by Ananda Devi
Ki to pe atann? Personn. Ki lavi finn donn twa? Nayen. Komye dimunn inn fer twa promes? Zot tu. Komye dimunn inn gard zot parol? Okenn. Dimunn pa gard parol, zot zis kass to leker, pa bizin per, fer kuma zot, kas zot leker, pas to simin, pa krwar nayen. Pa krwar nayen, to pa pu sufer. Pa krwar nayen to pa pu sufer.
I don’t believe in anything. But I suffer all the same.
SAVITA
After school she tells me, I have to go. I try to convince her to stay, but she disappears into herself, like she always does just when I’ve gone a bit too far.
Inflexible Eve, that’s what I call her.
I’ve gone with you so many times. I’ve taken you to your place so many times. It’s like I’m always there at the right moment to pick you up. But it’s because I always listen for you. You never call. But I hear you anyway.
But watching you run away like this, I feel sad. You could say no if you wanted to. Why do you have to give yourself up to them? Why do you always bind yourself to them? I don’t understand.
I want to protect you. I want to keep you from losing yourself. I want to be the one who saves you from yourself.
Sometimes your voice breaks; sometimes my heart breaks just seeing you. Neither of us is innocent, and I hate the world for it.
I’d give my life for you.
It seems so easy. Only you would know what I mean. All the beauty and pain that those words carry.
Sitting on the balcony, I look your way. Here, nothing belongs to me except for you. I hear my father’s impatience as he waits for the treasure chest to open for him. I hear my mother’s incredulity as she listens to him daydreaming and sneers at him. I try to listen to myself, but all I can hear is the air going in and out of my lungs. The body’s automatism. And the lack of life.
My little bag stays in my closet, still full, still waiting for my decision to leave.
The smell of food makes me think that you are hungry but do not know it, you who only nibble on bitter fruit.
Don’t you think my face is shaped like a mouse’s? you asked me one day.
I kiss your mouse-shaped face. You’re the world’s beauty, its light.
EVE
The sea surges, escapes, scatters. It moves a thousand memories and a thousand scraps. Papers, cans, broken glass, smells of death. The neighborhood’s life is dragged away by stream waters, swelling and bursting its banks.
I wait for the stream to subside so I can go back. I don’t want to see anyone. I wait for night to fall and cover everything, including the shapes of people nearby and even the shapes of things.
The other day, in the office I’d been called to, I looked at the city and I saw it as it had been that morning with Saad at the statue of the Virgin Mary. Pale and sleepy. From high up, everything was smoothed out. The sharp edges were worn down, the holes filled in. The air-conditioned office, cushioned with carpets, smelled like new leather. You wanted to snuggle up in the armchairs. There was a huge painting reflected in the window. It winked at me. I recognized it. A teacher had told us about the artist, Malcolm de Chazal. I could see within his potbellied dodos and cheerful flowers those childhood dreams that had long since been forgotten.
I could have slept here, sheltered, in this bubble at a remove from reality. I could have slept in the foreign leather and the hissing air conditioner and the smooth, monotonous light. I could have slept in this white place, where I would have been protected from sunlight and screaming. In this twilight, not of the day but of the senses, I feel all right. But I know that if I slept there I would wake up with my heart frozen. My body numb from the lifelessness. Maybe that’s what the man drinking one glass of whiskey after another on the other side of the desk is trying to exorcise through me. He needs a body to thaw himself in. He needs a life to make himself feel alive. I understand him: he struggled for so long to get here and now that he’s here, he doesn’t know what he wants anymore. He’s made a life, but not a home.
He looks at the girl with childlike eyes, standing in front of the window. I’m not in a rush. I wait. I look. I’d look all night, if he left me here. The city, the night, the void.
What you’re looking for isn’t here, I wanted to tell him. But I can hear him replying: Nor is what you’re looking for, either.
You’re calm. Your hair makes black splashes. Your face is serious. He’s heard about you. He’s been told, she’s not like the others. He sees that it’s true. He’s been told, she does everything. He doesn’t know if it’s true. You don’t ask for anything. You’re stern and bewitching, that’s what he thinks of you. But they also told him what they did to you. Parties where you were alone and they were many. How one morning they left you almost lifeless not far from your neighborhood.
It’s not hard for him to imagine it. Your bones are so thin.
What do you want? What are you looking for?
At that moment, you turn around and he gets up, unbuckling the belt of his pants.
EVE
The stream quiets down. I do, too. One day, I was left here by men who had gone crazy, drinking from my body. They hadn’t taken me to an air-conditioned office but to an island right by the island, an island full of winds, birds, scrub, and snakes.
They got drunk and the moon got into their heads. They did some kind of dance around me, they pulled off their clothes, they looked like heavy, clumsy birds on their tiny feet. When they pounced on me, I saw that I was something foreign to them. We destroy what’s foreign to us. Then we gather it up like a bag of sand in a boat where the water washes it.
I wake up as that bag of sand, I look at the sky thick with stars, and I tell myself: This is the last time.
But the men hunt me down and life goes on and I’m so indifferent to myself that I don’t resist.
I’m trying to figure out where life’s limit must be. What color it would be. What exactly the point of no return would be, that would tell me what I am.
I keep walking forward. One step after another, but it’s always the same step, repeated endlessly. Step after step in the same place, the only aim being to contradict itself.
My feet take me past other girls, other women, other boys, other men. Some rush ahead, their heads bent down. Others fall back. All of them vanish into the distance, leaving me alone.
My body is crushed by waves in all directions, by a tumult of winds.
They run to escape, swallowing the harshness of their future. I stay afloat.
By the open window, nobody answers me. I would have liked to know what was watching out for me, what was driving me. The root of this refusal. What planted this negation in me.
The school principal told me: Vous vous devez de réussir. Then she said it again in English: You owe it to yourself to succeed. And, finally, in Mauritian Creole: Pa gaspiy u lavi. In three languages, she told me the same thing. That I’m responsible. I have to forget the place I go back to each night, how the cockroaches follow the same path as me, how this path is littered with cripples. Parts of bodies, arms, legs, eyes. People reduced to their most invisible selves. Along my path curious, hazy eyes follow me and seem to ask me, who are you, walking with such aimless eyes?
They don’t understand me, these people unused to life who slip and disappear through the neighborhood’s cracks.
Trash hammers the road like shrapnel. The ruts seem dug by mortar fire. On TV faces are talking about war. But here, I feel like I’m living through a siege. We’re at war, yes, against ourselves and against these bodies growing on us like parasites.
But this isn’t just the city. The world is also fighting against everything that staggers forward, everything that doesn’t walk in victory. Its distant rhythms aren’t for us. It’s better to be born blind so as not to see the rage in its eyes. Everybody’s preparing for war. We’re all born with this naked and open flesh. Then each of us fashions an armor of thorns and spiky brambles. But the two sexes don’t have the same heritage. We’re not born with the same burdens.
What do men give in exchange for
a body? They don’t give their own body; a man has to take. They protect themselves. They watch their shadows. We’re butterflies caught in a net, even at our most exultant, even at our most resistant. We’re stolen bodies.
The days follow one another. Savita tries to hold me back, to intertwine with me, to save me from myself, but it’s too late. She’s already like a happy memory. I know that she won’t follow me where I’m going.
When I tell her I’m staying at school after class, she looks at me and doesn’t reply. Her heart, weighed down with everything she can’t say, giving out.
One day she told me, I’m waiting for you.
And since then, every time, she’s waited for me, like she’s waiting for me tonight.
SAAD
They slip between the walls like two little ghosts laughing at us. They dance in front of everyone as if nobody would notice them at all. They almost seem like two virgins, these two little ones, if their movements didn’t have this slowness suggestive of night rather than day. I would have seen them as vestals if they had made me the object of their worship. All dressed in white, their veils barely hiding their gentle hearts, their swaying hips, their bronze backsides.
But they’re like two hands on a body. They don’t need a third. They are free to do whatever they like, whenever they like. Their smiles suggest no need for any boys. Their eyes bind them to each other. We are invisible.
That scares the gang. I can sense something changing in them, even after they’ve tolerated Eve’s escapades for so long, and Savita’s distant prettiness, and even what drew them together at first. But they don’t want these female bodies being dangled in front of them with no hope of a taste. Eve can move from man to man, but when she’s with Savita, that’s when she slips away. We’re not yours, the two of them say. We never will be. On their tiptoes they slip and slide. The cigarettes flare with sharp inhalations and reveal malicious glimmers in the guys’ eyes. Kenny whispers, it’s time to teach those two a real lesson. The others just get hard. Yeah, what’s their game? A girls’ game, sure, but no way these sluts have any idea what’s coming to them.
And they keep talking.
I try my best to calm them down, to change their mind. I have to think up a hundred different ways to distract them. I say to Clélio, hey Clélio, remember that car you got the license plate number for, yeah, I have the address, my uncle handles vehicle registration stuff. But Clélio’s in his own little world, he’s biting his nails to the quick, and when that happens he doesn’t have any time to listen to me. But everyone else is all for it: let’s go slash the tires on that huge four-by-four, they say. Let’s break the windows and give that little lady a scare.
Nobody really wants to go do it, but when you’re a gang, you have to forget that you’re a person, you have to be part of this moving, powerful, hot body that nothing can stop. Once you start moving, you have to go all the way.
Clélio doesn’t want to come.
Leave him, says Kenny, he’s got his head in the clouds.
We can’t leave him alone, I say.
Leave me alone, says Clélio, as he’s peeling away the dead skin on his soles.
And I do it, because I want to get the rest of them away from Savita and Eve. I want to distract them from the two women.
We leave the cité at the mercy of Clélio’s breakneck fury.
EVE
Savita’s just left me in front of my place. I didn’t go inside right away, as usual. Tonight, more than ever, everything’s weighing down on me. The teacher’s thrown me off. He was like a lizard; he seemed to actually be in love with me—as much as a man can actually know how to love. He stares at me for minutes on end and sighs, and then, suddenly, he unleashes a pent-up fury, but that doesn’t even make me angry.
Tonight, something weird happened. Something I’d never experienced before.
Just when he realized it, he seemed shaken, as if he was about to start crying. I can’t figure it out. I don’t think he just wants my body, the way everyone else does. I think he wants me, too, the soft and warm thing beneath my icy crust. When he puts his hands in me, I feel like he’s trying to find that. To find me right where it hurts so much to be touched. But maybe he’s just like all the others and wants to see me wince in pain, and that’s all it is. Maybe he’s just a man the same way all the others are men.
Fortunately, Savita waits for me every time in front of the school. When I see her, I forget what’s just happened. When I see her, I catch a glimpse of the moments to come and I can shut the door on what tears me apart.
I think of Savita tonight, she who saves me from myself.
SAVITA
I’m afraid tonight. I’m walking her home again, but after what I’ve seen, I can’t stop shaking. But she seems so calm, so distant from everything, even though her thighs are red.
I feel weak and dizzy. I have trouble walking. The air is heavy. It’s so hot my body is sweating. I’m not the one holding her up anymore, she’s the one guiding me. I’m thinking again about what I saw in the classroom. I didn’t want to look. But she was late coming out, so I thought maybe she’d already left. I went up. The door wasn’t completely shut.
I think he saw me, or smelled me. Not her. She was forgotten. I ran out. I went back down to wait for her. When she came, I could see in her eyes that she didn’t know I’d seen her. She took me by the arms, as usual. I looked up. Someone was looking at us from above. That gaze bored into me. I felt its bite.
I started walking fast, but my feet were so heavy. She heard me gasping, and she said, what’s wrong? But as usual, those nights, she was only half there. The other half was somewhere else. The other half tried to come back and disappear within herself.
I have to talk to her. We need to leave, to escape. The guys from the neighborhood are becoming men, with all their hatred. Soon they’ll take it out on us. They can’t bear to see us together, just the two of us. She doesn’t pay attention to them. But I do. I see the anger growing in them. I see the heat rising in their thoughts. We have to leave.
But how can I run away when I feel so heavy? I have trouble walking. I have trouble breathing. The ground is stuck to my feet. My feet are sinking in lava. Soon I won’t be able to move anymore. The volcano will tear me to pieces.
Promise me you’ll gather up my pieces, Eve, I say.
What are you saying? she asks.
I don’t know.
She hugs me close.
My darling Savita, she says, I won’t just gather up your pieces, I’ll eat them so you’ll always be in me.
I tried to joke: I always knew you were a cannibal!
She bit my shoulder lightly. I wanted her to leave teeth marks on my skin. That would be my only souvenir of her.
As we each went our way, I realized that I was crying, without really knowing why. Our apartments aren’t far apart. I left her in front of her building. I just have to walk past where all the trash is, and I’ll be at my place. But in the darkness, it feels like such a long way to go. As long as life itself.
PART TWO
SAAD
Last night was perfectly ordinary. Last night was another life. And then, in the morning, this. Nobody understands what’s happened. Even in Troumaron, this has never happened, certainly not ever like this. The neighborhood is quieter than it’s ever been. Everybody’s hiding. Nobody dares to say that it had to happen at some point. We don’t want to believe that about ourselves.
She was found in the trash, at the bottom of a trash bin.
Nobody heard anything. Everybody was looking the other way, of course. Ignorance is our only protection.
We, the boys, even if we’d known something, we wouldn’t have said a thing. We don’t snitch.
We know that some of us are monsters hidden behind ordinary appearances. That our seeming banality can mask murderous eyes. It’s a legacy of childhood, this brutality, but it never comes fully to the fore. Usually it’s the quietest ones, the sleepiest ones. Their eyelids seem so heavy. We
can’t see how their eyes are bloodshot. Something hazy clouds their decay. But most of us are normal kids. We play at being terrors, but deep down we’re not doing anything really terrible. At some point we’ll fall into line again, after feeling like we’ve had some freedom to be ourselves. So we don’t understand.
What happened? Nobody had anything against her, Savita.
I think of the last line I wrote on the walls, last night: Your mouth in red memory opens for the sovereign man’s blood.
I was riffing on Rimbaud, as usual. But it’s true: man is sovereign. He will be until the planet changes its orbit.
When I see Eve again, I’m paralyzed by her face. She’s gone completely blank. Obliterated.
Now I understand why she couldn’t say I love you to a man.
Bloodless, bent over, broken down. She’s sitting by the stream. She’s not crying. She’s curled up into herself like an egg in its shell. She’s chewing over her grief. She’s trying to spit it out, but it’s stuck in her mouth, in her throat. She retches but nothing comes out, not the least drop of deliverance. I can’t even try to touch her. She’s so far gone.
I can only sit by her and watch her shaking. As the day goes by and the shaking doesn’t stop, I see her drifting away into her memories, disappearing into her loss. She’s lost. Eve will never be mine. I’ll never stop loving her. But I, too, feel a sort of death. I will never be the same Saad. I didn’t understand sadness until this day.
Off in the distance police cars are coming. There’s noise in the neighborhood. The guys would rather hide. But the police change everything.
I take her balled-up fists and open them up. Her hand is studded with small red crescents, as if the new moon had trampled over it. I bring my lips to those red crescents. She pulls away her hands. She wants to hurt herself. She wants to cry. But she can’t.