There’s a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem

Author:Gaëlle Bélem
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Gaelle Belem, Reunion, Saint-Denis, Indian Ocean, Creoleness, Sainte-Marie, 1980s, French colonialism, slavery, cafre la soie, cafrine, Solpak, Grand Raid, Salazie, Laetitia Saint-Loubert, Karen Fleetwood, Grand Prix du Roman Metis, Prix Andre Dubreuil du Premier Roman, Kevin Curran, Wendy Erskine, Michelle Gallen, Frank Wynne
Publisher: Bullaun Press
Published: 2024-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

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At this stage, I had the good idea of teaming up with the daughter of one of our new neighbours. As a present for my ninth birthday, she gave me her personal copy of the Gospels and a glass of grenadine. As I had read and reread my supply of books, I was consumed with passion for this ream of thin paper and fervently recited this passionate defence of the poor in spirit, the famished and the persecuted Palestinians. You might think it had been written for the Dessaintes and me. I could never have imagined the reaction of my parents when they heard the ascent to Calvary. Although I didn’t understand three quarters of what I was reading, they experienced a supreme revelation. It was the perfect new gobbledygook to relieve the flatness of their existence. Before I had had time to finish the book, they had rustled up two enormous and mysterious bibles from God knows where. Sometimes they used them as armrests, sometimes as a hobby. And, not content with drinking from the great cup of sacred words on their own, they began studying the New Testament every week with a couple of Holy Joes.

For some years, the poorest neighbourhoods had been swarming with these tie-wearing missionaries. They waylaid underage mothers, the unemployed and others in need of a crutch, spouting verses that announced either the advent of paradise or the imminence of the world’s end, depending on their mood at the time and the degree of sympathy that their audience inspired in them. Their victims, struck dumb through incomprehension, were rarely hostile. So one Saturday morning, a pair of these believers appeared at our gate, a bible under one arm and a child in the other. While those around the Dessaintes considered them to be a couple of nobodies governed by the whims of social services – though they didn’t say it aloud as they were in the same boat themselves – these people had come to prove, with the support of a chapter of the Gospels, that a god existed who was foolhardy and thoughtless enough to love them, to ascribe them some value and to pardon all their faults. Moreover, said god seemed to be very partial to large-scale massacres – to the point of contemplating committing an umpteenth one very shortly. Needless to say, my two great lovers of apocalyptic films plunged headlong into these spectacular stories and read them with the same joyful solemnity that they put into reading the week’s major short news items. The good old scraps and machete blows onscreen were now supplemented by the biblical promise of imminent seraphic combat with swords, hailstone showers, fireballs and horsemen straight out of outer space. To tell the truth, all this came at an opportune moment. For some time, the horror that played out in full each evening in the sitting room had taken on a liturgical tone of such predictability that the two Dessaintes had been stricken with boredom. Now their dreams were peopled by new stories, just as bloody but brand new.

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