Hadriana in All My Dreams

by René Depestre

  The Great Fire, coupled with political intrigues, ultimately put an end to this splendor. These days, nostalgia is the problem. The port is sanded up, the great ochre buildings of the customshouses are closed, and all the homes stand shakily in the wake of recent hurricanes, the streets silent and empty. Children play in the gutters, a few women crouch beneath the steps of the iron market, in front of little piles of grains, dried fish, and fruit, waiting for customers. And the pinnacle of refinement: a sign warns in Creole not to soil the boardwalk. There is no longer any telephone service, and the electricity is intermittent, like everywhere in Haiti. On Toussaint Louverture Square, there’s the old city hall, where one can still see traces of the words Liberté-Égalité-Fraternité on its façade. Its crumbling walls rise up against the blue of the sky, the ocean peeking through.

  On Sunday, with the bells of the six o’clock Mass, and by the grace of God, the town awakens for one day. Led by nuns wearing wimples, hundreds of children in blue-and-white uniforms head toward the church, singing hymns. The market resounds with the noise.

  On the roads (or what passes for roads) that lead to the old seaside resort of Raymond-les-Bains, clusters of people in all their finery—women in their pastel-colored straw boating hats, men in jackets that must have belonged to their grandfathers—seem to have set off on an endless path. In any of Jacmel’s three open-air music halls, one can find two or three happy couples enjoying the orchestral rhythms of guitars, marimbas, castanets, or rain sticks.

  People still enjoy themselves at the Kraft Sisters’ Bed and Breakfast. Run by two elderly women, the little hotel offers weary travelers rooms furnished in an old-fashioned style that include wood-paneled galleries lined by portraits of successive Haitian presidents, including Papa Doc and his son Jean-Claude, currently in power. They offer authentic Creole cuisine (sauce à la petite malice, well-seasoned avocados with smoked herring, a stew of roasted chicken rubbed with lemon and spices, potatoes and fried bananas, guava jam, and rum cocktails) served by silent maids who fan you between courses. Jacmel lives in the past with as much intensity as it doubts its own future.

  _______

  1. Claude Kiejman, “Letter from Jacmel,” Le Monde (April 1972). Return to text

  3

  Heart pounding, I read the first lines of the article, expecting at any moment to find something about the life and false death of Hadriana Siloé. Had the exceptional vitality of her youth not made her, up until the night of her wedding, truly one of the jewels of Jacmel’s splendor?

  Once I had finished reading, I found myself deeply saddened: not the slightest allusion to Hadriana. The tragic circumstances of her “evaporation” were given no consideration next to the Great Fire, the hurricanes, and the political intrigues that had been identified, and rightly so, as amoung the plagues that put an end to Jacmel’s opulence. The unforgettable beauty of the young French girl had not been acknowledged as one of the causes of the nostalgia that consumed the people of Jacmel. Although it had inspired my departure from my homeland before I had even turned twenty, and had become the cross I bore throughout my years of exile, our collective case of “Hadriana-ache” seemed to have disappeared without leaving any trace in Jacmel’s devastated memory.

  This was no reflection on the reporter. In all likelihood, she simply had not managed to get any intimate details about the Siloé Affair from her interviewees. Yet the two elderly ladies who ran the Kraft Sisters’ Bed and Breakfast were as well suited as I to tell the journalist about the events of 1938. In fact, they had the considerable advantage over me of having never left Toussaint Louverture Square.

  Mélissa and Raissa Kraft had been Hadriana’s childhood friends. From kindergarten all the way to their high school graduation, the three had been enrolled together in the Saint Rose of Lima School, located only a few steps away from their respective homes. I had often seen them strolling arm in arm or riding their bikes along the pathways of the town square during those years when the exuberance of their burgeoning womanhood had just begun to beautify the existence of both gods and men. In my eyes, they were the three Creole Graces—already as captivating and inseparable as that trio of Greco-Roman divinities: Aglaea, Thalia, and Euphrosyne. Four years later, on the beach in Raymond-les-Bains, those superbly formed young girls, with their graceful way of strutting about in their swimsuits, barefoot in the sand, were the first to teach me that the female body in motion, all curves and joyful roundness, would soon inspire enormous passion and celebration in my own striking geometrical appendage. Whenever they went by, it would harden—suddenly, unfettered, marvelously!

  At Hadriana’s wedding, the Kraft sisters stood at the head of a fascinating coterie of bridesmaids, even closer to the action than the luscious Philisbourg twins. Mélissa was the one who had torn her bodice in the church upon seeing her friend collapse. After the “dead” girl’s zombification, Mélissa and Raissa, overcome with grief, had imprudently sworn to the patron saints of the parish to abstain from all sexual relations until Hadriana’s safe return to the family home. That wait ended up lasting their entire lives. And so, contrary to their natural disposition, their promise compelled them to maintain a cruel celibacy. More than a little aware of their sex appeal, neither one of them found chastity very much to her liking.

  4

  Imaginary Interview in the Luxembourg Gardens

  Holding the “Letter from Jacmel” in my trembling hands, I couldn’t help but put myself in the Kraft sisters’ place and imagine an interview that would supplement the newspaper story. In my mind, I took the journalist amiably by the arm.

  “Come with me, I’ve got something to share with you about Jacmel’s history.”

  I led the young woman to the balcony on the third floor of the old prefecture. Standing at the iron railing, we had a marvelous view of the entire lower section of the town, by the seafront. It was an exceptionally beautiful twilight. The shadows of the silk-cotton trees on the square faded at our feet. There was no need to protect our eyes from the rays of the setting sun. We could watch comfortably as the light softened into shades of pink and violet on the surface of the sea and on the rusted zinc of the roofs topping the rows and rows of houses, their wood frames darkened by years of bad weather. Pressed up against the fronds of the mango, tamarind, and coconut trees, the houses gave the impression of huddling together fearfully, as if to better resist the stormy proximity of the bay and the seasonal raids of the hurricanes. On the nearby hill that hovered over the pitiful little houses, one could make out a green-and-white colonial-style plantation house surrounded by an extraordinary garden, the wings of the house in perfect harmony with the dwelling’s central structure. On the lateral wall running along Orleans Street, four movable shutters pivoted on recessed hinges embedded in the large windows. At the very top of the building, on the sign designating this heavenly place, one could make out a few red letters against a white background: The Alexandra Manor Hotel.

  “Is it true that the hotel is haunted?” asked C.K.

  “Is that what the Kraft sisters told you?”

  “No, no. They both remained completely inscrutable when I asked them any questions.”

  “You should have pressed them. That’s the house where one of our schoolmates lived, from her birth until her false death, at nineteen, decked out in her wedding veils.”

  “Now there’s a great beginning for a fairy tale.”

  “It’s something that actually happened in 1938. Feel free to check and double-check the facts. The original name of that hotel was Hadriana Siloé Palace. One month after its grand opening, the proprietor, an American impresario from Cincinnati, Ohio, was compelled by the prefect and the townspeople to replace Hadriana with Alexandra, the name of his oldest daughter, a very happy wife and mother.”

  “Would Hadriana have brought misfortune to Jacmel?”

  “Hadriana, written on the façade of the old manor house, would have been a constant knife in the wound that Jacmel had become—an even more atroci
ous source of anguish than what you described in your article. Too much, just too much for a community that had already had it up to here with history, fire, hurricanes, and political turmoil.”

  “Was the girl murdered?”

  “Worse: allegedly the victim of a heart attack, she disappeared from her grave on the day after her burial! When something like that happens in Haiti, people don’t need anyone to paint them a picture. It was clear to us all that a witch doctor had taken the young bride from the cemetery in order to have her serve him. That morning, the news spread like an earthquake.”

  “Another zombie story! These days, books about your country are full of them. It would seem it comes in cycles. Before leaving Paris, I’d already heard three. Yours is clearly homegrown—in the Kraft sisters’ spicy sauce, to boot! Come on, do you really believe in zombies?”

  “As recently as last Saturday, a neurologist friend of mine, a pretty dour sort, answered a question just like yours in my presence. Those who believe in zombies are fools, he said. Those who don’t are even bigger fools! That ridiculous dilemma is Haiti’s Gordian knot. It’s been more than thirty years now that I’ve been trying, if not to resolve it, then at least to put it out of my mind. But fate, nevertheless, has kept it tucked away in a corner of my handkerchief . . .”

  “To hear you tell it, there’s a causal link between the death of this young woman and the decline of your little town. Have I got that right?”

  “You’ve hit the nail on the head. As a result of the events of 1938, even the connection between cause and effect ceased to function normally in Jacmel. The natural filiation between the real and the supernatural was ruptured by the disappearance of Hadriana Siloé. From then on, all causal links, even the imaginary ones, could have an impact as real as that of Hurricane Inez, one of the most devastating storms ever to hit Jacmel. But let’s get back to Hadriana Siloé. Now, where were we?”

  “On the early morning of her return to the living.”

  “Well, it would seem that Hadriana had proven stronger than her kidnappers and, on the day before the zombification ceremony at the cemetery, had managed to give them the slip, thanks in part to the torrential downpour. She’d apparently gone around knocking at several doors, beginning with those of the manor house. But wherever she went, no one answered, and her pursuers were able to recapture her and put her back in captivity.”

  “The heavy rain must have prevented people from hearing her cries for help, because I don’t see French parents turning a deaf ear to the call of their daughter, even if she was coming back to them from the dead!”

  “The Siloés slept on the third floor of the manor, in the bedroom farthest away from the ground floor. It’s likely that the storm kept them from hearing anything. Everywhere else, people were sleeping not far from their front doors. Look, I don’t want to keep anything from you—Hadriana’s fists knocked at our door too. My mother, Uncle Ferdinand, his wife, the servants, and, yes, I—the guy who’s here talking to you right now—we all woke up with a start. But we stayed curled up under our covers. It was convenient to confuse her desperate pounding with the noise of the driving rain! Like so many other families, caught up in our belief in—and visceral fear of—the power of witch doctors, we were incapable of lifting a finger to save our friend. The Catholics maintained that Jacmel had exposed Hadriana to the worst kinds of risk on the night of her death by deciding, despite the warning of the parish priest and the vicar, to have her wake in the midst of the excesses of a Vodou carnival. But that isn’t true; the bacchanalia and all the masks had nothing to do with anything. Christians and heathens, we all gave up Hadriana to her zombifiers for different reasons.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The effectiveness of magic (I learned this from Lévi-Strauss) is a phenomenon of social consensus. And that’s what was working against Hadriana Siloé that night. When an entire village, in accordance with its traditions, is convinced that a human being can become undead as a result of a toxic substance and an act of witchcraft, the victim’s entourage can’t be expected to come to her aid in such circumstances. On that night back then, in the depths of everyone’s conscience, we all just wanted to keep our distance from the young zombie bride, brutally abandoning her to her inescapable fate, seeing her as a danger to the whole of the Jacmelian community. That’s what happened.”

  5

  Prolegomena to a Dead-End Essay

  All theory is gray, but forever green is the tree of life.

  —Goethe

  The afternoon of my imaginary interview in the Luxembourg Gardens, as I headed back to my room at the Ségur Hotel, I resolved to let my memory turn back to the events of 1938 and their disastrous consequences on daily life in Jacmel. It wasn’t the first time I promised myself—somewhat insistently—to dedicate a book to the subject. My first idea was to talk about Hadriana herself rather than writing an essay on the place and the role of the zombie phenomenon in the deterioration of Jacmel. Is it possible that my homeland was some sort of collective zombie? But after the basic off-the-cuff lesson my uncle Féfé had given me following Hadriana’s “evaporation,” my inquiries among my friends and neighbors, just like my studies and research abroad, added nothing substantial to my understanding of the zombie’s condition. Behind each mystery there were at least a hundred more . . .

  In each text I read on Vodou, there was the obligatory chapter on zombies in Haiti. In every instance, the author seemed somehow to be left short of breath, chasing after an elusive ghost. There was a time when the flood of studies on this element of Haitian sorcery constituted a veritable industry, both within and outside the academic world. It went from the most frenzied sensationalism to the most erudite scholarship. I wanted to offer a personal perspective, situated somewhere between a serialized novel and a monograph—some new and well-thought-out, passionate, and organized tribute to my beloved—that I hoped would raise the debate to a higher plane.

  In the early 1960s, I began reflecting seriously on the notes I had gathered. But too often interrupted and ignored over the course of my wanderings, the manuscript never amounted to much of anything. Tossed about from one part of the world to another, I carted it around with me like some pitiful reminder of my failure at Hadriana Siloé’s wake.

  On the night of April 9, 1972, I unwrapped it for the umpteenth time in twelve years. I fully intended to finish the essay this time around. I began looking over the pages where I had summarized my working hypotheses. I had grouped them into nine propositions under a heading that certainly wasn’t appropriate for an essay: “The Jacmelian Adventures of a White Petit Bon Ange.”

  First Proposition

  (The Universal Historic Stage)

  The zombie phenomenon is situated at the confluence of a variety of mystical trends that have left extraordinary traces at the core of the agrarian sects to which Vodou and its singular “Vodouishness” belong. The rural witch doctor, creator of Haitian zombies—like his homologue from the Middle Ages or the early-baroque era—is a dispenser of good and evil. He is capable of producing either the beneficial charm that protects and heals, or the evil charm that persecutes and destroys.

  Second Proposition

  The nocturnal gangs from the sectes aux yeux rouges of our (Hadriana and my) Jacmelian childhood have their roots in either the Italian Frioul archipelago or in sixteenth-century Lithuania, with the Gascons of Henri IV, or the traditions of Latin- and German-speaking Alpine countries. One might also follow the roots of their magical prowess to societies far removed from one another in the global sphere, from the countries of Siberia and Central Asia to the Andean highlands of South America; from the Pacific islands to the Nordic territories; from the communities of Japan, Tibet, and China to sub-Saharan African societies; from the shores of the Indus River to Northern Africa.

  Third Proposition

  We have credited witch doctors from all of these diverse regions of the globe with the capacity to transform their enemies into animals (werewolf, bu
tterfly, lizard, crow, rat, ox, cat, lion, leopard, etc.), to engage in the ritual sacrifice of children, to screw and even knock up young women remotely, and to take over the vital substance—spiritual or physical—of other beings in order to increase their own power in society.

  Fourth Proposition

  (The Historic Haitian Stage)

  In Haiti, a witch doctor can steal a person’s light and his capacity to dream (his petit bon ange), which he then imprisons—like a ship in a bottle—in an empty bottle of rum, Scott’s Emulsion, champagne, or Coca-Cola, as it awaits future magico-genetic operations. During this time, the victim’s muscular energy (his gros bon ange) ends up, compelled by a whip, executing the harshest tasks in some part of the countryside. Dissociated beings like these fall, wrists and ankles bound, under the category of human livestock, subject to endless brutality.

  Fifth Proposition

  The fate of the zombie might be compared to that of the colonial plantation slave of old Saint-Domingue. Its destiny corresponds, on the mystical plane, to that of the Africans deported to the Americas to replace the decimated Indian labor force in the colony’s fields, mines, and factories. It would make sense, for the purposes of this study, to determine whether the idea of the zombie is in fact one of the traps of colonial history—something Haitians might have internalized and integrated into their own worldview. It could be a symbol of an imaginary world borne of tobacco, coffee, sugar, cotton, cacao, or spices—one of the many symbols of the ontological shipwreck of man on the American plantations, a perfect fit in the gallery of the wretched of the earth that the writings of Sartre, Memmi, Fanon, and Simone de Beauvoir, among others, have collaged together from various portraits of the colonized (black, Arab, yellow)—not to mention women and Jews.