Alphabet of the Night Read online

  A young boy crosses the road without looking. A butterfly chases him and his madness. It appears he comes down to the harbour every morning to bunk off school, and to avoid the spoonful of cod liver oil that, here in the north, they give to the scrawny, delicate kids from the south. Every morning he follows the same instinct, a child wound up in his wounds.

  The radio is intrusive. It yells. It is an all-purpose machine. No one dares wake up without it. The radio drives away the night and forecasts the colours of the day. For over ten years, no one has dared go out or send their children to school without getting the go-ahead from the radio. It punctuates the day with its advertising jungles. It entertains. It distracts. Scattered over gullible ears glued to it expectantly, today’s news is interwoven with that of yesterday and the day before, like a roll of film that rewinds itself in blood after a tasteless show. You could not say that the radio uses the language of madness and grief deliberately. Politics and fate have already killed off the time of appeasement.

  Who can tell me when in the history of this place the streets rid themselves of the lunatics who used to go round everywhere, hugging the walls and putting up posters of the current heads to be cut off or stuck back on? The tropics and the devastating hurricanes will have to die out before the tide of fear goes down. We Jews, who ransack the land without ever working it, have never invented a new language. We have been content to cover the town with our stalls, remaining silent and unmoving in the face of bad customers. The people’s militia may be right to leave misunderstood, simple and absent-minded crimes outside the door of our shops and homes. We came from far away to build a republic of clients. Our principle is to be at their disposal, to quicken the drug effect that our shelves have on them. It has always worked because the Revolution has never been so accurate, so targeted.

  We have always believed that the politics of the national palace regularly renews itself, leaving needs and desires unchanged. In our most fearful dreams, this era has not revealed the most obscure aspect of its face. I belong to this community, one which is suffering a dramatic loss of power.

  I am the unworthy heir of a line of merchants. I regret that I am not up to the job of maintaining the well-established family firm. I closed the shop before having the electronic signboard put up across the front. It is true that the power has been cut off for a long time, and the little generator can’t handle any more, but I should have invested in another source of power. Then my name would have been picked up by every pair of eyes, spread all over town, discussed in every home, creating a desire for the shop to reopen. But I think I have become a sad case, keener to campaign for love than for memories.

  At school with Fresnel, in this my town of refuge, there was reading aloud, gold stars in our report books to encourage us. I spent the first twelve years of my life with a head full of subconscious dreams. The harbour, the streets as straight as the letter ‘I’, the abandoned lighthouse, are as much a weight as a way of not forgetting. Adult life transformed the little bell of my games—most of them forbidden—into a muffled roar that means rebellion or permanent exile. I came back to this town to cry tears of anxiety, to lessen Fresnel’s absence under the microscope of memories. I am afraid I will forget how to untie the knot of our passion. I am now certain that my debt to him is clearer and more exacting than the debt to my family. I am going to come back from the dead, starting from this town that sketched the outlines of an alliance of heart and sense.

  “Reactions from all of Haiti’s political class in exile, and even those of some foreign governments and personalities, keep coming in to our editorial offices after the shocking assassination of Father Jacques Lachenet. Through its official nunciature in Haiti, the Vatican has made a vehement protest against the impunity enjoyed by criminals. It is particularly worried about the tendency to trivialise crime in a Christian country. There is no need to remind you that Father Lachenet is well known throughout Latin America for his stand in favour of preaching reparation. He is leader of a movement that accuses the Church of encouraging and taking part in colonisation, of having supported plans for the impoverishment and loss of dignity of the native populations of America and of those who came from Africa. We find the Vatican’s open letter surprising, given the reluctance of the Holy Father to support the late priest’s theological masturbation—to use the words of the Archbishop. But there is no need for alarm. An inquiry has been opened and will continue indefinitely.”

  This piece of news exposes the presenter’s own fears. He is usually so careful about the tone he uses, depending on where the sun is in the sky and on advertising contracts. I once persuaded him to promote a new brand of razors for me. He presented my product as if it was a weapon against man-eating beards. Everyone believed him; sales figures far exceeded all my expectations.

  8

  I REALISE THAT FATHER LACHENET was an important person. I had to put up with him for six years of my adolescence at the Collège Saint-Martial. I didn’t really like him. But in this turmoil of words, deaths and bankrupt hopes, you hang on to, cling on to, graft yourself onto every pain. Perhaps it is the time for solidarity, for the reverse side of the seasons.

  The first time I met the late priest was the day I took my entrance exam for the Collège Saint-Martial, a school renowned for its expertise in helping revive the country’s elite. However stupid a politician might be, somewhere on his curriculum vitae he has a few years at this expensive, prestigious and austere school. Concentrating on the questions on my commentary sheet, I tried to avoid the presence of this Father who watched me throughout the test. When I handed in my script, he stared at me for a long time with eyes that were devoid of feeling. I realised that never again would I find a religious ear to listen to the song of my restless nights. No more holy hands on my child’s skin. The time of memories was fast approaching. I felt deposed, deprived of my privileges.

  For four whole years I was never able to get close to Father Lachenet. At the end of each year he came to give out the annual reports. He always held mine between his finger and thumb and looked at it for three or four minutes. He was interested in my results. I never was. Sometimes I heard him laughing in the library, where every afternoon he shut himself away with young people from the collège and the lycées in the town. I imagined him spending his life writing forewords for the plans of his friends’ lives. I was still not in his group. But I sensed my day was coming. He did not mix with the babies of the collège. His thing was the big boys.

  In the October when I went into the Humanities class, he was appointed to the tenure of Haitian History. I found myself in the front row, in a seating plan he had drawn up himself. He called all the pupils by their first name, except me. Yet I was one of the rare Whites—and thus visible—in a class that was mostly black or mulatto. My family was not unknown, although not highly thought of in political and intellectual circles. But although we lived modestly, no one could accuse us of being poor. Not content with just paying my school fees, my family contributed to the cost of all the extracurricular activities. I was a good pupil. My love affair with Fresnel was now ten years old. Despite the hotheadedness and desires of our adolescence, we had never openly publicised our relationship. Our secret had the advantage of putting distance between us and the school, through the magic of our journeys to celebrate our childhood, intact and restored to our games.

  In a few months, the Father-Incumbent got me to visit places connected with the history of families like mine, something I had always refrained from doing, even with good analytical tools. He had the words for, and a way of talking about the all-pervasive Jews, who do not have any popular, proletarian project in mind. At first I took him for a dreamer who, instead of keeping his feet on the ground was trying to blow it up, to the detriment of anyone trying to hang on. I did not feel the least bit guilty about having an immigrant Jew for a father. I knew this country had been looted from the moment it appeared in the history books. Spaniards, English, French, their sons calling themselves Haiti
ans, Germans, Italians, Black Americans, Levantines, Jews: they had all passed through. The Black Africans who think they belong here are not the first arrivals. Haiti is an open country, a mosaic.

  In my reasoning and my personal situation, I used these rational words to fill the emptiness left by the arrows that the Father fired during history lessons. I had to react in public in order to ring my little bell, the victim’s bell. In the playground, like attracted like. But I was not like anyone. Even Fresnel had found other interests. People only came to me to set up a fund to pay for the sharing-out of gifts at the end-of-term prize-giving or other celebrations.

  Father Lachenet never came into the playground, but in his absence I felt his presence. I heard him everywhere, in the whispering, when others ran away. Two weeks after my declaration of principles—which he found rather pompous—he called me into his office, a colourless box collapsing under the weight of books two centuries older than him—or that was how it seemed—to confess something to me. He began by asking me to leave the school voluntarily. According to him, a well-educated Jew is a threat to future generations. And in the end, Haiti has to become a nation. This is very complex, with all the various groups who have different-coloured skin as well as different economic situations. The case of the Jews could be even more difficult. They have no real roots. Their memory is confined to their business to start with; and since time immemorial, the moment they become rich they expand and demand the right of ascendancy over all the peoples of the world. They believe they are God’s direct descendents. And since the earth and all it contains belongs to God, it follows that the Jews, who are God’s heirs, should claim to be owner-managers of the earth, and especially its wealth.

  His speech left me with no choice. My father helped me understand the political class’s need for nationalism in the direction they had taken. I knew our role was to provide the people here with cheap rubbish and goods from the rest of the world, while still getting them to dream. With our seeming success, we had to take hold of people by their belly and their desires. For their part, they would carry on with politics and come to us at the appropriate time, such as for financing an election campaign against the promise of franchises.

  The following year I left the collège and went to study accountancy in the United States. I wanted to go to university and then teach. Alas: the destiny of every Jew leads him to the back room of a shop.

  Not long afterwards, on the Voice of America programme, I heard that Father Lachenet had been arrested and forced into exile:

  “A communiqué from the press-relations department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Religious Worship has published the names of members of religious orders who have been declared persona non grata on Haitian territory. These priests were running a network of young leftists without patriotic sympathies. The government, which is mindful of respecting the Constitution, upholds people’s rights of association; but it also has a duty to ensure that the country’s future decision-makers get a good education. It is with the aim of protecting the student community that the police have been ordered to break up this network which, in its way of operating, had every appearance of a breeding ground for terrorists. Subversive books and leaflets have been seized and destroyed. Father Lachenet, the main instigator of this movement, has been stripped of Haitian nationality and banned for life from living on Haitian territory.”

  When there was a change of those in power, Father Lachenet naturally came back. He rediscovered the good intentions of his militant tendency. This grieved me, but I understood his position.

  9

  1st November

  2 30 p m

  LESS THAN TEN KILOMETRES to go before Port-au-Prince gets to me. The city is well protected by rows of shanty towns with a line of cracks down the middle. Port-au-Prince is the sort of capital that anticipates your intentions. The town never lets itself be caught out. I am one of those who come back to rake over the ashes, to refresh the blood. Murderous twinges grip my heart. I worry about my many different survival instincts, which obscure any sensitive impulse, the right to be human. Most of all I am mesmerised by the military activity, the searching looks, the menacing talk of the poor people which bombard me whenever I stop. The mere idea of the smell of the streets, the whispering of the haggard houses, the weight of the voices, makes me hide behind my salesman’s vigilance on the main road to Port-au-Prince, a road which is crumbling, at the end of its tether.

  I have got older just thinking about skirting round the town and its rhythms on the edge of the darkness. Common sense reels around on my suppressed sobs. Why did I choose All Souls’ Day, the procession of the guédés, to take a road that struggles towards my return? I left this place under a deluge of alarming news. The traffic defies time and any urban logic. From all directions, the dance is approaching. It is a road in the shape of a cross, lost in the cemetery. My patience opens like a tomb the council has ordered to be reused. Among my most recent bereavements, my most painful losses, Fresnel and Lucien loom up and seep into the expectant silence. It would take all day to make those who loved me realize that in every man’s life there is an infinity of nights, that in these nights there are drugged nights which don’t wake up with the sun, and in every crazy night, tombs burst open and yield up models of the dead which are anchored in the infinity of unsubdued grief.

  With taboos going off in my head like Catherine wheels, I stop for a break on the edge of town. The cemetery has been tamed by fresh lime, the artificial season of oleander and the overpowering smells of tafia and piment-bouc. Led by a stream of nymphs-for-a-day, the dance conquers this place of reverence, stands in the way of regrets bewildered by the swagger of the festival. Everything seems to justify its being in leaf. On a pathway lined by tombs, their tops decked out in finery, I sit down to cut grooves in a stolen candle. My keen affection struggles in the furrows that my nails dig in the wax. My body regains its liking for frenzy. Sighs come out of my sorrow. The dead know how to love at the opening of the festival, the beginning of reverence.

  The wind has stocked up with ragged songs, shattered footsteps which drown out the last of the sobbing that usually precedes the procession. My prayers, incredulous at so much hysteria, become physical under the insistent caresses I keep warding off. It is a daydream that has real power over my search. I am convalescing from love.

  It needed this woman to bring me back to the performance. The way she arrived laughs in the face of all moderation. None of my senses dare try to explain her unexpected presence. The cemetery is a place of confusion strewn with unquiet dead, with lost ghosts. People talk of freed zombies who are waiting for the moment to come out of their daze. They are everywhere. They scorn the terrible fear of death. The woman is in a trance. In her frantic dance she displays her sex to me, working away at it with a hot pepper soaked in cane alcohol. Because I am constantly rubbing against the reality of this ritual, I know she is not bluffing.

  Stifling smells. Dances of whirling waists. Songs without rhythm. Everyday words on every wavelength. Her voice rises and tunes in the mood to the right frequency.

  “Fresh blood will replace dry blood. We haven’t seen anything yet in this country. I see days coming when hands will take up machetes for the great bale-wouze*. Aagh! Port-au-Prince, my girl, the rape will be first class.

  In the future at the gates of the city, Cité Soleil will meet Pétion-Ville for a fight that will be like the passing of the last tank. Woe to them who don’t lay down their weapons and their medals at the feet of the departed. The town will be stormed by the seven secret societies of Léogâne and Arcahaie. The dead will console the dead. The dance of the guédés will be everywhere, every day, until the end of time.

  Leave this town by the first plane, the first boat, the first dream. When the mutilated dead march on the capital under orders of the great general, Baron Samedi, none will be spared and none will fail at the next passing. The land is no longer what it was. It is no match for so many people cut down while they were
asleep, for the dead nailed down in their coffins regretting that they haven’t lived. All the living are guilty. Responsible.”

  With the silence she returns to normal. The dance dies away. The pain flares up. Like a child waking after a restless night, she is amazed to see my eyes still fixed on her lips. She turns her head away, gathers up her once-white skirt and tries to move her legs, numbed by her swollen, burning sex. She turns round. Her eyes are searching for the threatened future. She refuses to believe in what is left of her prophecy.

  * The great cleansing.

  10

  1st November

  5 p m

  AT THE CARREFOUR DE L’AVIATION, a day is torn up. People pack their bags of wounds and disappear along the potholed road that is oblivious to the call of the stars. The column winds, solitary in its night march.

  The Delmas road is covered with large patches of dried mud, a sign of the last flood. If this country was the same, all we would have to do is spray life with water bowsers every December. On the first of January we would celebrate the baptism of a brand new country without any manufacturing faults. The long line of people is still silent. Now and then it lets out a deep sigh, a question mark over an uncertain tomorrow. For some time the nights have been so long that people are afraid that, one dawn, they won’t be able to break the ice to let out the cockcrow. Everyone is going home. Which home? It is the daily rendezvous, the gathering for the little scene at the end of the day. One crowd, two thousand, ten thousand Haitians, one sigh, different songs, God of all the flavours, president for life until the next coup d’état, millions of dried-up hopes waiting for a night without faith or law.