The Museum of Love

by Steve Weiner

  ‘You understand these things, Jimmy? Nous sommes frères?’

  ‘- frères -’

  ‘We weren’t prisoners, we were esclaves. The most powerful enslaver was Egbo. When we heard Egbo’s drums we hid. Egbo wore a black jaguar skirt and a fur cape. He came through the huts and fucked anybody, anything, he wanted. Man, woman, pig. Anybody objected, he cut off their hands. Egbo ordered:

  ‘“Obey De Groot. I have given him power over you.”

  ‘One morning Helmstad van der Zandt was stabbed. His son, Dirk van der Zandt, lined us up and tapped each and every one of us, asking, “Who killed the white man?” A prisoner named Wilson Gairie flinched. Vander Zandt had an iron pumpbolt riveted into his mouth. Gairie worked after that like a mule with a bit through his cheeks, swallowing his own blood.

  ‘Van der Zandt and Demoullines whipped us. One man got gangrene. He stank so bad that Demoullines fed him laudanum and killed him. We got the heavy melancholy. The Negro goes into a shadow world. And many died from that. Some escaped. They caught one and clubbed him with gun barrels. The ravines were full of logs that had leaped the rapids, vines and orchids, and there they threw him to be eaten by the wild hogs and ants. The ravines filled with blue vapour.

  ‘Cholera swept through New Albina. I was on corpse detail. We threw them in the Maroni too. Negro, Indian, they went into the rapids. A brother and sister died. We chopped them apart and buried them in the sand.

  ‘I was put in the cachot, the dungeon. Demoullines lowered oatmeal in a bucket full of flies. They put a fleur de lis on me. Look. Like a cow. I got leg ulcers from the iron ring. I became a shadow. Blue vapour left me, heavy, dripping, my négritude.

  ‘The cook, a Negress, Amelia Maurice, killed the infant Samuels De Groot with a hat pin to the brain. They tied her to a tree, and had starved dogs eat her.

  ‘That night we broke out of the sheds, caught a white guard, cut off his head, and made the other guards kiss it. Then we caught Anthony van der Zandt, poured resin on him and set him on fire. We found Demoullines, roped him to a log and sent him down the saw slide where he blew apart into the Maroni. De Groot ran out of his house, shot two of us on the porch, then ran upstairs into the bathroom and shot himself. We caught the white guard Willems, swung him by the feet and clubbed him on to tree stumps.’

  ‘ – liberty -’

  ‘For the next three days we dressed in De Groot’s top hats and military ribbons. We danced in European finery. We chewed coca. We smoked tobacco. We took collaborators one by one to the big logs and brained them. We found De Groot’s wife and raped her until she went insane. Then we hacked her apart and threw her into the choked ravine. This went on in drunken liberty.’

  ‘ – sweet liberty -’

  ‘We danced the balancez, avant-deux, hornpipe, double shuffle and egret dance. I had taken a round through the tendon of my left leg. It never healed. See this twisted flesh? That’s why I limp. You limp too, don’t you, mon petit? But I danced. One dances in liberty.’

  ‘ – oh, liberty -’

  ‘Rangers set up machine guns across the Maroni. Suddenly bullets punched our huts, splintered piled logs, ricocheted off saw blades. Many were killed. I swam the Maroni, but my friends Henry Lemoine and Joshua Fremml drowned when a ranger cannon blew off their legs. The rest of us ran into the forest and buried sharp sticks smeared with our shit in the path. Two rangers cut their legs and died of infection. We crept back to the Maroni at night and strangled two more rangers by their gunboats.

  ‘During the day the boats shelled the jungle. Shrapnel hit our manioc and blew open the torso of my friend Ramissey. I killed him and threw him in the gorge so the ranger dogs wouldn’t smell him.

  ‘We raided farms for white hostages. We caught Peter de Havelaan, his aunt Sarah, Hendrik Siemens, and Demoullines’s grandfather, Ezechiel, a babbling idiot. We hacked them apart. Only one survived, Fernanda van der Zandt, aged eleven. I forced her mouth open and pushed fish down her throat. I caught a monkey, skinned it, and made soup full of ground nuts, olive oil, sweet yams. But when the monkey skull came up she fainted.

  ‘I rubbed sap into her lips. She tore at my eyes. I frizzed her hair with clay and put bark plugs in her nostrils. I did everything I could to make her understand she was my honoured guest, that Egbo would not hurt her, she was my wife. I would sell her for a passport to the Antilles. I was frightened by how wide her eyes grew. After a few nights I sold her for salt to the Bush Negroes, she was so worthless.

  ‘I lived alone on freshwater fish: patoyayes, yaya blancs, oeils rouges, brobro and coulans. Low, broken clouds rolled on the green Atlantic that threw rotted logs on the beach. I was disoriented with the pain and horror I had seen. I walked into the cold surf to die. Suddenly gazelles jumped out of the waves. A circle of huts appeared behind a reef. My relatives smoked beef in the sunshine. Orisas- African ancients – threw spears from the rainbows. I wanted to go back to Africa so bad, I tied logs together with vines and paddled into the sea.’

  ‘ – oh, Africa!’

  ‘I was captured by Venezuelans. They sold me to Cubans. I worked two years in the sugar cane, then went with a fisherman to Florida where I cleaned fish five years. I lived in Louisiana, was arrested, worked my way up the Mississippi River and came to Michigan. I worked in the motor car plants. I started a café. Like you, I looked for a place where there is no Code Noir, no négritude.

  ‘But, of course, there is no such place.’

  Fifteen

  My parents moved to Vincent, Missouri.

  I went up and down the Mississippi River. There was a Vincent in Wisconsin, a Vincent in Iowa, and a Vincent in Kentucky. I found many Vincents, but none was the true Vincent. A riverboatman told me there was a Vincent on the Mississippi in Missouri near Quincy so I followed the bank and found Vincent, an old slave town with a prison, a Catholic church, French quarter and birch woods.

  On the edge of the woods stood four burned black cypresses. Our Chevrolet was rusted, on blocks in a horse paddock. Someone was writing in a window of a trailer. I went closer and smelled strong coffee. It was my mother. She was practising her letters.

  Her hair was white.

  ‘Mama – ’

  ‘Just a minute.’

  She dipped the end of the pencil on her tongue. She bent over and wrote a large U. She looked at me.

  ‘You’re dirty.’

  ‘It’s dirty out there, Mama.’

  ‘Your hair is stiff.’

  ‘It’s the resin.’

  ‘And your face – ’

  ‘Shoe polish.’

  ‘You can shower by filling the metal bucket and setting it on the top of the trailer. No sense being shy.’

  I showered. The trailer had the red divan, the altar, a crucifix above the bed, Ignace’s religious theatre, my ice skates and tea cups hanging on brass hooks. Brilliant sunshine came in oblongs on the braided rug. Over the bed was the portrait of Catherine Labouré. Even the dust smelled clean. The bathroom was a ditch covered with boards.

  Ignace’s books, prize ribbons, St Bonaventure jacket, death certificate, Catholic Encyclopedia filled the trunk of the Chevrolet. I tossed my duffel bag into the Chevrolet.

  ‘I wondered where that was,’ she said.

  My father was very thin. His red hair was fluff. He wore khaki trousers baggy around his skinny knees, tied with rubber bands.

  My mother washed the curtains.

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Michigan.’

  ‘What did you find?’

  ‘Négritude:

  ‘What a clown.’

  One day I came around the paddock and saw Death in a red flannel shirt. He tried to rip my father’s throat. My father hit him in the crotch. Death bit him on the neck. They fought over the hay bales and around the Chevrolet.

  ‘Papa!’

  ‘Jean!’

  Death punched my father in the balls. I picked up a shovel, ran in, and beat Death on the head.

  ‘Vous – v
ous- FUCKER!’ I screamed.

  Death melted back into the birches. Crows circled the trailer.

  ‘It was a good thing you came by just then,’ my father said.

  Death came to the Belle Riviere Hotel. He played poker with my father. Death sat by a red tasselled lamp perched on a black television, badly lighted. They bet on numbers, suits, wild trays, red hearts, black tens.

  ‘Who is this guy?’ my father asked. ‘He’s damn good!’

  My father went upstairs to Georgia Berenson. She yanked his limp dink.

  ‘Nobody home?’ she laughed.

  * * *

  My father went to fix his watch at LeMoin Jeweller’s. Skeletons stood in black leather jackets and motorcycle caps in the doorway lights. He backed away and went to the Big Muddy Tavern. After two lagers the bartender wiped the bar with a bloody rag.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ my father asked. ‘A menstrual cloth?’

  ‘It’s the cloth the Jamaican, Barrault, spit into as he lay dying.’

  My father ran to the edge of town. Stumbling into the public housing projects, he got tangled up in laundry hanging from the lines. He crawled to the swings and heard:

  ‘It is so cold, mon capitaine – ’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘The rain – ‘

  ‘WHO’S SPEAKING?’

  My father tumbled backward into a cart full of carrots.

  ‘I am so very cold.’

  My father went home and ordered me to carve his tombstone. It would be three feet above ground, one foot below, rounded, of red granite with black letters. It would read, ‘Jack Verhaeren. 1914–1955. Prison guard, HM Prison Swallowfield. Vive la France.’ I found granite in a slag heap. I stole a chisel and click-clicked until my hands were raw and white with granite dust. It was no good. The letters were crooked. The stone cracked. I pasted over the mistakes with clay and glue. My father admired it.

  ‘The one good thing you ever did,’ he said.

  My father could no longer dance. He bumped and ground to the radio. His face discoloured. His abdomen bulged like a grasshopper’s. His knees jerked in spasms. He sank into the Verhaeren melancholy.

  ‘I am but a pair of legs,’ he said, ‘carrying future Verhaerens. A germinal sac, through this world.’

  He dreamed of prisoners turned to swallows in the fields. In the morning my mother laid a noose at the trailer door to ensnare Death. She smeared chicken blood on the window, Pippi’s excrement to disgust Death. I burned Death’s effigy.

  On the dirt my father scrawled:

  Sauve qui peut.

  Living became odious to him. He hated Kiwanis, Oddfellows, Optimists, Rotary, Junior Chamber of Commerce, all the congregations of the living. He moved in wind-shadows and watched impotently as houses on the Mississippi collapsed. A chain gang drove in pylons. A warden cradled a shotgun over Negroes.

  My father murmured:

  ‘Negroes … and a shotgun …!’

  The heat grew bad that August. Dogs hung over the edge of the canal, tongues out, baking in red shadows. Stink bugs swollen with blood crawled the wharf. A huge catfish, the largest ever seen in the county, died in the posts. It had come up from the Gulf. I dragged it home and my mother cooked it with garlic and basil.

  I was very depressed having to live in the United States. The people were tedious, the food banal.

  Old Frenchtown grew hazy in the heat, but at night – oh God – Boulevard d’Horloge, La Vache Street, Oignon Street, Boulevard des Martyrs d’Amérique Nord – red lanterns hung in black streets. Negroes danced, men with men, smoking, bloodshot eyes glazed with vodka. Men cursed in every patois. We danced, a bassoonist blew the blues.

  I met René Yville there, from Portage des Sioux, also Gene Phipps from New Madrid, and Tyrone Montoie from Carthage. We forgot everything in the vodka, the sweat and foul breath of miners, railroad men, mechanics, boilermakers.

  It was a hell of a summer.

  Relations and friends of relations came down from Canada for the summer fair.

  ‘Paul Hartmann!’ I yelled.

  ‘God! Do you look awful! Your hair!’

  ‘It’s the resin!’

  ‘Etienne Bastide wants to see you!’

  ‘Who is that girl?’

  ‘You don’t recognize her? That’s Antoinette Hartmann!’

  Antoinette Hartmann wore a rust-red dress with white pockets. She was assistant sales manager at Kreske in Rutherford. She was tall, full-grown, with small breasts and intelligent eyes, but she still had a few freckles. When she smiled the sun exploded in the trees.

  ‘Jean,’ Antoinette asked. ‘Why are your teeth so bad?’

  I went home and filed my teeth into points.

  Verhaerens stayed in Quincy. Nightly they drove over to party. I hardly recognized my female cousins. Groups of two and three roamed the wharf under the lights. They tossed fish boxes into the Mississippi. They danced. Their backs and legs became sore. They could not stop dancing. They fell dead and jumped up again. They danced under the moonlight. They danced, female with female, in the stiff spiked grass around the oaks.

  The priests of Holy Sacrament Church patrolled the birches and pried them apart.

  ‘How lovely – ‘ Antoinette Hartmann whispered, her legs wet with sweat.

  The August fair began. Headlights appeared across the Mississippi. The river was golden in streaks as cars crossed the bridge. Gnats hung in clusters over Vincent. Rain fell far away. Everything was suspended. A great delirium was ours. We moved downward in darkness, selling what we had left to Americans.

  ‘Hey, American,’ Antoinette called, ‘buy French lemonade?’

  ‘Would I? Shit, yes!’

  St Croix women sold breads, sausages, mustards, seafood, beer, garlics and onions at the fair. They stirred stews, played cards, rolled dice and told smutty stories about homosexuals. Country music boomed through fairground speakers down the Mississippi River. St Croix dressed in costume.

  I was the Capitaine Funèbre. Etienne was Woman Fecundus, with water balloon breasts and high heels. M. d’Aube was Great Procreator, with papier-mache testicles the size of basketballs, hair glued on to a broomstick in his belt. Paul Hartmann was La Putain in black fishnet stockings. Antoinette Hartmann was Pope Pius XII. She wore a red towel for a cope, pumpkin for mitre, and sprinkled us with Seven-Up. Jack-in-the-Green, Ed Gien, Elvis Presley, bobbed among the lanterns.

  Etienne found me. He smelled of cigarettes and wore sunglasses. He took a newspaper clipping from his wallet. A hobo named Kurt Flood had burned to death in Minnesota.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Do you remember, Jean? When we first kissed?’

  ‘Leave me alone. Look!’

  A seven-headed mutant lay in a cage with red bulbs winking. It disgorged its meal. A white, lethal light filtered down on its striped back. It stared. Flies danced on its head, because it was meat, and nearly corpse, and the flies needed to lay eggs.

  Cousins came daily. Our trailer was packed with Verhaerens. Fighting, drinking, cooking, throwing up. They rode a horse around the paddock. There was a shrimp feast. My father called for Antoinette Hartmann.

  ‘It is not right,’ she said gently.

  ‘Antoinette – ’

  ‘No, no …’

  ‘Please … I am dying …’

  ‘Naughty Jack …’

  My mother sat on a folding chair, knitting burial tassels. Dust motes danced behind her head. She sang:

  ‘Monsieur d’Marlborough est mort

  Mironton, tonton, mirontaine

  Monsieur d’Marlborough est mort

  Est mort et enterré.’

  ‘The Duke of Marlborough is dead

  Mironton, tonton, mirontaine

  The Duke of Marlborough is dead

  Dead and in the ground.’

  My father looked to Antoinette. It was his turn to sing.

  ‘Antoinette, your pants are wet

  I love you yet, Antoinette

 
; I’ll bet you wet everybody you met

  My lovely freckled Antoinette.’

  Antoinette blushed. She left with Paul and Etienne. When my mother wasn’t looking I shoved my father’s head into the pillow.

  ‘Papa,’ I said. ‘DID YOU?’

  In the second week of his agony there was no bread. Sister Alicia from Catholic Relief brought us two shopping bags of groceries. My mother fried fish. He retched. I gave him rum. He hallucinated. Antoinette and Paul Hartmann, the Pics, and the Leszeks, Etienne Bastide, came to pay last respects. My mother sewed burial booties.

  ‘Death comes in giant steps, Mr Verhaeren,’ Paul Hartmann said.

  ‘I am swollen with it.’

  ‘Yes. Your belly is full of wind.’

  ‘They have it up my ass.’

  ‘You decay, sir,’ Etienne said, moving away, waving the air.

  I played the red accordion for my father. During those long days and suicidal nights I played La Tempête sous la Lune, Miséricorde, Les Saltimbanques and Le Pendu. I played Gaspé reels. I was Jean Carrignan. I dressed in Swallowfield grey. He clutched the sheets like a shroud.

  ‘Who will help us?’ he asked.

  ‘We are beyond help,’ I said.

  ‘Our lives are incoherent.’

  ‘Yes. One moment I’m at Burt Lake. Bang, slam. I’m in Vincent. I don’t remember how.’

  The trailer began to sink into the earth.

  ‘Now listen,’ he said. ‘When I was in the merchant marine I saw an ammunition freighter torpedoed. It was in the North Atlantic. The ship rose three feet above the waves, turned inside out, arms and legs flung into the open sea. Orange fire rolled over black oil.’

  ‘It was a vision.’

  ‘At that instant I seized life,’ he said.

  ‘I have no vision.’

  ‘You live on other people’s visions.’