Cayenne, 2pm, mid august. I’m leaving the appartment a colleague from Collège last year has (very generously) lent me whilst he is in mainland France over the long summer holidays.
The streets of Cayenne are empty this time of day. Cars, and scooters buzz past occasionally. I’m walking up one of the big roads to Place des Palmistes. Tradional Creole houses and more modern buildings on each side.
Recently restored two or three story creole townhouses, colorful and charming, sounds of meals being prepared slip through slatted wooden shutters. Brick and wood are painted two tones, often pastel and a darker hue for highlights. More delapidated buildings have rusted corrigated iron roofs and drooping woodwork, the building hunched; faded and dirty walls blend with swelled, rotten frames; an overwhelming dull grey-brownness that suggests a structure nearing the end of its inhabitability.
These houses have balconies which, towards the evening, will be occupied by isolated old people surveying the street below, and steps up from the street to door-windows where people will cluster to drink and talk and sit at night.
The heat is oppresive and heavy.
The three or four story skyline of the towncentre is dwarfed by the enormity of the vividly blue sky and its cloud-mountains, white and towering at this time of year. The more modern buildings of the town are dull and utilitarian; built in some period between now and when they discovered that concrete and breezeblock were great materials for building uninspiring functional buildings. Commercial buildings and domestic appartment blocks,they vary from brilliant white to ugly, patchy, tawny colour, presumably a variable of how recently they were built and the degree of climactic prescience of the architect. The embodiment of this is the obstinately un-majestic Majestic Centre, a building that certainly does have some Features but so uninteresting that I can’t remeber anything about it except that it is a mottled grey clour, very ugly.
The pavement is cracked and uneven. When I cross a road I step down heavily, the pavement is high and gaping drains open to rush away the water during the rainy season. In August, they just smell bad. Bad smells developing quickly under tropical heat is something the municipality has catered for in offering rubbish collectins three times a week, but there’s nothing to stop the stink of Cayenne’s drains in the dry season. It's not the overwhelming impression of the town though, just a detail of which you are occasionally and unpleasantly reminded of.
The street is not uniformly filled with buildings. Often there is an empty lot.
On the road between the apartment and Palmistes one of these has the skeleton of a small house, overgrown. The rest of the lot has long grass and detritus : a corroding air-con unit; empty Heineken bottles ; inexplicably, a dis-jointed red tractor, furry with rust.
Between houses, an ally held in by a wooden door or a corrugated iron fence leads to small, overcrowded one storey buildings or to yards rammed with mango trees and drying laundry.
In (Suriname capital) Paramaribo, the collonial buildings look fresh and maintained and pavements are either uniformly flat or quaintly cobbled. In Cayenne though, there is an air of past-its-bestness, yellow grey blurry, and vivid patches of green under the intense equatiorial sun. I find Cayenne very charming.
Place des Palmiste is a large, unevenly grassed square in one of the top corners of what makes the centre of Cayenne. At one point it had some collonial role, probably to do with slaves or prisonners. It used to have shitloads of royal palm trees, now it just has quite a few. At night lots of vans come and sell sandwiches and burgers, people meet and drink and eat and play music out of their cars. There are several metal gradins, that is, scaffold seats that people watch the processions from during carnaval and the rest of the year sit in the evening in groups to talk and watch children play on the go-carts that can be rented from the go-cart man.
In the daytime, however, the scene is of a banal urban park on the border of the administrative and commercial distrincts of town : sparse pairs of people in suits carrying files, a mother with a young child, civil servants’ cars bordering all tarmac. Cayenne touches- an addict gesticulating abstractly, sat in the shade of a palm.
