Moonbath Page 2
One of the two riders following Tertulien approached Olmène and pointed to his master. Tertulien took off his hat and, with a fixed grin that was at once a smile and a threat, asked Olmène to sell him some fish. He bought everything. He who, by several accounts, stopped eating fish long ago. Ever since a kingfish in quick-broth had nearly killed him some years earlier. But that day Tertulien would have bought anything and everything. That’s what he did. He didn’t haggle as he usually did over prices, and he paid the fisherman and farmers their due. He bought Ermancia’s millet, sweet potatoes, red beans, and yuccas, which the two other riders hauled behind their horses.
Like all of us, Olmène had occasionally seen a truck, or some horses or donkeys, reeling under the weight of all sorts of goods, crossing the salty lands, forking behind the Mayonne River in the distance and climbing the bridge until disappearing in the direction of Tertulien Mésidor’s silent estate. Like all of us, she imagined, without saying a word and with a mixture of curiosity and envy, what these cargoes could be hiding. Whatever she did or didn’t know, it was beyond what she could possibly imagine. Beyond what we, too, could even dream up. And if a smile twisted our lips or exposed our toothless gums in those moments, it was impossible, for her and us alike, to not blame the world for just a few seconds. To not blame those who resemble us as two drops of water do each other, to not take it out on the Mésidors and their kind. The maids, who once a week braved the trip to the market in Ti Pistache, Roseaux, or Baudelet, sometimes said things that piqued our curiosity for that world. A world that we, the men and women of Anse Bleue and all the surrounding towns and villages, nonetheless avoided. With a determination matching that with which the Mésidors kept us at a distance.
A game that chained us all to the Mésidors and that shackled them to us despite themselves. A game that we, victors and captives, had mastered long ago. Very long ago.
An ancient story entangled the Mésidors, the wind, the earth, the water, and us. But this is not some story about the origins of the world or the mists of time.
Just a story about men when the gods had just barely stepped away…When the sea and the wind still hissed in whispers or wailed their names of foam, fire, and dust at the top of their lungs. When the waters traced a straight line at the edge of the sky and blinded us with the blueish glow. And when the sun levitated like a gift or crushed like destiny.
A story of tumults and very ordinary events. Sometimes of furors and hungers. At times, of blood and silence.
And sometimes of pure joy. So pure…
A story where a new world already straddles the old one. In fits and starts, like you might say about the gods when they straddle a chrétien-vivant…*
Such it was that, on this dawning day in Ti Pistache, not far from Anse Bleue, a village of rock, salt, and water nestled at the feet of the high mountains of Haiti, Tertulien Mésidor, master of his estate, was shaken to his core by the sight of Olmène Dorival, the peasant girl nonchalantly crouched on her heels, facing a basket of fish, vegetables, and provisions at a distant market in the countryside.
4.
The Mésidors, due east, on the other side of the mountains towering over Anse Bleue, had always coveted land, women, and goods. The family’s destiny had crossed that of the Lafleurs and their descendants, the Clémestals and the Dorivals, forty years earlier. That day in 1920, when Anastase Mésidor, Tertulien Mésidor’s father, had stripped Bonal Lafleur, Olmène Dorival’s great-great-grandfather, of the last carreaux* of his habitation,* where acajous and mombins, the coffee of the maquis, still grew under the shade of elms. Bonal Lafleur got this property from his mother, who wasn’t from the village of Anse Bleue but from Nan Campêche, in the mountains sixty kilometers south.
Anastase Mésidor had already seized the best lands of the plateau. But he also eyed others to sell for the price of gold to explorers and mavericks who came from afar, like those in the United West Indies Corporation, who had descended upon the island with the arrival of the Marines. Persuaded that they were like the fincas of Santo Domingo or the haciendas of Cuba, great properties that would make them rich and, at the same time, would transform us at last into civilized peasants: Christians, wearing shoes, hair clean and combed. Tamed but landless. “Never,” a word that Solanèle Lafleur, Bonal’s mother, had repeated dozens of times to her son while tracing a cross on the ground and pointing, quickly and with outspread arms, to the steep slopes of the mountains. There up high, in the dokos,* where the spirit of the Ancêtres marrons* still blew. “The land, my son, it’s your blood, your flesh, your bones, you hear me!” Anastase Mésidor had put a curse on the Roseaux brothers, Pauléus and Clévil, who thought they could stand up to him and play the rebels. They disappeared in the fog of the first hours of the day, on the road that led to their jardin. One was found on the Peletier Morne, hanging like a rag doll from a mango tree, and the other was devoured by swine on the side of the road leading from Ti Pistache to the village of Roseaux.
We, the Lafleurs, had the reputation of being unbreakable and the bearers of powerful, even fearsome, points.* For kilometers and kilometers, many thought this power extraordinary and envied it. An unshakable power. Yet this solid reputation couldn’t stand up to Anastase Mésidor’s insistent offer: one morning, grinding his teeth before a surveyor in a black wool hat and a notary in a dark gray three-piece suit that was much too small on him, Bonal Lafleur was forced to give up his lands.
After a script that started with the words “Liberty, equality, fraternity, the Republic of Haiti” and ended with “here collated,” Anastase Mésidor, the notary, and the surveyor made it clear to Bonal that he was no longer the proprietor.
His thumb smeared with ink barely stuck on the paper in the guise of a signature, Bonal Lafleur demanded his due from Anastase Mésidor. He had nonetheless sold him, with a heavy heart, some of the most beautiful of the lands of the Lafleur heirs, in the wide fertile plains surrounded by the mountains that rose southward over Anse Bleue. The mountains with slopes still green, very green, even if some fine strands of white already streaked their thick hair.
Anastase Mésidor, to Bonal’s immense surprise, paid in cash, a big smile on his lips. A meager sum that Bonal had to share with a cohort of claimants whose rights to the land were far from clear. In looking at his ink-stained thumb, Bonal remembered contentions with a long list of brothers and sisters, cousins, from a first marriage, a second, a third, and others. Without forgetting all those who wouldn’t fail to emerge from the surrounding lands with the announcement of this sale. One day, he had wanted to stop counting the interested parties, after a fight between the rival branches had nearly ended in blood drawn by machetes. Each recalling, with the sharp edge of their blade, events that had fixed borders and bounds. Even if Bonal had tried to stop counting, the fragmentation of the land hadn’t stopped. Upon leaving the notary’s office, Bonal, remembering the incident, shook his head from right to left under his floppy straw hat, frayed on the sides, while touching the bills in his right pocket.
All these memories came to weave a web of dark paths in his head, leading nowhere. A light vertigo came over him. And then, above all, there was Anastase Mésidor’s smile. Not clear. Too good to be true. A smile that sent a chill down his spine. A smile that was a sign of nothing good to come. He thought for a moment of the Grand Maître high above, sighing, his throat dry. But God, the Grand Maître, was really too far to quench his thirst, and Bonal, touching the bills again, settled on some good glassfuls of clairin.* Not one of those trempés* with macerated herbs, spices, and bark. No. A good clairin, pure, to scald his tongue, burn his throat, and never says and wake his soul up in the middle of beautiful flames so that, for just a few hours, his life appeared before him like a luminous road without brambles. Without thickets. Without bayahondes. Without Anastase Mésidor. Without a cumbersome family. Agile on his legs with their protruding muscles, chin slightly forward, he advanced with a resolute stride in the direction of Baudelet.
“So many offspring for all these men! So many! Ten, fifteen, twenty, and even more!” sighed Bonal. Nonetheless, this idea of staying flush to the grave reinvigorated him, and he had a sweet and fleeting thought for a young femme-jardin* from Nan Campêche, hard working, soothing, with strong thighs, and who had given him two children. He smiled as he lightly passed his hand over his thick beard and quickened his step, running after visions, despite the yaws that bit at his left heel.
But, in fear of being beaten up by the Marines and forced into one of their dreadful chain gangs or, worse, to be slaughtered with no warning just for being mistaken as one of the cacos* rebels, Bonal changed his mind. Fear in his core, but agile like a wild cat, he preferred to use the steep paths. This fear twisted his guts, which he had to tame, to calm, he knew it all too well. Acid and painful fear. Fear that never loosened its grip. Stuck to us like a second skin. Planted inside us like a heart. Fear, a heart in itself. Beside you to love, share, laugh, cry, or get angry. So, in big strides, Bonal chose to move toward it in solitude. In the bushes and the bayahondes. To advance into the unknown. There where nobody came to look for us. Where the shadows are: in the eyes of beasts, under the bark of trees, in the sighs of the wind, under the leaves, in the stone beneath the dirt. He touched the small blister under his left arm and walked in this strange light of the undergrowth. Where he could merge with breath, the murmur of elements. Where he could be everything and nothing at once. There where Gran Bwa* watches over his children and topples their fear. Where he reduces it to silence. Bonal hummed quietly, several times in a row, without even noticing it:
Gran Bwa o sa w té di m nan?
Mèt Gran Bwa koté ou yé?
Gran Bwa what did you tell me?
Grand Bwa where are you?
And went on with a light step, very light…
5.
Once he was on the path in Baudelet, Bonal slowed down in order to not arouse any suspicion and put on a normal face, the face of the villages, the face of a peasant smiling ear to ear, dazed by hunger and obscure divinities. Who says nothing, sees nothing, laughs, and never says no.
Bonal stopped, like on all the rare occasions when he went to Baudelet, at Frétillon’s store, not far from the market. “The Haitian peasant is a child, I tell you all, a child!” Albert Frétillon liked to repeat as he twirled his thick mustache. And we always agreed, nodding our heads and staring at the ground. Which reassured Albert Frétillon, who stuck his thumbs underneath his suspenders and, to better observe us from above, lifted his head, stretched out his neck, and adjusted his glasses.
Frétillon’s two sons, François and Lucien, and their only sister, Églantine, donning gloves and a hat, had gone to France on one of the large ocean liners that often docked in Badaulet to make a fortune in ports on both sides of the Atlantic. Albert Frétillon’s fortune went back two generations, since an ancestor from La Rochelle had settled in Baudelet and started a lineage of mulattoes in this port town, the bourgeois of the province. In addition to his coffee trade, Albert Frétillon prepared, in a guildive* at the entrance of the town, the best clairin around. Once the brandy was distilled, he spent most of his time on the porch of his house, next to the shop his wife ran. The chief of police, town judge, and director of Baudelet’s only school met there, with some others, to bicker and speak their minds.
That afternoon, Anastase Mésidor, after purchasing Bonal’s lands, joined them in their heated ranting. They hadn’t let go of the events of the past few months. The director of the school in Baudelet brought up, once again, the cities bombed by the American Air Force, the bloody debacle of the leaders: Charlemagne Péralte assassinated, tied up naked to a wooden door and displayed in a public square; and Benoît Batraville, killed some months later. The volume rose. Some of them, like the judge, spoke of their sense of honor, pounding their chests as they went on, of an unbounded love for their homeland. Some of the others, like the chief of police and Anastase Mésidor, vaunted the benefits of this civilizing presence that was finally going to put an end to the fratricidal fights of the savages we were. “Yes, all, we are savages!” In saying the word “savage,” Anastase noticed Bonal standing in front of the store and beckoned him with his finger, with an insistence that didn’t reassure the latter. Albert Frétillon had acquiesced to all of these opinions. Absolutely. The future and prosperity of his business depended on this total absence of opinion, on this conviction that had been planted in him, that we the peasants would never grow up.
Bonal took off his old straw hat and flashed them his biggest smile. He even let himself, as usual, be lulled to the point of vertigo by the subjunctive imperfects and Latin words of these gentlemen—a feeling he’d felt since leaving the notary’s study—and he felt a strange premonition that confirmed this finger pointed at him. Then, addressing this unease, he decided to drown it in the clairin he was dreaming of since the sale of the lands. A real clairin.
At the first sip, just outside of Baudelet, Bonal naturally remembered the offering to make to Legba,* to open the door to family divinities, the offering to Agwé,* so that the ocean would keep feeding them for a long time, and to Zaka,* so that the jardins would be more generous. The earth already seemed lighter to him, suggesting that the sun at its zenith had made a clean world, clear, emptied. He went hurriedly toward the bush, in the direction of Anse Bleue.
Bonal disappeared that same day. Without Zaka, without Agwé, without Legba. Those among us who didn’t want to stand up to the powerful said that drunkenness was the cause of his inexplicable disappearance. Some swore having seen a group of men, riding donkeys, who had, without a doubt, taken Bonal’s money and, then, his life. Others recalled the presence of a goat that stood on the edge of the road and spoke clearly, showing two golden teeth. Some swore they had seen an old woman who, after moving with the light step of young girl, must have disappeared in the gorge at the bottom of the ravine. The whole affair unfolding before the indifferent eyes of two Marines, each with an imposing gun slung over his shoulder.
And each of us added a little more, added a little more…
Trying to clear up all suspicion, Anastase Mésidor sent a messenger by horse to meet Dieula Clémestal, the mother of Bonal’s four children: Orvil, Philogène, Nélius, and Ilménèse. But the anger had already shut Dieula’s jaw shut to the point that she didn’t say a word. Not a single word the whole time the messenger stood before her at the entrance to her hut, awkwardly fidgeting with the hat in his hands.
“Your honor, Madame Bonal! It’s Anastase Mésidor who sends me to tell to you…”
In response, Dieula slowly lit her pipe. Very slowly. Exhaling strongly three times in a row without ever raising her head. Then she spat so loudly and so forcefully that the man left immediately. He did not even dare to turn around before disappearing on his horse at the end of the path.
This scene, as Orvil, Olmène’s father, would often have to repeat later, left him with the first strong and indelible impression of what he was and what this messenger represented. Of who was big and who was not. Who was strong and who was weak. Of the hunter and the prey. Of who charges and who is trampled. Orvil Clémestal was just twelve years old. He and his younger sister Ilménèse hid in the folds of his mother’s skirt.
That night, Bonal appeared to Dieula in a dream—“Like I see you here,” she told her children and all of us. And Bonal had told her everything. Absolutely everything: the sale of the lands, the hidden paths to Baudelet, the finger pointed at him, buying the clairin, and, on the road, a sharp pain in his back. Inflicted by the point of a cutlass. And then nothing. Nothing more.
The next day, with Orvil, her oldest son, she went at dawn, without the slightest hesitation, to the exact place where Bonal’s body was found: at the bottom of a ravine, in the middle of the brambles and bayahondes. Bonal’s pockets were empty and a cloud of flies was swirling around his body, which was starting to swell. We were stunned, shocked, but not the least bit surprised. Dieula only reminded us of the powe
r of dreams, the strength and the solidity of the threads that tied us to the Invisibles. We cried out our pain, and then we silenced ourselves. Returning to our placidity. To our place. To our peasant silence.
Bonal’s service had no drums. No wailing. Tears were swallowed. No cries pulled up from the insides of women. No open reminiscing on the life of the deceased. Just the moaning and murmuring among the jerky sway of bodies back and forth. The priests, gendarmes, and Marines knew nothing of it. A lugubrious and sad service whose only sound was the asson,* the prayers, the grief, the songs cornered between throat and mouth. Despite the three sacred words murmured into Bonal’s ear and all of Dieula’s skill, the celebrated mambo,* the deceased didn’t designate anyone among us to welcome his met-tet* and look after our heritage and our blood. The désounin* had failed, and Bonal left carrying his Spirits with him. Those who led him, led his house and protected the lakou.* And we were not sure that he had heard all of our messages to our Dead, to our lwas* and all our Invisibles. So we all were afraid for the protection and life of the lakou.* We were afraid for each one of us.