TE22 Potpourri

Michèle Rakotoson

Lalana

swallowed all the pills I could find, I still got sick. Medication is too much money, Naivo, too much.” It’s like a plea, a prayer for mercy. But what mercy is there for AIDS? What medication is there when earning a hundred francs a month? How much is just one pill for malaria, flu, or diarrhea, and what resignation, what despair for other horrors, cancer and the like? No one can get treatment, sowhat good does it do to dream of anything? People tell them about medicinal plants, traditional medicine, and other nonsense to cover the neglect, and a whole country tries to find leaves and tree bark to maintain some semblance of hope. But to no avail. In poor countries, you die a slow and lonely death, without a sound. And what some call wisdom is nothing but dereliction and giving up. Naivo chokes back a sob and begins humming a wordless song again, so as not to alarm his friend, and so he can hold on, too, while Rivo speaks in a flat monotone: He’s back in the projects, on the hill where the mind breathes, in the murky room, in the world without hope, the violent, ugly world. Rivo, he’s a prisoner of that reality, and no matter the journey, even beyond life, he cannot escape it, and he’s here on this rock, looking at this scenery and talking, talking, words spilling out endlessly. And rage overwhelms Naivo, blind rage. He’s going to kill them all, the ones strutting around in front of him, and the rest, the false pastors and their politicians blusteringupastorminthepapers, onTV, inchurches, spouting “In the projects, there’s four of us in one room, it reeks of piss.”

nonsense, promising heaven and earth. He hates them and theirdeceitful paradise and their slimy lies. They all slosh in the same muddy fishbowl, splash in the same swamp that nothing good ever comes of, living amongst themselves, the Center of theWorld, as if Madagascar andMalagasies didn’t exist beyond them and their spawn, their self-centered navel-gazing that stinks of shit, and nobody listens to them anymore. Nobody votes anymore, no one cares, it’s only way they’ve found to not move toward civil war, which for better or worse none of them are going to try to start to avow their power. Naivo hates them, sees them crystallized in their stupidity, their concrete villas, their car alarms, and their pasty fat flesh. And they all jerk around in churches where they bawl their cowardice with their God’s blessing, in front of an entire country that no longer knows which saints to pray to. He hates them, all of them who have blown the nation off course. But what can he do about it, Malagasies have tried everything— revolutions, riots, strikes—and they remain unmoved. Now the whole country stays quiet to avoid a bloodbath, prays to stifle murderous thoughts. And younger people are killing themselves from despair, illness, or drugs. To the shame and disdain of pedantics who say: “AIDS is a shameful disease, a disease of tramps and prostitutes, like gonorrhea and syphilis and the like. Amen.” Rivo, he has hidden, and he would have remained there for a long time if not for that pain crushing his bowels, lungs, muscles, the pus taking over his body bit by bit, evacuating in

22

23