Moonbath Page 5

  Orvil stretched out and asked, mechanically, if sales had been good. Ermancia pouted slightly and said the routine “Not bad,” while in fact they had sold everything, and for a good price. She handed out a portion, just a portion, of the profits to Orvil, along with the soap, the oil, and the cloth that she had bought from Madame Frétillon. Ermancia promised him that she would make him a new shirt in Roseaux. He nodded.

  When she asked him for news of her sons, Orvil told her that Léosthène had just told him again about his desire to leave Anse Bleue and go to the Dominican Republic or Cuba. Anywhere, just to leave. Like Saint-Ange, the father of Ilménèse’s children. Like Dérisca, that man from Ti Pistache who had left for the big island and brought back, his words ringing like bells—“caramba, porqué no, si señor”—“guayabelles* like you’ve never seen and two gold teeth that speak volumes about what a man can get over there in Cuba.” Philogène, Orvil’s brother, before his death, had been able buy a bread oven for the mother of his children, who lived between Roseaux and Baudelet. “Just by cutting cane, Uncle Philogène did it,” repeated Léosthène.

  “With Fénelon, you can never know,” Orvil added. “Never.” As much as Léosthène’s heart was on the side of the sun, for all to see: the joy, pain, torment, or contentment; Fénelon’s loved the shadows and silence. Nobody could say if he wanted to stay or leave, if he would open his hand to catch a dream or if he hid dark anger or resignation in his clenched fist. No one.

  Léosthène wanted to go to the lands where fortune sometimes caressed the dreams of men like him. Images were turning inside his head like a wild sarabande and he kept repeating: “Mwen pralé, I will go. Mwen pralé.” He had buried his rage to live deep down, and only wanted to take it out to bite at hope. Orvil hadn’t paid attention to it the first times Léosthène had said said these words, but he finally accepted that they hurt him like the blows of a machete. The blood didn’t trickle but all the same. So many people had already left. Too many people. Orvil, every day, told himself that he would get through this suffering, too.

  While the threat of Léosthène’s departure hung heavy over the hut, Olmène was still under the spell of her meeting the morning before. Fénelon, the youngest son, didn’t say anything, his eyes wandering. It’s true that the sea didn’t give as much as it used to and the gardens where vegetables grew under the sun strained to produce more. Orvil and Ermancia wanted to settle on the land that the State had abandoned not far from Anse Bleue. The land will keep giving for some time. “And after?” hammered Léosthène. “We will take more. And after?” He said it as if to wake us up, to snap us out of a dream. We pretended to not understand him. Fearing on his part a refusal to inherit, a desire to escape us. To no longer stand on the steps of our kin. He, Léosthène, simply didn’t want to wait anymore and had given up on the reasons we’d had for staying and not expecting more. He didn’t want to. Wanted nothing else. The impatience tormented him too much. And we could not hold him back.

  On that evening in particular Orvil felt that, even if to live and and to suffer were the same thing, there was, in the rough hand of the wind, in the bite of the sun, in the belly of the waters, a storm brewing. It had been too long since he had called the family divinities and he deeply felt the need. He begged their forgiveness for having neglected them all those months. Even if times were difficult. Because the lwas are hungry and thirsty, even more so than we are. And it’s necessary to nourish them. So that they protect us. So that they watch over everything and close the door to misfortune.

  Cilianise and Ilménèse, her mother, had prepared, for the entire lakou, some bananes pougnac, red beans, and millet, which put a light salve on our hunger. And they assured us that eating together was a pleasant and warming thing. That, in this circle, hunger took its share of us. Orvil later drove away the dark moods by standing up and telling, for the umpteenth time, with grand gestures, the history of Dieunor, the franginen grandfather, who disappeared on the other side of the mountains early one afternoon, one February. “When he didn’t draw on his pipe, he drank from the mouth of a bottle in which he had macerated spices, barks, and herbs into a clairin and only ate kabich,* cassava, sugar cane, and mangos. Nothing else. The Invisibles were with him all the time. All the time. No need for him to call them out loud. They were there. Dieunor reigned over the heart of the lakou like a great danti. Like a roi.”*

  “Then one day…” Olmène, sitting against her father’s chair, clung to it as though to hold back time. And to turn her back on the gloom of age that was already introducing itself. In the freedom of dreams, she returned, for just a few moments, to the circle of children that she had hardly just left, where she found clouds of gold, kings of forests, the insatiable ogres and Theseus, the poisson amoureux, as the fable went, the paramour of young girls. Laughter erupted every time that Orvil imitated the powerful voice of his franginen forefather. Who loved above all to stand at the top of the towering waterfall overlooking the Peletier Morne. Olmène imagined the franginen standing there when Anse Bleue and the world were still just ideas in the womb of Genesis. The words took on a malicious and crazy color, and contentment lit the stars in their eyes and put the first rays of the moon to bed over their roofs.

  The mats where Léosthène and Fénelon slept were frayed at the edges and filled with bugs. Despite the prickly straw, they fell asleep quickly. The day had been rough. The pestering whistle of the mosquitos passed over their faces, arms, legs. Everyone’s skin was riddled with bites.

  Ermancia, Orvil, and their children slept in one—the onlyroom of the hut. In the powerful, reproductive odor of the poor. Orvil and Ermancia’s was stubborn, the children’s was more acidic, and the adolescents’, with their battling hormones, was pungent. It mixed with the stench of rinds and stale leaves, with the pestilence of the hole behind the house that we crouched over, amidst the wild exhalations of the animals—the two pigs, the sow, the two chickens, and the goat.

  We were in July, the month when the heat announces the hurricanes. The first drops of rain, slow, thin, spaced out, tolled with regularity, like bare steps, and blended with the rattle of the of rats in the straw. Darkness had fallen and submerged us in its secrets, its strange creatures, its spells. Each in their hut sang, in silence, the prayers to stupefy the bakas: *“Vade retro Satanas,” and said the simple ones to the cast away the devils.

  In the hut there was only one bed, for Orvil and Ermancia. A mattress made of bumps and crevasses that from afar you might think were big rocks. Ermancia received Orvil on this mattress. Without a sound. Without a complaint. Without a word. Until, with a grunt, he turned toward the wall and fell asleep. Olmène kept her eyes wide open, her ears, too. Thinking of certain nights when the stifled groans, the sighs and gasps of Orvil and Ermancia, shaken from head to toe, called to mind a distant tumult of cats.

  Olmène twisted and turned on her mat, placed right on the ground, and eventually buried her head in the rags piled into a heap like onto the belly of a stinking beast. Because of what Ermancia and Orvil had just done, the memory of Tertulien troubled Olmène even more. A memory of curiosity, fear, and speculations of all sorts. She squeezed her hands between her thighs in order to contain what was already moving within her. Pain. Calculation. Sweetness. Which, if she had listened, would have taken her back to the market in Ti Pistache. She heard the wood whine under the wind and rain. Like the hut might disintigrate under the cumulative effects of the rain, the salt, the wind. Fatigue carried her into a light sleep, very light. A sleep without dreams. But at least crossed by fleeting images. Images of the franginen forefather, of the waterfall, of the magician kings, of the orange tree braving the clouds to climb to heaven, and those of the older man towered above them all. Images she wouldn’t remember when she woke up.

  For the third time in a fortnight Agwé came to Orvil in his sleep.

  The next day, the storm didn’t let up. It rained three days in a row, as though it was a wall of water pushed by the mountain that imprison
s us. Confinement in a vast liquid country. The shavings of the bois-pin* to cook the food were wet and we had to stay, sleeping late, inside our huts, only getting up to share some pieces of kasav, to speak in low voices, to look through the slats in the wood at the cracking of the trees under the rough wind and rain or to listen to the noises of the animals in the enclosure. Then, on the last day, the rain was light and the earth was full of ruts and puddles. There had been three long tedious days of waiting, scolding the children who fought and wouldn’t sit still, braiding the hair of girls, of women, unbraiding and braiding again. Telling dreams, deciphering their meaning. Returning to the time from before, the temps-longtemps, and reviving rumors. Three long days of words passing through the silences to talk to the gods. Of laughter breaking us in two, tricking our stomachs growling with hunger. Three long days when Léosthène dreamed of leaving, Orvil of a service for Agwé, Fénelon and Ermancia of the monotony of the days. Three long days when Olmène thought of Tertulien, who thought of her.

  11.

  The opportunities to meet didn’t arise as quickly as Tertulien Mésidor and Olmène would have wished. But enough for them to see each other three times in a row at the Ti Pistache market, one time on the road toward Baudelet, and she sang a song that drove him wild. And, each time, insidious thoughts like so many grains of sand embedded themselves in Olmène. Tertulien started to desire Olmène not like she was a forbidden fruit—he was the master and lord of lives and goods for kilometers and kilometers—but like a vandal desires the innocence of a virgin. She didn’t have an opinion, except that the time had come for her to be woman. And that this event and this knowledge would come to her from Tertulien Mésidor, a powerful man.

  Then, the fourth time they met, unlike before, Tertulien was more voluble and told stories while making big sweeping gestures with his hands. He was surprised by these words coming out of a mouth like his, he who had bitten, spat out curses, and pronounced death sentences. Olmène saw a magician in Tertulien. She said that the Maîtresse, the queen Erzuli Fréda,* had put on her path a man who would build her a solid house and would feed her children. She only had her youth to offer to this man who lived under the same roof as his wife and who had already scattered his seed in the flowers of so many women. Olmène wasn’t stupid. But that made Tertulien, in her eyes, all the more powerful.

  Despite his impatience, Tertulien waited for the day when Olmène was sent alone to the market. Ermancia was bedridden with a high fever. He followed her along trails through the brush and bayahondes that lead toward the hills. He left his horse and took her by the hand. She followed him and, in the middle of the clearing, Tertulien mentioned shoes, three dresses, a house, a canopy bed, a plot of land, and a cow. She said nothing, but they both knew that a deal had been made. She stopped abruptly. On her face you could read neither desire nor hate. Nothing. Even her eyes, which she lowered for a moment, didn’t express submission nor fear. Between her teeth she cracked the little ginger candy that until then she had been turning over under her tongue. Leading lightly with her left leg, she traced a half-circle on the grass with her bare foot. Tertulien’s eyes shone with desire. He had already made up his mind to possess her. “If she resists, I will take her by force. I will rape her.” But Olmène had also understood that she, too, could gain something from this exchange and played this agreed-upon game.

  Then, when he played at insisting, she played innocent and raised her eyes again as though to tell Tertulien: “You can have what you want.” The leaves of an old acajou cast a shadow over them and, despite the strong heat, Tertulien felt something like the caress of a breeze.

  Olmène kept her eyes fixed on him for a moment, as if to evaluate what would happen to her that she didn’t already know. That she had only guessed by the whispering of the women or by their laughter when they came back alone from the market. Tertulien wanted to feel—the ultimate caprice of man—some resistance, however slight, to have the sensation of taking her by force. Imagining the body under the coarse dress, secured at the waist by a big twisted handkerchief, he already devoured her with his eyes. In her there was neither fear nor desire nor hate, but the expectations of a young sixteen-year-old peasant to whom a man was going to offer a roof that wouldn’t leak, children he would take care of, who would eat every day.

  Despite his violent desire, Tertulien took care not to tear Olmène’s dress. He opened the top and put his desperate mouth on two hardened nipples. Olmène was caught beneath this breathless man who penetrated her without even taking off his pants, he had only undone the zipper. He penetrated her for the first time with a gluttonous and voracious strength, inevitable, and the appetite of an older man to whom such a young girl gave the illusion that death didn’t exist. “How you are sweet, Olmène! With your skin like a ripe mango, your chafoune like sugar cane,” he murmured, drunk on a body that gave off the strong perfumes that he loved so much. Yes, how he loved the peasants! How he loved them!

  Several times in row, Olmène held back a cry in her chest, until pleasure swallowed the pain in a deep sigh. Tertulien had the skill of an experienced rascal, but he had to take her fast, very fast, before an indiscrete eye saw him in his pleasure. Tertulien’s pleasure was hasty, too hasty for his taste, and made up for Olmène’s, which was fresh, voluptuous, and stunned. A light vertigo made him believe for a moment that his bon ange had led him to the bed of a river in the arms of Simbi, or right into the mouth of the wind, the mouth of Loko. Far, very far. There where you glimpse death. A sweet death.

  On his tongue, Tertulien savored the flavor of the ginger candy that Olmène had just cracked. He was shocked, even shaken up, and swore next time to caress this body offered to him right on the grass. To caress it from calloused heel to charcoal hair and to make it tremble in rippling waves like the sea shakes when it is angry. He promised himself everything his manly vanity could invent on the spot. Olmène, she too, savored a sweetness, just that of slowly melting into her her destiny.

  She wiped, with curiosity, this sticky saliva that flowed from her, adjusted her dress, shook off the strands of straw and dry earth that had stuck to her, and left Tertulien without turning around. On the road toward the hut, her skin seemed softer to her, as though she had been coated in castor oil. Her back hurt from supporting the weight of so corpulent a man. The thing between her thighs was all bruised, her breasts imprinted by the mouth of a man. She touched her wrists, which Tertulien had held on the ground. And it was through all these parts of her body in pain that she experienced the first sweetnesses of pleasure.

  When Tertulien passed Dorcélien, the local constable, a little later, he zipped himself back up ostentatiously, boasting like a greedy man. And when Olmène passed him still later, it seemed like Dorcélien smiled at her with a satisfied air. His smile was something salacious and chanson-pointe.* Certain that she, Olmène, wouldn’t look the same way at the naked men bathing in the Mayonne River. Certain that she would think differently of the whispering and smiles she’d noticed among the women, of Gédé’s* swaying hips. Knowing that she had become a woman.

  A lineage will be born from this burning afternoon. From the master whose desire obliged him to fall to his knees and a peasant who opened herself to a man for the first time.

  12.

  The stranger raised his hands to his eyes to protect himself from a blinding sun and tried, fumbling in the fog, to search for the horizon. After stumbling backward, he left in a sort of horror, running with difficultly because his shoes sank into the wet sand. He turned around several times in my direction, as though he wanted to convince himself of what he saw.

  He is now at the height of the first huts of the hamlet, still screaming the same names: Estinvil, Istania, Ménélas. Screaming to rip them from his lungs.

  Mother, call God, the Virgin, and all the saints. And all the Invisibles. Call them out loud! Ask Ogou* to put his sacred machete on me. Do it, please, tanpri.

  All that’s left for me to do is to not do too much and to pre
serve all my strength for what is to come…What will come, that I do not know. To play dead. So that they leave me alone. So that they do not come back to me from all directions and spoil me even more.

  Jimmy arrived from far away. From very far. From the big city. In his clothes out of a magazine, with his two rings on one of which there was a lion’s head, and his perfume like we had never smelled…And then the boots like you see in the movies.

  Now I remember: I gave a shopkeeper at the Baudelet market a few gourdes* as a deposit for sandals. Strappy. Red. High heels. For the feet of a queen. And I gave myself a pedicure right on the sidewalk. Because, what else to do, peasants, you recognize them by their feet. Even without looking at them closely. Those of my father are flat, solid, toes rigid, twisted, deformed. No nail on either of his pinky toes.

  The first time, I didn’t want it to be with Uncle Yvnel. I hate Uncle Yvnel. Because of what he tried to do. Under the pretext of watching out for us as a responsible adult, Uncle Yvnel had taken on the task of following us in the fields, on the road leading to school. And then, one day when I was going with Cocotte and Yveline on the road from Roseaux, we heard footsteps in the bushes. Heavy and cautious steps. Steps like those of an animal on the lookout in the brush. But, because of his increasingly strained breathing, I came to realize that it seemed to be a man.

  Before I had the time to think, two hands appeared through the branches. The girls ran away. And suddenly a voice at once authoritative and trembling says my name. I stand before him. He advances, takes me by the arms, I resist. He hits me. I yell so loud that the girls retrace theirsteps, and Uncle Yvnel calls me all the names: “Jeunesse.* Ti bouzin.” And I laugh, mouth open, I mock him! I defy him!