Eve Out of Her Ruins Read online

  But today, it’s the man who says them, just because you have a gun in your hand. You accept this reversal of roles. You welcome the contempt that fills your gut.

  You tell him: get down on your knees.

  That, too, they said to you every time. Get down on your knees. Open your mouth. Take it.

  He is so worn out that he seems about to disappear. He doesn’t understand. You repeat:

  Get down on your knees.

  He does it. You walk up to him, you lift up his chin and you look him in the eyes, so as not to forget this face, this moment. Then you set the mouth of the barrel on his forehead, between his eyebrows.

  The gun is heavy, but it’s not very big and fits comfortably in your hand. You wonder if the safety is switched off, if you know how to shoot. The waxy skin you’re looking down at doesn’t look human at all. It looks more dead than Savita’s skin at the morgue.

  You think about her again, as you saw her last. It’s because of him that she had this purplish tinge, this rigidity, this absolute stillness. It’s because of him that she contradicts everything she ever was: a girl who was laughing, thoughtful, warm, and alive—above all, alive. He was her final moment. It was this face—pasty, defeated, unaware of the very meaning of the word love—that she saw at the moment she died.

  You will not forgive him.

  EVE

  I left his place, astonished that nobody heard the noise. I hadn’t expected it, this noise. I thought I would go deaf. But my hand hadn’t trembled.

  He looked like all the others behind his closed eyes.

  I walk out into the rain that has begun to fall. It is slow and warm. It dampens my bare scalp, presses my clothes to my skin. It is so heavy that puddles form around my feet, grow, and swallow them up.

  I feel like I’ve walked away from the house, but I see I haven’t moved. I stay there, standing, not knowing what I should do.

  How does the rest of the story go? Saad, that’s your job, to tell it. I myself don’t know. Will mine finish here, at seventeen? Is life really that short?

  SAAD

  It’s done: I called the police to warn them about a possible riot. I hope they’ll come in time.

  I came running to the teacher’s house. Eve is standing in front of the house. She’s turned her back on it. She’s completely soaked by rain. Even without her hair, I recognize her right away. Eve, it’s Eve. She has a gun in her hand.

  She’s gripped by starlight. Her face looks like it’s come undone. Odd colors, colors of blows and bruises cloud her features. Her eyes are so deep and their echoes so metallic that I have trouble meeting her gaze. They go beyond this house, beyond Port Louis, beyond the present. Her eyes see into tomorrow, and tomorrow doesn’t exist.

  The rain brings the odors of the sea. It falls all around her with a gentle rumble. The rain almost seems as if it could soften her and melt her, until there was nothing left of her.

  I stop in front of her and I take the gun from her hand. She doesn’t stop me. She says:

  He left a letter, about Savita.

  I say, good, they’ll have to release Clélio, and besides, that gives me an excuse.

  An excuse?

  When I go to turn myself in to the police.

  She shakes her head and explains, calmly: No, I’m the one who killed him, not you.

  Eve, I say, let me do it. I know what I have to do.

  She looks at me with what little of her wrath remains:

  I have to go all the way, it has nothing to do with you.

  I drag her to a low wall that will protect us a bit from the rain. I force her to sit down next to me. She is so exhausted and shaky that she lets me do it, even if moving reawakens all her pain and makes her wince.

  I don’t want you to take the blame for me, she says. I forbid you from doing it.

  I don’t need you at all.

  I don’t need you at all.

  Six words: one for each hand, one for each foot, one for the head, and one for the heart. I drip red.

  For the first time, she wraps her arms around me. Her mouth is desolate, but inflexible. Despite my dismay, I think of the inch separating us.

  Otherwise it won’t have been of any use, she says.

  I don’t know what use it was. I can feel her halting breath, her uneven heartbeat.

  I look at the damage wreaked upon her body. She is sculpted like volcanic rock. I don’t understand violence at all: it is there, everywhere. A poison floating in the air.

  But I am sure of one thing: for her, with her, for one season or many, I am ready to go into hell. Nothing else matters. I stroke the nape of her neck, her bare head. Even under the low wall, the water is drowning us.

  But the rain tastes sweet on her lips.

  TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

  To call Mauritius part of Africa feels simplistic: the tiny island is actually on the other side of Madagascar from the rest of the continent, deep within the Indian Ocean. It has been colonized successively by Dutch, French, and British explorers, and, despite becoming an independent democracy in 1968, traces of its colonial history can be seen everywhere, from the various historical buildings around the capital city of Port Louis to the numerous ethnicities—Western European, Eastern African, Indian, and Chinese—that became part of the island’s population as settlers, slaves, indentured servants, and, finally, immigrants. This history is also evident in Mauritius’s languages: when the British took over the island, they allowed the inhabitants to keep using French, and to this day most Mauritians are fluent speakers of English, French, and Mauritian Creole.

  This mélange of languages, cultures, and histories parallels Ananda Devi’s own background. She was born in Trois Boutiques on the southeastern end of the island, and grew up in a family of Indian heritage. By the age of fifteen, she was already winning prizes for her short stories, and she continued to write prolifically even as she moved to England for a PhD in Anthropology and to Congo-Brazzaville for work before finally settling in France by the Swiss border. These various influences and interests have shaped her literary career, as she has trained her novelistic gaze on disenfranchised populations and the ways in which femininity is shaped and established. Her gorgeously hewn sentences rarely shy away from depicting violence or suffering; her novels, rather, embrace the entirety of human experience, from abject suffering to unalloyed joy.

  Devi’s prose reveals the complexity of the country she still returns to every year, and I quickly came to realize that Eve Out of Her Ruins would present intriguing challenges as I translated it. Devi writes in French purely by choice, and the sentences her Mauritian narrators speak or write bear tinges of English and Mauritian Creole. English syntax occasionally creeps in, which I mirrored with snippets of French syntax. Foreign words and phrases stand out vividly on the page, and just as I kept Mauritian Creole phrases intact, so I kept occasional French words like cité (ghetto) unchanged from the original.

  There are a few multilingual puns. The neighborhood, for example, is named Troumaron, and French speakers might recognize the Creole name as meaning trou marron, or “brown hole.” The implication in Mauritian Creole, of course, is much dirtier. Another pun is visible as one of the narrators says his name: “Je suis Sadiq. Tout le monde m’appelle Sad.” Someone reading the French text likely would catch the reference to the English emotion, just as a knowledgeable English reader might notice the parallel pun in a man saying “I am Tristan. Everybody calls me Triste.” To maintain a similar subtlety, I retransliterated the name from the Arabic word for “truth” and “friend”: “I am Saadiq. Everybody calls me Saad.”

  Eve Out of Her Ruins is a harrowing story, but even its most intense moments of grief are tempered by the beauty of Devi’s prose. As I’ve translated it, it’s been my pleasure to meet so many readers that this book has touched in French. Annabel Kim was the first to press the novel upon me. Professor Thomas C. Spear, who maintains the Île en île website dedicated to Francophone writers, has been an invaluable
ally and advocate. The generous editors at The Offing—Amanda DeMarco, Charles Lee, and Darcy Cosper—published the first pages of this book and helped it to find a home in print. Justin Dickinson spent a long afternoon poring over sentences with me, and provided me with insights that lingered over the rest of my work. Similarly, Cécile Menon and Angeline Rothermundt gave this translation one of the most thorough, thoughtful edits I could have asked for. And it is thanks to the efforts and passion of Cécile Menon, Charles Boyle, and Will Evans that Ananda Devi’s stunning novel is being brought, at long last, to a new cadre of readers in English.

  And I owe a debt of gratitude to Ananda Devi herself for answering so many questions, teasing out new interpretations, imbuing this translation with her own singular voice, and—most of all—writing such an extraordinary book.

  Jeffrey Zuckerman

  ANANDA DEVI was born in 1957 in Trois-Boutiques, Mauritius, an island notable for its confluence of diverse ethnic, cultural, and linguistic identities. She studied ethnology and anthropology, and completed a doctoral thesis at SOAS in London. After several years in the Congo, she moved to Switzerland in 1989. She has published eleven novels as well as short stories and poetry over her entire career. Eve Out of Her Ruins, originally published by the prestigious Gallimard publishing house in France in 2006, was an enormous critical and popular success, winning the Prix des cinq continents de la francophonie for the best novel of the year written in French, previously won by such writers as Alain Mabanckou and Mathias Enard. She was made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 2010. Her first novel in English, Indian Tango, was published by Host Publications in 2011, and she has been a part of numerous literary festivals in the US, Europe, and India, and her works have been translated into numerous languages.

  JEFFREY ZUCKERMAN is Digital Editor at Music & Literature magazine and a translator from French. He has served on the 2016 jury for the PEN Translation Prize, and his translation of Antoine Volodine’s Radiant Terminus is forthcoming from Open Letter in 2017. His writing and translations have appeared in Best European Fiction, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Paris Review Daily, the New Republic, and VICE.

  JEAN-MARIE GUSTAVE LE CLÉZIO was born in April 13, 1940 in Nice, France, but both parents had strong family connections with the former French colony of Mauritius. He is president and long-standing member of the prize jury for the Prix des cinq continents de la francophonie (awarded to Ananda Devi’s Eve Out of Her Ruins in 2006), and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008.

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