Moonbath Read online

  At the market in Baudelet, they sat in their usual spot, under the leaves of one of the rare acacias that stood in the vast space where they exchanged what the lands gave them: mangos, avocados, bananas, plantains, sweet potatoes, breadfruit, greens, millet, and corn—with what the city offered—matches, thick blue cotton, soap, enameled utensils. This corner where she sat with her daughter, Ermancia had won it at the end of a fierce fight. She took hold of it the day after Grann Méphise, an elderly vendor who had taken her under her wing, died without leaving behind a daughter or a niece or a goddaughter to pass it down to. Another crass woman set up her stakes just after her death, while everyone was still in mourning. Ermancia stood before her, hands on hips, her skirt slightly hiked up on one side, and challenged her: “You stay in this place one second longer and I can no longer be held responsible for my actions!” After the usual cursing, the two women were held back from coming to blows, and the dispute was resolved by an improvised tribunal that immediately recognized Ermancia’s right to the spot.

  Olmène liked this stubbornness in her mother, who stood up to everything: the day, the night, the chrétiens-vivants, and the animals. The land could burst into the flames, the waters could dry up, she wouldn’t relent. She kept going. She went as far as she could. Every market day, she took a little bit more space. After three months she spread out her goods in peace in one of the most coveted corners of the Baudelet market.

  But Ermancia didn’t stop at the market. She managed to win over Madame Frétillon, too, by offering her the most beautiful eggplants, yams, beans, not to mention her tobacco leaves as long as a man’s arm. Very quickly, she became the main supplier for Madame Frétillon, who even went as far as saving her a cup of coffee on market days.

  Lucien, one of Albert Frétillon’s sons, unlike his sister Eglantine, who remained in France, or his brother, François, who lived in Port-au-Prince, loved the greed of this trading post in the province where his family had made its fortune. He had married Fatme Békri, a Syro-Lebanese woman. It was a break from convention in those times, for a bourgeois, even in the provinces, to marry a Syro-Lebanese. But Lucien knew that she would have no match in turning goods into cash. He had Fatme Békri Frétillon stand below a caricature of a thin man in rags facing a pot-bellied man in rich clothes. Under the first image, it read: I sold on credit, and under the second: I sold for cash. At every demand for a rebate or credit, Madame Frétillon, the sweet hypocrite, pointed to the caricature and translated it, with big gestures for the peasants, into a sweet Creole tinted with Arabic: “Ti chérrrie, mafifrouz, I cannot, mwen pa kapab.”

  Olmène, standing behind her mother, enjoyed, as her grandfather Bonal Lafleur had some forty years earlier, watching the men sitting on the Frétillons’ porch. Always the same: the director of the high school, jet-black; the chief of police, a mulatto from Jacmel; the town judge, a quadroon from Jérémie. She watched everything, listened to everything, and remembered the rare occasions when she had seen Tertulion Mésidor meet with these men to discuss questions that were beyond her comprehension. Just as they had been beyond the comprehension of her grandfather Bonal Lafleur. It was 1960 and Olmène knew almost nothing, no more than we did, that they were talking about a powerful man, a doctor from the countryside who spoke, head down, with the nasally voice of a zombi and wore a black hat and thick glasses. Because he had taken care of peasants in the countryside and treated the yaws, some men, like the director of the high-school, believed in his humility, in his charity, in his infinite compassion. Others, like the police chief and the judge, feeling that their old-world, light-skin caste was under threat, were suspicious of this black peasant who said nothing worthwhile. No, really, nothing worthwhile! “Bakoulou, charlatan,” they repeated as often as they could. Tertulien, he kicked himself for having been convinced by the judge and the police chief to back the rival of the man in the black hat and thick glasses. Others, just how many we’ll never know, were right to believe that it would be difficult from there on out on this island to stand tall as decent men and women.

  Like all of us, Olmène often wondered if God, the Grand Maître, in his great wisdom, had created them, she and hers, with the same clay as the rest. And if he had put as much care into his creation of hers as of theirs. Equally into those who loved the man in the black hat and thick glasses as those who didn’t. She looked at her naked feet, the august assembly of these men, then at Madame Frétillon’s light skin and her husband’s new car. It seemed to her that he hadn’t. To us, too.

  Olmène thought of it again in the first shadows of the sunset, after washing her face several times, letting the droplets make her skin glisten like mother of pearl. And again just after scrubbing herself, scrubbing her feet of any trace of mud. She thought of it again at night fall, on the veranda next to the market, when the women, face and feet clean, met around the lampes bobèches* and Man Nosélia’s only stove to sip some tisanes and to talk. To talk as though wresting from the night these words that belonged to it alone. Words that they drew from the light of the day, as though a little darkness was needed to seize them. Olmène loved these voices that seemed to come out of a single great body of shadow. From a sole mouth. The flames danced over these burning, bare words of the night. Olmène could distinguish a profile eaten away by the darkness whenever one of the women bent over to rekindle the fire or pour more of the cinnamon or anise or ginger tisane in her enameled mug. Or when one of their faces rose out of the plumes, nearly blue, from the smoke of a pipe.

  They took turns without tiring, stringing together one story after the other. Those of tax collectors and soldiers, always ready to extort them for something. The escapades of concubines, the impertinence of matelotes,* the troubles of children. Those of the jardins, where they would wear themselves out growing vegetables, millet, and corn. The stories of the most precious garden, that they, the women, kept, coiled up between their hips, that belonged only to them. And the men who had stopped there to rekindle their embers and light their fires. Words of women who spoke by the grace of God, the force of the Mysteries, the tribulations and the satisfactions of the chrétiens-vivants. She could have listened for hours to this speech pulled from the thickness of the days. Because the time spent talking like this isn’t time, it’s light. The time spent talking like this, it’s water washing the soul, the bon ange.

  Man Nosélia put down her pipe only when she felt the first burning in her mouth and the stinging in her eyes. She laughed one last time before soothing the sores on her tongue, the insides of her cheeks, and her palate with a concoction of lettuce and honey. She did so loudly and then spat out a big stream of saliva, scratched her feet, crotch, and armpits in the manner of a cockroach, and fell asleep, a smile forgotten across her lips.

  Ermancia arranged the rags on which slept with her daughter. They went over the sales of the day one last time and reviewed the projects for the future: once fattened, the larger of the two pigs would be sold to allow the purchase of two other younger ones who would be fattened in turn, and the new lands of the State would be opened for cultivation.

  “Even if, just between you and me, Olmène, the new cultivation land won’t give much, and if I listened to myself, I would go all the way up there. Where, in great mercy, the coffee grows. Where the veins of the earth are very fragile, but where the sun is still generous.” And then Ermancia sighed: “But that’s how it is.”

  Olmène listened to her attentively while straining to see in her mother the vendor in the market, the woman she had discovered. Ermancia noticed and, just before closing her eyes, she whispered to Olmène that one shouldn’t say everything. Especially not to men. “Even if he offers you a roof and takes care of your children.” That silence is the surest friend. The only one who won’t betray you. “Never, you hear me,” she insisted. Olmène snuggled close to her mother and put her head on her belly. To traverse, with her, these quiet lands that man never penetrated, except with the ignorance of a conquerer. Where, however conquering he may
be, he doesn’t know how to tread.

  Olmène entered into the grand plain of the night swept by the opposing winds, thinking of the meeting at daybreak, of the secret that Ermancia had since seemed to keep, of that conversation at night among the vendors and those last words of her mother. She smiled at the idea of this first secret of women. This first complicity between mother and daughter.

  Olmène looked at the stars outside, like nails stuck in the sky. Like us, she knew that God had hammered them there and could take one out whenever it seemed right to send messages to the hougans* or the powerful mambos. Or to put them in their open palms.

  Other thoughts came to her, clear because they had no noise, no words. Not demanding anything. A sigh that wasn’t just fatigue escaped through her lips. A sigh that evoked the memory of a man’s gaze. The memory of this man’s eyes weighing on her like hands. A diffuse pleasure radiated from a hot and humid place inside of her. She curled up to hold back this strange wave. A sigh escaped her again, that nobody was to hear. No one. Not even Ermancia.

  9.

  In the early afternoon, with some other women, two from Roseaux, one from Pointe Sable, and two from Ti Pistache, Olmène and Ermancia went back to Anse Bleue. Splitting up, catching up, splitting up from each other again. Like a flock of migratory birds. A moving stain, never the same, on the paths winding under the sky and sun. Olmène felt more than ever that she belonged with these peasant women. Open to all the winds. Women in the same washed-out, patched-up dresses. Women with speech in tatters. A force sleeping in the swaying of their hips, in their voices too. Like under the dirt, a sheet of running water, a source of a fire.

  It was hardly three o’clock when, on the road between Roseaux and Ti Pistache, they passed a young priest, already quite beaten up by the sun, big red patches on his skin. He rode a donkey led by Érilien, the sacristan of the chapel in Roseaux, and carried a collection of miscellaneous objects—a pot, two enameled mugs, books, a blanket. Sweat beaded on his forehead, at times nearly forcing him to close his eyes and marking his white cassock with big halos under his armpits, on his back, and above his navel. The priest breathed like a bull. Two bulging eyes protruded from his fat face. Eyes that were strong-willed and naive. Naive to the point of seeing his entrance into the world of Ti Pistache, Baudelet, and Anse Bleue as both certain and necessary, and that this certainty and necessity were irremediable. “That’s the new priest,” Olmène said to Ermancia. “He is going to the Chapelle Sainte-Antoine-de-Padoue in Roseaux.”

  The young priest, a chubby but tired thirty-something, took off his hat to greet them as they approached, wiped his face and neck, introduced himself, and announced that he was the new priest in Roseaux. That he would build a beautiful church there. “I expect you to come and hear the word of God.” Ermancia smiled and acquiesced with a submissive “Yes, mon pè.” Hardly audible. Eyes fixed on the ground. Érilien overrated the piety of the women whom he claimed to have known for a long time. Olmène smiled in turn, examining the man, secretly but with a sharp eye. Their smiles had raised an invisible wall into which Father Bonin—that was his name—collided without even realizing it. A wall that the sacristan had helped them build with his words. Ermancia and Olmène, standing behind this wall, glanced over it for a moment as the Father walked toward Roseaux. Érilien, not wanting to arouse any suspicion from the newcomer, didn’t exchange a single look with the two women and turned away without turning back, his hand firmly squeezing the donkey’s reins. Father Bonin went on, exhausted by the journey but his heart at work, his soul lighter, persuaded that he had brought two new sheep into his flock on its way to salvation.

  Between Roseaux and the Peletier Morne, Olmène, Ermancia, and the other women walked along the Mayonne River, bordered by malangas with large violet leaves and watercresses like fuzzy manes, with the same fear in their heart of seeing Simbi* come out from between two rocks and lead them to a secret place from which they wouldn’t return unscathed, like Madame Rodrigue’s daughter, from Pointe Sable, who had disappeared one afternoon and whom they hadn’t found find until three days later, wandering ten kilometers away, haggard, half naked and mute. Abandoned by her bon ange in the middle of the winds. And, because the surface of the waters could be an unpredictable mirror, merciless at times, Ermancia turned around to make sure that Olmène followed her and didn’t lean over the river, trying to sneak up on that which could make her disappear.

  They went on. Each climb followed a descent that didn’t lead to a plain but just to a strip of land that lead to a new climb on a narrow path bordering a dangerous abyss. Sensing that they were approaching Anse Bleue, they sped up in silence and climbed the last hill.

  Olmène and Ermancia finally saw Anse Bleue. Behind them, the parrots coming from the distant mountains cried, announcing the impending rains. On the horizon, the red globe of the sun set amidst the squalls of seagulls. The wind broke the crests of the waves in sprays of foam that came to die on the sand. Anse Bleue was already sleeping. They descended the hill with a light step, almost running, magnetized by the village. Olmène was eager to see her father Orvil, her two brothers Léosthène and Fénelon, and the entire cohort of aunts, uncles, cousins. Everyone.

  The way to Anse Bleue had been long. Very long. It led to our world. A world without a school, without a judge, without a priest, and without a doctor. Without those men who are said to stand for order, science, justice, and faith.

  A world left to ourselves, men and women who knew enough about the human condition to speak alone to the Spirits, Mysteries, and Invisibles.

  10.

  The daily catch hadn’t been as good as the day before, because the nets hadn’t held up. Orvil left at the break of dawn with his sons, Léosthène and Fénelon, and they fought for two hours with a bonito that they didn’t succeed in catching, leaving a sea of red blood around them. The bois-fouillé* had taken on water and they thought that it would best to return with the few fish that they’d managed to catch earlier. On the way back to Anse Bleue, Léosthène and Fénelon scraped the scales and gutted the fish with their knives, and left them to dry in the salt.

  But after this hard catch at dawn, Orvil was exhausted. “To live and to suffer are one and the same thing,” he’d always claimed, “with our whole lives to pass through our sufferings, heels fixed into the earth to not waver. And when we want to throw out fierce obscenities and curse the hell out of life, we call the Mysteries and the Invisibles, and we caress it, life, like one calms a rearing horse.”

  Orvil had hardly passed through the door to his hut when he had to intervene to take care of Yvnel, the son of his younger brother Nélius. He put his blue handkerchief around his neck. Blue, the color of Agwé, his mèt tèt. He wore this whenever when he had to work to heal somebody, help with a difficult birth, or remove a bad spell cast over a chrétien-vivant, a house, or a jardin. Yvnel trembled from head to toe, overcome by a high fever. Orvil made his way to the back of hut, to the family grove. He gathered roots, bark, and herbs, which he crushed, mixed, kneaded in an enameled bowl while singing in a whisper:

  Mèt Gran Bwa Îlé

  Zanfan yo malad

  Bezwen twa fèy sakré

  Pou m bouyi te

  Maître Gran Bwa Îlé

  Your children are sick

  I need sacred leaves, three

  To prepare the tea

  Grimacing, the boy swallowed three gulps of a green and viscous liquid. Only Orvil knew the recipe. When he went back to Yvnel’s mother, it was to reassure her.

  Orvil finally sat down at the entrance to his hut, took his bottle of trempé and poured three drops in the dust for the Dead before bringing it to his lips. Once. Twice. Several times. The grave of his father Bonal, just beside the hut, between the stones and the wild grass, rose up behind the plumes of blue smoke from his pipe. He remembered the rider who had visited his mother, Dieula, and the month-long penance. He slid into a sweet sleepiness, nan dòmi, waiting for the the Invisibles and the Dead to visit
him behind his eyelids.

  And Bonal Lafleur soon made a sign above his grave. A sober, pensive, even uneasy Bonal, in his thin blue cotton shirt too big for his slight shoulders. And, behind Bonal, Orvil saw the furtive shadow of Dieunor, his franginen forefather. Long, evanescent silhouette, high forehead, emaciated face. But he would have recognized him anywhere, because of the scar on his right cheek. Not a day went by that he didn’t think of Dieunor, that he didn’t think of the secrets of this franginen ancestor, the secrets to which Bonal, his father, had been made the keeper.

  When Ermancia and Olmène arrived, Orvil was still sleeping, his head bent slightly forward, his chair propped against the wall at the entrance to the hut. Olmène watched the ample movements of his thorax like those of an animal in repose. His motionless face showed a deep fatigue, which got mixed up with the forgotten smile on his mouth. For a moment, Orvil resisted the hand that shook him gently on the shoulder. Neither Ermancia nor Olmène mentioned the unexpected and untimely appearance of Tertulien Mésidor at the fish stall at the Ti Pistache market.