by Ananda Devi
Talk to me, I say to her.
I saw her last night, right before, she says.
We said good-bye a few feet away from there, from where.
I didn’t go inside. I could have followed her, held onto her a little longer, been with her.
But I came here, to the stream. I was here and I didn’t see anything.
I didn’t see anything.
I was the last one. I could have. If I had. I should have. Why. If. But. Instead. She. And then.
She finally curls up into herself with a creak like an axletree. She pounds her fists against the ground. She pounds so hard that the earth squelches all around. She gets up and begins punching her fists in every direction, narrowly missing me. I get up and grab her. After a minute she calms down, even if her voice keeps lashing out.
She asks me:
Who did it?
I don’t know. I have no idea.
That’s impossible, she says. You’re everywhere, you hear everything, you know everything. It was one of the guys from the gang who did it. You know it and you’re not going to say anything, because you’re all watching out for each other.
That’s not true. Eve, I swear to you we weren’t there last night.
Where were you?
On a drive. We weren’t doing anything in particular. We were just looking for guys to scare.
She imitates me unkindly: We were just looking for guys to scare. You sure you weren’t looking for someone to kill, too?
She’s standing and looking at me with so much contempt that I don’t know where to start.
You wrote “sovereign man,” she says. They’re sovereigns for you, too. You don’t dare to stand up to them. You’d never dare to tell on them. You have to fit in, no matter what. You’re a coward and a show-off and a liar. Pitiful.
She runs off without waiting for any other explanation. But I didn’t lie. I might be a coward, but I’m not a liar. And she doesn’t know that I’m protecting her from the wolves.
And then I start tearing up the ground myself, but nobody sees me. I’m the only one who knows what’s twisting in my stomach.
EVE
The body is lying naked on the bench, like it’s ready to be cut up. But this isn’t an autopsy.
Lying, naked, on a bench in the biology room, I try to imagine myself wherever Savita is, spread out under the gazes of policemen and doctors, waiting to figure out her secrets. Waiting to splatter red on the white earthenware. But no, a dead body doesn’t splatter. Only a living body gushes red.
Saadiq wrote, on the wall: Your mouth in red memory opens for the sovereign man’s blood.
What did she, Savita, get from the sovereign man? Punches. Cuts. And maybe something else.
And for me, it’s not blood I’ll be getting, but a male’s sperm that invades and drowns the female, that disperses within her millions of his potential doubles.
But I’ll never carry his doubles. My body won’t be colonized.
My body is lying, naked, on the table.
A thin body to treasure or tear apart, they say.
And right now he is treasuring me and tearing me apart at the same time. He struggles and staggers under the force of his urges. I have never seen him so destroyed. His shadow on the wall is gigantic. That of a monstrous creature overlooking me. It doesn’t look like anything human, this stooped, wavering shadow emitting guttural, sucking sounds, the sounds of inhuman suffering.
Why did I come tonight? After what happened to Savita? I don’t belong here. But I don’t belong anywhere. I can’t mourn Savita in my home, or in hers.
So I do it here, with all the force of my hatred. I hate your death, Savita, and I hate this man who relieves himself in me without caring about whether I’m alive or dead.
Afterward, when he’s done slobbering, I’ll get up and, the better to destroy him, sit on this table to do my work in the silence of the room, in the bodily smells all around, my clothes rumpled, my hair still wet, my mouth dry, my body emptied out, my soul worn out, my memories dirtied, my days paid for, my pride ripped open, my sex loosened, and the letters and words of my knowledge like lead on the page but still meaningless, without any illumination, displaying their powerlessness and indifference because Savita will not be out there waiting for me like always to tie the rope of my life together again within my body and without that, I don’t have any life, anything to hold me up over the emptiness, anything to keep me from letting go.
Like her. But she never let go. Someone else did it for her. Someone thought she wasn’t worth any more than the trash he threw her into.
As he’s leaving, he says: What about this girl they found dead in Troumaron?
I wait a minute, and then I answer: I knew her.
I see the other question flickering on his lips, which he does not dare to pronounce. I answer it anyway: You did, too.
I know that when I leave, he’ll stay at the window, in the darkness, he’ll see me disappear in the schoolyard. He’ll wonder whether he’ll see me tomorrow. Or, as I head home in the dark, alone, whether I’ll see the light of day tomorrow.
The street is etched by car headlights, by indifferent traffic. What about him? Is he indifferent to what’s happened? Would he caress me as if I was a dead body, too, on the autopsy table? What difference would there be?
On the bench in the biology room, he dissected a human body, nothing more, nothing less.
CLÉLIO
The city’s swarming with suits.
Nobody likes that. We feel uncomfortable, even if we haven’t done anything wrong. We’re not cut out for suits.
I feel like everyone’s looking at me funny. My mother starts crying like a Madonna as soon as she sees me. My father is like a live wire. But I haven’t done anything. I’m not guilty. If I wanted to murder kids, I wouldn’t pick the ones who couldn’t defend themselves. I’d pick the ones hurting the others.
The sky’s heavy. The wind prowls low. Everybody in the gang’s hiding from me. I don’t get why. I didn’t go with them last night, but that’s no reason to be pissed off.
They’re all cowards. I try to sing, but anger swallows up my voice the minute it comes out. I’m not singing to feel happy, I’m singing to talk to Savita. Of course nobody understands it. They don’t understand that it’s possible to talk to shadows more alive than themselves.
Everywhere I turn, there are policemen. The trash bin is the center of their anthill. Do they actually think they’ll find something here besides a girl’s corpse? You think that an angel will come down to Troumaron to show them the way? No, all there is here is death. If they’re astonished when death comes, it’s because they didn’t want to see anything. But I’ve got my eyes open. I know death will come and claim every one of us, in the worst way possible. That’s why I’ve begun practicing.
EVE
The apartment smells like sulfur. As soon as I walk in, it begins burning.
They’re waiting in the living room covered with calendar pictures. They ask the usual questions, edged with fear. I answer evasively. Then I figure it out. Savita’s death has changed everything. Her parents have been openly saying what they’ve been thinking: that I dragged her down into the pit. If she’s dead, it’s my fault, they say.
My father asks me: Do you know anything about her death?
I would have liked to say, I’m not guilty, but I can’t. Because I was her, because she was me, I’m guilty. We both died at the same moment. All that’s left of me is useless. The words lodge in my mouth. The taste of my saliva nauseates me.
My father says: They said you set a bad example for her.
I answer: Do you know any good examples around here?
He immediately gets up and slaps my face. I was expecting it, of course. He has no other answer to my words. He has no other response to my presence. I moved as he slapped me, and the strike wasn’t nearly so strong.
My mother has been reduced to almost nothing: a larva of a mother. I get up, tired. I don’t care about
them. I don’t want to see them. They don’t know anything about her. They don’t have any imagination. How could they know what she lived through? She doesn’t matter to them. All that matters is what people think, what people say, it’s about appearances, the whole façade of normalcy, their pitiful pride. Their pride? There’s nothing to boast about here. Their mouths are thick with the sludge of mudslinging.
Leave me the fuck alone, I say.
All I can think about is lying in Savita’s calm sunlight.
But he sees I’m tired and punches me, a solid fist punch to my face. I fall onto the armchair in shock. My mother cries out.
He grabs my hair and forces me to look and listen to him. I shut my eyes and cover my ears.
He yells curses. He lashes out in such a red rage that even our neighbors and their own neighbors can hear him. His fury echoes further and further, like the aftershocks of an earthquake.
I’m not really paying attention to what he’s saying anymore. He yells at my mother while he’s still holding me by my hair. I wait, patiently, for him to stop.
The only thing I tell myself is that I need to think about cutting my hair. Cut it short, very short. Shave it until my skull can be seen. I’ll go bareheaded. Like a lioness nobody would dare touch or even look at directly. Touch a lioness and lose a hand. Teeth sinking into skin, sharp and heavy teeth, teeth thick with blood. And then, digesting in the sun, the lioness will lick them gently to wash them. A lioness’s breath is thick and bloody. The beauty of a lioness digesting, golden and luxuriant.
Finally, noticing my absent gaze, he yanks his hands out of my hair, pulling out several tufts as well.
I go into my room at last. I spit bitter saliva. I throw myself onto my bed, paying no attention to the pain in my scalp. Everything I might ever suffer is nothing compared to what Savita endured.
She was stripped of her body and her life by the sovereign man.
He refused her any dignity and threw her into a trash bin. He decreed: You are nothing. You don’t exist. You’ve lived for nothing. You’re not useful for anything. You’re over.
The man, in his uselessness, prevails. What does she say? What does she do? Does she cry? Does she accept the inevitable? Is she happy that she’s been finished off? Does she think of me in her final moments? Does she ask me, why aren’t you there?
On a table, somewhere, under a harsh light, her body waits to be decoded. To reveal what? Signs of death? There’s no need to open her up to figure that out. Remnants, traces, incriminating liquids? And what about me? Will they find traces of me on her, traces of my hands, my lips, my pleasure? What will the autopsy say about her? Be your silence, Savita. They don’t deserve anything more.
Outside, electricity crackles. More than Savita’s death, the police presence strips bare the cables of tension crisscrossing the city. I feel like, now that she’s left, I’m the only one facing the horde. Everybody’s looking right at me. As if I’d broken the laws. I had disturbed the pattern, changed the space, broken open the locked doors. I sow discord. I give off a smell of greasy soot. I’m the fallen angel of the neighborhood, its ripped-out soul.
I’m so convinced of it that I start to doze off in exhaustion.
I grab the edge of a sheet and pull it over my face like a shroud. My body is so flat it’s barely an eddy in the small ocean of the bed. My eyes are open beneath the shroud. I try to see the world through this soft grille, this mesh. What would I do if I had to hide from everybody? How would I live as a ghost? Or does invisibility free us from our fears?
I slip into a half-sleep under my shroud, looking at a white world. Soon, everything slackens. Even my breath, the rhythm of a broken pendulum, subsides.
CLÉLIO
There was no getting away from it. I was the first one to be questioned. The first suspect. Nobody said anything, of course. But there are plenty of ways to say something without saying anything. The old guys are just waiting for that. These kids are more or less okay, they say, but, sure, there’s a couple of bad apples in there. One of them’s been in prison, he’s always looking for trouble. You know, if their hearts are black, there’s nothing you can do. Ki pu fer, ena, zott finn ne kum sa. That’s just how they were born, rotten to the core.
Fuck it, I’m not that shitty! Those men are the shitheads. Nobody says my name, but I feel like I’m hearing it everywhere, in the air, in the church bells tolling Sunday Mass, in the car tires screeching. Even my first name doesn’t come out right when anyone says it. But the policemen aren’t all idiots. They’re doing their job. If one of us has been in prison, that simplifies things. What were you doing last night? Last night? Nothing. Nothing? Nothing at all. You didn’t have anything to do? No, there are times when I don’t do anything. Where were you? On my apartment roof. Who saw you? Well, the birds flying over my head, I don’t know if they were finches or cape canaries or cardinals, and then there are bats flying around as soon as it’s dark out. Stop messing with us!
If they’re looking for proof, they’ll find it in their little folders. Your honor, this boy is a repeat offender. Society has done all it can to rehabilitate him, but there are people who just can’t be redeemed, Your honor, and the judge will look at me solemnly and he will ask, in English, Are you beyond redemption? as if he were asking that question of himself, but I’ll tell him, Oui, je suis au-delà de la rédemption, because I don’t want to be redeemed or rehabilitated, and I haven’t committed the crimes you’re imputing to me, as they say in their legal jargon, I haven’t done anything at all, other people committed the worst crimes, but the police won’t dare to arrest these guys, or if they have to, it’ll be with velvet gloves and they’ll say excuse me, Monsieur, before locking them up and they won’t lay hands on those guys, they’ll smell as crisp and fresh as the millions of rupees they’ve laundered and just as unattainable, which will make these poor officers with their crappy salaries dream, you’ve got to understand them, there are things that go beyond poor people’s imaginations but okay, they still have to be arrested because that’s how it is, the people need to be shown that there will be justice even if they’re released the same night and their trials don’t go anywhere because they have to shut up all the activists whining about corruption in this country and slush funds and liquidated assets, and so I’m beyond redemption, and you can pin that murder on me without even saying please or showing any actual proof, I’m guilty of being me, I’m guilty of just being, and they’ll shove me, and hit the back of my head and say, you have to talk, you little pimp, and if they have to they’ll beat me up without leaving any signs, and then it’ll turn into a story of race and communities, it’s always like that, even if Savita, she joked about these things, when she died she became a racial symbol, and now I am, too, over the centuries we’ve been enemies, slaves, coolies, it’s a nasty history, for sure, which is why it keeps happening again and again, it’s been going on for centuries now and it’s not going to end anytime soon, believe me, even if we the children of Troumaron don’t care about religion, race, color, caste, everything that divides all the other guys on this shitty island, we the children of Troumaron, we’re a single community, and it’s a universal one, this community of the poor and the lost and that, believe me, is the only identity that counts.
I’m leaving this place with handcuffs on my wrists. There’s no way out.
SAAD
They took Clélio away. I knew we shouldn’t have left him alone. Whenever he’s on his own, he gets into trouble. I know he didn’t kill Savita. But he’s the Perp. They’ll try to make him say it and even if they can’t do it, it won’t make a difference. Clélio just has to open his mouth and he’ll be sentenced. He’s stupidly, totally innocent.
In the meantime, she, Eve, has a new obsession: she wants to see Savita’s body. I don’t know what she’s hoping for, but I keep trying not to help her and she keeps pushing me to. But she’s started talking to me again, and that’s something at least. It’s better than a poke in the eye with a blunt stic
k. I have some hope again. I take her to the police headquarters.
The officers look at us indifferently at first, then, once they hear where we’re from, suspiciously. Especially me. They take more kindly to her, she looks so young with her big T-shirt and her hair pulled back in a ponytail, yes, she seems really young, like she’s fifteen years old. And then there’s that dark splotch on her right cheek, isn’t that a typical feature, isn’t that the mark of life in those tormented places?
The officers buzz around her like fat bumblebees.
The inspector takes us into his office. He remains standing. He’s huge and seems fatherly, but I don’t entirely trust him. He touches her face, strokes the swelling there with his thumb, a thick brown thumb on this small face, I want to slap it and I can see in the way he’s looking at me that he knows it.
Did your boyfriend do this to you? he asks.
My father, she says as she looks right into his eyes.
He lets his hand drop. She sizes him up. She asks what she has to do for him to let her see the body. They consider each other. I have no part to play here. There’s a coded conversation in their silence.
She’s in the morgue, he says.
So, is it far away? The morgue? she asks.
Why would you want to see her?
She was my friend.
We only let close family see the body.
I’m family.
We’ll return it to you when the autopsy’s done. It’s best to wait.
He goes back to his paperwork with an air of finality.
I drag her out of the headquarters before she tries to do something else. I don’t understand this ease she has in paying for things with her body. As if it didn’t mean a thing. I think it’s the most precious thing in the world.