by Ananda Devi
I am seventeen years old and I don’t give a fuck. I’m buying my future.
I am transparent. The boys look at me like they can see me inside out. The girls avoid me like a sickness. My reputation’s been sealed.
I’m alone. But I’ve known for a long while the value of solitude. I walk straight ahead, untouchable. Nobody can read anything on my blank face, except what I choose to show. I’m not like the others. I don’t belong to Troumaron. The neighborhood didn’t steal my soul like the other drones that live there. This skeleton has a secret life sealed in its belly. It’s carved by the sharp edge of refusal. Neither the past nor the future matter; they don’t exist. And the present doesn’t either.
Eraser. Pencil. Ruler. Beginnings are always easy. And then we open our eyes to a bleak world, to a universe under siege. The looks of others, eyes that judge and condemn. I’m seventeen and I’ve decided my life.
I’m braving the reefs all around me. I won’t be like my mother. I won’t be like my father. I’m something else, something not really alive. I walk alone, straight ahead. I’m not afraid of anybody. They’re the ones who fear me, who fear what they can only guess lies beneath my skin.
The more they touch me, the more they lose hold of me. The ones who dare to look into my eyes feel dizzy. They’re so simple. The inexplicable frightens them. They have fixed ideas. A girl to marry, a girl to conquer and toss aside. Those are the only two categories they can understand. But I don’t belong to one or the other. So they end up baffled and angry.
At night, I haunt the asphalt. Meetings are arranged. They take me, they bring me back. I remain cold. Whatever changes in me, it’s not the truest, innermost part of myself. I protect myself. I know how to protect myself from men. I’m the predator here.
They take me. They bring me back. Sometimes, they rough me up. No matter. It’s just a body. It can be fixed. That’s what it’s for.
I sidestep the traps and the obstacles. I dance in evasion.
Shadow or wing, what you were no longer is. You become something else. In Troumaron, a reflection follows you. It taunts you. It tells you you’re walking the wrong way. It transforms your surfaces, inverts your trajectory, reveals the other side of your silence. The paper boat is leaking everywhere and you don’t know it. You watch as you sink but you don’t see that it’s you. Erasers, papers, pencils, rulers, books, heart, kidneys, toes. One day, you’ll see yourself in the mirror, and nothing at all will be yours.
You see a face congealed under its lies. You ask yourself where you went. You were looking for a key—but something had broken in.
CLÉLIO
I’m Clélio. I’m at war. Fighting everybody and nobody. I can’t get away from my rage. Someday, I know it, I’ll kill someone. Dunno who. Maybe my parents, or some boss, or one of my guys, or a girl, or myself. Dunno who. I’m Clélio. You know who I am, so don’t you mess with me. You shitheads have no idea what anger is if you’ve never met me.
I’ve done all sorts of jobs. The only one left is to kill someone. And then sometimes I sing. When I sing, people listen. Well, at least they stop. I stop their lives and their hearts. My voice pierces infinity, Saad told me. (He doesn’t talk like anyone else here.) My voice makes metal shiver, apparently. The buildings stop crushing men, cement loosens its grip. Walls turn nostalgic. Girls go rosy. But I won’t fucking sing for shit.
A couple of times they’ve asked me to sing at a wedding. Everyone just stares at me, beaming like idiots, and I want to punch their faces in. To see them standing around in their nice clothes. Their shoes so tight their toes look ready to pop out like horns. And they’re acting like nothing’s wrong, stuffing their mouths and boozing like they’re not miserable and broke—it makes me want to shove those smiles down their throats. I tell myself that if one more old lady asks me to sing Marinella, I’m kicking her straight to hell. I’m no good when I drink too much. One beer and I’ll knock over the tables and the bride. One time I even jumped on the bride to pull off her veil, because I knew it was a mask. If they hadn’t held me back, I’d have pulled away her dress, too, and all the oaths she’d taken.
I must have been born that way. I must have seen the future and decided I didn’t like it. So when I see nails, I feel like swallowing them or forcing someone else to swallow them.
I’ve been through prison for assault and battery many times. I wasn’t ever there for long, since I’m a minor. Next year, when I’m eighteen, the punishments will be worse. The judges, if they’re men, lecture me. If they’re women, they go weak when they see how my eyes look like a kid’s; they go soft and try to tell me, implore me to do better. I know I won’t change, though. I’m a little snot. A little shit.
I am Clélio. Dirt poor bastard, swallower of everyone else’s rusty nails. What can you do? Nobody changes just like that.
SAAD
They tell me I’ll succeed. But success does not mean the same thing for everyone. It’s a slippery word. In my case, it simply means that locked doors could open just a bit and I could, if I sucked in my stomach, slip through and escape Troumaron. Everybody knows poverty is the harshest of jailers. Still, the teachers say everything is possible. They tell me how they, too, once learned their lessons by candlelight. But I can see in their eyes just how dim their minds are as a result. They insist: seize your opportunities, don’t hold back your country. But who do they mean by “your”?
Stereotypes were made for us. We fill them all. We are the champions.
The teachers allude to success, as if they were talking to me without entirely believing what they were saying. They look at me surreptitiously: You can make miracles happen. It’s true, I have a good memory. I’m a sponge: I absorb everything. And I’m a bladder: I pour everything back out. Apparently that helps for success. Swallow and expel.
But I make good use of them. I go to class. I pass my tests. I lead a double life: night with the gang, day with the sages.
I can still remember the day I split into two. During French class, the teacher, a young woman with skin as jaundiced as her canary-yellow blouses and who didn’t stay for long (and for that reason I say she was only there for me, at that moment, like fate knocking on my sleepy head), the teacher said: We’re going to read poems by someone your age. As soon as they heard the word poetry, the boys pretended to retch and covered up their ears while making rude noises. But she read those poems anyway, in the middle of this ruckus, and also this boy’s letters, in her small, trembling voice. She started: No one’s serious at seventeen. At first, I thought to myself, he’s wrong; for us, seventeen is very serious. But then I heard, instead of her feminine voice, the harsh voice of a teenager talking about his hopes, his rebellion, his wounds, his wishes, and even more than that, he was talking about the world, his and mine, and suddenly I felt keenly that he was talking to me and only me. Yes, directly to me. He was saying, I am your brother. She read a poem where he was saying that vowels had colors, and the truth of it made me sit bolt upright: I, too, saw colors in words. Just as the island unfurled its blues and oranges, so the words unfurled still more vividly purple rages in my head. When she was done she said, this poet’s name is Rimbaud.
I am your brother.
I am your double. I am your single. I have split completely and totally in two: I was Saad, sitting transfixed in my stiff chair (or stiff in my transfixed chair), and I was someone else, unmoored, observing things but pushing them away through his thoughts, his defiance, his mortality.
That night, lying in bed, I took a marker and began writing on the wall by my head. Of course, I wrote about Eve. She alone occupied my thoughts. I began talking to her directly, saying you instead of she, guessing where she’s going, what she’s thinking, what she’s living. She doesn’t know that I’ve figured her out. I’ve written so much about her that sometimes I think I’m actually writing her life, and other people’s lives, and all our lives.
I read in secret, all the time. I read in the toilets, I read in the middle of the night, I
read as if books could loosen the noose tightening around my throat. I read to understand that there is somewhere else. A dimension where possibilities shimmer.
EVE
The water and its swirls. Its lines, its marbling, its abrupt changes in direction. I spend hours watching the stream run endlessly. Colors slip beneath its clarity when the sun hits it straight on. And I do too, I slip forward, carried by time, by nothing.
The buildings are straight ahead. I’m not afraid of them. I dare them to look back at me. All of us born there are fated to die, but that doesn’t mean anything. Everybody is born to that fate. The babies’ eyes are drained of color and sky. I’ve known for a long time the coldness of metal. It’s imbued me with its liquid strength.
This neighborhood was a marsh at the base of the mountain. They filled it in to build these streets, but they couldn’t do anything about the smell of wrack or the unsteadiness of the ground where only the corpses of brambles and dreams are still growing. Several buildings are starting to tilt. Soon, we’ll have our own Leaning Tower of Pisa. The eighth wonder of the world: Troumaron.
Seated on a mound not far off, I’m smoking and watching them. There’s a guard at the end of each street. The fiery tips of their joints dot the closed circle. The boys swear oaths, declare rules, make alliances: a pack mentality. If you care about your life, your body, if you’re a girl, if you’re old, you’d do best to give them a wide berth. They spread a pool of oil around them in which their bored faces and their footsteps are reflected. Now, nobody walks. Everybody runs. It’s a dance to the death. According to them, most females carry the same heaviness: this hole that is an impassable yet open door that keeps its secrets. So they go and hunt, like the hundreds of feral dogs raging through the city and tearing it apart.
Even Saad, who’s a little different, who thinks about something other than spreading our thighs, is part of a gang. He’s afraid to stand out, to be alone, to go off in another direction. He has no idea what’s in us.
This troubled water, this murky world, this faraway smile like a moonlit night, when the wind comes to whisper things that make us pensive and sad.
Saad talks about poetry when we’re alone. But he has no idea about the poetry of women.
The poetry of women is when Savita and I walk together step by step to avoid the ruts. It’s when we pretend to be twins because we look like each other. We wear the same clothes, the same perfume, as if we’re dancing together. Our earrings chime. Her nose is pierced with a tiny jewel like a star. The poetry of women is laughter in this lost place, laughter that opens up a small part of paradise so we don’t drown ourselves.
But those moments are brief. When I am alone, I sink back into my darkness and I know I will die.
I decide to go back. The stream isn’t deep, but I’d rather stay there and listen to its voice than the jeers I’ll hear as I walk past.
I see Saad among them. He pretends not to see me. I know he’s ashamed. I smile.
A hand has closed around your ankle and is slowly pulling you down. Your eyes skitter. At first, you thought that these gestures and actions were circumscribed. You thought that they were delimited by the rush of desire. But violence came into the equation. And the hand is pulling you, and desire is turning into something else. The act takes on other forms, other furies. There’s always more. Possibilities proliferate.
No more hasty couplings behind trees or in bathrooms. You’re caught in secret places you never knew about beneath the veneer of ordinary life. A hand drags you along. In the darkness, you don’t recognize mouths or shapes. In the darkness, the pain is unexpected. Or in the red light of a bare room you see who has been waiting for you, and your heart falters.
When you go back out you walk in the city slowly, as if you’ve been knocked off-center. You walk to rid yourself of memories. You open your mouth and let in a hot wind that burns away the danger of remembering. You go back in to sleep, believing you’ve forgotten it all. You can do it again, without knowing why.
The hand around your ankle doesn’t let you go. Its grip tightens. You have no choice now. You can only scrub your burdened flesh again and again, without realizing that you’re also erasing your own self.
Forgetfulness is the common link between day and night, the smooth wall that protects you from yourself. You go deaf. You no longer hear the roaring that once tormented your ears. You no longer hear the music in total contradiction to what you see.
SAAD
Baby won’t you give it to me, give it to me, you know I want it.
They shake their hips to the song, hardly a movement, a wave that pulls them together, pulls them away, pulls them together again. As they sway, their jeans hug their butts like two hands glued to their curves.
Baby won’t you give it to me…
They both wear tank tops, one of them red, the other white, over their small, juicy breasts.
I sit deep in an armchair as their movements blur with the music and the beer, all coursing through me, a liquid pulse surging in my torso. The bass tones reverberate in my groin. If I move at all I’ll get hard.
Eve and Savita are dancing together. They aren’t looking at us. They aren’t looking at anyone. An arabesque of cigarette smoke escapes their lips. Their shoulders shake in rhythm. Their jeans tighten in the same rhythm. I imagine them slipping into the fold, into the crease.
I can’t take it anymore. I get up and run down the stairs to the bathrooms. I step over bodies. At the top of this nightclub in Grand Baie there are rooms. I can’t stop thinking about Eve and me going up there. We’d open the window because the room would reek of old bodies. Grand Baie’s salty air would flow in, turn the brothel room into a small honeymoon suite, everything in red. I’d slip my hand into her jeans. I’d slip music into her legs, onto her shoulders. I’d slip a cigarette between her lips. I’d be the wind, everywhere within her. I’d leave a sheen of salt on her skin. The music changes, becomes more pressing, but in my head it stays won’t you give it to me, give it to me, you know I want it, I hum I want it I want it I want it, and my hands are furious.
My face is covered in sweat. I walk out of the bathroom, and I’m the one who’s reeking. But I feel better. I go back to the nightclub where they’re still dancing, unaware that a volcano has just erupted.
I pick up my beer again. The others make fun of me. They talk about her, mock her, sing dirty songs. Eve takes her pants off faster than her own shadow, they say. I don’t listen to them. I’m the only one who knows what Eve really is.
Nobody knows what pulls Eve and Savita to each other. Eve and Savita are the two sides of the moon. Savita also lives in Troumaron, but there’s a gulf between the two families. Savita’s family acts like they don’t belong in Troumaron, as if they were only there by accident. The accident of poverty, of course. It’s always the same story: the father betting on horses, the mother scrubbing hospital floors. He inhales the stallions’ sweat, she smells rotting bodies and blood. Savita doesn’t seem to worry about any of that. When they run into each other on the street, Savita’s family looks away from Eve as if they’d just seen two dogs in heat, but still the two girls’ eyes meet and lock on one another. There’s a smile so vague and discreet that you’d have to be looking for it. This smile between the two of them, bronze eyes meeting black, a quiver of light that disappears before it starts to gleam, almost a shared rivulet linking their lips, this smile is a doorway toward a place only the two of them know. Just between girls: we sparring cocks wouldn’t know anything about it.
At night in Grand Baie, the world flips inside out like a glove. The small beachside town swarming with tourists and bonhomie during the day teems with these insects who only come out at night. With scantily clad girls and men turned into wolves, the hunt can begin. The nightclubs turn into labyrinths where deals are made in all languages—English, French, Italian, German, Russian. The identical girls get younger and younger. The smallest ones are from Madagascar or Rodrigues; they can’t be more than thirtee
n. They wait patiently, some without moving at all, others trying to entice the first tourists who come in. I’m ashamed and angry.
They don’t have any choice.
But her? Don’t tell me there isn’t a way out for her. Don’t tell me there aren’t any possibilities. She’s roaming around, looking for the seediest parts, the trenches. I’ve tried to imagine the horizon as she sees it. I’m sure that’s what’s driving her, an illusion of light, a country only she can see. I know she’s not a station where every bus stops. If everyone else talks about her that way, it’s to pull free of her spell, because they’re all obsessed with her but no one can have her.
I go back home and sulk over her for days on end. She acts like she doesn’t notice anything at all.
Baby won’t you give it to me…
No, after all that, I’d rather go back to Rimbaud: The girls always go to church, glad / To hear the boys call them sluts.
Slut, slut, slut.
It’s a beautiful word in French: garce.
Later, I copy out another line for her on the wall in front of her apartment: This is the rag of disgust that has been shoved in my mouth.
I don’t know if I’m talking about her or me. Or even Troumaron.
CLÉLIO
After the soccer game, a bigger guy shoves me. I grab him by his shit-yellow collar and push right back. If he falls, it’d be a fight in the stadium. And it’d be old enemies facing off, as if our teams were still called the Muslim Scouts or the Hindu Cadets. But my friends run over to hold me back and pull my hands off this stinking heap of flesh. I stare at him like I’ll rip his face off. They’re dragging me away before I set off a fight. But I’d love to. The feeling of hitting someone, taking a blow, enjoying my fury in full force like an acrid wind rushing through me and wiping away my memories.