“To press one’s wares is to cheapen them, madam merchant. That’s why I’m lost in the congo canes.” And, with a little enigmatic laugh, he added: “Up there in my forest I don’t hear such comical things.”
At that moment Letitia saw me, and as I emerged from the shadow she called to me carelessly:
“Telumee, my friend, where is it written that a man’s made just for one woman?”
Her hair was done in four braids hanging down her back; she was wrapped in her skin as in a mantle of silk; I thought she looked magnificent.
“Letitia, Letitia, you are beautiful, it’s true, but with the beauty of a waterlily that lives in stagnant water.”
“A lily in stagnant water? Maybe,” she answered, smiling. “But for all that you’re a coconut flower right up in the sky, and when the breeze blows you’ll fall.”
“Let’s wait for the breeze, my waterlily—let’s wait for the breeze to spring up.”
“As long as you like,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. And with a laugh she glided off, sinuous and airy, scraping her long toes against the earth at every step. A gleam of light still lingered in the sky, revolving slowly, as if the sun was loath to leave Fond-Zombi. I was back again in Elie’s sight, a tall red canna, my soul light and free, and I said to my heart: “Ah, Telumee, my girl, you were ready to moan, but your hour of sorrow has not yet sounded.” Already, without more ado, my man was unloading the planks and setting them out around our cabin, singing:
Telumee what a pretty girl
A girl a Congo cane ladies
A Congo cane in the wind
She bends forward and back
Back and forward
You should see her bent forward ladies
You should just see her bent forward.
8
IN THE PERFECTION of my rise, its speed and resonance, there was something disturbing, and I was puzzled at having obtained, all at the same time, the three crowns that can usually be hoped for only at the end of a long life. Love, the trust of others, and that kind of glory that accompanies every woman who is happy—these were gifts too great not to become dangerous in God’s sight. So sometimes, in the shade of my Chinese plum, I would tremble with fright, trying to make out the exact moment when the Almighty would take umbrage at my crowns. But then a little breeze would come and play with my skirt, my sleeves, my braids, and I’d feel I could go on like that until the end of time, and it was as if I was already embalmed, powdered, and laid out happy on my deathbed.
Since the evening when Queen Without a Name had come with me to the cabin and roasted a few cobs of corn to sanction my presence under Elie’s roof, I seemed to have entered another world; it was as if I never lived before, never known how to. When Elie looked at me, then, only then, I existed, and I knew well that if ever one day he turned away from me I should disappear again into the void. I watched him as a sailor watches the wind in fair weather, knowing not every ship reaches haven. The feeling I bore him overflowed onto every creature my eye lighted on, and I marveled at the skill and agility with which man fulfills his destiny, however changeable, unpredictable, or excessive it may be. Life went on turning, suns and moons were engulfed and then reborn in the sky, and my continuing joy lifted me out of time. But meanwhile there were the dead children, the old who survived them, and friendship betrayed, razor slashes, the wicked waxing strong on their wickedness, and women with garments woven of desertion and want, and so on. And sometimes a long thorn slowly pierced my heart, and I’d wish I were like the tree called Resolute, on which it is said the whole globe and all its calamities could lean.
One evening when I was taking my usual stroll in front of my cabin, a neighbor stared at me so persistently that I asked her: “Are you so fond of me, mother, that you wear out your eyes on me like this?” And the woman answered at once, as if she expected my question and had prepared for it: “Everyone loves dragonflies, and you are a dragonfly without even knowing it. You know how to light up your own soul, and that is why you shine for everyone else.”
“If you think I’m a dragonfly, mother, perhaps I’ll really become one.”
Then I went on with my stroll, thinking that if it was so obvious, the time must be near when every second would seem to me like a whole year. The shadow had almost reached the hamlet, the sun was disappearing over the horizon, a heavy perfume rose into the air and over the mountains and clung to a dull and melancholy half moon. A little while later I found Queen Without a Name sitting in her rocker. Here and there around her in the grass the toads seemed to be searching for a dew that would not fall. As I settled myself on a stone, the Queen said without looking at me:
“The breeze won’t get up, it’s as tired as I am. Will it get up during the night? Maybe, but everyone will be in bed and no one will get any good of it.”
“It’s a season for zombies, not for men,” I said, to amuse her.
“Why do you want to bother about men?” she said with a faint laugh. “Many are zombies, and this weather suits them down to the ground. But what surprises me is that you’re so good at seeing that spring keeps to its winter quarters. Have you come back to earth?”
It was my turn to laugh, and, this polite exchange concluded, I told her what my neighbor had said, and described my fears. At this moment I envied the Queen. I would have liked to be old and have lived my life already. And suddenly I asked:
“What is natural to man, then—happiness or unhappiness?”
“It depends,” she answered.
“What should one do then, to bear—” I went on feebly.
“My child, you will feel just like one deceased, your flesh will be dead flesh and you will no longer feel the knife thrusts. And then you will be born again, for if life were not good, in spite of everything, the earth would be uninhabited. It must be that something remains after even the greatest sorrows, for men do not want to die before their time. As for you, little coconut flower, don’t you bother your head about all that. Your job is to shine now, so shine. And when the day comes that misfortune says to you, Here I am—then at least you’ll have shone.”
We’d known many bad times, but after every other slack period, when no poisoned word had been uttered, Fond-Zombi and its inhabitants had warded off drought, unemployment, and depression—the canes grew green again, we took our place once more in the earth’s orbit, the world went on turning. But this time everything seemed different: it was only the beginning of the season, but it was as if the men were tired already, exhausted with doing nothing. And only a few laughed and said to themselves: “What else is there to do, and when a man is about to die who can stop him from laughing?”
Fond-Zombi’s downfall began that year with a winter that astonished everyone. The village was attacked by waterspouts that transformed the streets into muddy torrents and swept all the goodness of the soil away to the sea. The fruit fell off the trees before it was ripe, and the children all had a painful little dry cough. We must wait for things to calm down, people said, forgetting that a bad winter can get the better of a good spring. And spring came, torrid and stupefying, stifling the pigs and devastating the poultry yards, while the banana leaves became hatchings of the wind, tattered finery scoring space and symbolizing rout. Fond-Zombi was like a desert. Evil seemed to hang in the air, the only tangible thing there was, and people stared at it, dazed, throughout whole afternoons. The women went about the streets in disconcerting haste, so that one only guessed how thin they were, and what sadness was in their eyes. They glided along like shadows, and when they passed each other made a little evasive gesture which meant, “We must block evil with our silence, and anyway, since when was sorrow a subject for tales?”
From the start, before the pigs died, before the hens’ tongues were swollen by the pip, even before that conversation with the neighbor, I knew the hour of the abyss was approaching for me. Elie seemed to find the sun tarnished, dulled, and you could see from his glance that here was a man who had stopped seeing wonders. Not a si
ngle new cabin was built in Fond-Zombi—only shanties, hovels of cardboard, and patched-up shacks. All the timber that should have been sold piled up around the house like flotsam on the shore. Elie kept on going to his forest, all alone, out of sheer obstinacy, but he hardly ever laughed now as he set out his planks of locust wood and red mahogany. After a good swig of rum he would wander about the yard examining each plank minutely, then stretch his idle arms out in the darkness, gingerly trying his muscles, swaying now to the right and now to the left as if the weight of his body was too great to support. One evening when he seemed even more depressed than usual I started to hum a little beguine to remind him of old times. But he looked so scandalized I stopped short. He seemed to be saying, “Don’t you realize, my poor Telumee, that the time for songs is over?” Next morning, as I was handing him his old lunch box that he used to take to the forest, he snatched it from me and threw it down, shouting:
“Can you see one little house post going up anywhere, that you dare to give me this?”
I was transfixed with surprise. I couldn’t take my eyes off the food lying scattered about, with little ants running over it already. When I looked at him again, Elie was scratching his head gloomily and glaring wildly at the sky, the piles of planks nearby, and the trees in the distance, as if he didn’t know whom or what to vent his anger on.
“Oh,” he moaned quietly, “what I’ve always feared is happening. We no longer live on solid earth, Telumee, we’re out at sea amid the currents, and what I wonder is whether I’m going to drown outright.”
“What I wonder is, what fish would ever eat you, with that tough hide,” I said, trying to be light and reassuring.
“Tough, you say. Don’t be too sure.”
And he turned away and went slowly off toward the village, in search of the others, equally disenchanted, who now gathered to drink and bicker and even, sometimes, fight; to lose their savings at dice, and fritter the hours away on the same adegonde verandas where not long ago they had talked of the stars and the meaning of life.
From that day onwards Elie spent most of his time amid the bruised and shattered souls of Negroes without jobs, and when he staggered home he wouldn’t have anything to eat, but just spat out jets of brown saliva and muttered: “A long time ago . . . I used to saw wood . . . but now I’ve found friends who are fond of me, so what does it matter?” Sometimes he would come back from these gatherings quite changed, and look at everything with a mysterious, knowing gaze, as though he possessed the secret of all existence. I used to envy him those bird of prey’s eyes looking down on life from on high; I too wanted to know the secret that was told on the verandas now that Fond-Zombi had left its place in the earth’s orbit. One afternoon, wishing to acquire the same look as my Elie, I decided to go to one of the meetings. That day, all those with nothing to do were gathered at the other end of the village, on the veranda of Madame Brindosier, already old and crowned with white braids, but still keen on stirring up evil. She crouched on her heels some distance away from the rest, under a flame tree, her eyes fixed admiringly on the group of bold demons cursing and yelling and boxing on her handsome veranda. Every so often she would stand up and lean over the balustrade.
“It gets worse every year,” she sighed. “Men go further and further downhill, and it isn’t that which kills them.” And her fine gold-speckled brown eyes were filled with artlessness.
Slipping in among the crowd outside the balustrade, I hid my face behind one of the smooth planks Elie had brought back from the woods a few years before. The first thing I noticed, at the other end of the veranda, was the tall reddish-brown Amboise, looking down pensively on the spectators. Then I became aware of the continual hubbub that reigned inside, punctuated by hoarse bids on the dice and a ceaseless flow of gratuitous insults. At that moment two men were going for each other with an air of fierce resignation. Elie was egging them on and singing drinking songs, hollow-cheeked and red-eyed, the veins in his temples swollen with rage and helplessness. Suddenly he let out a crazy laugh and the fight broke off, as if no longer capable of masking the confusion of men’s minds and hearts.
“It’s hot as hell,” he panted, “and I’m dying of cold.”
Then, snatching up a bottle of rum, he drank till he was out of breath, stopped to say a few words, and punctuated them with a long jet of brown saliva, as if to show that for him speech itself was nothing but bitterness and disgust.
“Which of you can answer and tell me exactly what we are hunted by—for we are hunted, aren’t we?”
Amboise emerged from the crowd and murmured in a distant voice, such as one uses to the wind and trees and rocks:
“Friend, nothing hunts the Negro but his own heart.”
A huge disappointment spread over every countenance, and Elie shouted, full of wrath:
“Why talk to me about the Negro’s heart, when what it’s all about is my two arms and my trade as a sawyer? You think you’ve got a monopoly of all the world’s wisdom, Amboise, and you’re really only an acomat fallen among rotten timber!”
Amboise looked long at the face of his friend, his brother of the forest.
“Alas,” he said at last, “the Negro’s heart is a dry land no water will improve, a graveyard insatiable for corpses.”
And coming over to me among the crowd, he drew me away with a firm hand, while behind us, in the hubbub on the adegonde veranda, the fighting began again. We went through the village in silence and he left me as soon as we were in sight of my cabin.
“You certainly found what you were looking for,” he said, and disappeared.
That night Elie came home even later than usual, and, dragging me out of bed, started to beat me unmercifully without saying a word. From that instant dates my end, and thenceforward shame and derision were my guardians and my angels. Elie would come in in the middle of the night and put on superior airs: “I am a shooting star, Negress, I do what I please, and that’s why you’re going to get up and warm up my supper before I have time to bat my eyelids.” I didn’t cry out under his blows—all I did was cross my arms to protect my eyes and temples. But this only increased his fury, and he would thrash me with all his strength, saying, “For you six feet of earth and for me penal servitude, my girl.” I was covered with blue and purple bruises; soon not a square inch of my flesh was presentable. Then I began to flee the light of day, for a women’s misery is not a tourmaline she wants to flash in the sun. Every evening when night fell I would hide my purple skin in the dark and drag myself to Queen Without a Name’s. She would make me lie down, light a candle dedicated to suffering, and massage me gently with carapate oil warmed in the palm of her hand.
“It’s abominable,” she’d sigh as she rubbed my arms and legs. “He ought to send you away instead of knocking you about like this. But things like this never go unpunished, and I’m sure he’ll get what he deserves.”
Her oracular tone made me shudder.
“Don’t curse him, Grandma. He’s drowning, and if you curse him it’s all over with him.”
But she would shrug her shoulders and sadly shake her head:
“I don’t need to curse him, woman. He’s taking care of it himself.”
One day, when people had stopped believing in Him, God caused it to rain: the earth was flooded, the roots watered, and with them human hope. Soon the banana leaves stretched out like the sails of windmills, and the canefields foamed and sang beneath the wind’s caress. Gradually all the verandas emptied of their demons. People stared at each other wide-eyed, in silence, and with a certain touch of mutual admiration, and went about the streets as light as ships without ballast. The planks around our cabin had faded: they served as nests for termites, the rain had rotted them. Elie never set out for the forest again. He was crushed, weighed down by his own body, his soul, his breath. People looked at him awkwardly, and he remained alone and friendless, with a gulf in his bosom that swallowed up everything. He bought a horse with the last of our money, and stayed away from Fond-Zombi
as much as possible, spending his time in the neighboring districts, stirring up trouble in them, issuing his famous challenges. He would ride full tilt to Le Carbet, Valbadiane, or La Roncière, install himself in a bar, down a full glass of rum, and suddenly bawl out to all and sundry: “Is there a man among you? In less than three rounds I’ll send him back to his mother’s womb.” In this way he came to be called the Hunted One, and Old Abel himself said: “I acknowledge my part in Elie’s head, his body, his arms and legs, and even the reed flute between his legs. But I acknowledge no part in his heart. The gulf of the hunted ones is in his bosom, and the way he’s heading now he’ll go right through the thirty-two communes of Guadeloupe, and soon think the whole world too small for him!”
When he returned from these excursions Elie would call me a black cloud and swear he’d dispel me. He would indulge in strange kinds of violence, choice cruelties that he called his specialties, his little pleasures. Some days he would weep, wild-eyed, and approach me with lips parted as if to speak of truce, and of bygone things that might come back again. But no sound would ever emerge from him; all he did was watch the sky resignedly, and after a while take to the road again. One evening as she was rubbing me with oil I asked Queen Without a Name:
“Grandma, doesn’t he realize I love him?”
“In the state he’s in, my child, your love is of no use to him—the whole world might love him and to him it would be of no use. Alas, if only men could love not with half their heart but with the whole heart God has given us, then no one would deserve to die. But as you see, no one is immortal, and that is how the world goes around.”
I grew extremely weary. I had had enough of living. I was drunk and swollen with sorrow. Elie beat me now without a word, without a look. One evening I sank into the void. I heard and didn’t hear, saw and didn’t see, and the wind passing over me encountered another wind. When he was tired of beating me Elie would sit in a chair with his head in his hands and try to work out ideas, kinds of barricades or ditches that separated him irrevocably from me and from himself and from the whole world. He would sit like that for hours, not moving, his only thought to try to counter each of the bruises dealt by life with an even more perverted and sinister notion, though the contest never came out in his favor. He went away, came back, went away again and never looked at me any more. I sat in the shade of my Chinese plum, languid and nonexistent, and sometimes, under the tree, I fell asleep and dreamed there was a bubble inside my body that filled me up and floated me to heaven. Passers-by looked on me as a kind of apparition. They took the precautions one takes with a spirit enclosed in flesh; as they approached my cabin their conversation would fade to a cautious murmur. Both children and grown-ups seemed to dread frightening me, lest I should fly away. A few stray dogs did bark at me, but even their yapping only confirmed the general idea that I had been changed into a zombie.
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