Читать книгу Moonbath - Yanick Lahens - Страница 14

7.

The first moment of stupor over, the man whom I do not know, after having retreated, advanced toward me again. He leaned over again, his eyes wide open. And I saw his face twist slowly in a strange grimace, his jaw slacken, his mouth open as his lips trembled. That’s when, all of a sudden, this face curled in on itself and the man started to cry out, with all of the force of his lungs, names that I didn’t know: “Estinvil, Istania, Ménélas, anmwé, osékou, come to me, help me.” At times he screamed words that fear broke, stretched out, distorted, mixed up. It was like a seawall had given way. And he could no longer stop the waves that gushed from his mouth.

I, I wanted to ask him to stop. Tell him that I would explain. And since I couldn’t, of course he continued to scream even more. It was awful!

Then, like he was mustering up the courage, he came even closer to me, his head bent forward, and opened wide his toothless mouth. No way to withdraw from nor escape his breath of night. No way. A breath to turn your stomach.

Wanting to drown myself in sleep. Just for a few minutes. Knees against my chin. Eyes shut. Shut inside of sleep like the inside of an egg. Let the night glide over my skin. With the memory of the coldness of the moon. Of the rippling water that sparkled like sequins.

At the edge of the village, a rooster shouts at the top of his lungs. Another responds to him. Both call forth a day that struggles to make itself seen.

“Do not do what you might regret,” my mother hammered. “Do not do it!”

My blood throbs outside of me in this wind where I hear this muffled breathing, the clinking of a buckle unfastening…And the cold member, straight as a stick…My neck hits the sand. The tearing. My body is lifted off the ground. The pain around my neck…And then the night… the sea…Again the night. Liquid. Black.

No matter what, in this story, you have to pay attention to the wind, its saline breath on our lips, the moon, the sea, Olmène absent…The earth that doesn’t give anymore. The stingy sea. And the foreigners arriving with their faraway customs. Their habits, their American cigarettes, their bodies, their odors, and their shoes that catch our eyes.

And I, who didn’t want to be here anymore, here I am powdered with sand, crowned with seaweed and longing for Anse Bleue.

“Osékou, anmwé.”There now, the cries of the stranger strike strong in my chest. Mixed up uncannily with my brother’s cries from three days ago, in the night.

My brother stops on each of the syllables of my name. He had to put his hands up to his mouth like a megaphone to make them travel. Far, very far. And then the cries of others who with him brave the night, the wind, the water to cry out my name. “Koté ou yé? Where are you? Answer!”

The people of Anse Bleue swam through the night and the water, their eyes open, like whales.