Eve Out of Her Ruins Read online

  THE SUN’S GOTTEN INTO MY BODY. It’s the core of what I’m writing. A portrait of Eve in the echoes of my room. Sentences that describe her, that draw her out. I’m in love.

  I believe in possibilities. Yes, even here. Even hurtling down our slopes. A word described her for me that day when we raced downward on bikes from the Virgin Mary. That day, right when she told me she would never say I love you, I saw the word that described her, a word at once resonant and foreign in this place: grace. If this grace is part of my possibilities, I thought, I can do anything.

  Port Louis looks at me differently. I believed dark, ugly Port Louis, disfigured by grotesque shapes, insurmountable in its waves of humankind, was beckoning to me. Its black pigeons dotting every roof agreed to decipher its moods for me. The city told me: if there are moments like this one and faces like your own, then, you have to love me, if only for this.

  I know this, that I’m only a simulacrum. But a drop of blue ink has gotten into me. I transform it into a black child’s ink, lacerating the walls. This story you’re reading on my walls, its words will only disappear when the buildings born out of the cyclones’ waters have disappeared.

  ALSO AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH BY ANANDA DEVI

  Indian Tango

  translated by Jean Anderson

  Deep Vellum Publishing

  3000 Commerce St., Dallas, Texas 75226

  deepvellum.org · @deepvellum

  Deep Vellum Publishing is a 501C3

  nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013.

  Copyright © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2006

  Originally published in French as Ève de ses décombres in 2006 by Éditions Gallimard, Paris, France

  English translation copyright © 2016 by Jeffrey Zuckerman

  Introduction copyright © 2016 by J.M.G. Le Clézio

  First edition, 2016

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1-941920-41-1 (ebook)

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2016939553

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  Cover design & typesetting by Anna Zylicz · annazylicz.com

  Text set in Bembo, a typeface modeled on typefaces cut by Francesco Griffo for Aldo Manuzio’s printing of De Aetna in 1495 in Venice.

  Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution.

  Table of Contents

  —

  Foreword by J.M.G. Le Clézio

  Eve Out of Her Ruins

  Translator’s Afterword

  FOREWORD BY J. M. G. LE CLÉZIO

  The island sometimes fades away like a stain. The island of gilded coastlines, hotels like royal palaces, luxury shops, and dreamlike villas. But it is another island that Ananda Devi describes, an island of dryness and drabness, neighborhoods bereft of hope, areas nobody dares to go: Rochebois, Karo Calyptus, Troumaron. This island never fades away; it is peyi Moris, an island of violence and promiscuity, where teenagers have nothing to do but lie in ambush, zip around town on mopeds, pretend to be adults. It’s an island where girls are doomed from the start to become “turtles”—women crushed under their husbands’ oppression—or to slide into the bottomless ravine carved by prostitution and drugs. Mauritians have coined for those living on this island a name that says everything: population générale. Neither this nor that, neither black nor white, neither Creole nor Hindu.

  But there is Eve. Eve with a child’s body, thin and dark, with a face bearing a small comic-book smile, with a wild mane of hair, thick and tough. Eve who does not accept, who does not submit, who defies her father and the world, who laughs while toying with men’s desires. Eve who like a woman knows everything and like a child forgets everything. Eve who gleams because she is the star deep within Troumaron’s darkness, a marrone escaping from slavery into unfriendly forests and towering buildings. And she is the living, beating heart of this broken world; she is desired by everybody, and she belongs to nobody, except Savita, who took her into her arms one day when she couldn’t go home, and who soothed her until she fell asleep, until pure, unchangeable love in all its beauty was born within her.

  What can the others, all the others, the teenagers and adults and witnesses and actors, do? The island is their prison, the beautiful coastlines tug at their heart, even as they dream of escaping someday, going far away, to the other shore, going where people drive beautiful new cars and live all alone in houses with ten rooms, far from the ugly slums and rusted buses, away from the streets where heat sticks to bodies and ennui flows through veins like cruelty. The bars of their prison are made of envy and hate. Someday they will get up, and they will demand answers. Or take empty bottles and rags soaked in gas and make Molotov cocktails to throw—at who? for what? Clélio will stay in jail, despite his lawyer, despite his witnesses who took wing over his building’s roof, even as deep within a cellar Savita…And so everyone will stay put, the beautiful coastlines will keep on shimmering like a frilly dress around royal palaces, the IRS—the Integrated Revenue System—will go on helping those gran mounes, pretentious people with pretentious lives, and men will go on stalking barely pubescent girls’ bodies and pushing them down to the ground, down to their knees.

  Yet Eve has truth on her side, and so she overcomes everything, truth is her ally even in her final revenge. For her, those who have eyes can see the truth, a thing worth far more than all the images and all the legends of the world. Before doing what cannot be undone, the murder that puts an end to the adults’ abuses and her father’s punches, she cuts off her mane to look like a lioness. For her, Savita will do anything, even die, and Saad will bear the responsibility for her crime, because he loves her as if nobody’s serious at seventeen. Ananda Devi—who knows the cost of waging war against institutional wrongs and capricious fate as she delineates this battle in every one of her books—makes her island a fiery star on the maps of the Indian Ocean.

  She forces open a door in darkness’s wall. This opening indeed reveals the beauty of the island, of this gift from the gods that is Mauritius, this gift that humans do not deserve but only a few innocents may ever see. “To the west,” says Saad, “there’s the harbor, so calm in the morning that we can’t see the least ripple in the water. That’s the first miracle: water that could almost be walked on.” Come and join them, take off your useless finery, forget all your prejudices; only then will you experience these other miracles and one day, like Saad, pull Eve out of her ruins.

  Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio

  translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman

  EVE

  Walking is hard. I limp, I hobble along on the steaming asphalt.

  With each step a monster rises, fully formed.

  The urban night swells, elastic, around me. The salty air from the Caudan waterfront scrapes my wounds and my skin, but I go on.

  I clear my own path. What was once deep within me—the slow drip of life that has slipped away and turned me into this livid creature sucking the night dry—no longer matters. The silence that fills me takes my breath away.

  I’m getting into my stride. I no longer have a choice. I can only hear the stuttering beat of my footsteps. I hoist my schoolbag on my right shoulder; there aren’t just books in it tonight. There’s a reassuring bulge right next to my armpit: the blaze of false starts and missed arrivals. Soon enough it will no longer be a rhythm coursing through my veins. I’m going to leave my mark on a forehead, right between the eyebrows. I was born for this moment.

  I wipe my neck. The coarse feel of it surprises me. The lack of hair makes me feel more naked than ever. Then I remember: my mother sheared it off. When I saw myself in the mirror, I saw that I had a lioness’s head. I had a mane of hunger.

  I walk, even if I’d rather run toward myself. The night quivers. The city trembles. I have gone.
Nothing can stop me now.

  PART ONE

  SAAD

  I am Saadiq. Everybody calls me Saad.

  Between despair and cruelty the line is thin.

  Eve is my fate, but she claims not to know it. When she bumps into me, her gaze passes through me without stopping. I disappear.

  I’m in a gray place. Or rather, yellowish brown, which better suits its name: Troumaron. Troumaron, a sort of funnel; where all the island’s wastewaters ultimately flow. Here is where the cyclone refugees are rehomed, those rendered homeless by tropical storms and who, two or five or ten or twenty years later, still have their toes in the water and their eyes pale as rain.

  I’ve always lived there. I was born a refugee. Like everyone else who’s grown up in the yellow shadows of these buildings, I’ve never understood their monstrous edges. I never saw the gaps born beneath our feet, separating us from the world. I played with Eve. We called her the skeleton because she was so thin, but also to mask an unspoken affection. We played at war until we found ourselves at war.

  We are at the bottom of Signal Mountain. Port Louis grabs our feet but we are stuck here. The city turns its back on us. Its muted magma stops at our borders. The mountain blocks our view of other things. Between the city and the stone are our buildings, our rubble, our trash. The eczema of paint and the tar beneath our feet. A children’s playground has become a battleground teeming with needles, shards of broken glass, hopes snaking into nothing. Here, boys clenched their fists for the first time, and girls cried for the first time. Here, everyone has faced up to their realities.

  One day we wake up and the future has disappeared. The sky hides the windows. Night makes its way into our bodies and refuses to leave.

  Night and our hormones gone wild. We boys are bundles of frustration. We start following girls to the shuttered factory that devoured our mothers’ dreams. Maybe that’s also what’s waiting for them. There’s nothing left of the factory but an empty metal shell and hundreds of sewing machines that carved into their shoulders that curve of despair and into their hands those nicks and cuts like tattoos. The remnants of every woman who worked here linger. We see that they tried to bestow some humanity on this desolation. Beside each machine, there’s a mauve plastic flower, yellowing family photos, postcards from Europe, and even a forgotten red barrette, a strand of hair still caught in it. And religious symbols—crucifixes, Koranic verses, Buddha statues, Krishna figures—that would allow us to guess which community they belonged to, if we wanted to play such guessing games. When the factory closed down, they weren’t even allowed to retrieve their things. It was that abrupt, that unexpected, but I realized, later, that they hadn’t wanted to see any of it. I wonder what use all this piety was to them. In any case, all of it was left to rust and to our perverse games behind the moldy curtains. These are our traces, in these stale, dingy rooms. Stains of so many virginities lost here.

  Sometimes, when the neighborhood is quiet, the island’s sounds seem different. Other kinds of music, less funereal tones, the clang of cash registers, the dazzle of development. The tourists scorn us without realizing it. Money has made them naïve. We cheat them out of a few rupees until they begin to mistrust our pleasant, false faces. The country puts on its sky-blue dress, the better to seduce them. A marine perfume wafts from its crotch. From here we can’t see the island all dolled up, and their eyes, dazzled by the sun, can’t see us. As things should be.

  Mothers disappear in a resigned haze. Fathers find in alcohol the virtue of authority. But they don’t have that anymore, authority. Authority, that’s us, the boys. We’ve recruited our troops like military leaders. We’ve carved out our portions of the neighborhood. Once our parents stopped working, we became the masters. Everybody knows we can’t be ordered around. And now nobody can look us in the eyes without shivering. From that moment, each of us began to live as he wanted to, free from everything, free from rules. We make the rules.

  But something else has slipped into my dreams lately. I mark the walls of my room with my questions; I bloody them with the juice of words. I learn to be quiet. I learn to talk to myself. I learn to put myself together and to take myself apart. I suppose we’re all like that; we go with the flow, like the others, but inside, each of us withdraws into himself and harbors his secrets. I follow in their steps and I act like I belong, as a matter of form, as a matter of survival. Eve doesn’t understand that.

  Eve walks by, her hair like foamy night, in her skin-tight jeans, and the others snigger and suck their teeth in lust, but I—I want to kneel down. She doesn’t look at us. She isn’t afraid of us. She has her solitude for armor.

  At night, my hormones seize on her face and describe it in long arcs of desire. When I can’t bear it anymore, I go out with the gang, our noisy mopeds tormenting the sleepy old folk. In the morning, the others sink into the stupor of drugs and rage. But I go take a shower, I shave, and I go to class. This double life sucks me dry, yet nothing in the world could keep me from seeing Eve’s profile in the morning at the bus stop, a sliver of sunlight playing on her ear.

  And then, I swear, I love words.

  I slip a poetry book into her bag.

  Later, she bumps into me and her eyes bore through me. It drives me insane.

  To her I dedicate all the sentences that have been darkening my walls. To her I dedicate all my bitter suns.

  Our cité is our kingdom. Our city in the city, our town in the town. Port Louis has changed shape; it has grown long teeth and buildings taller than its mountains. But our neighborhood hasn’t changed. It’s the last bastion. Here, we let our identities happen: we are those who do not belong. We call ourselves bann Troumaron—the Troumaronis—as if we were yet another kind of people on this island filled with so many kinds already. Maybe we actually are.

  Our lair, our playground, our battleground, our cemetery. Everything is there. We don’t need anything else. One day we’ll be invincible and the world will tremble. That’s our ambition.

  EVE

  Pencil. Eraser. Ruler. Paper. Gum. I played blind man’s bluff with the things I wanted. I was a child, but not entirely. I was twelve years old. I shut my eyes and held out my hand. My fingers closed on air. I shivered in my thin clothes. I thought everything was within reach. I made moonlight shine in the boys’ eyes. I believed I had powers.

  Pencil. Eraser. Ruler. I held out my hand because in my bag there was nothing. I went to school completely and totally empty. I felt some kind of pride in not having anything. People can be rich even in having nothing.

  Because I was small, because I was thin, because my arms and my legs were as straight as a child’s drawing, the bigger boys protected me. They gave me what I wanted. They thought a gust of wind would tip me over like a paper boat with a leak in its side.

  I was a paper boat. Water seeped into my sides, my stomach, my legs, my arms. I didn’t know it. I thought I was strong. I weighed up my chances. Assessed every moment. I knew how to ask without seeming to.

  Pencil, eraser, ruler, it didn’t matter. The boys gave me things. Their faces softened slightly, and that changed everything, it made them look human. And then, one day, when I asked without seeming to, they asked me for something in return.

  I thought it would be simple, it would be easy. What could they want in return? I was the smallest one, the least important one. Everyone knew I had nothing. For once, they were saying I had something. My bag held many nothings: the nothingness of my apartment, smaller and more bare than everyone else’s; the empty nothingnesses of our wardrobes; even those of our trash cans. There was the nothing of my father’s eye, which alcohol had turned oily. The nothing that was my mother’s mouth and eyelids, both of them stapled shut. I had nothing, nothing at all to give.

  But I was mistaken.

  He wanted a piece of me.

  He dragged me off to a corner of the playground, behind a huge Indian almond tree, he pinned me against the tree’s trunk, and he slipped his hand under my T-shirt. I was wea
ring a red T-shirt, with a soccer player’s name on it. I don’t remember who anymore. His hand stopped at my breasts, slowly moved up and down, just over the small black points. There was hardly anything there. I heard other children shouting and playing. They seemed far away. It was another world. The boy had slipped his other hand in. His skin turned blotchy. His cheek was hot. He took his time, even though he was scared. But I didn’t feel anything. I was out of my body. It was apart from me.

  That day, he didn’t ask me for anything else. He gave me an eraser, or a pencil, or a notebook, I don’t remember. His lips came close to my ear. The next time, he said, we’ll try something else.

  I shrugged, but I stared with some curiosity at his eyes. They had a silver sheen like melted sugar. As if he had been erased. Now he only existed through his hands. Now he only existed through me.

  For the first time my bag was no longer empty. I had something I could pay with: myself.

  I could buy. Exchange myself for what I needed. Exchange morsels, bits, various parts of my body. I looked brazenly at the taller boys when school was let out. You want to see something? I asked them. They laughed and said, Go away, there’s nothing to see. But then they looked at me a long while and my eyes told them something else. I knew how to do it. Someone else slipped fluidly into my gaze, someone completely separate from my bony body. I refused to be small or weak. I contradicted myself. That changed everything. They stopped breathing. They flowed into the shadows on my face. They left caresses there, a slime of desire that oozed down my right cheek. They, the bigger boys, had something else to give in return: books, calculators, CDs. All I gave them was the shadow of a body.

  I am in permanent negotiation. My body is a stop-over. Entire sections have been explored. Over time, they blossom with burns and cracks. Everyone leaves some trace, marks his territory.