Let us wager that our Émilienne will invite into the courtyard soloists whose virtuosity, when they play their part in this story, is still out of our ken.
And let us indulge her decision to stay put, for hours on end, without moving, without a fuss, without making a scene—all the while feeling the air chill and the night settle in, waiting for voracious shadows to cover the country and render ever more invisible what we can hardly see, even now.
2.
Did somebody mention me? Hilaire?
Well, I’m asking because I thought I heard somebody bring up “the guy who hanged himself in his cottage.”
Unless they called me “that faggot.”
Excuse me for asking, but here I am.
And before I start, I have a message for you from the man who fell off the roof of city hall. Old Élie.
He asked me to tell you that he’s not coming tonight. He won’t even try. Nope, he’s refusing to stick his nose in whatever’s happening in this little corner of the universe. He’s not in very good shape, and he’s mad because his drinking buddies always teased him about how rum was such a great preservative. They used to say that he’d probably take a real long time to rot, seeing as how he put down so many pints—what am I saying, barrels—of rum. Shit, he wasn’t thinking of that when he was downing all that booze with his pals. Regardless, watching himself disappear in puddles on the ground, well, that just makes him hopping mad, as red as a toad in heat. His innards being pressed out of him like liquid from a blood sausage, and his head swelling and swelling so much he’s gonna end up looking like a giant pumpkin sitting in a muddy pool.
But boy, did he drink a ton of rum in Petit Curé’s corner store. “Little Priest,” that’s the nickname we gave the grocer who drank all the time but ran his shop just fine somehow—and he never missed a morning mass. Okay, I know we’re not here to listen to old war stories from the neighborhood, but all the same . . . So, how is this organized anyway? Everybody speaks in turn? You join in and you talk about what’s bothering you, about your shitty life? I’m asking because that old lady who took the floor a minute ago, she barely touched on what’s really bothering the little kid.
Just where is her schoolteacher?
3.
Thursday morning, May 25, 1967. I still can’t understand why you didn’t come home.
Mama doesn’t answer when I wake up and ask, “Did Papa leave already?”
Emmy’s preparing some homemade chocolate for us. She calls me over and says, “Stop asking where Papa is like that!” She doesn’t yell. Instead she tries to speak softly, but she’s creasing her forehead. So I move away.
I shrug and I hear her yell, “Émilienne!” I apologize right away.
You don’t shrug when an older person speaks to you. You never respond to your elders, “Leave me alone!” You never suck your teeth, “Tchluup.” You never ever yell, “Oh boy!” as if the sky were falling. I know all her commandments, and it isn’t worth having to recite them on my knees in the courtyard.
So, “I’m sorry, Emmy.”
For a day off, today sure is starting off on the wrong foot.
Emmy is usually so sweet to me, and on Thursdays we do a lot of things together. But this Thursday everybody seems to be in a bad mood.
I help Emmy prepare some lemon zest for the cacao and cinnamon, but I wonder what’s really going on.
We set the table in the courtyard, put out our breakfast bowls, and we all sit down: Mama, Émérite, our oldest sister, Emmy, Émelie, Émilie, Emmanuel, Émilio, Emmett, Émile, and Émilienne.
I understand why Mama can’t remember all our names in one go. She always says the idea of giving all the children nearly the same first name as yours was crazy. Her own name is Emma, almost a copy! Mama says the whole gaggle tires her out. (You say we’re more like a pod of dolphins.) But on Thursdays, when we’re all present, we’re really a great family, especially when you join us, Papa—even if you don’t like chocolate.
After breakfast, I remember the report card in my book bag. With Émile sticking his nose in everything, I have to hide it somewhere. If he opens my book bag—supposedly to borrow my protractor, my T square, or my compass because he’s always losing his own things—he won’t hesitate to take a peek at my report card. And then there’ll be “hell to pay.” (That’s an expression you really like Papa. You always say, “There’s sure to be hell to pay.” And then you laugh.)
So I wrap my report card in a plastic bag from the grocery store and hide it behind the green metal filing cabinet where you keep your bills and your workers’ papers. It’s a very heavy piece of furniture, and nobody bothers to move it to do the housework. That’s what I tell myself. There’s always a bunch of things that fall behind the furniture, but nobody ever has the energy to push aside a gigantic cabinet to clean up whatever is sleeping in the dust.
I’m so relieved that Mama signed my report card, I want to keep us from ever talking about it again. Please, let her not think about it!
And no one does ask to look at my grades. So eventually even I stop thinking about it and start my assigned chores.
On Thursdays, I’m supposed to clean the blue bathroom. I really like the blue bathroom. I don’t know why I’m supposed to clean it because nobody ever uses it, but when I go up there, it’s true it’s always a little dirty. It’s because those lizards who cling to the ceiling, those mabouyas, like to poop on everything.
The blue bathroom is brand new and still smells like fresh cement. I rub the flawless sink, I scour the shower, I wash the floor with a lot of water. I create a bunch of suds and slide across the tiles. When I’ve rinsed and dried everything, I like to stand in front of the mirror Mama installed. I don’t know why.
But this Thursday I don’t have time to plant myself in front of the mirror and repeat my “favorite mantra,” as Emmy likes to say: “I have no name. I have no face.”
Mama is calling me. Marlyse is downstairs in the courtyard waiting for me.
4.
What’s happened to the schoolteacher?
We’re in agreement, right? That’s the theme of our meeting? At least that’s what I’ve understood. Me, Hilaire. But instead of answering this seemingly innocent question, we’ve been skirting the issue; we recount our lives or we evoke happy memories. It’s normal because, frankly, the mystery of the missing schoolteacher calls for a strong tremolo. In this I agree with the quadrille callers; Nono’s accordion can’t tell the tale right. I’m telling you, it’s real tragic business, and for that we need a violin.
Unless we think the schoolteacher has found something better.
We could pretend she’s accepted a more satisfying job than teaching a bunch of little girls whose legs are chalky and hair is messy after only an hour of class, kids who sweat like a pan of chestnuts over an open fire, kids who naturally smell of sour onion.
Maybe the administration offered her the chance to join the Normal School, the exclusive training institute destined for the new teaching elite, located in the cool heights of Morne Miquel. A replacement for her position as a grammar school teacher in that not very nice school by the sea smelling of piss and surf, where it’s hard to talk over the noise of the cars passing by and the buses that block the crosswalks and rev their engines.
Maybe she was dreaming of leaving that establishment, where it’s impossible to teach the nation’s history with the merchant ladies on the quays raucously advertising their freshly caught fish—with the smell of diesel fuel from the ship Île d’émeraude, which ferries people back and forth from Marie-Galante, in the air. And let’s hope that ship doesn’t catch fire like the Oiseau des Îles, which burned up in the harbor last summer.
What a thing to happen, what a show! Fuel had leaked out of the engine, and that black, shiny grease was just waiting for a little spark to burst into flames. The chickens and rabbits kept in cages in the back of the ship were roasted and the potatoes were grilled in big jute sacks piled up on the bridge. Fire danced across the
top of the oil right up to the port, and the firefighters had no idea how to handle any of it: how to put out the fire, how to evacuate the passengers, how to fish out the drowning—while seabirds laughed hysterically, looking on from the horizon, playing at being spectators.
We might be surprised to learn that all the teacher’s loving kindness, all that dancing around about personal revolution, all that sappy poetry about discovering one’s identity, all that wasn’t enough to keep her from grasping at a new carrot.
What a stinking idea! What a lying explanation! Just the ranting of a nobody.
I know this kind of talk would have gotten me killed, no questions asked, if I weren’t already rotting in my soapbox, my secondhand coffin that’s already falling apart—which is why I prefer to think of myself as a hanged man dressed in off-white, wearing a trilby.
5.
I’m surprised Mama doesn’t send Marlyse away, telling her that “Émilienne has things to do.”
Everybody has to finish their chores on Thursdays, not spend hours gabbing on the sidewalk or in the courtyard. That’s what I’ve always understood. And then, after our showers, we have Thursday morning dictation. And Marlyse knows that too!
I’d finished washing the bathroom a while ago, but I wanted to stay up there and daydream. The others don’t pay attention to me when they don’t see me.
“Are you busy?”
“No, it’s okay. What’s up?”
“I’ve been thinking about our teacher. Do you think she’ll be back tomorrow?”
“She said she would.”
Marlyse doesn’t seem to believe it, so I try to reassure her. “Of course she’ll be back. She said she’d leave at the end of the month.”
Her visit really has me surprised. Marlyse rarely comes to my house because her parents are Jehovah’s Witnesses; they don’t like her to spend time with “worldly” people. Marlyse has already explained that the world is anybody who isn’t a Jehovah’s Witness; it’s hell and Beelzebub. I think those are pretty funny names: Beelzebub, Jehovah. Marlyse can’t tell me what language they come from, but we don’t talk a lot about that stuff when we’re together. We’d rather laugh.
Marlyse hands me a little bag. “Take it, it’s my table runner. We don’t do that, Mother’s Day, I mean. I finished it last night while everybody was sleeping. But I can’t give it to my mama. If you want, give it to yours.” She smiles at me.
I hid my report card and she hid her table runner.
I watch her walk away.
And then I realize that the men who usually work on our house haven’t shown up. I wonder if they didn’t come because you’ve disappeared.
Maybe you’ll never come back and we’ll spend the rest of our lives in an unfinished house; the wooden ladder that leads to the third floor will always stay put because there’ll never be a third floor.
I’m used to the workers. I normally see them when I go up to clean my bathroom. That is, I hear them. They pass each other pails full of concrete on a rope pulley. They make the concrete by mixing cement, sand, pebbles, and water in that machine, your big Sambron, turning and turning on the sidewalk, making a lot of noise.
“When are they going to stop that machine? It’s wearing me out.” Mama can’t stand the dust from the cement, the piles of sand and pebbles in the courtyard, the sand the workers track all over, the huge barrel they have to fill with water all the time.
“Madame Emmanuel, can we hook up the hose?” Liters and liters of water sometimes spill all over the place when they’re not paying attention, and this always sets Mama off. She yells, “Guy-Albert, does your father work for the water plant?”
“Beg your pardon, Madame Emmanuel.”
I hear them tell all kinds of stories. They laugh. They make fun of each other. It’s like that all the time, I mean every Thursday, that is, when they come. But this Thursday, they’re not here. It feels like they’ve deserted us.
The sand sieve, I think it’s called a sifter, is still on top of the wheelbarrow, full of sand. For once, Émile and I aren’t wheeling around and pushing each other. The silent work site gives me the creeps; I don’t feel so good.
Mama says, “No dictation today. I have too much work to do.”
That doesn’t make sense. We’re all here on Thursday to help her out, so she has less to do. I think she’s just really angry.
Émile couldn’t be happier. He hates dictation. He runs off to La Place de la Victoire. He’s probably scared Mama will send us to do math problems with Mademoiselle Potrizel, the neighbor who runs the day care school Mama sends us to for tutoring when she’s had enough.
He leaves in a flash!
Emmy tries to catch him. “Where do you think you’re going? To play drums? Don’t you have homework?”
He doesn’t answer. He’s already far away. She’s the only one who tries to control him. Mama has given up.
I run to the sidewalk to see where he’s heading and catch sight of him as he turns the corner on rue Vatable. It’s clear he’s going to La Place.
People are waiting for the bus in front of our house. I hear them say nobody has seen Léogane’s green buses. That’s true, I haven’t seen Léogane or Mauril today.
I don’t have permission to speak to Mauril—the one who helps the market ladies load their baskets on the roof of the bus—nor to the drivers. They’re adults and I must respect them, Mama says, just like they must respect me. Mauril, whose voice cracks, waves to me when he sees me. Mama doesn’t like that. No one will ever see Mama engaged in conversation with bus drivers or the owners of bus lines.
I love Léogane’s green buses. The name is painted in red on the two doors and on the back, some letters filled in, others just outlined, and red, yellow, and white hibiscus flowers are painted around them. It looks like the name is sleeping in a field of flowers, in the bed of the letter L, with the lower part stretching farther and farther out . . . But nobody knows why the Léogane buses haven’t left the garage today.
6.
When people think about me, they see a hanged man.
Mademoiselle Pansy hanged himself. Man, what those two sisters must have been feeling in the back bedroom, the one over there, to the right of Émilienne’s little bench. The elder sisters’ bedroom. I’d love to look in and watch them sleep, those two girls who ran to my house to watch me dangling at the end of a rope. They didn’t imagine they’d have nightmares and have to wake up their father in the middle of the night—what a grand idea for him to install a bell in his princesses’ bedroom. They cried that the ma-commère—that’s me—had just grabbed their feet.
Where the hell does that story come from, that the dead pull on your feet? Don’t we have enough to do? With all the work you’re saddled with when you get to the other side! To start, you’re forced to go over every last detail of your life, live it all over again in your mind to understand how one thing led to another. We basically continue the work that starts when we turn sixty. We take apart the seams; we unroll the balls of yarn. Other people think we’re just repeating ourselves, rehashing and rambling, but the truth is, nature doesn’t give us a choice. It’s as though everything is hardwired in our genes; you have to travel back in time.
It starts out real softly with “I remember, I remember . . .”
It’s no wonder that phrase—in all the languages I know and even those I haven’t mastered—serves as an anchor for so many different kinds of books, novels, and poems: Je me souviens, Me acuerdo, An ka sonjé or Mi ricordo, Amarcord, Ich erinnere mich.
What are we trying to find out by remembering?
Even the little one. She’s barely nine years old, and I know she’s going to regale us with all the memories she’s accumulated of her teacher in just one single year. And she’ll go back farther, farther, and farther, back to the first years when she was only a baby.
But let’s not panic! I’m not trying to shut anyone up! That’d be impossible anyway; human beings have to talk. There’s nothing to be don
e about it. They just won’t shut up. But all the same, what I love in that child’s worrying is the feeling of having lost a world that was just beginning to blossom in front of her, different from everything else she’s seen till now. At least that’s what I’m able to understand.
That schoolteacher represented her future. She suggested new ways of living, how to confront what her country is, its history, a way of shaking up her perceptions.
I would’ve liked for somebody along the way to have opened a door for me and shown me a future where all this harassment, all this name-calling—pansy, faggot, fairy, and queer—could actually end.
I would’ve liked to have had another option besides stringing that noose around my neck and being hoisted up off the ground with one quick jerk, leaving behind the singular and unforgettable image of shit erupting from my body and soiling what was left of me.
I would’ve really appreciated being spared an entire life of depression and loneliness.
7.
Around eleven o’clock, I’m told to pick out the pebbles in the dried lentils. While I do this, I go over what’s happened the last few days in my head.
Wednesday: my teacher tells us she’s probably going to have to leave. My father doesn’t come home.
Thursday: the workers don’t show up. The Léogane buses don’t park in their usual place, and Marlyse lies to her mother so she can come over and worry with me about our teacher.
With these lentils from Madame Plaucoste, I have loads of time to sift through different versions. There are tons of stones to remove.
I grumble, “Madame Plaucoste is nice enough, but these lentils are really awful! There are more pebbles than lentils.”
“We’re not going to stop doing business with her. She’s our friend, our good neighbor,” Mama says.
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