Colour of Dawn Read online

  Since Gabriel was born, Angélique’s eyes have lost their ability to ensnare. Her body has laid down its arms. She keeps all her happiness tightly bound in a severe bun at the nape of her neck. I have difficulty coming to terms with this new Angélique; I find it hard to let go of the other Angélique who was lively and full of laughter, blazing under the sun. A notion of pure joy, of abstract happiness remains at the sound of her name. How I miss my sister, whose happiness and contagious bliss always went before her, who made me believe that the sun of my childhood would never set, who made every day a delicious flow of honey – despite the days when we went hungry, the days of pretence from just above the bottom end of the scale, the very bottom. We were always prepared to pretend, as if we went to sleep sated, our thirst quenched. As if our clothes were not held together by Mother’s ingenuity and mending skills. As if we were not always a hair’s breadth away from being expelled from school. As if, indeed, we hadn’t sometimes been expelled. As if, as if…

  Since my childhood I have been at war. Angélique knew how to make it a happy war. I learned from her the rough, wild strength of that pride. How I miss that Angélique, whom a crafty, boastful man with an ‘it’s your lookout’ attitude stole from me one ordinary day, against a backdrop of sky, earth and sea. This bully in the making must just have raised his head above the surface of our sea of poverty, for I recall he was wearing his shirt open to his navel and his smile revealed a gold incisor. Mother had clearly not had time to give Angélique sufficient warning, to remind her to be wary of strangers lying in wait by the roadside.

  Angélique now has a great shadow on her heart. Between the church services and the petty cruelties she bestows on the household, she has no time either to receive the love of God or to give love.Yet Angélique has just one thing on her lips: ‘God and His love’, ‘God and His works’, ‘God, God, God…’. I even suspect she uses her profession to distance herself from the sufferings of us mortals, and uses prayer to measure the extent to which she can resist earthly pleasures. Her heart is closed and the space between her thighs has been flooded with sadness. The connection is obvious. She knows it as well as I do, but would never admit it, never.

  Earlier, when I made to join her outside for coffee, I saw that Fignolé’s bed was empty and the sheets had not been disturbed. This fact froze my blood, but I revealed nothing as I heard Angélique open the door to the backyard. She simply said to me:

  ‘Joyeuse, Fignolé didn’t come home last night.’

  And I replied, ‘I know.’ Cloaking myself with the air of an eccentric diva that I use when my heart is set to race, I added, ‘He must have slept at a friend’s place.’

  Angélique made no comment, but I know she didn’t believe me. For all her devout airs, Angélique is as sharp as an old monkey. When she moved away again towards the backyard, I took the opportunity of having a quick look behind the only cupboard in the living room, where a panel has worked loose. I know this is where Fignolé has taken to slipping the lyrics of the songs he writes, his desire for secrecy inspired by a lingering adolescence with its mysteries, its violence and its games. Without pausing to reflect for a second, I slipped my hand in. I didn’t expect to find anything but papers, but my hand met with something cold and metallic. I knew immediately it was a gun.

  ‘What on earth can Fignolé be doing with a gun?’

  I drew it out quickly to examine it and convince myself. The barrel, the trigger, the butt. I closed my eyes for a few moments to gain strength to bear the violent music in my blood, which threatened to suffocate me. My hand was shaking.

  But I remembered the tale told to me as a child by Mother one evening at nightfall; the tale of a woman who had gained all the strength in the world by swallowing a sacred stone given to her by a mage. Since then I have kept beneath my breast a small imaginary grey stone as a talisman against the evil spells of this island. My thoughts were all on this little grey stone as I tucked the gun beneath my nightshirt together with the few papers that had also been hidden in that cranny. In the bedroom I placed the gun in a box on top of the wardrobe and stowed the papers in my bag next to the bed. Despite all my acrobatics, despite all these comings and goings, Mother didn’t notice a thing. Lying beneath the sheets, she simply emitted a lengthy stifled moan as she turned towards me.

  I have hardly begun to drink my coffee when Mother joins us in the backyard a few minutes later. She simply says: ‘Do either of you know where Fignolé spent the night?’ and doesn’t wait for a reply. Mother’s suffering is obvious. She suffers in silence. Something has been torn from her. She submits totally to this void, this great empty space, submerged in suffering and the waiting for Fignolé, but she won’t talk about it. Mother must have faltered by her son’s bed and invoked her loas as if grasping a pair of crutches. Mother falters but never falls. While Mother lives, the end of the world will never arrive.

  Despite a certain plumpness accumulated with the years, Mother is still beautiful, though it is not that same beauty that was considered a scandal some years ago. Mother is a sovereign in decline, and this morning a tragic sovereign. The waiting turns her mouth into a remote island in the middle of her face, with her eyes like far horizons. Her hands resting on her knees, she murmurs as her whole body sways:

  Holy Mary, mother of God,

  Pray for us, poor sinners…

  She hasn’t said a single word about the absence of Fignolé. Not a word. Instead she raises her voice against the whip, the rigoise that Angélique has used on Ti Louze’s back and Gabriel’s frail legs. I join Mother in this strange chorus and soon we are all three of us yelling. Deep down, we know that Ti Louze and Gabriel are strangers to these cries, to our anger. We yell all the same. We yell because we cannot talk of the only thing that would relieve us, the only thing that would restore us to our humanity. Our sufferings began a long time ago, and those we would wish them on are too far away. Ti Louze and Gabriel are within earshot of our voices, within reach of our hands. We are cruel by default. Wicked by obligation.

  In the face of inextinguishable anger, Gabriel breathes jerkily as he examines his legs carefully. He fears that the lash has left visible traces; he fears his little friends will make fun of him at school.Ti Louze sniffs loudly. She no longer has the words to beg for leniency: ‘Please, please…’ A trickle of blood runs from the two or three scabs she has caused herself by dabbing at insect bites with an old, worn cloth. Through her tears, Ti Louze calls on death but will have to wait for that wish to be granted. Ti Louze and Gabriel must think that the world is an unfair place, and they’re not wrong. Gabriel will get used to it, sooner than he may think. For Ti Louze the game has already been played out, in full. Ti Louze, whose braids are no longer than finger-bones; a true African’s head with no future on this island – Ti Louze, so black she is invisible.

  A moment later, no doubt weary of this game, Mother asks me to call Paulo, the son of our neighbour Madame Jacques. She doesn’t mention Jean-Baptiste or Wiston who live at the other end of the street. While waiting for Paulo, she ceaselessly slaps her lower arms to warm up her blood.

  The sky is pink-hued mother-of-pearl, but the night’s mood still freezes us to our bones.

  Sitting at Mother’s feet, I drink my coffee in silence. I think of Fignolé.Where could he possibly have spent the night? Why did he hide that gun behind the cupboard? Why? I think of Luckson. Of the jeans I’ll put on this morning. I study my toe nails, my fingernails. My nail varnish, salmon-coloured, is beginning to flake off.

  FIVE

  I begin my shift at seven o’clock as usual. On arrival, I carry out the same routine tasks, to distance myself from the pain that I always see in the sick who line both sides of the large communal ward as I walk down it.

  Gabriel had trouble waking this morning and going over his lessons for school. No doubt there were other images playing out behind his eyelids.There was nothing to be done about it; my fear that night must have crept in between the folds and furrows of his sleep. H
owever, when he woke I was ruthless with the whip. God knows why! A malicious spirit took pleasure in whispering like burning coals: ‘The whip never did any harm to a little Negro boy or girl. The whip never did any harm…’ And I hit him. And I hit her… ‘Fignolé can say whatever grand words he likes about suffering and injustice, but Ti Louze should consider herself lucky that we’ve taken her away from her peasant life.’ And I hit, and I hit. ‘A life where she would be dead by now from eating roots and drinking the stagnant water of the ponds.’ I hit them until my arm ached, until I was exhausted.

  Now I regret using the whip. I regret that I can’t undo what I did. This violence was all I had to distance myself as far as I could from my fear. This violence that leaves me with the taste of mud and ash in my mouth. Because of the whip Gabriel appeared not to recognise me – me, his mother – when I made him kiss me as he left the house. It was not until he disappeared at the end of the road that I could resign myself to taking my eyes off him.

  Gabriel devours me in silence and he doesn’t know it. No-one knows. Gabriel was the beginning of my sleepless nights, my desolate mornings. Gabriel was the beginning of my solitude. A child is the beginning of solitude for all women… But enough of these grand sentiments. This is the turning-point where I, Angélique Méracin, await Joyeuse, my sister Joyeuse, so free, so free…

  Walking down the road, I greeted neighbours as I passed: ‘Hello, Madame Jacques, Maître Fortuné. Hello Boss Dieuseul, Willio. Hello Wiston, Jean-Baptiste, Altodir, Théolène, all of you.’

  Madame Jacques’ shop stocks everything we could want in this every-man-for-himself neighbourhood: sugar, which she pours into little paper bags, needles and thread, Palma Christi oil and honey that leave the shelves sticky, antibiotics, products for straightening the hair, lightening the skin, school notebooks and rice, supplied by food for the poor but sold to us by Madame Jacques. Just like she makes us pay for the telephone calls we receive or make on the filthy, malodorous receiver on her counter. Madame Jacques keeps notes beneath her voluminous bosom and impassively deals out strong words to recalcitrant customers, surrounded by the sticky flight of the flies.

  Jean-Baptiste was wearing a jacket too narrow for his broad shoulders. He has had a job for a while at the Customs office. He is blessed with luck – the men of the Prophet-President, boss of the Démunis party, don’t employ but recruit. Jean-Baptiste imposes the same regime on this collection of houses, like a boss. On Théolène, Altodir and Louidon who, sitting on this pavement, watch the passers-by from sunrise to sunset, picking their teeth, scratching their ears, whistling at girls and laughing as they rub their knees. Slapping their thighs. Opening and closing their legs. Boss Dieuseul, taciturn and with a sombre regard, is the only one to spend the brightest part of the day claiming that whatever will happen, he has already seen it. That what has already happened is nothing compared to what awaits us.

  Here, every smile has its measure, every word its weight. In this neighbourhood we play out muted wars. Wars without victory, without outcomes and without glory. These are petty wars. Wars in which, every day, we examine our defeats a little more closely. Wars of the vanquished, whose history is nothing but a great dark play, full of noise, fury and blood. A history that makes us hate our very presence in the world, the black humiliation of our skin.

  In the central space between the beds aligned on either side of the ward, I move with a steady pace, chest squared, feet turned slightly outward, to prevent myself from being caught by the exhaustion that I drag behind me like a convict’s ball and chain. This stiffness in the way I walk comes also from everything my nostrils breathe in between these walls, these images like a release of wild birds. From all that my ears have heard expressed by mouths twisted by pain. From that which my hands have touched, living or dead. A great tangle of nerves constantly re-awoken beneath my skin. It’s amazing that I’m still sane. Surprising that madness has not devoured me to the marrow.

  Joyeuse says I must have swallowed a broomstick, the way I walk so straight, without the slightest sway of my behind, without that rowboat roll that is expected of a woman, a real woman, so she says. Especially a woman from round here. She often seasons her own bitterness with a hint of contempt.

  ‘Unbelievable,’ she repeated again this morning, as she applied her lipstick and twirled in front of her mirror.

  SIX

  I’m hardly able to drag my thoughts away from the metallic object on top of the cupboard. I hardly dare put a name to it in my head. Too many questions torment me and threaten to become an obsession. Why this gun? Does Fignolé believe he’s in danger right now? Why hasn’t he spoken of it? Why did he leave it in that cupboard if he’s in fear of his life? Perhaps he’s not himself a target but he’s protecting a friend? Who knows? I open my bag quickly, thinking to find an answer to my questions in those few bits of paper left by Fignolé. There is a telephone number, Ismona, the forename of his girlfriend, written in capitals, the district of Martissant underlined in red and a line of verse: The heart yearns for a bullet while the throat raves of a razor. Beneath, in small, fine writing, Mayakovsky. Knowing Fignolé as I do, none of it is written at random. Everything has a reason, which I will come to decipher. Fignolé learned all these grand, fine words on a few forays into gatherings in Pacot, Laboule or Pétion-Ville where, seated on comfortable sofas, they enacted the Revolution surrounded by glasses of wine and the sounds of the trumpet of Miles Davies or Wynton Marsalis.

  Fignolé, why make us breathe at such giddy heights? Recalcitrant, rebellious Fignolé, inhabited by poetry, crazy about music. Fignolé has no place on this island where disaster has broken spirits. Fignolé, can you hear me? Pass through the lightning and the fire of this city unharmed if you will, but come back to us… Come back to us soon. Unhurt, uninjured. More alive than a living soul in this land ever was. Fignolé, can you hear me?

  I leave the house at the same time as Mother, who refused to wear the dress with little sun-yellow flowers that I bought for her during the last sales at Madame Herbruch’s shop. Not content with merely refusing to wear this dress, Mother tied a scarf round her head like a peasant. I didn’t dare say anything to her. She had that expression I know so well, that ‘you don’t want to cross me’ expression. No loa had yet ridden her, but even so, she had already escaped me, her mouth firmly shut like a tomb. Her eyes turned towards the Invisibles.

  This evening I’ll do her hair and that’s all. My fingers moist with Palma Christi oil, I’ll take pleasure in undoing her little plaits one by one and then putting her hair up in a single braid above her nape. She’ll protest at first, but she’ll let me do it. As always. This is an established ritual between us, which ultimately pleases us both. It always has, since childhood when, as night fell, she would invoke Grandfather Saintilhomme, whose legends bind us all to one another. Grandfather, whom the god Agoué came to find one day to take him to Guinea underwater. Or the tales in which the fish are clothed in phosphorescent seaweed. Where ogres devour children. Where stars can be caught in the palm of your hand. She would tell these stories until the day the blood ran between my thighs for the first time. Looking me right in the eye, Mother asked me to be on guard with boys from that moment on, and stopped talking to me. I mean, really talking to me. It was a parenthesis of silence.The truce of adolescence.The end of those hours, warm and so full of sweetness. She was content to reassure herself that each new moon brought me my share of moist, warm blood.

  One day she inserted an authoritative finger to reassure herself that my body had not yet been breached, was no wound open to the breeze. She never did it again. I understood quickly that there was a connection between this blood, the shadowy triangle of my thighs, and the men who made Mother appear more beautiful sometimes, a dancing flame in everyone’s eye, her hips as if released, when I would get home from school and our bed would exude a scent of amber and kelp.

  I also experienced the discomfort, the unease of having a place in that school among girls who were stran
gers to me. Mother was jubilant at the idea of her daughter’s unexpected advance towards that world of stucco, lace and frills, but never imagined the violence it would imply for her, never. Right from the start, I had refused to assume the role of an innocent who would steal cheap jewellery and only realise too late. I had chosen to be a thief of stones of deceptive brilliance. One who knows it and continues to do it, with no regrets, without useless nostalgia. In my adolescence I had a volcano inside me, which I ignited myself, without saying a word, every morning. Now this volcano will never be extinguished, Mother and I have merely changed places and roles.

  I’m twenty-three years old and I’m the strongest.

  Mother lets me do her hair and listens, sitting between my knees or with me standing behind her. We have reemerged from our silence. I talk to her of my twenties which are like an itch, of my great hunger for life, of my certainty that there is no-one to complain to about the battering and hurt the world will bring.

  Mother knows like no other how to keep to herself in her silence. She knows how to love us in her silence like the warmth of the earth. Like the light which enwraps the world. Hers is a love against which all the fury, all the noise of others are as nothing. I know it as I know that no-one will love Ti Louze. No-one. As I know that hard, cold cruelty also lives in the hearts of the defeated – a certainty that Fignolé always opposed with a hundred explanations and a thousand boastful answers.

  Madame Jacques stops us on the threshold of her shop. She wants to reassure us about Fignolé.