Eve Out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi Read Free Book Online Page A

Of course, the day they open the door, they won’t understand anything, they won’t know what’s being hammered and chiseled here. But having done that reassures me. I’ve performed that act. I don’t know what it’s worth, but I’ve done something. I haven’t just stayed here and faded away into death. I’m inscribing myself, rather than erasing myself. I’ve built a bridge with a child who’s also angry at heart, even if he’ll never know me. He tells me:
    The star wept rose into the heart of your ears, an infinity of white rolled between your nape and hips and man bled black onto your sovereign side .
    I’m young; take my hand .
    I love a girl whose body has been crushed. But the day I’m in her, I’ll wipe all the marks off her body; she’ll be new.
    I’m young; I’m in love.
    The sun’s gotten into my body. It’s the core of what I’m writing. A portrait of Eve in the echoes of my room. Sentences that describe her, that draw her out. I’m in love.
    I believe in possibilities. Yes, even here. Even hurtling down our slopes. A word described her for me that day when we raced downward on bikes from the Virgin Mary. That day, right when she told me she would never say I love you, I saw the word that described her, a word at once resonant and foreign in this place: grace. If this grace is part of my possibilities, I thought, I can do anything.
    Port Louis looks at me differently. I believed dark, ugly Port Louis, disfigured by grotesque shapes, insurmountable in its waves of humankind, was beckoning to me. Its black pigeons dotting every roof agreed to decipher its moods for me. The city told me: if there are moments like this one and faces like your own, then, you have to love me, if only for this.
    I know this, that I’m only a simulacrum. But a drop of blue ink has gotten into me. I transform it into a black child’s ink, lacerating the walls. This story you’re reading on my walls, its words will only disappear when the buildings born out of the cyclones’ waters have disappeared.
    Sometimes, when the wind comes from Signal Mountain, when I see the fires burning on its slopes, the scrub fires, the trash fires,I tell myself that under all that is beauty, even here, and something is sizzling, and a fire is sparking in the underbrush of my own mind.
    I forget what I am, where I come from. The wind from the mountain erases the name Troumaron from my lips and from my memory.
    I want to leave and I want to stay. Between the two, I do not move. But my body cannot stop wandering over our pool of dreams, at Eve’s mercy.

CLÉLIO
    The factory smells like engine grease, decaying waste, abandoned sandals, wasted bodies. Sometimes I come here all alone so I can see how life tells lies to the poor. Does me good. My mother, when she got a job here, she thought everything had changed. She took her first paycheck and bought me Nike shoes, she thought that would make me happy, she never saw that I was sick of Nikes, that we had all these tricks for getting these pointless things, I didn’t need things, I needed a guide, I needed purpose.
    After that, she changed, from one week to the next. The factory grew and got deep into our lives. My mother started bringing me defective sweaters. If I see another Ralph Lauren sweater with one sleeve shorter than the other I’ll cut it up and stuff it down the mouth of this man who made lopsided beings of us. But for us, it’s not sleeves. It’s arms, or legs, or eyes that are uneven. We’re defective humans.
    She got smaller, grayer. She got less and less sunlight. At the end of the day, when she came back in, she was like a blurred copy of herself. Something had started rubbing away at her features. My father sat in a chair waiting for her. He spent his day waiting for her, like an old idiot, his eyes like a lost kid’s, but all he could say when she got home was, Did