Colour of Dawn Read Online Free Page A

escaped me, her mouth firmly shut like a tomb. Her eyes turned towards the Invisibles.
    This evening I’ll do her hair and that’s all. My fingers moist with Palma Christi oil, I’ll take pleasure in undoing her little plaits one by one and then putting her hair up in a single braid above her nape. She’ll protest at first, but she’ll let me do it. As always. This is an established ritual between us, which ultimately pleases us both. It always has, since childhood when, as night fell, she would invoke Grandfather Saintilhomme, whose legends bind us all to one another. Grandfather, whom the god Agoué came to find one day to take him to Guinea underwater. Or the tales in which the fish are clothed in phosphorescent seaweed. Where ogres devour children. Where stars can be caught in the palm of your hand. She would tell these stories until the day the blood ran between my thighs for the first time. Looking me right in the eye, Mother asked me to be on guard with boys from that moment on, and stopped talking to me. I mean, really talking to me. It was a parenthesis of silence.The truce of adolescence.The end of those hours, warm and so full of sweetness. She was content to reassure herself that each new moon brought me my share of moist, warm blood.
    One day she inserted an authoritative finger to reassure herself that my body had not yet been breached, was no wound open to the breeze. She never did it again. I understood quickly that there was a connection between this blood, the shadowy triangle of my thighs, and the men who made Mother appear more beautiful sometimes, a dancing flame in everyone’s eye, her hips as if released, when I would get home from school and our bed would exude a scent of amber and kelp.
    I also experienced the discomfort, the unease of having a place in that school among girls who were strangers to me. Mother was jubilant at the idea of her daughter’s unexpected advance towards that world of stucco, lace and frills, but never imagined the violence it would imply for her, never. Right from the start, I had refused to assume the role of an innocent who would steal cheap jewellery and only realise too late. I had chosen to be a thief of stones of deceptive brilliance. One who knows it and continues to do it, with no regrets, without useless nostalgia. In my adolescence I had a volcano inside me, which I ignited myself, without saying a word, every morning. Now this volcano will never be extinguished, Mother and I have merely changed places and roles.
    I’m twenty-three years old and I’m the strongest.
    Mother lets me do her hair and listens, sitting between my knees or with me standing behind her. We have reemerged from our silence. I talk to her of my twenties which are like an itch, of my great hunger for life, of my certainty that there is no-one to complain to about the battering and hurt the world will bring.
    Mother knows like no other how to keep to herself in her silence. She knows how to love us in her silence like the warmth of the earth. Like the light which enwraps the world. Hers is a love against which all the fury, all the noise of others are as nothing. I know it as I know that no-one will love Ti Louze. No-one. As I know that hard, cold cruelty also lives in the hearts of the defeated – a certainty that Fignolé always opposed with a hundred explanations and a thousand boastful answers.
    Madame Jacques stops us on the threshold of her shop. She wants to reassure us about Fignolé.
    â€˜He’ll come back later,’ she says sharply. ‘Paulo is sure of it.’
    This morning, Madame Jacques does not look good. The cares of the last few weeks have given her a sunken, tattered appearance. This morning, Madame Jacques is older than all the women who walk barefoot in the dust of the Old Testament. Older than Rebecca. Older than Judith. Older than Jezebel or Sara. Further on, Maître Fortuné rushes up in front of Mother,