Claire of the Sea Light

by Edwidge Danticat

  It was just like him to set her up by bringing those parents there and then try to make a lesson out of the whole thing. He had been that way since the Faculté, always eager to teach someone a lesson in a totally roundabout way.

  “The children at our school are never hit on our premises” was often the theme of their school-related pillow talk. That and his insistence that she was a great teacher in a country with so few and that she should have been teaching for decades, and even now could still be teaching. And that she was wasting her time on that show. It was useless for her to keep telling him that she thought she was “teaching” on her show.

  His was one of a few schools in the region with a no-hitting philosophy, which some of the parents welcomed and others detested. Most other schools carried out some type of corporal punishment, from ruler taps on the hand to cowhide straps on the legs and flat-board taps on the bottom. But Max Senior felt that corporal punishment was archaic, even barbaric, and he kept close watch on everyone, especially any teachers accused of abusive practices, to make sure they didn’t take place at his school.

  “Henri’s mother wants to meet with you and me tomorrow afternoon after school.” His voice was tight, distant. And without saying anything more, he turned his back to her so that they were now facing opposite sides of her room.

  “Must I go?” she asked, knowing, in spite of having one of the most listened- to voices in town, that she now sounded like a child who was being sent to the headmaster’s office. “I’m not even a teacher at the school.”

  “This must be resolved,” he said. “And I hope you will grant me and this boy and his mother that courtesy.”

  It wasn’t meant to be a slap, just the flutter of her hand, like a conductor guiding members of an orchestra, each with the same goal in mind, but different instruments in hand. Mazora Henri, or Toothless Henri, as even the other children with missing teeth called him, had long legs, which he constantly knocked together, and a loud, jumpy laugh.

  Of all the children she had ever read to, he interrupted the most, both with his clamorous laugh and by reaching over, whenever her back was turned, to grab, pinch, or shove the other children. Whenever she tried to keep him still, by making him stand alone in the back of the room, he mumbled a long list of audible curse words under his breath. She should have discussed the situation with Max Senior from the beginning, but she had thought herself capable of handling him.

  The particular morning of the slap, she was reading out loud to the class a poem called “Le Soleil et les Grenouilles,” “The Sun and the Frogs,” by the French fabulist Jean de La Fontaine. Given that the town, like many other coastal towns, no longer had any frogs—something that the French herpetologists had linked to the increased possibility of seismic activity and freak waves—and since the children were already familiar with their parents’ or older siblings’ accounts of the summer a decade ago when the frogs had disappeared, Louise thought it might be instructive to share the poem, one of her favorites, with them.

  As she read aloud, she became completely enthralled, as she did on the radio, with the sound of her own gravelly voice. Rising from the rocking chair, she walked back and forth between the evenly spaced benches, stopping now and then to accentuate a certain part of the poem for a particular row or child.

  … Aussitôt on ouït d’une commune voix

  Se plaindre de leur destinée

  Les Citoyennes des Etangs.

  … Abruptly, a cry

  From all the frogs in the land

  Who could no longer bear their fate.

  What will we do if the Sun has children?

  We can barely survive one Sun.

  If half a dozen come

  Then the sea will dry up, with all that is in it.

  Farewell, marshes, swamplands: our kind has been destroyed …

  For a while, she ignored Henri, who was mimicking her facial expressions and lip movements and grimacing to distract the others. But the more Henri was ignored, the more animated his impersonation became, until most of the children stopped listening to laugh at him. Or really to laugh at her.

  She couldn’t tell when it started, but at some point while she had her back turned, Henri had yanked a ribbon from one girl’s hair, then had walked (or jumped) to the next row and pulled a handful of barrettes from Claire Faustin’s hair. The sight of Claire’s stoic face and the barrettes, spread out now like so many dead aphids on the floor at her feet, enraged Louise, who put the book down and slowly walked toward Henri.

  As she approached him, he straightened his body and looked ahead. Even as she was standing beside him, she had not yet decided what to do. Should she send him to the back of the room? Send him home?

  She had meant only to accentuate whatever command she gave him by pounding on the notebook in front of him with her open palm. But as she stood before him, a toothless smirk came across his face. She wanted to erase it, the way one might erase words and numbers from a blackboard.

  She realized that she’d hit him only when she heard the other children gasp. Henri rubbed the side of his face. There were no finger marks that she could see, no blood streaming past his lips. He didn’t cry. Instead, he went on smiling, his toothless gap growing wider, until Louise walked back to her desk and continued reading.

  That night, Max Senior left her house without saying a word. It was likely that he wouldn’t even speak to her again unless she attended the meeting with the boy’s mother and all of this was resolved.

  Louise spent the next morning in bed, writing. She had been wrong to hit the boy, she knew, but it wasn’t the end of the world. He needed it. In fact he deserved it. This is what she planned to tell his mother. Or maybe she wouldn’t. This, she knew, was what was worrying Max Senior the most: that she might not show any remorse.

  He was finally letting her go. She sensed this, though he’d not said it out loud. Now she would no longer have the children to read to, including that devil of a boy Henri. And that luminous child Claire. Now she would not even have Max Senior. She had long felt him slipping away, the intrigue of her biblical affliction waning as she moved deeper into middle age.

  In the beginning, he had liked the taste of blood in her mouth. He would describe it to her in great detail as though his tongue were not inside her mouth.

  “It is salty,” he would say. Then he would add, “It is sweet.” He was convinced that the taste was based on her moods, and she would let him go on and on about it, expressing the same thoughts with different words. And she would daydream of other things as he spoke and she would daydream of how free she would feel without this affliction and she would marvel at how some things could destroy a person’s life, like being housebound for a few days when you were bleeding out of your mouth and you had trouble remembering when you had not. And all of a sudden, the past was your haven and the time you felt freest was when you least understood your body, when you were like Henri Désir’s favorite victims, when you were a little girl. And this is one of the reasons that Henri Désir had to be stopped. Because boys like him became anguish-causing men, men who felt like they could freely ravage and maim, and they had to be stopped. This is why she would never regret slapping him. She would even slap him again, even more purposefully this time, if she had the chance.

  Odile and her son were in Max Senior’s office that afternoon, just as he said they would be. Sometimes when Louise walked into a place like that, a place bursting with old things—dusty ledgers and educational manuals, creaky desks and chairs, things that could easily be fixed or changed or discarded but were kept as if out of a nostalgic reverence for the past—she felt as though she too were a relic. Everything was old in that room except the boy, Henri.

  Max Senior was sitting behind his cracked desk. He seemed relieved to see her, letting out a loud sigh when she came in. Again Odile was wearing her uniform and apron. It was as though she wanted to show the entire town that she had a job. She and her son were sitting across from Max Senior in a pair of ta
ll wicker chairs, one of the boy’s feet hanging off the edge. An extra chair had been brought in for Louise and had been placed halfway between them.

  Max Senior appeared torn between his roles, his eyes swerving back and forth to look at each of them. Louise could see that he was choosing his words carefully. Finally he simply said, “Allons. Let’s begin.”

  Odile sprang up and massaged her buttocks, where the chair had left a damp sweat crease. Louise also rose up from her chair and then Max Senior did too.

  Everyone was standing now except Henri, who gripped the sides of his chair with clenched fists while tapping his sneakers against one of the footholds without making any noise.

  “Madame?” Odile took a few hesitant steps toward Louise. “They say you slapped my son?”

  Odile kept moving closer, until Louise could feel and smell Odile’s warm breath on her face, could almost describe, if pressed, what she had eaten for lunch.

  Odile reached toward Henri’s chair and, without taking her eyes off Louise, grabbed him by the shoulders and plopped him between herself and Louise. He was, she observed with a cool disinterest, uncharacteristically obedient, flaccid; his arms hung limply at his sides.

  “My son has always told me,” Odile said, “what a good person you are. He told me you are like none of the teachers here, that even if we are poor, you treat him like all the other children and that you have read many wonderful things to him. I said to myself, ‘My son has much to learn from this woman, this big, famous woman.’ Am I telling a lie, son?” Odile grabbed her son’s chin and pushed his face forward, toward them. Henri shook his head no. His mouth was closed, but his lips trembled, and it seemed to Louise that, for the first time since she’d been around him, he might start to cry.

  “Let’s all sit down now,” Max Senior said, his fingers drumming his desk.

  “You see, Msye.” Odile turned her attention now to Max Senior. “I know your school does not strike children. I was told this the first day you accepted him here. I am a poor woman. Still you accepted him. I thank you for that. But I can’t thank you for the rest. If my son did something wrong, I would give you permission. I would put my cross on a paper, if I have to, to let you punish him the proper way. But I would never let anyone slap my son on his face, like he was some type of chimè, some brigan, or some criminal. Non, non. That is not correction. It is humiliation.”

  Odile now gently took Henri’s hand and moved him aside. Freed, he buried his face behind one of the chairs. Stepping back, Odile took a deep breath, then aimed for Louise.

  The slap landed on Louise’s cheek before she could see it coming. Her head swung so fast that each of her ears tapped against each of her shoulders for a moment. Her cheek throbbed. It felt hot, then warm, then deadened, so that if Odile slapped her again, she probably wouldn’t feel a thing. Yet the most painful thing about it was that it felt as though the slap had come from Max Senior. It was as if he had hit her.

  “Finished now,” Odile said to both her and Max Senior. “No more hitting talk. Just teach my child. And remember, correction, not humiliation.”

  Odile grabbed Henri’s hand and yanked him toward the door. On his way out, with the contented look of the vindicated, Henri turned to face Louise, opened his mouth, and flashed her the gap between his front teeth: his version of a celebratory smile.

  Louise heard herself breathing loudly as she tried to massage some sensation back into her cheekbone. The old office door squeaked behind Odile and Henri as they moved into the yard.

  Max Senior slipped back into the ancient chair behind his desk and motioned for Louise to also sit down. His gaze was fixed on her as though, she imagined, he was thinking of the two of them alone in one of those dark rooms of his childhood on those “Ki moun sa a?” nights, those “Who are you?” nights, and was trying to figure out who she really was.

  She was Louise George. That’s who she was. She had always done her best to protect herself from insults and injuries like this. Only for him had she let her guard down with these children, and look where it had led her, into a pitch-black moment of her own.

  A droning sound was ringing in her ears, but she thought she heard him ask, “T’es bien? Are you okay?”

  “Why did you let her do that?” She pressed her palm against her cheek and massaged it in a gentle circular motion.

  “After so many years of friendship,” he said, “you think I would tell her to do that to you?” Still, he seemed neither shocked nor outraged, and he did not get up from his chair and walk over to console her.

  No matter what he said, she found it hard to believe that he did not approve of that woman slapping her. Odile must have sensed it too. Otherwise she would have never taken the chance. She would have never risked her child getting kicked out of the school, or worse.

  Louise was feeling a bit dizzy now. The sound of Max Senior’s creaking chair echoed inside her head, his voice drifting in and out of her ears. Why didn’t he slap her himself? she wondered.

  He no longer wanted her in his life or at the school. She had felt it for some time, but she hadn’t been absolutely certain of it. He now turned to look at one of his old wooden cabinets, bursting with years of student dossiers and records. “The school is my whole life now,” he said, “and it has to be done right.”

  She had heard him go on about all of this before. Here, at the school, he could still nurse and guide childhoods without taking full responsibility for their outcomes. The children were not his children. He could not fully blame himself for their lack of self-possession, their selfishness and failures, their willingness to ruin their lives and the lives of others. But he could at least shield them while they were still young and in his care.

  “Even though this is my school,” he said, “my son, when he was this boy Henri’s age, was often misunderstood by the teachers here. And though they never slapped him physically, they often slapped him with words. This is why I would never allow something like you’ve done here.”

  “We are not talking about your son!” she shouted.

  “There is such a thing as a social contract then,” he said.

  “I did not deserve to be slapped,” she said.

  “Neither did that boy.” He pushed his chair forward in her direction, increasing the screeching noise coming from it.

  “You didn’t even explain to his mother,” she said. “You didn’t even try to help her see my side.”

  “You have no side here,” he said. “Besides, you were not there every moment I was with her.”

  “So why was the other man there last night, that man Faustin?”

  “Because,” he said, “as I heard it from the other children, Henri struck his daughter. I was hoping you would be brave enough to reassure both of those people that their children were still safe with us.”

  “Then you should have had the whole class there last night,” she said, “because that boy has hit every one of those children.”

  “That may be,” he said. “But—”

  “So this was a konplo,” she said, cutting him off. “A plot to humiliate me?”

  “Don’t be dramatic, Louise,” he said. “We are not on your show here.” And the way he twisted his mouth and curled his lips reminded her how much he hated her show.

  This might just be an elaborate send-off, she thought. She herself might have chosen a simpler way to say good-bye. But this was Maxime Ardin we were talking about here. Maxime Ardin père, le premier, senior. The son was fils, deux, junior. Maxime Ardin, Sr., did not know of any simple ways to say good-bye. And when he couldn’t divorce or banish you, unless you were one of his students, he apparently had you smacked.

  “If I did what you did,” he said, while looking so on edge that his teeth were nibbling on his bottom lip, “I would remove myself from my position. I couldn’t continue here.”

  He got up, sat down, got up, then sat down again, but did not make an approach toward her. That dreaded feeling of loneliness she felt so often returned.
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  “Now you can have more time for your show,” he said. Again she noticed his scowl of disdain, for the show and now also for her. He had told her many times that she could have been a great teacher and that the show had kept her from it. But now he knew that she could never be that kind of teacher, and there was no longer much to admire.

  “You can also keep writing your book,” he was saying. The slap he’d assigned to another woman was also meant to propel her toward this other redeemable talent, the writing of her book.

  One of his favorite things to say to her was that she was like a starfish, that she constantly needed to have a piece of her break off and walk away in order for her to become something new. Of course this had always been truer of him than of her.

  As she turned around to leave his office, she saw what he thought he was trying to slap back to life, a stronger and freer woman, one he could both salvage and admire. This slap, she knew, he perversely considered a gift to her, a convoluted act of kindness.

  Anniversary

  The night Gaëlle Lavaud’s husband died, she thought that everyone should die. After Laurent’s murder outside Radio Zòrèy, she’d sold their house in town and moved into her grandparents’ house on Anthère Hill. She had turned the fabric shop over to her employees, then had lain in bed for months, also waiting to die. Although everyone said that her milk would be tainted by her sadness and would fill her daughter, Rose, with sadness, Inès, her housekeeper, insisted that Gaëlle nurse her daughter as a way of saving both the child and herself. Gaëlle got out of her bed only when she could no longer keep her daughter in it, when the child began to crawl. And when her daughter started to walk, Gaëlle walked again. And when Rose began to talk, Gaëlle talked again.

  She was tempted to close the fabric shop, but she returned to it, because it had meant so much to her husband and, unlike the house, was in a part of town that was less prone to floods, mudslides, and other potential disasters. Business had slowed anyway. People were buying less fabric and more ready-made used clothes, pèpè, from abroad. She was now mostly selling fabric for school uniforms and even that was dwindling. Besides, during her time of mourning, many of her friendships had dissolved. She no longer attended baptisms, communions, or wedding receptions in the best houses in town. She even refused to listen to broadcasts from the radio station, where her husband had spent so much of his time.