Kannjawou Page 7

  WHEN WE LEFT KANNJAWOU, MONSIEUR RÉGIS WAS CROONING TO A SLEEPY MONSIEUR VALLIÈRES THAT HE HAD NEVER MADE SO MUCH MONEY IN A SINGLE NIGHT. If it continued like this, he’d soon be able to pay off his debt to Isabella and would be free to play at being Christopher Columbus elsewhere. But he says this just to talk. He doesn’t know that everyone knows. That his parents had paid for him to study abroad. That things were looking good for him. That the women in his family, his mother and his sisters, had gone to check in on him to make sure that he had settled in well and wasn’t in need of anything. That he had enrolled in several different business school programs, written a little poetry and played a little guitar, failed his courses, accumulated some practical knowledge by doing odd jobs here and there, decided that business was worth more than business school and his country better than far-away countries, and paid for his return ticket with his savings.

  WE BEGIN OUR WALK. Our descent. For the first time, Sophonie was contemplating skipping the beer at the outdoor bar at the Place des Héros and going straight home. The night had been hard. She just wanted to take a bath and go to bed. In order to do so she would have to fill the bucket and unscrew the bulb in her bedroom to replace the one missing in the cupboard that served as their bathroom, then redo the whole operation in reverse after her bath. But it would be better than going to bed with the smell of customers and the weight of fatigue. I had to finish writing a paper for a student at a private university and think a little bit about the idea of a thesis on the history of the cemetery. Popol wasn’t sharing his thoughts, but I knew it made him sad to see Sophonie work so much. We walked along Oak Flower Street. It’s a pretty name that must at some point have represented a reality we can no longer imagine. Turning right, we passed in front of the large Protestant church whose loudspeakers in the street frequently disrupt the nearby graduate schools, although none of the students protest in the slightest. In a city where the power of any small group or clan resides in its ability to strike fear in others, no one denounces the racket coming from the church that makes it impossible for professors to teach their classes. The students suffer, but they don’t have the courage to confront the church fanatics. A fanatic knows only one fear: that of not living up to his faith. Threats don’t touch him. It’s easy to cause problems for a university when the dean is scared. But how cowardly the brave would be if they had to face religious extremists who would fight them stone for stone and insult for insult, who would break into classrooms with signs covered in quotes from Psalms and about the Apocalypse. One day I’ll have to talk to Wodné about this.

  SOPHONIE WAS THE FIRST TO SEE HER. A head. A little head. A broken body, crumpled in on itself. “It’s Sandrine.” A body soaked with tears and vomit. Her eyes are wild. With despair. And fear. Three people she hadn’t wished to see. Three black faces. “It’s me, Sophonie.” Worry. Hesitation. Sophonie? As drunk, sick, ruined, and vaguely suicidal as she is, she doesn’t want to be hit by strange black hands; she shields herself with her arms, protecting herself from the threatening blows that aren’t coming. Sophonie? She doesn’t know anyone by this name. Yes, Sophonie, the server! On Wednesdays! At Kannjawou! She’s wearing the same clothes as earlier but her white blouse has turned to gray and is missing a button, so you can see her bra underneath. Her chest is flat. Very flat. Breasts that haven’t developed enough for someone like Marc, who likes them to be bigger and rounder, and who danced until the bar closed with a smaller brunette. Who’s probably still dancing somewhere, in a different way, with this brunette who’s better looking, less jealous, less suspicious, who’s more clearheaded, who’s not searching for love where it can’t be found. The little brunette searched so hard that she found only despair, which has made her look like a worn-out doll. And there’s Sophonie, alert, skillful, precise. Help me lift her up. Instructive, protective: “We won’t hurt you.” Convincing, firm: “You really want to stay there and be harassed by thugs?” Then Sophonie, directing us all. Popol and I holding up the little brunette. Still crazed. Thrashing about. “Leave me alone.” Above all, she is ashamed, and begins crying again every time she looks at herself. And Sophonie, magnificent: “Don’t be ashamed. He’s the one who’s a piece of shit.” But don’t spend your whole life crying over this piece of shit. She doesn’t say these words but I can hear them, although I don’t know whether the little brunette she’s speaking to can hear them through her stupor.

  WE WENT TO MAM JEANNE’S HOUSE. Because she has a shower. I know where she hides the key. She’s always said to me, If there’s something really wrong, you should come in without knocking. We didn’t want to wake her. Sophonie began to undress the little brunette, while Popol and I tried to get out of the way. Mam Jeanne was there, and she was looking at us, with Loyal behind her. We explained to her what was going on. She understood right away. She went to look for a clean towel, which she gave to Sophonie. The two girls went into the bathroom. Mam Jeanne thought the situation warranted a cup of tea. I felt uncomfortable, I wanted to help her, to do something to justify my presence. You feel stupid when you’re not of much help in a stressful situation. But it will be a long time before Mam Jeanne lets someone else make tea for her. The girls came out of the bathroom. Both were wet. Sophonie still in her clothes, and the little brunette wrapped in a towel. Ill at ease. Her eyes dodging our gaze. Her hair and her face clean. She was able to hold herself standing without any support. To sit down, taking care to make sure that the towel was hiding everything she wanted hidden. Accompanied by Popol, Sophonie went out into the night to go get some clothes from next door. Mam Jeanne served us the tea. This Marc deserved a good dose of Loyal’s piss on his head. The little brunette didn’t understand. Or pretended not to understand. Marc? Who was Marc? A goose and an ostrich. I told her what happened to bad people when they walked underneath Mam Jeanne’s balcony. She laughed. A timid little laugh. Resurrections didn’t always happen the same way as Saint Lazarus’s did. The dead who return don’t all return walking briskly and speaking loudly. They have to start living again slowly. The little brunette’s laugh was timid. Furtive. As though she herself was stunned to discover that she hadn’t lost the ability to laugh, to feel something other than the pain that had landed her on the street. She served herself more tea, the second step of her resurrection. How had she found herself there, in the bad part of the city, where she’d been forbidden to go by the documents she’d signed when she accepted her job? When she’d left Kannjawou, she had driven around aimlessly and fallen asleep at the wheel. For how long, she didn’t know. When she woke up, there was a car parked behind hers. Two men. She was scared. She started her engine too quickly and drove right into a wall. Her car was unusable. She saw the headlights of a car. She thought of the two men and began to run. She knows how to run. At school, running and swimming were her favorite sports. Run, my brunette. She ran. Wondering if she was going to die here, on the land that hadn’t asked anything of her. What she had come here to do. And what an idea, to fall in love with the first good-looking guy she’d slept with. Run, my brunette. They’d warned her. About the country. The men. Bad neighborhoods. Run, my brunette. Shit, everyone is allowed to want to live her life! At home, elsewhere: the world belongs to everyone! And she didn’t come here to commit crimes! There was a job open, and she had taken it. An opportunity to see the world, to get to know something else. And then bad things started happening one after the other, like dominos! “I didn’t do anything wrong. You know?” We knew. Mam Jeanne didn’t respond. She asked her how old she was and when she planned on learning to distinguish what was real from what was fake. The little brunette didn’t take the question badly, but she didn’t understand it. There had been a position, an offer. A skill. A job. With the agreement of the local authorities. That was enough for her. And in the places she usually went, she hadn’t experienced any signs of hostility. It was her third country. Her third job. It was a way to explore. To help. She believed it. Loyal was lying on Mam Jeanne’s lap. Two old ladies. And Mam Jeanne to
ld the little brunette that here, on Burial Street, most of the young women hadn’t had the opportunity to be so naïve. When you were born with such privileges, you had to know how to enjoy them and not let yourself be weighed down by pointless pain. There were Marcs in every occupied city. “Yes, but he’s not like that. He’s better than what people think of him.” A goose and an ostrich. “We could have…” Yes, you could have. And Mam Jeanne went to bed, Loyal following his mistress. For a few minutes the little brunette and I were left alone. In silence. Without anything to talk about. Sophonie and Popol returned with the clothes, and the little brunette went to change in the bathroom. The jeans and t-shirt were a little too big. A lost little body. Lost. Little. She wanted to walk in the night. “If you want to.” Sophonie wanted to. I shut the door behind us and put the key back in its hiding place. We walked in the night. We went alongside Grand Street towards the intersection with Léogâne Gate. A world that used to exist. No more singers with their guitars. No more little bars where bohemians went to waste their youth. No more storytellers with people gathered round, laughing at stories that resembled their daily lives. When we were children and went to Mam Jeanne’s house to stock up on sweets, she used to say that Wodné didn’t laugh enough, that dry bread never softened as it aged. Wodné and the little brunette! What would they have been able to say to each other? Nothing that the other would have been able to understand. What a clash that would be! The O.K. Corral of sour faces. But the little brunette didn’t have a sour face now, in her too-big clothing, as we walked up and down the Gate, which is no longer than what it used to be. A kingdom, in the old days, of satirical singers, who mocked the power and sexuality of the righteous. Instead she had the air of a child apologizing for not knowing that the world is big, a child who often feels very lonely. Because her colleagues weren’t really her friends. Because she didn’t have the glibness or the audacity or the mile-long legs of the tall blonde. Because you can’t attract Kompa or Zouk dancers by discussing international law treaties with them, even if everyone knows that the people in power can violate those treaties whenever they want to. She was talkative, melancholy, she wanted to drink one last beer before going home. Was that wise? Yes, she promised, she swore, she wouldn’t vomit any more. And her service vehicle? And her safety instructions? Oh, she would think of them the next day. She would ask the tall blonde for advice, or the Three Musketeers, who knew all the strategies for breaking the rules without facing consequences for their careers. One last beer, I’ll pay. And we drank it, that last beer. We didn’t want to wake up Mam Jeanne again. Sophonie and Popol sleep together on Wednesday nights. At our house there are two real rooms and one half-room that serves as a kitchen and storage room; in that room, there’s a chaise longue that Popol and I recovered from when one of the last prominent families in our neighborhood moved away. The living members of those families had started to flee Burial Street before the dead could decide to escape the cemetery. We had only the chaise longue to offer to the little brunette. “That’s fine. I’ll take it.” Once we were at our house, Popol and Sophonie went into their room. I put some sheets and a pillow onto the chaise longue for the little brunette. She had taken off her jeans and t-shirt. She started to say “co—,” then caught herself, stopped speaking. I knew what she was going to say: comforter. A nice word. I see it often in books. But I’m not sure it would appear very often in a realistic book about Burial Street. I gave her the piece of canvas that I use as a “comforter.” In my room, I opened the last novel that the little professor had borrowed from the library. A few pages, to make it easier to slip into sleep. Popol and Sophonie have the real room. The door to mine doesn’t shut all the way. I was going to turn off the lamp when I saw a shadowy figure in underwear pass by and knock on Popol and Sophonie’s door: “I don’t want to be alone.” I heard the door open and shut again. I’m ready to bet that Sophonie was the one to get up from bed to greet her, and that she gently pushed Popol towards the side of the bed to make space for the little brunette—no, my love, for Sandrine, her name is Sandrine, everyone has the right to a name—between their bodies for the rest of the night.

  THE LITTLE PROFESSOR CAME TO READ TO THE CHILDREN. There were fewer than usual. Only the boldest were there. Hans, Vladimir, and a few others. The ones who already supported themselves and didn’t take orders from anybody. Or the ones who never learned to obey the few parents they did have and didn’t see the point in changing now. Then the parents arrived, more of them than the children. They had asked to have a discussion with the committee. All of Wodné’s gang, half of the committee, was already there. Popol and Sophonie hadn’t been warned. The parents had been informed that, late at night, their little ones had been involved in sexual activity with white people, and that the little professor had his eyes on the young women, even the youngest girls. They had proof. I went to look for Mam Jeanne. Even Wodné’s gang wouldn’t contest her authority. As for the parents.. such parents they were! “You, who would sell your own mother, daughter, even your wife, for a glass of clairin… And you, who’ve never spent a cent on educating your son… No one here is touching your children’s bodies. If you were able to do the same, their skin wouldn’t be striped from the rope, the paddle, the whip… Be happy that they’re welcomed here and that someone’s putting something into their heads aside from the idiocies that bring you all together.” Thank you, Mam Jeanne. The parents left and the other children came back. But the little professor didn’t have the heart to begin reading to them again. He told me that already that morning at the university, he hadn’t been able to teach his class. Students had interrupted his presentation, accusing him of being a profiteer who fucked his students and then tossed them aside like garbage. What was he going to do? “Nothing. The truth always prevails.” I don’t share his opinion. If you let truth face a lie all on its own, there’s no guarantee that it will win. “Do you know the story about Mam Jeanne and the false prophet? I could write a novel about it, in the style of Gogol.” It’s the first time I used the informal form of “you” when addressing him. The story was pretty bad, but we laughed over it, even if we had to force ourselves to. Mam Jeanne had had a brother who considered himself a poet, even though he hadn’t had much education. Once, on a public bus, he had met a man who was going on and on about how to write well. Modestly, he had asked the man if he would be willing to come over and correct his writing. “Gladly. You have to help others.” The man came, asking for nothing in return. Other than his daily jug of the best clairin at the time, which was called Mulatto, accompanied by a hot meal. Then he took up a pencil, crossed things out, phrased, rephrased. Mam Jeanne’s poor brother was in despair. Despite all of his efforts he hadn’t managed to write something that was worth anything. His wife, too, was in despair. The family’s finances depended on it, as well as her husband’s health. She went to see Mam Jeanne, who told her brother to copy some verses from his favorite poet into the schoolboy’s notebook that he used for his own poetry. The instructor arrived, ordered his meal and his clairin. Then, just like the last time, he began to cross things out, proclaiming that his disciple wasn’t very talented and that he had only gotten worse. “As a matter of fact,” Mam Jeanne told her brother, “you’re not very talented. Stop this craziness.” Then she turned to the instructor. “And you, get out of here. You’re not even a very talented drinker if you haven’t recognized the taste of cat piss in your glass.” Exit the instructor and the poetry. “I’m not sure about Gogol. A little more Chekhov, maybe.” And we spent the evening in the little professor’s library, talking about stories that had only become major works of literature once they had been rewritten by masters. Real ones. But his face was sad and his voice very weak. I had never realized how alone he also was.