Читать книгу Guyana - Elise Turcotte - Страница 10

He won the tournament. I had his grandparents, aunt and two uncles over for dinner. Tomas and Stefan took turns spinning him in the air, and as usual it scared me. Some men are strangely driven to defy danger, even when there isn’t any. Then my sister Christine washed the dishes while my parents snuck a listen at Philippe’s chest. Rudi was probably laughing, wherever he was. ‘Released’ is what they say. I don’t know. But in the end, we laughed all the time together, and I didn’t see why it shouldn’t continue. So I laughed with Rudi in the hallway that led to the bathroom, where I could breathe a little. But my parents’ interference still irked me.

Since the great sadness that had befallen our family, every occasion for getting together had to be observed. It was starting to weigh on me. All of these meals had a hidden agenda: to patch a crack. Enjoyment was hardly ever part of it. I had figured out that Philippe felt it too. That day, I would rather have taken him on a trip to Tibet or to a beach in Mexico – anywhere but here.

I kept my secret to myself.

I did what I was supposed to do – serving, reviving the conversation, changing the music – but a scene of desolation lay in the background.

I had become a master in the art of living this way, on two planes. Nobody talked about Rudi. If I didn’t mention his name, he was absent from our world. Even Philippe respected this rule. Sometimes I wanted to blow the smokescreen away. But everything was so well choreographed, like how Philippe moved his pieces on the chessboard when he knew he was being watched.

That night, he thanked me.

‘For what?’

‘For my hair.’

In the dim light of his room, he looked like a small, tired actor.

‘You’re not talking about your hair, are you?’

‘No, but I don’t know what to say.’

‘That’s okay. Sometimes talking is like singing in a storm.’

‘Like when you’re scared?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Or when you’re sad?’

‘That too. A voice can be reassuring.’

‘Sing!’ he commanded me.

That made me happy. It had been so long since he had asked me to sing.

I started with a Debussy lullaby. I hummed some Brazilian tunes. And then two songs in Creole.

Once I was sure he was asleep, I went down to the kitchen.

It was still early, and I couldn’t imagine spending the rest of the evening coming up with scenarios that would just fall apart the next day. I needed to act, and fast. Suddenly it hit me how little I knew about Kimi, and I had to do something to change that.

I decided to call the police station.

I asked to speak to the detective responsible for the investigation at the Salon Joli Coif, Rue McDonald.

I was told he wasn’t there, but that if I had information for him, they would let him know.

I thought about Kimi’s smile. About her engagement ring with the fake diamond. About her regal bearing even in a shack.

‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘I knew the victim.’

I heard myself say the words as if someone else were talking. Two planes: the song and the stony silence.

They gave me an appointment for the next morning: Inspector Robert Massé would see me.

I had managed to make a first step toward Kimi and her unfathomable death. All signs were pointing me down this secret road.

First I needed to understand where she came from. I had gone to the library that morning and taken out everything I could find about her country, which wasn’t much, but it was enough for me.

Kimi grew up in Guyana. She spoke of it with nostalgia. Perhaps because her whole family still lived there. Or perhaps it was me who had read something into her words even though her gestures and her very being emanated a confidence and composure that I found compelling. Regardless, she smiled differently when she talked about her other life, as if she were smiling somewhere else, in a parallel universe. I would listen but all I would hear was the nostalgic sheen of the words, a sheen I wanted to believe, a long way from vast tropical forests, wide muddy rivers, a past forged by slaves and racial conflict.

When I first met her, I thought Guyana was a Caribbean island, a former English colony, like Barbados – a little paradise like that. I was wrong. And she never corrected me.

‘I left because of the poverty,’ she told me one day, much later.

It was snowing, it was cold out and I was wondering what she was doing here.

A poor island then, like so many others, I thought.

I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t paying attention. Not to her past and especially not to my own.

That night, I put an end to my misconceptions.

Guyana is not an island but a country, the only English-speaking country in South America, and as soon as I found it on the map, my perspective changed, the memory came back to me. Not an island, a continent. The feeling of oppression had another source.

The impression Kimi had given me of her country, or the one I chose to retain, was fairly distorted. Guyana is one of the poorest regions in the Western world, it’s true, but also – and this she didn’t mention – one of the most dangerous. Crime is pervasive, violence a part of daily life: armed robbery, rape and political assassinations. This could not have escaped Kimi.

I could see her smile again, and I was mad at myself for not having asked more questions. She offered me a glimpse of a life that smelled of damp flowers, when an atmosphere fraught with violence was the actual backdrop for her adolescence – a time of life when one’s understanding of the world accelerates, a time when Kimi decided to go into exile. It was more than just the poverty that had made her leave.

One of the ideas I had about her was that she was determined. She gave the impression of being sure of herself. But one aspect of her personality intrigued me: a small hesitation, a pause, the tiniest distance between her words and their resonance as she spoke. I often thought that that was exactly where she reached me, in the secret quivering of the air around us.

Reading up on Guyana made me feel like I was partially filling this gap. With what? The beginnings of a landscape. A background of tragedy that stays caught in the throat. Something razor-sharp that moves through cities, both the one where I found myself and Kimi’s of her childhood, Georgetown. I understood what connected us.

And that night I knew that, one way or another, she had ­been killed.