Raynand had no inkling that such a disaster was coming. Nevertheless, the following Sunday, through the open front door, he saw Solange in Gaston’s arms.

It was a violent shock. A sudden gust of wind. A cyclone. His head jerked back. He almost lost his footing. Out of modesty, he made sure he wasn’t noticed. He’d have felt ridiculous. Like a lapdog, tail tucked between his legs, he went away, all his limbs trembling. His skin felt like it had been overcome with a sudden fever, intense and profound. His stomach churned. His intestines writhed like a snake hit in the head with a rock. No, like an earthworm wound around itself, its head crushed under someone’s heel, every ring broken. I’m enveloped in shadows. The night is more present deep inside of me than anywhere else … than under the spherical cap deprived of sunlight … than in all things cut off from the light. I’m irrevocably draped in darkness under the sordid weight of an endless night. The beast is neither dead nor vanquished. It lies within me. Of one body with my nerves and my vertebrae. I am pity incarnate, misery itself. A pathetic human being. A sadness without greatness. The infected wound of a dog without a master. Just trample me, Solange. Spit on me. Crush me like an insect. Crush my worm’s head. Love turns bitter in my hands. It burns me with a voracious flame. It is without pity. It nibbles at my entrails, killing me slowly but surely. Assassinating me. It strangles me mercilessly. It’s the queen bee who, in a whirlwind, kills any male who comes near her. It’s the female hippopotamus who kills her partner on the bottom of the ocean while mating. My Solange! It isn’t her fault. It’s my fault entirely. I had the audacity to love her. I ventured into a no-man’s-land. And not by accident. But because I simply could not do otherwise. And so it is that now even retreat is painful. All I leave behind are strips of flesh caught on the teeth of barbed wire.

Raynand walked for hours without even realizing it. He was really just walking in circles, looping endlessly around the same block of houses next to Saint Antoine. He’d become a pair of walking legs in the wind, heading nowhere. He had the vague sense of being followed. He took off running. He ran without knowing where he was headed. At one point he felt like an invisible giant crane had lifted him up and flung him toward the stars. Having fallen back down to earth, he was seized yet again by clusters of invisible hands, irresistibly powerful — brutally restrained by long, sharpened claws skinning him alive. He lost all sense of space, of time, of the surrounding world, of himself even.

When he came to he found himself in his bedroom. Stretched out in his own bed. His head heavy. Bruises on his arms. He tried to sit up. His body, worked over by a cement truck, remained immobile. His mother, drained of color, sat at the foot of the bed. A grave-faced stranger was seated, arms crossed, just next to the door.

His mother informs him that the stranger is Paulin, the generous passerby who’d found him unconscious at the intersection of Jean-Jacques Dessalines Boulevard and Fronts-Forts Street.

Paulin came to see Raynand through the whole time of his recovery, becoming his dearest friend.

As a child, on Sunday mornings, I often saw my mother using a wood-handled knife to slit the neck of a chicken or a rooster right through to the throat (the jugular, she’d say). Coming back from the seven o’clock mass at the Petit Séminaire, it was always a treat for me to be present for — to participate passionately and feverishly in — the preparations for this good old-fashioned Creole cuisine. The bloody feast of flesh crackling in the pale yellow oil of the saucepan. Perfectly content to be a part of this culinary ritual, I helped my mother make the fire. I followed all of her instructions meticulously. I heated the water we used to parboil the chicken. I danced with joy at the moment when, mortally wounded, the bird did a frenzied farewell casser-banda.^* Desperate beating of wings. I didn’t realize that the innocent beast was actually suffering. I only knew that three hours later, the time it would take to cook and serve it, I’d be eating grilled flesh, a delicious morsel of roasted chicken the color of burnt mahogany.

Back then I had a neighborhood friend who brought me a packet of sugar pilfered from his aunt’s boutique every night. He was often beaten for failing to memorize his catechism lesson or for not doing his math homework. The bastard son of a white man passing through the region, he had straight hair and blue eyes. He lived as the quintessential pariah in the community. And he was usually addressed by the pejorative nickname “wicked manioc-eating white boy.” As for me, I never picked on him. Time and again, in fact, during any number of full-blown fistfights and ferocious hand-to-hand combats, I smashed in the face of whatever troublemakers had gone after him for no reason. Things went on like that for two years, which seems like an eternity to me today. Battling the same little adversaries. United in the same turmoil. Divvying up the booty from our petty thefts. Playing hooky together. And, above all, hating that toothless old aunt who all too often struck my friend with a bull pizzle.

This went on until the day he caught a bad flu, having gone out in the rain to run an errand for that miserable aunt. He didn’t last long. He died one afternoon in May, the month of beautiful flowers. Or at least that’s what I heard people saying that afternoon. I was on my way home from school. But I didn’t yet understand the truly tragic and macabre nature of death. It was only the following day that I came face-to-face with the brutal reality of this separation, when my mother made me put on my white suit — to accompany my friend on a long trip, she said. His final journey. At the cemetery, the coffin was placed next to a deep, freshly dug hole in the ground. When the cover of the casket was lifted so that we could take one last look at the embalmed little cadaver, the toothless old aunt started whimpering, morbid and inconsolable. And there I saw my innocent childhood companion laid out. His eyes open. Like those of a fish. Apparently, it had been impossible to close his eyelids, stiffened by the cold of the morgue. People let loose piercing cries. But me, I looked into his open bluish eyes. Fish eyes. Unmoving. And I understood right away that death is a deep sleep with eyes wide open. A dream perhaps. A dream with no awakening.

It was a horrific shock for me when, using a series of interwoven ropes, they slipped the tiny closed coffin — gloomily nailed shut, hermetically sealed — into the dark ditch and began covering it with quickly thrown handfuls of brown earth. My blood turned to ice in my veins. Tears ran into my mouth. A taste of salt mixed with mucus. It was then that I felt the pain of ultimate separation. But when I think about it today, I still can’t bring myself to forgive that old aunt for taking away my first friend and for having poisoned — with the whip, with insults, with mistreatment — the short life of a kid who was no worse than any other. An innocent who never got the chance to count ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty years alongside me. To live other joys. Other sorrows. Other pain. All that he would have lived with those blue eyes of his. Open like those of a fish.

Ah! My son! sighs old Marguerite, thinking of Raynand. From the first cry of infancy, we mothers are never again fully alive. The child leaves our body and takes with it a part of us that we can never reclaim but that we’re forever attached to, that we’re forever drawn to despite ourselves. The split between mother and son is only superficial. If the child is hurt, it is our own flesh that bleeds. If he takes risks, our hair stands on end and anguish rips apart our entrails. If he suffers from the smallest thing, we cry our eyes out to the very last tear. If he dies, we shut down completely, trapped despairingly in an infernal interior prison. The terrible suffering of the snake that bites its own tail. Should senseless people see fit to crack open our hearts, split open our bellies, they’ll still find there the bed of love where the child once slept, always freshly made. The umbilical cord never breaks between mother and child. There is no blade capable of cutting the ties that bind the two …

Marguerite is brought out of these reflections by the arrival of a stranger.

She gets up from her low chair. Places the coffee grinder on the white wood table.

She moves toward the stranger, wiping her hands on her calico skirt.

— Hello, Madame, says the stranger, brusquely.

— Hello, Sir, responds Marguerite, nervously.

— Are you Raynand’s mother?

— Yes, Raynand is my son. Did you need him for something?

— I’d like to speak with him, yes.

— Raynand has been out for a while now. He’ll surely be back in a moment or two. Would you like to wait for him?

— No, that won’t be necessary, responds the gentleman, annoyed.

— What was it you wanted to speak to him about? You might leave him a message, even a word or two.

— That wouldn’t be the same thing, no. Nevertheless, continues the stranger, tensely emphasizing each word, I’ll ask you to let him know that Gaston — Gaston, in person — came to see him. He’ll understand what that means. If he isn’t crazy, he’ll understand very well.

— But what’s going on? What has he done to you? I’m his mother — certainly I have the right to know. Monsieur Gaston, please tell me.

— Well, all right! Tell him to stop hanging around Solange. Around her house. Tell him he isn’t wanted. That if this continues he’ll have real worries. Big problems. It’s a short trip from stubbornness and imprudence to death. So tell him he should be careful not to go stomping around in my garden.

Gaston departs angrily. Appalled, hand to her chin, Marguerite doesn’t know what to think. She had already told Raynand to let go of this thing with Solange. This old love story. And now things were getting complicated. Completely stupefied, dragging her feet in their leather slippers, she goes back to her coffee grinder. The bag empty, she crumples into the low chair. Anxious. Anguished. Raynand must leave — it’s the only solution. He must leave and make his life elsewhere, before his roots push any deeper into this cruel soil, before his branches become prisoner of this mess of vines that will only drink up his sap and make of him a pile of dried-out fibers! Ah! My child, a green tree that hasn’t even borne fruit as yet! Why? Why do they want to strip from me my nine months of torment? My painful pregnancy. The pain of my sleepless night at the hospital. Childbirth. The profound tearing. The sharp ripping of my belly. The twisting of my guts. Painful pushing forward of life. Who would steal from me my eleven months of breast-feeding? All the clothes washing. My patience. My tears. My hopes. All those dreams that are exactly as old as my child.

— So, Mama, have you finished grinding the coffee? says Raynand, coming through the door.

— Not yet, darling, responds Marguerite in a voice marked with melancholy tenderness.

— But what’s wrong, Mama? You seem like you’ve been crying. What happened while I was gone?

— Somebody named Gaston came to see you. He was furious and made threats against you. It has something to do with Solange.

— So that’s it, then — we aren’t free? Since when can’t a person go for a walk, wander around?

— Try to understand, my darling. You’re not yet even fully recovered. You’re still ill. And I’m just sick about it. It wasn’t long ago that I nearly died of shock when Paulin brought you here, bones broken, face swollen with bruises.

— But, Mama, I haven’t done anything wrong. They’re the ones persecuting me, as if my very presence is an annoyance.

— Clearly that’s the case. Your presence has become intolerable. The only solution is to leave, especially seeing as you’re not really doing much of anything here.

— So you want me to leave, Mama?

— Yes, my son. You’ll never have the upper hand with them. I’m old — there’s nothing left of me but skin and bones. I wouldn’t even make a good mouthful. They want a nice healthy, muscular body. Get out of here — as far away as you can.

— You’re asking me to run away, Mama. To give in like a coward to the scare tactics of some good-for-nothing.

— Think about it, my son. I’m speaking from experience and from my heart. I only want what’s best for you. Listen to me. Leave, my child. These are not idle threats. Gaston has connections in the government; he’s a known killer. I’m begging you, Raynand. Leave immediately.

— Fine … let’s say I accept. How would we manage the trip?

— I’ll go see our neighbor, captain of LA GRÂCE DE DIEU — the one who traffics between the islands. We’ll work something out for the costs. You’ll go to Nassau. You’ll find work there. You’ll make a lot of money. After a while, you could maybe even go on to New York.

— So you’re set on me leaving forever?

— The years run by like water, my darling. This is the time to think of your future, you’ll see.

Shirtless, wearing only a pair of underpants, torn at the crotch, Raynand listens carefully to his mother. For the first time, he seems to take the old woman’s suggestions seriously.

— Tell me, Mama, won’t you be sad living all alone?

— Of course, I’ll be sad in the beginning. But I’ll manage. I’m agreeing to this little sacrifice for you. For both of us. For both our happiness. For your safety.

— You still haven’t told me how we’ll manage this.

— I’ll go talk to Murat, the captain, this very night. He won’t refuse me this favor. It’s his job to bring Haitians to Nassau.

— But, Mama, we don’t have any money. A trip like this is expensive. We don’t even have enough money to pay for food or the rent.

— Let me handle it, my dear. There’s no other solution for the moment. All the young people in the neighborhood are doing the same thing. Don’t stay here. Go — and forget Solange. Forget Gaston and all the other cannibals who eat the flesh of our children, who chew up their bones. Go far away from these people who rip apart mothers’ guts, trample women’s hearts, and devour the best young growth in the fields we’ve been cultivating endlessly.

— I understand what you’re saying, Mama. I accept it. You can go ahead and speak to Captain Murat.

— I’ll make sure you get out of here as soon as possible. In Nassau you can sort out your papers to establish residency in New York. It’s much easier over there. Don’t stay and waste away here. The Caribbean gods will open the way for you, my son.

His vision wearied by the room’s low ceiling, Raynand listens attentively to his mother’s words. Then he lets his mind wander. Numbed by the overwhelming summer heat. Heavy headed. His gaze follows the buzzing, staccato flight of an enormous fly. A screwworm fly … that’s a sign of good luck and of bounty; a sign of wealth to come. This age we’re living in is made for traveling. In tenth grade, the literature professor often said that any intellectual worth his salt had to travel … See the wide world … New York Harbor … the Eiffel Tower … Spit into the Seine … Piss in the Saint Laurence … See other faces … Open his body to all the winds of the universe … And his heart to the many faces of love.

— Mama, I’m set on leaving. As you wish. I’ll go.

— Thank you, Raynand. I knew you’d understand. Thank you, my darling.

I was ten years old when I began to appreciate the power and the omnipresence of money. At all times. In all places. In all things. In the things I loved the most. In things I’d believed were nature’s offerings to man. It made me sick. I couldn’t accept the nauseating and revolting idea that everything can be bought or sold, depending where you stand. If ever I’d even looked for the border — the dividing line — between buyers and sellers, I wouldn’t have been able to find it. With a pang of anguish, I faced the fact that you have to have money to taste such things as candies and fruit. Reluctantly, at the beginning of every month, I handed over wads of dollar bills to the potbellied bursar at Saint-Martial High School. A red-nosed priest who stank of garlic. Who, clearing his throat, used to receive me while seated behind his big desk. Who smelled like bad wine. Who counted my poor mother’s money, three wrinkles in his forehead. Whom I loathed for kicking me out of school. Twice. Because my monthly bill hadn’t been paid, he made sure to explain.

My bitterness was even greater when I realized that I also needed money to be treated by a doctor. To acquire a much-needed pair of shoes. Or in order for Santa Claus to come. Moreover, I was enraged by all these privations. Source of my first revolts against the adult world. My rage against the system. My refusal to obey laws I didn’t understand. My taking a stand against social injustice. My dissidence. My revenge. I resolved to protest in every way. The one who had to deal most often with my bad behavior and my rebellions was Uncle Bernard. Owner of a big boutique, he was the Croesus of the family. Exceptionally stingy, he never forgave a cent of debt among family members. He hated the poor. His heart was made of neither flesh nor wood. For the flesh is weak, and wood heats up when it burns. Truth was, he had no heart. Completely ungenerous. He loved no one. He was harsh. Inflexible with everyone. Cruel. Indifferent to human suffering to the point where he’d refuse to offer the slightest help to my despairing mother, overwhelmed by the weight of her poverty. One day when we had nothing to put on the fire, we went to him, only to be treated like vile parasites. In front of people we didn’t even know. That’s when I decided to act in my own best interest. I initiated a veritable impoverishment campaign against him, stealing whatever I could from him … I went to his grocery store more frequently just so as to advance my plan for meting out justice. Not a day went by that I didn’t pilfer some can of something or other, or some money even. My lifestyle improved. I drank milk three times a day. At night I started smoking cigarettes in the toilets. As time went on, I increased my take to up to ten dollars a day, money I spent recklessly with boys from the neighborhood.

One morning when, as usual, I showed up at Uncle Bernard’s, I found the living room crowded with strangely dressed people. One of them was wearing a red coat and reading from a Bible with a black cover. I learned from Anna, the servant girl, that this was a Freemason ceremony. A spiritual event. A mystical happening. They’d come as a show of support for their brother-in-arms, victim of inexplicable thefts that had been occurring on a daily basis. They’d come to perform an exorcism of the haunted boutique. To chase away the thieving demon. I also learned that my uncle’s wife, for her part, had gone to see several Vodou priests and had just been given the magic recipe that would enable her to catch the thief. People were even predicting that the thief would be dead in less than three days, either when the clock struck twelve noon or at midnight. I stayed till the end of the ceremony, which ended at about eleven in the morning. That afternoon, before the sun had even finished setting, I’d already pilfered a twenty-dollar bill from my uncle’s cash register. And I went on messing with him for years. When I finally stopped stealing money from him — a purely personal decision — he died three days later. On a Saturday, at around noon. Result of a brain aneurysm, said the family doctor. His wife followed him to the grave that same year.

The rumor circulated for a long time that his wife had poisoned him, having been unfaithful to him throughout their entire marriage. Her most recent lover was none other than one of the Freemasons, the one who’d played the role of priest the day of that famous exorcism ceremony. That crafty profiteer is still alive. Every time I pass him in the street I can’t help but curse his hypocrisy. Yet I pray he lives as long as possible. Certain that he’ll leave this world before me to rejoin his mistress in hell.

When I think of this macabre story from so long ago, I always imagine a theater piece with three actors: the adulterous wife, the cuckolded husband, the fraudulent lover. In the wings there’s me, hooligan of a nephew, brilliant director of the play “The Other Side of Magic.”

The bus races along. Raynand is seated nonchalantly in the last row. The back of his head leaning against the window. Fingers trembling nervously. Every so often he shivers lightly. He gets up every morning, goes to his job, his skin slightly feverish. His workplace, a tomato and onion cannery, is twenty minutes away from where he lives — or rather, where he’s being hidden by a fellow migrant, a prostitute he’d known once upon a time at a whorehouse on Carrefour Street. Not having a resident’s visa, he only goes out to work. Other than that, obliged to stay clear of the police dragnets, he lives holed up in the room offered to him by this kindly woman.

In the month since he’s been in Nassau, he’s been living on the edge. A real test of his nerves. He knows an immigration agent could catch him at any moment. A fresh hell in a foreign land, in a town he barely knows. Exhausted. Out of his element. Without any roots. His nostrils irritated by the acidic smell of the onions processed in the factory. Respiratory passages blocked, the worst kind of suffering for me. And then there’s Mama Marguerite — so far away. She would have fixed me up some refreshing cure. Something with magnesium in it. And some finger biscuit tea. But here I am, with no choice but to take care of this awful flu myself. How I hate having a cold. The snoring. The chewing. The sound of ice cubes and dry crackers in my mouth. The glug-glug I make when I swallow. The vomiting. The farting. The belching. The defecating. The whole digestive ritual. Shameful alimentary liturgy of all human beings. Waste scoria diarrheic shits. Filthy vomit and poo. From the lowliest porter to the most glorious leader of men. A strange folklore passed down from the oldest generations. Fecal ritual left behind by a population of fossils, unsparing of the most beautiful women and the greatest dignitaries on the planet. Someone should erect a universal totem somewhere, and all creatures could gather at its feet, pawing at an immense sea of excrement and urine! Man pretends to be enlightened, though he’s nothing more than a charlatan. He thinks he’s impressing all the other species with those magic tricks he calls the conquest of the civilized … Electricity. Mechanics. Architecture. Ballistics. And from end to end, the tragicomedy of History. Vast circus of dwarves and clowns. An insomniac theater ruled by a guilty conscience. Science, technology, literature, art, politics, war. The fascinating exhibitionism of idiotic spectators, often amnesiac. Smugness in sterile solitude. Solemn masturbation. Buildings and streets, veritable con game, collective falsehood. A network of traps. Every block a multidrawer vault in which the selfish, gathered together as families, close themselves up in the false security of domesticity, really nothing more than the hermeticism of cemeteries. Closed rooms, shantytowns, skyscrapers, hospitals, madhouses, barracks, banks, prisons, factories, churches, museums, stores, castles, palaces, boutiques, warehouses for rockets and bombs — let it all crumble, collapse on itself, melt in an inextinguishable blaze! Ah! Something really isn’t right … Could I be the only one to see that? How the embers of hell burn my brain! Expiation … The supreme punishment …

— Hey! Stop! Stop! cries Raynand, having nearly missed the turn where he has to get off to go to the factory.

Raynand pushes the door open, hops down to the sidewalk, watches the bus pull away before crossing the road. At almost the same instant, he’s approached by a brawny police officer holding a strapping, menacing dog, its drooling tongue hanging out of its mouth like a wide, fleshy leaf. Not understanding English, much less the question being posed to him by the officer, but guessing at a word or two here and there (words like: refugee, illegal, unwanted, travel, passport), Raynand turns on his heel to get away from the policeman. He only gets the chance to take a single step. With a ferocious leap, the guard dog grabs him by the pant leg.

Brought to the immigration bureau, Raynand is only able to make out a few of the sentences that mean, more or less, the end to a whole world of hopes and dreams.

— Go back! Go back to your fucking country!

Slivers of his most precious dreams fly away on the island winds, like the frailest bits of butterfly wings. Each one of those English phrases reminds him vaguely of that stupid eighth-grade English teacher who’d spent an entire year teaching the plural and the possessive.

— Get out of here! Son of a bitch!

Everything is slipping through his fingers … Destruction of an edifice he’d thought was made of solid concrete. Instead, it had been built of crumbly stone. God save the King! Poor Raynand! Leaf ripped off a dying tree. Mummy wrapped in bandages.

— Go back to your fucking country!

It’s all over. Skinned alive. Total collapse. Complete disarray. The apocalypse brings down the last sections of wall in a whirlwind of blinding dust. Horrifying defoliation. A dry storm in the middle of the afternoon. Funereal journey of leaves migrating toward who-knows-what faraway places. A pile of books, swallowed down in class, that do nothing but irritate the brain. Soap bubbles that burst at the slightest angry wind. Useless brain. Gangrened hands. Destructive, insect-like fingers. That’s the repulsive mixture you’re left with after fifteen years of fastidious classical studies. Fifteen years of brainwashing. Fifteen years of bullshitology! The dramatic shipwreck of an entire educational system focused on the decorative and the folkloric. Absolute annihilation.

It was during the world war. The second one. Sometime in 1943 maybe. There were few radios in the working-class neighborhoods. Every night we rushed over to the house of a well-off neighbor who proudly made available his fancy new RCA VICTOR for the inhabitants of Bel Air. Even random passersby gathered around the front steps to follow passionately the latest international news. Our parents talked of bombs, of aerial offensives, of naval combats. We children lived paradoxically between total ignorance and fascination with the submarines, torpedo boats, armored tanks, and unmanned airplanes that peppered the conversation of the adults. In the end, the episodes of war, distorted by the popular imagination, seasoned with a dash of the marvelous, peopled our interior lives. Our heads were potpourris of nightmares and bloody dreams. Hitler was introduced to me by my cousin (who didn’t really know much more than I did) as some sort of dragon, a magician. I took it to another level: for me, he was like the ghost of the invisible man, the white devil who disappeared and reappeared whenever he wanted and wherever he wanted. Waking at night to use the toilet, I was actually afraid that I’d find him in my room — with that lock of hair on his furious forehead and that nervous mustache. Despite our considerable distance from the front, the whir of any plane in the skies above Port-au-Prince made us shake in our boots. The thing was, Haiti — by way of her president, Élie Lescot — had just decided to ally herself with her generous neighbor Uncle Sam by declaring war against the Axis Powers Rome-Berlin-Tokyo, in the name of the sacred principle of Pan-American solidarity (which, over the course of history, had never managed to offer our hungry selves the slightest crumb from the great feast that might have happened to fall under the table of the Continental banquet). According to public rumor, Hitler had intimated that after Germany’s victory he’d turn our little island, lost in the middle of the Atlantic, into a stable for his horses. Despite the lack of credibility of the idiot Lescot’s unpopular regime, the Haitian people — with their glorious past — found their dignity profoundly insulted by this idea, and offered their blood to the cause of freedom and democracy, sending volunteers to the front and putting their territory at the disposal of the United States. And the denouement wasn’t long in coming: spring 1945 solidified the defeat of fascism.

In our neighborhood, Bel Air, there lived an Italian named Papito, a deserter from Mussolini’s army. Taking advantage of the black market, he’d been able to make some money selling soap made out of guaiacum wood. On Sundays, he’d round up all the kids in the neighborhood and take them to the cinema. Later on, suspected of having tried to introduce us to the world of alcohol, cigarettes, and pederasty, he was more or less cast out of the community. At the end of the war, called to return to his country, he preferred to put a rope around his neck instead. After breaking down the front door of his house, the police found him hung on a beam, his eyes bulging, his face swollen with black blood. The neighborhood was completely shaken up, just like when Lescot first declared war on the Axis Powers at that time.

And I’m not sure why, but today these two facts are permanently linked in my memory: Lescot’s unthinking bravado and the suicide by hanging of Papito the Italian.

There are three hundred of them. Four hundred fifty. Eight hundred. Close to a thousand. In the corridors. In the hold. On the bridge. They’re young. Old. Sad. Pensive. Taciturn. Chatty. They’re there. Piled on the ship like so many pieces of damaged merchandise. A scrap heap of a boat chartered by the Bahamian governor to repatriate the mass of Haitian nationals living illegally in the various islands of the Bahamas. The wind blows strong. The waves break ferociously against the port side of the boat. Some of the refugees stacked on the bridge look out, at once nonchalant and livid, as the lights of Nassau fade little by little. It’s seven thirty in the evening. The same situation. The same conditions. The same troubles. The same despair. An immense wandering heart. A misery without moorings.

They’d spent a month, two months, four months in the English prisons of the Bahamas before being stockpiled here, on this old ship headed for Haiti. No one knows exactly. A truly loathsome trip home. A backpedaling that no one had the slightest desire to make. Having come to these islands with a trunkload of hopes, they were headed back home today against their will. Hearts ripped apart in fear of what lay ahead. Hangdog souls. Suffice it to say, these travelers weren’t at all happy to be seeing their homeland again. A few of them, slumped in a corner, showed absolutely no sign of life. Others took little steps to stretch their legs. There were those who spoke. Some under their breath. Some with voices raised. But all their secrets, all their accusations, all their mutterings, the wind, the uneven sea, the rolling of the ship, together formed a strange symphony of desolation. Drama of ultimate despair. Tragedy intensified by the bitterness of the women’s sorrowful voices. A heartrending panting that reached up to the veiled backdrop of the sky.

— What can possibly await me there? The infernal welcome of atrocious suffering. Unbearable unemployment. Intolerable privations. And prostitution.

— I’ve lived thirty years of tribulations. That’s why I seem so worn-out for someone who’s only thirty-eight years old. I’m sure that, looking at me, you’d take me for fifty.

— In my whole life as a perfectly fit man, I don’t believe I’ve worked more than thirteen months … as a carpenter in the Artibonite Valley. Ever since, walking day and night, looking everywhere for work, all my sap has been drained. Now I’m reduced to the dregs. No job. No profession. It would be one thing if I hadn’t been looking … But still …

— I who thought myself brave enough to move mountains, who had the drive to take over the world! What have I become? A loser. A useless limb. A good-for-nothing wanderer. A vestigial organ.

— My infirm mother has no one but me to count on. Once upon a time she sewed, did laundry, ironed for people in the neighborhood. On Césars Street. But for a while now there’s been no work. She’s rotting away in her run-down cottage. In these hard times, everyone’s doing his own sewing, laundry, ironing. In coming to Nassau I thought I’d be able to help her out and even get her old house fixed up. She’ll never survive this. No question, she’s simply going to die …

— Those days, nightlife didn’t exist in Port-au-Prince. Everything was dead. From what I’ve heard, nothing has changed. The slump is still going. The cafés are moving in slow motion. Business is at a standstill. One good day … four bad days. The worst thing about it is that the Dominican prostitutes have taken over the best bars. Without the slightest effort they’re replacing the Haitian prostitutes. Full of prejudice, the clients prefer those Spanish chicks for their thick, long tresses and their coffee-and-cream complexions. These foreigners are well paid. Sometimes up to thirty dollars a blow job. And to think, some of them are no better than mango leaves … Unequal combat where the black woman has her own brothers fighting against her. Haitian men are seriously messed up!

— There are times when you don’t even have enough money to pay for food and rent. In the end, what more could I do — aside from be completely discouraged? Accept failure. Hunger. Death. What kills me now is that I have to go back without a cent. Shame on my grimy face.

— I left Môle Saint-Nicolas stowed away in the hold of a ship. Hidden among hundreds of sacks of rice and bunches of bananas. Just a year ago. Thanks to the help of a member of the ship’s crew to whom I’d promised eighty dollars, I was able to get around the vigilance of the captain. Moreover, I’d have offered my very life to pay for the trip if necessary. Look at the ropey, bulging veins wrapping around my arms, my hardened hands, my fingers streaked with grooves and calluses. They’ve been useless, you know. I’ve wanted so badly to work. To be able to come home at night, muscles aching. To be able to say, pleased with myself, that I’d earned my daily bread by the sweat of my brow. To experience the satisfaction of having accomplished my task as a good father to my family. I had none of that … All that was left for me was begging. Theft. Pederasty. Corruption. Prostitution. My dignity sorely tested, I couldn’t go on. I was at the end of my rope. Undone by idleness …

— All I have to do is start thinking, insofar as I can even manage that, and I start wishing for death. What’s waiting for me … an ordeal without end. I’m already shaking. Unemployment. Hunger. Fear. Anguish. Nightmare from which there’s no awakening. Paralysis of the tongue. Stiffening of the limbs. All that kills without mercy. And the rest of the footage for this film isn’t very hard to imagine … Walking mummies. Individuals reduced to children. Zombies kept in line with whacks of a cudgel. Oh yes, zombies! We’ve all become zombies.

— What I’ve endured to make it here! I have no words to describe it …

— You’ve got to be kidding me! It tears me up inside to have to remember my own situation. And my memory has been bleeding during this whole relentless ordeal. We’ll call it purgatory, if it’s God’s stick that’s beating me — the horrors of hell, if it’s the evil of men! The journey we went through, no way I’d ever have believed something like that possible … Nine of us had paid one hundred and fifty dollars up front to the owner of the bathtub that was meant to bring us to Nassau. A clandestine voyage for which we had to take every precaution, exercise maximum discretion. Sails flapping, we’d left the shores of Gonaïves one Tuesday at dawn. The day went by without incident. In the afternoon, we came upon a big, oblong boulder, shaped like a big loaf of black bread, a few scrawny mangrove plants growing on its surface. The captain made clear that we were to get out there and wait for him for half an hour at most. To give him some time to contact his associate, he explained, a smuggler who usually assisted him in these sorts of schemes. In any case, he hastened to add persuasively, “My friend isn’t far from here; he lives in the area, on one of these little islands; he’s an experienced seaman; he knows his way around better than I do.” And so we peacefully disembarked to wait for him. An hour went by, followed by several others. The bathtub was taking a long time to come back. Our eyes searched the darkness. Our voices trembled with fear. In spite of the cold and the humidity, we were resigned to spending the night on the boulder. Huddled together on top of one another in a compact mass. In a common anguish. With no cover. Suddenly, since we weren’t sleeping, the sound of steps, like the rustling of dry leaves, caught our attention. We got up cautiously, guessing at what it could be. When we used our lighters, the horror of a bloodcurdling spectacle presented itself before us. A terrifying army of crabs had already invaded the entire surface of the boulder. Enormous, bulging, greenish crabs. Despite our screams, the noises we made to scare them, we were barely able to chase them away. Unbelievably, their numbers kept increasing. Incalculable hordes. They grasped at our pant legs. Scratched. Bit. I felt my legs swelling from their stings, bites, and scratches. We continued to battle them. But each time we managed to crush a few of them, more aggressive successors immediately launched an attack. A horrifying crunching of antennas, legs, blistering mouths. In the end, confusion took hold. Besieged. Disheartened. Panic-stricken. We jumped into the sea. Then, to top it all off, only five of us knew how to swim. We couldn’t save the others, weak as we were, depressed, and fearful that the worst would happen to us too. After more than three exhausting hours of swimming and painful paddling through the waves, we were rescued — half-dead — by a patrolling lifeboat. We were given first aid. A week later, still suffering from shock, I found myself in a dark room with only a basement window providing air. To my great astonishment, I’d been shut away in a Nassau prison where I was to await my imminent repatriation to my home country …

— For me, hell is right here on earth. I’ve lived and suffered enough to know that. No one will ever make me think otherwise. I can’t imagine a demon more intelligent, more ingenious than man in the perfecting of punishment and misery. And in the end, life is contained dramatically within the parentheses of an enigmatic choice. A miserable set of alternatives: furious wisdom or peaceful madness. Otherwise, of course, surely we’d be dead before we even started living.

Endlessly, the passengers speak whenever they aren’t sleeping. Two nights and two whole days of navigation. Long hours woven with stories of misery and wandering, drawn-out sighs and a spattering of complaints. Voices thick with weariness and sadness against the calm silence of the sea. Hundreds of broken-down bodies on the old, wheezing ship. At dawn on the third day, the reflected rays of the sun illuminated the Caribbean. Large birds gleaming black and pink flew diagonally and heavily over the boat. In a few hours … Haiti. Enormous sharks followed in the vessel’s frothy wake; their narrow, silvery fins cut through the blue waters of the Wind Canal. Everything seemed marvelous. The majesty of the ocean. The flapping flight of the birds that alight periodically on the yard. The leaping sharks. Nature’s splendor. Unchanging. Eternal. Indifferent. As if it had never had anything to do with the suffering of men.

Standing up toward the rear of the deck with twenty or so other wretches, the unfortunate souls being sent back with him, Raynand seems to be lost in appreciation of this simple beauty, in a confusing amalgam of sensations and thoughts. To see my mother again. The streets of Port-au-Prince. The smells of humanity. The erotic heat. To return to this little place differently, in less pitiful circumstances … How happy I’d be! But to land back in my country as a good-for-nothing. Without money. Completely derailed. A wreck. Wearing this threadbare suit. Flapping in the wind. How will I be welcomed by my country … by my neighborhood … by my home?

Raynand’s gaze floats above it all, faraway. Suddenly, he’s torn from his daydreams by a sound that makes him start. A real racket. A veritable panic. In the front of the ship, anguished voices, begging:

— My friends, please, come back here! You’re going to kill yourselves! Don’t do this! Come back!..

Raynand barely has a chance to catch something about the escape and possible rescue of some drowning men before he realizes that there’s a group suicide happening. Four passengers had dived brazenly into the tide full of voracious sharks. Immediately, on the captain’s order, the old piece of scrap iron slows down. The sea, a roiling abyss, becomes an electric drum set, beating out a frenetic jazz rhythm. Violent intake of air. Locomotive with buzzing mucous membranes pitilessly kneading their prey. Hand brakes engaged. Swirling funnel in which the sharks, in a great red disorder, share pieces of arms, legs, and jagged flesh amongst themselves. Entrails and chests torn to bits. Not one scream is heard. All is submerged in a grating tumult of fins and froth. A horrible shredding of jaws, teeth, fangs, and tails. A porridge of effervescent colors and bloody turbulence. A sudden brewing of living, active ingredients in full eruption. An unbearable lyricism of purplish-blue stained with scarlet stripes. A massacre of slashed meat and exploded viscera.

Eyes peeled and fingers tensed on some rigging, Raynand holds his breath. Vertigo. He turns away and can just make out the distant shape of the island of Haiti, indolent and desperately denuded on the horizon. That very day, they’ll all disembark on the wharf in Port-au-Prince. A long line of horrifying skeletons. Faces from beyond the grave. If it weren’t for the frequency of the spectacle of repatriated boat people, one would take them for strange zombies escaped from some marine cemetery. From the inner port of the city they file out, two by two. Heads lowered. Attached to one another. As if made up like plague victims to act, against a realistic backdrop, in some scene from a dramatic opera. Quotidian theater of island violence. Tragedy of a people torn between secular suffering and the uncertainty of a dream without moorings.

Of course, our classical university schooling and our independent studies had opened the door to the world of beings and things outside ourselves, although we often arrived at dead ends. We’d learned a lot from that. To the point where we began to have doubts. To become conscious of our own ignorance. To renounce. To break. Slow meandering of a river whose mouth seems to vomit up the sea. Fermentation of the brain that yearns to create because the body is suffering and the heart is raging. In flying over the vast forests of History, we thought we glimpsed through a window — or at least guessed at — humankind’s long itinerary. Thus fascinated by an impossible dream of a moon and a rainbow wound together in the deceptive, velvety darkness, feverishly drinking up the light planted behind a nameless day, caressing the breasts and the navel of a sexless woman, parodying the language of sewn-up mouths, seeking the raised lids of a face without eyes, dancing on the contorted legs of a broken puppet … why ever would we stop milking the midnight cow? We draw the new milk of anonymous days. We don’t worry about the vastness of the dome that opens onto absurdity and nothingness. It has been put there on purpose to discourage us, this incessant back-and-forth between sickness and relapse. Let us borrow the nocturnal eye of the phosphorous lamp. The fiancée is there, sewing her bridal gown in the next room.

Nothing but sleepless nights and insomnia have dilated our pupils — from the last drop of rainfall to the first picked fruit! Heavy stride, magical caverns on the wings of ballistic engines. Miserable and perilous acceleration of History by an angel of light. A scout who heads up the caravan. Avant-garde that calls for revolution. A dramatic sneeze that decongests the blocked nostrils of time. For I take all revolutions to be the sneezes of History.

At school, I’d come across this word — History — wide as life itself, stormy as the sea. I was told so much about it that I got lost in a maze, having added so many crazy ingredients that I’d ended up with an indigestible and complex sort of bouillabaisse. Repulsive cat soup. Movement of a mobile whose path traces a closed curve. Journey of a celestial body in its orbit. Rotation around an axis. Abrupt and violent change of direction. While I knew full well that life was in fact open — irregularly — onto the branches of a rising spiral. To the point of vertigo. And that, ultimately, old bodies, worn-out hearts, and weary legs all end up part of a new universe, engorged with energy.

More and more teachers and books passed before my eyes, talking to me of revolutions! The miracle of Christianity. Demographic surges. Economic booms. New ventures in psychoanalysis. Surrealist quests. Marvels of modern science. Barriers broken down. Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines, Karl Marx, Victor Hugo, Rimbaud, Einstein, James Joyce, Apollinaire, Lenin (whom I loved from the very first encounter) were presented to me either as madmen, visionaries, or as embittered and bloodthirsty characters. And during the twentieth century all political movements sought, or so it seemed at least, the revolt of the masses. Whereas on the sidelines of all demagogic orchestration the truth still seems inaccessible and ambiguous.

However, in a little corner of my life, at the very core of my being, the image of something I experienced long ago has always remained fresh. A seemingly banal event. But one that I carry in me like a drop of light. This image is first to appear, emerging from its hiding place, as soon as I hear anyone speak of revolution. It’s in January 1946. I’m nine years old. Standing under the little gallery of my house one Monday morning, I see an enormous agitated crowd of mainly young people coming up Docteur Aubry Street. Frightened, I clutch the porch rail. At the bend of Tiremasse Street, one of the protesters kneels suddenly, his face aflame, his arms flung open. And cries out over and over: Down with Lescot! Down with misery! Excited, my mother begins to scream the same words. I ask her what they mean. She tells me that this is the revolution.

Ever since, whenever I hear or pronounce this word, before putting together its fundamental elements, the very first image that comes to my mind is that of a frenzied crowd and a man, arms flung wide, screaming out his suffering against one of the Lescots of this world.

Raynand climbs up Monseigneur Guilloux Hill, the one leading up to the sanatorium. Tired, he has trouble dragging along his own disoriented body. He’d been left in a state of complete exhaustion after that unjust and horrific three-month incarceration. His head, swimming with calculations, weighs too heavy on his shoulders. Why keep looking, when life poses questions with no ready answers? Solutions are all out of reach. Since yesterday, I’ve been wearing myself out in vain looking for ten dollars to save my dying mother. Tuberculosis. Pulmonary hemorrhage. She’d been spitting up blood. Resign myself? How can I visit her at the sanatorium? Without bringing her anything? And the thing is, she’s there because of me, poor old woman. She caught this illness while I was out of the country. Her spirit broke when she found out about my troubles in that foreign land.

Can one ever know the toll bitterness takes on the life spirit that surges through the networks of an interior architecture we’re so proud of? The blood that courses through our veins. I still don’t understand. It’s clear I’ll never understand anything. I’ve always been told: do this, don’t do that. At home, old uncle Raoul doled out, left and right, advice I found so rational that it never occurred to me to question it even once. Old uncle Raoul died one rainy night, a skinny dog and a bottle of tafia on either side of him. Drowning in debt. Abandoned by his wife, Nellie. Buried as a pauper in a mass grave. He ended up alone in his own skin. Turns out he’d never understood much about anything either.

At school, the teacher theorized, and terrorized — screaming about the usefulness of the sciences until our eardrums just about burst. My boy, think about it: the straight line, parallel lines, symmetry, right angles, etc. It was just so marvelous, that shortest distance between two points. Today, all the lines are broken. The roads are blocked by brambles and barbed wire. The object is beyond the center. None of the images I see are real. All the mirrors are distorted. There’s only a mocking, farcical caricature spouting unintelligible phrases against a gray sky. The mobile and incandescent arc of life presents such different angles to each vision, each minute. The sun doesn’t have its image in the hearth; it burns and we sweat, at the mercy of steep roads that lead nowhere. Other than to the most hideous suffering. To failure. The horrifying solitude of a sanatorium devoid of any treatment for disease.

With tiny steps, Raynand climbs toward the entry stairs to the hospital, his head encircled by a huge iron ring. Fever burns his brain. He’s always had a fever. His first contact with the world was a burning, devouring malarial fever. He’d had to miss a week at Saint-Martial Middle School, where he’d been enrolled in basic classes in the children’s section. Upon his return, still recovering, and unable to express himself in French, a ridiculous smile and idiotic facial expression were his only response to dear Sister Félicienne, who’d wanted a note explaining his absence — a note that his illiterate mother wouldn’t even have been able to write. That was so long ago. Yet that scene stayed fresh in his memory. There, too, he hadn’t understood. And his little classmates had all laughed at him.

His mother relied on him at the time, she who didn’t know — and couldn’t know — what life had in store for her … She who didn’t know that her son was crippled in both legs. Crippled by the struggle for existence, ever since his bitter childhood, he’d been good at hiding his crutches and his wooden legs. In fact, had he ever had anything worthwhile inside him? He’d only ever made the poor woman suffer, she who naïvely thought that putting her child in the Seminary, an institution of classical education run by Spiritain missionaries, would guarantee his success. It’s the first step that counts, she thought. But the road is long, perilous, strewn with emaciated skeletons. A pile of skulls, femurs, clavicles, pelvises, digits, severed little bones. Hideously ugly cadavers. Travelers fallen in the middle of the mournful night before their pale eyes were able even to make out the lights of a distant dawn. So many had fallen. They had faith in the future. They had goodwill. They’d fallen in the midst of struggling. For my part, I didn’t worry about it. I was more of a faithful servant of evil. Playing hooky … Coins slipped out from under the damask rug … The mahogany furniture I marred on purpose … The classic books I resold on Cathedral Place so I could buy cigarettes and alcohol. The money for school fees I spent on sweets … Truly, Mama had no idea that I didn’t give a damn about catechism, sacred history, arithmetic, French grammar, all of it peppered with holy communions and fastidious prayer. And what has she gotten for it, my mother? What’s left for her? A life sacrificed for absolutely nothing. A candle that goes out for lack of oxygen and a liter of blood. Nothing more … not even ten dollars for the necessary serum. Nothing for her but the inevitable annihilation.

Raynand is standing, more or less, at a north-facing window of the sanatorium. Near his mother, who’s dying along with the last rays of the July sun. The internist is saying something about a rupture of the pulmonary vessels, a situation that medical science could address, if it weren’t already too late … But Raynand’s gaze floats over Port-au-Prince, spread out at his feet. Dives recklessly into the city in its petri dish. Rises back up toward the church bells. Lingers on the roofs of the big buildings. Follows Jean-Jacques Dessalines Boulevard. Flies up to the smoking chimney of the Hasco sugar factory. Takes in the Plain of the cul-de-sac. And throws itself into the sea where the light is slowly disappearing in a bloody sunset.

When he comes back to himself, to the vast white room of the sanatorium, the old woman Marguerite is already wearing the cold sandals of eternal silence, fading away as discreetly as she’d come into being. For once letting go of the self-effacing role she’d taken seriously to the very end. Ridding herself of those dreams she’d always believed could be realized with God’s grace … with her prayers … with her novenas … and with the countless pilgrimages she’d made to all the churches in the city.

At seminary, I took communion every Sunday at the seven o’clock mass. Instead of teaching me that this was a purely symbolic ceremony, the teachers saw fit to fill my little kid’s head with the idea of a God buried somewhere inside the host. And I was supposed to swallow the divine cautiously, without it grazing my teeth. It contained the body and blood of Christ. And it required some serious lingual acrobatics to dislodge the circular wafer stuck to the roof of my mouth and bring it to my throat.

One morning, coming back from the Sacred Table, I surreptitiously took the host out of my mouth and placed it on the armrest. Then, after having examined it carefully, I put it back between my teeth and patiently chewed it — as I would have done with a hard candy. I couldn’t detect any hint of blood. Just to be sure, I licked the palm of my hand with my moist tongue. Nothing appeared aside from a bit of viscous spittle. I was puzzled. Disappointed, even. I spent the whole day thinking about it. Questioning myself. Crying about it. Especially troubled because I couldn’t share with anyone the profane nature or the disastrous results of my experiment. I suffered terribly and couldn’t eat anything that Sunday. It was the first shock of my life. A whole section of a marvelous edifice began to crumble amidst a thick cloud of dust that, once it had died down, left a hideous void around me. Much later I realized that I just taken my first difficult step in the painful ordeal that leads to enlightenment, to true peace of the soul. Other facts arose that shook my faith in the teachings and practices of religion.

I left school one afternoon. Nearing the Cathedral, I was caught in a sudden downpour and obliged to take shelter inside the church. Hours passed and the rain kept coming down. At seven in the evening, a priest, followed by the sexton, came around. Ceremoniously, he reminded all those present that the doors to the church would be closing and that we would all have to evacuate God’s house. I didn’t wait for him to finish his sermon. I was the first to leave, braving the furious downpour. I arrived home soaked to the bone. My mother gave me some ginger tea. And she rubbed my chest. Despite these efforts, because of my weak bronchial tubes, I fell seriously ill and owe my life to an unending list of medical prescriptions.

In sixth grade, during the school holidays, I became passionately engaged in reading the Bible. I was floored to discover the existence, on every page, of a cruel and unjust God — a true despot who accepted Abel’s offerings while disdaining those of his brother Cain. That hurt me. I suffered along with Cain. This poor peasant who knew how to till the earth. To sow seeds. To observe the germination and growth of plants. To make out the circulating of green sap in the branches. To pick the most beautiful fruits of his garden. To bring them to his lord and master. Only to be rejected with a slap in the face from He who desired a blood sacrifice. All of that marked me deeply. The inexorability of a god served by angels armed with double-edged swords. The shortsightedness of a vengeful and jealous creator driven to drown his work in a flood. And then his regret at having breathed life into man. All these pages revealed to me the monstrosity of a tyrannical and capricious God.

However, from as far back as I can remember, it was in philosophy class that I received the real sledgehammer argument (don’t worry — I’m not going to bore you with the details of all my readings). Of course, I had gotten to know about History and about the great masters of scientific thought. I knew how Christianity had come into being and developed in the context of the slaveholding Roman Empire until it became the state religion. The Inquisition. The persecution of progressive thinkers. The discrediting of Epicurus, who wanted to free men from their fear of the gods. Giordano Bruno’s auto-da-fé. Vanini’s tongue ripped out. Galileo’s sad story. Darwin’s evolutionism. Marxist theory. Freud’s discoveries. The theological and philosophical uncertainties of Teilhard de Chardin, who preferred talking about the noosphere and the Omega Point as expressions of divine transcendence, following which he should have logically posited, at the end of his scientific research, the spiritual dynamic of matter and the primacy of energy in all cosmic, physical, and biological phenomena. Of course, I knew all of that.

However, what struck me was a perfectly banal fact. It happened in 1955. High schools were going to the airport to welcome the American vice president Richard Nixon. I got into line with everyone else. Suddenly, at Grand Street, I was struck in the forehead by a rock that some kid had thrown at a dog pissing on the wheel of a car. With a black eye and the arch of my eyebrow slightly fractured, I had to leave the parade. Once home, I immediately placed a saltwater compress on the swollen wound. Plunged into bitter thoughts, I shivered at the idea that I easily could have lost an eye for no reason. I spent the whole day trying to find the causes that might have explained the fact that I’d been hit by this projectile. Why me personally and not someone else? I didn’t find any convincing explanation. I also looked for what I might have done wrong, but couldn’t point to anything. So it was that I began thinking about chance. Religion offered no decent explanation. Only scientific data came to my rescue and, just like that, I understood the laws of ballistics: understood, that is, the fact that I’d been walking in line, in step with the rhythm of my column; that the rock had been thrown clumsily, in accordance with its own speed; and, finally, that at one point I’d very logically become a specific target on the trajectory of the projectile. Sudden clarity. I’d seen the light. My heart beat more quickly. I forgot the pain in my head. Chance no longer existed for me. My thoughts extended outward to consider the sufferings of all those who seemed to be victims of some dreadful fate. Those who lived in slavery or misery. Peoples oppressed by wealthy nations. I began to understand it all. Underdevelopment. The appearance of political leaders, artists, scientists, geniuses. Beauty. Ugliness. Natural epidemics. Progress. Vices. Births. Wars. Victories. Defeats. Scientific discoveries. Works of art. From one thing to the next, the world unfolded before me, clear like water from a stone. Nothing stopped me anymore, since I’d found an explanation for all cosmic phenomena. I was now equipped to perform an autopsy on both happiness and sorrow. I left behind anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism any time I needed to analyze some particular occurrence or other. I considered man as one animal among many. And, courageously, I told myself that anything that can happen, good or bad, to any of the other species is just as likely for man. The only difference — a quite significant improvement, to be sure — is that we fully understand the situation! And even there, the keen awareness that we have these problems draws all its enlightenment from the blinding sun of science.

Since then, I look at religion as a trompe l’oeil for the naïve, a screen, a major obstacle to the objective study of human behaviors or any other phenomenon. And the idea of God, a cork to stop up who-knows-what hole. A hole that doesn’t actually exist. Purely imaginary. That shouldn’t frighten anyone.

For the universe is an infinite mass of energy. The void is only apparent as it is constituted by intermediary entities that rely on other unknown regions. New ones. Where man pursues his adventure in an interminable process at once continuous and discontinuous. Where light shines brighter and brighter. Takes us. Tears us away from the monotony of the quotidian. Throws a pure diamond into our hearts. And injects us with the virile audacity that makes this world move along.

A heavy day. Hot. Suffocating. Exhausting. Summer tunes its drums. Suspended by some invisible rigging, the sun, giant monster, casts its voracious tentacles on the rooftops, the streets, the bodies and blinding windows of the cars. Harshly. Ferociously, even. The sun doesn’t grow old. Steadfast eye, it has become a roaming light. The day emerges from the trickle of tears gushing from the blazing eye of this wandering Cyclops. At times, a few stray clouds wipe at the dazzled corners of that eye whose every lash is the clash of a cymbal in the ears of the planet. The striking of a drumstick on the tanned hide of the islands.

Just after noon, the eye gnashes mercilessly. Arms itself with a circle of teeth that bury themselves deep into the bones of all things. Into the very heart of this so-fragile existence. Trees, animals, men cry for mercy. But the burning eye, bursting with vitriol, turns a deaf ear. It holds on to those fine rays that pierce, tear apart. Needlessly penetrating into our guts. Impassible judge, it watches the living as they slowly die. Who, then, could even speak of survival? That would be ridiculous. Who could possibly talk about relief while we find ourselves here at the very bottom of a seething boiler? Such talk could only leave us feeling more crushed, even more broken.

The streets stretch out, veins dried up, thinned out, bloodless. The sun has swallowed everything up. Leaving nothing but powdery earth under the steps of the aimless vagabonds. Throats that have given out from having yawned too much, begged too much, moaned too much. A streak of white dust on the asphalt traces the circle of death.

Blinding mirror that condenses the misfortune and doom of the idle pedestrians. Each face is pressured to pay up its share of sweat.

That afternoon, four young men are seated at the entry to a passage on Macajoux Street. Overwhelmed by the heat and by an overall sluggishness, they speak of everything and nothing.

Abruptly passing from one topic to the next, just to pass the time. Searching … in the void. A quest … into oblivion. A way of managing their boredom. From time to time, taking turns, they wet their lips, the tips of their tongues, their palates, with a little glass of sweetened rum. Filled three quarters of the way, the bottle, in which blond cherries and twigs of cinnamon are soaking, is placed underneath Raynand’s chair. He’s the most chatty, the least thirsty of the bunch. Paulin is there, too; he drinks moderately, but smokes quite a bit.

— It’s a superior compound. Quite a nice little concoction. Been macerating for many days.

— Paulin, you’ve heard the latest international news. Seems like things are going from bad to worse in Southeast Asia. The escalation has crossed a new threshold.

— It’s pretty serious. The Vietcong are about to launch a general offensive.

Passing the bottle around, each of them has a small glass. Raynand removes a packet of Splendids from the pocket of his shirt, takes out a cigarette, raps it quickly against the box of matches with light taps, then lights it and blows out rings of gray smoke.

— Roland is getting married on Saturday …

— Brave guy.

— How’s that?

— He does nothing at all in life. Lifts neither light nor heavy loads. Neither straw nor stone. And he’s getting married. Next Saturday. Not a day later.

— It brings tears to my eyes, just thinking about what he’ll have to go through.

— You may be mistaken. Roland knows exactly what he’s doing.

— Well, then, explain it to us.

— Roland’s marriage — it’s a transaction. A sort of investment. A misery insurance policy. But more than anything else, it’s a dirty trick.

— Really, a dirty trick? You’re not just saying that?

— Not at all. A suicide. Pure rubbish, really.

— Okay, now spill it. If you’ve got the goods, then let’s hear what you have to say. Don’t make us beg you for such small potatoes. We won’t talk. And we’ve all got a pretty good poker face, so we won’t give away anything you tell us.

— The girl is pregnant.

— So? Is that all?

— The kid isn’t Roland’s. The real father took off. He refused to marry her. So the girl’s parents had the great idea to buy her a spouse. A sort of cover. Someone to wash her all clean.

— Now there’s a story! This wouldn’t happen to be something you made up?

— I’m telling you, Roland is a serious stain remover, the kind of detergent you use to get out the nastiest dirt.

— What are they offering him by way of compensation for plunging into such shit?

— The girl leaves for New York soon. Roland has wanted to go to the United States for a long time now. This marriage is the best deal he ever could have hoped for. It’s the surest way for him to obtain a residence visa.

— So then that’s the contract. The price of the soap. And then of course once married, he can be shown the door.

— Even if I were offered millions … there’s no way I’d do it. For me — and I’m not even talking about a case like this one — marriage is a dangerous commitment. Single, I always know where to find my feet. I tell them to go left or right, and they obey me. Tied to someone, I’d never know for sure what my spouse was thinking. Or what she’d do at the moment when I’d count on her the most. When I’d count on her fidelity. Woman is an element of the unknown raised to the nth degree. We can live for three centuries and we’ll never finish finding zeros to add on to that equation raised to the tenth power.

— So what do you have against women?

— Nothing, in principle. A lot, in practice. Enslaved for millennia. A commodity in bourgeois society. She isn’t herself. In some cases an object of disdain. In other cases a degraded fetish. So my grievance is just as much with the society that has made women into a condensed form of all its problems. Married, one would live constantly with that stench in one’s nose. And that causes nausea. And I don’t like vomiting.

— And so, are you against marriage?

— I’m against living together, legal unions, and common-law arrangements.

— So what solution do you propose?

— Women must fight. Participate. Her autonomy mustn’t be a gift. But a conquest. Only her active presence can change her situation. Neither laws nor decrees are going to earn her real emancipation. Only her participation in the liberation of oppressed classes, of trampled-down races, can truly lead to her rehabilitation. She’s got to give up all the self-pity and facile romanticism. She’s got to stop begging. Put her shoulder to the wheel. And take what’s owed to her. Not be satisfied with her status as spoil of war shared between men. A trophy for the victors. At the very least, give revolt a try. Not with moaning and supplications. She must assert herself to the world based on her own merit. Not by ruse or low blows. Strike head-on. Not from behind.

— Okay. You say that women must participate. For that, she’ll have to stand beside men.

— Yes, beside men. Everywhere. In the most dangerous places. In the resistance movements. In the trenches. Coming close to death. Living it, not suffering it. Standing, by our side. Before lying horizontal on some bed. And all that depends entirely on her. We do not refuse her participation in those ways. On the contrary, we welcome it.

— All that outside of marriage?

— Outside all affective liaisons. Outside any household. Otherwise, it becomes a tomb in the end. We men must learn also to see women in a different light, less unhealthy, less perverse.

— In the end, you condemn love …

— No. I’m far-sighted. I issue a warning. Besides, in our current context, love — that marvelous sentiment, that vertigo that brings two beings together — only exists as long as those beings don’t live under the same roof. As long as they haven’t become materially intertwined. It’s neither the man nor the woman’s fault. It’s the whole society’s responsibility. On slippery ground like ours, the furniture to change, the wardrobe to update, the car and its mechanical problems, sicknesses, medications, jewelry, perfumes, and even the spice rack — all that leads to the strangulation and, ultimately, to the death of even the most powerful love.

— In that case, Paulin, you won’t have children?

— The way things are right now, I wouldn’t want to have any. I plan to remain available, for the time being. Children are a bunch of fruit hanging on beautiful flowering branches, yes, but too often they hold back the fervor of the tree. Whereas I intend to do with my life as I see fit. Too often, children amount to a long tail that hinders all movement. That keeps you from stepping over the fire. That makes you too cautious. The spouse, the good family man is a sort of mole who retreats into his den, where he thinks he can find safety for himself and his loved ones … False security! The hearth would be a constraint for me. A sort of underground tunnel. Whereas wide-open spaces attract me irresistibly. Have you never noticed with what ridiculous eagerness married men abandon the company of their friends for fear of encroaching on the hour or so reserved for the little wife?

— Really, Paulin, you wouldn’t like to be married someday?

— I’ve often thought about it. And it repulses me, the pitiful little puppy dog trapped in the bond of marriage.

— Raynand, tell us what you think of your friend Paulin’s ideas. Why don’t you say a thing or two on the subject …

Raynand carefully fills his glass to the brim, takes his time emptying it, then responds calmly.

— To be afraid of marriage is a form of cowardice. I’m not denying the difficulty of domestic life, with a wife and kids, not one bit. On the contrary … But I see, despite that, important reasons to fight for such things. The life of a family man is made up of everyday heroism. Who doesn’t recognize the valor it takes for a man to feed his children, to clothe them, to watch over his companion, to concern himself with her happiness, to give meaning to her life?

— Exactly, responds Paulin confidently. That’s what I fear the most. Under no circumstances would I want to exhaust my own strength in fruitless battles. Not to mention all the petty conjugal disputes. A bit of warfare between lovers, as Sartre might say. There are so many problems to solve that I wouldn’t want to dissipate my reserves of energy — out of affective lack or unforgivable weakness — on a woman who wouldn’t understand my sacrifices. I loathe wastefulness. Moreover, as I’ve made clear here, in the best of circumstances, marriage consecrates the triumph of selfishness in the illusory happiness of a closed circle. Removed from others and their suffering.

— You’re a cynic, Paulin. The selfish one is you, who refuses to share your life, retorts Raynand angrily. Yes, you’re the selfish one. You’re afraid. Because you’re not sure of yourself.

— Well, who isn’t afraid? Who is sure of himself? Please, introduce me to this heroic being, this rare species of animal.

— I still love Solange. I’d marry her in a second, if she wanted that.

— Go after her, then. Marry her. Share your life with her. That’s all up to you, if you’re so sure of yourself.

— As far as this is concerned, Paulin, we’ll never agree. We don’t have the same history. Our experiences are different.

— Do you really want to brag about that, dear man? responds Paulin ironically.

Nonchalantly, Raynand rises from his seat. He downs another shot. Clasps his friends’ hands. Gives Paulin’s shoulder a friendly slap.

— All right, Paulin. I’m headed out. I’ll come by your place tomorrow afternoon. I’ll be there for sure.

— Okay, I’ll be waiting for you. I hardly ever go out. I write. I’m preparing a great work.

Raynand goes out into the sun as it tips its fiery boiler into the bay. Above the din of the Croix-des-Bossales market, sailboats rest at anchor in the harbor. Butterflies perched on an immense gray platform. Ah, the silvery mirror that is the blue sea of the islands on a summer afternoon.

— How many times did you tell me you’d come back! Every day I watch the trees gather up their shadowy skirts, propped up on their crooked legs. Every night I’ve counted the hours till the cock’s crow, till the stridulations of the crickets. But you never came back, Jastrame.

She lowered the flame of the lamp and lit a candle that she’d affixed using a bit of wax melted on the little oak table. She undid the white handkerchief that held back her long hair, the color of cane syrup. Stretched out on a mat woven out of dried leaves from the trunk of a banana tree, I pretended to sleep. She couldn’t know that I’d heard her, that I’d been watching her. Enlarged, deformed against the earthen wall, her shadow offered a pitifully disheveled image of unrequited love. She uncorked a flat bottle, spilled three healthy measures of spirits at the foot of her bed.

— You never came back, Jastrame. Can it be that you’ve abandoned me for the rest of my days? Lord, why have you burdened me with this test too great for my strength and my morale? I suffered so much during my youth that I thought misery would have been forever banished from my existence. Lord Jesus! Mother Mary, my mistress! Why leave yet another vulnerable place in my brutalized heart?

Head bowed, she begins to weep. Until she’s been worn out. Exhausted. To my eyes she’d become the very picture of suffering — weeping, naked, slumped on the armrest of the night. I stopped watching her. And I began to cry under my sheet. I cried all night long.

Grandmother, seventy years old at the time, never again saw Jastrame, her lover, her companion in old age. Alone in an impoverished province, cut off from her people, only seeing her grandson during the summer months, she died of despair. When we learned of her death, by telegram, the entire household burst into tears. During the two days spent in funeral preparations, I stayed clear of all the others, with their yapping like rabid dogs … Their cries bothered me. I didn’t shed a single tear. They called me cynical, an ungrateful little beast incapable of affection. I didn’t defend myself at all. I alone knew how much Grandmother had suffered in her solitude, because I had cried alongside her, without her knowing it, at the very moment where she needed — more than ever — to hear a human voice. Abandoned in her provincial hole, she’d spent her final days awaiting a touch, a word, a smile, a cry. Hoping for someone, a Jastrame, anyone. She died with only love’s painful shadow to keep her company, tragic portrait of solitude projected on an earthen wall. That, I alone knew.

The day of her funeral, the truck in which we were riding swerved suddenly and flipped over near “Smelly Springs.” Although no one was hurt, the accident itself upset me greatly. And I was even more horrified by the fact that my Grandmother would end up buried in a cracked coffin. Only eight years old, I’d already been made aware of life’s cruel workings. With all its problems. Its surprises. Its complications. I knew that something didn’t work correctly. I couldn’t accept the fact that misery had been long nipping at the heels of a poor peasant woman, and had ruthlessly pursued her to her very grave.

Now that I have so much better understood Grandmother, I wonder if I’m not the only one in the family to keep an inheritance of torments and worries buried deep inside. In my body, sealed-in pain. In my heart infused with the tears of a night when love pitifully projected its lonely and fateful shadow on an earthen wall. Like Grandmother, I’m waiting for someone. Anyone. A touch. A human voice. A face. A Jastrame. I’m waiting to no longer be alone.

Three in the afternoon. Raynand is at Paulin’s house, in his bedroom. He’s clearly surprised by the atmosphere of silence and order that suffuses the little gray room. He’s impressed. So astonished that he can hardly speak. He doesn’t know where to begin. Not in a million years would he have imagined such discipline from someone as noisy and explosive as Paulin. He glances quickly at the shelves of the bookcase before sitting down. A bunch of marked-up manuscript pages have been arranged on a metal table.

— Are you the one who wrote all of that, Paulin?

— I’ve been working on a novel for the past few months. It’s been tormenting me mercilessly, beating me like a draft horse. I’ve been carrying a heavy load ever since I took on this project.

— You say you’ve been working on it for months now?

— This could even take years, my dear Raynand.

— I’ve heard that the novel is a difficult genre.

— Yes, in a sense, rather difficult. Especially when it comes to breaking with tradition. To renewing something. To creating. Literature is beginning to grow old. And having arrived at this state of decrepitude, it risks being dethroned by cinema, which, conversely, shows brand-new vigor. Making use of the scientific technologies of the twentieth century, and using the resources of other branches of the arts as helpful tools, cinema has achieved almost a miracle: it has raised itself to the level of a total art form. The threat it poses to literature is enormous. Certain. Yet it isn’t a question of doing battle, or of eradicating it. That would be a waste of time. Literature is dying. It will die, without question. Not even the most seasoned doctors can save it. Its tissues, its arteries are sclerotic. And its heart, having turned into rusty metal, feebly pumps out rotten blood.

— If that’s the case, what’s there to do? I’d say you should stop writing. You might as well break that useless pen in two and then tear up these sheets of paper before throwing them in the fire.

— What’s left is waiting for the end; the death throes can go on for some time. In the interval, literature will accept its place as underling. And we can still slow down its ultimate end by infusing this old, ailing organism with a bit of new blood. With something enriched that has been extracted from the drama of its own dying, which is also that of men — for whom the earth is no longer enough. The planet has become a straitjacket for man’s respiration. He needs wings to rise up. To conquer infinite illuminated spaces. But literature, that decrepit old man, loses its breath in the course of such vertiginous ascension. And free falls terrify it. In the meantime, cinema, marvelously new, served up by the television and by communication satellites, quickly travels along the new itinerary of cosmic waves. That’s why, my friend, to produce a literary work that pays close attention to the aesthetic becomes so difficult. Originality, authenticity — these are the stumbling block and the challenge. We must create, more now than before. As we wait for the certain turn toward death. The fascinating era of interstellar acrobatics.

Raynand is spellbound by Paulin’s words. After a few moments of contemplation, he lights a cigarette.

— Tell me, Paulin, how far along are you with your novel?

— The first chapters are already written. I’m at a crucial point, and I’m finding it very difficult to move forward. It happens at times that I end up spending hours doing battle with a single blank page. A cruel sheet of paper that refuses to fill up. That stubbornly refuses to bear the scratch marks of my pen or the strikes of my typewriter. A resistance that undermines my spirit. Often reduces me to tears. Because in such moments, neither semantics nor the dictionary, nor grammar, nor memories of past reading are of any help. And so, I give it up. I get into my bed and tell myself that literature is a curse. The surest path to my self-destruction. To suicide. But then the next day, I wake up full of enthusiasm. And I go back to writing, like a rebel full of rage. A masochist full of vices. An incorrigible megalomaniac. A zo-bouke-chen — irredeemably shameless!

— So what is it that holds you back?

— It isn’t that I don’t know what to say. It’s the way of saying it that torments me. The obsession with language in the crucible of solitude. Writing is the stumbling block. There are moments when I feel the weight of several tons pressing down on my shoulders. And then I lose my breath. And the clutch slips. I think that’s where the essential difference lies between painting and music, on the one hand, and literature, on the other. The basic instruments used by the painter and the musician to communicate their ideas — that is, colors and notes — are external and allow for easier manipulation. Whereas the writer has no direct grasp of words, which are completely internal. The painter has before him his palette and the whole range of colors. The musician, his instrument, and the panoply of scales and registers. As for the writer, he must constantly risk an incursion into the interior volcano, in order to extract, burned by lava, even the simplest word.

— I think I understand a little. So, Paulin, what’s the subject of your novel? What’s the title?

— I haven’t started worrying about the title yet. That will come, I’m sure. For the time being, I’m sorting out the structure of the chapters.

— But what are you going to talk about? You must have a story to develop.

— Not one I have the least idea about. Look, I don’t want to write a narrative novel. Or a story that goes from one end of a straight line to the other.

— If I understand what you’re planning, you’d like to try out the experiment André Gide conducted in The Counterfeiters?

— Not exactly … More like expand it. Gide composed his novel en abyme. That, of course, already marked some measure of progress in the construction of the novel as a genre.

— And what do you plan to do?

— The novel is a vision of life. And as far as I know, life isn’t a segment. It isn’t a vector. Nor is it a simple curve. It’s a spiral in motion. It opens and closes in irregular helices. It becomes a question of surprising at the right moment a few rings of the spiral. So I’m constructing my novel in a spiral, with diverse situations traversed by the problematic of the human, and held in awkward positions. And the elastic turns of the spiral, embracing beings and things in its elliptical and circular fragments, defining the movements of life. This is what I’m using the neologism Spiralism to describe.

— Okay. Still, you’re not going to make me believe you’re writing this novel without even the slightest idea of where it’s going.

— I don’t have even the slightest idea. No fixed notion should hold back the breath of a work that reproduces the accelerations and the imbalanced spasms of life. I take the pulse of the spiral and inscribe it in graphs and charts, from the very life of writing. It’s a pluridimensionality at the level of words — words functioning as particles of sonoric energy in motion.

— Well, if that’s the case, your novel seems to be based on pretty expansive foundations. Which puts an extremely vast area of exploration at your disposal, I suppose. An immense field you can draw from at will.

— Not exactly. To say that I’m developing the theme of bankruptcy would be inexact. Rather, I suggest an ambience of failure. Writing a thermometer-novel capable of indicating the temperature of fictional landscapes. Making it so that the reader feels the climactic and spatio-temporal variations.

— I fear, Paulin, that you’re going about it all wrong. That you’re following the wrong path. That the public won’t understand.

— The public will understand. In fact, that’s who I’m writing the last chapter for. Does one have to be a genius to know if the weather is good or bad, if it’s night or day, if it’s cold or hot outside? Everyone knows, with no fear of getting it wrong, when it’s raining and when it’s sunny. That’s why, theoretically, I won’t explain anything to my reader. He’ll make out the landscape by the ambient temperature that touches his senses directly. He’ll play along from the start. What’s more, I’d like the dialogue between characters in the Spiralist novel to recall that of the theater, and for it to be situated right at the limits of poetry.