Haiti Noir_The Classics

by Edwidge Danticat

  Small sailboats, white, triangular birds, run over the waves. At the river’s mouth, washerwomen and half-nude bathers with cloths draped below their navels sing and play. Black little children bawl and give each other great kicks in the water. The sky is dotted with small, cottony clouds. Bronzed dockers bustle about on the wharf. Splashed with sun, laughter, and sweat, they shout in chorus, and their walk is drunken, bent over, waltzing beneath the sacks of coffee and the bales of cotton. A veritable dance-song, a kind of worker’s ragtime. The ship is surrounded by a string of small boats where market women offer fruit on large wooden trays and hold out coconuts, which, decapitated with one brusque machete chop, laugh and cry before reaching the lips of the sailors leaning on their elbows on the bulwarks. Below, ten o’clock peals from the bell tower that lifts its sharp finger above the foliage and the flame trees. Here, just beyond Customs on the little parade ground, a stream of military music suddenly unfurls. A general as black as jet in his bottle-green uniform trimmed in gold braid prances on a white charger amid the blare of the war music, cannon salvos, and bursts of gunfire. He shouts orders and maneuvers an army of cacos-plaqués, cuirassiers in uncured, hairy leather vests. Second Lieutenant Earl Wheelbarrow, his eyes beckoned from every side, is still thinking of his native Chattanooga, of the frame houses on his street, of the Negroes of his town; and the three faces of Rosasharn, Dorothy, and Eleanor jumble together in his mind.

  The smoking room is full of people. The first to be called on, Earl answers the questions of the officer, a grimo with a pockmarked face, his lips barred by a bristling mustache. Purpose of trip . . . Length of stay . . . The arrival of a fat man in a black alpaca coat and cream tussor pants brings the questioning to an end. The supercilious Maître Desagneaux extends a moist, pudgy, spatulate hand to Second Lieutenant Wheelbarrow, who quickly seizes the black paw.

  “Lieutenant Wheelbarrow? Maître Desagneaux, Anténor Desagneaux, your uncle’s business manager.”

  In his speciously courteous hurry, the second lieutenant almost sweeps the immigration officer’s documents off the little table. He apologizes. Maître Desagneaux pulls the immigration officer aside and speaks to him.

  “Everything is in order, lieutenant; we can leave . . .”

  Earl Wheelbarrow feels an arm slip around his shoulders like a familiar serpent and a hand pat his left deltoid. He trembles with horror, smiles, and lets himself be taken in tow, pressed against the shoulder of Maître Desagneaux.

  * * *

  Under a driving rain, the horses were scaling the rugged slopes of the mountains that surround St. Marc. Until further notice, the lieutenant is an archaeologist obsessed with pre-Columbian relics. Once landed, he’d had only one thing on his mind—to climb the foothills standing before him. The pretext of archaeological research had worked wonders against all suspicion, even that of his uncle’s former business manager, Maître Anténor Desagneaux. In this little town, provincial if ever there was, the wooden shutters had clattered ceaselessly as the second lieutenant passed. The parish festival had been somewhat eclipsed by his arrival. Everyone had kept up with all the comings and goings of the white man, and his haste to climb into the mountains despite all advice had caused a sensation and testified to the finest scientific spirit. Indeed, in these troubled times, the fearless climb toward the uncertain heights, where the streams were said to be wild and the torrents raging, at the very moment when people talked of hordes of cacos commanded by a glory-hunting braggart swarming all over the mountains and ready to fall on the city—in such times, the climb was an act of courage. Such intrepidness was bound to inspire good will.

  The white man made his way alone, then, accompanied by a guide and three mules loaded to the breaking point. They hurried through cloudbursts, their clothes clinging to their bodies, their waterlogged eyes fixed on the precipices. At all costs they had to make La Voûte; this grotto would be the best shelter against the downpour. And the guide was showing plenty of signs of impatience. He was afraid of running into cacos, who were likely to give him hell if they mistook him for a spy: cut off his ears, beat him within an inch of his life with the flat of a machete, or leave him tied up in a ravine. They forced their animals so insistently that they soon arrived despite the opposition of branches and foliage allied with the rain.

  Wheelbarrow was snoring in the grotto, making loud noises reverberated by the echoes. The guide had left in the middle of the night in spite of the raging rainstorm, declaring that he’d rather spend the night with some peasant before returning to town. He had left the second lieutenant somewhat disturbed by the wild ups and downs of this grotto, as high as a gothic cathedral and hairy with vines that fell from all over the ceiling like frolicking snakes . . . So the lieutenant was sleeping when a slight form slipped cautiously into the grotto and headed toward the cot where he was lying. He opened an eye at a rustling sound but pretended to continue his snoring, a flashlight in one hand and his Browning in the other. The form was very close to him; it was leaning over the bed.

  Suddenly, the lieutenant sprang up and ran his flashlight over the visitor’s face. The figure screamed and threw itself backward. It was a woman with a curvilinear face, reddish, with round features haloed by a cascade of black hair. She was as tall as a logwood beam. They rolled on the ground, she furiously defending herself, he gripping her. Three times the lieutenant rose up above her, grasping her wrists in a vise-like grip; three times she threw him. The fourth time she finished his fall with a head butt straight to his face. He let go, stunned. She fled. His finger on the trigger of the pistol, the lieutenant followed her with his eyes. He didn’t fire.

  Covered with sweat, Lieutenant Wheelbarrow spent the rest of the night wide awake. Dawn found him sitting with his pistol in his hand, surrounded by empty whiskey bottles, haggard-eyed.

  * * *

  Some time later, the lieutenant had settled in at Bassins-Coquilleaux on the small mountainside domain his uncle had left him, which overlooked the seven circular, azure-watered basins that open toward the sky like human eyes. They rise like the steps of some mysterious staircase to the plateau—a mystery so old that no one can say whether man or nature had placed these wonders in such a remote place.

  Initial contacts with the peasants had proven disappointing. The first time a peasant had approached the lieutenant, holding out a bit of flint, Wheelbarrow had asked him curtly, “How much?”

  The man hadn’t answered, but he’d taken the bill he was offered. That night, a hail of stones beat against the lieutenant’s cabin. They came from every direction, seeming to fall from the sky itself. This left Earl stupefied for several days. Without his knowing why, the hostility spread. Men would turn their heads and spit as he passed. Women would whisper to each other when they saw him and burst into ringing, scornful laughter. Even the children would follow him at a distance sometimes, innocent-looking, beating a hellish din on old cooking pots, a nettling, provocative chalbarique: “There’s the seditty white man!”

  After a heroic struggle with his conscience, Earl descended toward the hamlet on the little plateau at the place where the foaming river, as white as the pebbles it sweeps crazily along, hums its centuries-old song. He walked straight up to a cabin in front of which an old man was sleeping and, speaking gibberish, asked for a light for his pipe. He was invited in and offered coffee, served by girls who accompanied their offering with a curtsy. Still, peace was not restored, nor did the stones stop falling, until he had visited all the men of the area, had slapped them on the back and let them slap his, and had drunk with them, chatting about the seasons and harvests.

  All these things had plunged the lieutenant into a bottomless reverie. In the town, where he went for supplies, he hadn’t dared discuss it with anyone, not even Maître Anténor Desagneaux, who collected his mail. So the men of these mountains had forced him to capitulate! Actually, he was surprised to find that he was not displeased. And from the day a little girl offered him a bouquet of field flowers beside a path, he
was no longer the only one to go visiting. He was visited in turn. The peasants brought him splinters of flint, pre-Columbian axes, pieces of quartz, fruit . . . He was accepted as a maniac for vestiges of the past, and if he’d consented to go and dance the Martinique, the calinda, or the mahi under their tonnelles, the people would have ceased to notice that he was white and would have considered him a natif-natal Negro, a dyed-in-the-wool Thomas of Haiti. He was playing his cards right; soon he could start digging without arousing suspicion.

  Earl had questioned the people in vain about the existence of a woman with a complexion the color of apricots and tumultuous black hair. They had looked at him, but had not answered.

  * * *

  One night, however, Earl thought he could see the woman on the bank of the third basin. He was convinced it was she; he’d have staked his very life on it. She was sitting down, feet in the water, combing her hair with a glittering comb, singing to a strange rhythm that he’d never heard in the region. Earl tore down the slope like a madman. When he was a few steps from her, the woman turned around, stood up, and burst into a crazy, cascading laugh. Her only covering was a palm leaf that crossed her chest at an angle. She took off running under the moon, sowing her gay goat’s laughter, and disappeared into the bushes.

  When the second lieutenant went back into his cabin, where the mosquitoes were already buzzing, he lay down. The fever took hold of him not long afterward, a cold fever that bathed his body in thick sweat . . . For days Second Lieutenant Wheelbarrow stayed in his cabin with chills and fever, swallowing handfuls of quinine and glassfuls of whiskey that would have stunned an ox. One night, while he was in the grip of the fever, the alcohol, and his waking dreams, grumbling and arguing with himself half-naked on his bed, two visitors walked in. Suddenly seized with terror, the sick man sat up and bellowed like an animal. The visitors fled. The strangest tales began to circulate about the white man who lived near the basins. People said that he was a fiend and that they had caught him in his cabin, naked as an earthworm, offering satanic worship to the spirits below, grumbling strange words and howling like a wild man. They gave him a wide berth, and people no longer ventured out to visit him.

  When he began to feel better, he went out. People turned away as he passed. He wanted to go visiting, but he never found anyone at home. Weak, his mind still dimmed by the fever, Earl realized that he would have to act quickly to find his treasure. The climate in these mountains was killing him. He had become convinced that the treasure was at the foot of the last basin, where he’d seen the mysterious woman again. This concurred with the directions his uncle had left, based on an old sketch found in the papers of a Frenchman from the colonial era. Thin, a mere shadow of his former self, Earl Wheelbarrow was the victim of strange mirages after that; he dreamed of Spanish doubloons, of animals, and of an enchantingly beautiful woman with a crazy laugh.

  One night, the lieutenant began to dig. He had chosen a very dark night, thick as kalalou djon-djon. After working for several hours by the light of his flashlights, he had dug a hole at least three meters deep. Water spouted. An underground pocket of water as pure as crystal had burst open. The water began to fill the hole. Animated by anger that was tied to a penetrating fear, his nerves set on edge by fatigue, Earl grabbed the pick again after a minute’s hesitation. He began to dig a drain-off pit to empty the trench. After two hours of back-breaking work in water that already reached his belt, he emptied the hole. The water was coming through the opening now only in spurts; it was draining out quickly. Earl began digging again. After he wore himself out getting through a rocky layer, his pick met a crumbly subsoil. Once in a while Earl replaced the pick with the shovel, digging without stopping, his body flooded with torrents of sweat.

  Suddenly, the lieutenant turned around and froze where he was, terrified. There was an enormous snake in the pit! Then a burst of laughter rang out above his head. He looked. It was the woman, watching him, the same woman he had surprised in the grotto and whom he had seen again near the third blue-watered basin. He turned a flashlight on her. She didn’t flinch. She stood there like an antique statue from ancient days, priest-like, haloed by a full-blown beauty, dressed in a simple cloth draped around her hips.

  “You’re mighty daring to touch the Vien-Vien mountain!” she declared slowly, as if letting the words fall drop by drop.

  “You’re mighty daring!” she said again after a silence.

  “Mighty daring!” she threw out one more time.

  Then she disappeared. The snake which had been in the pit a minute ago too!

  Furiously, Earl climbed the walls of the deep trench. Dawn was whitening the sky now and was lighting up the horizon with pink and orange miracles. The lieutenant tore off his clothes and dived into the water near the last basin to clear his mind. He was wide awake. He came out immediately and ran like a madman toward his cabin. He brought out a few pre-Columbian axes and all the pottery he had collected up to then. Was he the victim of one of those mirages that seemed to emanate from this country whose very earth seemed magic? He thought he could still hear the woman’s voice in the distance shouting, “Come! Come!”

  After three days of a raging fever, Wheelbarrow was feeling better. As soon as he was up, he tore up all the letters he’d gotten from Rosasharn, Dorothy, and Eleanor, as well as all his identification papers—in a word, everything that tied him to Chattanooga and the star-spangled republic. From now on he would live in this country. He would get to the bottom of its mystery. He would have that woman if it killed him!

  He reflected a long time. Then he remembered having heard of Maréchal Célomme, a former rural sheriff, a patriarch, a papa lwa above reproach, who lived still farther up in the mountains in the area around Gouyaviers. There was no mystery of the heart of man, no mystery of the lily-like bodies of the Invisible Ones, that was unknown to Maréchal Célomme, the peasants said. He had “the gift of eyes,” clairvoyance. He even knew what only the knife learns as it penetrates the heart of the yam, they said. Life is a yam . . . So Wheelbarrow made the decision to climb up the pathway that tirelessly winds itself around the summits to go and consult the high priest, servant of Heaven and of the Eloahs.

  I can remember the very sound of Maréchal Célomme’s voice as he told me this story. In fact, the old man recounted his interview with Lieutenant Wheelbarrow so many times that the very words he used are engraved in my memory. I don’t think the old sage would have added to the facts. Not only was he incapable of lying, but, more than that, he never varied a single detail. I’ve often met papa lwas who respected the orthodoxy of their venerable religion; I’ve had long discussions on occasion with honest Servants burning with faith in Vodou and the Eloahs of their fathers; but never have I met a man who was purer, more righteous, more humane, or more selfless than Maréchal Célomme, in spite of his credulity and ignorance. This is the way he related his interview with Second Lieutenant Wheelbarrow to me.

  When Earl arrived at Gouyaviers, whose peaks dominate the Bassins-Coquilleaux and all the surrounding area, he got off his exhausted mule and inquired for the papaloa’s dwelling. Maréchal Célomme was waiting for him, standing before the door of the sanctuary. He summoned Earl with these words as he advanced toward him: “I was expecting you, my son!”

  They greeted each other. The lieutenant gave him his hand and told him he had come to penetrate the mystery of an apricot-colored girl who haunted the blue basins on moonlit nights. The papaloa bade him enter the sanctuary and led him to the room where stands the badgi, over which the great soursop tree sways its fruit, pimply green breasts, above the golden roof thatch. Watching Maréchal Célomme exercise the powers that the highest stage of Vodou initiation confers, the taking of the eyes, was an unforgettable thing. After a short prayer before the badgi, Maréchal Célomme gravely took in his left hand “the eye of Heaven,” a small Indian ax of blue stone, the product of the fusion of maroon Blacks, of Zambos, and of independent Indians under the great Cacique Henri. He took a fistfu
l of ashes, which he let sift slowly between his withered fingers.

  “Whoever dares to touch the treasure of the mountain will die . . . But man can attain the treasure of life . . . I see a red woman, the beautiful mistress of the waters, calling you . . . Walk toward her without fear and without haste; it is the treasure of life that awaits you . . . Each gold coin costs a drop of blood!”

  “I don’t want the treasure of the mountain anymore,” said the lieutenant forcefully.

  “Do you love this land and the men of this land? Can you sacrifice yourself to them, sacrifice everything?”

  “I no longer know anything but this land and the men of this land,” the lieutenant affirmed.