Small Lives Read Free Page B

timber of the voice change when speaking of them. It had really become the gift of a Magi.
    That coffee and letter were the last signs of the life of Dufourneau. A definitive silence succeeded them, which I can and want only to interpret as his death.
    As to the way the Wicked Stepmother struck, conjectures can be infinite. I imagine a Land Rover turned over in a furrow of blood red laterite, where blood hardly leaves a trace; a missionary preceded by a choir boy whose white surplice pleasingly silhouettes a soot black face, entering the straw hut where the master gasps out the last measuresof a vast fever; I see a flood carrying off the drowned, a companion of Ulysses asleep, slipping off a roof and crashing to the ground without completely waking up, a hideous snake with ashen scales that the fingers graze and immediately the hand swells, then the arm. In the final hour, I wonder if he thought of that house in Les Cards that I, at this moment, am thinking of.
    The most romantic – and, I would like to think, most likely – hypothesis was whispered to me by my grandmother. Because she “had her own idea” about it, which she never completely acknowledged but readily alluded to; she evaded my insistent questions about the death of the prodigal son, but recalled the anxiety with which he had mentioned the atmosphere of rebellion then reigning in the plantations – and indeed, the first indigenous nationalistic ideologies must have been rousing those wretched men at that time, bent under the white yoke toward a soil whose fruits they did not taste. Childishly, no doubt, but not without reason, Elise secretly thought that Dufourneau had died at the hands of the black laborers, whom she imagined much like slaves from another century crossed with Jamaican pirates as they were depicted on bottles of rum, too dazzling to be peaceful, as bloody as their madras scarves, cruel as their jewels.
    A credulous child, I shared my grandmother’s views; I do not renounce them today. Elise, who had laid the groundwork for the drama by teaching Dufourneau spelling, by loving him as a mother when she knew herself to be a possible spouse, who had determined the destiny of the little commoner by leading him to believe that perhaps his origins were not what they seemed and appearances were thus reversible, Elise who had been the confidant recording the prouddefiance of the departure and the sibyl uttering it into the ear of future generations; it fell to Elise to write the drama’s denouement as well, and she acquitted herself justly. The end that she had appointed him did not belie her hero’s psychological coherence. As with all so-called upstarts who cannot make others forget their origins any more than they can themselves, who remain poor men exiled among the rich without hope of return, Dufourneau, she knew, had undoubtedly been all the more pitiless toward the lowly in his efforts to keep himself from recognizing in them the image of what he had never ceased to be. Slave labor dug under with the seed and struggling to rise with the sap toward the fruit, sheaves of mud that the ploughshare sprays at you, that nervous air as the man in the necktie or a storm approaches, all of this had once been his lot, and maybe he had loved it, as a man loves what he knows. The uncertainty of a mutilated tongue that serves only to deny accusations and ward off blows had been his; he had come so far to flee the labors he loved, the language that humiliated him; to deny having ever loved or feared what those black men loved and feared, he brought the whip down on their backs, shouted abuses into their ears. And the blacks, concerned with reestablishing the balance of destinies, wrested from him one final terror to equal their thousand terrors, wounded him one last time to equal all their wounds and, extinguishing forever that horrified stare in the instant when he finally admitted he was one of them, killed him.
    This way of