Eve Out of Her Ruins

Ananda Devi, Jeffrey Zuckerman

• Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781941920411
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

With brutal honesty and poetic urgency, Ananda Devi relates the tale of four young Mauritians trapped in their country's endless cycle of fear and violence. Eve out of Her Ruins is a heartbreaking look at the Mauritius tourists don't see, and an exploration of the construction of personhood at the margins of society.

EVE

Walking is hard. I limp, I hobble along on the steaming asphalt.

With each step a monster rises, fully formed.

The urban night swells, elastic, around me. The salty air from the Caudan waterfront scrapes my wounds and my skin, but I go on.

I clear my own path. What was once deep within me—the slow drip of life that has slipped away and turned me into this livid creature sucking the night dry—no longer matters. The silence that fills me takes my breath away.

I’m getting into my stride. I no longer have a choice. I can only hear the stuttering beat of my footsteps. I hoist my schoolbag on my right shoulder; there aren’t just books in it tonight. There’s a reassuring bulge right next to my armpit: the blaze of false starts and missed arrivals. Soon enough it will no longer be a rhythm coursing through my veins. I’m going to leave my mark on a forehead, right between the eyebrows. I was born for this moment.

I wipe my neck. The coarse feel of it surprises me. The lack of hair makes me feel more naked than ever. Then I remember: my mother sheared it off. When I saw myself in the mirror, I saw that I had a lioness’s head. I had a mane of hunger.

I walk, even if I’d rather run toward myself. The night quivers. The city trembles. I have gone. Nothing can stop me now.

PART ONE

SAAD

I am Saadiq. Everybody calls me Saad.

Between despair and cruelty the line is thin.

Eve is my fate, but she claims not to know it. When she bumps into me, her gaze passes through me without stopping. I disappear.

I’m in a gray place. Or rather, yellowish brown, which better suits its name: Troumaron. Troumaron, a sort of funnel; where all the island’s wastewaters ultimately flow. Here is where the cyclone refugees are rehomed, those rendered homeless by tropical storms and who, two or five or ten or twenty years later, still have their toes in the water and their eyes pale as rain.

I’ve always lived there. I was born a refugee. Like everyone else who’s grown up in the yellow shadows of these buildings, I’ve never understood their monstrous edges. I never saw the gaps born beneath our feet, separating us from the world. I played with Eve. We called her the skeleton because she was so thin, but also to mask an unspoken affection. We played at war until we found ourselves at war.

We are at the bottom of Signal Mountain. Port Louis grabs our feet but we are stuck here. The city turns its back on us. Its muted magma stops at our borders. The mountain blocks our view of other things. Between the city and the stone are our buildings, our rubble, our trash. The eczema of paint and the tar beneath our feet. A children’s playground has become a battleground teeming with needles, shards of broken glass, hopes snaking into nothing. Here, boys clenched their fists for the first time, and girls cried for the first time. Here, everyone has faced up to their realities.

One day we wake up and the future has disappeared. The sky hides the windows. Night makes its way into our bodies and refuses to leave.

Night and our hormones gone wild. We boys are bundles of frustration. We start following girls to the shuttered factory that devoured our mothers’ dreams. Maybe that’s also what’s waiting for them. There’s nothing left of the factory but an empty metal shell and hundreds of sewing machines that carved into their shoulders that curve of despair and into their hands those nicks and cuts like tattoos. The remnants of every woman who worked here linger. We see that they tried to bestow some humanity on this desolation. Beside each machine, there’s a mauve plastic flower, yellowing family photos, postcards from Europe, and even a forgotten red barrette, a strand of hair still caught in it. And religious symbols—crucifixes, Koranic verses, Buddha statues, Krishna figures—that would allow us to guess which community they belonged to, if we wanted to play such guessing games. When the factory closed down, they weren’t even allowed to retrieve their things. It was that abrupt, that unexpected, but I realized, later, that they hadn’t wanted to see any of it. I wonder what use all this piety was to them. In any case, all of it was left to rust and to our perverse games behind the moldy curtains. These are our traces, in these stale, dingy rooms. Stains of so many virginities lost here.

Sometimes, when the neighborhood is quiet, the island’s sounds seem different. Other kinds of music, less funereal tones, the clang of cash registers, the dazzle of development. The tourists scorn us without realizing it. Money has made them naïve. We cheat them out of a few rupees until they begin to mistrust our pleasant, false faces. The country puts on its sky-blue dress, the better to seduce them. A marine perfume wafts from its crotch. From here we can’t see the island all dolled up, and their eyes, dazzled by the sun, can’t see us. As things should be.

Mothers disappear in a resigned haze. Fathers find in alcohol the virtue of authority. But they don’t have that anymore, authority. Authority, that’s us, the boys. We’ve recruited our troops like military leaders. We’ve carved out our portions of the neighborhood. Once our parents stopped working, we became the masters. Everybody knows we can’t be ordered around. And now nobody can look us in the eyes without shivering. From that moment, each of us began to live as he wanted to, free from everything, free from rules. We make the rules.

But something else has slipped into my dreams lately. I mark the walls of my room with my questions; I bloody them with the juice of words. I learn to be quiet. I learn to talk to myself. I learn to put myself together and to take myself apart. I suppose we’re all like that; we go with the flow, like the others, but inside, each of us withdraws into himself and harbors his secrets. I follow in their steps and I act like I belong, as a matter of form, as a matter of survival. Eve doesn’t understand that.

Eve walks by, her hair like foamy night, in her skin-tight jeans, and the others snigger and suck their teeth in lust, but I—I want to kneel down. She doesn’t look at us. She isn’t afraid of us. She has her solitude for armor.

At night, my hormones seize on her face and describe it in long arcs of desire. When I can’t bear it anymore, I go out with the gang, our noisy mopeds tormenting the sleepy old folk. In the morning, the others sink into the stupor of drugs and rage. But I go take a shower, I shave, and I go to class. This double life sucks me dry, yet nothing in the world could keep me from seeing Eve’s profile in the morning at the bus stop, a sliver of sunlight playing on her ear.

And then, I swear, I love words.

I slip a poetry book into her bag.

Later, she bumps into me and her eyes bore through me. It drives me insane.

To her I dedicate all the sentences that have been darkening my walls. To her I dedicate all my bitter suns.

Our cité is our kingdom. Our city in the city, our town in the town. Port Louis has changed shape; it has grown long teeth and buildings taller than its mountains. But our neighborhood hasn’t changed. It’s the last bastion. Here, we let our identities happen: we are those who do not belong. We call ourselves bann Troumaron—the Troumaronis—as if we were yet another kind of people on this island filled with so many kinds already. Maybe we actually are.

Our lair, our playground, our battleground, our cemetery. Everything is there. We don’t need anything else. One day we’ll be invincible and the world will tremble. That’s our ambition.

EVE

Pencil. Eraser. Ruler. Paper. Gum. I played blind man’s bluff with the things I wanted. I was a child, but not entirely. I was twelve years old. I shut my eyes and held out my hand. My fingers closed on air. I shivered in my thin clothes. I thought everything was within reach. I made moonlight shine in the boys’ eyes. I believed I had powers.

Pencil. Eraser. Ruler. I held out my hand because in my bag there was nothing. I went to school completely and totally empty. I felt some kind of pride in not having anything. People can be rich even in having nothing.

Because I was small, because I was thin, because my arms and my legs were as straight as a child’s drawing, the bigger boys protected me. They gave me what I wanted. They thought a gust of wind would tip me over like a paper boat with a leak in its side.

I was a paper boat. Water seeped into my sides, my stomach, my legs, my arms. I didn’t know it. I thought I was strong. I weighed up my chances. Assessed every moment. I knew how to ask without seeming to.

Pencil, eraser, ruler, it didn’t matter. The boys gave me things. Their faces softened slightly, and that changed everything, it made them look human. And then, one day, when I asked without seeming to, they asked me for something in return.

I thought it would be simple, it would be easy. What could they want in return? I was the smallest one, the least important one. Everyone knew I had nothing. For once, they were saying I had something. My bag held many nothings: the nothingness of my apartment, smaller and more bare than everyone else’s; the empty nothingnesses of our wardrobes; even those of our trash cans. There was the nothing of my father’s eye, which alcohol had turned oily. The nothing that was my mother’s mouth and eyelids, both of them stapled shut. I had nothing, nothing at all to give.

But I was mistaken.

He wanted a piece of me.

He dragged me off to a corner of the playground, behind a huge Indian almond tree, he pinned me against the tree’s trunk, and he slipped his hand under my T-shirt. I was wearing a red T-shirt, with a soccer player’s name on it. I don’t remember who anymore. His hand stopped at my breasts, slowly moved up and down, just over the small black points. There was hardly anything there. I heard other children shouting and playing. They seemed far away. It was another world. The boy had slipped his other hand in. His skin turned blotchy. His cheek was hot. He took his time, even though he was scared. But I didn’t feel anything. I was out of my body. It was apart from me.

That day, he didn’t ask me for anything else. He gave me an eraser, or a pencil, or a notebook, I don’t remember. His lips came close to my ear. The next time, he said, we’ll try something else.

I shrugged, but I stared with some curiosity at his eyes. They had a silver sheen like melted sugar. As if he had been erased. Now he only existed through his hands. Now he only existed through me.

For the first time my bag was no longer empty. I had something I could pay with: myself.

I could buy. Exchange myself for what I needed. Exchange morsels, bits, various parts of my body. I looked brazenly at the taller boys when school was let out. You want to see something? I asked them. They laughed and said, Go away, there’s nothing to see. But then they looked at me a long while and my eyes told them something else. I knew how to do it. Someone else slipped fluidly into my gaze, someone completely separate from my bony body. I refused to be small or weak. I contradicted myself. That cha...