Moonbath

by Yanick Lahens

  24.

  A few weeks after the death of the stranger, Father Bonin closed the doors to his church and left for Port-au-Prince for a whole month. He had to meet the superiors of the episcopate in the capital. We knew him well enough by then to know that it didn’t bother him to punish us by depriving us, for some time, of the church’s school, clinic, and comfort. Upon his return, he made us wait two whole weeks despite all of our greetings of “Hello, my father, how are you?” In response to each of us, he uttered a dry and short: “Not bad,” and went on his way or about his business. And then, on the eve of the the Feast of the Assumption, to our great surprise, he opened the doors to the church and the presbytery, and announced through Érilien that mass would be sung the next day. Standing at the entrance to the church, he waited until the crowd of faithful was dense enough to tell us in his slightly hoarse voice: “I am not going to punish the innocent children of the five surrounding villages because their parents are forever lost.” After this introduction, he looked at us insistently as he went on with his speech, adding: “It is my duty to save them.”

  Our reconciliation was warm. We offered him a beautiful rooster, watercress, malangas for broth, corn, rice, bananas, red beans. Father Bonin celebrated mass as we adored it. Filled with prayers and songs for Maman Marie, and a hallucinating sermon about her rise to heaven. To nourish our dreams for a long time and feed our conversations for whole week, the course of which Mary would sometimes be Dantò, sometimes Fréda, other times Lasirenn. He knew it, but had decided to leave us to our playacting, convinced that God would eventually recognize his own. These acts were the sum of all our beliefs. Illegitimate indeed, but they were ours.

  One afternoon, Father Bonin came all the way to Anse Bleue to talk to us about all he intended to do to expand the school. Works for which he asked our assistance. He had taken a seat next to Orvil on a straw chair, and asked for a coffee. Orvil promised him that all the brave men of Anse Bleue would help him. It was self-evident. Then, to the astonishment of all, Orvil asked him a favor in return. He had lowered his voice, and Father Bonin hurried to put down his cup to listen to what his old friend wanted to tell him:

  “Father Bonin, you are going to do me a favor.”

  “Orvil, you know that I am here to help the children of God.”

  “Father Bonin, you remember the young man who died at the entrance of Roseaux?”

  Father Bonin looked at Orvil. He didn’t want to rekindle his anger toward Anse Bleue by stirring up ashes that were still warm, and just nodded his head. Orvil, feeling that he could go further and trust in Father Bonin, asked him to wait. He went into the house and, coming outside, held out the letter that Fénelon had brought back to Orvil like a spoil of war.

  “Father Bonin, you know how to read. Tell us what this man wrote in this letter. Mwen vlé, I want to know.”

  Then Orvil called Ermancia, Yvnel, Cilianise, Ilménèse, and all the others. Everyone sat in a circle around Father Bonin.

  He asked for a glass of trempé, wiped his face, then feverishly unfolded the slightly creased pages. In the very first seconds of his reading, father Bonin started to tremble. We felt that he was about to cry and that he was struggling with all his might against that urge. He translated the letter for us into Creole as he went on, and read with quivering lips.

  Dear Parents,

  I do not know if this letter will reach you. I do not know if you will see me again one day. But know that heretofore I haven’t betrayed any of my dates with destiny. Not one. The path is narrower every day, but my courage, far from flinching, sharpens. I thank you for having helped me be the man I am today.

  The country has entered into long season of mourning. For the political catastrophe embodied by the rise of the man in the black hat with thick glasses, combined with the ravages of Flora, a devastating hurricane if there ever was one, which left us bled dry. I didn’t stop thinking of my brothers and my sisters that this disaster touched: the peasants and the left-behind of the cities. And, to top it all off, now our vigilance must extend beyond our borders, since the Yankees invaded the Dominican Republic. I deeply admire the courage of the resistance on the other side of the island. And we have to, us too, be ready to face any intrusion on this land that we’ve inherited from our glorious ancestors. The occupation at the start of the century was already a painful humiliation, too great an affront. And, as our saying goes, “Jodi pa demen,” we have to prepare ourself for the worst to pave the way to a brighter light.

  You will understand better one day. If the reaper gives me some respite, I would tell you myself the stories of my long struggle. Or else, the comrades who survive me will tell you that, until the end, I have tried to be a man.

  I caused you a lot of unease by my long silence of six months, which added to the confusion of my letter stamped from Brussels, and not from Strasbourg where I’m supposed to be taking classes. But know that the ardor that I always put into my studies, I am using it at every second with the intimate conviction that that there can be goodness in this world and that some are called to knead the dough that will raise the bread of tomorrow. No one sacrifice is too big for such a dream. This dream, I share it with the other men and other women who fight in the Andes and in all four corners of the world. I will return to my studies with ten times as much faith. I promise you. And you will see me sometime, I hope, around the family table. To talk ideas with you, father, or to listen to mother play the sonata by Ludovic Lamothe that she loves so much, while enjoying her delicious vanilla flan.

  I do not run to meet death. Rest assured. I am no glutton for punishment. I’m simply leaving like so many others, like Che, whom you’ve certainly heard of, in search of a star that is not at odds with reason but is reason itself.

  It will certainly surprise you to I tell you that I’ve passed you, as well as my brothers and sisters, cousins, several times on the streets of Portau-Prince, but that I couldn’t in any way let my love and my affection for you to betray me. That was made possible because you weren’t able to recognize me. I let my beard grow and I wear the thick glasses of a myopic. I am still somewhere in this country that I love deeply. But, above all, don’t try to know where I hide. That would put you in a situation of extreme danger.

  I am not alone. Difficult times have come to me and my comrades but I will never waver.

  Lately, I will admit, a vise seems to be tightening. Since two of my comrades were caught in Plaisance, two others on the ruelle Chrétien in Port-au-Prince, others in Martissant, others in Farmathe or Cap-Haïtien. Frantz, stopped in Martissant, was shot dead one night in the courtyard of a prison facing the sea. And, before giving up his soul, he seemed to have had time to say “Maman” and to raise his eyes toward the moon that watched over the land he had loved so much.

  I love you so much, too,

  Michel

  Father Bonin finished reading and kept his head down for a long time. And we, we wanted to console Father Bonin. He lifted up his head after some minutes, and spoke to us of similar things that had happened to his family thirty years before, recalling how his father had been killed in the maquis. He hummed the verse of a song that made his eyes shine again:

  Take the rifles, the shells, the grenades out of the straw

  Oh, killers, with the bullet and the knife, kill quickly

  Oh, saboteur, pay attention to your load: dynamite!

  It is we who break the bars of the prisons for our brothers

  Hate at our heels…

  His song ended in a restrained sob:

  And the hunger that pushes us, the misery

  Despite Father Bonin’s sadness, there before us, it was the stranger himself who’d given us this shock. This incomprehension. These questions. He spoke of a country that we did not know. Of people who were far away from us. Of dreams that we had never tasted. Ermancia and Ilménèse and all the women of the lakou thought of his mother. Our questions passed over the pain, the courage, and the tears, leaving us to face an abyss.


  Undoubtedly, this stranger didn’t suspect the extent to which he was foreign to us. More foreign than Frétillon, more foreign than Toufik Békri, more foreign than Father Bonin, who had drunk from our enameled mugs, ate on our plates, and did a lot of other things that we would soon discover…

  25.

  Dieudonné was twelve years old when Orvil decided that he was old enough to accompany him at sea. Far offshore. A place where you have to bring all of your courage, what remains when breath itself, for a few seconds, leaves you. He was going to teach him, his grandson, to hold on by the strength of will. And the strength of the Invisibles—Agwé first, Lasirenn his wife, Damballa, and Aida Wèdo. He never left the mainland without warning them that he was coming. Vulnerable, but tenacious and fearless. The jardins didn’t give much, nor did the sea. But Orvil loved departing at night on the rickety boat, after having meticulously prepared everything, the harpoon, the bait, and checked the oars, the nets, and the sails. He also liked to remind his grandson: “Luck, you have to wait for it, but first count on yourself.” They left the shore together before dawn, on a sea that was still shaking its little mirrors under the effect of the moon. At first they didn’t see other sailboats, just masts devoured by the clouds, only to be discovered in their totality when they moved away from the coast and the sun swallowed the clouds. Every boat left to its own luck or loss, that’s how it was. After a while, Orvil took in the sea with a look that taught Dieudonné the taste of solitude. In those moments, he observed his grandfather’s powerful shoulders, the protruding muscles of his neck, and his burned skin, tanned by the sun. So dark that he was invisible. With this taciturn and stubborn man, he learned to never let go of a bonito, a sardine, a black fish, or a mackerel, even after hours of fierce struggle. Not to be afraid of the open seas as long as you could read the map of the sky in the clouds, wind, and stars. He often heard Orvil, on the way back, recalling the time when the sea was generous: “I caught fish twice as big as you.” Dieudonné preferred fishing over work in the jardins, which he willingly ceded to Ermancia, Cilianise, and her children, to Nélius and his.

  Dieudonné missed school. Especially the days when he saw Osias, his accomplice at sea, go by, with his uniform and his books under his arm. Looking at his friend, it seemed that in his own way Osias wasn’t stuck in the harbor, either. That he’d also sailed toward an immense ocean. A horizon as infinite as the one that his grandfather Orvil had opened to him. He promised himself that his children wouldn’t renounce the sea, wouldn’t renounce the jardins, but that they would go to school. He would offer them this journey that he had never made.

  And then Dieudonné grew up without us realizing it. Long legs, all muscle. So long that he outgrew all of his clothes. Fénelon had given him two of his old shirts, and Ermancia ordered him two pairs of pants from a tailor in Roseaux. His voice cracked and light tufts of hair covered his armpits and pelvis. When he sweated, he gave off the odor of man, of a wild animal ready to pounce. No longer wanting to hold that tender and soft bird so strongly in his hands, that tender and soft bird in the middle of his boy’s belly.

  When he was fifteen, the crops burned. The Mayonne River shrunk to a meager stream of water. The entire surrounding country-side was devastated by a sudden drought. Hunger hit the poorest, those who had neither parents nor friends in any of the countries on the other side of the water, nor ones dressed in blue uniforms. So it wasn’t any surprise that misfortune led a young niece of Faustin, the father of the children of Cilianise, to end up in the lakou.

  Louiséna, very small for her sixteen years—she could’ve been twelve—slipped into Cilianise’s luggage when Faustin left Morne Sapotille, a few kilometers northwest of Anse Bleue, to sail for Miami, hidden in the hold of a cargo ship. Louiséna put a small cardboard box in front of Ilménèse’s house. Ermancia and all the women of the lakou welcomed Louiséna with relief at the idea that the oldest among them would be able to rest their old bones. As for the youngest, they were already delighted to see their load lighten considerably. Between the preparation of dinner, the wash, the ironing, and the insults, Louiséna only stopped to collapse on the rags that served as her bed at the entrance to the hut.

  Louiséna had a playful face, uncombed hair, two big eyes always ready to be surprised, which all the misfortune had neither reached or extinguished. One day when the she returned to the Mayonne River to do the washing, Dieudonné followed her. And crouched under a big shrub further away to watch her put the wash at the edge of the water, put the batouelle* by her sides, and coat a rock with soap, and hold it right in her palm. She sat down, and without wasting a moment, she poured herself into the work that distanced her from Anse Bleue and the reprimands of all those women. Dieudonné feverishly glanced at the fault line that he imagined beneath her clothes several times. He rose before her and, by his expression, Louiséna understood. She didn’t lower her eyes.

  Spurred by that look, Dieudonné asked to see: “Once. Just once your foufoune.” The words of cunning and desire came out rough and sweet from Dieudonné’s mouth. As sweet and rough as the song that danced in his veins and made him swell. Louisena responded with a gruff smile and called him a virgin, a child, a timoun: “I won’t let a bed-wetter like you run around in my garden.” Dieudonné couldn’t stand the provocation, felt emboldened, and dragged her behind the bayahondes to the east of the Mayonne River. Louiséna didn’t resist at all. It was she who grabbed his neck and pulled him to her. When, surprised and happy, he entered into her warmth, he reveled in her honeypot, but, very quickly, he was caught off guard by a pleasure that swept them away. The very first for Dieudonné.

  Dieudonné took a liking to this grown-up game that he played several times soon thereafter, until, one day Cilianise, suspecting the affair, decided that Louiséna had done her time in Anse Bleue and sent her with no explanation back to her hunger and her destitution in the Morne Sapotille.

  When Dieudonné was initiated, he had a protective balm made of mixed herbs rubbed into an incision on his left arm. He knew that the Invisibles, the lwas, are greater than life, but not different from life. And that it’s because they lived out their own dramas they are so close to us. They are thirsty and hungry, even more than we are, and we have to feed them. They are the mirror to the present and the star to guide us toward our future. He went through all the steps the lavé tèt, the kouche— isolation in one of the rooms of the colonnade—the kanzo,* until the taking of the asson. And replied with submission and rapture at the first call of Agwé.

  Dieudonné heard of those that were absent, his uncle Léosthène, Faustin, Cilianise’s husband, and the most absent of the absent, Olmène, his mother. One day, a man returned from Port-au-Prince and told us that he had seen Léosthène on a street corner near the Champ-de-Mars. Another claimed to have spoken to him in the hallway of a house in Bas-Peu-de-Chose, and that he had confided in him his plan to return, rich and generous toward us all. Back then we were still waiting for a sign of Léosthène, but Léosthène didn’t return.

  For years Olmène didn’t give us any sign of life either. Ermancia often called for her only daughter, and Dieudonné tried to make a place for her among the stories of the earth, sea, strange creatures, hurricanes, jardins, and hunger. Dieudonné sometimes dreamed of this stranger who had left a big gaping hole between him and eternity. A hole that prevented him from leaning against something tangible, solid. He often dreamed of a grande dame, beautiful, dressed in white, who descended from a ladder to come speak to him. And, whenever he tried to touch her, she climbed back up ladder, agile like an angel.

  One day, a man from Pointe Sable returned from the Dominican Republic with a package carrying some money for us in an envelope, plus some provisions and a cassette, all from a Madame Alfonso. If Olmène hadn’t put the cassette in the package, none of us would have made the link between Madame Alfonso and her. Ermancia fainted as soon as she heard Olmène’s first words on Fénelon’s tape-player. Olmène spoke to us in the voice o
f a stranger. “Mother, Dieudonné, pitite mwen.” From that day on, Dieudonné was never the same. He waited for Madame Alfonso day after day. We did too, but less than him. Less than Orvil and Ermancia.

  26.

  In the truck bumping along the lose stones in the truck rented only for him and his bags, Léosthène suddenly felt himself seized by fear. This fear that dug into him on his way to Anse Bleue, it was a fear he knew well, one that turns joy into the smell of acid and overtakes the road home for those who left too long ago. Ermancia, Orvil, Olmène, Fénelon…Would he see them again? Were they still alive? This remorse of having abandoned them had haunted him for fifteen years. Fifteen long years. At the bottom of his bag, he squeezed his fingers around the protective balm that Orvil had made for him, and thought of Ermancia’s last words that night: “Come back, my child, do not forget us…Tanpris, I beg you.”

  Noon had struck an hour and a half ago and the earth was burning under the July light. He looked at the plain, then at the sea. It reflected all the light in long beams on the corpse-like earth. He couldn’t believe his eyes: all the countryside seemed to have suffered a long and devastating illness. You’d think that a cursed hand had taken it upon itself to slash everything, pillage everything, sack everything.. “Jesus, Mary, Joseph,” he repeated. “Jesus, Mary, Joseph…”

  The truck painfully swallowed the kilometers, rattling on the sharp rocks. Léosthène had left Port-au-Prince at dawn. When he reached the Lavandou Morne, Anse Bleue appeared to him in its entirety. The driver unloaded the truck and ordered two donkeys for the rest of the trip. They descended the bridge with the perseverance that was demanded of them. They had hardly reached the limits of Anse Bleue, taking shade under a calabash tree, when a small crowd gathered around them.