by Maryse Conde
Manolo, Faustin’s father, was still angry. A two-year prison sentence for having made a mess of his son—Ivan had got off pretty lightly. He decided to take his revenge. Oh yes! This family and its putrid miasmas needed to be wiped off the face of the earth. He urged his friend the mayor to strike Simone off the list of those in need who received a monthly allocation of several euros, but, above all, to expel her from the rent-controlled apartment she had occupied for twenty years, since well before the twins were born.
One morning Simone and Ivana were dragged out of their beds by the police and thrown onto the sidewalk with all their meager possessions. But the police hadn’t reckoned on Maeva. Not only did she welcome her daughter and granddaughter into her cramped little shack, but she also begged Kukurmina, the master of the invisible—who hides in the infinitely small and influences the infinitely big—to come to her aid. The powerful could no longer continue to crush and humiliate the weak and go unpunished. Apparently Kukurmina heard her, for three days later while getting up in the middle of the night to take a piss Manolo’s feet struck an unknown obstacle and he fell flat out, smashing his skull against the edge of the bath. The entire island went into a state of shock. What a to-do was Manolo’s funeral! His parents and relatives emerged from all over the place: Paris, Marseille, Strasbourg, Lyon, Lille. For it’s a well-known fact that there are two types of Guadeloupeans: those who are without a job on the island, and those who just get by in metropolitan France. There are a lucky few who are an exception to the rule and take refuge abroad, but such privileged individuals are few and far between. Manolo’s family transformed this period of mourning into a stroll around the island. Some rented cars and went for a dip in the icy waters of the red and black rivers at Matouba. Others took selfies and had themselves driven to the pre-Columbian site at Trois-Rivières and the Lucette Michaux-Chevry roundabout at Montebello. Another group flew off to the islands of Les Saintes and Marie-Galante for the day.
“It’s not true the Caribbean sea is bluer than the Atlantic,” claimed one of Manolo’s sisters who lived in Saint-Malo and was married to a Breton, the perfect example of the age-old attraction the Bretons had for Antillean women.
Adding to the festive nature of the event were the succulent dishes served up in abundance. First came the blood sausage: “one kind two fingers wide, twined in coils, another thick and stocky, the mild one tasting of wild thyme, the hot one spiced to an incandescence” (the description is by Aimé Césaire). Then came the stuffed crabs, curried goat colombo, tuna casserole, octopus, and conch fricassee. During the church ceremony the mayor refused to let the priest read the homily and went straight up to the pulpit himself.
“There is an African proverb that says when an old man dies a library goes up in flames. Manolo knew things which nobody knows today and he takes this knowledge with him.”
Should we correct the mayor? This is not an African proverb but a famous quote by Amadou Hampâté Ba, one of West Africa’s greatest intellectuals. It would be a waste of time. The mayor is already posturing for photos and publishing them on Facebook.
At the end of the ceremony it began to pour with a sharp, drenching rain, proof that the deceased regretted this life.
Now Maeva and Simone, who never really got on together, were forced to live under the same roof. In fact as soon as Simone reached fifteen she left home, tired of the constant sanctimonious atmosphere alternating with visionary fits. She moved in with Fortuneo, a gangling Haitian who sometimes hired himself out to the factories for harvesting the sugarcane and sometimes manicured people’s gardens. Fortuneo never stopped talking but Simone was never tired of listening to his constant chatter.
“When I was born,” he would say, “I was so black, blue in fact, that the midwife couldn’t tell the difference between my front and my behind. She dropped me and I still have an enormous bump on my head. Could it be a stamp of madness? When I was in my maman’s womb I wasn’t alone. I had a brother, a twin you might say. But he died or, to be exact, he merged into me. He must have been a musician. Sometimes he fills my head with his melodies. I am deaf to the people around me and look at them like an idiotic ababa. Other times his voice goes round on the vinyl of my brain, as hard as a sapphire stylus.”
It was Fortuneo, an instrumentalist with an extremely harmonious voice, who introduced Simone to the world of music. Thanks to him she delved into her memory and recalled those lullabies, those chants she heard in her childhood to which she had never paid much attention. They spent hours of an evening singing in their patch of garden, leaning against the hedge of hibiscus while the moon sailed back and forth high in the sky like a round, moonstruck lantern.
Unfortunately after five years living together Fortuneo went to join his brother in the States. His brother assured him it was a country where there was plenty of work to be had. Consequently there followed a bleak period for Simone, who went from bed to bed, from man to man, from macho to macho. Then the wind of love and music produced a miracle.
One evening no different from any other, she attended a choir rehearsal. Around ten in the evening a group of men arrived dressed in unusual attire. They were wearing cotton robes over baggy trousers. Simone learned later that these were African costumes, namely boubous. The men were holding strange musical instruments. One of them, obviously the leader of the group, addressed the choir, who were both intimidated and repelled by the strangeness of these new arrivals.
“This instrument,” he explained, “is called a kora. Its voice accompanied the heroic deeds of our kings and followed them into battle. This one is a balafon. Each of its metal strips emits a different sound, and learning how to harmonize the notes is essential. This stubborn little one is called a ngoni and it dodges in and out all over the place.”
The speaker who cast a fiery gaze over the audience while he spoke was cousin to the famous Mori Kanté, who had delighted Guadeloupe the previous year and filled the stadium of Les Abymes with thousands of spectators. His name was Lansana Diarra. Between Simone and him it was love at first sight and it changed their vision of the world in an instant. Stars lit up their eyes and it was as if they had known each other for years. Forever, in fact.
After the rehearsal they went out into the night. The stars, which had made their eyes sparkle, climbed back up into the sky and left behind a gentle glow, the glow of mutual comprehension and commitment. Lansana and Simone held each other’s hands.
“Are you a woman or a spirit?” Lansana asked. “Although my life has been filled with the sounds of love, I have never met anyone like you. Tell me about yourself.”
Simone laughed good-heartedly.
“There is nothing to tell. I think my life begins today. There was nothing before you came.”
Lansana departed after spending two weeks in Guadeloupe, during which the two never left each other. At the airport they kissed passionately and Lansana had murmured, “I’ll have you come to Kidal where I live. You’ll see how this town is like no other. It defies the desert from which it derives its force.”
Not long after, Simone realized she was pregnant and sent Lansana letter after letter but to no avail. She couldn’t get over it. This man who had brought her the hot breath of the Sahel—was he in fact no better than the others? As the months added up, she gathered he was no better. Once Ivan and Ivana were born she became a single mother. Like so many others around her. Why are some lands more fertile in single mothers than others? Are the women lovelier and more attractive? Are the men more hot-blooded? On the contrary. They are lands in dire straits. The sexual act is the only godsend; it gives the men the impression of having achieved an exploit and the women the illusion of being loved.
After an exhausting day at the market where she had tried to sell her hens, Simone returned home to her mother’s. In the cramped but meticulously arranged dining room the table had already been laid. A delicious smell of rice and smoked herring, diri et arengsaur, flo
ated in the air. This irritated Simone no end. She knew what it meant. Her mother, who had always blamed her for being disorganized, was giving her a lesson in good manners. Maeva emerged from the kitchen wiping her hands on the apron which she always wore.
“I’ve had that dream again,” she said anxiously.
“What dream?” Simone asked in exasperation.
“The same one where I see Ivan and Ivana in a blood-covered fog. What can it mean?”
“Nothing bad, I can assure you,” Simone said, shrugging her shoulders. “They love each other too much to hurt one another.”
She did not know that being in love is as dangerous as being out of love and that a famous English writer once said, “Yet each man kills the thing he loves.”
Crouched on top of a hill and edged on two sides by ruthless cliffs, the prison at Dournaux dates back to the eighteenth century when the rebels who dreamed of ousting the king were dispatched as far away as possible to meditate on their crime. Numerous events have marked its history. The most spectacular was The Great Escape dating back to 1752. Armed with solid Manila ropes, the rebels slipped down the cliffs to a small creek where their accomplices were waiting for them. These accomplices then rowed them out to sea to a three-master named La Goëlette. What happened after that? We shall never know. Did a quarrel break out? The fact remains that the rebels fought each other to the death and the ghost vessel drifted past Dominica and dumped a crop of stinking corpses on the coast of Martinique.
Wings had been added over time to the main building since the prison was overpopulated, as were all prisons the world over. It’s quite easy to see why. There are more and more people wherever you look who have no respect for the law, make a mockery and turn their backs on it.
It was here they took Ivan. He was thrown into Building A, which housed petty offenders. Here there were a good number of prisoners guilty of having abused their partners. Covered in bruises and blood, the battered women had had the strength and the audacity to go to the police and press charges. Their cases had been accepted and much to their surprise their abusers had been arrested. What! You can no longer beat up your wife nowadays? From time immemorial our ancestors were used to practicing this little game. Is the world about to change?
Ivan was mortified at being imprisoned together with a group of petty delinquents. He would have preferred being locked up in Building B or C or in the high-security ward where you sometimes caught sight of the prisoners doing the rounds in their courtyard surrounded by barbed wire under the supervision of a horde of prison screws who were the subject of many stories in the press. One of the prisoners was nicknamed The Locust since he was as thin and destructive as a cricket, and capable of reducing a crowd of individuals to pulp. Another one was called The Mongoose because he was deceitful and cruel. And yet another The Black Mamba, who outdid all the others in cruelty.
Patience, a voice whispered to Ivan from deep down, your day will come, when you will write your name in the sky with letters of fire and everyone will remember you.
Ivan became friends with Miguel, the son of Dr. Angel Pastoua. Five years older than Ivan, Miguel took him under his wing. He had been imprisoned because he had blinded his wife Paulina in one eye, suspecting her of being the mistress of a Lebanese cloth merchant, rue de Nozières. Miguel was the son of a “draft evader,” so called by the Antilleans because they refused to do their military service and had joined the ranks of the FLN in Algeria. Once Miguel’s father was amnestied he had returned home and become a reputed cardiologist. That is all it took for Miguel, constantly confronted with this image of a valiant father, to turn into a delinquent from an early age. Like Monsieur Jérémie, he would chatter on to Ivan: “Albert Camus said: ‘Between justice and my mother, I choose my mother.’ You know who Albert Camus was, don’t you?”
Ivan didn’t answer since he had never heard the name. Oblivious to his ignorance, Miguel continued, “Albert Camus was so right. My father bored me stiff with his stories about the FLN, how he had gone into combat, how he had met Frantz Fanon and so on and so forth. It was so boring. For me Algeria boiled down to Blida where my mother was born. I lived with her until I was seven; then my father had the terrible idea of having me come to live with him.”
Miguel decreed a number of peremptory rules: never set foot inside a church, above all never confess or take communion. The Catholic Church had defended slavery. Priests such as the Père Labat had owned slaves. On the contrary, focus on Islam, a religion despised by Westerners, but filled with grandeur and dignity. Leave Guadeloupe, where nothing ever happens, as quickly as possible and join other regions of the world where the struggle against the powerful is raging.
These two years in prison were beneficial, dare we say, for Ivan. In the mornings they made tennis balls and rackets. They assembled parts for record players and various musical instruments. Afternoons, volunteer teachers came over from the surrounding colleges. They taught French, Math, History, and Geography. Ivan was already familiar with Victor Hugo, of course, but soon got to know Rimbaud, Verlaine, Lamartine, and above all a certain Paul Éluard:
On regaining health
On ignoring risk
On hoping without looking back
I write your name.
And with the power of one word
I begin my life again
I was born to know you
To call you
Freedom.
Ivan realized that he didn’t understand what these lines actually meant. But he knew deep down that it didn’t really matter. Poetry is not meant to be understood. It is designed to invigorate the mind and vitalize the heart. It is meant to quicken the blood in one’s veins. After his time in prison Ivan passed his college diploma with flying colors. The jury made a surprising mention:
“If Ivan Némélé would only make an effort, we would have nothing but compliments to give him.”
When Ivan got out of prison, he and Ivana met up again and were paralyzed by shyness. For two long years they had only seen each other once a week amidst the chaos and disorder of a crowded visiting room, communicating through a meshed window and sometimes forced to shout in order to be heard. Snatches of conversations in foreign languages mixed in with theirs.
Now they were back together again they didn’t dare look into each other’s eyes or touch each other, and even less to kiss. They both agreed to set off for a place they particularly liked: the Pointe Paradis, a creek where privateers of every nationality laid in wait for the Spanish galleons loaded with the bullion they were coveting. This is where the famous Jean Valmy had been ambushed by the king’s soldiers. Shipped back to France as a traitor he was hung on the Place de Grève.
Ivan laid his head on the soft cushion of his sister’s stomach and murmured, “I think of you all day long. I wonder what you are doing, what you are thinking. When I imagine your thoughts they end up becoming mine. All things considered, I am you.”
Ivana stopped herself from asking him what he was going to do with his brand-new diploma when he asked her the last question she was expecting.
“Have you heard of a certain Paul Éluard?”
She shrugged her shoulders in amazement.
“Yes, of course.”
“What do you know about him?” he insisted. “Was he deprived of freedom? Was he sent to prison? And for how long?”
“That, I don’t know.”
Thereupon she began to rattle on about the platitudes she had learned regarding Paul Éluard: Surrealist poet. Disciple of André Breton until he was evicted from the movement, a great friend of René Char’s.
It was obvious her brother was no longer listening to her. He had constructed his own version of Paul Éluard, a writer made to suit him. Simone de Beauvoir wrote that a writer should never meet her readers. In my opinion, the reverse is true. Readers always think of a writer as being good-looking, handling their words with
elegance, and being full of good humor and sparkling wit. They risk being disappointed with reality.
Idleness is the mother of all vices. Ivan had been out of a job for almost a year. At La Caravelle he was persona non grata, an ex-prisoner. However often he made regular visits to the association in charge of helping him reintegrate into society, they came up with nothing. At one point he found work with a circus, the Pipi Rosa circus from Venezuela, which traveled throughout the islands of the Caribbean. But the sight of these unfortunate animals locked in their cages, especially a couple of lions, looking dazed in their shabby mane of fur, depressed him. After two weeks he resigned. It was then that Father Michalou offered to help him and invited him to come aboard his fishing boat to confront the open sea. As early as four in the morning, while the two men set sail, a thick fog that had accumulated during the night came and settled on their shoulders. Rapidly the sky would brighten and they would throw out or haul in their nets several times. But fishing today is not what it used to be, and they returned to land, their boat half empty, and Ivan got fed up.
Finally, an extraordinary event changed his life. Monsieur Jérémie opened a private school and asked Ivan to be one of its tutors. Consequently all three women, Maeva, Simone, and Ivana, were showered with all kinds of questions. They were lost in conjectures. How come Monsieur Jérémie who, everyone knew, was out of favor with the Ministry of Education, who had no connections and not a cent to his name, could open a private school? In actual fact the Institute of Blinding Light was a branch of a flourishing open university founded in France by a popular philosopher whose initials BC (not to be confused with the meaning “Before Christ”) will be the only indication so as not to run the risk of legal proceedings. While he was in France Monsieur Jérémie had gone to Noirmoutier to visit BC’s university. The two men had become friends and grown even closer owing to the similarity of their partners’ deaths. Usually austere and taciturn, BC mellowed when talking about his late wife.