novel changes its reader’s imagination. We close the book with our vision of the world and humanity altered, revised in a deep and lasting way and not merely embellished. When we finish Morrison’s Beloved, for example, we believe in the felt reality of what we experienced there: the inhuman closure of slavery, the necessary murder of a child in order to save it from a life worse than death, the loving ongoing presence of a ghost. That is the unique power of great fiction: it provides its reader with an experience, not just an account. Moonbath has the same effect. This is not “magic realism”—it is realism of the highest order. So that, by the time we come to the final pages, we have lived through everything that Lahens’s characters have lived through, their sufferings and joys, their cruelties inflicted and received, their religious ecstasies and denials, and the ongoing presence of their gods. The reader who finishes this novel will be different than the reader who began it.
Russell Banks
July 2017
1.
After a madness lasting three days, here I am, stretched out, at the feet of a man I don’t know. My face a hairsbreadth from his worn, muddy shoes. My nose overtaken by a stench that nearly revolts me. To the point of making me forget this vise of pain around my neck, and the bruise between my thighs. Difficult to turn over. To stand back up. To put one foot on the ground before the other one follows. To cross the distance that separates me from Anse Bleue. If only I could escape. If only I could run as far as Anse Bleue. Not once would I return. Not a single time.
But I cannot. I can’t anymore…
Something happened at dusk on the first day of the storm. Something that I still can’t explain. Something that broke me.
Even though my eyes are closed, nearly shut, and my left cheek is pushed right up against the wet sand, I still manage, and this gives me some relief, to look over this village built like Anse Bleue. The same narrow huts. All the doors and all the windows shut. The same leprous walls. On both sides of the same muddy road leading to the sea.
I want to force a cry up from my belly to my throat and make it spurt out from my mouth. Loud and clear. Very loud and very clear until I rip these big dark clouds above my head. Crying for the Grand Maître,* Lasirenn,* and all the saints. How I would love for Lasirenn to take me far, very far, on her long and silky hair, to rest my aching muscles, my open wounds, my skin all wrinkled by so much water and salt. But before she hears my calls, I can only pass the time. And nothing else…
All that I see.
All that I hear.
All that I smell.
Every thought, fleeting, full, overpowering. Until I understand what happened to me.
The stranger took out his cell phone from his right pocket: a cheap Nokia like the ones you see more and more at the All Stars Supermarket in Baudelet. But he couldn’t use it. His whole body trembled. So much that the phone flew out of his hands and fell straight on my left temple. A little more and the Nokia would have hit my eye…
The man backed away abruptly, his eyes terrified. Then, working up the courage, he bent over slowly and stretched out his arm. He grabbed the phone quickly while taking extraordinary care to not touch me.
I heard him repeat very quietly, three times in a row, his voice choked with emotion: “Lord have mercy, lord have mercy, lord have mercy.” I still hear his voice…It gets mixed up with the sea that writhes in wild sprays upon my back.
In my head, the images rush. Clash. My memory is like those wreaths of seaweed detached from everything, dancing, panicking on the foam of the waves. I would like to be able to put these scattered pieces back together, to hang them up one by one and reconstruct everything. Everything. The past. The time from long ago, like yesterday. Like three days ago.
Year after year.
Hour after hour.
Second by second.
To retrace in my mind the route of a schoolgirl. Without brambles, without bayahondes,* without an airplane in the night sky, without fire. To retrace that route as far as the wind that, this night of the storm, enchants me, intoxicates me. And these hands that make me lose my footing. Stumble.
To piece together the whole sequence of my existence, to understand once and for all…To bring back to life, one by one, my grandfathers and my grandmothers, great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, as far back as my franginen* forefather, to Bonal Lafleur, to Tertulien Mésidor and Anastase, his father. To Ermancia, Orvil, and Olmène, who were like water and fire to each other. Olmène whose face I do not know. Olmène whom I always missed and whom I still miss.
What a storm! What a tumult! Throughout this story, it will be important to pay attention to the wind, the salt, the water, not just to men and women. The sand was turned around and upside-down in the greatest disorder. Like land waiting to be sowed. Loko* blew for three days in a row and swallowed the sun. Three long days. The sky turned a lighter and lighter gray. Milky in places.
“Do not do what you might regret,” my mother hammers into me. “Don’t do it.”
I ramble like an old woman. I rant like a mad woman. My voice breaks at the back of my throat. It’s still because of the wind, the salt, the water.
2.
The elusive gazes of the men, the slightly aghast looks from the women, upon the arrival of this rider, all to suggest that he was a dreadful and dreaded being. And it’s true that we all dreaded Tertulien Mésidor.
Tertulien Mésidor loved to pass through all of the villages, even the most distant, to test his power. To measure the courage of men. To weigh the virtue of women. And to check the innocence of children.
He had emerged from the candy colored curtains of the devant-jour. At that hour when, behind the mountains, a bright pink rips through shreds of clouds to run flat out over the countryside. Sitting on his ash gray horse, he was dressed as usual in a stately straw hat, the wide brim turned down over two bulging eyes. A cutlass hung from his belt and following his lead were two other riders, who advanced with the same slow and resolute steps as their master.
Tertulien Mésidor went toward the fish stall that reeked of offal and decomposing flesh. At his approach, we started talking very loudly. Much louder than usual, vaunting the variety of fish, the quality of the vegetables and provisions, but without taking our eyes off the rider. The more we watched him the louder we spoke. Our racket on this dawn was nothing but a mask, another, for our acute awareness. When his horse reared, the procession froze. Tertulien Mésidor bent down to whisper into the horse’s ear and to caress its mane. “Otan, Otan,” he murmured softly. The animal stomped in place and shook its tail. The man with the wide-brimmed hat wanted to go ahead on the rocky path between the stalls. With a gesture of authority, he hit the flanks of the horse with his heels and, squeezing the bridle, forced the animal to trot in that direction.
He had hardly advanced a few meters when
