Pelée, pt. 1: Introduction
I stand in weeds, knee-deep; I look down at the body of a chestnut-colored workhorse, dead since last Tuesday, covered in crawling flies. The carcass is bloated, splotched. The flesh slicked in a filmy ooze, its body pocked with inch-thick welts.
"What killed this horse, sir?"
"Centipedes. Hundreds of them, about a foot long each. They came out of the brush." I pointed to the jungly growth, fifty yards off. "They came with the ants and bit the animals to death."
The swarming cloud of flies simmers in the midday sun.
I am talking to a journalist, a fat round man from Basse-Terre. We pivot and survey the still-smoking remains of St. Pierre -- unquenched fires still burning in the rows of shacks by the sea -- and I stand with numb shock as I face the vision before me. A city of 30,000 -- a few days ago, it was a lively port. Now it's a wasteland -- smashed stone, splintered wood, decaying corpses.
Perhaps I should start from the beginning. My name is Louis-Auguste Cyparis. I am 32 years old, born to a poor nigger family in the French West Indies. My father disappeared before I was born. At the age of eight, my mother died from yellow fever, and I was sent to live with my uncle in St. Pierre. This was where I would grow up, make my trade, and eventually witness the catastrophe that transpired there.
I'm what you might call a roughneck, a roustabout. I take whatever jobs I can -- harvesting the fields, hauling barrels at the distillery, working as a longshoreman. Laborer's work. When I was 16, I started working in the cane fields, swinging the machete. At the time, I had some notoriety for being able to fell a stalk with one blow, which was unusual for a kid. I guess the good lord gave me muscle, and this is how I earned the nickname Samson, a name that would stick with me throughout my adult life.
They tell me I'm the only known survivor of what is already being called the worst natural disaster of the century. And today, I look upon the remains of what was my home: my friends, my family, my livelihood -- buried now in ash and rubble, all destroyed within an hour.
"What killed this horse, sir?"
"Centipedes. Hundreds of them, about a foot long each. They came out of the brush." I pointed to the jungly growth, fifty yards off. "They came with the ants and bit the animals to death."
The swarming cloud of flies simmers in the midday sun.
I am talking to a journalist, a fat round man from Basse-Terre. We pivot and survey the still-smoking remains of St. Pierre -- unquenched fires still burning in the rows of shacks by the sea -- and I stand with numb shock as I face the vision before me. A city of 30,000 -- a few days ago, it was a lively port. Now it's a wasteland -- smashed stone, splintered wood, decaying corpses.
Perhaps I should start from the beginning. My name is Louis-Auguste Cyparis. I am 32 years old, born to a poor nigger family in the French West Indies. My father disappeared before I was born. At the age of eight, my mother died from yellow fever, and I was sent to live with my uncle in St. Pierre. This was where I would grow up, make my trade, and eventually witness the catastrophe that transpired there.
I'm what you might call a roughneck, a roustabout. I take whatever jobs I can -- harvesting the fields, hauling barrels at the distillery, working as a longshoreman. Laborer's work. When I was 16, I started working in the cane fields, swinging the machete. At the time, I had some notoriety for being able to fell a stalk with one blow, which was unusual for a kid. I guess the good lord gave me muscle, and this is how I earned the nickname Samson, a name that would stick with me throughout my adult life.
They tell me I'm the only known survivor of what is already being called the worst natural disaster of the century. And today, I look upon the remains of what was my home: my friends, my family, my livelihood -- buried now in ash and rubble, all destroyed within an hour.
Labels: Pelée
posted by Jeweled Accumulation at 7:10 PM
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