Sweet Undoings

1

When Cyprien slows down at the red light, the screams of the sirens are still far behind him. Haunted by images of the past night, he doesn’t hear them and, without thinking, turns on the radio. You are a wonder of nature! A people of creative geniuses! You are Audi! You are Haiti! His strange dream gets mixed up with these words—words that over the last few weeks have taken over a good portion of his brain: Audi! Haiti! But with the insistent, anxious news from the journalists never far behind, both dream and Audi alike always end up swept away by a sort of dark storm. It’s hard to calmly announce that entire fields of pearl millet have been ravaged by a fungus; that the main public hospital has no more medication, gauze, or sterile gloves; that people are being killed over a few bills withdrawn from the bank; or that a judge like Raymond Berthier has been assassinated for wanting to know too much. Living here means managing the casualties. The city is a cauldron and you’ve got to reach for the froth if you don’t want to end up scraping the bottom. Cyprien grips the steering wheel with both hands. Some part of his brain needs to stay aware of the passersby, of the two motorbikes rolling up on his left, of the packed taptap bus coming to a stop just in front of him so that a passenger can hop on the back, of the motorbike slipping between him and the colorful taptap. It’s hot. Maybe ninety degrees in the shade.

—

The crowd—teeming, chattering—rushes along on a narrow strip of sidewalk between the stands and the market women’s baskets on the ground. The trash hasn’t been picked up for three days. Cyprien has become less and less tolerant of this rosary of misfortune being recited all day, every day—the scorching heat, the noise of the crowd, and the stench of the gutters. He adjusts the air conditioning to seventy degrees. Full blast, as his colleagues would say! The light turns green. In his modest Hyundai Tucson, the air conditioner constantly goes full throttle. At seventy degrees in the passenger seat, you forget what it’s like at the bottom of the cauldron! He adjusts the patchouli air freshener on the dashboard. Brune finds it overly sweet, but he likes it. It’s a vulgar smell, she’d even said to him one time. He still thinks about that and remembers saying to her that she always had strong opinions about everything, in any event, and that he wasn’t going to change the scent. Cyprien listens distractedly and for the umpteenth time to the warm voice on the radio extolling the virtues of the Audi Quattro in between two tragedies: You are a wonder of nature. You are an epic, legendary people, you are a brave, resilient people, you are Audi, you are Haiti, land of the Quattro. As much as Cyprien loves that gleaming, powerful, classy piece of machinery (truly, hats off to those Germans!), and despite the announcer’s well-rehearsed voice, it’s still tough for him to make the connection between Audi and Haiti. Audi and Haiti: you really had to work to come up with that one. Fuzziness having settled into his brain, his intellect more or less chloroformed, he listens over and over to those words ringing out. Tinkling. Words that, put end to end, mean nothing. The nothingness of vertigo. Softening up your brain. Advertisements have that virtue, that ability to render the improbable perfectly plausible.

The roar of the sirens gets closer, as do the flashing lights. Passersby on either side slow down and turn their heads. Cyprien doesn’t notice anything. The strange dream from last night won’t let go of him either. Strange isn’t exactly the right word. The dream seems to him like some sort of premonition, foreboding, emerging from the most tucked-away part of his being, the darkest part. He’s still completely shaken. Could the dream have something to do with his sex life? He’d thought so at first, but nevertheless has his doubts. He’s well past the age of wet dreams. His mother had raised him on her own, along with his two sisters. That intimacy had made him into a man who loves women—even though, like many men, his brain tended to drop into his crotch at the sight of a skirt or a tight pair of pants. And then, too, things were going perfectly well with Brune in that department. A hundred and thirty pounds of perfect curves, heavenly legs, heavy breasts like two perky chadek fruits.

In his dream, along one of those high mountain roads of which there are so many on this island, Brune moved farther and farther away from him, dancing, legs bare. Just thinking about it he felt a slight tightening between his thighs. It was dark. Though he called out to her at the top of his lungs, she never turned around. And when all of a sudden she rose up into the air to step over a ravine, he screamed … But Cyprien starts with a jolt. Sirens blaring right behind him. He barely has time to look in his rearview mirror and notice a black Toyota Land Cruiser just a few yards behind his modest Hyundai. The Toyota, brand new with a large engine, is preceded by another, less luxurious 4x4 with tinted windows and flashing lights on the roof. Two motorcycles lead the procession. The cars in front of him move quickly to the right side of the road, while the passersby flatten themselves against the walls. As for Cyprien, his maneuver was quick, a skillful turn of the wheel to head over to the right himself, after glancing to make sure no one on that sidewalk, teeming with arms and legs, ended up under his wheels or up against his bumper. The front tire grazed the gutter with a screech that went straight to his chest. But clearly the security guards in the first 4x4 think Cyprien hasn’t acted fast enough. Through the window he sees a pair of threatening eyes beneath a hood and two hands gripping the barrel of an automatic weapon. The man in the Land Cruiser behind it, surely some high-ranking authority, lowered his window just a few inches and looked right at him, unmistakably, insistently. Cyprien swallows hard. Brune’s bare legs, her arms flailing about in his dream, waking up drenched in sweat—all of that faded with the screeching of the siren, his quick maneuver, and those spine-chilling looks. Far more down-to-earth thoughts take over those lingering images from the night: the mechanic’s bill, the eighteen payments he still owes the dealer. He considers himself fortunate not to have come across this convoy on one of those roads that have nothing national about them aside from their name—on some bend in the road at the edge of an abyss. I, Cyprien Novilus, I’d have found myself in a freefall, sent feetfirst to kingdom come. No witnesses. Gone without a trace.

2

Once he realized that death was headed straight for him, Raymond Berthier had gone to meet it. Without blinking, without lowering his head. My beloved wife … Barely disguised threats leave no further doubt as to the fate reserved for me by certain forces … But I will not leave … Pierre Martin no longer remembers everything Raymond Berthier wrote in his letter, he nonetheless remains obsessed with. But he knows that these days, to exist so loftily on this island is quite simply out of fashion.

Pierre has left the blinds half lowered so as to conserve the coolness in the sole large room and to absorb the inconvenient din caused by the odd motor struggling to turn over and by the sound of backfiring exhaust pipes coming from the sidewalk garage, set up on the other side of the street, not to mention the chants of the pastor and his parishioners in the makeshift church two houses down. Well aware that any conversion on my part would be impossible, God is playing a final trick on me by condemning me to this racket. With his black coffee and light cigarettes, Pierre stretches out the seconds and the minutes in the shadowy not-quite-silence—his customary break in the day: sitting in his half-reclined armchair, in the middle of the tropical afternoon. In the center of this wooden house that smells of eucalyptus and vanilla, for the past two days Pierre has been rereading passages from Baldwin’s Just Above My Head, a book that had put him on the path to self-acceptance.

So he kept quiet as he and Crunch stepped onto the crowded train. Crunch leaned against the door; Arthur stood next to Crunch, still wondering if he should leave. Crunch didn’t seem to see him, or to know he was there. But he knew that if he tried to leave, Crunch would call him back. Crunch would be hurt—it was a game he couldn’t play, a risk he couldn’t take. He stared at himself in the subway window as the train shook and roared through the tunnel.

Pierre reads a few pages at random. He knows all of them by heart. Or almost all of them. With Jean-Michel, he himself had been Crunch on occasion, other times Arthur. The book falls from his hands as he gently nods off. Through the blinds, dust dances in the beams of light. He likes to believe that the spirits, so many restless nomads, invite themselves in at such moments. That everything is merely an illusion!

Death doesn’t scare Pierre. What makes him ashamed is continuing to live as a silent observer, a coward, tail between his legs. What he fears is the wearing away that inevitably corrodes everything. The muscles that will no longer hold on to anything, life hollowed out in miasmas and excretions, the fading of his memory, the sadness that will require morphine and total forgetting. I’m already old. After sixty, sixty-five years on this island, you’re nothing but a cadaver on borrowed time. The flesh is decomposing even if the stench hasn’t yet entered the nose. I love life. Pierre wasn’t only thinking those words, he was saying them aloud, softly. He’s always been sensual, always will be. Right to the end. It’s really a question of temperament. One of the indisputable advantages of having finished running the obstacle course of life is that your temperament, at his age, is forged in steel. But Pierre is no longer on the hunt. Even when he longs for the affections of others, his hand rests there on his chest, near his heart, as if to protect himself. He’d still like to taste a few simple, inconsequential pleasures. Right there within reach. And that’s it. Today, God in his infinite mercy has given him a reprieve: there’s no soccer match on. Picture an entire city seated or gathered on the sidewalk, crowded around a television screen, watching, in a state of total hysteria, twenty-two grown men run after a ball. An entire city screaming Gooooooooal!!! And then letting loose a few rounds of machine-gun fire into the air. All the better to forget that those bursts of ammunition are really for people like Raymond Berthier, sending them off to the precipice of eternity. My paradise is right here. Right now. In this near silence. In this half-light. Without any soccer match. Without anyone wailing to God. The sun lays its fingers on the furniture, on the paintings, on the various objects that are precious to Pierre, on Pierre himself as he dozes off slowly, far from Baldwin, gnawed at by questions about Raymond Berthier’s death. For days at a time, he imagines the projectile hitting his brother-in-law, the blood flooding his mouth in a scarlet wave, reaching his nostrils, and finally making him collapse. I couldn’t cry. I didn’t cry. I stood there in the shower, dumbfounded and stark naked, eyes wild. What I was feeling had no need for words, so powerful was the pain in every inch of flesh, every muscle, every drop of blood. Pierre should try to get some information about Raymond’s brutal death from Henri Norestor and Didier Polvert, longtime friends with connections to the authorities. Old friends, faithful so far, can still be useful. He won’t stand for this wasting away, face to the ground, mouth sewn shut. Might I be a coward? I have to know, and to act accordingly …

Diesel fumes from the garage waft into his living room and make him cough. When Pierre was a child, this neighborhood was still a rural village, quiet and peaceful, where public celebrations were limited to a festival for the patron saint, religious processions, and Corpus Christi feasts. Then came the time of bougainvillea-covered fences. Simple fences at first, as delicate as lace. The charming, flowery little town was so lovely that visiting travelers compared it to suburbs in Tokyo, just imagine that! And then came the wrought iron bars on the windows, the high stone walls, and the gatehouses at the entrances to people’s homes. The time of