Hadriana in All My Dreams

by René Depestre

  7

  I must have dropped off again, as I was abruptly awakened by a bugle call, a tremendous reveille on the other end of the square, soon drowned out by the rada drums. I could not see people dancing, but from the cadence of their steps I was able to picture the movement of their knees, hips, and shoulders. There was a drum break: in homage to my death the crowd went into a cadavre-collectif. Then a soldier approached my catafalque. He shined a flashlight on my face. It was Captain Armantus. He seemed to be listening to me like I was telling him something very serious. His face suddenly took on a terrified expression, as if he had seen some horrible monster in my place. His eyes bulged out of his head, and he could not finish his military salute. He screamed like a hunted animal. I shuddered so intensely I thought my blood, which was then circulating in fits and starts, was going to resume its natural rhythm. I once again heard the bugle call for the dead. Indeed, I had fallen on the battlefield. After the captain’s precipitous exit, there was a strange void all around me, a deathly silence. All my ears could pick up was the gentle flickering of the burning candles. Suddenly, the piercing cries of a sow being sacrificed! Too much, it was too much: I was seized with violent internal spasms. All my bones vibrated to the point of breaking. I sank into a nightmare buried inside my nightmare. I was being robbed of my essence. My petit bon ange was being separated from my gros bon ange. The former was being put into a calabash to be brought on the back of a mule to a penitentiary for souls on a mountain in Haut-Cap-Rouge. The latter, arms tied behind its back, was being prodded in the opposite direction with lashes of a whip. All ties had been broken between the two parts of my being. After hours of climbing, the mule carrying my petit bon ange passed through a heavy wooden gate. An old black man, in passably good shape, received me smilingly.

  “Madame Danoze, I welcome you to the prison of thoughts and dreams. This inner house, where, for a variety of reasons, the souls of thousands of petit bon anges are peacefully spending the rest of their days, will be your home from now on. This detention center has been equipped to hold the contained souls of good people condemned to lose their spiritual freedom. The cellular process consists of bottling up the imagination of individuals transformed into the living-dead. The bottles you’ll see are a whole host of dungeons made of glass, crystal, metal, porcelain, leather, earth, and stone!”

  My amiable jailer brought me into a subterranean gallery brightly illuminated by dozens of lamps. The four walls were covered from floor to ceiling with crates full of bottles. It was a veritable museum of bottles: round, square, flat, tubular, wicker, potbellied, large-bottomed—they ranged from vials to carboys, from flagons to decanters, from oil to vinegar cruets, from small jugs to wine bottles, from carafes to measuring glasses, from flasks to demijohns, from mini–champagne bottles to siphons, from magnums to jeroboams!

  “Each of these containers,” said the guard, “bears a label where the former identity of the bottled soul is written. Don’t be afraid to come closer, madame, the beings we keep here are as harmless as butterflies. Here, let me tell you about a few of your cellmates—I’ll choose at random. In this old jar of Vicks VapoRub we have a babbling petit bon ange taken straight from the cradle, a Syrian merchant’s child. There’s a commodities trader meditating in this pitcher over here. The occupant of this bohemian crystal carafe is a Marine Corps sergeant. This milk jug contains a little shoemaker’s petit bon ange. This demijohn over here holds the soul of Brother Jules, a Breton schoolteacher. Right next to it is the soul of an ex-president of the republic. A little farther away, in that liquor bottle, a Surrealist poet is busy contemplating something or other. And in this alchemist’s beaker presides an Anglican bishop. There’s a homosexual painter incarcerated in that bottle of seltzer water, and a colonel from the Haitian National Guard in that wicker stein. And finally, we have here the petit bon ange of a Mater Dolorosa right next to that of a Little Poucet. As for you, madame, given both your beauty and your nobility, you’ll be sealed in this old jeroboam of champagne. It was once kept in the cellar of a Norwegian king from the baroque era. Your label has already been prepared: Petit bon ange of a French femme-jardin. In the absence of sweet dreams (since petit bon anges don’t dream), you will be free, like a canary in a cage, to trill to your own song, without any longing for your gros bon ange, which now serves the desires of a famous Baron-Samedi in the mountains of the northeast!”

  Immediately thrust into the royal bottle, my petit bon ange awakened in the false cadaver displayed on the central square in the midst of a raging carnival . . .

  8

  I then saw Madame Losange in a red blouse and a grenadier’s tricornered hat. She was not the only one bustling around the chapel. She was dancing—which dance was it again? maybe a yanvalou-dos-bas?—with a young girl in a wedding veil. I could only see their upper torsos as they bent forward and straightened up, like small boats racing on a furious sea. I saw the stranger, a very beautiful black girl, remove her veil and move toward my coffin. She was completely naked. She bent over me and let her breasts hang above me. I wanted to bite into their vivacious feast: huge breasts swollen with life and lyricism, round, firm, suspended above my famished abyss. I recognized my own breasts disguised in the bosom of this black girl participating in my marriage carnival. She then used her veil as a bath towel and wiped death’s funereal dew off her body. At that moment, the rhythm of the drums changed suddenly into a nago-grand-coup, to bring the wake to its climax. I was surrounded by masked revelers swept up in the diabolic communal farandole. History itself seemed to be parading around the catafalque. I could identify various historical figures mixed in with the traditional costumes of a Jacmelian carnival. There were masks of marquises and pirates from long ago. Old regime soldiers accompanied by Marines and Benedictine monks appeared in my honor. Thanks to the images I had seen in schoolbooks, I easily recognized Toussaint Louverture, Simón Bolívar, King Christophe, Dessalines, and a stocky, mustached white man—a contemporary figure I had seen in the journal L’Illustration: it was Stalin himself, wearing the elegant garb of a czar. His mischievous little eyes stayed fixed on me as he held on tightly to the woman of his dreams, Pauline Bonaparte, fascinating in her whiteness. Noticing him so thrilled to see me, a desperate hope popped into my head: maybe I was also part of the carnival, playing the role of Sleeping Beauty—my seeming death and everything that had happened since the beginning of the evening merely episodes from the famously prolonged sleep in that fairy tale. By dawn, I would once again be Hadriana Siloé, just as Pauline Bonaparte would return to her young dressmaker’s body, Bolívar to his frail shoemaker or tailor’s shoulders, Sir Francis Drake to his familiar dockworker’s gait, Joseph Stalin to his short-legged provincial notary’s stance and talent at playing the harmonica. I would finally become the prized spouse of the aviator Hector Danoze, well on my way to the at-long-last-sanctioned festivities of my honeymoon.

  A gunshot snapped me out of this last dream nestled within my dream. A moment later, someone cried out: “Down with Granchiré! Nana is resurrected!”

  Nothing had changed as far as my living-death was concerned. The birds made their startled presence known in the silk-cotton trees. I must have been enormously intriguing to them, flanked by candles in the blue of the day. Madame Losange, still wearing her imperial grenadier’s outfit, traced the sign of the cross on my forehead with hot ashes. Her partner in this dream, before blessing me, showed me once more those breasts that were twins of my own under the transparent veil. I then heard the stark chiming of the bells of Jacmel: after the mad, rushing eighth notes of the night before, somber white and black notes rained down on my desert, one by one, like so many drops of metal, in the place of the tears that, trapped behind my cornea, were unable to raise the alarm by glistening on my cheeks!

  9

  It was customary in Jacmel to close the casket for the raising and transportation of the body to the church. Just as Scylla Syllabaire was about to shut the lid, my father signaled for him to sto
p. Paternal clairvoyance allowed me a two-hour reprieve. Everyone seemed to appreciate his infringement of this customary funeral tradition. The good sisters from my school insisted on standing guard over my catafalque, just before the farewells of my closest friends: Sister Nathalie-des-Anges, romantic and sensual, her eyes puffy with sorrow in the middle of her impishly charming face; Sister Hortense, the Mother Superior, who seemed a bit ashamed of her tears; Mélissa and Raissa Kraft, the Philisbourg twins, Alina Oriol, Olga Ximilien, Gerda Radsen, and Odile Villèle—all seemed broken like waves on a windless day. Patrick could not stop circling my catafalque, as if my “death” were henceforth to be his cage for life. I had no news of Hector. He must have spent a terrible night in his hospital bed. Once the convoy had departed, a little truck was summoned to load up all the wreaths and bouquets of flowers. I recognized the vehicle as the same one the merchant Sébastien Nassaut used to go around town with, showing off all the gifts that could be purchased at his shop. As we tossed this way and that, my gaze fell on what had been written on the ribbons of the funeral wreaths: For our darling daughter from the deepest part of our broken hearts, Denise and André; For my beloved wife, yours forever, Hector; For the Siloés’ Creole fairy, from Prefect Kraft—on behalf of eight thousand heartbroken Jacmelians; From the Sisters of Saint Rose of Lima to their enchanting student; From the women of the iron market to the Siloés’ siren; From the tobacco factory workers to the daughter of their employer and benefactor; To the rose in the Good Lord’s cap, the team from the Southwest Gazette; From Patrick to his sister in baptismal water, among hundreds of others. On the Sorels’ balcony, the little boy from the night before threw a fresh rose in my direction. He was aiming for the middle of my chest. I was buried with this talisman. The balconies on Church Street were deserted. The family names came back to me as we moved forward: the Colons, the Maglios, the Bellandes, the Bretouxes, the Claudes, the Craans, the Mételluses, the Wolfs, the Depestres, the Hurbons, the Leroys, the Camilles—whole families moving together toward my burial. Upon arriving at the church, I was happy to see the festive wedding decorations. Deep inside myself, I sang the familiar funeral hymns right along with the Rose of Lima choir.

  “Hadriana was her given name,” began Father Naélo’s sermon.

  There was no Sabbath at my wake, Father, aside from the celebration of the Vodou gods paying homage to the beauty of life. God, in His mercy, will not hold a grudge against the guédés. Thank You, Father, for spilling the water of Christ on my bare feet, wounded during my very difficult uphill climb. Thank You for “the star that shone only once.” Where? When? The night at the holiday resort in Meyer beneath Patrick’s awkward, trembling hand? In the garden of the manor, in the respectful arms of my Hector? It feels so sweet to me, praying to the blessed Mary, Mother of God—help all those who have loved me as well as those who have hated me; love my parents in my place, protect my husband Hector, my friends, Mam Diani, and my beloved brother; pray for us poor sinners, now at the hour of death, so be it!

  Father Naélo then said tenderly: “Farewell, madame!”

  “Farewell, and thank you, Father,” I said without anyone hearing me.

  10

  Leaving the church, I was submerged in intoxicating light. I suddenly felt more weightless than a feather. I had become a wisp of straw in a torrent of rain. On either side of my coffin, strong arms held me securely above the streams of light that marked the final stages of my destiny. The convoy sailed smoothly along without lurching or rolling. Upon reaching Turnier’s Shop, Patrick took his uncle’s spot at my port side. He only stopped caressing me with his eyes when he in turn was relieved by someone else. I was the eye of a storm blowing in the sunshine. My friends’ houses filed by with their familiar physiognomy: I was forever leaving behind the Lapierres, the Lamarques, the Gousses, the Lemoines, the Beaulieus, the Cadets, the Dougés. On the façade of Pinchinat High School, I was greeted by a banner that read: The Class of 1938 Thanks Nana Siloé for Having Opened Its Imagination to the Beauty of the World. At the steepest part of the coastline, four masked men abruptly took hold of the coffin, singing and dancing. Instead of progressing forward, they started heading back the way we had come. They moved forward, then in reverse, without deciding one way or the other, as if some invisible danger was holding them back. The convoy started moving backward, then forward, in a single breath, only to move back again with the same momentum, while at the same time the crossbearer and the nuns leading the coffin started getting far ahead of the rest of the burial party. I was the hub of this strange ballet of U-turns and lightning-quick about-faces. What were those guédés up to? Whose path were they trying to confuse? That has remained one of the mysteries of my Jacmelian adventure. The merry-go-round ride finally came to an end in the central path of the cemetery. My father, Prefect Kraft, and Uncle Féfé took back their sad possession from the hands of the death spirits. Then there was a sort of general scattering of the procession. It could have been mistaken for the beginning of a big country festival, a lively picnic where everyone was jockeying for the best spot under the trees on a typical lovely January Sunday. The epitaphs on the gravestones quickly reminded me of the situation I was in: Here lies Rosena Adonis, taken from her loved ones at the age of thirty-two, RIP; For our marvelous father Sextus Berrouet, division chief, dead in his seventy-ninth year; Here lies Jacmelian Major Seymour Lherisson; and on a brand-new marble stone: Here lies, in all her splendor, our cherished mother Germaine Villaret-Joyeuse (1890–1937), requiescat in pace. I closed my eyes in terror, only opening them upon arrival at the grave site. I was placed right on the ground underneath a gleaming almond tree. The gravediggers seemed fascinated by the client of the day. I saw a shadow of doubt glimmering in one of the diggers’ eyes. Lost and without any recourse, I was good and frightened as Father Naélo’s drops of holy water fell on my face. I was not doing much better as Maître Homaire began playing a melody from an opera that my mother had played a few times on the piano. Everyone cried while listening to it. My diaphragm contracted, I felt tears forming, creating a knot in my chest. But my “outburst” ended there, well before reaching my throat. The same thing happened when all of Jacmel sang its farewell to me. Lolita’s soprano, Uncle Féfé’s bass, the accompaniment of the flute, and the immense wailing chorus were all tearing me apart but were not able to free my tears, imprisoned as they were behind my eyes. In the golden pomp of that Sunday, the words of that song brought me back to a fragile wooden bridge as I crossed Meyer Stream, accompanied by Lolita Philisbourg, who, that summer back then, had taught me a new song: “Sorrowful Sunday.” Then there was the sound of a horse galloping, of a cock crowing, of a dog barking, of an adolescent laughing, and of tender chirping in the almond tree. My father waved his handkerchief, Mama smiled at me, leaning over my ersatz cradle. Patrick and the hairdresser Syllabaire tenderly closed the lid of my coffin. The sounds of fistfuls of dirt and flowers rang against my face. An empty, formless void took hold of me.

  11

  How much time had my blackout lasted? An hour? Two? Five? I will never know. Waking up underground, I was still in the same state of pseudo-death, or pseudo-life. My lungs managed to breathe; the air in my chamber seemed to be refreshing itself regularly. There must have been an airway, if not several, in at least one of its walls. I opened my eyes to an empty darkness, a horrifying absence of space and time, an absolutely brutal obscurity. Little by little, the darkness became my own, my property, my second nature—as much as the little trickle of consciousness that continued to gleam in my head. I was integrated into the very fabric of the savagely obscured earth, into the density and darkness of the Jacemelian soil, well aware of the borders between animal, vegetable, and mineral. I had forgotten about my heart ever since its big breakdown the night before at the church. Was that not it now—making its presence known in a rather extraordinary manner? It began with a simple sound in my chest. Then its beating seemed to rise from the depths of the earth, as if the root of the cosmos and my h
eart were beating as one to nourish the mysterious language of my return to life. The strange rustling, coming from my blood and from the abyss of the soil, was clamoring for something: it was a coarse demand—a fierce and rudimentary SOS—for a ray of hope, a little more oxygen, a sign from some other soul buried in the depths of this timeless night. There was nothing to see. I could only listen. I was nothing more than a listener. I listened to myself fading away in that wooden cage buried six feet deep in the earth. I listened to myself dying. Whatever part of me was still alive was trapped in the absolute blindness of my subterranean hearth. As punishment for some crime I had not committed, my life had been thrown into a vast emptiness without any temporal or spatial link to the outside world. I was lost in the paralyzing void known in Haiti as zombification. I had been temporarily tossed into the dungeon of a grave before being divided through black magic into a gros bon ange and a petit bon ange, left in a doubly vegetative sham of an existence: on the one side, a pretty cow’s head, infinitely exploitable and, above all, infinitely fuckable; and on the other side, lifelong resident of an old, oversized champagne bottle. That future seemed an even more horrific fate to me than this primitive auditory existence I had been living since Saturday night, in this state of catalepsy or bogus death. My supersonic hearing was on the lookout for ultrasounds. What I had thought, when I woke up, was a secret pulsation from the earth, beating in unison with my pulse, soon became a language quite familiar to my ears. It was not the fullness of the obscurity of the earth communing with my terror, it was a different cosmic whispering—the throbbing of the nearby sea reaching my funerary cellar. It was the mysterious call of the bay of my childhood, an indescribable summons to travel, to hope, to act. The sea of Jacmel was driving me secretly back toward the luminous space of everything I was this close to losing forever. Victory was still possible over the diabolical forces that had zombified me. I just had to listen carefully to everything that had constituted my life up until that point. The kidnappers were not going to take long to come collect the package that had been left at this station at the end of the line. Nothing was more pressing than for me to gather together any memories still capable of resisting. I had to remain attentive to the flow of wonderful years lived on Orleans Street, between Toussaint Louverture Square and the bay. The family home had to open doors in the walls of my bogus death. As before, I had to live and listen to myself living. I listened to myself growing out of the depths of my terrifying burrow to reach the sun-drenched Sunday up there, high above my nightmare. So nothing was more urgent than for me to project myself toward the heights of the radiant day as it continued on without me, sparkling on the dense blue waters of the bay of Jacmel. Laid out for my final rest, or for zombiehood, listening intently to the infinity of life, I had to open myself up like the three giant coconut trees that protected the southern façade of our manor, veterans of seven hurricanes . . .