Kannjawou

by Lyonel Trouillot

  THE LAST GOOD JOKE WAS THE ZOMBIE ATTACK. It toured the whole town, provoking laughs in homes and bars and even inspiring a few jokes on the radio. A theater troupe created a sketch from it that they performed in the public markets and on the steps of the chapels on festival days. Annoyed by this bit of ridiculousness invading his troops, the police chief put out a memo reminding everyone of the institution’s motto: to protect and serve, a job for which it’s difficult to gain respect. Impossible without the assistance and cooperation of the whole population. He then ordered stricter surveillance of the area surrounding the great cemetery. The lower-ranking police officers assigned to this task began making rounds that for a time slowed down the activities of Halefort’s gang. But the police officers were miserable and complained to each other about having passed the national exams to go to the capital, only to have to keep watch over dead people’s bedsides. The whispers grew louder. Put under pressure by this new surveillance, the pillagers asked Halefort, their boss, to make an arrangement with the unhappy guards. After all, even the guardian of Christ’s body abandoned his post. The police officers and tomb raiders sealed their deal one evening underneath Mam Jeanne’s window. The thieves agreed to share their profits and to be more discreet. For this they would be allowed to work in peace at regular hours, like office workers, and would receive a steady income. They would take turns allowing themselves to be arrested once a month for attempting to rob a coffin and would spend a few hours at the police station before being released with no charges. The agreement works perfectly and without any unforeseen problems. But the stability doesn’t necessarily make them happy. Halefort paid off his gambling and alcohol debts. He also cast aside his roguish persona, adopting a more respectable one instead. Even the old ladies in the neighborhood have begun to respond to his greetings. He doesn’t hide any more from his son, who has begun to see him regularly and seems less sickly and better clothed. But at night, while his subordinates are robbing the dead without any need to hurry, and loading the coffins into the cars of the national public transportation system, Halefort mopes around the streets and alleyways near Burial Street in a fit of nostalgia. Passers-by who are out late sometimes mistake him for a ghost. He has begun to disappear for a few days and return with a smile on his face. I suspect that he goes to open the tombs in suburban cemeteries to keep himself in the game and satisfy his thirst for risk. As for the police officers, whose job is less exciting than that of the grave robbers, they’ve won more hours of sleep. More time with their mistresses. And their prestige is growing in their respective communities. If one of their loved ones dies, they respond to calls for help from their community by bringing them a beautiful secondhand coffin, the proof that they’ve succeeded in the capital without forgetting their origins. At night, the noise of the pick-axes and shovels seems to me sometimes like something very far away, but also predictable, without the slightest surprise, and I feel even more alone when I write.

  JUST AS BEFORE, ONE WEDNESDAY EVERY MONTH I GO WITH POPOL TO MEET SOPHONIE AT KANNJAWOU. We watch other people’s lives without speaking. Monsieur Régis stays faithful to the big gulps of whisky he drinks alone behind his desk. His wife calls him at all hours, inventing new insults each time. Sometimes the words are difficult and Monsieur Régis has to go consult Monsieur Vallières: “The Catholic Isabella called me a sybarite.” Monsieur Vallières is the only one of his customers to use words like that. Sybarite or not, Monsieur Régis sweats a lot. The more she calls, the more he sweats. One day he’ll slip in his own sweat. We can’t hear the words, but you can see from the courtyard that he’s losing all the water from his body and stammering, waving his arms like a drowning person.

  In the Occupation forces and the NGO offices, new employees are constantly coming and going, in the name of democracy and the principle of rotation and also so that representatives from all countries can take advantage of the opportunity. One expert replaces another. And so the bar’s clientele changes, too, so quickly that Sophonie has a hard time memorizing the names of the customers. The tall blonde has left, replaced by a redhead in the same mold. The Three Musketeers, too. Other girls have come—girls who haven’t yet chosen between the local studs, who are always on the lookout, and the foreign executives. The local studs have in their favor their exotic shirts and their skill on the dance floor. Marc wears the same guayabera and has set his sights on an exhausted-looking psychologist who’s leading a project to reintegrate street children. The young foreign executives brag to the newcomers about how long they’ve been here and the safety they can offer. “If you want to better understand the culture of the country, to know the best beaches and to go hiking in the countryside, I’m your man. I already know the language and I’m used to the customs.” Soldiers have come, too, recognizable by their shaved heads and muscular bodies. But they’re rarer. Civil servants earn more money. Bars are like funeral processions: hearts are worn on people’s sleeves. At Kannjawou, the people don’t have any doubts, aside from Monsieur Vallières and the little brunette. As though they all have one-track minds. Happy are the bodies of the occupiers. The intellectuals who talk about structures and international events and the Occupation are first and foremost bodies. The children of Burial Street know this. At the Cultural Center, when Wodné asks them to draw something that has to do with the Occupation, they draw more bodies than things. It’s strange that Wodné has asked them to do this. He doesn’t like to draw anymore. It was a long time ago that he drew imaginary cities with Popol. These days, I believe that he doesn’t like anything except for hate and possession. And that improbable thing he’s been preparing for. As kids, we dreamed of a city in celebration. I don’t see Wodné organizing a celebration. He does, however, have a happy body, like the occupiers. At the university, he’ll show up at the slightest skirmish between a student and a professor or a member of the administration. Like the big tough guys at the front of the rival gangs during carnival processions who are hoping that some moron will be the first to throw a punch so that they can have the immense pleasure of hitting someone weaker than them. Wodné has a nose for sniffing out crisis and he gloats with joy whenever it directs him to a new one. A body arching in triumph. Especially ever since the professor stopped visiting the neighborhood. I’ve noticed that Joëlle always walks behind him and speaks in a monotone. One of the kids drew the couple, without labeling their names. You could see the man in front and the woman behind, with a rope linking them together. Wodné didn’t want to say anything about the drawing under the pretext that the kid had gotten distracted—it happens—and drawn something unrelated to the theme. Sophonie had intervened: “We have to respond to everything, or we won’t respond to anything. And then the powers are all alike.” Sophonie doesn’t often speak up at the Center. There are even some idiots who think that it’s better that way, because of her job. And because she abandoned her studies a long time ago. But Sophonie has the children’s confidence. Wodné gets tired quickly. The children are more malleable for indoctrination than the young adults. It’s not enough to tell them, “You’re traitors to yourselves,” giving them a bad conscience so that they’ll become scared and throw their hearts into the trashcan. They never miss a chance to ask, “Why”?

  “Why are you the boss?”

  “Why doesn’t the little professor come to read to us anymore?”

  “Why don’t you ever laugh?”

  “Do you ever cry? What does love mean to you?”

  Yes, Wodné, why does Joëlle say, “He gives an order, I carry it out?” Why are you scared of children? Children are the uncontrollable force that walks into the middle of the wind. Popol likes them well enough without being very good with them. As for me, all I know how to do is to read them stories. But I’m ashamed of doing so in the little professor’s place. And I have a very hard time listening to their own stories. Children are capable of strange analogies, and woe to those who claim to understand or expect them. A child is never a stopped clock, except when misfortune strikes t
hem too hard and they stop daring to move. Children are traveling all the time—rising up to the sky, descending into the depths of the sea, dancing with colors and words, bringing together the living and the dead and the young and the old, replacing reality with dreams whenever reality is bad, showing you a dream while saying, “Look, this is real” and looking at you with a challenge in their eyes whenever you’d like to say that their dream isn’t true. And then all of a sudden they become pragmatic and more realistic than you, saying that if Father Christmas did ever exist he must be quite dead, given that he’s never come to Burial Street. And if he’s not dead—you never know, there’s no dust-covered tomb bearing his name in the great cemetery—it must be that he’s busy elsewhere. They surprise you, explain to you that that all these stories with their fairy godmothers, snowmen, white dolls, and mermaids who live in the sea are things that are put in books with pretty illustrations to help us forget how dry the bread is, on the nights when we do even have bread. Children move you all the time, drag you places you don’t want to go, empty Pandora’s box, bring your old secrets to light, take your mask off, reveal your fakeries to you when you’re least expecting it, see the invisible rope between the man walking in front and the woman walking behind and the power struggles behind the nice-sounding words. Sophonie is the only one who manages to follow them without getting tired. When she speaks, they listen to her. Ordinarily, she lets Wodné and his gang be and doesn’t get mixed up too much in the Center’s affairs. But when it has to do with children, she’s the boss. Without wanting to be. The children chose her. The one who understands the words from our mouths before the others do, the one who does things because of us and for us, without taking the lead or treading on others’ toes—that’s her, our leader. And the leader said, “We have to respond to everything.” Joëlle stayed mute. In the silence, I heard the distance between the two sisters. And I wondered if Anselme had ever read in the cards that his two daughters wouldn’t follow the same path, that he would perhaps have two halves of a kannjawou. Two pieces of a party. Two life paths going in opposite ways. Poor Anselme. Anselme, with his worn-out body, hoping that his two daughters would support him, each one taking an arm to help him walk towards his homeland one last time. That a car would come to take them to Arcahaie, to the land that hadn’t belonged to him for a long time. That no longer belongs to anyone. Even the old soldiers and the shady lawyers who seized them don’t want it any longer. Land that now belongs to cacti and dust, where experts and foreigners on vacation stop their cars in order to photograph the barren landscape. Anselme, who’s preparing for an imaginary voyage to his native village where vaccines*, drums, dancing, and food are waiting for him and his daughters. Anselme, who believes he’s still rich enough to offer everyone a babaco* with cows, pigs, clairin, and liquor. Anselme, who has returned to childhood. Anselme, who believes that his daughters are taking care of the preparations. Anselme, the remnants of a body. With his useless legs. His ruined card games. Anselme, who knew how to say to a woman, “By the virtues of the ace of spades and the trickery of the jack of diamonds, a man will enter into your life, love you for a little while, and then leave you,” or to a young man, “By the power of the king of hearts and the beauty of the queen of clubs, you will love two women; the first will give you everything, but you’ll leave her for a pretty picture; the second one will take everything from you. You’ll wander the seas for a long time, and you’ll die at sea on the night of a full moon.” Or else, “You, the old man with the broken body: life still has surprises in store for you. If you’re a just man, justice will be served, and you will find again what you thought you had lost.” That’s Anselme talking to himself, pretending to talk to others. Anselme and his divinations. Anselme and his ramblings. Who hadn’t foreseen that others would take his land away from him. That he would be forced to sell it for a low price. Who hadn’t foreseen Port-au-Prince and the little house on Burial Street. Immacula and the little baby, who came too early. Before they had even adapted to the noisiness of the neighborhood. And then the second baby, three years later. Another girl. And the stress when the piastres* from the forced sale of the land ran out. The loans, Immacula’s little side job as a nurse’s aid. And then one day, just like that, with no warning, chest pains. And the older child returning from school, asking “Where’s Mamma?” And the response: “Be a very big girl.” And ever since then, she has been big enough for three people. Even bigger when her father began to lose his wits. Anselme, who had returned to living in his native village, without moving anywhere. Anselme, who doesn’t know that today, kannjawous are held in the bars of rich people, and that Sophonie carries glasses and plates in one of those bars. Anselme, who doesn’t need to know that the route to Arcahaie is lined with soldiers who don’t speak our country’s language. Anselme, who doesn’t need to know that these days, the fortune tellers are the gentlemen in suits, rich from per diems and risk premiums, who come and go, come again, leave again, decide on the best times to devalue the currency, to replace a bridge with another one, to blow up the side of a mountain with dynamite, to leave—but it’s not any time soon, because “There are so many things still to do here.” Anselme, with his legs of skin and bone. His drumstick legs, as the children say. They’re right. The whole world is bodies. Relationships between one body and the next. Between a body and itself. Between a body and space. In the streets, the children see more tanks and armored vehicles, more flags and emblems, than actual soldiers and officials. But an object that’s out of place surprises no one. You can move an object around yourself. For tanks and armored vehicles you only need an instruction manual to learn how to move them. As for flags, every time someone raises one, someone else takes it down again. Objects have no value in and of themselves; their value is in the strength of the hand that exercises power over them. But for a person, their presence is the proof of their power. When someone comes and settles down in your house, telling you, “Leave, you can’t stay here,”—or when they say, “Stay here. Don’t move. Be quiet and leave me be”—that’s the proof that they’ve asserted their power. And you’re nothing more than the object on which they’ve asserted it. The bodies of the occupiers are free. They can leave, stay, go away again, return. At Kannjawou, Sophonie witnessed a horrible thing that perhaps might be common, seeing as there are other bars and other embassies. One night, when not many people were there, a young officer had left the bar, slightly tipsy. Ten minutes later, he returned, his face distraught. He had rejoined his table. There were murmurs and telephone calls. Then a car from his embassy and a diplomatic official showed up looking for him. The next day, he was put on a plane. As he had been driving back to his apartment, the car he was driving had hit someone, projecting him into a ditch. The man had died from the shock. One pedestrian. One car that was driving too fast. One body in a plane. One body in a ditch. One guy, one ambassador. A living body and a dead body. One who will have the choice of remembering or forgetting. One who might possibly be forgotten by everyone. The identity of the dead man was covered up. Maybe he had children, a lover. But sometimes those who survive aren’t able to remember. Sometimes surviving is a full-time job that burns up all your energy. When you don’t know how your day is going to end, there’s no yesterday and no tomorrow for you, no dreams and no memories. Maybe this is why there aren’t as many people in the funeral processions. The living are too busy not dying; they don’t have the time anymore to accompany the dead.

  AT KANNJAWOU, SOPHONIE IS NOW THE MOST SENIOR SERVER. Fritznel asked for special time off to visit his dying mother in a village in Grand’Anse. He never came back. The last anyone heard, the old woman lived for longer than expected, and so the prodigal son—who had to do something while he was waiting for her to die—took up working in the field again, regaining a taste for outdoor festivals and home-grown tomatoes. He announced that he would never set foot in the capital again, not for anything in the world. From time to time he’ll send the owner vegetables from his garden to remind him of
his existence. He’s part of the latest wave of lunatics who have returned to the countryside. That’s what Monsieur Régis says. He takes the vegetables home for himself. Not everything is shared with the customers. Abner was serving himself beer a little too often and was beginning to stagger while at work. Finally, the owner called him out on it, telling him that a man should have a sense of moderation. Abner chose to hand in his resignation so as to avoid being fired, playing the indignant victim while stashing two last bottles in his backpack. He found a position in another bar and graduated from beer to whiskey. Two younger guys replaced him. Marcello, although that isn’t his real name. But he had looked for a job for a long time using his given name without finding anything. A name, as we all know, can give the wrong impression. After careful consideration, he decided to adopt the name Marcello due to a slight resemblance to the Brazilian soccer player, a resemblance that no one would have noticed if he had introduced himself as Boniface Beauséjour. “Marcello? It’s true, you do look a little bit like him,” and so the deal was sealed. To add to his story, he tells everyone that he plays left wing on an amateur team every Saturday morning, even though the only thing he plays is the Sunday lottery, using half the money he gets from tips. The owner also hired Franklin, who’s a little older but who comes across well and plays neither soccer nor the lottery. He’s very kind. Too kind, according to the cook, who has very strict ideas about manliness. Franklin tried to explain that it wasn’t his fault, that when he was a child, his parents had whipped him and his mother had recited novena prayers, even consulted a bokor*, but neither the spankings nor the nondenominational prayers had changed anything. He preferred dolls to soccer, except when the soccer players were very good-looking. The owner interrupted him then, saying that considering the number of homosexual customers he had, he might as well have homosexual servers, too. And at any rate, people’s sexuality was their own affair, as long as they didn’t leave condoms in his bathrooms.