by Maryse Conde
“Our two lives fused into one. We looked in the same direction. We smiled at the same moment. We were one and the same person.”
His wife had been run over by a reckless driver and was killed on the spot together with the baby she was carrying. BC and Monsieur Jérémie both came up with the idea of creating a university in Guadeloupe but they were unaware it would take them almost eight years to achieve their aim. The Institute of Blinding Light comprised three sections: Humanities, Social Sciences, and History. There were no lectures but conferences, colloquiums, and seminars instead moderated by leading experts from France and especially from England and the United States. Monsieur Jérémie’s modest title was Assistant Director of Social Sciences but everyone knew he was in charge of everything.
He was the one who rented Dr. Firmin’s former clinic which had been left abandoned for years. He was the one who had it repainted and proudly signed in majestic letters The Institute of Blinding Light: Center for Fundamental Research. He was the one who gave an interview to an anti-establishment private radio which caused a sensation. He was the one behind the choice of speakers and their topics; for example, Slavery, A Crime Against Humanity; Capitalism and Slavery; What’s the Purpose of Literature; Raising Awareness of the Oppressed; The Ravages of Globalization; On Liberating Mankind. On the surface Ivan played a minor role. He was in charge of making sure the DVDs and Blu-Rays were available for the speakers when they were required. He also supervised the cleanliness of the place and oversaw an army of cleaning women equipped with brooms and constantly lamenting the cost of living. This period was the best time of his life. The world deconstructed and reconstructed under his eyes. The lies, myths, and shams were unmasked. He understood that years of unjust and arbitrary imperialist power had caused the suffering in the world today. He returned home of an evening radiant and talkative. He would take his sister by the hand and have her dance the Charleston and boisterous boogie-woogies, somewhat out of fashion but an excuse for making comical contortions and entrechats. For the first time in his life he had a little money of his own and consequently showered his sister with presents of Creole jewelry such as a collier gren d’o necklace and zanno créole earrings. The most striking of them all was a ring in which he had engraved the words ti amo.
How lovely Ivana was, in all her finery! She was reaching the age when the teenager turns into a young woman. The round contours of her cheeks, her stomach, and her thighs had melted and she was sprouting up straight for the sky like a Kongo cane. Simone contemplated her with an emotion unwittingly bordering on jealousy.
Was I as lovely as her at her age?
Of course not! Maeva had put her to work in the sugarcane fields. It’s a fact the work was not as hellish as in the old days; now machines were used to cut the cane. The cane bundlers dressed in those padded clothes so dear to Joseph Zobel have now disappeared. But the remaining work is still terrible. No matter how thick Simone’s cotton stockings were, her legs were covered in scratches and her hands callused. Her skin was blackened and chapped.
As soon as it opened, the Institute of Blinding Light was met with great excitement. Three hundred students registered during the month of October alone, mainly because the fees were minimal and admission was accepted at high school diploma level. The institute was also the target of angry criticism. How could the powers that be tolerate such a monument of hatred towards metropolitan France? the affluent asked. How could they allow some of the teachers to claim that the Crusades were the first colonial enterprise, that the great Napoleon Bonaparte was nothing but a vile slave driver, and that a much-admired president of the republic was in league with the collaborators during the war?
The final straw was when BC came in person to give a lecture entitled “The Psychic Wounds of Domination.” Given his reputation he was invited to speak on television during prime time. He was a handsome fifty-year-old. The sound of his voice, the way he carried his head, and especially his way of looking at you indicated he believed he was one of the most intelligent men on this earth. He calmly explained that the dependency in which the Antilles had been maintained for centuries, a dependency which had changed names but still remained fundamentally the same, had caused an irreversible trauma in the minds of its inhabitants. On second thoughts his opinion merely repeated the words of Césaire in And the Dogs Were Silent—when the slave covered with the blood of his master he has just killed shouts, “This is the only baptism I remember today.” It also mirrored the thoughts of Frantz Fanon.
Given the age in which we live, however, such remarks were dangerously loaded. Hardly had a week gone by after BC climbed back on his plane than a company of riot police, booted and helmeted, raided the Institute of Blinding Light. They dispersed the students who happened to be there, invaded Monsieur Jérémie’s office, where a gigantic photo of Martin Luther King had pride of place, and informed him the institute was closed by order of the Minister for the Interior. Before leaving they placed seals just about everywhere.
The students were appalled, and organized a march inviting every political party from the right to the left to join them in demonstrating against such a major attack on freedom of expression. Their plea went unheard. A trickle of men and women assembled on the Place de la Victoire. There was a growing atmosphere of fear. There were reports that riot police had landed from Martinique and Guyana. It was then that Monsieur Jérémie committed suicide. He walked into a cane field not far from his home and put a bullet in his head. Some field workers found his body already devoured by chicken hawks.
Monsieur Jérémie’s funeral was totally different to that of Manolo’s a few years earlier. This time you could count the number of mourners on one hand: his old mother who never stopped sobbing and asking what she had done to deserve such a son as well as his half-brother who had never got along with him and drove an unregistered taxi in Fontainebleau. Monsieur Jérémie had never had a mistress nor had he kept a woman on the side. As a result, there were no bastards, no illegitimate children born of adultery. BC was unable to attend the funeral as he had been invited to Tunisia by the Muslim Brotherhood. But he attached great importance to the events at the Institute of Blinding Light and named a lecture room at his university after Nicéphale Jérémie.
Monsieur Jérémie’s death completely shattered Ivan. He could not have cried more if Monsieur Jérémie had been his father. As always in such cases he blamed himself for such trifling things as looking bored every time Monsieur Jérémie rambled on about his love for Alya or looking skeptical when he started in on his favorite theory:
“Africa will dominate the world after China. And when I say Africa I don’t mean Black Africa or White Africa, as the Western World calls it. I mean the entire continent: people united by the same religion.”
Consequently Ivan set off every day to the local bar and spent entire nights there. He was picked up dead drunk at every crossroad night after night. Simone and Ivana were scared to death and wondered whether he was not suicidal.
One afternoon he received a visit from Miguel with whom he had remained close. Miguel was on to a good thing and wanted to let Ivan in on his plan. Alix Avenne, a well-known wine merchant, had a debt towards Miguel’s father who had operated on his heart a few years earlier. He had just opened a fish-canning factory and was looking to hire reliable young people for deliveries to hotels, restaurants, and individual clients. They would collect the sums due and pay back the SuperGel Company each month.
“Frozen fish!” lamented Maeva. “Ka sa yé sa! Whatever next! When I was young we used to throw the fish still alive and wriggling straight into the court-bouillon.”
Ivana did not agree. She had never liked Miguel, who had committed the abominable crime of having blinded his partner. This angel face could hide nothing but foul thoughts. Obviously Ivan did exactly as he pleased. Won over, he piled his meager possessions into a rucksack and followed Miguel who had offered to lodge him.
The first few months everything went brilliantly. Every Saturday Ivan arrived in Dos d’ne at the wheel of a van displaying the words: Our fish is fresh, only our customers are spoiled. He was dressed in a dapper uniform and carried loads of frozen fish: slices of red tuna, sea bream, red snapper, and the same sort of colorful tropical catfish that his mother used to cook in her stews.
During the All Saints Holiday, Ivana went to join him. Like all those who lived on the Leeward Coast, the little town of Pointe-à-Pitre seemed distant and foreign. Ivana had only been there once or twice to sing the “Ave Maria” by Gounod in the Cathedral of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. Its crowded streets, with Lebanese stores bellowing out the latest zouk songs, were a frightening place. But Paulina, despite being blinded in one eye, had come back to live with Miguel and had even given him a son. She took charge of making sure Ivana changed her opinion, and arm in arm would drag her on endless walks.
“For those who don’t know Pointe-à-Pitre, it’s true the town might appear unattractive,” she said. “But it’s quite different when you live here. I was born in the Canal Vatable district in a house belonging to the diocese because mother hired out her services to the presbytery. She scrubbed the floors, polished the silverware, and made the priests’ beds. It was rumored that me and my two brothers were the children of one of the priests, a South African from Durban, because of our blue eyes and our yellow mop of hair. Nobody could prove it and my mother took her secret with her to the grave. When I was a child, everyone who lived in the poorest neighborhoods was terrified of fires. Whole blocks of houses would go up in flames. People lost their possessions and sometimes even their children.
“One late afternoon my mother and I went to the cathedral to attend the coronation of the Virgin Mary. You know, the one that takes place every August 15th. When we arrived home our house was glowing like a torch with my two brothers inside. Ever since that day I’ve loathed the unhealthiness and precariousness of poverty. That’s why I stay with Miguel. However much he acts like a low-down nigger and claims that nothing counts in his eyes, he’s a bourgeois and son of a bourgeois. His mother was an Algerian peasant his father refused to marry. He preferred a lovely mulatto girl like Marie-Jeanne Capdevielle, whom he placed as a center piece at home.”
Ivana was at a loss for an answer. As for poverty, she didn’t know whether or not she hated it; it was her daily lot. She attended the school’s film club. She read everything she could lay hands on: Balzac, Maupassant, and Flaubert were part of the school curriculum as well as Jules Verne, Marguerite Duras, Yasmina Khadra, and René Char, whose poetry she saw as a beautiful but indecipherable dream:
Behind your maneless running I am bleeding, weeping; I gird myself with terror, I forget, I am laughing under the trees. Pitiless and unending pursuit where all is set in motion against the double prey: you invisible and I perennial.
As soon as she passed her baccalaureate she would choose to become either a nurse in order to take care of the weak and the destitute or a police officer in order to protect them. She couldn’t make up her mind.
After four months everything changed. Miguel vanished with his wife and son. First it was thought they had gone to Guyana, to Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni where Paulina came from. That turned out to be untrue. They couldn’t be found in Blida at Miguel’s mother’s place either. In the end the police had been notified and discovered they had flown to Paris and then on to Turkey. From that point on all trace of them had been lost. Alix Avenne then realized they had left behind a totally unsuspected mess. The orders had been overbilled. Some remained unpaid. There was a huge deficit in the accounts. They arrested Ivan. He was obviously an accomplice since he lived with Miguel and they were two of a kind. For the second time then, Ivan went back to jail and Simone sobbed bitterly.
It was then that her vague desire to write to Lansana Diarra took root and grew. Ivan was growing up as best he could without a father to hold his hand on the road of life. Did Lansana remember the dreams they had dreamed together while she was pregnant? But then she wondered how to get in touch with him. Nowadays nobody writes with paper and envelope. You’ve got to know your correspondent’s email address and use a computer. After some musing and a good many tears she made up her mind to send a letter to Monsieur Lansana Diarra, musician with the instrumental ensemble Bamako, Republic of Mali. At the post office the sympathetic lady behind the counter advised her to write her address on the back of the envelope.
“That way, if it doesn’t get delivered, it will be returned,” she advised. “At least you’ll know.”
Simone sobbed even louder and Ivana’s whole being revolted at the sight of Ivan’s photo on the front page of the local newspaper. The photographer had contracted his forehead and eyes and blown up his jawbone and ears giving him the features of a perfect hooligan. It was also the tone of the article that went with it, the work of a journalist obviously in the pay of Angel Pastoua. He made Ivan out to be the brains behind the affair. It was this good-for-nothing from Dos d’ne who had corrupted the son of a notable. The trial seemed to be a done deal. But they hadn’t taken Mr. Vinteuil into account. Not only had he not returned to his native Clermont-Ferrand but he had recently married a black woman: not a white Creole or a mulatto, not a light-skinned coolie or a mixed-blood Indian, not a high yellow girl or a light-skinned, brown, or red girl. But black. Mr. Vinteuil had helped Ivan once before and now asked to be his officially appointed lawyer. He was not going to let the weak pay for the powerful and be ruined because of them once again.
An ultramodern prison had recently been opened at Bel Air. In order to avoid any attempt at escape it was lit up every evening like an ocean liner. As a result nobody could get any sleep for miles around and a petition had been circulated. The prison housed a number of offices equipped with computers and Dictaphones. Mr. Vinteuil met his client here on a daily basis and interrogated him about his life.
Ivan discovered the joy of talking about himself, of plunging deep down inside and coming up with long-hidden, secret thoughts.
“Why did Monsieur Jérémie become your role model?” Mr. Vinteuil asked.
Ivan hesitated, turning the question over and over in his head until finally he said, “Before I met him, nobody took any interest in me except for my sister, my mother, and my grandmother.”
“What did he talk to you about? What books did he give you to read, for example?”
“A bunch of books: Frantz Fanon, Jean Suret-Canale, and especially a lot of African-American authors translated into French. I must confess I didn’t read them much since they bored me a little.”
“What did interest you then?”
“Monsieur Jérémie’s life. His actual life. He had lived in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was in Libya the year Gaddafi was killed.”
Hearing these words, Mr. Vinteuil gave a start.
“How would he describe Gaddafi? A dictator or a hero?”
“In his eyes he was a hero. He worshiped him.”
“Did he encourage you to leave for either Syria or Libya?”
Ivan rolled his eyes.
“Leave? How could I leave? He knew I didn’t have a cent to my name, not even enough to buy a bus ticket to Basse-Terre or Pointe-à-Pitre. He insisted my duty was to improve the world around me.”
“Improve? By doing what?”
“He said everyone should do his part. I never really understood what that meant.”
All this ended in an acquittal pure and simple, together with a sentence of community service.
During Mr. Vinteuil’s defense speech some people, especially the women, wept. Others applauded. At the end, the court rose and gave him a standing ovation.
Ivan returned to Dos d’ne victorious. His mother had rented a van with flag flying and sounded the horn continuously. All along the road people emerged on their doorsteps wondering what was going on. Numbed by their own problems in life, they had never h
eard of Ivan and had no idea that for once justice had been rendered. On the main square in Dos d’ne the schoolchildren sang the Marseillaise while waving little tricolor flags. The mayor, who as we have already seen was partial to homilies, couldn’t let such a perfect occasion slip by. He boasted of a just and tolerant France who could not allow one of her sons to be wrongly accused. Many spectators were shocked that Ivan did not want to speak and join in the concert of voices praising the Mother Country. The truth was that he couldn’t put one word in front of another. It was as if he had been put through a washing machine, wrung, and hung out to dry. He felt no gratitude towards Mr. Vinteuil since he had no understanding of what was going on around him. He recalled Miguel’s enigmatic words:
“I’m going first,” he had declared mysteriously, the day before he disappeared. “I’ll let you know how it’s going and whether you should come and join me with Ivana.”
As soon as they could, Ivan and Ivana set off for their favorite place, the Pointe Paradis. Ivan showered his sister with passionate kisses while Ivana whispered in his ear:
“Please don’t go back to jail again. Think of me. It hurts me so much when you’re not here. All year long while you were in prison I thought I was going to die. I had trouble even studying at school.”
Ivan sat up on the sand and looked at the sea as it frothed at their feet. Without realizing it he repeated Miguel’s words: “One day we’ll leave. We’ll go somewhere else.”