The Restless by Gerty Dambury

Author:Gerty Dambury
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781936932078
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 2017-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

The sun had started to set while we were talking; a shadow was closing in on us. The flamboyant tree we were standing under had stopped complaining about the heat, no more regular sharp little cracking noises. And the bats were about to start their anarchic flying overhead. A few voices had already called out to me as they passed: “How you doin’, Henri!”

“Hey, Plumain.”

Men were leading their cows back. “Hey, Henri.”

“Hey, Girard!”

Knee-high boots, clothes stained with banana sap, huge hats, rubber gloves, and sharp knives had all finished their day’s work and were moving slowly away from us. Walking with ease, taking big determined steps.

I asked, “What do we do now?”

“I want Colette to stay with you tonight and all weekend, if need be.”

She wouldn’t go along with this; he was the one who needed protection. I didn’t exactly feel like spending my evening listening to increasingly crazy stories. I knew all the bad aspects of my brother: his penchant for useless provocation, his ability to piss off every kind of imaginable authority, his stubbornness and fury—angering even the people in the various political groups he frequented, without missing a meeting. I would have happily welcomed Colette into my home, but she was having none of it. There was no way she’d leave him by himself when she could help keep him from encountering an armed policeman in some dark alley.

My brother mumbled, “All this way for nothing.”

“That’s not true,” she answered, smiling.

I invited them up to the house for a drink, but she avoided answering. She whispered to me later, when I leaned into the car to say goodbye, “If we’d gone into your house, he’d convince you to keep me there, and I don’t want him to leave for La Pointe alone. I’m really worried, you know.”

When they left for La Pointe, I started to gauge how dangerous it was, especially for him. I’d heard from friends that that Friday was going to be messy, and I figured he’d for sure be one of the first persons the authorities would go after.

Our mother was especially worried about him, and I was too. One of Colette and Julien’s neighbors, whose balcony looked onto their inner courtyard, told me about his tirades against the government. His provocations as well.

Those inner courtyards are the best thing about Pointe-à-Pitre. They’re a little like a port: you land there after a long day, half-dead from life in the noisy and dirty city, sit down in the cool shade underneath a tree, and then you have a little rum or some ice-cold lemon soda with anisette liqueur—or both, the fiery rum followed by the pleasure of an icy drink—and watch the sun hurry on down. People who don’t have a courtyard sit on their stoops or on a bench they’ve brought out front, or on a rocking chair installed like a sentinel in front of their door. Some have folding chairs they take out only to fold them up again and store them behind the door.

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