So as I’m trying to comfort her, I think that maybe we’ve become friends without my realizing it—even if we still compete for first place.
I bring her home with me and even before I ask Mama if I can stay in the courtyard with my new friend, she answers, “Of course you may.”
I whisper to Annie, “Don’t mention my report card!”
She shakes her head. No, no. She won’t say a word.
Annie and I don’t do much; we look at the books we got as prizes. Annie’s disappointed because she’s already read two of them.
I’m luckier; I haven’t read any of mine.
One is very old, as if our teacher received it when she was our age. It smells moldy. I don’t really like the smell of mold, especially on books. I prefer the smell of new paper.
My very old book is called Les Contes d’Amadou Koumba. We’d never seen this collection of tales in our class’s library. No one had ever taken it out before.
When we open it, Annie and I recognize a sentence our teacher made us copy in our notebooks at the end of each day: The tree only grows by sinking its roots into Mother Earth.
This makes us laugh, so we start to read the tales of Amadou Koumba out loud.
I read one story, Annie another, and from time to time we happen upon another phrase we’ve already copied into our notebooks: Speaking too much is always a bad idea!
I’ll tell our teacher how we found those sayings, and I already feel real happy to be able to share this secret with Madame Ladal. But I’m not sure I’ll ever see her again.
I see her locked doors; I see La Place as sad as the day they buried Pope John XXIII, when Mama cried while she listened to the big, slow voices singing on the radio.
And all of a sudden, I’m nervous. I say to Annie, “Let’s not read it all right away! Besides, I have some things to do for Mama. You should probably go.”
Mama, who’s sewing in the courtyard, raises her head.
Annie is disappointed, and she asks, “You’ll lend it to me, when you’re finished, right?”
I say yes, but I already know I’ll never lend this book to anybody, absolutely not. Never.
I’m angry, so angry I feel like stomping, stomping, stomping until my whole body aches.
Mama says very softly to Annie, “Well, you’ll see each other tomorrow, won’t you?”
Annie leaves and I go up to the blue bathroom.
I face my mirror. I finally face my mirror.
I’m angry, so angry and sad I’m about ready to pass out. But I don’t want to cry. I can’t stop repeating in my head, You aren’t going to cry, are you? You aren’t going to cry!
I try to calm down, but I can’t. Every time I’m this angry, my whole body itches. I have to hold myself back because if I don’t, I’ll scratch so hard I’ll make myself bleed.
I say the two sentences that calm me down. I don’t know how they came to me, but it does me good.
When I start breathing normally, I stop looking in the mirror. I sit on the floor of the balcony and think, as Mama often does, Today I haven’t had a single minute to myself.
But I actually say it out loud, and I hear someone laugh. It’s Mama. She came up and I didn’t even hear her.
“Are you making fun of me?” she asks.
I answer, “Why do people disappear?”
She looks surprised. “Émilienne, you think too much for your age.”
And so I tell her about my teacher, that her doors are closed and locked; I tell her that Emmy and Émilie think Papa isn’t going to come home, that Emile saw people screaming in front of the police station, that maybe something terrible has happened and we don’t know what it is, and that Emmy, on top of everything, is going to get married and leave me all alone. I tell her that Annie cried because our teacher has disappeared, that Marlyse is worried. I didn’t want to cry, but it just came out, and I yell at Mama, meanly, while crying, “You don’t love Papa! That’s why you’re not looking for him!”
Mama tells me to get dressed. I don’t understand what’s going on. I was waiting for her to strike me and make me get on my knees. The last time I got mad at her, I told her she wasn’t my mama, because if she were my mama she’d never hit me. I also said I must be a child she found in the garbage. That’s what she says sometimes when she feels like joking, but I took it seriously. I yelled real loud at Mama and she made me kneel in the courtyard. Do you remember, Papa?
That day, you didn’t tell me to get up. Usually you don’t like it when I’m forced to kneel but you simply shook your head. “So just like that your mother isn’t your mother? You really are an extraordinary child!”
This time I know what I said hurt her, but she isn’t getting angry. “Go get dressed!”
When I walk down to the girls’ bedroom, everybody watches me pass by: Émérite, Émilie, Émilio, Émile. Emmett, who’d been playing the piano, stops to look at me. Émelie whispers, “You’re crazy, little girl!”
Emmy isn’t there to defend me, not that I know she would. Emmanuel, the most timid of all of us, has disappeared. He must be watching things from a distance.
Mama says, “Put your best shoes on!”
I pick out my red dress with the blue flowers and my red patent-leather shoes, the ones with a little strap that buttons over my ankle.
I think maybe Mama is going to abandon me or give me back to the person who really is my mother, and I’m afraid. But I obey.
She gets dressed too. She hadn’t gone out once all day and had been wearing an old housedress. She washes her arms and face and then slips on her sleeveless dress, the striped one. She grabs a scarf, a kind of beige mantilla. Maybe she’s going to take me to church so that I can ask forgiveness for what I’ve said.
But when we leave, we take a very different route than the one that goes to church.
We walk down boulevard Hanne; we pass in front of Amie Lou’s house, the person who gives coconut sweets to Emmett so he’ll play for her.
Some people are buying blood sausage from a lady seated on a little stool in front of a bucket shining in the streetlights. That lady is there every evening, but Mama never buys boudin from her because she’s dirty. Anyway, we’re not out for a walk to buy blood sausage.
It’s already getting dark. I’ve never gone so far in this direction, and never in the evening.
All my brothers and sisters have stayed home and Mama is taking me somewhere, I don’t know where. And I’m afraid because she’s squeezing my hand hard and not saying a word.
12.
“It’s amazing how a clean sheet can mask a dirty mattress.”
How many times have I heard that, ringing out like a death knell from the mouth of the person who first snitched on me, Mademoiselle Potrizel?
She boomed out that phrase every morning until my death, looking me straight in the eye, but I never looked away. Instead, I made do with greeting her respectfully by tipping my hat while she waved her hand in front of her face as if to chase away a foul smell. I no doubt smelled of lust—and God protect us from the Prince of Darkness and his evil deeds!
She was a childminder, a babysitter, that’s what she was. She claimed to be teaching the neighborhood kids to read from books, books in which a mythical father smoked a pipe that never went out, unlike the pipe of our policeman neighbor who was devoted to the magazine Détective—which helped him solve any local mystery featuring naked women.
Mademoiselle Potrizel always had her eye on me. Often as I passed by, she’d give a little speech to whatever innocent kid happened to be at hand—not that they’d stay innocent for long! Sticking out her chin in my direction, she’d unleash her ritual phrase, “It’s amazing how a clean sheet can mask a dirty mattress.”
The child, thinking he was having a reading lesson, always repeated the words “unclean,” “sheet,” and “dirty” while looking at me. He’d understood the essential: I was the unclean man in the dirty sheets.
Very dirty indeed, when the little angels’ guardian
stopped by the school I was teaching at and confronted the principal. She asked him point blank, “Are you aware that Hilaire, to whom you’ve entrusted our children, is doing business with the jeweler, and everybody knows it?” (That bitch only had access to the children of her neighbors, who had no idea what went on in her so-called school.)
An informant, a snitch, but incapable of coming right out with it. So she chose her words carefully to spark something in the principal’s mind. “Doing business” referred to a Creole expression for lesbianism: Women who font zafé.
But maybe that’s why, seeing as I was a man, the principal didn’t get it. As far as the jeweler was concerned, everybody knew he liked men—but also that he sold jewelry he’d purchased on the cheap from women in dire straits. He profited from their financial difficulties, but that was all.
My principal must have thought I was involved in some black-market dealings for inexpensive jewelry, and—thank God—none of that seemed very important to him. He even remarked to me with a conspiratorial laugh, “Come on, Hilaire. You didn’t even try to get me to buy something for my wife! You wouldn’t let your principal miss a good bargain, would you? Your neighbor, Mademoiselle Potrizel, informed me of your little trafficking business. Try to be more discreet next time.”
Our school was a vast market where the teachers, all working second jobs, shamelessly sold every kind of thing under the sun: jewelry, perfume, yams, and christophenes, evangelical pamphlets like Awake!, tablecloths and clothing from Santo Domingo, shoes from Puerto Rico, soft candy from Saint Barts, lace from our own Vieux-Fort, cassavas from Capesterre, manioc flour and syrupy candies from Marie-Galante, hair gel and straightening creams from Miami—and, how could I forget, marvelous baby products such as Johnson’s baby oil, which even I used, imported from the English islands surrounding us.
13.
Mama and I wind through a lot of little streets without sidewalks. The deeper we get into the neighborhood, the darker it gets.
There’s no light at all, no street lamps—on our street there’s a big light, and you say it keeps you from sleeping, Papa. But here there’s nothing at all and the dark is making me scared, and besides, there’s a funny smell.
Mama stops in front of a tiny pale-yellow house, also poorly lit. She knocks and a lady comes and opens the door. She jumps when she sees us. “Ò-ò, Éma! Ka ki pasé?”
They speak only in Creole. Mama answers that nobody’s died or hurt, but they need to talk. I look hard at the lady and see she looks like you.
“Kiss your Aunt Lise; she’s your father’s sister.”
Aunt Lise is still speaking Creole. “É ki non a piti-lasa?”
Mama answers, “This one’s Émilienne.”
“Oh yes, her father’s little sweetheart! Kiss your auntie, darling.”
Other ladies show up. They look like you too. Aunt Lise introduces me to Aunt Isabelle, Aunt Augustine, and Aunt Chimène.
They never come to our house, and we never go to theirs. I’ve never seen them, but I know you have lunch with them, dinner too, and you have a coffee with them the mornings you and Mama fight.
Papa’s four sisters. Papa’s four sisters. That’s what I keep repeating in my head.
I don’t really know why Mama brought me here. Maybe she’s decided I love Papa so much that I should live with his sisters. That way I could see him every day, more often than at home.
But I don’t want to leave Emmy and all the others, my house, the blue bathroom, Émile. I want to beg Mama to take me home. (Let’s go, Mama!)
We sit down in the dining room around a huge shiny table, and I cross my arms, trying to act like a good little girl.
14.
Try to be more discreet.
The day after the babysitter’s failed snitching attempt, I went over to the small costume shop near the entrance to the infamous alley sheltering her phony children’s school. I bought a whole selection of half masks, full masks, flounced dresses, and false breasts from the old lady running the store. I dressed up as a bearded lady, ready to parade my stuff in front of the bogus teacher that Saturday morning. Did I mention she’s a Seventh-Day Adventist—maybe even worse!
Try to be more discreet.
Saturday was a sacred day for her and her kind. As soon as Friday night rolled around, old Potrizel lowered her eyes, refused to acknowledge this sinful world on the road to damnation, and lost herself in loony conversations with a God who never asked for such a thing. She was supposed to emerge from her suffering for all of humanity’s sins on Saturday night, at sunset and the end of Sabbath. Nevertheless, in order to show the world her faith, her plunge into sainthood was topped off by going to church in a lace dress, with her fanciest parasol and bright white shoes that made her feet look six meters long.
Try to be more discreet.
I knew when she was going to leave her house to play out this holy carnival, so I accompanied her right up to the Adventist temple, more femme than her, with my falsies falling out of a stunning yellow dress, silky and formfitting, and in flesh-colored stockings. (Those pinkish stockings on my black legs had quite an effect!) And all the way along this crucifixion trail, I rattled a ton of bracelets, chains, and gold rings I’d worked at winning by feeding ten-centime coins, one at a time, into the bubble-gum machine in front of Madame Plaucoste’s shop. Every piece of gum came with a little plastic egg that held a piece of jewelry, as precious as the juicy pink chiclet.
Try to be more discreet.
Our parade caught everybody’s attention and provoked the hearty laughter of the streets. We heard the clucks of chickens and assembled turkeys, the cackles of hyenas and jackals, the grunting of squinty-eyed pigs—and the oinking rumblings provoked by a vulgar show. All the town’s animal nature was on display.
I’d obviously hit the heights of discretion, and after that I wasn’t going to hide anymore. The babysitter, the phony teacher, would know that her snitching had no power over me. At least that’s what I thought. I assure you it’s what I thought and what I sincerely wanted. I believed I’d crossed a threshold with my outlandish declaration, but I’d given myself too much credit that day and underestimated how dangerous Potrizel really was. She went crazy, running from one office to another, from the priest to the bishop, from the principal of the school to the director of the vice-rectory. Confusing homosexuality and pedophilia, she invented all kinds of stories about me, up until the moment I perfected my trapeze-artist act—without any kind of net, without a single hand held out to catch me.
Isn’t it possible your schoolteacher made the same mistake?
15.
Mama speaks first, “The child wants to know where her papa is.”
Aunt Lise starts to explain, “What makes you think we would know?”
Aunt Augustine interrupts her sternly, “Don’t start by lying, Lise. You’ll make things even more complicated. Emma is Emmanuel’s wife. She has the right to be worried. Emmanuel is our brother, not your husband. I’m tired of you acting like this! It’s time to stop!”
Mama sighs.
I uncross my arms and start to monkey with my fingers. Aunt Augustine scares me; her eyes sink real deep in her head and she’s skinny, too skinny. (She’s taller than all the others, right, Papa?) Aunt Isabelle and Aunt Chimène are a little heavy, but not too much, not as much as Aunt Lise. At least that’s how it seems to me.
Aunt Lise grumbles, “Emmanuel vinn isidan bo maten-la.”
(Is that true, Papa? You were here while we were waiting for you?)
Aunt Chimène gets up and comes back with some glasses: anisette liqueur for Mama and lemonade for me.
Aunt Augustine starts up again, “I’m telling you, Emma, we don’t agree with everything Emmanuel does. He has his business and we don’t interfere, but when our brother’s in trouble, we support him. When he came over this morning, he was pretty worked up. He told us he was supposed to go to a meeting with all the other construction company owners, but he didn’t agree with them. He told
us not to wait for him for lunch or dinner because the meeting was sure to go on and on.”
Mama says, “He hasn’t come home since Wednesday, and this child, the one right here in front of you, thinks her Papa has abandoned us. Is that what’s going on?”
All four of your sisters speak at the same time.
“Oh sweet pea, your father would never do such a thing! He loves you. He loves your Mama; he loves his children. You shouldn’t think such a thing! Times are hard; that’s all it is. Times are hard.”
When we get up to leave, Aunt Lise says to me, “You’ll have to come back to see us one of these days, okay?”
Everybody kisses me, and Aunt Isabelle even gives me a cinnamon stick covered in coconut.
16.
Well, just let me tell you—me, Queen Nono, as they’re calling me now—that little girl, well she’s just pulled off a miracle: getting her mother and her father’s four sisters together, face to face.
Now let me speak!
Without knowing anything about the history of those women—why they don’t speak to each other or go to each other’s houses, or why the sisters don’t even know their brother’s youngest children—that child managed to get them to budge!
Should I tell you why these five women were enemies? Would you like me to explain it?
It’s an old story that could’ve been resolved a long time ago if Sauveur Emmanuel himself hadn’t benefited from widening the gulf between his wife and sisters. Divide and conquer, after all! Sauveur was the prince of two realms—the absolute ruler. But Sauveur Emmanuel was a prince without a treasury, and when I say “treasury,” you should know the sisters always had one: from jewelry they sold, to small discreet business deals, to cakes prepared at home—in their wood cottage with the tin roof, a house the child only saw for the first time last night. They did piecework, poorly paid—some sewing and ironing, a couple of jobs as maids in an upwardly mobile household; a kind of trade set up by a country cousin whose vegetables they’d sell—but carefully saved the money they earned. You spoil your clientele, the money comes in regularly, and you take a percentage. Everybody lives like that, off of what comes in from a dozen small jobs, and since the state doesn’t get a whiff of that money—and why on earth would you give the state some of what it can’t even create and organize?—it’s not taxed and gradually adds up.
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