Moonbath

by Yanick Lahens

  The youngest had never seen Léosthène. Cilianise was the first to recognize him and summon everybody. She shouted “Léosthène!” to Ermancia, who rose like a robot and dropped the pois France that she was shelling in the folds of her skirt. Ermancia let out a long cry from deep within her. She gave birth. She gave birth to her son Léosthène a second time. And then the cries came from everywhere. The women raised their skirts and ran to the entrance of the lakou. The men advanced more slowly, dubious smiles on their lips. Ermancia didn’t advance or retreat, she fainted in the very spot where she had stood up. And we had to rub her with alcohol to make her regain consciousness.

  When Léosthène asked for news of Orvil, he was told that he was sitting in front of his hut. That he walked with difficulty, leaning on his cane, dragged his left leg because of the knee that refused to obey and from time to time gave out, knocking him down. At Léosthène’s approach, Orvil held his hands to his face like a visor, blinked, and, when he recognized his son, he didn’t move, letting tears run down his cheeks. Léosthène’s knelt at his feet and wept heartily. He drew his father close to him and felt, in the shadow of Orvil’s skin, the death that was working to make his bones stick out. To devour his flesh. Day after day. One after the other. His father was already light as an angel. Léosthène told himself that one day soon death would bite Orvil for good and would cling to him until it made a pile of dust and bones of him, leaving his soul for Guinée. But for now, death seemed to be asleep. He had forgotten him. She had not shown up yet. Orvil was alive. The idea pleased him above all else. The idea of life pleased him above all else. Léosthène burst into laughter.

  Everyone, the men, women, and children of the lakou, surrounded the hut. The great Lafleur tree spread out its branches, and Léosthène touched them all, feeling even Olmène’s absence. Beyond the candélabres and fence posts, the children coming home from school, the merchants, all stopped for a moment to look at this man dressed for a wedding or a baptism, with his polished shoes and his brown felt hat. The relatives got bold and started to walk around the suitcases, guessing what was hidden inside.

  As a precaution, Léosthène set down his bags and didn’t let them out of his sight. When he, regrettably, opened the first box, everyone, uncles, aunts, cousins, cousins, eyes sharp like claws, were ready to take, receive, shoot, push: “Isn’t it beautiful, this shirt.” “What soap, how good it smells!” “I want this toothpaste.” “These pants would fit me perfectly.” Léosthène soon realized that he would be overtaken. He left his suitcase and boxes, wrapped in three sheets of butcher paper and string, at Ermancia’s, and asked Dieudonné to keep guard over what the tribe seemed to see as spoils of war to be shared.

  Fanol and Ézéchiel, Cilianise’s sons, were sent to tell Fénelon, who arrived right at nightfall.

  In front of Orvil and Ermancia’s hut, each came to tell their story of the last fifteen years in just a few minutes. Births, deaths, and departures. The earth emptied of its blood, its flesh, brought to its knees, the stingy sea, the eradication of pigs, the death of craftsmen, the disease of the coffee, palms, and lemon trees, the clothes from elsewhere, the worn-out dressing gowns of the women from Minnesota that warmed the old bones of the countryside, the worn-down cowboy boots from Texas to work in the gardens, like those worn by Yvnel and his young son Oxéna, Fanol, and Ézéchiel, the jeans, the t-shirts, and sneakers from the fifty states of the USA. The bad influence of Port-au-Prince was discussed quietly, the dope, the paille,* which makes the eyes of the town’s adolescents bask in false paradise.

  Léosthène wanted to meet all those born during his absence, so as to remember how stubborn life was, and he had the feeling that the tree was still generous with its new branches.

  When he asked what had become of Father Bonin, he was told of his rushed departure from Anse Bleue for political reasons, and our surprise at discovering a little mulatto bastard in Roseaux with the same pudgy face as Father Bonin. Léosthène laughed, slapping his thighs:

  “No! Father Bonin!”

  And everyone wanted to tell their version of the story. Finally, Cilianise stood up, demanded silence, and pointed out that the little one was named Peter, but that everyone called him “Venial,” like the sin. Léosthène laughed twice as hard. We did, too.

  “And why?” he asked.

  “Because we do not think that Father Bonin deserves to go to hell for having succumbed to the charms of a negress from Roseaux.”

  And then until very late, by the light of the lampes bobèches and the bougies baleines,* Léosthène let the happy hours of the night pass through him and the evening went on like that, drinking fresh water from pitchers, anise trempé, or lemon tea in enameled mugs.

  In order to not kill the myth, Léosthène spoke of a Port-au-Prince and Florida taken from dreams and left those of nightmares for later. For when he could speak to Fénelon and Nélius away from all these ears. Alone. Man to man. He spoke of the circumstances of his departure. He had met Roselène, a young woman from Môle who had relatives in Miami. He moved in with her, and she was the one who facilitated his journey to the other shore.

  “Miami?” they all said at the same time. “You mean you’re coming from Miami?”

  Roselène’s family had helped him find his first job in the back of a kitchen of a hotel in Tampa. Soon thereafter, his papers were formalized by his boss, who had come to appreciate his work ethic.

  “Men like that, you only come across them once in a lifetime. I had that luck. I got really lucky…” he went on, and he gave details about this Miami of our dreams: highways, refrigerators, electricity, buildings much higher than three palm trees stacked one atop the other…“And all the food you could want!”

  He stopped for a moment and, looking at all those eyes still hanging on his lips, measured the effect of his words. He decided to finish with a bang:

  “And I came back on a plane.”

  “On a plane!” We were dumbfounded. So it was a satisfied Léosthène who stopped there and pulled out a pack of Marlboro cigarettes from his pocket. He lit one with the awareness that this act had just forged a new distance, and then he told them about everything, the numbered seats, the hostesses—beautiful women, well made-up—the spaces always too narrow to store luggage overhead or under the seat, you’d think that those who built these machines have neither relatives nor friends, the forms that you can’t fill out because you can neither read nor write, and the passenger next to you, whom you don’t want to give your address, your date of birth, or passport number to, fills them out for you.

  “You were born lucky,” Yvnel murmured, his eyes staring at the first stars in the sky.

  When the women returned to their huts under the gentle cover of the night, the men lingered beside Léosthène. And when they were alone, Léosthène told them the other story, the nightmare.

  “The trip to Miami was very hard. Very difficult. I paid a smuggler. The captain, this man I’d given two thousand dollars to, said nothing to us when we got on board. He directed us with the flick of a wrist. Like the others, I went down the ladder and dove right into the darkness. When he saw that we understood, he went back and waited for the mechanics who were doing the last checks. The hold of the boat was full of bags of salt and dirty water stagnated at the bottom. Once all the passengers were in, the captain closed the lid, and we found ourselves in deep darkness. Like a tomb, believe me. Then we heard the engine moan and start. And since there were women on board, the captain and two of his assistants relieved themselves throughout the voyage. They twisted only to undo their belts and lower their pants, and grunted as they sank into them. Then they would go up, and the panting and hoarse breathing of the young woman could be heard, as if she had just escaped a burst of machine-gun fire and was trying to catch her breath. After a few days, the hold stank of stagnant seawater, jute, sweat, seed, crotch. We urinated and defecated into the water between the slats. And the unctuous and warm smell of our excrement slowly returned to our nostrils.
”

  Léosthène stopped for a moment, laid his hands flat on his legs: “And then you’re afraid of dying in this shroud if the wind rears up and sinks the boat. The waves violently strike the bow and the boat rises almost vertically on the waves, as if it were climbing a mountain, before dipping and rushing at full speed to the bottom of the hole. There where you frankly want to rest your head, like when you were a child on your mother’s palms full of stars and sweet dreams, and cry hot tears, but you hold back. Because you’re a man. So you call Agwé, Damballa, Ogou. You call them all. And then there comes a time when you reach a place that is beyond fear. Beyond shame. And you say to yourself that if you have gone through this, you can be neither afraid nor ashamed. Never. You are courage, you are perseverance. Once this ordeal is over, you feel a form of power. Because of this knowledge of things that others do not and never will have. Yes, that’s right, power.”

  Léosthène had said these last words as though he wasn’t talking to us, as though he wanted to swallow them up immediately and push them into himself.

  Léosthène stopped his story because he did not want to bring back too many images, and concluded with a loud, “But at least I did not end up half-naked on a white beach with my photo in the newspaper next to terrified men and women. No way!”

  We looked at Léosthène, pensive. Proud, too. Léosthène had prospered elsewhere, by his own hand, without hurting any of us. The tree did not bleed. One branch had grown more than the others. That’s all. Léosthène returned, but in his place.

  Heavy with fatigue, he wanted to sleep in Orvil and Ermancia’s refurbished hut, and not in Olmène’s house, as Fénelon had suggested. Léosthène wanted to return to his intact childhood. Fall asleep in a hut surrounded by the rustling of insects like a blanket. Breathe the air of this single room where his innocence was asleep. He slept like a log. The next day when the door creaked and fell open, he looked at the rising foam. Only to break in white sprays. Burst. Then, behind him, the mountain that seemed to want to come closer and devour us.

  27.

  A few days later, Léosthène went to Baudelet only to find a town in decline. Baudelet was no longer what it had been. The hand of misfortune had seized it, too. But he evaluated how far he, Léosthène Dorival, peasant, son of Orvil Clémestal and Ermancia Dorival, had come when he paid for all his purchases in cash, pushing back a little on principle but not really haggling, his eye fixed on the yellowing caricature that still hung above the counter, right next to a photograph of the man with black hat and thick glasses. Madame Frétillon greeted him with a broad smile. The news of his return had spread like wildfire the day after his arrival. A Lafleur had taken a plane. Ermancia, proud of her son, had taken it upon herself to share that fact, and Madame Frétillon was the first to hear.

  The decline of Baudelet had begun when, on the orders of the man with a black hat and thick glasses, its port was closed. Out of fear of the incessant attacks from all those who hated him for having lost their sons, fathers, wives, friends.

  Those who did not move to Port-au-Prince joined uncles and aunts across the world who had already realized that their salvation was no longer on this island.

  Thousands of men and women from towns, villages, and localities abandoned the ruined gardens, the skeletons of burnt trees and the rivers that had become bloodless veins, in order to stick together and swell the belly of the city. The competition having dropped its arms and fled the province, the Frétillons rushed to fill this void and in the exodus of the countryside they found customers who made them rich again. With the sales of some gourdes of mantègue,* three gourdes of soap or sugar, and two reels of fabric, the Frétillons strung together the great semi-legal, illegal, or frankly criminal schemes that allowed them to amass a real fortune. The conversations on the veranda had lost their spark. But it didn’t matter to Madame Frétillon, who did not want any stories and liked the man with a black hat and thick glasses. This one or she really didn’t care who else, but this one more than the others because she felt that he stuck it to the bourgeois who once looked at her from above, she, the Arab, the immigrant with her bundle on her back. She jubilated twice over in counting every cent in her cash box each night.

  Léosthène glanced at the television set just in front of her greedy counter. The very first television in Baudelet. The Frétillons had started a real riot when passersby, mostly peasants just in from the countryside, discovered for the first time, astonished, this luminous square, crackling and spitting out images. After an hour the crowd had grown so large that Madame Frétillon had to call for the help of her commander of a brother, Toufik Békri, who quickly swept away the most docile with blows de rigoise and saved the rifle butt for the most recalcitrant, dumbfounded by the images that twitched on the luminous square. And to make things even clearer than they already were, Fatmé Békri Frétillon turned up the volume whenever an orchestra, smiling and in synch, played the blazing songs for the glory of its leader: “Crush them, Duvalier, crush them. Maché pran yo Divalyé, maché pran yo.”

  Fénelon rushed to introduce Léosthène to Toufik Békri, in the latter’s office at the headquarters of the men in blue. A militiaman was sleeping, his hands resting on a rusty rifle that dated from the American occupation forty years earlier. He jumped at the arrival of Fénelon and Léosthène, and hurried to present them to the commander. Toufik Békri, without lifting his head from his newspaper, muttered between his teeth: “Come in, come in.” Then, with a brusque gesture, he placed the newspaper on the rickety table which served as his desk, put on his black glasses, and examined Léosthène from head to toe. After a few seconds of inspection, he asked him in the tone of a police interrogator if he was one of those stateless renegades who, once abroad, spoke ill of their country and their president. “Oh no, never, never!” Fénelon cried out. Léosthène did not reply. His silence did not please Toufik, who turned to Fénelon: “Your brother, the diaspora, forgot to speak Creole or what?” Léosthène cut the conversation short by saying that he was tired and in a hurry. Toufik cast him a furious and murderous glance. All that had accumulated in the course of this brief exchange emanated from it, which had not been said by either one or the other. Toufik resumed reading his newspaper and made a remark that left no doubt about his thoughts: “You’re lucky to be Fénelon’s brother.”

  Fénelon was not happy with Léosthène and made that clear to him outside: “Have you lost your mind or what? Or are you crazy? Just go. I’m staying.” In response, Léosthène told him that he felt, in the air he breathed in the streets of the town, around the market, that he, Fénelon, and his friends were starting to be despised. There were the germs of unrest, the ferment of turmoil. He had dark premonitions and saw clear threats. Fénelon didn’t believe him, and replied that he would be delighted the day he left.

  On the way back, Léosthène thought of Bonal his grandfather, of the franginen forefather, and of Olmène. He told himself that it really was time for him to leave, but before doing so, he would honor all the spirits and the dead of the lakou.

  Three days before his departure, Léosthène awoke in the orange and pink flashes of the devant-jour. In the azure and raucous noise of the sea in the distance. The mist still lay between the huts. Crouching down, he filled the halves of more than a dozen coconuts with cotton that he soaked in castor oil, and lit them all. The branches of the beautiful Lafleur tree who remained came out. Even Orvil, whose neck was stiff and back siezed-up, and whose legs no longer bent. He, the most beautiful branch still alive, graced the assembly with his presence.

  Érilien, old and shriveled, called for the occasion, blessed the offerings. Cilianise, Ermancia, and Léosthène made salutations to the four directions and gently moved their lips, eyes closed, candles in hand, to invoke the protective gods, the Disappeared, and all the Invisibles of the family. It didn’t take long for tears to trickle down our cheeks. And Léosthène had trouble articulating the last words. A light fresh breeze worked through all his pores, and his
flesh and the earth became one. This wind that tormented the branches told us that they, like us, had resisted everything. Exposed to the dust of the seasons, to the corrosion of salt, to the passing of hurricanes, to the slow fermentation of vegetables, to the fury of men, to torrential rains. They had resisted everything.

  Accompanied by Ermancia, Ilménèse, Cilianise, Nélius, and Yvnel, Léosthène, beside his father Orvil, bowed before each of the trees where the spirits of the house slept, placing at their feet half a coconut with its flame dancing on the castor oil. The calabash tree, the orange tree, the mango tree, the elmwood, the sandbox tree, and the almond tree…He saluted them all.

  In the evening Léosthène sat down in the hut facing Orvil, Ermancia and Dieudonné at his sides. He opened an envelope and drew out a bundle of bills, which he placed in his mother’s palms: “Here, take it. You have to do something else, since the earth does not give as much, nor does the sea. So you are going to build a bread oven. Bread, men eat it every day.” This bread oven made us the new gravediggers of the hills and surrounding lands.

  On the morning of his departure, Léosthène gathered all the relatives and distributed the contents of his suitcases and boxes. He was stripped of everything. A little more urging and we would have taken the shirt off his back. He left three radios, one for Ermancia and Dieudonné, the second for Cilianise and his children, and the third for Nélius and his. Community radios disseminated all kinds of information on hygiene and health, agriculture and education, and passed messages from town to another, from one village to another, breaking the isolation of the poor who had lived there from the beginning. The transistors were time bombs that distilled the news to those who knew how to understand it. The voices that emanated from the radios of Port-au-Prince spoke about the whole island and of countries on the other side of the waters. And these voices had the accents of impatience, freedom, contained rage, and brewing fire.