by Ananda Devi
I explain to her that I was by the stream, and that was the reason I didn’t hear anything. I tell her that for me, it’s life that’s distorting my features and making me unrecognizable.
My hand touches her cheek. I lean in, but the inspector holds me back. No, he says.
He takes me to a small café where the flies are more plentiful than the diners. I want for him to tell me something, for him to ask for something in exchange for the service he’s rendered. He doesn’t ask for anything. But he asks me questions. By the dirty window, I see the world going by. Yes, there’s a world, over there, out there, that doesn’t know Savita and where lives haven’t stopped along with hers. I tell him everything, without really knowing why. How old I was when I began, where I went. I describe these places he knows so well. His questions take me further and further. My actions are getting crazier, I can tell. That’s what he thinks: this girl is crazy.
He looks at me as if he can’t believe me:
And you’re still alive? he says.
What was the use of it all? he asks, again. His big hands on the table are trembling and fiddling with a paper napkin to the point that there aren’t anything but shreds left. I wouldn’t like to be a criminal he’d arrested. There isn’t any skin that would resist those hands.
I finally answer his question:
To slip through the cracks. To…
To what?
To go on.
The next question had to be, go on to where, but he doesn’t ask it. His eyes are tired and my thoughts are completely blank. I was thinking about buying myself a life. But I don’t know which one.
He asks me if I have any health problems. I know what he’s talking about, but I pretend not to understand. I show him the blue bruise on my cheek, which has turned yellow: these sorts of problems, yes, every day, I say.
He isn’t looking at me anymore, I think he’s trying to imagine what they did to me, what they made me do, what they’ll make me do again, in the mirror behind the bar I see us and I know I look young, too young, a bit of string, a little burned thing, and I know he’d like to keep me from slipping further down, but he doesn’t know anything at all.
Suddenly, he gets angry:
What if I shoved you in prison for a bit of time, you’d have to stop, that’d make you get better, wouldn’t it?
I get up to leave. The conversation’s over. There’s nothing else to say.
It’s hard to keep believing, he says quietly. But you have to defend yourself. I want you to stay alive.
He takes me back to Troumaron. In the car I don’t say anything. But I remember something he said: Savita wasn’t raped. I think he said that to reassure me. But then why was she killed? There was no anger there, no sexual violence. For the fun of it? Or to shut her up?
We pull up in front of the buildings. The sky is low. Here, there’s always something watching. Some spirit that’s vibrating, living, malignant.
He comes and opens the door of the jeep for me. I’m not used to that. Before I step down, he slips something into my bag.
Only use it to protect yourself, understand? he says very quietly.
I look down. I don’t know why he did that. I didn’t give him anything.
He holds me by the shoulders as I step down, and rubs them a bit.
He’s talking in English. Be good, he says.
I shrug. It’s too late to be good.
It’s only once he’s gone that I realize that we were right in the middle of all the buildings. Every window’s facing us. Everybody saw me come back to Troumaron in a police car, everybody saw the inspector whispering in my ear. I colluded with the enemy. As usual, I’d done what I shouldn’t have. I can almost hear through these windows what everybody must be thinking furiously: this time she went too far.
The ground starts to give way beneath my feet and caves in just as I walk into my apartment building.
But, after all, there was never any ground under my feet.
A light touch. Was there one? Maybe. Maybe not. The scene could have played out a thousand ways:
coming to open the jeep door, he picked you up like some straw, like a stalk, his big hands wrapping around your waist, he set you on the ground like something breakable
coming to open the door, he hid your half-naked body under his police vest, you had blue bruises on your arms
coming to open the door, he leaned in toward you and listened to the secrets unfurling like a pale mist from your mouth
coming to open the door, he laughed a little, knowingly, as if to say that we just have to behave ourselves, and you, too, laughed a little.
From window to window, fury flits around like a wild bird and bangs against the window panes to the point of breaking them.
The man is your fate and your death.
Coming to open the door, he put Troumaron’s fate into your hands.
All around, the doors shut with the violence of a maimed laugh.
SAAD
That’s the inspector we met together. She went to see him again. She came back with him. Eve, Eve, will you ever stop? Did you even manage to see Savita? What difference did it make, to have seen her body? She wasn’t there, in the body, was she? What you saw was something else: a mask that could just as well have been your own.
I turn around in my cage. I spew my dark musings on the walls.
Maybe you wanted to make it up to her because she always waited for you after school and walked home with you? She thought she was protecting you, but you put her at far greater risk. She had nothing to do with your doings.
I mentally follow their path. I see them going home, both of them, afterward. After Eve was with the other guy. It’s dark. Who follows them? Who waits for them and then follows Savita and not Eve? Why Savita? Why not Eve? Was it just chance? What was the difference between them? What did they have in common?
The clock’s ticking. I can’t sleep. I have to understand.
And then I realize I know. Like Eve, I know.
The gang’s waiting for me. I miss our nighttime drives on motorbikes and mopeds. The night unfurls its fringes and we drink in the sharp scent of the neighborhood and our hot bodies are red-blooded shrieks of energy. It’s a primal moment. A minute that explodes, that makes us all believe in living. For a minute, for an instant: living like a note drawn from a guitar, out of tune, but heard at a distance. Not disappearing. Not refusing to be.
But I don’t go with them, because I know what they’re talking about right now. There aren’t that many possibilities. I saw how angry they got when she came back with this cop. How could she have been so stupid? Coming back here in a police car. She didn’t even think. She only thinks about whatever’s got her upset. Other people don’t even cross her thoughts. I know her too well, this girl I dreamed up.
She wants her time, her actions, her decisions, her body to herself. She refuses to be worthless. But none of that belongs to her. And that’s what we all are, anyway: worthless.
Somewhere in the abandoned factory, something’s brewing. A red light bathes the buildings, sweeps the sky, streaks the façades. As always, like zombies in a horror movie, something that could be from an entrail, or a cave, or a drainage hole, or a basement window, comes out. These are the monsters we made, broken bottles in their hands, ready to devour, ready to disembowel. Life, in an instant, takes on this enemy’s face.
But when the enemy gives way, we come back together, hungry, wild-eyed.
They think about Clélio in prison. They think about Savita dead. They think about Eve with the cop. The equation is too obvious. She has to submit.
My Eve, who believes herself born with steel in her heart, doesn’t know it’s the shine and warmth of gold living in her, that she will never stop melting and fleeing, and that this molten girl will soon be nothing more than a shapeless, faceless puddle.
In the abandoned factory, they get together to decide on a plan of action. Troumaron should be barricaded, one of them says. No, we have to attack who
ever’s threatening Troumaron, say some others. Let’s set fire to the police headquarters. Let’s smash some factory windows. Flip over some cars. Show them who they’re dealing with. They don’t get to make Clélio a scapegoat. We’ll force them to release him, otherwise they’ll kill him in prison, it’s easier than waiting for a trial. We’ve seen all this before. They’ll do the same thing to us. After that they’ll tell us we’re all the same, we’re all killers, all any of us deserve is a wall around the neighborhood, a wall all the way around with no openings. They’ll turn Troumaron into our prison, our ghetto.
The joints and booze help, everybody’s ready to fight against being imprisoned. In the glimmer of gas lights, unaware of the danger, they begin making Molotov cocktails. Cigarettes in their mouths, they soak rags in gas and stuff them in bottle necks. The energy of violence floods them.
But first, they say, but first we have to find her. She’s the one who started it all.
Now all their fury is aimed at one thing.
I write on the walls of my room with permanent marker as fast as I can, as if ill, as if insane, filled with an urge to tell everything before I’m forgotten. It’s a broken-up, shaky story, rooted in bitterness and rage, but it’s the only one I know. The lives of guys like me, so simple that they break apart before even coming together, so indistinct that they fade away before having achieved anything. Their hopes scatter every morning like the dust on their feet. Their deaths don’t aspire to brighten stars and only call to mind the bare space of a grave. And so a wall is there the minute they look at you.
Whoever comes into my room will contend with another mystery. But, at least, I’ve said what I had to say. Eve, you have to flee. I have to help you flee.
EVE
It’s like someone committed suicide with an exhaust pipe in this room. As soon as I locked myself inside, I smoked everything I could reach. But the pain is still here. And I’m still here.
Once again, my hair is practically torn out of my scalp. But this time, he used it to bang my head against the wall. I don’t know where I hurt anymore. I don’t know where I’ve been hit or what I’ve been hit against. Everywhere.
I crush a thousandth cigarette on the linoleum dotted with holes and undress. I almost have to peel the clothes off my skin. I look at myself in the mirror. I’m shocked at my appearance: even with all this pain, I hadn’t realized how much damage had been done. I slump down on the bed, looking in the mirror, I don’t know what I look like. Like nothing, nothing at all. Is there still anything to recognize?
My skin is so many colors: yellows, blues, purples, blacks, reds. If I didn’t hurt so much, I’d have laughed. I’m covered in all Harlequin’s colors. I didn’t know that I could have so many different complexions. But when I try to smile, it hurts. A small crack gapes in the corner of my mouth. Then inside. And then, suddenly, a hundred cracks burst open. I’m cracking apart.
I take a pair of scissors out of a drawer.
This is how my mother finds me: curled up, locked in solitude, holding scissors in my right hand.
For once, she’s calm. She kneels in front of me and tries to loosen my fingers around the scissors, but she’s not able to do it. My hands are clenched and hers quiver too much.
Leave me, I tell her.
I’m not letting you do that, she says.
She thinks that I’m going to try to kill myself with these stupid scissors.
I’m not going to butcher myself, I tell her. I just want to cut off my hair.
I saw my hair in the mirror: bursting out of my head like fireworks. Like comic-book characters when a bomb’s exploded in their face.
She sits on the bed next to me. She strokes my hair. Maybe she’s thinking about how often people grabbed it. As if that was the strongest part of my body, the place where my energy could be grasped and absorbed.
My hair’s the most visible part of my femininity. That’s why they all start there, that’s where they hurt me most.
I can almost hear her whispering: I’ve abandoned you.
I must be hearing wrong. But she says it again, more clearly: I’ve abandoned you. No mother should ever do that to her children. I’ve been cowardly, I’ve gone weak.
She takes pajamas out of the armoire and helps me put them on. Then she says, give me the scissors, I’ll do it.
She takes them and begins cutting my hair. It’s hard, it’s difficult, the hair squeaks, the scissors grind. The clumps fall, strand by strand. The sound suits me, dries the tears that could have fallen. This contact seems strange, my mother’s nearness, after so many years. I try to remember when we had been this close. But it’s too far away. The feel of her hand on my scalp is pleasant. There’s something special about motherly hands, I think. But it’s too late for me. I can’t surrender to them. I don’t want to be consoled.
When she finishes cutting the thickest clumps, she goes to find her husband’s razor and shaves my head bald.
I look in the mirror. This time, I manage to smile. I really do have a funny head. I’ve metamorphosed. I think I look like what I wanted to be: a lioness. A starving lioness in a godforsaken zoo rather than a queen of the savannas, but it doesn’t matter. I’ll take it anyway.
My mother can’t bring herself to look at me.
When she leaves, the lioness puts on pants with a grimace. She takes her bag and goes out without making a noise, as she knows how to do, so that nobody will notice.
Outside, even though I’m limping, nobody pays me any attention. I’ve become invisible, barely human, the incarnation of a will that, all by itself, manages to keep me upright and urge me forward.
He waits for you. He knows you will come. He knows it with the apathy of the next breath. Things have gone too far. He doesn’t see the point of his actions anymore. He knows you will know sooner or later; the spark in your spirit, in your memory.
He is sitting in front of the television, bathed in its white light, fidgeting in silence. You have been to his place before, to get books. You know where he lives. You will open the door and you will breathe in the scent of rat poison. You will think that he might have opted for this outdated way of committing suicide, such a difficult, painful way, and that you will see his green body contorted in pain, his face twisted into a grimace at life. But don’t worry: he will not offer you such an image of himself.
He will say to you, sit down. You will look at the armchair’s flowery, worn fabric, and you will stay standing.
He will walk toward you and hold you in his arms. Your head will not reach above his chest. Despite himself, he will feel a stirring in his gut and want to pull you in closer while remembering you; already a memory, already past, already too late.
Most of all, he will think of that time, that night, when things skittered and time turned inside out. When his face was deep down within you, you began to bleed. He saw this outpouring still warm as the depths from where it came, this fluvial offering with such a strange texture, at once thick and liquid, with a coppery taste, reddening his lips. He pulled away. He saw the trickle flowing slowly, not like a wound, but like a stigmata that had simply opened. Wholly unexpectedly, this woman’s blood, this flow from a buried volcano, seemed sacred to him.
When he got up, you looked at him. You put your fingers on his mouth. His lips were red. Red from you, you thought. As he looked down at you, perhaps he looked like a vampire. Perhaps he looked like a member of a diabolical sect that drank blood. Perhaps he looked like a truly primitive being that drank its mother’s milk and blood. But you only thought of a child with lips reddened by guava juice.
Despite the confusion he was experiencing, he saw the smile that had come so quickly to your eyes. He told himself, this is the first time you’ve shown something, even if it’s just a hint of a smile. The first time that something passes between the two of you. Something more than what usually goes from body to body.
All sorts of possibilities that he had never envisioned until now—a future, a sun that you cracked ope
n in his life, a curtain of darkness he had thought permanent being raised—all appeared to him in his idiocy, out of nothing more than this reflection of a shadow of a smile.
And then, at that moment, there was a movement close to the door. He turned and saw the light in the slit of the half-shut door turning dark. (How had he failed to check the door?) He immediately saw himself as if from outside: his mouth reddened by the intimate blood of a woman. His reversal was immediate. Shame had overcome him all at once.
Shame in himself, in having come this far. Shame in being ridiculed, if the story spread. Shame in humiliation, if he was fired. Undone by a simple story. What little he had made out of his life was about to fall apart.
He waited until you left. He looked through the window and he saw the two of you walking away. He followed you both. Then he followed Savita. He killed her without hatred, almost without violence. At one point, he felt as if she was willing. But maybe she was simply too weak.
The weakness of a female body, its lack of fighting strength. At the very first blow, they give up. What remains is a passionless thing, maybe not even a thing. An annihilation. A disappearance. But she was already dead long before, this little girl who was your friend, long before he put her in a trash bin while thinking that this was what they did, those guys who lived in this neighborhood, if they had to kill. (Careless, irrevocable contempt.) She died at the moment she saw a red flower bloom on his mouth. She died when she saw his sad eyes and she knew that he was not killing her out of hatred.
No, not out of hatred. But indifference is far, far worse. He didn’t even regret it.
And now he waits for you. He knows you will come. He only wants to hold you in his arms as a gift in his final hours. He will inhale the vanilla of your skin and touch the light T-shirt you are wearing and shudder while thinking about everything under it. He will know that these are his last sensations as a man before dying in his turn.
CLÉLIO