Captain Armantus approached the chapel alone. He lowered his torch over the coffin, right over Hadriana’s face. His ear cocked, he seemed to be listening to something terribly sad. He hung on the dead girl’s words, drinking in something clearly very crucial. He then lifted his right arm to offer a military salute. But instead of finishing the gesture, he let loose a scream that was like nothing anyone had ever heard—aside, of course, from the one we had heard a few hours earlier under the vault of the church. He began walking backward until he reached the policemen at the rear of the gathering. He then spoke in a low voice to the bugle players, who quickly sounded the death knell. Immediately afterward, Captain Armantus ordered his men to make an about-face before hustling them back to the barracks at top speed.
4
Among all the mysteries that would end up defying our common sense that year, Armantus’s behavior remained one of the most disconcerting. Several witnesses tried in vain to figure out what had happened. But the serviceman chose to leave the police, Jacmel, and the country rather than share with anyone even the smallest detail regarding his panicked reaction to Hadriana Siloé’s mortal remains.
I realize this is going to sound incredible, but what follows is a true story. Feel free not to believe me. One afternoon in the winter of 1955, in New York City, I hailed a taxi just in front of the Pennsylvania Hotel, intending to visit the Statue of Liberty. The driver and I immediately felt a connection. He asked me in English what my nationality was. I’m not sure why, but I got the idea in my head to hide the fact that I was Haitian. Randomly, I told him I was from Dahomey. My lie had the most surprising effect on him.
“You said Da-ho-mey, right? The country where the Port of Ouidah is?”
“Exactly.”
“What day is it today?”
“Friday, November 18.”
“You said Friday, right?” the taxi driver pressed.
“Yes, indeed. Yesterday was Thursday and tomorrow Saturday.”
“So to be clear: on Friday, November 18, in the year of our Lord 1955, a citizen of Dahomey jumped into the taxi of the former Captain Gédéon Armantus. Destination: the Statue of Liberty, in New York City! Have I got that right?”
“What’s so extraordinary about that?” I asked, profoundly taken aback.
“Why everything, my dear sir! I have been awaiting this miracle for the last eighteen years! An encounter with a messenger from Ouidah, a Friday, the eighteenth of November—all three elements converging at once just as my Aunt Euphémie predicted!”
“Aunt Euphémie?”
“My great-aunt who died in the early 1930s. She appeared before me in 1938 in the coffin of a young French girl who’d died on the night of her wedding, at the very height of her physical glory!”
“Forget the Statue of Liberty,” I told him, overwhelmed. “Drive wherever you want, no matter what it costs. Tell me everything.”
And so it was that I was given the key to Gédéon Armantus’s crack-up on the night of January 29, 1938—and from the man himself! Leaning over Hadriana’s open coffin, his hand already reaching up to perform a respectful military salute, he had discovered that the lovely face familiar to all of Jacmel had been replaced, to his great astonishment, with the mummified visage of his old aunt, deceased five years earlier at the age of 107 after having taught civics for half a century at the Célie-Lamour School for Young Girls. Apparently, the former schoolteacher had whispered to him: “My darling nephew, do something for me: do not leave here without having your bugles sound a death knell for all to hear. Some of humanity’s very greatest lie in rest right here under Toussaint Louverture Square!”
Two days later, when her spirit was contacted through a loa, Aunt Euphémie confirmed what she had said at Hadriana’s funeral. She made her descendant swear, on pain of death, never to tell anyone the secret she had entrusted to him, “unless,” she said, “you cross paths—preferably in New York, among the white Americans—on a Friday, November 18, anniversary of the victory of the Haitian army at Vertières, with a man from the land of Ouidah, Dahomey. To him alone are you permitted to relay the message that might otherwise cause a serious aneurism in your Jacmelian brain!”
5
Captain Armantus’s bugle call had, in effect, driven Jacmel to the edge of a collective embolism. An impenetrable congestion of red blood cells hung over the square, provoking a general existential weightlessness: for several minutes we experienced the same malaise that a pod of dolphins must experience when washed up on a sunny beach. We could each hear our own panting breath, our own heart pounding to beat the band, as well as that of the person next to us. Seated near Maître Homaire, I could distinctly hear the pileup of all sorts of metaphors rippling in that exceedingly creative man’s formidable brain! What saved us from a collective thrombosis was the stabbing of a young pig that some clever Jacmelian had the presence of mind to initiate at that very instant; the shrill cries of the near-decapitated animal pulled the crowd out of its death throes. The drums of a new banda, even more feverish than the one that had come before, reinfused everyone’s blood with the very strongest beats of life.
6
Without losing any time, Madame Brévica Losange jumped with both feet into the role for which she had probably been born, early one morning in April 1894, in southwest Haiti. She peered into a woven bag, out of which she solemnly extracted the elements of a costume: a tricornered hat, a red military shirt, a purple cardboard mask of a Catholic saint, two small bags, a bottle, a pair of driving gloves and goggles from the year 1900, a short, thick black candle, and a bundle of pine.
“What’s she doing?” I asked my mother.
“She’s preparing an expedition against the evil spirits of death. It’s a well-known conjuring rite.”
Madame Losange put on the grenadier’s blouse, placed the patent-leather tricornered hat on her head, and slipped on the driving gloves. Once she had secured the mask and glasses on her face, she took a few steps toward the catafalque and greeted the Siloé family with a graceful bow, her chest pressing forward. She uncorked the bottle and spread a few drops of its pinkish contents to the right and left, just in front of the catafalque, while chanting, Apo lisa gbadia tâmerra dabô! Then she raised the bottle in a salute to the cardinal points of the square and quickly tilted its neck over Hadriana’s face. With these ceremonial libations complete, she kissed the polished wood of the coffin three times, poured some ashes into her right hand, and drew three circles, topped with a cross, on the ground right in front of the catafalque. She emptied another of her little bags and used coffee grounds to trace the contours of a giant butterfly, his wings outstretched over female genitalia.
“What do you see?” I asked my mother.
“Some kind of strangely patterned zodiac!”
7
There before our eyes, the talented Madame Brévica had sketched a monstrous half-breed creature lusting after a beautifully shaped solar-vulva, its lips and clitoris spread wide open. She picked up a few sticks of pine and started a fire. We watched her every move with rapt attention. All the good Christian folk had their heads bowed in prayer as they recited the Rosary with desperate piety. The Siloés, their thoughts elsewhere, were busy unwinding interior Rosary beads, unfamiliar to us blacks. Jacmel’s good Catholic families—the Fontants, Ramonets, Voucards, Zitals, Douzets—seemed crushed beneath a double sense of shame: first, the blasphemous display of African customs; and second, the aggressive desecration of white flesh.
Madame Losange suddenly called everyone’s attention to the steps of the funeral rite over which she was presiding. “Hellfire and damnation,” she shouted. “The flames of redemption demand to be fed!”
With that, several of the onlookers began feeding the fire. One person started things off by throwing in some old copies of the Southwest Gazette. Upon seeing the flames flare up, Lolita Philisbourg took off her bra and fed it to the fire. Her sister Klariklé watched her sibling’s offering and upped the ante, tossing in her Italian
-made garter belt. Mélissa Kraft and some of the other young girls gave up their silk stockings and satin lingerie. The men threw in socks, ties, and handkerchiefs. A few of the disabled gave up a crutch here, a mahogany arm there. A straw hat, a mask of Pope Alexander Borgia, an umbrella, a small bench, a rattan chair, an enormous gothic dildo, and a nun’s wimple all landed in the increasingly robust flames. Madame Losange’s face tensed with pleasure as she contemplated the joyful erection of the blaze. She took one of the burning twenty-pound candles next to the catafalque and planted it above the drawing of the dead girl’s genitals, thus attempting to thwart the butterfly’s rapacious intentions. Madame Brévica raised her voice once more, this time to ask that the celebration’s three principle drummers—Fat Cyclone, Master Timebal, and General Lil’ Congo—be brought to her side.
“Princes of the rada rhythm,” she said while pouring out rum for them to drink, “join this battle to protect the final rest of the princess lying here before us!”
From the very first steps of the dance, Saint Jacques the Major, leader of the Ogoun family of warrior spirits, took possession of Madame Brévica Losange. As soon as she had been “mounted” by the spirit, the mambo began improvising a song to the rhythm of the drums.
Loa Saint Jacques, patron saint of Jacmel,
Protect our beautiful Nana.
A cursed butterfly has bewitched her.
You who so adore the solar-vagina,
Bring it back to life in our blood!
Loa Saint Jacques, General of the Fire,
With your love for big tits,
Reignite Nana Siloé in our lives!
Once the crowd picked up the melody and the words, the whole wake exploded. No one could pray on his or her knees any longer. Everyone was seized by a violent urge to sing, dance, and shout—to roar in the face of death’s sacred visage. With their Christian idea of mortality deeply offended, the clergy discretely disappeared—first the two parish priests, then the director and the Mother Superior of the two congregational schools, and then the monks and nuns. After their departure, no great wind of vice began blowing over the square, as often was claimed in the days and months that followed. Everything took place within the bounds of a pagan tribute to Hadriana Siloé. At no point—not even when the Enchanted Balls entered on the scene—did her final celebration threaten to become some sort of priapic occult ceremony, a Caribbean Walpurgis Night, or the unbridled Saturnalia of a scandalous Haitian-style masked ball! On the contrary, the drums, vaksin, and wind instruments transformed Madame Losange’s song into the brightest of nights: their musical fury carried each of us back and forth between death and birth, between anguished screams and triumphant orgasmic cries. The musical volcano reduced the legendary obstacles between Thanatos and Eros to ashes, went beyond any prohibitions separating the sperm of black men from the ovaries of white women. The explosion of guédé spirits, enlivened by our seething blood, placed our bodies and souls, our frenzied penises and vaginas, into a space of cosmic harmony, fueled by the crazy hope that we might somehow snatch Nana Siloé back from death so that the radiance of her earthly being might shine in our lives once again.
That senseless hope electrified the crowd. Beyond Madame Losange, numerous other people became vessels for the gods. Among the possessed who had been mounted by spirits ranging from Agoué-Taroyo and Damballah-Ouèdo to Baron-Samedi and many others, a black woman of about twenty years old stood out. Her face was protected by a mask, nicely adorned with a lace veil, which she wore beneath a large feathered hat like those in Mexican engravings. She was clothed only in a diaphanous garment of embroidered tulle. The mambo signaled to her to approach the fire. She whispered something in her ear. People on the square were saying that the goddess Erzili, guardian of the freshest and clearest waters, and protector of life’s infinite enchantments, had possessed the unknown woman.
“Who do you think that is?” I asked my mother.
“I have no idea who it could be. But she’s certainly a beautiful wisp of a girl! As for the spirit, I recognize her: she’s a Spanish goddess, the Black Virgin of Altagracia. She comes from Hatuey, in the Dominican Republic. In addition to Erzili, she’s often called Fréda Toucan-Dahomin. She’s one of the good ones, venerated on both sides of the border. She’s also worshipped in Cuba and Brazil. Fréda watches over honeymoons and all other acts of love!”
The dazzling Fréda came upon the erotic drawing that had been sketched at the foot of the catafalque. She seemed to recognize it as the genital light shining in herself. She saluted it respectfully. Then, at some distance from the other spirits, Madame Losange and Fréda began undulating their shoulders and feet, performing feints, leaps, and rapid turns, as if transported by the ebb and flow of an invisible wave. Saint Jacques the Major (Brévica) danced like a master. But all eyes were on the young girl in the wedding veil, her beauty and grace matched only by that of the deceased. Her dancing of the yanvalou-dos-bas was marked by an astonishing sensuality: under the transparent veil, her naked curves resembled the swaying path of some imaginary boat. She stopped dancing around the flames, took off her veil, and pretended to set it on fire. Then she drew it around her neck, over her breasts, across her buttocks, and between her thighs, like a foamy sponge of salvation. Once she had completed her sacred ablutions, she put the veil back on but kept it lifted up to her hips so as to join Saint Jacques the Major in miming the pelvic thrusts of a phenomenal sex act.
8
Titus Paradou chose the exact moment of this symbolic copulation to launch the parade of his famous Brotherhood of the Magic Balls. Heads protruding, necks stiff, the group of young people held each other by the waist and, rotating their hips, advanced in a single file behind their leader, feet abandoned to the rhythm of a nago-grand-coup. The contagious music put the whole square back in motion. Along all of its paths, rows of men and women, most of them masked (as historical personalities, notably), rolled their torsos while taking short, compressed steps, shaking their shoulders and hips as if trying to dislocate every bone in their bodies. These masked revelers were soon joined by the dignitaries and by all those who, for fear of offending the quiet suffering of the Siloés, had not dared leave their chairs, confined to their roles as spectators. My mother and I, along with Maître Homaire, Henrik Radsen, the Philisbourg twins, the Kraft sisters, my uncle Féfé, and many others, gave in to the desire to join the dancing anthill.
Led by Titus Paradou, Madame Brévica, and Erzili, the chain of dancers circled the catafalque seven times. As they danced alongside the open coffin, everyone got the chance to say a personal farewell to the young woman. The general feeling—which was much commented on subsequently—was that death had not altered her features in the slightest. She looked to be sleeping peacefully, her eyes lightly closed and her mouth traversed by a kind of ineffable joy. It was, as Maître Homaire would later put it, “the smile of a being grappling only with the mystery of her interrupted dream of love.”
Among the impassioned commentaries incited by the lawyer’s article, there were several bizarrely framed comparisons of Hadriana’s smile to Mona Lisa’s famous grin. Maître Homaire, among others, had written:
In the bluish veil of the early morning, which seemed itself to have fused with her wedding veil, the sense of sublunary enchantment that emanated from Hadriana Siloé’s death was heightened measurably by the enigmatic joy that graced her lips. As with the Mona Lisa, the charms of her face seemed to have turned inward, completely cleansed of the troubling circumstances of her death and wondrously instilled with the inner incandescence that is the mark of eternal feminine beauty.
When I arrived in Paris in late 1946, I breathlessly rushed to the Louvre—to Leonardo’s famous canvas—as if this were to be my first rendezvous, far from Jacmel, with Nana Siloé. I found myself profoundly disappointed. The Mona Lisa was certainly the masterpiece of a true genius, but compared to the young girl of my memories, she seemed to be sneering, without the slightest bit of inner passion. Frozen within
the frame of my incurable nostalgia, Hadriana’s wedding makeup was still intact; the skin of her neck and hands was as smooth and fresh as a mango picked just before sunrise. Death had given her beauty a look of joyous profundity, as if she had been captivated from within by a dream more extraordinary than life and death put together. The curve of her lips looked like no other smile, however renowned. It was a fruit bursting with freshness that any eager mouth would have longed to bite to the point of ecstasy.
9
The light at six o’clock on Sunday, January 30 had painted the trees on the square in monochromatic shades. Titus Paradou’s farandole had brought the night to its climax. All there was left to do before the funeral was burn the Papa Mardi Gras. Would everything be forgiven? the crowd wondered. The Philisbourg twins gave the answer. They presented one of the greatest surprises of the wake, arriving unexpectedly with the effigy of an enormous butterfly. Everyone realized that someone important had been left out of the celebration: Balthazar Granchiré. We all stopped singing and dancing immediately. The fire was dying out, so people began once again tossing in old newspapers, false breasts, polished tricornered hats, panties and underwear, and a few fistfuls of sea salt.
The ceremony nearly took a bad turn: a young man whose engagement had been broken off because of the butterfly fired a pistol at its likeness. The bullet got caught in the puppet’s stuffing less than an inch from Lolita Philisbourg’s left breast. With lightning speed, Fréda Toucan-Dahomin used a machete to symbolically cut off the butterfly’s erect penis. Once castrated, he was thrown into the blaze. He burst into flames amidst a solemn silence. Someone shouted: “Down with Granchiré! Nana is resurrected!”
Hadriana in All My Dreams Page 5
