Love, Anger, Madness

DIDEROT [37]

Book One

It was as if suddenly the earth, ravished and devastated by a horrifying cataclysm, had opened up to swallow us. People were running, shrieking. I leaped to open the door and, falling to my knees, looked outside. A taunting patch of tropical indigo sky caught my eye-an indigo stretched with water to the infinite horizon by the enormous brush of a tireless, austere and silent painter. Sky of Haiti, sky beyond compare, a custom-made frame for the giant mapou trees, for the unrelenting verdure of a landscape coddled by eternal spring. Bullets whistling by my ears quickly made me duck and close the door. Silence and trouble! Fearful silence. Deadly silence. Were they, like me, listening to their hearts leaping in their throats? The silence weighed like bricks upon us and we no longer dared move, lying low in terror, in our common terror where we clutched each other, invisibly, as if we were at the bottom of an airless pit. A stagnant agglomeration of cowards and curs! If only I could shake off my terror. I am going to shake off this repulsive terror of mine. They will see me show myself, a harmless poet and a dreamer, alone, in all the glory of our forebears, and offer my serene brow to their bullets. Lies. After many twists and turns, the poem crosses my field of thought and stops there as if to fool me about who I am. I am afraid. I’m stunned by the hammering of their boots. There they are walking past my house! I locked the front door and barricaded it with the old dresser rotting with wood lice, the four wicker chairs, the little pitch-pine table and the trunk where I keep my books and scraps of paper. I do all this, and yet by way of a peculiar doubling, I calmly go where I hear screaming, where I am certain the devils are committing murder. I avoid danger as I accuse myself of cowardice, loathing my own reactions. In the trunk, there are a few poems, unpublished, as are all of my poems about devils and hell. Enough of them there to get me pumped full of lead without anyone hesitating. No one until now has managed to describe them as well as I have, so intuitively. Before I even saw them, I pictured them booted, armed, dressed in resplendent red and black uniforms decorated with gold buttons. I understood the symbolic shorthand: incandescent flames burning at the bottom of an abyss out of which the damned, in a supreme and vile temptation, would see a rain of gold. Red, black, gold! Flames, abyss, ambition! No use trying. I can’t write. I will try to preserve in my memory this poem that keeps worrying at me.

Red, black, gold!

Flames, abyss, ambition!

Captivating colors of damnation…

By the glory of our forebears, I’m going to do it, kick the door open and walk up to them. Dessalines! Petion! Toussaint! Christophe! [38] I call on all our indomitable heroes for help. On God Himself! Yes, God! Why not! I unhook the crucifix, piously, I who had forgotten all about it for so long, since the day poetry replaced everything for me, since the day I tried, shut away in my Haitian Parnassus, to create my own god, a truly Haitian god, half-white, half-black, a blend of Christ and Legba [39] in whom I took refuge, wings dangling, eyes closed to better carve my way through an entanglement of traps, reversals, life’s one hundred thousand humiliations; to hack a path to freedom with an imaginary machete through the thicket of campeachy mahogany, and oak, and climb the unreachable hill of dreams. I must no longer dream. I must face danger. With what weapons? I put the crucifix on the floor, pointing its face at the front door. I, who haven’t believed in miracles in so long, here I am, today, awaiting one from God. My poem in the French manner has suddenly left me. Sad and nostalgic Creole stanzas have replaced it, and two astonishingly violent verses spring out of my mouth. Trembling, I yell them out, lying on the ground, hands lifting the crucifix. Then I put it back down, piously kissing its feet.

My black mother, before you died you told me:

“Serve the family loas and pray God you’ll never be in anyone’s debt.”

But I despised the loas and avoided the thought of God. I was hungry too often, and a man praying on an empty stomach is spitting in his own face.

I feel weaker before the devils who have invaded our little town, more inclined to seek divine protection. You can stifle hunger! but the devils…

I pull the trunk toward me and open it. Beneath the dusty layer of books and papers, I find a pile of sacred objects for a voodoo shrine: marassas dishes, [40] candles dressed in the seven colors of the rainbow, little pitchers stuffed with dried leaves meant for protection, the miraculous amulets I wore on a red string around my neck as a child. My black mother, who didn’t know how to read and who sold trinkets at the market, slaved away to make a scholar of her son. I left Creole and voodoo behind by going to school, and she, who was never able to say a French word to me, would beam when she heard me recite lessons she did not understand.

What are the good French sisters at the Sainte-Marie-de-Dieu school doing right now? Or the good French brothers at Saint-Valentin High School? They are on their knees, interceding with God on behalf of the cursed town, beseeching Him to vanquish the devils, to slay and crush them. And what if evil were to triumph over good yet again? Might as well wheedle the loas and have them on my side as well.

I take out the things from the trunk with ceremonial respect and pour water on the ground, offering drink to the gods of Guinea; then, I fill the marassas dishes with cane syrup and surround them with amulets and pitchers. I have nothing else to offer them, neither liquor nor candy, and in my generosity risk croaking from hunger while I wait for the devils to depart. Having pleased the loas, I lie sated on the floor, hands behind my neck. A thin trickle of light comes through a hole in the boards and I jump up and paste my eye to it. I would have preferred the whistling of bullets to this all-pervading silent torpor. From this observation post I have a wonderful view of Cecile’s tall house, the white railing of her balcony, her potted carnations, her lace curtains. I seek in vain for signs of life there. Where is she? What is she doing? What has happened to her parents? Their devious maid, Marcia, a pretty black girl, used to smile at me and shout:

“Lost your mind, heh! crazy mulatto, lost your mind…”

But the only woman I ever had eyes for was her mistress. And she knew it. What did I care about the insults of a poor, ignorant black girl mad with scorn to the point of throwing stones at me and making the kids of the Grand- rue chase after me!

I was biting my nails, bemoaning the fact I had not sought the object of my desire sooner, when I heard a man cry out. He was doubled over and running away as fast as possible, straight in the direction of my house. I saw Cecile’s window open slightly. In the time I lost looking for her silhouette the man fell, riddled with bullets. Two tiny devils, their weapons slapping their backsides like tails, leaned over the body and smashed its face in with their red boots.

Cecile’s window was closed again. I plugged up the wall with a piece of soap and took off my sweat-soaked shirt. On the ground, the crucifix gleamed in the half light. I stretched out on the floor again. I am on the floor with all of them now. On the floor with Jesus. On the floor with the loas, for it is said that the spirit of the gods of Africa descends upon the offerings for nourishment. On the floor, like a pariah. I burned my last mat to get rid of the bedbugs busy eating me alive at night. Before being reduced to this, I knocked on every door: Mme Fanfreluche’s door, and M. Potentat’s, both with businesses on the Grand-rue, both passing for rich people around here. I knocked on every door, repeating myself like a parrot in a voice growing weaker and weaker from rising hunger:

“Please give me some work.”

They would whisper something to each other that I could not hear and would put a twenty-centime coin in my hand for an errand I had agreed to run. But what can a man do with a Haitian coin of twenty centimes?

I am thirsty! My water pitcher is half-empty I will need to ration myself. Ah, if only I had enough courage to go cross the yard to get some coal and the little stove and make a bit of coffee! Thank God for the day my mother had the good idea to buy me this chamber pot.

Here I am alone as I have never been. Alone with my memories, my regrets, my remorse. Why remorse? Is it always there? After my mother’s death, I reproached myself for cutting short my mourning, though I had shut myself in for a month, even refusing to see the good Dr. Chanel. The doctor was the only one, apart from Father