Kannjawou

by Lyonel Trouillot

  MONSIEUR VALLIÈRES IS STILL THE MOST REGULAR CUSTOMER. Anyone who’s there for the first time says yes to his invitation, falling into his trap: he buys their first beer, and they sit down at his table. But quickly they grow bored of his ramblings and begin to throw desperate glances at the other tables, hoping that some good soul will come to rescue them from Alexander the Great’s contentions with death, or the usage of rhetoric in the Catiline Orations, or other topics of conversation that are of no interest to them. Finally they give in to the siren call of the party, leaving Monsieur Vallières alone with his ghosts and heading to the dance floor, beers in hand. He continues to lecture gloomily about the uncultured people who mix up Haiti and Tahiti, or the Catiline Orations and the new book by the trendy novelist whose name he can’t remember, or the people who believe that the myth of the Amazons came about at the same time as the New World…. He comes across as too old, and some of the young customers have complained to the owner about how he spoils the mood. Pleasure is no less totalitarian than pain. He wants to dominate the place. No other person can stand him. There’s a novel I borrowed from the little professor’s library, I no longer remember which one, in which a dictator bulldozes a shantytown, leaving standing only the little house of the woman he wants. He watches it from his palace using a pair of all-powerful binoculars. At the bar, there are dictators. Why is this old guy hanging out in a bar for young people, as though to remind us that there’s other things in life besides ourselves and the things we do? Kannjawou is ours. The owner reserves all his fear for his wife and has none left for others. Kannjawou is mine. He ordered the security guard to show the insolent complainers the door. Lifting his head from his whisky, he confided in Sophonie and the other servers. “Nothing lasts. They’ll all leave. And one day this bar will be nothing but a memory. A relic. Its popularity will end with the Occupation. No one will come here anymore. Except him. One day, only he and I will be left. They’re looking to gulp life down—here, elsewhere. Everywhere. They destroy the world in order to pay for their travels. But he chose my bar, and only death will chase him away. Pray that he lives for a long time, so you can keep your jobs.” But there’s not much chance of that. The employees will leave, surely, when the clients do. Or before. Franklin is saving up money to open up a hair salon and return to where he came from. Marcello hopes that his name will open other doors for him. With his experience, he might one day be offered a job at a fancy hotel. I don’t know what Sophonie’s plans are. But I believe that she’s given enough, and that one day she’ll decide that weakness is human and that she, too, has the right to be mean and greedy. To take more than she gives. Yes, soon the owner will find himself alone. And he’ll need pretexts other than the onslaught of clients and the emergencies of the job to escape his wife’s calls. Monsieur Vallières won’t hold on for very long. He’s acting more and more like a dying person. He left the management of his store to his eldest son. The younger son collects the rents from his buildings downtown. And his daughter forbids him from seeing his grandchildren whenever she decides he’s had too much to drink. One of the three has to come find him on the evenings when he falls asleep at the table, his face buried in his folded arms. I imagine they argue a lot beforehand about which one of them has to perform the chore of coming to collect the old man. It’s easy to believe that one night he won’t be able to lift his head again, and his children will bring home only a lifeless body to be buried in the new cemetery, in the northern part of the city. His funeral will feature a procession of new cars from which his heirs and old acquaintances, dressed up in new outfits, will descend. He won’t have the right to the “infinite laughter of the sea” nor “this quiet roof, where doves walk by.” After all, it’s his fault, Wodné would say. He only had to instill in them the taste of beauty, rather than a taste for business. But I doubt anyway that Wodné has read Aeschylus or Valéry. They’re too abstract, a waste of time in his eyes—just as they are for his businessmen, his supposed enemies. In his little circle of rebels without diplomas, he can condemn powerful businessmen without much risk. And yet there are two things he has in common with them. A complete ignorance of the principle of loss. And a fierce hatred for mystery and dreams. Or maybe just one thing, but it counts for everything: hatred, pure and simple.

  SANDRINE IS GONE. She threw a party, her good-bye kannjawou, in an unremarkable bar. The owner is a former cooperation officer-turned-restaurateur who sometimes walks around with his dog, whom he clearly prefers to the customers. He doesn’t know anything about the business. The proof of this is that he hired Abner, who drinks as much as the customers do. Abner’s the one who told Sophonie all this. Parties happen one after the other and none of them are quite the same. For her good-bye party, the little brunette had chosen kitschy lamps designed to look like the moon, a neighborhood without passersby, and a new bar, and every guest had to pay for his own drink. Popol and Sophonie weren’t among those chosen to attend. Only her work colleagues, all foreigners, plus one Belgian and one Spaniard from her dance class, were invited. The sole local present stayed off to the side and didn’t mingle with the others. It was the jealous boyfriend of a cultural attaché; the man had once almost thrown the attaché out the window of their apartment—which she paid for in full—one evening when she accused him of saying nothing but insults in front of their guests. The embassy had covered up the whole affair, advising the attaché to get her ribs fixed at her own expense and with complete discretion and to choose better sexual partners next time. Ever since, the couple has come to an arrangement. The attaché continues to pay for the apartment. The stud has the right to the room in the back, where he shuts himself up whenever she has distinguished guests over. He can accompany her when she goes out on the condition that he remain discreet. As the little brunette and her friends were talking about the job that she would soon take in some Asian country, he was drinking a local beer at the bar. His eyes were staring vacantly into space, and no doubt his thoughts were empty, too. After a quick stop in Britain, enough time to see her parents and her first nephew, the little brunette would leave to offer her services to another sick country, where typhoons had inflicted damage that local leaders must be incapable of fixing.

  EVER SINCE THE WEDNESDAY NIGHT WHEN I HAD COME OUT OF MY ROOM TO FIND THREE BODIES INTERTWINED— one of them must have opened the door at some point to let some air in—the little brunette hadn’t come back to Burial Street, nor had she spoken to Sophonie on any of the nights she had been at Kannjawou. Of course, she came to Kannjawou less frequently during the weeks preceding her departure. She wasn’t as frantic and frightened as she had been back when she was lurking in shadowy corners and trying to stay hidden, like a small animal venturing into a wide-open space where it knows that it will almost certainly be devoured by a more dangerous animal. Fearing the bite and yet still looking for it. She changed. Became less sad, more lighthearted. She was already elsewhere. As though in her head, she had already cast off everything she’d experienced in this country. The tears. Marc. That one strange night of love when she had received as much as she had given and given as much as she had received. On her last night, Marc had tried to ask her to dance. She refused, shaking her head. He insisted. She refused again. With a smile this time. I think it was the smile that killed him. He paused for a minute, motionless. Like a rooster without a comb, who realizes that his very presence is ridiculous and becomes ashamed of himself. The worst thing for a clown is to feel as though there is nothing left of himself other than his clown suit. That if you took off the suit, there would be nothing underneath. And there he was, a ghost sticking out his guayabera-clad chest. But a predator doesn’t stay dead for long. A hundred times consider putting on your guayabera again. I wonder what relationship he has with the woman who washes it. There must be a mother or a servant who takes care of his clothes for him and serves him coffee while he puts the finishing touches on his act. Maybe when it’s time for him to leave, he holds his arms out to the woman and says, “Pass me my c
lothes.” Like surgeons when they enter the operating room. A surgeon doesn’t die from having failed one operation. As long as there are still more bodies…So the guayabera-man pulled himself together, glancing around to make sure no one had caught him looking at himself in the mirror, then left to go to another party. Resuscitated. For some people, shame doesn’t stick around very long. Shame can kill. And they want to live. Their last will: to still be around tomorrow. To take advantage of everything. To eat up someone else’s ass, pussy, heart. To guzzle air, time, rivers, cities, highways, skyscrapers, paths, beltways, the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, archipelagoes, continents, bridges, the water that passes under the bridges, the humans who throw themselves into the water. To devour the world, taking ogres as their models. And yet Marc can’t be very rich. He must live in a house similar to those on Burial Street. If it’s a servant who washes his shirts, he must have trouble paying her at the end of the month without calling one of his conquests for help. If it’s his mother, she must do everything for both of them: laundry, work, dishes. Prepare the water for their baths. If it’s a servant, over time she must have developed the ruses and powers of a mistress, learning how to get by with the little he gives her. Inventing hot meals. Blackmailing him. Threatening to leave, or to burn his shirt. “Who else besides me would agree to work in these conditions?” Wait for him in bed, knowing that he’ll return to her after he’s chased after Sandrine, Corinne, and the others. If it’s his mother, she must be embarrassed when her friends ask her, “What is your son doing?” One day, she will die from grief while the son in question is strutting around in a guayabera in a trendy bar. Maybe one morning we’ll see Marc walking down our street at the front of a funeral procession. A procession made up of farmers ill at ease in their nicest clothes, and humble folk who’ve never set foot in a bar like Kannjawou. Nor in a bar like the one we went to with the little professor. Nor in any bar, for that matter. People who don’t participate in society life, who never leave their houses except to make a modest salary. If it’s a servant who does his laundry and prepares his meals, maybe one day she’ll put rat poison into his bowl of rice and watch him kick the bucket before taking off. Mam Jeanne tells a story about a servant-mistress who killed her lover-boss. Not because of all the paychecks she had never received because he could never pay them. Nor because of the real mistresses who spent the night in the bed she had to make in the morning. It was just because when they made love he refused to kiss her. I’m a woman, so kiss me. I have lips, too, just like your stuck-up mistresses. If it’s his mother, maybe one morning he’ll discover that her old heart stopped while she was sitting on a low chair in front of the portable stove, leaning over to light the coals so that she could make coffee for him. Will his current conquest walk at his side, dignified, pale, and concerned in her mourning attire? Or will he refuse to let her attend, so that he can keep death as his one area of truth? Or will she refuse to accompany him? She came to find joy, not death. Go grieve, and return to me afterwards.

  THE LAST NIGHT SANDRINE WAS AT KANNJAWOU, DESPITE THE CUSTOMERS’ YOUTH AND THE INTENSITY OF THEIR SWAYING HIPS, AN OLD SONG THAT MAM JEANNE ADORES TO HUM CAME INTO MY HEAD. She uses it as shorthand for describing people who resemble things. They go, go, go this way, the little puppets… It makes me laugh to see her turn her old hands in circles when she hums it, looking suddenly like a little kid as she pronounces a final judgment on this man that she’s known since childhood or that public personality or this or that neighborhood boy or girl, all of whom share the same disastrous situation of having missed out on their truths. They go, go, go this way… Three little turns, and then they go away…

  Mademoiselle, would you like to dance? But no one uses those dated phrases anymore. After sending Marc away, the little brunette agreed to dance with another man. They began spinning on the dance floor. Then, forgetting the man, she began to dance all by herself. Responding to the call of the music. There was nothing but her and the music. For the first time, she was no longer the pitiable sight of a body seeking indifference, begging for a partner who would treat her as though he were doing her a favor, touch her as one might touch an affectionate dog—with a distracted, forced caress before sending it back to its kennel. For the first time, her dancing was free instead of forced, pleading; it didn’t beg anyone: torture me, knead me, break me, manipulate me. For the first time, her body wasn’t crying out, “I want you to love me, I know you don’t love me, it’s okay if you just pretend, don’t even pretend, do whatever you want, but just do it with me, with my body.” People can also become respectable through their bodies. Freedom makes itself known through the body. Mam Jeanne tells how, during the first Occupation, the Americans participated in the white slave trade, importing Dominican prostitutes. One teenage girl brought here by force had sliced off the genitals of a U.S. Marine. The Marine nonetheless promised to bring her with him back to his country. Haitian women had helped the other prostitutes hide her. Proper and righteous mothers with their own daughters to raise had taken her under their roofs. Despite her whiteness and her profession. The little prostitute had become the most Haitian of all the Dominicans. At the end of the Occupation, she returned to her home country. She was less pretty than when she had arrived. But she was more beautiful. So yes, people become respectable through their bodies. Everyone at the bar was looking at Sandrine. I think Marc saw, like the rest of us did, how that body had learned to live for itself, to move for itself. To love itself, finally. Even Monsieur Vallières, lost in the history of the Latin world, sensed that something new—maybe even something exceptional—was happening. He lifted his head from his table and began to shout: Isadora, Isadora! At the end of her dance, the little brunette smiled at Sophonie. Popol was waiting on the wall. I had gone to sit down with Monsieur Vallières, for long enough to ask him, why Isadora? Her name is Sandrine. He told me about the American dancer whose body had been a revolution. I looked at him, stunned. It was because of his reference to the United States, where, according to him, no remarkable advancements in civilization had ever been made. And because of the word “revolution,” which ordinarily he used only in the plural, to denounce their barbarism. This positive usage of the word contradicted his hatred of plebeians. He smiled, telling me that he had nothing against revolutions, except that people never know how to do them, nor with whom, and so they were one of those things that he was content to like from afar, speaking of them only to himself. Especially not to his wife and his children. And he hadn’t talked to them in a long time about anything, anyway. They only appreciated the most vulgar components of the United States: fast food and superstores. Certainly they had never heard of Isadora Duncan. He also hated listening to them brag about the advantages and opportunities the Occupation presented for entrepreneurs. His sons are hoping to increase their sales revenue by getting involved in transporting equipment. “The traitors.” Hidden behind his soliloquies about what is inferior and what is superior, dance and revolutions, Latin and family life, is Monsieur Vallières’ misfortune of not belonging to any time period and of wanting incompatible things at the same time. He talks like the books that Joseph has bound, in which you find pages and subjects belonging to different books all jumbled together. “Don’t try to understand me. At times I don’t even understand myself.” It’s true that you can’t understand everything. Do I understand why, in my own notebooks, I sometimes write “Sandrine” instead of “the little brunette”? Does it mean that in my mind, she has become a person rather than a caricature? They go, go, go this way, the little puppets… But sometimes, on the third turn, the puppets become human. They throw off their strings and hold themselves up all by themselves, masters of their own movements. Sophonie won. Or almost. She taught us something. Taught Sandrine. Taught me. And without thinking about it, she continues to serve the customers. Without asking for anything. Her modest repayment was that smile, their last bit of contact. Freedom is also the freedom to forget. No one spends their life saying thank you. This was an id
ea close to Wodné’s heart, that you shouldn’t waste time calculating your debts. It holds you back from moving forward. That’s why he doesn’t smile at people when they shake his hand. The little brunette, Sandrine, at least had the politeness to smile. A month later, she threw the intimate party with its fake-moon lights. A stingy little party, with everyone calculating their portion of the bill: I had a beer, you had a kir, you had a whisky and soda. Not like the kannjawou that Anselme dreams about for his final voyage. A real party, to which everyone will be invited: parents, friends, friends of friends, people who live in the next town over, anyone. Sandrine or the little brunette—I’m not sure what I’ll call her in my memories—had a little two-square-meter party. The next day she returned the keys to her service vehicle to her old bosses, who surely must have then wished her good luck at her new job. A Haitian chauffeur drove her to the airport.