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  Colette would push him out the door as quickly as she could. “Monsieur Panpan is waiting for you, Julien . . .”

  “Yeah, fine, let’s go.”

  And Panpan would drag Julien away from the chance of getting hit by a stray bullet.

  Sometimes when it was even too late for dinner, when the gendarmes’ calves had already made their appearance, when all other strategies failed, Colette made one last attempt to make all the guests leave. She’d gather up the notebooks she had to correct and pronounce, “I have to look over the homework I’ve given to my students.”

  Thanks to my friend, I knew everything threatening my brother and my sister-in-law. But if they’d come all the way out to see me, it meant that even my reckless brother had realized something bad was going to happen.

  I had to intervene and ask someone to protect them. I still had a few friends from high school who held important positions, especially in the police. Our country is so small we sometimes find help from the most unlikely places; unsuspected friends can countermand the most draconian laws.

  I jumped into my car, but I never arrived in La Pointe. A gory accident put an end to my journey towards town. I lost my head in that terrible collision; it was severed at the neck and landed in the middle of the banana plantation near l’Allée Dumanoir.

  I hate that road, have always despised it, especially because of all the trees bordering the narrow, buckling asphalt—four hundred nasty royal palms. Twelve hundred meters of one-hundred-year-old trees, which shelter the nearby banana plants from the ocean winds, winds that were blowing fantastically when I crashed my car into a royal palm.

  Let me describe how the leaves shook, how the branches scraped the car, how, unable to withstand the shock, the palm tree tumbled to the ground and seemed to bounce a few meters away, sounding just like an eraser hitting the floor.

  My life stopped on that road. If I’d lived one more day, maybe I would have died on La Place de la Victoire. The inevitable was just waiting to catch up with me, so it seems.

  But death, old and stubborn, showed up a day early. And so, in the end, I never found out what happened to Colette and Julien. I even wonder if my presence tonight in Émilienne’s courtyard has any meaning at all.

  THE THIRD FIGURE: LA POULE

  1.

  Begging your pardon, dear readers, dear dancers, dear dancing readers. Today we’ll be what you might call entrepreneurial callers.

  This Friday merits some wiggle room in our usual manner of calling.

  There’s been so much commotion, it’s impossible for the music not to be affected.

  Friday, May 26, our little sister Émilienne came home a good half hour late.

  It was noontime.

  We thought she’d been lingering near La Place de la Victoire. She really loves that spot with its hundred-year-old sandbox trees, which they say were planted to commemorate the abolition of slavery.

  Whenever she leaves school, where the pungent stench of piss from the Turkish toilets overpowers the sea air, she often stops for a few minutes on La Place. She closes her eyes, and while the other children around her run, laugh, and fight with one another, she greedily inhales the heady aroma of midday tide.

  Oh yes, how she loves the smell of the sea!

  So we thought it was only her usual seaside pause that had kept her away.

  Mama was getting ready to scold her, as she did every afternoon.

  But when she arrived, we were immediately alarmed by her torn dress and broken glasses, the traces of tears on her cheeks. To tell the truth, we were shattered.

  Our mother grabbed her, holding her close to the dampness of a housedress smelling of dishwater.

  She was sobbing like she does when we’re mean and pinch her.

  But for once we weren’t guilty of anything, and we couldn’t understand the reason behind her enormous sorrow.

  We watched her hiccup, “Our teacher has disappeared.” And even though we’d always preferred to laugh at her melodramatic suffering, this time we might have had tears in our eyes. I say “might” because nobody really knows if our memories of this particular afternoon haven’t already been altered by our new circumstances. We’re waiting.

  Our mother gave Émilienne permission to take refuge in our parents’ big bed. In the middle of the day! Getting high on the scent of ylang-ylang that our father always left in his wake.

  She had wanted to sleep like the dead, to forget everything. But in the end, she couldn’t even close her eyes. Smiling at us, she let us tease her about her midday siesta. She liked Mama’s joke, suggesting she have her morning coffee as if she’d just woken up. As if it were early in the morning, time for bread dunked in weak, sugary coffee.

  We saw her smile, and that small hint of her normal tender self made us think we’d saved her from disaster. All of us—yes, all of us—were ready to give her permission to go back to school, even after having gone to bed at that strange hour.

  She would leave with the hope her teacher would be there after lunch break.

  Mama thought she’d slept some, but we watched her like a hawk, as we always did, and we knew she didn’t close her eyes even once.

  She’s our favorite, our littlest, who we’re unkind to sometimes, of course, but who we also fuss over constantly. No, she didn’t fall asleep.

  She was almost drunk from having cried so much, so she listened to the radio dispense vague information on the construction workers’ strike and on the negotiations that were “coming along.”

  The announcer spoke in a monotone, the emphasis of his words falling repetitively, like a lullaby.

  Indifferent to his litany, we instead paid attention to our mother, who was beating or stirring something—probably a puree—incorporating butter into potatoes or into boiled breadfruit, her wooden spoon hitting the same spot at the same pace.

  Our little sister turned to look out the window, watching the sun filter through the shutters, the slats of light projected on the walls; she concentrated on the wavering shadows, on the warmth in which she normally takes comfort.

  She always says that heat’s as comforting as a hot bowl of milk. That makes us laugh, but it’s true all the same! She’s still pretty naive, our Émilienne, and very fragile. We should have protected her.

  But we allowed her to fight the violence in this country all by herself—the brutality of it all battering her about, scattering her like ashes in the wind. She alone had to reckon with the disappearance of the teacher she and her classmates loved so much. Her rage had reduced her to silence, without her understanding the bigger danger her teacher posed to the men in navy blue or gray-striped suits, those joyless white men who looked to us like an enemy tribe.

  She didn’t know it, but every one of us had at one point or another encountered those men in suits, sitting silently in the back of our classrooms, obsessed with discovering the tipping point in the battle to learn that teachers wage with their students.

  We should have told her that examiners don’t get rid of teachers permanently but transfer them somewhere else, to another school that she could maybe visit one day.

  We never thought she’d prefer facing death over finding herself face-to-face with the empty void where there’d once been a teacher’s desk, confronted with an empty cupboard, the dissolution of all her routines, as if by magic—a death, then, more unreal than all those that happened around her that afternoon.

  We let her go back to school, hoping as she did that it was all just a simple mistake to be easily resolved. But that was an illusion, because everything was far more terrible than we could have imagined.

  Luckily, Guy-Albert, one of Papa’s workers, was there. He’ll be the only one to dance in this last figure of the quadrille, la poule. Just him, all by himself. Guy-Albert has the floor for his story and his drum. And our little one will keep on shaking her tambourine.

  To the floor, good fellow!

  2.

  A simple honest man, that’s how people have alwa
ys thought of me. A simple honest man. A poor man among poor men, that too. An odd way to see someone. How do you ever escape that sort of ironclad box, once you’ve been put in it? Even when you start suffocating, even when you feel more and more trapped. It’s not always enough to use your imagination. You long to be different from what you’ve always seemed to be.

  I’ve just about had it with being that simple and honest man, the poor man among poor men, who waits every morning on the side of the road to be picked up by his boss in a truck. The easygoing and uncomplicated man climbs into the back and finds a place among the other workers whose speech is broken because they’re seated over a worn-out suspension and the road’s rocky. Nothing distracts that simple man from the drive to the work site with its dust, the noise of machines carelessly tearing up the land, the merciless sun.

  Every morning, leaving the house at dawn, taking off on foot, crossing through the part of town that’s still asleep, tackling the coast until he gets to the main road, and then waiting for the boss, standing on one leg like a great kyo, a heron resting from a long trip. Or leaning against a tree, shouldering a cloth sack with water in a metal thermos, a lunch pail, an old towel—those three indispensable items that simple and honest boys know to bring, having resigned themselves to following their father’s strict advice (learn to handle a trowel, that’s sure to be useful) and to their mother’s prediction (my poor boy, you’ll never amount to a thing, one day you’ll end up in construction with a leaky thermos, a beat-up lunch box, and a frayed towel to wipe away your sweat).

  Every morning, my boss Absalon lays on his horn as if he’s crazed, and I always think, without even glancing at the faded blue truck, that his stinginess runs on gas fumes alone, yes. I wonder why he needs to make such a scene so early in the morning, when he knows I’m right there waiting, when he can see me standing there from far away.

  He brakes way too hard, and I wonder if the sharp screech coming from the truck is from relief or exhaustion. It gets on my nerves.

  “Ka sa yé, Guy-Albé?”

  “Ka sa yé, patron?”

  “How ya doin’?” That’s how it goes. We don’t talk much, nothing personal in any case.

  3.

  On Thursday night, I sleep with Mama.

  She’s the one who invited me. I’m still a little anxious because of what I said to her today, because of the visit to Papa’s sisters, but after dinner, she calls me over.

  She’s still seated at her place at the table.

  She kisses me on my eyelids. She likes to give us wet kisses on our eyes, and I like it too, a lot, even if it tickles.

  “Let’s stop being mad at each other, okay? You can sleep with me tonight.”

  I’m so comfortable. I sleep with her soft warm breasts against my back.

  When I wake up on Friday, I’m calm, even if I can see you didn’t come home again last night.

  Friday, May 26, 1967. I’m going to school, and I’m sure my teacher will be there. I’m going to write the date in my notebook. I pack my book bag. I remember to grab my report card from behind the green filing cabinet.

  Marlyse waits for me on the corner of rue Vatable; we always walk together. I don’t tell her about the visit to my aunts. I didn’t tell anybody about it, not even Emmy. I want to keep it inside me, deep down inside, because it makes me happy.

  I say to Marlyse, “All joy has not withered away!” And she looks at me with big eyes. She thinks I’ve gone nuts.

  I laugh and start to run, saying over and over again, “All joy is not lost, all joy is not lost . . .”

  We cross La Place de la Victoire, and the shutters of Madame Ladal’s house are open. Another good sign. I repeat my new song, jumping up and down with my book bag.

  At La Place, there are men speaking in front of the subprefecture, and lots of kids, like usual: students from my school, girls from the Michelet High School, boys from Carnot, and some students from the Catholic school, wearing their white blouses and their red-and-black checked skirts. (They always cross La Place without speaking to us. To them, we’re just savages, a bunch of bamous.)

  4.

  Once I thought the boss and I could become close, so I decided he should be godfather to my last kid, I mean the one I had two years ago. A little girl. He came to the baptism with his whole family and some money for a present: a small envelope, not exactly stuffed with bills, more like something thin and cutting, like a razor. After that, nothing. Except, when he manages to think about it, he might ask, “Tout moun-la byen?”

  I always say fine, everybody in the family’s just fine.

  And then we talk about turf, stones, gravel, asphalt, and drywall. Always rushed. Pick up the workers on the side of the road, drop them off at the work site, give a couple of orders, make sure all the material’s been delivered, and then, take off!

  Not that we need him there. It’s normal for him to leave the work site. Sometimes he’s got a bunch of jobs going on at once, in communes that aren’t close together at all. We still don’t understand why he drives everyone on his construction teams himself, but we suspect he’d rather run himself into the ground with that stupid task than pay us a transportation stipend, which some other bosses allow. Sometimes he lets his handyman, Michel, drive, and he at least doesn’t plow through our sector like a tank on a country road. He knows how to wait, quietly, if by chance a work buddy is running a little late.

  We prefer it when the boss is off our backs and not complaining about how the communes don’t pay him. He’s always mouthing off about taxes, the Bureau of Equipment, and all those public offices hounding him and—we always know what’s coming next—“stealing the bread from his workers’ mouths.”

  If you don’t get what that means for your pay period—that you’re not getting any—you’re either thick, naive, or an asshole.

  When he starts to talk like that, we workers just mutter things like “uh-huh” or we suck our teeth, but nobody dares say anything.

  But he always ends up giving us what we’re owed. He’ll set up his little table and folding chair, install himself under a shade tree, and pull a fat envelope stuffed with bills out of his shabby briefcase.

  On those days, he thinks we don’t notice how he sets up all kinds of blinds to protect himself, as though, for as long as we’ve been working for him, we’d ever try to steal his money—it’s ours, after all. As soon as the piles are lined up, the bills secured with a rubber band, our pay doesn’t belong to him anymore; but he doesn’t see it that way. As far as he’s concerned, it will always be his money, even when it ends up in our pockets.

  The last time it happened, the best thing he could cook up was to put a pistol in the glove box of his Dauphine and ask one of us, Albéri, I remember, to go fetch his glasses from the car.

  Of course Albéri came back screaming, “Hey Boss, that’s not some little cap gun you got in your glove box!”

  And the boss, crafty as a fox, “Well you never know, what if I run across a mongoose?”

  What the hell kind of mongoose would that be? I wondered. A two-fisted and two-footed mongoose who does construction work on your sites! Who do you think you are, Absalon? You better watch out that pistol doesn’t get used against you, against Absalon, the big mongoose. That’s not the first time I gave him a nickname, but I thought “mongoose” really fit him, even if it’s a pretty common insult around here. The way the mongoose darts along so fast, the way it crosses the road like a bat out of hell as if the devil himself were after it, the way it doesn’t trust anything around it. Well, that’s the spitting image of our boss, Sauveur Emmanuel Absalon.

  What’s his problem? Why doesn’t he trust us? I know the guy, and I don’t even know how close he is to the other workers who’ve been with him for at least ten years, who saw the birth of his last little girl, who went to his mother’s funeral, who bring him fruit from their gardens, who invite him home to eat, who give him the seat of honor at their local festivals—and he pulls that pistol stunt on us!
I guess it’s because he’s such a coward because when Almighty God was doling out courage, you sure can’t say Absalon was first in line!

  So what does he do instead? Yell, of course. The kind of yelling cowards always keep close to their chest, ready to be launched defensively, before even starting a discussion, before speaking like men who respect each other and aren’t afraid. Instead, he barks; he barks a lot, a whole krèy!

  And since the end of last year, he’s yelled all the time because we asked for a little raise.

  Christmas and New Year’s Day were already in full swing, not just in stores, but in our kids’ heads and in our wives’ needling: it’s time to change the linoleum in the big room and the bedroom, time to put some new curtains over the doorways—that’s the style here, curtains made of colored plastic strips that wave in the wind and make a kind of noise that lulls you to sleep—time to buy new shoes for one of the kids. You know, what you always do at New Year’s, those little things that bring good luck for the coming year. Everything had already been discussed with our families, and our wives kept hounding us that we just had to ask for a small raise with our next pay.

  But where the hell were we going to find the courage to convince a man like that? Bowing and scraping in front of a guy who knows exactly how to respond: He has a family too. He, too, has children. He knows, just like us, when the holidays arrive and the little ones always want new things, how difficult it is to say no when they touch your face and make you look right into their eyes and promise.

  “Especially my little girl. She does it so good. Her mother tells me I don’t know how to say no, but isn’t it always my wife who says to the child, ‘Ask your daddy.’ Isn’t she the one after all?”

  “Boss, here’s how it is. It’s the end of the year, you know the holidays are coming; we’d really like to give just a little more to the family, it’s hardly anything at all.”