“Strange how blessings come,” I imagined my mother saying. Strange too how people with means can make the less fortunate feel special by putting them to work. As much as I loved my mother, I would have easily traded that satisfied grin on her face for a word, any word, even an insult, from Romain.
My opportunity for escape came when my mother joined Rosie and Vaval in collecting just a little more water for the house. She had strolled across the alley, carrying two small jugs, and had gone back inside the house to put them away once they were full. I handed Monsieur Christophe’s son Tobin, a pale-skinned fellow twelve-year-old, the screwdriver I was holding. And at a moment when Monsieur Christophe was concentrating on some complicated procedure that required him to be as close to the valve as possible, I ran.
There was a different feel to our neighborhood for sure. People were walking around looking dazed, exchanging bits of information they were gathering from the radio and television and from one another. Like Rosie, many were collecting shrubs from the ground and waving them in the air. Some of the men were wearing red bandannas around their heads and swinging sticks and tree branches while pouring rum and beer on one another. Others were dancing and performing somersaults but stopping occasionally to yell slogans or phrases they had held too long in their chests: “We are free” or “We will never be prisoners again.”
The bells of the nearby cathedral were chiming non-stop even as several people were shouting, through windows and above the loud horns of passing cars, that the tomb of the pudgy dictator’s father, from whom the son had inherited the country, had just been excavated by demonstrators. An early rumor had it that the son had carried the father’s bones with him into exile, but the people who’d opened the father’s crypt believed they had the bones and were parading them downtown, skull and all.
Graffiti were going up everywhere. Down with the departed president and his wife! Down with poverty! Down with suffering! Down with everything you can imagine.
From the radio reports that were being broadcast at the loudest possible volume from every house, I gathered that the homes of former government officials and the abandoned mansions of the president and his wife were being ransacked, with protesters carrying away everything from tiles to toilet bowls to toothbrushes. There was the stench of kerosene and burning tires wafting through the air. It was only a matter of time before the rubber smell would be replaced with that of flesh.
The doors were bolted tight at Romain’s mother’s house. Only when I got there did I remember that Romain’s mother was away on one of her business trips, buying cloth and women’s undergarments in Curaçao for resale. Like my mother, Romain’s was a business-minded woman, even though she was operating on a larger scale than my mother was.
Romain’s aunt Vesta came to the door and opened it a crack to check out my face. I was in love with Vesta too, enraptured by her long neck and legs, which she displayed freely in thigh-stroking skirts. Vesta hastily let me in. She wanted me to give her a detailed account of what was going on out in the streets, and I did. But in the end all she really wanted to know was whether or not Regulus had been caught.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“The old man’s probably far away from here now.” Romain’s voice boomed inside the room where Vesta had her bed, a table, and a radio from which a taped message from the exiled president was being disseminated.
“I have decided to transfer the destiny of the nation into the hands of the military,” the dictator fils declared in a droning nasal voice that sounded almost the same as his father’s, whose daylong speeches were constantly rebroadcast on the radio each year on the anniversary of his death. It was then reported that six rich men, most of them military officers, would take control of the country.
“It will be more of the same,” Vesta said. “Nothing will change.”
Romain, who’d been standing there as still as a rock through the entire announcement, motioned for me to walk through the white lace curtain that separated Vesta’s room from the rest of the house. Romain was slight but limber, like the kung fu masters. It was clear that he hadn’t bathed, combed his hair, or changed his clothes since the last time I’d seen him, three days before. He was unshaven, barefoot, and scratching his thin legs through his imported jeans. His sunken, bloodshot eyes seemed as though they were struggling to blink, showing that he hadn’t slept much either.
Romain’s mother’s beautiful two-story house was her unconditional gift to him, compensation—his word—for his having to take her last name. As we entered the blush-rose living room and settled down on the sofa, Auberte trailed us and asked if we wanted some refreshments.
Romain replied, “Pi ta,” later, and waved Auberte away, but she paid no attention to him and brought us each a glass of freshly squeezed lemonade and a large piece of buttered bread served on a colorful tray covered with images of Curaçao’s beaches, beaches with names like Barbara, Marie, and Jeremi.
And yes, I was in love with Auberte too. Sometimes I had dreams of Rosie, Vesta, and Auberte coming into the room I shared with my mother and sending my mother away only to fight one another for the honor of devirginizing me.
My wife stirs in our bed now, trying not to move from the one position she’s able to sleep in these days, on her back. My son, you are also lying on your side, I imagine, resting for your imminent journey to us. (You will have to tell me one day what it is you were really doing.)
Listen to your mother now as she says to me, “Michel, are you still talking into that cassette? Go to sleep. If the baby comes tomorrow I’ll need you rested.”
And listen as I, your father, reply, “Just another minute.” And listen now as your mother says, half jokingly, I hope, “I wish I was one of those women you only dreamed of sleeping with,” then goes back to sleep.
Now we return to Romain.
Romain did not drink the overly sweetened lemonade Auberte brought him. He was jittery, his fingers shaking as he bit into his bread. He put the rest of the bread down, got up and paced around the room, and pressed his face against the wall, coming short of banging his forehead against it. Then he walked over to the large television set on the coffee table, reached over as if to turn it on, then held himself back. Instead he sat down, picked up his lemonade once more, and stared into the glass at the thick layer of brown sugar refusing to melt at the bottom.
“When will your mother be back?” I asked him.
“Couple of days,” he said, raising his eyes from the glass. Then he paraphrased Voltaire the way he always did whenever he was served anything with too much sugar in it.
“C’est à ce prix qu’ils mangent du sucre en Europe,” he recited. That’s the price of their eating sugar in Europe.
While studying for his BAC exams, Romain had become too distracted by the French literature segments, going off to read entire books excerpted in his lessons. He would fall behind in class, while seeking other sources on the same themes until he’d mastered them. In the end, he gave up school entirely to study on his own. By way of explanation for ending his studies, he had simply cited someone else to his mother—I would later learn that it was Socrates—“Know thyself and you will know the world of the gods.”
But just then, when he looked at the sweet juice, which I was enjoying very much myself, saying “C’est à ce prix qu’ils mangent du sucre en Europe,” I replied, “Okay, your majesty,” feeling glad that at least his father wasn’t the only thing on his mind.
“I’m sharing with you Voltaire’s words,” he said. “I tell you that in Europe they eat sugar with our blood in it and you mock me with a colonial title.”
I realized then that it was going to be business as usual, just an ordinary Romain conversation, and so I said, “It seems to me we consume a lot of sugar here too. Does that mean we’re drinking our own blood?”
He laughed and said, “Imbecile, you’re like that baby pig who deigns to ask its mother how come her nose is so big and ugly. Let me be the mother and tel
l you, ‘Pig, son, one day you’ll find this out for yourself.’ ”
We both laughed. Then his face grew somber and he said, “You know, I’m not listening to the radio or watching television that much. Tante Vesta is, but I’m not.”
“Why watch television or listen to the radio?” I said. “If you want to know what’s happening, hit the béton, the pavement, go out into the streets.”
I was feeling cocky, brazen. I’d ventured out when Romain had not. I’d slipped away from my mother’s grasp to do something she disapproved of, visit with Romain. I felt I had an edge on him. I could now tell him about things he hadn’t yet witnessed, things that were going on out there in our new world.
“I know I shouldn’t be feeling this,” he said, brushing aside my attempted boast by simply ignoring it, “but I can’t help it. I’m a little worried about Regulus. I know the old man isn’t going to sit around waiting for them to get him, but it seems that people like him are going to die very painful deaths.”
“When was the last time you saw Regulus?” I asked.
“Last May eighteenth,” he said. “He was marching in the Flag Day parade on the national palace grounds with all those other macoutes. I went to watch the stupid parade, just to spot him.”
“They probably won’t find him,” was all I could think to say. “He has so many women. One of them will hide him good. Maybe he’ll cross the border, go to the Dominican Republic.”
“Maybe,” Romain said, halfheartedly agreeing to all those possibilities. Maybe Regulus would survive and emerge from all this a new man, repent for all his sins, reclaim all his children, offer them his name—if they still wanted it—beg their forgiveness, both for what he’d done to them and for what he had done to his country.
My mother popped into my head once again. By now she’d probably noticed that I was gone and was furiously looking for me, ordering Rosie and Vaval to join the search. She would think I was out running around with the demonstrators, trying to discover where they would go next, see who they’d find and what they’d do.
“What’s the matter?” Romain asked.
“I’m worried about my mother,” I confessed. “She might be fretting about me.”
“Twelve years old,” he said, “and still Mama’s baby. I’m going to make you a man today. We’re going to do like those guys, like Regulus. We’re going to escape.”
We didn’t tell Vesta where we were going. We simply hurried past her, Romain mumbling that we’d be right back.
“Come back here!” Vesta yelled as we rushed out of the house. “Do you know what’s going on out there? Come back!”
As we sprinted away, I asked Romain, “Where are we going?”
“If we had someplace in mind,” he said, “then we’d be going on a trip, not escaping.”
Most of the shops near Romain’s house were closed even as the streets were growing more and more crowded. On the way to the bus depot, we found ourselves in the middle of a mock funeral procession with a group of “pallbearers” carrying two wooden coffins, one for the president and the other for his wife. Some of the men in the crowd donned priest’s cassocks while young women in black dresses pretended to be sobbing and fainting from inconsolable grief. Among the mock mourners were a few waving blue denim uniforms, which they claimed to have stripped off fleeing macoutes.
We made our way out of the crowd and down an alley into a quieter street, where we found a taxi. Romain jumped in and told the driver, “We’d like to go to La Sensation Hotel.”
“That’s not going to be easy,” the driver said, “with all the people on the streets.”
“Take all the shortcuts you know,” Romain said. “You’ll be paid well.”
The drive to La Sensation confirmed that we couldn’t escape what was going on, short of leaving the city or the country. Everywhere we went, even through the narrowest side streets, byways, back ways, there were people jumping out of corners, waving flags, ripping old posters of the president and his wife, and carrying containers of kerosene, hoping to find a macoute to punish.
When we finally made it to the walled oasis of the hotel, Romain sent me ahead to wait for him in the garden while he settled things with the driver; then we walked over to the front desk together, only to find out that all the rooms were booked, mostly by desperate foreign journalists who were due to arrive within the next twenty-four hours. Romain had been counting on a former classmate who worked as a porter at the hotel to get him a room, where we would hide out until things calmed down. Our escape was going to be financed by Romain’s mother, who left him a big wad of cash whenever she went away.
Surprising even myself, I suddenly wanted to go home. I was missing my mother. What if she got so worried that she lost her mind, went running down every street in the capital screaming my name? What if she thought I was dead and my body taken to a mass grave?
Romain’s friend was nowhere to be found, and the pretty young woman at the check-in counter gave us such a disdainful look that it seemed she wouldn’t have offered us a room even if one had been available.
There was nothing preventing us from sitting here a while and having a drink, though, was there? Romain said. After that we’d go home.
We walked through the lobby, down a flight of stairs to a table under a large umbrella by the side of the heart-shaped pool. A man wearing a dark suit and a bow tie asked us what we wanted to drink. Romain ordered a Coke and so did I. It seemed like such a stupid thing to come all this way for, a Coke.
Romain looked up toward the steep hills above the hotel, and higher still at the row of mountains in the distance. A cloud was passing over the nearest and most prominent one, Mòn Lopital. Then, just as suddenly, the cloud moved on and the sky was as blue as cornflowers again.
Watching me staring up at the mountains, Romain said, “Imagine, a mountain named Hospital. Maybe we should go there.”
We had already failed at our small adventure. We were certainly doomed to botch a larger escapade, like a complete retreat to Mòn Lopital. Still, I replied, “Okay,” hoping that Romain wouldn’t want to follow through with that particular idea.
While we were sipping our Cokes, watching the fizzy dark liquid rise through the straws, a man about Romain’s age hesitantly wandered over to our table and sat down. Romain seemed relieved to see him. The man was meticulous-looking, clean-shaven, and tense. He shook Romain’s hand, nodded in my direction, then made some guarded remarks about the new political situation, how the hotel was going to lose a lot of its faithful clientele, the call girls, and the macoutes who’d hired them.
Romain casually said, “It must be rough, camarade.”
Then the man looked over at me, then back at Romain as though there was something he wanted to tell Romain but wasn’t sure I should also hear it.
Finally Romain said, “Man, it’s okay.” Then I realized there was a larger purpose to our coming to that particular hotel. As with everything else with Romain, this too was not simple.
“You can tell me in front of the little guy,” Romain said, lowering his head to sip more of his Coke. “Is he here?”
“No, man. I’m sorry,” the man said. And he looked truly regretful, even sympathetic. “He didn’t come here. Maybe he went somewhere else.”
The man’s eyes wandered toward the heart-shaped pool and he shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “It’s pretty busy. Sorry you couldn’t get a room. We’ve got to take advantage while we can.”
With that, he got up and walked away. Romain kept his head down, kept on sipping his Coke. I should have been too young to understand what was going on, but I did. Twelve years for a boy like me, a boy without a father, a boy with a mother who tried to protect me so much that her actions incited me to go out and discover everything myself, was like twenty years for another kind of boy.
“He sometimes brought women here,” Romain said. “I used to follow him here. I thought he might have come here today.”
“Who, your father?” I asked.
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I don’t know why, but every now and then I would ask a dumb question like that, demand an explanation for something I already knew.
“No,” Romain snapped, “your father, Christophe.”
I don’t think he even realized why he said it. He was impatient, angry. His nerves were raw. Besides, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t suspected it. Unaware that I was paying attention, people had often whispered things around me, from the girls in the neighborhood who coyly commented how much I looked like Tobin, the child of the wife, the “inside” child, to even Tobin himself, who was sometimes kind to me and sometimes refused to look me in the eye as though we were rivals, to the wife who refused to ever come anywhere near the tap station in order to avoid facing her husband’s indiscretions and their living results. Still, it was too painful for me to be reminded that I had a father who lived and worked so close to me and still didn’t call me his son. I didn’t understand why my mother had to struggle so much to earn money when she could have asked him for it, why she had to force Rosie into virtual slavery to keep us afloat. I didn’t understand why Christophe hadn’t offered my mother money to feed and clothe me, why he only sold her water at a discount and did not offer it to her outright since it was water that I, his son, could also use.
As I sat there with Romain with the straw separated from the Coke bottle yet still hanging out of his mouth, it wasn’t the shock of hearing Christophe declared my father yet again that made me cry. I was simply ashamed to be considered a dishonorable secret.
Romain tried to reach over and stroke my head, but I shoved his hand away. I wanted to grab one of the Coke bottles and smash it against his skull, but I knew he would catch the bottle before it could hurt him.
He had brought me here, he’d said, to make me a man. Was this what he meant? Did he think that seeing his own murderous father hiding out in a low-grade hotel to keep from being burned alive would illustrate what kind of man I ought not to be? Was telling me, reminding me, about Christophe in this blunt, off-the-cuff manner his way of teaching me that I shouldn’t want to be too much like Christophe either? Or was it simply Romain’s way of forcing me to accept what he was about to do?
The Dew Breaker Page 12
