MIKA TAUGHT HER that there are many kinds of words. Some words can open doors and windows, and even bring down barricades. Others are used to solve riddles, while others make our soul sing. Junon didn’t remember the words to use to describe her state of mind during those early days of March. What she did know was that after spending more than a month in the country, that land to which she was bound by both love and hate—a bond of suffering, terrible, fleeting things—she was about to unfurl a shroud she had been patiently weaving for years. Shroud: that was the only word that came to mind. I’m going to open myself up to the world, she thought to herself, open and clear-eyed. How many years does it take for the dust to settle, for the hands of time to undo what was done? She had been waiting all those years to be born at last.
Junon had insisted on cooking supper the night before she left, to say goodbye to Mika and Banuteau. It was better to stay in a hotel tonight, she explained, to avoid traffic jams and other problems on the way to the airport. Would she see Mika again? Quite possibly this was the last time: her grandmother was almost eighty. Junon had the peculiar impression that Mika was relieved to see her go. The loathing that rooted and grew in Junon’s heart like a tree spreading wide its branches cast icy shadows over Mika’s world.
In the afternoon, she packed up a small car she’d rented under a fake name. In less than an hour, she was ready. While she was packing, she phoned Soli and then María Luz. Both women chided her for not having called, and she reassured them as best she could.
The day before, Junon had visited the area for the second time. She’d left the car in a safe place on the road to Kenscoff and taken a camionette that dropped her off at the main road, near the street leading to the Impasse des Petits Oiseaux. She had spent the afternoon in the neighbourhood, first on the empty beach, then strolling here and there to get a feel for the place. There were few people on this road, and almost no houses. Colonies of green lizards swarmed in the grass, bright as lightning.
Now the weather was overcast, but she liked the gloom of the twilight, the wind’s lashing gone quiet and the trees returning to their peaceful posture as the sun got lost in the distance. In the dim, waning day, everything has become pale and icy. She felt cold, because of the breeze off the sea but also because of the fatigue and emotion of the last few days. She had wanted to go off the main road, which was rutted and still today crowded with vans and trucks careening around—big Jeeps overflowing with soldiers, ordinary vans kitted out as tanks. Although many weeks had passed since their leader’s departure, these manoeuvres were still going on, to try to intimidate people, to get them to stop settling scores with the makout. Within half an hour, she calculated, she would be at her destination. She found the small side road easily and parked the car out of sight among the trees.
The narrow path was hard to walk on, a dark, muddy strip of land that cut through the brush. Her footsteps sank into soil thick with clay, which made her progress difficult. Branches swept across the path and thorns scratched her face, but she hardly felt a thing. Bottomless calm. Nothing but her footsteps sucking in the muck. The wind was up, and carried the vague scents of plants she couldn’t recognize. The house wasn’t far from the beach, and she was crouched behind a high dune. She moved her fingers, which were going numb. Twenty minutes: the man at the pizzeria had told her that he usually went to bed at seven, after the maid who served him his supper had left.
Sheltered and trusting her lucky star, which had led her by the hand and guided her steps, she waited there, at peace, and she looked back on her life. Something insistent held her by the throat, and she told herself that her youth was over now. Isn’t that how it goes, when the cold takes over, leaves us with a landscape of wounds, shame, and resentment? A rabid cloud closed around her heart. She was ready to face hell, she said to herself, she would do anything to give this story a voice. The moment of reckoning had come.
The owner seemed intent on discretion: the house was built at the end of a huge courtyard, with bushy camellia hedges stretching out on either side of walls that obstructed the view. The house was sturdy, reminiscent of the colonial homes in parts of the United States. A coffee-coloured resin covered the columns of the huge verandah. The garden was a dark tangle. Dwarf palms, coconut palms, banana trees, and other plants whispered, muffled in the night.
She hadn’t expected the gate to be closed, but it was chained and padlocked tight. Junon didn’t insist and went around the concrete wall, which thankfully hadn’t been bristled with shards. She climbed it on a side of the house where there were no doors or windows. Jumping down, she landed on a thick carpet of damp leaves and moss, just as she heard the voices.
“There’s no need to ask him the same question. They’re all liars. He’ll just keep lying.”
It sounded like an older man, but still Junon thought of Gabriel. The same fire, the same ardour. Could it be that this raid, as he and his group called their attacks on the butchers’ dens, had been planned before his death? She had told him everything she knew…hadn’t she? Gabriel, she recalled, said he knew everything about the man from Marigot: “He’s on our list, I have his file,” he’d said harshly.
“Who sent you?” someone barked.
It had to be Astrel Benjamin, the man she had come to meet.
“Pass me the gun so I can answer him!” another voice ordered. “We’ve already wasted far too much time with this motherfucker.”
“Not yet, not so fast,” another voice replied. “Monsieur Benjamin,” he went on, “we’re going to tell you why we’re here. As for who sent us, what an impertinent question. Did you know that there are men—flunkies, really—who are sent to women’s homes in the dead of night to rape and assault them? That’s not us. We’re not here on the orders of any jackboot regime, or summoned by some evil force. We have come of our own free will. We are here because of a sense of duty—to hold you to account. We’ve come for you, monsieur Benjamin!”
Whoever had spoken was pacing back and forth. From her position in the bushes, Junon could hear his footsteps. He seemed like the leader, and asked one of the others to read Benjamin’s indictment. At the same time, Junon heard an irritated grunt, followed by a sharp jerk and a lingering whine. A window opened, and Junon once again heard the same voice.
“Throw those canes out the window!” Something landed in the camellias with a thud.
“They say you’ve had health problems. I guess you can’t even move around without your walking stick, unless you throw yourself to the ground and crawl. And that would be rather risky, and useless, especially, wouldn’t you say?”
“Who are you? Where did you come from?”
Junon would have given anything to see his face, the face of the man who had just snarled like a beast cornered. No one bothered to answer him. Suddenly a thin voice—a young girl—piped up.
“Look at that bloated body, look at this animal! Who are we? You’ll know soon enough. Where did we come from? From our mamas’ wombs! We didn’t come all the way out here to argue. We are here, in your hovel, only to uphold the principle of retribution. And in the name of that principle, you will die, by your own hand. If you refuse, simple: we’ll set the house on fire, so you die anyway. Unless you manage to get out, which is unlikely. Everything we need to start a fire is out on the verandah.”
The man’s breathing became laboured. Slowly, Junon moved a little closer to the door. The space between the hinges and the frame was just wide enough for her to glimpse a small room and a rattan armchair. A stocky man sat in the chair, folded up on himself. His forehead was bony, his hair sparse, and his eyes disappeared under bushy eyebrows. He was staring, bewildered, at two men and a girl.
“Are you afraid?” the girl asked him. “Are you hoping to make us cry? After such a long and illustrious career, after torturing, raping and murdering so many people, you expect me to believe that these two amateurs and a girl can scare you? Come on! I’m sure you’ll be as brave as ever.”
“But what atrocities are you talking about, madame?” the man blustered. “I have only served my country. I never overstepped, there was never any abuse. I only did my duty.”
One of the men leapt at him as if to slap him. The girl caught his arm. Then she spit in the old man’s face.
“Do excuse me,” she snarled. “I grew up without a father to discipline me and I had a mother who was absent, bruised, and completely traumatized by rape—the rape I came from. Do you understand? She was raped one night by a son of a bitch, a hyena, who looked just like you. My poor mother did her best, but I’m afraid I don’t have very good manners. When hyenas invaded the neighbourhood, they often raped all the girls in the same family. Do you understand, monsieur Benjamin?”
The girl was sobbing.
“My hatred is the weight of all these years of suffering, my mother’s suffering and my own, the suffering that I lived through when every single day I had to face the revulsion of the woman who gave birth to me, her disgust. She was barely able to lay eyes on me, she couldn’t take me in her arms, look at me, talk to me. I look so much like you.”
Her voice faltered, but she went on.
“Those bushy eyebrows, those thick lips…I finally understand the extent of her sacrifice. More than anything else, it was her silence that killed me slowly. And you will pay for that silence, the silence against which she had no power, the silence that was her only lifeline. My mother was a wreck all her life; my mother, stripped of everything; my mother, irremediably mute.”
Junon’s limbs were trembling. How was it possible that this young woman was speaking her words, Junon’s own life? The man tried to stand, as if on impulse. It was high time for her to leave, she told herself, but her legs were unsteady, and she didn’t know if this was a dream or reality.
Robotically, she backed out to the road, to her car in the bushes. A huge moon suddenly appeared in the sky as if to show her the way. Now she was walking fast, very fast. Her feet barely touched the ground. How many of us are here in this country with our lives in tatters? She wanted more than anything to be sitting on the plane, and she thought of María Luz, her longing so sharp that she started to cry.
In the house, the man was panting and flailing as if he were dancing in his chair. Because he was a coward, he continued to moan weakly. The girl thought he was drooling, and sneered in disgust before realizing that it was her own spittle dripping down to his mouth.
“Who are you,” the man sniffed again, “to come and talk to me about justice?”
“Who’s talking to you about justice? Have we even uttered the word? You don’t know who I am, yet there must be so many women and children in this country, in this city, who dream of standing before you to do what I’m doing. Who I am really doesn’t matter; I am one of many.”
“Now,” the younger of her two companions said, walking toward the man dumped into the armchair, “I am going to ask you a few questions, just as a formality. Answer simply with yes or no. Is your name Astrel Benjamin?”
“Yeah.”
“Were you, on the night of January 5, 1958, a member of the death squad sent on the orders of François Duvalier to the home of the journalist Mika Pelrin, and the next day, to the home of the Jean-Baptiste girls, on Tirmasse?”
“I was there, but it wasn’t me. That night there was Romain, Barbot, Maître, Désir, Ti Boulé, Gros Féfé, Gracia, André, Paul...Milice Midy, Bòs Pete, Zacharie Delva...”
“Basta!” the girl shouted.
“I don’t know who else,” he muttered. “I was an army officer, I was just obeying orders.” The excuse rattled out in a single breath. “Actually, I think it was someone called Ti Boulé that night or Albert or maybe Pierre, I’ve forgotten, I don’t know. It was so long ago.”
“You were there but it wasn’t you? It wasn’t you, it was Pierre, Albert, Orcel, Tassy, it was Peter Rabbit, it was Jérôme, Décembre? Didn’t you even boast, after it was done, that you’d eaten your fill?”
“They were Duvalier’s orders,” he protested again.
“So you committed these crimes and everything else that you’re accused of only because it was your duty?”
The man said nothing more.
“Are you going to answer? Yes or no!?”
Terror blazed from his pupils like lightning bolts. He inhaled sharply and shivered.
“You’re going to smoke, you’re going to burn alive!” the girl screamed at him. “Imagine the fire rising from the floor, the flames licking your chair. It’s wicker, isn’t it? What a beautiful crest of sparks that will make. Then your legs, which you won’t even be able to move. Picture the tap behind you in the kitchen, but you’ll have no way to quench your thirst. And imagine your favourite weapon, between your bastard thighs, in pain, shrivelled and charred. What an end for the thing that’s destroyed so many lives. That terrifying, fearsome weapon—nothing more than a dog turd in the fire! Come on, keep going: your heart, lungs, spleen, liver, crimping, dissolving, disappearing. And the raging flame climbing up to your face.”
The man groaned again.
“That’s enough, animal! No one is going to come to your rescue. You’ve done so much harm here, you’ve killed so many people, you’ve destroyed so many lives. Everyone hates you. They’ll be happy to let you die! But we can avoid the fire; we can put the barrel of the gun in your mouth and you’ll shoot yourself.”
The girl motioned to one of the other two. One of them came up and leaned toward the man, who bucked. The chair gave way. The man tried to move his left hand to grasp the pistol with his deformed fingers, and was cuffed with the butt of the rifle. Desperate, he leapt, throwing himself at the table where an oil lamp glowed. They only had time to put a bullet in his foot before they left the scene.
They had strung dozens of coconuts together around the house with long strands of cotton and raffia. All the wicks came together in the same place, buried under a thin layer of straw on the highest mound of soil before the beach.
Inside, the man was shouting. The fire’s fierce crackle could be heard from far away.
They only needed to set one or two wicks on fire, Gabriel had insisted, since they would all come together; the wind would take care of the rest. And that was what they did.
When Junon’s car reached the top of Morne La Vallée, at the junction that led to the border, she stopped. At the bottom of the hill she could see long plumes of smoke and enormous reddish tongues.
She closed her eyes for a moment, and a fairy-tale vision flashed before her eyes: women standing around a fire wearing long skirts lined with wide lace frills were dancing a fandango, their bracelets tinkling. She could hear the castanets. Down there, far down, the fire hissed. Like a greedy snake, it twined around the house.
Someday, on a day like today, Junon thought, someday when my hair is white, I’ll come back to dance and piss on those ashes. She turned at the crossroads. Right now, I’ll just sit and watch as everything that’s been burning inside me goes out.