Eve Out of Her Ruins Read online

  You, Carlo, you chose to leave before us all. You say you’re in France, you say it’s your voice I’m hearing on the phone, but that’s not true. I know it. That’s not your voice. It’s someone fake, trying to pronounce those rs but we never say them here. It’s someone fake, pretending to be French but you’re Mauritian through and through. It’s someone fake, yapping about his bottle-green Renault Clio but I know you only like Japanese cars, you swore they were the best cars in the world. It’s someone fake who won’t answer my questions even though you promised me nothing would drive us apart and you would take me wherever you went.

  No, this betrayal has made you someone else. You’re not Carlo. I’m taking a knife and carving my leg with your name, Carlo. Now my blood’s spelling out your name, you’re in me and you are me. There’s two of us. The one who talks over there like he’s forgotten everything, he’s fake.

  The toad yells on the roof. It welcomes the night.

  It yells, yells, yells. Carlo’s blood drips. If I stretch out my arms, will I fly away?

  Tell me, since you know.

  EVE

  He helps me, of course. So it’s a trade-off. He gives me books, he pays more attention while correcting my papers. He makes sure, in class, not to look at me more than anyone else, not to ogle me with his milky, wandering eyes, but everybody knows. The smell of a man around the woman he’s lusting after doesn’t fool anyone. His jerky steps toward her don’t, either.

  He tells me that he’ll tutor me. He tells me to wait after class in the small biology room, since he has a key.

  After class, when everybody’s left, I stay behind. His searchlight gaze is aimed at me. My eyes burn while I refuse to blink.

  His pursuit was ridiculous. It was clear he wasn’t used to it. It took him weeks to summon up the courage to tell me to stay after class. He’s surprised I say yes so quickly, so coldly. How could it be this easy? He wonders if I really know what his intentions are.

  He gives me the key and tells me to go into the room, he’ll be there soon. Maybe he’s going to regain his courage in the bathroom. Or cool off his burning skin with icy water. Get condoms from his car, I don’t know. But I walk into the small room that smells like sulfur and formaldehyde. My steps echo in the hallway lined with vinyl scratched up by thousands of feet. Something flies across the dusty windows. I don’t have time to see if it’s me.

  He’s taken care of the setup. The table is at the back of the room, against the wall, in the shadows. We’ll sit side by side. I’ll be right by the wall. The table’s big and solid. And there are also lab benches along the walls. Immediately, the room’s function is transformed.

  When he comes in and sits down next to me, I see that he hasn’t cleaned up. He’s still oozing desire. He stammers nervously. He opens a book at random, tries to discuss something with me. He wants to keep up the masquerade until he’s sure I won’t run out screaming. He asks me questions and doesn’t notice that I’m clearly avoiding direct answers. I just have to smile.

  With this smile, he finally seizes the opportunity, turns to me, and holds my face in his hands, his mouth struggles to find mine, he’s in such a rush he misses his target.

  I love you, I love you, he says, blind with desire. It’s so awkward I’m almost insulted. Does he really think I’ll believe him? His tongue is in my ear. The words bunch up around the thick mass. That moisture, his hot breath, his fumbling, it all disgusts me. I want to push him away, but I’m up against the wall, his hand’s rubbing all over and I hear him whispering, you’re not wearing a bra, and then he doesn’t say anything at all, he’s all hurried and stuck and drowning.

  I let him.

  He can’t even get my clothes off, I have to do it for him. He frees himself and tries to push into me. My head bangs against the wall, but all I feel is tired. He’s lost in my body. He’s thin in places, flabby in others. I watch him. I notice the bald spot at the top of his head. He’s so tall that nobody can see he’s losing his hair. I feel like I’m learning things about him that boil down to a few words, things that will destroy him.

  The disgust I felt at first has disappeared. Things are boring again. As usual, I don’t feel anything anymore. He hammers away. He doesn’t come. Do something, he begs. I shrug, then nod.

  While he’s grabbing my hair, I think to myself how I would have really liked a cigarette.

  A cigarette to mask the bitterness in your mouth. Eyes open, you work. Seventeen years old and you dream of nothing. Except continuing to walk beside yourself, fleeing your reflections.

  Seventeen years old and you think you know everything. Your face is stony and your hands are exhausted.

  EVE

  When I walk under the mango trees, they wave to me like they know me. I think I look like lots of things—organic, or mineral, or strange and sloughed-off, but I don’t look like a woman. Only a reflection of a woman. Only an echo of a woman. Only the deformed idea of a woman.

  In windows, mirrors, eyes, there’s my face fleeing endlessly. I don’t want my soul trapped in any of those. I’ll be anything but a captured soul. But a bird with clipped wings. When I meet my own gaze, I’m chilled and frightened. I hate how much I’m hurting myself.

  Someday, tomorrow, later: nothing.

  At home, we dance around each other. We’re playing a game of avoiding the real questions. They see me and they don’t see me. A stench of lies hits me as I walk in the door.

  Every day I count my steps before coming back to my place. Or rather, their place, because it isn’t mine. I didn’t choose to live there. I didn’t choose anything at all, even being born. I would have liked an unknown place, with the sea lapping its borders, and a single shapeless filao tree stunted like an old man caught in the wind, and myself sitting under the tree, not doing or saying anything. Sometimes, I’d climb up the highest branches and look into the distance. Far off, there’d be nothing. Except for sea and more sea. The sea’s constant, whispering movement. The land would look like it was being rocked to sleep. A moon would slip away. I’d curl up at the bottom of the tree and fall asleep. Maybe I’d never wake up.

  There was no fairy at my crib. I think that when I opened my eyes I suddenly saw my whole life in front of me: a stone wall, bars over my eyes, a gag in my mouth, and metal in my heart. That face drove me to pronounce, when I opened my mouth, that vital word: no.

  Hide everything and walk on coals, show nothing of myself. I let them think I’m easy come, easy go. I let them think I’m nothing more than a body, this body that, when they pull off its clothes, makes them quiver.

  A body so fragile, so thin, so easily broken; a body to cherish and destroy; that’s what they try their best to do.

  Savita and I have fun dreaming up other selves, born in good places, into families where defeat can’t be read in palm lines or bent knees. We’d be doctors or lawyers and we’d care for and defend the weak and the poor. We wouldn’t leave anybody to fend for themselves. Those are the stupid dreams we invent for ourselves. But when they become doctors or lawyers, these other girls, do they forget their past? Do they refuse to open the doors they’ve barricaded?

  Savita tickles my toes. I lick the soles of her feet. We have the same skin, completely smooth, into which our hands disappear. The softest parts are the hollows of our backs and the insides of our thighs. When we rub these spots, time stops. I lay my head on her stomach and I hear the sounds of her organs. Something rumbling, some hunger, some urge, I don’t know, or maybe it’s just her intestines doing their work. We don’t really need to talk. We know how to listen to our silences.

  SAVITA

  Eve’s silence is the rumble deep within a volcano. It hurts me to see her so fragile when she thinks she’s so strong. When she’s serious, her face is like a child’s, shocked in a dream, her eyes filled with lights. Her laugh is so rare, but when it comes it’s like a hurricane. When I get close to Eve, she sweeps me off my feet.

  Before her, I looked at things from so far away that nothing
touched me.

  I was going to leave that day. I was going to take a little bag and go straight out, walk without looking back. I’d had enough of my parents sniveling. Of all those responsibilities that fell on me as a result, helping my sister, setting a good example for her. We lived in Troumaron as escapees, as refugees among refugees. Living there while insisting on being somewhere else, something else, refusing to accept the signs that we were no different from all the others. At odds with ourselves.

  I decided to leave good old Savita, the good girl, behind for good. I didn’t know where I’d go. But it wasn’t Troumaron I wanted to escape. It was my family. Troumaron was my place, my struggle, my anchor. I’d never experienced anything else. I grew up here. But my parents’ eyes saw only another Savita, a sweet girl, a trooper, a winner. I had been forced to fit into that image. I couldn’t do it anymore. She wasn’t me.

  And then, at school, I came across a shipwrecked Eve, her face drowned not in tears but in the shadows of the tree she was sitting under. I saw the walls encircling her. I saw the other schoolchildren’s looks, furtive, treacherous. A loneliness so deep it was no different from death.

  The most frightening part was that I had the impression she was me.

  I went weak. I was riveted by her sadness. Through the opened doors of her sides, her life was escaping. I had to console her, take her in my arms like a mother or a lover, and make her forget, however briefly, why she was shaking.

  SAAD

  Miracle of my life. The flame trees are in bloom. Thousands of red lips have gorged on the tree, then blossomed all at once. The lychee trees disappear under their fruit. An almost indecent explosion of color, as if shutters have opened onto a body of pure light.

  Everywhere I look, the same colors fill my view. My heart sways. Even here, even here, in this city of cement, summer has come. A shrub turns slate blue. The grass becomes momentarily green before yellowing again. On their balconies, women struggle to preserve miniscule blossoms in pots. They no longer feel weighed down in their bodies and so they sing. At night, the smell of fruits can be discerned from that of trash. For a very, very short while, the fruits win out.

  Summer numbs us at first, before the heat revives the landfill’s call and stirs anew our shadows, our sleepy dregs.

  And I, sitting by my window open to everything that could rouse the night, I keep thinking about her. Her eyes’ resonance, her body pushing away and feeding fantasies. The kind of body that could completely disappear into your own. That could be eaten. The kind of body that could be folded into all sorts of positions to reach its impossible nooks. And that, from its toes to the end of its hair, would be a place to lose yourself in. Her toes would taste like longan. Her hair would be filled with smells of seaweed and night. Her sex would have the tuberous odor of frangipani flowers and the half-rotten warmth of mangroves.

  Oh, I’m off and away, like always. I’m imagining her with someone else, with everyone else. Which makes me even more excited. I’m jealous, but at the same time, I know I’m the only one to love her. She’s waiting for me. I know it. I feel it.

  I’m young; take my hand.

  Yes, he, the poet, he said that at seventeen, with all too much hope. Too much belief, too much promise. He could write. And then one day, he set aside this too-heavy gift. I want both: to write, and to have Eve. Eve and writing. Hand in hand. Having only one of them is as good as nothing. They are the fruits that will sate me, the seeds that will sprout more plants and multiply my voice like a banyan tree swallowing up land.

  I know that, for now, I can’t create anything. I can only copy. My voice isn’t my own. This language isn’t my own. I don’t even know who I’m talking to.

  But this room will end up becoming something real. I reread madness on the walls, in black and white ink, and I tell myself that I’m also in the process of creating, even if it’s with other people’s words. I was a child who stumbled over words. I’ll become a man who tames them. Of course, the day they open the door, they won’t understand anything, they won’t know what’s being hammered and chiseled here. But having done that reassures me. I’ve performed that act. I don’t know what it’s worth, but I’ve done something. I haven’t just stayed here and faded away into death. I’m inscribing myself, rather than erasing myself. I’ve built a bridge with a child who’s also angry at heart, even if he’ll never know me. He tells me:

  The star wept rose into the heart of your ears, an infinity of white rolled between your nape and hips and man bled black onto your sovereign side.

  I’m young; take my hand.

  I love a girl whose body has been crushed. But the day I’m in her, I’ll wipe all the marks off her body; she’ll be new.

  I’m young; I’m in love.

  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.

  Sometimes, when the wind comes from Signal Mountain, when I see the fires burning on its slopes, the scrub fires, the trash fires, I tell myself that under all that is beauty, even here, and something is sizzling, and a fire is sparking in the underbrush of my own mind.

  I forget what I am, where I come from. The wind from the mountain erases the name Troumaron from my lips and from my memory.

  I want to leave and I want to stay. Between the two, I do not move. But my body cannot stop wandering over our pool of dreams, at Eve’s mercy.

  CLÉLIO

  The factory smells like engine grease, decaying waste, abandoned sandals, wasted bodies. Sometimes I come here all alone so I can see how life tells lies to the poor. Does me good. My mother, when she got a job here, she thought everything had changed. She took her first paycheck and bought me Nike shoes, she thought that would make me happy, she never saw that I was sick of Nikes, that we had all these tricks for getting these pointless things, I didn’t need things, I needed a guide, I needed purpose.

  After that, she changed, from one week to the next. The factory grew and got deep into our lives. My mother started bringing me defective sweaters. If I see another Ralph Lauren sweater with one sleeve shorter than the other I’ll cut it up and stuff it down the mouth of this man who made lopsided beings of us. But for us, it’s not sleeves. It’s arms, or legs, or eyes that are uneven. We’re defective humans.

  She got smaller, grayer. She got less and less sunlight. At the end of the day, when she came back in, she was like a blurred copy of herself. Something had started rubbing away at her features. My father sat in a chair waiting for her. He spent his day waiting for her, like an old idiot, his eyes like a lost kid’s, but all he could say when she got home was, Did you bring something to eat? He didn’t bother to say anything else. Every time he said that I wanted to wring his neck. Let her sit down, take off her shoes, drink a glass of water, you shithead, I wanted to yell at him, go make your dinner yourself. Or tell her you spent all day in front of the window watching for her shadow.

  She had rings un
der her eyes as deep as Père Laval’s grave, her eyes were sunk that deep. Her hair had started falling out. It was like strings. I don’t think she ate enough. Her hands look like the moon with so many craters.

  Then they brought in Chinese workers who worked fast and good and without complaining. Or maybe they were complaining in their own language and nobody could understand them. They told the Mauritians they had to do the same if they wanted to keep their job. Some of them were fired. But my mother worked hard. She wasn’t a loser. She was a fighter, like me. Well, not exactly, but more or less. It didn’t matter. She was fired when the factory closed since it cost too much to make sweaters and shirts here. My father said that between the American and Chinese giants our country was an ant that nobody noticed, even when stepping on us. Would you even think twice before crushing an ant? he asked. It’s all the same to them. It’s not injustice, it’s just economic rationale.

  Sometimes my father isn’t as stupid as he appears to be.

  I’d have really liked it if Carlo sent us a little money, helped us, even if he didn’t want to come back. But he still hasn’t sent anything. He calls Mam, and her face lights up like a Christmas tree. It gets me so mad, Mam being excited for fake Carlo, believing all his lies, telling me, li pu fer mwa vinn kot li en Frans, li ena enn zoli lakaz ek dis lasam, yeah, I’ve never heard any Troumaron guys talking about having a ten-room house in France and promising their mothers for ten years that they’ll bring them there and then not doing it.

  Carlo, it’s over. I’m done with the fake you. The real one’s right here by me. We’ll sit on the roof and laugh, we’ll tell stories, like before, he’s my big brother, as handsome as a god and when he’s here I’m not afraid of anything.

  Tonight I have my guitar with me. I lie down as the last bit of sun stains my head and set my guitar on my belly, I play it easy. Going to sing songs I’ve been thinking up, songs I’m not singing for anyone else. Carlo would understand if he was here.