by Maryse Conde
“Where do you want us to go?” Ivana said, astonished.
“I don’t know. But we’ll go to a place more just and more humane.”
Six months later Ivan’s community service took him to CariFood, a company founded by two nutritionists, fathers of extended families. CariFood had been declared state-approved and was generously financed by the Ministry for Overseas Territories. It was also largely subsidized by the Regional Council. This was not surprising since CariFood maintained an argument likely to find favor with the nationalists. The two nutritionist directors had demonstrated that the jars of baby food in the Caribbean did not contain a single Caribbean nutrient: neither yam nor sweet potato, neither cassava nor dasheen, neither breadfruit nor plantain nor green banana. Consequently, this baby food could develop a dangerous alimentary alienation and was at risk of altering the infant’s palate by accustoming him to regrettable foreign tastes.
Ivan got the cold shoulder from the dozen or so men and women who worked in the spacious facility that had once belonged to the Darboussier factory. Can you imagine, working with an ex-convict whose photo had been spread over every newspaper? He was allocated a tiny studio in a block of flats not far from the Morne de Massabielle. Since Ivan had never lived alone and couldn’t cook, he used to go twice a day to the café-restaurant A Verse Toujours. He was recognized immediately, the word “ex-convict” began to be rumored, and he found himself relegated to sitting all alone. This had a deep impact on him but didn’t prevent him from frequenting the café, as he liked the surroundings. It’s true the Massabielle neighborhood was unlike any other. A fourteen-story tower block was its only sign of modernity. All around it were wooden houses that recalled olden times, built between courtyard and garden, as well as upstairs-downstairs houses where potted palms flourished behind wrought-iron balustrades on their narrow balconies. There was also a private school of good repute and, consequently, every morning clusters of schoolchildren in white and blue uniforms played hopscotch while waiting for classes to begin.
By dint of bumping into his neighbor in the tiny hall outside their studios Ivan ended up getting to know her; she was a Spaniard of mixed blood, full of the petulance her country is known for. She soon started telling Ivan the story of her life.
While she was studying physical therapy, her mother, Liliane, a Guadeloupean from Vieux Habitants, was sent to a small thermal spa in the south of France. There, despite the pathetic sight of the obese and pallid bodies of the spa guests, she fell deeply in love with Ramon, a young Spaniard whose search for work had forced him to cross the Pyrenees. Back in Paris, she realized she was pregnant. When she finally tracked down Ramon he had married Angela, his childhood sweetheart, and emigrated to Argentina, still looking for work. She had sadly christened her daughter Ramona in memory of her father and a song that her mother would hum when she was a child:
Ramona, I hear the mission bells above,
Ramona, they’re ringing out our song of love.
I press you, I caress you
And bless the day you taught me to care
I always remember
The rambling rose you wear in your hair.
Ramona had grown up in Vieux Habitants with her mother. Like her she had studied physical therapy and like her she worked at the Rehabilitation Center, The Karukera. But it was there that any resemblance between mother and daughter stopped. Whereas Liliane’s only pastime was to attend mass during the month of the Virgin Mary or vespers depending on the season, roll the beads of her rosary or kneel twice a month at the altar after having duly confessed her few sins, Ramona was hot-headed and a man-eater. Very quickly she decided to get a taste of Ivan, an ex-convict perhaps but well built: over six feet tall, narrow hips, and, it must be said, an athletic build under his somewhat ungainly clothes.
First of all she invited him for a rum punch accompanied with spicy hot black pudding and nicely salted plantain chips. When that proved to be of no avail, she invited him for dinner and then a long session in front of the television. But that didn’t work. Around midnight Ivan planted a chaste kiss on her forehead and returned home. One evening she could stand it no longer. She slipped on an alluring dressing gown that gaped open at all the right places and came knocking on Ivan’s door. Ivan opened the door exasperated since he was in the process of sending a text message to Ivana and asked roughly, “What do you want now?”
Ramona snuggled up to Ivan.
“There’s a burglar,” she whispered. “I’m sure there’s a burglar in my place.”
With a sigh, Ivan armed himself with a broom handle and crossed the landing. Once inside Ramona’s apartment it was obvious all was quiet and calm and that there was no hidden burglar. Ivan shrugged his shoulders.
“You can see full well there’s nobody here.”
Hurling herself against him, Ramona then smacked a passionate kiss straight on his mouth. Without losing his cool, Ivan extricated himself and made her sit down on the sofa.
“I’m going to tell you something,” he gently murmured.
“Tell me what?”
“I already love a girl and I can’t cheat on her,” he said in all seriousness. “I can never stop thinking of her, you understand.”
Ramona stared at him, her eyes wide open in stupefaction.
“What are you talking about?”
She had no idea what he was saying. She was not asking to be engaged or married. Just a bit of pleasure on the side. It wouldn’t be the first time that a man in love with a woman gave way to temptation for another.
Ivan, however, managed to get out of a tight spot and went home without having surrendered to Ramona’s charms. The following afternoon a police car stopped in front of CariFood and two armed police officers stepped out. They entered the facility and went straight for the corner where Ivan stacked the baby food in boxes.
“Are you Ivan Némélé?” they barked. “Ramona Escudier is accusing you of rape.”
“But I never touched her,” Ivan stammered, stupefied.
The other employees began crowding in and a small group was gathering at the entrance. Paying no attention to what Ivan was saying, the police officers pushed him outside and shoved him into their car. Ivan was driven to the police station in Pointe-à-Pitre where an officer charged him with the offense. He was then thrown into a cell surrounded by thick iron bars. He endeavored to think straight. He needed to get in touch with Mr. Vinteuil as quickly as possible. The latter would surely come to his aid, unless he was fed up with the constant escapades of his client. Around 6 p.m. a fat man dressed to the nines, a camera sitting comfortably on his abdomen, came to stare Ivan in the face.
“You again, Ivan Némélé. Now you’re a rapist.”
“I never even touched her,” Ivan protested again.
The man shrugged his shoulders and without asking for Ivan’s permission began firing away with his camera.
To cut a long story short two contradictory events occurred at the same time. First of all, Ivan’s face was once again spread all over the front page of the local newspaper Tropicana followed by an article which virtually turned him into public enemy number one. Secondly, Ramona recovered her wits and withdrew her accusation. Ivan was set free. In the light of such a scandal, however, CariFood no longer wanted anything to do with him.
Is this how the world works? Ivan asked himself, as he sat devastated in the bus that took him back to Dos d’ne. Friends who abandon you without warning? Girls who slander you? Journalists who write lies about you? People prepared to eat you up alive? If so, give me a load of explosives for me to destroy it.
But he had no idea how to go about it.
The grandiose landscape that the bus passed by to the left and right was of no comfort. In fact he didn’t even notice it. He had not been taught to pay attention to Nature’s beauty. The sea, the sky, and the trees were as familiar and indifferent to him as his own
face.
At Dos d’ne life was not rosy. Ivana was studying for her baccalaureate and virtually invisible. As soon as classes were over she would go and join a group of students who were sitting for the same examination and they would revise together until two or three in the morning. Afterwards, extenuated and exhausted, she would come and kiss her brother who was waiting for her in the warmth of his bed. Maeva, who was once so valiant, had problems standing, yet alone walking, and spent most of her time lying prostrate in bed. Her speech was incomprehensible, her eyes brimming with tears as she pointed to the Sacred Heart of Jesus above the head of her bed.
“Jesus Christ, the son of Mary, is seated to the right of the Father. Look! His heart is bleeding for all the sins we commit. One in particular makes him suffer. That particular sin, nobody dares say its name. Papa must not say that he fathered his daughter and that now he has every right over her. The brother must not think the same.”
As for Simone, Lansana Diarra’s silence broke her heart. She had been waiting for an answer from him for almost two years and still nothing. She imagined him giving concerts, carried away by the applause, clutching the hands of admirers, and that infuriated her. As a result, she ranted and raved against men, much to Father Michalou’s disgust.
“Listen to me,” he grumbled. “They’re not all as bad as you say. I personally have never done you any harm. If you had let me I would have taken in your twins as my own children.”
The mayor made the kind gesture of recruiting Ivan to help build the Mediatheque. Why a Mediatheque at Dos d’ne? Why not? All the towns and villages compete with each other to have one and, although nothing much goes on there, it’s the common lot. Henceforth Ivan belonged to a team of workers who broke rocks, planed beams, and mixed cement, things he had never learned to do previously. He would get up before dawn, wash with cold water in the yard then drink the coffee his mother, up very early, had made especially for him. Apparently mother and son had nothing to say to each other. In actual fact their silence was filled with soft words, full of the love and tenderness they bore for each other. Their most common expressions were weighted with meaning.
“Would you like a braided roll?”
“No, I prefer a rusk.”
Ivan’s work exhausted him but he didn’t mind being worked to the bone. Anything was better than being confronted by a frightening tête-à-tête with his thoughts regarding the monstrousness of this world.
Suddenly everything brightened up. In the month of June the first of the extraordinary events occurred. Ivana passed her baccalaureate with flying colors. To tell the truth, nobody was surprised. She had always been first in every subject. But to see her name printed on a list of those who had passed at the Dournaux Lycée left Ivan in awe.
“There’s no doubt she got all the brains,” he laughed to himself. “I’m just a load of muscles.”
Maeva found the strength to kneel at the foot of her bed and forced her granddaughter to do the same while reciting a dozen thanksgivings on her rosary. Deo gratias. Simone went even further. She delved into her meager savings. Since her old age prevented her from working in the cane fields she now took care of the children of a mulatto couple who lived in Dournaux. Thus she earned a little more and was able to order a crab patty as well as a marble cake from a caterer. She hung flowers around the dining room and invited a dozen young friends. They selected the best zouk music and danced till early morning. Nobody took offense at seeing Ivan and Ivana dance constantly together. That’s how they’d always been. Everyone still remembered when they were ten or twelve and the drummers from Morne-à-l’Eau came to give a concert on the main square with Master Lucas Carton as the star performer; during an interval Ivan had boldly mounted a drum almost as tall as himself and bid his sister dance, lifting up her skirts over her slender legs, much to the delight of the spectators.
“Who taught you how to beat the ka drum?” Lucas Carton asked Ivan in amazement.
“Nobody,” Ivan had replied with his swaggering attitude.
Simone had flown to his rescue.
“They’ve got it in their blood. Their father is one of Mali’s greatest musicians.”
“Salif Keita?” Lucas inquired, since he knew a bit on the subject—two years earlier Lucas had been invited to a festival in Mali and had introduced a new sound from the Caribbean.
The second extraordinary event occurred when Simone finally received the answer she was waiting for from Lansana, posted from Montreal. Lansana described the tragic events that had devastated his life and explained his silence. After Colonel Gaddafi’s death, gangs armed to the teeth had invaded his country and descended as far as Bamako. Based in Kidal at the Al-Akbar Mosque they claimed a change of lifestyle and a religious revival. No longer would there be prostration in front of idols or the treasuring of centuries-old manuscripts. No longer would there be dancing, singing, and performing music. Only silence would please God and be tolerated.
One day a gang of ruffians had penetrated the recording studio that Lansana had built at great expense and completely wrecked it, then pounced on the unfortunate musician hiding in a corner and left him for dead. The neighbors had been alerted and drove him to the hospital where he had spent six months while violent acts of the worst kind were being committed all over the country. Once he had recovered, the terrified Lansana had been forced to flee to Canada where he was a well-known figure. There he had been given a warm welcome. Now he wanted to leave Canada and join the resistance in Mali. He now considered his flight to Canada as an act of cowardice. He should have plucked up courage and endeavored to destroy those who were wreaking so much havoc. He had never stopped thinking of Ivan and Ivana but he was unable to bring them to Mali as long as the country’s problems persisted.
“I don’t know how long it will take,” he wrote. “Six months, a year, two years. But I will send them two plane tickets, that’s for sure.”
Lansana included a photo in his letter which made Simone cry. It depicted him under different circumstances, wiry as a guava twig in his flowing boubou, his hair thinning and gray, portraying a wrinkled face and a sickly body, leaning on two crutches. Age had not spared him.
Lansana’s photo left Ivan and Ivana indifferent. They had dreamed a lot about their father when they were small, since children imagine the family as a magic circle, designed to protect them from their fears. Deep down, they had no inclination to leave their mother, a victim of life’s mistreatment. They were even less inclined to travel to Mali, a country in Africa whose religion and language they did not share. They had heard that Mali, much like the rest of Africa, didn’t have one common language like France or England, but dozens, even hundreds, of dialects. One neighbor doesn’t understand the next. What was the point of going to this place of purgatory? Besides, Ivana thought it was time to pamper Simone. She still couldn’t manage to choose between a career in nursing or one as a police officer. Consequently, she made up her mind to pay a visit to the Careers Advisory Center in Dournaux.
The Lycée at Dournaux, unlike the school at Dos d’ne, was lucky enough not to have been entirely destroyed by Hurricane Hugo. If that had been the case it would have been rebuilt along ultramodern lines. Such as it was, it was composed of a motley group of wooden pavilions scattered around an asphalt courtyard. Here and there a few solitary mahogany and ebony trees sadly grew. The director of the Careers Advisory Center, a young French woman, tanned from her constant sunbathing, stared at Ivana in commiseration.
“So you’ve never left Guadeloupe and have done all your schooling at Dos d’ne!”
Slightly annoyed by her tone of voice, Ivana explained that trips abroad had not been lacking. She had traveled several times to Martinique, twice to Guyana, and once even to Haiti.
“But why do you limit yourself to the two careers of nursing and the police force?” the young woman continued. “With a baccalaureate like yours you could sit for the entrance
exam to the prestigious higher education schools.”
Ivana shook her head violently. She didn’t want that sort of a career, a career of prestige. She wanted to serve, quite simply to serve those of humble origins like herself.
“I think you’d do best to choose the police force; it will enable you to discover the world around you. There are some excellent police academies in France.”
Ivana then ventured that she had no intention of going to France on her own; she would be accompanied by her brother.
“Your brother?” the young woman repeated in surprise.
“Yes, my twin brother.”
The young woman then made a conciliatory gesture.
“He could work as an apprentice.”
“But where as an apprentice?”
“That depends on the job openings. You’d have to contact the Apprentice Training Center.”
But man proposes and God disposes. The proposed appointment on the scheduled date never took place since Maeva died a few days later. She had got in the habit of asking Simone to place her chair in the yard so that she would be bathed in light and could clasp the brotherly palm of Comrade General Sun.
Returning home one lunchtime Simone found Maeva lying on the ground. Had she wanted to get up and try to walk on her own? She had stumbled against a rock and her head was lying in a pool of coagulated blood. In the time it took to alert the neighbors and dash to Dr. Bertogal’s, the only physician who was not bothered about who would pay his fees, Maeva was dead, though not before having whispered in her tearful daughter’s ear: “Take good care of Ivan and Ivana. I dreamt about them last night again lying in a pool of blood.”
Simone was amazed she was so grief-stricken at the death of this mother she thought she had never loved and who had always frowned upon her decisions and judgment. Only their common passion for music and the beauty of the songs they sang with the choir brought them together. Likewise Ivan and Ivana were surprised to find themselves crying. Their grandmother had been the only person to treat them like potential criminals, as if they bore inside them the embryo of a crime. That, they could never forget.