The Boiling Season

by Christopher Hebert

  Then came the weapons. At some point each day, one of the instructors brought out to the tennis courts a crate of old guns, which the boys practiced taking apart and reassembling and running around pointing at one another. In lieu of bullets, they made explosive gurgling sounds with their throats as they dodged behind the straw dummies, taking improbable shots. Almost as much as they loved shooting did they enjoy dying, staggering about like drunks, watching imaginary pools of blood trickle through fingers splayed across their chests. Sometimes, after the formal lessons were over, I saw boys practicing their death pirouettes and crumbling to the ground, while others stood off to the side offering tips and critiques.

  I never saw the boys fire actual ammunition. I assumed there was none to spare. For target practice they threw rocks. But so easy did they find it to hit the dummies while standing still—even from great distances—that they preferred to throw while weaving and scrambling in unpredictable squibbles; firing sidearm while in midair; diving and tumbling and hurling from their knees. Even so, they rarely missed.

  To counter these discouraging sights I found myself more and more often taking walks leading past the casino, where at certain hours I knew the younger children would be outside playing, their teacher reading quietly on the steps. I envied her ability to find peace under circumstances such as these. And I wondered where she had acquired the books. Madame’s library, perhaps. If so, was it possible she could read English? I knew without a doubt that she and I were the only two people among the hundreds here who had finished school—perhaps we were the only ones to have attended at all. What could someone with her education and disposition have in common with these people? None of these men could mean anything to her. She must find them repellent. Like me, she had probably spent her whole life trying to get away from them. And yet here we were, surrounded.

  But an opportunity to talk to the schoolteacher and ask about her books never arose. Over the course of several weeks I learned little more about her than her name: Mlle Trouvé, which the children sometimes sang out in affection: Mademoiselle Trouvé, Mademoiselle Trouvé, she sits and reads while the children play.

  On Sundays I saw Mlle Trouvé at the pavilion, where a man in a makeshift collar—fashioned, it seemed, from a dinner napkin—led morning services. The pavilion was too small for even a fraction of Dragon Guy’s followers, so most of them made do with a seat on the grass. Not all of them came. Still, on no other occasion could I see so many of them in one place—usually well over two hundred. There seemed to be more every week.

  I had a favorite spot at the base of a shady tree on the periphery, which the grizzled priest—whose shapeless collar gave him more than a hint of menace—had no trouble reaching with his voice.

  The benches inside the pavilion were reserved for Dragon Guy and his inner circle, including his younger brother and Black Max. Although I had come to feel a certain fascination for the services, what had first brought me to them was a realization that it might be my only chance to see Hector.

  Despite everything that had happened in the almost two and a half months since Dragon Guy had appeared here, I still could not bring myself to blame Hector. Perhaps he had played some part in deceiving me. Perhaps he had been aiding his brother all along. Perhaps he had even been the one to show Dragon Guy the hole in the wall. Perhaps he had done even more than this.

  Whatever he had done, he had done out of desperation, and not because deception was the direction toward which his heart inclined. I could believe he had duped me, but I knew better than to imagine his devotion to the estate had ever been anything less than sincere. And that was why I continued to believe that if I could just get rid of Dragon Guy, we would be able to recover the things we had lost.

  Each Sunday, from my spot under the tree, I could see the boy sitting beside his older brother. It was remarkable how much he seemed to have aged, all the while wearing the same tattered jersey and flimsy sneakers. The hardest thing of all was seeing the sadness that seemed to overtake him the moment he sat down. It was not just the solemnity of the service. In fact, I had never seen a congregation more prone to outbursts, weeping and laughing, shouting and clapping. But each week Hector sat perfectly still and perfectly silent, sapped of all his former energy. I could not help wondering, as I watched him stare abstractly off toward the trees, if he was sitting there wishing he could take it all back and return to the way it was.

  At moments like these it was hard not to think of what it must have been like for my father when I was Hector’s age. Those hours he spent in church watching me drift through services, and how much of the time that he would have liked to devote to worshipping he instead had to spend on thinking of ways to keep from losing me. Now here I was in his role, and Hector was in mine. And yet although I had countless reasons to have given up on Hector, to have stopped caring, to have turned against him, I never did. Was it possible that the same was true of my father—that he had continued to love me, even through his disappointment?

  Hector was not the only one who had trouble staying attuned to the priest’s sermons. His brother was even worse, hopelessly fidgety and impatient. In truth, it always surprised me that Dragon Guy bothered to come at all. Aside from his jewelry, there seemed to be nothing even remotely pious about him. Everything about his restless manner suggested he was here out of some sort of obligation. Perhaps even powerful generals needed to keep up appearances.

  On Dragon Guy’s other side sat his girlfriend, René-Thérèse, who discreetly touched his arm whenever she saw his attention straying. In those moments she reminded me of Mme Marcus, and how at any social occasion she could be found standing at the Senator’s elbow, feeding him the names of every minister’s wife and the ages of every one of her children. She had done as much as anyone to make him the man he became. I wondered if the same could be said of René-Thérèse.

  At every service Mlle Trouvé sat in the grass, accompanied by several older women. They could have been relations, but I thought it just as likely that they were merely part of the group of women who lived together in the former maids’ quarters near the laundry. By chance I had seen Mlle Trouvé coming and going from there on several occasions. To my dismay, among the women she sat with was the limping old lady from the dining room, whose eye I had to be careful never to catch. But there was little chance of that, given the rapt attention she paid the priest.

  The women’s gazes never wandered; their voices never faded during the hymns. Although I was not myself devout, I found their devotion comforting. It suggested—or so I hoped—that however anarchic things seemed, perhaps some higher principle continued to circulate among the baser currencies.

  Much as his appearance suggested, the warrior priest delivered fierce, fiery sermons. His was a scripture I remembered from my childhood, full of bombast about the poor, oppressed masses, and I often thought how much my father would have liked this man, who wielded holiness like a club.

  Before this crowd of misfit soldiers, Dragon Guy’s priest spoke of hope, of a new day, of God’s grace for those of his creatures who followed the path of righteousness—the latter uttered without any trace of irony. Since their arrival it was surely the least trodden path in all of Habitation Louvois.

  I was aware that the priest was not their only spiritual guide, nor likely the most popular. From men in the dining room I learned of villas where lazy-eyed seers stinking of rancid herbs read cards by candlelight, hoisting bowls of chicken blood and communing with the dead. Somewhere deep in the preserve they had even built a peristyle, providing a proper place to enact their delirious worship. On nights when the fighting with President Duphay’s army was less intense and some of Dragon Guy’s followers were able to stay within the walls of the estate, the drums never ceased, and it was all too easy to imagine them tripping over each other as they staggered around in various states of possession, recalling scenes from my childhood of some of our neighbors’ more grotesque nocturnal gatherings. There was no way to live on the island w
ithout encountering it, but that did not make hosting it in my own home any more bearable.

  * * *

  Upon taking over the manor house and the guesthouse and the outbuildings, Dragon Guy had also decided it was time to move his people into the two remaining groups of vacant villas—a wide berth being yet another of the privileges I had surrendered. These new additions quickly came to take on the feel of a marketplace. There were barbers and seamstresses and basket makers and rum distillers and knife sharpeners. Bartering was the chief form of payment, but there also seemed to be a great deal they got for free. As in the dining room, where every man was allotted his bowl of slop, there was a villa where one went each day to receive one’s quota of charcoal, of which there appeared to be a limitless supply—thanks to the preserve’s endless bounty.

  So greatly had they expanded the cutting and burning of Madame’s trees that virtually the entire forest now wore a permanent shroud of smoke—it seeped up through the turf as though the earth itself were raging in fire. During daylight hours I could barely see Cité Verd from my balcony. I could scarcely see the sky. Watching the smoke was like witnessing my mother’s last breaths. The preserve was slipping away, and I could do nothing to save it.

  Whatever charcoal they did not use themselves they stuffed into sacks and threw onto their shoulders to carry to the market. They treated the trees like a pestilence, something to be eradicated at any cost. Never mind that the trees were just about the only thing keeping them alive. All they could see was what the trees bought them in exchange, guns above all else.

  I could only assume it was also the trees that bought their other supplies, including rice from the coast and coffee from the mountains. The rest of their food they grew here. Before becoming slum dwellers, most of them—like virtually everyone in Cité Verd—had been farmers in the countryside, and the women had been able to turn almost every available patch of ground into garden. I doubted they had ever seen such fertile soil. Swaths of the immense lawns along the drive were now barren of grass, seeded instead with yams and onions and eggplants. The water came free, too, flowing endlessly from the springs. They had discovered ones even I never knew about. Someone had gotten the water flowing again in almost all of the villas, the outbuildings, and the casino.

  Now it was their turn to grow accustomed to luxuries.

  And yet, despite all of this, it was clear the estate was nearing collapse. By now there must have been nearly three times as many people living here as there had ever been, even at the hotel’s peak. Three, four hundred? It was hard to guess. I could measure their numbers only by the devastation they wrought. I wished my father could see what really happened when walls and gates came down and everyone was let in. Was this his utopian dream? Everywhere I looked I saw peeling paint and crumbling walls. Among the outbuildings there were no more paths; the constant trampling of the grass had left nothing but dirt. Everything of value in the manor house—the vases and paintings; all the silver and crystal; even the chandelier—every bit of it had disappeared. Whatever was left that they had no use for—and that could not be sold or burned—they dumped in piles out near the stables, as if its mere presence offended their senses. Their own garbage, however, bothered them not in the least. They left it wherever it happened to fall, sowing fields and pastures of trash.

  I often asked myself what reason there was for continuing to stay. What good could I possibly do? Despite the priest’s call for faith and hope, I had almost none. And yet, I could not bring myself to leave. Even if I had somewhere to go, I could not abandon a place I had sworn to protect.

  Nor could I abandon Hector.

  It was during one of my daily walks following the midday meal that I encountered Mlle Trouvé on one of the lower paths among the villas. I had just come down the stone stairs beside the guesthouse as she was heading toward them. Mlle Trouvé had a way when she walked of drawing her shoulders and elbows in toward her body, as if trying to make herself smaller and more difficult to see. I wondered where she was coming from, alone and unhurried. As I watched her shrink toward me, a picture came into my head, so vivid it was as if I had been there to see it myself: Mlle Trouvé reading quietly by herself on the bench in the preserve that Madame and I had for so long shared.

  A few steps before we met, I stopped. Against her chest she held a small brown book. I knew then that what I had imagined must be true.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I said.

  She stopped suddenly, as if surprised by the sound of my voice. I realized then that prior to this we had never actually spoken. Did she have no idea who I was?

  “The preserve,” I added. “It’s my favorite place in the entire estate.”

  She glanced at the steps rising before her and then hesitantly back at me. “Is it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It always has been. It was—is—Madame’s as well.”

  Mlle Trouvé smiled quickly. “I see. Well”—and she placed her foot on the bottom stair—“good-bye.”

  “Do you have one?” I asked.

  She paused to look over her shoulder.

  “A favorite place in the estate?”

  Shuffling her small feet on the narrow stone, she turned around to face me. Her tiny mouth twisted nervously. “I couldn’t say.” With a nod she started back up the steps.

  “Perhaps I could show you.” I recalled the tours Madame had given to her rich and glamorous guests when the hotel first opened, full of shimmer and sparkle. Why should Mlle Trouvé not be afforded the same opportunity? For someone like her would it not be all the more rewarding? Who could better appreciate the beauty of what we had made than someone who had spent her life in a place such as Cité Verd? As had been the case with my mother, raising a family in our squalid neighborhood. As had been the case with me. We were drawn to the things we did not have, things that seemed out of reach, that we knew would make our lives better than they were.

  In my tour for Mlle Trouvé, there would be no room for discotheques and ballrooms; this would be a tour of the places that went unmentioned in the travel brochures—the quiet, peaceful spaces where one could escape from the world and find true tranquillity. Where one could be immersed in a pure sort of beauty utterly untouched by the clamor and desolation all around us.

  “Another time,” she offered from the top of the steps.

  “Of course.” I took them two at a time after her. “When?”

  By the time I made it to the top, she was far across the lawn.

  That night at dinner I found an empty chair at a table with the smiling young man and his skinny friend. Their crude companions from previous meals were thankfully nowhere in sight.

  The smiley one pointed at my bowl and gave me a thumbs-up. “How have you been?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Okay.” There was something about him I found oddly appealing. Perhaps it was simply his ability, rare among this group, to be friendly without forgetting our differences.

  The skinny one was silent and sullen, and I wondered if things had not been going well with his laundress.

  “My name is Marc.” The smiling man pointed to his skinny friend. “This is Louis.”

  Louis nodded wanly.

  “Don’t mind him,” Marc said. “He is heartsick.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Marc smiled. “It’s the sort of pain that gives a man pleasure.”

  “Is it the woman?” I said. “Lulu?”

  Marc slapped his knee in delight. “You remember her name! Yes, Lulu is not making it easy for him. I’ve tried to tell him the difficulties he experiences now will make it all the much sweeter when it does happen.”

  “Does she not like him?”

  “Oh, you know women. They are moved by winds we never feel. She loves him—she just doesn’t know it yet.”

  “He looks unwell,” I said. Louis had folded his arms into a pillow, upon which his head now lay. He seemed to be moaning. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about her anymore.”

  �
��Oh, no no no,” Marc said. “The worst punishment of all would be if he could no longer hear her name.”

  Across the dining room I saw the old woman with the cart making her way toward us. I was uncertain whether she had seen me come in, but somehow she always seemed to know who had been served and who had not. It occurred to me that Mona would like her. The two could have been sisters, dour and humorless.

  When she arrived at the table, the woman showed no sign of remembering me, filling my bowl with the same mechanical gesture she used with everyone else.

  “Thank you very much,” I said.

  She glanced at me suspiciously, as if I might have just picked her pocket.

  Marc elbowed me gently, wearing a devilish grin. “I keep telling Dragon Guy we should take her out of the kitchen and put her on the front line. President Duphay would surrender just at the sight of her.”

  “Do you know Dragon Guy?”

  Marc shrugged guiltily, as if I had caught him in a lie. “I was only joking. In any case, I shouldn’t say such things about Claire. She’s a widow, you know. Her husband was killed in the fighting.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “That’s the way it is. We’re all missing something. We seem to attract misfortune.”

  “You too?” I said, surprised by how easily he had drawn me in.

  “I have a wife and daughter. My little Evelyn is six years old. They live in the States now, but I’ll be joining them soon, God willing.”

  “Have they been gone long?”

  “Two years. Almost three. I prefer not to count.” He was still smiling, but for the first time I noticed the lines on his face. “It already feels long enough without knowing the number.”

  “It must be difficult, living apart.”

  “It is difficult. It would be one thing if we were living apart on the island. But instead she’s living in a completely different place. What’s it like there? I have no idea. I can’t picture it. I see their faces, but what are they doing? Where do they live? All I can imagine is our house in Cité Verd, but I know it’s nothing like that.”