As I emerged onto Orleans Street, a joyful din arose from the town square.
“Long live the bride! Long live Nana!”
It was truly that general state of jubilation that people in Jacmel had been talking about for the past several days: confetti, garlands, and orange blossoms rained down on my path, mixed with hand-clapping and shouts of adulation. Young girls were crying tears of joy! Some part of me also felt like crying. But laughter blocked its path through my eyes, my mouth, the rapture of my skin . . . I moved forward—sunlit, ecstatic on the gallant arm of my devoted father. On Church Street, on the Sorels’ balcony, a little boy cried out: “Here’s a kiss for you, Nana!”
I wanted to send one right back to him. But it was too late: I was dying. Just a moment prior, a terrifying unease had started to come over me. A sharp tingling had begun coursing through me, as if I were being pricked with needles from head to toe. I couldn’t breathe. I was suffocating under my veil. My father, though right by my side, noticed nothing. Standing proudly in his tuxedo, he helped me respond to the cheering crowd. No one noticed the state that I was in. On the square just in front of the church, I saw my fiancé Hector on the arm of Mam Diani, my friend Patrick’s mother. And Hector saw me for the first time in my bridal gown; the idea that he would soon be able to take it off me was completely blinding him. He could not see that the hands of death had been the first to slip under my dress, rustling with dreams.
2
With my first steps inside the church, I thought my legs would give out before I could make it to the altar. The sounds, the colors, the lights, the smells—they made a jumble of confused impressions on my muddled senses. I could not make out the difference between the sound of the organ and the flicker of a candle, between my own name and the green banners, between the smell of the incense and the bitter flavor that was burning my taste buds. I moved forward, groping as I went, through a sort of effervescent tar. I found myself kneeling in front of a wide well: I pulled myself together and concentrated what life I had left on my sense of hearing. I felt as if I were swimming desperately in viscous, bituminous water toward the most fantastic object in the world: my fiancé, Hector Danoze, just to my right, his flesh turned shapeless and phosphorescent. He had become nothing more than three giant letters that spelled out YES. My frantic swimming sought only to reach that goal as it first came close, then moved away, liquefied into a stream of lava that enveloped Hector, the priests, the altar, the hymns, the decorations, the attendees, the sky beyond the apse. This empyreumatic sound-light-body, on one of its backward surges, suddenly threw itself at me. It lodged itself in my genitals. And my genitals came together as a final sigh that began climbing up through my body like the rising mercury of a barometer. I felt its upward movement in my guts, then in my digestive tract. It left a strange emptiness in its wake. It stopped for a few moments at my heart, which was barely beating. Was the sigh of my sex going to take its place? I felt it rise up through my throat. It nearly choked me before finally settling its burning weight on my tongue. With the four lips of my true mouth, I screamed the ultimate Yes of life to my Hector and to the world!
“Hadriana Siloé is dead!” the voice of Dr. Sorapal rang out above my lifeless body.
I heard a tumult of overturned chairs and benches, a racket in Creole, a clamoring whirlwind of panic. In the midst of all this, I could make out Lolita Philisbourg’s sensual, dramatic soprano. It seemed as if people were ripping fabric all over the church. Something fell down just next to me, and then someone cried out: “Hector is dead too!”
It seemed he had followed me to the grave. The voice of Father Naélo snapped me out of this first dream within my dream: “Hadriana Siloé has been taken from us at the moment of her marriage. The scandal has occurred in the house of the Father!”
Someone’s arms lifted me off the church floor. Whose could they be? I would have recognized immediately those of my father, Hector, or Patrick. The man had trouble pushing through the crowd of attendees. My dangling feet knocked into people as we passed. A hand grabbed my right foot. It held on for a long time. I felt the cool evening air despite the death mask that had been welded onto my face. The bells chimed with their full force, the backdrop to the cheers and hand-clapping, just as before. Whoever was holding me began to run. Several others ran alongside us noisily. Of all my senses, only my hearing still functioned. A woman’s voice cried out: “Long live the happy couple!”
Immediately, the carnival began on the town square. I noticed that I could smile—laugh, even—from within my misfortune. I had my first giggling fit of the night—people were doing carnival dances all around me; drums and vaksin were going wild. I felt as if the man carrying me was also dancing. My stiffened limbs were incapable of joining him. As soon as whoever it was had crossed the manor’s doorstep, my sense of smell immediately came back to me: it was the smell of the waxed floor of my childhood. The man placed me carefully on one of the sitting room rugs.
3
There was a furious commotion all around me, punctuated intermittently by sobs and exclamations. I could hear the sadness and surprise in my girlfriends’ bitter utterances—admiration and anger in those of my male friends. At one point, I felt someone leaning over me. A hand took hold of my wrist; another moved what must have been a stethoscope to different spots on my chest. The people attached to these hands exchanged a few words. From their voices, I understood they were Dr. Sorapal and Dr. Braget. Once again, I wanted to laugh. Young Dr. Braget, ever since his return from Paris, would say to me every time we met: “When are the Siloés going to switch family doctors? I’d so love to watch over the health of their daughter.” And now, his hand in my blouse, he was feeling my breasts. Would he realize that they were still full of life? My optimism did not last long.
He placed something on my mouth. “Negative,” he murmured to his older colleague.
“She has no pulse,” said Dr. Sorapal.
“Her breasts are still warm. Splendid, fresh fruits! It’s like they’re still alive!”
“A dying star continues to shine, my friend! Check her eyes.”
Dr. Braget parted my eyelids. I saw him, but the fervent gaze in his catlike brown eyes, misty with tears, could not see me back!
“No ocular reflex,” he said.
“All that remains is to prepare the burial license. It’s official: stiff limbs, no respiratory or ocular reflex, no pulse, diminishing core temperature. Heart attack.”
“Son of a bitch!” exclaimed Dr. Braget.
“Damned myocardial infarction!”
They cursed death instead of deepening their exam. I focused on my sense of sight: perhaps there would be a glimmer, the flicker of an eyelid. As he ran his fingers through my hair, Dr. Braget’s face was suffused with tears.
Dr. Sorapal kept chewing on his lower lip. “The saddest night of my long life,” he said.
“It’s my Waterloo,” said the other one, the Don Juan.
4
The corner of the sitting room where I had been laid out was dimly lit. Mama had come over to cover my body with a sheet. When it was time to cover my face, she changed her mind. In tears, she caressed my face. My father joined her; he kneeled down by my side. I felt sorry for them—for all three of us. I wanted to cry, but could not. My parents had to be brought away, and Patrick took their place. He clasped my hands in his, and he looked deep into my eyes. He kept calling out my nickname with an infinite tenderness. He, too, went away sobbing.
Everything in the sitting room had been moved. The mirror, covered in flour and hanging just above me, looked like some sort of Pierrot, hilarious in its white mask. From the other end of the room came Madame Losange’s voice (polygonal, with rounded angles and far more than three sides, as Hector had always said). She had strongly suggested to my girlfriends that they turn their underwear inside out. The Philisbourg twins, Mélissa Kraft, and Olga Ximilien were the first to comply. Then she said to all present that my death was unnatural. She told the story o
f Balthazar Granchiré, the butterfly. I was brought back to a story from long ago, similar to the ones my old servant Felicia used to tell me before bed when I was a little girl. And now it was the story of my final repose. Klariklé Philisbourg had told me about a diabolic deflowering butterfly. Apparently, my godmother had taken the creature as her lover in the months leading up to her death. I was meant to be next. We had had a good laugh at that idea, Hector and I. Not for nothing, Jacmel had always been known as a magical place. After that, the question arose as to where to display my body for the wake. Patrick’s uncle, good old Uncle Féfé, proposed Lovers Lane! Maître Homaire declared that I belonged to the realm of the stars. He added something about the birds. A moment later, Madame Losange went back on the attack: she said something about needing to deflower me. I knew from Felicia that this was common in the countryside whenever it was deemed possible that a sorcerer had “bottled up the petit bon ange of a young virgin.”
There was some sort of debate about who should be the one to do it. Madame Losange vetoed Lolita, given that she was a twin. Someone else said that the job should be done by a fellow innocent. “Why not Patrick Altamont?” they said. My dear Patrick—I would have loved to see that!
Mam Diani flew to his rescue: “Nana and my son were held by the same woman over the same baptismal font. They’re like brother and sister.”
Actually, Patrick very well could have been the one to open me up. It was the summer before I met Hector. At a holiday resort in nearby Meyer one night, we had wandered away from the others down a path that led to the beach. I was his for the taking. Would he be the one to penetrate me? His hand trembled between my legs. We had run down the hill in the light of a gentle moon that loomed over the empty sea. He had complete liberty to plunge into the mysterious waters of my flesh. He caressed me gently, with the amazement of a teenager who could not believe his clumsy hand was actually lying there, starstruck, on the mound of my ripe almond! He had something pretty impressive going on himself: not your average little dickie or some sweet diddly wee-wee—more like a magnificent piece of manhood, ready for a spectacular nocturnal voyage. But we contented ourselves with gazing quietly over the Caribbean Sea!
5
I saw two men in black cassocks bend over me before heading toward the well-lit part of the sitting room: it was Father Naélo and Father Maxitel. Once they arrived, several others, who had been scattered about up until then, moved their chairs closer to the sofa where my parents were seated. Then there was a long discussion in hushed tones. They were making plans for my wake and burial. The house was abuzz with all sorts of sounds: steps on the staircase, an incessant coming and going on the ground and first floors. The sounds of the carnival were muffled, as the windows that opened out onto Orleans Street were closed. In the sitting room, the whispering seemed to go on and on. No one else came to see me. Bored to death, as it were, I had fallen into a deep sleep inside of my final sleep. In it, I had the following dream: I was a powerful kite—red, white, and blue, like the colors of my homeland. I had a long, knotted tail: a strip of cloth fitted with razor blades and glass shards. I looked just like one of those multicolored kites from the heated competitions young Jacmelians often play on the beach. In the 1930s, upon returning from High Mass every Sunday, the spectacle of colorful kites used to greet me in the skies above our balcony—just over half a mile away, as the crow flies. Some days, more than fifty little boys and grown men, facing into the wind of the bay, tugged fearlessly on their kites made of paper or light fabric. In my dream, my skin was stretched across a bamboo frame, and there were only four of us kites on this morning—our colors battling for space a few hundred feet above the magnificent waves. Hector, my pilot on the ground, held tight to my string: he would set me off on an abrupt descent, only to help me climb even higher, with slight feints to the right and left so as to catch the strings of my adversaries by surprise with the razors and sharp glass affixed to my tail. The flight, in the heat of the sun, had me downright tipsy! I was getting drunk—an eagle, feathers blowing in the wind, talons unsheathed, I charged at the nearest prey. It didn’t take long for me to knock out two of the most formidable enemy kites. There was still one huge blue-and-red kite remaining. In my dream, I figured out that it was an aerial tournament between France and Haiti: red, white, and blue versus red and blue. What would my fiancé—the Haitian controlling my every movement—decide to do? My dream threatened to become a nightmare as I turned from a kite into a small plane. I suddenly found myself on the balcony of the manor, whereas Hector was still holding the joystick of the single-seater aircraft. I was waving a handkerchief, sending him kisses. Before disappearing into the distance, he spelled out my name in pink smoke in the azure of the bay. I woke up to this vision of happiness.
I had first met Hector in very similar circumstances: one Saturday morning, two days after receiving his pilot’s license in Port-au-Prince (he was one of the first three pilots trained in the country by American aviators), he had arrived from the direction of the sea, like an arrow pointed at the manor house, a veritable conqueror of the skies. Attracted by the humming of his little plane, I had rushed out to the balcony to see the words, HADRIANA, I LOVE YOU! above me. After landing, he called me from the capital. We spoke on the phone for two hours—and for another two the next day, and each day after that, until his return to Jacmel the following weekend. We did not leave one another’s side for the next forty-eight hours—stampeding down to Raymond-les-Bains Beach first thing in the morning for a wild sunrise swim, tennis in the afternoon, dancing at night, followed by a stroll along the beach leading up to an exquisite midnight stopover in the garden. From the very first night he, too, could have opened me right up—to the point where I had come to think of my virgin’s ripe almond as Hector’s very own box of dreams. But he dreamed of an act of love blessed in a church, by Father Naélo. And now he was in the hospital in a state of shock, with me walled up in my false death. Fate was punishing me for a sin I had not even committed. Hadriana knocked out, down for more than ten seconds on the church floor at her own wedding, disqualified from the spectacular combat of her honeymoon, from the work-of-the-flesh-only-after-marriage, as Hector had wanted it. Ashamed of his apostolic aviator’s erection, he had placed a hand over it, scared stiff by the possibility of committing a mortal sin. He was afraid to dirty the white skin of the French fairy, Creole daughter of a prince of mathematics and tobacco. I spent my honeymoon—my tar-moon, really—on a parquet floor that smelled of childhood and zombies, a few hours before my burial and my consecration as one of the living-dead. A terrific wave of distress enveloped me and I tumbled into it headfirst before losing consciousness.
6
When I finally came to, I found myself on the town square, stretched out between the candles dotting Lovers Lane. Strangely, I felt as if I myself was leaning out the window, observing what all the masked people were doing there, standing around a catafalque underneath the silk-cotton trees rattling with the sound of terrified birds. I disappeared from the window frame of the third floor only to reappear, naked, on the floor below. Every so often, over the course of the night, I let myself go in this doubling game that was taking me from childhood to death, from the little girl riding her bicycle around the town square to the teenager strolling along with the Kraft sisters. My fainting spell had made me miss my chance during the preparation of my body: I had hoped that upon touching my flesh, the person who had been tasked with arranging my body for its horrible fate would end up discovering the truth of my false death. I was still wearing my bridal gown—veils and all. Indeed, I had gone through with the marriage sacrament by pronouncing that formidable, famished Yes. My perception had improved since the knockout at the church. I could hear just about everything. From time to time I could even see a bit—my sight coming and going. I felt the cool softness of the filmy fabric. The crown of orange blossoms was still on my head; the twinkling stellar cupola of the night sky within my reach. The vast space sparkling with stars see
med to want to become part of my body. The moon came back in full force and settled in my fertile ovaries. All I would have had to do was stretch out my hand and bring one of the stars to my lap, to take the place of my empty ripe almond—stuck there in the midst of one of the most wonderfully starry nights of our lives. But my hands could not bring anything close to me. Nailed to the cross of my false death, crucified on a dream buried within a dream, I could only hear the silence of the carnival to my left as it deepened a lesser mystery at the center of the great mystery of what was happening to my destiny. Again there was some debate about me. I was an apple of discord among the living. Cécilia Ramonet wanted to protect the wake from the excesses of the Vodou gods. Maître Homaire made a point regarding my great love for life. “And now her beautiful legs are trapped in that padded box.” One thing he said was very true: even in my coffin I was far closer to a carnival drum than to the tolling of church bells. Father Maxitel reprimanded Maître Homaire, accusing him of profaning a saint. Me—a saint? You know, I managed—not once, but twice, Father—to offer my body, eyes closed, to another being, well before the lifting of the “not-until-marriage” bond: Patrick was but a single blond hair away from getting over the paralyzing fact of his awkward adolescent hand on my ripe almond and taking a proper manly dip into the passionately consenting waters of my womanhood. With Hector, from the very first night, it was the same scenario: my box of dreams had been ready and willing to reveal the last of its virgin secrets. A saint—really? Reverend Father, excuse me, but I have sinned! Another time, one overheated August afternoon, with the door to the balcony flung wide open against the sky above the bay, I was nude in my bedroom with Lolita Philisbourg. The black-and-purple coal of my seventeen-year-old sex cried out in the burning embers of her caresses. I was electrified by her mouth on my peach, riper than any other fruit in season, be it Haitian mango or French melon. It was incredible, Father, hearing the song of the birds outside as Lolita cultivated my springtime garden. It was wonderful, delivering my enflamed Creole flower, my untamed love box, to my best friend’s tongue, as she brought me dizzyingly to seventh heaven with three, five, up to seven orgasms in a row on that blessed day. Dr. Braget argued that the banda should be seen as a form of prayer. A banda dancer himself, it was surprising that he had not been able to distinguish my living breasts from a pair of tits ready for the morgue. Dear Henrik Radsen, Papa’s best friend, had gone even further: he lauded every dance of the pelvis and buttocks as the oratory form that gave Haiti all its charm in the eyes of the white Western God. General César spoke of the second death that awaited me, prey to the bestial rutting of Baron-Samedi. And what if the Haitian gods chose their lovers from among zombies? What if a certain sex-maniac, fully-loaded-machine-gun of a butterfly was already setting up at the cemetery, waiting for his chance to launch an attack on the Siloés’ Maginot Line? My ear caught the words of the ever-faithful Mam Diani: she had seen me “transform from a little tyke into an exceptional beauty.” She remembered what I had once told her in confidence: if ever I should die young, instead of prayers and tears at my wake, I wanted a carnival of five hundred devils! I got my devils after all—my wake was hit by the lightning bolt of their five hundred “Magic Balls”!
Hadriana in All My Dreams Page 10