Angelo and Brother Justinien, who made sure I did not die of hunger. But, like the Haitian saying goes, the good ones don’t last. And it is true that death always picks off the best. Dr. Chanel is dead. So is Brother Justinien. As for Father Angelo, just as good but now old, he can barely walk and, cassock or no, he does seem to live by begging just like me. For there is more than one way to beg.
To witness a man murdered makes you heavy with remorse. The body in front of my door is beginning to mean something to me. He haunts me. Was he running to me? Now I am standing in front of the wall, scratching away the soap to open up the hole again. Who is he? His clotted blood has stained his yellow shirt with large blackish blotches: the blood that gushed out red has become black. Black like the devils’ uniforms. Are devils black or white? Who am I, I who was born of a father mulatto enough to pass for white? Saffron skin, mahogany skin, sapodilla skin? No, rotten coconut skin.
“The color of farts,” as my mother used to say, “all mulattoes of your kind are the color of farts.”
This irresolute color with which I have trouble identifying makes whites lump me with blacks and blacks reject me as white. The mixed-blood race! Birds forever without branches, but of late especially unwanted.
When did I really begin to feel ill at ease? And for whose sin am I paying? They haven’t taken a good look at me, they haven’t seen my troubles, for the love of God!
The bloodbath that my friend Jacques, a poet like me, has predicted will come to pass. Although I still devour whatever palliatives life offers to help pass the time, it comforts me to think that if they should suddenly force open the door and step over the body of Christ to kill me, I would still know how to die bravely. That last jolt of pride, the guilty pleasure of a malcontent. Is death near? I have been letting myself sink into my past with too much complacency not to be frightened by it. It’s fishy. This brew of memories is unhealthy. Malcontent! An arresting word. An arrogant malcontent, like all artists.
Arrogant malcontents!…
I don’t want to write. At least, not as I have before. I feel as if I am coming out of my apathy and becoming self-aware. Cornered, hounded like an animal, I take stock of my powers in silence and in fear, and plunge to the very bottom of my being. To find what there? Ah! Lord have mercy! Spare me from clutching at nothing yet again. Look at my buddies. Poets like me. Their empty gizzards stuffed with crooked rhymes, just like me. Poetry! The endemic illness of young malcontents, desperately embracing beauty, hog-tied to the tempting rhymes of a loaned- out language, tossed about between Creole and French like those rowboats over there on the sea I can hear but not see crashing from my shack. My senses grow sharp in this silence intermittently punctuated by cries or the whistling of bullets. I no longer need to look in order to see: the sea is raging. Raging against the devils, against our resignation, against our cowardice, against us. I listen to it holler, scold, protest, refute. Furious, her waves lift abandoned sailboats and make them clatter like teeth. Silver and pink fish jump high in the air and cast stunned looks at the shore; gaunt dogs pace along the beach, nosy, searching through trash and bodies. Closer by, multihued birds shake off the rain, gliding indifferently, wings fixed between heaven and earth. Between squalor and splendor. They whistle and sing cheerful sunny songs, the strident songs of island birds; and their unbridled effervescence, wafting on the warm noon breeze, that Haitian noon usually suffused with the smell of dishes spiced with garlic and hot pepper, accentuates our torment, poor prisoners that we are. We are indeed prisoners. Brave is he who ventures out. Even the beggars have deserted the streets. They have probably dug themselves in somewhere in the mountains. Let’s hope hunger doesn’t turn them into snitches and drive them to make a pact with the devils, those who just yesterday were praying at the gates of the church, arms outstretched in a cross. The church too has closed its doors and, since morning, the bells have been quiet. Is Father Angelo afraid? Is Cecile afraid? Let me put my thoughts in order, let me draw a battle plan, and I will fly to your rescue… Where have I read this?…
My shack is in a back alley that opens on the Grand-rue. A nameless back alley in the slums where near- beggars of my kind live here and there. It is near the Grand-rue and is even more despised for it. A disgraceful appendix of that main street with its heap of self-styled aristocrats, baptized by high society, as they say. Shopkeepers, businessmen, exploiters, thieves in the guise of respectable citizens, bursting with every sort of prejudice, living like pashas in this provincial small town, which, due to the terrible roads that link it to Port-au- Prince, seems forever separated from the rest of the world.
This Haitian province sung over and over in my French rhymes, province that I love because my mother and I grew up here, suffered and slaved here, I will free you from the devils’ claws!
The past is forever vomiting up regrets. Life is like a heavy cart slowly, implacably grooving a path straight ahead of itself. I turned my head to look back and was seized by discouragement. Why didn’t I keep begging for work? Why didn’t I have the courage to declare my love to Cecile? I ran away from responsibilities out of fear of the future and now I may no longer have a future. I am alone, shut up like a rat in his hole, I am gnawing at my solitude with every last tooth. Look at my buddies. Andre, Jacques, Simon! Malnourished poets like me. Hunted by the devils like me.
I heard gunshots and then furious running. And this time I jumped to the barricade to unblock the door. I opened it wide and the fugitive saw it and flew into my house like the wind: it was Andre. We put back the barricade before embracing.
“What were you doing outside?”
“Looking for Jacques.”
“Where is he?”
“Left two hours ago. He jumped out the window and I haven’t seen him since.”
“The devils might have caught him.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Did he not also predict in one of his poems that the time of the devils would come?”
“My God!” Andre says, putting his hands together.
And he kneels to recite a prayer.
a voice outside recites. We listen carefully attentive and curious.
“Jacques!” Andre hollers.
He rushes to the door and I block his way.
“No, Andre.”
“Jacques!”
I put my hand over his mouth, grab his shoulder and push him against the wall.
“Look, I say.”
The devils, a dozen of them, escort Jacques, who walks slowly and indifferently among them, declaiming his poems.
“Do you see them?”
“Who?”
“The devils. They are all around your brother. Circling around him. Pushing him ahead.”
“Where?”
“There, at the corner of Grand-rue.”
“So he might get killed?”
“Something strange is going on.”
“What?”
“Devils though they are, it looks like they sense they are in the presence of a greater force, something that seems to overpower them.”
“I see Jacques!” Andre cries out. “People are cheering him on!”
“Those are the devils!”
“They’re going to kill him, Rene, they’re going to kill him,” Andre sobs.
“Do you see them?”
“No. But I am sure they’re going to kill him.”
