Colour of Dawn by Yanick Lahens Page B

has listened to all these extraordinary words. Nourished by the words of the prophets and the apostles, Gabriel has sung and prayed. I can still see him, wide-eyed, heart beating, turned towards Pastor Jeantilus, this speaker of spells, this teller of marvels.
    All these stories have not, however, prevented Gabriel from asking me, exactly a fortnight ago, who his father was.Without the slightest hesitation, my nose once again rubbed into my sin, I replied that he had died shortly after his birth. However false this notion, I wanted it to be the foundation on which Gabriel builds his life from now on. Between him and the nothingness from which he emerged, between him and eternity, there will be this lie. The words seemed as if they were coming from the mouth of a stranger, one of those who inhabit me.Those for whom I have never known how to make space, and who appear suddenly with hardly a sound. And that is why my reply vanished as anger and remorse grabbed me by the throat.

SIXTEEN
    T hese disturbing memories that assail me make the tap-tap journey to the uptown commercial district seem much shorter than usual. After getting off the vehicle I go to a public phone box and again call the mysterious number written by Fignolé on that scrap of paper. Without success. I get the voicemail service again. And once again, I don’t leave a message.
    I walk through the streets of the city centre which breathe to the rhythm of its strangely calm crowds. How long will they remain calm? No-one can say. The city centre also has its mysteries.Working in this luxury shop, I have come to understand that its upper echelons, distributed in an enigmatic order, include German and French descendants and immigrants from the Middle East. Mixed blood, great-grandchildren and grandchildren of the natural sons of a fornicating, arrogant conqueror, bent on dissipating the remains of African blood or adapting to it as they would adapt to rather disreputable family secrets. Everyone has their history. More or less glorious, more or less acceptable, hints of which I have caught in snatches of conversations picked up from Madame Herbruch, my boss. Reported words. Rumours placed end to end, that I associate with certain faces, unknown to them. The pieces of a jigsaw, the whole of which is totally insipid, mediocre, hollow.
    I open the doors of the shop mechanically, caught in a pincer movement between these thoughts and my anxiety at the absence of Fignolé. As she does every morning, the vendor sitting by the entrance offers me seasonal fruits, mangos, soursops, cachimans or pomegranates. Every day Madame Herbruch drives her away, her and the others who crowd round the door. And every day they make a show of shifting a few metres up or down the street, then gradually creep back those few metres they have moved in one direction or another, to return to the same place.
    â€˜Too expensive,’ I retort to the fruit seller. She must have mistaken me for someone else.The poor do not buy fruit. Or very rarely. We pick them from the trees or we pinch them. But she sees fit to insist. This little game has been going on between us for several months. I know she will get me in the end by wearing me down. Wearing down – the most formidable weapon there is, as I know from trying it myself with Madame Herbruch herself and those before whom I should resist or disappear. The fruit seller in turn tries it on Madame Herbruch and me. We therefore wear one another down to the bone, to the marrow.
    I will never forget the day when Madame Herbruch asked me to help her with a large banquet she was preparing in her luxurious residence. When I crossed the living room to the beautiful toilet with its blue ceramics beneath the stairs, I felt the eyes of the prestigious guests burn into me, reducing me to the mere idea of a being. To these bourgeois mulattoes with their fair skin I was not a budding young woman but merely a black female of a breed with simple,