Free Wonder by Dominique Fortier Page B

long train travelling on shining rails through anemerald-green landscape. Overjoyed, Elie spent the next minutes gazing at the various components of the train, properly stowed in their compartments from which he dared not take them. As well as the gleaming locomotive there were eight iron cars, five of them closed, with windows, steps, and wheels in every respect like those on real trains, along with enough lengths of straight rails and curved ones to form, once fitted together, a good-sized ring in the middle of the bedroom rug.
    The locomotive started slowly, then speeded up, advancing with a powerful clickety-clack, nearly leaving the track on a curve, just barely landing on its wheels to work up speed again, only to go off the rails for good at the next turn, followed by its cars whose wheels went on turning, pointlessly, long after.
    “It doesn’t matter,” said Baptiste, “we’ll try again in a while.”
    Elie cut the cake after he’d uprooted the eleven remaining candles, tears of wax congealed along the narrow stems, discovering under the white icing a bright red pastry he refused to eat. For long minutes he kept using his lighter to light again the shortest candle and snuff it by pinching the wick between thumb and forefinger. Floating in the air was the odour of ozone, metallic and acid, like the smell after lightning has struck.

 
    I N CERTAIN DUSTY VILLAGES IN THE MIDDLE of the United States, the populace had never seen a black man except in a print or a photo – and those were mostly of convicts, who had expressions so sinister that honest people thus informed about the unfortunate characteristics of the race were determined to be wary of any man whose skin was the colour of coffee.
    One night when he was standing, arms folded and one foot slightly forward (a pose he’d borrowed from the lion tamers), in front of a ragged piece of canvas bearing a painting of Mount Pelée erupting, throwing into the sky flaming stones and a fountain of black smoke, Baptiste overheard a conversation between a little girl with blonde curls and her mother, who wore a hat with a broad wingspan that in all likelihood had cost the life of more than one bird and made it impossible to see her face. It was obvious that the lady was a person of some importance in the small town, perhaps the mayor’s wife, for the rest of the audience held themselves backrespectfully and sent in her direction looks at once curious and cowed.
    “Mama,” asked the child in a high little voice, “why is that man black?”
    Baptiste could see that the people around the lady with the hat were holding their breath as she replied calmly:
    “Because he was burned, my pet. As you can see, he was in a fire so he’s as black as coal. Now come along, sweetheart, do you want to see the hippopotamus?”
    Another night, there were an elderly man and woman dressed all in black who could have been man and wife or brother and sister, so much did they resemble one another, in their bearing more than their features. The two shared the same stiff posture and an identical look of disapproval, with pinched nostrils and mouth. They called Baptiste
sotto voce
“Satan’s lackey,” whispering that if he had survived on Judgment Day it was because God in His infinite wisdom had not wanted him in His kingdom and, continuing more and more loudly, declaring that the colour of his skin was the reflection of his black soul.
    “How dare they,” the man went on in a tone of boisterous lamentation, “present to us here one of those infidels from a land where they know not God? How dare they corrupt our innocent youth?”
    Looking around him, Baptiste observed that the audience was made up of farmers, small merchants, and housewives, all of them well over forty. Brushing aside that detail, he wanted anyway to defend the honour of his island, but when he opened his mouth the man’s companion broke into a series of strident
Amens
that drowned out any rectification. In the