Love, Anger, Madness

and his hand running over paper distract my thought from its objective. Andre’s dazed inaction gets on my nerves. He is always sitting, arms dangling, mouth gaping, unless he’s clasping his hands and mumbling prayers. I am alone. More alone than before. No matter how much I focus, I can’t recover my train of thought. And yet I had come up with a plan to defeat the devils. I’m trying to find it. Trying to find it. I’m turning in circles. I am stuck on the wrong trail. Still trying to find it. Suffocating. As though a leaden hand is keeping my head in a sea of tar. I’m struggling. It’s dark, dark. I can’t see a thing in front of me. Wrestling with truth. It’s luminous but I don’t understand it. Empty! Empty! I am going to sink. I’m wallowing in unspeakable darkness. The glimmer returns. I reach for it. It slips away. Ah! My head is going to explode. My heart is going to give out!…

I would sometimes go to the market on Saturdays with my black mother. She would make me sit beside the goods tray and I would help her set up the cheap cloth swatches, the Creole hoop earrings, the lace trim that I was learning to measure by the ell, the silver medals, and the calico scarves. She was proud of her big goods tray that she carried on her head as night fell. Around us, the servants and the beggar-cripples came and went, as did the beggar-thieves whom we watched out of the corner of our eye. Mama would say to me:

“Don’t let them leave your sight, they’re more cunning than cats.” But all I could pay attention to was Alcindor, an old drunk who would roll on the ground and get up again in a moldy old frock coat-a gift from the prefect-white with dust, and do a banda dance. [54] His toothless mouth tied in a grin to his ears, he would sway his hips and we would clap to the rhythm to get him going. Bam bidim, bam bidim, bam bidim… bap! At noon, we would buy our meal from my mother’s cousin Justina, Aunt Justina as I called her, but whom others including my mother called strictly Mme Macius after her marriage in deference to the new wedding band on her finger.

When did I leave the common people behind? When we walked by, people used to say to my mother:

“How’s your mulatto boy Sister Angelie?” And my mother would reply:

“Praise God, he’s growing, my sister; he’s growing, my brother.”

“Oh, cousin!” Aunt Justina would cry out, squatting before her huge pot, “he’ll be a man soon!”

“God is good!” my mother would be quick to say, warding off bad luck.

For she feared the evil eye would fall on her mulatto boy like the plague. And especially because he was different from all the black boys. When did I abandon the people? She had hung around my neck the scapular medal Father Angelo had offered me at first communion. And the scapular hung near a large evil-eye bead on a red string that she wouldn’t have taken off me for anything in the world. I wore the scapular on the outside and the evil-eye bead underneath, and I could feel it bounce against my navel with every step. When did I lose my evil-eye bead? It was no ordinary evil-eye bead. Gromalin, the houngan my mother visited once in a while to make sure things went well for her, had endowed it with the miraculous power to keep all evil spirits away from me. When did I get rid of my evil-eye bead?

I grew up listening to the French writers talking in the books Brother Justinien lent me.

“You are very bright, Rene,” he would say to me. “I will keep pushing you in your studies.”

But he was seventy-three and died a short time before my mother did. And I cried, for I have a tender soul and all poets are tender-souled, sensitive types. I am talking about the true poets, not the false ones who write because it’s fashionable, to get attention. I wrote verse in French about Christophe, Dessalines, Toussaint and Petion. I am clinging to the colonial legacy like a louse. Why not? Dessalines thought he had uprooted it when he yelled:

“Off with their heads, burn down their houses!”

His Declaration of Independence, did his secretary Boisrond-Tonnerre [55] write it in Creole? What about Toussaint? What language did he learn to parry wits with Bonaparte?

“Do you want a seche?” [56] our French friend Simon said recently offering me a cigarette.

I stared at him without understanding…

I can see the town’s houses dancing. They’re going around my shack. As they file past, I hear good Dr. Chanel’s piano and then Mme Fanfreluche’s radio. A Mozart concerto rises up from the former, a popular merengue from the latter. Mozart breaks the spell of the drum over me. Who taught me to love Mozart? One day, I had opened the door to Dr. Chanel’s living room without knocking and he caught me standing very still, listening, arms crossed, serious and attentive. He said to me:

“Now, that’s what we call music, my son. Mozart alone is an angel among spirits.”

I felt the notes penetrate my flesh, mingle with my blood. I understood only later that on this day I had encountered something universal, out of the depths of a shared humanity, something that legitimately belonged to me as well, for the ties between it and myself had already been established. Mozart, the German, was my brother, beyond blood and distance, beyond centuries. A hyphen between races, as with Villon, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud. Mozart’s biography, which Dr. Chanel had me read, gave me ambitions.

“I will write,” I exclaimed, “poems that will shake the world.”

And thereafter, I discovered that such a task demanded one’s blood, drop by drop. I opened my veins and vainly dipped my quill in blood. Accursed poet! A poet on layaway! A French-minted black poet! Where is your tongue? Give me the clairin! I got drunk night and day to forget. Like Villon, like Baudelaire, like Rimbaud…

“Brotherhood of mad poets!” Commandant Cravache sniggers.

Hearing that we’re crazy, again and again, will make us so. In any case, he’s tried everything he can to make that happen, our Commandant Cravache. How many times must we get our heads bashed in? How many months in jail? And why, oh gods? Who are they trying to frighten by attacking us, hunting us down, persecuting us, beating us up?…

I don’t like this silence. It’s been weighing on our heads for too long. A terrible explosion will make everything disappear. The blast will come suddenly, lifting the houses and transforming them into torches, reducing human beings to dust. It’s coming. It’s coming. The wait is so awful! No respite from it, neither in oneself nor others. To know, to feel the creeping danger. Am I hungry? I don’t have time to think about it. I have to implement a battle plan.

“I’m hungry,” Andre says.

“Drink a little damn”

“It makes me feel like vomiting.”

“Bugger me!” [57]

“You’re imitating Simon,” Jacques says to me, having stopped writing.

“No. I’ve seen it in books. I can’t imitate Simon, white as he is.”

“Do you think he’s a great poet?” Andre asks me.

“What the fuck would a great French poet be doing in this mud-hole?” I replied, imitating Simon.

“You’re imitating Simon,” Jacques repeated.

“No. Whites in general call our country a mudhole. And so, imitor patrem. [58] Have you forgotten that my father spoke French like a Parisian?”

“You’ll never admit it, but you’re imitating Simon.”

Simon the bohemian. Filthy and flea-ridden like us. A bearded giant who lives off his “regular girl,” as he calls her. His regular girl is Germaine, a plump black woman, all dimples and more jealous than a wildcat.

“You’ll never believe me, old man,” Simon once told me, “but I wound up on the Haitian shore, coughed up from the cargo hold of an American ship.”

He’s been happily warming himself in the heat of our sun for the past six years, sick one day out of three. Puking his guts out from spicy food and booze, and vowing that these white pinkish innards of his will either get used to this or kill him…

I hear the bells toll… dong… dong… dong…

“Do you hear the bells, Andre?”

“The bells!”

“Listen!”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“You’ve always been hard of hearing. Jacques! Jacques!”

“What?”