In truth, after the misery of the last months, the marriage of these two exceptional beings is like a pact with hope and beauty that Jacmel will sign. All the love stories of the past, radiantly reanimated, will mingle freely in the immense blue skies of this wedding!
There was less of an epic tone and less lyricism in the announcement my family received:
Mr. and Mrs. André Siloé and Mr. and Mrs. Priam Danoze have the honor of announcing the marriage of their children Miss Hadriana Siloé and Mr. Hector Danoze. They graciously invite you to attend (or to join us in spirit for) the wedding Mass, which will take place on Saturday, January 29, 1938, at six in the evening, at the Saint Philippe and Saint Jacques Church. Father Yan Naélo will officiate. After the religious ceremony, Mrs. André Siloé and Mrs. Priam Danoze will host a reception at the Siloé manor, prior to the public festivities set to take place for the duration of the evening on Toussaint Louverture Square.
2
The wedding preparations made people forget about the hairdresser’s sinister predictions. Scylla himself stopped talking about his oversexed protagonist and offered up his impressive talents to the committee of prominent citizens who were working twelve hours a day at city hall. Accompanied by a group of women, he feverishly ran up and down Seafront Street to gather monetary contributions from local businesses. In less than a week, the collection amounted to three times what the municipality usually managed to amass for celebrations of the patron saints, Philippe and Jacques.
The couple had registered at Nassaut’s Little Gallery. Sébastien Nassaut, the owner, got things started by offering the betrothed a lavish Delft porcelain coffee set. Hundreds of other gifts were quickly purchased. There were so many presents that Scylla proposed loading them all into a small van, so that the whole community might bear witness to “the success of the future couple—the two H’s of happiness (Hadriana and Hector).” He had heard about this custom from a traveler who had returned from a trip to Japan. Several days in a row, in the late morning or afternoon, Sébastien Nassaut used a bullhorn to invite people around town to applaud the basket of dreams that had been hitched to the festively beribboned vehicle. The traveling exhibition of gifts served as a kickoff to the night of feasting and extravagance everyone was awaiting.
Other ideas poured into the prefecture. Captain Gédéon Armantus, the chief of police, proposed a torchlight procession to open the festivities—leaving from the barracks on Burnt Widows Lane and making its way to the central square. Titus Paradou, official guide for the Brotherhood of the Magic Balls, let it be known that musicians and dancers from his famous carnival band would dispel any and all anxieties with their abundant exuberance and humor. Other carnival bands, among the most renowned in the region—like Madame Lil’ Carême’s Charles-Oscars, the Raras of Cochon-Gras, Pedro Curaçao’s Bâtonnisses, the Ajax brothers’ Tressés-Rubans, and the land surveyor Mathurin Lys’s Mathurins—all promised to “offer this carnival of the century an incomparable hymn to the beauty of life and the freedom of love.”
There were plans for the sacrifice of twenty-eight bulls, sixteen goats, thirty-three pigs, and an indeterminate number of poultry, to be served with a hundred bunches of plantains, sacks of rice and red beans, and dozens of kilos of sweet potatoes. They had also prepared thousands of codfish fritters, pastries, and various candies flavored with coconut, ginger, and every other spice the archipelago had to offer. As for the drinks, there would be barrels of white rum, canisters and demijohns of tafia, rivers of Barbancourt, Veuve Cliquot, and French wines and liquors galore. Népomucène Homaire, an attorney in addition to his work at the newspaper, announced in the Southwest Gazette that he would be trying out an exceptionally strong punch he had made himself: no fewer than 365 different herbs had gone into the preparation. His great-grandfather Télamon Homaire had invented it during the hurricane of 1887, “to raise the spirits of all the male disaster victims who were left with their balls caught in a net.”
All the artisans of Jacmel (dressmakers, tinsmiths, shoemakers, basket weavers, coppersmiths) put their usual tasks on the back burner and devoted themselves to making masks and costumes for the carnival. City hall was stocked full with confetti and ribbons, boxes of streamers, pennants, garlands, and Venetian lanterns, for decorating the square. As for the mysterious unlabeled cardboard boxes that three firemen were seen unloading from a police truck, we assumed they contained fireworks and Bengal sparklers.
3
Back in those days, I had a considerable advantage over Hadriana’s other suitors: my mother, a well-respected milliner in Bel-Air, had been asked to make the bridal outfit. From dawn to dusk, her scissors and her Singer sewing machine offered a fabric serenade to the many charms of the young bride-to-be. All of us in Uncle Féfé’s house floated along on an extraordinary cloud of tulle and silk, torrents of organdy and lace. As it emerged from my mother’s virtuosic fingers, the bridal gown only deepened the fascinating mysteries of the flesh it would soon envelop.
At night, my mother would leave it on a mannequin. It was swathed entirely in tulle and superbly embroidered in a traditional style. The refinement of her sewing was singularly apparent in the transparency of the sleeves and the low-cut bodice accentuated with organdy and satin. Hanging in sensuous folds at the hips, the dress also boasted a huge bow at the back with a detachable false train. The real train, a cascade of lacy flounces, stretched out infinitely. The generous skirt, made for dancing and swishing about, seemed already to conceal within it the secrets of some sort of enchanted fan. The crown was decorated with interlacing silk threads and embossed with orange blossoms and iridescent sequins.
Once everyone had gone to bed at night, I would wake up without making a sound. My heart beating furiously, I would perform a passionate ritual in my mother’s first-floor workshop. By the light of an oil lamp I brought with me, I danced with the mannequin. I caressed its curved neckline. I whispered words of tenderness to it with an intensity I myself barely understood. Fanning the flames of its power within the walls of our hearth, I sheltered it from the wind during those nights leading up to the fantastic voyage it was about to embark on with my beloved godsister.
By day, I skipped classes at school so I could watch Hadriana give herself over, body and soul, to her fittings. Though I had never paid much attention before, the familiar idea of a “fitting” began to expand like a balloon in my belly each time Hadriana, or Nana as she was often called, disrobed, without the slightest modesty, and slipped on that dress. She would pivot on her heels, arch her back, sway her hips, and square her shoulders, all with the utmost grace. The very next instant, dressed in all her bridal finery, she would hoist herself up onto a bench, bend a knee, raise an arm, thrust out her chest, and, without warning, sweep me up in a full English waltz. Perfectly following the instructions that my mother shouted through a mouth full of pins, Hadriana managed to make a celebration out of life’s most tedious events. Looking at herself in the mirror, she would give her opinion, and finish by wrinkling her nose and sticking out her tongue at the ideal of French beauty that had set my young life on fire.
4
On Saturday, January 29, the bridal party left the Siloé manor at six in the evening. There were just over three hundred yards between there and the church. Arranged on either side of the church, a receiving line had been gathering since the late afternoon. A great clamoring of applause welcomed Hadriana as she moved forward on her father’s arm.
“Long live the bride! Bravo, Nana!”
Flowers, confetti, streamers, and cries of admiration—“That’s one hell of a beautiful girl!”—burst forth from everywhere at once. She approached the east side of the square—slender, sensual, and fluid in her white veils. Gloved to the elbows, she held a lace purse in one hand and a bouquet of assorted flowers in the other. Everything about her glowed, as if attempting to outshine the sun as it set over the bay. Entire families held their breath, feeling as if they were witnessing the most important sight of their lives. Se
veral young girls I knew broke down weeping. One of them, my cousin Alina Oriol, swore to me thirty years later that the image that had been burned deepest into her memory was that of Hadriana as she took those first steps away from her home . . .
“I remember bursting into tears,” she said.
“A sinister premonition?”
“Not at all. It was a much more complex emotion: to my eyes, her beauty was—for just a few moments—still linked to childhood dreams, to burning virginity, to amazing menstrual rhythms, to the gentle paternal hearth, to that freshness that marriage permanently takes from us women. More than any other young girl in Jacmel, Nana Siloé had a paradise to bury.”
There on the church square, Hector Danoze, on my mother’s arm, joined the procession as it moved solemnly through the nave toward the altar. The organs made the entire gaily decorated temple, filled to capacity, vibrate with the sparkling of thousands of candles.
The ceremony began under the direction of Father Naélo and two deacons, with the Saint Rose of Lima choir adding to the contagious excitement spreading throughout the crowd of attendees. Most of the faithful had gotten down on their knees to follow the service, assuming a posture of contemplation that reminded me of the intensity of Holy Week services. Awash in this radiant silence, we all sat or kneeled, anxiously poised to hear the wedding vows.
“Hector Danoze,” said Father Naélo, “do you take Hadriana Siloé, present here before us, to be your lawfully wedded wife, according to the customs of our Holy Mother, the Church?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Hadriana Siloé, do you take Hector Danoze, present here before us, to be your lawfully wedded husband, according to the customs of our Holy Mother, the Church?”
Hadriana let out a staggering “Yes” of distress and then immediately fell down at the feet of the priest. Dr. Sorapal rushed toward her. He held her wrist for what seemed like an eternity before crying out: “Hadriana Siloé is dead!”
Forty years later, the doctor’s words still make me shudder. Hector Danoze and several others passed out immediately. People shouted questions in Creole with great cries of dismay. Klariklé Philisbourg threw herself on the ground, tearing at her bridesmaid’s dress. Mélissa Kraft, Olga Ximilien, Mimi Moravia, and Vanessa Lauture did the same. Father Naélo simply could not manage to calm them down. As the screams and general hysteria continued to drown out his voice, he climbed up the stairs of the pulpit.
“Silence, my dear brothers and sisters. Quiet down, I beg you. Hadriana Siloé has been taken from us at the very moment of her wedding. This scandal has occurred right here in her Father’s house! Rather than give yourselves over to blasphemy, let us ask that He bestow His grace and mercy on the daughter He has struck down before us!”
“Grace and mercy!” cried hundreds of voices.
5
Maître Homaire lifted Hadriana from the altar’s steps where she was laid out and took her gently in his arms. Using all his strength, he parted the agitated crowd like a breakwater. At the exit to the church, those who had not been able to find a place inside greeted them with cries of joy, thinking that this was some kind of impromptu add-on to the ceremony. Amidst the cheering of the crowd and the ringing of the bells, he continued on toward the Siloé home, followed by a stampede of people. Night had fallen. On the poorly lit edges of the square, just about a hundred yards from his destination, yet another misunderstanding awaited us.
“It’s the newlyweds! Long live the newlyweds!”
With these cries, Titus Paradou’s band of drummers and musicians announced the beginning of the carnival of 1938 with a spirited dance of the rabordaille. Straightaway, a group of masked young men and women also began dancing in a row, about two lengths ahead of the lawyer and the dead girl. Holding one another by the waist and twisting their hips, they transformed the deflated bridal party into a delirious procession of joy leading all the way up to the doors of the manor.
Maître Homaire placed the bride’s body on a white sheet spread out on the floor of the sitting room. From that moment on, there began a pitiless battle between the two belief systems that have long gone head-to-head in the Haitian imagination: Christianity and Vodou. Hadriana’s parents soon began to lose control of the wake. The stately manor that had long presided high above the bay was transformed—in the blink of an eye—into a fantastical beehive: swarms of guests, most of them total strangers to the Siloés, freely began fussing over their deceased daughter. Without even asking their opinion, in the midst of the tears and lamentations, people rolled up the Persian rugs, moved the period furniture and the porcelain vases, covered the mirrors and the glass on the bronze clock with some white powdery substance, and turned over the seat cushions of the Louis XIV armchairs and sofa. Someone even had the idea to turn upside down a gorgeous English tea table inlaid with mosaic.
Once these preparations had been fully executed, one of the Siloés’ neighbors, Madame Brévica Losange, reputed to be something of a mambo, suggested to the sobbing bridesmaids that they turn their panties and bras inside out and that they put their blouses and skirts on backward. She then declared loudly that Hadriana had not died of natural causes. And it certainly would not take Sherlock Holmes’s talents to find the trail that would lead straight to the evildoer. This whole affair had Balthazar Granchiré’s signature on it! With that, framed by the gilded paneling of the sitting room, she briefly recounted the same troubling facts that had been revealed to us in the square two months earlier by Scylla Syllabaire.
6
Were the Siloés actually expected to believe what they were hearing? In June of 1914, Hadriana’s father had taken the entrance exam for École Polytechnique in Paris. Admitted with honors, he had been immediately snatched up by the Great War. At the end of this global battle, having taken up his studies again with equal success, André Siloé was all set to become a railroad engineer. But the sudden death of an uncle in Jacmel meant an obligation to take over the tobacco plant, which was the pride of the entire town. In March 1920, just a few days before leaving France, he married Denise Piroteau, an eighteen-year-old girl from Bordeaux, fresh out of the Saint Jeanne d’Arc Institute. She had had to give up the masters in classical literature she had begun at the Sorbonne in order to follow her husband to the Caribbean. Three years after Hadriana’s death, André Siloé went off to Africa to join General de Gaulle’s troops. Wounded at Bir Hakeim, he received a high-level decoration from General Kœnig himself. Colonel Siloé ultimately let himself die of sorrow in a hospital in Algiers, never having gotten over the loss of his beloved daughter. I met his widow several years later in the apartment she lived in on Raynouard Street in Paris. That day, I tried to jog her memory, hoping to learn what she and her husband had felt during those hours leading up to Hadriana’s wake.
They had been deeply shocked to hear their neighbor cite Nana’s name in some scandalous story about a butterfly that preyed on young girls. Nevertheless, she and her husband had been too overcome with grief to react. Deep in their hearts, they had felt that this type of darkly salacious tale the woman had infused with so much fantasy was no doubt just part of the fictionalized lore that surrounded any Haitian funeral. At the end of the day, it was all just a question of the mysteries of death—our common fate. People from every background could certainly relate. She and André had long had that attitude—well before the tragedy that destroyed their happy home. As far as matters related to Vodou were concerned, they were far less prejudiced than the members of the Jacmelian elite they rubbed elbows with at the Excelsior Club. In this, they were not unlike the Danish exporter Henrik Radsen, an immensely curious individual who, following the path laid out by Jean Price-Mars, had initiated an invaluable research project on Haiti’s national religion. Although very much practicing Catholics, she and André had found it perfectly natural that Hadriana’s childhood be enriched by the incredible stories her black servants whispered to her as they performed their daily tasks or behind the closed doors of her bedroom. On
the very night of her death, the Jacmelians who had loved and admired Hadriana like some kind of fairy princess integrated her into the vast repertoire of the country’s folk imagination, in an utterly fantastic tale . . .
In fact, the state of total despondency into which the Siloés had both fallen immediately afterward kept them from ever being fully aware of the fierce battle over their child’s body that was taking place under their own roof. At the time of this legendary wake, they looked like any old “white” couple, eternally dejected, condemned like any one of us to wander aimlessly among the sand dunes that the mysteries of Vodou would swirl furiously around the spellbinding enigma that was Hadriana Siloé’s death.
7
That same night, so as to limit the damage as much as possible, my mother and a few others close to the Siloés spent their time trying to find some measure of compromise, however fragile, between the rites of Catholicism and those of Vodou, those two rivals fighting bitterly over the young girl’s body and soul. But first, what was to be done about the crowd of merrymakers who had not stopped singing and dancing beneath the windows of the manor? Should they be permitted to encroach upon the solemnity of a Christian burial with the atmosphere of Caribbean revelry? For weeks, all anyone had been able to talk about was this one night of feasting and madness. Could they possibly be satisfied with a proper wake, a somber affair conducted “in the manner of the French-from-France?” And then, also, should the bride’s body be displayed? In the Siloés’ sitting room, in the communal space of the town hall, or in the prefecture?
Hadriana in All My Dreams Page 3