by Maryse Conde
It was then that a young blonde woman dressed in an ungainly pair of shorts came over to him. It was Amy, the correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle who two years earlier had been living at The Cedars of Lebanon.
“Still here?” Babakar asked in surprise.
She sat down familiarly at his table. “Last year,” she explained, “I was called back to San Francisco. Then several weeks ago I was sent back here to report on the return of democracy.”
“Return of democracy?” Babakar wondered, pointing to the crowd of soldiers around them.
She nodded. “Yes, you might say so. The kidnappings have virtually stopped. The tourists who flocked to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic have grown tired of the usual sea and sun and are now bused to the Sans-Souci Palace and do the rounds of the voodoo peristyles. Just one threat remains.”
And here she lowered her voice. “Henri Christophe’s younger brother, Captain Dalembert.”
“Captain Dalembert?” Babakar repeated, stunned.
“Reliable sources claim he has sworn to avenge his older brother. He is now entrenched at Jérémie, their hometown, and from there, apparently, he is raising an army. You can be sure he’ll find some madmen to follow him.”
You can bet too that the Americans will make short work of him! Babakar thought.
What did Jahira know of these plans and what had “her brother” Dalembert told her?
“How is your adorable little girl?” Amy asked.
He could go on forever on the subject of Anaïs. And it’s true she was very alert and very intelligent for her age. What worried Babakar were the constant times when she looked vacant, as if she were conversing with people only she could see. Who? Her mother? Her father?—whom she would never get to hug.
After a while Amy got up. “Unfortunately, I have to go. I have an appointment,” she apologized. “When will I see you again?”
Babakar explained he lived a fairly long way away in Saint-Soledad and that, above all, he was a stay-at-home sort of person.
When Fouad came to join him, he was on his third glass of pineapple juice. The two men went out into the warm night. Despite the late hour, the streets were noisy and lively, crowded with men, women, and even children, as well as cars and bicycles. Babakar had never lived in a country teeming with such humanity. Every time these lives brushed shoulders with him, they literally burned him. He was afraid of this country’s exuberance, the very portrait of the voodoo god Ogun Ferraille clashing swords with dictators, corruption, drugs, belief in the supernatural, and natural catastrophes.
“Since when have you thought about leaving?” he asked Fouad, avoiding the expression “leaving me,” which came more naturally but was too melodramatic and ambiguous.
“I told you I have always dreamed of becoming a writer. A poet like Mahmoud Darwich.”
“You appeared so happy with Myriam and Zohran, I believed you had given up the thought,” Babakar murmured, aware of being in bad faith.
“You know full well it’s not true,” Fouad interrupted brutally. “How can a man forget his dreams? And then there is my cousin Zohran, whom I can never forget.”
As they reached the huge dark form of the car in the night, Babakar made another objection. “Will Myriam agree to leave Haiti and go with you to the States?”
Fouad didn’t answer.
“Will you take her with you?” Babakar insisted.
“If she likes.”
“And what about your son?”
Fouad replied in a resigned tone of voice. “His mother will decide.”
They made the journey home in silence, each locked in his own thoughts. Babakar was terrified at the idea of spending dark and gloomy days without Movar and without Fouad. If the latter left Haiti, he would do the same. Where would he go? Would he travel to the US? Would he get used to it? He had never lived in a developed country, and knew nothing but destitution, suffering, and deaths that should have been preventable.
Shortly afterwards, Mr. Zhang Zhong Li, who spoke five languages fluently, arrived from Hong Kong to represent the Yen Kao company. He came straight to the point. It would all have to be torn down if they were to transform a hardly attractive place into an earthly paradise. They would build a luxury hotel similar to the one the hotel chain owned in Saint Barthélemy. He appeared not to realize how absurd his words were.
Jahira was planning to go to Jérémie.
“Sô Euphrasie admits she is not capable of doing the work Myriam and I are asking. She cannot see where Movar is or whether he is dead or alive. The person Dalembert knows can perhaps help us.”
She dreaded taking Anaïs with her because the child was very impressionable: any kind of travel or new faces made her overexcited.
“I hate to leave her,” she repeated sadly, “but we won’t be away for long. Three days at the most.”
This visit to Jérémie was not to Babakar’s liking. He raised the first objection: Wasn’t it dangerous to travel to the region? Hadn’t there been a terrible accident there recently?
The international press had given it the same headline news as the hurricanes. The ferry, Le Neptune, old and run-down, which connected Port-au-Prince to Jérémie, was overloaded as usual. Apart from the two thousand passengers on board, it was carrying eight hundred oxen and sacks of coconuts. It is here the reports differ. Some claim that the deck collapsed and caused the boat to sink. Others claim that, sailing into a violent storm, the boat began taking on water and the pumps were no longer working. Given that there were no life jackets or lifeboats on board, the end was easily predictable. Lifeless bodies washed up by the hundreds on the beaches of Miragoâne and Petit-Goâve. If some people managed to survive the shipwreck it was because they mounted the oxen and held on to their horns, like this hysterical, half-naked woman who shouted: “Sé bef la ki sové m!” (This ox saved my life!)
It didn’t take much to transform the oxen into benevolent incarnations of the guardian loas and they soon became the subject of songs in the city yards. From one day to the next, thousands of naive paintings were piled up in the markets or in front of the tourist hotels depicting the “miracle” of La Neptune. Winged bulls raised up their muffle and carried men, women, and children with their hands joined in prayer upon their humps. The very serious journal Études caribéennes published a special issue with the learned title of “The Wager of Popular Art,” devoted to the extraordinary creativity of the Haitian people.
“Don’t worry!” Jahira said. “We’re taking the plane. Dalembert is paying for the tickets.”
Babakar made his second objection: was the place safe? He had heard that Captain Dalembert was raising troops of mercenaries with the aim of avenging the murder of his brother.
She rolled her eyes. “Who told you such nonsense? That scumbag, Saint-Omer? Together with his good friend the President, he won’t be content until he’s finished off Henri Christophe’s family.”
“No, it wasn’t Saint-Omer. It was Amy Evans, an American journalist.”
She stared at him in commiseration. “You keep company with Americans now and you believe their pack of lies? Dalembert has to stand up for himself because he is forced to do so. The truth is he loathes violence. What he would like to do is become a musician.”
We all loathe violence, Babakar thought. And yet it sucks us in and does what it likes with us.
He did not dare confess his third objection: the jealousy that was torturing him. Therefore he didn’t say another word. On the day of her departure, he kissed Jahira without much enthusiasm, then went and fetched his daughter who was asleep in the next room—content, nevertheless, at the idea of spending a few days alone with her.
Jérémie today is a small town of little interest, redeemed only by an original site and a heroic past. It was in turn an important site for the Maroons and a refuge for the two rebel chiefs, Plymouth and Macaya. Then it became the c
enter of a peasant revolt during the troubles that followed independence. When Henri Christophe decreed he was a descendant of the emperor of the same name, nobody was shocked, not even those who had seen him born of a needy mother and a humble fisherman. After all, any one of us is entitled to say we descend from a historical hero. Aren’t they the fathers of the nation? Consequently, the unemployed, numerous not only in Jérémie but everywhere else in the country—we can even say under every clime—enthusiastically helped build the Royal Bonbon Palace, which he had built for himself and his lovely companion up in the mountains. They used those gleaming rocks extricated from river beds, nicknamed “Marble of the Tropics,” for the construction.
The news of Henri Christophe’s murder in his palace at Quisqueya was greeted with amazed disbelief. What!? Everybody was convinced that the bullets of the Americans and their local lackeys could never touch a man of his caliber. He was invincible, like Mackandal. Consequently, nobody was surprised when he turned up again in the region a few weeks later. Some saw him in full daylight at high noon walking arm in arm with Estrella and her little brother, Captain Dalembert. On certain evenings the Royal Bonbon was illuminated in all its splendor like an outward-bound ocean liner. You could see seated on the terrace the woman who had served as Estrella’s mother, Tonine, the tall silhouette of Henri Christophe with his crown of dreadlocks, and that of his companion, a true Miss Haiti. They were surrounded by generals in red and blue uniforms and women in crinolines whose plunging necklines exhibited their ample breasts. Servants were handing round all kinds of drinks; the champagne sparkled, music could be heard, and couples were dancing. Some evenings, there was complete silence. They performed plays by Frankétienne. All the splendor of Sans-Souci was reenacted under the eyes of the enraptured onlookers. On other evenings, more prosaically, Henri Christophe and his younger brother would go and get blind drunk on rum at Pepe Noguez’s while Estrella and Tonine rambled through the surrounding fields. They were accompanied by a huge black mastiff which killed everything in its path—chickens, roosters, rabbits, and lambs. As a result, the peasants began to dread these rambles and locked themselves up.
Nobody can say with any certainty that Captain Dalembert had raised an army of mercenaries to avenge the death of Henri Christophe. Everyone was well aware of the bond of affection between the two brothers, but the general opinion was that the younger did not have the military skills of the older brother. He was primarily known for his attractive physique, and his love of women and compas music. The inhabitants of Jérémie did, in fact, see a crowd of young men flock to the Nelson Mandela barracks flanked by huge tents. But they believed it was caused by the offer of free literacy classes. It’s important, isn’t it, to speak, read, and write in French, the key to success? What they did remember, however, was the ambush by the democratic forces of the new President, allied with the Americans, which cost Captain Dalembert and his guests their lives. That day, a grandiose ceremony was being held at the Royal Bonbon: it was the annual Democracy Prize-giving ceremony. The senior year students at the Lycée of Human Rights had studied an expression by Kwame Nkrumah, an African revolutionary, today largely forgotten, but who had his hour of glory in the 1960s for having left the British Commonwealth in a huff: “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Shortly before noon, military trucks forced their way into the Royal Bonbon. A swarm of soldiers armed with machine guns, bazookas, and rocket launchers climbed out. In next to no time the palace was surrounded, sacked, and burned. The soldiers then climbed back into their trucks and left the same way they had come. It was like a dream, a bad dream. The stunned inhabitants of Jérémie pulled eighty burned corpses out of the ruins.
Given the poor state of communications by telephone with Port-au-Prince, news of the drama reached Saint-Soledad only much later. It was only two days after the attack that Babakar and Fouad learned of the extent of their loss.
The two men rushed to Jérémie by plane and managed to check in at the Alexandre Dumas family boarding house, which was crowded with mourners.
“You know,” the owner whispered in Babakar’s ear, “there’s a very powerful individual here, Fwé Euloj, who can get back for you all those you have lost. Do you understand? All of them. If you get your wife back, you’ll lead a quiet life with her to the end of your days since she is already dead and can never leave you again.”
Babakar didn’t follow his advice and made his way to the cliffs where men in black cassocks, supposedly employees of the De Profundis undertakers, were incinerating the bodies and throwing the ashes out to sea. A pestilential stench that the pungent sea breeze was unable to dissipate floated in the air. His face flooded with tears, Babakar recalled the words of his friend, Hugo Moreno: “Soon everything will be underwater. As far as the eye can see there will be only violet waves, crested with white foam.”
So, the women he loved had all disappeared. Two of them had been carried off by conflicts in which they were not involved. Azélia, the “Southerner,” had been murdered by the authorities of the North. Jahira’s case was even more absurd and incomprehensible. What forces had toyed with her? The mind was at a loss for want of an explanation. Only memories and ghostly images remained of his loved ones, to such a degree that he no longer knew whether they had really existed.
Back in Port-au-Prince, Fouad and Babakar arrived in time to attend the ceremony of National Reconciliation decreed by the President after having rendered inoffensive the last rebel war chief. The ceremony was held in the cathedral, hastily repainted and brutally emptied of the homeless who usually filled it. Babakar and Fouad managed to get a seat on the first row together with the numerous onlookers attracted by the spectacle. Police squads kept the crowds at a good distance and all you could see were the dignitaries’ gleaming new cars. Yet everyone knew that ministers and religious personalities from all over the world were gathered around the President. Numerous archbishops from Latin America were present. It was the American representative, a plain, corpulent woman, who gave a speech transmitted by loudspeakers throughout the entire town: “We are entering a period of peace and brotherhood for the development of the common good.”
Heard that before! Babakar said to himself, taking Fouad’s arm in order to leave.
It was only after a long absence that he saw his mother again, despite his constant appeals during the torture of his nights. She turned a deaf ear. She probably preferred to keep a respectful distance from the suffering she could not wholly partake in. She had never hidden the fact she disliked Jahira. She kissed Babakar tenderly on his forehead.
“How are you feeling?”
“Why is it only now you have come?” he asked reproachfully.
She merely sighed.
“And then,” he continued, “you could have warned me I was going to suffer another misfortune. There was no dream, no vision, no premonition, no omen. Nothing.”
She sighed once again. “I couldn’t find the words to warn you.”
“What I should do is go back to Mali, to Segu.”
“Segu! Are you mad?”
Babakar stood firm. “Not at all! It’s there I can assume the life that was made for me: the life of a bush obstetrician, crazy about his vocation, working day and night in a small maternity clinic, delivering the underprivileged. Even more importantly, in the Traoré compound, our compound, Anaïs, this beloved child, twice orphaned, would be surrounded with affection by dozens of mothers, aunts, and cousins.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” she cut in impatiently, shrugging her shoulders. “Always dreaming and fabricating myths. All that’s left in the Traoré compound at Segu are the elderly and the bedridden. Life is elsewhere. All the able-bodied men and women have braved the desert and the ocean to go and look for work in Europe. There’s nothing left there, Segu is moribund.”
Babakar was not easily flustered, and retorted, “The entire world is moribund. We ar
e all waiting for death.”
There was silence.
“Henceforth,” she continued, “I’ll no longer come and visit you at night and suffer your bad moods or whims. I’ve found another way of constantly keeping in touch.”
“Which is?” he asked, upset.
She laid a finger on her lips and said, “Farewell my love!”
Farewell? She kissed him tenderly on his forehead like she used to do after she had told him a story when he was a little boy.
He didn’t have time to tell her more before she disappeared.
Stabbed with anxiety and pain, he woke up. What did she mean, I’ll no longer come and visit you at night?
It was seven in the morning. The sun’s rays were knocking furiously against the shutters and shooting their arrows through all the cracks in the walls. What had she meant? The very mainstay of his life had now collapsed. What had he done? Why did she choose this moment when he was in so much pain to announce such a thing?
He went to the dining room to join Fouad, who was bravely keeping up the routine gestures of life such as serving breakfast, eating, and listening to the radio. Despite these commendable efforts, everything was obviously going downhill. The doors of Building B, which previously housed the maternity ward and the doctors’ offices, now gaped wide open. Monsieur Saint-Omer had laid hands on the beds, the cradles, the fans, and all the medical equipment. He’d had them shipped to the old Sagrada Hospital, abandoned for more than ten years for lack of funds, which he hoped to open again with the help of a team of Thai volunteers who had arrived with the hurricane and remained stranded amidst the ruins of Saint-Soledad. Babakar had refused to join them despite Monsieur Saint-Omer’s pleas. He was at the end of his tether.
Mechanical diggers were flattening the terrain and covering it with truckloads of sand. Hordes of Chinese workers, flown in on a charter flight, were bustling around in all directions, shamelessly eating the bread of the Haitian laborers. Amidst all this desolation there still remained the students of the language institute who were furious and powerless on seeing the mango trees cut down. Fouad and Babakar were constantly filing or throwing out documents and personal papers, crying when they came across something that brought back memories. That was how Babakar discovered a notebook belonging to Jahira in which she had written her favorite songs in her schoolgirl’s hand. All her songs were there: Quizas, quizas; Que bonitos ojos tienes; Adiós, pampa mia, and some rather surprising ones such as Let the Sunshine In and Imagine. She had framed her favorite in red: