The Colour of Dawn Reprint Edition

By Yanick Lahens, Alison Layland

Poetry Wales Press Ltd.

Copyright © 2008 Yanick Lahens
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78172-057-8
CHAPTER 1

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 …

CHAPTER 2

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!

CHAPTER 3

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.

CHAPTER 4

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 …

(Continues…)Excerpted from The Colour of Dawn Reprint Edition by Yanick Lahens, Alison Layland. Copyright © 2008 Yanick Lahens. Excerpted by permission of Poetry Wales Press Ltd..
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