Even though I have resigned myself to not knowing who he was, Quentin, my son, will not be inclined to do the same. He’ll set off like Ti-Jean and travel the world on horseback, stamping the ground with his hooves of hatred, stopping at every cabin, every hovel and every Great House to ask:
“Ou té konnet papa mwen?” (Did you know my father?)
He’ll hear and get all sorts of answers. Some will say:
“Oh my, he was a vagabond who came to bury his rotten self here. We don’t even know whether he was white, black or Indian. He had every blood in his body.”
Others will say:
“He was crazy and talked out the top of his head, out the top of his head!”
And yet others will say:
“He was a malefic man who bewitched two of our loveliest maidens. A ragamuffin, I’m telling you!”
But I have to know the truth.
I’ll never go down to the gully again. It too betrayed me. Like Rosalie Sorane, my mother, who abandoned me to solitude from the first day I came into this world. The fruit it gave me to calm the hunger of my heart was, in fact, poisoned.
I, Mira, the wild thing with no collar or leash, I didn’t realize there was pleasure in serving, giving, even humiliating myself.
He would laugh at me.
“Woman, as in all good families, you were taught that the best way to keep a man is through his stomach. I’m telling you that nothing will keep me. Neither head, nor heart, nor stomach, nor sex. Nothing. I’m just passing through. Before you came, you know, I had never screwed a woman more than once, scared she would keep me prisoner of her thighs.”
As he stood on the veranda, his eyes roved the horizon.
“I wish that little volcano you keep your eye on every morning, that scares you so much, I wish it would recover its former strength and explode. EXPLODE. A sun, brighter than the sun itself, would flash out of its crater mouth. Sulfur ash would be spewed out as well and we would all die. All buried without having the time to catch our breath. To die alone, one time and one time only, that’s what’s so terrible!”
“Why do you always talk about dying?” I protested. “You’re as firm on your feet as a mapou tree.”
I couldn’t get him to smile and he shook his head.
“Me a mapou? If I told you the truth, you’d run a mile.”
“Tell me the truth.”
But he didn’t say another word. And to this day I don’t know anything. So I have to discover the truth. From now on my life will be nothing but a quest. I shall retrace my steps along the paths of this world.
I can guess what they are all thinking. My father thinks that after the Good Lord has been so bountiful in dealing out misfortune, I’ll keep my eyes lowered in his presence and spend my days repenting. I’ll become a zombie at mealtimes, putting my hand over my child’s mouth to stifle his voice. Aristide imagines I’ll find my way back to his bed as if nothing has happened. Dinah thinks I shall join the growing flock of those that bleat and graze far from their shepherd. Nothing of the sort will happen. They’re all mistaken.
My real life begins with his death.