I slowly backed away as the crowd went up to the winner. I felt oppressed, ill at ease. Suddenly, from the shadows beneath a tree Mo emerged. I gave a start, like an idiot. Holding out his hand to me, he said Bonsoir, but I was scared, I didn’t shake his hand I backed away from him and then quite frankly ran all the way back to the clubhouse. I got onto my motorbike and fled like a thief. I rode all the way home without stopping and the cooler the air became in the nocturnal shade of the great trees out in the country, the more ashamed I felt. The boy was barely fifteen.
I spent the weekend at home, ignoring calls from my friends to go and swim, dive, or dine. I couldn’t stop thinking about the way Mo had emerged from beneath the tree and about his notably polite greeting. Had he wanted to ask me something? And what had I done? I’d turned and run as if I’d seen the devil.
It had been arranged that I’d spend a week at Kani-Kéli in the south of the island, to set up another youth club along the same lines as our own. On Monday I called in at the clubhouse in Gaza and waited for Chebani to come and bring me a car to drive to Kani-Kéli. He himself would take my motorbike. He arrived at ten o’clock at the wheel of an old gray Renault Clio, he said to me I guess you’ve got your driver’s license and without waiting for my reply, roared with laughter and jumped astride the bike.
Maybe I’d had this idea since Friday night when I’d walked away from Mo there in the darkness, maybe one regret led to another but when I saw him on a corner, sitting on the steps of one of the houses in the neighborhood, I opened the door of the Clio that I was driving cautiously through Gaza’s narrow streets and said to him Would you like to come for a ride? He stayed sitting there and I pressed him Go on! Come along!
He stood up, tightened the strap on his rucksack a little, tugged on the peak of his cap so it came down a bit farther over his face, and got into the car. He smelled of sweat and old clothes, his legs were the color of ash. He put his rucksack at his feet and fastened his seat belt, and I started the car.
Ten minutes later, we’d barely reached Mamoudzou, and Mo was asleep, softly snoring like an exhausted child.
Moïse
When I got into that car there was the hum of the air conditioning, the softness of the seat behind my back, the carpet I could run my feet over. Stéphane said nothing, he drove carefully, in silence, with no music, it was pleasant. I could feel my body letting go, my eyelids growing heavy and I didn’t even struggle against it.
When I woke up I was alone in the car. I got up with a start, first of all checking my rucksack and then my scar. I always do that when I wake up, I don’t know why. I know it’ll still be there but I can’t stop myself from checking the puffy line that runs across my face. Maybe every morning I have the illusion that I’ve made a leap back in time to earlier days, returned to my past life, and that this scar was just a bad dream. Or maybe I’m scared of it getting bigger, growing longer, closing my eye for good, and traveling all around my head and body, as in that recurring nightmare when the mosquito netting over my bed becomes a snake, wrapping itself around me, stifling me.
The car was parked beside a house in the shade of a flame tree. I looked around, there was no one there. I waited for a moment, not knowing what to do, maybe Stéphane would come back at any minute? The garden was surrounded by a bamboo hedge. There were several shrubs in the yard, down at the far end, plants in pots here and there, and some brightly colored children’s toys. Red, green, yellow.
I got out of the car cautiously, keeping one hand on the open door. The air was hot, but it wasn’t the furnace of Gaza. I inhaled a breath and there wasn’t a smell of anything. It was so good. I heard the sound of birds above me and further off as well, in the depths of the garden, on the other side of the bamboo hedge, behind me and more distantly, everywhere, in fact, the birds were calling.
I took off my cap, I let go of the car door, I looked up at the flame tree. The sky seen through its leaves and branches was like a blue, green and brown picture, a picture that stirred in the wind or maybe it was me swaying a little. I closed my eyes. I’d have liked to be able to fly, to view this miserable world from on high, very high, to be unreachable, unassailable, invincible, invisible. I’d have liked to be a birdman, no I’d have liked simply to be a bird chirruping here, there and everywhere. I imagined my bones and body shrinking, my pores opening to let green feathers sprout from them, the same green as my eye, I felt my scar disappearing, my eyes growing round and very mobile, my face extending, my mouth changing into a black, pointed, shining beak, my brain becoming the size of a pea, my memories floating away in smoke, my claws preparing for takeoff, my wings opening out and now I’m flying, I perch on the flame tree’s thick sturdy branch. I’m both light and powerful. I sing. I light up the sun, I make the rain fall, I make wonders unfold.
When I opened my eyes, Stéphane was in front of me, staring at me. He pointed to the right side of my face and asked Who did that to you? His voice was hard, kind of high-pitched, different from his normal one and maybe I was tired of hiding, maybe it was the cutting edge of his voice, maybe because I was still a bird (and birds don’t know how to lie), I said It was Bruce.
He took a deep breath and opened his mouth as if he was about to say something and I didn’t want to hear any of his pity or his questions, but he simply asked me if I was hungry and, relieved, I said Yes.
We walked over to the restaurant and then Stéphane told me we were in Kani-Kéli. Do you know it, Mo, have you been here before?
I shrugged. I thought about how I’d begged Marie to bring me here to the south of the island and she’d refuse, saying You’re not ready for it yet! Am I ready now? I don’t know. How can I tell Stéphane that I came here as a baby in my mother’s arms on board a kwassa-kwassa to Bandrakouni just a few miles from here and that since then everything has got mixed up in my head. I’d dreamed so much about that beach but now I was so close to it I no longer knew what I wanted, no longer knew what was good for me.
Stéphane could never understand things like that. I don’t judge him, I’ve seen guys like him spending a few months in Gaza, I don’t know what their aim is, I don’t know if they really believe a few film screenings, a few soccer games, or some American pop music will be enough to make us forget the poverty, the filth, and the violence. They know a lot of things, those guys, they know the figures on poverty, they know the statistics on petty crime, they study graphs of violence, words like culture and leisure spring readily to their lips, but they never truly understand anything. Only a street kid can know the joy of finding an old toothbrush on the ground, washing it in the gully, and rubbing it with an old piece of soap, old soap, so hard and marked with black stripes that it’s like a stone, but you rub away at it all the same and afterward you go into a corner because you don’t want anyone to steal this brush from you and you clean your teeth with it, you turn the brush around in your mouth as if it were a lollipop and, the joy of that, only a kid who lives on the street can know that. There’s no film screening or soccer match that can equal the fact of owning something, some object that belongs to you and you alone, even if it’s only an old toothbrush.
I don’t much like remembering that week at Kani-Kéli. It was as if I’d been made to act in a film where I played the part of an ordinary young boy with no problems. I was helping Stéphane to refurbish the little house that would soon be a home to a club like “Young People Forward.” He told me to wash down and I washed down. He told me to scrape the paintwork and I scraped. He told me to paint and I painted. He told me to sweep and I swept. He told me to hold up the shelves while he fixed them to the wall and I held them up. When he was working on his computer I’d open my copy of The Boy and the River and reread it for the thousandth time but no matter. When people came I stayed in my corner cleaning, scraping, painting, washing, and reading and people ignored me. When Stéphane spoke to me I listened but I never really took in his words, they were like raindrops falling on my skin, falling, falling, and then there was a great
pool of words at my feet. When he told me to rest I went into the garden to sit under the flame tree. He’d say to me, go and take a walk, get some air, go onto the beach, but I stayed under the flame tree, listening to the birds and imagining myself flying around the trunk and my wings beating so fast that all the colors of my feathers blended together. When Stéphane asked me why I always read the same book I shrugged because I didn’t want to explain to him that this book was like a kind of talisman that protected me from the real world, that the words in this book which I knew by heart were like a prayer that I repeated over and over again and it may well be that no one heard me, maybe it served no purpose, but no matter. Opening this book was like opening my own life, that insignificant little life of mine on this island, and in it I made contact with Marie again and the house and it was the only way I’d found of not going mad, of not losing track of the little boy I’d once been.
I didn’t speak much, I didn’t think much, I did what he told me to do because that week I realized that was all I was good for. Bruce had trained me to be a good dog and that week I’d been a good dog, clean and well fed.
On Thursday morning Stéphane fastened a big map of Mayotte to the wall and stuck a red drawing pin in at the spot where we were, Kani-Kéli. I went up closer and just an inch away from it, a little lower down, I saw Bandrakouni. I stared at this name which was both mysterious and familiar. Suddenly, by magic, it began floating away from the map, first one letter, then another, BANDRAKOUNI and they came flying up to me like angry wasps, they were on my face, on my scar, I tried to drive them away but they became embedded in my skin and I started yelling …
I was lying flat on a mattress in the living room and the light outside was as white as a sheet. I had a pain in my right eye and my scar was throbbing. I put a hand over it, hoping to calm it down. Stéphane was there but he said nothing. I was relieved at not being alone, at not being on the hill at Gaza, at knowing Bruce was far away. I kept my hand over my face, I waited a little and then I told Stéphane I’d like to go onto the beach at Bandrakouni. He simply said OK.
I was convinced that nothing would ever appear beautiful to my eyes again, that nothing could awaken me from the lethargic state I’d been sunk in since Marie’s death. Stéphane told me he’d drop me off at Bandrakouni for the time it took him to call on a friend. In the car, as it drove slowly along my gaze was drawn irresistibly to the sea unfurling its blue, emerald, green and opaline. To our left we could see Mount Choungui. In the meadows old freezers served as drinking troughs for the animals. At the roadsides men and women walked along with baskets on their heads and sticks or machetes in their hands. The sky was cloudless and as we traveled through this idyllic landscape, something made my heart swell. What was this sweet, beautiful country? What was this country that had forgotten me?
It’s there Stéphane said, stopping the car at the side of the road. I got out, he drove off at once.
So it was there. I followed a shady path lined with shrubs where tiny butterflies darted about, as well as with tall trees, eucalyptus and mangoes. Their branches formed sinuous traceries over my head, I could hear the sea, I could hear the birds, at every step there was a crackle of dry leaves. It was there.
I came to a little bay in the shape of a crescent moon and now, beneath my feet, black sand, as black as my skin. Behind me, as if shielding the island and forming a ring around the bay, a number of baobab trees. Inside their trunks, as I’d been taught at school, there’s always a hollow. I don’t know what purpose it serves.
I walked up and down, made a tour of all the baobabs. At the base of one there were charred logs and a mound of gray ashes. People came here to grill meat, they came to swim, to eat, to enjoy themselves, they didn’t come here like me with anguish in the pit of their stomachs and a longing to discover something or other in the hope that this beach might answer all the questions, fill all the empty spaces, shine light into all the shadows.
What should I do now? I stood still, listening to the sound of the delicate waves, the hissing noise that came from the rocks, the shrill birdcalls. I’d finally returned to where it had all begun but this was only a beach. Fifteen years ago my mother had landed at this very spot with other illegal immigrants but there was no trace of them today. The tides had washed away their footprints on the black sand, the wind had blown back their shouts across the open sea. I’d have liked to be able to say that I saw a sign, that I recognized a particular birdcall, that a wise and comforting phrase had been whispered in my ear, that I could read a mark on the trunk of one of the baobabs, that I felt less alone, all those magical things I’d imagined and cherished in my mind when I thought about this place. Bandrakouni.
The delicate, foam-fringed waves washed in and wove their collars of lace about my ankles. I went into the sea. My body stretched out in the water, I cupped my hands, I began kicking my legs in a scissors action, and the movements learned long ago came back to me. Breathe, thrust forward, breathe, thrust forward. I swam silently, not thinking about much, except the positioning of my arms and legs, and the way my head needed to break the surface to enable me to breathe. Maybe if I’d been stronger, more intelligent, I’d have swum to another shore and tried to live another life, differently, in another way. But when it comes to boys like me, who live in constant fear, who’ve had everything and suddenly have nothing, we go back, just like lambs to the slaughter.
When I returned to the shore at Bandrakouni I realized that I was about the same age as my mother had been when she landed on this beach of black sand surrounded by baobab trees. Had she been afraid then? In the dark during the crossing? Had I cried? Did she know that baobabs contain a hollow space inside them, one into which she could have slipped me? I’d have fallen asleep, then I’d have died there in that hollow and I’d have become a little bit of that tree, invincible, admirable. It’s a glorious life being a baobab tree on a beach.
Bruce
You always thought you were different from the rest of us. There was something in you I could never put my finger on, get a grip on, rub out. Sometimes when I saw you sat there, unmoving as a stone, I had the urge to shake you, and say there was no point in your sitting there, boys like you and me were made to grapple with life, get stuck in and snuff it with no regrets. No mercy, Mo. No mercy. You’re just like the rest of us, Mo. You’re black, you’re alone, you’re trapped here, you’re on the street.
I knew you spent your afternoons up there in that white fool’s place, the one who looks like nothing on earth. His skin’s so pale he looks as if he’s dead already, he’s as thin as a drumstick and does your head in with all his talk and his soccer games. Before every film he thinks he has to spout loads of stuff about the actor or the guy that made it or even tell the plot, is he a fucking fool or what?
I always thought you were watching TV up in the room there, but no, you’re reading. That’s all you do, sit there and read. But I let you carry on, I was keeping you in reserve, the way I keep all my homeboys in reserve. I told myself one day you’d be useful to me for something. I knew you were cunning, the djinn doesn’t choose fools and weaklings, Mo, believe me. I knew perfectly well you hadn’t gone out of your mind, I knew you hadn’t gone nuts, I knew I needed to be wary of you. But you stayed quiet, you came when I called, you did what I told you, and maybe I should have kept a closer watch on you.
You chose your moment, didn’t you. I was too easy that weekend, I’d beaten that dumb bastard Abdallah in the mourengué. He was the champion over at M’tsapété and he thought he was cunning and strong enough to come and challenge me on my own turf. MY OWN TURF? You saw him there on the ground crying for his mother. That weekend we had good drinks, good smokes, good dancing, on Saturday night we went to Ninga disco and couldn’t get in like we usually did. It was the bouncer, that fucking African fool who came here on a kwassa-kwassa like a half-starved wretch, but who now thinks he’s an American in his dark suit. I had enough money to have fuck and my prick was itching for it, I’d had enoug
h of bleating goats, I was the king for fuck’s sake. I gave cash to La Teigne, Rico, and Nasse, who’d come back from Anjouan on a kwassa-kwassa, and they all had a fuck in the bushes, front and back, and afterward we washed our pricks in Mamoudzou Harbor. I felt good. Same thing on Sunday. I had enough cash to buy a whole box of chicken and Nasse grilled it all properly, chili pepper, cassava, the whole of Gaza smelled of home-cooked kebabs, the blue smoke attracted all the kids, it was a feast. Bruce was king, it was all too good. You know very well, you ate your share the same as everyone else.
Tropic of Violence Page 9