Fanon (26 page)

All that to say or unsay what, he said, Frantz Fanon said to himself so no one heard he barely hears himself in the noisy hospital ward, and if he couldn't hear himself think, obviously it was necessary to bend down, place his doctor's lips at the level of the patient's ear, the level of the prone patient's heart and glazed eyes, eyes immobile as dark stones lining the rocky bank of a river he remembers from his green island, water from high on the volcano's steep slope gushing cool
over his bare toes, sun hot on his shoulders, sunlight blackening the unmoving stones as if they were sunken in a shadow of themselves the light deepened, the shimmering light solid as skin stretched over the moving water's surface, a speckled skin—could he, if he tried, reach out and pick off a glittering mica chip of it. The patient's eyes still and dark as those black island stones, all the life in them sucked down to the sockets. Open pits and you know better, don't you doctor, than to step too close to the edge. Though emptiness beckons, you resist. After all, what's to see, what's to find down in there. The lesson learned as a boy in Le François, then part of your training as a physician. You learned to brush aside cobwebs of illusion, of hope when you enter the sick bay, but as you're leaning down to speak into the patient's ear you can't help casting another glance at those dead eyes, a glance slowing as if it's entered a medium sluggish as porridge, slow motion the only possible motion across a strange, bumpy, untidy terrain, the patient's flesh magnified and distorted as your gaze crawls over the wasteland once a man's face, blurred now by nearness and intimacy into something alien, unruly hairs, gaping pores, pimples, creases, rubberish lumps, craters, your eyes trying to sneak mercifully past the disaster of his features and keep the patient at the periphery of your vision where you see but don't really see, you don't need to look, you're not a captive dragged naked across burning coals, but in order to speak to him, to this patient, to say whatever it is you don't know yet you're going to say to whomever this patient might be, this person you've caught a glimpse of by not minding your business when you allowed your gaze to stray too close, linger too long, Fanon, if you're going to speak it's necessary either to holler loud enough to be heard above the chaos of the ward or bend down so your lips are next to the patient's ear and then perhaps he'll hear the words that you're still forming, the words you couldn't share while you towered, doctor, over his bedside. Your pity, your fear aroused, as always, when you consider a millisecond after
you read his chart how you might feel if you were him. Then you sneak a look at him and don't look away quickly enough. You see the eyes you'd imagined just a few seconds before as stones, as black holes, are cartwheeling, rolling, swiveling, bursting with wild energy, eyes that would emit bloodcurdling yells if they had tongues. Don't listen, doctor. You must do your duty, you must forget those eyes and regain composure and deliver the message you compose as you lean closer to the stink and dying of him, this patient now wrapped totally head to toe in bandages like a mummy, holes in the swaddling for eyes, nose hole, shit hole, piss hole, one ear hole waiting now for your words, words good for nothing, of course, except to make yourself feel better, doctor, remind him, remind yourself, you're doing your best though you know and he knows your best always far from enough, this throwing yourself on his mercy, on your knees, no, not praying, you would despise yourself for even thinking of prayer, for trying to recall words of prayers you used to perform, kneeling beside your bed, praying out loud so your mother could share the false comfort of that humiliating, fearful ritual, and now you can't go down on your knees without feeling silly, raunchy, no, your mother is not somewhere hovering in the darkness of the room listening, you are a man, standing erect on your own two feet, doctor, so you must not kneel, you must lean down and say whatever words you should say to the patient, not a prayer dammit though it's okay to borrow prayer's rhythm and Bible words, the whispered singsong
now I lay me down to sleep,
or
Yea, though I walk,
my, my, how those island habits, island voices, island sad songs and prayers persist, you can't help weeping, moaning a little bit now,
in extremis,
Frantz, wishing your gimpy old man's legs could dance. Legs stiff under the twisted sheets. His frozen legs burning. He remembers his mother soaking her tired feet at night in a bucket of water, remembers water covering the washerwomen's feet,
les blancheuses
who squat on black stones lining the green riverbank or sit dresses pushed above their
knees, shiny brown legs dangling, toes chopped off, anklebones broken and bent, you'd think, seen from the angle where he crouched one spring afternoon spying on the women, the swift water purling around their shins, around their thighs when they step out deeper, deeper, swaying, singing, their dresses balled around their hips, stepping till the river rears up and drowns them, drowns everything, every part of the washerwomen gone but their voices and what his eyes had stolen creeping up on them, hiding on his knees in the bushes, peeping like the river up their wet dresses, at their wet brown skin, the women laughing because they knew a boy spied on them, they'd get their revenge soon enough, boy, looky, looky, long boy, the roar, rumble, and thunder of the surging river like chaos in the ward he bends to be heard above, bends down to hear, down to an ear, his own ear, little Frantz's grown-up little failing, decaying, stinking black ear, Doctor, save me, kill me, save me, kill me, the message blinking on and off in the patient's darting eyes.

(No. You tell
me
how my mother and Fanon wound up in the same place. You figure it out. Me, I haven't reached that point in the story. Maybe I never will, so don't hold your breath. An explanation might unravel itself along the way in spite of me. If an explanation's necessary. As if an explanation ever changes facts, the fact for instance that in this movie an old woman, my mother in a wheelchair, encounters Doctor Frantz Fanon as he lays dying in a hospital bed.)

The first time she rolls herself by Fanon's room it's an accident, a coincidence because his room happens to be on a route she follows for no particular reason the day she invents her route for that day, wheeling here and there through the hospital corridors, riding elevators to various floors, tooling through various wards, anywhere within the sprawling, built-yesterday-already-old-today health-care complex neither signs nor nurses shoo her away from. The next time
she goes by the room that turns out to be Fanon's, it's less innocent because her curiosity has been more than aroused by the very unusual circumstance of a policeman on a chair guarding a door she'd chanced upon during her previous run, so on her next run, last of the three per day she's authorized and encouraged to undertake, she hurried back, a beeline this time, to ascertain whether or not a cop still sat outside the door of the third-floor room and sure enough there he was, or there
one
was on a chair (one a woman one day), nodding off my mom thought till he raised an eyelid like lazy old Teddy, who was a girl dog not a boy dog in spite of her name, used to one-eyeball anybody who cracked the frame of the kitchen doorway when Teddy snoozed on her ratty blanket next to the stove. Of course my mother wondered fiercely who could be behind a closed door with a cop guarding it, a burly brown cop who smiles at her the next time she passes, Smokey the Bear with his big leather belts and boots, cowboy hat and a gun in the holster on his wide hip to keep people out or keep somebody in, she wonders which and thinks to herself it's always some of both, no doubt, rolling past again, then many times again, one time the door cracked and a crowd inside, doctors, nurses, suits, uniforms, spilling through the door, hiding the room's occupant, whoever's in the room and a couple people who can't fit inside squeezed outside with the cop in the hall who's standing not sitting on this occasion to keep track, it seems, of what's going on inside as well as outside the room. Cracked that once, the door closed since. Always a cop and always closed. Closed. Closed. She didn't count the closed times because she wouldn't want to lie when the detectives questioned her with a lie detector: How many times have you wheeled past that room which is none of your nosy-old-lady business, old colored lady, why do you sneak past peeking so many times a day, at least once every morning noon and night, don't think we don't see you on your so-called exercise runs you claim the doctor ordered to keep your blood flowing and maybe
raise your depressed spirits but we know beyond a shadow of a doubt the doctor sure didn't advise you to scoot straight to the back elevator and up to Three, your old heart beating faster and wheels turning slower the closer you get to the closed door with nothing to do with you behind it, ten, twenty, how many times a day, you tell us, lady, and tell us who pays you to spy and she wouldn't confess anything to them or yes, forgive me lord, if they torture her, she'll tell them, hand on the Bible, every barefaced lie she can dream up, because her business none of their business if the closed door's none of hers. Tell the truth, she'd lost track of how many times she passed the door. Same thing every time. Same ole. A shut door. A big blue bear with a big gun scaring people away.

On his side of the closed door Fanon misses nothing. He hears the spinning wheels, the old, thumping heart. The door not exactly transparent, so her likeness took a while to seep through it, and now a clear image of her face available each time she rolls by. He's developed a preternatural awareness, a kind of Humbert Humbert spidery acuity in the lonely vortex of a web which trembles when a butterfly's wings agitate a breeze in Peru. How Fanon feels from time to time anyway, chained to a bed, lying there helpless, naked except for a diaper, hour after hour, or days or years, neither awake nor asleep, throat parched, a swamp of sweat, shivering, choking, assaulted by the frantic traffic of cells constructed, cells demolished and trucked away, cells remodeled, scraped, scrapped, workers and machines coming and going, a great excavation at the center of him, a constant thudding of wrecking balls and hooting bulldozers knocking down older quarters of the city, slums cleared, fresh construction tumbling down as it's completed, new and old consuming each other, collapsing into the same pit at the center of him into which everything, hands, eyes, memories, bowels, disappears, the cells clamoring, screaming because loud brutal tools are pulling them down faster than other tools can shape and secure them, love them, their
walls giving way, giving up. There is nothing, no solid ground inside him to stand upon, cling to, just the lost city of him, demolished, sliding away, dust, rubble, and noxious waste. Each cell on a suicide mission, self-destructing, the raw walls buckling when the first dab of paint applied, bright panes of glass maneuvered into place on a top story, then crashing down into the emptiness where his island once floated, the city of him unfit for habitation, its foundations quicksand, his flesh sinking into mud, becoming mud, he breathes mud, tastes mud, swims in a slick wet ooze, he's drowning, the thick, smothering intimacy of the mud bearing dead messages from everywhere, nowhere, news of pain at the tips of useless fingers, pain messages delivered by follicles of hair with burning roots like a torturer's cigarettes stubbed on his chest.

But on his side of the hospital room door, as on her side, you can't even depend on pain or death to get you through the night. It lifts. Not death. Not night. They don't lift, my brother. Pain lifts. A torturer's trick Fanon knows well. The torturers schooled him—all pain no gain, my brother. Keep hope alive. You must keep hope alive or the stubborn ones overdose on pain and die on you. A black mark mars your record, not theirs. You suffer the consequences, not them.

Pain lifts. Temperature rises. Not fluorescent lighting searing your eyes, Doctor Fanon, it's the tropical sun. Shield your gaze. Scan the postcard view. Forget your skewered, blistered, bloated, blackened body roasting over a pit. Run toward the laughing ocean. Your legs are strong and sturdy again. Soccer trim. Run fast but not too fast. Your muscles have grown sluggish. Allow them to warm up. This is not a dream, not paradise. No wings. You'll need your legs. Remember, you're no better at imagining paradise when you're awake than when you're asleep. Don't sprint, a gentle lope because a small person with legs shorter than yours clasps your hand. Can't you feel the warm, wet squeeze. Can't you hear her squeals above the thudding surf. Waves loom ahead tall as skyscrapers. A city's famous face
painted across the horizon rushing toward them. He'll sizzle when waves break over him. Salt will heal the charred threads of his skin. It will only hurt a moment, my dear, he shouts, smiling down at her crown of dready locks. Her small hand grips his tighter than skin. I won't let go this time, my daughter, my flesh. Soon we'll be free, home soon, as soon as we step into the cool sea we'll step out on the other side. See the rows of braids, the white ropes, blue ropes, green ropes of rolling and pitching water, see the rainbow fish, their bubble eyes and needle teeth, look down their tongueless mouths into the pink wells of their bellies, my sweet girl. Gentle strides but he must hurry too. Her short legs scissor to keep up, old sores popping and bleeding, his, hers, your flesh after all, your bad seed sprouting in this daughter, blacking up her skin, scarring her hair. It's not far, baby, hurry, hurry, don't pull her small hand off her small arm, Daddy.

She survives you, whatever that means, and in an interview I imagine or read she talks briefly about her name, your name, Fanon, the difficulties claiming a famous name so neither she nor it's forgotten. A balancing act, the difficulty of shedding the famous name when she wishes to be known by another, the difficulty of wanting others to remember her different name yet not to forget her father's name her mother did not take but asked him to give to her daughter, your daughter, Fanon, your flesh surviving after you're gone, and though you were in love in Lyon, about to marry another woman, you said yes and signed the appropriate documents bestowing your name
Fanon
on your daughter, thus giving her the legal right to claim the name, but you did not include her right to claim more than you decided you were willing or able to give, and you never met her, this girl child Murielle, bearing your dead sister's name, the daughter whom I imagine further on a rainy day, your birthday perhaps, July 20, perhaps walking alone under a purplish umbrella down an aisle of the cemetery in Fort-de-France, a two-tiered cemetery, one tier a
crowded, sprawling ghetto on the hillside's steep upper slope, the poor as you predicted at last on top, and at the foot of the hill the rich folks' cemetery, a walled village of miniature stone dwellings. Your daughter Murielle finding you where she knew you'd be waiting, at the base of the hill, her father handsome, dignified, in a photo encased on a marble page of an open book atop the stone crypt inside the iron fence enclosing the family mausoleum that sits at an intersection near the cemetery wall farthest from the little stone shed at the entrance where I asked directions of a goateed attendant and he pointed down a lane between two rows of elaborate, aboveground tombs
tout droit, tout droit
and I followed his finger along this street lined with monuments and mansions of the dead to arrive at the spot where I'm imagining her under her large mauve umbrella staring at photos, plaques, wreaths, dead flowers, imitation flowers arranged on a chest-high stone vault containing various remains, I assume, though not her father's, he lies many islands, more than one sea away, back where he came from and therefore she came from and where he has returned and she will too, but not yet on this rainy afternoon I imagine her paying her respects in the Cimitière de la Levée, the so-called cemetery of the rich, in Fort-de-France. Although her father's buried, they say, in Africa, he's also memorialized here by his family in the final resting place as they say of his mother, father, brothers, sister, etc., the Fanons, her people too, her name inscribed on mementos, carved in the tomb looking back at her as she waits dry-eyed in Fort-de-France under her umbrella. An easy day for mourning, no need to cry or tap deep private reserves of sadness. All nature's grieving. Dismal sky, dark puddles on the asphalt pavement, a small damp chill in the air that counts as cold in the summer tropics. The gray stones of this town of the dead blacker, heavier when they're wet. Tears from the sky gently tap, tap, tapping on the purple umbrella shielding her plastic-scarfed hair, and she's glad no wind today, no howling, no whipping, no snatching. She stands aside
quietly, lets the universe mourn, the sliver of it anyway revealing itself here, on this gray day, lets nature cry for her father's absence so she's free to listen for him, to greet him if he arrives unexpectedly, lets the quiet in her deepen until she can hear the
plink-plink-plink
drip from yellow beaded tips of the umbrella's struts, slower, more lugubrious on the pavement than the tap, tapping above her head. It's a soundtrack appropriate for doing this dreary thing, being in this difficult place. Without looking at them she recites the words inscribed on the marble book holding her father's image, a lament honoring a beloved son and brother. The words dissolve, scatter as she repeats them to herself, fading like in a movie she thinks to take her from one scene to the next. Effortlessly she's thousands of miles away in a green place she's never been. Africa one name for where her father rests, where he or whatever's left of him rests in peace, she hopes, impressed as she always is and isn't that numerous nations now lay claim to her father's bones, his dust, while none claimed him when he lived and breathed and wrote and spoke his changing mind. She worries his spirit may be drifting, unsettled and restless like the elders say fresh souls wander, just beginning their voyage back across the water. She wishes she could help him. Launch him where he needs to go or be his anchor, the tether her mother couldn't be for him ... but that's old, gossipy business, after all, they need each other now, all of them, us, these dead, the Fanons, in new ways none of us can dream properly yet. On gray days like this one she fears her father's lost forever, his name forged on empty graves, his body scattered to the winds by politics of naming and claiming. Her father kidnapped, then refused and abandoned like her. How could you give your name to a person and not claim that person, not allow that person's claim on you. How long does it take to make a daughter. How long to name her. Is naming a mere technicality, a cold, formal signing on or signing off, as simple as sleeping in one woman's bed one night, another woman's bed another night. The somber skies,
the rain pouring now are mourning for her so she's free I think to imagine forgiveness or other less imposing possibilities beside a replica of the Fanon home, a representation in stone of the family parlor except one wall is iron bars so the living can spy on the dead as we peer at lions in a zoo, as lions in a zoo peer at us. Don't fret, don't mourn. Don't blame the years lost waiting for your father to claim you. He was busy in his way, intent on doing just that—claiming you, my mother would say. Fighting a war for you. A claim's not in a name. He'll know you by your footsteps, your knock, my dear, not by your name, your country, your color, your fate. Just step toward him. He'll meet you halfway when the iron gate swings open. And open it will, my mother would insist. Don't weep, my children, she would say to the Fanons, father and daughter, say to us, to Fanons gone and to come, huddled on either side of the door, if she could.