Colour of Dawn Read Online Free Page B

contenting himself with taking her clammy hands into his and inclining his head towards her breast. Apart from Madame Jacques and Maître Fortuné, mother does not confide in the other neighbours. Certainly not in Madame Descat, our neighbour on the right, recently moved in to the neighbourhood. A woman with an opulent bosom, she has visibly lightened the skin of her face with lashings of abrasive creams. Madame Descat is one whom we don’t know well enough to take into our confidence but know too well to share our misfortunes with. Madame Descat receives visitors who are no doubt enthralled by the falseness of this grimelle who has arrived and who looks down on us with an air of authority. Mother gives Madame Descat broad smiles, which are returned with the same hypocrisy. Not me. She can see from my expression that I’m not afraid to get in with my teeth first before I can be bitten.
    The present-day mistrust creeps through their veins like a seeping liquid, thicker than that of the mistrust there has always been – the mistrust that the older people always obliged us to maintain towards those who resemble us like peas in a pod. Together with misfortune, this mistrust is the only inheritance to which we, the defeated, are truly entitled. It certainly does not count among our losses, but our gains. It’s not hard to see why!
    Mother endlessly repeats that the neighbours are not what they were. And that we are fortunate to have Maître Fortuné.
    â€˜Without someone like Maître Fortuné you couldn’t last in this city. There would be no future here.’
    Maître Auguste Fortuné is able to set you up with a clandestine source of water or electricity in less time than it would take you to ask for it, or to procure for you a certificate of birth, death or any kind of qualification.Tall and strong like the trunk of a mapou, with stooped shoulders and furtive eyes, he makes his way through hardships at a steady pace. Maître Fortuné is not a master of anything but muddling-through and trickery. Maître Fortuné exists only to satisfy himself that not a single centime will line the pockets of the State. Not a single one. A great usurer, Maître Fortuné lends on the black market. Maître Fortuné is the fruit of a blend of races, all the virtues of which we have rejected, retaining only the faults. He has made his place in our great disorder like a fish in water and revels in having the whole wide ocean to swim in. He has thrown a thick veil over his past, a veil that no-one lifts. Malicious tongues say that he embezzled the funds of a minister and came out of it by a feat of conjuring. Others claim that after making a living by running a brothel in Cap-Haïtien, he stripped a few forsaken widows in Curaçao of their assets and entertained a number of bored housewives in Fort-de-France. So why did he end up among us? We will never know.
    A true chameleon, Maître Fortuné knows how to assume the colours of whoever is in power, tinting his tongue and his brain. But it is impossible to talk of his soul. For activities of the kind he undertakes, Maître Fortuné is not burdened with a soul, fortunately! Fortunately for him, and for us who live in this neighbourhood of houses that are permanent but twisted, half-finished, half-painted, displaying their metal guts like shaggy hair. This neighbourhood to which we have escaped but only just, with the fetid breath of alleyways which, elsewhere, further downtown, among the shanties, are sickening. We live in a place like a fruit that is half worm-eaten, half rotten, where eager teeth may yet bite. But all the same, we live in a neighbourhood of the defeated.With plenty of cause for unblemished, rich, deep happiness and with other things that are ugly, terrible and yet so human.
    Now I think on, Paulo has not mentioned Vanel, the young drummer in the band. I love Vanel, I love his fragility. Vanel licks a great internal