Kannjawou

  When we return home from the bar, Sophonie and Popol pass right by the street corner where we had found her that night—dirty, sad, ugly from her sadness—without stopping. Why would they stop? There’s no one there. No battered bodies. No sound of sobbing. There’s nothing but the closed doors of the houses on the street. They go, go, go this way…

  A KID CAME BY TO TELL ME THAT THE LITTLE PROFESSOR WAS EXPECTING ME AT HIS HOUSE.

  Not a hustler like Hans and Vladimir. A timid kid, who never participates in the conversations after the readings. The little professor had grown fond of him. I didn’t know that he was continuing to study with him in secret in his library. The little professor hasn’t visited us on Burial Street since Joëlle’s outburst, contenting himself instead with sending books from time to time for the little kids at the Center. I play the go-between, bringing the books back to him once a week. I don’t tell him that the books he lends us are often the subjects of impassioned polemics. Jasmine, an education student who sometimes talks as though she’s reading from a manual, thinks they’re too scholarly. She’s developing a theory of progression. From short sentences to complex ones, from simple stories to chapter books. Wodné takes advantage of the opportunity to denounce the arrogance of the intellectuals who wrote them, saying that they have lost all sense of moderation. When I go to return the books to the little professor and borrow some more, we spend some time discussing them. He receives me in his library on the second floor. I don’t find anything immoderate in what he says. I only see that he has grown older. I hear steps and sometimes voices coming from the guest room. One night I thought I saw the shadow of Monsieur Laventure. But it didn’t occur to me to ask questions. The little professor and I only ever talk about characters in novels or from history, avoiding the touchy subjects of the real-life people we both know. The exception to this is Mam Jeanne; with a smile, he asks if she’s still handy with a bowl of cat piss. And yet I know that everything he says about the world or love or any given character or philosophical position is based on whatever bewitching image of Joëlle he has in his head at that moment. The world and his relationship to it change according to whether his thoughts of her are fulfilling or sad. I can sense it whenever he’s about to break his silence, ready to ask me to lend him my eyes: How is she? Do you see her? The silly questions that lovers ask. Here’s what I would like to respond to the questions he doesn’t dare ask: It’s time for you to look elsewhere. She’s no prettier than her sister. And she’s lost the ability to imagine. Like most people, she can only see what’s right in front of her. Her head is a ghetto, without space for anyone or anything else. I can’t tell him these things. If I were to say those words, they would become too real. I wouldn’t be able to take them back, the way you can take it back when you say “I love you” or “I hate you.” Joëlle would become for me exactly what I’d said, and I’d lose out on smiles and dreams. I don’t want to lose Joëlle. I want to give her time to change, to pick herself up again, as though she were a character in a novel. And anyway, who am I to draw such conclusions about someone? I haven’t accomplished anything. Other than these notebooks, which I abandon, pick up again, destroy, rewrite. The little professor has grown older. He drinks too much. He always offers me a beer, which I don’t dare to refuse for fear of hurting his feelings. But I’m angry with myself for going along with it. Sometimes he dozes off, and I leave him to sleep sitting up in his office, walk down the stairs alone, close the front door behind me, head back towards my house, stop for a bit in one of the open-air bars at the Champ-de-Mars. Then, sometimes passing by military patrols, I continue my descent towards Burial Street. There I am greeted by the snores of ghosts, the two retired tradesmen, who have been put to sleep in the same bed again by Hans and Vladimir. I pass in front of the house of the girls, who barely talk to each other any more. In front of Mam Jeanne’s house. I imagine Loyal curled up at his mistress’s feet. Which one will betray the other by leaving first? Mam Jeanne doesn’t talk about death very often. Only once: My little one, a woman who has experienced two eras of Occupation in her lifetime has the right to die before the second one ends. No, Mam Jeanne, I don’t want you to die. Not while all your stories still don’t have a happy ending. It’s not a good time to die. You say yourself that someone who dies in a time of sadness brings eternal sadness with them into the grave, where it mixes with the earth, sullies it, defeats it, and sterilizes its heart.

  AND SO AFTER THE KID’S VISIT, I LEFT FOR THE LITTLE PROFESSOR’S HOUSE. What emergency could he be having? I knew that he was supposed to teach that day, and he had never before missed a meeting with his students. Even the day after the incident with Joëlle, he had taught his class and answered the students’ questions, fulfilling the terms of his contract with the republic and the university’s board of education. I must be wrong in believing that people’s inner wounds or joy can be read on their faces. Maybe the best men are those who don’t let anything of their inner selves show. The ones who never bother their dining companions, ruin parties, walk through the streets with a flask supposedly filled with poison to impress young women. I thought about the little professor suffering and I put down my books about the era of railroad construction and the Bank of the Republic during the first Occupation to hurry over to his house. He came to open the door. He seemed tired. An ordinary kind of tiredness, with the same expression as always that betrays nothing. He led me to his library. There was nothing unusual there except for the mimeograph and piles of newspapers and magazines that I had never seen there before, fanned out in a semi-circle on the ground of his office. I glanced at them reflexively. Some old mimeographed papers and some badly bound pamphlets, nothing like what you would find in a bookstore. “Old memories that I’d like to get rid of. I was using them for a project I’ve just finished. A history of the left. For my teacher, Monsieur Laventure, who’s been asking for it for a long time.” And without paying any more attention to my curiosity, he moved on to other subjects. How were the papers I was writing going, both mine and those of the private university students? They were going slowly. The more I dig into the past, the harder it is for me to draw a connection to the present. I can’t seem to find the place where today’s state of decrepitude broke away from yesterday’s hopes. In response, he told me that the big difference was this: “You didn’t live the past. But things were probably a little cleaner. Stronger. The Occupation. The Resistance. Now everything has gone weak, and pretends to be something else. Now no one calls a spade a spade. Except Mam Jeanne.” At the idea of Mam Jeanne choosing her newest victim, we exchange smiles. I didn’t ask him why he hadn’t gone to teach his class. After all, at the state university, professors can grow weary of going even more often than the students. The strikes—or maybe I should say “our” strikes—happen just as regularly as normal working hours. Some of them are justified. Others… Wodné’s gang hadn’t gathered stones or pepper spray. There had been no threat of a strike that morning. The little professor had just wanted to straighten up his papers, restore a bit of order to his library. He had also wanted to give me two books. One that he was particularly fond of: The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. And the other one was Daughter of Haiti, which he didn’t think particularly good as a work of literature. But he thought the book’s intention was worth understanding. He had already lent them both to me, and we had spent long hours talking about them. He considered Finzi-Continis to be a true masterpiece about love and indifference. In response to my reservations about Daughter of Haiti, he said that it was about a merciless battle between a vow and an impossibility, an impulse fighting against gravity. “But Mr. Professor, the main character is nothing but a young, somewhat reactionary bourgeois.” “You don’t have to love the book; you have to love the idea that one day, she might turn around and go in the other direction.” I knew that all of his remarks about literature and philosophy were nothing but pretexts for talking about Joëlle, about the part of her that was like Micòl from Finzi-Continis, and about her subjugation
to Wodné’s gang. That morning, he didn’t want to discuss the books, he just wanted to give them to me. He owned too many. Two fewer, or three, or even twenty, what difference could that make? So I took the books. He accompanied me to the front door, as he usually does whenever he’s feeling up to it. I didn’t pay attention to the sound of the key in the lock, even though he often protested the idea of locked doors. “A house should be a home, and every table set for guests. The passersby aren’t the ones missing.” I found myself on the street again, with the Italian novelist’s passionate romance and a young Haitian woman’s arguments with herself in my arms. I returned to the story of the banks. Banks are what run the world. They hold life by its guts. I wandered into the banks. There was one that a president had called the “rascal bank” at the beginning of the last century, a Trojan horse brought in by foreign capital to create the financial crisis that benefitted the first Occupation. There was another that had gone bankrupt. After an order of confidentiality, the State had given the bank’s building and land to the Catholic Church. The Council of Bishops turned it into a chapel. It’s still there, at the top of a hill, named after a saint said to be generous all the way down to the tips of his toes, to which hordes of beggars come to pray. The change was minimal. For the poor, it’s still a pilgrimage, a difficult climb, whether it’s a climb towards God or towards money. I wandered among the banks and the power they hold over us. The one that interested me the most was the Bank of the Republic, which is as large as a palace, still standing at the bottom of the city, immense, its prestige old-fashioned given its shabby surroundings, right next to the dirty water of the coast. When people on the street began to shout “Fire!” I didn’t turn back right away. I was lost in my own world. You can’t always trust the things crowds say or the choices passersby make. But all of a sudden, I understood. The shouts and voices reached my hands. I felt the books I was holding begin to burn, as though they wanted to join the others. The beautiful garden of the Finzi-Continis became hot with anguish and despair. I didn’t see the tennis players and the tender green of the plants, but before even turning around, I could see what was happening behind me. The fire was traveling from shelf to shelf, licking at the three Karamazov brothers to heal them from their obsessions and prevarications, snatching away all of Hugo, come down, little father, put an end to Olympio’s sadness and the epic of the humble; taking it all away, ancient and modern poems, speeches on this and that: method, voluntary servitude, science and art; gone are the kingdoms of this world, the beautiful, the ugly, the good, the bad; gone are the enchanted flutes and the musician trees; gone are the reveries of the solitary walkers and the summer afternoons in the shadow of young girls in flower; gone are the gardens, seeds, and grapes of wrath; the dance of the forests and the taste of nettles; gone is the froth on the daydream and the life before us,and a thousand other paper beings, which I may have loved or may have hated, but which nonetheless all deserved to live, to experience life, even if in the end we’re nothing but lumps of fat and human creatures, good for flies and nausea, deafness, and blindness, even if we’re nothing. And among these beings, right in the middle, must have been the man who had introduced me to all this, sitting in front of his desk, burning with them. His flesh melting into theirs. The books fell from my hands, I turned around, and I ran towards the house. But what house? The smoke and the flames, wild, enraged, had already caused the windows of the library to shatter, they were leaping outside, rising towards the sky, dancing over the heads of the passersby, who were running for shelter, or to escape the heat and the ash, or coming closer to see the disaster from up close. You couldn’t see any of the house anymore. The flames and the smoke were shielding it from view and you could tell that there was nothing but rubble underneath. I imagined his charred flesh forming a heap of ash with the pages. The little bed in the guest room, where Joëlle had gone only once. He had been so happy. And she, too, had looked so happy. I knew that there were no longer any books up there, nor the little bed, nor the little professor. Nothing but an amalgamation of words, objects, and flesh. A mish-mash of bread and sauce, tallow and grease, smoke and stench. I knew that it was hopeless. That I would never again see his smile. Nor his pain. But still we try even when things are hopeless, to pretend that the violent facts aren’t true, to refuse to accept reality. Shit, why does reality always make the wrong choices? It’s as though every time we let it choose by itself, it can’t make any choices that aren’t the worst possible ones! It’s as though we are born only to suffer, to relinquish our desires to its malice. I ran towards the front door and, flames or no flames, smoke or no smoke, I tried to break down what was left of the door with punches and kicks. Let me pass, you bastard. It remained standing and I struck it, pushing it against the fire. Like the people I’ve seen at the cemetery, who bang with rage on the coffins before the last shovelful in the hopes of awakening the dead person being buried. Like those who go so far as to bite on the wood, losing their teeth in the attempt to get the person they’d loved out. I would hit the door until it gave way. A man who’s burned alive in a closed room is a man who will enter the cemetery still alive. And all alone. Shit. Get out of my way, you bastard, let me pass. My teacher, my friend, my brother is in there. Get out of my way. It’s love that’s burning up there. And kindness, if it exists. It’s language that’s dying up there. The proper use of language and of the heart. It’s living that’s dying up there. Promises of a kannjawou, do you want them, here they are. For everyone has a right to celebrate. Taking only the part of life that will come back to you is enough. And inviting the other part to the party. It would be enough. Get out of my way. The fire had already burned up the ground floor, and the smoke was spilling out through the door onto the street. By the time the damn door finally fell, vanquished, my hands were covered in blood, and strange hands were pulling me away. In front of me was a huge mass of red and black. Another book. But what can books do? I was screaming. I knew that I was screaming but I couldn’t hear my screams anymore.

  HOURS LATER, WHEN THE FIREMEN ARRIVED, THE NEIGHBORS HAD ALREADY PUT OUT THE FIRE WITH BUCKETS OF WATER THAT THEY HAD PASSED DOWN IN AN ASSEMBLY LINE. Among the firemen were two foreigners, two fire chiefs, and some instructors speaking English. The people in the street shouted to them, It’s finished, come back another time. And one of the instructors said in English, Too bad, too bad. Bits of paper with blackened edges were floating around. Here and there a few little sparks were still burning. The whole second floor had disappeared. The little guest room and the library. On the ground floor, a few swathes of black, disintegrating wall remained. The fire had lasted until the early afternoon. The passersby who had dragged me away from the door on fire had long since left for their normal activities. Dozens of onlookers had come after them, each one with his own commentary. The neighbors had granted interviews to the press. “A man who kept to himself. A good neighbor. Not like the ones who dump out their dishwashing buckets in the street.” Whatever the circumstances, people always end up bringing things back to whatever’s of interest to them. Hans and Vladimir arrived as representatives. Not like the spokespeople who speak for the whole of the group that they represent. Coming out of the negotiations with meaningless words for the group and a job or scholarship for themselves. Mam Jeanne had known some, during the Patriotic Union. There had been some who were opposed to the first Occupation. And others who pretended to be. There are some in Wodné’s gang. The little professor didn’t pretend. Except for the fact that he preferred to talk to me about things other than his inner torment. Why hadn’t he told me how lonely he was? The little professor is no longer anything more than a pile of ashes scattered on the floor, mixed in with the ashes of the paper and the wood. Hans and Vladimir arrived at the same time as the dean of faculty, while the foreign instructors were still speaking in English with the Haitian firefighters. No one is as knowledgeable as a colonist. One day, he’ll teach you how to plant cabbage. Another day, how to put out a fire. But you won’t be the one to
eat the cabbages and the fire has already burned you. The children sat down next to me.

  “So the books are gone?”

  “No, the books aren’t gone.”

  As Wodné says, there are plenty of books. Even in the great cemetery, there are dead people who wanted to keep the words of their favorite poets or philosophers with them forever. Or even their favorite recipes.

  “But the dead can’t lend you their books.”

  “We’ll find some books for you.”

  “Why did he do it?”

  “It was an accident.”

  “It was because of her, right? And Wodné’s gang, who hated him.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “Love is dumb.”

  “Yes, love is dumb.”

  “And those guys, with the hats and the uniforms, they couldn’t have arrived earlier?”

  “They couldn’t have done anything, it all happened too fast.”

  “Yes, but all the same, they could have arrived earlier.”

  The dean got out of his car, his face closed off. He looked for a long time at the ruins and then left again. Like a trainer or a coach, he often says, I don’t like to lose anyone, talking about professors as well as students. The highest-ranking firefighting instructor hadn’t finished disseminating his knowledge. It had to have been his idea, an on-the-ground training. A sort of case study. They only teach humans how to save people after they’re already dead. The instructors directed us to form a ring around the fire site and not to let anyone pass. It was already evening. I told the children to go home. I watched them leave, to go tell the others that it was true. The little professor had burned inside his home. They walked, hunched over like adults, angry, their hands balled up into fists as they passed the firefighters. I got up. With a decisive step, I crossed the forbidden line. The firefighters looked at me like I was crazy. One of the instructors started to exclaim, in English, “What the f…?” then got a hold of himself and instead yelled “Stop!” I responded, “Shit!” Stop. Shit. Stop. Shit again. Suddenly, as though it had fallen from the sky, a stone just nearly missed the firefighter’s cap by a few centimeters. He shouted again, “What the f…?” Then another stone. And another. A rainstorm. On Burial Street, stones are free. You have to pay for everything else. We call them the State’s cookies because they’re the only thing the State gives us for free. Kids learn very early what you can do with them. State cookies were raining upon the instructors. Hans and Vladimir are the real experts. They hadn’t wanted to actually reach their targets, just to frighten them. At least it would allow them to bring home a funny story to their friends in addition to the bad news. The instructor was too occupied with protecting himself from the stones to bother me any more. Everything was still smoky. The pillagers wouldn’t come until later, when the night had cooled off the ground and the wind had dissipated the smoke. They wouldn’t find much. Less, in any case, than the grave robbers. I took off my shirt and lowered myself towards the ground. The air was still impossible to breathe. I gathered at random a handful of ash, still hot, and wrapped it in my shirt. I tied the sleeves together and carried the shirt on my back like a bag, holding it with one hand. I walked towards the place where I had stopped upon hearing the first voices shout “Fire!” I looked around and saw first The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, not far from a little pile of orange and banana peels that someone must have swept up and left there with a faint hope that a waste disposal service would pick it up one day. The garden was lying there. I remembered the walkways and the greenery, the little piece of happiness that the war would put an end to. And Micòl, as pretty as she was inexpressive, a beautiful nothing who left for the gas chamber. Don’t all love stories and failed love stories begin in gardens? A little further away lay Daughter of Haiti, soaked in the dirty water of the gully. Why had he wanted to save those two? He had other famous classics in his library. And it couldn’t have been a gift based on my personal taste. I prefer stories that cut straight to the heart of things. He used to say that you had to give things time to settle, to wear down their mysteries, to edge slowly towards truth. At heart, the little professor was an optimist. It was for her that he had given them to me. To preserve her. He thought that the books expressed some part of her and had wanted to protect them from the fire. You don’t burn the woman you love, even in paperback format. But Micòl would never understand anything about the narrator. And who doesn’t have struggles, contradictory things you must choose between? As I was walking I got the violent sensation that all of it, the novels, the textbooks, the histories of banks and neighborhoods, all the aimless classroom conversations weren’t of any use at all. Nothing but mockeries and power games. The honest players die. The others win. The little professor was an honest player. He had lost. Arriving in my room, I placed the shirt onto the little table I use as a desk. Then I went to Mam Jeanne’s house to borrow some matches and kerosene. I found myself two doors down, at Anselme’s house. I was sorry to have to force this on Sophonie. She’s always the one who has to scrub the store windows clean. I threw the books on the ground. The little professor was an optimist. I’m not. I lit a fire and watched the beautiful green garden, the tennis court, and the beautiful young women wondering what to do with themselves burn.