Colour of Dawn Read online

  I leave Mother and Lolo, intrigued, at the end of the road and slip away for a few seconds, hoping that the neighbourhood’s only phone box is working. I dial the number written on Fignolé’s scrap of paper and reach a voicemail service asking me to leave a message. Naturally, I don’t. Best to be careful. I leave any further attempt till later. Lolo and I accompany Mother to the tap-tap station. She takes her leave of us, but only listens with half an ear to our recommendations. ‘If you hear any shots, if… if…’ She nods and that is all. We go our different ways, Lolo and I uptown, Mother towards the crowded suburb where Aunt Sylvanie lives.

  Aunt Sylvanie’s neighbourhood is on the edge of an even poorer area – on this island, poverty has no limits. The deeper you dig, the more you will find poverty even greater than your own. And so, between Sylvanie and that which doesn’t yet have a name there is merely a small area of trapped water, full of silt and mud, enough to turn your stomach. Over there, on the other side, is the place where lives are held in balance between the peelings of everything that can be eaten, animal carcases, the incontinence of the old folk, children’s faces grimed with snot and that bitter water rejected even by starving stomachs. Alongside the dogs and the pigs, sinister shadows often emerge. Backs bent, they blend in with the animals. When they are not fighting them for the scraps, they are furtively rooting in the stinking, rotten rubbish on either side. I would often find myself leaning forward, eyelids half-closed, hand on my forehead to get a better view and convince myself that those creatures were not dogs, nor pigs, but human beings like you or me; men, women, children, old people who have no choice but to get up in the morning, live, eat, make babies and see to their needs. Hundreds and thousands of souls come to the city as if to paradise, only to find nothing but this hell under an open sky. Ti Louze can consider herself lucky to have found us. If God created this world, I hope he is tortured by remorse.

  From the other bank I often look across at this world like someone who, in the midst of battle, just escaped by means of a well-sharpened machete blade or a hail of bullets from a submachine gun, and is now unable to believe their luck. Anyone who once sets foot in that district will from that moment know why the streets sometimes spread their legs for the highest bidder or shed blood with the calendars. It’s impossible not to know, impossible!

  The night was punctured by the crackling of gunfire. The city, pregnant with a hideous beast, fought an insidious war. On the orders of the boss of the Démunis, armed bands in the outlying districts blended in with the forces of order, once more to take hold of the city and liquidate the insurgents one after the other. They are tracked down street by street, alley by alley. The more fortunate ones might come away riddled with bullets. They behead the less fortunate ones, showing off the heads at arm’s length or on the end of a pole, burning them like torches or mutilating them and feeding them to the pigs.

  Why did Fignolé underline Martissant in red? Why is Ismona’s name written in capital letters? And that telephone number? And why these lines of verse? What is the connection between them? The connection with the rest of it? A long day awaits…

  NINE

  I continue my shift as if nothing has happened. I administer drops, distribute tablets, instruct the auxiliaries to change dressings. One of them, taken on just a week ago, can hardly tell left from right, so I have to oversee everything. Taking blood samples, wielding thermometer and syringes. This morning I am unlikely to be vigilant enough. I’m too worried about Fignolé. I’m concerned for Mother.

  Despite our warnings, she wanted to consult Aunt Sylvanie. ‘No-one and nothing can stop me.’

  As recently as last week she sat herself on the back of a moto-taxi and sped off, heading alone across that part of the city where thousands of bodies mill about in a mix of bustle and lethargy between the pavements and the road, defying the tap-taps and bus traffic forging ahead at full speed in an earsplitting racket. You would run away without hesitation if you didn’t fear the crowded pavements with their risk of entangling your feet in other calloused feet, the feet of beggars, carters and idlers, all battling for space. And so you dodge with agility between three Francis mangos, four large bunches of bananas and two pots of peas spread out for sale on the ground. A cocktail of smells pervades the air and threatens to suffocate you. The scent of tobacco. Rancid oil. The peelings of fruit and vegetables. Offcuts of meat fought over by battered dogs. Sweat from armpits and between thighs. Mother crosses this flood, knocking against legless cripples, children with flies teeming around their nostrils, women as thin as nails, bumping into the lame and the blind, finally reaching the stall at the far end, the one where machetes, rigoises and knives are hung on display, before heading for Sylvanie’s neighbourhood.

  Mother has an unshakeable belief that the Spirits who dwell in flasks, bottles and gourds wait at Aunt Sylvanie’s house to cure ills. To prophecy. To explain mysteries. That Aunt Sylvanie knows how to awaken them to apply a soothing balm to all those who visit her.

  This morning, having drunk her cachiman infusion, Mother summoned Paulo to her. He went out with Fignolé yesterday evening to who knows where, his guitar under his arm. But listening to Paulo’s words we were none the wiser. He looked like someone who had not got a wink of sleep all night. Someone afraid. And above all, someone who had smoked a whole field of marijuana all to himself. His Rasta dreadlocks covered half of his face. All the while he was talking to us, he never stopped looking towards the door and raising himself on his toes when not bluntly turning away. You would think he was being watched.When he was not turning in all directions he kept his head down. Paulo knows something but does not want to speak. No-one could convince me otherwise. He gabbled three or four confused sentences about a guitar with strings gone slack, one of the two vocalists being ill and some such. Mother didn’t believe a single word of an outpouring he seemed to be inventing on the spot to reassure us. Joyeuse, hands on hips, rebuffed him like only she knows how.

  ‘My dear Paulo, you seem to think I was born yesterday.You’ve always been one for telling stories.You’re not going to make me swallow any old lies.’

  The only definite information we were able to drag out of him was that Fignolé left them around ten o’clock, together with Vanel, the group’s drummer, and Ismona, heading for Martissant. And then nothing more was heard…

  In the hospital corridors distress has left its marks. Electricity cuts have caused the smell of corpses to rise from the morgue and spread this far. For the first time ever, nausea hits me head on. I make an effort to hear human voices, to understand them.

  The last time he stayed in this hospital, Fignolé was being eaten away inside by a kind of fever, which froze him and burned him up, all at the same time. Fignolé was trembling, shivering. We had every reason to be eaten by worry. We feared the worst. At mid-day, in the heat of July, with the thermometer recording thirty-five degrees in the shade, I heard his teeth chattering. I immediately changed his sweat-soaked sheets – sheets I’d brought myself to a hospital that has nothing – and dried his shoulders, his chest and his back to stop him getting a chill. A doctor arrived a few days later, an American with a sing-song accent like in the westerns. This was a real stroke of luck for someone like Fignolé, who liked to live his life on the throw of a dice, to thumb his nose at death. The doctor changed his medication and asked if his case could be passed to colleagues in a health centre downtown. But all this I guessed afterwards. The stranger didn’t want to talk to him in my presence, under the pretext of the patient’s right to discretion.

  The fact that Fignolé was an adult.

  That all sickness is private.

  He waited for acquiescence from me. I looked him straight in the eyes and then turned on my heel and left in silence. Even strangers take me for something I’m not.

  It was the same with John and Father André. John, a young American journalist, had followed Fignolé over all the blazing barricades he had raised in order to shout out his hatred of the men in unifor
m and demand the return of the leader of the Démunis whom they had driven from power. He and Fignolé became inseparable for several long months. Very quickly, Paulo, Wiston and Jean-Baptiste joined them in their dreams of insurrection, their revolutionary projects and their secret meetings of desperados. As for Father André, he gave them his blessing between two Our Fathers and three acts of contrition.

  We have known Father André since he arrived from faraway Belgium a few years ago. After looking after the church of St Anne’s, he was sent to Solino, the crowded neighbourhood where Aunt Sylvanie lives. He believed I was saintly simply because I had cared for two patients he referred to me, free of charge in their homes. As for John, that was a longer story. Much longer. John got out of a hire car with Fignolé one afternoon. Six foot three, he looked down on us and wished us a good evening with a very gentle smile. This tall blond man, with the thin lips of people from colder climates and inordinately long arms and legs, found it difficult to sit comfortably in the cramped gallery at the entrance to our house. When he arrived, he planted himself in front of Mother who looked at him with an extraordinary intensity. Her astonishment was enough to make Fignolé, Joyeuse and I laugh till our sides split. She admitted later that she had seen in John a striking resemblance to the image of Jesus holding his bleeding heart, which hung on the wall of the living room.

  That afternoon, sitting on the step by the entrance to the house, Fignolé could not resist declaring in the tone of someone who had just won first prize:

  ‘John is a friend, an American journalist.’

  John put his backpack down beside his chair and began by saying:

  ‘I love this country; I love the poor.’

  He made his pronouncement in the way that others would say I’m a doctor, a plumber or a lawyer.

  Before meeting John I had not known it was possible to earn a living by loving the poor, that loving the poor was a profession.

  TEN

  Fignolé’s notes spin round crazily inside me like a carousel. How can I decipher the mystery of that telephone number? And that verse – I’d like to get to the bottom of the significance of that to Fignolé. Though in fact the significance is too evident not to petrify me. The capitals in which he has written Ismona’s name reveal the passion that has been taking shape. I felt that, in Ismona, he had found a gentleness and closeness the left him unable to believe his luck – he who, pursued by anxiety, looks for pain to revel in as others would a marvel. To the point of fever, to the point of dizziness. But there he is calling on the bullet and the razor, even if it is despite himself. What was he looking for in the brothels of the Grande-Rue where, behind the bead curtains, on unsavoury mattresses, the sexes come together, mouth to mouth, body to body? The dope and the music haven’t cured him of the world. Ismona, his muse under the sun, his sister in the night, can she save him? This morning, I don’t believe she can. I don’t believe it. Any reassurance will leave Fignolé helpless. He wears despair like a second skin.

  I’ve been worried about Fignolé for too long, not because he smokes joints, not at all, but because of what these joints could lead him to do. I worry myself sick because of his music. Because of his rebelliousness. Because of everything that gets all mixed up and makes too much sense. The music won’t tear down the walls, Fignolé. It can’t. I’m worried about your height, your weight, your bowel movements, your sex, your perspiration, your tears, your hunger and your thirst. I will put a finger on the place where your heart is wounded and I will stop it from bleeding one second longer! Believe me and come home.

  I still can’t help connecting all this information to the fact that Fignolé and Paulo met up with the rebels while John, Wiston and Jean-Baptiste didn’t. For Wiston and Jean-Baptiste the choice is clearer. It is a choice based on deprivation, a low doorway that obliges the defeated to bow their heads. As for John, he is nothing but a pitiable man who is afraid to leave his illusions behind and who holds onto them by putting up with any kind of horror. The dream has already died where he comes from, on the streets of Seattle or New York, on the receiving end of a baton and a few clouds of tear gas, so he wants to revive it here, whatever the cost. Even at the cost of renouncing himself, even at the cost of sacrificing our lives. He twists and retwists events to make his reports look good and to populate that sham paradise he has invented for himself in his head. In any case, John is risking nothing here, John is losing nothing. He’s not at home.

  ‘I’ll talk to you about hunger one day, John, about the kind of deprivation that bends backs, that opens thighs, about the arrogance of conquerors and the humiliation of the defeated. I’ll tell you what goes on inside the head, the stomach and the genitals of a man who is hungry. What goes on inside the head, the stomach and the genitals of a woman who has nothing to give her children to eat. I’ll tell you… One day. I’m the only one here who knows you. Who really knows you, I mean.’

  The anxiety gives me an empty feeling and I no longer know what to think or who to think about. About Fignolé who hasn’t come home. About Mother, about Angélique or about my youth, which is asking, begging me to let the sun intoxicate me, to roll my hips and wait impatiently for Luckson to drive me wild.

  It’s been so long since I looked up at the sky. Since I took notice of days drenched with light, flowing towards a languid twilight of mauve and orange. Since I gave myself up to this obstinate, avid city, because of its overflowing energy, because of its strength that can eat me, swallow me whole. Because of the uniformed schoolchildren who set it ablaze at mid-day. Because of its excesses of flesh and images. Because of the mountains which seem to come forward to engulf it. Because there is always too much. Because of the way it has of taking me and not letting me go. Because of its incendiary men and women. Because… Because…

  It has been so long since I laughed until my sides ached, like on those Friday afternoons when I would join the young women of the neighbourhood from whom Lolo and I have now taken over. Between hairdos they would sip fruit juice or pop, running their hands over the thin layer of sweat just above their top lips, or over the occasional droplets forming on the bridges of their noses or foreheads. These girls with their legs like palm trees, their expressive behinds who, when the stickiness became unbearable, sucked or noisily bit into ice cubes by the entrance of the only hairdresser’s in the neighbourhood. It was an excuse to watch the men go by in rare luxury cars or jealously watch those whom good fortune had placed in these dream machines. I particularly liked the evenings when Juanita, the owner of the salon, would prepare for her outings. She would quickly run a comb through her hair, her blow-dry completed in the early afternoon, coating her body with a perfumed veil of Opium, her favourite scent. Then, once she had coloured her eyebrows dark brown to match that mark just beneath her throat, she would adjust her breasts in her push-up bra, slip on a dress, always a very clingy one, and put on her high-heeled sandals. The moment would then have arrived when she tuned the radio to her chosen station and performed a few rumba, cha-cha-cha or salsa moves to satisfy herself that everything was staying in place. She would always bring this ritual to an end shaking with a storm of crazy laughter as if she were being tickled.

  I wait three-quarters of an hour before I am finally able to jump into a tap-tap. I woke early so as not to be late and to be in a position to throw myself, claws out, into the merciless stampede of everyday life. When an old woman with rough skin, bent back and vacant gums raises her face to mine as she stands by my side, to tell me in a conspiratorial whisper: ‘Mademoiselle, these are difficult times. You know, in my day…’ I remain unmoved. Not like me, I know, but I am unmoved. Because that face and that voice could trap me. Compassion is a luxury I can’t afford. And so I consciously raise a wall between the old woman and myself, topped with barbed wire, broken glass and a ‘Beware of the Dog’ sign in large red letters. As I turn towards her, I do not notice soon enough the brand new four-by-four that slows down right in front of Lolo and me.

  Dark glasses on his nose,
a heavy chain around his neck, a bracelet on his wrist, rings on his fingers, the driver, grinning like a rampant dog, offers Lolo and me a place in his car. He reeks of illicit dealings a mile off. I do not paint on my coarse smile, straighten my shoulders or push up my chest. I do not accept the offer, despite the imploring expression of Lolo who always swoons at the sight of a luxury car. I could have done, like I would have in those days of lassitude, when, to make my body sing and lighten the wallet of one of those arrogant males who rush their pleasure and take urgent possession like soldiers on a campaign, I would play the game and win. Slipping away unnoticed … But last night Fignolé did not come home. I’ve been tormented for several weeks by a man. None of my strongly-held beliefs about the species applies to Luckson, not one. I am serious despite myself. Despite my twenty years. Despite my great hunger and love of life, the way you do love it at twenty years of age, with the wings of a bird, a sun-drenched look, a heart ready to travel…

  The driver with the detestable smile roars away, making a point of splashing water up in a foul-smelling spray from a puddle right by the pavement. Lolo, who’s never at a loss for words, follows him with a barrage of vitriol, insulting every attribute his mother has ever had. Her anger pours out in a torrent of choice words. A few passers-by are already applauding and guffawing. I look at the stained hem of my trousers, Lolo’s shoes smudged with mud, and like a distant drone hear the voice of the old woman: ‘You see what I was saying, you see…’

  More than anything I want her to shut up and leave me alone with my rage.When the tap-tap arrives I elbow my way on with a violence I didn’t know I had in me. A huge wave of anger and exhaustion breaks over me. A huge, deep wave that rolls me over, drawing back to leave only foam, beating against me with its great liquid body to make me taste the salt and the sand of powerlessness. It all mixes together and weighs ever heavier. Everything I’ve lost, people, things, my childhood. Everything I’ve wished for, that I’ve never had and never will have. Everything I’ve wanted to know, that I’ve never known and never will. I measure the immensity of the void until I no longer remember where I am, where I am going, nor where I have come from. I sit down on the bench behind the driver, the very spot I have set my sights on. I don’t feel a thing as the tap-tap sets off and I see, through the window, the little old woman, left standing desperate and lost on the pavement, who will have to wait at least another half-hour beneath a sun that is already baring its teeth. A sun like a curse.