Franketienne - Ready to Burst

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 .