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beggars, carters and idlers, all battling for space. And so you dodge with agility between three Francis mangos, four large bunches of bananas and two pots of peas spread out for sale on the ground. A cocktail of smells pervades the air and threatens to suffocate you. The scent of tobacco. Rancid oil. The peelings of fruit and vegetables. Offcuts of meat fought over by battered dogs. Sweat from armpits and between thighs. Mother crosses this flood, knocking against legless cripples, children with flies teeming around their nostrils, women as thin as nails, bumping into the lame and the blind, finally reaching the stall at the far end, the one where machetes, rigoises and knives are hung on display, before heading for Sylvanie’s neighbourhood.
    Mother has an unshakeable belief that the Spirits who dwell in flasks, bottles and gourds wait at Aunt Sylvanie’s house to cure ills. To prophecy. To explain mysteries. That Aunt Sylvanie knows how to awaken them to apply a soothing balm to all those who visit her.
    This morning, having drunk her cachiman infusion, Mother summoned Paulo to her. He went out with Fignolé yesterday evening to who knows where, his guitar under his arm. But listening to Paulo’s words we were none the wiser. He looked like someone who had not got a wink of sleep all night. Someone afraid. And above all, someone who had smoked a whole field of marijuana all to himself. His Rasta dreadlocks covered half of his face. All the while he was talking to us, he never stopped looking towards the door and raising himself on his toes when not bluntly turning away. You would think he was being watched.When he was not turning in all directions he kept his head down. Paulo knows something but does not want to speak. No-one could convince me otherwise. He gabbled three or four confused sentences about a guitar with strings gone slack, one of the two vocalists being ill and some such. Mother didn’t believe a single word of an outpouring he seemed to be inventing on the spot to reassure us. Joyeuse, hands on hips, rebuffed him like only she knows how.
    â€˜My dear Paulo, you seem to think I was born yesterday.You’ve always been one for telling stories.You’re not going to make me swallow any old lies.’
    The only definite information we were able to drag out of him was that Fignolé left them around ten o’clock, together with Vanel, the group’s drummer, and Ismona, heading for Martissant. And then nothing more was heard…
    In the hospital corridors distress has left its marks. Electricity cuts have caused the smell of corpses to rise from the morgue and spread this far. For the first time ever, nausea hits me head on. I make an effort to hear human voices, to understand them.
    The last time he stayed in this hospital, Fignolé was being eaten away inside by a kind of fever, which froze him and burned him up, all at the same time. Fignolé was trembling, shivering. We had every reason to be eaten by worry. We feared the worst. At mid-day, in the heat of July, with the thermometer recording thirty-five degrees in the shade, I heard his teeth chattering. I immediately changed his sweat-soaked sheets – sheets I’d brought myself to a hospital that has nothing – and dried his shoulders, his chest and his back to stop him getting a chill. A doctor arrived a few days later, an American with a sing-song accent like in the westerns. This was a real stroke of luck for someone like Fignolé, who liked to live his life on the throw of a dice, to thumb his nose at death. The doctor changed his medication and asked if his case could be passed to colleagues in a health centre downtown. But all this I guessed afterwards. The stranger didn’t want to talk to him in my presence, under the pretext of the patient’s right to discretion.
    The fact that Fignolé was an adult.
    That all sickness is private.
    He waited for acquiescence from me. I looked him straight in