Eve Out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi Page A

snakes.
    They got drunk and the moon got into their heads. They did some kind of dance around me, they pulled off their clothes, they looked like heavy, clumsy birds on their tiny feet. When they pounced on me, I saw that I was something foreign to them. We destroy what’s foreign to us. Then we gather it up like a bag of sand in a boat where the water washes it.
    I wake up as that bag of sand, I look at the sky thick with stars, and I tell myself: This is the last time.
    But the men hunt me down and life goes on and I’m so indifferent to myself that I don’t resist.
    I’m trying to figure out where life’s limit must be. What color it would be. What exactly the point of no return would be, that would tell me what I am.
    I keep walking forward. One step after another, but it’s always the same step, repeated endlessly. Step after step in the same place, the only aim being to contradict itself.
    My feet take me past other girls, other women, other boys, other men. Some rush ahead, their heads bent down. Others fall back. All of them vanish into the distance, leaving me alone.
    My body is crushed by waves in all directions, by a tumult of winds.
    They run to escape, swallowing the harshness of their future. I stay afloat.
    By the open window, nobody answers me. I would have liked to know what was watching out for me, what was driving me. The root of this refusal. What planted this negation in me.
    The school principal told me: Vous vous devez de réussir . Then she said it again in English: You owe it to yourself to succeed. And, finally, in Mauritian Creole: Pa gaspiy u lavi . In three languages, she told me the same thing. That I’m responsible. I have to forget the place I go back to each night, how the cockroaches follow the same path as me, how this path is littered with cripples. Parts of bodies, arms, legs, eyes. People reduced to their most invisible selves. Along my path curious, hazy eyes follow me and seem to ask me, who are you, walking with such aimless eyes?
    They don’t understand me, these people unused to life who slip and disappear through the neighborhood’s cracks.
    Trash hammers the road like shrapnel. The ruts seem dug by mortar fire. On TV faces are talking about war. But here, I feel like I’m living through a siege. We’re at war, yes, against ourselves and against these bodies growing on us like parasites.
    But this isn’t just the city. The world is also fighting against everything that staggers forward, everything that doesn’t walk in victory. Its distant rhythms aren’t for us. It’s better to be born blind so as not to see the rage in its eyes. Everybody’s preparing for war. We’re all born with this naked and open flesh. Then each of us fashions an armor of thorns and spiky brambles. But the two sexes don’t have the same heritage. We’re not born with the same burdens.
    What do men give in exchange for a body? They don’t give their own body; a man has to take. They protect themselves. They watch their shadows. We’re butterflies caught in a net, even at our most exultant, even at our most resistant. We’re stolen bodies.
    The days follow one another. Savita tries to hold me back, to intertwine with me, to save me from myself, but it’s too late. She’s already like a happy memory. I know that she won’t follow me where I’m going.
    When I tell her I’m staying at school after class, she looks at me and doesn’t reply. Her heart, weighed down with everything she can’t say, giving out.
    One day she told me, I’m waiting for you.
    And since then, every time, she’s waited for me, like she’s waiting for me tonight.

SAAD
    They slip between the walls like two little ghosts laughing at us. They dance in front of everyone as if nobody would notice them at all. They almost seem like two virgins, these two little ones, if their movements didn’t have this slowness