Moonbath Read online

  Once Bonal was buried not far from his house, Dieula called all her Invisibles for a whole day and night. All of them. Her gods and her Spirits. Her Invisibles from the paternal side and those from her maternal side. The brave, the magnetic, the wise, the compassionate, the powerful Ogou Kolokosso, Marinette Pyé-Chèch, Grann Batala Méji, Bossou Trois Cornes, Ti-Jean Pétro, Erzuli Dantò, and all the others…

  Two days later, her low chair at the door to her hut, Dieula started to sing a strange psalm that seemed to come from afar. Not from her insides but from further away. From the very heart of the earth.

  And it climbed up her legs, into her organs. And from her throat it came out like a thread through a needle until it went beyond the heavens. Not one of us dared to bother her, out of fear of breaking this thread. She sang without ever stopping:

  Yo ban mwen kou a

  Kou a fè mwen mal o!

  M ap paré tann yo

  They hit me

  The blows hurt me very badly!

  I wait for them at the bend

  And then, slowly, Dieula got up, put on a rough blue cotton dress, tied a red handkerchief around her head and another around her waist, where she buried an enameled goblet, half of a small empty calabash, and a bag holding her pipe and a little tobacco. She summoned Orvil, her older son, and told him what she had to do and that she would return soon. We saw her disappear on the other side of the Peletier Morne. Without a cent, without bread, without water, she walked in the thickets, the bayahondes, and the bushes, begging for food and shelter, to do penance and plead to her divinities to respond.

  Dieula returned the afternoon of the eve of the storm, beneath a wall of menacing clouds. She did not want to be carried away by the powerful current of the Mayonne River, she told us. The penance had lasted a whole month. As proof, her feet were badly beat up and pain radiated from her lower back. Seeing her return, we cried out, wept, and danced. We had all been waiting—at once confident and worried. Dieula was exhausted, but her eyes were clear like the sky after rain. As though in all the time we hadn’t seen her, her eyes had been soaked in light. Or fire. Or Gods.

  She sat down with difficulty on her low straw chair at the entrance to her hut, her bloody and blistered feet in sandals whose thin leather had been marred by the dust of the trails and the water of the rivers and streams. She took off her shoes and asked Orvil to draw a tub of water so that she could soothe her feet, then asked for something to eat and drink. She swallowed a plateful of corn with black beans and bananes musquées, Orvil and Philogène standing behind her, and the two little ones at her sides.

  Four days after her return, Anastase Mésidor’s fourth son, who was born two years after Tertulien, died unexpectedly. Typhoid? Poisoning? Meningitis? The Mésidors never knew. We, in Anse Bleue, Ti Pistache, and Roseaux, without saying a word, believed beyond the shadow of a doubt…and we believe it still, that Dieula Clémestal had taken death by the hand and led it dutifully to the Mésidors’ front door.

  After the death of Bonal, who was then our danti,* the life of the lakou was marked by prudence and vigilance. We had been hobbled, and we were afraid of falling until the day Bonal appeared in a dream to his brother, Présumé Lafleur. The latter gathered everyone in the early morning at the entry of his hut to tell us of the strange dream: “I saw Bonal walking toward me, as straight as an arrow. Dieula walked behind him but it was like she had shrunk, and it was Orvil, with his broad chest, who led them both.” As Présumé Lafleur told his dream, tears rolled down Dieula’s cheeks. She was relieved and pleased. Présumé went on: “I stood there, frozen, shocked. And, just when I lifted a foot to walk toward my brother, he disappeared over the water as he pointed his finger to Orvil. And Dieula wept, wept, like she is weeping here before us.” We all took Présumé at his word and we bowed to Bonal’s will to make Orvil his successor, and the new danti of the lakou.

  Dieula made some offerings to the divinities, waiting for Orvil to pass through all the steps of his initiation before he took asson. That ended a few weeks before his brother Philogène left for Cuba, a year before Dieula died, and three months after the Americans departed the island.

  Orvil became our danti and oversaw everything, the fishing, the work in the jardins, the punishments, the offerings to the divinities, our protection against those more powerful than us—like the Mésidors, Frétillons, the chief of police. Our protection against all who resemble us as two drops of water do each other, but who were not us. Who were not from the lakou. He made sure that ambition never nested in any of the hearts of the lakou. None. We were branches of the same tree, arms from the same trunk, and we had to stay there.

  But Orvil, though he was our danti, couldn’t do anything to treat the underlying wounds, from which the blood of the earth gushed. The primal scars that dug into the sides of the hills. The rivers that shriveled and shriveled, bleeding out. The earth and rocks that kept piling up at the feet of the slopes when we pushed them away. The growing power of the hurricanes. The droughts, each one more devastating than the previous. Against those who left, detached themselves from the tree for a reason that was not ambition but looked a lot like it. Orvil was powerless against these events that only seemed to want to follow, straight, straight ahead, a one-way road with no escape from fate.

  6.

  Nothing upset Olmène more than these acts of hate, tears, and blood between the Lafleurs and the Mésidors. Orvil, her father, sometimes relived them as though they had taken place the day before and not forty years earlier. Yet nothing troubled her as much in this dawn as the look of the lord and thug Tertulien Mésidor. A wind coming from the mountains stirred up the waves. Olmène looked at the sea, which seemed to breathe like a beast stretched out on its back, agitated by the ebb and flow of the blood of all the creatures and souls living within it. Nan zilé anba dlo, on the island under the waters. She secretly greeted the Dead, the Ancestors, and the Mysteries. Undoubtedly, Tertulien Mésidor’s fleeting and flagrant presence had plunged her into a strange disorder. Strange, but good…We, too, were troubled by that brisk and bizarre visit, but we left Olmène to herself…To taste her first feelings as a woman.

  It was said that Tertulien Mésidor got his power and his money from a pact with the devil. That in the right pocket of his pants he hid a free pass, in indelible ink, issued by one of the secret societies, Zobop, Vlingbinding, or Bizango, that surprised the innocent on the roads at night. That he even reigned over one of them as emperor. That in the room upstairs, at the back of the far south end, behind two doors that were always closed, he hid a hideous creature with two horns on its head and a cork-screw tail. Without ever having seen it, several among us swore to have heard it howl at the full moon. Regarding the death of his fourth son, Candelon, we heard that he had offered him up in exchange for richness and power to a blood-thirsty God, Linglinsou or Bossou Trois Cornes.

  “But they say so many things,” Olmène thought. She pushed back the blood that rose to her face and, with that blood, all these things said over and over again, endlessly repeated and rehashed, leaving the shock to fold into itself, inside of her, like an August storm.

  As with God, if we believed in Tertulien, his power fascinated us all in spite of ourselves. Despite the suffering that he inflicted upon us, he fascinated us. Like his father, Anastase Mésidor, had fascinated us. Despite the wounds, thirst, pain, and hunger. And, since God made the earth tremble, overwhelmed the waters and crumbled the mountains, Tertulien perhaps had set his mind on resembling God. Maybe he wanted to outdo him by even making the stars and stones bleed. He was surrounded by this aura that power bestowed upon the strongest and that so often made us, the conquered, lower our heads and, nose to the earth, inhale the darkness.

  When, some years before his death, a dispute had pitted his father, Anastase Mésidor, against men from the big city, the residents of these five hamlets and surrounding villages, including Anse Bleue, had armed themselves with machetes, cutlasses, and bâtons gaïacs.* And, with the
help of some clairin, they pushed back the assault. The Mésidors had been dealt an attack by conquerers coming from afar, and we had all felt insulted by it. All of us. Without exception. Go figure! But that’s how we are. This pitched battle, which threw back the assailants, sealed a strange pact, another one, between the Mésidors, Anse Bleue, Ti Pistache, Morne Lavandou, Pointe Sable, and Roseaux. As fearsome and cruel as they were, the Mésidors were ours. We were even proud of them. But make no mistake about it. Under the shared blow, under the whipped pride, mistrust and fear were sleeping. They were always there. They blew inland like a soft black wind, sweeping the grass of the hills, passing through souls, and descending the dry slopes until reaching the sea. And returning to the hills and descending again. For us, mistrust and fear of a new and unexpected cruelty on the part of the Mésidors. And for the Mésidors, mistrust and fear of our unpredictable vengeance. Who knows?

  When Tertulien Mésidor returned home after his trip to the market in Ti Pistache that morning, he, unlike other days, thought neither of his business nor of his political contacts, let alone of his wife, Marie-Elda. The image of Olmène had already taken hold over his entire body and swept everything else away. Absolutely everything. A man’s desire sharpened inside of him, and it made his eyes shine in the hot light of that early afternoon. He barely tasted what the servants put out for him on the table and he didn’t even notice his wife’s presence. “That’s enough, I’m not hungry anymore. I already ate.” At this very moment, all Tertulien Mésidor wanted a very young woman. Just one. A peasant, as he liked them. And not a meal.

  It is the look of this man that Olmène had borne at the market in Ti Pistache. She had kept her eyes raised for a long time, but eventually dropped them before this rider who could have been her father and who had taken off his hat to talk to her, the daughter of a fisherman and a peasant. She had found the high and serene brow of man who, contrary to legends, contrary to what all of Anse Bleue slurred between clenched teeth, seemed to have a calm presence. The same calm with which he had gone inland toward his grand house with its big gates and all of its servants.

  Ermancia, like the other women at market, like all of us, was caught between fear and wonder. Wonder sparked by the attention of a man that powerful, and fear by the often harmful consequences of such power over our lives.

  7.

  The first moment of stupor over, the man whom I do not know, after having retreated, advanced toward me again. He leaned over again, his eyes wide open. And I saw his face twist slowly in a strange grimace, his jaw slacken, his mouth open as his lips trembled. That’s when, all of a sudden, this face curled in on itself and the man started to cry out, with all of the force of his lungs, names that I didn’t know: “Estinvil, Istania, Ménélas, anmwé, osékou, come to me, help me.” At times he screamed words that fear broke, stretched out, distorted, mixed up. It was like a seawall had given way. And he could no longer stop the waves that gushed from his mouth.

  I, I wanted to ask him to stop. Tell him that I would explain. And since I couldn’t, of course he continued to scream even more. It was awful!

  Then, like he was mustering up the courage, he came even closer to me, his head bent forward, and opened wide his toothless mouth. No way to withdraw from nor escape his breath of night. No way. A breath to turn your stomach.

  Wanting to drown myself in sleep. Just for a few minutes. Knees against my chin. Eyes shut. Shut inside of sleep like the inside of an egg. Let the night glide over my skin. With the memory of the coldness of the moon. Of the rippling water that sparkled like sequins.

  At the edge of the village, a rooster shouts at the top of his lungs. Another responds to him. Both call forth a day that struggles to make itself seen.

  “Do not do what you might regret,” my mother hammered. “Do not do it!”

  My blood throbs outside of me in this wind where I hear this muffled breathing, the clinking of a buckle unfastening…And the cold member, straight as a stick…My neck hits the sand. The tearing. My body is lifted off the ground. The pain around my neck…And then the night… the sea…Again the night. Liquid. Black.

  No matter what, in this story, you have to pay attention to the wind, its saline breath on our lips, the moon, the sea, Olmène absent…The earth that doesn’t give anymore. The stingy sea. And the foreigners arriving with their faraway customs. Their habits, their American cigarettes, their bodies, their odors, and their shoes that catch our eyes.

  And I, who didn’t want to be here anymore, here I am powdered with sand, crowned with seaweed and longing for Anse Bleue.

  “Osékou, anmwé.”There now, the cries of the stranger strike strong in my chest. Mixed up uncannily with my brother’s cries from three days ago, in the night.

  My brother stops on each of the syllables of my name. He had to put his hands up to his mouth like a megaphone to make them travel. Far, very far. And then the cries of others who with him brave the night, the wind, the water to cry out my name. “Koté ou yé? Where are you? Answer!”

  The people of Anse Bleue swam through the night and the water, their eyes open, like whales.

  8.

  Even though there didn’t remain much for them to sell—Tertulien Mésidor having bought so much from them in the early hours of the morning—Olmène and Ermanica decided to meet the other women at the market in Baudelet, which was bigger and busier than the one in Ti Pistache. The heat was already hanging over the paths leading to the Peletier Morne, weighing down the chrétiens-vivants, animals, and plants. Even the rocks groaned. Yet nothing slowed their course on those paths, cleared by bare hands, hard and polished like brick by the sun and the wind.

  On market days, Olmène felt the weight of fatigue more strongly, having gotten up ahead of dawn with the children of the lakou, then climbed and descended the hill, a calabash on her head, another in her hand, in the search of water. But she had already forgotten her painful legs, her bruised feet, and walked straight as an arrow behind Ermanica. She sped up as she went inland toward the towns, leaving the sea to languish in her wake. That world spread out behind her, that great liquid country, could still, at any moment, swallow her in its immense, silent, beastly belly. At times herbal, clear and so reassuring, the world she went toward could also, with no warning, turn her around, freeze her, and knock her over with its cascades of water, its storms, and its cliffs. These worlds had already taken a father, a cousin, a brother, or an uncle from us. Between the first break of light of the devant-jour and the sudden shadows of the afternoon, Olmène put one foot in front of the other, agile and quiet, into the arrogance, extravagance, and power of these worlds.

  The trip seemed longer that day to Olmène, because of the silence of her mother, who never mentioned Tertulien Mésidor’s insistence on buying their goods. Ermancia had seen nothing. Heard nothing. Olmène let herself slip into this same ring of silence, following her mother’s lead. Yet Ermanica couldn’t stop herself from thinking of Tertulien Mésidor, who resembled, as two drops of water do each other, his father, Anastase Mésidor, who unceremoniously and without restraint, at the mercy of his will, had taken so many women that he’d forgotten their names as soon as he’d had them. Scattering kilometers of the coast, the surrounding mountains, with children whose first names he didn’t know, whose faces he didn’t recognize. Even the women who were spared his monstrous lust, if they crossed themselves after passing him, it was because they were intrigued by all that power. Olmène and Ermancia had been, too, that morning.

  They climbed the mountain, hardly feeling the rough limestone bruise the soles of their feet, cut their heels. Olmène eventually forgot the pain, her mother having told her so many times that feet unable to face the stones and rocks were useless, good for nothing: “God gave you feet so that you could use them!” They left very late that day and sped up their steps so as not to be surprised by too strong a sun. It was already almost unbearable because of the glare spreading out from the sea. As far as the eye could see. It gave off light as tho
ugh condemning the earth to fire.

  At the first turn at the top of the hill, Olmène traced the first dark green trees, which didn’t grow thick but still escaped the vicious dryness of Anse Bleue. Entering Roseaux, she and Ermancia took a break, time to wipe their faces, relieve their bladders, to pick strands of mangue fil and stick them between their teeth. Time also to chat for a few minutes in front of Madame Yvenot’s stand, and she offered them half of an avocado and a kasav*. Olmène couldn’t keep herself from looking at Madame Yvenot’s new shoes, black with a buckle on the side. For the last two months she’d been dreaming of them.

  Madame Yvenot, recently returned from the Dominican Republic, showed off her profits from selling provisions and pois Congo. What Ermanica knew of the Dominican Republic had started over meals shared with Josephina, a friend of her mother’s from Duverger, back when there was trade with Pedro, Rafael, and Julio in Bani; it stopped with a death, blood, a scar on her left forearm, and a missing front tooth. She escaped Trujillo’s massacre because her mother covered her up with her body and breathed her last breaths beneath the repeated strikes of the machetes and the heinous sound of the voices that cried: “Malditos Hatianos, malditos.” The events that sometimes disfigured her joys or filled her sleepless nights despite the fatigue of the days. Ermancia didn’t even want to say the name of that part of the island, and settled on listening to Madame Yvenot in silence.

  Changing the subject, her eyes insinuating, serpentine, she asked them why they were late. There’s nothing to quicken the pulse of the slanderous, mal parlante Madame Yvenot more than taking out peoples’ dirty laundry and wallowing in the salt of their tears, the red of their blood, the stickiness of their seed. And sniffing around, celebrating the odor of misfortune. Ermancia told her that Orvil had trouble getting up that morning because of the pain in his back. Madame Yvenot, pleased by this display of confidence, reminded her that she would wind up killing her old man of a husband: “You are going to finish him off, Ermancia!” They both laughed out loud. Ermancia started to tell the story of a woman whom she knew in her hometown and who, one day… She whispered the rest into Madame Yvenot’s ear. And, when they laughed again, Olmène laughed with them, not because of their words, which had been muffled and which she didn’t fully hear, but because of Madame Yvenot’s enormous breasts, which shook all around like two wild horses each time she burst out laughing. That didn’t make her forget Ermancia’s lie, and it only further sharpened her curiosity for this older man who emerged from the fog and who had the power to make her mother lie.