Heading South

by Dany Laferriere

  TEN MINUTES LATER.

  “Missie is outside, Charlie. She wants to talk to you.”

  “No problem.”

  They go out.

  “It’s all your fault, Hansy,” Missie says, just short of tears.

  “What happened?”

  “Everyone is saying I’m fighting with June over this . . . imbecile. You have a wicked, wicked tongue.”

  “Would you be good enough to tell me why you called me out here?” Charlie asks politely.

  Missie turns on him.

  “I want you to go back in there,” she says breathlessly, “and tell everyone that I have absolutely no interest in you whatsoever, and that I do not intend to fight over you with June.”

  “You’ll have to run all that by me again, because I didn’t understand any of it. And you talk too fast,” Charlie adds with a half-smile.

  She glares at him angrily.

  “I could never feel anything for a person like you.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Hansy asks.

  Charlie signals to him to stay out of it.

  “But Hansy, I don’t even know him. He isn’t a member . . .”

  “No, I am not a member of your charmed Circle. I know that. My mother is a governess and my father is a gardener . . . In other words, they’re servants . . . They work not far from here . . .”

  “And you dare to come in here?”

  “Missie!” cries Hansy. “Don’t you see how exceptional this fellow is? You’re right, he’s not at all like us. He has no desire to hide his origins, or his identity . . . There’s not a single member of the Circle who hasn’t been vague about his life from time to time. We’re always lying about something, hiding our suffering, our desires, our fears . . . A man who can proclaim his agony like this fellow does is a prince, I tell you, a prince.”

  “Will you please leave us alone, Hansy?” Missie says.

  Charlie and Missie watch Hansy move off towards the brightly lit building.

  “Do you know why I’m here?”

  “No, but I have a feeling you’re going to tell me,” Missie says, resuming her customary ironic tone (“acid-tongued Mis-sie,” as she is known).

  “I happened to be in the area, and I saw you crossing the street, on your way to play tennis. And I said to myself, ‘That’s her. I want her. She’s the one!’ That’s the only reason I came here tonight.”

  Missie looks at him, nearly choking.

  “Me! You! Why?”

  “That’s the way it is. I want you . . . I want to hear you moan . . . and I will . . .”

  Missie continues staring at him, transfixed.

  “I’m in no hurry,” Charlie says calmly.

  And he leaves. Before Missie can even think of anything to say, he’s at the gate of the Bellevue Circle. The meeting place of the privileged youth of Pétionville. Missie feels that she can no longer stop herself from retching. She bends over between two parked cars and vomits huge, yellow streams on the green grass.

  She stays outside for a long time, watching the others dancing. She sees Hansy come out to look for her, but really, she doesn’t feel up to talking to anyone. She runs between the luxurious cars parked anyhow on the lawn. She wants nothing more than to go home and shut herself up in her room. She hears Hansy calling, over and over. “That asshole has made me run away from my own friends twice in one night,” she thinks, continuing to flee. A luminous white dress in the moonlight. Just before reaching the villa, she stops one more time to throw up.

  TWO O’CLOCK in the afternoon. Someone knocks on the door to Charlie’s miniscule room.

  “Come in, it’s open.”

  Hansy comes in.

  “What did you do to Missie?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She’s gone completely bonkers . . . She came to my place at nine o’clock this morning . . . Nine o’clock! I was barely awake! She wanted me to find you. We looked everywhere. I don’t know what happened between the two of you, and it’s really none of my business, but I think it must have been serious . . .”

  “Where is she, Hansy?”

  “She’s downstairs in the car. I’ll go tell her to come up, shall I? I’ll stay down there.”

  Charlie dresses hurriedly. He starts tidying up the room, then changes his mind at the last moment. He decides to wait for Missie sitting on his narrow, iron bed.

  She comes in.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello.”

  “Excuse me for bothering you at home like this, but I didn’t sleep last night.”

  “Ah!”

  “I don’t understand what right you have to think of me that way,” she says coldly.

  “And that’s why you came here, so I could explain it to you?”

  A long moment of silence.

  “It’s because I’m afraid of voodoo.”

  He bursts out laughing.

  “Is that it? Really?”

  He laughs again, falling back on the bed.

  “No,” he says, “I don’t use voodoo for things like this.”

  “What, then?”

  “It’s a question of blood.”

  “Blood?”

  “Yes. My blood wants to mingle with your blood.”

  Missie’s lips begin to tremble.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What I mean is that it’s out of control . . . It has nothing to do with religion, or race, or even sex.”

  “Well, if that’s true, then it has nothing to do with me, either,” she says, moving towards the door.

  “If it had nothing to do with you, you wouldn’t have come here.”

  She stops suddenly, like someone who has been shot in the back just as she was about to rush down the stairs.

  CHARLIE IS LYING on his back, staring up at the ceiling. He can lie like this for hours.

  “Can you lend me ten bucks, Charlie?” says Fanfan, coming into the room.

  “Where do you think I could get hold of ten bucks?”

  “Come on, Charlie, this is serious. I’m caught short. I’ll pay you back first thing next week.”

  Charlie gets up and opens a drawer.

  “Here. But you absolutely have to pay me back on Monday.”

  “Thanks, old pal, you’ve saved my life . . . By the way, how did things go last night at the Bellevue Circle?”

  “As you suggested, I played the sincerity card, and so far it seems to have worked . . . I met that girl, Missie Abel . . .”

  “Wait, I know that name . . . Isn’t she the ambassador’s daughter?”

  “His niece.”

  “What happened?”

  “She was here, just before you walked in.”

  “Ah, my friend, you’re playing in the big leagues.”

  Fanfan pushes Charlie until he falls back on the bed.

  “Listen, Fanfan, you haven’t understood what I’m saying.”

  “You’re going to tell me what it’s like to pork a rich girl!” Silence.

  “No, Fanfan, she just dropped by to tell me that we’re from two different worlds.”

  “In her eyes you’re nothing but a dog.”

  “That’s it.”

  Longer silence.

  “I’ve got to go, my friend . . . Don’t worry about your money. I’ll have it here Monday without fail.”

  Fanfan misses a step on the stairway.

  “Shit! Shit! Shit! And shit!”

  TWO DAYS LATER. Two o’clock in the afternoon.

  Charlie climbs heavily up the steep stairs to his room. Missie is waiting for him at the top.

  “Have you been here long?”

  She gives him a beseeching look.

  “Did Hansy drop you off?”

  “I took a taxi.”

  He opens the door and lets her go in first. She enters and sits on the only chair. Charlie remains standing. She sits there without saying a word. Then suddenly she jumps up.

  “Goodbye.”

  She races down the stairs
at the risk of breaking her neck. He listens for a moment, hoping she’ll reach the bottom in one piece. Then he sits in the chair she has vacated, and waits.

  He waits.

  Two hours go by. She comes back. He hears her feathery tread on the stairs. He tells himself that her feet would do well to get used to climbing those stairs, because they’re going to be climbing it many times a day from now on. A small knock at the door.

  “It’s open.”

  She comes in. He doesn’t get up.

  She stands in the middle of the room. He looks at her tranquilly.

  “I can’t do it anymore.”

  He keeps looking at her.

  “I want . . .”

  She stops, thunderstruck. A fierce storm appears to be raging in her head. He waits, silently.

  “I want . . .”

  She stops again.

  “I want . . .”

  Her knees buckle slightly.

  “The other day you said, you said . . .”

  “What did I say?”

  A moment’s hesitation. But she recovers. He has the feeling she may get away from him. Then she lowers her head.

  “You said that you’ll . . . make me . . . moan . . .”

  Charlies says nothing.

  “I don’t know why,” she goes on, “but since then I’ve been able to think of nothing else . . .”

  He decides not to have her today. She is suffering, but her pain is her pleasure.

  WEDNESDAY MORNING. As usual, he finds the gate open. His mother is peeling potatoes in the kitchen, which is clean and well lit. He sneaks up silently behind her back. She is singing “The Red Roses of Corfu.” Her happiness song. The one she sings when she’s happy.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she says without turning around.

  “How are things?”

  “Very good, my dear.”

  “And Papa?”

  “Your father is very excited because he planted some birds of paradise; you know how difficult it is to get them to grow . . . Well, yesterday he called me out into the garden, where as you know I hate to go because of the anole lizards, to see their magnificent flowers. They really do look like birds. Even the Ambassador was impressed.”

  “And Mademoiselle Abel?”

  His mother looks at him in astonishment.

  “Why are you asking about her?”

  “She and Papa weren’t getting along, and, if I remember correctly, you were pretty worried about it.”

  “Oh, we hardly ever see her anymore. First she was always underfoot, now she doesn’t even come home for dinner. And when she is here, she shuts herself up in her room.”

  “And that doesn’t bother you?”

  “No! Things are much better this way . . .”

  “Okay, Mama, I’ve got to go.”

  “Already? Do you need money? I don’t have much, but . . .”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure you don’t need anything?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Good. Don’t forget to shut the gate behind you.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  A Naïve Painting

  I tell you it’s springtime by placing

  a couple in the centre of the landscape.

  DAVERTIGE

  MY NAME IS Laura Ingraham. I’m thirty-five years old. Men find me attractive because I am tall, slim and blonde, but they also find me a bit frightening because I’m a New York Jewish intellectual. I was born in New York, and have lived there all my life. I love that city. Especially its hardness. New York doesn’t believe in tears, as does, say, Moscow. My favourite book is Breakfast at Tiffany’s, by Truman Capote. I always keep it in my handbag and take it out whenever I have a spare minute somewhere. For a long time I worshipped Andy Warhol. I collected anything from that era (late sixties, early seventies), the time of The Factory, the Warhol studio. My biggest regret is that I was never at Studio 54 when Jackie Kennedy, Liza Minnelli and Bianca Jagger were there. My favourite type of man: Peter Beard, the photographer/adventurer. My favourite film: Woody Allen’s Manhattan. I’ve seen it more than a dozen times. I also love men’s underwear by Calvin Klein. Do you remember Diane Keaton wearing it in Annie Hall? Well, I wore the same kind for years, right up until the time one of my lovers (a music critic for Rolling Stone) told me that once you’re past adolescence such things are ridiculous. But it wasn’t ridiculous to me.

  I HAVE ANOTHER side that no one knows about. My secret garden. It’s a story that goes back to my childhood. I was five. One day my father brought home a small painting (a landscape) and hung it in my bedroom, above my bed. A simple landscape, of the naïve school. Sometimes, at night, when I was afraid, I would spend a long time looking at this painting (nature, benevolent, luminous), until eventually my nerves would settle down. Sometimes I would imagine living in my painting. Being born in such a place instead of in Manhattan. But I need both. My urban landscape and my imaginary one. Manhattan excites me. But the landscape calms me. I believe that this duality is part of my deepest nature. Like most excitable beings, I am capable of remaining calm and quiet for hours on end. My friends are totally unaware of this aspect of my personality. All they know is this woman who is capable of spending two hours in Bloomingdale’s looking for a scarf to wear to a cocktail party that evening, then after the party running out to Queens to visit a some friends before ending the night at some trendy new club on Long Island. No matter what the hour, I never go home without stopping on Park Avenue to pick up some warm bagels. This is the girl, urban down to her fingernails, that my friends know (even my closest friends). However, I can also be this little country girl who gets up at the crack of dawn with the roosters and goes outside in bare feet to gather ripe fruit that has fallen to the ground overnight. Am I schizophrenic, like most of the people who live in this city? When I left my parents’ house and rented a small apartment near Columbia University, the one thing I took with me was that little landscape painting. And the first thing I did was hang it in my bedroom. Whenever I happened to wake up in the middle of the night with a bad case of the sweats (loneliness, combined with fear), that painting (the sole constant in my life) was the only thing that would calm me down.

  I STILL HAD no idea what country the painting came from. I could have found out easily enough, if I’d wanted to, by looking at a few art books in the Public Library, but I was never interested in the painting’s origins. The landscape existed so concretely to me that I never thought of attaching it to any particular place. Except for the place that existed inside me. But I took that place with me wherever I went. One day I was meeting an old friend at a bar not far from moma (the Museum of Modern Art in New York), and as I was a bit early (a mania with me) I decided to kill some time at the museum. There happened to be an exhibition of Haitian naïve art. And there, to my astonishment, were these enormous canvases (enormous in their quality more than in their dimensions) in the same style as my little landscape. It wasn’t so much that I had found a country; I had discovered a universe. An enchanted world. Brilliant colours. Animals, people (lots of people), mountains. Thatched huts on the flanks of blue mountains. Fish flying through the air. Cattle crossing swollen rivers. Cocks fighting. Marketplaces. Tall, slender women calmly walking down from the hills with heavy sacks on their heads. Children playing in dreamscapes. The sea. Everywhere, the sea. And no one looking at it. Natural life. Only after I had made a complete circuit of the exhibition did I begin to notice the names of the painters. The signatures danced in the corners of the canvases. Salnave Philippe-Auguste, the friend of the Douanier Rousseau (“I want to speak of Rousseau’s Dream. Just as one could say that everything is contained in the Apocalypse of Saint John, so, I am tempted to say, this huge painting includes all poetry, and with it all the mysterious gestations of our time . . .”—André Breton, 1942). The quote was printed across the back wall of the room in which the massive jungle scapes of Salnave Philippe-Auguste were hung. In another room: the imaginary villages of Préfète Duffau
t. The maniacally delicate precision of Rigaud Benot. Jasmin Joseph’s candor. Saint-Brice, who drew me in and frightened me at the same time. And the immense Hector Hyppolite (a Homer who used colour instead of words). Most of all, what sealed my loyalty to these magical works was the natural way they dealt with death. Life and death intermingled. They even made me wonder if death didn’t precede life. For me, who had always been afraid of the dark, this was the first time I had felt calm when confronted with symbols of death (especially in the paintings of André Pierre). I don’t know what happened (the security guard came and cast an uneasy glance into the room, even though I was the only visitor), but I no longer felt as though a block of cement were sitting on my chest, preventing me from breathing, as I had felt since my childhood. These are my people! These are my people! These are my people! I must go back to my people! I felt like an animal that had strayed from its herd, and years later was beginning to find traces of it. I absolutely had to get myself down there immediately. It was a matter of life and death.

  I LEFT NEW YORK the next day, and have been in Haiti ever since. I lived in Port-au-Prince for a few months (I couldn’t stand the Bellevue Circle crowd for much longer, completely self-absorbed as they were; I wasn’t interested in re-creating in Port-au-Prince the artificial life I had just left behind in Manhattan), and then I met Solé, a farmer from Artibonite, and followed him here. I look after the house and our son Choual (which means “Horse”)—he’s the little blond-haired black boy playing football down there with his schoolmates— and sell the produce from our rice fields. Artibonite is in the part of the country that produces the most rice. Our rice is very aromatic. It’s the best in Haiti. If you’re ever in the region of Haiti that includes Hinche, Verrettes, Petite Rivière, Pont Sondé, Marchand-Dessalines, Saint-Marc or even Gonaïves, ask for the white farmer, and they’ll direct you to my house. My name is Laura Joseph. I’m now forty-seven years old, and I live with my husband and son in the painting of my childhood.