Hadriana in All My Dreams

by René Depestre

  As if in echo to that cry of hope, the tolling of the first bells announced the funeral. Fathers Naélo and Maxitel appeared, preceded by a crucifer. Forcefully, they cleared a path in the direction of the chapel. The raising of the body was imminent. The two dancers had just enough time to dip their thumbs into the Papa Mardi Gras’s burning ashes. In the presence of the two priests, each woman traced the sign of the cross on Hadriana Siloé’s forehead. The celebration slowly died out, and we all made an effort to regain our composure while still caught up in the uninhibited merriment of the previous hours.

  Chapter Four

  Requiem for a Creole Fairy

  Death and Beauty are two things so profound,

  So of dark and azure, that one might say that

  They were two sisters terrible and fecund

  Possessing the one enigma, the one secret.

  —Victor Hugo

  1

  Despite the short distance separating the church from the town square, we were completely out of breath when we arrived just behind the casket. The joyful decorations of the holy site were unchanged. Father Naélo had not had the brightly colored wedding banner replaced by the wall hangings appropriate for mourning. One might have believed even that the ceremony was going to pick up where it had left off the night before.

  After the Kyrie Eleison had been sung by the nuns, and the words of the Book of Wisdom and the Gospel According to Saint Jean read by Father Maxitel, Father Naélo’s homily brought us abruptly back to the real world.

  “Hadriana was her saintly Christian name,” the priest began. “Instead of the Christian wake her purity deserved, Jacmel has subjected her to the outrageousness of a night of carnival. To the injustice of her death has been added the scandal of masks and the most unbridled pagan dances.

  “The fact is this: by enacting this unseemly ritual, Jacmel has sullied the innocence of its fairy. In truth, my dear brothers and sisters, Hadriana had no need of help from our guédé spirits, nor did she need the accompaniment of our drums or our obscene and macabre dances in order to appear before her true God. These impious undertakings have greatly degraded her passing.

  “In this horrible January, here in Haiti, dear Lord, we beg Your forgiveness for all those who have soiled the virginal morning of Your beloved flower. We ask—on behalf of Hadriana and all of Jacmel, as it grieves for its angel—for the mercy of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit!

  “The radiant young woman before us had an exceptional gift for being present in the world, Lord. Let the waters of your mercy run cool and clear on her naked feet as she makes her harsh ascendance toward the assembly of saints over whom you preside in your heavenly kingdom!

  “Yes, Christ the Redeemer, receive Hadriana as a sentry awaits the first light! Take no offense at these Vodou ministrations and forgive Your little town of Jacmel. These Jacmelians love You above all else, and their love has hope for Madame Hector Danoze, in all honor and in all glory!

  “Lord we pray for Your servant

  the Creole fairy, Hadriana Siloé,

  we pray for her star

  that has shone but once!

  “Saint Mary, mother of God,

  pray for the poor sinners of Jacmel,

  now and at the hour of their death

  deliver us from the masks

  and the drums of paganism.

  “In memory of the baptism that this regal body received here in this very place, in the house of her Father, and in which she died at age nineteen; in memory of her radiant beauty; in memory of her radiant soul, bluer than all the blue of the sky, Lord, beyond the pain and the tears, may Your beneficent smile welcome her at the doors of heaven! Farewell, madame!”

  At the end of these funeral rites, the chorus of nuns heaped a few Latin phrases upon the grief-stricken Caribbean, on this, its first Sunday without Nana Siloé. The faces of those good people still wearing their masks now appeared to my confused eyes as tiny coconut-shell lamps filled with castor oil.

  “Accende lumen sensibus, infunde amorem cordibus, infirma nostril corporis, virtute firmans perpeti . . . De Profundis . . . Dies irae, dies illa . . . Libera me . . . Dona eis requiem . . . in paradiso . . .”

  2

  For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, Haitian arms carried Hadriana hurriedly out of the church of her childhood. At the exit, the smoky tête-gridape lamps flapped their owls’ wings in the bright morning sunshine. Hundreds of people, crushed to the bone with fatigue, had returned home once the party had died down. The number of those who accompanied Nana to the end was nevertheless very impressive. The convoy marched off at a good pace behind the crucifer, in a tide of flowers. From the temple to the cemetery, there was not more than a mile to walk. About a hundred yards from the entry gate there was a little hill to climb. It was well known to frequent funeral-goers by the name of “Melpomène Saint Amant’s pubis.” It was there that the convoy suddenly reared up like a spooked horse. A man who looked a lot like Baron-Samedi invited some of the guédés present to take the coffin from the hands of its apostolic bearers. These Vodou gods of death immediately began to sing and dance. They staggered forward then back with the coffin, making a series of shifts and sudden about-turns, such that the whole of the funeral procession was obliged to do the same. They repeated this exercise three times around the perimeter of that erotic hill before deciding to run across it at top speed.

  “What are they doing?” I asked my uncle Féfé.

  “The gods are trying to disorient Nana’s innermost self—her petit bon ange. Should it ever get the idea to head back home, it won’t be able to find its way.”

  3

  In the main path of the cemetery, Prefect Kraft, Henrik Radsen, Maître Homaire, and my uncle Ferdinand took over for the guédés. We were still a decent distance from the grave site. Not having a family vault in Jacmel, the Siloés had obtained a plot that looked out over the length of the entire bay. The gravediggers were waiting in the shade of an almond tree, but upon seeing the masked figures dispersed throughout the cemetery and headed their way, they nearly hightailed it out of there. We all gathered around Hadriana’s parents. Father Naélo took the holy water presented to him by a choirboy. Solemnly, he sprinkled it on the casket, which lay on the ground atop the heaps of dirt piled up alongside the grave. Was someone going to say a few words? The pallbearers were getting ready to wrap the rope around the coffin when Maître Homaire signaled for them to wait. Someone handed him a long black case. He took out a flute that all his neighbors knew well and began to play a regal melody. Although the tune was not well known in Jacmel, it nevertheless made quite an impact. Everyone was crying, Catholics and Vodouists alike. Years later in Milan, at La Scala, I learned that it was a piece from Nabucco by Giuseppe Verdi: the choral music of the Hebrew captives, “Va, pensiero!” Maître Homaire then went on to play “Sorrowful Sunday,” a very popular song at the time, which people said had inspired lovelorn souls across the world to commit suicide. The words were on everyone’s lips, and the crowd readily sang along with the flutist:

  “I will die one Sunday from having suffered too much.

  Then you’ll come back but I will have left.

  Candles will burn tenderly like hope

  For you, only for you, my eyes will be open.

  Don’t fear my eyes, even if they can’t see you,

  They will tell you that I loved you more than life.

  On that dark Sunday, my arms filled with flowers,

  I stayed all alone in my little room

  Where, alas, I knew you’d never come.

  I murmured words of love and heartache,

  I stayed all alone and cried softly,

  Listening to the cold December wind,

  Sorrowful Sunday!”

  * * *

  On that splendid Jacmelian Sunday, the song had a most unexpected effect. Joy shone through the tears in everyone’s eyes. The jubilant sounds of the sun-filled morning overwhelmed the burial—a cock flirting
with three hens at once in a neighboring banana plantation, a young couple riding bareback on a roan horse as it galloped through two red hedges and an arbor of daisies, birds chasing each other wildly through the branches of an almond tree swaying in the sea breeze. On that glorious day in Haiti, endlessly and immensely blue, all sadness melted into the extraordinary azure of the bay. Grief did not really suit our farewells. Even the mere sound of stones on the wood coffin would resonate in our memories for years afterward like an echo of life that was somehow greater than our sorrow.

  4

  On Monday, January 31, I hurried home right after finishing my morning class at Pinchinat High School. Mam Diani, my uncle Féfé, and his wife, Auntie Émilie, were in a heated discussion in the atelier. None of them could keep still; they all had cups of “fainting tea” in their hands. Without giving me a chance to speak, my mother handed one to me.

  “Now what’s happened?” I asked after taking a sip.

  “Patrick, please have another sip,” said my mother. “Féfé has just come back from the Siloé manor: Nana has disappeared from her grave!”

  “What?!” I replied, stupified, addressing my uncle.

  Apparently, one of the gravediggers had returned to the burial site looking for a shovel he had left behind, only to find the grave empty. Scared nearly to death, he made a beeline for the rectory. Father Naélo had listened carefully, and between the gravedigger’s panting and stuttering, the good Father managed to extract the following piece of information: “In the place of the beautiful bride, buried right here in front of everyone, there’s nothing left but a jug of rainwater, its contents evaporating in the heat of the sun!”

  The priest immediately alerted the authorities. My uncle, the magistrate, Prefect Kraft, Captain Cayot (standing in for the bedridden Captain Armantus), Dr. Sorapal, the medical examiner, and Maître Homaire (on behalf of the press) had all accompanied the priest to the cemetery. Underneath the almond tree where Madame Hector Danoze had been buried just the night before, they found a gaping hole with nothing in it aside from a tiny puddle of water left over from a recent downpour. The body, the coffin, the flowers—everything had vanished into thin air!

  At the request of the prefect, my uncle immediately wrote up a statement describing the scene. In compliance with Article 246 of the existing penal code, a legal dossier would be opened officially against X for having flagrantly desecrated the young bride’s grave, for having taken her petit bon ange hostage during her wedding ceremony, and for the criminal sequestration of her reanimated body.

  In a state of complete agitation, the officials then went together to the Siloés’ home. The prefect explained to them that at some point between Sunday night and Monday morning, their daughter had been the victim of what was likely some sort of ritualistic crime—she had been raised from her grave and forcibly taken to an unknown destination.

  Hadriana’s parents received both the news and Father Naélo’s uncomfortable explanations with looks that were at once incredulous and resigned. After what they had been through since Saturday’s events, nothing really could have shocked them any further. It was all perfectly clear to them—at both Hadriana’s wake and funeral, in the moving tribute to her beauty—that the “real” Haiti had been exposed. Incapable of accepting that a heart attack had toppled Nana at the foot of the altar, the Jacmelians—with their necrophilic imagination—had incorporated their daughter into some sort of fairy tale. The disappearance of her body from the grave was the final episode in this leap into an imaginary world that was straining to grapple with fear and death. It was the tribute that their misfortune was obliged to pay to the magical identity of their adopted country.

  “Denise and I,” André Siloé had concluded, “like you—like you, sirs, or, in fact, like you, Reverend Father—we can do nothing to fight the complex web of fables and fiction that surround the fatefulness of death and life in Haiti. In order to deal with that double inevitability, Christ himself (if ever he let himself get mixed up in Haitian affairs) would be as armless as the Venus de Milo.”

  “He said all of that with humor and an air of decisiveness,” confided my uncle.

  “None of you dared push it?” asked my mother.

  “No. After they said that, we had to back down in the face of their suffering and just stay quiet. That’s what we decided. All six of us tiptoed out of there without addressing the elephant—or rather, the zombie—in the room!”

  “You were the one who should have done it, Féfé,” said his wife.

  “I think so, too,” said my mother. “Who in Jacmel is more qualified than you to talk about zombies?”

  “Look, I was on the verge of spilling everything, but I changed my mind at the last moment. For white people, the zombie is just one of those fanciful Haitian ways of dealing with fate. The Siloés would have made a mockery of my memories.”

  “What memories are you talking about, Uncle Féfé?” I asked.

  With an air of great mystery, he pointed directly at me. “Young man, I’m talking about one of life’s greatest enigmas!” he announced solemnly. “In our country, it’s true: history repeats itself more than it does elsewhere.” He put his head in his hands.

  “Why all the secrecy?” I asked. “Just tell me, Uncle Féfé.”

  5

  So Spoke My Uncle Féfé

  That evening was the first time I ever heard an educated adult, “a man of the law, of substance, and also of the spirits” (as we often laughingly referred to my uncle) take up the zombie question. Up until then, this phenomenon had been more of a mystery to me than the story about getting knocked up by the Holy Ghost’s hard-on. As children, zombie stories thrilled us, holding us spellbound and making our hair stand up on end whenever we found ourselves in those storytelling sessions late at night, during long summer vacations in the hills of Jacmel.

  According to Uncle Ferdinand, a zombie—man, woman, or child—is a person whose metabolism has been slowed down under the effects of some organic toxin, to the point of giving all appearances of death: general muscular hypotonia, stiffened limbs, imperceptible pulse, absence of breath and ocular reflexes, lowered core temperature, paleness, and failure of the mirror test. But despite these outward signs of death, the zombie actually retains the use of his or her mental faculties. Clinically deceased, interred and buried publicly, he or she is raised from the grave by a witch doctor in the hours following the burial and made to labor in a field (a zombie garden) or in an urban workshop (a zombie factory). Whenever there are doubts as to whether or not someone has died of natural causes, steps are taken to avoid all risk of zombification. It is customary to put a large knife, a razor, or a gun in the hand of the deceased so that they might protect themselves upon being brought back to life. In other cases, the zombie is buried with a ball of thread and an eyeless needle to distract it from the efforts of the zombifiers; or else sesame seeds are put within arm’s reach, so as to tempt the unfortunate being to count them one by one during its first night underground. It is not unheard of for people to inject formaldehyde into the veins of a corpse—or a member of the family might ask a pallbearer to break the corpse’s bones, to strangle it, or to decapitate it altogether . . .

  6

  The Zombifier’s Secret Code, or a Zombiferous Pharmacopoeia

  The first stage of the zombification process is the dramatic slowing-down of the metabolism. The houngan—the Vodou priest—who creates the zombie arranges things with an accomplice, usually a member of the victim’s entourage, who administers the precise dose of a highly toxic substance to the target. The formula for the most well-known zombie poison requires the following ingredients: extracts of dried sea toad, a mule’s gallbladder, tibial scrapings from a rabid dog, ground-up bones of a young boy, puffer fish cartilage, and bones from the middle ear of a garter snake. These ingredients are all ground together in a mortar or using a grindstone, along with a few tcha-tcha seeds, some velvet bean sap, a bit of powdered sulfur, and a few mothballs. That mix
is then blended into a solution consisting of rum, castor oil, and asafetida.

  Ingesting the drug leads to the apparent cessation of the principle vital functions, which bottom out at about zero, at the point of no return where decomposition otherwise sets in. In the hours following the burial of the zombified body, the witch doctor initiates the reanimation of the bogus cadaver. In order to do this, he gives the victim an antidote composed of zombie-cucumber (devil’s trumpet or jimsonweed) and dried leaves from several trees (including cupiuba, pleomele, and guaiacum). These elements are then diluted in a large calabash shell full of seawater that has served previously as the vaginal bath for a woman in her sixth month of pregnancy, or for twin sisters during the half-hour after having sexual intercourse, or two nights before their next menstrual cycle.

  Absorbing the antidote is enough to completely reawaken the zombie, in the fullest sense of the term. It keeps the victim from succumbing entirely, releasing the organism from its state of temporary hibernation and allowing it to quickly eliminate the toxins. The cells then move from the weakened state of hypothermia to their normal functions, and the process of oxygenation of the blood, circulating at that point only by fits and starts, returns to its normal rhythm. At this point the subject is ready for the final stage of zombification. The only thing remaining for the witch doctor to do is to remove the individual’s petit bon ange from its body by manipulating the cosmic forces that connect plants to the spiritual principles of the human condition. Thanks to this exceptional, magical act, the deceased’s soul is separated from its body and placed in a bottle.

  Uncle Féfé told me about an exploit that had been realized by the witch doctor Okil Okilon, the one who had changed Balthazar Granchiré into an oversexed butterfly. Okilon had inhaled the soul of a rival doctor through a cracked window while the latter was napping one day. He blew it into a crystal carafe. Then, at the cemetery, after a funeral, all he had to do was pass the pitcher’s narrow mouth under Dr. Oruno de Niladron’s nose to reanimate him. Okilon pulled off a real coup that day.