by Ananda Devi
I take her to the Caudan waterfront because I know she doesn’t want to go back to Troumaron. She’s devastated. We sit and look at the sea and wait. The bruise on her face has turned purple under the streetlights. It actually looks beautiful.
The sea by the luxury hotel gleams with hazy fire. Where we live, it looks like oil and smells like an armpit.
People walk past, sit at a café, take in the air, drink beers, enjoy the weather, and think about nothing. Eve once told me that we were on another planet. I think she’s right. Our sun and theirs aren’t the same.
She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t see anything. She isn’t there. How can I reach her?
We walk on glass parapets, over the clear void. There are a thousand silences between us and all the distance of infinity.
I light a joint for her. She inhales sharply and her eyes turn to warm honey. Their colors mass on my tongue like the honey of voracious flowers from Rodrigues. To lizie kuma dimiel Rodrig, I say to her in my head. The ganja races through my body, shimmers in my veins. My words are simple and straightforward.
We’ll get through this, I tell her.
Maybe you will. Not me. I don’t have any energy. It’s all gone.
But there are options. Pretending, persuading, that’s what will help us get out.
She smiles.
Your words, she says, you borrow them from other people, and they’ll help you fool people. Yes, you’ll get out.
It upsets me to hear her say that.
If I use them, I say, then they’re mine. I take them. Words don’t belong to anyone.
And they belong to everyone. You’re free to do whatever you want. I won’t follow you. It’s too late.
How can it be too late when you’re seventeen?
I feel old, she says.
We’re practically children, sitting on our parapet. And she, with that flower of violence on her cheek, feels old. She gets up and walks a few steps in front of me. She seems completely off-balance. She’s dancing and falling at the same time. I hold out my hand to catch her.
Did this place make us this way, or is it the other way around?
I don’t answer. In my head, I make her a promise: Eve, I will bring you out of your ruins.
Smoking together, we’re closer than we’ve ever been. She lays her head on my shoulder. I’m filled with the herbal smell of the joint, but even more so with the smell of her. Her skin and flesh. I smell her sweat. I smell her hair. I smell something else, something secret, urgent, living, something buried, something so intensely feminine that, even in my sleepiness, I’m dizzy with desire. I pull her up against me. Oh, how I want you! I tell her without daring to say it out loud. How I want you!
EVE
Other kinds of graffiti have replaced Saadiq’s phrases and the older curses. On our floor, it’s an explosion of hatred. The fecal taste of it all stays in my mouth.
My father’s fury hasn’t subsided. Suddenly, he’s playing the perfect role. He’s not the father who beats his daughter, but the father who “corrects” his daughter. That makes all the difference. I have to sneak out when there are fewer people outside. I avoid everybody’s gaze so as not to feel their intensity on my skin.
My father has long conversations with the other men in the building. When he comes back, he reeks of the local wine. My mother withdraws into herself like a turtle. That’s what “till death do us part” means.
At school, I do nothing. There’s nothing left for me to do now. Some teachers try to talk to me, but they give up when they see my deadened eyes. The other teacher tries to get close to me again, he slips pieces of paper into my notebooks, he tells me to meet him in the biology room. His messages get more and more urgent. I ignore them. Little worms of desire ooze from him as he walks past. Ever since I was autopsied on that table, I haven’t felt like anything more than a corpse under his slimy gaze.
In fact, I’m dead.
In fact, I’ve disappeared under the shroud.
I don’t know why my moving body keeps pretending when it would be better to give up.
It’s like time’s nervous tremor towards its own end. Days gone limp with warmth, days heavy with pollen, heavy with pollution, rains like drops of shadows drowning souls. Pale winters, as flat as the backs of our hands. Summers exploring bodies with burning hands. Cyclones and droughts one after another and speeding up. All that in a single year. The year I’m seventeen. Everything’s happened to me: life and death.
I’ve lived many lives. And yet more I don’t remember. Each of them has finished like this. Facing walls.
I see girls dancing and women walking along a carefully chosen path. I see pensive men and old guys happy with the sun on their white hairs. I see images on the television, shrill joy or morose suffering that bears no relation to what I am, to what I see. Why is nothing here in Troumaron like what happens on that screen?
I’m nothing. An accident along the way. A wasted thing. Singular, unified, eradicated.
The night devours me. Its gluttony is endless. Bit by bit, it gnaws, it nibbles. But it isn’t done.
On the autopsy table, he remembers you. You or your shadow, either one. But he doesn’t know anymore whether it’s you or the other one, she who looked through the gap in the door that night.
He sets the books in order on the table. He doesn’t like disorder. He lines up the edges. These are your own books. You left them for him. You didn’t come back again. You don’t want to smell the scents that stuck to them. Nor the images. Nor your face flattened between the pages.
On the biology table, he makes you last. He can do whatever he likes with your memory. A blue body, with soft innards. Purple lips, as if full of old blood. Arms so thin that they seem to have nearly disappeared. And at the end, a small damp hand that falls, lifeless, on the table’s edge.
On the table that is his life, two girls have come back together. He cannot tell between them anymore. Equally beautiful and equally dead. He mixes the two of them up, their hands, their armpits, he watches them melt together, ever so slowly, into each other. Sometimes he’s standing up, sometimes sitting, sometimes lying down. They slip from one place to another, switch places, and hang, like acrobats, in their pallor.
He is the happiest man in the world. On his knees, from his slowly aging body, from his days lost in not knowing when to live, from his futile attempts to communicate a knowledge he doesn’t have, having become a man once more through the shiny depths of a body as flat as the table, a bone structure visible on the wood’s dark face. The veins are its rivers. The shudders of this body taken by storm are the avenue down which he marches triumphantly, from the first day you offered him your downfall and your pitiless gaze. You offer what you have: a bit of nothing, a bit of everything.
Head banging against the wall under his ponderous rhythm. Did he see a warrior’s gaze deep within your eyes? An avenging glare? He doesn’t remember.
So much inertia. So much indifference. This “Monsieur” you bestow upon him after the act, and which nails everybody to the cross of their roles. That’s all he is to you: “Monsieur.” A teacher swallowed up by the impossibility of speaking.
He doesn’t understand why other people fight for these little mummified beings who never break free. Others say: If one of them succeeds, that’s a victory for them all. But when he comes into the classroom and sees the faces hardened under their masks of refusal, under their need for confrontation, under their defiance toward everything he has to offer, under their indifference to other prospects, he feels himself starting to die. He sets his books on the table as if slamming shut a coffin, knowing that what they contain emanates a sepulchral smell. He gets used to it right away. They see into him with such intensity, such cruelty that they instantaneously know how to hurt him. He snivels inside until the day a bit of sunlight on foamy hair shows him a hidden treasure in the back of the classroom, and his heart skips a beat.
In this moment, the color of his life changes: he’s seen you. He
discovers you, a small animal shirking behind your table, hanging on in order not to fall. You’re surrounded by an inexplicable emptiness. When you leave, you leave alone, with an icy step. You’re so thin he wants to carry you like a baby. You don’t join in the heckling. You’re isolated.
He only lives for you now, he loses himself in your night. Ever since he saw you, his life hasn’t been the same. He’s in limbo until he’s with you again. But now you refuse him.
He’s not made for this job. He’s not made for anything. He spends his life regretting his existence. Old before his time, with such scarce gifts.
Normalcy is long since past.
Day after day, everything breaks down.
Normalcy is in flight. How did it come to this?
He held a doll’s body in his hands. He knew it wouldn’t make him happy. It was his revenge on life, against life, to break it in two.
EVE
He’s a poor excuse for a father, he doesn’t even know where to start with me. He ponders, he thinks, he wonders. Images float around and crash against his memories. A messed-up bed, a messed-up body, and too much woman for such a little girl.
A kid’s love is passive. Then the clock starts ticking. The kid goes wild. What’s a father supposed to do to bring his daughter to her senses? To keep her body from going crazy? To assert his power again? What power does he have over me, besides his violence?
Mother’s drowning, kneading her flesh in despair all the while wishing she had an easier way to kill herself. She’s just a small pile of shame at this point. Because of me she doesn’t dare make herself seen anywhere. She knows me. She knows how far my defiance will go. How far I myself will go, not just to destroy myself, but to drag them along with me. A poor mother saddled with a girl so stubborn in her fury—isn’t that what every mother dreads? Distrust burrows within her as well, the mother who couldn’t take the reins and tame this wild blood, this surfeit of pride, this headstrong willfulness.
Children have wings of lead and keep thinking they can fly, until they’re found, trash in a pile of trash.
The windows are filled with holes. The buildings go dark. The water doesn’t run anymore. All friendly light is gone. The neighborhood is drowned in darkness. Nobody goes out. The increasingly nervous gangs gather weapons. A girl left dead and unavenged. A girl still rummaging through the ruins. Blood is called for. Only screams manage to tear through the emptiness.
Savita’s parents are alone in their mourning. I think of them tonight. I want to tell them something about her, but my mere face would make them scream. They don’t want to know me. They want to be alone with their dead body. But the final act has made their daughter unspeakable. Behind their horrified faces, the silent question etched in their eyes is this: what did she do to make this happen?
She is an active participant in her own murder. Even now she is still complicit. Even now she is her own murderer. This is how they feel.
The parents think, this was a normal girl, nothing special about her. They prize that as parents, a perfectly normal daughter. They don’t know about the other side of her life, where she’s written the most special and beautiful story of all. They can’t possibly imagine the smile that swells her lips. They believed in her future and knew nothing about her present. Her present was me.
They look at the younger sister crying. Sobbing, shaking, their tears surging again. This time, it isn’t for the older one but the younger one, as if they could already see, on the fresco of their terror, her shattered body.
I’m no longer prone to love. I’d like my heart to be flattened, as flat as my body, able to disappear when living becomes too hard.
I’m no longer prone to vertigo. I actually need to keep looking at the void again and again. From the roof where Clélio hides himself every so often, I look down into the depths. Deep down, something’s waiting for me. My real shape. My arms starry wings. My legs spread wide. And my childlike face at rest, creamy with sadness and relief.
The only way to take flight is to take a step out.
To walk on a carpet of air, the consoling wind in my ears and the sun wending across the deep blue of the sky. The shriek weaving through my lips isn’t a shriek of fear but of life.
A step out, a definitive decision. Space tamed. Just enough time to comprehend the briefness of eternity.
A step away from everything, from everybody, even myself.
Whatever’s waiting deep down is just an unremarkable fluke. The little news item we don’t think twice about, because it’s just about small, wholly unreadable parts of ourselves. All the beginnings that have not ended are collected here, in a clenched fist.
I’m no longer prone to regret. That would mean wasting precious time when I could be living. But the only real question is: Am I prone to life?
CLÉLIO
It’s dark. I’m stuck. This place is a hole. They’re not hurting me, but I know I’m not getting out. My life stops here. I don’t understand what happened. I know prisons well, but this is the first time I’ve ever felt like I’m fucked. They don’t look at me like they did before. The policemen and wardens won’t meet my eyes. In the papers there are already headlines: Savita’s Presumed Murderer Taken into Custody. I can see the front page when the warden reads the paper. I see a picture of Savita, happy as always, smiling, half teasing, I’m telling you, like she’s laughing at us all. And a picture of me: a repeat offender, of course, as if I could be anything else.
But I’m making plans in case I get out. I’ll find a job, for real. I’m done acting stupid. Done acting like I want to punch everybody’s face. Done acting like I have to be seen no matter what. I’m going to make myself as small as I can and stay out of trouble. I’m leaving the gang. I’m not chewing my fingernails anymore. I’m not shaving my head anymore. I’m scrubbing my tattoos with acid. I’m done carving Carlo into my skin.
Carlo was right to leave. That was what he had to do to escape. Break all ties with the past, otherwise it’ll hold you back and never let you leave. Carlo, my brother, was right. He didn’t come back to get me, but he left for me. To show me that it was possible. Even if he has a Renault, I forgive him. Even if he lies to Mam when he says that he has a house with ten rooms, I forgive him. He can’t do it any other way. Leave, forget Troumaron, forget that he once lived here, that he once almost died here. Savita, too, she should have left. She didn’t have time to. But we weren’t the ones who killed her.
And my father, I have to understand why he’s like that, too. The house we had before the hurricane, he and Mam bought it themselves. They paid for it all at last, and, even if it didn’t look like much, even if it was as shaky as their heads, it was their own home. So when the hurricane destroyed it and they lost everything, it wasn’t possible for them to begin again. My mother coped somehow. All mothers are like that. But he, he couldn’t. Got to understand that.
Looks like I’m becoming a saint in prison. I’m starting to understand everyone. I’m not thinking about myself anymore. I’m thinking about Saad, that poor little dickhead in love with Eve. But no, he isn’t a dickhead. If you’re not in love at seventeen, when are you ever going to be able to fall in love? I think that’s my problem right there. I’ve never loved. I haven’t met anyone. Maybe I haven’t bothered, maybe I’ve been too busy being angry.
But if I become a saint, maybe I might have to become a priest when I get out. And if I become a priest, I won’t be able to fall in love again. So, it’s better if I don’t change too much. Besides, I just have to look at the warden’s mug to know that I haven’t changed all that much: I still want to murder him.
It’s dark. I have to try to sleep. My thoughts are like those swarms of killer bees or cockroaches in a horror movie. As soon as I shut my eyes, they come out from every hole and climb all over me. They jump on me and begin nibbling at me everywhere. I shake them off, I scream, I throw my arms around enough to scare the other prisoners, but I can’t get rid of them.
If I get out, I’ll f
uck the first woman I see. Well, if she’s not too ugly. And not if she’s my mother, what kind of person do you think I am?
EVE
The inspector finally agreed to take me to the morgue. I don’t know how he did it, but he managed to get me in. He must have connections. That, and he feels sad for me. I don’t care how he did it, I just care that I’ll get to see Savita.
In the morgue, both the light and smell are greenish. I thought the movies would have prepared me for this. But movies have nothing to do with reality. It’s totally different here. The filth in the corners. The ceiling blooming with mold. Chemical smells coming from the walls.
My whole body goes weak. The place is heavy with their presence. Everybody who came through here has left traces. On the walls, on the ground, on the ceiling, in the air. Like invisible lips sealed to their silence. Nobody ever leaves completely.
The inspector holds me by my arm and says, you don’t have to.
No, I’ve never had to.
I shake my arm free. I don’t want to turn back. After what she’s gone through, I can go through everything. And then, in my head, I saw her a thousand times like this. I keep seeing her, in that envelope of death. And now I actually do see her.
Unmoving and pale. Her face glazed, rigid, solid. The bruises still on her neck from the murderer’s fingers. I know her, yet she is wholly unrecognizable. Her youthfulness, I think. When death comes to someone so young, it makes her unrecognizable. And there’s a bluish, almost purplish tint to her skin. I reel from the strangeness of it all.
But I do recognize her mouth. I hold on to that. That mouth with its darkened edges is her mouth, Savita’s mouth, I’m happy to see it again in all its perfection at last, yes, I haven’t started to forget her features like I’d feared a second ago, I haven’t betrayed her, I still have that memory of her mouth in me as something so precious that, for the rest of my life, all my senses will bring it back to me.