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Fiction

Abandoning Myself

By Magali Nirina Marson
Translated from French by Allison M. Charette
In this gut-wrenching excerpt from Magali Nirina Marson’s novel Nouvelles de Madagascar, a young victim of abandonment, poverty, and abuse looks back on her life.

Burning, the needle that gently scrapes my skin, that doesn’t press very deep, that moves along slowly, that skims my flesh beneath the surface, that injects black ink blood between the two layers. Gaël crouches over my thigh. His left hand stretches and holds the skin. The other draws with the strange machine. Piercing, its sound—it reminds me of the dentist’s drill. Its tiny needle makes me think about the one in the sewing machine where Neny Kely rips open her fingertips and wears out her eyes, neck, and back, all day and all night afterward. Neny Kely. My Little Mama. It will be her birthday soon. We haven’t celebrated it at home, since Papa . . . But thirty-three is apparently a special year. “It’s how old Christ was,” Nirina said. “You have to remember Him,” she always said.

My friends at school, they were shocked the day I forgot to be quiet. I never talk about her or what happens at home. It’s better that way. They’re all rich, at the French school, most of them. They don’t know what poverty is. I didn’t know about it, either, before. She moved in when I was eleven, quietly, when Papa left. I learned to hide her presence, because the golden fingers of Neny Kely, well . . . She became a seamstress when he left, when money became genuinely scarce. Her mother had taught her how. Lots of foreigners and upper crust wives in Tana want exact replicas of what’s in the magazines. She works quickly and diligently, Neny Kely does. So the women, they like her very much. They recommend her to friends. They give her their children’s old clothes, sometimes, which Little Mama tailors for us. Or she makes us new clothes from her clients’ leftover fabric.

No, better to keep quiet about home, about the string of little papas who’ve lived there after mine left, about my four half-brothers and half-sisters who have always seen and heard their fathers cussing Mama out, because scarce money and alcohol, well, it makes men violent, makes them snap. It lifts their honey-sweet mask and turns them into themselves, I think. In junior high and the French high school, to fit in with them a little bit, the ones who drop them off and pick them up in the nicest, latest-model cars, I’ve never talked about myself, so that they don’t see how different I am. And besides, poverty’s not interesting, and I don’t want them to pity me. Not at all. So for all the bad things that happen, I learned to stay quiet. That day, though, “Neny Kely” popped out of my mouth all by itself. I couldn’t suck it back in. My sophomore classmates asked me why I called her “Little Mama,” so I said that she had me early, at sixteen. That Papa had fallen in love with her and the island, when he’d arrived in Madagascar. That there weren’t age restrictions for that. Their own mothers were much older when they’d been born. “She must be pretty cool!” they said, and I smiled. I couldn’t tell them that no, not really anymore. Not since Papa—he must have taken her ringing laughter away with him to his France. I didn’t say anything about the smiling clients who are demanding and difficult, or the sleepless nights at the machine or with a needle in hand, always hunched over, and always too much work, which doesn’t bring in nearly enough money. I didn’t mention my half-brothers and half-sisters, either, who don’t have French citizenship or scholarships—and no school fees, because their papas never officially recognized them, or they just aren’t French. They go to the Malagasy school. So when my real brother comes back from boarding school on weekends, and when I come home after my classes are done and I’ve finished up all my homework real quick in the school library before getting on the bus, we teach them how to read from our books. Papa often said that school’s important. It opens a door to the future. But Malagasy schools don’t open anything. Teachers, doctors, the rich, they won’t attend those schools. What matters is a foreign degree. So no, Neny Kely and I don’t spend too much time together. Actually, we know each other really well without saying much. But it’s so much work and silent worry for a woman all alone with too many children.

“Sting-ing, scratch-ing, sting-ing, scratch-ing,” I chant over and over in my head. I like rhyming, I like words that use the same sounds. I used to try writing poems and short little things, in my diary, before . . . My teacher said that I was good at writing, that my stories were good. I liked French, I liked those classes . . . It’s hot in this hotel room. It is big, though. But heavy, my eyelids are so heavy sometimes. You’d think the walls were closing in a little. My head starts to swim, a little. Burning on and under my skin. People said it would hurt a little, but I almost like it, when it feels like a sharp nail that absolutely wants to pick a scab, pressing and scraping, making a gash. If it were me, I would dig the needle deeper and scratch my skin much harder! It happens to me sometimes when I sleep, or when I succumb to nothingness and slide out of time, like Nirina says. When I abandon myself. Papa often said that word. He’d chuckle. “I abandoned France,” he’d say. “I didn’t like my life back there.” Then, he abandoned us one day. I never really understood why. His official wife had gotten very sick, I think. His children from before us had asked him to come back and stay with her until the end. The end lasts a really long time, though! Maybe he started not loving us anymore? Maybe I should have paid more attention, made him swear to come back. Then our lives wouldn’t have become so . . . gray.

Sound of drilling. Like a giant mosquito going bzzz. It keeps going, but I like the burning a lot. It makes me feel more, I don’t know, more . . . alive. I didn’t think it would take such a long time, to paint an animal and a few strange letters into me.

A bit of sweat on Gaël’s forehead. Little pearls of saltwater. A focused crease between his eyebrows. Little smiles in the corners of his eyes, when he looks up at me for a moment. He’s only three years younger than Neny Kely, and her wrinkles are so much deeper! She doesn’t even need to smile for them to show. Maybe women get old more quickly. Or maybe it’s that she had the last three kids one right after the other. That, and Papa. And my half-siblings’ fathers, they left, too, but they didn’t stay as long, each one stayed less than the one before, and the last two, violent-violating her when they’d come home mamo, drunk as a skunk . . . She didn’t say anything, but I know. Their alcohol, and her screams, and the blows . . . That’s what made her old so early. That, and everything else that only women have to deal with. I hear her crying softly at night, a lot. She thinks we’re sleeping. But I don’t sleep very soundly, since . . . yeah, since those days. I don’t like it, but I have nightmares, and That comes back, sometimes, even when I’m not sleeping. We never talk about it. We did talk about it once, so the weight on Neny Kely’s shoulders is heavier now, I can see it, ever since That. She stays quiet, but I know that she’s worried. She was scared, and she’s still scared, that I’ll drop out of school and that the doors to my future are closing like hers, her future that’s lost more and more blood ever since Papa left. No, I won’t drop out. I know I had to do last year over again. I couldn’t work like I had before. I lost the desire to work, a little bit. Or the will. I even thought, plenty of times, that it wasn’t worth it. But Nirina made me swear to the stars-and-ancestors that I wouldn’t end up like her. I go out much less on weekends and during vacation since she hasn’t been around. And since Gaël, too. I made it into sophomore year, just barely, and I won’t stop. And the tattoo is for That, too, it’s not just something pretty. The picture will make sure I don’t forget the day I became the other me. It’ll make sure I always remember that what hurts us must also make us stronger, this painting in me, of that animal from the day when I became the one who abandons myself, the one who needed to go out at night to look . . .

Gaël’s very nice to give me this as a present. Otherwise, I’d never have been able to get it. I’d been dreaming of it for a long time. More and more people have them at school, on their arms or shoulder blades or necks. It became a thing a year or two ago I think, I dunno . . . at the same time as those phones where you can slide your finger along the screen—what are they called, again? Oh yeah, “touchscreen.” It’s so important to keep up, not just for rich people. Everyone wants to have those imported things. Even when they don’t really have the money, there are still the little “bizniss” guys, like Tiana says, my homeboy on the street. Kind of jiolahim-boto-thugs like him, or enterprising students, with friends who manage to find the latest phones, I don’t really know how, the ones that are also mp3 players. They sell them at high prices, but not like in the official “Orange” stores! Tattoo artists have also opened up shop. Lots of them, in Tana. But you can get infections, AIDS, and their tattoos are expensive and not as well done as the real ones. People with real ones, the really gorgeous ones, they get them done like rich people. They go to the hospital or the doctor, to “foreign” tattoo parlors and artists, “made in France.” Nirina got herself “decorated” here, “on the heart side of my arm,” like she said. I went to Behoririka with her, in Chinatown. In the very back of a junk shop was the booth, a really tiny one. It smelled bad. I didn’t feel very well there, not at all. I wanted to throw up and I wanted to leave, but I didn’t say anything. There was Chinese art on the walls, patterns of big snakes and skulls-and-crossbones, right next to overly colorful mermaids and Jesus of the Sacred Heart. Nirina picked a red crown of thorns, like a bracelet, on her upper left arm. Her tattoo bled on the thorns, black-red pearls like period blood. And afterward, too. Or maybe it was the ink? Later, it got infected. She had to go to the pharmacist several times, to get penicillin to heal herself. The man had probably pressed his dirty needle down too hard. Everything there was nasty. It was next to the bathrooms, and it smelled like toilets, and mold, mixed with spoiled food and the strong odor of lots of men, when they’ve just had you. I know how the big guy got paid. I remember him looking pervily at me and her. I saw him pinch Nirina’s ass when she walked in, and I heard some familiar sounds when she asked me to wait for her outside, afterward. She popped a Pecto into her mouth as she walked out. Sucking on it takes the bad taste away. Maybe it was there, where she got—

“Owww!” That stung worse, there, on my inner thigh. That skin is as tender as a baby’s bottom. Gaël’s finished the circle of letters and started to fill in the flying horse, but he stops after I jumped. He asks me if I want to take a break, or if I want him to open the window or get some water for me, if I’m OK, if it hurts, if . . . His questions make me smile. I won’t tell him. I don’t want to. Not him. Actually, I haven’t really told anyone the whole story, except for Nirina. I knew right away that I could tell her everything about That. Every last bit. Words, descriptions tumbled out by themselves. Well, the ones I had that were somewhat clear, the ones I actually kind of remembered. Not like with the French teacher or the school nurse, or the therapist that the social worker from the consulate had sent me to. All my words stuck inside me with them. I didn’t know, I didn’t remember anymore, only that animal, and my shaken body, and me gone from there. I abandoned myself, I kept repeating. They didn’t understand. They pitied me, I know, but they thought I was lying or scared or wanted to protect someone, but that’s not true! Their own lives are so far from that. They live here, but they’re vazahas, or maybe Malagasy but rich, that’s just like being a foreigner. They live in this other world. I know: I listen to the girls at school talk sometimes. Tennis clubs and riding lessons on weekends, their second house in Mantasoa, their vacations in France or “abroooad”—like they do, with the longer vowels—or all the things their parents bring them from their “business trips.” Those types of people have vola. People with money, they can’t know how it is! And besides, who genuinely wants to know the truth? No one wants to know what it’s like to be nothing, “tain’akoho chicken shit,” someone people don’t see. Being poor is like trying to scream your lungs out while dust stuffs up your mouth and nose without anyone noticing, not even up there in the stars, not even if they can hear and see you, no one will help make it stop hurting. It’s being able to feel misery and an utter lack of power, and not being able to do anything besides what rich people tell you to do, because you’re nothing and you don’t want to disappear without anyone caring. Except Neny Kely, that drove her insane, you not coming home at all one day, with her never knowing why, and . . . I hate thinking about That! It makes my chest so tense and agitated. There were some who wanted to try to help me, and they were nice, really. But they didn’t understand a thing. They listened to me, but from a distance, and they didn’t hear anything. I know that. I was like them, before. Not exactly, but close.

We used to live like vazahas, before, and my life slid by so sleek and smooth! Mama had the same stars in her eyes as they do when she smiled. And I think our laughter had the same music as theirs. Papa had his pension from the French army and worked for rich people who paid him well. Inside that life, I didn’t see the chicken shit in the dustcloud-streets! There was a young street zaza who slept under a piece of cardboard, not too far from the house. Papa took pity on him. “He’s a poor orphan,” he said. He gave him little things to do, just a little every day, to keep him from begging, he told me. He paid him with a bit of money and something to eat. He talked with him a little and clapped him on the back in laughter, like he did with me and my little brother. I watched the snot that, just like they said, did everything it could not to run—the nearly-liquid yellowish green crud that was always crusted just below his nose. I thought it was icky-maloto so I didn’t say anything, but I didn’t want to touch or talk to someone who was that dirty. I didn’t know what it was like, before, to be mafy ady, poorer than poor. Life taught me. He really had nothing! His parents had left him behind, he told us, the priest in his village . . . I remember I thought, “Why is he called Tiana, then—beloved and desired?” Yes, that Tiana. He became my homeboy. He hangs out around Antaninarenina, where the nightclubs and hotels for whites are. He’s smart. He won’t get nicked by a knife in a gang fight. He’s got his little gang of jiolahim-boto-thugs, too, but he’s managed to stay far away from those wars. He used to watch-wash cars, like for Papa, then he did carry-your-bags for women who were shopping around there, then it was a bunch of other little things. He would make “home d’livreez”—he’d say that in front of the tourist hotels—of vanilla, spices, artisanal goods from the vendors who were working elsewhere. Now, he does “bizniss,” he boasts about it with a self-important smile. “Imported cigarettes!” you hear him say, outside of the nightclubs, and he’s the one who brings the rasta weed, rongony, to creatures of the night. We laugh, sometimes, when we share a smoke or a joint. We’re the same, him and I. We provide the grass or a flesh-trip, in exchange for first-class-fanafody: money, or “comfort meds” (we saw something like that on T-shirts some tourists from Reunion were wearing, it made us laugh so hard!). Anything against destitution—financial and emotional.

The therapist, teacher, and nurse who wanted to help me, to try to, afterward—they smile at me when they see me in school. But their lives kept going, the same as ever. They don’t know what it’s like to hurt yourself for no reason, clawing at your arm or stomach or thigh until it bleeds, while you’re sleeping, because of nightmares where That happens again, the mix of the empty pit and mahamay, the burning inside. Feeling yourself suffocate and die, and needing to leave the house at night because That comes back again and again, even when I’m not asleep, even if I don’t want it to. The nurse, though, she at least understood. One night, she came out to the club with vazaha friends, a little before Gaël. The other kids at high school go out dancing other places, like the chic bar in the basement of the Carlton. Practically never where I go. Kids my age don’t even go out yet. Too young. I’m very careful. But that time, I couldn’t turn around and leave fast enough. She looked me over, up and down. She was worried, I could tell, about my short shorts and all my makeup. She understood, I know she did, but she acted like it was nothing. I got out of there fast. I was ashamed of myself, of that me. And on Monday morning, she came into the school courtyard and asked me to follow her. She gave me a glass of water in her office and said, “If there’s something wrong, Aïna, if you want to or need to talk, come see me. You can talk to me, you know, it’s between us girls. I understand many, many things.” I nodded. I said thanks. But besides that? I can’t. Normal girls can’t understand That. Even I can’t, sometimes. Like with Gaël. I can’t tell him that I like hurting myself. That I don’t just work nights for the money. Sure, we need it at home. Especially because, since all of that happened, Neny Kely hasn’t been working as quickly. But it’s not that! Before, I would never have done that! These days, I seek out pain because it’s stronger than me. I can’t keep myself away from it. It happens all by itself. It’s me . . . and it’s not me. Gaël can’t know! He’d think I was weird, adala, even though I know I’m not crazy. That must not happen. Gaël’s nice. He’ll take me to France, maybe, if he loves me enough. Maybe I’ll see Papa again there? No, Gaël doesn’t know how to hurt anyone.

I knew it right away, when I saw him leaning against the bar, by himself, that he wasn’t like the other guys. He came out to the club several times before we started talking, and he left alone, every night. I noticed him as soon as he walked in the first time. Tall, with bronze skin, light eyes. Same color as mine, I thought. He shook his head at all the girls who went up to him, every time. He had a nice smile, but it was far away, so . . . “no”. He was watching everything around him, and it seemed like he didn’t like what he saw. “A meat market. The guys are animals, starved. And the girls, too. I wondered what you could have possibly been doing in the middle of all that,” he told me, after we . . .

I didn’t go after him like I did with the others. Not Gaël. Something kept me from it. Papa had had the same good look in his eyes, the same one. I tried to go up to him, lots of times, but my heart was pounding inside, like it did when I was fourteen, when a hot boy looked at me. I couldn’t. With the others, I square my shoulders, hold my head high, and look them straight in the eye. But I couldn’t with him. He looked at me a lot that week. But nothing. It wasn’t vacation or anything, but I worked every night, just to see him again. And I didn’t want him to see me with the other guys. I remember, I’d swing my arm up, quickly, forcefully, when somebody else put their hand on it. Then, one night, I crossed my fingers behind me for good luck, and I went over and asked him if he’d like to buy me a drink. “Just because,” I said, “not for any reason.” He smiled, looked at me curiously, and offered me the seat next to him. He was surprised that I spoke French with almost no accent. He has one, but it’s not too thick, it’s got a little bit of a lilt. I told him that I went to the French high school, and that Papa was French. “I’m mixed, too,” he said. “My mother is half-Guadeloupian.” I didn’t know where that was, where his country was. He told me. And it started like that.

Even when we’re doing it, Gaël is considerate. He didn’t want to, at all, for at least a month. It was weird. He’d meet me after school, we’d walk around Tana. We’d talk about him; about his home, an island he didn’t get back to very often; about younger me. I even told him about Papa leaving. It came naturally. It was fine, he kissed me, stroked my hair, my arms, my back, but nothing. I thought maybe he didn’t like women. So I asked him. I pressed him. He wanted to wait, wait until we knew each other better, wait a few more months, wait until I was eighteen. “What for?” I asked him. So . . . No one had ever done me like that before: slowly, very gently at first, but really good. Right after, I almost wanted to cry when he held me to him tightly, but so gently. With him, it was never like he wanted to tear his way into me and bang me as hard as possible, like the other guys, all the other guys. I never want to detach myself when it’s with him. He never has the crazy-hunger-eyes that roll into the back of his head, Doing It. He’s never like them. The others don’t really talk, they just say what they want, ask how much, growl something dirty Doing It. They take me into alleys by the bars or maybe to their hotel, they hike my skirt up and put as many fingers in me as possible, or not, then put their hard-on inside me.

Gaël, sometimes he’s almost too gentle. I want to tell him to do it harder, to hurt me sometimes. But I can’t. He wouldn’t like that, wouldn’t like me like that, I don’t think. He’s not like the others, even though people might think he’s worse, with all the tough-guy tattoos that cover him from the neck down, like the scaly snakelike thing that slithers over his whole torso, chest and back, in many colors, as big as the fañany fitu luha hydra that Neny Kely told me stories about when I was little, except this one doesn’t have seven heads. “It’s a Japanese tattoo. This is a dragon, and these are symbols within a snapshot of daily life,” he told me, when I’d asked him. That’s when he told me more about himself—that he’d worked for a well-known tattoo artist in Paris, but had “taken a break” for his thirtieth birthday, he’d needed to. I thought, “Abandoned, like Papa.” He explained that he’d gone to Reunion on vacation to visit friends who were also tattoo artists, where business was good, and that he’d come to Mada without a return date in mind, to see the country, the beautiful country, and to try to convince his boss to let him stay and open something here. He explained why he’d chosen the designs on himself. “Tattoos often represent—” Now, what was it again? “—something important in someone’s life, a change. Many people get one to mark a turning point,” he told me. Then, he explained the meaning of his symbols. “Speaking and Writing: they bring things from deep inside you into the light, so that they burn in the open and hurt you less inside,” the therapist had said as he gave me a notebook that I was supposed to show him at our next session. But I couldn’t find the right words to put on its pages, and I stopped going. That was it, that’s when he told me that he always had his tools with him, that’s when I remembered and told him about Nirina: how sad her smile had been when she saw her brand new crown of red thorns. “It’s to remind myself that life hurts, but that you have to forget the pain, pick yourself back up and become a tough thorn, and keep going,” she said. So I started thinking about a way to write That and its wound, my wound, into my skin. I didn’t say anything about That, of course. But Gaël only had to look into my eyes to see that I couldn’t bring myself to ask him, but that I desperately wanted to have one.

No, he’s not like the rest, the other guys, who only want to move inside me, go out and in and out again, and then back in again, more and more violently. His hands on me are never sticky-moist. They don’t need to squeeze every last bit of my stomach, my nonos (which aren’t that big, anyway), and my ass, like making mandarin juice or kneading pastry dough. Papa was a pastry chef. They make me laugh, the others . . . or, well, they used to! That was before. I stopped, since Gaël. I only went back for one—no, just two nights! But I stopped. I don’t want to anymore! It’s tempting, sometimes, but I want to completely stop. I want to heal. I’ll try, anyway. Now I know that it’s a kind of illness, the hunger for pain and flesh. Nirina gripped my arm hard, just before she left, looking me directly in the eyes. “It kills. Could be slowly or more quickly, but it’s always death!” She repeated that over and over.

Before, there was . . . no, not too long ago, we pretended to be izy, them, the men. We mimicked their grunts, when their ragged breathing would break up their words, always the same ones. We laughed so hard! “Mampalahelo daholo, they’re so pathetic! All of them!” she said. “They want to be strong and hard, but during? Mampalahelo daholo!” she’d say. “It’s like they’re zaza be, just big babies, fat or skinny, hairy or smooth like girls, they all want us to tell them that their dick down there, theirs is the best, the biggest and hardest, that it’s great. The best? Pssssssh,” Nirina laughed, “even if they’re not snipped and even if it’s all twisted at the tip like a corkscrew?” Oh, we could laugh so hard! “They want to take, to possess,” she taught me. “But they’re nothing! They’re nothing more than meat at that point,” she said. “You’re the one with the power to make them exist, make them believe they’re strong, real men,” she told me over and over, “but they’re just little scraps of meat that aren’t always hard, they have nothing. They aren’t even masters of themselves! Watch them carefully,” she explained. And it’s true! Malagasy, White, Indo-Pakistani, “Sinese,” old or not, rich or less powerful, they all look the same in the moment. Their tongue, trying to lick you everywhere, their teeth trying to bite and their mouth trying to swallow-breathe skin until it turns purpley-blue. The way they huff-puff out of breath on top, or moan and grunt on bottom or when you take them in your hand or mouth. They’re all the same. “At that moment, we’re the strong ones,” Nirina told me a lot. And sometimes, when we’d see them after and they looked at us miavonavona, all high and mighty, we’d smile, Nirina and I. They’d forgotten, but we’d seen them Doing It, and in real life, men aren’t very pretty when they’re naked!

The only time I didn’t laugh, when it actually pained me to see one of them, was when a guy from high school came to the club, over the last school break. A boy from an important family. I thought he was cute, but he never wanted anything to do with me, even before. He was an upperclassman, in his last year. And besides, they never mingled with others, those types of people. Not even with other Malagasies, if they weren’t upper class like them. Not usually. His girlfriend was mixed, but her mother’s family had power. I was a little jealous of girls like her. I wanted to have their clothes, the same ringing laughter, and mainly their birth, into marriage and money, that gave them such a life.

His girlfriend’s skin was the same as mine. “My little café au lait,” Papa called me. We could have been sisters, except her hair was smooth and her eyes warm-honey brown. My hair is crinkly and golden brown, and Papa gave me his weird green eyes, the color of pool water, kind of, and it changes, light green or darker, it depends. “You’re lucky,” they told me, girls of the night. The ones from the coast didn’t like their hair and spent hours straightening it or putting fake extensions in to get tight curls. And the ones from the Central Highlands wanted to have my coastal ass, “round and a little perky-pointy.” J-Lo kely, they called me, little Jennifer Lopez. Most of them had or wanted mixed kids, even though they knew that the men wouldn’t stay. I don’t know what’s wrong with people—why the children of this earth hate each other so much. Even upper-crust daughters want to marry vazahas and have mixed children. They don’t need passport-and-Euros, though! It’s like how Neny Kely’s father was from the southeast, from the race of “star-readers,” and Grandmother was from Tana, so Papa always told us, “Your mother has two cultures instead of one. You, my darlings, have three, at least, and the world is wide open in front of you! Being multiracial is a treasure.” What kind of treasure, though? Maybe if I was, I dunno, Malagasy or vazaha or whatever, but something rich, they wouldn’t have dared, they’d never have treated me like That! It’s not skin color. Not just that. It’s vola. In Madagascar, you have to have money to exist, and even more so if you’re half-white. Being a “peasant vazaha” and poor, on the Red Island, is worse than not existing at all.

I don’t remember his name, the young guy from the rich family at school. He was shocked when he recognized me. He stammered out that he’d just taken his Bac. Then he asked me if I went there a lot. He’d never talked to me before. He was always with his gang—some were gasy from important families, like him; some vazahas; some mixed races, like his bae. All rich. The French school was like a microcosm of Madagascar. Different groups stay together, they don’t mix together much. But they’ll mingle when money erases birth, differences, and colors. For them, I was just a financial aid student. Invisible. I couldn’t talk to them. But that time, there, it wasn’t the same. I looked him straight in the eye and saw that he wanted it. So I took his hand. He let me. We went into his SUV. He couldn’t get it up. His fleshy dick stayed limp and hung there, the poor thing. I helped him with my tongue and then got on top. We stayed there all night. We did it three or four times, I don’t know anymore. He wanted to say something when I got out of the car. I heard, “Thank you. Aïna, I—” but I was already gone. I didn’t want to talk money with him. Nirina chewed me out for it. “No exceptions! That’s the rule!” She was right. I saw him once more during vacation. He seemed to be doing badly. He was with his girlfriend, who glare-looked at me. The poor thing! He acted like he didn’t know me. He looked elsewhere, but his eyes flicked back to me many times, like something was burning him inside. I smiled to myself. Now it’s them, the men, who are burning! He was ashamed of me, I know, but he wanted me, too, even with her right there next to him. He came back alone the next night, a friend of Nirina’s told me that. He was looking for me. I thought about him sometimes. Poor kid! Pathetic, mampalaheo: him, his girlfriend, men and their wives, slaves to a little bit of tail-flesh.

Nirina saved me, I think, when she explained all of that to me. There were many times I thought about taking chloroquine and abandoning myself for good. Ever since the day with the horse and the days after, and after what Neny Kely said, I told myself that I was nothing, that I wasn’t worth anything, that Papa left because we were cursed. He’d said that Mama’s ancestors and the good Lord were watching over us. If that were true, they, he never would have abandoned our house. He never would have stayed with his official wife in France! If I were protected by the cross that Neny Kely had kissed when she’d placed the necklace she’d worn around my neck, then they wouldn’t have done That to me! It seemed like my whole body—my head, heart, gut, everything—would explode, so icy cold did That burn inside of me, everywhere. I wanted to tear myself apart, I hurt so badly. I wanted to leave.

I didn’t go back to school for a long time after the hospital. They wouldn’t leave me, the images that kept coming back, mixing with the pain and the desire to scream for That, the voices, the sounds, even the smells on me, to leave me alone, but That stayed stuck in my throat for a long time afterward. Prison-silence, for days and days. Neny Kely didn’t know what to say, what to do, the poor woman, she had to watch me in such anguish. She went back to her sewing. But she didn’t work as quickly or as well as before. I heard one customer complaining about her late work, threatening that she’d change seamstresses. She slammed the door, and Neny Kely came to see me. She started crying. Sobbing buckets. “It’s my fault!” She screamed it over and over. “I didn’t want to send you to boarding school, like your brother. I wanted you to help me in the evenings. The miles you walk alone after the bus, it’s all because of me! Papa wanted us all to go to France together. I was scared. I’d never taken a plane before. I didn’t want to leave my parents’ homeland. So I told him to go, that we’d wait for him . . . But his wife stayed sick for a long time. He’d already walked out on her once. He couldn’t leave her like that. But I don’t know.” She took a breath, then: “I felt jealous, alone, and then there was your first half-brother’s father. It was an accident, a mistake!” she sobbed. “Once I realized, it was too late. Somebody told him. I’m the reason he didn’t come back.” I wanted her to stop, to hear nothing, no more, but she kept going. “I know,” she told me. “I had That happen to me, too. I was twelve. It was an uncle, a friend of the family. Your Papa saved me, but the sins of the flesh came back in me, when he left, it was stronger than me. I didn’t love the men after him. The drinking, the hitting . . . I abandoned myself, my girl. Life made us drift apart, you and I, and I let it happen.”

I’m pretty sure that’s when the fissure that began cracking on the day with the horse blasted wide open. We hugged each other tight, Neny Kely and I, and I did what she did with my brothers and sisters, and with me when I was younger. She cried. I felt . . . nothing. My arms and my words lulled her. “Tsy mitomany,” I sang softly, automatically. “Don’t cry.” But I was empty inside, and I was far away.

I went back to school the next day, like a machine. We didn’t have any money—I had to keep my scholarship. It was a Friday, and that night, I don’t know, I just didn’t want to go home. “Breathe,” I thought. My chest was so heavy. “I can’t breathe. I need air!” I walked into the city without thinking. I drifted for a while. It was like I’d smoked Rasta weed. I don’t know how long I walked. When I came back to myself, it was dark. I wasn’t far from the jewelry district, with hotels and bar-clubs. It was two years ago—that was when I walked into that nightclub for the first time. The two men at the door let me in without a glance. I was afraid that they’d ask for my ID. “Unaccompanied Minors Prohibited,” the sign read, and I was just barely fifteen.

I crossed a terrace-type thing. It was dark inside, and hot. The strobe lights and music didn’t reach me, they slipped over me like water off a wide leaf. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the stage. Standing there was a girl with a cherubic face, wearing a clingy red slip. She was dancing like they do in ragga videos. There were lots of men around the runway. They seemed . . . like me. Under the hypnosis-power of the dancer’s thin thighs that she thrust-and-squeezed in rhythm-grace with her round butt. I watched for a long time. Then, I felt a hand on my arm. I saw a beautiful body, very tall and muscular for a girl, I thought. Her pretty face was heavily made-up, with crinkly hair encircling it, and there was a big scarf around her neck and shoulders, as red as her lip gloss, with feathers on top. “What are you looking to find or lose here among the crocodiles, little one?” she asked. It was Nirina. When I finally managed to speak, a little later at the bar, I told her, “I came for men.” The words came tumbling out all by themselves, as if they knew that they could. That’s when I told her everything. She listened in silence, nodding as I went along. She smiled sadly, patted my cheek, and tried to give me money for a cab home. “You’re just a lost lamb,” she said. “Once you’ve started, you can’t go back. It’s like a drug. You’re young, you’re lost. Here, you could lose yourself even more. Go back home!” I shook my head. I stood firm. Nirina became my Neny Kely of the night, my best—but I didn’t have any others, so my only friend.

Yes, she saved my life. She explained the rules of this world to me, and the prices, and especially how to find a man and how to act Doing It. “Control,” she told me. “How to take it, keep it, and never lose it.” I think I blushed or blanched. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll teach you. After the first time, it’ll come naturally.”

Ever since she said that, I knew myself to be the embodiment of strength. It’s weird, I know, but I liked it, letting them shake me up. I was the one who decided. I sought them out and they paid me, for that, for the me who had been forced to her knees, buckle-bent in the dust. I decided, to move mechanically or not, to let their hands grab and rub my skin quicker and quicker, to open up or not as their hard-on makes its way between my thighs and into me. I let them. And I even liked that, when they held my shoulders or hands down, gripping tightly, to work in and out faster. Sometimes, there were marks the next morning. “Mixed skin gets bruised easily,” Nirina said, smearing vinegar on the wound. When I got one who talked to me, I moaned, I said “Mmmmm,” like Nirina had taught me. “That makes them as happy as zaza kely who’ve just had their milk, the big babies,” she’d said, and then, inside, I found . . . peace. They didn’t know. They didn’t see how, when they banged too hard, on top or from behind, when I didn’t like the pain anymore, I’d go away. I liked when the physical pain made a door close in me. I would leave myself and leave them behind, far away. It was that day, the day with the horse, when I abandoned myself for the first time, Doing It. Now I know how. I withdraw whenever I want, and sometimes when I don’t want to. I close my eyes, or not, and I split myself in two, and I float just beside or above, farther away. It’s almost like how rongony smoke makes me fly away, this cloud in my head, but it’s not the same. Weed makes me blissful. Here, I don’t laugh. I’m just not heavy with sorrow inside anymore. I float. I feel and hear everything, I’m there, but I don’t stay wholly there. Looking for guys and Doing It, it’s like . . . I don’t know. I can’t find the words. Physical pain makes me feel, well, stronger than him, and stronger than me, I think, and even more . . . well, not “more.” Just “alive.” Something like that.

The buzzing’s stopped. Gaël’s hand is gentle on my cheek. “Let’s take a break, honey,” he says. Heat billows up to my face. The tattoo burns a little less as he rubs Vaseline into it before taking off his gloves. I like it, all the lines of the horse are filled with ink. It’s just the wings and letters left. We designed it together. I told Gaël about the horse on the side of one of the cars, but nothing else. He looked up the logo on his computer. I didn’t like seeing that one again. So I thought about the winged horse that our French teacher had told us about, the one that a Greek god had made into a group of stars. “Pegasus,” Gaël smiled, getting a piece of paper. “You want it in black and gray, or color?” I thought about the crooked thorns on Nirina’s arm. I knew she’d stay written in me, at least a little. I showed Gaël what I wanted: AÏNA, written vertically, on the “heart facing” side. That’s how it started: “Are you scared of forgetting who you are someday?” I held my breath. “He knows,” I thought. He’s already asked me what my nightmares are about, many times. “I don’t remember,” I tell him, every time. I don’t want him to know, to think I’m dirty. That day made me dirty. I was scared that I’d said something in my sleep, or that he could read my thoughts, but he smiled and stroked my cheek. “You have a pretty name. Aïna, ‘life,’ it’s precious.” I felt a lump welling up in my throat. My eyes started to sting, like they’re doing now. I look at my thigh, at the drawing on it. I like it. I don’t want to cry. I haven’t cried for a long time. Yes, it’s been a long time, since that day. Crying, sharp and broken screams, calling out—I couldn’t stop for a while afterward, I remember. I know I clawed at my face and pounded my chest, crying. My cheeks burned. My mouth felt dirty . . .

It was so hot in that bus, so stuffy! It had been a long day. I was tired. Another mile to go, walking, I thought. Didn’t want to. A closer house would have been better, not so far away. And comfortable, not like our two gray rooms where we can barely breathe during the rainy season. I got off the bus. I walked for a bit before I heard the noise, an engine, and the horn behind me. It was a big gray SUV. I got out of the way, but the car didn’t go past. It was like it was following me. I heard men’s voices, several, I remember. My name, repeated. Then everything gets blurry. The car that stopped, all the dust that the wheels had kicked up. Then a man’s hand, a large one, seizing my wrist. There were four of them, yes. They made a ring, surrounded me. They pushed me like in blind man’s bluff, from one to the next, and the next, and the next. My head, spinning. I smelled their odor, the alcohol. I wanted to throw up. Then, they yanked me away. There was a little path kind of thing, off to the right of the dirt road. I felt . . . They dragged me there. They threw me to the ground. I fell, on my back, I remember. It knocked the wind out of me, an impact, a shock, like a punch in the gut, and I tried to get back up. There was a mud wall, an old one, almost completely smooth, to the right, and the car at the end of the path. There was a horse on the body of the car, on the side. THE horse! Then the feeling of suffocation. I screamed, I know. They put a hand over my mouth. I couldn’t breathe. And I felt many hands on me. One pulling to lift my T-shirt up. Another crushing my nonos, then on my stomach, like it was, I dunno, dough being kneaded. I felt . . . after, or maybe at the same time, one pulling to get my jeans down. I tried to kick, but they were heavy, and many. They held me down. I felt my thighs wrenched apart, then . . . that long knife going inside me, like a saw in my body, BURNING. I tried to bite, but the hand over my mouth pressed down even harder. I heard someone bark, “Shut up! Or else.” Then there was something like sharp metal against my throat. “We get to do whatever we want. You’re gonna shut up!” they said, or else my mother, my little sister, they’d do the same thing to them, in front of me. I still remember the saw moving back and forth inside me, again, and then animal grunts, and a heavy, heavy weight on me. There was liquid burning inside. I’m going to die, I thought. For a moment, I believed that it was done, but each of the men had their own saw. Pain cleaving into me, my stomach exploding. The saw inside of me that started over, again. Then . . . That’s when it was, that was when my soul split. When I managed to lift my head a little, “Turn your neck!” I thought, and I saw the car from far away, and the horse on it. I don’t know why, but I stared at the horse. I felt pain for a long time. But I abandoned myself there. I know it kept going, that they put my body on its knees, then on all fours. Heavy, the weight on the wrists. I fell. Earth taste in my mouth. Then I fainted, I think. When I came to, doors were slamming. My jean jacket was thrown over to me. Laughter, I don’t know anymore. The car left and I just stared at the horse. That’s when I started screaming. I picked up my dirty clothes, then I cried and screamed on the side of the road, the main one. I tried to put my clothes back on as best I could, and started walking, mechanically. A scooter passed, a taxi, another car. They kept going. They left me there. I limped back to the house. Neny Kely was still working. It was late. She was worried. She yelled at me. She looked at me and stopped, and . . . I quickly told her there’d been pickpockets on the way home that tried to steal my backpack, with my books inside. I hurried away to wash the dirt, the blood off in the bathroom out back, in a large basin. I scrubbed and scrubbed. Then I collapsed next to my brothers. Then, we woke up, the next morning. Neny wanted to talk to me. I said that I was running late. I went back to school like nothing had happened. For a few days, it was like I was in a cloud. Sounds were faraway, muffled. One of the teachers noticed I was walking strangely. “Like a duck,” she said. I was limping a little. The nurse noticed the marks on my wrists, even though I was tugging on my sleeves. The rest happened in a whirl: summoning Neny Kely, the doctor, who inserted her steel machine to spread where I was still bleeding and burning, and the social worker, the police. I couldn’t say anything except “gray car . . . horse . . . ” The images I saw in my dreams. “Many men,” I said. “The horse,” I kept saying.

They never did it again, those men. I never knew who it was. I erased all the traces, all the fingerprints, when I went home that night and washed myself off. But still. It was a large SUV. Men who had money, and I just had my word. The police couldn’t do anything with that. They didn’t do anything. The nightmares started, where I was raped by men, many men, underneath the horse’s head. One night, at the club, it seemed like I remembered something. A laugh. I’d heard one of those laughs! I told Nirina and pointed out a group from behind. “Come on,” she said, leading me out into the noise, the night, my very soul felt confounded. But there was a wink in her smile, a few days later, when she was talking to me, casually, about “four men attacked in the middle of the night, in an SUV.” “It’s the recession,” she said. “Rising poverty.” They were followed, apparently, by an organized gang. They were robbed of everything: cell phones, watches, clothes. “The car was completely stripped, probably to be sold for parts,” Nirina said. “They got away, but the ones who did it to them, they left them pretty messed up. Lots of thugs. The men are at the hospital and aren’t going to press charges,” she emphasized. “They’re in a state of shock, and they didn’t recognize their attackers.” And then, I wasn’t dreaming, she was smiling, wide-smiling. I miss her so much. Or rather, him.

Yes, Nirina was “him,” and I hadn’t seen it throughout all those nights. She had her Chinese mother’s delicate features, she was all gentle femininity. Sometimes I thought that her voice was low, a little husky, but no, I hadn’t figured it out. Not that, not anything else. The innocence of it all. After meeting Gaël, I went back less and less, then not at all, to the “nights” in Tana to lose myself—or to find myself again, who knows? Nirina and I called each other a lot, and then, what with time, and my classes . . . And it felt like she was gently easing distance between us, more and more. Far away, at the other end of the line. When I didn’t hear anything at all, I got extremely worried. Her cell went straight to voicemail and her home phone just kept ringing into thin air. I stopped by several times. No one. Maybe she went back to her official boyfriend, I thought. I smiled as I thought of her saying, the first night, “I’m not faithful. If that happened, I’d never be able to keep it up. Never ever,” with her great sweeping arm and her voice placed so high. And maybe she’d found another passport and taken off for somewhere else. I don’t know, I felt . . . She’d called me a few months ago. Gray, morose, broken, her voice on the other end of the line. The Nirina who came to see me had short hair, short nails, no makeup. She was dressed plainly, as a man. A pale, thin, tired man, who winked at me, asking hadn’t I known, deep down, before reminding me about the wild nights and the gamble he’d taken, how he hadn’t protected himself, how he didn’t like that, even if he always told me to do it. “I played and lost!” He smiled sadly, and then told me about how a long time ago he contracted AIDS, which was ravaging him now. When a long time ago? He didn’t know. His boyfriend had broken up with him when he found out, of course. “Cut off my water and supplies. Oh well, food schmood!” he said, trying to joke with me. It didn’t make me laugh, but I saw in his eyes that he never would have accepted my pity or sympathy. So I tried. He wandered from stoop to abandoned apartment, he said, then to the hospital, without proper care or money. I offered—“No. I came here to say good-bye, little sister. Honor that. I’m going back to my family first thing tomorrow morning.” We talked for a long time, spent the whole afternoon together, and then, just before leaving, he winked at me one last time. “I want to see my parents again, before . . . I need to go back to my homeland. And it’ll be time, sooner or later, sickness or no, to go up, you know?” He smiled. “To abandon myself for good, go up to the stars.”

Burning, the needle that gently scrapes my skin. Gaël is almost done. He’s at the last lines of Masoandro that I asked him for, my light of day, above the horse. He thinks the great gray sun is to celebrate me passing the Bac. I haven’t told him, not yet. “A full-moon stomach soon,” Nirina had smiled. It’s a girl. I’ll call her Noro—“my light.”

 

“Je me deserte . . .” © Magali Nirina Marson. From Nouvelles de Madagascar (Paris: Magellan & Cie, 2010). By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2015 by Allison M. Charette. All rights reserved.

English French (Original)

Burning, the needle that gently scrapes my skin, that doesn’t press very deep, that moves along slowly, that skims my flesh beneath the surface, that injects black ink blood between the two layers. Gaël crouches over my thigh. His left hand stretches and holds the skin. The other draws with the strange machine. Piercing, its sound—it reminds me of the dentist’s drill. Its tiny needle makes me think about the one in the sewing machine where Neny Kely rips open her fingertips and wears out her eyes, neck, and back, all day and all night afterward. Neny Kely. My Little Mama. It will be her birthday soon. We haven’t celebrated it at home, since Papa . . . But thirty-three is apparently a special year. “It’s how old Christ was,” Nirina said. “You have to remember Him,” she always said.

My friends at school, they were shocked the day I forgot to be quiet. I never talk about her or what happens at home. It’s better that way. They’re all rich, at the French school, most of them. They don’t know what poverty is. I didn’t know about it, either, before. She moved in when I was eleven, quietly, when Papa left. I learned to hide her presence, because the golden fingers of Neny Kely, well . . . She became a seamstress when he left, when money became genuinely scarce. Her mother had taught her how. Lots of foreigners and upper crust wives in Tana want exact replicas of what’s in the magazines. She works quickly and diligently, Neny Kely does. So the women, they like her very much. They recommend her to friends. They give her their children’s old clothes, sometimes, which Little Mama tailors for us. Or she makes us new clothes from her clients’ leftover fabric.

No, better to keep quiet about home, about the string of little papas who’ve lived there after mine left, about my four half-brothers and half-sisters who have always seen and heard their fathers cussing Mama out, because scarce money and alcohol, well, it makes men violent, makes them snap. It lifts their honey-sweet mask and turns them into themselves, I think. In junior high and the French high school, to fit in with them a little bit, the ones who drop them off and pick them up in the nicest, latest-model cars, I’ve never talked about myself, so that they don’t see how different I am. And besides, poverty’s not interesting, and I don’t want them to pity me. Not at all. So for all the bad things that happen, I learned to stay quiet. That day, though, “Neny Kely” popped out of my mouth all by itself. I couldn’t suck it back in. My sophomore classmates asked me why I called her “Little Mama,” so I said that she had me early, at sixteen. That Papa had fallen in love with her and the island, when he’d arrived in Madagascar. That there weren’t age restrictions for that. Their own mothers were much older when they’d been born. “She must be pretty cool!” they said, and I smiled. I couldn’t tell them that no, not really anymore. Not since Papa—he must have taken her ringing laughter away with him to his France. I didn’t say anything about the smiling clients who are demanding and difficult, or the sleepless nights at the machine or with a needle in hand, always hunched over, and always too much work, which doesn’t bring in nearly enough money. I didn’t mention my half-brothers and half-sisters, either, who don’t have French citizenship or scholarships—and no school fees, because their papas never officially recognized them, or they just aren’t French. They go to the Malagasy school. So when my real brother comes back from boarding school on weekends, and when I come home after my classes are done and I’ve finished up all my homework real quick in the school library before getting on the bus, we teach them how to read from our books. Papa often said that school’s important. It opens a door to the future. But Malagasy schools don’t open anything. Teachers, doctors, the rich, they won’t attend those schools. What matters is a foreign degree. So no, Neny Kely and I don’t spend too much time together. Actually, we know each other really well without saying much. But it’s so much work and silent worry for a woman all alone with too many children.

“Sting-ing, scratch-ing, sting-ing, scratch-ing,” I chant over and over in my head. I like rhyming, I like words that use the same sounds. I used to try writing poems and short little things, in my diary, before . . . My teacher said that I was good at writing, that my stories were good. I liked French, I liked those classes . . . It’s hot in this hotel room. It is big, though. But heavy, my eyelids are so heavy sometimes. You’d think the walls were closing in a little. My head starts to swim, a little. Burning on and under my skin. People said it would hurt a little, but I almost like it, when it feels like a sharp nail that absolutely wants to pick a scab, pressing and scraping, making a gash. If it were me, I would dig the needle deeper and scratch my skin much harder! It happens to me sometimes when I sleep, or when I succumb to nothingness and slide out of time, like Nirina says. When I abandon myself. Papa often said that word. He’d chuckle. “I abandoned France,” he’d say. “I didn’t like my life back there.” Then, he abandoned us one day. I never really understood why. His official wife had gotten very sick, I think. His children from before us had asked him to come back and stay with her until the end. The end lasts a really long time, though! Maybe he started not loving us anymore? Maybe I should have paid more attention, made him swear to come back. Then our lives wouldn’t have become so . . . gray.

Sound of drilling. Like a giant mosquito going bzzz. It keeps going, but I like the burning a lot. It makes me feel more, I don’t know, more . . . alive. I didn’t think it would take such a long time, to paint an animal and a few strange letters into me.

A bit of sweat on Gaël’s forehead. Little pearls of saltwater. A focused crease between his eyebrows. Little smiles in the corners of his eyes, when he looks up at me for a moment. He’s only three years younger than Neny Kely, and her wrinkles are so much deeper! She doesn’t even need to smile for them to show. Maybe women get old more quickly. Or maybe it’s that she had the last three kids one right after the other. That, and Papa. And my half-siblings’ fathers, they left, too, but they didn’t stay as long, each one stayed less than the one before, and the last two, violent-violating her when they’d come home mamo, drunk as a skunk . . . She didn’t say anything, but I know. Their alcohol, and her screams, and the blows . . . That’s what made her old so early. That, and everything else that only women have to deal with. I hear her crying softly at night, a lot. She thinks we’re sleeping. But I don’t sleep very soundly, since . . . yeah, since those days. I don’t like it, but I have nightmares, and That comes back, sometimes, even when I’m not sleeping. We never talk about it. We did talk about it once, so the weight on Neny Kely’s shoulders is heavier now, I can see it, ever since That. She stays quiet, but I know that she’s worried. She was scared, and she’s still scared, that I’ll drop out of school and that the doors to my future are closing like hers, her future that’s lost more and more blood ever since Papa left. No, I won’t drop out. I know I had to do last year over again. I couldn’t work like I had before. I lost the desire to work, a little bit. Or the will. I even thought, plenty of times, that it wasn’t worth it. But Nirina made me swear to the stars-and-ancestors that I wouldn’t end up like her. I go out much less on weekends and during vacation since she hasn’t been around. And since Gaël, too. I made it into sophomore year, just barely, and I won’t stop. And the tattoo is for That, too, it’s not just something pretty. The picture will make sure I don’t forget the day I became the other me. It’ll make sure I always remember that what hurts us must also make us stronger, this painting in me, of that animal from the day when I became the one who abandons myself, the one who needed to go out at night to look . . .

Gaël’s very nice to give me this as a present. Otherwise, I’d never have been able to get it. I’d been dreaming of it for a long time. More and more people have them at school, on their arms or shoulder blades or necks. It became a thing a year or two ago I think, I dunno . . . at the same time as those phones where you can slide your finger along the screen—what are they called, again? Oh yeah, “touchscreen.” It’s so important to keep up, not just for rich people. Everyone wants to have those imported things. Even when they don’t really have the money, there are still the little “bizniss” guys, like Tiana says, my homeboy on the street. Kind of jiolahim-boto-thugs like him, or enterprising students, with friends who manage to find the latest phones, I don’t really know how, the ones that are also mp3 players. They sell them at high prices, but not like in the official “Orange” stores! Tattoo artists have also opened up shop. Lots of them, in Tana. But you can get infections, AIDS, and their tattoos are expensive and not as well done as the real ones. People with real ones, the really gorgeous ones, they get them done like rich people. They go to the hospital or the doctor, to “foreign” tattoo parlors and artists, “made in France.” Nirina got herself “decorated” here, “on the heart side of my arm,” like she said. I went to Behoririka with her, in Chinatown. In the very back of a junk shop was the booth, a really tiny one. It smelled bad. I didn’t feel very well there, not at all. I wanted to throw up and I wanted to leave, but I didn’t say anything. There was Chinese art on the walls, patterns of big snakes and skulls-and-crossbones, right next to overly colorful mermaids and Jesus of the Sacred Heart. Nirina picked a red crown of thorns, like a bracelet, on her upper left arm. Her tattoo bled on the thorns, black-red pearls like period blood. And afterward, too. Or maybe it was the ink? Later, it got infected. She had to go to the pharmacist several times, to get penicillin to heal herself. The man had probably pressed his dirty needle down too hard. Everything there was nasty. It was next to the bathrooms, and it smelled like toilets, and mold, mixed with spoiled food and the strong odor of lots of men, when they’ve just had you. I know how the big guy got paid. I remember him looking pervily at me and her. I saw him pinch Nirina’s ass when she walked in, and I heard some familiar sounds when she asked me to wait for her outside, afterward. She popped a Pecto into her mouth as she walked out. Sucking on it takes the bad taste away. Maybe it was there, where she got—

“Owww!” That stung worse, there, on my inner thigh. That skin is as tender as a baby’s bottom. Gaël’s finished the circle of letters and started to fill in the flying horse, but he stops after I jumped. He asks me if I want to take a break, or if I want him to open the window or get some water for me, if I’m OK, if it hurts, if . . . His questions make me smile. I won’t tell him. I don’t want to. Not him. Actually, I haven’t really told anyone the whole story, except for Nirina. I knew right away that I could tell her everything about That. Every last bit. Words, descriptions tumbled out by themselves. Well, the ones I had that were somewhat clear, the ones I actually kind of remembered. Not like with the French teacher or the school nurse, or the therapist that the social worker from the consulate had sent me to. All my words stuck inside me with them. I didn’t know, I didn’t remember anymore, only that animal, and my shaken body, and me gone from there. I abandoned myself, I kept repeating. They didn’t understand. They pitied me, I know, but they thought I was lying or scared or wanted to protect someone, but that’s not true! Their own lives are so far from that. They live here, but they’re vazahas, or maybe Malagasy but rich, that’s just like being a foreigner. They live in this other world. I know: I listen to the girls at school talk sometimes. Tennis clubs and riding lessons on weekends, their second house in Mantasoa, their vacations in France or “abroooad”—like they do, with the longer vowels—or all the things their parents bring them from their “business trips.” Those types of people have vola. People with money, they can’t know how it is! And besides, who genuinely wants to know the truth? No one wants to know what it’s like to be nothing, “tain’akoho chicken shit,” someone people don’t see. Being poor is like trying to scream your lungs out while dust stuffs up your mouth and nose without anyone noticing, not even up there in the stars, not even if they can hear and see you, no one will help make it stop hurting. It’s being able to feel misery and an utter lack of power, and not being able to do anything besides what rich people tell you to do, because you’re nothing and you don’t want to disappear without anyone caring. Except Neny Kely, that drove her insane, you not coming home at all one day, with her never knowing why, and . . . I hate thinking about That! It makes my chest so tense and agitated. There were some who wanted to try to help me, and they were nice, really. But they didn’t understand a thing. They listened to me, but from a distance, and they didn’t hear anything. I know that. I was like them, before. Not exactly, but close.

We used to live like vazahas, before, and my life slid by so sleek and smooth! Mama had the same stars in her eyes as they do when she smiled. And I think our laughter had the same music as theirs. Papa had his pension from the French army and worked for rich people who paid him well. Inside that life, I didn’t see the chicken shit in the dustcloud-streets! There was a young street zaza who slept under a piece of cardboard, not too far from the house. Papa took pity on him. “He’s a poor orphan,” he said. He gave him little things to do, just a little every day, to keep him from begging, he told me. He paid him with a bit of money and something to eat. He talked with him a little and clapped him on the back in laughter, like he did with me and my little brother. I watched the snot that, just like they said, did everything it could not to run—the nearly-liquid yellowish green crud that was always crusted just below his nose. I thought it was icky-maloto so I didn’t say anything, but I didn’t want to touch or talk to someone who was that dirty. I didn’t know what it was like, before, to be mafy ady, poorer than poor. Life taught me. He really had nothing! His parents had left him behind, he told us, the priest in his village . . . I remember I thought, “Why is he called Tiana, then—beloved and desired?” Yes, that Tiana. He became my homeboy. He hangs out around Antaninarenina, where the nightclubs and hotels for whites are. He’s smart. He won’t get nicked by a knife in a gang fight. He’s got his little gang of jiolahim-boto-thugs, too, but he’s managed to stay far away from those wars. He used to watch-wash cars, like for Papa, then he did carry-your-bags for women who were shopping around there, then it was a bunch of other little things. He would make “home d’livreez”—he’d say that in front of the tourist hotels—of vanilla, spices, artisanal goods from the vendors who were working elsewhere. Now, he does “bizniss,” he boasts about it with a self-important smile. “Imported cigarettes!” you hear him say, outside of the nightclubs, and he’s the one who brings the rasta weed, rongony, to creatures of the night. We laugh, sometimes, when we share a smoke or a joint. We’re the same, him and I. We provide the grass or a flesh-trip, in exchange for first-class-fanafody: money, or “comfort meds” (we saw something like that on T-shirts some tourists from Reunion were wearing, it made us laugh so hard!). Anything against destitution—financial and emotional.

The therapist, teacher, and nurse who wanted to help me, to try to, afterward—they smile at me when they see me in school. But their lives kept going, the same as ever. They don’t know what it’s like to hurt yourself for no reason, clawing at your arm or stomach or thigh until it bleeds, while you’re sleeping, because of nightmares where That happens again, the mix of the empty pit and mahamay, the burning inside. Feeling yourself suffocate and die, and needing to leave the house at night because That comes back again and again, even when I’m not asleep, even if I don’t want it to. The nurse, though, she at least understood. One night, she came out to the club with vazaha friends, a little before Gaël. The other kids at high school go out dancing other places, like the chic bar in the basement of the Carlton. Practically never where I go. Kids my age don’t even go out yet. Too young. I’m very careful. But that time, I couldn’t turn around and leave fast enough. She looked me over, up and down. She was worried, I could tell, about my short shorts and all my makeup. She understood, I know she did, but she acted like it was nothing. I got out of there fast. I was ashamed of myself, of that me. And on Monday morning, she came into the school courtyard and asked me to follow her. She gave me a glass of water in her office and said, “If there’s something wrong, Aïna, if you want to or need to talk, come see me. You can talk to me, you know, it’s between us girls. I understand many, many things.” I nodded. I said thanks. But besides that? I can’t. Normal girls can’t understand That. Even I can’t, sometimes. Like with Gaël. I can’t tell him that I like hurting myself. That I don’t just work nights for the money. Sure, we need it at home. Especially because, since all of that happened, Neny Kely hasn’t been working as quickly. But it’s not that! Before, I would never have done that! These days, I seek out pain because it’s stronger than me. I can’t keep myself away from it. It happens all by itself. It’s me . . . and it’s not me. Gaël can’t know! He’d think I was weird, adala, even though I know I’m not crazy. That must not happen. Gaël’s nice. He’ll take me to France, maybe, if he loves me enough. Maybe I’ll see Papa again there? No, Gaël doesn’t know how to hurt anyone.

I knew it right away, when I saw him leaning against the bar, by himself, that he wasn’t like the other guys. He came out to the club several times before we started talking, and he left alone, every night. I noticed him as soon as he walked in the first time. Tall, with bronze skin, light eyes. Same color as mine, I thought. He shook his head at all the girls who went up to him, every time. He had a nice smile, but it was far away, so . . . “no”. He was watching everything around him, and it seemed like he didn’t like what he saw. “A meat market. The guys are animals, starved. And the girls, too. I wondered what you could have possibly been doing in the middle of all that,” he told me, after we . . .

I didn’t go after him like I did with the others. Not Gaël. Something kept me from it. Papa had had the same good look in his eyes, the same one. I tried to go up to him, lots of times, but my heart was pounding inside, like it did when I was fourteen, when a hot boy looked at me. I couldn’t. With the others, I square my shoulders, hold my head high, and look them straight in the eye. But I couldn’t with him. He looked at me a lot that week. But nothing. It wasn’t vacation or anything, but I worked every night, just to see him again. And I didn’t want him to see me with the other guys. I remember, I’d swing my arm up, quickly, forcefully, when somebody else put their hand on it. Then, one night, I crossed my fingers behind me for good luck, and I went over and asked him if he’d like to buy me a drink. “Just because,” I said, “not for any reason.” He smiled, looked at me curiously, and offered me the seat next to him. He was surprised that I spoke French with almost no accent. He has one, but it’s not too thick, it’s got a little bit of a lilt. I told him that I went to the French high school, and that Papa was French. “I’m mixed, too,” he said. “My mother is half-Guadeloupian.” I didn’t know where that was, where his country was. He told me. And it started like that.

Even when we’re doing it, Gaël is considerate. He didn’t want to, at all, for at least a month. It was weird. He’d meet me after school, we’d walk around Tana. We’d talk about him; about his home, an island he didn’t get back to very often; about younger me. I even told him about Papa leaving. It came naturally. It was fine, he kissed me, stroked my hair, my arms, my back, but nothing. I thought maybe he didn’t like women. So I asked him. I pressed him. He wanted to wait, wait until we knew each other better, wait a few more months, wait until I was eighteen. “What for?” I asked him. So . . . No one had ever done me like that before: slowly, very gently at first, but really good. Right after, I almost wanted to cry when he held me to him tightly, but so gently. With him, it was never like he wanted to tear his way into me and bang me as hard as possible, like the other guys, all the other guys. I never want to detach myself when it’s with him. He never has the crazy-hunger-eyes that roll into the back of his head, Doing It. He’s never like them. The others don’t really talk, they just say what they want, ask how much, growl something dirty Doing It. They take me into alleys by the bars or maybe to their hotel, they hike my skirt up and put as many fingers in me as possible, or not, then put their hard-on inside me.

Gaël, sometimes he’s almost too gentle. I want to tell him to do it harder, to hurt me sometimes. But I can’t. He wouldn’t like that, wouldn’t like me like that, I don’t think. He’s not like the others, even though people might think he’s worse, with all the tough-guy tattoos that cover him from the neck down, like the scaly snakelike thing that slithers over his whole torso, chest and back, in many colors, as big as the fañany fitu luha hydra that Neny Kely told me stories about when I was little, except this one doesn’t have seven heads. “It’s a Japanese tattoo. This is a dragon, and these are symbols within a snapshot of daily life,” he told me, when I’d asked him. That’s when he told me more about himself—that he’d worked for a well-known tattoo artist in Paris, but had “taken a break” for his thirtieth birthday, he’d needed to. I thought, “Abandoned, like Papa.” He explained that he’d gone to Reunion on vacation to visit friends who were also tattoo artists, where business was good, and that he’d come to Mada without a return date in mind, to see the country, the beautiful country, and to try to convince his boss to let him stay and open something here. He explained why he’d chosen the designs on himself. “Tattoos often represent—” Now, what was it again? “—something important in someone’s life, a change. Many people get one to mark a turning point,” he told me. Then, he explained the meaning of his symbols. “Speaking and Writing: they bring things from deep inside you into the light, so that they burn in the open and hurt you less inside,” the therapist had said as he gave me a notebook that I was supposed to show him at our next session. But I couldn’t find the right words to put on its pages, and I stopped going. That was it, that’s when he told me that he always had his tools with him, that’s when I remembered and told him about Nirina: how sad her smile had been when she saw her brand new crown of red thorns. “It’s to remind myself that life hurts, but that you have to forget the pain, pick yourself back up and become a tough thorn, and keep going,” she said. So I started thinking about a way to write That and its wound, my wound, into my skin. I didn’t say anything about That, of course. But Gaël only had to look into my eyes to see that I couldn’t bring myself to ask him, but that I desperately wanted to have one.

No, he’s not like the rest, the other guys, who only want to move inside me, go out and in and out again, and then back in again, more and more violently. His hands on me are never sticky-moist. They don’t need to squeeze every last bit of my stomach, my nonos (which aren’t that big, anyway), and my ass, like making mandarin juice or kneading pastry dough. Papa was a pastry chef. They make me laugh, the others . . . or, well, they used to! That was before. I stopped, since Gaël. I only went back for one—no, just two nights! But I stopped. I don’t want to anymore! It’s tempting, sometimes, but I want to completely stop. I want to heal. I’ll try, anyway. Now I know that it’s a kind of illness, the hunger for pain and flesh. Nirina gripped my arm hard, just before she left, looking me directly in the eyes. “It kills. Could be slowly or more quickly, but it’s always death!” She repeated that over and over.

Before, there was . . . no, not too long ago, we pretended to be izy, them, the men. We mimicked their grunts, when their ragged breathing would break up their words, always the same ones. We laughed so hard! “Mampalahelo daholo, they’re so pathetic! All of them!” she said. “They want to be strong and hard, but during? Mampalahelo daholo!” she’d say. “It’s like they’re zaza be, just big babies, fat or skinny, hairy or smooth like girls, they all want us to tell them that their dick down there, theirs is the best, the biggest and hardest, that it’s great. The best? Pssssssh,” Nirina laughed, “even if they’re not snipped and even if it’s all twisted at the tip like a corkscrew?” Oh, we could laugh so hard! “They want to take, to possess,” she taught me. “But they’re nothing! They’re nothing more than meat at that point,” she said. “You’re the one with the power to make them exist, make them believe they’re strong, real men,” she told me over and over, “but they’re just little scraps of meat that aren’t always hard, they have nothing. They aren’t even masters of themselves! Watch them carefully,” she explained. And it’s true! Malagasy, White, Indo-Pakistani, “Sinese,” old or not, rich or less powerful, they all look the same in the moment. Their tongue, trying to lick you everywhere, their teeth trying to bite and their mouth trying to swallow-breathe skin until it turns purpley-blue. The way they huff-puff out of breath on top, or moan and grunt on bottom or when you take them in your hand or mouth. They’re all the same. “At that moment, we’re the strong ones,” Nirina told me a lot. And sometimes, when we’d see them after and they looked at us miavonavona, all high and mighty, we’d smile, Nirina and I. They’d forgotten, but we’d seen them Doing It, and in real life, men aren’t very pretty when they’re naked!

The only time I didn’t laugh, when it actually pained me to see one of them, was when a guy from high school came to the club, over the last school break. A boy from an important family. I thought he was cute, but he never wanted anything to do with me, even before. He was an upperclassman, in his last year. And besides, they never mingled with others, those types of people. Not even with other Malagasies, if they weren’t upper class like them. Not usually. His girlfriend was mixed, but her mother’s family had power. I was a little jealous of girls like her. I wanted to have their clothes, the same ringing laughter, and mainly their birth, into marriage and money, that gave them such a life.

His girlfriend’s skin was the same as mine. “My little café au lait,” Papa called me. We could have been sisters, except her hair was smooth and her eyes warm-honey brown. My hair is crinkly and golden brown, and Papa gave me his weird green eyes, the color of pool water, kind of, and it changes, light green or darker, it depends. “You’re lucky,” they told me, girls of the night. The ones from the coast didn’t like their hair and spent hours straightening it or putting fake extensions in to get tight curls. And the ones from the Central Highlands wanted to have my coastal ass, “round and a little perky-pointy.” J-Lo kely, they called me, little Jennifer Lopez. Most of them had or wanted mixed kids, even though they knew that the men wouldn’t stay. I don’t know what’s wrong with people—why the children of this earth hate each other so much. Even upper-crust daughters want to marry vazahas and have mixed children. They don’t need passport-and-Euros, though! It’s like how Neny Kely’s father was from the southeast, from the race of “star-readers,” and Grandmother was from Tana, so Papa always told us, “Your mother has two cultures instead of one. You, my darlings, have three, at least, and the world is wide open in front of you! Being multiracial is a treasure.” What kind of treasure, though? Maybe if I was, I dunno, Malagasy or vazaha or whatever, but something rich, they wouldn’t have dared, they’d never have treated me like That! It’s not skin color. Not just that. It’s vola. In Madagascar, you have to have money to exist, and even more so if you’re half-white. Being a “peasant vazaha” and poor, on the Red Island, is worse than not existing at all.

I don’t remember his name, the young guy from the rich family at school. He was shocked when he recognized me. He stammered out that he’d just taken his Bac. Then he asked me if I went there a lot. He’d never talked to me before. He was always with his gang—some were gasy from important families, like him; some vazahas; some mixed races, like his bae. All rich. The French school was like a microcosm of Madagascar. Different groups stay together, they don’t mix together much. But they’ll mingle when money erases birth, differences, and colors. For them, I was just a financial aid student. Invisible. I couldn’t talk to them. But that time, there, it wasn’t the same. I looked him straight in the eye and saw that he wanted it. So I took his hand. He let me. We went into his SUV. He couldn’t get it up. His fleshy dick stayed limp and hung there, the poor thing. I helped him with my tongue and then got on top. We stayed there all night. We did it three or four times, I don’t know anymore. He wanted to say something when I got out of the car. I heard, “Thank you. Aïna, I—” but I was already gone. I didn’t want to talk money with him. Nirina chewed me out for it. “No exceptions! That’s the rule!” She was right. I saw him once more during vacation. He seemed to be doing badly. He was with his girlfriend, who glare-looked at me. The poor thing! He acted like he didn’t know me. He looked elsewhere, but his eyes flicked back to me many times, like something was burning him inside. I smiled to myself. Now it’s them, the men, who are burning! He was ashamed of me, I know, but he wanted me, too, even with her right there next to him. He came back alone the next night, a friend of Nirina’s told me that. He was looking for me. I thought about him sometimes. Poor kid! Pathetic, mampalaheo: him, his girlfriend, men and their wives, slaves to a little bit of tail-flesh.

Nirina saved me, I think, when she explained all of that to me. There were many times I thought about taking chloroquine and abandoning myself for good. Ever since the day with the horse and the days after, and after what Neny Kely said, I told myself that I was nothing, that I wasn’t worth anything, that Papa left because we were cursed. He’d said that Mama’s ancestors and the good Lord were watching over us. If that were true, they, he never would have abandoned our house. He never would have stayed with his official wife in France! If I were protected by the cross that Neny Kely had kissed when she’d placed the necklace she’d worn around my neck, then they wouldn’t have done That to me! It seemed like my whole body—my head, heart, gut, everything—would explode, so icy cold did That burn inside of me, everywhere. I wanted to tear myself apart, I hurt so badly. I wanted to leave.

I didn’t go back to school for a long time after the hospital. They wouldn’t leave me, the images that kept coming back, mixing with the pain and the desire to scream for That, the voices, the sounds, even the smells on me, to leave me alone, but That stayed stuck in my throat for a long time afterward. Prison-silence, for days and days. Neny Kely didn’t know what to say, what to do, the poor woman, she had to watch me in such anguish. She went back to her sewing. But she didn’t work as quickly or as well as before. I heard one customer complaining about her late work, threatening that she’d change seamstresses. She slammed the door, and Neny Kely came to see me. She started crying. Sobbing buckets. “It’s my fault!” She screamed it over and over. “I didn’t want to send you to boarding school, like your brother. I wanted you to help me in the evenings. The miles you walk alone after the bus, it’s all because of me! Papa wanted us all to go to France together. I was scared. I’d never taken a plane before. I didn’t want to leave my parents’ homeland. So I told him to go, that we’d wait for him . . . But his wife stayed sick for a long time. He’d already walked out on her once. He couldn’t leave her like that. But I don’t know.” She took a breath, then: “I felt jealous, alone, and then there was your first half-brother’s father. It was an accident, a mistake!” she sobbed. “Once I realized, it was too late. Somebody told him. I’m the reason he didn’t come back.” I wanted her to stop, to hear nothing, no more, but she kept going. “I know,” she told me. “I had That happen to me, too. I was twelve. It was an uncle, a friend of the family. Your Papa saved me, but the sins of the flesh came back in me, when he left, it was stronger than me. I didn’t love the men after him. The drinking, the hitting . . . I abandoned myself, my girl. Life made us drift apart, you and I, and I let it happen.”

I’m pretty sure that’s when the fissure that began cracking on the day with the horse blasted wide open. We hugged each other tight, Neny Kely and I, and I did what she did with my brothers and sisters, and with me when I was younger. She cried. I felt . . . nothing. My arms and my words lulled her. “Tsy mitomany,” I sang softly, automatically. “Don’t cry.” But I was empty inside, and I was far away.

I went back to school the next day, like a machine. We didn’t have any money—I had to keep my scholarship. It was a Friday, and that night, I don’t know, I just didn’t want to go home. “Breathe,” I thought. My chest was so heavy. “I can’t breathe. I need air!” I walked into the city without thinking. I drifted for a while. It was like I’d smoked Rasta weed. I don’t know how long I walked. When I came back to myself, it was dark. I wasn’t far from the jewelry district, with hotels and bar-clubs. It was two years ago—that was when I walked into that nightclub for the first time. The two men at the door let me in without a glance. I was afraid that they’d ask for my ID. “Unaccompanied Minors Prohibited,” the sign read, and I was just barely fifteen.

I crossed a terrace-type thing. It was dark inside, and hot. The strobe lights and music didn’t reach me, they slipped over me like water off a wide leaf. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the stage. Standing there was a girl with a cherubic face, wearing a clingy red slip. She was dancing like they do in ragga videos. There were lots of men around the runway. They seemed . . . like me. Under the hypnosis-power of the dancer’s thin thighs that she thrust-and-squeezed in rhythm-grace with her round butt. I watched for a long time. Then, I felt a hand on my arm. I saw a beautiful body, very tall and muscular for a girl, I thought. Her pretty face was heavily made-up, with crinkly hair encircling it, and there was a big scarf around her neck and shoulders, as red as her lip gloss, with feathers on top. “What are you looking to find or lose here among the crocodiles, little one?” she asked. It was Nirina. When I finally managed to speak, a little later at the bar, I told her, “I came for men.” The words came tumbling out all by themselves, as if they knew that they could. That’s when I told her everything. She listened in silence, nodding as I went along. She smiled sadly, patted my cheek, and tried to give me money for a cab home. “You’re just a lost lamb,” she said. “Once you’ve started, you can’t go back. It’s like a drug. You’re young, you’re lost. Here, you could lose yourself even more. Go back home!” I shook my head. I stood firm. Nirina became my Neny Kely of the night, my best—but I didn’t have any others, so my only friend.

Yes, she saved my life. She explained the rules of this world to me, and the prices, and especially how to find a man and how to act Doing It. “Control,” she told me. “How to take it, keep it, and never lose it.” I think I blushed or blanched. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll teach you. After the first time, it’ll come naturally.”

Ever since she said that, I knew myself to be the embodiment of strength. It’s weird, I know, but I liked it, letting them shake me up. I was the one who decided. I sought them out and they paid me, for that, for the me who had been forced to her knees, buckle-bent in the dust. I decided, to move mechanically or not, to let their hands grab and rub my skin quicker and quicker, to open up or not as their hard-on makes its way between my thighs and into me. I let them. And I even liked that, when they held my shoulders or hands down, gripping tightly, to work in and out faster. Sometimes, there were marks the next morning. “Mixed skin gets bruised easily,” Nirina said, smearing vinegar on the wound. When I got one who talked to me, I moaned, I said “Mmmmm,” like Nirina had taught me. “That makes them as happy as zaza kely who’ve just had their milk, the big babies,” she’d said, and then, inside, I found . . . peace. They didn’t know. They didn’t see how, when they banged too hard, on top or from behind, when I didn’t like the pain anymore, I’d go away. I liked when the physical pain made a door close in me. I would leave myself and leave them behind, far away. It was that day, the day with the horse, when I abandoned myself for the first time, Doing It. Now I know how. I withdraw whenever I want, and sometimes when I don’t want to. I close my eyes, or not, and I split myself in two, and I float just beside or above, farther away. It’s almost like how rongony smoke makes me fly away, this cloud in my head, but it’s not the same. Weed makes me blissful. Here, I don’t laugh. I’m just not heavy with sorrow inside anymore. I float. I feel and hear everything, I’m there, but I don’t stay wholly there. Looking for guys and Doing It, it’s like . . . I don’t know. I can’t find the words. Physical pain makes me feel, well, stronger than him, and stronger than me, I think, and even more . . . well, not “more.” Just “alive.” Something like that.

The buzzing’s stopped. Gaël’s hand is gentle on my cheek. “Let’s take a break, honey,” he says. Heat billows up to my face. The tattoo burns a little less as he rubs Vaseline into it before taking off his gloves. I like it, all the lines of the horse are filled with ink. It’s just the wings and letters left. We designed it together. I told Gaël about the horse on the side of one of the cars, but nothing else. He looked up the logo on his computer. I didn’t like seeing that one again. So I thought about the winged horse that our French teacher had told us about, the one that a Greek god had made into a group of stars. “Pegasus,” Gaël smiled, getting a piece of paper. “You want it in black and gray, or color?” I thought about the crooked thorns on Nirina’s arm. I knew she’d stay written in me, at least a little. I showed Gaël what I wanted: AÏNA, written vertically, on the “heart facing” side. That’s how it started: “Are you scared of forgetting who you are someday?” I held my breath. “He knows,” I thought. He’s already asked me what my nightmares are about, many times. “I don’t remember,” I tell him, every time. I don’t want him to know, to think I’m dirty. That day made me dirty. I was scared that I’d said something in my sleep, or that he could read my thoughts, but he smiled and stroked my cheek. “You have a pretty name. Aïna, ‘life,’ it’s precious.” I felt a lump welling up in my throat. My eyes started to sting, like they’re doing now. I look at my thigh, at the drawing on it. I like it. I don’t want to cry. I haven’t cried for a long time. Yes, it’s been a long time, since that day. Crying, sharp and broken screams, calling out—I couldn’t stop for a while afterward, I remember. I know I clawed at my face and pounded my chest, crying. My cheeks burned. My mouth felt dirty . . .

It was so hot in that bus, so stuffy! It had been a long day. I was tired. Another mile to go, walking, I thought. Didn’t want to. A closer house would have been better, not so far away. And comfortable, not like our two gray rooms where we can barely breathe during the rainy season. I got off the bus. I walked for a bit before I heard the noise, an engine, and the horn behind me. It was a big gray SUV. I got out of the way, but the car didn’t go past. It was like it was following me. I heard men’s voices, several, I remember. My name, repeated. Then everything gets blurry. The car that stopped, all the dust that the wheels had kicked up. Then a man’s hand, a large one, seizing my wrist. There were four of them, yes. They made a ring, surrounded me. They pushed me like in blind man’s bluff, from one to the next, and the next, and the next. My head, spinning. I smelled their odor, the alcohol. I wanted to throw up. Then, they yanked me away. There was a little path kind of thing, off to the right of the dirt road. I felt . . . They dragged me there. They threw me to the ground. I fell, on my back, I remember. It knocked the wind out of me, an impact, a shock, like a punch in the gut, and I tried to get back up. There was a mud wall, an old one, almost completely smooth, to the right, and the car at the end of the path. There was a horse on the body of the car, on the side. THE horse! Then the feeling of suffocation. I screamed, I know. They put a hand over my mouth. I couldn’t breathe. And I felt many hands on me. One pulling to lift my T-shirt up. Another crushing my nonos, then on my stomach, like it was, I dunno, dough being kneaded. I felt . . . after, or maybe at the same time, one pulling to get my jeans down. I tried to kick, but they were heavy, and many. They held me down. I felt my thighs wrenched apart, then . . . that long knife going inside me, like a saw in my body, BURNING. I tried to bite, but the hand over my mouth pressed down even harder. I heard someone bark, “Shut up! Or else.” Then there was something like sharp metal against my throat. “We get to do whatever we want. You’re gonna shut up!” they said, or else my mother, my little sister, they’d do the same thing to them, in front of me. I still remember the saw moving back and forth inside me, again, and then animal grunts, and a heavy, heavy weight on me. There was liquid burning inside. I’m going to die, I thought. For a moment, I believed that it was done, but each of the men had their own saw. Pain cleaving into me, my stomach exploding. The saw inside of me that started over, again. Then . . . That’s when it was, that was when my soul split. When I managed to lift my head a little, “Turn your neck!” I thought, and I saw the car from far away, and the horse on it. I don’t know why, but I stared at the horse. I felt pain for a long time. But I abandoned myself there. I know it kept going, that they put my body on its knees, then on all fours. Heavy, the weight on the wrists. I fell. Earth taste in my mouth. Then I fainted, I think. When I came to, doors were slamming. My jean jacket was thrown over to me. Laughter, I don’t know anymore. The car left and I just stared at the horse. That’s when I started screaming. I picked up my dirty clothes, then I cried and screamed on the side of the road, the main one. I tried to put my clothes back on as best I could, and started walking, mechanically. A scooter passed, a taxi, another car. They kept going. They left me there. I limped back to the house. Neny Kely was still working. It was late. She was worried. She yelled at me. She looked at me and stopped, and . . . I quickly told her there’d been pickpockets on the way home that tried to steal my backpack, with my books inside. I hurried away to wash the dirt, the blood off in the bathroom out back, in a large basin. I scrubbed and scrubbed. Then I collapsed next to my brothers. Then, we woke up, the next morning. Neny wanted to talk to me. I said that I was running late. I went back to school like nothing had happened. For a few days, it was like I was in a cloud. Sounds were faraway, muffled. One of the teachers noticed I was walking strangely. “Like a duck,” she said. I was limping a little. The nurse noticed the marks on my wrists, even though I was tugging on my sleeves. The rest happened in a whirl: summoning Neny Kely, the doctor, who inserted her steel machine to spread where I was still bleeding and burning, and the social worker, the police. I couldn’t say anything except “gray car . . . horse . . . ” The images I saw in my dreams. “Many men,” I said. “The horse,” I kept saying.

They never did it again, those men. I never knew who it was. I erased all the traces, all the fingerprints, when I went home that night and washed myself off. But still. It was a large SUV. Men who had money, and I just had my word. The police couldn’t do anything with that. They didn’t do anything. The nightmares started, where I was raped by men, many men, underneath the horse’s head. One night, at the club, it seemed like I remembered something. A laugh. I’d heard one of those laughs! I told Nirina and pointed out a group from behind. “Come on,” she said, leading me out into the noise, the night, my very soul felt confounded. But there was a wink in her smile, a few days later, when she was talking to me, casually, about “four men attacked in the middle of the night, in an SUV.” “It’s the recession,” she said. “Rising poverty.” They were followed, apparently, by an organized gang. They were robbed of everything: cell phones, watches, clothes. “The car was completely stripped, probably to be sold for parts,” Nirina said. “They got away, but the ones who did it to them, they left them pretty messed up. Lots of thugs. The men are at the hospital and aren’t going to press charges,” she emphasized. “They’re in a state of shock, and they didn’t recognize their attackers.” And then, I wasn’t dreaming, she was smiling, wide-smiling. I miss her so much. Or rather, him.

Yes, Nirina was “him,” and I hadn’t seen it throughout all those nights. She had her Chinese mother’s delicate features, she was all gentle femininity. Sometimes I thought that her voice was low, a little husky, but no, I hadn’t figured it out. Not that, not anything else. The innocence of it all. After meeting Gaël, I went back less and less, then not at all, to the “nights” in Tana to lose myself—or to find myself again, who knows? Nirina and I called each other a lot, and then, what with time, and my classes . . . And it felt like she was gently easing distance between us, more and more. Far away, at the other end of the line. When I didn’t hear anything at all, I got extremely worried. Her cell went straight to voicemail and her home phone just kept ringing into thin air. I stopped by several times. No one. Maybe she went back to her official boyfriend, I thought. I smiled as I thought of her saying, the first night, “I’m not faithful. If that happened, I’d never be able to keep it up. Never ever,” with her great sweeping arm and her voice placed so high. And maybe she’d found another passport and taken off for somewhere else. I don’t know, I felt . . . She’d called me a few months ago. Gray, morose, broken, her voice on the other end of the line. The Nirina who came to see me had short hair, short nails, no makeup. She was dressed plainly, as a man. A pale, thin, tired man, who winked at me, asking hadn’t I known, deep down, before reminding me about the wild nights and the gamble he’d taken, how he hadn’t protected himself, how he didn’t like that, even if he always told me to do it. “I played and lost!” He smiled sadly, and then told me about how a long time ago he contracted AIDS, which was ravaging him now. When a long time ago? He didn’t know. His boyfriend had broken up with him when he found out, of course. “Cut off my water and supplies. Oh well, food schmood!” he said, trying to joke with me. It didn’t make me laugh, but I saw in his eyes that he never would have accepted my pity or sympathy. So I tried. He wandered from stoop to abandoned apartment, he said, then to the hospital, without proper care or money. I offered—“No. I came here to say good-bye, little sister. Honor that. I’m going back to my family first thing tomorrow morning.” We talked for a long time, spent the whole afternoon together, and then, just before leaving, he winked at me one last time. “I want to see my parents again, before . . . I need to go back to my homeland. And it’ll be time, sooner or later, sickness or no, to go up, you know?” He smiled. “To abandon myself for good, go up to the stars.”

Burning, the needle that gently scrapes my skin. Gaël is almost done. He’s at the last lines of Masoandro that I asked him for, my light of day, above the horse. He thinks the great gray sun is to celebrate me passing the Bac. I haven’t told him, not yet. “A full-moon stomach soon,” Nirina had smiled. It’s a girl. I’ll call her Noro—“my light.”

 

“Je me deserte . . .” © Magali Nirina Marson. From Nouvelles de Madagascar (Paris: Magellan & Cie, 2010). By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2015 by Allison M. Charette. All rights reserved.

Je me déserte…

Brûlure, l’aiguille qui écorche doucement ma peau, qui s’enfonce pas profond en elle et qui avance, lentement ; qui frôle ma chair dessous et qui injecte, entre les deux, ce sang d’encre noire… Gaël est penché sur ma cuisse. Sa main gauche tire et tend la peau. L’autre dessine avec cette machine bizarre. Aigü, son bruit qui me rappelle la fraise chez le dentiste… Sa petite aiguille me fait penser à celle de la machine à coudre devant laquelle Neny kely se déchire le bout des doigts et se casse, nuits après jours, les yeux, le cou et le dos… Neny kely… ça va bientôt être son anniversaire. On ne le lui a jamais fêté, à la maison, depuis papa… Mais trente-trois ans, c’est un jour spécial, il paraît. « L’âge du Christ », Nirina m’a dit. « Lui fêter, c’est important », elle m’a répété… Les amis, au lycée, ont été étonnés, le jour où j’ai oublié de me taire. Je ne parle jamais d’elle ou de la maison. C’est mieux. Ils sont riches, au lycée français, la majorité. Ils ne savent pas la misère. Moi, je ne la savais pas non plus, avant. Elle s’est installée doucement quand j’avais onze ans, quand papa est parti. J’ai appris à la cacher, parce que les doigts d’or de Neny kely. Elle est devenue couturière, après son départ, quand l’argent a commencé à manquer vraiment. Sa mère lui avait appris. Beaucoup d’étrangères et de femmes de famille, à Tana, veulent les modèles, exactement, des catalogues. Elle est sérieuse et elle travaille vite, Neny kely. Alors elles l’aiment bien, ces dames. Elles la conseillent à leurs amies. Elles lui donnent les vieux habits de leurs enfants, parfois, que petite maman arrange comme s’ils étaient faits pour nous.  Ou bien elle nous en fait des neufs avec le reste des tissus des clientes. Non, rien dire de la maison, des petits-papas qui ont habité là après le départ du mien ; de mes quatre demi-frères et sœurs, qui ont vu et entendu leurs pères engueuler maman souvent, parce que l’argent rare et l’alcool, ça casse les hommes et ça les rend violents. Ça enlève leur masque doux-miel et ça les rend eux-mêmes, je crois… Au collège et au lycée français, pour faire un peu partie d’eux, ceux que le chauffeur ou leurs parents accompagnent et viennent chercher dans de jolies voitures dernier modèle ; pour qu’ils voient pas trop ma différence, je n’ai jamais parlé de moi. Ça n’intéresse personne, de toute façon, la misère ; et je ne veux pas faire pitié. Ça, non ! Alors, sur ce qui va mal, j’ai appris à me taire. Ce jour-là, « Neny kely… » est sorti tout seul de ma bouche. J’ai pas pu le ravaler. Mes camarades de seconde m’ont demandé pourquoi je l’appelais « petite maman », alors, j’ai dit qu’elle m’a eue tôt, à seize ans. Que papa est tombé amoureux d’elle et de l’île, quand il est arrivé à Madagascar. Qu’il n’y a pas d’âge pour ça. Leurs mères à eux étaient bien plus vieilles quand ils sont nés. « Elle doit être cool ! », ils m’ont dit… J’ai souri. J’ai pas pu répondre que non, plus tant que ça. Plus depuis papa, qui a dû emporter ses grands éclats de rire d’avant ; et les emmener dans sa France avec lui. J’ai pas dit les clientes souriantes, mais exigeantes et difficiles ; et les nuits blanches sur sa machine ou l’aiguille à la main, pliée en deux, toujours ; et le toujours trop de travail, qui ne ramène pourtant jamais assez d’argent. Je n’ai pas raconté non plus mes demi-frères et sœurs, qui n’ont pas la nationalité française et la bourse ; et les fournitures scolaires, eux, parce que leurs papas ne les ont pas reconnus ; ou ne sont pas Français. Ils vont à l’école malgache. Alors, quand mon vrai frère rentre du pensionnat, le week-end ; et quand je rentre, après mes cours et la biblio du lycée où j’essaie de vite tout finir mes devoirs avant de prendre le bus, on leur apprend à lire dans nos livres. Papa répétait souvent que c’est important, l’école. Ça ouvre l’avenir. Mais l’école malgache, ça n’ouvre pas sur grand chose. Les profs, les médecins, les de La Haute, ils y vont pas. C’est les diplômes étrangers, qui comptent ! Non, on ne passe pas, plus, beaucoup de temps ensemble, Neny kely et moi. On se sait sans se parler, tellement ! Mais c’est tellement de travail et de soucis en silence, une femme toute seule avec son trop d’enfants…

« Pi-qûre, écor-chure, pi-qûre, écor-chure, pi-qûre… ». Je chante en silence, comme un refrain. J’aime bien les rimes. J’essayais d’écrire des poèmes et des petits textes, au milieu de mon journal intime, avant… La prof disait que j’étais bonne en rédaction, qu’elle était jolie, mon écriture. J’aimais ça, le Français, ses cours… Il fait chaud, dans cette chambre d’hôtel. Elle est grande, pourtant. Mais lourdes, mes paupières, lourdes, par moments. Les murs se rapprochent, un peu, on dirait… Je commence à flotter, un peu… Brûlure sous et sur ma peau. On m’a dit que ça me ferait un peu mal, mais j’aime presque ça, là où je sens comme un ongle pointu qui veut arracher absolument une croûte, qui appuie et qui râcle, comme une déchirure… Moi, j’enfoncerais l’aiguille et je me grifferais beaucoup plus fort ! Ça m’arrive, des fois, quand je dors ; ou quand j’offre mes yeux au vague et sors du temps, comme disait Nirina ; quand je me déserte… Papa utilisait souvent ce mot-là. Il rigolait. « J’ai déserté la France », il disait. « Je n’aimais pas ma vie là-bas »… Puis c’est nous qu’il a désertés un jour. J’ai jamais vraiment compris pourquoi. Sa femme officielle est tombée gravement malade, je crois. Ses enfants d’avant nous lui ont demandé de venir l’accompagner jusqu’à la fin. Mais elle dure longtemps, la fin ! Peut-être qu’il s’est mis à ne plus nous aimer, ici ? J’aurais dû faire plus attention, peut-être ; lui faire jurer de revenir… Notre vie ne serait pas devenue aussi… grise !

Bruit de la fraise. Comme le « zon-zon » d’un gros moustique. C’est long, mais oui, cette brûlure, j’aime bien. Elle me fait me sentir comme, je sais pas… Plus en vie… Je ne pensais pas que ça prendrait autant de temps, de peindre cet animal et ces lettres étranges dans moi.

Un peu de sueur sur le front de Gaël. Petites perles d’eau-sel… Un pli sérieux entre ses sourcils. Petits sourires, au coin de ses yeux, quand il les lève un moment et me regarde… Il a trois ans de moins que Neny kely, mais ses rides à elle se sont tellement creusées ! Elle a pas besoin de sourire pour qu’on les voit. Peut-être que les femmes vieillissent plus vite. Ou que c’est d’avoir eu ses trois derniers enfants un vite après l’autre. Ça, papa ; et les pères de mes demi-frères et soeurs qui sont partis, eux aussi, mais qui sont restés de moins en moins longtemps, chacun ; et les deux derniers qui la violençaient quand ils rentraient mamo comme des cochons… Elle a rien dit mais je sais, leur alcool ; et ses cris ; et les coups… C’est ça qui l’a faite vieille plus tôt. Ça et le reste réservé aux femmes. Je l’entends pleurer doucement, la nuit, souvent. Elle croit qu’on dort. Mais je dors jamais profond depuis… oui, ces jours-là ! J’aime pas, mais je fais des cauchemars ; et Ça remonte, des fois, même quand je ne dors pas ! On n’en parle jamais. On a parlé juste une fois, mais le poids sur les épaules de Neny kely est devenu plus lourd, j’ai vu, depuis Ça. Elle se tait, mais je sais qu’elle s’inquiète. Elle a eu peur et a peur encore, que j’arrête le lycée et que mon avenir se ferme comme le sien, qui a saigné, coulé de plus en plus liquide, quand papa est parti… Non, j’arrêterai pas. J’ai redoublé ma troisième, je sais. J’arrivais plus à travailler comme avant. J’avais perdu l’envie, un peu ; ou le courage… Je me suis même dit, plein de fois, que ça ne servait à rien… Mais Nirina m’a fait jurer devant les étoiles-les ancêtres de ne pas finir comme elle… Je sors beaucoup moins, les week-end et les vacances, depuis qu’elle n’est plus là. Depuis Gaël, déjà… Je suis passée en seconde, même très juste ; et je n’arrêterai pas. C’est pour ça aussi, pas juste pour le joli, ce tatouage. Il me fera ne pas oublier, ce dessin du jour où je suis devenue l’autre moi ! Elle me fera me souvenir, toujours, que ce qui fait mal doit rendre plus fort,  cette peinture en moi, de cet animal… Celui du jour où je suis devenue celle qui me déserte ; celle qui avait besoin de chasser, certaines nuits…

Il est gentil, Gaël, de me faire ce cadeau. Je n’aurais jamais pu, autrement. J’en rêvais, depuis longtemps. De plus en plus en avaient, au lycée, sur le bras ou le haut du dos ; ou la nuque. La mode est arrivée il y a un an ou deux, vraiment, je sais plus… ; en même temps que ces portables où on glisse le doigt sur l’écran… Comment, déjà ? Oui, « tactiles ». C’est important, d’être tendance, pas que pour les riches. Tout le monde veut avoir ces choses importées-là. Même quand on n’a pas trop les moyens, il y a les petits « bizinessi », comme il dit Tiana, mon pote de la rue. Des un peu jiolahim-boto-voyous comme lui ou bien des étudiants un peu affairistes, ont des amis qui arrivent à en trouver, je sais pas trop comment, ces derniers téléphones-là, qui font aussi lecteurs Mp3. Ils les revendent cher, mais pas comme dans les boutiques « Orange » officielles ! Des tatoueurs ont ouvert aussi. Plusieurs, à Tana. Mais on peut attraper des maladies, le sida ; et ils sont chers et pas aussi bien faits que les vrais, leurs tatouages. Ceux qui ont les vrais, les vraiment beaux, les ont fait comme des riches. Ils vont à l’hôpital, chez le médecin, dans les magasins et chez les tatoueurs, « en France, à l’étranger ». Nirina s’en était fait « fleurir » un ici, « sur le bras côté cœur », comme elle disait. Je l’avais accompagnée à Behoririka, dans le quartier chinois. Tout au fond d’une boutique bric-à-brac, elle était toute petite, la cabine. Elle sentait mauvais. Je me suis sentie mal, là-bas ! J’ai eu envie de vomir et qu’on parte, mais j’ai rien dit. Il y avait des dessins chinois sur les murs ; et des espèces de gros serpents et des têtes de mort, à côté de sirènes trop colorées et de Jésus au cœur qui saigne. Nirina a choisi une couronne d’épines rouges, comme un bracelet, en haut du bras gauche. Son tatouage a saigné, perles rouge-noir comme les règles sur ses épines, pendant. Même après… Ou bien c’était l’encre ? Il s’est infecté après. Elle est allée plusieurs fois au dispensaire, se faire guérir avec de la pénicilline… Le gros homme l’a sûrement écorchée trop fort, avec son aiguille sale. Tout était crade, là-bas. C’était à côté des W.C ; et ça sentait les cabinets, le moisi, mélangé à de la cuisine gâtée et à la sueur forte et sale de beaucoup d’hommes, quand ils viennent juste de te prendre. Je sais comment il s’est fait payer, le gros type. Je me rappelle son regard vicieux sur elle et moi. Je l’ai vu pincer la fesse de Nirina en arrivant ; et j’ai entendu ces bruits que je connais, quand elle m’a demandé de l’attendre dehors, après… Elle est sortie en mettant un bonbon pecto dans sa bouche. Ça enlève le mauvais goût. C’est peut-être là-bas qu’elle a commencé à attraper…

« Yaïïïe ! ». Ça m’a mordue plus fort, là, à l’intérieur de la cuisse. La chair est tendre comme les fesses des bébés. Gaël a fini le tour des lettres et a commencé à remplir mon cheval qui s’envole. Mon sursaut l’a fait s’arrêter. Il me demande si je veux qu’on fasse une pause, qu’il ouvre la fenêtre ou un peu d’eau ; si ça va, si je n’ai pas trop mal, si… Ses questions me font sourire. Je ne vais pas lui dire. Je veux pas ! Pas à lui ! En fait, je n’ai jamais vraiment tout raconté à personne, sauf à Nirina. A elle, j’ai senti tout de suite que je pouvais dire tout Ça. Vraiment tout. Les mots-les images sont re-sortis tout seuls… Enfin, ceux que j’avais en à peu près clairs, où je me suis rappelée vraiment… Pas comme avec la prof de Français ou l’infirmière du lycée ; ou la psy où l’assistante sociale du Consulat m’a envoyée. Avec eux, les mots sont restés bloqués. Je ne savais pas, je me rappelais plus, juste de cet animal et de mon corps tout secoué et de moi sortie de là. « Je me suis désertée… », je leur ai répété… Ils ont pas compris… Ils ont eu pitié, je sais, mais ils ont cru que je mentais ou que j’avais peur ou voulais protéger quelqu’un, mais c’est pas vrai ! Leur vie à eux est tellement loin. Ils vivent ici mais ils sont vazaha, eux ; ou malagasy, mais riches, c’est pareil que les étrangers. Ils vivent dans un monde tellement… ailleurs ! Je sais, j’écoute les filles du lycée parler, des fois. Des clubs de tennis et de cheval où elles vont le week-end, de leur deuxième maison à Mantasoa, de leurs vacances en France ou « à l’étranger-han », comme il fait, l’accent qui monte, à la fin… ; ou bien des choses que leurs parents ramènent quand ils reviennent de leurs voyages « affaires »… Ces gens-là ont du vola. Ceux qui ont de l’argent, ils ne peuvent pas savoir ! Et puis, qui a envie de savoir vraiment ? Personne ne veut ça, savoir ce que c’est, d’être rien, « tain’akoho-caca  poule », que les gens ne voient pas. Etre pauvre, c’est hurler de toutes ses forces avec de la poussière plein, dans la bouche, le nez, sans personne, même dans les étoiles, là-haut, qui s’arrête, même s’il t’entend et te voit, pour t’aider et que ton mal s’arrête… C’est juste pouvoir se sentir misérable et impuissant total ; et c’est pouvoir rien faire d’autre que ce que le riche te dit, parce que tu n’es rien ; et que tu veux pas disparaître comme ça, sans que ça intéresse personne, sauf Neny kely, que ça rendrait folle, de plus te voir rentrer du tout un jour, sans jamais savoir pourquoi, comment… Comment j’aime pas repenser à Ça ! Ça gonfle et ça s’énerve tellement, dedans ! … Ils étaient gentils, ceux qui ont voulu essayer de m’aider, vraiment. Mais ils ont rien compris. Ils m’ont écouté, mais de loin ; et ils ont rien entendu ! Je sais. Je ressentais comme eux, avant. Pas tout à fait mais presque…

On vivait comme des vazaha, avant ; et je sentais la vie glisser lisse, tellement ! Maman avait les mêmes étoiles qu’elles dans les yeux, quand elle souriait. Et nos rires chantaient pareil, je crois. Papa avait sa retraite de l’armée française et travaillait chez des gens riches, qui le payaient bien. Dans cette vie-là, je ne les voyais pas, les « caca poule » dans les rues-la poussière ! Il y avait un zaza des rues qui dormait sous un carton, pas très-très loin de la maison. Papa avait pitié. « C’est un pauvre orphelin », il me disait. Il lui donnait des petites choses à faire, un peu, tous les jours, pour ne pas le rendre un mendiant, il m’expliquait. Il le payait avec un petit billet et à manger. Il parlait un peu avec lui et lui tapait dans le dos en riant comme il faisait avec mon petit frère et moi. Moi, je regardais la morve qui faisait exprès de ne pas couler, on dirait ; cette espèce de truc jaune vert pas tout à fait liquide, qu’il avait toujours collée sous le nez. Je le trouvais maloto-beurk et je ne disais rien, mais je ne voulais pas toucher ou parler à quelqu’un de si sale. Je savais pas ce que c’était, être mafy ady, avant ; pauvre de tout… La vie m’a appris. Il avait tellement rien ! Ses parents l’avaient abandonné, on nous a dit… Je me souviens, je me suis demandé « pourquoi il s’appelle Tiana, alors ; celui qu’on aime et qu’on veut ? »… Oui, c’est Tiana. Il est devenu mon pote de la rue, depuis. Il traîne à Antaninarenina, dans le coin des boîtes et des hôtels pour Blancs. Il a l’intelligence. Il ne s’est pas fait piquer au couteau dans une bagarre de bandes. Il a sa petite bande de jiolahim-boto-voyous aussi, mais il a réussi à rester loin de ces guerres-là. Il a gardé-lavé-voitures, comme avec papa ; puis il porté-paquets des dames qui  faisaient leur marché pas loin de là ; puis il s’est débrouillé de plein de façons. Il apportait « servissi-adomissil’a », il disait, juste devant les hôtels des touristes, la vanille, les épices ou l’artisanat de marchands qui travaillaient plus loin. Il fait du « bizinessi », maintenant, il se vante un peu, avec un sourire important. « Cigarettes importation ! », on l’entend, devant les boîtes ; et c’est lui, qui apporte l’herbe rasta, le rongony, aux gens des nuits. On rigole, des fois, quand on partage une cigarette ou un joint. On est pareils, lui et moi. On donne de la plante ou de la chair-voyage, contre des billets première classe-fanafody : de l’argent, du « médi-calmant » -on a vu quelque chose comme ça marqué sur des T-shirts de touristes de La  Réunion… Ça nous a fait rire !-, contre la misère ; celle du dehors et celle du dedans !

La psy, la prof, l’infirmière, qui ont voulu m’aider, essayer, après, me sourient, quand elles me croisent au lycée… Mais leur vie à elles a continué pareil, elle. Elles savent pas, ce que c’est, se faire mal pour rien, se gratter le bras ou le ventre ou la cuisse jusqu’à ce que ça saigne, en dormant, parce que les mauvais rêves où Ça revient, le mélange : le trou vide et mahamay, le brûlant dedans ; et se sentir étouffer et mourir ; et devoir sortir, la nuit, parce que Ça revient et revient encore, même quand je ne dors pas, même si je veux pas… Mais l’infirmière, elle a compris… Elle est venue en boîte avec des amis vazaha, un jour, un peu avant Gaël… Les gens du lycée vont danser ailleurs, comme dans le bar chic en dessous du « Carlton ». Presque jamais là où je vais, moi. Ceux de ma classe ne sortent pas encore. Trop jeunes. Je fais attention, surtout. Mais là, j’ai pas pu me retourner et partir assez vite. Elle m’a regardée, le haut, en bas… Ça l’a embêtée, j’ai senti, mon mini-short et tout le maquillage. Elle, elle a compris, je sais, mais elle a fait comme si de rien. Je me suis vite enfuie. J’ai eu honte de moi ; cette moi-là… Le lundi matin, elle est venue dans la cour, au lycée ; et elle m’a demandé de la suivre. Elle m’a donné un verre d’eau à l’infirmerie et m’a dit : « si tu as des soucis, Aïna ; si tu as envie ou besoin de parler, viens me voir. Tu peux me parler, tu sais, entre femmes. Je peux comprendre beaucoup, beaucoup de choses… ». J’ai fait oui de la tête. J’ai dit merci… Mais quoi d’autre ? Je ne peux pas. Les femmes normales peuvent pas comprendre ça ! Même moi, des fois, je ne me comprends pas. C’est comme pour Gaël. Je peux pas lui dire que j’aime avoir mal. Que je faisais les nuits pas que pour l’argent… Oui, on avait besoin, à la maison, encore tellement plus parce que, depuis tout Ça, Neny kely travaillait moins vite… Mais c’est pas ça ! Avant, je faisais pas… ; j’aurais jamais fait ça ! Depuis ces jours-là, je vais chercher la douleur parce que c’est plus fort que moi. Je peux pas m’empêcher. Ça se fait tout seul. C’est moi et… c’est pas moi ! Gaël doit pas savoir ! Il va me trouver bizarre, adala, même si je sais que je ne suis pas folle… Et ça, il ne faut pas ! Il est gentil, Gaël. Il m’emmènera en France, peut-être, s’il m’aime assez pour ça. Peut-être que je reverrai papa, là-bas ? Non, Gaël ne sait pas ce que c’est, faire mal…

J’ai su tout de suite, quand je l’ai vu appuyé tout seul contre le bar, qu’il était pas comme… izy, tous les autres. Il est venu à la discothèque plusieurs fois, avant qu’on parle ; et il est reparti seul, tous les soirs. Je l’ai remarqué dès  qu’il est arrivé, le premier soir. Grand, la peau bronzée soleil, les yeux clairs. La même couleur que moi, j’ai pensé. Il faisait « non » de la tête aux filles qui allaient le voir, à chaque fois. Il était gentil, son sourire, mais loin ; et « non ». Il regardait tout, autour de lui et il avait l’air de pas aimer ce qu’il voyait. « Un marché à viande. Des animaux affamés, les hommes ; et les filles aussi… Je me suis demandé ce que tu pouvais bien faire au milieu de tout ça… », il m’a dit, après nous…

Je n’ai pas chassé comme avec  les autres, Gaël. Quelque chose m’a empêché. Papa avait ce même regard bon-là ! J’ai essayé de m’approcher, plusieurs fois, mais mon cœur cognait fort, dedans, comme ça faisait, quand j’avais quinze ans, quand un beau garçon me regardait. J’ai pas osé. Avec les autres, je me mets bien droite, je lève la tête et je regarde profond dans leurs yeux. Là, j’ai pas pu. Il m’a regardée souvent, cette semaine-là. Mais rien. C’était pas les vacances, mais j’ai fait toutes les nuits, juste pour le revoir. Et je n’avais pas envie qu’il me voit avec les autres. Je me rappelle, j’enlevais mon bras, vite et brutal, quand d’autres venaient poser leur main dessus.  Un soir, j’ai croisé mes doigts fort, dans le dos ; et je suis allée lui demander s’il voulait bien m’offrir un verre. « Juste comme ça », je lui ai dit. « Pour rien d’autre ! »… Il souri, m’a regardée bizarre et m’a montré la place à côté de lui. Il a été étonné, que je parle français presque sans accent. Il en a un, lui, pas fort, mais qui chante un peu. Je lui ai dit que j’allais au lycée, que papa est français. « Moi aussi, je suis métis », il m’a dit. « Ma mère est à moitié antillaise ». Je ne savais pas où c’était, son pays. Il m’a expliqué. Ça a commencé comme ça…

Même Pendant, il fait attention, Gaël. Il n’a pas voulu, du tout, tout un mois, au moins. C’était bizarre. Il venait me chercher au lycée, on se baladait dans Tana. On parlait de lui, de son île où il n’allait pas souvent, de moi, petite. Je lui ai même dit papa, son départ. C’est venu naturel. C’était bien, il m’embrassait, il me caressait les cheveux, les bras, le dos, mais rien. J’ai pensé : « il aime pas les femmes ». Alors, c’est moi qui lui ai demandé. J’ai insisté. Il voulait attendre, de se connaître plus, quelques mois encore, mes dix-huit ans… « Pourquoi faire ? », je lui ai dit. Alors… On ne m’avait jamais fait comme ça, lent, tout doux d’abord, mais bien, avant… J’ai presque eu envie de pleurer tout de suite après, quand il m’a serrée fort, mais tellement douceur ! Lui, c’est jamais comme s’il voulait me trouer gros et profond et me cogner le plus fort possible dedans, comme les autres, tous… J’ai jamais envie de me décoller de moi, quand c’est lui. Il n’a jamais le regard-faim et fou et les yeux qui vont à l’envers, Pendant. Il ne fait jamais comme eux. Les autres ne parlent presque pas, juste pour dire ce qu’ils veulent, demander combien, grogner des mots sales Pendant. Ils m’emmènent dans les petites rues autour des bars ou bien dans leur hôtel, ils soulèvent ma jupe et me mettent le plus de doigts possible dedans ou pas, avant de me rentrer leur bout de dur à l’intérieur. Gaël, des fois, c’est presque trop doux. J’ai envie de lui dire de faire plus fort, plus mal, des fois…  Mais j’ose pas. Il aimerait pas, moi comme ça, je crois… Il n’est pas comme les autres, même si on peut croire qu’il est pire, avec tous les dessins durs qui lui montent jusqu’au cou, comme cette espèce de serpent à écailles qui lui court sur le haut du corps, devant, derrière, plein de couleurs, gros comme le fañany fitu luha que Neny kely me racontait petite, sauf qu’il n’a pas sept têtes ! « C’est du tatouage japonais. Là, c’est un dragon et là, des symboles, dans une scène de vie », il m’a dit, quand je lui ai demandé. C’est là qu’il m’a raconté plus lui : qu’il travaillait chez un tatoueur connu, à Paris, mais qu’il avait « fait un break » pour ses trente ans, qu’il en avait besoin. J’ai pensé « déserter, comme papa… ». Il m’a expliqué qu’il était allé en vacances chez des amis tatoueurs aussi à la Réunion, où les affaires marchaient bien ; et qu’il était venu à Mada sans se donner de date de retour, pour visiter le pays, beau ; et voir si avec son boss, il pouvait venir ouvrir quelque chose ici. Il m’a expliqué pourquoi il avait choisi ces dessins, sur lui. « Le tatouage marque souvent… » Comment, déjà ? « une étape importante, un changement, chez les gens. Beaucoup en font un pour marquer un tournant important dans leur vie », il m’a dit…Puis il m’a expliqué les symboles… « Parler et Ecrire, c’est faire sortir les choses de dedans pour qu’elles brûlent moins et fassent moins mal », m’avait dit la psy en me donnant un carnet que je devais lui montrer à la séance d’après… Mais j’ai pas trouvé quels mots mettre dedans et j’ai arrêté d’y aller…  C’est là ; c’est quand il m’a dit qu’il voyageait toujours avec son matériel, que je me suis souvenue et lui ai raconté Nirina : comment elle a souri triste, en regardant sa couronne d’épines rouges toute neuve. « C’est pour me rappeler que la vie blesse, mais qu’il faut oublier la douleur, se relever et devenir une épine ; et avancer », elle m’a dit… Là, j’ai commencé à penser à comment écrire Ça et sa, ma blessure, dans ma peau… Pour Ça , je n’ai rien dit, bien sûr. Mais, juste Gaël a dû comprendre dans mes yeux que je n’osais pas lui demander, mais que j’aurais aimé en avoir un.

Non, il n’est pas comme eux tous, les autres, qui ne veulent que remuer dans moi, sortir et entrer et sortir encore ; et entrer de plus en plus brutal. Ses mains à lui ne sont jamais mouillées-collantes, sur moi. Elles ne veulent pas presser chaque bout de mon ventre, mes nono, pas très gros pourtant ; et mes fesses, comme on fait du jus de mandarine ou comme avec la pâte crue des gâteaux. Papa était cuisinier-pâtissier… Ils me font rire, les autres ! … Enfin…, ils me faisaient !! ça, c’était avant. J’ai arrêté, depuis Gaël. J’ai refait une… Non, deux nuits, juste ! Mais j’ai arrêté. Je ne veux plus ! Ça m’appelle, des fois, mais je veux arrêter, complètement ! Je veux guérir. J’essaierai, en tout cas. Je sais, maintenant que c’est une sorte de maladie, la faim de mal et de chair. Nirina m’a serré fort le bras, juste avant de partir, en me regardant profond dans les yeux. « Ça  tue, lentement ou plus vite, mais c’est la mort ! », elle m’a répété…

Avant, il y a… non, pas si longtemps, on se racontait izy, eux, les hommes. On imitait leurs grognements ; et leurs mots cassés par la respiration forte, toujours pareils ; et on rigolait, tellement ! « Mampalahelo daholo ! Ils font pitié, tous ! », elle me disait. « Ils veulent être forts et dur et… , mais Mampalahelo daholo, pendant ! », elle répétait. « On dirait des zaza be, des grands bébés, gras ou maigres, pleins de poils ou à la peau lisse de fille, qui veulent tous qu’on leur dise que le bout d’eux, en bas, là, est le plus beau, le plus gros et fort, que c’est bon »…  « Beau. Tsss ! », Nirina se moquait, « … même quand ils ne sont pas coupés et que ça plisse tire-bouchon au bout ? ». Ce qu’on pouvait rire ! « Ils veulent prendre et posséder », elle m’a appris. « … Mais ils, rien ! Il ne sont rien que de la viande, à ce moment-là », elle me disait. « C’est toi qui as le pouvoir de les faire exister, se croire forts, de vrais hommes », elle répétait ; « mais ils ne sont qu’un petit bout de viande pas toujours dur ; et ils n’ont rien. Ils ne se possèdent même pas eux-mêmes ! Regarde bien », elle m’a expliqué… Et c’est vrai ! Malagasy, Blancs, Indo-pakistanais, « Sinoua » ; vieux ou pas, riches ou moins puissants, ils se ressemblent tous, à ce moment-là ! Leur langue qui veut te lécher partout, leurs dents qui veulent mordre et leur bouche qui veut aspirer-avaler la chair jusqu’à la marquer bleu-violet ; leur façon de souffler et s’essouffler, dessus ; et de gémir ou de grogner dessous ; ou quand on les prend dans la main et la bouche… C’est tous les mêmes. « C’est nous, à ce moment-là, qui sommes fortes », Nirina me répétait. Alors, des fois, quand on les revoyait après et qu’ils nous regardaient miavonavona, de haut, on souriait, avec Nirina. Ils avaient oublié, mais on les avait vus, Pendant ; et c’est pas très beau, l’homme, tout nu pour de vrai !

La seule fois où ça ne m’a pas fait rire, où ça m’a vraiment fait de la peine pour un d’eux, c’est quand ce garçon du lycée est venu en boîte, les dernières grandes vacances. Un fils de grande famille. Je le trouvais mignon, mais il aurait jamais voulu de moi, même avant. C’était un grand de terminale. Et puis, ils se mélangent pas trop, ces gens-là. Même avec d’autres Malgaches pas de la Haute comme eux. Pas souvent. Sa copine était métisse, mais la famille de sa mère était puissante. J’étais un peu jalouse, des filles comme elle. J’aurais voulu avoir leurs vêtements, les mêmes éclats de rire ; leur naissance, surtout, dans le mariage et dans l’argent, qui leur donne cette vie-là.

Elle avait la même peau que moi, sa copine. « Mon petit café au lait », papa m’appelait… On aurait pu être sœurs, sauf qu’elle avait les cheveux lisses et les yeux marron miel chaud. Moi, j’ai les cheveux bouclés, marron un peu doré ; et papa m’a donné ses yeux vert bizarre, couleur d’eau de mare, un peu, qui change, vert clair ou un peu plus foncé, ça dépend… « Tu as de la chance », les filles des nuits me disaient. Celles qui viennent de la Côte n’aimaient pas leurs cheveux et passaient des heures à faire des lissages ou à se mettre des faux cheveux comme bouclés au fer… Et celles des Hauts-plateaux voulaient avoir mes fesses de côtière, « rondes et un peu pointues-coup de poing ». « J.Lo kely, petite Jenifer Lopes », elles m’appelaient. Beaucoup avaient ou voulaient des enfants métis, même si elles savaient que les hommes ne resteraient pas… Je sais pas ce que les gens ont avec ça ; pourquoi les fils de cette terre ne s’aiment tellement pas ! Même les filles de famille veulent se marier vazaha et ont des enfants métis. Elles n’ont pas besoin d’Euros-passeport, elles ! … Comme le père de Neny kely était du Sud-Est, de l’ethnie des « liseurs d’étoiles » ; et que grand-mère était de Tana, papa nous répétait : « Votre maman a deux cultures au lieu d’une. Vous, mes chéris, vous en avez trois, au moins ; et le monde grand ouvert devant ! Le Métissage, c’est la richesse ! », il disait. Quelle richesse ? Peut-être que si j’étais, je sais pas… Malagasy ou vazaha ou autre chose, mais riche, on n’aurait jamais osé ; on ne m’aurait jamais traité comme Ça !  Mais, c’est pas la couleur. Pas que ça ! C’est  vola. Il faut avoir de l’argent pour exister, à Madagascar, mais encore plus, si on est demi-blanc. Etre « vazaha de rizière » et pauvre, sur l’île rouge, c’est pire que de ne pas exister du tout !

Je me rappelle plus comment il s’appelle, le jeune fils de riche du lycée. Il m’a regardée étonné, quand il m’a reconnue. Il venait d’avoir son bac, il a bégayé. Puis il m’a demandé si je venais souvent là. Il ne m’avait jamais parlé, avant. Il était toujours avec sa bande. Des Gasy de grande famille, comme lui ; quelques Vazaha et des métis comme sa nana, tous riches. Le lycée français, c’est un peu Madagascar en petit. Les groupes restent entre eux, se mélangent pas trop. Mais il y a mélange, quand l’argent efface la naissance, les différences, les couleurs. Moi, pour ces gens-là, j’étais juste une boursière du consulat. Transparente. Je n’osais pas leur parler. Là, c’était pas pareil. Je l’ai regardé droit dans les yeux et j’ai vu qu’il avait envie. Alors, j’ai pris sa main. Il m’a laissé faire. On est allés dans son 4×4. Il n’arrivait pas. Son bout de chair restait mou et pendait là, comme une pauvre chose. Je l’ai aidé avec la langue et je me suis assise dessus. On est restés toute la nuit. On l’a fait trois fois ou quatre, je sais plus. Il a voulu me dire quelque chose quand je suis sortie de la voiture. J’ai entendu « Merci. Aina, je… », mais je suis vite partie. J’ai pas voulu lui parler d’argent. Nirina m’a engueulée. « Pas d’exception ! C’est la règle ! »… Elle avait raison. Je l’ai revu une fois pendant les vacances. Il a eu l’air mal. Il était avec sa copine, qui m’a regardée-mépris. La pauvre ! Lui, il a fait comme s’il ne me connaissait pas. Il a regardé ailleurs, mais ses yeux sont revenus vers moi plusieurs fois, comme si ça le brûlait. J’ai souri, dedans. C’est eux, les hommes, maintenant, qui brûlent ! Il a eu honte de moi, je sais, mais envie aussi, même elle juste à côté… Il est revenu seul la nuit d’après, une amie de Nirina m’a dit. Il m’a cherchée. J’ai pensé à lui, des fois… Oui, les pauvres ! Mampalaheo, lui, sa copine, les hommes et leurs femmes, esclaves d’un petit bout de chair-queue !

Nirina m’a sauvée, quand elle m’a expliqué tout ça, je crois… Plusieurs fois, j’avais pensé prendre de la nivaquine et me déserter pour de bon. Je me disais, depuis le jour du cheval et les jours d’après ; après les mots de Neny kely, aussi, que j’étais rien, que je valais rien, que papa était parti parce qu’on était maudites. Il m’avait dit que les ancêtres de maman et le Bon Dieu veillaient sur nous. Si c’était vrai, eux et lui n’auraient pas déserté la maison. Lui ne serait pas resté chez sa femme officielle en France ! Si la croix que Neny kely a embrassée quand elle a mis sa chaîne à lui autour de mon cou me protégeait, on m’aurait pas fait Ça ! … Oui, j’ai cru que tout moi, la tête, le cœur, le ventre, tout, allait exploser, tellement Ça brûlait froid dedans, partout ! J’avais envie de me déchirer, tellement j’avais mal. Je voulais m’en aller de là…

Je suis pas retournée au lycée un long moment, après l’hôpital. Ça se mélangeait et ne me quittait pas, les images qui revenaient, le mal et l’envie de hurler pour que Ça, les voix, les bruits, même les odeurs sur moi, me laissent tranquilles ; mais Ça est resté coincé dans ma gorge, longtemps après… Prison-silence, des jours et des jours. Neny kely ne savait pas quoi dire, quoi faire, la pauvre, tellement elle me voyait douleur. Elle tournait, venait me voir pour, juste me caresser la tête en silence. Elle retournait à sa machine. Mais elle ne travaillait pas aussi bien et vite qu’avant… J’ai entendu une cliente se plaindre du retard, la menacer de changer de couturière. Elle a claqué la porte ; et Neny kely est venue me voir. Elle s’est mise à pleurer. À fendre les pierres… « C’est de ma faute ! », elle criait, répétait. « Je n’ai pas voulu te laisser en pension comme ton frère. Je voulais que tu m’aides le soir. Ces kilomètres à pied à faire seule après le bus, tout est à cause de moi ! », elle a hurlé. « Papa voulait qu’on aille en France tous ensemble. J’ai eu peur. Je n’avais jamais pris l’avion. Je n’ai pas voulu quitter la terre de mes parents. Alors lui ai dit de partir, qu’on l’attendrait… Mais sa femme est restée malade longtemps. Il l’avait abandonnée une fois. Il ne pouvait pas la laisser comme ça. Mais je ne sais pas… », elle a respiré et… « je me suis sentie jalouse, seule ; et il y a eu le père de ton premier demi-frère. C’était un accident, une erreur ! », elle a sangloté. « C’était trop tard quand je me suis rendue compte. Quelqu’un lui a dit. C’est à cause de moi qu’il n’est pas revenu ! »… J’ai voulu qu’elle arrête ; rien n’entendre, rien de plus ; mais elle a continué : « Je sais », elle m’a dit. « J’ai vécu Ça aussi. J’avais douze ans. C’était un tonton, un ami de la famille… Ton papa m’a sauvée, mais le mal de la chair en moi est revenu, quand il est parti, plus fort que moi. Je n’ai pas aimé ces hommes, après lui. L’alcool, les coups… Je me suis désertée, ma fille. J’ai laissé la vie nous dériver ! »…

C’est là, je crois, que la fissure qui avait commencé ce jour-là, celui du cheval, a comme explosé. On s’est serrées dans les bras, Neny kely et moi et j’ai fait comme elle, avec moi, petite ; et mes frères et sœurs. Elle pleurait. Moi, je me sentais… rien. Mes bras et ma bouche la berçaient… « Tsy mitomany », je chantais doucement, mécanique… « Ne pleure pas » ; mais c’était vide, dedans et moi, j’étais loin…

Je suis retournée au lycée le lendemain comme une machine. On n’avait pas d’argent, il fallait pas perdre la bourse. C’était un Vendredi et le soir, je sais pas, j’ai pas eu envie de rentrer. « Respirer », je pensais. Lourde, elle était, ma poitrine ! « J’étouffe. Besoin de respirer ! »… Sans trop réfléchir, je suis allée jusqu’en ville à pied. Là, j’ai traîné longtemps. Je me sentais comme avec l’herbe rasta. Je ne sais pas combien de temps j’ai marché. Quand je suis revenue dans moi, il faisait sombre. J’étais pas très loin du coin des bijoutiers, des hôtels et des restaurants-discothèque. C’est là, il y a deux ans, que je suis entrée pour la première fois dans cette boîte de nuit… Les deux hommes à la porte m’ont laissée sans même me regarder. J’ai eu peur qu’ils demandent ma carte d’identité… C’était écrit « interdit aux mineurs non accompagnés ! » sur une pancarte ; et je venais juste d’avoir quinze ans.

J’ai traversé une espèce de terrasse. Il a fait sombre à l’intérieur, chaud ; puis les lumières clignotantes et la musique qui ne passait pas, qui me glissait dessus comme de l’eau sur la feuille de songe. Mes yeux n’arrivaient pas à se détacher du podium. Dessus, il y avait une fille au visage d’enfant en combinaison moulée rouge. Elle dansait comme dans les clips ragga. Il y avait beaucoup d’hommes, autour de la piste. Ils avaient l’air… comme moi : sous le pouvoir-hypnose, des cuisses fines que la danseuse écartait-resserrait en bougeant-joli-rythme, ses petites fesses rondes… J’ai regardé, longtemps. Là, j’ai senti une main sur mon bras. J’ai vu un beau corps, mais long et musclé, j’ai trouvé, pour une fille. Son joli visage était très maquillé, avec des cheveux qui frisaient tout autour ; et il y avait ce grand foulard  rouge comme son gloss, sur son cou et ses épaules, avec des plumes dessus. « Qu’est-ce que tu viens perdre ou chercher ici, au milieu des crocodiles, petite sœur ? », elle m’a demandé. C’était Nirina. « Je suis venue pour les hommes ! », je lui ai dit, un peu après, au bar, quand j’ai réussi à parler. Les mots sont sortis tout seuls, comme s’ils savaient qu’ils pouvaient. C’est là que je lui ai tout raconté. Elle a écouté en silence, a hoché la tête plusieurs fois. Elle a souri triste, tapoté ma joue et a voulu me payer le taxi pour que je retourne à la maison. « Tu es un bébé perdu », elle m’a dit. « Il n’y a pas de marche arrière, quand tu commences. C’est comme la drogue », elle a continué. « Tu es jeune, perdue. Ici, tu peux te perdre encore plus. Rentre chez toi ! », elle a répété. J’ai secoué la tête. J’ai insisté…  Nirina est devenue ma Neny kely des nuits ; ma meilleure -mais j’en avais aucune autre-, ma seule amie.

Oui, elle m’a sauvé la vie. Elle m’a expliqué les règles de ce monde-là, les prix ; mais surtout comment aller chercher l’homme et comment tout diriger Pendant. « Contrôle », elle m’a dit : « Le prendre, le garder et ne jamais le perdre ». J’ai rougi ou blêmi, je crois… « Ne t’inquiète pas », elle a continué. « Je t’apprendrai. Un fois et ça viendra tout seul ».

Depuis elle et ses mots, je me savais Force. C’est bizarre, je sais, mais j’aimais, là, les sentir me secouer. C’est moi qui décidais. J’allais les chercher et ils me payaient, pour ça, pour la moi qu’on avait mise à genoux, pliée-courbée dans la poussière. C’est moi qui décidais, de bouger mécanique ou pas, de laisser leurs mains coller et frotter ma peau plus rapide ; et d’accepter ou non, leur bout dur se faire le chemin entre mes cuisses et m’ouvrir… Je les laissais. Et même, j’aimais ça, quand ils me bloquaient les épaules ou les mains en serrant fort, pour aller et venir encore et plus vite. Des fois, j’avais des marques le lendemain… « La peau métisse marque facile », me disait Nirina, en passant du vinaigre dessus. Quand il y en avait qui parlaient, je gémissais, je répondais « Mmmmhh » comme Nirina m’avait montré. « Ça leur fait plaisir comme des zaza kely à qui on vient de donner le lait », elle m’avait dit ; et là, moi, dedans, j’avais… ma paix ! Ils ne savaient pas. Ils ne voyaient pas que, quand ça cognait trop dedans, devant ou derrière, quand je n’aimais plus la douleur, je m’en allais. J’aimais quand le mal au corps faisait se fermer une porte, dans moi. Je me laissais et je les laissais loin, dehors. C’est ce jour-là, celui du cheval, que je me suis désertée pour la première fois, Pendant. Depuis, je sais comment faire. Je repars quand je veux ; des fois, même quand je ne veux pas. Je ferme les yeux ou pas et je me sépare en deux ; et je flotte juste à côté ou dessus, puis loin. J’ai comme un nuage dans la tête, un peu comme la fumée-rongony m’envole, mais ça ne m’emmène pas pareil. L’herbe me rend gaie. Là, je ne ris pas. Juste, je ne suis plus lourde douleur, dedans. Je flotte. Je sens et j’entends tout, je suis là, mais je ne reste pas là tout entière… Aller chasser les hommes et, Pendant, c’est comme si, je ne sais pas. Les mots, je les trouve pas. Le mal au corps me fait me sentir… plus forte que lui ; et plus forte que moi, je crois ; et, vraiment, encore plus… ; ou non, pas plus. Juste « vivante »… C’est quelque chose comme ça…

Le « zon-zon » s’est arrêté. Douce, la main de Gaël sur ma joue. « On fait une pause, ma puce », il me dit… Des bouffées de chaud me montent au visage. Ça brûle un peu moins, le tatouage, quand il me passe de la vaseline dessus avant d’enlever ses gants. J’aime bien : tous les dessins, dans le cheval, sont remplis d’encre. Il reste les ailes et les lettres. On l’a dessiné ensemble. Je lui ai expliqué le cheval sur le côté d’une voiture, sans rien dire du reste. Il a cherché la marque sur son ordinateur. J’ai pas aimé, revoir ce dessin ! Alors, j’ai pensé à ce cheval à ailes que la prof de Français nous avait raconté ; qu’un dieu grec a transformé en ensemble d’étoiles… « Pégase », a souri Gaël, en prenant du papier. « Tu veux du tribal ou des couleurs ? » Il m’a demandé. J’ai pensé aux épines pliées, sur le bras de Nirina… Elle restera écrite, un peu, dans moi, je me suis dit. J’ai montré à Gaël ce que je voulais, dans le cheval et les ailes, puis AINA, tout droit, sur le « côté cœur » du reste. C’est venu comme ça… « Tu as peur de ne plus te souvenir un jour de qui tu es ? », il m’a demandé. J’ai retenu ma respiration. « Il sait », je me suis dit. Il m’a déjà demandé plusieurs fois de quoi parlent mes cauchemars. « Je ne me rappelle pas », je lui réponds, chaque fois. Je ne veux pas qu’il sache, qu’il me trouve sale. Ce jour-là m’a rendue sale… J’ai eu peur d’avoir dit quelque chose dans mon sommeil ou qu’il lise dans ma tête… mais il a souri en passant sa main sur ma joue. « Il est beau, ton prénom », il m’a dit. « C’est précieux, AINA, “la vie” ». Là, j’ai senti une boule dans ma gorge. Mes yeux ont commencé à piquer, comme maintenant. Je regarde ma cuisse, le dessin dessus. J’aime bien. Je ne veux pas pleurer. Je ne pleure plus depuis longtemps. Oui, ça fait « longtemps », ce jour-là. Pleurer, crier aigu et cassé, appeler : je n’arrivais plus à m’arrêter, je me rappelle, juste après. Je sais que je me suis griffé le visage et frappé la poitrine en pleurant. Mes joues piquaient. Je sentais salé dans ma bouche… Il faisait chaud, lourd, dans ce bus !

La journée avait été longue. J’étais fatiguée. Encore deux kilomètres, la piste, à pied, j’ai pensé. Pas envie. J’aurais voulu la maison d’avant, pas si loin. Le confort, pas ces deux pièces grises où on respire à peine, pendant la saison des pluies… Je suis descendue du bus. Je marchais depuis un moment quand j’ai entendu le bruit, un moteur ; et le klaxon, derrière moi. C’était un gros 4X4 gris. Je me suis poussée, mais la voiture n’a pas dépassé. C’est comme si elle me suivait. J’ai entendu des voix d’hommes, plusieurs, je me rappelle. Mon prénom, plusieurs fois… Puis tout se brouille. La voiture qui s’est arrêtée, toute la poussière que les roues ont fait remonter… Puis la violence de la main d’homme, grande, autour de mon poignet ! Oui, ils étaient quatre. Ils ont fait comme une ronde. Ils m’ont entourée. Ils m’ont poussée comme à colin-maillard, l’un vers l’autre, puis l’autre, et encore l’autre… La tête qui s’est mise à me tourner. J’ai senti leur odeur, l’alcool. J’ai eu envie de vomir. Ensuite, ils m’ont traînée. Il y avait une espèce de petit sentier, à droite du chemin de terre. Je me suis sentie… Oui, ils m’ont traînée là. Ils m’ont poussée par terre. Je suis tombée, sur le dos, je me souviens. Ça m’a bloqué la respiration, comme un grand choc, un coup dans la poitrine ; et j’ai essayé de me relever… Il y avait ce mur de terre, vieux, presque lisse, à droite ; et au bout du sentier, la voiture… Il y avait un cheval, sur le côté, la carrosserie, derrière. LE cheval ! Puis la sensation d’étouffer. J’ai crié, je sais… On m’a mis la main sur la bouche. Ça m’empêchait de respirer. En même temps, j’ai senti plusieurs mains sur moi. Une qui tirait pour soulever mon t-shirt. Une autre qui écrasait mes nono, puis sur mon ventre, comme si c’était, je sais pas, de la pâte à modeler. J’ai senti… après ou en même temps, qu’on tirait, pour descendre mon jean. J’ai essayé de secouer mes jambes, mais ils étaient lourds ; et nombreux. Ils m’ont bloquée. J’ai senti mes cuisses écartées, puis… ce gros couteau qui me rentrait dedans ; comme une scie à l’intérieur : LA brûlure… J’ai essayé de mordre, mais la main sur ma bouche a pressé plus fort. J’ai entendu crier « tais toi ! Sinon… » Alors, il y a eu comme du métal en pointe contre ma gorge. « On va faire ce qu’on veut. Tu vas te taire ! », ils m’ont dit, sinon ma mère, ma petite sœur, qu’ils allaient leur faire pareil, devant moi ! Je me souviens encore des allers et retours de la scie dedans, encore ; puis d’un grognement d’animal ; et puis lourd, le poids sur moi. Il y a eu … Brûlure liquide dedans. Je vais mourir, je me suis dit. J’ai cru un moment que c’était fini, mais chacun des hommes avait sa scie à lui… La douleur qui vrille, le ventre qui explose… La scie dedans qui recommence, encore… Puis… Là, c’est là, que mon esprit s’est fissuré… Quand j’arrivais à soulever un peu la tête, -« tendre le cou ! », je me disais- ; je voyais de loin la voiture ; et puis ce cheval dessus. Je sais pas pourquoi, j’ai fixé le cheval… Et je me suis désertée, là ! Je sais que ça a continué longtemps ; qu’on a mis le corps à genoux, puis à quatre pattes… Lourd, tout le poids sur les poignets… Je suis tombée. Goût de terre dans ma bouche. Puis je me suis évanouie, je crois. Quand je suis revenue, les portières claquaient. On m’a lancé ma veste de jean. Il y a eu des rires, je sais plus…

La voiture est repartie et, juste, j’ai fixé le cheval. C’est là, que je me suis mise à hurler. J’ai ramassé mes vêtements sales, puis j’ai pleuré, hurlé, sur le bord de la route : la grande. Je m’étais rhabillée comme je pouvais pour y aller, mécanique… Une bicyclette est passée, un taxi, puis une autre voiture… Ils ont continué. Ils m’ont laissée là. Je suis rentrée à la maison en boîtant. Neny kely travaillait encore. Il était tard. Elle était inquiète. Je me suis faite engueulée. Elle s’est arrêtée en me regardant et… Vite, je lui ai dit que j’avais rencontré des pickpockets qui avaient essayé de voler mon sac du lycée, les livres dedans… Je me suis dépêchée d’aller laver le sale, le sang, dans la salle de bain derrière, dans une grande cuvette. J’ai frotté, frotté… Puis je me suis écroulée à côté de mes frères… Ensuite, il y a eu le réveil, le lendemain. Neny a voulu me parler. J’ai dit que j’étais en retard… Je suis retournée au lycée comme si rien ne s’était passé… Ces jours-là, j’ai été comme sur une espèce de nuage. Loin, coton, les bruits autour ! Il y a eu la prof qui a remarqué que je marchais bizarrement. « En canard », elle a dit. Je boîtais un peu. Les marques sur mes poignets, elle a constaté, l’infirmière, même si je tirais sur ma manche… Le reste a été comme un tourbillon : Neny kely convoquée, le médecin, qui a entré son appareil en fer pour écarter là où je saignais et brûlais encore ; et m’a donné des antibiotiques ; puis l’assistante sociale, les policiers… J’ai été incapable de répondre autre chose que « voiture grise, cheval… », les images que je voyais en rêve. « Plusieurs hommes », je disais. « Le cheval », je répétais…

Ils n’ont jamais recommencé, ceux qui ont fait ça. Je n’ai jamais su qui c’était. J’avais effacé toutes les traces, les empreintes, en rentrant, le soir, quand je me suis lavée. Mais même. C’était un gros 4X4. Des hommes qui avaient les moyens et j’avais juste ma parole. Ça n’aurait rien donné, la police. Ça n’a rien donné… « Tsisy preuves suffisantes ! », on m’a dit. Là, les cauchemars ont commencé, où j’étais violée par des hommes, plusieurs, à la même tête de cheval… Il m’a semblé me souvenir de quelque chose, un soir, en boîte. Un rire ; j’avais entendu un de ces rires ! Je l’ai dit à Nirina et lui ai montré un groupe, de dos. « Viens ! », elle m’a dit, en m’entraînant dans la musique, le bruit, la nuit, comme si mon esprit s’embrouillait… Mais il y a eu comme un clin d’œil, dans son sourire, quelques jours plus tard, quand elle m’a parlé, avec son air de rien, de « quatre hommes agressés en pleine nuit, dans un 4X4 ». « C’est la crise », elle m’a dit. « La misère qui monte ! ». On les avait suivi, il paraît, une bande organisée. On leur a tout volé, portables, montres, vêtements… « La voiture a été entièrement démontée, sûrement pour être revendue en pièces détachées », Nirina a continué. « Ils s’en sont bien sortis. Mais ils les ont pas mal amochés, ceux qui leur ont fait ça. Il faisait nuit. Les voyous étaient plusieurs », elle m’a répété. « Les hommes sont à l’hôpital et ne veulent pas porter plainte », elle a insisté. « Ils sont en état de choc et n’ont pas reconnu leurs agresseurs ». Et là, non, je n’ai pas rêvé : elle a grand, grand-souri. Elle ; ou plutôt il, me manque tellement !

Oui, Nirina, c’était « il » ; et je n’ai rien vu, toutes ces nuits. Elle avait les traits fins de sa mère chinoise et était si douceur, si féminine ! Je me suis souvent dit que sa voix était grave, un peu rauque, mais non, je n’avais pas deviné. Ni ça, ni le reste. Pudeur… Depuis Gaël, je suis de moins en moins, puis plus du tout, retournée me perdre –ou me re-trouver, qui sait ?- dans « les nuits » de Tana. On s’est appelées, beaucoup, avec Nirina, puis le temps, mes cours, la seconde à ne pas doubler, cette fois… Et je l’ai sentie prendre de la distance, doucement, puis de plus en plus. Lointaine, au bout du fil ; et de plus en plus brève. Ça m’a fait de la peine… Quand je n’ai plus eu de nouvelles du tout, je me suis réellement inquiétée. Son portable était sur répondeur et chez elle sonnait dans le vide. Je suis passée plusieurs fois, personne… Elle a peut-être rejoint son ami officiel, j’ai pensé. J’ai souri en la revoyant me dire, la première nuit, « Je ne suis pas fidèle ; et le devenir, je n’y tiens pas pas ! », avec ce grand geste du bras et sa voix perchée si haut… Puis qu’elle s’était peut-être trouvé un autre passeport et envolée pour ailleurs… Mais au fond, quelque chose me disait… Je ne sais pas, je sentais… Elle a appelé il y a plusieurs mois. J’ai l’impression que c’était hier… Terne, grise, abîmée, la voix, au bout du fil… La Nirina venue au rendez-vous avait les cheveux, les ongles courts, aucun maquillage. Elle était habillée sobre, en homme. Et c’est un homme pâle, maigre, fatigué, qui m’a fait un clin d’œil en me demandant si je ne le savais pas, au fond. Puis il m’a rappelé nous, nos rires en éclats, la folie des nuits et sa loterie… ; qu’il ne se protégeait pas, qu’il n’aimait pas ça, même s’il me répétait de toujours le faire. « J’ai joué et j’ai perdu ! », il a souri, tristement, juste avant de m’apprendre le sida qui couvait, depuis longtemps ; et commençait à le ronger vraiment… Depuis quand ? Il ne savait pas… Son ami avait rompu en l’apprenant, bien sûr… « Vivres et robinet coupés, poil au nez ! », il m’a dit, en essayant de plaisanter… Ça ne m’a pas fait rire, mais j’ai lu dans ses yeux que ma douleur ou ma pitié, il n’aurait pas supporté. Alors, j’ai essayé. Il a squatté ici et là, puis l’hôpital, il m’a dit ; l’absence de soins, d’argent… J’ai proposé… « Non ! Je suis venue te dire au revoir, petite soeur. Respecte ça. Je rentre chez les miens demain matin, première heure ! », il a répondu, fermement. On a parlé longuement, passé l’après-midi ensemble et, juste avant de partir, il m’a fait un dernier clin d’oeil… « Je veux revoir mes parents, avant… », il m’a dit. « J’ai besoin de retourner à ma terre. Après, il sera temps, maladie ou plus tôt, de partir debout… ». » il a souri : « Tu sais ?  de… me déserter pour de bon, direction les étoiles »…

Brûlure, l’aiguille qui écorche doucement ma peau… Gaël a presque terminé… Il en est aux dernières lignes de Masoandro, mon œil du jour, que je lui ai demandé, bien au-dessus de mon cheval. Il pense que c’est pour fêter mon bac, ce grand soleil tribal. Je ne lui dis rien, pas encore… « Ventre de lune bientôt », sourirait Nirina… C’est une petite fille. Elle s’appellera Noro, ma Lumière.

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