Dancing in the Baron's Shadow

by Fabienne Josaphat

  The sound of water soothed him, drowning out Yvonne’s voice in his mind. Life together used to be good because they’d endured everything in silence, together. But the regular sight of executed men, their bodies displayed as a warning, was enough to rip apart households. The main question, for many, had become: Stay or try to go?

  Adeline splashed her brother and the boy laughed. Raymond wanted to chide her for wasting what they didn’t have, but for a moment he felt relief to be with his children under the smoky shroud of the night sky. What if he never saw them again? What if he disappeared, and they had nothing left? Maybe Yvonne was right. Not about leaving the country, of course. It was too dangerous. But maybe he should ask Nicolas for help. He felt his face burn with shame at the thought, and he squeezed Adeline’s hands together to keep her from wasting water.

  He looked up at the diamonds sparkling overhead. “Look.”

  The children followed their father’s finger as he pointed upward, and their jaws dropped as they tilted their heads back, their eyes shining with starlight. He released Adeline’s hands, now that she was distracted.

  “See the biggest one, the shiny one over there?” he whispered. ‘That’s the one the three kings followed when Jesus was born. That’s how they knew he was born, and that’s the same one I followed every time I got lost in the fields with Uncle Nicolas.”

  “How do you know it’s the same one?” Adeline asked.

  He’d told them the story many times, of playing soccer with his brother all afternoon and getting lost as they walked back through the fields. He’d told them how he navigated by the stars while Nicolas cowered against him, terrified of loup-ga-rou—werewolves—roaming the dark. He was also haunted by thoughts of evil spirits, but Raymond had kept his eyes riveted on the guiding star and led his brother to the main road and safely home. He wanted his children to know there was nothing shameful about manual labor—it was good for the soul; it helped him understand the mechanics of the world—and he wanted them to know that their uncle, Nicolas, didn’t understand it like he did—that his nice house, his beautiful wife, their beautiful clothes and shiny car didn’t mean they were better. Just luckier.

  “It’s that same one, and it always takes you home,” Raymond said.

  “That star is old,” the girl whispered in the dark.

  He chuckled silently and felt her fumble around for her brother. They always managed to make him smile. That’s what children do: patch up the wounds their parents spend a lifetime licking.

  Raymond relented and let the children play games with the water until, little by little, it ran out. He didn’t have the heart to break the spell cast by night and water.

  FOUR

  Since boyhood, Raymond L’Eveillé had accepted that he wasn’t destined to be someone important like his brother. Nicolas was the anointed one and Raymond the worker, the man of humble but practical skills, just another one of the millions of Haitians seeking a modest lavi miyò, a better life, in Port-au-Prince. Still, he’d come to suspect that this “better life” everyone chased after was a lie—and it wasn’t just him. This realization was spreading through the slums like cholera. In fact, he was pretty sure there was nothing “better” than the life he’d left behind when he moved to the city.

  Raymond had grown up in a small farmhouse in the valley of L’Artibonite, north of Port-au-Prince, where his parents had spent their lives harvesting rice. The path was paved for Raymond and Nicolas to take over the farm, but their parents had dreams of giving their sons more and put every cent they could wring out of the little farm toward tuition at the neighborhood Catholic school. Raymond was never good at school. The complexities of mathematical formulas eluded him, and language became his enemy on the classroom’s battlefield. He learned to remain quiet instead of raising his hand and risking ridicule for mistaking a feminine pronoun for a masculine one. Pages of text paralyzed him, his tongue tying itself in knots each time he tried to string letters into sentences. The jeers were cruel: “Analphabèt se bèt!” If you can’t read, you’re stupid. Raymond, ashamed, retreated behind his desk, constructing cars out of plastic juice bottles and soda caps.

  The friars were efficient at sorting the mediocre students from the best ones. Unlike his brother, Nicolas was eager to please and driven to learn, and he quickly became the friars’ favorite. He had a natural intelligence, a remarkable capacity for memorizing tables and retaining conjugations. “Nicolas est brillant, especially in French and Haitian literature,” the teachers wrote in his report card. “Would make an excellent professor.” Raymond’s report card rarely had any comments on it. The few he got went something like: “Student seems ill suited for academia.”

  Creole was comforting to Raymond, whereas Nicolas’s elegant French made the headmaster’s blue eyes shine with pride. While Nicolas devoured books and aced his tests, Raymond, feeling inadequate, spent his time sitting in the shade of orange trees. Their mother, deeply superstitious like so many peasants, had chalked up his deficiencies to the supernatural, convinced that someone had hexed her eldest. “Someone wants to harm my baby,” she said. “I dreamed I found two nickels wrapped in a notebook page inside his pillowcase. Someone’s cursed my boy. But I will find out who the culprit is. They will pay.”

  For a while, Raymond wondered if he might really be cursed. Who would want to harm him? It was true that his family’s farm did better than others in the village, but they were still part of the community, and they had their hardships. It didn’t make sense to him, and in the end, it didn’t matter why he struggled in school—just that he did. His mother brewed him special tea in the mornings, placed leaves between the pages of his books, encouraged him to sleep with lessons under his pillow, discouraged him from accepting gifts from strangers or even friends. Still, his grades never improved. Raymond gave up. Perhaps it was God’s will.

  As they walked home from school, Nicolas would begin his own brand of teasing. His academic excellence made him feel superior to his embarrassing big brother.

  “You’re going to end up growing rice all your life, just like Mother and Father,” he’d say, trailing behind his brother. “Is that what you want?”

  Raymond shrugged his shoulders. “At least I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty,” he said. “I can work the field, and I’m pretty good at fixing things. Why does it matter that I can’t read?”

  “But you’ll never be important,” Nicolas said. “That’s why you go to school. To become somebody, to get out of this place. Me? I’ll never be a farmer. Never.”

  He meant it. On konbit days, when all the villagers rose before dawn to work together, Raymond had to prod Nicolas from his natte and drag him to the rice fields. “Father’s going to be mad if you don’t hurry up,” he’d say.

  Nicolas would kick rocks on the way as the sunrise blanketed the rice fields with a soft pink glow; he refused to put his feet in the cold mud while Raymond masterfully wrapped his large brown hands around a bundle of rice. When their father was far in the distance, plowing the ground with his pick, joining in the collective call-and-response song, Nicolas would even pull out a book. He’d find a strong calabash tree root to sit on and forget all about the farmers, the cook who stirred the hot pot for the workers, the cows’ tails whipping flies away in the morning air. When he caught Nicolas reading, their father would beat him. “Are you ashamed of farming?” he’d roar as his belt smacked the boy’s hips. “You’ll get your hands dirty like the rest of us whenever it’s required, you ingrate!” Raymond stayed up many nights tending to welts on his brother’s body.

  When Raymond turned fifteen, he dropped out of school and found a job at a mechanic shop in the nearby city of Saint-Marc. “Let’s face it,” he told his parents, “I’ll never be like Nicolas. Don’t waste any more money on that school. If I do good work as an apprentice mechanic, maybe I can open my own shop one day.”

  Saint-Marc was known for a neighborhood of graceful, old streets that eased up the hills away from the bay and t
he parks. It was called La Ville des Bicyclettes, aptly named because its residents’ preferred mode of transportation was bicycles. Raymond’s early work as a mechanic entailed fixing chains and replacing wheels with broken spokes. Over time, he moved on to oiling the engines of trucks that traveled to and from the capital. He learned how to drive, shuttling customers from the shop to wait at a nearby bar. In the evenings, he came home with greasy hands and his pants stained with oil that his mother could never fully wash out. But he came home fulfilled, as if he’d spent the day fixing the entire world with just his wrench. At dinner, his head bowed over his meager bowl of bouyon, Nicolas would keep quiet and pretend to study his large history and geography books before scrunching his nose in disdain. “You smell like car grease. What do you do, bathe in the stuff?” Raymond learned to let his brother’s snotty remarks roll off his back.

  Raymond arrived at Nicolas’s house the next day around noon and found Eve in the dining room with their live-in housekeeper, Freda. Freda cooked most of the delicious things in that house, but Eve made some herself, decorating them with sprigs of parsley and orange rinds. “I am a femme à tout faire—a woman of all trades,” she often joked at the stove. “My mother always said a woman must learn to use all ten of her fingers. Here are mine.” And she’d wiggle them in the air.

  Today, Raymond watched her hands fly over the utensils. She lifted a serving spoon, topped the rice and beans with a flower-shaped bell pepper, and scooped out a fresh piman bouk pepper studded with cloves. She sliced onions into perfect rings to frame the chunks of beef, as if dinner were an arts and crafts project. It was almost offensive to Raymond, this display of luxury, this fussing over aesthetic details, and yet it made his stomach clench with yearning.

  “How’s everything?” Eve asked distractedly. “We haven’t seen you since last week.”

  Eve was a tall woman, even taller when she wore her wedge sandals around the house. She had a habit of dousing herself in lavender oil and carried a cloud of the scent wherever she went. She’d never been a thin woman; Eve was curvy, with a little meat on her bones. She had beautiful almond-tinted skin and perfectly pressed hair that framed her face like a smoky halo.

  Raymond was holding Amélie, his niece, in his arms. The baby had just turned one, and she was looking more like her mother all the time, her black hair meticulously combed back on her head. She clung to her uncle’s collar. Raymond rubbed the baby’s back gently and admired Eve’s dedication as she went over a place setting that wasn’t up to her standards, switching a silver spoon for a fork here and there. His eyes widened at the sight of lobster, a rarity, bathing in a red Creole sauce. The aroma punched him in the gut and his mouth watered.

  “M’ap knee,” Raymond said. “Hanging in there.”

  She looked up and cocked her head to the side. Raymond knew instantly that she was reading worry in his eyes.

  “You look tired,” she said.

  “I’m fine,” he said, turning away from her. He didn’t want her to see him like this, vulnerable. He kissed the baby’s forehead and she giggled, babbling something unintelligible.

  “Amélie missed you,” Eve said. “Look at her, she’s beaming. You’re so important to her, you know. When you don’t come around, it breaks her heart.”

  Raymond wondered how much the child was aware of. She was still so young. Amélie always smelled divine from the layers of lotion and talcum powder her mother smothered her in. Raymond had never been able to afford those luxuries for his children. All his money had been spent on food and medicine, especially that dreadful night when Enos nearly died of pneumonia. For a long time, the children walked around barefoot, and their first shoes had been a present from Eve.

  “Nicolas will join us soon,” she said. “I told him you’re here, but he’s probably working on that book of his…” Eve shook her head longingly and sighed. “I wish you could talk some sense into him.”

  Before Raymond could answer, she turned away to pour water into the glass goblets and asked Freda to close the door on her way out. Raymond assumed she was retreating to the help’s quarters in the back of the house.

  “He won’t sleep at night, sometimes, always talking on the phone about his notes,” Eve added. “He won’t listen to reason either. I tried talking to him but he won’t hear it. The telephone is no place to talk about those things. You know? After what happened to my family…”

  She paused for a brief moment, then continued her work. Raymond knew she was thinking about her father and brothers, who had died with the Jeune Haiti rebels in the southern mountains the year before.

  “Trust me, I support him and I want nothing more than to see this regime crumble,” she continued. “There isn’t a place in hell hot enough for Duvalier to roast in. But why take silly risks, right?” She froze and looked hard at her brother-in-law. “The Baron is cunning, Raymond. You never know who’s spying for him. The walls have ears.”

  She set the water pitcher at the center of the table, and when she turned her head, her body was still turned toward him. To Raymond, Eve was like the Madonna, a woman of unparalleled beauty who carried herself like royalty. His brother was so lucky. Raymond still loved Yvonne, but he had grown weary of her own weariness over time.

  Realizing he’d stared at his sister-in-law too long, Raymond’s ears burned with shame.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Eve continued softly. “I’m preparing myself for the worst.”

  Raymond stared at her. He wasn’t sure what she meant.

  “What do you think will happen?” Raymond shook his head. “Everything will be fine, Eve.” He knew his brother’s ambitions were foolish, but he couldn’t imagine they’d really ever take off again like when they went into hiding.

  “Won’t you talk to him again?” she pleaded. “When I think of what could happen if someone denounced him, it makes my skin crawl. Did you hear what they did to that lawyer downtown?”

  Raymond leaned against the kitchen counter, shaking his head. Eve grabbed a newspaper from behind the fruit basket and handed it to him. Raymond unrolled it with his free hand, trying to ignore the smell of bananas and pineapple. He was hungry.

  The grainy front-page photograph gripped him in the gut. He was looking at the charred skeleton of a man, the melted remains of a rubber tire clinging to his bones. There was nothing left of the corpse but blackened gristle and two rows of stark white teeth.

  “How can you do that to a human being?” she asked, her hand on her hip. She shook her head. “He was a good man, never harmed anyone. Nicolas knew him.”

  Her voice wavered, and Raymond realized she was fighting back tears. “Someone denounced him. They said he was plotting against the regime—” She blinked. “I haven’t slept since reading this.”

  “I already tried talking to him,” Raymond said, dropping the newspaper back on the counter. “You know that. He won’t listen to you, so what makes you think he would listen to me, a taxi driver from anba lavil?”

  Nicolas walked into the kitchen, and they fell silent. Eve stepped away from Raymond. Raymond wondered how much his brother had overheard.

  The brothers shook hands with awkward formality, muttered quiet greetings to each other. The resemblance was there, even with their difference in height. Nicolas was younger than Raymond, but he was taller, leaner, while Raymond’s shoulders were broader, his arms and calves more muscular. But the brothers’ jaws and foreheads were of the same squareness, their noses the same width, their skin the same chocolate brown.

  Nicolas pulled Amélie away from her uncle. “Come to Papa.”

  “Leave him with Raymond,” Eve started. “She hasn’t seen him in a while.”

  “She just took a bath,” Nicolas said, finding his way to his chair.

  Raymond glanced at Eve, but she avoided his eyes and pretended to wave at Amélie. His brother likewise kept his eyes glued on the baby. Nicolas sat down in his usual place at the head of the table. The insult stung, but Raymond bit his lip. The las
t time they’d gotten into it, Raymond had stayed away for a month—and it would have been much longer if Eve hadn’t intervened. As they both got older, Raymond found his bitterness deepening, impatient with a life lived in the shadow of his brother’s ego.

  Raymond had come here to borrow a bit of money from Nicolas to repaint his car, but the thought of asking his brother for help still pained him. He’d mulled it over all morning as he brushed his teeth and drank his tea. He was going to ask because he had no other choice. He didn’t mention anything to Yvonne, just in case.

  For the first time, he started to regret not having taken a job with Faton at the tannery. Perhaps that’s what he should do. Accept the inevitable, that he needed to provide more for his family at any cost, to get a job working for someone, for a company. Accept the stench of decomposing cowhide and lime and dye that seeped through the skin. He’d have to accept the consequences of that stench as well: the icy distance from his wife and children, whose warm embrace he depended on; Amélie, whom he’d never again be allowed to hold; his sister-in-law, who would back away when he entered the kitchen; and Nicolas, who would surely keep him farther away.

  Raymond found his place at the table, next to Eve. Who was he fooling? This charade of not believing in anything better, this resignation to a vie de misère, it was a lie. Raymond was intensely aware of this as Eve filled his goblet with passion fruit juice and her gold ring caught the ceiling light. He wanted this, all of it, the luxuries in life: the brushing of the soft tablecloth against his legs, the slam of full cupboards doors, and the humming of an electric refrigerator.

  As they ate without saying much, he listened to the ambient noise around him. Utensils scraped differently against ornate porcelain plates than against his cheap aluminum back home. As Raymond reached for a serving spoon, he realized that the apparent inconvenience of having to stand up and reach around the glass candlesticks and crystal water pitcher would always be an extraordinary privilege for someone like him.