“We were watching you. What tipped us off was that you had Coca-Cola machines. You can’t buy them. Only the Coca-Cola Company owns them. You’re not the Coca-Cola Company, are you?”
THE BLUE HILL BY RODNEY SAINT-ÉLOI
Ozanana
Translated by Nicole Ball
The stench of sulfur mixes with the reeking blue toxic trash that was dumped on the hill that January day. It has been named “the blue hill” ever since. Everyone is afraid to say who is responsible for this open gash in the earth that poisons everything and will, eventually, eat up the legs of children and rot the roots of plants, cause the dogs, the flies, and the fish to disappear. Even the mosquitoes won’t survive.
Rumor has it that the garbage comes from a friendly country that has an overload of chemical refuse and needs to find generous neighbors who can house it for them. So far from God indeed. Proximity is sometimes a curse. That’s how a dump like this came into our backyard. Except that at City Hall, under the pretext of us being the twin city of God-knows-where, they pocketed the cash that was exchanged for this so-called favor. On top of that, the military, the ministers, and the honorable members of the government have all made tons of money.
One fine Monday, at exactly noon, the ship, sailing under the friendly neighbor’s flag, reached the harbor. The kids swam close to it, performed amazing pirouettes and somersaults, acrobatics meant to impress cruise ship tourists in the hope that the visitors would enthusiastically throw their pennies into the water. In no time at all, instead of being filled with generous tourists, the wharf was under military watch. The ship was full of guards with the faces of unleashed and trained dogs eager to stuff themselves with nigger meat. You could see battle dress, golden flashers, and a thousand boots of the Special Forces. On their heads were green berets and on their cleanshaven faces were plastered a kind of cynical seriousness, a conquering look of What do I care about petty local squabbles? They spoke sternly into their walkie-talkies, surely of matters of state. The seaside was promptly evacuated, with a huge deployment of troop vehicles whose sirens and tinted windows scared the locals. Trucks transported hundreds of suitcases up the hill. Shops and businesses were forced to close their doors. The chemical trash-dumping troops went around every street, every neighborhood, showing off their machine guns at every window. They imposed a curfew without warning. It was just a matter of military strategy, letting people know that they had taken over the city. So every mouth stayed quiet. Local men were rounded up and forced to work day and night for a whole week to burrow everything into the blue hill.
That blue dirt didn’t look like the sky, the locals joked.
Soon, many residents became covered with blue pustules, large blue stinking marks. Lacerations invaded bodies. Slashes marked their faces. Gashes on their bellies.
Yes, it’s the blue disease, brought to us by the fatra pwazon, they said. Forced to remain silent, the few doctors in the area couldn’t give a name to that blue body-and-mind disease which was spreading as quickly as mad grass. They say it’s a matter of national security, and that’s why it’s not being mentioned in the papers or on the radio.
Detective Simidor, whose local police duties had been immediately neutered by the invasion, refused to accept the curfew. Even though his massive, muscular physique hadn’t been affected, he immediately began to feel his mind slipping. For one thing, he could not remember any specific moments from his past. Had he always been a bachelor locked up in a one-room house by the blue hill? Did he have a wife, children, who somehow never made it home? Was he a brother? An uncle? A nephew? Did he have a living mother? A father?
He hadn’t slept since the blue invasion began. All he could think about was what he knew had once been a city- his city?-and the blue hill. How can the city defend itself, he wondered, when the people have barricaded themselves inside their homes, becoming accomplices of their own confinement, while peeking from behind their windows at the invading blue trash army? Watching the trucks full of blue chemicals being dumped on the hill by his countrymen, he felt like shouting out that the plot must not succeed. But it was already too late. He wanted to loudly preach to everyone, hammering the truth into them. Our cowardice is our suicide, he wanted to say. Our silence is our coffin. It seemed, however, that he would have to pursue this job of enlightening people singlehandedly. The next day he would go into the streets and declare to whoever was willing to listen that the ground was soiled and that everything had been contaminated, that they would have to yell to be heard, that they would have to move heaven and earth to shed light onto the graveyard the country has become.
Life on your knees is no life at all, he would say. Pito nou lèd nou la. What was the point of this horrible, stupid charade, clinging to the remnants of day-to-day existence, an absurd life, as absurd as the bright spots that once in a while made you think that light was awaiting us at the end of the tunnel?
Dragons now routinely walk on the sea, he would tell them. They unwrap their wings, their mouths of fire. In the mythical world from which these invaders and their blue trash have come, giant creatures swallow entire schools of flying fish and set ablaze incandescent beams that wipe shores clean. Millions of gallons of oil spew out of the core of the earth, from deep beneath the sea. A sign of the times: the end of the world is striding in. At the first ring of the church bells, the residents must not scurry off and seep into burrows under the sand like spider crabs, hiding their faces under seaweed flowers of transparent green.
Some of them, paralyzed with fear, are still hiding under their beds, reciting their rosaries, purring strange words in strange languages: God of Mercy, may our prayers be answered! And there are those who are stronger and pick things up: this one a chair, that one a mattress, that other one a bucket, and in the daytime, before the next curfew, they follow the path to the hills to take shelter on the mountainside. But what is the point? Despair is the only certainty here. If it doesn’t kill you, they say, it will strengthen your veins, your muscles. Despair sticks to your skin; it’s your sweat, and the air you breathe. Despair is second nature from which everyone draws the joy of laughter and resilience together, so we can go peacefully to cockfights, bet on the winning numbers at the lotto, and pretend that the crystal ball of luck is turning smoothly-but doom, like a valiant soldier, always comes hounding.
Apocalypse, Apocalypse, he would tell them. In the last days, dogs will not recognize bones. Sons will not recognize their mothers. Cats will think they are lions; birds will have beaks of fire; oceans will be large mouths of flame. The sky will sweep down on us like a vulture. The blue priests and their blue cassocks will come from everywhere, but they will be of no use.
Now sweating in his room behind the police station where he believes he has barricaded himself, Simidor fights the blue fever madness that has turned the entire town into blue-hilldigging zombies and thinks that perhaps it would help them come out of their blue fog if he told them the story of the little black saint named Santik Du.
Around the year 1350, a plague was terrorizing the country. Santik Du was living a life of hardship and charity. He went around barefoot in the hope of relieving the wounds of the sufferers. He promised them eternal life and solace. That is how Santik Du contracted the plague and died. Simidor would not make the same mistake-though he, like Santik Du, was on the side of humble people. He could not remember ever being a praying man. But this was finally something he could remember. He had learned the story of Santik Du at the school-required catechism, just like the rest of them. That is, those whose parents could afford to send them to school. Even those who hadn’t learned this version of the story still knew to pray to Santik Du when they had small ailments: headaches, colds. They even prayed for compensation from petty thefts. Sometimes he would joke to them that Santik Du was making his job insignificant. Yes, he could still remember that. When someone loses something, all he has to do is say the Santik Du prayer: help me, Santik, to find my wallet and I will give you five pyas. And that’s why you can find near the Virgin Mary, along with many written prayers, small bills wrapped in handkerchiefs, and a prayer specifically addressed to the black saint, gourds filled with offerings. Often, for lack of money, they will leave a mere piece of bread and a few peanuts. It’s reassuring for the people to find a saint who resembles them for a change; Detective Simidor could maybe talk to the city’s patron saint who fastened the rope of bad luck around the whole nation. Santik Du, help my people come out of the blue fog. Save me, too, who wants to save them. Don’t let me die before I tell them all this. Don’t let the fatra pwazon take over our brains before it kills us.