Moonbath

by Yanick Lahens

  Maybe Jimmy just gave me some leftovers that I ate from his hand. Jimmy threw me crumbs. He made me play with fire. I spent days and nights yearning for the look of an indifferent man. Why, at some point in our lives, do we feel this need to play with fire? To sully our reason with madness? Why is that? I played with fire. I sullied my reason with madness, too. In my own way.

  With my right eye I see the sea. I take my time when I look at her. Especially since the four men have stopped in their tracks. Despite the morning breeze, they sweat. Wipe their foreheads. The squat one takes off his red cardigan. I hope a stray dog does not come to put his wet muzzle right against my face. To sniff me.

  The night of the hurricane, nobody dared to look out to the sea. No one. They would have been too scared. A whole village walking in fear and rain. Even when the sun started to rise timidly, they preferred to look at the side of the hills overlooking Anse Bleue. Nobody except Abner. Abner is the bravest of us all. In any case, they did not see me leave, nor the sea close in on me like the lid of a tomb.

  37.

  When he was old enough, Abner also wanted to draw us toward a world that did not exist. A world that had been dangled before his eyes by the new sellers of miracles. A world whose contours he began to outline in his head. Abner only has the word development in his mouth. Development here. Development over there. “If you cut the trees, no development. If you plant the beans in the coffee fields, the land will disappear, no development. If you defecate in rivers, no development.” We planted the beans in the coffee fields all the way up, cut down the trees and defecated in the waters. He believed that the arrival of the prophet, leader of the party of the Destitute in power, would change everything and us with it.

  Abner’s anger was equal to his disappointment. But one day he stopped staring at the world with bitterness. We did not know where he had gotten the courage, but he had found it. He dug a well, tested out seeds, and organized a cooperative. A whole production that his brother Éliphète did not believe in. Éliphète did not believe in much. With Abner, there were explanations, more explanations, always explanations, to describe this world that would finally be developed, wild with happiness.

  Jean-Paul, a descendant of the Mésidors, and François, one of Madame Frétillon nephews, had come to be the head of a team that was to embark on an ambitious program for irrigation and the establishment of the cooperative. They had arrived with the same sandals that the men and women of the party of the Destitute had, and the same straw hats. Jean-Paul walked barefoot sometimes, just to give his soft and smooth soles a chance to be hurt. François asked questions about what we ate, how we organized our families, what our cultivation methods were. The other one never stopped surveying the five villages to plan the cooperative. Or he walked around the plains and hills to understand where the water could come from and whether it was still possible to find much depth. There were meetings, rallies in the area and sometimes in Port-au-Prince. Abner returned more transformed every time. He had really felt like a leader when, after a meeting where he had spoken, he was invited to the residence of Jean-Paul Laboule. There he drank whiskey, a rum for the rich, and listened to music as sweet as the murmur of a woman.

  The years passed, resembling each other. Between the drawings of the lottery, every day, Dieudonné told us what he learned from the radios. The prophet had transformed the hunger-stricken, poor, and cursed like us, into organized gangs armed to the tooth—you didn’t want to run into them. White people came to see them, they took them for Western heroes, warriors, and were fond of their names of the night: Jojo-mort-aux-rats, Hervé-piment-piké, or Chuck Norris. Names that sent chills up your spine. Names suggesting that these men could make you their next meal. But these white people loved sensationalism. So they wrote articles for the newspapers and filmed them to frighten other whites who would be watching them on television. We also saw them on televisions in Baudelet, between soccer matches. For a few seconds we told ourselves that it was still good to live in Anse Bleue, Roseaux, or even Baudelet. And not in Port-au-Prince.

  One day when Fanol had visited Anse Bleue, he and Abner got into a bad fight. Fanol defended his meaningless job and denied that what remained of the meager cake was shared openly with everyone. That the appetite of all had been whetted, but that the cream and three quarters of the cake had been carried off along the way. That people would also disappear forever. That others died, riddled with bullets by strangers. Always unknown. That some of those who disappeared reappeared because their parents had paid. Fanol denied everything. Oxéna and Yvnel encouraged him to deny so he wouldn’t get into trouble.

  But they also spoke in a hushed tones about a new miraculous manna. White as the flour of the loaves when Jesus fed the five thousand. Planes landed at night to deliver this manna. Or let it fall from heaven in bundles. Entire lands had been cleared for this single harvest.

  In the truck rented from a man in Roseaux, Éliphète had seen much of the country and heard a slew of words between Anse Bleue, Roseaux, Baudelet, and Port-au-Prince. He had claimed one day, in a moment of inspiration, that the miracles would not take place. “The only miracle will come from heaven and it will be poisoned. Because it is the devil who will send it on metal wings. The metal wings will cross the sky. And this manna, they’ll eat it sitting on stones of fire, under a dry sky, among the last cacti and bayahondes, between the discotheques, the glimmering 4x4s, the gangsters, the tramps from the lounges and the AK47s.” He had moved his arms in a way to say that these were weapons used to kill. Éliphète had been right.

  “The world is a difficult place. You cheat and trick and lie, or you die,” he concluded. “I don’t want to die,” cried Cétoute. She was barely twelve years old. We did not know where this cry came from. He had taken her by surprise. And we all laughed. And then Cétoute went to join her mother and the charismatic sisters on the narrow porch in front of her house. She repeated three Hail Marys with them to forget for a moment the tremendous and terrible surprises that life had in store at this time, in this place.

  38.

  On one morning in April, a new 4x4 was swallowing up kilometer after kilometer, making passersby since Port-au-Prince turn around. In the villages, our eyes caught it like claws. When the 4x4 reached what seemed like the top of the world, Anse Bleue offered all of itself to Jimmy’s eyes. The sea was a shining plate as far as the eye could see, put there to send back all the power of the sun, as if the condemned land was caught between two destinies, to burn or to be swallowed up. He scanned these hamlets like little blisters on the sand. Putrid. Nauseating. The driver started a long diatribe about this earth which, shamelessly, showed its guts and scars. Abandoned by all. Jimmy was deaf and indifferent to the whining and boring drone of the driver, whom he asked after a moment to be quiet because it was hot. Jimmy wanted to be alone with his thoughts. Without the crutches of a man whose opinion did not matter. The disorder was even greater than he had imagined and it didn’t upset him. Not at all. Disorder was his element, his breath, his water and his sky. He rubbed his hands together, a broad smile on his lips. To the astonishment of the driver, who had seen the surrender of the man with a black hat and thick glasses and the blue uniforms, the rise of the party of the Destitute with its prophet, its bearers of good news, becoming after a few years richer than those of the party of the Rich, who had sharpened the same machetes and crackled the uzis.

  The driver wondered what might make his passenger smile: “Mr. Jimmy, it’s like in the Bible, it has become difficult today to separate the wheat from the chaff.”

  “I leave that work to God,” retorted Jimmy. At this, the driver resolved to speak of the rain and the good weather, and not to mention the high cost of living, let alone the desolation of the countryside. He was not going to preach or make enemies and handed over the what little remained of his soul to God every Sunday and every Tuesday fasting at the renovated church of the Pentecostalists.

  “How are the authorities in the area?”


  The driver spat out, almost with emphasis:

  “Very serious people.”

  And after repeating the “very serious” three times, he praised the qualities of each of the commissioners, the mayor and his assessors, the deputies, and the senator. Jimmy did not believe a word and in his head said to himself: “He’s lying to me, but this lousy bunch doesn’t deserve any better.” He was eager to reach Morin Hill after Baudelet. “It is not possible, Baudelet, where are you? Perhaps, feeling my arrival, you went back underground?” With this thought, he laughed out loud. And his eyes shone with the mad glare of those men for whom hell is the preferred state of mind.

  Jimmy murmured something between his teeth that the driver couldn’t hear. When the latter asked him to repeat what he had just said, he replied that it was nothing important, just the ramblings of a man gripped by emotion. The driver did not believe a word and, of course, did not insist.

  The driver had trouble going along this rocky road. The new jeep, a yellow SUV, made a spectacle among pedestrians and motorists, peasants along the road.

  When they finally reached the market in Roseaux, Jimmy whispered: “I am back and you will feel it. A Mésidor is back and that’s something.” This time he had uttered his words so loudly that the driver could hear him and swallowed his own spit. Jimmy was a member of the Rich, but he had his ins with the party of the Destitute and was preparing, with his accomplices on both sides, to lend a hand to the disorder.

  He had to do it quickly, very quickly. His grandfather, Tertulien Mésidor, was in agony and he, the son of Mérien Mésidor, disowned a few years earlier, wanted to be accepted by this grandfather whom he did not know. To be accepted in order to redeem his father. But also to take, to seize. Tertulien, pursued because of his quarrels with the men in blue, had taken refuge in the Dominican Republic and later had returned in secret. Waiting for the tide to turn. In a country where the most dependable weapon is erasure; the most lucrative defense, evasion. To let the storm pass, before spreading our wings again and running with the pack of the moment.

  The driver of the yellow SUV recounted, the following Sunday, in the square of the Pentecostal church in Roseaux, Jimmy’s arrival, and, at the market in Baudelet, Tertulien’s servants told us the story of the last conversation between the dying man and his grandson. By way of receiving them in as far out as our part of the countryside, we knew that the pack of the moment, with or without uniforms of the armies of the world, were coming from every corner to hunt or cut up this corpse that had become too cumbersome. Haiti, yon chaj twò lou, a thorn in the foot of America.

  We, in Anse Bleue and in the other villages, were like a wayward horse, which could not be coaxed by cunning nor by force. So we were fenced in, in an enclosure. And we are still humming inside ourselves:

  Chèn ki chèn, nou krazé li

  Ki diré pou kòd o

  We were able to break the chains

  But what about these thin ropes?

  39.

  When Tertulien saw this grandson, who had come from so far away, he still couldn’t keep stop the memory of Mérien from rising to the surface and spoiling his joy.

  Marie-Elda, Tertulien Mésidor’s wife, was made of a fragility that contrasted with her husband’s unremitting rage. No servant remembered hearing her say one word too many, one word too loud, one word awry. Marie-Elda Mesidor seemed to look out at the other side of life without paying attention to what was happening here, in plain sight. Under her nose. We were never explained her presence in such a place, her presence on a sheet next too such a man.

  If each new birth had left her more frail than the previous one, that had not stopped her, without a tear or a cry, from pushing ten children into the world at the pleasure of her husband: Osias, Boileau, Pamphile, Candelon, Théophile, Joséphine, Horace, Hermit, Madrine, and Mérien. All of them, like Marie-Elda, obeyed their father’s every word. All except Mérien, the youngest, who had come into the world with a poisonous stinging in his chest. Like all gifted souls, the tiger’s cub began to resemble its parent very early on.

  The last time Tertulien had beaten Mérien, everyone had thought he was going to kill him. With a blackjack as a whip, he had lacerated his skin, then bashed, bashed his bare hands into his chest, face, arms. Like he wanted to exorcise some evil spirit from his son. Mérien bore the blows until the moment a rage from the bottom of his guts made him leap, head forward like a young bull, and fight back with all his might. Tertulian Mésidor fell backward. Son nailed father to the ground, placing his hands around his neck, ready to tighten, hard, on his Adam’s apple. If it weren’t for the cries of his mother, the interference of Osias, the eldest of the brothers, and the cries of the servants, perhaps Mérien would have committed the irreparable. Tertulien, standing up, seized a machete and threatened Mérien, who retreated, looking at his father in the eyes. None of the other brothers could catch him. He ran off and behind his back he heard Tertulien, his father, cursing him for five generations. Mérien Mésidor, a few days later, we learned from the most talkative servants, joined one of his aunts in America. That was many years ago.

  Tertulien was moved. Which loosened the hand of that pain that painted horrible grimaces on his face. His mouth seemed to want to snatch all the air around him. An inaudible murmur came from the bottom of his throat. He only had the strength to stroke the hand of his grandson, to put a hand on his hair and to hand him a paper. He asked him to write down the names of the men and women on whom he could rely. For anything. For everything. “Take note, my son!”

  Tertulien Mésidor, in a final outburst, sat up in his bed and gathered his last strength to cast words out of his mouth like a flamethrower:

  “My son, I have no remorse and I will not beg for God’s mercy. By way of compromises and dirty deeds, I accumulated a small fortune, property, property, and more property. I am wealthier than the residents of these five villages combined. Nothing ever stopped me when I wanted to kill, steal, rape. Nothing. It was very nice those days when I had blood on my hands. It’s like God cleared a path for me every time I moved forward.”

  He stopped to laugh out loud, his eyes shining with dementia.

  “I saw everything on this island. Until the second occupation by the Marines. I say second occupation, my son, because there will be others. And I always got the same respect from everyone, do you hear me?”

  Jimmy nodded, “Yes, yes.”

  And Tertulien clung to his shirt:

  “Yes, respect for gold and power. Nothing else, my grandson, nothing else.”

  Before dying, Tertulien wanted to have the pleasure of recounting his crimes. He uttered his last words, falling back on his bed. He died with his eyes wide open.

  The news of Jimmy’s return spread along the paths, from one hut to another, in the aisles of the markets. From one garden to the next. Then it seemed to us once again that nothing had happened. That the party of the Destitute had not existed. Some of us began to distrust their memories. Going so far as to believe that our fevers were only the fruit of a collective hallucination. That the misery from before, from under the man with black hat and thick glasses, was perhaps better than the one that had planted its fangs in our lives today.

  Jimmy decided to take it all back, even more than he’d came back for. He would be a curse. Him too.

  “I’m back and you’re going to feel it.”

  40.

  It’s Jimmy who killed me. And it all started with the plane. It was a Friday and I had left Baudelet like I did every Friday to return to Anse Bleue.

  It’s true that the first time the plane flew over Anse Bleue, in the middle of the night, we were awoken with a start. And my father, still asleep, called us one after the other in a low voice, with words that fear distorted, like there was a piece of potato, still burning hot, in his mouth. He called us to ask if we heard this strange noise over our heads. Drowsy, with eyes half closed, we too heard the rumbling that had just punched a big hole in the night. We first believ
ed it was a sign from heaven or from the land under the waters.

  After three turns above Anse Bleue, the noise of the plane faded, as if silence swallowed it as the plane went toward the Lavandou Morne. After a moment that felt like an eternity, we heard nothing more.

  Woken up much earlier than usual, my father, Aunt Cilianise, Yvnel, the children, all spoke quietly in front of their huts. The children ran between our legs and mingled their hollering with the crowing of the rooster, the barking of the dog that kept going in different directions. We spoke in sentences that said and did not say. A real game of hide and seek with ourselves. The seconds were full of words and yet cluttered with silence. But we understood each other, as we always did, when a silent word like a dark presence came to take its place between us. All this unrest was returning us to a great tumult. So sometimes we looked at the sea, sometimes to the sky swaddled in blue and pink on the slope of the hills. And I, Cétoute Florival, I heard time gnaw at us like an army of rats.

  Altagrâce pointed to what had been the trajectory of the plane just above our hut, before Uncle Yvnel interrupted by proposing an unbeatable argument that seemed to be authoritative: he knew how a plane was made, because Léosthène had described it to him in great detail—the airplane seats, the belt tied around the waist, the turbulence that turns your stomach, the hostesses who fill in the forms for this cohort of illiterates that we are, that daily forces the gates of America.

  Abner avoided the question of the trajectory, which had already caused too much drooling, but assumed that sullen and skeptical gaze that knew enough to be worried and not enough to share this worry with us. For a few days, he twirled his beard and settled on, “I do not like this plane. I do not like what it’s going to bring us.” When asked what he meant by these words, he just concluded that, in his opinion, the aircraft had landed on the Mésidors’s property.