THREE
THE WIFE AND THE ORPHAN
While still very young, I became an expert at choosing inoffensive subjects, ones that wouldn’t provoke a long diatribe from you against the Doréval dictatorships or those rare silences that were the precursors of your days of utter prostration. But today I wonder whether my ploy accomplished much at all. Whether you, Maman, didn’t carry an inexpressible sadness with you to your grave. And whether I who vicariously experienced the despotic regime won’t always have it under my skin. I’ve heard so much about those people since my childhood—not only the Doréval family, but also the notorious henchmen with their revealing or deceptive nicknames, still evocative of terrible anecdotes long after their time: Ti Baba, Captain Henry Tobias, Evaris Maître, Chief Lanfè, Lucien Désir, Colonel Britton Claudius. They’ve become elements of my universe, so powerful a part of my mental space and of my memories that it seems to me I’ll never be able to escape them and will always remain captive to their ghosts.
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Her own silence practically smothered her. She made a concerted effort to escape from the void, to retrieve the thread of her thoughts, not to lose her grip. Not yet. So many things to untangle for her personal benefit. Hers alone, for once. She mustn’t think any more about the young woman whose persistence in scrutinizing her never faltered. Rarely did any animation show on the young woman’s fine, yet somber, face, and then just fleetingly, like a twitch. The absurd thought came to Odile that she and the caregiver were playing hide-and-seek without knowing or wanting to. Mutually hiding their faces so as not to be seen. She struggled against her impulse to approach the young woman’s dense melancholy, touch it with her finger, and wrap herself in it, too. She tried hard to purge everything from her mind. To stop thinking about the children, the Deceased, and everyone else. She no longer wanted to be a mere adjunct, the part of the couple that always followed the “and,” as if she couldn’t exist independently. As if her own story had no importance in the larger scheme.
She didn’t regret anything. Blubbering and remorse were alien to her character, but she could now look at her married life in a new way. Without worrying about her failure to behave as a good wife. She admitted to herself that she had drawn considerable comfort from the stability of the marriage and the family, in spite of her fierce need for independence. The difficult beginnings, the modest lodgings in the Rue de l’Enterrement, her lonely year during Fabien’s overseas study in Missouri, the uncertainty regarding his absence, the anxiety for the future—none of that detracted in the slightest from the sense of well-being that a home set on firm foundations brought her, if only because she was confident of Fabien’s love. She, the abandoned orphan, flourished in the solidity and routine of everyday life.
But nearly sixteen years after their marriage, when the Deceased leapt into the political fray, she, too, threw herself into it, wholeheartedly. She understood then that a part of her was waiting to reveal itself fully in that environment of struggle, ambition, clashing ideas, betrayals, and dubious alliances. Understood, also, that she had spent long enough keeping up their pathetic lodgings and working in health centers frequented by derelicts whose lives were doomed at the outset. She moved into the National Palace without apprehensions, but with the firm intention of staying there as long as possible. She congratulated herself on having chosen a husband so successfully.
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The wedding of Jean-Paul Doréval and Isabelle Baudet took place several months before our departure for Martinique. From its inception, that year had proved remarkable for our family. As if once again familial events coincided with occurrences that were convulsing the life of the nation. First of all, the loss of both your parents within a two-month span. You told me that after your marriage your parents had begun slowly withdrawing from you. My birth brought them a measure of happiness, but their contentment was almost ethereal, already detached from the world. They’d decided it was time for them to rejoin Jean-Édouard. They didn’t say this in so many words, but you heard your mother mumble that their old bones were clamoring for rest (though neither of them was yet sixty-five!), that they’d had enough of this world. While feeling abandoned, you couldn’t blame them for wanting to escape their ordeal. For how do parents carry on after the death of their child? After the loss of a son in such circumstances? How do they summon the will to get out of bed after restless nights spent imagining the suffering and torment of a being they would have wanted to protect from the tiniest scratch?
Sometimes a sadly complicit smile would pass between them, and you would feel excluded, already deprived of their presence. They used to lavish attention on me, their only grandchild, so avid were they to draw some small consolation from the spontaneous and light-hearted affection of a child. From time to time, with gentle caresses of your arm, a firmer pressure of their lips on your forehead, glances that were misty-eyed yet determined, they were saying good-bye to you. When your father, the first to go, died of a heart attack, you knew that your mother would soon follow. And in fact, you were just starting to recover from the first bereavement when an attack of hypertension carried away Grand-mère. Two funerals in less than three months. I don’t recall much of that period, although you told me many times that in the beginning I kept asking for my grandparents. Still, childhood shielded me from the more devastating aspects of grief.
Once in Fort-de-France, however, you tried hard to rekindle my family memories. It was a tradition of ours to visit your maternal grandparents during the summer break. They had settled in Descailles in the house you called the house of flowers because your grandmother had planted oleanders, daisies, and hibiscus bushes all around. Your mother had always wanted to return to the city of her birth to live out her days. Even though they’d grown up in Port-du-Roi, both she and your father came from the South, that region of hills and plains, of shifting terrain. The nearby ocean was like an immense blue veil, tingeing the atmosphere and the ever-present ranges of hills. A low-lying city, Descailles fell prey to hurricanes even before it became the practice to name them. Nowadays bearing disarmingly familiar names like Flora and Allen, their menace still weighs annually on the city.
In fact, a particularly dangerous storm season was responsible for your presence in the capital on that fateful August fifteenth. Normally, you would have been in Descailles celebrating the feast of Our Lady of the Assumption.
When you were little, your grandmother Eugénie, known to you as Man Nini, would stand outside her cottage waiting for you and Jean-Édouard. A battered old bus would drop you, your brother, and your mother there. Through the bus window, you told me, you could see Man Nini standing with open arms. As if she had spent the entire year waiting in front of her door for her loved ones. The next day she would lead you and Jean-Édouard far out of town into the cornfields.
Even with your persistent prompting, however, I couldn’t remember the annual visits that you, Papa, and I made to Man Nini after your parents died. Before we left for Fort-de-France. While Papa was alive.
I would be very glad if those cheery remembrances came back to me. For the time being, I can only borrow yours. I imagine you as a little girl astride a donkey, deathly afraid on the bumpy trail, your arms clutching the animal’s neck and your eyes shining with nervous excitement. You would not have exchanged your place for anything in the world. The vacations with Man Nini were timeless days of sanctuary from the infamous years of tyranny, a small enclave of childhood bliss for you to savor. While you were telling me about it, you became carefree again, lively and sparkling.
Of course, as the dictatorship grew more severe, it became harder and harder for you to get to Descailles for your summer vacations. Your mother was hesitant to venture out on the roads with you and your brother. At the time, it was dangerous to travel from one region to another. Traveling to Descailles had always entailed fording rivers and streams. Sometimes your party would spend the night on the riverbank and set off again in the morning when the waters became passable. Now there was the added risk of coming upon Tonton Macoutes greedy for the money they could extort from the bus passengers or simply intent on flaunting their power. Consequently, the trip lost much of its appeal. And yet, when you arrived at Man Nini’s, you would immediately forget the immense but agreeable fatigue that had set you dozing on the bus, you’d forget the fear and the tedium. You would see only the prospect of a sojourn between sun and sea and of evenings passed under a crystalline sky alive with stars.
How happy I was to hear you enliven your recollections in that way, to discover several oases of joy, playful and welcoming spaces that offset the usual gloomy mists. I adopted the phrase “the days of sweet memory” to describe those moments when, your eyes pensive and luminous, you would share your morsels of happiness. On those days you would also recount your everyday activities in Port-du-Roi: your fits of helpless laughter, the sudden acrobatic stunts that startled your mother, those peaceful interludes in which you were lost in the universe of a book, the innocent squabbles that sometimes led to parental swats and tearful outbursts. Under the watchful eyes of parents who were protecting you from everything, not just the threat of VSN militiamen. In those days, you insisted, the adults contented themselves with being parents. They didn’t aspire to become their children’s friends at all costs and to confide in them about everything; and so they spared them a great many worries. Only as an adult did you learn that some evenings you had almost gone hungry for want of money, that the store where your mother relied on credit to buy the fabric for your school uniforms was demanding payment by month’s end, that school tuition charges had gone up again. In those days, before terrifying tales of the Tonton Macoutes came to dominate everyone’s imagination, children would go to sleep with only the anxiety of an uncompleted homework assignment or their dismay over the scary story heard before bedtime.
Indeed, on the curfew evenings you children eagerly huddled together to hear blood-chilling yarns from the storyteller of the moment, whether it was the cook or your mother’s elderly aunt who lived out her days in your household. From the veranda, you kids could catch the whispers of your parents and the closest neighbors, their heads drawn together to share the latest rumors. But what truly captivated the little ones was the tale that poured from the lips of the evening’s storyteller. More fearful than the others, you nonetheless hung on her words, instantly forgetting your startled reactions to a chair scraping the floor or leaves rustling in a tree. Ignoring also the multiple warnings from your brother and cousins, who invariably dreamed up pranks to heighten your fear.
During the night the sharp crack of the rara* band’s leather whip threw you into such terror that you desperately wanted to cower in your parents’ bedroom. Except that you would have had to go down the narrow corridor past a window overlooking a bleak little courtyard, where—according to your cousins—unimaginable events took place nightly. You learned much later that the boys who made fun of you and terrorized you by day hid their eyes at night and cringed in fear.
Trembling, bathed in sweat beneath your sheet, you would replay in your mind the stories you had heard. The ones about winged creatures with supernatural powers, about a little boy cured through the intervention of an aunt who’d been dead for five years, and about the sudden and mysterious death, exactly as foretold, of a colonel who’d made a pact with the devil. But in the morning, like a sun-kissed miracle, all your fears melted away with the first rays. During those summer days, with Jean-Édouard and the cousins who spent practically every summer at your place, you all frolicked in the courtyard. The boys were always less inhibited than you; as the only girl in the group, and also the youngest, you were saddled with a long list of dos and don’ts. Forbidden to climb trees, to talk boisterously with the neighbors, to go beyond the fence, to sit with your legs apart. You used to smile tenderly at those memories before the wave of desolation came to claim you again.
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Her chest subsided farther under the weight of an inaudible sigh. Feeling more than seeing the circumspect gaze of the young aide turn toward her, she quickly recast her features to those of a decrepit old lady with lifeless eyes. Despite the surrounding silence and calm, a troubled feeling enveloped her. Oh! She wasn’t mistaken about the physician’s emotionless expression or about the brisk and sometimes curt manners of the head nurse. She also knew that death would not be too long in coming. People don’t live forever. But the danger that was stalking her just then came from elsewhere; it was floating around her. Present, imminent. After a while, feeling tired and breaking off her effort to understand, she let her eyelids close.
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Nevertheless, I have met survivors of that era who had succeeded in putting the horror behind them, who had constructed a present without that pain like fresh blood ready to spurt, the pain you could never escape. With an expression you hoped would look serene, you used to mention various Quisqueyans, descendants of families victimized during the repression, who had changed their last names. First of all, to escape further violence, then to free themselves from the burden of the memories that clung to the familiar appellation. All mention of the name became a source of heartache and despair, of anger or remorse. For that reason, they had to adopt a new name that would not be associated with the regime’s opponents, its accomplices, or even its innocent victims. This could be a demanding task, for in many families either an executioner or a victim could be identified, and sometimes both. Monsters and heroes, the fiendish and the honorable, sometimes found themselves united by the shared syllables.
The sense of guilt that overwhelms the survivors of a tragedy is sometimes occasioned by the sheer joy of seeing the sun rise on a morning in the month of May. I learned very early to recognize the guilt in your eyes: it would spring up without warning, but most often after joys that were too full. In the next moment your smile would contort with self-reproach, darkening our happy times.
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A glance can reveal a thought more clearly than a word. Ever since childhood, she had mastered her own expression to the point of giving it a detached and mysterious character, lightly ironic, inoffensive without being vacuous. The first time she set eyes on Fabien, a tremor ran through her. He didn’t realize it—that’s how skilled she was at controlling her body—but she smelled the man’s power just as you recognize the scent of your native soil. Toughness and burning ambition beneath a seemingly nondescript appearance. A nursing colleague had told her one day, “It’s easy to forget him if you’ve never met his gaze, but once his eyes have rested on you, the mark of Fabien Doréval doesn’t leave you.” She knew that behind her back several nurses called her husband’s look “the mark of the beast.” Did they really know him, those nurses who said they’d crossed paths with him at the time of the anti-TB campaign? Did they base their judgments on their first impressions or on Fabien’s subsequent actions? Whenever someone told a story about the Deceased, it took on a particular coloration tied to his rise to power.
His rise to power! She bristled at this hurtful expression, as if Fabien was like all the others who had occupied the presidency, every one of them addicted to power and its manifestations. Without any real agenda. A year or two sufficed for them, as if the mere fact of being installed in the seat of power, however briefly, exhausted their ambitions. How demeaning to pass into the history books that way, on the roster of presidents whose hold on power had lasted two years or less! Fabien swore he would not add his name to that lineage, regardless of predictions to the contrary. Besides, their reign lasted much longer than Fabien’s fourteen years plus the fifteen years of Jean-Paul: it was an entirely different mode of behavior, an attempt to retrieve a sense of history, to rebuild the national sovereignty, to restore the people’s dignity.
She realized that it was becoming more and more of a strain for her to think about all that, but she focused single-mindedly on her snatches of memory. All she had left was the luxury of dipping into the past, seeing and reliving it before letting go.
Her youth. A young girl with a proud step, anxious to avoid attracting just anyone, intent on telling the losers clearly and pointedly that they should give up. Nor was she interested in collecting bright-eyed, handsome young men who dreamed of entering the bourgeoisie, and she was never infatuated to the point of forgetting what was uppermost for them: a downtown department store, a factory in a working-class district, a thriving import business. At the orphanage, she had heard enough about certain patronesses—forthcoming with their time and money, their hand-me-downs, and their opinions—to know what to expect of their male offspring. After years of primary and secondary studies in one of the schools run by religious orders in the capital, these young men thought they no longer owed any dues to Quisqueyan society. A minority of them even made their way to the American school or the French lycée, though both were ostensibly reserved for the children of diplomats or foreign nationals. Then, a stint at a European university, either Swiss or French. Coursework completed or not, what difference did it make? Diplomas would serve at most to embellish their natural prerogatives as the sons of merchants or industrialists.
Their amorous declarations were halfway between melodrama and farce. They were never madly enough in love to flout the advice of the grandmother, custodian of the family traditions: “Never marry someone darker-skinned than your mother. Aim to father a generation whiter than your own.” A notable exception was recognized where the dowry offered would compensate for the deficit in lighter-skinned babies! Even in those cases, however, it was necessary to weigh things carefully, to evaluate the pros and cons, so as not to place the family in an inferior position over the long run.
She understood these axioms so well that her smile glided rapidly over the upper-class boys who craved impulsive flings or real romantic attachments, depending on their personalities, inhibitions, or culture. She ignored both types and kept a safe distance from them, too solicitous for her own future to let herself be taken in by the impromptu fabrications of reckless young men. Other suitors were pencil pushers, the plodding sons of the middle class condemned to toil away as bookkeepers in businesses owned by others or to shout themselves hoarse while standing in front of blackboards. Though bearing them no ill will, she trampled on their fawning gazes. She had no intention of enduring a dreary, hand-to-mouth existence, fixated on minimizing every expense, spending her nights tossing and turning with anxiety about the next day, bearing children condemned to replicate the same way of life in a perpetual downward spiral. When she was introduced to the young physician Fabien Doréval, she immediately recognized him as the person who would deliver her from all that. They shared the same imperatives, similar origins, and an all-consuming ambition.
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Since Wednesday, the nursing home has been under heightened security. An intruder, almost surely a Quisqueyan, skulked through the corridors, penetrating as far as the widow’s room, and inserted his head through the half-open door. Blindly heeding the director’s standing instructions, I hurried to close the door and chase away the intruder. But before he left, in a voice astonishingly spirited and forceful for someone who looked so droopy and timid, the man snarled at me, “So she, too, is going to die in her bed. Then there’s no justice in this country!”
I can’t forget his words; etched in my memory is the face of this man more ravaged by hurt and powerlessness than by anger. Do I have the right to ignore all those disfigured lives?
The temptation to act is growing stronger and stronger in my mind as I contemplate the old woman’s dormant form. The idea has evolved as the weeks go by. I am seriously weighing its feasibility. What began as a cloudy speculation, born of my sorrow and frustrations, is becoming real. Martine, a Quisqueyan friend who has lived in France for more than twenty years, but who still believes strongly in the powers of the Vodou deities, often mentions a Quisqueyan ougan who resides in Paris and whose results she guarantees on the basis of her many experiences with him. It would be only fitting if the dictator’s widow died at the hands of an ougan. The dictator who toyed so much with people’s beliefs to entrench his rule! But I can’t reconcile myself to such a solution. I can try to obtain toxic substances by other means. That would perhaps be harder, but it would still be doable. The prospect of my initiating any sort of punishment gives me a heady sensation, a novel one for me. I want to keep the idea simmering on the burner, not rush it. In any case, the old woman, bedridden, speechless, and impotent, has no escape.
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The memory of the betrayal still pained her as much as ever. A face with abhorrent features, pale eyes, and permanent-waved hair passed before her eyes. How could Fabien have become entranced by that woman, brought her into their household, spent hours with her under the pretext that she was serving as his private secretary? Every day, watching them sit side by side, like accomplices, touching each other, now whispering, now falling into silence. She was supposed to have accepted all that without reacting! The rival had thought she could consolidate her power by marrying her brother into the family as a replacement for Marie-Danielle’s no-good husband. On the basis of soft caresses, wanton thighs, and overwrought embraces. But Odile could not let that woman walk all over her, and she would never abandon the family to her wiles. She and her eldest daughter had always understood each other. If she stood up for Marie-Danielle’s husband (while not vouching at all for his character), if she supported that fast-talking con man, it was because she wanted to protect her daughter and the grandchildren and also deal a mortal blow to that woman. When, as a result of Odile’s constant pressure on Fabien, the woman whom public rumor identified only by her married name—Madame Saint-Albain—finally left the country, it was one of the sweetest victories of her married life.
She would not have allowed Fabien to throw away all that they’d been through together. Not that he had wanted to, but sometimes the cup reaches its limit and adding even a droplet causes it to overflow. A brief mention of the difficult years, of the period when rumors of impotence kept him in a semipermanent state of rage, was enough to remind him of his vulnerability. All men, regardless of their degree of intelligence, reveal themselves to be particularly susceptible to problems of that nature. As if on some level they defined themselves by that organ, by its functioning, its prowess or its inadequacy. She didn’t complain, at least not overtly. With regard to her position as first lady, as she conceived of it, she played the game out of loyalty to her husband. Until the day he dared to raise his arm to strike her. Then and there, she forgot to modulate her voice, forgot to behave as a married woman, respectful and reserved . . . on that day only.
Some wives didn’t share this sense of duty toward their husbands. On the contrary, they actively tried to destroy their partners. She saw an example of that in her own family, but years earlier she had abandoned all attempts to understand her son’s marital situation. The relationship between a man and a woman must in any case remain uncharted territory. No one can intrude there without risk of being ridiculed, frustrated, or duped. In the end she swallowed her defeat but never hid her opinion of the Foreigner.
The wedding was one of the regime’s greatest errors. She would remain convinced until the end—which was fast approaching—that this lavish display of eye-catching apparel and jewelry, this extravagant and provocative ceremony, had precipitated the regime’s downfall. Right in the midst of a crisis, to scoff at the people and to impose on them the spectacle of this mulatto woman decked out in a white gown. A divorcée in white! What an outrage! For the bride to go so far as to order a fur coat and command the palace technicians to run the air-conditioning at full blast so that she could wear it. Then to prance around in front of the cabinet ministers, the army officers, the paramilitaries; to put on such a show in front of the soldiers who had left their wives in their sweltering quarters, with a sputtering fan as their only relief. Utter madness!
She had found it necessary to surround herself with loyalists; it was thanks to them that they were able to hold on for another fifteen years after Fabien’s death. And yet once again popular opinion had predicted a reign of only a few months, asserting that the Heir couldn’t hang on any longer than that.
Just as at the very beginning, when Fabien was ill. She recalled the chaos surrounding his heart attacks. The first one was a veritable nightmare! First of all, the shock, the consternation, the doctor’s ineptitude. An incompetent who had made her spend hours in unforgettable anguish. How could she contemplate losing Fabien, after only two years in power, after just fifteen years of marriage, when her youngest, Jean-Paul, had just celebrated his seventh birthday? She was going to find herself widowed with children still in need of supervision and a father’s presence. Had Fabien died, the debacle that followed his death would have brought down the regime and put in jeopardy the advances that were barely under way. Fortunately, he survived that first attack, no thanks to the doctors’ expertise. Truly, those so-called specialists turned out to be worthless! She regarded Fabien’s responses as very lenient: he merely dismissed the incompetents and shunted them aside. Had she been in his place, she might well have shown more severity. But at least that episode prepared her for the Deceased’s other heart problems, his chest pains, mood swings, threats, and tirades.
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Your mother knew so many stories of girls whose complexions were too dark, whose hair was too nappy, and who were denied admission on some pretext or other, that she refused to enroll you at the prestigious school on the Avenue Crown run by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny—refused, she’d repeat to anyone who would listen, to subject you to that humiliation. You were accepted by the Sisters of Divine Wisdom, where you nonetheless associated with the daughters of the bourgeoisie—you always made a point of reminding me emphatically that in your day such a thing was still possible.
During my rare visits to Port-du-Roi, I observed the existence of diverse worlds that had almost nothing to do with each other, and on the few occasions they did, always in very specific contexts. Contacts were kept to a strict minimum. Even in the nightclubs where my cousins took me during our brief stays and where young people came to enjoy themselves. All privileged in one way or another in this wounded country, and yet they grouped themselves according to the color of their skin, their incomes, their proficiency in French. Everyone behaved as if this compartmentalization was normal. Boys and girls danced as if these obvious barriers represented something other than an insult to their country’s history. Any mention of color prejudice was strictly taboo, for then a silence would descend, heavy with reproach. “We outgrew that kind of thing long ago!” And right away the slurs would rain down on anyone who risked challenging that assertion. And of course someone would bring up Doréval and the havoc he had wrought by raising “the question of color.” Soon enough, there would be references to the little priest in the National Palace. No one had wanted to understand that both the dictator and the priest had only plunged the knife more deeply into a festering wound.
When I tried to broach those questions with you, you fell back on your personal experience as though it trumped everyone else’s. And I had to listen once again to the story of your friendship with Laura, a former schoolmate, youngest daughter of a well-known mulatto mercantile family. You and Laura were best friends in the latter years of elementary school. “We used to share our most intimate secrets,” you would murmur, as if forgetting that the opportunity for an adult friendship between the two of you turned out to be almost nonexistent. Your paths barely crossed again.
But I never dared contradict you. I masked every stirring of revolt, choked back every question that could have caused hurt, stifled the doubts that were poised on my lips.
I remember an incident in a store in Alexandreville during one of our brief visits to Quisqueya. You had dragged me there to buy the products of Quisqueyan artisans, justly renowned for their creativity and delicate craftsmanship. Around us were a fairly impressive number of other customers, considering the economy’s fragility. Besides the locals, there were foreigners and expatriates like us, endowed with supercharged foreign currencies that made the proprietor’s skirt twirl as she bustled to serve us. The ambience was polite, Frenchified, and rather standoffish. Luxury perfume floated in the air. The little bell on the door tinkled, and all eyes turned instinctively toward the new customer. A woman, simply dressed, her face slick with sweat, her expression sheepish in the face of so many glances. Each one astonished. Some indifferent, others unmistakably cold. The proprietor sized up the newcomer but gave no sign of welcome, returning her attention to customers who were worth her while. Nonetheless, animated by a sense of determination that was stronger than her apparent diffidence, the sweat-soaked woman advanced toward a sales clerk and murmured something to her. The clerk responded offhandedly and with a shrug that conveyed her disdain. I inwardly admired the courage of the intruder, who insistently repeated her question in a somewhat louder voice. She was speaking Creole, which turned heads a second time. It had to do with a gift she wanted for a cousin who was getting married in Boston and who had seen this item in the store. She tried to describe an iron sculpture of imposing appearance. Wanted to know if the store expected to obtain others in the same style. Wondered what it would cost. If it wasn’t too expensive, she was eager to buy it for her cousin in Boston, because he was so kind. And her voice rose, her Creole blazed with her desire to show her gratitude to her cousin who had settled in America. Condescending smiles formed, eyebrows arched up. The proprietor then stepped forward. Her voice rang out like a slap. Patronizing, dismissive, brooking no appeal: “Madame, we told you we can’t help you.” The woman tried one last time to stammer out her story, but the proprietor’s glare stopped the flow of words. The sweaty-faced woman finally went quiet. She backed away and exited.
I waited for one of the customers to react. I waited, Maman, for you to be the first to make the proprietor understand that she should have behaved civilly toward this woman, who only wanted to buy a gift for a relative, who had not offended the dignity of the nation by speaking Creole, and who was not responsible for the fact that she had no car and had perspired under the broiling sun of Port-du-Roi. I would have been satisfied if you’d simply commented on the incident as we left the store, if you’d linked it like so many others to the climate of exclusion that relegated a large segment of the population to circumscribed spaces, if you’d perhaps poured out your indignation with your customary verve—but the days went by with no mention of the event. We left Quisqueya soon afterward. Curiously, you never did speak of the woman dripping with sweat.
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On Sundays, when rumors of coups or conspiracies didn’t throw them into an anxious frenzy, the family sometimes went to their property west of the capital. A place of simplicity, an informal, less pretentious lifestyle. She felt good there. She would let herself sink into one of the mahogany chairs, with classic lines and a somewhat rigid back, but so similar to those of her Tante Cléante that she always nestled into them with delight. She struck up neighborly relations with the villagers, conducted herself—oh! so effortlessly!—as a grand lady taking her leisure.
The bucolic environment brought back happy memories of her family. The dinners on the last Sunday of the month at Tante Cléante’s, where her sisters and she would gather with their relatives. In the early days of her marriage, she rarely missed these get-togethers. She adored her sisters, even though they didn’t share her resentment toward their mother. The four resembled each other to a degree that was striking for those who knew of their diverse paternity, as if the paternal genes had made no impact on the arrangement of their features. Or perhaps their mother had chosen men who were all alike!
Peals of laughter and conversation, kitchen aromas, and clinking glasses punctuated their gatherings in a convivial atmosphere that was at once rustic and elegant. The reason, no doubt, was that all the sisters took pleasure in sashaying about in their exquisite apparel in this simple setting. And also because the cousins, six girls and three boys, bickered good- naturedly, combining ruggedly physical games with talkfests and with fashion shows that the girls organized under the boys’ mocking eyes.
Fabien had always respected her sense of family and her need to share her good fortune with her relatives. Her family had benefited in every possible way from her position as first lady. As soon as they’d finished secondary school, two of her nieces went off to the same Swiss university as her daughters. Her nephews all received cars as soon as they attained the legal driving age—or even before. Indeed, Jean-Paul adored sports cars and often gave them to his cousins. On many occasions, she was forced to intercede with Fabien on behalf of cousins, sons of cousins, and godsons implicated in prosaic dramas that could have turned out badly.
Like the time one of her nephews, Philippe Moreau, had a fling with his wife’s younger sister. The two sisters, both pregnant by the same man, lived for a time under the same roof. Philippe had always been something of a daredevil, drawn to reckless adventures and sticky situations. To assuage his father-in-law’s wrath, he presented the family with a 4 × 4 and two round-trip plane tickets to the United States. The outraged father-in-law threatened to kill him. How could she have remained indifferent to the justifiable panic of Angela, the youngest of her sisters, who came to tell her the story? A squad of VSN thugs promptly explained to the father-in-law that it would be best for him to calm down and accept the reparations, and above all not to make waves or spread the story around. If he did, he would regret it. In the end, they all left the country: the two sisters, the babies, and the in-laws. Philippe made no effort whatever to retain them; it was obvious he didn’t care about them. Several months later, he admitted to his mother that the younger sister was still a minor, but the outcome would have been the same in any event. She could not decently have left him to the mercy of the father’s rage. You simply have to protect your own.
Likewise, she could not have tolerated her own sister paying the price for the impetuous actions of Léonard Daumier. It was a pity that Clara didn’t understand the motives behind the regime’s reaction. It pained Odile that her sister was still maintaining a cold and distant attitude after all this time. They’d been compelled to act quickly to make Clara divorce this man who was plotting against the government. Fabien had no choice but to come down hard on Daumier. She would never have believed that Clara’s resentment would last so long. More than thirty years. Still, Clara had always been one to hold grudges. Even as an adolescent she would berate you for the most trivial remark a month after the fact. All the same, they used to get along well most of the time. Odile would have loved to see her sister again before it was too late. She felt time sliding between her thoughts as if it were playing hide-and-seek with her. Only she no longer had the strength to run after it, and above all she had no doubt which of the two would win the game.
She had always envisioned growing old with Fabien, like the elderly couples in her mother’s native city, nodding off in rocking chairs on their sunlit stoops. Despite the first heart attack and her foretaste of separation, she fantasized for a long time about their twilight years of marital togetherness, a calm and fulfilling harvesttime. She used to dream of evenings with their grandchildren’s laughter in the background, trips to Europe, shopping excursions to department stores. Of visits to countries they had never really found the time to explore. Her vision of retirement was the transfer of power to Marie-Danielle—or in a pinch to Jean-Paul once he’d matured sufficiently—from the hands of a Fabien who would be up in years but would govern until the transition was assured. A handover would be done in good and due form, not like what had actually happened, under conditions of anxiety and uncertainty.
Fabien hadn’t made things any easier! Long refusing to envisage his inevitable death, he rejected all consideration of a successor. Proof that even the greatest sometimes have their blind spots! He saw himself as president forever, even though the doctors had written him off. The 1964 constitution made no provision for succession. She finally managed to convince him that it was preferable to create a plan, rather than put in jeopardy the revolution for which he’d sacrificed so much. But he remained dead set on the choice of Jean-Paul, whereas the most logical solution was to designate Marie-Danielle to take over. After all, their eldest daughter was already governing while her father’s latest illness kept him bedridden. The circumstances allowed Marie-Danielle to impose her domineering personality and exercise her managerial skills. And yet Fabien would hear none of it. Odile had exhausted herself in trying to persuade him to pass the torch before it was too late. She reluctantly decided she’d be going too far if she also made him accept Marie-Danielle. Besides, she had to wonder whether the Quisqueyan public was ready for such a choice.
In the end, Fabien didn’t have much trouble winning acceptance for his son. “Young people of my country,” he said, “here is the young leader I promised you.” He had set his right hand on Jean-Paul’s shoulder, and that photo was circulated all around the country and soon all around the world. Once again, constitutional amendments were quickly enacted to change the age of eligibility for the presidency from thirty-five to nineteen. Then, the referendum of January 30 recorded 2,390,816 votes in favor of Fabien’s choice and none opposed. In less than two months Fabien had organized everything necessary for the transition to pass off without a hitch.
It took her much longer than that to get used to his absence, to the void created by all that she missed: the measured cadences of his voice, the muffled tread of his steps. The children, particularly the younger ones, were inconsolable, weeping without shame, but for her it was as if she had been condemned to live with a part of herself brutally torn away. From time to time she groped toward the missing part, but she was never able to catch hold of the shreds. All those years lived with another, only to find herself suddenly alone. At the end of her life, her loneliness seemed even more unbearable to her.
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You sometimes spent hours on end describing the wedding of Jean-Paul and Isabelle and the reactions evoked by the announcement. They varied from the most fatalistic indifference to the most vehement indignation. At a time when the country was floundering in poverty, people were starving to death, the value of the coffee crop was falling by the day, and the country’s economy was becoming ever more dependent on foreign aid, this idiot was marrying a scion of the bourgeoisie. He had just slaughtered the country’s pigs to prevent a supposedly imminent epidemic. The Americans had demanded it, and of course Baby Fab knuckled under. He didn’t protect the country. Outsiders accused us of spreading AIDS and all sorts of other diseases, and he didn’t object. Though the brightly colored posters of the Office of Tourism still blithely proclaimed, “Vive la Différence!,” tourists no longer set foot here.
Heated discussions flared up between the old-timers who missed Fabien and the apologists for his son. “Jean-Paul didn’t even choose someone with money. Instead, he’s going for a gold-digger, a divorcée who’s only marrying him to grab a pile of his cash. A Sunday, no less; the Lord’s Day. One more sacrilege. Ah! He’s not like his father. Fabien would never have accepted this marriage.”
“What are you talking about, you moron? Wasn’t it your Papa Fab who sided with the Americans against Castro and who gave huge privileges to bourgeois fat cats for cooperating with him? You seem to forget he gave that German industrialist Kurt Holsen exclusive rights to import fabric and finished goods. Who did his youngest daughter marry? And who was his chosen mistress? So why should only the son bear the burden of their hypocrisy?”
The crowd had gathered very early in front of the cathedral. This time it wasn’t necessary to send trucks into the countryside to round up droves of peasants. The petit bourgeoisie, no less than the middle class and the elite, wanted to watch the festivities. The laborers, the small-time vendors, the whole lower-class world of Port-du-Roi scurried there to take in the wedding of the century. The bride’s hair drawn back to prop up her gigantic headdress and flatter her skillfully made-up eyes, the groom’s gold chain and rings, his solemn countenance, which was more contrived than authentic: these and other details of the wedding, large and small, were dissected and analyzed. The government released an official photo that was published throughout the world. It wasn’t every day that a country with such a paltry per-capita income spent five million dollars to show off a new presidential couple. That’s without regard to the prenuptial frivolities and those that would come later. Jean-Paul’s million-dollar yacht, for one. The young Madame Isabelle Baudet Doréval adored splurging on jewelry, designer apparel, and gaudy shoes. She was given to parading around in front of people, both men and women.
Sometimes I tried in vain to dam the torrent of your words. To discredit your chronology and force you to confront the fateful year and the enforced silence that surrounded it. The year of my father’s death, the year of our departure for Martinique, before your dark vision permanently colored my own view of the world.
I methodically reviewed my notes on the Doréval regime. My contact with the widow plunged me willy-nilly into that period. It seemed a worthy occasion to reread the notebooks covered with your crabbed handwriting and to revise my own scribblings. On my computer, I opened new folders in the big Doréval file and keyed in your notes and mine. In the evenings, I went to bed exhausted and slept fitfully. Often I woke up sweating in the middle of the night. Sometimes the name that was so well known came unwilled to my lips: Odile Savien Doréval. I savored the richness of the syllables within my mouth. With a mixture of fascination and resentment. Also of self-loathing, for after my assigned work is done, I have difficulty curbing the impulses that propel me toward the widow’s bed in that boxy room whose pastel-colored walls can’t conceal the moribund atmosphere.
My mind reels, torn between recollection and reality, besieged by your nightmares and my own aspirations.
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From their very first meeting, she realized that she would marry Fabien. She had been without any romantic involvement for two years, having moved quickly to break up with that engineer from Nippes. The openly scornful looks of his mother and sisters told her clearly that, as a modest young nurse, she did not measure up to the expectations of this petit bourgeois family aspiring to improve its social status. She would have simply laughed this off if the engineer’s character had not seemed so contemptible to her. Lacking both strength and determination. Deficient in both courage and dignity. She could never have spent her life with such a mediocre individual. She broke up with him three months after their first date. Thereafter, she waited, hoping to find a man capable of meeting her requirements, strong enough not to be frightened by her ambitions. When she saw Fabien and met his gaze, it was the beginning of their shared drama. A story of love and power, respect and tenderness. A journey that was sometimes difficult but always passionate.
“Odile, my faithful and tireless companion.” He often mentioned her in his speeches and writings. Talked with her about decisions he had to make. Listened to her even when their opinions differed. Shared with her the ecstasy of power. She couldn’t fail to lend a hand when troubles mounted up. She had come into their marriage with settled ideas about the masculine gender, strongly influenced by the misdeeds of her father, who had served as a symbol of callous male behavior. Beyond that, the experiences of several of her women friends had revealed on various occasions how vile and debased men can be. At best, she only half-trusted them, always primed to resist their treachery. With Fabien, she had gradually lowered her guard, for they shared so many experiences. But her watchful and secretive side had reemerged when she realized he was interested in someone else and even ready to ally with the woman and her family against his own children. Oh, but he was! For all her respect for him, she would not let herself be taken for a fool.
In this, she was unlike the chatty confidante of her youthful days, Thérèse Bouchette, a nurse of baffling serenity. Thérèse admitted to her colleagues that she climbed into bed each night beside her husband, a maniac who kept a knife stashed under his pillow and threatened to skewer her liver with it. And that she was able to fall asleep without difficulty. “What do you expect me to do?” Thérèse would ask in her placid voice. “If he really wants to kill me, do you think I’ll be able to stop him?” Once in power, Odile almost regretted that she had never dealt with her friend’s husband. Meanwhile, in fact, Thérèse’s parents had gotten rid of him, literally buying her a divorce. Odile would gladly have settled the man’s fate.
She had heard plenty of stories about cheating and violent husbands of all ages. Always fibbing to their wives, taking their pleasure elsewhere, fathering children outside the marriage with no thought of the consequences. On that score, she had no cause to reproach Fabien. In any case, just like her, he had too much regard for his reputation and his progeny to propagate them hither and yon.
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There it is, then. I feel liberated from my indecision. For the last two days I’ve been conducting serious research. I’m sleeping better. Will the prospect of action alleviate my nightmares? I’m so immersed in information about poisons—their effects, the time of action, the dosage for each substance—that I barely have time to think of anything else. When I look at the old woman, planning and theorizing replace anger and hatred. I feel more upbeat, less jittery. I approach the days with less dejection, the nights with more tranquility. Even my mental forays into the past have become less destructive.
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With a painful effort, the old woman managed to hold back the sigh that seemed intent on escaping from an unexpected place in her chest. The young woman was spying on her more and more. Even with her eyes closed, Odile could sense the hatred radiating from her. She would have to redouble her prudence and maintain her enervated appearance. She caught her sigh in the back of her throat and forced it down with a renewed twinge of the pain that never fully left her. She had never learned how to prepare herself for death. Refused to think about it. Preferred to cope with the realities of life without looking ahead to the moment when her body would abandon her. How hard it is, though, to look at yourself honestly!
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Shortly before your death—had you felt it coming?—you renewed your formerly close ties with some cousins who still lived in Quisqueya. From your bungalow in the Lamentin district or from the department store in the city center where, until your illness struck, you carried out the duties of a floor manager, you used to stay informed about “current affairs.” You followed the changes that were occurring at a breakneck pace in Quisqueyan society. Curiously, you disregarded certain aspects, as if it hurt you too much to focus on them, and yet you lingered over others that seemed painful in their own right. For example, you refused to comment on the fact that a fairly large number of women were bleaching their skin, whereas you lamented the destruction of neighborhoods you had known. “So many ravages at every level,” you told me with tears in your eyes, “and I can attest that they are solely responsible.” I didn’t need to ask who “they” were.
Any little thing could provoke a volley of ire and outrage. Your routine contacts with a compatriot at her new stall in the Fort-de-France marketplace never failed to bring you distressing news. “The state of the high schools has gotten even worse since the Doréval regime, can you believe it? That woman’s nephew is in a tenth-grade classroom that has more than a hundred students piled on top of one another. I can’t even imagine it.” A telephone call from Port-du-Roi would throw you into an alarming frenzy. “Corruption is more rampant than ever. People have to pay bribes for the smallest service. And to think that they expected things to be better with the little priest! How ironic! People are still looking for a savior. They got a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” Or you’d burst into my bedroom after the evening news, full of indignation over the frosty reception given to your countrymen in the French Antilles. You lashed out against the unequal relationship between the developing countries and the rich ones. You worked yourself into a state over signs of intrusion in Quisqueyan affairs by certain powerful countries. I knew that no response would be adequate. I simply had to let the flood of words run its course, while putting on a look of dismay—meanwhile curbing my frustration and my urge to scream at you to knock it off.
I regret my cowardly inability to talk back to you. I settled for a spongelike passivity, my only use being to absorb a sea of regrets and gory stories. Instead, I should have helped you move beyond your history.
According to Latifa, with all the wisdom of her graduate studies in social psychology, you latched onto me so as not to topple over into insanity. “You were only a child,” she reminded me. “How can a kid of six, ten, or even fifteen help an adult cope with her past and live her life differently? I know you adored your mother, Marie-Ange, but you have to recognize that she used you to keep from going crazy. I don’t know whether she succeeded, but she certainly didn’t spare you.”
Latifa’s words seemed to me somewhat unjust and oversimplified. No doubt she was partially correct, but how can anyone remake history? How can I be angry with you when I know what you lived through? How can I not share your past and your desperation?
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Fabien’s dalliance nearly destroyed the family. She found herself torn between her children and their father. Protective mother, rebellious wife. A period of insomnia, chronic indigestion, nonexistent sexual appetite, and unrelenting rage. Her resentment toward Fabien assumed ever greater proportions, verging on the incurable, and her anger vied with her fear of losing the attributes that made them a strong couple and the envy of their opponents. The discussions between them multiplied, grew heated. For the first time Fabien made a hostile movement, the memory of which still caused a tingling sensation behind her eyelids.
She hadn’t let herself be pushed around, however. She had fought, threatened, wielded all available weapons. Among them, words that struck at the most vulnerable part of his being, where men want to feel secure, surrounded by tenderness and clarity. She attacked his male pride, was upset with herself for doing so, but to protect her children she would have done it as often as necessary. She read the rancor in his eyes, saw his fists clench with rage. She felt it in her core, but she held firm. She fought with the strength of a woman who knew her man intimately, knew his faults and his flash points, what tempted and what elated him. She folded those things, twisted them and hung them around his neck. It was too bad if in the course of the exercise she, too, had been badly bruised, leaving their marital rift marked indelibly on her heart.
She never stopped loving him, never regretted marrying him, but in rare moments, she hated him intensely.
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That boneheaded director just complimented me for overcoming my initial “animosity” and “acting like a professional worthy of this establishment.” What drivel! I looked at him and nodded without further comment. He can take that any way he wants.
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She dressed in black for the funeral. The crepe veil around her head gave her profile the dignity of a grief-stricken but noble widow. Later, when she studied the photos, she felt such pride that she experienced the usual reflexive desire to share her satisfaction with Fabien. Then the stinging realization of his absence struck her, as it did numerous times over the course of the year following his demise. While on the one hand she was fighting against enemies within her circle—the self-styled comrades, the self-proclaimed friends of the revolution—on the other she was battling the perennial detractors, who were already rejoicing at the prospect of an unavoidable debacle. Every corner of the country was in ferment. Overseas, the eternal exiles, the habitual troublemakers, pooled their resources in dingy basement apartments in Brooklyn and Queens to support ridiculously small factions and sow disorder in the country once again.
Every kind of conjecture and supposition erupted regarding who would lead, who would emerge with a tight grip on power. As if she were only an incorporeal shadow, an outline without content. She would never let anyone outside the family benefit from Fabien’s work. To the end, she carried out her duty as wife and mother. Propped up Jean-Paul, who needed it, though all the same, he was not the buffoon that the public imagined. Far from it! A son of theirs could not have lacked intelligence! But predators and vultures surrounded them. The Deceased would have been gratified to see the clear-sightedness and cunning she displayed in foiling intrigues and double-dealing, ignoring rumors and ploys, yielding neither to pressures nor to panic, standing up to the long-frustrated plotters who had dreamt even under Fabien of one day seizing the reins and believed she could be easily manipulated.
During all that time, she also had to cope with her grief. “I share your pain, Madame President,” they would say to her stiffly. With handshakes, kisses, hugs. “Our sympathies in these painful circumstances.” Pain, grief, sympathy. Formulaic phrases inadequate to characterize the desolation that was shattering her limbs.
Evenings. When the children, the relatives, the true friends returned to their homes, when all the vultures fluttered away, alone in her bed, she nursed her wounds. Let her tears flow everywhere. Her entire body would sob, not just her eyes, but also her arms that twitched like damaged limbs in search of restraints, her legs that the Deceased had often brushed lightly while pretending not to touch them at all, and most of all her hands, blind and bereft, which would reach in vain for the other body.
She was careful to make the funeral reflect the great man’s importance. First of all, she had a gold cross placed on the pillow, near his left ear. His exemplary Autobiography of a Third World Leader, which he would often leaf through to extract quotations, was likewise in plain view on the left side. She did not remove his glasses. They were an integral part of his personality, his image. To the end, she remained loyal, faithful, carrying herself erect and strong. A one-hundred-and-one-gun salute and the bells of all the churches in the country for the man who had dedicated his life to it. Her eyes grew misty during the service. In spite of herself, she stumbled and almost fell, but managed to regain her balance. To the end, standing proud and tall. Twenty-two officers and twenty-two enlisted men saluted her husband’s passing. The end of fourteen years in power and twenty-two years of married life. Together, they brought four children into the world. It’s too bad if Marie-Danielle wore an indifferent expression and if Jean-Paul seemed to sink into his chair. Nadine and Ti Odile mourned their father.
Then, suddenly, nature itself decided to remind the country and the world that an illustrious figure was taking his leave. A mysterious gust passed across the site, impetuous and unexpected, ruffling the women’s hair, lifting skirts and dresses, making the bravest men shiver. Apparently, a number of mourners darted into the covered spaces for protection. Then, just as suddenly, the wind abated. She didn’t really witness the incident, for at that moment the tears were blinding her behind her veil. Her sisters reported it to her, her friends told her about it, and she read about it in foreign newspapers. The Deceased had manifested himself forcefully even after his death.
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On the day of Fabien Doréval’s funeral, you would have thought that even the dictatorship would take a rest, that the VSN would stop their blindly repressive practices, too shaken by their leader’s death to think about drawing their guns. And yet, on the very day of the funeral, it was Marcel Bouvier’s turn to disappear, dragged away by the Tonton Macoutes. In the days following the funeral, innumerable family conversations were fueled by the tale of the wind that had come from the great beyond to spread panic all through the funeral cortege. Recounted in a thousand versions, it made incredulous listeners laugh and more gullible ones tremble or cringe.
But not many Quisqueyans spoke of the very last murder attributable to Fabien Doréval, en route to his final resting place. For me, however, the story symbolizes more than any other the cruelty unleashed by a regime for which human life had no importance.
On the way to the Port-du-Roi cemetery, the funeral cortege passed in front of Marcel Bouvier’s house. As soon as the convoy had passed, Marcel’s mother, Madame Bouvier, eighty-six years old, threw some water from her stoop. It was the time-honored Quisqueyan method for warding off evil spirits and cleansing the air of maledictions and sorcery. Spies reported her action to the militia. A few hours later, the VSN showed up at the Bouviers’ house. Marcel was playing cards with friends in the rear courtyard. He was arrested and then went missing. Never to be seen again. Like so many others.
The Quisqueyans who had settled in Martinique well before Jean-Paul Doréval’s rise to power told of how they had rejoiced upon hearing of the older dictator’s demise. They had spilled out into the streets singing and dancing. Broke out the bottle of five-star rum received as a Christmas gift. All their hopes of returning home—long hidden in a suitcase under the bed, in the back of a closet, or on a cupboard shelf—burst forth, riotous and impatient to be aired. Their hopes of escaping their present-day humiliations in a foreign land, of forgetting the wounds of a terror-filled past. Some immediately bought one-way tickets, while others more prudently tried to contact relatives still in Quisqueya to verify the news. To take the pulse of the mother country. They had fled from your island’s four corners, its nine departments, all scarred by the dictatorship in their lives and memories. Some elderly people originally from Cap-Créole, alluding to the Bouvier case, recalled the practice, so common in their locale, of pouring out water after the passage of a funeral cortege. Especially if the altar boy, worried about getting too far ahead of the hearse, stopped and set down the base of the cross to rest his arms. Even if only for a moment! If by some mischance the cross had touched the ground in front of your house, it was imperative, in order to avert otherwise certain doom, to throw out some water as soon as the procession had passed. This prevented a death in the family, since the cross on the ground was the deceased’s way of designating someone to follow him. Hadn’t Madame Bouvier simply wanted to protect her household, her family?
So many men and women had been lost just as pointlessly, in equally banal ways. The city of Cap-Créole had borne its share of losses. And could we say anything different about Belle-Anse? Don’t forget the South, where every stream carries drops of blood to the sea. The ridges of Grande-Plaine still echo with stories of corpses dragged from the hills to the highway and left there to show the punishment that awaited troublemakers. All the émigrés clustered around radios, televisions, and telephones to spread and share the news and replenish their longings with hope. While still nurturing their resentment.
One Sunday morning at Cap-Créole, the local militia commander ordered a school principal to open the doors of his establishment. Their informants had reported that an armed rebel was hidden there. The militiamen pulled the principal out of church, where he was attending Mass, and escorted him to his house to obtain the keys to the school. They found no one in the school, however. Apparently, the rebel had taken refuge in his attic. He emerged from his hiding place and surrendered just as the uniformed men were about to drag away his pregnant wife in reprisal.
At l’Anse-aux-Rocs, an illiterate promoted by Fabien Doréval to the post of regional commandant, in recognition of his loyalty and his expertise in torturing resisters, required all the inhabitants to stand at their windows or on their balconies to salute him when he entered the town. Whether it was three in the afternoon, Saturday at dinnertime, or Friday in the middle of the night, he had to be met with the citizens’ cheers and applause. Woe to any resident who didn’t light a candle quickly enough or turn on a lamp—if by some stroke of luck there was electricity. Savage retribution awaited them. As accompaniments to all these dismal stories, sighs mingled with nodding heads and the clearing of throats.
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She poured herself into the completion of the mausoleum. Met the architect personally, chose the white marble, the simple yet elegant designs, the layout. It seemed to her that she was prolonging her contact with Fabien by lingering over the details, the plans and drawings that the architect submitted to her. She supervised the construction of the edifice and ordered the flowers for its inauguration. She told herself that she would go there to join him in thirty years or more, because in her family the women rarely died before eighty! Later, in Paris, she was stunned and devastated to learn that a raging mob had destroyed the mausoleum and ransacked the tomb in search of Fabien Doréval’s body. As if she would have left her husband’s remains to their mercy! In 1964, the family of Claude Joris had “put away” his body to prevent his enemies from using it—Fabien had become aware of that when his henchmen had brought him the casket on the day of Joris’s funeral. She, too, had subsequently considered the possibility that someone would want to snatch her husband’s brain. No, she couldn’t say she had imagined the horror that transpired, this avalanche of violence and savagery, the desecration of the tombs and the mausoleum, this barbaric outburst she had watched on the French TV networks. Still, she had taken the necessary measures to protect him against all attempts at zombification,* against any possible intention to defile his remains. She had summoned Zacharie, the grand ougan. With more than usual attentiveness, she followed all his orders, took care to satisfy his every request. This wasn’t Zacharie’s first visit to the palace, nor his last. He didn’t stint on his services—or his time or expertise, either. The necessary arrangements were made not only to put Fabien Doréval’s body in a secure place, but also to prevent anyone from using his brain.
She had confidence in Zacharie, since he had never disappointed her all through the years when she and Fabien so often consulted him before making decisions. With faith in Zacharie’s know-how, but also to foster the public perception that they enjoyed a privileged rapport with the ougans and an advanced acquaintance with Vodou, its power and lore. A perception carefully nurtured by Fabien. At the outset, she winced when he ordered that ceremonies be conducted within the palace compound by Zacharie or sometimes by Marianne, a celebrated mambo* of southern origin. Then she herself was initiated into the ritual and gradually became involved in the preparations from the jetedlo* until the final sacrifice. She knew where to place the various objects, including the smoked glass bottles and the calabashes full of snake vertebrae. Mentally noted the significance of different-colored candles. Was particularly fond of the purple one for its help in times of danger for her family or friends. Over the years she had lit several purple candles to free herself from malevolent forces in such situations. In a general way, she was intoxicated by the mysterious atmosphere of the rituals. By the scent of burning wax, the imposing majesty of the poteau mitan,* and the stunning intricacy of the vévés.* Just as she was moved at Catholic services, despite the large number of interminable liturgies she had attended as first lady. She couldn’t resist the subdued but profound pleasure of repeating the words of the liturgy, pronounced the celebrant’s words along with him: “Peace be with you,” and murmured the responsive phrase with complete naturalness: “And with your spirit. Amen.”
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I’m envisioning alternatives to poison. This morning, as I made the widow’s bed, my hand grazed the pillow. I plumped and smoothed it. Of course, smother her! Undoubtedly the easiest solution, requiring the least preparation. Simply wait for the opportune moment and seize it. Don’t hesitate, concentrate on the regime’s victims while doing the deed. Besides, it would be soon be over, a simple pressure of the hands. Given the old woman’s condition, who would be surprised?
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They were married, she and Fabien, on a December day in the cathedral of Port-du-Roi. The flourishing poinsettias gave the city a festive air. She had always relished the mildness of December. In contrast to Fabien, who preferred the month of April, between the reborn verdure of March and May’s abundant blooms. She lulled herself in the coolness of the year’s final month, the month of good luck baths* and red Christmas decorations, a month that dazzles with its passion and fervor. The closer one gets to its end, the more luminous the air becomes. Like a long, resplendent scarf whose end tickles like a farewell.
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Why did you always save for last the stories of resistance and of revenge against the VSN, after all the accounts of repression and torture? Perhaps to remind me that life can outfox even the high and mighty? On one occasion they came to arrest a middle school teacher in a small northwestern city, and the principal stalled them in his office while his wife took women’s clothing to the male teacher, who blended in with the kitchen staff. The militiamen failed to discover the ruse and left in a rage. To show their displeasure, they fired shots in the air, terrifying the students.
Under Fabien Doréval, no one could leave the country without authorization from the regime. The names of dissidents were recorded on a list, and members of a special team of inspectors automatically blocked them at the airport. Sometimes an unlucky person was turned back simply because his first and last names matched those of an enemy of the regime appearing on the famous list. In the time it took to verify his identity, he missed his flight and experienced hours or days of uncertainty. Nevertheless, for a whole year a clandestine network of dissidents and veterans had access to the seals authorizing departure from the country. They established contacts among the airport staff and even managed to alter the list that the dictator’s spy services had arbitrarily compiled. As a result, many individuals escaped who would otherwise have had to live underground and at constant risk.
In the Martaban quarter, the capital’s southern suburb, a group of young men fired on an especially bloodthirsty militiaman who was spreading terror among local families. The shots missed him, but for days the VSN militiamen, panic-stricken, would go out only when they were heavily reinforced. In addition, popular songs rang out everywhere, full of defiant humor. Secretly mocking the torturers. Jokes and anecdotes targeting the most notorious Doréval loyalists circulated from house to house, enlivening meetings of friends, who repeated them in whispers. One such anecdote concerned the slap that Fabien gave Lambert Chambral in the midst of a cabinet meeting and the degrading reaction of Lambert, who murmured, “Forgive me, Excellency!” How shameful!
It was in the retelling of such stories that many émigrés as homesick as you passed their years of exile. Except when they were trying to renew their residency cards, apply for menial jobs, or pursue other dead ends, because they had to start all over again as if they hadn’t already paid their dues in life. Always in the backs of their minds were their memories of an oppressive past, from which they could hope to break free only with great turmoil and agitation.
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She no longer remembered the previous Christmas with her children. How your memory plays tricks on you when it teams up with old age! The hymns learned at the orphanage and the accompanying taste of hot chocolate invaded her senses. A chocolate that was not especially smooth, with an excess of sugar and cinnamon to cover the paucity of milk and cocoa: that was what her memory offered to her. How empty all that seemed!
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Since Monday, the nursing home’s social coordinator has had Christmas music playing softly in the corridors. This struck me as a pathetic gesture. I don’t know whether it’s meant to remind the patients of the departed pleasures of yesteryear or to inspire them to take advantage of the holiday season, which is undoubtedly their last. Judging from the absence of visitors, there is every likelihood that the old lady will spend the holidays alone in the depressing sterility of her room.
I miss you more than ever, Maman. Is it from seeing this solitary woman at the end of her life and knowing how much I would have loved to have you with me? How will I spend New Year’s Day, my first one without you? Without the cake you used to bake every year? Or that famous consommé you made from your grandmother’s recipe? You began simmering the bouillon on New Year’s Eve, with all the manner of a light-hearted little girl. At sunrise the next morning, the mouth- watering aroma would search me out in my bedroom. Never failing to offer visitors a bowl, you explained to them that this was a Quisqueyan tradition. In the late afternoon, when we were starting to forget the numerous lunch courses and our appetites were slowly returning, we would sit down to a slice of upside-down cake, accompanied by a cup of coffee. The coffee of our island, the best. I used to repeat with you: the best. How can I spend the first day of the year without you?
And yet I feel you close to me, your expression slightly ironic and also a wee bit impatient, but always full of tenderness and affection. I have reconnected with our part of the island, and I find you there alive and very active. I regularly receive news from the relatives and friends living in Quisqueya with whom you had stayed in contact. For me, that began as a simple act of courtesy. With my reply to an e-mail, and then gradually my attitude passed from mild annoyance, adroitly concealed—you know how skilled I am at hiding my feelings!—to a growing interest. In spite of myself, I compared the Quisqueyans’ lives to those of the young people in Martinique. Just as you used to do when I was growing up, surrounded by madras clothing and the local Creole music, attracted by the shopping centers and the new little Renault I just had to have, no matter what it cost, and the latest high-tech gadget you forced me to explain while you pretended not to understand. Still, I refused at first to let myself be dragged into those never-ending dramas of visas to be obtained for the Quisqueyans who counted on you, of medical bills and school tuition to be paid. Taking on all those problems left you broke and mentally exhausted. I tried to resist the abyss of knotty problems, the morass of difficulties with their thorny tangles.
But what drew me inexorably were the silences, the ellipses and dead spaces, the voids infiltrated by a mute perplexity. The moments of drift in which despair overpowers all of life and stifles all expression. Sometimes in boys and girls younger than I. It was their youth that swayed me toward them. Without even being aware of it, I opened myself to their lives. I now send and receive e-mails, call them on the phone. I can’t remain indifferent to the urge to be alive that wells up in them, sometimes unexpectedly. A powerful gust of hope and courage that defies all obstacles and seems ready to engulf me, too. These contacts throw me into a world where reality nudges me along and shakes up my memory. As if I were emerging slowly from a long, hazy tunnel.
The notes of “Vive le vent d’hiver,” a seasonal song set to a jazzy arrangement, float through the building. The frenetic atmosphere outside, the images of light-strung streets, bedecked storefronts, and gift-wrapped packages lend a surreal character to this drab room where silence broods in every corner. More than ever, the motionless form on the bed seems to interrogate me. I move closer to it in spite of myself, watching closely for some slim sign of cognition in the weary features. I wordlessly summon her to face up to me and answer my questions, to state her name before a tribunal, her hand raised in an oath of truthfulness, and to confront justice and her memory. I lower my gaze toward the bed, and a lucid glance meets mine. As if to forestall my instinctive movement of rejection, a hand grasps my arm. Swiftly, as if retreating from an observed danger, I free myself and back away. But before reaching the door, I think I hear a raspy croak coming from the bed, a hesitant, quavering appeal: “Marie-Ange.”