“Why don’t they go?”
“Their parents don’t think it important enough. They save no money.”
“School isn’t free?”
“Of course not. Everyone pays.”
“What if you can’t afford it?”
“One must find a way,” I said. “My father did. It’s the most important thing.”
She continued to look out the window, seemingly deep in thought. And then she turned to me with a puzzled expression. “I’m surprised you don’t have more compassion. These are your people, after all.”
“My people?” I said. Could she really not see the differences between them and me? I stammered on for a moment, but I saw no way to correct her without giving offense. All I shared with such ignorant people was an island. I did not see how the accident of my birth in this time and place compelled me toward loyalty with others simply because they shared the same fate. If I must be assigned a people, why could those people not be Senator and Mme Marcus instead? Or even Mme Freeman herself? People who had worked hard to achieve their success.
I was relieved when we turned inland again and began heading up the road into the hills, which would lead to Habitation Louvois. From here, peasants were few, and only the remains of century-old plantations testified to their ever having been here. Within a few minutes our conversation was forgotten.
I knew we were almost at the estate when we passed a footpath twisting down the hillside to a small clearing, where two plaster shacks with thatched roofs squatted in the shade of acacia trees.
Madame exhaled. “How picturesque!”
I nodded, withholding my thoughts about the filth one would undoubtedly find inside.
A few minutes later, we pulled up to the manor house and Madame dropped me off alone. She would be staying at the Hotel Erdrich into the foreseeable future, until we were able to get her room in the manor house restored. The room she had picked out for herself was on the southern end of the second floor, with a corner balcony overlooking the pool and the gardens—or rather what had once been gardens. Aside from that room, Madame graciously offered whichever one I wished.
After she left, I spent an hour going from room to room, but none of them seemed suitable. They were too large, much larger than I would ever need, the smallest the size of the Marcuses’ bedroom, with a balcony and shutters extending from floor to ceiling. A glass door connected this room to a slightly smaller space, which was not itself a proper room, since it was accessible only though the larger room. Nevertheless, it was in here that I laid my pallet.
Later, when the renovations were complete, this would become my office, and the attached room my sleeping quarters. By then the memory of my former space in the Marcuses’ attic had begun to fade, and these new rooms no longer seemed quite so large. I learned quickly that there is nothing easier to grow accustomed to than luxury.
Chapter Seven
As I had hoped, upon taking up my new life at Habitation Louvois, the world I had become acquainted with through Senator Marcus quickly disappeared from view. I was able to go days and weeks at a time with no other preoccupation than exploring my new home—its endless paths and vast, empty rooms and disguised, secret cupboards. I had been left alone to discover the relics of a lost civilization, the island trapped in time. As far as I was concerned, the entire world was contained within the borders of our stone walls and iron gate.
Yet, however separate I was from the latest upsetting incidents in the capital, there was nothing I could do to entirely shut out the rumors. They slipped in like stowaways whenever I received an occasional visitor, sent by Mme Freeman to perform one or another task. In this way, I learned that a few days after I arrived here two journalists foolish enough to attach bylines to work criticizing certain allies of the president had been beaten nearly to death.
A week later, the interior minister—a vocal opponent of M. Mailodet and a friend of Senator Marcus—was gravely wounded in a mysterious bombing.
Still, however awful the news, it was easy to believe these things were happening somewhere far away. Here we received no visits from ambassadors and government ministers. Here no bodies were deposited along the road. In fact, the road went almost entirely untraveled. Politics were not only irrelevant, they would have been an unwelcome distraction from the work at hand.
In addition to the violence and terror, I was also finally free of the nagging reminders of the place I was from, the most hopeless place I had ever known. And behind me now were the hours I had wasted in the lobby of the Hotel Erdrich, content to listen to the buzz of important men with engagements to keep.
In my own way I had become one of those important men myself.
On those rare occasions I cared to look, the capital existed only as distant lights sparkling through the trees beyond the balcony.
One morning about a month after I took up residence at the estate, I awoke to discover legions of laborers waiting at the gate. They had been dispatched by Mme Freeman’s architects to begin the renovations. There were masons and carpenters and plasterers and steel workers and gardeners armed with scythes and machetes. Madame’s architects were there too, a pair of light-skinned mulattoes who zipped down the drive in a sleek white convertible with a brown leather top folded in the back. One was directing the restoration of the manor house, the other the recovery of the landscape. In a circle around those two gathered the foremen of the different trades.
That first morning, standing on the balcony, I watched the men disperse from their separate camps and converge on the manor house, and I felt as though I were watching colonies of ants descend upon a fallen crumb.
In the coming weeks and months, work on the manor house progressed slowly. Electricity was no less erratic here than everywhere else; if anything, our remoteness made it even worse. Sometimes we went days without power. The telephones were dead, too. President Mailodet had recently introduced a special tax levy to pay for modernizing the phone lines. The money had been collected in full, but not a penny had been spent.
Much of the manor house’s foundation needed to be rebuilt. After nearly two hundred years of exposure to the elements, significant portions of the mortar holding together the stone had turned to dust. Matching the original construction without the original materials proved an unending challenge. For many of the crumbling columns and balustrades we had to make new molds before we could recast them.
The weather also slowed us down. Generally it was dry—too dry—but when it rained it rained enough to unbury the dead, and we often lost several days of work at a time. One afternoon a storm unexpectedly tore through, reducing the masons’ scaffolding to a pile of firewood.
Stone, cement, and wood arrived by the truckload. Mahogany, oak, pine, cherry. I did not know where it came from, but I was certain there were not enough trees left on the entire island to supply it. The trucks never ceased. They brought food, too—sacks of rice and beans and fruit by the crate, and cages of chickens and dozens of small pigs. I spent days doing nothing but running back and forth to the gate to let the trucks in, and I could not remember when I had been more happy.
Three old women did the cooking, peasants from Saint-Gabriel. They also brought the men water as they worked, going from one to the next with a bucket and gourd.
At night, sleeping mats covered nearly every patch of lawn, giving the grounds the appearance of an army encampment. The three women slept inside the manor house, in the room next to mine. I slept lightly in those days, my ears attuned to any sign of trouble.
During this time I saw little of Mme Freeman. She continued to stay at the Hotel Erdrich, only occasionally coming to the estate to check on our progress. Sometimes she brought with her the architects, but most of the time she came alone, and we strolled for hours along the paths and the forest preserve. This was to be Madame’s second residence, a retreat from her frantic work life back home. For me it was no less important an escape, albeit one of a different sort.
But a month into the const
ruction, it was finally time for Mme Freeman to leave. From the start I had understood she was a successful businesswoman in her own country and that business would often keep her away. The day before she departed, she came to the estate for a final inspection. With the two architects at her side, she walked inside and around the manor house and across every accessible meter of the grounds. Together they made note of the things still to be done.
“We have a long way to go,” she said when we met in her office that night. “But I have every confidence that you’ll be able to see it through.”
“Thank you, Madame,” I said. As sad as I was to see her go, I too felt not the faintest doubt. “I will not disappoint you.”
“Is there anything you need?” she asked as she walked me to the door.
“Not a thing.”
A flicker of worry came into her eyes, but I could not understand what I might have said to put it there.
She touched my arm. “Maybe you should take some time off. You haven’t had any time to yourself since you got here. Perhaps you’d like to go visit your family?”
“I’m very happy here,” I said, relieved that it was nothing more substantial than that. “It’s peaceful and the work is rewarding.”
I could tell by her look that she was not yet convinced.
“I never hear you talk about your father or your friends,” she said. “Don’t you miss them?”
“Yes, of course,” I said quickly. But Madame was still looking at me strangely, and I could not explain why I suddenly felt so uncomfortable. Was it not enough that I wished to stay at the estate and complete the work she had hired me to do? “I love my father—”
“Is there no one else you’re close to?” she added after a pause. “I’ve heard you mention someone named Paul. And what about M. Guinee?”
“I like them very much.” But did I also need to explain that they were a part of my old life, two of the many things I had gladly left behind when I came here?
“And is there no one else? A girlfriend maybe?”
“I prefer to avoid distractions.”
“I see.” Her face wore a worried look. “Not even just for fun?”
“Maybe later,” I said. “When there’s more time.”
“I don’t mean to press.” Her tone had turned apologetic. “It’s just that I don’t want you feeling stuck here.” Then she peeked at her watch. “I have to go, but I’ll be back soon. We’ll talk more then.” She reached out and took my hand. “This place seems to attract lost souls. Soon we shall see what else it brings.”
* * *
However hard I tried to remove myself from the political dramas still unfolding in the capital, they continued to find ways to reach me. If the worst of it was over, there was still plenty of bad news to be had. Truck drivers delivered the stories with the rest of their cargo; the other men brought back gossip from visits to their families. Everyone agreed that President Mailodet was showing no signs of letting up. He crushed the unions that dared come out in opposition to his new constitutional powers. In response to a supposed conspiracy involving a small group of students, he abolished all youth organizations, regardless of philosophy and affiliation. Everywhere he looked, he saw a plot. Knowing all too well where coups and assassinations were bred, he shut down the military academy. And the first task he assigned his new security forces—whose members he picked by hand—was to keep an eye on the few army officers he had not already removed.
Although he, too, was a reminder of a past life I had been glad to put behind me, the one person I did think of often, particularly during Mme Freeman’s absences, was Senator Marcus. Whenever I had trouble with the men, or when the construction faltered, I imagined myself back in the Senator’s study, watching him dissect problems with his always flawless composure.
By this time I had fashioned an office of sorts, a desk made of an old oak door balanced atop two rusty barrels, and it was from here that I handed out orders. Whenever one of the foremen came to me for an answer, for instructions as to how the men should proceed, I thought back to the times Senator Marcus and his colleagues retired to his study after dinner to discuss matters unsuited to the dinner table. No matter how impassioned the conversation grew, Senator Marcus always sat calmly in his chair, the last to respond. I often suspected he purposefully held back what he had to say, savoring it like cigar smoke, until the time was right to let it out. The weight of his deliberation had a way of nullifying everything that came before it and rendering useless anything that might follow. His way of speaking with finality was something I tried to emulate, and slowly, over time, I began to feel comfortable as the man in charge.
The majority of the problems had to do with the men. I forbade alcohol, but the men drank anyway. And they fought. Who knows what they fought about? It hardly mattered. They welcomed any excuse for picking up a knife. These were the sort of men I had spent my life avoiding—crass, vulgar, lazy, and violent. They would gladly have smuggled guns or drugs instead of hammering nails, if only they had been offered an invitation.
One evening I heard them yelling out back. Fearing the worst, I went to investigate. Against my better judgment I had been allowing the men to build a fire each evening in the pit by the laundry. Joseph, the foreman of the carpenters, had assured me that it was an easy way to keep them entertained.
“At what cost?” I asked on the day he brought his proposal.
“They’re men,” Joseph insisted, “not children.”
To which I had replied, “I hope you’re right.”
That night, beside the fire, two dozen men stood in a circle, shoulder to shoulder. From within came the shouts I had heard from my office.
“What are you waiting for?” someone in the circle said. “Hit him.”
Pushing my way through was like rolling heavy logs stuck in the mud.
“What’s going on here?” I yelled.
As if they were slowly waking from a dream, the two scuffling men in the center came to a belated stop. One had a torn shirt, the other a cut above his eye. The two men looked at each other and then at their feet.
“What is this about?”
The one with the ripped shirt looked up, but he would not meet my eye.
“I caught him,” he said. “It’s his fault.”
The other winced, shaking his head. “I didn’t do anything.”
Several of the men in the crowd pointed to the man with the bloody eye. “It’s true. He caught him red-handed.”
“Enough,” I said. “Both of you.”
The two in the center looked up warily.
“You’re done here. Pack your things.” And then I turned to face the others. “Let this be a warning to you. I will not tolerate this behavior. There are thousands of men out there who would give anything to have your jobs. If any of you step out of line for any reason, I will throw you out without giving it a second thought. I have no time for childishness.”
“We didn’t do anything,” protested someone at my back.
I turned around, but it was too late.
“Who said that?”
Everyone fell silent.
“You,” I said, pointing to a tall, weak-chinned young man who was trying to hide behind the others. “Was it you?”
“No.”
“Was it him?” I asked his neighbor.
He averted his eyes. “Yes.”
“You’re fired too. I want you out of here now.”
He stomped off into the dark, cursing under his breath.
I looked to the others. “Do any of you want to join him?”
They answered with silence.
“Then put out the fire. It was your last.”
There was grumbling, but no one was foolish enough to complain. They may not have been happy as they dispersed, lumbering back to their mats, but they understood I was not to be trifled with.
Naturally, everything took longer than we expected and cost more than we had hoped. Every time the men fixed one thing, they discover
ed something else in need of repair. Still, the renovations continued, and no problem was insurmountable. We worked sunup to sundown, and at night I studied an old English grammar I had found on my last trip to the capital. I wrote Madame long letters each day, detailing our progress and outlining what remained to be done. I was sorry I could not do so in person. The phones remained unreliable, when they worked at all, making the mail our only means of remaining in touch. These letters seldom required a response, and seldom received one, though Madame always arranged for more money when we needed it. She always expressed her gratitude and announced her intention to return shortly. I kept waiting for that day to come.
The worst part of my life was the degree to which the work kept me from my father. As time passed, I felt a growing sense of guilt about enjoying a life of relative tranquillity while he continued to be exposed to the ever-worsening conditions of his neighborhood. Yet what could I do? He had chosen his life and I had chosen mine, and there no longer seemed to be anything either one of us could say to change the mind of the other.
Although no work was done on the estate on Sundays, I was seldom able to get away. There were always matters for me to attend to. Having no car, I had no easy way to get to my father’s shop. Nevertheless, once a month I woke up early and caught the bus from Saint-Gabriel. By now most of the roadblocks and obstacles thrown up during the recent strikes had been cleared away, making the drive at least bearable, if not pleasant. After transferring to another bus in the capital, I could reach my old neighborhood just in time for church. But in order to get on the return bus, I had to leave before the neighborhood gatherings.
I think it was in large part because of the infrequency of these visits that I began to notice differences in my father. One afternoon I arrived to find him slumped on his stool, struggling to catch his breath.
“What happened?” I said, rushing to his side.
He waved me off, but several moments passed before he was able to tell me he was all right. Eventually I got him to explain what had happened.
The Boiling Season Page 8