Another, more daring than all the others, decided to come as far as Anse Bleue. Cilianise helped Philomène beat back the intruder. She grabbed the heavy pocket that was her belly and advanced like there was a hurricane in her blouse, the color and patterns clashing with her skirt and the hair that she hadn’t combed. The intruder fled and was never heard from again.
Noting that no injuries, accidents nor illnesses were reaching Philomène, another woman, who thought herself powerful, wanted to lend a helping hand to fate by sprinkling one of the paths that Philomène frequented, just before she passed, with a powder meant to swell her legs so much that she would die in atrocious pain. The matelote abandoned the struggle when Philomène, standing on legs long like palm trees, was pregnant again by Dieudonné and gave birth to Éliphète and, eleven months later, Cétoute Olmène Thérèse.
31
Someone killed me. I am sure. It is because of this pain that persists around my neck. I’m sure, I do not doubt it any more. Someone killed me before escaping to the bayahondes off in the hills. I am Cétoute Olmène Thérèse, the youngest daughter of Philomène Florival and Dieudonné Dorival.
Olmène because Dieudonné, my father, wanted his mother to live again in me. He had seen her in a dream three days before my birth. They say I have her eyes and her smile. Dieudonné, my father, wanted me to replace the dream woman who came down the long ladder hanging from the clouds. I always felt the lack of this link in the chain. A fault between me and eternity. I always felt that throughout my life I had stood at the edge of a precipice. That a lugubrious and black wind blew at my back.
Thérèse because my mother, Philomène, had never forgotten the story of the life of Thérèse d’Avila, God’s madwoman, that she’d been told at Catechism. She did not want me to be crazy, but filled with the bright lights that she’d extinguished by settling in Anse Bleue.
Cétoute, like “c’est tout,” “that’s all,” because my mother Philomène wanted nothing more than for me to be the last. In order not to keep the promise of ten or fifteen children buried in the depths of the wombs of women here.
I’m just called Cétoute. The one whom people have grown accustomed to not seeing. Came too late. In a tired belly, already committed to a certain sterility. In this oblivion, I made a wild and unrestrained life for myself, entrusting all my madness to the sea. It was before Jimmy. Before school. Before the plane and the fire.
And here I am cast down on the sand. Before the eyes of an entire village. Four men carry me on this white sheet. Each one holds one corner. And here I am, balancing at the mercy of their steps, from one side to the other. Early in the morning, once she had coffee, my mother lay her feet quietly along the black lace of the seaweed, sighed, and then sat down, legs spread like a pregnant cow, and waited. What was she waiting for? I will never know. But, like her, I resolved myself to keep my eyes open. To surprise what the sea hides under her dress of salt and water. The frothy mysteries and damp and purple dreams of my mother Philomène. And it’s by scrutinizing the sky, questioning the ocean, my soul tortured by their strangeness, that I have learned to love the extravagance, the turbulence, and the beauty of the world.
With Altagrâce, my sister, Éliphète, my brother, this fondness for water began very early. Between the work in the house and the work in the fields, we try to swim by imitating the frantic movements of dogs treading in the water. We knead the sand in our hands to make gray bread, mud huts. Even when our fingers are numb and we chatter our teeth, we still demand the spectacles of sparks and mirrors from the sea. Often we lay out on the sand, the sea licks our feet and we laugh with rainbows in our eyes and large birds perched on our hands. In the evening, we fall asleep, body, face, and hands frosted with salt.
Abner is not afraid of anything. One evening, he decided to show me the night despite the protests of my father and mother, who begged him to return. Outside, the screeching of the insects was unleashed. I liked seeing the coucouyes* fly like tiny stars. I loved the voluptuous blanket of the night. I am in the night as in the flesh of Philomène. And then one day I felt the cold of the moon wash over my belly, the belly of a girl, like a bath, I never forgot it.
Abner is much bigger than any of us. He is the only one to accompany me in the night. To take these moon baths with me. To taste the wild beauty, the violent mystery of the night.
32.
Father Lucien was a native of the Cayes. He replaced Father André on one July morning. Father Lucien was from the Petite Église, which did not want to receive orders from the Grande Église nor from the Palais. Wandering with faith and obstinacy throughout the region, he met the faithful at home, in their jardins, their shops, or their borlettes. A way for him to extend, throughout the five surrounding villages, the tentacles of the party of the Destitute, which was beginning to take shape. And, destitute as we were, we were their favorite target.
One Saturday in December, Father Lucien was preparing to receive militants from Port-au-Prince for an important meeting. Fanol and Ézéchiel had gone to meet them, taking paths through the fields to avoid Roseaux, and above all Fenelon. We found out after the fact, but we hadn’t been at all surprised. We had all noticed how Fanol and Ézéchiel’s eyes shined for the past few months, with the excitement of children contemplating their dreams. Cilianise hadn’t missed this sudden rise of fervor either. We watched them and they knew it.
Once this mission had been completed, Fanol and Ézéchiel did all they could to convince Dieudonné, Oxéna, and Cilianise to accompany them to a meeting at the presbytery. Yvnel, meanwhile, adamantly refused.
“Who wants to see us?” asked Dieudonné, skeptical.
“Yes, who?” added Yvnel.
“Honest men and women.”
Dieudonné and Oxéna burst out laughing.
“Have you ever met honest politicians?”
“Yes. Those over there.”
“That’s it, that’s it. Give us some clairin and make us cry by getting us to sway to the sound of music. The country is for you, péyi a sé pou ou, do with it what you want! É yan é yan…”
But their arguments ended up melting our thick armor of mistrust. Dieudonné, Oxéna, and Cilianise had given in and agreed to join Fanol and Ézéchiel, who, listening to Father Lucien for almost three years, had learned to no longer want that life we’d been given, we who have been poor since the beginning of time. With the help of two German volunteers, Father Lucien built two fountains between Roseaux and Anse Bleue, expanded the school and clinic, and built a soccer field. We stood by the fountains, at the school, and at the dispensary, we stood by football the pitch, and at the same time, we stood by Father Lucien, who was definitively one of us. We therefore agreed to remain silent, so that the news would not reach the ears of Fénelon or Toufik Békri.
And then, with Father Lucien’s sermons urging, the radios too, we all ended up resenting the man with the black hat and thick glasses. His friends, his men in blue uniforms, his accomplices, people whom, after all, we did not know. In a room next to the presbytery, Father Lucien greeted all those present, other monks and nuns of the Petite Église, agronomists and people with notebooks under their arms, tape recorders and glasses who spoke volumes about their desire to know us better than we knew ourselves. Nothing about us should escape them. They were attentive and excessively humble. Then we played the game of those who were being watched and pretended not to be. Father Lucien invited us all to sit in a circle, and the newcomers sat down among us. Dieudonné, Oxéna, and Cilianise thought up a strategy. One more. We were ready to defend ourselves against this new assault. To pretend to lend ourselves to it in order to stop it. To pretend to listen to them, but to hear only a distant refrain. At this game, there is no one better at it than us. And Father Lucien knew it. So he went to extraordinary lengths to speak Creole slowly and with a peasant accent, inflections that belonged to us. He went over the top. So much so that it became at once credible and unnatural, blurring our mistrust in a large dark cloud.
> Packed shoulder to shoulder, we drank a good part of the words of the militants of the party of the Destitute who, with their notes and their notebooks, their great faith and their bare feet in dusty sandals, described to us, behind their glasses, happiness of a rare extravagance. The one that the Mésidors and the Frétillons, and all those who resemble them, had never let us see. They launched into fierce tirades against those who had taken away our pigs to sell us others, frail and more expensive, of blond princes who had come from the United States. Against those who had suffocated us with taxes and fees of all kinds. Those who had killed all our small-scale commerce, leaving us no choice but to cut the trees.
The powerful words, magic, melted our thick armor of doubts. When they told us that change was on its way and that soon the pain would not only disappear, but would give way to the the rise of hope, we believed it. For a few seconds. Weeks, even months. We believed it. Who knows why, but we believed it. Especially what, for days, weeks and months, Fanol and Ézéchiel had repeated to us over and over, that with the party of the Destitute we could finally choose our own destiny. Carried, like them, along a road with turns and detours we thought we foresaw, we moved forward only to fall backward. The road would only be clear to us afterward. Once the die was cast. Long after.
A few weeks later, under the guise of a large public prayer meeting, there was a gathering in the square in Baudelet, under the noses of the soldiers and men in blue. The promise of the happiness to come was magnified tenfold by a megaphone. The songs to Jesus, God, Mary, and all the saints echoed in our ears and we were electrified. Never had Cilianise spoken out so much. Little Altagrâce, the youngest of Dieudonné and Philomène, too. And the voices of the priests, emboldened by the growing enthusiasm of the crowd, threw out promises like they were bulls roaring. Madame Frétillon looked at us in terror, and summoned her brother to go look in on this unprecedented event: the awakening of the peasants. Upon his arrival, Toufik Békri didn’t flinch, knowing that the march against the party of the Destitute was already ready. He reassured her: “Wait a bit and you’ll see!”
That same day, in fact, the party of the Rich had decided to hold a meeting a block away in order to distribute food. Many of us couldn’t resist the lure of bags of riz Miami, farine France, and big cans of powdered milk. The shops and houses of Baudelet quickly closed their doors. As far back as any man—or woman—could remember, nobody had ever seen such a torrent in the city. Those who looked at us, from behind their blinds or drawn curtains, did so with astonishment, as if they were seeing us for the first time. Because of the years of mistrust and misery that had become so encrusted on our faces. And that made us look at the world with an acute curiosity. That made us look at it, often, with a malice rivaling our hunger. They did not recognize us.
The idlers, the street vendors, the porters, they all joined us. Women yelled in the scramble as they tried to catch a bag of rice. Fanol and Ézéchiel got away with a sack each, Cilianise a big can of powdered milk. Altagrâce and other children were stepped on when they opened their hands to collect the flour that came out of bags torn open by the unleashed crowd. Everything became frenzied. The distribution turned into a riot. Fights broke out… The wave of the hungry, we were in it, swept around the trucks. And soon the women had their headscarves torn off and the men with their shirts ripped, their hair sprinkled with rice, their faces white with powdered milk.
Overwhelmed by the turn of events, frightened, the militia fired into the crowd. One. Two. Three bursts. Two men and one child were killed instantly by the bullets. Women fainted in the rush that followed. Then we emerged on the main road, for the first time without it being for a rara.* Without a roi. Without drapeaux.* Without majò jon.* Without vaccines* and without drums. Just us. Bare hands. Bare feet. Terrified eyes. Like a mob from the afterlife. The last taps-taps* sped off, their passengers crammed together on the benches. We kept going until the night, like a big mouth, devoured the road. We looted the shops and robbed the rare passersby who had lingered. We set fires and everything in our path burned.
And then we went home late in the night, among the shadows, to listen, ears to the transistors, to the radio broadcasts from Port-au-Prince shouting that the land couldn’t offer enough. And that the gods were still thirsty. And that in Baudelet there had been some blunders and bloodshed. For the first time, they spoke of us in Port-au-Prince, as they soon would of a dozen other cities.
So, very quickly, in one night, it was over. Because this stillness had to shatter. Let the door of expectations be forced open with a brutal blow. New forces had mingled with the night and had converted it to the cause of the Destitute and those who wished to be innocent. Port-au-Prince, the great city, burned in a quiet surge. The flames, high and red, rose in plumes like blossoming flowers. The machetes blazed. The songs faded and died in a din of syllables. Misfortune seemed to want to break the night’s teeth. And those who had born it bumped into their own shadows. We heard them screaming the name of their mothers, while the innocents smashed bottles on their heads, chased them, and they fell under the rage of cutlasses with blunt edges. Bodies were burned alive with tires firmly tied around their necks, and old women accused of witchcraft, lynched here and there. The night had been long, pierced by calls of conch lambi* riddled with muffled gusts. And the whole thing filled our chests like a hot rum.
In Anse Bleue, we woke up, that morning of February 1986, to the same shimmer of the first rays of sun above the water, the same crow of the roosters, the same harshness of ordinary days. Just a little more attentive to the expectation of that promised happiness. But we did not hope anymore. Ermancia had the same dream of flames surrounding her son Fénelon. Dieudonné decided to light up the liminin for the lwas.
33.
Standing in front of the Frétillons’ shop with the closed shutters, Fénelon opened his eyes in disbelief when a friend told him that the family of the man with black hat and thick glasses had left in the middle of the night. Fénelon had left Roseaux early in the morning and was going to the base in Baudelet to receive instructions from the militia leader, not knowing that Toufik Békri had crossed the border in the middle of the night. Nor that Tertulien Mésidor was already in hiding and that, disguised as a woman, he was getting reading to leave at any moment, to follow the same route in the night. Neither of them had warned him. Nobody.
“That’s not true!” Fénelon cried out to the friend who told him the news, discretely, so that he could take cover. “It is impossible,” added an incredulous Fénelon, who didn’t doubt for a second that the crowd was already watching him.
A few weeks ago, the news of the debacle had spread and reached Baudelet. Fénelon had simply decided to not listen to the radio. Not to lend an ear to this misleading propaganda. To these subversive and, above all, untrue words. He had even locked up, after beating them to a pulp, two regulars at the borlette, who, under pretext of listening to the winning numbers, had been bouncing with anticipation in front of him, in plain sight, to hear news of the fall, the debacle. Recalling the incident, Fénelon went so far as to whisper to himself: “That’s right. I beat them to a pulp. A lesson to discourage all who would think of doing what they did.” Perhaps he spoke to himself to ignore the rumor that was growing behind his back. Around him. That of the silent crowd which soon was going to be his entourage. The younger men were already intoxicated by the magnetizing smells of that morning’s storm. The lips of a young mechanic quivered. He was a militant in the party of the Destitute. Coming from Port-au-Prince, he had never had enough to eat. His violence was cast in pure metal. He was one of those who wanted to cut off a few thousand filthy heads in public squares. And now a filthy head appeared before him. A real filthy head. At that moment, in the party of the Destitute, they had no time to forgive. Forgive, right away, right now, on the spot, with hatred hot like a heart in your hand? No, they could not. Because hatred, she made you feel good inside. She comforted like faith in God. They did not have time to judge. They w
ere killing.
Someone in the crowd calls Fénelon by name. And for the first time, the name he had always known takes on a new sound. This name slowly invades his chest, his whole body, penetrates the depths of his life and gives him a weight he did not know until then. As if his whole life was suddenly inside that moment and in those syllables. The voice adds:
“Fénelon, you’re going to die!”
A group of men emerged from the market and blocked him. The crowd had grown in rage and in number because prices had been rising for some time, because the drought had been rough. Because children had died of dengue fever, lack of care. And Fénelon had been sowing fear inside of them for years. A vast anger sleeping in each of these men, each of these women, it overwhelmed them. They wanted to extract that anger like a loose tooth.
Father Lucien, feeling the beast grow inside of every man, every woman, to the point of making of a single beast of the whole crowd, interrupted and cried out: “Let he among you that is without sin cast the first stone!” The first stone came from a stall on the left and hit Fénelon straight in the chest. A blow that could take out a donkey. In shock, Fénelon lost his balance. While trying to get up, a second shot kept him on the ground. The insults rained down from all sides, at the same time as the stones. In the crowd, some even laughed. An indecent, cruel laugh, capable of driving back the sun. But it was still there, the sun, and Fénelon could not quite see it through the blood that stuck to his lashes.
Fénelon is dazed. He does not understand. He is pulled from all sides. From the right. From the left. Forward. Backward. His big blue shirt is torn. Two buttons have already popped off. Fénelon wipes the blood off his face, his chest. Fénelon trembles. He is afraid. When the second shot hits him in the face, his sight is blurred. He feels that the countdown has begun. He is going toward his death. The pain is atrocious. The flowing blood mixes with the sweat and blinds him. People are approaching from all sides. Someone strikes a drum, then an impromptu song rises from chests and mixes with shouts, the songs of the truckers, the porters, the peasants who have just arrived from the jardins, the merchants from the stalls. Blood makes you want to hit harder. People are elbowing to be in the front row. And then the blows come down vigorously. Everyone is crowding around Fénelon and everyone would like to be part of this big party and offer a blow. He receives one so hard that he thinks his skull will burst. Then, mustering whatever strength he had left, Fenelon made a strange decision, to get up and go forward. Skull busted and blood running down his neck. Where was he going? He did not know it himself. The time to launch a counter attack that would enable him to breach the seven circles of this stubborn and terrible army had long since passed. As had the chance to call Toufik Békri to his aide. No, he would not run away. He would put one foot after the other, a way not to die on his knees, he who had humiliated so many men and women for miles around.
Moonbath Page 14