“What’s wrong?” Andre asks.
“Did you see?”
“Who?”
“The devil there, at the corner of Grand-rue.”
He throws himself on the floor and curls up trembling behind the trunk, hands clasped together.
No point talking to him. He only knows how to tremble and pray. His presence weighs on me. It seems to me that if I were by myself I’d be able to think of a solution more easily. His terror is contaminating me. I make vain efforts to turn inward, to focus. As in a dream, I feel like I am running after something that escapes me just as I think I am about to catch it in my hands. Oh! My God, the ugliness of that face! Could I ever forget it?
“Stop mumbling prayers,” I shout to Andre impatiently. “You’re not letting me think.”
“Hush! Lower your voice,” he begs.
I’m hunting down an idea. Surely it concerns the devils. To defeat them, but how? Fight them, but how? I’ve got it. I’m going to kill one of them, just one, I will slip on his uniform and then I will wedge myself among their ranks and keep my head down. An exterminating angel striking at hell’s minions with my blade! I will free the town from the devils’ clutches. God has designated me for this role. I will fulfill my destiny only when I obey Him. Each of us has a role to fulfill down here, otherwise how can we justify having been created? But one must not play dumb and blind, but obey. As for me, I have ears to hear with and eyes to see with, and I have heard and I have seen. What I experience cannot be merely personal. Will the others shirk responsibility? Are they going to close their eyes and ears like Andre? Until this very minute, I thought that the corpse was the source of the turmoil within me. But I see the light now. I feel lifted by an unexplainable force that paradoxically inclines me to great humility. I feel like a child who, one fine day, finally receives a long-coveted toy.
The body is teeming with ants, its eyes slowly disappearing into two deep orbits traced by the ravages of the merciless insects. I will stoically bear witness to its slow and irreversible decomposition.
Original sin is like a tattoo, we are cursed from the beginning. Where did I read that? Is this fair? If the devils have made ours their town of choice, it can only be because of original sin. What are we guilty of? Let each of us cry out: “Mea culpa, mea culpa,” and the devils will disappear. God has unleashed the devils upon us to punish us. Otherwise, how can we explain their power? God is tired of us. God spits in our face.
God tortures us so that the punishment will bear fruit once and for all. Who has not felt the icy finger of remorse weighing on his heart at least once? Hedonists, exploiters, frauds, spies, torturers, all kneel and cry out: “Mea culpa!” “It seems begging has become a profession,” was your response to the one who implored and held out his hand to you. “Leave me alone, lazybones,” you cried to the cripple.
And in your moneyed homes, you amassed expensive knickknacks from France or the United States, collected jewelry and baubles to adorn your wives so they could strut past the beggars while holding their noses.
What am I guilty of? Me?
Well before the devils came, I felt I was being spied on, as if a mysterious presence was watching my every move, sniggering whenever it heard me recite my verses. And yet, I am just a minuscule creature! To you, I am nothing but a wisp of straw. I am nothing but a poor ox resigned to the stake, pulling his rope out of habit, docile, with no great desire to leave the meager pasture where it is attached. A Haitian ox, born in poverty, used to his poverty, lowing in the sun, his empty gut growling. But so be it, whether or not you’re an ox at the stake, each and every one of us needs to account for himself. Life is nothing but a usurious loan, and we still have to pay back the interest someday. We’ve abused the terms of the loan and the devils’ judgment day is here. Purification through the flames of hell here and now, and the triumph of truth afterward. We will confess our crimes in public this time, shouting: “Mea culpa!”
The devils speak. Listen to their bullets. Our overgrown gutters are red with blood. Cursed be the towns where poverty becomes a stone-faced routine. Where it no longer arouses pity.
It is said that the innocent will pay for the guilty. Oh! Yes, wait a minute, my God, after all, nothing has been bestowed upon me since my birth save the blessed love of my mother. Contempt, humiliation, cheap shots have been my lot. Of course the crippled beggars are in worse shape than I am. Thanks to my good black mother, I have a shack for shelter and some ordinary furniture. All of them naked like veritable zombies, gaunt, skeletal; they must be dying of hunger somewhere in the hills, the crippled beggars. But the devils’ bullets muffle their voices…
I knew my father by sight and reputation.
“Look,” my mother said to me one day, pointing out a man as light-skinned as a white man with a soft felt hat on his head, beautiful polished shoes, and, on his arm, a beautiful lady who looked like she could be Mme Fanfreluche’s sister. “That’s your father.”
A great landowner, who also had buildings on the Grand-rue, he wouldn’t give me an inch of thread for a pair of pants. My mother had been brought to him when she was fifteen by some of the farmers who had settled on his lands and who wished to get in his good graces. These farmers happened to be my mother’s own parents. Poverty forces poor blacks to grovel like dogs before the rich. They offered him their only daughter as a house slave, making her a
But in reality that’s nothing. There’s worse. The crippled beggars dug into the mountains somewhere, with neither food nor water, nor voodoo drums nor dancing, nor
