sighed: “But that’s how it is.”
Olmène listened to her attentively while straining to see in her mother the vendor in the market, the woman she had discovered. Ermancia noticed and, just before closing her eyes, she whispered to Olmène that one shouldn’t say everything. Especially not to men. “Even if he offers you a roof and takes care of your children.” That silence is the surest friend. The only one who won’t betray you. “Never, you hear me,” she insisted. Olmène snuggled close to her mother and put her head on her belly. To traverse, with her, these quiet lands that man never penetrated, except with the ignorance of a conquerer. Where, however conquering he may be, he doesn’t know how to tread.
Olmène entered into the grand plain of the night swept by the opposing winds, thinking of the meeting at daybreak, of the secret that Ermancia had since seemed to keep, of that conversation at night among the vendors and those last words of her mother. She smiled at the idea of this first secret of women. This first complicity between mother and daughter.
Olmène looked at the stars outside, like nails stuck in the sky. Like us, she knew that God had hammered them there and could take one out whenever it seemed right to send messages to the hougans* or the powerful mambos. Or to put them in their open palms.
Other thoughts came to her, clear because they had no noise, no words. Not demanding anything. A sigh that wasn’t just fatigue escaped through her lips. A sigh that evoked the memory of a man’s gaze. The memory of this man’s eyes weighing on her like hands. A diffuse pleasure radiated from a hot and humid place inside of her. She curled up to hold back this strange wave. A sigh escaped her again, that nobody was to hear. No one. Not even Ermancia.
9.
In the early afternoon, with some other women, two from Roseaux, one from Pointe Sable, and two from Ti Pistache, Olmène and Ermancia went back to Anse Bleue. Splitting up, catching up, splitting up from each other again. Like a flock of migratory birds. A moving stain, never the same, on the paths winding under the sky and sun. Olmène felt more than ever that she belonged with these peasant women. Open to all the winds. Women in the same washed-out, patched-up dresses. Women with speech in tatters. A force sleeping in the swaying of their hips, in their voices too. Like under the dirt, a sheet of running water, a source of a fire.
It was hardly three o’clock when, on the road between Roseaux and Ti Pistache, they passed a young priest, already quite beaten up by the sun, big red patches on his skin. He rode a donkey led by Érilien, the sacristan of the chapel in Roseaux, and carried a collection of miscellaneous objects—a pot, two enameled mugs, books, a blanket. Sweat beaded on his forehead, at times nearly forcing him to close his eyes and marking his white cassock with big halos under his armpits, on his back, and above his navel. The priest breathed like a bull. Two bulging eyes protruded from his fat face. Eyes that were strong-willed and naive. Naive to the point of seeing his entrance into the world of Ti Pistache, Baudelet, and Anse Bleue as both certain and necessary, and that this certainty and necessity were irremediable. “That’s the new priest,” Olmène said to Ermancia. “He is going to the Chapelle Sainte-Antoine-de-Padoue in Roseaux.”
The young priest, a chubby but tired thirty-something, took off his hat to greet them as they approached, wiped his face and neck, introduced himself, and announced that he was the new priest in Roseaux. That he would build a beautiful church there. “I expect you to come and hear the word of God.” Ermancia smiled and acquiesced with a submissive “Yes, mon pè.” Hardly audible. Eyes fixed on the ground. Érilien overrated the piety of the women whom he claimed to have known for a long time. Olmène smiled in turn, examining the man, secretly but with a sharp eye. Their smiles had raised an invisible wall into which Father Bonin—that was his name—collided without even realizing it. A wall that the sacristan had helped them build with his words. Ermancia and Olmène, standing behind this wall, glanced over it for a moment as the Father walked toward Roseaux. Érilien, not wanting to arouse any suspicion from the newcomer, didn’t exchange a single look with the two women and turned away without turning back, his hand firmly squeezing the donkey’s reins. Father Bonin went on, exhausted by the journey but his heart at work, his soul lighter, persuaded that he had brought two new sheep into his flock on its way to salvation.
Between Roseaux and the Peletier Morne, Olmène, Ermancia, and the other women walked along the Mayonne River, bordered by malangas with large violet leaves and watercresses like fuzzy manes, with the same fear in their heart of seeing Simbi* come out from between two rocks and lead them to a secret place from which they wouldn’t return unscathed, like Madame Rodrigue’s daughter, from Pointe Sable, who had disappeared one afternoon and whom they hadn’t found find until three days later, wandering ten kilometers away, haggard, half naked and mute. Abandoned by her bon ange in the middle of the winds. And, because the surface of the waters could be an unpredictable mirror, merciless at times, Ermancia turned around to make sure that Olmène followed her and didn’t lean over the river, trying to sneak up on that which could make her disappear.
They went on. Each climb followed a descent that didn’t lead to a plain but just to a strip of land that lead to a new climb on a narrow path bordering a dangerous abyss. Sensing that they were approaching Anse Bleue, they sped up in silence and climbed the last hill.
Olmène and Ermancia finally saw Anse Bleue. Behind them, the parrots coming from the distant mountains cried, announcing the impending rains. On the horizon, the red globe of the sun set amidst the squalls of seagulls. The wind broke the crests of the waves in sprays of foam that came to die on the sand. Anse Bleue was already sleeping. They descended the hill with a light step, almost running, magnetized by the village. Olmène was eager to see her father Orvil, her two brothers Léosthène and Fénelon, and the entire cohort of aunts, uncles, cousins. Everyone.
The way to Anse Bleue had been long. Very long. It led to our world. A world without a school, without a judge, without a priest, and without a doctor. Without those men who are said to stand for order, science, justice, and faith.
A world left to ourselves, men and women who knew enough about the human condition to speak alone to the Spirits, Mysteries, and Invisibles.
10.
The daily catch hadn’t been as good as the day before, because the nets hadn’t held up. Orvil left at the break of dawn with his sons, Léosthène and Fénelon, and they fought for two hours with a bonito that they didn’t succeed in catching, leaving a sea of red blood around them. The bois-fouillé* had taken on water and they thought that it would best to return with the few fish that they’d managed to catch earlier. On the way back to Anse Bleue, Léosthène and Fénelon scraped the scales and gutted the fish with their knives, and left them to dry in the salt.
But after this hard catch at dawn, Orvil was exhausted. “To live and to suffer are one and the same thing,” he’d always claimed, “with our whole lives to pass through our sufferings, heels fixed into the earth to not waver. And when we want to throw out fierce obscenities and curse the hell out of life, we call the Mysteries and the Invisibles, and we caress it, life, like one calms a rearing horse.”
Orvil had hardly passed through the door to his hut when he had to intervene to take care of Yvnel, the son of his younger brother Nélius. He put his blue handkerchief around his neck. Blue, the color of Agwé, his mèt tèt. He wore this whenever when he had to work to heal somebody, help with a difficult birth, or remove a bad spell cast over a chrétien-vivant, a house, or a jardin. Yvnel trembled from head to toe, overcome by a high fever. Orvil made his way to the back of hut, to the family grove. He gathered roots, bark, and herbs, which he crushed, mixed, kneaded
