The Boiling Season

by Christopher Hebert

  “Why would he?” I said almost breathlessly.

  “I told you already. He was one of them.” It was the first time Paul had shown any impatience.

  I pushed back my chair and started to get up. “This whole thing is impossible.”

  Paul shrugged. “You can believe what you want.”

  But I was angry now, and I had a great deal more to say. “What does any of this have to do with why I’m here? You invite me here under the pretext of wanting to help, and instead you hand me something I cannot possibly believe. I know my father,” I said, stabbing my finger into the air between us. “I know he would never have been involved in anything like this. He is literally the last person in the world who would ever be involved in this.”

  “Did it ever occur to you,” Paul said, a newly sharpened edge to his voice, “that there are things about your father that you don’t know? Did it ever occur to you that what you saw was only part of it? Did it never occur to you to wonder what happened before you came along? Did you never wonder what happened to make him so bitter?”

  “I know what made him so bitter,” I said. “He lost his land. My mother died of malaria.”

  “Why is it so hard to accept that your father might have believed in something? For someone who supposedly refused to discuss politics, he had a lot of strong opinions. Especially when it came to rich people. Do you really think there was nothing in the world he wanted to change? Is it really that crazy, wanting to stand up for yourself?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is when you’re doomed to fail.”

  “Fine.” Paul waved his hands, signaling defeat. “Okay.” He shrugged resignedly. “All I can do is tell you. What you do with the information is your business.”

  “What I cannot fathom,” I said, “is why you’re so willing to accept it. Does it not bother you at all to think of your father being involved in something like this? What you’ve become is exactly what they would have despised.”

  He leaned over the desk until I could smell his sweet breath. He gave me a long moment in which to savor it. “That’s true,” he finally said, “but success like mine doesn’t come without strings. I said a long time ago when we were kids that I would never be anyone’s servant, and I’ve held to that. But I’m not so vain or stupid that I’ve forgotten that all of us are here not by the grace of God but because someone with more money and power than us has decided to let us. That’s as true of me as it is of you. I owe my business and my fortune to monsters like Mailodet and Duphay. I’ve benefited from them as much as anyone and more than most. That’s because, unlike your senator, I’ve never given them any reason to question my loyalty.”

  At the mention of Senator Marcus, a shudder coursed through me, and I felt my chest tighten. I could not bring myself to speak.

  “But that doesn’t mean I have to like them,” Paul said. “And in fact I would like nothing more than to see M. Duphay dragged out into the street and shot. I would volunteer myself to pull the trigger. So to answer your question, I mostly believe my father was a fool, and the people he got mixed up with were scum, but it pleases me to think there might also have been some part of him that was willing to put a bullet in a tyrant’s brain.”

  I slumped back into my seat. “You still haven’t told me where you got this information. What makes you so sure of it?”

  Paul folded his arms across his chest, and for the first time he looked at me not as if I were an old friend but as if I were a disagreeable chore he hoped would soon be over.

  “Look around you,” Paul said. “We’re not children anymore. You wanted to know what this has to do with your situation? It has everything to do with your situation. I called you here because you need my help. So that’s what I’m offering you.”

  “How is this supposed to help?”

  “That’s up to you.” Paul leaned back in his chair, recollecting his thoughts. It was clear he would not let me go until he had said precisely everything, and precisely to his satisfaction.

  “My father got three years,” he said, signaling that his story was not yet over. “Most of the others did too, including Clement.”

  “And that’s why your mother said he disappeared,” I said, supplying the ending for him.

  Paul gave no indication of having heard me. He seemed intent on finishing without me. “Clement died in prison. Most people say he was murdered on orders from the president. The newspapers didn’t report it, of course. They just said he died of ‘unknown causes.’ ” Paul leaned forward again, letting his elbows land solidly on the desk. “My father wasn’t killed. He got sick. It was probably pneumonia. Of course, it was a forced-labor prison and a cesspool. So basically they killed him, too. Only no one had to go to the trouble of actually stabbing him.”

  Paul was silent then, and I was too. And I realized, looking into his eyes, that he felt he had already said as much and more than was required of him. I could see there, too, a catalog of the innumerable ways I had failed him over the years, starting with when we were children, but most of all when we were older and I could have done better. My crimes were greater than just having missed his wedding. Years ago in the hotel restaurant I had been ashamed and done everything I could to distance myself from him. How many times had I asked for his help? And when had I ever given him anything in return?

  “Why did no one ever say anything? Why did my father and your mother not tell us the truth?”

  Paul’s expression was not unlike the ones I had seen reproduced on my father and M. Guinee’s saints. This was all he had wanted. The only thing he had ever asked of me was that I trust him.

  “What else were they going to do?” he said. “However much he’d bought into it before, your father had no choice. After the arrests there was a decree. Everyone was paranoid about communism. They made it illegal. You could get sent to prison just for talking about it, even in your own home.”

  Suddenly it seemed Paul’s air conditioning had fallen to some arctic setting. The cold swirled along my spine, and just then I felt my thoughts drifting elsewhere, exiting the room and the frigid house, speeding down the twisty hill as quickly as I had gone up, crashing amid a pile of dominoes on the table outside my father’s shop on the day he died. He was a one-man revolution, René had said. But who was he talking about? Paul’s father or mine?

  Or maybe it had been someone else entirely. Where did it end? If what Paul had told me was true, if this really was my father, someone I thought I knew, someone I thought I had understood, where did that leave me?

  And that was the moment I began to laugh. I tried to stop, but that only made it worse. I could not help myself. I shook my head and then I laughed some more. I laughed not because there was a single thing about this that was funny but because at that moment I was remembering all the time I had spent alone at the estate, thinking about that figure from our ancient history, General Louvois. And of course there was nothing funny about General Louvois either, nor about his legions of dead, nor the death he had inflicted upon us. But really it was General Louvois’s young wife and even more specifically his infant son that caused me to laugh, although they were not the least bit funny either. I was laughing because laughing was what I had always imagined them doing, the ghosts and descendants of everyone who had arrived upon our shores as conquerors and left in defeat, who spent the rest of their lives and centuries watching us crumble and destroy ourselves while they sat in warm splendor in their garden gazebos. And I was laughing to think of the shame with which I had often imagined the farces and comedies their writers must have composed, their actors on stage in blackface, their audiences rolling in the aisles. I laughed now to think of the countless times I had asked myself, how could all of this not serve as proof to them of how right they had been in their efforts to subdue us? See, I had imagined them chuckling, do you see what barbarians they are?

  And the least funny part of all, I realized now, was that they were not laughing. They never had been. Not once. Mme Louvois and her son, sittin
g in their garden gazebo, had not thought of us at all. For them, we ceased to exist the moment their ships passed over the horizon. They had their own struggles, their own changing world to be concerned with.

  No, the reason I was laughing, the reason it was all so excruciatingly unfunny, was that I understood now that all along the only one who had been laughing was me.

  My determination to escape the desolate place I was from had itself followed the path General Louvois had laid out for us. I had thought I was turning my head and refusing to bear witness, but all along I had been laughing, while everyone else around me, even my father, had continued fighting. Because it was not true that by defeating General Louvois we had vanquished our enemy. We had vanquished merely one of its manifestations. The interminable upheaval that had remained with us ever since was not a confirmation of our savage natures, it was in fact a badge of our resolve never to succumb, even in those instances when we were our own oppressors.

  “But the main reason I called you here today, Alexandre,” Paul said, drawing me back from some distant place, “is that I thought you should know President Duphay is sending his army to you. It will be hours, not days. And I’m telling you this because I consider you a friend, but more than that I’m telling you out of loyalty for our fathers. And now you know why. Because after my father died, it was your father who supported us. My whole childhood, and he never asked for anything in return. Without him we would have starved. And this is what I owe him. That is why you’re here.”

  “Is there no way to stop it?”

  Paul shrugged, unburdened now of his responsibility. “They’re coming with everything they have. One way or another, they’re going to bring this to an end.”

  Paul leaned back, and the soft leather of the seat bottom shushed beneath his shifting weight. “I already bought you as much time as I could.”

  I sank back into my chair, feeling that heaviness too.

  From that position, the slightest bit removed, I noticed for the first time how clean Paul’s desk was. It was immaculate. So shiny was the surface that it was as if nothing had ever touched it, as if it were impervious to any of the violence of the material world.

  It was not as if I had not seen this coming. But only now did I understand that Hector had seen it too—he had seen it right from the start. And not only had he known, he had accepted it. Everyone had accepted it, everyone but me. I alone had resisted, thinking there might be some other way out.

  For Hector, it had all been inevitable. That his brother would be forced to begin the war. That he, a mere child, would have to see it through. I understood that now. He was willing to die for the very people I had spent my life trying to escape. And what was true of Hector had been true of Senator Marcus, just as it had been true of the slaves who defeated General Louvois, just as it had been true of our fathers. In the end, all that was left were the battles one chose and the consequences one accepted. Apparently Mlle Trouvé understood that too, and she was prepared to take her stand, children in tow.

  “So what’s it going to be?” Paul said, reaching for the phone. “Do you still want that visa?”

  How strange, I thought, taking it all in one last time, that Paul’s office would turn out to be so much like M. Rossignol’s. Tidiness was one of the last things I would ever have expected Paul and Senator Marcus’s old friend to have in common. But perhaps that was how it was with men who had survived for so long embroiled in chaos. Their prize was a certain clarity. But what one did with the clarity remained the thing that mattered most. And as I gazed upon the finish of Paul’s desk, seemingly free of even fingerprints, I was reminded of M. Rossignol’s last words to me, and I hoped somehow that he would learn how wrong he had been.

  Perhaps this so-called war was inevitable, and perhaps certain sacrifices were necessary, but I felt equally sure that there were some things that could be saved.

  “Do you have a piece of paper?” I asked Paul.

  As he slid open one of his desk drawers, I reached over and from a shiny brass stand at the top of the blotter I removed a pen.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  In the light flooding through the louvers, I could see a bit of shine on the knees and cuffs of my suit. I had managed to get rid of the dirt and soot. The first time I wore the suit, Senator Marcus’s maid had shown me how a dab of vinegar could return softness to wool, and ever since I had made sure to keep a small bottle in my wardrobe. I laid the pieces out on the bed, straightening the arms and legs and smoothing out the flaps over the pockets. Despite its age, there were no tears or holes. It had been handmade by the Senator’s favorite tailor, and the stitching still held. The lint did not come off as easily as it once had, but when I pulled on the pants and the jacket and looked at myself in the mirror, it seemed to me the old suit had lost none of its dignity. About the cuts on my face there was little I could do.

  The benches were already mostly full when I arrived at the pavilion. Here were the men with whom I had often seen Louis dining; there the women who spent their days gossiping with Lulu at the laundry. Through the innumerable traces of displaced seams, the women’s dresses told complicated histories of former incarnations. To add luster to the sun-bleached fabric, many of them wore flowers pinned to their chests and pressed into their hair.

  Despite its peeling paint, the pavilion itself looked lovely.

  I was still looking around when I spotted Marc coming up the path with the priest at his side, struggling to fix his misshapen collar.

  “Well?” I said as they reached me. “How did it go? Did you find her?”

  “Later,” Marc said coolly. He kept going. Still at his side, the priest glanced back at me, sensing strife and eager to piece together what Marc and I were talking about. I felt equally at a loss.

  Lulu was impossible to miss, standing uncomfortably by herself near the back of the pavilion. Somehow she had gotten hold of an actual wedding dress, whiter than ivory. Where were the stains, the rips? Even the fit was perfect. For so skinny a girl a dress like this could not have been easily altered. The thin tulle sleeves supported a lattice of delicately needleworked white petals and flowers. The way Lulu’s arms were wrapped around her stomach, she appeared to be enveloped in vines. A self-conscious smile appeared on her painted lips and disappeared as Louis, ignorant of even the most simple wedding customs, led Marc and the priest over to her. Did no one here understand that bride and groom should not see each other before arriving at the altar? Not even the priest?

  Every time I tried to get closer to Marc he moved farther away, as if we were at opposite ends of the same pole. The sorrow on his face had no place at a wedding. I could only guess his search had not gone well, and I was sorry. Still, part of him must have known all along that his wife was dead. If I had used him, I had also tried to save him. And I was willing to save him still.

  Marc was not the only one keeping his distance. The men with whom I had shared so many meals walked past me as if I were invisible. Were they afraid I would recognize their voices, taunting me by the fire? I saw them, and I smiled. I called out to them by name: Hervens, Haute Pierre, Jersey Lynne, Owen-Sam, Alain, Jean-Joseph, Red Bean, Hugo. None of them dared to raise his eyes. I stood out as much as Lulu in her white dress. Perhaps more.

  No one thought I would have the courage to come.

  The priest entered the pavilion first, calling for everyone to take a seat. Marc found a spot in the back, buried in the shade. Below him in the grass I tried to catch his eye, but he kept turning away.

  Had this been one of M. Gadds’s weddings, the music would already have started. For our guests he had standing arrangements with a string quartet from the capital, two young men and two young women who had studied at the university and owned their own tuxedoes and formal dresses.

  Not until he had taken his place at the makeshift altar did the priest appear to realize what was missing. With an awkward flourish he gestured toward the bandstand, where only now did I notice a teenage boy in an unbuttoned
shirt squatting on a stump behind a tall drum. Quietly, almost accidentally, the boy’s fingers began to brush against the skin. In the middle of the drum he traced soft circles. The sound was like someone sweeping.

  There was movement at the back of the pavilion, Louis and Lulu debating their next move: whether they should go up one at a time or together and—if one at a time—who should go first. Who knows how long they would have remained there, arguing under their breath, had Claire not finally stepped in, rushing toward them from her seat in the front. The old woman took the couple’s hands and brought them together, guiding the two of them forward. Did she really know no better than this? Louis should already have been at the altar. And was there no one to give away the bride?

  I watched Claire return to her seat, and that was when I found Mlle Trouvé. Like the other women, the schoolteacher had brought out for the occasion her finest dress. It was the blue of a cloudless sky, with sleeves that only just capped her softly rounded shoulders. The neck of the dress was uncommonly high, rising partway up her throat. On another woman it would have looked coarse and inelegant, but for Mlle Trouvé the collar was a pedestal upon which to place her gentle face. I knew my mother would have approved. It was something she might have made herself.

  As Louis and Lulu took their tentative first steps down the aisle, the heads of the assembled turned to watch. And just then the peculiar brushing of the boy with the drum started to change, taking on a more familiar form. Bum ba da um da da da da da da dum. I closed my eyes, imagining the notes bowed from twin violins.

  To the slow, careful thumping of Pachelbel’s Canon, Louis and Lulu reached the altar, and when they turned around to face their friends, both of their faces were flushed.

  Suddenly I was aware of a crowd forming around me on the grass, pressing in from every side. Barefoot in jeans and T-shirts and shabby dresses, they encircled the pavilion, sliding their elbows along the rail, vying for a better view. If these were the uninvited, they seemed indifferent to the slight. Two little girls weaving among the adults crashed into my legs and ran off in laughter.