“I don’t know why everyone is pretending to have a heavy heart. It would have made him laugh, that’s for sure, after the way they treated him around here. But the people in Rivière au Sel are like that. They’ve got no feelings, and what’s more, they’re hypocrites. There’s no use me lying. I didn’t care a damn for Francis Sancher. I’m not going to take to mourning for the two hundred francs a week he gave me to fork over his garden! I’m here because I haven’t smelled such delicious food or wet my throat with a good shot of rum for ages.”
For the third time Désinor the Haitian went and filled his bowl with thick soup and looked with delight at the large marrow bone Madame Ramgoulam, Rosa Ramsaran’s sister, was placing on a bed of cabbage, carrots and pumpkin. The hunger in his belly had been appeased, and he was helping himself again not only out of gourmandism but also in anticipation of tomorrow and the meager days to follow when there would be neither meat nor gravy. He ate voraciously, using his hands, and he could feel the look of contempt from his neighbors, who had skillfully served themselves with their spoons and placed a paper rectangle on their laps. He behaved so uncouthly on purpose and took delight in it. For once he was on an equal footing with the people of Rivière au Sel and wished he could have insulted them, shocked them and made them realize who in fact this Désinor Décimus really was, instead of taking him for a wretched Haitian gardener. It was only yesterday that Dodose Pélagie had given him one of her husband’s old suits.
“Here, this is for you, Désinor.”
He had almost thrown her jacket and trousers back at her face, so threadbare were they that you could see right through them, but he had gained control of himself and said what was expected of him:
“Thank you for your kindness!”
Earlier that week, he had just finished mowing her lawn, when Madame Théodose had called him in and pointed to some leftover sea-bream stew and a big slice of yam on a corner of the kitchen table. He had eaten because his belly wouldn’t let him alone. Nevertheless, the bitter juices of his anger had got into the food.
That’s why he had brought Xantippe along with him. To hurl a silent defiance at these petits-bourgeois. To shock them with their blackness. To shock them with their smell of poverty and destitution.
Désinor had arrived in Guadeloupe in November of 1980. November 2 to be exact, the day of the dead. This was no coincidence, as you can imagine, and his friend Baron Samedi46 had leered at him from under his top hat, hinting that he was about to enter a realm of darkness and desolation. In fact, Désinor had dreamed of turning his back on his country for a long time. But in his mind, he had seen himself treading the sidewalks of New York that he already knew from Carlos’s letters:
Brother Désinor,
I’m writing to let you know that I am in good health. You can find all the jobs you want in New York. Work is plentiful, all you have to do is bend down and pick it up. My room’s big enough for two. I’m sending you the money for the journey …
Oh, that was so typical of Carlos! Two thousand miles apart and his heart still glowed with warmth. It was because they had grown up together, eaten out of the same bowl of poverty and sucked on the same dried-up breast of misfortune! They had mounted the same fleshy buttocks of the same Negresses, clinging to their coarse pubic hairs when they had been allowed to, which was seldom the case since they didn’t have a cob47 to their name. One day, tired of being refused by these heartless women, they climbed on each other, and to their surprise found the same flash of pleasure at the end of their lovemaking. So they had started all over again …
At first, Désinor had worked in the cane fields (still thriving for some people) over in Baie Mahault. Most of the cane cutters were Haitians like himself and exclamations were fired in all directions:
“Ou sé moun Jacmel tou?” (You’re from Jacmel as well?)
Ah, the enslavement of the Haitian is not over yet! With great sweeps of his cutlass Désinor slashed his rage and his despair. At least back home there was always a bottle of rum to share, sweetening the taste of poverty.
One day, the news spread that the police were going to surround the field and ask everyone for his papers. Papers! Désinor had taken flight. The eternal flight of the black man from his misery and misfortune! He had run in a straight line, without even stopping to catch his breath, leaping over steep-sided gullies, climbing up hills and then suddenly, coming up against the forest, he had found himself in front of a sign reading “Rivière au Sel.”
The place looked secluded and out of the way enough to discourage any overzealousness on the part of the police. You sensed that those living there were not in the habit of seeing farther than the end of their noses or breathing in anything but the smell of their breath. If the gendarmes came nosing around, they wouldn’t get much out of these folk. So he had decided to lower his anchor at Rivière au Sel. He soon realized, however, that he had not been the only one to think along these lines. No less than a dozen men from Jacmel, Les Cayes and Les Gonaïves, recognizable by the very blackness of their skin and by the way they stole back furtively to their corrugated iron and mud huts, had settled together in a place called Beaugendre. And that’s how they re-created their lost homeland as best they could.
Since Désinor had got it into his head to sit out his bad luck all on his own, he put as much distance as he could between Beaugendre and himself. This greatly upset the colony of exiled Haitians, who started to build fantastic stories about him. He was reported to be a “tonton-macoute” abandoned by kith and kin, one of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s henchmen left behind after the dictator had fled to France to lead a life of luxury with the millions he had stolen, or a boko48 hounded by angry loas.49
Désinor took no notice and went his own way. Ever since he had arrived in Rivière au Sel he had had the desire to be his own master, and made up his mind to offer his services as a handyman, digging up yams here, hoeing a patch of cassava there, fetching coconuts and pruning trees.
He propped a wattle hut up against a mango tree which, in season, dropped its fruit with the roll of a gwo-ka, and topped it off with two or three sheets of corrugated iron. Once he had made himself a stool and table out of a whisky crate, he felt a powerful feeling of ownership. In the dark he rested his weary bones on a kaban50 and dreamed of New York, which now he realized he would never see. Or else he read over and over again the letters from Carlos:
Brother Désinor,
I’m writing to let you know that I’m in good health. I cannot believe what you told me. Guadeloupe is like any other country. You must be able to go somewhere else besides France. Make enquiries …
Désinor laughed. Carlos couldn’t possibly understand. No, this place wasn’t like any other place. The planes only went to Paris and back. People only traveled to French France!
Désinor lived two long years in this extreme solitude, his only company being the letters from Carlos that Moïse brought him regularly, often with a brotherly money order tucked inside. One morning, as he arrived at the crossroads, he saw a column of smoke curl up over the charcoal burners’ hut. But it wasn’t Justinien and his comely Josyna who had come back.
It was a man, as black as mourning and infinity, casting heavy looks of misfortune on people. His body was all skin and bone, vaguely covered in rags made from such a coarse cloth that it looked like jute. His feet were heavy and gnarled like Guinea yams. Despite his self-control, Désinor jumped and almost ran off as fast as his legs would carry him. Then he got hold of himself and murmured politely:
“Sa ou fè?”
The other mumbled an incomprehensible answer.
Three days later, while he was out fetching food for Dodose Pélagie’s rabbits, once again he came across the character, standing like a dog on the prowl under a trumpet tree. With some difficulty he started up a conversation with him and learned that his name was Xantippe.
He discovered that Xantippe grew tobacco on his patch of land between his fruits and vegetables. A tobacco the likes of which Désinor hadn’t tasted since he left the banks of the Artibonite. Once they were dried and rolled, the leaves gave you a smoke sweet enough to intoxicate the devil himself in Hell. The two companions made a habit of sitting opposite each other in the evening and communicating in silence amid the heavenly fragrance.
Désinor’s heart was filled with the deep blue sky of Haiti or the powdery white of the sidewalks of Manhattan where Carlos sank up to his knees.
“I know I’ll never see the Statue of Liberty,” he grumbled. “Besides, they say she’s nothing to look at and only looks kindly on those immigrants that are not like us. We’re not the right color.”
As for Xantippe, he was always grumbling about the same things. Something about a fire. Something about a hut burned to the ground. Something about a shower of sparks dancing in the midday sun. For a while, Désinor wondered whether Xantippe wasn’t one of those arsonists who put the police on edge. He certainly looked like one! Besides, what was he doing roaming in the woods as soon as the cocks crowed? Until that day at Chez Christian when somebody recounted the unfortunate fellow’s story with a great deal of assurance.
From that day on Désinor felt tied to Xantippe by a stronger bond. Who could be more miserable, more lonely than they were? Without wife, without children, without friends, without father or mother, with nothing under the sun.
For a moment the rain stopped hammering on the iron roof, and in the silence the choir of women could be heard:
“The Lord is in His holy temple,
The Lord, His throne is in Heaven;
His eyes behold, His eyelids try, the children of men.”
Blessed was Francis Sancher on whom life had stopped sharpening its claws and who now had all eternity to rest! At that moment, Désinor’s full stomach let out a loud belch and his neighbors looked at him, horrified by the presence of this vulgar nigger.
