I smiled, in on the joke.
The first step towards becoming a collaborator, an informant, a snitch, is that complicit smile. Listen to your Uncle Justin, Émilienne! The first step is that little laugh that permits injustice to persist; it’s how you look away instead of protesting.
I did that, looked away, hands clenched behind my back, mouth shut, anger controlled behind a smile. A smile that made me deathly ill—stomachaches, vomiting. I guess I’ve always had a weak stomach.
How could I have smiled at that?
I’ve lived with shame ever since. I finally pretended to have an allergy attack, to be susceptible to the pieces of cane that escape into the air when the crop is burned. I showed the red patches on my fragile skin. (I’m a redhead after all.) And I quit that job.
Well that’s not quite the truth. Maybe I should set the record straight to give myself some credit.
This is how it happened.
A small dark room, the head accountant’s desk to the left, surrounded by dockets, me next to the wall, in shadow, a shutter right over my head, letting in a feeble light, dust trembling in its rays. I feel like I’m being smothered, especially since I have to report to the head accountant at least ten times a day.
But that day, he says, “Justin, bring me the order form, you know, the order for that guy’s casket, what’s his name—Jazaron.”
I had a rebuttal right on the tip of my tongue. It was ready to take off, find its mark, cut through the bullshit, but finally, I smiled, and brought him the order.
I’d already had my revenge: I’d selected a casket in padded mahogany, with a Parma lace lining, four silver handles, a frame for the photo of the deceased. I’d hired six bearers and a hearse. It had purple ropes that the solemn bearers would hold on to with all the respect they’d bestow upon the hand of the dearly departed comrade. I’d already paid for a mass on the fortieth day after his death and for a memorial service whenever the family thought it appropriate.
“Justin, I thought we’d agreed. You were supposed to choose the cheapest casket. Mahogany! What were you thinking?”
I thought I could smell the dead man right over our heads. A crushed, bloody hand waved at me, and then I heard the laugh. Incredible, totally communicative, an explosion of joy in that stifling office. So I laughed too. I grabbed the head accountant and began to waltz with him, repeating, “Mahogany, Justin, what were you thinking?” And then I stopped and pushed him against the wall with one hand while I grabbed the papers he was supposed to sign. He signed. He signed his sarcasm on the funeral bill. Accounting registers tumbled to the floor, dust was flying, a painting fell off the wall and its glass broke—if we can call a reproduction of a five-thousand-franc note with its exotic woman in madras and all those satisfied sugarcane cutters a “painting.” Yep, with the broken glass and the false bank note on the floor, he signed. He even agreed when I told him he was not to open his big mouth to anyone, not to complain to the gendarmes, not a word, otherwise . . . It was after that incident that my father got involved: “He’s my son, I’ve come to ask you to hire him. He’s an accountant.”
So I left sugarcane for bananas. I don’t think I was any better off. In any case, I couldn’t rid myself of my shame.
Maybe a stray bullet will earn me forgiveness.
So, my darling favorite niece, would you please tell them to dress me in my blue suit before they bury me? A beautiful blue suit. I want to hear them say how great I look in my coffin, especially your mother.
“He’s handsome, don’t you think? Don’t you think my brother’s handsome?”
That’s how she’ll be able to ward off her grief. At least that’s what I hope.
I can’t seem to get used to my new appearance: stiff and cold. That’s not the cheery me, who always had a laugh ready for the family and for you, sweet Émilienne, my inquisitive girl.
Tell them, too, that I don’t want any powder. I’d never get used to the saccharine odor, that blend of talc, death, and naphthalene.
I’m not accustomed to being immobile either, but I want to imagine that dark blue suit in all its proud glory, a perfect complement to my eyes, eyes that change from green to yellow, depending on the weather. What do they look like today? And will they keep on changing now that I’m dead? You’re so special, you can probably answer that question, right? Can’t you?
Tell them to give me a white shirt and a tie as well. It’ll be the second time in my life—that’s probably the wrong expression. What would you say?
The first time was when I married that woman. If only she’d miss the funeral! Do you think Emma could arrange that? Let her go complain to the heavens elsewhere, and let me lie in peace—if we can think of death as a vacation.
How in God’s name did I ever bind myself to that woman? From the very beginning, I hated our life together, in spite of the kids. All ten of them.
Your mother, my older sister, my adored sister, always asked the same question, “How can you hate her so much and still make a baby every year?”
I don’t have an answer to that. Nope, no answer. In the beginning, sex was always a contest. We were taking revenge on each other, at least that’s how I saw it. There was no love, only a power struggle on both sides. And the cold winds blowing from the Saint Claude Mountains did the rest. She was always too cold in the morning. I warmed her up just before crawling out of bed. And then I put on that short-sleeved light blue shirt and gray slacks—a uniform without the label—and slipped into my sad life, exactly like my father’s, any way you looked at it.
I’m angry with myself today for leaving ten orphans in the hands of that idiotic woman. But I don’t feel like talking about her. She meant nothing to me when that bullet hit me in the stomach.
A stray bullet. Or better said: an entirely bad luck bullet. There was no reason on earth for me to be hit by a bullet that afternoon. I didn’t even know anything was going on in La Pointe. Not a clue.
You could probably even say it was fate, when you know how much I hate the town of Pointe-à-Pitre. I detest those long flat streets. I’m used to living in the mountains.
In my town, Basse-Terre, it’s only a little ways to get from the port to the heights. From where the boulevard Félix Éboué starts to climb and the dank old prison is located, the heights already begin to overshadow the sea. But the noise and smells of Pointe-à-Pitre make me sick. I need the fresh air of my native Basse-Terre, of Gourbeyre where I was a child, of Saint-Claude where I’ve been living lately—until now.
I only went to Pointe-à-Pitre when I had to, and also to see my beloved sister.
And I had to go on May 26, 1967.
Mother’s Day was coming that Sunday, May 28, but celebrating it was out of the question! The shrew was just waiting for it, so she could go and boast in the streets, “He still belongs to me. That other one can take a hike, the one who says she’s pregnant by him. Because I’m the one he offers presents to on Mother’s Day. I’m the mother of his children.”
I knew her routine too well to get caught in that trap. But May 28 is also my little Georgia’s birthday, and I’d promised her a pair of jeans. She likes to think of herself as a cowboy. She has such great fun with her brothers. They perform scenes from cowboy movies they go see at Le d’Arbaud on Sundays, right after mass. It was always fun to watch her draw her two pretend pistols, her feet wide apart, her eyes narrowed as she found her target. She made me laugh. I laughed when she pretended to slide a glass of whisky over the counter of an imaginary bar. But she wanted jeans and all the equipment, a belt with a holster for her pistol, a bullet pouch that could hold twenty-two bullets, a Stetson, and a sheriff’s badge shaped like a star. She’d asked for all that for Carnival and I’d laughed, not understanding how it might hurt her. She opted out of the Carnival parade at her school, the first time she wasn’t the center of activities at Carnival time. So I swore to myself I’d get her what she wanted for her birthday. I’d gone to La Pointe to buy a belt, a pouch, and a sheriff’s st
ar when that bullet ripped open my stomach—without my seeing anything coming, without even having the time to understand what was happening.
If somebody had asked me about the workers’ strike, I would no doubt have expressed my disapproval, probably with a little smile, that complicit smirk I mentioned at the beginning of this story. It’s crazy, isn’t it?
Silence, a smile, and every man for himself—that’s me.
I’m not a rebel; things that get to me aren’t political, but human, like that business with the casket and the worker from the sugarcane plant. Yeah, I can imagine doing things like that, but I can’t imagine striking or building barricades. I really knew nothing about what was happening in La Pointe that day. Not a thing.
I’d never even set foot on La Place de la Victoire, which is ugly, if you ask me. I’m repeating myself, probably, but honestly not a thing about Pointe-à-Pitre attracts me. I have no attachment to its polluted port or its outlying districts, especially where my sister Emma, her husband Emmanuel, and their children live.
When I get to La Pointe, I have trouble orienting myself, finding it hard to know where it starts and where it ends, wondering how to stop ending up in the township of Abymes. It’s so immense, so labyrinthine, there’s hardly any space for Pointe-à-Pitre. And that “Peter’s Point”—all two square kilometers of it and some change—likes to think of itself as the capital of this country! I know I’m sounding like a bourgeois from Basse-Terre.
Of course we’re in competition, especially with the subprefecture lounging on La Place de la Victoire—and just what “victory” could that be? But Basse-Terre is where the real prefecture and the administration of this entire county are located—that is if you want to think there really is something like an administration. But I don’t give a damn about these rivalries between prefectures and subprefectures. The reason I don’t like La Pointe is simply because it stinks and it has no beautiful views; you can’t see the horizon when you’re there. It makes me feel sick, boxed in, as if I’ve been tied to the ground on my stomach, in the middle of all those filthy gutters full of disgusting fish that thrive in dirty water.
When I get to the bus station in Bergevin and make my way through the swarming crowds, I always try to avoid the pools of water in those giant potholes until I get to boulevard Chanzy, which is endless. And when I finally get to rue Frébault, I seek refuge in the stores if there’s anything I need to buy. But I rarely buy anything in La Pointe. Usually when I go, it’s to see my dear sister, Emma. I need to speak to her, to see her, to listen to what she needs to tell me, to hear her laugh.
Sometimes I succeed in making her laugh in the midst of her list of complaints, even if she feels she has to hide her mouth with her hand to not expose the broken teeth marring her beautiful face. She lets herself go with me: we have fun, like we did when we were kids. My sister isn’t really happy with her little tailor. I can’t imagine calling him anything else—the little tailor—even though he’s gone on to do other things. In my mind, he’ll always be that. I said so to our mother. I told her Emma shouldn’t marry him. I thought he was too old to marry my sister: twenty-eight years old. Emma was only nineteen.
But our mother kept saying it was time to accept a marriage proposal. Had there really been others? I have no idea.
“I’m done with it. There’s nothing more I can do for her.”
Our mother was only forty-two and already worn out, worn out by work, by poverty. All she wanted was to marry off her daughter and have it done with. I was living with my father, so I wasn’t a burden.
“I’ve had it with responsibility.”
But twenty-eight and pretentious . . . “She works; she helps you out,” I pleaded.
“Enough is enough, I’ve already said so.”
You couldn’t argue with our mother.
But I remember the words she muttered, “A small man, a negro who thinks he’s a big boss.”
Luckily, the times I slip into my sister’s home, as though I were a wily lover, her husband is never there. I don’t even know when he’s usually at home, when he gets up and leaves, when he comes back. But around two o’clock, I’m sure he won’t be there. So my sister and I close ourselves in the kitchen, as far away as we can get from the smell of the animals in their pens at the back of the garden.
I can’t stand the smell of chickens, or rabbits, who seem to always want to make faces at me, wiggling their soft rosy noses. And besides, it’s cooler in the kitchen. It’s in the shade and not too big, just enough for us to sit down on a bench and put our heads together—and we can go on for hours while her husband’s away and the kids are in school—and after the girl who helps her with housework has hung up her smell on the back of the kitchen door. During this time, which is ours alone, we talk about our lives.
We also talk about our brother’s life at sea; he joined the navy when he was just seventeen.
Timothée wanted to flee the feeling of suspension in Basse-Terre. That’s what he said at least. What do you mean by “suspension,” we asked him. And he answered by talking about the women who went up and down the hills without appearing to move; it happened so slowly. He talked about how everybody drew out their words, making them last forever. He complained about always meeting the same people in the same place at the same hour. He disliked the passivity and absence of passion that seemed to emanate from Basse-Terre.
If during these last months he’d been able to experience the rush of anger in the streets of Basse-Terre, especially in March, he might have changed his mind. But when he was free of the war against the Germans and panicked at the idea of returning to Basse-Terre to twiddle his thumbs, he elected to plunge into the conflict in Indochina, in Saigon, in a climate even more humid than La Pointe’s. It took seventeen days of travel on Le Pasteur, but that period of his life cut him off from the rest of the world.
I never told Emma any of his stories of ambushes, deaths, atrocities, Vietnamese prostitutes, or hunting wild black pigs in the jungle. For years after his return, Timothée’s life looked normal, even banal—a wife, kids, an okay job at Saint Hyacinthe Hospital. And then he fell into a bottomless depression.
He hasn’t spoken for over a year; he just looks at us and cries, his body overcome by sobs, like a child.
The big man—who used to pick up our mother as though she were a feather to tuck her in bed in the last years of her life, who delicately washed her and braided her hair—has turned into a long sack of bones piled into a beige leatherette armchair in a sitting room. And all this in a cramped building, backed against the mountains of Basse-Terre, trapped like a beached ship.
I navigate from one to the other, from Timothée to Emma, from La Pointe to Basse-Terre, and it seems that in 1967 I’ll have seesawed from a rioting city to a city in revolt. I won’t have had the chance to talk with my sweet sister about the fury taking over La Pointe, because I never made it to her neighborhood. I only heard her voice in my ear, at the moment when death claimed my body, after the bullet tore up my insides. Yes, her voice, as soft as my mother’s when she was finally at peace, a voice hovering over me, as if she’d crossed the city to be with me in my last moments. She still doesn’t know a bullet has just robbed her of her brother. When will she find out?
I hear my sister’s voice and it seems my mother is speaking to me.
In fact, I actually see my mother on the other side, welcoming me and connecting me to other victims of today’s violence with one of her old stories.
One year Mother told us this story about a young man who disguised himself as Death. This took place in Gourbeyre during Carnival.
“Nothing really very scary, children. Just a young boy, hardly more than a child, who covered his head with a sheet. I don’t even think he poked holes in it for his eyes. Just a Carnival mask of Death, really nothing more than that. So he walks near the gendarmerie in Gourbeyre and some gendarme’s wife, some white lady on her veranda, sees him, gets scared, and runs back into the house screaming. What could
she have said? That a black guy tried to touch her, rape her? Whatever it was, her gendarme husband grabbed his pistol without a second thought, and he shot and killed the Carnival ghost, a ghost hiding a very real young man. How can I capture what the population felt then: apathy, frustration? The boy’s father had been in Basse-Terre, who knows what he was doing there or why. But when he heard his son had been killed by the gendarmes in Gourbeyre, he decided to walk home and claim his son’s body, probably to mourn. Maybe to take revenge. Who can say whether or not he said what any father might—must—say upon learning his child has been murdered: ‘Tala ki tchouyé pitit an mwen-la, an ké fin chyé avè’y!’
“Yeah, maybe he said he’d make the man who killed his son pay, maybe he did. But any father who respects himself has to say such a thing: a son is not a dog—and even a dog, you don’t shoot it when it gets its head stuck in a paper bag and runs around like an imbecile. You just laugh. You laugh, right? In any case, the mounted Gourbeyre gendarmes, claiming the father had made his intention to seek revenge clear (even if nobody heard it), arrested him, the man who’d just lost his son. They caught up with him on the road from Basse-Terre and tied him to a horse and dragged him all the way from Basse-Terre to Gourbeyre: trotting, trotting, trotting, galloping, galloping, galloping. And they laughed, those mindless men; they laughed thinking that such a demonstration of strength would shut the population up. They laughed because they were adding another dead man to the family of a dead man. They laughed until the sound of fury jarred them out of their insouciance and their arrogance.
“The sound of fury is like the sound of the earth. Who here has heard the roar of the earth when it’s angry?You can’t locate where it’s coming from, but when the sound of the earth starts to grow, you understand how you’re always living your life on tiptoe and that something greater, totally invisible, has given you permission to scrape by. And so the sound of the people’s fury, from Gourbeyre, Basse-Terre, Vieux-Habitants, Bouillante, Capesterre, arose from the corners of the land because our words travel faster than telegrams. Because our words are like the earth’s words, like its sound: You’ve hardly understood how it spreads, how fast it’s going, where its epicenter is located before it’s caught you off balance, sent you into a tailspin, upended cars, burned down buildings, floored men, and torn apart those on the fault line between two worlds. It makes those living in arrogance head for the hills. They hide and don’t know where to hide; their guns no longer serve a purpose because all of a sudden people’s chests have become like steel, and bullets can’t hurt them.
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