The Boiling Season

by Christopher Hebert

  “Not at all.” Even knowing the dangers as well as I did, I would have done the same. In fact, knowing what life was like on the island made the estate that much more vital. There was nothing we could do to fix the rest, but this was something we could save.

  “I knew it was a risk,” Madame said. “But I like risks. I decided it was a risk worth taking. Don’t you agree?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

  Madame picked up her fork and took a small bite, before gently returning the silverware to her plate. Feeling suddenly self-conscious, I looked around my plate and realized I had eaten everything I had been served, like a ravenous dog. I might have escaped the place from which I had come, but I had not yet learned to be someone better.

  “We need to believe that paradise is possible,” Madame said with a blot to her lips. “Without that, life would be unbearable.”

  It was as if she could read my mind. It was remarkable how wise M. Guinee had been to bring us together. How could it have been otherwise but that we would share this place and all the good it would bring?

  The women came to take our dishes away. While we drank our coffee, I told Madame about the storm. The damage from the leaks was substantial, but ultimately inconsequential: the ceilings were going to be torn out anyway, the floors refinished. The roof, however, would need to be inspected immediately. Already the builders had indicated that repairs would be costly. But no amount of bad news could spoil the pleasure Madame felt at being here.

  “Better that we discover this now than later,” she said, stifling a yawn.

  “You must be tired.”

  “I just hope I’m not too excited to sleep.”

  I began gathering together our cups and saucers.

  “Were you able to make the arrangements I requested?” Madame said, bringing her hands together in anticipation.

  I was relieved to be able to say yes. At least one thing had worked out as I had hoped.

  “They will be here in the morning.”

  She held open the door, beaming at me as I passed through. “I can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve done.”

  “There is no need,” I said. “There is nothing I would rather do.”

  I had almost reached the edge of the courtyard when I heard her call out to me. “I nearly forgot to tell you,” she said. “Monsieur Guinee sends his regards. I was able to tell him about all the work you’ve accomplished here, and he was very pleased.”

  “Thank you, madame.” It brought a smile to my face to think of him again. “I’ve been meaning to write to him.”

  “I’m going to have to keep an eye on you,” she said. “It is possible to lose yourself too much in your work.”

  There was no need to disagree. Despite what she might say for the sake of appearances, we both knew we were in this regard exactly the same.

  She tinkled her fingers in the air to wave good night.

  Madame wasted no time. Early the next morning, after a hurried breakfast, she set to work with the two boys I had hired to help her with the garden. When I left them to attend to the roofers who had just arrived, they were clearing the ground Madame had picked for her roses, just beyond the villa’s terrace.

  With the grounds and the manor house at last dried out from the storm, things felt as though they had returned to normal. I was looking forward to a day in which Madame’s enthusiasm would take the place of the usual chaos.

  I was thus more than a little distressed when, several hours later, I was sitting in my office and heard a series of shouts coming from down below. Rushing out to the balcony, I saw an unfamiliar vehicle in the drive. I thought at first that it was an army jeep, but what would the army be doing here? Looking more closely, I noticed the jeep bore none of the army’s markings. Still, I could not imagine whom it might belong to.

  There were more shouts, and I hurried down the stairs and out to the grounds. On my way to Madame’s villa I came across two of the masons eating lunch in the shade of an avocado tree. I ordered them to come with me. “Something is wrong,” I said. “I may need your help.”

  They got to their feet slowly and shared a furtive glance as they brushed at the seats of their pants. By the time I had reached Madame’s pool, they were no longer behind me.

  On the newly cleared earth behind Madame’s villa stood four large, dark-skinned men dressed identically in khakis and sunglasses, pistols holstered on their hips. The two boys I had hired to help Madame were nowhere to be seen.

  “This is my property,” Madame was yelling, “and I want you to leave. You have no business here.”

  The men shifted uncomfortably. I could see they were confused. No doubt they did not understand a word of what Madame was saying, though her tone was unambiguous. The man standing closest to her—the biggest of the four—seemed to be their leader, if only because of his size. His right hand hovered in the vicinity of his weapon.

  “I have asked you to go,” Madame said. “If I have need of your services, I will let you know.”

  The big man turned to me then, acknowledging my presence for the first time. “Who is this white woman?”

  His sunglasses—all of their sunglasses—were dark-lensed and thoroughly obscured his eyes, making it impossible to judge his intent.

  “She owns this property,” I said.

  “She owns nothing.”

  On Madame’s face I saw no fear. I knew the same could not be said of me. But then again, she had the benefit of not knowing what he had said.

  “What’s going on here?” The big man glanced at the building materials still scattered around the villa.

  “Nothing,” I said. “We’re just rebuilding.”

  “Why?”

  “So she can live here.” I nodded toward Mme Freeman, who in return raised her eyebrows, curious to know what I was saying.

  “Why would she want to live here?” the big man said, coming another step closer.

  “Why not?”

  “It isn’t safe.”

  I took another step back. “Why isn’t it safe?”

  The big man smiled, and the effect was anything but friendly. “Because I said so.”

  “I see.”

  “We might be able to make it a little safer,” said one of the smaller men. “It’s something to think about.”

  With my attention turned to the man who was speaking, I did not see what happened next until it was too late. I heard shuffling behind me and I spun around to find Madame striding toward the big man, fists raised as if to strike him. I reached out to stop her, but not before she had pushed her hand against his chest.

  “Leave!” she yelled. “Now.”

  In what felt like slow motion, the big man lowered his head, regarding the thin fingers pressed into his white shirt. He could have broken every bone in her hand, if he had wished. I do not know what stopped him.

  The big man merely turned, letting Madame’s arm fall to her side. He nodded wordlessly toward the path, and four sets of heavy boots tramped their way back up to the drive.

  Madame and I stood silently side by side until we heard the jeep start, and then the crunch of loose gravel as they sped up to the road.

  “Who do they think they are?” Madame said. Her face was flushed, her eyes wide with wrath.

  Above us I heard something rustling, and I looked up to find one of the boys emerging from a cover of banana leaves on the roof of Madame’s villa. At the same moment, the other one returned from somewhere in the trees, whistling nonchalantly to himself as he picked up his shovel and returned to work, as if nothing at all had happened.

  It took me several hours to arrive at a satisfactory answer to Madame’s question. I started with the two masons, reading into their timely disappearance that they knew something I did not. I brought them into my office one at a time.

  “Who were they?” I asked the first, hunched in a chair opposite me, his clothes stiff with mortar.

  With his fat, dirty fingers he pulled a penny nail from h
is pocket and began to clean his cuticles. “I don’t know.”

  “What’s your name?”

  He looked at me sideways, half squinting, as if he could not quite remember. “Roro.”

  “Who were they, Roro?”

  The dirty little man twirled the nail between his fingers. “I don’t know.”

  “Then why did you disappear?”

  He began to work on the cuticles of his other hand.

  “You knew there was going to be trouble.”

  He glanced at me quickly, and then once again he lowered his eyes.

  “How did you know?” I said, losing patience. “Was it the jeep?”

  He sighed, letting the nail tumble in his open palm.

  “How did you know the jeep?”

  “Everyone knows it.”

  “Everyone but me,” I said angrily.

  Once again he gave me that sideways look.

  “Where have you seen it?”

  He shook his head sullenly. “Around. In town. Everywhere.”

  “Why will you not just tell me who they are?” I said. “Must I treat you like a child? Are you afraid they’ll come get you if you do?”

  “How do you know they won’t?”

  “This seems not to be much of a secret,” I said in exasperation, “if everyone knows but me.”

  He put his hands on the arm of the chair and started to push himself up. “Then ask someone else.”

  I was up first, and I pushed him back down. “I’m asking you.”

  Hearing my voice shaking with anger, he slumped back down and the cushion deflated with a hiss. “Who do you think they are?” He threw up his hands in frustration. “They work for President Mailodet.”

  “Doing what?”

  “How should I know? Whatever he tells them to.”

  In disgust I shooed him toward the door. “Send in whoever is next.”

  Each in turn, the others confirmed what the first mason told me. The men in khakis and sunglasses were part of President Mailodet’s personal security force. In recent months, men like these had been appearing throughout the capital, as well as in the slums where most of the workers lived. It was not the first I had heard of them, but I was surprised to find them circulating so far from the palace. What I had thought to be a small contingent of bodyguards, however, had apparently swollen into something inconceivably larger. There were rumors the security force’s ranks now outnumbered the army’s. One had to give the president credit: he had finally found the perfect solution to the threat with which the military had plagued his predecessors for more than a century. There could be no coups as long as his army was larger than theirs.

  It seemed everyone had heard of the president’s new protectors. One after another, virtually every man on the crew supplied me with a third- or fourth- or fifth-hand account of what these so-called security forces had done to one or another of President Mailodet’s enemies. Everyone believed Madame had been lucky to have treated them the way she had and to have escaped with her life. Had she not been a white woman, a foreigner, they were certain things would have turned out much differently.

  As for why the president’s security forces had come here in the first place, no one could say for sure. Madame was certainly not one of the president’s enemies. Perhaps they had been ordered to find out what we were up to. Perhaps they were annoyed that from the road they could not see what was going on beyond the wall. I could imagine they had simply been exercising their right to go anywhere they pleased. Or their motive could have been even baser still—to frighten us into paying some sort of bribe. Either way, they had underestimated us. Madame was not to be intimidated. The same could not be said for the gardener—threatened, he said, at gunpoint—who let them in.

  That evening, Madame called me to her villa. “What have you found out?” she said, skipping her usual pleasantries.

  “I think they were security forces, Madame.”

  “And what,” she said, “were they securing?”

  I took a deep breath. “President Mailodet.”

  “And why,” she said, pouring herself a glass of water, “does the president need to be secure from me?”

  When I failed to answer—when I could not answer—she added, “I wish you had told me in your letters about what’s been happening here. I need to know.”

  Most painful to me was the disappointment in her voice. How could I tell her that I had not known myself? How could I face her, knowing how badly I had failed?

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It won’t happen again.”

  She waved me out of her office, and the door crashed shut behind me.

  The next morning, before anyone else was awake, I caught the bus coming down the road from Saint-Gabriel. It took an hour to travel the twenty kilometers of tortuous roads to the capital. At the central market I hired a taxi and directed it up the hills to Lyonville.

  About halfway up, the taxi arrived at a wooden barrier blocking both lanes of traffic. Two men dressed in khakis sat lazily at the side of the road. With their identical clothes and their eyes cloaked behind dark sunglasses, there was nothing to distinguish them from the men I had encountered just the day before. I could see now how their interchangeability made them appear that much more ubiquitous and menacing.

  When we came to a stop they rose slowly to their feet and ordered us to get out. One of them held a pistol between my shoulder blades while the other searched the car. The driver lit a cigarette, leaning up against a whitewashed garden wall. The three of them chatted casually, while I did everything in my power to become invisible. The man with the gun to my back complained about a toothache. The driver recommended a woman he knew, who made a special poultice.

  The man who had been searching the car inched out of the backseat. “Would that work on a sore shoulder?”

  “Don’t know,” the driver said. “Maybe.”

  While he explained where the woman could be found, I felt the gun twisting against my spine. I tried to imagine I was somewhere else, but the pain was too specific, and it kept pulling me back.

  “Tell her I sent you,” the driver said.

  “I will.”

  From around the bend came the sound of a downshifting car.

  The driver flicked his cigarette over the wall. “Well?”

  The man behind me slid his pistol back into its holster. Apparently we were done.

  “What was that?” I allowed myself to ask once we were a safe distance away. I did not dare look back.

  “Security.” I detected in the driver’s tone a disturbing calm, as though what we had just experienced required no explanation. As though we had been dealing with checkpoints all our lives.

  The only person I knew I could trust to tell me what was really happening was Senator Marcus. As we rounded the last bend at the top of the hill, I felt at last that everything—however bad it seemed—was going to be all right. I only hoped he had forgiven me for abandoning him.

  When we reached their drive, I was surprised to find the gate was open. It was not like the Marcuses to be so careless. Only later, as I thought back on it, trying to make sense of what I had seen, did I realize the driver had shown no alarm as I rushed from the car; he had not bothered to call after me, demanding his fare. It was as if he had known all along that I would be back.

  At the center of the circular drive, the three stone children in the fountain swung as always around their maypole, happy and carefree. Beyond them, at the top of the broad front steps, a scorched hole marked where the front door had once been. On the floor above, the windows stared out like a dozen black eyes. The smudge of my own small window, just below the eaves, was almost indistinguishable from the ring of soot circling the roof.

  I might have stood there the rest of the day, frozen in shock, had the taxi driver not pulled forward.

  “Ready to go?” he said with the same tone he might have used to discuss the weather.

  As I lowered myself unsteadily into the back of the car, I managed to as
k, “What happened?”

  He looked up past the gate, saying offhandedly, “Looks like a fire.”

  Upon my return, I did not tell Mme Freeman what had happened to Senator Marcus’s home. Even so, she had seen enough for herself. Two days after my trip to Lyonville, she boarded a plane. She could not say when she would return.

  Her rose garden remained unplanted.

  Chapter Nine

  It was the solitude that took the most getting used to. Solitude was something I had grown to recognize in my time at Senator Marcus’s house, but I had gotten little direct experience of it myself. When she was not entertaining—or preparing to do so—Mme Marcus had often liked to read, and I frequently came upon her in her favorite chair in the sunroom, enjoying the warm wash of light soaking through the windows. When she was not reading, Mme Marcus could be found in the ballroom, practicing her minuets on the grand piano.

  Until I began working for the Marcuses, I had never seen a piano, except in pictures, and in fact I was not at first certain the instrument in the ballroom was a piano. Contrary to everything I thought I knew about pianos, this one was ivory white. For several weeks—before I ever heard anyone play it—I eyed the piano from a distance, and once or twice I thought to ask Mme Marcus what it was, but it seemed best whenever possible not to remind her of my ignorance.

  One day I happened to be passing through the ballroom alone, and with no one in sight I went over and touched the cold white finish, so glossy it felt like water flowing over a stone. I lifted the lid, and there were the keys, the big, thick white ones and the skinny, stunted black ones. Gently I pressed the very last key, and it made a sharp, hollow sound, less like music than like something clattering to the floor. Scarcely had the note stopped echoing through the room before I had returned the lid to its place and quickly stepped away.

  Not long after that, I heard Madame play for the first time. Although I had no true means for comparison, I knew I had never heard anything so beautiful. I rarely had a chance to actually watch her, but whenever she played the sound resonated throughout the house, and I stopped whatever I was doing to listen. Sometimes, when it was just the two of us alone together and I knew I would not be seen, I stood in the corridor where, at just the right angle, a mirror allowed a view of her sitting at the bench, her slender fingers bouncing along the keys. Even during the most complex movements, Mme Marcus appeared at peace, the music serving only to emphasize the silence surrounding her.