The Colour of Dawn E-Book

Yanick Lahens

• Herausgeber: Seren
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Seren Discoveries
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 210

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Port au Prince, Haiti. The police roam the streets and no-one is safe. Fignolé, musician and political radical is missing. His sisters Joyeuse and Angelique search for their young brother amid the colour, bustle, deprivation and political tension of the city. Everntually they will find him, but in the process they will also have found more about themselves than they wanted to know. One day and three lives in a city where love is hard to find, life is cheap and death is all too familioar. A tense, passionate and viivdly told story of small victories of hope in the face of a seemingly impossible fight against a monolithic regime. "Writing so beautiful it takes your breath away" - Le Mode Diplomatique Winner of the RFO Award; the Prix Millepages and the Prix Litterataire Richelieu de la Francophonie.

Leseprobe

The Colour of Dawn

The Colour of Dawn

Yanick Lahens

Translated by Alison Layland

Seren is the book imprint of Poetry Wales Press Ltd Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales

www.serenbooks.comfacebook.com/SerenBooks Twitter:@SerenBooks

Original French text © Yanick Lahens, 2008 Translation © Alison Layland, 2013

First published in French as La Couleur de l’Aube by Éditions Sabine Wespieser in 2008

This translation is published with the support of the Centre National du Livre

The right of Yanick Lahens to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

ISBN 978-1-78172-057-8 Mobi: 978-1-78172-058-5 Epub: 978-1-78172-059-2

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holders.

Cover image: Getty Images

The publisher works with the financial assistance of the Welsh Books Council

Printed by CPI Anthony Rowe Ltd, Trowbridge

The Colour of Dawn

…for in their secret awareness of Him, He was not the God of three faces they sang about. They knew quite well that he had four, and that the fourth explained Sula.They had lived with various forms of evil all their days, and it wasn’t that they believed Godwould take care of them. It was rather that they knew God had a brother and that brother hadn’t spared God’s son, so why should he spare them?

Toni Morrison

Sula

Oh, how can you expect me to put all these words into a letter

– eyewitness of a time that has not come to its last meal of cannibals?

Georges Castera

Lettre d’octobre

ONE

Stealing a march on the dawn, I have opened the door onto the night. Not without first going down on my knees and praying to God – how could I not pray to God on this island, where the Devil has such a hold and must be rubbing his hands in glee? In this house, where he has stealthily established himself as each day passes.

Three times in succession I have recited a psalm of David, taking care to emphasise each syllable so that, in speaking so intensely to God, I am doing something that counts, ensuring that the sky above my head is more than an empty half-gourd:

When the wicked advance against me To devour my flesh…

All night my eyes peered into the shadows. All night my ears strained to hear the crackling of gunfire in the distance – something you always want to imagine distant, very distant. Until that day when death comes, bleeding, to our door. Until the day it spatters our walls. Like the others, all the others, I am waiting.

Fignolé, my younger brother, didn’t come home last night. I didn’t hear him carefully opening the front door, nor noisily relieving himself in the backyard, as he so often does. And his bed, which serves by day as a couch in the living room, is untouched. For several months now I have been worried about Fignolé. I’m not the only one. How could anyone not worry about Fignolé? Fignolé, who has always held our lives on a string to the point of strangulation, whom fear has not yet succeeded in bringing to his knees. Where could he have spent the night? Where…?

It’s precisely half past four… This moment, between darkness and light, is my favourite time. The time when my thoughts can turn freely to those who occupy this house, to all those whose whereabouts are lost to me, or who are too far away. The hour of my accumulated resentments, the hour of my numerous hatreds, my expectations ranged before me, my hardships that are enough to make me cry with rage. Resentments, hatreds, hardships – I will soon have gathered them all, without exception, like a gaggle of chattering gossips. I carry inside myself so many other women, strangers who dog my footsteps, who live in my shadow, restless in my skin. Not one of them will be deaf to the call of this young woman, not yet thirty, on whom time has left its mark. A young woman struck down some years ago who pretends to carry on living as if nothing had happened.

Ti Louze has already gone to fetch water from the neighbourhood fountain. She has tucked away in a corner the rush mat she lays out as a bed, right by the door to the backyard, together with the rags she piles up to sleep under every night. Let’s hope she will return unscathed from those inevitable riots around the water, where we learn to cut our teeth, sharpen our fangs, at a very early stage.We are devoured by rage like dogs. Soon we will grow tails, walk the ground on four paws. It’s only a matter of time.

God, it’s cold! I put the coffee pot on the gas stove in the backyard and carefully raise the collar of my bathrobe that was once red but has long since faded to an indistinct brownish colour. The channel that runs along the far wall of this tiny courtyard gives off a persistent stench of decay and urine. It was wreathed in indistinct wisps when I opened the door. And to cap it all, Fignolé has not come home. One of us should help Ti Louze to carry the rubbish to the foul-smelling corner where all the neighbourhood’s residents pile up their garbage again and again without any hope of the public services coming to collect it.

The February dawn is enough to freeze the blood. Wedged into the rocking chair, arms folded over my chest, legs stretched open in front of me, I reign over this backyard as if it were a great palace of solitude where I can allow myself a few moments of madness. A mad queen, my body in turmoil, shaken from the tips of my toes to the roots of my hair! I can still believe my body has a purpose. Look, there beneath my left breast, my life beats in secret like a captive bird. I sometimes feel it flutter until it is enough to stifle my breath. Sitting like an abundant cow, I await an attentive hand that knows what to do, to awake it in a noisy beating of wings.

To draw it from its slough of despond.

To help it recover from this futile wearing-down.

I wait…

TWO

My skin has the heady fragrance of orange and custard-apple leaves, generously applied after steeping for hours in a basin in the sun. Behind the metal sheet that serves as our backyard screen, I used the infusion to meticulously wash my face, stomach, arms and legs before sleep caught up with me. I am a woman suffused with a lively glow, my body divested of much of its childish awkwardness, to be replaced with a vigour and suppleness which delight me.

How long have I taken to become a woman? I don’t know. My hips have assumed a bold fullness. My thighs have lengthened like palm trees. As the days go by, a deep cosy hollow has formed between my breasts. A fine line between my navel and my pubic hair has darkened and become an object of mystery and desire.When I was still young enough for Mother to wash me, she would often say this line meant my firstborn would be a boy. Now it is a curious detail that arouses men’s imagination and their passion, something I have not yet fully explored; something for which the moment of reckoning is still far off, very far off. And then there is Luckson…I only have to close my eyes to see, again and again, his bare chest seeking my breast, his keen eyes close to mine, and I succumb to insolence and desire. Yet I am an ordinary young woman, totally ordinary. I am so well aware of this that, day after day, I work away at transforming this ordinariness into something precious. I love Luckson’s slim hips. I love his mouth with its warning, his impudent hands. Luckson – honey and danger.

I open my eyes with a feeling of pleasure simply at existing, next to the sound of Mother breathing in her sleep. With a secret music deep in the hottest, most vital part of me, which soothes my ears, puts a spark in my eyes, animates my hands, burns my lips. Between two bursts of distant gunfire, Mother’s sighs kept me awake for part of the night. I don’t know what apparitions wandered through her sleep, what visitors ravaged her. Rising from the bed, I take care to keep my movements slight and ensure that I avoid disturbing the arrangement she has placed meticulously on the altar of her spirit Dambala.

Mother would rather go without buying clothes or food than cease honouring her extended family of African spirits, her loas, the Mysteries, the Invisibles, as she calls them. Above all, Dambala, who sits enthroned at the core of her life, who transports her and brings her back like a stalk of straw in the wind. Three or four times a year, she believes she is obliged to pamper them in turn, Dambala first, then Ogou and Erzulie Fréda. Only yesterday she lit a candle to Erzulie Fréda, placing it in the centre of the little altar she has dedicated to her behind the wardrobe. Three pink flamingo flowers have been placed before it, so beautiful you would think they were natural, freshly gathered from a lady’s flower garden. Fignolé presented them to Mother when he got his first wage. Mother thinks that Erzulie, a flirt like no other, must have been delighted to see her putting a few drops of her cheap eau de Cologne on a pink satin handkerchief and placing it in a small willow basket. She then took the trouble to satisfy the spirit’s huge appetite by serving her three nut slices on a fine porcelain plate, a plate that my employer, Mme Herbruch, left behind in her office one June afternoon and which I stole.Yes, stole. Why June, why that particular afternoon? I couldn’t begin to explain. Still, the next day, my eyes impassive and calmly meeting hers, I helped her myself to turn the shop upside-down searching for it.

‘That plate means a lot to me, Joyeuse.’

She worked herself up into a temper three days in a row, then never mentioned it again. The anger she expressed over the loss of that plate fascinated me. I remained unmoved inside, the better to observe her and to draw whatever conclusions I could from that range of feelings caused by the loss of something so trifling. Mme Herbruch was, after all, someone who could spare one plate!

Mother’s spirits and Angélique’s God have drawn a deep line of demarcation between them and me. I have weighed Angélique’s respectable God against my Mother’s illicit ones and remain unsatisfied. From the far bank where I set out my stakes in the height of noon, blown by fresh winds, I see the two of them fighting with shadows, blind and groping. I have chosen the light, wind and fire – even if they were to strike me blind, even if I had to give up my skin.

I’m in a hurry to go out, to find the fresh breath of the dawn. To leave this house, which seeks to imbue my skin with a musty staleness, the residues of sweat, those signs of deprivation and lack of water, all those clinging smells, the age-old scent of the poor. A house where we are hardly able to breathe in the night. Mother has not lost that annoying habit, from her distant peasant life, of going round before bed and sealing the windows, blocking up the cracks with any bits of fabric that come to hand. All gaps sealed, she keeps the house closed up like a fist, from a fear of all the visible and invisible creatures that await nightfall to come alive. Mother says the night is so favourable to bad air and apparitions!

THREE

A few scattered lights are still shining as night drags its feet. I have switched on the radio, to continue my conversation with God. The journalist-preacher with his shrill, nasal voice has kept his appointment with the Creator and with us: ‘Brothers and sisters, open your hearts…’. I hardly hear the first words of his morning prayer before I am back on my feet despite myself, as if a strange force were drawing me towards Fignolé’s empty bed. And I take Joyeuse by surprise, her shoulders slumped in stupor, standing before the same bed. She turns as I approach. Immediately I see in her expression that mix of feelings that she believes she can hide from me. As she sees me take several steps towards her, she suddenly changes her attitude, assuming the airs of a grandly-dressed uptown woman. A gesture here, a sigh there, her hands at her throat like a film star. When I remark to her that Fignolé hasn’t come home, she does her usual trick of acting as if she knows everything and is not unduly worried about her brother.

‘Night must have come down before he realised and he had to sleep at a friend’s.’

I don’t believe a single word of her reply. Not a word. And nor does she. Carry on, my dear Joyeuse; you carry on taking me for the greatest fool of them all.

Joyeuse, with a backside fit for parading about all the pavements of the city, will soon choose a figure-hugging dress, apply eau de toilette scented with jasmine and ylang-ylang and make up her face with colours to stop passers-by in their tracks. Joyeuse has an unshakeable faith in her lipstick, her breasts and her buttocks.

As for me, Angélique Méracin, I give the impression of wisdom, great wisdom. A sacrificed mother. A submissive daughter. An exemplary sister. Devoted to the sick in a hospital that has nothing. No-one has known me go with a man, either, not one. A woman without appetites, Angélique Méracin continues to serve, to obey, to smile. And so she is full of anger, run through with bad thoughts, shaken by delirious outbursts. And I hate it all. I hate this house. I hate this street, this city, this island.

I listen. Ti Louze is returning from the public fountain. Here she is, barefoot, her plaits coming loose, her dress a little more torn than yesterday and clinging to her skin like seaweed. Bent beneath the weight of two large bottles of water, Ti Louze does not dare meet my eyes. And with good reason! She woke too late and will be hard pushed to make the three trips to the fountain to fill the large plastic tank on the other side of the latrines.

I have taken a few steps towards the bedroom I occupy with Gabriel, my son. Well, I call it a bedroom although it isn’t in reality – I have merely put up a makeshift partition between this front room and the backyard to gain some privacy. Needless to say, the house is full to the brim. We can hear each other breathing. And of course, love has taken on the hues of our grudges, has become mixed and confused with our resentments. God obliges us to stay crowded together in all our moods, our resentments and our smells, as a way of putting us to the test, the better to serve Him.

In an hour’s time I’ll wake Gabriel to get ready for school. His soul nurtured in the splendour of the Scriptures, Gabriel should at this very moment be immersed in biblical dreams, glorious and epic. Sleeping with his hands curled into fists, legs spreadeagled, he can at last enjoy our large bed to himself. Standing on the threshold of my bedroom, I watch him from the corner of my eye, without ceasing to listen out for the sounds coming from the only real bedroom, the one that Mother shares with Joyeuse. Mother turned over a few moments ago, making the bedsprings creak beneath the weight of her bones that are beginning to get old. Her shoulders, I’m sure, will sag a little more in a while, when she realises that Fignolé has not come home. Then she will head slowly for the backyard and silently invoke her gods, her bold loas. Then, to the rhythm of the rocking chair, she will say her rosary, her eyes closed the better to see the other God, the one with the long white beard.You never know exactly which of these two universes is the one Mother moves in.

But at seven o’clock her ear is always glued to the radio; nothing in the world would make her miss the news, nothing. She gets a strange pleasure from listening to these voices that spell out our troubles every day, several times a day. Mother listens to them all: the strident and the clipped, the bass registers and the shrill, the drawling, the sing-song, the casual and the serious. Mother has been through rain, fire and blood. She says that, having lived for sixty years on this island, she is beyond the reach of shadows, beyond the reach of darkness. That her body may not yet exude the smell of a corpse but she is already dead.

And so when the journalist, with an appropriate and familiar voice, announces that an illicit gathering took place yesterday, Sunday, in the city centre, that armed men opened fire on some young people in a suburb to the north of the city, Mother just smiles a strange rictus of a smile, her jaw inflated with too many words, and flicks at the hem of her nightshirt with a swollen, arthritic right hand.

February has touched our daybreaks with cold hands. The pallid, milky light of the night dissolves into the colours of the horizon. I adjust Mother’s shawl. Joyeuse, sitting on her heels, sips her coffee without saying a word – and with good reason. Joyeuse has not been one of us for a long time, not since Uncle Nériscat, Mother’s cousin, paid for her to study with the Sisters of Wisdom, in the uptown district.

The three of us are thrown into turmoil by thoughts hard to bear, and I swear that we will avoid speaking openly of Fignolé’s absence, despite everything. We are too afraid to do so.

FOUR

Angélique is already outside preparing Gabriel’s meal. She often chooses this uncertain hour, away from our scrutiny, to unravel all the knots of kindness, reason and wisdom that hold together this gloomy, remote life of hers. Angélique’s life is lived at a low level, barely taking off from the ground. Angélique skims the foam of the days. I can’t remember the last time she laughed so the sun danced in her eyes. Truly, I can’t remember.

Since Gabriel was born, Angélique’s eyes have lost their ability to ensnare. Her body has laid down its arms. She keeps all her happiness tightly bound in a severe bun at the nape of her neck. I have difficulty coming to terms with this new Angélique; I find it hard to let go of the other Angélique who was lively and full of laughter, blazing under the sun. A notion of pure joy, of abstract happiness remains at the sound of her name. How I miss my sister, whose happiness and contagious bliss always went before her, who made me believe that the sun of my childhood would never set, who made every day a delicious flow of honey – despite the days when we went hungry, the days of pretence from just above the bottom end of the scale, the very bottom. We were always prepared to pretend, as if we went to sleep sated, our thirst quenched. As if our clothes were not held together by Mother’s ingenuity and mending skills. As if we were not always a hair’s breadth away from being expelled from school. As if, indeed, we hadn’t sometimes been expelled. As if, as if…

Since my childhood I have been at war. Angélique knew how to make it a happy war. I learned from her the rough, wild strength of that pride. How I miss that Angélique, whom a crafty, boastful man with an ‘it’s your lookout’ attitude stole from me one ordinary day, against a backdrop of sky, earth and sea. This bully in the making must just have raised his head above the surface of our sea of poverty, for I recall he was wearing his shirt open to his navel and his smile revealed a gold incisor. Mother had clearly not had time to give Angélique sufficient warning, to remind her to be wary of strangers lying in wait by the roadside.

Angélique now has a great shadow on her heart. Between the church services and the petty cruelties she bestows on the household, she has no time either to receive the love of God or to give love.Yet Angélique has just one thing on her lips: ‘God and His love’, ‘God and His works’, ‘God, God, God…’. I even suspect she uses her profession to distance herself from the sufferings of us mortals, and uses prayer to measure the extent to which she can resist earthly pleasures. Her heart is closed and the space between her thighs has been flooded with sadness. The connection is obvious. She knows it as well as I do, but would never admit it, never.

Earlier, when I made to join her outside for coffee, I saw that Fignolé’s bed was empty and the sheets had not been disturbed. This fact froze my blood, but I revealed nothing as I heard Angélique open the door to the backyard. She simply said to me:

‘Joyeuse, Fignolé didn’t come home last night.’

And I replied, ‘I know.’ Cloaking myself with the air of an eccentric diva that I use when my heart is set to race, I added, ‘He must have slept at a friend’s place.’

Angélique made no comment, but I know she didn’t believe me. For all her devout airs, Angélique is as sharp as an old monkey. When she moved away again towards the backyard, I took the opportunity of having a quick look behind the only cupboard in the living room, where a panel has worked loose. I know this is where Fignolé has taken to slipping the lyrics of the songs he writes, his desire for secrecy inspired by a lingering adolescence with its mysteries, its violence and its games. Without pausing to reflect for a second, I slipped my hand in. I didn’t expect to find anything but papers, but my hand met with something cold and metallic. I knew immediately it was a gun.

‘What on earth can Fignolé be doing with a gun?’

I drew it out quickly to examine it and convince myself. The barrel, the trigger, the butt. I closed my eyes for a few moments to gain strength to bear the violent music in my blood, which threatened to suffocate me. My hand was shaking.

But I remembered the tale told to me as a child by Mother one evening at nightfall; the tale of a woman who had gained all the strength in the world by swallowing a sacred stone given to her by a mage. Since then I have kept beneath my breast a small imaginary grey stone as a talisman against the evil spells of this island. My thoughts were all on this little grey stone as I tucked the gun beneath my nightshirt together with the few papers that had also been hidden in that cranny. In the bedroom I placed the gun in a box on top of the wardrobe and stowed the papers in my bag next to the bed. Despite all my acrobatics, despite all these comings and goings, Mother didn’t notice a thing. Lying beneath the sheets, she simply emitted a lengthy stifled moan as she turned towards me.

I have hardly begun to drink my coffee when Mother joins us in the backyard a few minutes later. She simply says: ‘Do either of you know where Fignolé spent the night?’ and doesn’t wait for a reply. Mother’s suffering is obvious. She suffers in silence. Something has been torn from her. She submits totally to this void, this great empty space, submerged in suffering and the waiting for Fignolé, but she won’t talk about it. Mother must have faltered by her son’s bed and invoked her loas as if grasping a pair of crutches. Mother falters but never falls. While Mother lives, the end of the world will never arrive.

Despite a certain plumpness accumulated with the years, Mother is still beautiful, though it is not that same beauty that was considered a scandal some years ago. Mother is a sovereign in decline, and this morning a tragic sovereign. The waiting turns her mouth into a remote island in the middle of her face, with her eyes like far horizons. Her hands resting on her knees, she murmurs as her whole body sways:

Holy Mary, mother of God, Pray for us, poor sinners…