door, put the latch down properly, give Bosco some food and leave water for him, press the padlock tight firmly until you hear the little click, shake the chain to test that it’s secure, you must go now, it’s time.
Tropic of Violence Page 4