Franketienne - Ready to Burst

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 .