The Boiling Season

by Christopher Hebert

  Leaving Senator Marcus was not easy, but it would have been far harder had he not been so distracted. Even now that the state of siege had ended, President Mailodet seemed reluctant to restore the legislature or give up his emergency powers. Nor was there any sign that the legions of recently arrested political prisoners—students, unionists, journalists—might soon be released. If anything, all indications were that their cells would soon be filled to bursting, now that owning a radio had been added to the list of crimes against the state. The president’s newly created security forces were busily confiscating every transistor they could find.

  Despite all this, Senator Marcus appeared suddenly rejuvenated. It was as if this crisis had given him a new sense of purpose. Men were arriving at our door early each morning, even before Mme Marcus had risen, and they were staying until long after she had gone to bed at night. I had no way of knowing what was being said behind Senator Marcus’s study door, and that was as I wished.

  It was on one of the few nights when Senator Marcus did not have guests that I delivered the news of my resignation. We were in his study, and I had brought him his coffee. His first reaction was to set down the papers he had been examining.

  He removed his reading glasses and squinted at me with a pained expression. “What will you do?”

  “There’s an estate.” Until now I had not realized how nervous I was. “A forest preserve. It needs to be protected.”

  He leaned back with a sigh. “It sounds wonderful.”

  “It is.” And I almost told him then of my mother’s stories about the way the island once had been, before the endless turmoil. But how could I, given what had happened, given the trouble we once again found ourselves in, with Senator Marcus caught in the middle of it?

  He was silent, and I felt him regarding me with a detached kind of scrutiny, as if he were looking not at but through me. “I envy you.”

  “Not at all, sir,” I said, fearing I had gone too far.

  “There are times I wish I had a place like that I could disappear to.” I watched his eyes flutter closed. “I don’t know what happens to us. We want to make things better, but we always make them worse.”

  “No one has done as much as you,” I said, striking a more defensive tone than I had intended.

  He opened his eyes at the sound of my voice, as if he were surprised to find me still there.

  “But we can’t all just escape.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Someone has to stay and see things through.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  He looked at me strangely, and I worried again that I had said the wrong thing.

  “I hope you don’t expect me to let you go without a fight,” he offered, not unkindly.

  “I’m sorry for any inconvenience this might cause you.”

  He folded shut the earpieces to his glasses and then sprang them open again. “Of course it’s a terrible time for this to happen,” he said, and in truth I found myself hoping he might try to talk me out of it. But rather than finish his thought, he propped the glasses back upon his nose and resumed reading the papers.

  By the next morning, he had forgotten all about the promised fight. He spent the next few days locked in his study with his most trusted advisers.

  I had been looking forward to telling my father. On the Sunday following my meeting with Mme Freeman, I hurried home hours before the start of mass, not wanting to wait until after church. It being Sunday, the shop was closed, but when I got there my father was dusting his shelves, already dressed in his starched shirt and pants. He looked me over cautiously as I came in, alarmed to be seeing me so early.

  “I brought you something,” I said, handing him a small box.

  He opened the lid and tilted the box slightly to look inside. Nestled within a paper wrapping was a pineapple cake—his favorite. I had gotten it the day before at the Marcuses’ bakery.

  “You shouldn’t be wasting your money on luxuries,” he said, setting the box aside without closing the lid.

  “It’s a treat,” I said. “For a special occasion.” My saying this seemed to confirm his worst suspicions.

  “What occasion?”

  His dread was so palpable I nearly changed my mind. I contemplated lying, fabricating an occasion. Where did this come from, I wondered, this need of his always to expect the worst?

  “I got a new job,” I said, and my father instantly lowered himself onto his stool, clutching the dust rag in his hand.

  “What new job?”

  “I’m not going to be working for hill people anymore. Isn’t that great news?” I said, and his demeanor was such that I honestly no longer knew if this news was good or bad or something else altogether. What would constitute great news for my father? What calamity would need to befall the National Palace for him to so much as smile? I realized as I stood there in his shop, my own excitement rapidly dissipating, that my father had oriented his life in anticipation of disappointment. I believe this had not been a conscious decision on his part, but a consequence of things having worked out the way they did—the loss of his father’s land, the early death of his wife, the venality of politicians, the failings of his son.

  “I’ll be working in the countryside,” I said. “Just as you always wanted.”

  His eyes narrowed in on me. “Doing what?”

  “There’s a forest preserve. It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen.”

  “What about your studies?”

  “This is better.”

  “A forest preserve?” He laid down his dust rag and looked at me with consternation.

  “It’s a sanctuary for trees and plants,” I said nervously. “And there’s a house—”

  “But what’s it for?”

  “It’s an enormous garden,” I said. “It reminds me of Mother. It’s the sort of place she would have loved. You would like it, too. When you’re there, you forget about everything else. All the chaos.”

  “What makes you think I want to forget?”

  “Wouldn’t you love to get away from all of this?”

  He suddenly looked exhausted. “You only hear the things you want to hear.”

  “That’s not true. All my life you’ve told me how much you hate all of this: the politics, the violence.”

  “You’ve never understood,” he said with a shake of his head. “Being disgusted is not the same as being indifferent. I never taught you not to care.”

  How could he so quickly change his mind? It was as if he were willing to say anything in order to find a way to disapprove, even if it meant contradicting himself.

  I said, “But I won’t have to work for the hill people anymore. I thought that was what you wanted.” He could not possibly deny that it was.

  “Trees can take care of themselves,” he said.

  “People will destroy them.”

  “People are just trying to survive.” My father got up from his stool and pushed past the curtain separating the shop from his bed. He returned a moment later, wearing his hat.

  “And I suppose you’ll be too far away to come back for church?” He opened the door and stepped outside, not bothering to wait for an answer.

  Throughout the service, my father would not meet my eye. But for once he seemed scarcely aware of the priest either, failing to respond with the rest of the congregation to any of his usual flourishes. It seemed my father had not come for the mass, but to have a moment alone—even amongst this crowd—with the one authority he believed could show him the way forward. By now my father must have understood the impossibility of changing my mind with any kind of appeal to a higher power, but perhaps he still hoped he might be able to beg some kind of favor. Maybe a fire rained down upon Madame’s preserve. Or even locusts, if all else failed. It was difficult to watch, knowing he would only be adding to his disappointment. It was harder still to sit silently, unable to plead my case.

  Looking for distraction, I allowed my thoughts to wander, and soon I was back again
in the marble foyer of Habitation Louvois, straining my neck to gaze at the crystal chandelier hanging dustily overhead, like a jeweled cocoon. I could hardly believe it was real, that in just a few days I would be calling it home.

  The service was almost over when we heard the clamor out on the street. It started with shouting, and then there was the thud of feet running on the hard-packed dirt. Outside, a woman screamed and the priest fell silent, cutting himself off mid-sentence. The shouting grew louder, and I could hear it getting closer. The gunshots, when they came, were not especially loud, but still everyone started at the sound. We all knew what it was. A couple here, a couple there. And then two more in quick succession, somewhere very close by.

  “The doors,” the priest shouted, “someone get the doors.” There was scrambling in the back, and first the metal gate and then the wooden inner doors slammed shut, sealing out most of the light.

  “O God,” the priest spoke, lowering his head, “Who knowest us to be set in the midst of such great perils, that by reason of the weakness of our nature we cannot stand upright, grant us such health of mind and body, that those evils which we suffer for our sins we may overcome through Thine assistance. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.”

  Around me spilled an echo of Amens, some whispered, some shouted. For once my father’s was among the quietest.

  In the end, it appeared that the priest’s prayer fell upon a more sympathetic ear than my father’s. We waited a few more minutes locked inside the church, until it seemed the danger had passed. The same men who had closed the doors went back and opened them, and a few at a time, the congregation crept outside.

  On both sides of the street it was the same—faces peeking out of doorways, peering down from rooftops. The body in the street belonged to a young man. He lay facedown on the ground, shirtless, his gray pants already stained purple. The blood ran in veiny streams from his head, following whatever depressions it found in the dirt. I could not believe how much of it there was. It appeared he had been blindfolded, but the cloth had slipped down and I could see his eyes. I recognized him instantly. His name was Thierry. I knew him from the neighborhood, but not well. I had seen him more than once with Paul, and thinking of Paul, I looked around for him. He would know what to do. But neither Paul nor his mother were there.

  A sobbing woman rushed forward, Thierry’s sister, I thought, though I could not be sure. She was screaming, but it was impossible to make any sense of it. Perhaps there was no particular sense, just rage and sorrow. Another woman came forward and took her by the arm. By then the crowd had pulled closer, and all around me people were shouting about what they had and had not seen. Two men with a gun. Maybe more. Someone claimed it was the police. Or the army. Or thugs. They had dragged Thierry out. No one seemed to know why. What did it matter, really? There was no possible explanation that would give anyone even a sliver of relief. How could this be anything but madness?

  “Do you see?” I said, turning to my father. “Now do you see what I mean?”

  From a nearby house a sheet was produced, and an old woman came forward to drape it over the body. My father knelt down and crossed himself. It was as if I had not spoken.

  We walked back to his shop in silence. The silence was almost more than I could bear, but out of respect for my father and for Thierry I knew I should say nothing more. What could I have said that all that blood had not said already? This was no longer a place for civilized people. How could my father not understand why I had to leave?

  Mme Freeman hired a car to come out to the Marcuses’ house to get me. The morning she arrived, the Senator was in his study, not to be disturbed. Mme Marcus was out shopping. I had reminded them the night before that I would be leaving, and I could not help taking their absence now as a sign that they were not yet prepared to forgive me for abandoning them. Most of all, I regretted not having a chance to thank them for all they had done.

  It took me just a few minutes to collect my few possessions, and then Mme Freeman and I were on our way out of the city, following a route I was surprised to find I remembered perfectly. Mme Freeman seemed different now, more distant and distracted, and I wondered if she was having second thoughts about me. Seemingly to break the silence, she began asking questions; she wanted to know about my family, and as best I could in my limited English I told her about my father and his shop.

  “He must be very proud of you,” she said, and for a moment all I could do was stare back at her, my mind as blank as the sky. What could I possibly have said to give her that idea?

  “My father has always had his own ideas about what I should do with my life.”

  Mme Freeman smiled. “Don’t they always?” And then she added, “What about your mother?”

  I told her she had died when I was eight, and Mme Freeman let her fingertips curl upon my arm.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  In the rearview mirror the driver’s eyes danced with each bump, never once looking back. I held my breath until Mme Freeman had moved her hand.

  “What was she like?” Mme Freeman wanted to know.

  “She was very kind,” I said. “And pretty. And patient. My father was the practical one. My mother was the opposite. He would send her to the market for food, and she could come back with flowers. She bought food too, but he complained about the flowers. She would plant them, and before the day was done they would be trampled or somebody’s goat would eat them. Or my father would buy fabric to sell and my mother would take it and make him a shirt and he would complain because he already had a shirt and why would he need another?”

  Mme Freeman smiled again. “She sounds wonderful.”

  “I think you would have liked her,” I said. “She would have liked you.”

  “I don’t know.” Mme Freeman shook her head. “I fear I may be more the practical sort, like your father.”

  “She loved my father,” I said, more adamantly than was probably necessary. “Despite their differences, they loved each other very much.”

  Mme Freeman curled her fingers against her chin. “Which of them do you think you take after more?”

  I imagined that she believed it to be a simple, maybe even frivolous question, but it caught me unprepared. Having lived without my mother for so long, I had rarely stopped to consider the ways in which I saw her reflected in me.

  “All my life,” I finally said, “I’ve been surrounded by poverty and ignorance. All my life I’ve wanted something better, and I’ve worked hard, like my father taught me. He wanted me to have a better life, too, but he wanted me to remain where I was, with the same people, in the same world, the same struggles. But I’ve had enough of that world. I want a world more like my mother’s, with flowers and new shirts. With beauty.”

  Mme Freeman reached out to pat my knee. “That’s the world I want, too.”

  For several minutes after that, we rode without speaking. I did not know how much of her silence grew out of the things I had said and how much of it was a reaction to what she was seeing outside. By then we had reached the countryside along the coast, where a certain darkening of one’s mood becomes inevitable.

  We passed over a narrow bridge, below which the river was nearly dry. At the lowest points, a few still pools remained, and there a crowd had gathered. We saw a half dozen women in calico dresses squatting in the hard-packed mud, rubbing at their laundry with stones. How such an effort could result in cleanliness was impossible to fathom. In the shallows along a sandy bar a man had parked a small bus emblazoned with “God Is Good” across the windshield. He stood in the water stripped to his waist, washing the vehicle down with a rag. An old woman riding sidesaddle on a donkey looked up at us and waved. Between her sunken lips she clutched a smoldering pipe.

  This was not the first time Madame had seen these sights, but I could tell she was still struggling to make sense of them. In her country, I understood, there was no such poverty. In her country, cars did not share the road with animals. Adults did not wallow in mud.
What must all of this look like to her? I wondered. What must she think of us? And I felt shame, sitting there, watching the peasants outside my window. Everything about their struggle for survival seemed to me a manifestation of their deadly ignorance. How could you help not looking down on these people when you knew a world where none of this existed?

  After several minutes, in an effort to ease her discomfort, I said, “It’s a disgrace.”

  My voice appeared to shake Madame from whatever thoughts were preoccupying her.

  “It makes me wish I could do something,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “But what can you do with people like these?”

  “Surely they can be helped?”

  “Of course,” I said. “But they must help themselves, too.”

  “Are there schools?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But not all the children go. How can you expect to improve your life if you don’t go to school?”