The hum quickly gave in to the sound of a hundred tumbling oil drums. Then a morbid absence of sound. Odette lay there watching the shards and splattered chunks of grapefruit marmalade dotting the white linoleum floor of her house. A few seconds seemed like an eternity. There was no other way to say it. Could time even be measured anymore, in this new silent and fractured world?
When the crash came, her five-year-old granddaughter Rose watched her with an extraordinary intensity. It was as if at that very moment the child had inherited the gift that the women in her family had been known to have for generations. The gift of double sight. The child’s amber eyes narrowed and she let out a loud melodic scream that lasted the entire thirty-five seconds of the shaking. But then, like the rest of the world, she too fell silent.
Her daughter, the child’s mother, had the gift as well. But she had turned her back on it, joining a Protestant church that made her believe she was haunted by ghosts. Then, over time, Odette’s gift had faded. After her husband died and her daughter left, she no longer felt the desire to tell total strangers to be careful because she knew there was nothing they could do. There was fate and there was destiny. And there was nothing you could do to stop your star from diving from the heavens, if that’s what it wanted to do.
As the roar reverted to another prolonged hum, she heard a constant ringing deep in her ears and felt her eyes fill with dust. When she finally heard her granddaughter’s voice, it was very far and faint. As the child crawled toward her, she noticed that the girl’s bony little body was moving slowly. Odette’s mind and eyes faltered between light and dark. For a moment, she couldn’t figure out why the child was crawling toward her; nor could she grasp why she started feeling sparks in her spine and lower legs.
By the time the child’s soft, warm hands touched her face, and she noticed the girl’s tear-filled eyes, a valve seemed to be cutting off power to Odette’s brain. The silence and darkness were deepening, becoming shapeless. Then something seemed to stir inside her. Was she in water? Drowning? That’s what it felt like. She was drowning while listening to the sound of intermittent clicking. She tried to spit each grain of dust out of her mouth as though it were water, but she could not.
Her body was playing a strange orchestra. She hadn’t played classical music in the house since her daughter left to marry someone from that church-extra protection, they had convinced her daughter, against the ghosts. Leaving the child behind was part of that too. Her daughter had dreaded when that day would come for her own daughter, when the earth would seem to shake and she would pass out and wake up with her gifts. Except they had not been gifts to Odette’s only child. The entire world’s pains had become her own. She could not read or write or even listen to the classical music she loved without intruding voices.
“We were going to the beach,” Odette heard herself say. Before the earth began to shake, she and the child were standing in the kitchen eating bread covered with grapefruit marmalade and talking about taking a trip to the beach. They both loved going to the beach, especially since the child’s mother had left. Odette’s daughter used to love going to the beach too. There at the beach, between swims, they danced to the blasting konpa music of the other beachgoers’ boom boxes. The music, like everything else, was in their bodies. But now Odette couldn’t dance to it. Instead, waves of silence filled her. Her heart was pounding faster than normal. She wanted to scream but she couldn’t. She closed her eyes and felt the child’s hand on her face. The child’s voice still sounded far away. At moments she thought they were both still standing in the kitchen eating their sweet bread, sobbing. She closed her eyes again and clenched her teeth. Her body felt like it was being pricked by thousands of needles.
Her granddaughter’s voice became clear for a second. Then Odette saw what was pinning them both to the floor. A large cement beam the size of two kitchen chairs was on her lap and on the girl’s head. Her granddaughter was completely drenched with blood. It was like when they played “monster” and the child covered her entire body with a sheet. Odette wanted to tell the little girl that she loved her. She wanted to laugh and tease her about not being a convincing enough monster, but something stabbed her in her coccyx area and flushed her head once again with darkness. She envisioned herself walking on the beach with both her daughter and granddaughter while eating ripe mangoes. In her ancestral village in the southeast, they raced each other by a stream of red and violet flowers.
“We can’t get to the child,” she heard a voice say. It finally registered that the voices belonged to some men who were helping to pull her out from underneath the concrete.
“The child is in pieces,” she heard another say.
“Continue to be brave,” another said. “We’re going to get you out.”
While those voices were instructing her, the pain spread from the center of her back and rapidly shot up through her entire body. She was still unable to scream.
She would later remember being raised by many hands, then placed on the ground with a small cushion behind her head. When she reopened her eyes, multiple heads were standing in a dark circle over her. A car came: a black shiny 1970 Peugeot pulled by two muscular Andalusian horses. Horses? Where could horses go in a broken city? They would ride over the cobalt-blue ocean of her daughter and granddaughter’s favorite beaches and their perfectly spaced coconut and palm trees.
In the tent clinic, she smelled the rubbing alcohol as they poured it on the gashes on her leg, but she felt nothing. Around her, she heard people groaning and screaming, “M ap mouri!” I’m dying! It was as if they were all swimming in a pool of fire.
When she woke up from another bout of sleep, she was in a massive white tent surrounded by doctors speaking to each other in Spanish. She remembered the bright smile of one young girl-like her Rose, she couldn’t have been more than five years old-as she lifted her stumped left arm.
“Alone. Dementia,” she heard someone say. “But otherwise okay.”
Dust was still blanketing the kitchen where she lay. A brown angel whose white wings flapped high up in the breeze touched the back of her hand and said in a very assuring voice, “You’re lucky to be alive.”
After her daughter was born twenty-five years ago, driving home from the hospital, holding the baby in her arms in the back of her husband’s shiny black Peugeot, they had passed a bidonville in the middle of the city and she had thought of Hiroshima. The city she was being driven through now was like Hiroshima, the epic destruction reminding her of the World War II films her husband loved to watch. The National Palace ’s collapsed domes were like crushed camel humps; the National Police Headquarters compressed onto its blue and white walls. Thousands of desperate bodies were now sleeping on the streets, on bare concrete like stray dogs. Not sure where they were taking her, she felt defeated and small in the back of the open pickup. Then she remembered that she had asked to go. She had told them that she had a house, one of the few policemen still alive had volunteered to take her back to Rose, to take her home.
The entire front of the two-story terraced house had collapsed. As some of her neighbors ventured into her yard, both happy and surprised to see her, she longed for the strength to dig beneath the rubble with her bare hands to find Rose. Instead, she climbed as close as she could to where she thought the kitchen was and sat there weeping, with the scalding sun beaming down her back.
“You can’t stay here alone,” a neighbor said, while handing her a small packet of crushed saltine crackers. “Come.”
And that’s how she let herself be led to the tent city closest to her house.
In the middle of the sweltering assemblage of human bodies, she sat under a sheet held up by sticks all day and unbraided her long salt-and-pepper hair, which she then covered with a dingy red satin head-wrap that someone had given her. She had also acquired, she did not know where, a polished pine stick with intricate carvings that she tapped while humming before she went to sleep. Despite the constant chatter of her fellow evacuees, the tapping made a persistent noise in the humid hot air that seemed intrusive to some and meditative to others. Eventually, she began to inspire gossip.
The gossip was a way to both pass the time and deflect resentment, which, without an identified target, would have reattached itself to its originator. Odette thus became an unwitting target over the next several weeks, as words traveled from mouths to ears to other mouths. Her tapping and ongoing conversations with herself were rumored to be a secret code, her red satin head-wrap proof of what many had heard for years: that she was such a lougawou, a wretched person, that even her own child had abandoned her. Many could now recall her predicting some horrible event that had actually taken place. A car accident. A coup d’état. A bad hurricane season.
“Why didn’t that old witch see this one coming?” they asked.
Rumor had it that Odette’s only child had died from an infection and loss of blood after she’d left her mother’s house and married a pastor.
“Even Jesus couldn’t save the child from that old witch,” they said.
People would have been happy to ask her about all of this, except Odette had not uttered an intelligible word since that horrible afternoon in January.
During the long sleepless nights of tent city life, gossip spread at a distorted speed, occasionally ricocheting past Odette’s ears. She knew the pain of those who even in their search for food and water found ways to invoke her name. She started crossing herself multiple times before falling asleep.
Every once in a while, Rose would appear to Odette in her sleep. The child would unwrap Odette’s head scarf and undo her gray tresses, then would braid them again and again. At night, the neighbors watched the old woman in silhouette as though she were the heroine of a silent film.
The less hostile ones sobbed, placing their hands over their mouths, as others continued to declare: “That woman is a witch!”
“I know one when I see one.”
“I’ve been waiting for someone else to realize it.”
“I don’t play games with witches.”
“In my old neighborhood, they never stayed around.”
The neighbor who had taken Odette to the tent city was among those who just watched and sobbed. Her young daughter, also killed in the earthquake, had been Rose’s best friend until the rumors had caught up with them. That neighbor appeared now and then with a plate of rice or some water for Odette. Otherwise, Odette would have died of hunger and thirst.
As she lay down in the dark one night, Odette heard the voices discussing her outside. Most of the talk was about her flying around in the dark, her being a witch. Closing her eyes, she longed for the clamoring of crickets, for the stillness of her old house, for the embraces of her daughter and granddaughter, for the breeziness of the beach. She had been living alone for so many years now that all this sudden company was agonizing.
An uneasy premonition was coming over her, an old sensation that she thought had long faded. Her hair stood up and her heart began to beat a little bit faster. As she listened to the voices, growing closer to her ears, she remembered how she had wailed helplessly when her mother was dragged into the street one night by an angry cross-wielding mob. It was the summer of 1955 and she was five years old.
Now, in a different time and place, that same fear and horror gripped her yet again. As the clamor grew louder, a wail pushed itself past her lips. The entire tent city seemed to be alive with commotion. The news that Odette, the lady lougawou, was about to be dealt with brought ecstasy to many.
A small group of stick-wielding women were already inside her makeshift tent. She felt an arm around her neck, which was followed by the tearing sound of the front of her dress and then a slap at the side of her head. All she remembered saying was: “Ki sa m te fè?” What did I do?
As the torrent of slaps continued, she wrapped both her arms around her head. Had it not been for a police pickup that was parked nearby, her body would surely have been hacked. Even in the presence of the officers, some managed to land a kick or a slap.
In the police truck, the destroyed city was not as visible, a less structured darkness now shielding the living and the dead from each other. The Andalusian horses were galloping ahead of them. Odette turned to the young police officer who sat next her to bring this to his attention, then she changed her mind. Instead, she raised her eyes to the sky, which was the brightest she had ever seen it and teeming with stars. She tried to search for her own star, but could not find it. It had forsaken her and dashed out of the heavens, it seemed, very long ago.
I’m sitting in my father’s chair-a tattered and tired office chair that I’ve lugged to the porch. It is showing its age: scarred faux leather, armrests sprouting prickly stuffing, scents of Papa in the fabric. Half shaded by an acacia tree, I am sipping rich, dark café au lait, scattering a bit on the ground first, just like my father does, to feed our ancestors. The air is soft with breeze and sweet with roasting coffee, the few clouds in the sky moving like fishing boats out on the Caribbean Sea. The voices of the neighborhood rise and fall in spurts. Outside the prisonlike gates of my parents’ house in Kenscoff, young girls balance buckets atop their heads, up and down the graveled roads. Sun-wrinkled women sell huge mangoes and homemade peanut brittle, while boys in cutoff jeans run in circles with makeshift kites or push around trucks made from plastic bottles.
Papa struts from the house. A dark beard nearly covers his entire face. This angled face is also mine. Only fear and distance make it seem less familiar. My father’s hair is still wet from the shower. His I-am-home clothing is worn and comfortable: a stretched-out sweater, blue chinos, and old wool socks. The skin crawls on the back of my neck and the pit of my stomach crashes into my pelvis. My father’s presence always makes me uncomfortable. He’s more of a jailer than a father. I don’t like his grim outlook on the world and the way he tries so hard to make a father and daughter out of us when we are in fact complete strangers.
He walks around behind me in his cramped, thin shoes, places his hands on the back of the chair, and asks, “What are you doing, Magda?”
I can’t see his face now but I know his eyebrows are furrowed in curiosity. I take a deep breath, push my wild furious loathing into a soft, horrible place inside myself, and I swallow. “Thinking,” I say.
He sits in the rocking chair next to me, elbows on knees, with his whiskered chin in the palms of his hands, and sighs. Then he picks up the magazine I have been reading, clutches it in his calloused and rough hands.
“I don’t think a girl should be allowed to go to nightclubs until she’s eighteen,” he says.
I nod my head up and down, like a bobble doll, pretending to be interested.
Papa looks at me. “You don’t like me much, do you?”
I raise my shoulders in annoyance. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
He takes a deep breath. “What if I let you go out with your friends tonight?”
Just like that. My life in Kenscoff becomes a dazzling succession of house parties, balls, gaieties, not only night after night, but also sometimes an afternoon gathering at one house followed by an evening party somewhere else. I dance, sing, and drink toasts with cheap beers. I wear trendy wide-leg jeans, white denims, belly shirts of neon colors, dresses with abstract, multicolored designs. At seventeen, I feel like I’m running my own show. I understand what it means to live at the rainbow’s end and have its colors shimmer about me.
Tonight, Lakoup Nightclub is crowded, noisy, and literally vibrating with the beat of music blasting through large speakers. The air itself is alive with energy, the crowd abuzz with anticipation. I walk into the music, into the shadows, and the hot, sticky night presses against my skin until perspiration beads my upper lip. People line up three deep at the bar, in the rez-de-chaussée of the old gingerbread house. The bartender is chatting with a woman. “What is so dreadful about your hair that someone would call it dreadlocks?” she asks.
I don’t know the number of gourdes required for a Coca-Cola or a Prestige beer. I let the sexy bartender get me a cocktail “on the house.” I explore the dark, empty rooms upstairs. I walk out on the balcony, the den of iniquity, where a couple is smoking something with a peculiar smell. The girl laughs and reaches up. She slips her hand under the boy’s blue shirt, up near the collar. Her hand is moving, rubbing the boy’s neck. They’re in search of privacy, but I just stand there. Then the couple leaves and I’m alone, under the stars, sipping my cocktail, watching people dancing downstairs, in the yard.
From the balcony, I can see the band in the backyard. Lead singer Michel Martelly’s voice is strong and unlabored even when reaching for notes in the upper registers. I love the grainy vocal quality that lends the band a tortured but familiar sound, as if one were remembering a bad day. Martelly keeps listeners hanging on every phrase, awaiting the next pause or streak or curve.
“Hello,” a voice says behind me.
There’s something boyish about the man standing there- the dimples and the apple cheeks. His hair is wild and shaggy, as if the wind has been playing with it. He’s probably in his late twenties, handsome, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist.
“Do you want to dance?” he asks.
He says his name is Ben and he is a lanky mulatto. As he moves me around in a circle, Michel Martelly sings, “Yon samdi swa nan lakou Lakoup, desten fè de moun kontre.” On a Saturday night, at Lakoup Nightclub, their destinies intertwined. The singer laughs and adds to the lyrics, “But he was a mad, mad man.” Ben’s hands leave damp spots on my back. He smells of oiled wood, and during the next dance he pulls back to look at me and says that I’m pretty. He gets me another drink.
Then we are lounging in the parking lot, his back against his beat-up Volkswagen, blowing smoke rings to the sky, watching them rise and disappear slowly. He calls me a wild grimèl. We can still hear the crunching guitar and the keyboard. They come together to create a sometimes sultry, sometimes dreamy, and sometimes raucous feel. I want to listen to Michel Martelly forever. His voice is both loud and strong and soft and vulnerable. His solos are the sound of supreme confidence: not aggressive or necessarily flashy, but casually assuring that every impulse will pay off.
“I’d like to see you again,” Ben says with a grin that crinkles the laugh lines around his eyes and deepens the grooves that bracket his mouth.
We meet again at another party in Pétionville, in a two-story brick house with an iron balcony. Ben’s eyes are chocolatebrown; his smile, easy and warm, makes me feel like the only person he’s ever truly smiled at.
While we’re dancing by the pool, a young man accidentally bumps into Ben.
“Watch it, fucker,” Ben says with a flash of recognition in his eyes.
“What did you call me?” the other man asks.
I give a horrible squeal, like a kitten under a rocking chair, when the stranger pushes both Ben and me into the pool. I don’t even have time to take a breath before I find myself underwater. Wild fear grabs the edges of my mind. Panic pounds loudly in my temples and twines my heart. I kick and squirm, fighting to get back to the surface. My lungs are screaming for air. I am choking. I am drowning. I gulp big mouthfuls of water; I can feel it going up to my nose and down into my lungs.
With one hand, Ben helps me out of the water. In the other hand, he’s holding a gun.
He fires toward the sky. Gunshots pop like firecrackers. The air is electric-people run around in circles and scream, boys hold their girlfriends’ hands. Leaving Ben behind, I plow through the madness to the side of the bar. I drop to the floor, crouching beneath the porch railing. There are too many people to see what’s happening; I am caught in a spiral of chaos and movement, charging, rushing, spinning, trampling. Just a sea of people and crashing movement. There is more running, sauve qui peut, and dizziness. I press my hands against my temples as two more gunshots shatter the air.
The other guy is gone. Ben calms down. He finds me in the crowd and asks me if I’m okay. There’s a dangerous flicker in his eyes.
I don’t go out that much anymore because Ben seems to materialize everywhere. Besides, there’s the embargo and the gas prices have skyrocketed, making it impossible to get around town. My father often spends half a day in a line to get his tank filled; no gas container allowed. I can only go to school three times a week. On school days, because of the traffic caused by the long lines, the alarm clock rings at four o’clock in the morning.
“C’est l’heure! C’est l’heure!” my mother chants each morning as she opens the windows for the mountain air to rush in.
We fetch water from a cistern built under the house for our bath and press our clothes with a smoky charcoal iron, whose hollow interior is filled with smoldering coals. High, spoutlike openings allow for the coals to be fanned when swinging the iron back and forth vigorously.
If there’s no electricity, I do my homework by candlelight. After I’ve studied a whole chapter on the French Revolution or read about la Négritude, there’s not much to do and I’m bored out of my mind.
I don’t remember giving him my phone number. But Ben calls.
We talk every night. I sit Indian-style, wringing, twirling the curly phone cord in my left hand, receiver tucked between my ear and left shoulder, until hours later it leaves hickeys on my ear. I tell him about my father. One moment Papa is normal, calm, quiet, in control, reliable; the next he is a wildeyed stranger, screaming so loud my ears sting. His eyebrows join together in a frown line across his forehead. His thin face is stern, lips latched tight, and his black-rimmed glasses magnify his furious eyes.
“If you ever need me to kick his ass,” Ben says, “I’m one phone call away.”
Ben is not that bad, after all. He might be dangerous-but he’s also fun. He doesn’t try to hide his trying to get into my pants. We have phone sex once, or so he thinks. I am only pretending, playing Tetris silently on my Game Boy. Maybe he’s faking it too.
I want to learn how to drive. Ben knows someone who knows someone else who works at the Department of Highway Control. I get my driver's license before I ever sit behind a wheel. I think that once I get the rectangular piece of colorful plastic, it will be easier to convince my parents to send me to driving school. Well, no. Papa says I am too impulsive to drive a car.
“Teach me,” I tell Ben.
Mom is okay with the lessons because I told her that Ben is a math teacher chez les soeurs. Truth is: Ben doesn’t exactly have a job. He was into stealing credit card numbers on the Internet for a while. Now, he admits just living off his mother’s retirement money.
That same afternoon, I am in the driver’s seat of his red Volkswagen. He spent the whole morning at a gas station, in an “embargo” line-his tank is full. The ashtray is polluted with cigarette butts; the floorboards have rusted out from summers at the beach.
Ben is distracted by my legs. I’ve been flirting with him out of boredom, wearing skimpy skirts and using words that my mother doesn’t know I know.
He shows me how to turn on the engine, how to back up. I chug and lurch two or three times in reverse before we make it safely out of the driveway. I spin the buggy in a one-eighty. Dried grass from the summer’s heat throws dust into the air and I narrowly miss hitting a parked pickup truck. I jump the curb, taking out several shrubs and a small tree, and then I regain control of the car.
We stop the bug and walk around it. The front bumper is wrenched downward; branches weave between it and the crammed wheel well. Ben starts pulling at the greenery and I join him. With one leg propped up on the slanted bumper so he can see some more skin, I tug on a particularly huge branch.
“I’m sorry,” I say. But I don’t really mean it.
Ben says I am a fast learner, and I tell him I don’t want to have driving lessons on a back road. I want the real thing, the treacherous Kenscoff Road leading to the mountains. This road is extremely slim and steep, with sudden turns and a ravine on both sides. There’s no way to survive a fall.
I want someone to temper my urges to look for trouble. I am expecting a No, are you crazy? from Ben when I mention Kenscoff Road. That’s how I usually deal with my impulsive, crazy ideas. I state them, and a saner person rebuffs them. Should I get a tattoo? Should I dye my hair blue? No. No. No!
But Ben says okay. So on day two, we are already on the main road. Tires spinning. Music blasting. The freedom! The excitement! I pop in a Bob Marley CD, crank up the volume, and punch the accelerator to the floor. The car makes a deeptoned hum and jolts forward with a squealing of the tires and a cloud of dust. I scream excitedly as we speed past the huge, honking trucks.
The first car I hit is a tap tap, a taxi full of people.
“Ben, you are in big trouble,” I say.
After all, I’m only seventeen; I’m still a kid. He’s the adult here. And it’s his car. Why should I care? He’s the one who was willing to let me drive.
The other driver is surprisingly unruffled, however. One look at Ben and the stranger is flustered, nervously running his short fingers through his hair. His eyes open wide, sending his bushy black eyebrows to the top of his forehead. He says his tap tap needed serious repairs even before we hit it.
The second car is a brand-new Honda. The woman looks angry for a minute, and then she composes herself and asks us if we’ve ever heard of Amway. She says there is a reason for all this to be happening, that God wants me to become a rich girl in Haiti. As she hands me her business card, she says, “Don’t worry about the repairs.”
So off we go again, down the mountains this time. We stop by my friend Nelly’s house. As soon as I park, the whole front of the car collapses. Nelly’s father gives Ben a hand to temporarily adjust the front of the vehicle. I let Ben take the wheel for the drive back-too much adventure for one day.
We fly up the road, kissing the embankment at speeds that test fate. Suddenly, Ben jerks the wheel to the right and sends us flying into a cow field. The headlights bob into an eternity of wheat-colored grass, the moonlight miles ahead. I can hear a million voices, like flies, buzzing at the back of my neck.
And then the engine dies.
I don’t expect fear to come at me so violently. I am alone with a grown man in a deserted area. He grabs me, tries to kiss me. I want to say, Oh no, you creep. Crank this puppy up and get me out of here or I’m… I’m… I’m walking! But I simply ask him to stop. He doesn’t; his hands are fumbling with my shirt. I can feel something in the air. Something nasty that is taking over. I have to think fast.
“I just need time,” I say. “I know you’re the one. I don’t want to ruin it by going too fast. I’ve been thinking about how special this has to be.”
Somehow, my hands remain steady and my voice unmarked by the fear that is overtaking me. There is something in Ben’s eyes, cold and animal-something I know I will never forget. He just sits there, listening to the loud ticking of the dashboard clock, his hands locked on the wheel, his foot still on the brake pedal. The smell of burnt rubber fills the cabin.
A muscle in his cheek twitches as he drives me home. And I can read his eyes. I know where you live.
When the embargo ends, the partying resumes. Somehow, I manage to avoid Ben for a few months. But then he shows up at my birthday party, with the clear brown eyes and dimples that complement his bright smile. He helps Nelly out of a red BMW, and she introduces him as her new boyfriend. Ben offers a strange smile, the corners of his mouth lift, but his eyes remain dead, without the slightest twinkle in them. Finally, he shows a set of pearly white teeth and helps himself to a glass of kremas at the outdoor bar.
“Did you miss me?” he asks.
My mother pulls me aside, to a corner of the patio. “Who is he?” I can hear suspicion in her voice.
“Nelly’s boyfriend, apparently.”
“I see that,” she says with a dismissive gesture of her right hand. “I meant, isn’t he the teacher who used to drive the beat-up Volkswagen? How come he’s driving a BMW now?”
I shrug. “I heard he’s a cop now,” then look absentmindedly at the azaleas and bougainvilleas lining the side of the house. “I don’t know, Mom.”
“Look at all the expensive jewelry around his neck. Smells like drug money to me.”
“I don’t know, Mom.”
I sigh and walk toward the deejay, a really handsome young man who smiles every time he catches me watching him do his thing. The music is good-mellow and sexy, and never overpowering. At the deejay’s table, I check the list of songs to be played next, smiling at the familiar faces on the dance floor. The boys wear Saturday-night smiles. The girls are in dresses and slinky tops, with their hair and makeup done to perfection. I shake hands, kiss cheeks, tousle hair, and hug. But something about Ben bugs me.
Ben and Nelly are French-kissing in a corner. Her chubby, short, and dark-skinned body and his gangly lighter one, merging. Nelly sees me and waves her arms high above her head. I gesture back, a very bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. Well, Ben is certainly the center of attention that night. He shows his police badge around and girls giggle, beaming in adoration. Nelly hugs him proudly.
I bump into my cousin Clement who’s spending a few days with us from Port-au-Prince.
“Do you know that guy over there?” he asks.
I look around, at the boys prowling and the girls flashing a lot of skin. The music is so loud I feel it vibrating in my eardrums. “What guy?”
“This guy making out with Nelly. Is his name Ben?”
I nod. “It sure is. What’s up?”
“I need to talk to you. Could you give me a sec?”
I follow Clement inside my father’s study. “What’s up?” I say again.
“Do you actually know Ben?” he asks gravely.
“Well, we used to be friends. He taught me how to drive.”
Clement scratches his ear. “Listen, I don’t want to scare you or anything, but Ben is out on a bail bond.”
I can hear my parents laughing in the kitchen. They drink cocktails, dark ones, often peeping through the venetian blinds to check on the “kids.” “I can’t believe my little girl just turned eighteen,” Mom says. “It seems like only days ago when we were playing koukou, ah!”
My heart is dancing the cha-cha. “What was he arrested for?”
Clement lights up a cigarette. “A drug deal gone bad. A fight at a pool party followed by a boy’s body being found in his trunk.”
A pool party, huh?
The cigarette hangs loosely from his lips. He lets it dangle there until the ashes fall off by themselves into a tiny gray pile on the floor. “Damnit!” he says. “I can’t believe this crooked cop is still walking around freely with his police badge.”
He lets me smoke some of his cigarette, and the gray smoke curls up toward the discolored ceiling. I slump down on a sofa, hoping that Clement is mistaken. The adults in the kitchen move on to talking about politics and the situation in Port-au-Prince. About the corrupt new police who replaced the army a few weeks ago.
“Are you sure about Ben?” I ask. “I mean, you know how it works here. Could just be rumors.”
“Believe me, ti cheri, I know what I’m talking about.”
My heart is skidding up into my throat. I need to find Nelly. Can it be true that Ben is a murderer? I remember the pool incident. I think about his broody eyes, his listen-to-me lips.
I look everywhere. Nelly and Ben are gone. Just gone.
It’s midnight. I dial Nelly’s phone number. No one picks up. The deejay belts out Bob Marley, and I chug my cup of cola champagne a little harder and realize how empty it is. The music is crisp in my ears, light and airy.
One in the morning. Nothing. At two o’clock, most of the guests are gone. I try Nelly’s home phone again. Nothing. While dialing, I get so many mosquito bites I take a pen and play connect-the-dots on my legs. Sleep crusts the corners of my eyes.
The last guests leave around five a.m. I finally get Nelly’s mother on the phone. She says her daughter hasn’t come home, and do I have any idea where she might be?
“We need to find Nelly,” I tell Clement in a coarse voice after hanging up. “Maybe she’s over at his house. He told me once where he lives. Would you please take me there?”
We don’t exactly give it a second thought. We get into Clement’s Honda. The sun is just waking up, and the wind whistles through the winged windows of the car. The cold air whips my hair as we pass houses patched with tin, cardboard, and plastic. Kenscoff smells of fresh leaves and donkey dung. The town is so quiet at this time of day that all I can hear is the jingle bells of ice-cream carts pushed by men on their way to Pétionville to sell sweet coconut popsicles. The road leading to Ben’s house is narrow and crooked. My heart is burning. I am haunted by the disturbing stories about Ben, and it’s nerve-racking.
Clement uses a rock to knock on the gate. We wait and listen; I think I hear the singing of psalms inside. A woman with heavy-lidded eyes and a red blouse comes out of the house. She looks at us curiously. “M ka ede w?” she asks. Can I help you?
“I’m sorry to bother you at this hour, ma’am, but we really need to see Ben,” I stammer.
She asks us to follow her, and we walk inside a room where four women are praying and incense is burning with a pleasant smell. All the shades are drawn. One woman lifts her head and nods. Clement and I nod back and follow the one in red down some stairs into a basement. She knocks on a door. “Ben,” she says, “there are some people here to see you.”
The door opens, and the smell of marijuana rushes out along with the rank odor of alcohol and stale cigarettes. Ben emerges from the room, his lids thick, his eyes red and watery.
“Hey, Ben,” I say, trying to sound casual even though I am sure my fear is visible. “How are you?”
His lips are drawn in a tight smile. His eyes are dead.
“I’m looking for Nelly,” I continue. “Is she here?”
He opens the door, and there are three other guys in his bedroom, all high on something. Two of them, their eyes set deep in their sockets, are watching TV. The third one has passed out. He is lying on a padded sofa, bathing in his own vomit, the smell of which almost makes me sick. There’s a faint lamp in one corner of the room, and no sunlight gets in at all. We walk in and Ben puts his hand out, laying it on my arm. “She won’t come out of the bathroom,” he says.
His hand is raw on my skin. The darkness in his voice makes me shiver. His expression is unreadable. How did I ever find him cute? I notice a gun on his desk. The danger in this room is sharp enough to make the air around us crackle.
“Seems like you had quite a party here,” Clement says with a detached voice. How can he sound so relaxed?
I knock softly on the bathroom door. “Nelly, are you in there?”
No answer. Clement gives me a quick glance over his shoulder. I knock again. “Nelly, it’s Magda. Please open the door.”
Ben pulls me near. His hand caresses my shoulder, slides down my back, and comes to rest beneath my armpit, at the swell of my breast. “I’m sure she’s okay.”
I hear someone’s faint crying. Oh God! What did he do to her? Then the door cracks open, and Nelly sticks her head out. Her dark hair hangs across her forehead in messy strands.
She comes out of the bathroom and hugs me. Her eyes are dark, hooded.
“We’ll be going now,” Clement says then.
Nelly turns away from me to look at the men. Fear whisks across her face. Ben is tracing his finger along a scar on his chin. “No problem, man,” he says.
He doesn’t appear anything like the man I met months before. His good looks are gone. There is a stiffness to his face. He has an empty stare. When he kisses Nelly on the lips, she doesn’t kiss him back. Ben’s cheeks harden and his neck tendons engorge. There’s this dangerous look in his eyes again. The one I’ve seen in cats’ eyes while they play with their prey.
We make a quick exit to the car. I am about to get into the vehicle when a wave of nausea rolls over me too fast for me to feel it coming. I dry heave for several long moments. When the nausea finally abates, my temples are pounding, and the sunlight suddenly seems too bright. I pull myself inside the car, taking deep breaths to calm down.
On the cusp of morning, we ride into the sunrise, past the big old two-story houses with porch swings and flower beds along the front walks, the beautiful old flamboyant trees that line the quiet streets and hold on to their bloody leaves.
“I was afraid he was going to rape me,” Nelly says. “That’s why I wouldn’t come out of the bathroom.”
“I was afraid he was going to kill me,” I say. “But I couldn’t just leave you there.”
The bumpy Kenscoff Road is quiet, and the damp air raises goose bumps on my skin as I look ahead into the breaking clouds, warm colors coming in to soften the sky-pinks and golds that blossom against the horizon like jungle flowers.
But as I suck in my breath, I can’t taste the sunrise. I’m looking over my shoulder. Because Ben knows where I live.
Translated by Nicole Ball
With an agility that revealed an extensive amount of experience, Dread Lanfè leaned on his hands and, after a perfect pull-up, hoisted himself to the top of the wall that enclosed the property. Then he checked out the surroundings with eagle eyes. The premises were deserted. Except for a dog barking next door, there was nothing to disturb the silence. As soon as he was sure the way was clear, he put the fingers of his right hand in his mouth and made a high hoot that sounded exactly like the screech of an owl. Right away, his two accomplices, each carrying a canvas bag, popped out of the night. They climbed up the wall too. Dread Lanfè slung a.38 Uzi across his shoulder and walked quickly to the door indicated by the servant who served as informer for the job. Dread Lanfè stood still a moment to make absolutely sure the way was clear. The two German shepherds that might have stirred up the neighborhood had died a few minutes before, after they had swallowed-the pigs!-two pounds of meat spiced up with homemade poison. It was Grizon’s turn to act now. He was a former Tonton Macoute turned political activist, like Dread Lanfè. Grizon was famously expert at picking locks: he could force open the most recalcitrant doors, and it took him less than three minutes to open this one.
Dread Lanfè, his Uzi in hand, entered a dilapidated room with walls blackened by smoke. The scents of oil, spices, and spoiled food floated in the air. Pots and plates were piled in a jumble on shelves. A faucet was letting out a thin flow of water that was running in the darkness with a sinister hiss. He gestured to Grizon to close the door, then gave him the order to remain in the room and cover him. He liked to talk like the military, copy the way they acted and put on their look of mean dogs, to show that he was no petty thug but a political activist about to be integrated into the police force by the dictator-in exile at the moment-with the rank of inspector. If he had become a full-time thief it was because the bourgeoisie and the expat intellectuals had ganged up with the Americans and the French to kidnap the leader. He fully intended to come out of this rich house loaded with major loot. Eight kids to put through school, one wife, and three mistresses, among them the luscious Italian who loved his enormous member so much. He really had to move his ass now. Gone were the checks and suitcases stuffed with money coming from public agencies, the afternoons spent with all the activists who met to smoke grass, snort coke, and talk politics.
While brooding over these dark thoughts, Dread Lanfè walked gingerly up the stairs leading to the bedroom where Fanfayon, the owner of the place, and his wife were sleeping. Dread Lanfè always picked his victims with care, gathering all necessary information about them ahead of time. Certain mistakes had to be avoided at all cost. After you had taken enormous risks, you could either return with an empty trunk or go after a big shot who’d been a supporter of the former dictator. Fanfayon was one of those. He owned several gambling houses, two supermarkets, a money laundering enterprise, and a dozen or so pawnshops in Port-au-Prince. The money made in the gambling houses was transferred to his bedroom safe at night. Dread Lanfè trusted his informer. Sure of himself, he burst into the bedroom, followed by Fat Alfred, his other accomplice. In the wink of an eye they had Fanfayon, still sluggish from sleep, under control. The businessman’s wife screamed. Fat Alfred made her stop by hitting her on the head with an iron bar. The woman collapsed, unconscious, her face all bloody.
“The money!” Dread Lanfè bellowed, the tip of his.38 pressed against Fanfayon’s temple. “Give me the money or I’ll scatter your brain all over this room!”
Fanfayon rolled his frightened eyes. He stammered something and let out a cry of pain when an impatient Dread Lanfè kicked him in the groin. He doubled over, gasping. Dread Lanfè quickly brought up his knee. The noise made by the impact, the blood gushing out-he enjoyed it all. Fanfayon remained slumped on the floor. He was holding his belly and moaning.
“Give me the money!” barked Dread Lanfè again.
Fat Alfred forced Fanfayon to stand up and dragged him violently to the safe located between a dressing table and a bulky mahogany wardrobe.
“Open it!” screamed Dread Lanfè. “I’ve got no time to waste.”
“There’s no money here,” Fanfayon managed to say between sobs. “I swear it on my mother’s head.”
“Liar!” hissed Dread Lanfè, kicking him hard. “If you don’t open the safe, I’ll kill you.”
Whimpering, Fanfayon put his hand forward to dial the combination. Dread Lanfè was following the businessman’s movements with distrust, his finger on the trigger of the.38. When Fanfayon opened the safe, Dread Lanfè went back at his victim with renewed ferocity, hitting him with a kind of blind rage. Fat Alfred, meanwhile, was frantically looking through the safe. “Dread Lanfè, there’s no money!” he yelled.
“What do you mean there’s no money?” Dread Lanfè cried, turning away from Fanfayon, who lay unconscious on the floor.
He shoved his accomplice back and stuck his head inside the safe. He had to face the facts and it didn’t take long. The safe held uninteresting, worthless papers, a passport with an American visa stamped in it, and small change. Eyes bloodshot, Dread Lanfè grabbed Fanfayon, who was no longer moving. Dread Lanfè didn’t know how to perform artificial resuscitation so he turned to Madame Fanfayon. But Fat Alfred had killed her on the spot with that iron bar to the head. Dread Lanfè and his accomplice combed the place desperately, one room after the other, in search of some nook where a sizeable sum of money might have been stashed. Finally, he realized that this was not going to bring in much and came back to the bedroom. Fanfayon was still breathing. Dread Lanfè finished him off with a quick bullet to the temple. He had to get out of there quickly, he thought, but then noticed the ring his victim was wearing on his left forefinger. It was a solid gold piece of jewelry that glowed in the dim light as if it were phosphorescent. Dread Lanfè examined it with interest. He was mesmerized by the two snakes elaborately carved on the precious metal. Fanfayon was certainly a servant of a lwa who favored him with wealth and protection. As he couldn’t manage to get the ring off the finger, Dread Lanfè angrily cut off the appendage with the knife that had already cut so many. He put the finger in his shirt pocket before signaling to Fat Alfred that it was time to leave the premises. The neighbors might have been alerted by the shot. They vanished into the night as furtively as they had come.
Depressed, Dread Lanfè didn’t go home. He had another plan in mind. He decided that this was a bad-luck night, and he shouldn’t do another job. He went to Paola’s, his Italian mistress. She worked for an NGO and was always proud to show him off-him, Dread Lanfè, like a trophy you fought hard to win. He was fond of Paola even though he knew she didn’t care too much about the dire poverty of the people in the city where she’d come to work. Her apparent commitment was hiding something else. Some deeper discontent. A loneliness her culture had planted in her. Poverty, death ever-present, black bodies gleaming with sweat. All those niggers wanted was to gobble up white women and that made her panties wet-she, who had been frigid before. When she met Dread Lanfè, it was love at first sight, an explosion. The man had the reputation of being a criminal. He was tall, ugly, wild, and most of all, blessed with a member (a publicly known fact) that made all the other niggers in town envious. When Dread Lanfè put his hand on her, she could visualize mud and blood, and that propelled her right down the track to orgasm. And Dread Lanfè told himself that Paola was his safety net in this fucked-up country. Perhaps some day she would take off with him and they’d go live under other skies. That’s why he felt he had to concentrate on her, always keep himself in condition to satisfy her well.
So he knocked on Paola’s door. As soon as she knew it was him, she yanked the door open. She didn’t even give him time to undress. She wanted him to take her right there and then, in the living room. Dread Lanfè lifted her up with all his strength, propped her against a shelf, crushing china, pictures, statuettes in the process, like the brute he was. The anger he felt about the botched job at Fanfayon’s increased his energy tenfold. Paola nearly fainted after her orgasm. Dread Lanfè, following the ritual they had worked out together, made her come back to reality with a pair of slaps.
“Let’s go to bed,” she stammered.
“Give me a little powder first,” ordered Dread Lanfè.
She complied. After they had both snorted their dose of coke, they felt like the world was at their feet. Paola quickly fell into a deep sleep. Dread Lanfè then remembered that he had Fanfayon’s finger in his shirt pocket. He couldn’t fall asleep with a dead man’s finger on him. He got up, took the finger, tried once more to take the ring off it, but didn’t succeed. That ring could very well bring him a nice bundle of dollars. Dread Lanfè knew how to recognize gold. He put the finger on the dressing table, in a china glass. Paola would see the finger when she woke up. Lanfè didn’t care. It would only add to his charm. He tossed his shirt over on a chair and came back to lie down next to her. He tumbled into a heavy sleep, disturbed by the impression that a foreign body was crawling over his chest. He knew it was the finger when he felt the ring rubbing against his skin. He screamed and sat up on the bed, gasping, his body drenched in sweat. Thinking that maybe some horrible creature had slipped in next to him, he jumped out of bed. But he couldn’t find anything suspicious. The finger was still on the dressing table. He managed to convince himself that it was just cocaine playing tricks with his mind.
“What’s the matter?” asked Paola somewhere between sleep and wakefulness.
“Nothing,” he muttered. “A bad dream.”
“Come back to bed. Come closer to me.”
Dread Lanfè went back to bed. He held her tight, seeking comfort and safety in the warmth of her body, safety that only his mother, a peasant woman from Artibonite, could give him when he was a child. He was unable to go back to sleep. The nightmare just caught him like that, while he was still awake. He felt the finger on his thigh, climbing up, lingering over his navel. Dread Lanfè got rid of the intruder with an abrupt swing of his hand. He heard the finger falling on the floor and immediately trying to climb back onto the bed. Terrified, he jumped up and rushed to the dressing table. The finger had disappeared. Terror took hold of him like a gust of wind carrying a dry leaf away. He grabbed the machine gun he had placed underneath the dressing table. In the semidarkness of the bedroom, Dread Lanfè heard the finger climbing on a chair. Like a madman, he opened fire, unleashing an infernal racket. Paola woke up screaming, just as the finger jumped on Dread Lanfè and clung to his chest like a devilish bloodsucker. Without meaning to, Dread Lanfè pulled the trigger of the machine gun again. A hail of bullets brought Paola down. He dropped the gun in an attempt to snatch the finger from his chest. A demonic laughter rang in his ears. The finger was growing, transforming into a hideous, slimy creature with a cold and scaly body, a body that was coiling around his. Dread Lanfè tried to shout. He died without even realizing it.
When the police, alerted by the neighbors, burst into the bedroom, Dread Lanfè was lying on the floor, his body all dislocated. Paola was naked on the bed, her corpse riddled with bullets. The magistrate had not yet arrived for the report. The inspector who was leading the police squad gave the order to cover the foreign woman with a sheet. The officer crossed himself in front of Dread Lanfè’s body. He knew him well, for he had met him many times at the dictator’s place. While searching the room for possible booty, he discovered the finger on the dressing table, hidden behind a bottle of perfume. The ring immediately caught his eye. Surreptitiously, he grabbed it and slipped it quietly into his uniform pocket. The inspector knew a fence who always gave him a good deal. He didn’t pay attention to the finger, which was already on the move.
Translated by David Ball
It was pitch-black out when I reached the town of Gokal. We were in the rainy season and the humidity grabbed me by the throat through the open window of my car. All I could see were a few little houses shrouded in darkness and an occasional dog prowling around. I was looking for the Paradise Inn.
At the very end of the main street, to my left, I could see a light. A house was floating in the surrounding darkness like an ocean liner cruising through the sea at night. A rectangular one-story concrete building in no particular style, a few yards back from the main street. No garden in front, just a few agaves growing in the midst of the gravel. A loud neon sign was blinking mauve letters inside an orange circle: Paradise Inn. What a pretentious name for such a godforsaken place.
A rather unexpected apparition in this isolated spot. No one in the street, not the least glimmer in the windows of the other houses. The policeman inside me was already asking himself questions. From the moment I’d arrived in Gokal I’d been feeling vaguely uneasy. But I wasn’t going to worry myself with suspicions when I saw the place where I was going to live. I was lucky to come upon this kind of establishment in this dismal town in the northwest, the most unprepossessing corner of the island. Plus, it was all lit up and apparently comfortable. I’d see about the rest tomorrow. My stiff muscles were begging me to find them a decent bed.
I left my things in the car, put my weapon around my waist, straightened the kepi on my head, and headed in. I would go back and get my bag after checking in.
The main entry door opened onto a big hall that served as a lobby and cafeteria. A shiver went across my scalp as soon as I stepped inside-the cool temperature contrasted so violently with the stifling heat outdoors. An oldies tune was coming from a radio that I couldn’t locate. I looked around the place. In the back, to the left, there was the reception desk, separated from the rest of the room by a curtain of multicolored glass beads swaying under the breeze from the ceiling fan. I walked over to the reception desk. Nobody was there. I could sense some movement in the room behind the desk, which was also lit up. A half dozen small square tables, each surrounded by four chairs, took up the space used for the restaurant. They were covered with red tablecloths and decorated with glass pitchers containing bouquets of plastic flowers. Some of the tables still had scraps of food, dirty dishes, and glasses on them. I thought I could make out the clicking of knives and forks, but that must have come from the kitchen. The service left something to be desired: still nobody around. At the rear of the dining room, a staircase lit by a dark red light led to the floor above.
I shook the bell on the table. A few moments later, a woman came out of the back room. She was wearing a wide white dress that went all the way down to her ankles. A multicolored madras scarf was knotted around her head, hiding the top of her forehead and her ears. Her careful makeup gave her an incongruous appearance: such stylishness within these lonely walls was certainly unexpected. A solid gold Virgin hung from a massive chain around her neck and danced as she breathed. She was beautiful despite her plumpness, which weighed down her features and figure. An artificial smile stretched her lips and I admired a perfect row of teeth. The kind of black beauty who is hardly affected by time. She must have been about fifty.
The smile suddenly vanished from my hostess’s face. “Good evening, sir?”
“Good evening, madame! Umm… I’m looking for a room for the night, perhaps for a few nights… That depends… I was…”
“Ah! You must be the new chief of police for Gokal?”
“Err… Yes, I am. But how do you know that, madame?”
She hesitated a moment, and then answered with a cold smile: “Oh, you know, Gokal is just a small town, no bigger than the palm of one’s hand, and news travels fast. There never were a lot of people here, and they leave, one after the other, every day. Everybody knows everybody else, everybody knows what’s happening or what’s going to happen. And the uniform you’re wearing confirmed what I thought. Policemen don’t wander around this place just for fun.”
She scored a point there. I didn’t press it, and asked her to register me for a week at Paradise Inn. Her only answer was to hand me a key.
“Don’t you need to know my name, my address? Don’t I need to give you a deposit? How much is the room?”
I was dumfounded by my hostess’s reply. She gave a deep sigh and looked me straight in the eye while she said this, all in one breath: “You are Commissaire Vanel, born in Jérémie on September 28, 1968. Appointed to the police as a level two officer August 15, 1990, at the Port-au-Prince Academy. Bachelor. After your first year of service, you won a scholarship to Japan, where you went through twelve months of intensive training in the investigation of drug trafficking and related money laundering. Back in Haiti, you were a detective for eight years in the anti-gang division, and you were then appointed assistant to the head of the Criminal Investigation Department. In the capital, you live at 39 rue Bouvier. You know, Commissaire Vanel,” added the woman with no particular emotion, “I have the register of the Paradise Inn in my head. Don’t worry about it. As for the price of the room, you will be perfectly satisfied. Trust me.”
Oddly enough, I didn’t feel like arguing. The place was now so cold it was freezing my very core, paralyzing my reactions. Despite how surprised I was by the declarations of the woman standing before me, I could only think of getting a bite to eat and sinking into a bed. Tomorrow I could review the situation, look around the place, find police headquarters, and begin to adjust, so to speak.
I asked my hostess if she could have dinner brought to me in my room. She confirmed this. I took the key she gave me; it had the number 6 on it.
She had a last recommendation for me: “In the dining room, you must always sit at table number 6. It is reserved for you. At night, try not to make too much noise, so as not to disturb people in the other rooms.”
I was surprised at these precautions, since I hadn’t seen a soul in the place. I went out to get my bag and locked the car.
Room 6 had minimal furniture. A double bed that seemed fairly comfortable. A table with a reading lamp on it. Opposite the bed, there were armchairs on either side of a small round table. I found a few hangers in the freestanding wooden closet decorated with a long mirror. The bathroom was just as plain. A narrow shower, a sink, and a toilet. The towel was clean and the soap had not been opened. I took a shower; hot water flowed from the faucet. This hotel was surprising me at every turn.
I felt better after the shower. A pleasant torpor was invading my muscles and brain. I was surely going to fall asleep soon. The situation seemed less dramatic than I thought it would be. In my mind I was thanking my old friend Froset, who used to be my partner in my years as a detective. I had been stunned by the news of my imminent transfer to Gokal and called him up. Practical as ever, he’d given me the name of the Paradise Inn. It was known in high places. Froset had rapidly climbed the ladder because of his excellent service record and was now part of the high command. I wasn’t too worried, because Froset would surely not let me rot for a long time in this hole. Of course, when the top brass appoints you to a new place, they don’t care how you get there nor even where you’ll live.
I put on a loose undershirt and clean underpants. Then I took my cell phone to call my brother in Port-au-Prince and tell him I’d arrived safely. The screen of the phone showed the signal wasn’t getting through; there was no way to communicate. Not too surprising-that often happens in out-of-the-way parts of the country. I’d try later.
Someone knocked at the door. I took my weapon out of its holster and, holding it at arm’s length, opened the door halfway. A young woman stood there with a dinner tray. The mauve light from the corridor darkened her very black skin still more. All I could see of her was her white smock, her eyes, and her teeth. I waved her in and she set the tray down on the round table. In the light of the room, I could see she was a very young girl, no more than sixteen or seventeen. An oval face and big eyes that looked right through me. Her lips were thick and well defined: a mouth that ate up her face. Her kinky hair showed from underneath her scarf. Her breasts, firm as unripe fruit, pushed out at a little blouse cut off at the navel. A long filmy skirt covered her ankles. No jewel decorated her wild beauty. Once the tray was set down, I expected her to leave. But she didn’t. I looked at her more closely. She reminded me of someone-but who? Oh, yes! The woman at the reception desk. My landlady must have looked like this girl forty years ago. The presence of this adolescent disconcerted me. The aroma of the consommé stirred my hunger and reminded me that I’d had my last meal more than twelve hours ago. I swallowed with difficulty and finally sat down at the table to eat. She retreated and stood in a corner of the room, watching me stealthily. The soup was thick and tasty.
“The lady downstairs is your mother?” I asked the girl.
She nodded.
“What’s your name?”
“Josiane.”
“Your nickname is Jo?”
She smiled, and this gesture hollowed out two wonderful dimples that hung on to her smile.
“Sometimes.”
I kept on asking: “You’ve been working here for a long time?”
“Yes… I mean, no… I help my mother out from time to time.”
“Do you often serve guests in their rooms?”
“Yes.”
“Aren’t you at all afraid?”
“No… The guests are always nice to me. And then, before long they become harmless.”
I didn’t get the meaning of that remark. I was wondering if this child was really all right in the head.
“What do you mean, harmless?”
“Umm… Yeah, after a few days here, all they usually think about is resting. Yes, that’s what I mean. Are you going to stay in the hotel a long time?”
“I don’t know yet. Why?”
“You’re leaving tomorrow?”
For every answer, she was now asking me another question. What a funny girl. I thought I could detect a small note of alarm in her voice. Her eyes were staring at my face with touching attention and her question almost resembled a prayer. No, I really didn’t understand the coded language of this sweet child. I continued to doubt her mental capacities. Living year-round in this desolate environment, serving all kinds of guests in their rooms, could shake up a young mind.
“No, not tomorrow, Josiane. I’m here on assignment, unfortunately.”
Josiane sighed and turned her eyes away. The situation was becoming stranger and stranger. I continued to eat, thinking all the while. The atmosphere of this place had weighed on me as soon as I arrived. I kept trying to reason with myself, but I couldn’t quite get rid of that feeling. And now, this girl in my room. I picked up the glass of rum on the rocks from the tray and took a good swallow. Here I was, Commissaire Vanel, a career police officer, awarded medals by the high command, shut up in a strange hotel room in the middle of nowhere with a girl with exciting breasts and a deranged mind. When I got the envelope with the official seal on it yesterday-the envelope of my disgrace-I had absolutely no idea what was waiting for me.
The same torpor I’d felt after my shower took over again. My limbs were growing heavy, my joints seemed made of cotton. I finished eating and drank the rest of my rum. I thought Josiane was going to clear the table and I went over to the bed. When I sat down, she walked right up to me, very close. Now I was surprised by the passivity of her features. She was acting like an automaton. Deliberately, this child-woman was indicating that the time had come to stop the little game of Q &A. She was putting herself at my disposal.
A violent perfume was coming up from her armpits and provoking chain reactions under my skin. She was standing directly in front of me with her nipples brushing my face. She took my head by the nape of the neck and pressed my face between her breasts. I was progressively losing consciousness.
Thoughts of prudence did flash through my mind-she must surely be a minor-but no argument in the world could stand up against the tide that was sweeping me away. I wanted to touch her, my fingers were burning to caress her dream of a body, but she stopped my hands every time. She wanted to be the only one in charge.
“You want me,” she whispered. Her desire was of no importance; perhaps she felt none at all. All I had to do was let her do what she wanted. Was this service included in the price of the room? My eyelids were getting heavier and heavier, and as I threw back my head, the big mirror on the wardrobe showed me the picture of a child kneeling as if in prayer before my erect virility.
I woke up relatively early. Roosters were still crowing. From my room I could see the main entrance. My car was in the same spot. The brilliant sunshine reflecting off the stones of the street burned my eyes. The trees were rare and stunted in this place. There was something like a bit of life animating the main street. Doors on the side streets opened and a few people with dull looks on their faces were leaving their homes. I freshened up and put on a pair of jeans and a green T-shirt. I didn’t think it necessary to wear my uniform. First I wanted to take an inventory of the place, more or less, and transmit my report to the high command. I wanted to call Roland again, but my cell still wasn’t getting any signal; it remained strangely dead.
I got the idea of taking a discreet little tour around the property. The uneasiness I had felt the night before was persisting. I wanted to get a better idea of the Paradise Inn. I slipped my.38 under my belt. My room, number 6, gave onto the stairway at the end of a long corridor that connected the different accommodations. I tiptoed by them. When I reached the first landing, I opened the little door that closed off the corridor. It opened onto another series of steps leading to the ground floor at the back of the house. Might as well learn what was happening down below, stage left.
I came upon a vast courtyard. The place seemed dead; everything was covered by a thin layer of dust. The courtyard faced a garden overgrown with brambles. Empty pans were waiting around the dry basin of a fountain. I couldn’t see anyone but I remained vigilant. I would have preferred to see people: the silence and desolation of the spot were giving me the shivers. I heard a noise and my heart started pounding wildly. In my whole career as a policeman, it was really the first time I’d been that scared inspecting a place. I couldn’t foresee what kind of enemy I was going to be faced with. The lady upstairs had turned on the radio. Suddenly I realized that the whole time I’d been there, I hadn’t heard the humming of a generator. I glanced at the roof. No solar panels. They couldn’t have a system that worked on batteries when there was no current to recharge them. So? And yet everything seemed to work on electricity at the Paradise Inn.
The backyard of the hotel was uninhabited. No staff, no life, no smell. I continued my tour, hugging the walls as I walked along. I opened a door. It made an eerie sound, amplified by the emptiness of the place. A bedroom with closed windows bathed in a red half-light. I didn’t go in, but I looked around. Cobwebs hanging from the ceiling. The place smelled stuffy. There were many mirrors hanging on the walls, in all dimensions. Most of them were covered with big, dark veils. I made out the shape of a motionless body in a large bed, and I could hear regular breathing.
Josiane was lying in the middle of a mess of dried flowers, veiled mirrors, and spiderwebs. Her perfume reached me despite the strong smell of mold. I was chilled to the bone. What was Josiane doing in this sinister setting? How could people live in a place without leaving any trace of life? Who were these people?
I moved on. Two other rooms had the same dusty, abandoned appearance-what used to be a kitchen and a pantry in brown ceramic tile. I thought I’d seen enough.
Yet I still didn’t know what to make of my tour of inspection. It was all muddled up in my mind. What conclusion could I draw from what I’d seen? Everything seemed frozen, fossilized. What energy was feeding this façade of life?
The lady at the reception desk greeted me as coldly as before. She suggested fried eggs and boiled bananas for breakfast. I agreed. The room was empty. No employee was bustling about to serve up the meal. My landlady appeared to do it all herself. I walked over to a table-number 5. I stumbled on something that seemed to be a foot stretched out right next to the table, but I couldn’t get a good look. I stumbled again and tried to pull out a chair to sit down, but it resisted. I looked around. What do you know? The receptionist was watching me from behind her desk. Then I remembered what she had told me and walked back to table 6, rather embarrassed. I sat down with no problem. I had to keep my eyes open. Something very fishy was happening here. I was facing extremely tough enemies. Instinctively, I felt for the gun stuck between my skin and belt.
When my hostess brought over my breakfast, I decided to have a little conversation with her.
“I saw your daughter last night,” I said.
There was no strong reaction from her. She looked me right in the eye as she answered, “Oh, yes. Were you happy with her services?”
The impudence of the question threw me for a loop. I wasn’t expecting such audacity from the woman. I answered, as naturally as possible, “Yes, she does her work very well. But doesn’t she help you with the service? I noticed you don’t have much of a staff.”
The woman smiled. An ironic smile that stung me to the quick. “Josiane only works in the evening. She takes care of room service. She has to save her energy for certain guests. Tell me, Commissaire Vanel, aren’t you satisfied with our service so far? The room doesn’t suit you?”
“Uhh, yes. I have no complaints.”
“So don’t worry about a thing. The staff here is competent and efficient. But I do thank you for your interest, Commissaire Vanel.”
I decided not to continue the conversation. I had just received a lesson in authority, in all due form. The woman was chilling. She left me powerless.
I was hungry and ate greedily.
Like the previous evening, I noticed leftovers on the other tables, but no guests. The customers of the Paradise Inn were as discreet as could be. By the time coffee came (which was very sweet, strong, and hot), I felt myself overwhelmed by the same weariness as the night before. If this went on, I’d just laze around in bed. The air of the hotel must have soporific vapors, for I couldn’t explain the lifelessness of my limbs and my will. I had to force myself to get up and head out to my car. It was time to take a drive around the town and locate the police station.
The two right tires of the jeep were flat and the vehicle was leaning to one side. This was hardly surprising: the road I’d gone down the night before could disable a tank on treads. I had to find someone who could repair the tires. There are always one or two people like that on the main street of every small provincial town. If I took the street back from the hotel, I’d surely find someone to help me. I walked for a good fifteen minutes. The whole town of Gokal was composed of one main street lined with little low houses with wooden lace cornices, all of them in disrepair and saturated with the surrounding gray dust. The road gave onto a little public square that I’d crossed the night before without realizing it. In the middle of this space rose the only tree worthy of the name, and around it was a church, a general store whose shelves seemed empty, and a few other houses in the same style as the main street. A little farther on, slightly behind the square, an open space must have been used as an outdoor market. The darker ground in this place suggested that the sale of charcoal must still support the dying economy of the town. I couldn’t see any sign of a police station. Didn’t the high command know that nothing-but nothing-happened in Gokal? On my way I only met a child carrying a bucket of water on his head, two old men sitting under the covered passageway of a rickety house, and a crippled woman squatting in a doorway. No able-bodied man in view. The situation seemed bad.
I was sweating profusely. The best thing to do was to go back to the hotel and ask my hostess for help. I didn’t like the idea. I felt I was at this woman’s mercy. But she had to know the resources of the town.
I found her sitting at the reception desk. “Look,” I immediately went up to her, “I’m sorry to bother you, madame, but I really need you to help me.”
“How may I help you, Commissaire Vanel?”
Once again I felt like a child who’d been caught out, scrutinized by an adult. What was happening to me? Normally I was the strong one. I was the one who asked the questions, doubted, pushed, intimidated people. I was the police officer, the expert sleuth. I represented authority. People were afraid of me. I knew all the methods of persuasion. What was happening to me? Why did this woman have such a strong hold over me?
I forced myself to go on. “Well, here’s the situation: I have two flat tires. So I have to find a repairman. I’m also looking for the local police station. My transfer happened pretty fast and I haven’t had time to bring myself up to speed on the town of Gokal.”
The lady seemed embarrassed, like someone who had to give someone else a piece of bad news. She fidgeted on her chair, leaned her head to one side, then to the other. Finally she said: “There are no tire repairmen here, Commissaire Vanel. As you must have noticed, there are no cars in Gokal.”
“No cars?”
“None.”
“But what about the customers who live in your hotel? And market days?”
She made an effort to continue the conversation, which clearly annoyed her. I was reduced to a child bombarding an irritated adult with questions.
“The hotel’s guests are very special. Most of them are people who’ve come here to rest, men who want to get away from the craziness of city life. Among them there are a few policemen, like you. Once they’ve come here, they send their cars back so they can enjoy their isolation more fully. They rarely leave their rooms. As for the market, every Tuesday a few trucks do come to pick up the bags of charcoal that people in the country around here carry in by donkey. And that’s all the traffic there is.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. How could the high command send me to a place like this? Why me, an elite police officer? Little by little, I was beginning to realize that I had been exiled, abandoned. I thought over my last conversation with Froset just before I jumped into my car to come to this wretched town. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seemed particularly surprised by the news of my transfer. I was too happy about the hotel recommendation to pay attention to his lack of interest in my situation. And yet I regarded him as a brother. Once I had risked my own life to save his, during a clash with a bunch of gangsters. He used to tell everybody he was eternally grateful to me. With him in the high command, I felt I had some protection.
What was it he’d asked me on the phone? Oh, yes! He wanted to know what cases I was working on. Why had he asked me this question at that exact moment? And without thinking, I spontaneously told him I was working all alone on a big drug trafficking case involving someone close to the high command and that, after weeks of hard work, I was on the point of discovering this person’s identity. My investigation wasn’t taking place on the ground, but on the administrative level. I was trying to trace a network of fake customs documents to the top. Froset hadn’t said anything, but now I recalled that he’d seemed embarrassed as he peered at me for a few seconds. Then he suggested that I shouldn’t tell anyone about the results of my investigation. I could take it up again when my stay in Gokal was over. After that, he reassured me somewhat by telling me my posting there surely wouldn’t last long-three months at most. Then he’d back my investigation with everything he had. Now the connection between the investigation and my transfer stared me in the face. I’d let myself be fooled, like a beginner. Instead of coming out here, I should have headed for the border at a hundred miles an hour. You always think things like this only happen to other people. I was like a rat caught in an invisible net.
These ideas were whirling through my head. I had to lean on the desk for a moment to continue the conversation.
“Uhhh… can I use a phone, madame? My cell hasn’t worked since I got here last night.”
“Sorry, commissaire. The hotel phone hasn’t worked for ages.”
“Oh! So I’ll go phone from the police station.”
“There is no police station here.”
“You’re telling me there’s no police station here?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I said, Commissaire Vanel. Ever since President Belony’s administration, at the time when the town of Gokal was part of the Villefranche district, there has never been a representative of the law here.”
A question came to mind immediately: “But how do you know that, madame? President Belony’s administration goes back more than a century.”
This time she lost some of her composure. Her eyes clouded over and she stumbled on her words as she answered. “My parents told me. I am from here, you know, Commissaire Vanel.”
Her way of punctuating every sentence with a “Commissaire Vanel” was getting on my nerves. But I decided to keep calm. This woman was the only one who could help me. Josiane was floating between intermediate worlds in an amnesiac room. I kept asking questions.
“Where else can I find a phone?”
“The closest telephone switchboard is in the city of Papay, about an hour away by car,” she answered sharply. My despair must have been evident on my face, because she softened up and said, “Come on, Commissaire Vanel, don’t get all worried. Things will be okay. I’ll serve you a good cup of coffee and you’ll see things more serenely.”
I walked over to table 6, surprised at my own obedience. The sensation of not being alone in the room bothered me for a moment, but I got rid of the feeling very quickly. My brain was being heated up by too many questions and too many sensations at once.
After some coffee, I did feel better, much better. My skin, my limbs, and my muscles pleasantly relaxed. All my worries seemed light to me. I was filled with a sweet sense of well-being. I watched the hotel owner move around and she seemed to float as she walked. I had a gentle smile on my face.
I spent the rest of the morning in bed. The effort of the morning’s investigation had drained me. I felt a strange new sensation: my body was being emptied of its substance. I was drifting, carried along by a languor that only my bed could soothe. First I had to get rid of my fatigue, I thought. Once I was back in shape, I could get things under control and consider the situation. My first goal would be to fix my tires and find a phone. The only family I had was my younger brother Roland, with whom I shared an apartment. He wasn’t in the capital at the time I left. I had left him a note to tell him what was going on. I had to call him, reassure him. I also had to call the high command, tell them about my situation, and wait for orders. But nothing seemed urgent to me now. I might as well take advantage of my forced vacation. After all, I had a hard life. To have a career as a police officer in a corrupt environment meant coming close to death all the time. Colleagues and friends kept dropping around me every day. Sometimes I had the feeling I was fighting shadows. The law watched impotently as convicts got out after just a few days in jail. Only the high command made real decisions. A thankless, risky job. This rest might actually be good for me.
I caught myself waiting for the night, waiting for Josiane. If she came back she would give some sense to my situation. She would make me forget my powerlessness, just as she had the first time. I spent the afternoon in my bed, sleeping. From time to time I would wake up with a start, feeling the presence of shadows moving around in the room, but I would immediately fall back into a deep sleep.
Josiane returned at nightfall. She knocked on the door; I was expecting her. I had dragged myself out of my comatose sleep half an hour earlier, and a cold shower had cleared up my mind. When I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, the sight of my emaciated face gave me a shock. I looked as if I’d lost at least twenty pounds. I could hardly recognize myself. But I didn’t attach much importance to this discovery. Probably an optical illusion. All fresh and perfumed, I was chomping at the bit, hoping Josiane would come. When I opened the door for her, the hinges squeaked with a familiar sound. She stood in the hall lit by the bulb with purple reflections, wearing the same clothes as the night before. The same aroma of beef consommé got me in the guts. The same ice cubes were clinking at the bottom of the same glass of rum. A strong feeling of déjà vu weighed down on me: I felt as though I had lived through this scene hundreds of times. What day of the week was it? How long had I been in this place? I had to make a great effort to place myself. My God, what was happening to me? From time to time, I simply lost my train of thought.
Josiane watched me eat. She was spying on me from under the thick fringe of her eyelashes. I thought again of the girl I’d seen asleep in the room with a décor from beyond the grave. I could see her breasts again, the hollow of her belly. Once again, after dinner, I felt almost faint. I was drifting sweetly, wearily along. I thought only of Josiane’s body, so very present in the room. All my questions sank into oblivion. The rhythm of my blood was slowing. My movements were getting all bogged down. I had only one desire: to give myself up to Josiane’s skillful youth.
And yet when she put her hand on me, a last burst of conscience propelled me to my feet. I was sinking, calmly disappearing into quicksand. They’d sent me here to destroy me. Paradise Inn would be my final destination. But it wasn’t too late to escape. I had to get out of here right away, on foot if need be, this very night. I’d surely find a truck driver on the highway who would take me to the next town. My survival instinct was telling me to react, to shake off this torpor that was inexorably condemning me to oblivion.
I caught Josiane’s wrist and twisted it until a little cry of pain burst from her lips. I badgered her with questions.
“Who are you? Who is your mother? Who do you put up in this hotel? Where are the other guests? Who are you working for?”
She was turning blue with pain under my grip. It hurt me to manhandle her, but I had to save my skin first. She gasped out: “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I only work here. Ow! You’re hurting me.”
I felt like slapping her. All compassion left my soul. I just kept squeezing her wrist harder.
“I won’t let you go until you answer all my questions. Got it, you little bitch? Who are you, you and your mother?”
She was groaning with pain but said nothing. I squeezed her wrist harder still and kept on pushing her with questions.
“Who does the cooking, and the wash, and the cleaning up here? Why is the rest of the house dead? What is hidden behind all that?”
Josiane’s silence was incredibly irritating. I was foaming with rage. This little woman thought she could manipulate me through sex, lead me to the scaffold by my prick. I was going to teach her a lesson she’d never forget. I let go of her wrist and slapped her very hard. I thought I’d broken every bone in my hand. Her head was wobbling, she looked like a puppet. She fell to her knees and I kept badgering her.
“Where do you get the electricity from? I haven’t heard a generator and I don’t see any other system, how do you make electricity? Answer me, for Christ’s sake, or I’ll strangle you!”
Kneeling on the floor, she tried to look into my eyes. Maybe she thought she’d move me. Her lower lip was already swollen; blood was gushing out of a crack in it. At last she spoke. It was hard to understand her words.
“I’m telling you, I swear. I don’t know anything… My mother takes care of everything!”
A tear flowed down her cheek. I wanted to continue my questioning. I raised my hand to hit her again, but my energy was rapidly disappearing. I was out of breath, my heart was about to burst in my chest, as if I’d run a hundred miles. I had exhausted my last stock of energy. I was being paralyzed by a will stronger than my own. My arm fell to my side. All I could do was drag myself to bed and sit down. Josiane realized I couldn’t budge; she understood my exhaustion. She kept on crying softy as she spoke to me. I could hardly make out her words, which seemed to drift over to me from so far away.
“I don’t know the people who live here. They’re all men but you can’t see them. They’re sent here by the high command. The electricity that powers the hotel comes from draining their energy and willpower. They don’t last long. That’s all I know. You’ll become like them too, until you’re just a breath. You never should have set foot in this place. Never.”
That’s all I heard. I couldn’t hold my body up anymore. I sank back into the pillows and passed out.
I felt better in the morning, although still very weak. When I looked at myself in the mirror, all I could see was a silhouette, a blurry image. My car was no longer in front of the hotel. On a hunch, I searched for my weapon in the chest of drawers where I was sure I’d left it the night before, next to my police badge. They had disappeared too. I smiled. I couldn’t care less about all that anymore. I didn’t give a good goddamn. It really relaxed me to not worry about a thing. All I was thinking about was having a good breakfast in the dining room on the ground floor, at my table, number 6. And above all, enjoying a big cup of that good, strong, scalding coffee my dear hostess had served me the day before.
I was calmly eating breakfast at table 6. Banana peels and crumbs of bread littered the other tables around me. But the guests still could not be seen. Through the window, I saw my brother Roland arriving. He parked his car in front of the hotel with a big squeal of the tires. He seemed worried. He rang the little bell and spoke to the manager as soon as she appeared. I heard my name. I realized my brother was giving her my physical description. He raised his arms to indicate my height, and with both hands he outlined my width. My hostess shook her head and looked truly regretful. No. No. She hadn’t seen a police captain around here for ages. She said she was sincerely very sorry not to be able to help Roland. And I watched the scene from my table, sipping my coffee, totally indifferent. The high command had sealed my fate. Another life was beginning for me. I thought Roland would see me but his gaze just passed over me as I sat there, no more than ten yards away from him. He stood still for a moment, hesitating. Then he thanked the lady and walked away.
Translated by David Ball
The great-aunt in Brooklyn had promised to come get one of them, but which one? And take her in under her own roof, in her four-bedroom apartment-a godsend in New York! In a neighborhood that was getting less and less shabby: now the whites were trying to force her out.
“They can’t make me leave. They can move in with their sidewalk cafés, their little ‘boutiques’ with those French names they pronounce in their terrible accent. No way I’m leaving here!” declared the aunt in Brooklyn.
“Her apartment takes the place of a husband,” her niece Beatrice confided. “A submissive husband who doesn’t answer back, stays clean, and doesn’t have wandering hands. Who could ask for more? Four bedrooms is a luxury in New York!”
The bathroom next to her bedroom was graced with an enormous bathtub on ornately decorated feet. She had it put in after visiting the house of a friend audacious enough to tell the aunt that not having a bathroom connected to the master bedroom revealed a standard of living that was borderline primitive. The Brooklyn aunt allowed no one she knew to school her, be they relatives or friends. After all, ever since she came to the States she’d worked for a rich family on Long Island, Italian Jews with a taste for the good things in life and the ability to turn their money into more money. So nouveau riche Haitians thinking they could spin yarns to her-that really takes the cake! At her last yearly visit, Beatrice had gone into long raptures about the Italian tile in the bathroom and the bouquets of artificial flowers decorating the master bedroom. The second bedroom was reserved for the few rare relatives and friends bold enough to face the aunt’s sharp tongue for more than a few hours. After all, she was a hardened spinster set in her opinions and prejudices. The third bedroom was transformed into a sewing workshop where the aunt made cushions and curtains in velvet materials she thought were fancy because her employers were crazy about them. For the moment, the fourth room, the smallest, was full of old furniture and knickknacks. It served as both a storehouse and a treasure trove. This was the shambles she counted on fixing up to take in one of her grandnieces, one of the daughters of her nephew Aramis. But which one?
When Beatrice talked about the whims of her Brooklyn aunt, both of us would listen with a mixture of dread, fascination, and envy for that other world of perpetual wealth and light. But also with the vague fear that TB (Tante de Brooklyn), which we only called her behind her back, of course, might learn of our conversations in which we made fun of her. Still, they were so much fun and so therapeutic that we never got tired of them. We mothers. After all, it was the great-aunt who regularly wired us money and had sent for her nephew Aramis, the one who was carrying on the family name. The one who looked the most like his late father-and the one who had gotten us both pregnant roughly two days (or maybe a few hours) apart. Who knows? In any case, our daughters were born on the same day, at full term and almost at the same time. Right in the middle of an Easter Sunday, like a double, sunny act of defiance. Aramis had told his aunt about it right away. From her Brooklyn apartment, the great-aunt had used her privilege as an elder, settled in the States for more than three decades, to name the babies: Marie Catarina and Marie Carlotta, Italian names embellished with the name of the mother of God in the good old Haitian Catholic tradition. We had not protested because these imposed first names were associated with the father. For Aramis Salnave-with his aunt’s approval and an endearing smile from his sister-had legally recognized both children. I wonder what the clerk at City Hall thought when he saw the same date of birth and the names of two different mothers.
Which one of us had first succumbed to Aramis’s charms? He’s as seductive as the most handsome of the musketeers, Beatrice would repeat, always with the same pensive, nostalgic expression for that brother who’d left too soon, and also for a time when such literary allusions did not necessarily have to be explained. She would look at us almost despairingly when we didn’t react. And yet from the very first day Aramis told me about the character to whom he owed his name, I got all excited despite myself, and without ever telling him, read and reread whole passages in the copy of the novel he’d lent me, carefully covered in plastic. His father, Hébert Salnave, had unlimited admiration for Alexandre Dumas and gave this name to his only son. Beatrice and her younger brother had grown up reading, listening to, and telling the stories of the three musketeers. Aramis knew his namesake’s lines by heart and would quote them in the course of many conversations. He could easily narrate a whole episode if the person he was talking to seemed a bit lost. With a childish smile on his lips, he had charmed me with his cloak-and-dagger stories that were so far removed from our world that I was enchanted despite myself. I should have known this plunge into fantasy would cost me dear, I should have listened to my instinct, which told me to watch out.
He moved his hands when he spoke, like an enchanter whose only material to work with was his body. A beautiful body. Long, long, from his forehead to his slim, muscular legs. He walked like someone in a hurry, but with that relaxed, elegant air that attracted my eyes right away. Did the other mother also instantly feel fire spreading beneath her skin like lit paper before it’s burned up by a flame? I could kick myself even today for not being able to resist that need, for having wanted the burning encounter of our two skins at any cost. Despite my instinctive distrust of sweet-talking men, despite my persistent refusal to believe that life was granting me a reprieve. Even when I learned that he’d wooed another woman in the same month, with the same success, all he had to do was touch me and I was conquered anew, impatient to feel the delicious bite of his body again and again. Even while deep inside me, a child was already growing.
Yet my twenty-five years of existence had not really entitled me to become somebody’s mother. According to the family legend, after the departure of the man who had nonchalantly declared that the earth already had enough people on it, my mother, who was six months pregnant, let herself die. For five years. I still remember her lackluster, teary face and a childhood spent bucking up against that ever-present maternal sorrow. A world of constant privation, of sighs. Never enough food to satisfy you completely, restrained laughter, and shrunken, stifling spaces. No affection. My good grades in high school confirmed my conviction that education wasn’t much use when poverty and bad luck were aligned against you. There I was with my diplomas under my arm, an arid mouth, and a long, gray, dirty avenue in front of me. You had to use people and things-before you were used yourself, and then discarded. That was my motto for survival. Aramis challenged it with a hearty laugh.
When Aramis told me he was leaving, he once again sang the praises and expressed his affection for his aunt in Brooklyn, the one who’d always promised the son of her deceased brother she would bring him to New York for good, on a student visa. Since the papers were ready, he was to leave as soon as possible. As for Beatrice, she had no desire to immigrate to the States. Comfortable in her role as a middle-aged childless widow, she did not want to start life over outside of the country. But Aramis always seemed like he was about to take off and fly. He was always looking for an excuse to change worlds. Put him anywhere at all, he always preferred elsewhere.
He left us mothers, each one with a baby less than a month old in her arms. He left without any sign of emotion except for a teary half-smile and his eyes drunk with anticipation. He left us with our sudden disillusions; the fury of targeting each other. He left us with the rage of tearing each other’s memories away, along with any affection we might have felt for him. He left us to devour with our fingernails the breasts he had touched, the skin he had stroked, the folds of the arms where he’d buried his lips.
It finally took an international phone call from that four-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn to restore order and calm between Carrefour Feuilles and Delmas, between all those streets Aramis had walked down to go from one neighborhood to another and get into our homes, and into us, with promises and smiles and words so sweet that believing them was pure pleasure.
If I get the slightest whiff of a quarrel, I’ll stop the money transfers. No more presents for the little girls, no more anything. Beatrice transmitted the implacable message from the Brooklyn aunt with a touch of commiseration in her voice. Beatrice, with unavowed fantasies in her eyes and her bitter, frustrated hands. I pitied her a little, for her eyes often searched us for a spark of the fire that the merest mention of her brother’s name would light up, turning us into two wild beasts. Peace reigned in her house, at 15 rue Paultre, where she remained in her secure solitude and refused the rare men who were brave enough to dare measure themselves against the frozen perfection of her deceased husband.
“Why don’t you move in here?” she finally asked us both. A skillful way to watch our every move and distribute her gifts according to our behavior. “I think that solution would please TB.”
When did we mothers learn to tolerate each other? When the memory of Aramis’s caresses was too distant to give his body any human substance? When the sweet heaviness of his sex faded away under the weight of unforgiving daily life? Searching for something to eat every day, looking for a job, picking up your dignity and shoving it under your hunger. In vain. Starting over again the next day. Holding back your surges of rage and walking up and down the streets of Port-au-Prince, trying not to deposit your fear onto them. Taking your desire to hit someone and transforming it into a caress over a baby’s soft skin.
We couldn’t reject Beatrice’s invitation. She was giving us a neutral, comfortable space between our two wretched lives. Saving us from the envious mockery of our families, giving more legitimacy to our offspring. At 15 rue Paultre, in this wild, monstrous city, we found a stopover where we could shelter our shared disappointment. With Aramis gone, we found ourselves abandoned in exactly the same way. All the more so, as he quickly became too sick to talk on the phone and his destructive silence blanketed our memories with distrust. News came to us through Beatrice, who talked regularly with the great-aunt.
A few months after Aramis left, a family acquaintance brought some photos that showed us an emaciated, almost unrecognizable figure. Which of us turned her eyes away first? A hideous grin had replaced the seductive smile of the man whose lips had imposed their law on my body. His clothing floated around his tense, stiff arms and legs, as if the fabric refused to have any contact with his dried-out skin. A quickly metastasized cancer killed him a short time later. He’d sworn he would come for me as soon as he got his green card. Maybe he’d also promised the same thing to the other one? My hopes, already so slim, were utterly crushed.
Beatrice flew to Brooklyn for the funeral, armed with the tourist visa she was always careful to renew. She brought back a videocassette for each of us as an inheritance.
“My aunt thinks the children will probably want to watch it later,” she said.
We mothers followed the religious ceremony on the screen, more curious to see TB’s face than anything else. A very short, very plump little woman, hardly five feet tall without the high heels she wore-quite elegantly, in fact. Her face hidden behind a black veil, Italian style, of course. I was unable to watch the whole recording and I stopped before the burial. All those dark silhouettes gave me the impression of a black-and-white film, the kind impossible to understand, where the action never quite ends and you have to guess at so many things. Except I could already assume I hadn’t been given a good role in this film. I closed my eyes. I wonder if the other mother kept watching to the end.
Beatrice then informed us of the great-aunt’s decision to have one of the little girls brought to New York. To adopt her legally. Surprisingly, TB had hung onto her Haitian passport even though she’d only set foot on her native soil three times in thirty-two years-for her father’s funeral, her mother’s funeral, and then the double funeral of Beatrice and Aramis’s parents, who had died in a car accident. She’d said goodbye to this unhealthy country, a perpetual insult to her delicate senses, definitely a danger for her eyes, which had been recently operated on to remove hard, thick cataracts. So, she was going to come here to adopt her nephew’s child.
“With her, it’s family first,” Beatrice affirmed again. She had been entrusted with the task of setting the administrative procedures in motion as soon as possible. We mothers both had the same question on our lips and in our eyes. Which one of them? Faced with our anxiety, Beatrice’s enthusiasm collapsed. Her voice fell silent between words as if she could suddenly see all the complications that lay ahead. “She says she hasn’t made up her mind yet.”
Late in the afternoon after the babies’ bath, we would sit on the stoop with them. But most often, when Beatrice got back from her job as a civil servant in the General Tax Office, she would volunteer to take her nieces out for some fresh air. “Go for a little walk, go see some friends, I’ll take care of the girls.” She seemed to avoid talking to us individually. In her eyes we were merely the two mothers, the women who had borne the fruits of Aramis’s love. Her affection for her brother stripped us of our identities. Just as she would say “the little girls” when she spoke about our daughters. Always referring to them in the plural, relegating them to the position of a falsely twinlike appendage of their father and thus doubly erasing us, the mothers.
The neighbors would come by for a little chat, depending on the day of the week and the time, to get their fill of gossip and more details of that tragic story of the deceased brother, the little orphans, and the impoverished mothers who were taken into the home out of Christian charity by their childrens’ paternal great-aunt, a good person despite her difficult personality. Passersby who didn’t know the hidden side of their births would always react. The girls are the spitting image of Aramis, they would say. You can’t tell them apart. Real twins. Man, do those little girls look alike. It’s incredible! Doesn’t God work wonders? Isn’t that the truth! Beatrice would agree complacently. Often we would dress them the same way. It was inevitable, after all, as most of their clothes and linen- towels, washcloths, bibs, pajamas, onesies, tank tops, T-shirts, caps-arrived from Brooklyn in pairs. Only the loveys came with a very slight difference, and all that did was emphasize their similarity: two stuffed rabbits, one pink with white ears and the other white with pink ears. Compared to the display of clothes from America, with their smell of talcum powder and lavender (TB sent over laundry products and toiletries too), the few modest items of clothing we bought stood out immediately, like the poor relatives that we were.
Which of us set off the latest skirmishes? Waiting for the final selection fed the hostility between us. Our hesitant complicity rapidly crumbled away under the weight of tight-lipped comments and suspicious glances. A muted battle began, all the more unnerving as it was hidden under civil appearances so as not to provoke the wrath of the Brooklyn aunt. A dress inadvertently stained, a door banging a shoulder a little too hard-unfortunate accidents followed by hasty apologies. Beatrice took note of our new attitude with an astonished, disappointed look. She who’d never had a child, never known the pangs of hunger that wake you up at dawn and don’t give a damn about the beauty of the rising sun. She who had always lived in the banal security of her job as a government employee, with her grandaunt’s support for those needs people call superfluous, but which give life some color. With the ability to go far away if ever poverty drew too near 15 rue Paultre. To take off for Brooklyn and live with the great-aunt, work like her with Italian Jews or plain Jews, or work somewhere else. Beatrice who had probably never desired someone hard enough to trample on her fears and hold on only to the intimate smell, elusive and fleeting, of skin between her fingers. Hold on to it at any cost, for otherwise everything is pointless. And see it disappear in time nonetheless. Despite all my attempts to hold on to memories, all I had now was this baby, so much like her father and the other little girl, just as vulnerable as she was. Which one of them would reap the benefits of the aunt’s hospitality?
“I’ll always be there to help,” Beatrice would declare tersely when the tension reached a climax in the house, making the walls seem as thick as a tomb. “My aunt can’t adopt both of them. She’s not young anymore, but the other little girl will stay here with me, if you like. Don’t worry, they’ll both be taken care of.”
I could see my hopes and frustrations reflected in the other one’s hunched shoulders. Our anxiety broke the silence. Even Beatrice couldn’t escape from it. The two little girls were becoming individuals who were still largely indistinguishable, but who each had her own fate. The one who’d stay here in our country and the other who would go live with the Brooklyn aunt in her big four-bedroom apartment. Oh, not right away of course, but in a few months or perhaps a year. All the papers had to be in order and the aunt had to reduce the number of hours she worked for her Jewish-Italian bosses, to get her early retirement and do all that was needed to take care of the child. Just as soon as the lawyer filled out the adoption request form, the administrative process would begin. And already, when she pressed the girls to her chest, Beatrice would whisper into the ear of one or the other of them with a misty look in her eyes: “Well, sweetie, are you the one who’s going to leave me? So it’ll be you, my little sweetheart?” And she would shower both of them with kisses.
Sometimes I could feel the other mother’s despair overwhelm her, and her moist eyes would make me even angrier. Apparently, she didn’t understand that when you’re used to getting hit, one part of you hangs onto the leather of the strap and you absolutely must not flinch when it grazes your skin. On the contrary, you get your back up, you brace yourself and you wait for what’s coming, with your arms ready to pick up the broken pieces. And yet sometimes, in a flash, I could see the same dry, desperate determination in her eyes, which too often looked faded. Under her fragile appearances, was she, too, hiding rage strong enough to turn life upside down and give her little girl a chance?
And then one day Beatrice announced that in accordance with the aunt’s orders, she had scheduled an appointment with the lawyer to begin the proceedings. That TB was going to inform us of her decision very soon. As she saw us jerk in alarm, Beatrice quickly added that she didn’t know what the decision was. She would learn which of the little girls would be adopted at the same time we did. I managed to keep a poker face but I could feel my heart beating as if it wanted to jump from my chest and howl out its helplessness. The other could no longer hide her panic. Her fragility irritated me more and more. I would have liked her to be tough and unshakable like me-a formidable enemy, not a doll, easily smashed. Sometimes she would lean on the table as if she couldn’t bear life any longer, with her baby on her hip. We often carried our little ones that way, like a bump on our side that wriggled and gurgled from time to time.
When the little girls’ glances met, I wondered whether each one thought she saw her own reflection turning toward her. Of course, we could tell them apart, the other mother and I. I’d pick mine up and right away I could feel her little arms and legs clenching my body in total abandon, and in spite of myself I would lose some of my cynicism. How could I resist those tiny fingers clinging to my hair?
“Actually, you two resemble each other too,” Beatrice declared. “That’s why the little girls look like twins. My brother liked that type of woman. Ethereal, and a bit distant, taciturn. Both orphaned at an early age. Both frail, and mysterious,” she added with a knowing smile. As if we reminded her of a character in those romance novels she was always devouring. It’s true that we looked a bit alike, the other mother and I. We were the same age, both of us slender women with distant gazes. But I had discovered real differences very quickly. Through the other one’s dull eyes, I could see the trembling of a woman asking for friendship. Physically, too, she would sway from time to time like a rootless plant shrinking under the heat of the sun. Sometimes Beatrice would give her a worried look. “I’ll take you to the doctor if this keeps up.” Egalitarian to the very end, she wanted to include me in the consultation. Or maybe it was one of the great-aunt’s criteria. A medical evaluation of the two mothers before the definitive choice.
We were informed of the decision two days before the other mother had her first heart attack, four days before her death. As if her organism refused to assimilate the magnitude of the new situation. The announcement that the great-aunt would pay for the funeral quieted the discontented grumbling of the parents of the deceased far more than the verdict of the doctor who had hurriedly been called in. The young woman’s heart had collapsed. From New York, TB demanded an autopsy, furious at the fate that had interfered with her plans. But the family-cousins and an old uncle who seemed greedy and self-serving-were against it. No way they were going to cut apart their relative’s body. All they needed was a few thousand extra gourdes to do what had to be done.
The money was quickly paid, and an old woman came in with her panoply of leaves and bottles blackened by years of use. She shut herself up with the body to ward off any illintentioned attempt to get hold of the corpse after burial. The guilty party or parties would be punished. With the old mambo’s expertise, it would not be possible to turn their cousin into a zombie. The rumors of evil actions went on for a few days and then went to feed the store of tales to be told.
The great-aunt was more indignant than ever at the country that once again proved how little it could be trusted. Young or old, people were dying like flies. But God moves in mysterious ways. For this death-so unfortunate and unexpected- confirmed her decision: more than ever, the little orphan needed all the help she could get. As for Beatrice, she repeated to all the visitors that before the other mother died, her aunt had a dream in which Aramis whispered which one of the two little girls to adopt. The Salnave family had always boasted of very strong spiritual connections with deceased relatives.
Meanwhile, they gave the little orphan to me, the surviving mother. Still stunned by the rapidity of my action and its consequences, I cradled her with my own daughter. I had hatched my plan hastily, no doubt, but it was pretty smart. I couldn’t believe I was really carrying it out. All I had done, in fact, was take advantage of a given situation and wait for nature to take its course. After the very first visit to the doctor, even before the great-aunt announced her decision, Beatrice had confided that the other mother had a heart condition and had to be spared any strong emotion. The doctor had prescribed medicine and a special diet. Her lifestyle had to change to limit risk factors. Beatrice repeated the entire doctor’s jargon to me with a worried look. I listened with the appropriate expression on my face, without playing it up too much, already thinking of ways to exploit this illness, a gift from heaven. I needed to increase the “risk factors,” because the other one had to disappear for my plan to succeed. If I didn’t watch out for my daughter’s interests, who would? That was the least I could do for this child. She hadn’t asked me for anything and I had brought her into the world. It was fine to say that the two little girls would be cared for, but how could I not dream of that expansive horizon offered to the one who’d be taken in by the great-aunt? How could I not want to prevent my child from taking that long, sterile road I had gone down, the permanent anxiety of never knowing what tomorrow will bring, the feeling of walking with your arms dangling helplessly at your side in a perpetual state of frustration and rage?
I didn’t go to the other mother’s funeral. I stayed with the two babies. On that day, I said goodbye to my daughter.
It was so easy to substitute one for the other, to comb my baby’s hair the way the other mother combed hers, to switch the few articles of their clothing that were different, to put one stuffed rabbit in place of the other. It never would have worked if the other mother were still alive. She would have seen through the swindle right away. But I didn’t touch her that night. I could have activated the process, hastened the end. I did nothing of the kind. I let fate decide what would happen next. Who knows? They might have found her still alive at dawn.
That night, I’d been awakened by a thump and a child’s whimpers. Instinctively-a child’s sigh now had the power to dictate my actions-I turned my head to the cradle. My daughter was sleeping peacefully. I walked through the doorway between the two bedrooms.
The other mother was writhing on her bed. I took care of the baby first, gave her back her pacifier, before turning to the shrunken form on the rumpled bed. That’s when I noticed her pale, literally twisted face. With one hand on her left breast and her features ugly with pain, she was inhaling noisily, a wild sound wrenched from her guts. The Bible she read every evening before she went to sleep was lying on the floor. My first reaction was to look for her medication; the pills Beatrice had brought back from the pharmacy, and put one under her tongue as the doctor ordered. Then I held back. Why would I do that? I gently covered the sleeping child in her cradle and patted her little raised bottom. I had nothing against that little girl. She was my own baby’s sister, and besides, she was indispensable for my plan. Before leaving the room, I turned my head to the other mother. It seemed to me she was trying to raise her hand in my direction. I could hear her increasingly awful gasps, like calls for help stuck in the bottom of her throat, unable to reach the voice. For a second, her eyes-two frightened butterflies, prisoners of silence and pain-rested upon me. I turned mine slowly away.
In the bedroom at the other end of the hall, Beatrice wouldn’t get up before dawn. I went back to bed and waited for daylight.
When she returned from the funeral, Beatrice took out Marie Carlotta’s birth certificate. “Now this child has no father and no mother, but luckily she has aunts who love her very much and will take care of her. While I’m waiting for her to go to the great-aunt’s, I’ll take good care of her. Tomorrow I have an appointment with the lawyer.”
I leaned over the two little girls lying on their backs in their playpen and picked one of them up. I kissed my daughter and gave her to Beatrice.
Ever since then I’ve been living in agony, an agony I deliberately chose. I had to learn to accept the brutal and unexpected pain of separation. Every gesture has become an open wound that gets larger, adds onto the other wounds, accumulating like a blazing fire that can’t be put out. When I put her in Beatrice’s arms, she was so very attentive to the little “orphan.” I hugged the other baby and felt tears well up in my eyes, stinging my flesh. Hearing my daughter cry, knowing that the sound of my voice and the closeness of my body could calm her down, yet not budging, was agonizing. Letting Beatrice take care of her until her final departure, even more so.
I would have liked the process to go faster, the great-aunt to come over, sign the necessary papers, and leave with my daughter. That way I wouldn’t have her before my eyes every minute of the day, treating her like someone else’s child, watching her separating a bit more from me and turning to Beatrice, with the survival instinct natural to human beings.
There was no turning back now, and despite it all I did rejoice that my trick had succeeded. My daughter would have a much better life. She would have all the opportunities I didn’t dare dream of anymore. One day, I saw Beatrice looking at me while I was watching the child asleep in her cradle, with the other one’s daughter snuggled up against me. Did this childless widow understand my deception? Did she suspect that for once I had taken my destiny into my own hands, amending her aunt’s decision?
It’s too bad that, since then, every time my arms close around the one I kept, I can feel pieces of my heart disintegrating, then coming together again as I wait for the day that my daughter will leave me.
In the twilight of his last sliver of dream, Magloire saw VENDOLA, not as a single slip of green but all the bills fanned out in a diadem and glowing with an incandescent light, like a crown set on the head of Christ Resurrected. Indeed, the dollar bills crowned his own head but at the same time they appeared far away, so that he could not reach or grasp them. In this slippery zone between sleep and waking he often received counsel of his spirits, and now he believed that èzili Je Wouj was promising him he might conquer such a sum in the course of the day: twenty U.S. dollars-too small an amount to resolve his difficulties, thus not so large as to be unattainable.
He woke completely now, to cockcrow and the wispy sound of a palm leaf broom, sweeping the yard beyond the door. It was still almost completely dark. Anise’s sleeping breath flowed onto his forearm. She had turned toward him on the thin pallet where both of them slept. Were she awake she would not have done it. The whisper of air stirred something in him which he hurried to suppress, sitting up on the pallet and wiping his face with the back of his wrist. When he was a little younger, still in his teens, Magloire had been counseled by Doctor Oliver to wear a kapòt during all acts of love; such was the sort of foolishness that a well-meaning blan would conceive. He, Magloire, enjoyed only natural actions and undertook no actions that were not natural; therefore, he could seldom bring himself to wear a condom and by extension had not lain with his wife, as a man with a woman, for longer than two months. Besides, Anise would be irritable if he woke her now.
In a market basket near the door, draped with colored netting like a Christmas parcel, their son Léonty breathed easily in sleep. He was nearly two years old and had to curl his legs under him to fit into the basket, but he needed the protection of the net because mosquito bites had caused his fever; mosquitoes were still whining in the close humid air of the room, though the light was growing quickly. Magloire turned back the net for a moment to look at his son’s face. It seemed to him that the fever had passed, though he had not been able to find money to buy medicine.
In the yard outside the back door there was clean water in the white enamel bowl. Magloire used a little of it to wash and brush his teeth. The whispering of the broom had stopped and he straightened up to see his mother standing over a cluster of scrawny hens, holding a scant handful of cracked corn in one hand, irresolutely.
Presently she scattered half for the hens and returned the rest to the slack cloth bag. Her deep-set eyes passed over him without stopping. Magloire knew that later in the day she would pound the remainder of the corn and mix it with a greater quantity of dirt to make small cakes-not very nourishing but able for a little while to block the most cutting pangs of hunger. Some passersby might purchase them. If he could, he would buy green coffee beans at market and a little charcoal so that his mother might roast the beans in her iron caldron and pound them in her mortar if the customer desired. There was some profit to be made preparing coffee.
The bare-swept area of their yard climbed sharply up the jagged backside of Morne du Cap. On the high ground, propped on stones beneath a stand of bamboo, were two gas generators Magloire had taken for repair. He was trained as mechanic, electrician, plumber, refrigerator repairman, and could also drive trucks, guide tourists, and pilot small boats (in one case all the way to Miami). But lately no one could be found to purchase any of these skills. The two generators ran smoothly now but their owners would not pay to recover them, so Magloire was simply holding them hostage. This situation reminded him of a story he had heard from the capital: some zenglendo had summoned a man to shine their shoes, then kidnapped him when he was done, though the most they could raise for a ransom was twenty dollars.
VEN DOLA. Shaking off the thought of the kidnapping, he walked through the house, pulled on a shirt, and came out onto the street. Through the alley that cut down to the waterfront, the rising sun blazed off the surface of the harbor. From the neighboring bar curled a stale odor of last night’s frying. Magloire’s stomach fisted. Squinting a little in the brilliance of the light, he walked through the alley to the edge of the breakwater and stood breathing in the clean salt air. Men called to each other from a couple of small boats going out to fish. Rope creaked against a makeshift mast as a sail bellied full, and from behind him Magloire could hear the steady hollow thump of his mother’s mortar. It was said that one should take ten deep breaths each day before the sea.
Doctor Oliver drifted to a halt in the public square before the cathedral, a madman standing bare-headed under the scorching noonday sun. Once there had been shade trees in this place, but those were plowed under in some renovation and now there was nothing but bare flagstones and the statues of the national heroes, the metal ones looking as if they might melt. There were no people about on the square though a few had pressed themselves into tiny pools of shadow under the lintels of the church across the way.
In the southwest corner of the square was a new monument Doctor Oliver had not seen before, a different style from the venerable statues: three curving husks of polished aluminum, grouped together and standing about man-high. When he approached he saw there were inscriptions on the inner curves; the sculpture was arranged so that he had to step inside the grouping to try to read them. The effect was obscurely menacing, like standing inside some sort of iron maiden that had not yet been completely shut. Doctor Oliver did not feel well. He needed to take off his teardrop sunglasses to read and the burst of reflected light worsened his headache, which might have been brought on by sun or by early stages of narcotic withdrawal. The inscriptions were in Creole, which he had trouble puzzling out; he was more functional in French.
Gradually he absorbed the idea that each silvery husk memorialized a martyr of the Revolution who had died on this spot. Doctor Oliver recognized their three names from histories he had read. One had been burned at the stake and the other two broken on the wheel. This information seemed to be borne to him by some sort of voice-over narration, but surely that could not be real. Yet there was a Creole phrase being repeated in an angry monotone: Blan! Pa gade dokiman m! And a person saying it, a long scarecrow who’d detached himself from a niche of shade at the corner of the church and was walking toward Doctor Oliver in a jittery stride, obsessively repeating the words the doctor now understood to mean, Foreigner! Don’t look at my documents!
Doctor Oliver put his sunglasses back on but that did not make him feel any safer. He felt dizzy and sick and unsure of himself. Normally this part of town was perfectly safe, but there were always exceptional days. The week before, an election had gone wrong somehow and since then demonstrators had sealed off the approaches to the town with burning barricades. Though those phenomena existed comfortably far away from the central square, the aggression hurling itself his way now seemed to partake of the same spirit. Doctor Oliver opened his dry mouth and found he could not frame a placating phrase in the right language.
Then someone else had put a hand under his elbow and was steering him gently away, and at the same time speaking to the other man with the calm fluency Doctor Oliver had been unable to summon: Oke monchè, nou prale, nou pa gen pwoblèm ak sa wi?
They turned a corner and there was shade. Immediately Doctor Oliver felt a little better. With his free hand he checked the nearly empty pill bottle in his pants pocket. He was in the company of Charles Morgan, a white American like himself, known to the locals as Charlie Chapo. Their soft tongues elided the “r” and took the crunch out of the consonants, turning Charlie into Shawlie.
“You don’t want to be out in this with no hat,” Charlie Chapo was telling him now. They passed the grilled gateway of the Hotel International. Charlie’s battered Montero was parked across the street, and in the heavy dust on the back window someone had scrawled the name MAGLOIRE. An air conditioner rumbled in a window of the hotel restaurant and Doctor Oliver automatically moved toward the door, but Charlie nudged him past, to the “popular” bar beside it, which catered to the less prosperous locals and had no air-conditioning.
“You’ll get pneumonia in that cold,” Charlie said, “come in here first,” and he assisted Doctor Oliver when he tripped on the step into the popular bar, which was, unusually, stone empty. Charlie rapped on a hatch in the side wall and someone passed two bottles of beer through it, releasing a puff of frigid air before the hatch slapped shut.
Charlie Chapo took off his hat, which was the reason for his sobriquet, and set it on the chest-high counter where both men leaned. It was a nondescript straw hat of the sort the peasants wore, shaped like a Panama and as finely woven, with heavy sweat stains at the brow. Beneath the hat Charlie had, as always, a red bandanna covering his head and tightly knotted at the nape of his neck. The ensemble made it look as if he were affecting Indiana Jones, though if asked Charlie would say that he’d adopted the rig from pictures of the colonial planters and that it worked very well to protect his head-from heat and sun, presumably, though Doctor Oliver also knew that the red head-rag meant something or other among practitioners of Vodou, of whom Charlie Chapo was rumored to be one. At the embassy they sneered that he had “gone native,” which struck Doctor Oliver as peculiarly quaint in the twenty-first century, a line out of Somerset Maugham.
“What’s the good word?” Doctor Oliver said.
Charlie Chapo released a dusty chuckle. “We’re not dead yet.” He drank from his bottle of Prestige and snapped a lighter to a Comme Il Faut cigarette. “Nou lèd men nou la!”
“Have you been out of town?”
“Not possible, monchè. The soulèvman’s still up and running.”
At this, Doctor Oliver’s withdrawal pangs got sharper. “I thought those things were only supposed to last a day.”
“Supposed to,” Charlie said. There was no electricity in the bar, which was shadowy as a cave. Charlie stepped to tip ash through the blazing doorway and took a quick look up and down the street. “Full moon’s coming,” he said. “They’ll start the ceremonies on Morne Calvaire. That might shut it down if it was local but word is those guys on the barricades came up from Port-au-Prince.”
“Who’s running them?”
Charlie shrugged. “There’s a hundred stories.”
“That guy who was after me on the square,” Doctor Oliver began. “He was, I don’t know, more possessive than usual.” Possessed was another word that came to him. As if the whole person was owned, invaded, by the phrase he kept repeating.
“There’s some strange stuff swirling around today.” Charlie leaned forward, pushing his sunglasses up above the dustcrusted rim of his red bandanna, exposing to Doctor Oliver his tired eyes. “They killed La Reine D ’Ayiti, did you know that? In the Place Montarcher.”
“What?” Place Montarcher was a smaller square, only a few blocks uphill from the cathedral. Nothing bad happened there. “In daylight? Who?”
Charlie Chapo was nodding slowly. “I meant to tell you that. Chimè.”
That, Doctor Oliver knew, was the current word for zenglendo or bandits or occasionally lawless persons who might sometimes engage in political thuggery, abruptly materializing, then fading away. Those on the barricades were chimè as well. The literal translation was “chimera.”
“They cut her heart out,” Charlie added.
“Jesus. Why?”
There was a flash behind the bar, where a server had silently appeared, his eyes widening white in the shadows at what Charlie had said.
“Scare the bejabbers out of everybody.” Charlie shrugged.
He had known her, Doctor Oliver realized, this harmless madwoman who’d styled herself the Queen of Haiti and did the stroll from Place Montarcher to the Boulevard de la Mer, capturing whomever she could in tight lassoes of her crazy talk.
“There’s always a sort of big energy buildup,” Charlie Chapo was saying. “Between Pentecost and Trinity-and it releases in the ceremonies. Normally it should. A thing like this, though… it can all start going in the wrong direction.”
“I need to get out of here,” Doctor Oliver said. The demonstrations had cut him off from the airport, which was probably out of service anyway; he was meant to have flown to the States three days before.
“Right,” said Charlie, “it’s inconvenient for me too.”
Doctor Oliver touched the bottle in his pocket. Two pills left and why was he saving them? So there would be that much between him and the void. He resolved to speak about this to Charlie Chapo, who was sometimes something of a fixer.
“Charles. I need to…” A delicate matter. “Um. Refill a prescription.”
Charlie was looking at him slantwise. “For what?”
“Um.” Too much delicacy and he would not be understood. “Well, it’s Dilaudid. But I can substitute! OxyContin, Percocet even…”
“Or heroin would do.”
“Yes,” replied Doctor Oliver, naked now, and almost unashamed. “It would.”
But Charlie Chapo was shaking his head. “There’s coke around,” he said. “There’s even crack, believe it or not… but what you’re after-it’s not obvious.”
“At the hospital maybe?”
He felt Charlie Chapo withdraw a little, though his body had not moved. “You do the medical missions, right? So you know, they never have enough painkillers for…”
… nonrecreational users, Doctor Oliver thought, his shame bitter now.
“I’ve got a couple of cats to kill,” Charlie said. “I think you shouldn’t be kicking around by yourself-not today. Magloire’s looking for you, maybe he can help.”
“Oh,” said Doctor Oliver, remembering the name scrawled in the dust. It gave him a faintly reassuring sense of connectedness. “I thought he was looking for you.”
“I don’t have anything for him, though. All this traka- I’m light in the pocket.” Charlie Chapo put his hat back on and winked as he stood up. “I’ll check you tonight at the hotel.” In the burning doorway he turned back again. “Watch yourself, will you? Drug jail here’s not funny.”
Surely no one could be in greater pain than this, Doctor Oliver kept thinking as he followed Magloire in an aimless stroll around the town. His organs were shriveling in withdrawal, his brain withering on its stem. The sensation worsened when Magloire persuaded him to buy a hat-a gaudy monstrosity designed for some nonexistent tourist. But the sunstroke warded off by the hat left him prey to all the rest of it. They were then in the thick of the crowded market streets with people pressing into them on all sides, picking their way to avoid stepping on wares spread over the gummy ground and Magloire’s eyes staring hungrily at everything. Among the market women strode a coat hanger of a man who shook a plastic jug of filthy yellowish oil in one hand crying “Lwil, lwil, lwil” like a crow. Seeing that Doctor Oliver was faint, Magloire procured a ladder-back chair for him, but sitting down in the midst of the crush was not helpful and Magloire led him out of the market, up the hill where the streets were calmer. They passed the gateway of the Hôpital Justinien, and paused to look at the whitewashed trunks of the corridor of palms receding to the stairway, but they did not go in.
Doctor Oliver held himself up with a fist wrapped around an iron spear of the hospital gate. Somewhere in all the moil of frantic exchange there must be something to answer his need. Or else he would simply have to kick. He had done it before, but here? Not here. It seemed to him that somewhere the heart of La Reine d’Ayiti must be impaled on a fencespear like the one he grasped, deflated, tightening, the blood blackening to the iron as it dried.
Magloire walked him back to the hotel, where Doctor Oliver invited him in for a beer. He had also purchased Magloire a paper plate of spaghetti in the market, but so far had not offered him any money. They had walked around the market for an hour without Magloire being able to buy anything that he needed, and although the figure of ven dola was burning in the center of his forehead, like the mark of Cain, Doctor Oliver never seemed to notice. Magloire could not bear to describe it now, as they sat in the shade of the bar above the hotel pool and sipped their beers.
“It is very difficult to earn twenty dollars,” Magloire said, constructing the sentence carefully out of bits of French he still had from school. Doctor Oliver did not appear to hear or understand, just lurked behind his sunglasses as though blind.
“To make twenty dollars,” Magloire tried again, “requires a great many transactions in the head.”
“Twenty dollars?” Doctor Oliver raised his head.
“Twenty dollars! Yes, yes.” Magloire felt hopeful, then excited. Twenty dollars-the doctor had spoken the words. The resonance of two voices saying the same phrase produced a sudden harmony between them.
Now Doctor Oliver felt the confidence that had failed him before, in the light of all Charlie Chapo had said, to explain his requirements to Magloire in his own rickety French from school, and yes, Magloire was nodding and agreeing, though at the same time lapsing into Creole as he leaned forward to confirm the understanding, “Nenpòt sa w bezwen map jwenn li, wi!”
“What?” said Doctor Oliver
“Anytheen you wann, I get!” Magloire said in English, then, as if it were a code they shared, “Fòk nan pwen poum pa jwenn.”
Magloire went back to the market quickly, his head illuminated with a pleasant ruby light. He had two minds, or more than two, and had just shifted from one to another. A certain mind had been molded by the bon frères of Saint Jean Bosco who had taught him his trades. This mind could calculate, plan ahead, and undertake the interminable transactions needed to acquire ven dola (in this case)-it was like the mind of a blan, he thought, or even of a Haitian filozòf, for some Haitians were educated to the point that they no longer heard the spirits, or if they did they were afraid.
But now, as he sailed through the market streets, his mind was washed clean of all that arithmetic that had burdened it earlier, for Doctor Oliver had simply answered his prayer- without knowing it he had obeyed the will of èzili Je Wouj, not because he knew her or served her the way Magloire did, but because he was a good man of the right instincts who could let himself be moved to restore order to the universe by folding a twenty-dollar bill into the warm pale palm of Magloire’s hand. Tout pou nan amoni, Magloire was practically singing to himself as he fractured Doctor Oliver’s deuce into larger soft piles of Haitian currency, the bills limp and fragrant with a fruity, sweaty smell and so blackened from passage from hand to hand they were entirely illegible. He purchased small but double rations of charcoal, oil, rice, and dried beans, and canned milk for the children, then green coffee beans for his mother and a handful of ibuprofen tablets for himself-his head had hurt a good deal earlier from the all the transactions scrambling in it. At another stand he bought two red candles and a ball of black string. There were then left four hexagonal coins; enough for a basket of green oranges.
He divided his purchases into two sacks and the smaller of these he locked in a cupboard when he returned home, putting the iron key into his pocket. Anise looked at him sourly as he did so, for she knew very well what that was about. When he gave her the condensed milk for the boy she brightened, then asked him sharply about the medicine, but he pointed out that it was no longer needed, for the boy was well, happy today, teasing the chickens out in the yard, and then he gave Anise the oranges. As for his mother, when she received the charcoal and coffee she smiled at him with all her four remaining teeth.
Magloire had to hasten now, fast, the red light in his head compelled him, over the unpaved road that wrapped around the outside edge of Morne du Cap beyond the dwellings of the town, then splashing across the beach where the tide was coming in, as the sun, still blazing hot, tilted just a little toward the west. Hopping from boulder to boulder around the next point, he climbed into the walls of Fort Picolet, which in the time of the heroes two hundred years before had been the scene of a great battle between indigènes on shore and the French warships. Now the fort was full of spirits, and there were other sèvitè there pursuing their own missions. Magloire paused to draw breath and looked down the black stone spikes of côte de fer, where two or three youths were scribbling on school paper, just above the spring of èzili Freda, but it was èzili Je Wouj who would catch and deliver his desires. He climbed a little further, till he was facing her grotto. There he lit a red candle for her, and left a complex little bundle of black string, a figure eight bound to itself with a tightly wrapped waist, like the waist of a wasp that might sting.
Descending, his head began to hurt again, perhaps because of the heat and sun, which now flashed directly into his face from the mirroring sea. He had already taken two ibuprofen. Could they have failed so soon? If he had more money he would buy sunglasses like those Doctor Oliver always wore. The luminous red glow of èzili Je Wouj was fading from his brain, and a grimmer something else began to replace it. The boys above the spring were smiling at him and showing him their scraps of paper, on which they had been scrawling phrases over and over until the papers grew dark and confused as a jungle at midnight and finally became a perfect graphiteshining black.
These were Vodou passports the boys had made, and they wanted Magloire to purchase them, or maybe just admire them. His other mind was forcing itself back, the one with the calculations. The tide had certainly come in now and he would undoubtedly get wet when he crossed the shoal. He could not wait, so procuring dry trousers would be added to his mountain of difficulties. When he looked at the blackened papers the boys were showing him, his whole brain felt scribbled over in just the same way. In a headachy flash he perceived for the first time the flaw in his situation: he had spent the whole twenty dollars without obtaining what Doctor Oliver wanted. Indeed, he no longer had a clear notion what that thing was.
Doctor Oliver spent the hottest part of the afternoon in his hotel room, half-watching coverage of the demonstrations on Haitian national television. When he woke the screen had gone blank and the day was almost over. He put on his shirt and ambled out barefoot. Charlie Chapo’s dust-covered truck was parked in the hotel lot, so he was unsurprised to find the man himself in the bar, drinking a large glass of the excellent local rum, except that it was rare for him to drink hard liquor. Charlie had taken off both his hat and his head rag and the remnants of his extremely dirty hair were sticking up. Doctor Oliver sat down and ordered the same.
“Bwa debèn,” Charlie was muttering fixedly, as if it were a mantra of some kind. “Bwa debèn.”
“What?” said Doctor Oliver, as jovially as he could. Charlie Chapo started as if he had not previously been aware of the doctor’s presence.
“Ebony wood.” His left hand had begun folding his red head cloth into ever smaller triangles. “It used to be code for slave cargo, back in the day when they had to smuggle them. Of course, whatever real ebony there might have been here was slashed out and ripped off and sent to Europe along with the gold and the coffee and sugar and hope, till there’s nothing left but bare rock most places, and women making dirt cakes instead of corn bread. That’s us, monchè! We find a place as close to Paradise as this universe allows, that’s what we do to it. Sa kab fèm rele Mèt Kalfou mwen!”
“What?” Doctor Oliver repeated. His sense of incomprehension had now taken on an ominous cast. Charlie Chapo was pumping that triangle of red cloth very hard in his left fist and Doctor Oliver felt obscurely that this action might cause something bad to happen.
“Oh,” said Charlie, looking at his left hand as if it belonged to somebody else. “I mean, do things the way I shouldn’t. Sorry…” He shook out the bandanna with his right hand and wiped his forehead with it. It was getting dark quickly. Bats skimmed the surface of the pool and a cocotier by the railing shivered its long fronds in the breeze. In the far distance they could both see the series of flaming barricades that cut the town off from the airport and the road down to the capital. Doctor Oliver’s apprehensive feelings intensified as he touched the vial in his pocket where his two remaining pills still clicked. He considered that Charlie Chapo might possibly have taken care of his problem personally if he’d wanted, instead of fobbing him off on Magloire. Charlie Chapo was occasionally assumed to be a drug dealer himself because he had no other obvious portfolio. His presence in Haiti was one of the many anomalies from which the whole country sometimes seemed to be constructed.
“My people can’t get in and I can’t get out,” Charlie Chapo was saying. “It just gums everything all up-and for nothing, that’s what gets me sometimes. You know a bad day here can be-”
“Very bad.” Doctor Oliver felt the truth of this in his spleen at the moment he said it.
“And you know, I hate it that they killed that poor woman. I just don’t- All right, there’s no less point in that than in anything, but it really didn’t have to be her.”
Charlie Chapo drained his rum glass and shook himself all over, then turned on Doctor Oliver a lopsided smile. “I just need to clean out my head is all.” There was something in the way he said it that made the doctor think he could lift off the top of his skull and rinse out the inside and replace it. “Do you mind if I use your shower?”
“Go for it,” Doctor Oliver said. “There’s even soap. It’s from Taiwan.”
By the time Charlie returned to the table, it was completely dark. The barefoot servants had lit the lamps, and the fires on the barricades seemed much further off-as did the dark portents of Charlie’s earlier words. On the strength of Magloire’s quick visit, Doctor Oliver had dry-swallowed one of his two remaining pills and he now felt quite agreeably insulated from… what had it been?
“Without fear of the nighted wyvern,” he pronounced in a fat mellow tone, as Charlie hove up to the table, still raking water out of his thin hair with his fingers.
“Something cheered you up,” Charlie said, raising an eyebrow as he sat down.
“I ordered for us,” Doctor Oliver said, and at that moment a waiter began setting down platters of poulè kreyòl and banann peze. They ate without talking very much, which was the custom of the country. Or, rather, Doctor Oliver pushed his food around his plate, since the drug he had taken destroyed his appetite. As the dishes were cleared, he ordered them postprandial glasses of the marvelous rum. Just beyond the hotel’s outward rippling of light, drums had begun a rich insistent rhythm. The ceremonies Charlie had mentioned would be gunning up now, not far away.
“Thanks for putting me onto Magloire.”
“He take care of you?” Charlie seemed pleased.
Doctor Oliver reached for the envelope in his shirt pocket, then stopped. “He said something to me: Fòk nan pwen.” He couldn’t remember the rest of the phrase. “I didn’t get it.”
“Magloire said that?” Charlie’s eyes had narrowed. “That’s Bizango, basically. Vodou for most people here is Ginen, which is a whole lot like charismatic Christianity from all I’ve seen of it, but there’s this other thing that goes on, a kind of inversion of it, I mean. Left-handed.”
The word sinister surfaced in Oliver’s mind, like a paper flower blooming in a glass. Charlie Chapo’s left hand pumped on the tightly folded triangle of red.
“I mean,” Charlie Chapo was saying, “from the ougan’s point of view, well, yeah, Ginen is all sweetness and light, but it’s hard to get paid for that, see? So most of them work with the left hand too, that’s how they put it. For people who’d sell their mother or eat their own children to get what they want, sometimes…”
“What do they want?”
“Power. Sex. Money. Power.” Charlie shrugged. “Same as you, right? It’s not like these are the only people in the world who’ll throw a lot away for immediate gratification. In the long run it’s not such a good idea, because they have to bind their spirits to make them deliver like that, and the spirits can be pretty angry once they get loose. But in the short term, fòk nan pwen pou’m pa jwen.”
“That’s it,” said Doctor Oliver. “What does it mean?”
“There’d have to not be any for me to not get some.”
Charlie frowned. “Let me see what he got for you.”
The jab of anxiety Doctor Oliver felt was, thanks to his pill, no worse than being prodded with a hair. He pulled the small red and gilt envelope from his shirt pocket.
“Huh,” said Charlie Chapo. “That’s a ghost-money envelope. I get them in Chinatown and use them to give money to people down here. Well, no reason Magloire wouldn’t have a few.”
When Charlie Chapo opened the envelope and curled his index finger into it, Doctor Oliver felt a stronger stab: somebody’s messing with my dope. Charlie Chapo rubbed a generous amount of white powder between his thumb and forefinger. “I don’t know,” he said, and dragged his finger through a drop of water on the table. A smear like white paint appeared on the wood of the tabletop.
“I wouldn’t run this up my nose.” Charlie caught Oliver’s eye. “It’s lime, I think.”
“What, quick lime?”
“No, no! They’re not trying to hurt you. It’s like chalk, basically. They use it for whitewash.” Charlie closed the envelope and flicked it across the table like a paper football. “What did you pay for it?”
“Twenty U.S. ”
“Right,” said Charlie. “Kind of suspiciously cheap, don’t you think?” He looked out the ring of local light toward the fires on the barricades. “I dunno, though, in ’97 I could have bought an assault rifle for that in the capital. Twenty dollars.”
“Ever wish you had?” Doctor Oliver managed to ask, from the depths of the chill now locked around his heart.
“Sometimes, yeah,” Charlie said. “But you know, if you’ve got one of those things, the odds go up somebody will get killed with it.” He turned his head back into the circle of lamplight. “Don’t feel so bad-you can try again tomorrow.”
“Why not?” Doctor Oliver said. “Why not feel bad?”
“What I love about this country is that magical thinking actually does work here. But it’s got to have a little something to work with, you see? Like Magloire-in better circumstances he’d be a completely honest person. As it is, he has to cut a corner sometimes.”
The drums had grown louder and there was chanting now too. Charlie Chapo turned his head into the wind that came constantly off the bay, flipped up his red bandanna, and knotted it tight to the nape of his neck. He’s going to leave me, Doctor Oliver thought. Charlie leaned toward him across the table.
“Understand, Magloire wanted you to have what you wanted. His desire is for you to have what you need. And for him to have what he needs and… so somebody has to spin straw into gold. If the charm had worked like he wanted it to, you’d come out with the coin instead of the dried leaf. As it is…” Standing, Charlie clapped Doctor Oliver on the shoulder. “Thanks for dinner. And the shower. And what the hell, it’s only twenty bucks.”
After his delivery to Doctor Oliver, Magloire returned to the street where his mother lived with Anise and his son. Anise sat on a low stool holding the child on her knee and stirring an iron pot which released a rich smell of diri kole ak pwa. Beyond, in the darkness, his mother roasted coffee; a rim of red coal outlined the bottom curve of her cauldron. His mouth watered at the smell of the rice and beans, but although Anise was using provisions he had provided, he did not mean to share the meal. By the grace of Doctor Oliver he had already eaten quite well once today and that was better than he often managed. Also, it was easy enough to unlock the cabinet and slip away with the second bag while Anise was busy over the food.
With the neck of the loose cloth bag in his hand, he stood on the Boulevard de la Mer and watched the bone-white moon rising from the sea. His thoughts scattered, to the point he was not completely in one of his minds or another. Some men along the breakwater were fishing, each with a hook and a line rolled around a chip of wood, and a couple of students had clustered under the electric lamps to study their homework. Behind and above him, beyond the lights of Doctor Oliver’s hotel perched on its eminence, the drumming tightened, intensified, and there was a lone voice singing.
Magloire turned from the waterfront and climbed an ascending street. This little pocket of the old colonial town compressed a number of disparate things together as if in the heel of a sock: a middle-sized hilltop church was quite near the onfò where the ceremony was, and not far from that was the fancy hotel for blan, and not far from that was the very modest quarter where Magloire’s mother lived with Anise and the grandchild. A ravine and the steepness of the mountain beyond it had forestalled any further construction to the north from colonial times until quite recently, but now Magloire was picking his way across the ravine toward the shantytown that had mushroomed on the other side.
He had built the little clay house for Douslina with his own hands and it was stronger than most others, made properly with raclage under the clay, a real tin roof, and a concrete floor. True, Douslina had demanded it when she reported herself pregnant by Magloire a second time, yet he was proud to have accomplished the house, and her children were healthier than the son Anise had given him. The sweetness of Lina was that dous he’d woven to her name, and now when she saw what he had brought and came to him, surrendering all her warm weight against his body, Magloire felt stronger and more intelligent and capable than before, and he felt that all the paradoxes of his life had for a moment integrated: the constant puckering sourness of Anise completing a sphere with this sweetness now.
One of Douslina’s hands explored the bag and another was interested in Magloire’s other possibilities (the children were asleep, she said), but he pulled a little away from her, muttering Fòk mwen ale as he turned his face toward the drumming, the choruses that answered the lead singer now- it was well to remain pure, or at least somewhat pure, until he had thanked the lwas for their generosity; furthermore, it would not be practical for Douslina to have another child, or anyone else Magloire was responsible to feed.
He kissed and left her somewhat regretfully, but that feeling faded as he grew nearer to the drums, merging with threads of other people going there. The moon was so bright it was easy enough to see his way, and in the ring of the onfò there was electric light now, along with a sound system that projected the voices out over the church and across the bay. The pathways to the central area were labyrinthine, twisting among houses pinned to the steep flank of the mountain, but Magloire’s movement became automatic with the drumming. He greeted his acquaintances without seeing them. On the periphery women sold fried food, soft drinks, raw cane rum, and even cold beer, but Magloire had no money left and did not care. Bleachers had been built around the oval floor of the onfò, which by day was sometimes used for cockfighting. Magloire slipped through and moved toward the altar, a crazy tall structure in tiers like a wedding cake and with many real layer cakes offered upon it, along with holy cards and novenas and Vodou passports and candles and padlocks and mouchwa tèt and grubby illegible bills of money and the less valuable hexagonal yellowish coins. Ven dola. In his comings and goings all day, Magloire had encountered various creditors who’d heard of his spending money in the market, whom he could only tell Demen, demen, tomorrow and tomorrow, as his last centime had been spent on the red candle he affixed now to the corner of the altar and the looped black string he set beside it: at once a gesture of gratitude for the ven dola he had received today and a sort of fox trap he hoped might snare him another ven dola tomorrow.
He could give way now. The whole walk to the onfò he had been feeling a pulse rising between the cords at the back of his neck, responding to the drumbeat, the red magic rising from the back of his brain toward the front so that soon the Maji Wouj would submerge him completely: this was good. As he moved toward the concentration of dancers under the drums, Magloire caught a glimpse of Charlie Chapo on the periphery-Charlie had in fact discarded his chapo and wore only his red mouchwa tèt, to show the spirits he courted the red magic too. He stood at the edge of the dancing, turning his torso lightly at the waist and letting his slack arms sway like cooked spaghetti. In the glance they exchanged, Magloire understood that Charlie Chapo desired what possessed Magloire and that he would not get it. Magloire went altogether under the drums.
Charles Morgan, le-dit Charlie Chapo, was a connoisseur of many cultures and had experience of more than one pathway to the trance state that preceded full possession. Tonight he was combining several techniques-a scrap of qi gong, a bit of yoga, a subroutine of self-hypnosis-all in hope of bucking the ego out of his being for a time. He had planed down his consciousness till it was as frail as the weave of his worn-out hat, but he could not get all the way through membrane. Not tonight. A couple of times the thing had happened to him by itself, and while it terrified him then, he still desired and tried for it even though he knew how wrong-headed and futile it was to think that he could get there by trying.
Monkey-mind had a hold on him tonight. He let his monkey watch the show. As it would do before a crisis, the drumming knotted up as the dancers tightened themselves under the drums; the dancers mostly women now, except for one male onsi clad in white, working his way blindly toward the center, holding out a white candle with its yellowish flame and a white enamel cup of water. Charlie let himself sway like a tree in the wind. A respectable-looking woman standing just ahead of him let out a quiet sigh and slumped back into the arms he’d reflexively raised to catch her. As easily as that. It was a peripheral event; the dancing and drumming were still binding tighter. Charlie supported the woman from her armpits; her limp arms spread wide, like the arms of Christ on the cross. Presently others came and bore her away.
Charlie had just been relieved of his burden when the clenched fist of dancing cracked open under the drums. Two women who’d been dancing very close flung back, repelled from each other; one screaming harshly and tearing at her head. Charlie didn’t know what had happened to the onsi with his candle and cup, but between the two possessed women appeared Magloire; the women falling away from him like two halves of a hatching egg. Strangely, Magloire now seemed to be cradling the nub of red candle Charlie had earlier seen him place on the altar. That was Magloire’s body certainly, the deep eyes ringed with red, then white, but the person Charlie knew as Magloire was nowhere behind those eyes, not now. He had gone elsewhere, and Charlie, knowing that he could not follow, swelled up with jealousy and loneliness; at the same time, however, there was a moment of sympathy, for he knew in a backward fashion the same thing Magloire had known of him before, thinking, If only I could see, could be, the face of a living god.
Abandoned, Doctor Oliver sat by the railing above the hotel pool, lapping at a stale beer. There was a three-way discord between the soft konpa playing in the bar, the drumming and chanting and occasionally shrieking from the onfò, and the more aggressive dance music booming from a club at sea level down below. He watched the moon climb higher in the sky above black waves, perfectly round and full and alien and cruel. This moon cared nothing for him or for his predicament. A number of starved dogs quarreled in the dark streets below the battlements of the hotel; he felt sure they would devour him if they could. That man, that man in the square today, had believed that Doctor Oliver was stealing something from him with his eyes.
Behind his eyelids he could feel the pullulating of the marketplace where he had been that day with Magloire, the interminable screaming of need and exchange and over it all that harsh voice crying in its monotone, “Oil, oil, oil.” Grease the wheel. How abjectly everything seemed to cooperate in its own spoliation, quite as Charlie Chapo had said. The scene was miniaturized in his mind’s eye as if he saw it through a backward telescope, and he did appreciate how very small of him it was to imagine that this whole swarming nation existed only to serve his need. Still, they had robbed him. He had been robbed. He’d been robbed and he wanted to kill someone.