Who Slashed Celanire's Throat? by Maryse Conde

Author:Maryse Conde
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2004-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

For in fact the sun had risen, brightening the sky, a patch of crumpled cloth above the eternally muddy sea. Papa Doc had needed the entire night to unravel his sad story. Since the Galibi woman had already left to sell her wares at the market he set about heating up some watery coffee, which he poured out equally into tin mugs. The two men dunked their pieces of cassava, drank, and ate, both locked in identical thoughts. How amazing life is! There they were, side by side, sharing the same fate, victims of the same Celanire! Each of them had been born and had lived on opposite sides of the world, one in the Americas, the other in deepest Africa. Each of them had been separated by so many lands, oceans, and mountains! Did it mean they were going to die together? What nature of spirit was driving their common enemy? Why was she bent on doing evil from sunrise to sunset, from north to south? What caused her rage? What did she want to destroy in the world? Reluctantly, Hakim set off for Monsieur Thénia’s house. Out of the two, he was perhaps the more shaken. In dismay he realized he wouldn’t be able to tell his story before nightfall, and he felt something he had not felt for a very long time. Certainly not since he had been in Cayenne, where he lived as if in a daze. In fact he got the impression he had been born in this patch of forest and that the memory of what he had left behind had been erased from his mind. Had he ever been anything else but one of life’s rejects, thrown into the last circle of hell? That morning, his memory returned, and with it, the memory of the terrible injustice he had been a victim of. Abandoned by his father. Spurned by his family. Rejected by society. But suddenly another thought crossed his mind, interrupting his litany of woes. What if, like Papa Doc, he was paying for a crime unbeknown to him? Hakim had seldom thought of himself as a pervert. Fondling Bokar had not left him with a feeling of guilt. On the contrary, it had given two lonely, tortured teenagers a taste of happiness. Simply the death of his beloved had convinced him that because of something abnormal about him he was never meant to be happy. For the first time, he realized he was a degenerate who deserved the most terrible punishment.

In the past the promontory at Saint-François was known for its unhealthy vapors, rising up from the white and black mangrove trees soaking in the brackish, snake-infested waters, and capable of causing deadly diseases. Then some convicts had cleaned up the area and built dwellings for the notability. Monsieur Thénia’s house was the most remarkable of them all. As a safeguard against the risk of fire, the governor of the bank had shipped a metal framework from Bordeaux. The building’s slender columns and its numerous apertures gave it an impression of airiness.

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