Haiti Noir_The Classics

by Edwidge Danticat

  “Then, if your heart knows no fear, if your blood is as unsullied as dew, if your soul is as serene as the eyes of children, cross the threshold; if not, do not defy the gods of this land . . . Make your way, and quickly!”

  What happened after that in Maréchal Célomme’s hounfort, I have no way of knowing; the old man has always been reticent about it. The lieutenant’s manuscript is also silent on this point. No one will ever really know. What I do know is that Lieutenant Wheelbarrow met the woman on a moonlit night. Woman or Simbi of the waters, siren or mermaid, Vien-Vien or goddess, he saw her. We name things with our hearts, and everything is real if we hold the keys. Second Lieutenant Wheelbarrow was enchanted from then on, and his eyes could see what he thought he had distinguished in his fevers. To each his own task on earth, believer and nonbeliever alike; the one describes, the other explains, the marvels of life.

  The blue basins sparkled like shimmering mirrors. The dazzling beauty, fed by the primeval splendors of the Haitian land, held no more secrets for Earl Wheelbarrow. He had cast off his dross; the old man had died in him; the old rancor and the rags . . . She was waiting for him on the banks of the waters. She was a slender woman whose figure and features remained Indian in spite of the visible warmth of the blood of Ham. She was waiting for him, motionless . . .

  “Come! Come!” she said to him.

  He came closer.

  “I am the guardian of these mountains and these waters,” she told him. “Look at my green flocks jostling along as far as the eye can see; look at my blue waters mounting up to the largest blue basin of all, the azure of the sky. They’re sleeping quietly with all my treasures. It’s not yet time for the men of this land to take the buried treasures for themselves . . . I was waiting for you . . .”

  He came very close to her. She held out her hands to him. He took them.

  “One day the earth will open to give its treasures to all the sons of this land. For now I must watch over them . . . Will you help me watch over them? . . . If you betray the secrets of the earth, the earth will devour you alive, before you’ve even finished conceiving the idea!”

  “The earth will devour me!” repeated Earl Wheelbarrow.

  “To possess the land, to share the guardianship of the treasures, you have to defeat me in combat. Can you bend my back to the ground?”

  He seized her, and the combat began. They fought under the moon on the banks of the basins; they fought on the damp cress; they fought on the cool soil; they fought in the waters. It was at the last basin that they embraced . . .

  * * *

  After that, no one ever saw Second Lieutenant Wheelbarrow again in his cabin at Bassins-Coquilleaux. His manuscript is quite fragmentary, quite obscure, but in it he speaks with such an accent of joy and fulfillment that he may truly have known happiness. If the scraps of his journal that have come down to me are the work of a madman, then I don’t think the happiness all of us look for is far removed from madness. Perhaps his notes are somewhat incoherent, but then I distrust reason that’s too cold and rational.

  When she wants to taste a guava, wrote Lieutenant Wheelbarrow, I immediately feel two cold acid streams flowing along my jaws. She doesn’t need to speak. Our eyes meet, our hands clasp, and we rush out to the countryside . . .

  It seems that they never rested, and that every night they ran through the mountains. Earl wrote in his journal:

  I hurt myself falling into a deep ravine. She picked me up and carried me into the grotto. My calf is half torn off, but I’m not suffering. She gathers fresh dew to bathe my wound; that’s all. She takes care of me, and if by chance she sees a shadow of pain in my eyes, she simply puts her mouth to my wound, and immediately the pain is gone.

  Earl Wheelbarrow must have reached the point of human knowledge where one participates in every breath, every vibration, of living matter. He notes:

  Yesterday she told me that she would teach me to laugh like the flowers. For hours she directed my lessons. Then I felt a great peace and our bodies merged . . .

  He relates further:

  Now I can stay for long minutes underwater . . . The fish come and go around us, come close, look at us, rub against us, and leave again with slow strokes . . . I can’t make them snuggle into my hand yet the way she can . . .

  Then:

  Last night it was cold. I felt chilled. Then she beckoned. I slid behind her into the narrow fault in the grotto that descends almost straight down. We went down into the heart of the earth for perhaps an hour. At a point where the space widened, we stopped and settled in a crevice. There was a soft warmth everywhere. I felt the radiant life of the depths vibrating against my body and the trembling of the great thermal waters dancing under the earth’s flesh. Some kind of little golden flies flitted around us. I penetrated her and we slept . . . We went back up when day broke . . .

  If the manuscript is to be believed, life is a brotherhood among the Vien-Viens:

  Life is sometimes hard in the mountains, and it may happen that we’re hungry. If I’ve picked a fruit, a bittersweet root, a sugary stalk, she won’t eat if I won’t bite our find with her, turn by turn . . . Then her eyes are the most loving color I’ve ever seen.

  Never was there a more intimate union than that of Earl Wheelbarrow and the survivor of the gentle Xemi people. I read in his pages:

  The other day, for just a few seconds my spirit wandered far, very far away. She knew it immediately. So she took the musician-bird that lives with us and closed my fingers around this bouquet of living feathers. At that moment, I felt all the vibrancy of her love, her love as large as life, pass through me . . .

  I decipher from another fragment:

  She takes my hands, rests her head against my chest, and stays there for long hours listening to my heartbeat. I am merged with her . . . Often we play: she’s the waterfall, and I bathe in the mad tumble of her blueblack hair . . .

  Earl Wheelbarrow was still young, yet he was constantly anxious about the passage of ever-fleeing time. I can make out these sentences:

  I have no impression of aging or using myself up. I feel sure that I’ll go out like a candle some far-off day. May it be as far-off as possible, for she doesn’t know what it is to cry! . . . She would tie herself to my remains and hold me tightly against her until death came for her too. She would let herself starve to death, but she would never let me go . . . That was, she told me, what the wives of the great Caciques did in the olden days: they accompanied their mates into the tomb . . .

  Perhaps the enchanted second lieutenant learned all the secrets of the Xemi people, the secrets we would like so much to know. In any case, it seems that several times he was in contact with other Vien-Viens. He relates:

  I saw the great red xemès-god in the immense underground chasm . . . She told me the great samba of the Xemi people and taught me the words of the great, ancient areytos.

  I managed to read still more of the old, worn, tattered, ragged document whose letters are often faded by the water of heavy rains and by the sun’s burning heat:

  With the rainy season, the great festivals of the sambas arrive. We blow three modulated notes into great conch shells, and our brothers and sisters on the mountains answer us from far away . . . Then we come together, we sing, we dance until the end of the rains . . . The music turns me into a wretched, torn-up thing; even my tearing is melodious and participates in hers . . .

  That’s all I can say about the life of the enchanted second lieutenant, about the bitter poetry, the strange love that made it flare up like a Bengal light in the violet, violent mountains of the St. Marc highlands. He would run by night like an elf, drunk with the splendors of the mountains. He would run every night with his companion in the greening of the earth, in the mouth of the wind, in the shimmering of the waters. During the day he lived in the grottoes where lay the treasures amassed by the Cacique of the House of Gold, the formidable Caonabo. He knew all the ancient spells, all the songs, all the dances of Queen Anacaona the Great, the
Golden Flower, those songs and those dances that the mistresses-of-the-waters and the mistresses-of-the-mountains keep alive on moonlit nights.

  Some say that the Vien-Viens, the last descendants of the Xemis of Haiti, the guardians of tomorrow’s riches, who live hidden out of reach in the high, steep, inaccessible mountains, do not exist. More power to them . . . As for me, I know that in his manuscript, Second Lieutenant Wheelbarrow affirmed having shared the life of the last of the Vien-Viens. I have no reason to doubt it. Neither whiskey nor madness seem decisive enough arguments to me after reading his staggering testimony.

  Maréchal Célomme, my friend, told me finally that one night, at the time the fighting was at its height between the armed patriots—Charlemagne Péralte’s cacos—and the American invaders, Second Lieutenant Wheelbarrow was captured by the Yankee marines. Several of the old peasants of the area have told me that they saw the lieutenant bound and tied to his companion; that he was judged and executed on the spot, accused of high treason and complicity with the enemy. The two bodies were gathered by the peasants and piously buried in the little tomb whitening near the La Voûte grotto . . .

  They’re dead, and yet it’s said that in this area people still see a mistress-of-the-water on moonlit nights, tirelessly combing the black silk of her tumultuous hair on the banks of the blue basins that climb up the mountain. Could Lieutenant Wheelbarrow and his companion have left children? . . . Whatever the case, it’s a great and beautiful thing for a people to keep its legends alive!

  A WHITE HOUSE WITH PINK CURTAINS IN THE DOWNSTAIRS WINDOWS

  BY JAN J. DOMINIQUE

  Kenscoff

  (Originally published in 1996)

  Translated by David Ball and Nicole Ball

  Contrary to all common sense, despite the absence of evidence—and besides, what evidence could a reasonably sane person demand when hearing stories like that?—everybody agreed that the house deserved its reputation, or at any rate the people of Kenscoff unanimously agreed that it was inhabited by devils. With the type of seriousness appropriate to the situation, they acknowledged that it was cursed and that nobody should go near the little path that led to it after sunset, or even before that, just to be on the safe side.

  To establish his influence, the old ougan had announced to the mountain wind that he would take it over, making sure that on its way down the hill, the wind would carry his voice all the way to the marketplace where the villagers were gathered that Tuesday. He admitted, however, that his gentle or violent lwas, his holy waters and prayers, hadn’t had any effect on the house, and he gave up, even more frightened than the others.

  He had seen everything. Exactly what, he refused to say, not wishing to give up his secret, despite his concern about protecting those who were curious about the house. And neither promises nor coaxing could get him to speak.

  The man had his mystery. He guarded it closely. He was the only one who’d been in the house since the tragedy and he did not want that to change.

  All right, I’ll tell you . . .

  The house was about ten years old. Its owners had disappeared without a trace one day or one night, except for a few tire marks that no one could even identify with certainty as being from their car. A few weeks later, the masons and carpenters who’d been hired to build the house—all residents of Kenscoff or the surrounding area—died of the same bad fever a few weeks apart from each other. That’s when the rumors started. When Joseph—Marilia the priest’s cook, Joseph—was found lying on the little path where he’d fainted, and after a rubdown, medicinal tea, and some coaxing, was unable to explain what had happened to him, rumors turned into anxious conversations. And then there was the disappearance of Félicien’s black pig. So the priest and a few wealthy parishioners chipped in to build a large wooden fence to cut off the entrance from the little road. Félicien, the best carpenter between Pétionville and Kenscoff, refused to build the fence. It was built by an outsider who came from Port-au-Prince to do the job. It was said that Marilia grew fond of him. He promised to return, but was never seen again in the area. Then a silence fell over the town. Everyone understood that devils, or something else, had taken possession of the house. Not one girl from around Kenscoff would have dared to ask her lover to spend a night in that place as a proof of his love for her. Otherwise she would have been haunted all her life by the echo of his tender words whispered in another girl’s ear.

  And yet I liked that house, with its tin roof painted red, its white walls and pink windows. It had caught my attention for a long time, and whenever I looked at it, I had a strange feeling of being summoned, as if that empty house, that garden of zinnias and the path lined with pine trees, was holding out its arms to me. I wanted it. I would often walk up to the end of the path. Accompanied by the old ougan, whom I had persuaded to come along to protect me, I would prowl around the house, inhaling its scent as one smells the sea, standing there silently, hardly moving, and at times I thought I could hear the pines and the flowers whispering sad, painful words to me. Then the old man would cross himself, spit three times, and, taking me by the arm, drag me back to the road, to the reassuring streetlamps with their single bulbs looking over the misty night. He would answer none of my questions and it was impossible to know what that old ougan had learned. The thing that had shocked him on that November night, he simply couldn’t forget. Even those banal words that slipped from him were incomprehensible. In the night, they turned into the strange “Yo t ap kriye.” They were crying.

  Who was crying?

  I wanted that house. I didn’t care about the legend. I decided to buy it, since the first owners’ relatives had announced that they would sell it for a very low price. When I asked for more information, I realized that they were practically giving it away. I even doubted that ten years earlier the construction had cost so little. And I was sure that it was worth ten times as much when compared to other real estate in the region. Everybody thought it was a whim on my part, or worse, that I was losing my mind. But I really wanted it and I bought it.

  Things got very busy at work and I couldn’t move in as quickly as I wanted to. Then, one day, the mountain winds brought down the smell of red earth, of ti bonm mint and white jasmine, and I had to return to the house with the pink curtains.

  My absence had allowed some people to sleep more soundly. They were upset, but didn’t dare say anything. After all, I was the one who would be living in that supposedly evil house. They should just leave me alone with my devils. A few very brave young men agreed to help me move in, on the absolute condition that they would start working at six in the morning so they could be through before nightfall. When we were done and dusk was still far off, I invited them to dinner. They refused politely so as to leave more quickly, hiding their haste under the false pretext that they wanted to leave me alone at last.

  That evening, my first night in the white house, I took an ice-cold shower before going to bed. After a day like that, I needed a good night’s sleep. It was a calm night. As I had guessed, the devils did not show up. Could they have been as tired as I was?

  The next morning, I woke up with the scorching sun. Everything was truly quiet, since the main road bustle didn’t reach my wall of pine trees. The smell of coffee rose from the kitchen, a nice gift from the old ougan which was also, I knew, a form of reproach. He must have been furious at my carefree attitude. Sleeping like that with the windows open and the doors unlocked. What carelessness! Yet, I feared no one. If thieves wanted to venture into my house, they wouldn’t find anything worth taking. Besides, they wouldn’t be brave enough to break in. Funny, a house full of devils was my best watchdog.

  Once I got downstairs, a surprise was waiting for me in the living room that I didn’t find funny at all. All the curtains, the nice pink curtains, were soaked, and the wooden floor was flooded. What stupid, stupid people had thought it clever to play this trick on me? I almost became angry, but it was too nice and sunny out for me to stay that way. I wasn’t going to let my
self be pushed around. So I cleaned up everything. Then I put the curtains out in the sun, pinning them down to keep them from blowing away in the wind. Just as I was putting on the clothespins, however, the wind calmed down, then stopped all of a sudden like a door slamming shut, like a mirror breaking apart for no reason. I didn’t think much of this then, but now I remember. Now I understand everything. Yes, I tidied up the house a little, watered the flowers, and swept the paths.

  Toward the beginning of the afternoon, I mean around two o’clock, I followed the path toward the main road. Yes, at two. The old man was sitting on a pile of stones, his eyes staring into space, with traces of vanished suns on his face. He hadn’t heard me come. I stood there for a moment watching him, wondering what could possibly take place behind that brow whose wrinkles reminded me, for some reason, of happy young men and women who’d died at the age of twenty. I did not know how old he was. In his gaze I could also see the naïveté of young children along with the bitterness of those who’d lived too long and seen too much. I didn’t know, or even realize, that he’d seen me, but when he finally spoke he asked me if I’d had a good night’s sleep. I laughed then asked him if he had eyes in the back of his head. He calmly answered that he had felt me, that the change in the air current could only be due to my approach, and that all beings had a specific presence that he was able to perceive. And when he asked again about my night, I told him to note that I was in a good mood—a sign of a quiet, restful night.

  “Si ou te konnen!” If you only knew! he said, then closed his eyes, as if to block out a terror-filled night. Yet nothing bad or inexplicable had happened to me, except . . . But I could no longer bring back the unpleasant sensation I wanted to tell him about. So I didn’t ask him anything, certain that he wouldn’t have answered. And anyway, I had to go to the market.