by Ananda Devi
The public defender they assigned me is so young I thought it was a joke. I didn’t say anything, but she could see it on my face that I didn’t think there was any point getting a lawyer if they were going to pick a baby with a brand-new bib and a baby bottle, who wouldn’t even get dirty while eating or defending her clients.
Sure, she’s cute, with her little bangs over her eyes, I didn’t want to get her mad. After all, she would definitely be the first one I saw when I got out. Or maybe, whispered a nasty little voice like my own except cleverer, she’ll be the last one I see before being locked up for good. Would I actually be sentenced to death? I can’t remember anymore if they still kill people here. I don’t think there have been executions since I was born, but what do I know? Has the death penalty been abolished? Well, has the death penalty been abolished in Mauritius?
She smiles at me: reassuring, fake. She whispers something about a mandatory sentence of forty-six years, but they’ll be lenient, especially if you’re juvenile, she uses the English word as if to hide the tremor in her voice. Then she looks at me to see if I’ve understood. Yes, I’ve understood, chère mademoiselle. I’m not a kid anymore, I’m a juvenile, as in a juvenile delinquent.
Once the pleasantries are over, she starts explaining things, and I can see that she knows what she’s talking about. She’s serious, focused, attentive. Suddenly, I start listening to her more carefully. She frowns when I tell her that my only witnesses are birds and rats, but when I tell her that I was in the middle of carving Carlo’s name in my ass that night, she doesn’t raise an eyebrow but says, that just might help us…If we want to plead insanity, for example. But I’m not crazy, I tell her. She says in a soothing tone: No, I don’t think you’re crazy, but only a bit psychologically unstable. With good reason.
What do you mean, with good reason?
She doesn’t answer right away. Her little face scrunches up, goes almost as gray as the prison’s walls. This silence is like a secret she’s sharing with me. I don’t understand it, but it shocks me. I’m about to respond without thinking, despite my precarious situation.
I know where you come from, she says. I came from there, too.
I blink slowly. I can’t imagine her as a little girl from Troumaron or anyplace like that. I look over her body for the markings that show us for the losers we are, the proof that her dreams have already started to go to shit, but I can’t see it anywhere on her. I only see a good girl who’s done something with her life. But then again, anything’s possible. That doesn’t mean I’m going to tell her my secrets, though. Maybe she made it all up to get me talking. Besides, if she wants to plead insanity, it’s all over. I’m not an actor. I can’t pretend to be crazy.
After she leaves, the lights go out. The air she’d made a bit more bearable solidifies around me. She can’t do anything, I know. I don’t believe in anything anymore. The papers have already begun my trial. The warden gleefully reads snippets of articles out loud while clicking his fake teeth. I’m described as “a dangerous thug who’s already been behind bars several times.” Reliable sources come out of the woodwork to say as much. One of the headlines is: “From Petty Theft Straight to Murder?” They interviewed my mother. She started by saying Ki mo pu dir u… When a mother begins with What can I tell you? then there’s no hope. I can just see how the talk fell apart after that. Even when he was a kid, he was hard to control. I tried everything, I’m telling you. His father and me, we did everything we could to set him on the straight and narrow. But he was sucked into this gang of lowlifes. Once they had him, we couldn’t do anything. Piti-la inn sanze, mo dir u. We don’t recognize him anymore. And so on. She doesn’t know how much she’s hurting me, my poor Mam. She thinks that the missié ziz will have more compassion for me and it won’t be so painful.
But at least, Mam, at the very least you could have told them that you didn’t think I was guilty. You could have told them that.
There isn’t a single voice speaking up for me. And I’ve been hearing voices since I’ve been in here. The voices in my head won’t stop. But I’m not crazy, nor a Saint Bernadette. When there are too many walls around you, and walls beyond those walls, then the voices start talking to you to keep you from falling apart.
I just hope it won’t last too long. I don’t know how much longer I can hold out.
I hope they’ll give me a second chance.
If anyone’s listening out there, I’d really like a second chance. Even if I have to become a priest.
SAAD
They stream out, one after another, they follow each other with the sound of shrill music, unmelodious but still hypnotic. They buzz like bumblebees on the hunt. Hungry wasps, angry bees, furious insects who have just sighted a rare blossom not far off: a whole summer gathered into a single moving body that the horde senses from afar using some sense unavailable to men. The man-insects, bumblebee-machines, sketch large circles, dance their zigzag dances under the damp moon.
On their motorbikes, mopeds, and bikes, they set off in search of Eve.
I turn around in my room, armed with my black marker. I feel absolutely useless and powerless. I keep trying to describe my state of being while I think, which distances me from my thoughts. I do my best, as if the person writing was outside myself, using metaphors and similes, stylistic devices that just gussy up the truth. Why not just write, the gang’s gotten on their bikes and left the city? Why not just say, I’m scared that they’ll find Eve? Why not just say, I’m scared?
I write in order not to go crazy. I think that I’ve already said that, too. I want to cry. About this and about everything, about my need to live at all costs, me, the child of Troumaron, about my calls for help that nobody hears, about everything bearing down on us, about everything we’re being accused of, about everything that’s silencing us, about everything that’s gagging us, to say to say to say to say, for that I’ll kill them myself, I’ll go on the hunt, I’ll destroy every person who wants to hurt Eve, and I’ll make myself a news item they talk about on the television and in the papers, and then, once I’m in prison, I’ll write my story and I’ll write poems and I’ll send them to a publisher and they’ll take notice, the distance between myself and my writing will command everyone’s respect and they’ll all say isn’t that delightful, isn’t that marvelous, this disadvantaged kid who’s taken Rimbaud as his model, isn’t that a brilliant media and literary stroke, I’ll become a media sensation, and on top of that they’ll feel like they’re taking care of people’s needs, they’ll use me as a model for the other neighborhood kids who completely fuck up, but most of all, I’ll be heard and read, which is what counts, no matter how they take it and what they make of it, even if they exploit me, if that’s what they want, all I want, personally, is to get my head out of the water, to escape my fate, to simply be.
But to do that I have to kill.
But before that, I have to find her.
I have to summon up my courage to leave. The air is still streaked by their departures. If they see me, they’ll force me to say where she’s gone.
Opening the door of my room is hard. Here was a corner where I could breathe. Here was my den and my dawn. But outside, there’s no continuity. Everything’s stopped. Everything is waiting. The world is closed off. We can’t escape the circles etched by our needs. These circles that tell the rest of the world, we’re not like you, our world isn’t like yours, today, they imprison us more thoroughly than the state’s own prisons.
There should always be the possibility of an exit. So I can dream of an escape, even by tricking myself, even by hoping against hope.
In the neighborhood, everything’s at a standstill.
The gang’s spread out in Port Louis looking for her. They’re armed with Molotov cocktails. They want to find her first. The only thing they’ll listen to is the hammering in their heads and the bitterness in their mouths. The first strike will be the harshest in the city’s silence. The others, after, will be easy. The noise and the screams
will strike fear into people. Some will try to flee. Others will barricade themselves. And the wave will surge easily enough. They’ll be attacked. They’ll attack. The sparks will fly everywhere. And then the conflagration will begin.
They don’t know this. They’re blinded by their desire for the impossible. They don’t understand just how fragile their world is. How this act of stupid, teenage rage, of throwing a rock at a store window can set off shock waves that will be all but impossible to stop. Kids breaking things, sure; but behind them, there are wolves waiting to come out and tear everything apart.
They choose to forget that here, they’re all bound together. And that when people look at them, before seeing their faces, they see labels that are there for life.
I don’t want to be one of those waking up the volcano. This island was born from a volcano. One eruption is enough. I have to start running to find her before they do. Besides, I know where she is.
EVE
I limp, I hobble. Every breath is a door forced open. Each one lasts an eternity. Every breath awakens the numbest parts of my body. But this way, at least, I am sure I am conscious.
This will take as long as it has to. My time isn’t like others’. The two things guiding me are freedom and the end.
All these broken breaths catch in my throat. There they begin to tighten. I think I can understand what Savita endured. Thinking of her hurts even more, now that I know that it really was because of me.
This man’s hypocrisy makes me laugh, or scares me, I’m not sure. Oh, his tremors, his little jumps, his fears. A little, lizardly, spineless thing. He wanted me so much that he was able to overcome his shame. His courage was enough to bring him to the biology room and make his shadow on the walls into a naked monster; but being seen by someone else—oh, no, no. Another eye witnessing his degeneration, no. He could lay me flat on a table and shove me into the wood splinters, he could take me in every way, he could pretend to love me when we were alone in the prison of his fantasies. Until someone else sees us, and he denies everything. I can already hear him saying it, it was she who seduced me. She begged me. She threw herself on me. I ended up raping him, oh sure I did.
I think of the gun the inspector gave me, hitting my armpit every so often. He gave me a way to turn everything around. To wipe the slate clean. I’ve waited too long. There’s a whole world beyond rules and regulations. Savita’s body told me: burn your bridges and run. The inspector told me: this isn’t to bury you, it’s to clear a path for you. He knows which way I’ve been going, and where my next encounter by stone walls might take me.
I’ll leave my mark right between his eyebrows. Then I’ll leave. Violence as my escape. There’s no other way out. In my bag, under my arm, the gun bobs around. My bargaining chip with fate. I don’t need to take everything with me. I was stupid, as we all are at seventeen. Now, I know. There’s a place where the birds’ cries are short and piercing, and where summer burns so vividly that you’ll forget even the memory of maggots in your guts.
Death is in your hands, says the gun in my bag.
So is life, says Savita.
What will you choose?
I summon up all the memories I can before looking into these eyes grown old before their time, this man driven by shame and impotence to murder. He is far more disconsolate than I ever will be.
CLÉLIO
A softness slips into her eyes, in the shadow of her bangs. For me?
Her name is Lauren.
Her name is Lauren.
I don’t think I’ll be sentenced to death.
I can take apart the bricks that buried me here. One by one, I can detach them from their mortar beds, even if I destroy my nails and my youth. As I keep staring at the walls, they become a dirty smudge, then a hole, then nothing. Open to everything. Collapse into nothingness.
Cry or laugh? The choices are limited.
But the most important thing is to be convinced: I didn’t kill. The world can go to pieces. I didn’t kill.
In the middle of the night, I make my way out of this sludge that passes for sleep here and I see through the bars that Carlo is looking at me. I jump to my feet. Carlo! You’re back! He nods but he doesn’t say anything so he doesn’t upset me with his fake French accent. I look right at him and stick my hands through the bars. He holds my hands, but his are so cold that I shiver. Are you cold, Carlo? I ask him. He nods again. It’s the prison air, I tell him. It’ll chill you to death. Don’t stay there. I’ll come meet you outside. I take off my shirt and give it to him. When he puts it on, I see that he’s naked and very thin. What’s wrong, Carlo? And then I see he’s also in a prison cell. I don’t understand anything.
And then I’m outside. In a place that looks like Le Souffleur. I’m standing on the edge of a rocky cliff. The water spurts up and the waves crash against the sides of the cliff, wearing away at it, nipping at it. It seems like earlier the wind was whistling like a horn as it passed through the tunnels the water had carved in the rock. It sighed, it groaned, it could be heard in the nearby villages like dead people’s voices. Until these waves widened these holes more and more and took away these voices of the wind and of the dead. So I’m the one screaming, sighing, groaning, and awakening this place from its silence.
In prison, only my voice can be heard now.
Then the sludge of sleep overcomes me again.
At night, they say that the oceans sleep. But maybe they’re already dead.
SAAD
I am Saad, and I am my name. I enter sadness’s downpour. I am the only person who can walk under a cloud of his own name.
It’s raining. I’m cold from all this rain. I want to go with her, to go down her path, to go into her suicide; a pact, between two dying beings, two beasts exhausted before even starting to live.
But I don’t want to stop here, either. I still have a life to live. I’m not afraid of stumbling. I’m afraid of the fall. What will happen to these boys and girls like me, like her, when the blade falls on their night, on their laughter. Haven’t we all come this far, to this moment?
It’s all so brief. A few pathetic years, barely enough time to open new eyes to our life, and already we’re staring at death. Our alternatives: either defeat or violent conquest. But this conquest isn’t really one. It’s the resistance of the hopeless. That’s what I wanted to tell them, they who are ranging right now across the city with their angelic yet malevolent faces, caught up in their fake rhythm, their machines’ sputtering portending failure. I don’t know what ties us to these murderous cadences.
Maybe the gray sunlight of our birth?
It’s raining. It’s raining in my head. It’s raining everywhere in my secrets. You could say I’m crying, but that isn’t true.
I don’t want to die.
I want to talk about these places that exist outside time, that murder us. I mean these places that stubbornly repress all that we are.
I walk through a succession of armored and padlocked doors. The farther I walk, the more I feel as if I am the one they are locking out. Nobody will let me back in again. I have abandoned every permitted space, all the normal places. Eve’s the one who’s dragged me along her inward path, into her hurricane of wrath.
I bump into sleeping bodies in the doorways. On the steps slick with rain, their features stripped bare, they sleep. Drunkards, fallen under the weight of alcohol in their bellies. A very old woman, possibly dead, a pile of rags under her head as a pillow. A dog and a man together, breathing in rhythm.
They all have the same face, as blank as their rips and tears. It feels like I could enter them and live in the heart of their sadness. I could be each of the furrowed wrinkles on the old woman’s face. I could be the sick dog’s flank, entering through his sides and trying to keep life flowing within his body. I could be the man’s hand, moving—closed, open, closed, open—so he wouldn’t freeze completely. I could be the hem of his frayed shirt soaking beside him in a puddle of urine. I could be the wind’s voice sighing without a
ny violence and the island sleeping without trying to understand.
If I can be all that, I can also be her, Eve. I know where she is, what she’s doing. I’ve always known.
And I’m this wan, wretched man who’s destroyed the city’s peace, whose cowardice and urges have led to this explosion.
And I’m the fathers and mothers asphyxiated by the airless void of failure.
And I’m the furious, thirsty boys who think they’ll free themselves by sowing discord.
And I am, like him, the one who talks to me in my dreams, a thief of fire.
But now, I am me: become again simple and double and multiple all at once. I am Saad. Nothing else matters.
You look at him and you are astonished by the transformation he has undergone. He is crushed by remorse. Like a worm, he tries to hide in the corners. In the open door, in his resigned gestures when you enter, his hand raised and then quickly lowered, you see that he’s been expecting you. In front of him is a half-empty bottle of rum, its vapors filling the room and masking other, more permanent smells. Around him, there are sheets of paper, some of them torn, others not. There are pictures of someone who vaguely looks like him, made unrecognizable by hope. This person is someone whose light has flared.
You feel, just before you kill him, a brief twinge of pity. Then you steel yourself: he never felt the least pity himself. Cowardly, humiliated, selfish: all the more reason for him to disappear.
He attempts to get up, but he doesn’t have the strength. In his uneven breath, you can see he’s afraid. He says:
Don’t hurt me.
These words strike an icy chill in your thoughts. Every time you met a man, in your soul, in your flesh, there were these words: don’t hurt me. You never said them out loud. But you could never have known beforehand the extent of the damage. And you were hurt, they didn’t hesitate, didn’t flinch, sometimes smiled, sometimes seemed not to care. It was just, you thought, part of the bargain.