Dancing in the Baron's Shadow

by Fabienne Josaphat

  The metal door swung open and three men walked out of the fortress. Two of them wore slacks and carried rifles. They flanked a third man who was shorter, his hands clasped behind his back. He was dressed in a sharp, crisp khaki uniform with gold chevron insignia on his broad shoulders. Nicolas’s eyes followed the glimmer of a small gold medal on his lapel. Black and red. This man was more imposing and intimidating than the others, despite his height.

  The three men stopped in formation and stared at the prisoners. The man in uniform began to speak, and Nicolas noticed the scar running from his right eyebrow to chin. His heart skipped a beat. He’d seen that scar in photographs. He’d written about this man who was now shouting orders at him between dramatic pauses.

  “Prisonniers, en garde!” the man bellowed.

  The prisoners adjusted their stance, awkwardly shifting their weight from one foot to the other. They glanced at each other, uncertain. They weren’t soldiers. They had no idea how to obey those orders. The scar-faced man laughed at this and began to pace down the line, detailing each prisoner’s presentation and features. Nicolas stood motionless between two other men, his wrists raw with pain.

  The officer stopped in front of Nicolas but seemed to take no special note of him.

  “My name is Jules Sylvain Oscar,” he said. “I am the warden here. Bienvenue à Fort Dimanche.”

  And then Jules Sylvain Oscar smiled directly at Nicolas, eyes twinkling.

  Nicolas spent the next two days alone inside a cell so tiny he could touch the walls by stretching out both hands. They called it a tibout, or small piece. Every few hours, guards came and treated him to a bastonnade, their clubs raining blows on his body coiled on the hot cement. The first time they came, he could only think to ask them how they could stand to be torturers. “This,” they said, laughing, “this isn’t torture.” After that, Nicolas didn’t say anything, accepted the beatings. He wondered if he would die here like this, weak with pain and hunger.

  On the third day, the men pulled him out of the tibout and dragged him down a hallway by the arms. His torso was stained with blood and bile, and they didn’t want to get any of it on their clothes. One of them complained that cell number six was too far to bother with.

  “They should just let us waste the sons of bitches,” he said.

  Nicolas couldn’t see through the swelling in his right eye. The blood had started to coagulate there, leaving a sticky film coating his eyelashes. His heels scraped along the cold floor. Nicolas didn’t know in which of the ten cells he would land. Not that it mattered. He was going to die. He was sure of it. He didn’t know how he hadn’t died in that first cell.

  Along the hallway, Nicolas heard voices, screaming and moaning.

  “Please,” someone lamented. “Yon ti dlo, a drink of water…”

  They finally stopped in front of a narrow metal door. Nicolas heard the chiming of keys. A third voice was there, another man. Nicolas tried to see through the blood and thought he spotted a guard in a striped shirt standing against a wall with a pistol. Nicolas’s head fell back as he collapsed to his knees.

  “Stand up!” the guard ordered.

  Nicolas heard them shout, but he couldn’t respond. His legs were too weak. His head was spinning too fast, and everything throbbed. Soon, Nicolas, bloody and lacerated, was propped up like Christ on the cross, his arms extended. He felt a cool wind rush against his bare legs. He felt naked in his soiled underwear, but had no strength left for shame.

  The guard next to him shouted, “Prisoners, step away from the door!”

  Nicolas had never prayed for death before, but as the guard toyed with his keys and unlocked the door, he wished again for God to strike him down on the spot. He’d never suffered this much before, and when hands shoved him into a dark cell, he expected to meet an icy cement floor, to break his jaw or crack another rib. Instead, he landed onto a curious ensemble of limbs that broke his fall. Hands—hard, soft, callused, rough—brushing against his skin as they pulled him left and right, as if kneading and molding dough. He heard murmurs, whispers, and smelled a myriad of foul odors.

  “Toss him there!” someone ordered. “This is my corner.”

  “Eh! Kenbe li, catch him!”

  Nicolas’s head landed on a mat. He kept his eyes shut, his mouth closed. The air was thick with heat and stench, and the fiery ground sent pain rippling through his body. He cried out with his mouth open. No sound came out. He needed help. A doctor. Medicine. Painkillers. Air.

  The mat was a single, unpadded layer of woven straw, and it stuck to the open wounds on his back when he tried to roll over. He’d slept on mats as a child, sharing a room with his brother. His mother bought the nattes herself from an artisan who wove them by hand. But those were comfortable.

  He tried to speak and, instead, found himself gasping for air, trying to breathe in this oven. A wave of nausea swelled in his stomach. He turned on his side so he wouldn’t choke if he threw up and promptly lost consciousness.

  He dreamed of the countryside, of his parents and his brother and the fields. He dreamed of the children too, Amélie and Enos and Adeline, running and playing in the surf. He dreamed of the smell of the sand and his wife’s skin. All around them on the beach, it was sunny, but gray clouds mounted on the horizon. They came and retrieved him as he was still dreaming, before he could run down to the shore and pick up his daughter, and he was almost grateful to have been pulled from the cell without having to meet its other inhabitants. Assuming he was going to be shot, he grasped for the memory of his dream. His lips moved, but no prayers came.

  At first he thought the stench in the black hall was urine, but then he realized the odor was emanating from the walls of the prison itself. It was the smell of something rotten and decomposed, flesh that had been left to decay.

  Fort Dimanche was a narrow two-story building, and Nicolas counted five cell doors on both sides of the hallway. A bright lightbulb flickered overhead, casting stark shadows over the heads and shoulders of prisoners. They disappeared into another corridor, and Nicolas felt as if he were being swallowed whole into the mouth of a monster. Without warning, something sharp poked him in the rib. A Macoute was pressing the barrel of his rifle into his side.

  “This way!”

  Another guard grabbed Nicolas by the arm, leading him up an unsteady staircase. Nicolas’s heart raced. The fear was real, alive in his flesh. Nicolas managed to look back toward the cells, but he saw nothing but inky darkness. He heard a thunderous whack behind a locked door. A feeble howl rose in the air. Then another whack, followed by a groan, and then…silence. Nicolas thought of his father, and his mother, and the friars at Frères de Saint-Marc Institution and the words they’d taught him to pray. Our Father, who art in heavert…How did the rest go?

  The men finally stopped before a closed door. Nicolas saw a warm light shining beneath it. One of the men knocked. Nicolas closed his eyes again and tried to quiet the voices fluttering in his mind like wild, frightened birds.

  A voice shouted from inside. “Entrez!”

  One guard opened the door and the other shoved Nicolas inside. Nicolas stumbled forward toward the light.

  The room glowed orange from a lamp atop a metal desk where papers and folders were piled in stacks, forming a small barrier around the officer sitting at the desk. He kept his head down, signing and stamping documents one after the other. His movements were mechanical, and Nicolas could hear the grating of the ballpoint pen against the grain of the paper. The man kept his head down, but when he finally angled his face in the light, Nicolas recognized the stitched welt across his brown skin, the droopy eyelid over a scarred eye.

  There was the man he’d researched, written about, sought to destroy with proof of his crimes, a man as repulsive as the leader he served. Oscar was personally responsible for horrors: selling Haitian citizens over the border to the Dominican Republic for forced labor, trafficking cadavers to medical schools and young girls to pimps abroad. And then his name had come
up in connection with Alexis. All of it was in the book Nicolas had written—which, of course, the warden now had.

  “Sir, this is the prisoner, L’Eveillé.”

  Nicolas’s eyes swept over the desk and noticed an envelope stuffed with green American dollars. He stared at the bills and wondered why there was such a large amount of money just sitting there. Next to it, Nicolas recognized Duvalier’s Catechism of the Revolution. Children were made to memorize it in school.

  “Make him sit,” the warden said, putting his pen down.

  Oscar grabbed the envelope and ran a red tongue across the fold while the Macoutes pushed Nicolas down onto a wooden seat. The guards unknotted the rope around his wrists and, just as he sighed in relief, grabbed his hands and bound them again around the back of the chair. He felt his flesh burn as the rope bit even deeper into his skin.

  Behind the warden, there were shelves of books Nicolas sensed had never been read, the spines dusty, the lettering smudged and erased. There were also two framed plaques recognizing Jules Oscar for services rendered to the Republic of Haiti. Above the warden’s chair loomed a large, framed portrait of François Duvalier, his steely eyes smirking. The president’s skeletal gray hand and aging face were a testament to rumors about his declining health. He looked like a ghost, like the remains of a man, shrunken and solemn. Nicolas clenched his teeth at the sight. Even in a photograph, Duvalier’s eyes seemed to see everything.

  The warden reached down below his desk. When he came back up, he held a brown leather briefcase with a gold lock. He carefully stored the envelope of money inside and placed the briefcase back under his desk. Finally, their eyes met. Nicolas told himself to remain calm and composed. The men who had brought him in retreated into dark corners of the room, and Nicolas was relieved not to have them breathing angrily down his neck, machete and pistol inches away.

  “Nicolas L’Eveillé.” Oscar smiled. “It seems you are interested in me.”

  His voice echoed in the cavernous room where the walls, crumbling and chipped, were stained with mildew. He gave a little laugh. Nicolas stared at the warden and tried to swallow, his dry throat sharp and painful.

  “I know some things about you too, you know?” Oscar said, still smiling.

  Nicolas tried to picture him without the scar, but it was impossible. There was a silent rage to his face, a cold, deep-seated spite.

  “Attorney at law, worked out of Jean Faustin’s practice back in…1953? Now you run your own show, I see. A bigmouthed professor. Getting off on impressing the youth with your intellect. How many books would you say you’ve read?”

  The warden looked him over from head to toe with disdain. Nicolas drew a deep breath. He smelled the warden’s spicy cologne. Oscar’s plump fingers rested on the desk, and Nicolas noticed the scabs on his knuckles. A gold ring on his index finger flashed in the light.

  A sharp howl came from close by. Nicolas couldn’t stop himself from looking around, his eyes wide with terror.

  “You hear that?” The warden was now grim. “That’s the sound of cooperation.”

  Nicolas realized that everything was calculated here. The tiled floor increased the resonance of guards’ boots in the hallways. The torture chambers were kept close so prisoners could hear one another howl. All of it was designed to instill terror in every prisoner in Fort Dimanche all the time. It was a product of Duvalier’s sick, complex mind, and it was effective. He stared at the warden’s mouth. He wished for the ability to punch this man precisely there, to knock out a few of those mocking gold fillings.

  Oscar grabbed a folder from the stack next to him and thumbed through a ream of typed pages.

  “You’re a very interesting man, Nicolas L’Eveillé,” Oscar said. “Very intelligent, very educated. You’ve been told why you’re here.”

  Nicolas gritted his teeth but said nothing. The law, which he had taught for so many years, scrolled its statutes in the back of his mind, all of it meaningless. What lies have you been teaching? asked a horror-stricken voice inside him. The warden scanned the documents slowly, quietly. Nicolas realized it was his manuscript.

  “You seem to know me well,” Oscar continued. “You’ve been taking notes on my comings and goings, my personal transactions. Did you personally know the communist traitor Jacques Stephen Alexis?”

  “No, sir,” Nicolas muttered.

  Oscar stared back, his face blank.

  “You’re plotting to overthrow this government,” the warden stated simply, as though describing a physical characteristic.

  Before Nicolas could protest, the warden grabbed another sheet of paper from the folder and pushed it across the desk.

  “Do you recognize this? This signature here? Do you know who that is?”

  Nicolas leaned in. He let his eyes skim the paper, and the words that jumped at him were primarily legal in nature, mostly jargon. Then he saw the words “high treason” and the names, typed in all caps: “GEORGES PHENICIÉ, JEAN CICERON FAUSTIN, NICOLAS L’EVEILLÉ.” His blood froze in his veins. At the bottom of the page, the warden pointed at a signed name that was now vaguely familiar: Philippe Joseph.

  “Now who could that be?” Oscar asked.

  Nicolas couldn’t find the words. Everything he wanted to say seemed pointless in the face of this absurd reversal of fortune. All of this was happening too fast, and for what?

  “Thankfully, your ex-student is a true patriot,” the warden added. “His allegiance is to our father, Duvalier! Philippe Joseph had the good sense to denounce you.”

  Nicolas had lost all feeling in his legs and wrists. The name Joseph still drummed in his head. The officer at Casernes Dessalines, the one who processed him. His name was Joseph, wasn’t it?

  “He told us you were a kamoken,” the warden said, putting the form back in the folder. “He was right. We have found the black-and-white evidence, noir sur blanc. His Excellency has already heard of this. There is a penalty against all traitors.”

  “How does my writing make me a traitor?”

  Oscar slammed an open hand on the table. The lamp vacillated, the desk shook, and the orange bulb flickered.

  “You will not speak unless I tell you to, do you understand me?”

  Nicolas stared into the warden’s eyes. There was nothing to see there, except hatred.

  “I am in charge. Not you. You are an enemy of the state,” Oscar bellowed, slamming the desk again. “From now on, you will be treated as such, you piece of shit. Writing propaganda against the republic is betraying Duvalier.”

  Nicolas held still, trying desperately to calm his rapid heartbeat.

  “And you were packing your bags, ready to flee. That’s because you know you’re guilty. You’re a rat, a traitor, a coward!”

  The warden pushed his chair back and stood up. Quickly, but expertly, he smoothed his uniform with both hands. Nicolas got a good look at his broad head and bull-like shoulders. There was no question he was a strong man. Nicolas thought he would destroy his desk and chair with every touch.

  “People like you disgust me!” Oscar spat on the ground. “Who do you think you are, challenging me like I’m some sort of imbecilic pawn? I despise you elitist bourgeois, getting fat in your luxurious dining rooms and feeling indignant that you’re not in charge. You have no idea what life is truly like. You look down on everyone, and you think that gives you the right to spy on me?”

  He walked toward the door, rolling his sleeves up to the elbows. Nicolas tried to breathe, but he couldn’t. He tried to turn around, but he was bound too tightly. Tears of frustration welled in the corners of his eyes.

  “You are a threat to this nation, and this government has no tolerance for it. There is no place for your behavior in our society.”

  Nicolas saw the warden remove his watch, fold its leather band, and slide it inside his pocket. There was a brief silence in which the warden seemed to compose himself.

  “Of course, sometimes some people need to be reminded of that,” Oscar continued. “S
o we help them, you see. We correct their behavior.”

  Nicolas knew begging wouldn’t help, but still, he stammered, “I—I have a wife and child. Please, you must listen to reason.”

  The warden approached quickly from behind and gripped his shoulder with a large, icy hand.

  “You have no family now,” he said, squeezing Nicolas’s clavicle. “You are nobody. There is no reason for nobody.”

  The warden stepped away. Nicolas’s head pivoted, trying to track Oscar as he walked toward a wooden armoire in the corner of the room. He opened the door and reached inside, and when he turned around, the hair on Nicolas’s body bristled.

  “I am innocent,” he said. “You can’t do this. Please, for the love of God—”

  “God?” Nicolas heard him snicker. “In this room, God is dead, Maître.”

  The warden brandished a black club, its varnished shaft catching the light. He motioned for the Macoutes.

  “Flanke l’ sou djak!”

  Nicolas’s cry died in his throat. The men kicked the chair forward and his head hit the edge of the desk. He gasped for air, his skull buzzing. They untied him. Hands grabbed his wrists and squeezed as they secured a metal rod behind his knees and at the top of his forearms. His chest and ribs burned in pain.

  “Please,” Nicolas implored. “Please, don’t—”

  He wondered if his pounding heart would stop dead, like a broken clock. It would be better, he thought. Please God, he prayed. Please. Nicolas turned his head and made eye contact with the warden. Oscar’s eyes were dead. He was caressing the club with his fingers, admiring the finish before smacking it against the palm of his hand.

  “When I’m through with you,” the warden said, “you’ll be singing Duvalier’s praises.”