sixty kilometers south.
Anastase Mésidor had already seized the best lands of the plateau. But he also eyed others to sell for the price of gold to explorers and mavericks who came from afar, like those in the United West Indies Corporation, who had descended upon the island with the arrival of the Marines. Persuaded that they were like the fincas of Santo Domingo or the haciendas of Cuba, great properties that would make them rich and, at the same time, would transform us at last into civilized peasants: Christians, wearing shoes, hair clean and combed. Tamed but landless. “Never,” a word that Solanèle Lafleur, Bonal’s mother, had repeated dozens of times to her son while tracing a cross on the ground and pointing, quickly and with outspread arms, to the steep slopes of the mountains. There up high, in the dokos,* where the spirit of the Ancêtres marrons* still blew. “The land, my son, it’s your blood, your flesh, your bones, you hear me!” Anastase Mésidor had put a curse on the Roseaux brothers, Pauléus and Clévil, who thought they could stand up to him and play the rebels. They disappeared in the fog of the first hours of the day, on the road that led to their jardin. One was found on the Peletier Morne, hanging like a rag doll from a mango tree, and the other was devoured by swine on the side of the road leading from Ti Pistache to the village of Roseaux.
We, the Lafleurs, had the reputation of being unbreakable and the bearers of powerful, even fearsome, points.* For kilometers and kilometers, many thought this power extraordinary and envied it. An unshakable power. Yet this solid reputation couldn’t stand up to Anastase Mésidor’s insistent offer: one morning, grinding his teeth before a surveyor in a black wool hat and a notary in a dark gray three-piece suit that was much too small on him, Bonal Lafleur was forced to give up his lands.
After a script that started with the words “Liberty, equality, fraternity, the Republic of Haiti” and ended with “here collated,” Anastase Mésidor, the notary, and the surveyor made it clear to Bonal that he was no longer the proprietor.
His thumb smeared with ink barely stuck on the paper in the guise of a signature, Bonal Lafleur demanded his due from Anastase Mésidor. He had nonetheless sold him, with a heavy heart, some of the most beautiful of the lands of the Lafleur heirs, in the wide fertile plains surrounded by the mountains that rose southward over Anse Bleue. The mountains with slopes still green, very green, even if some fine strands of white already streaked their thick hair.
Anastase Mésidor, to Bonal’s immense surprise, paid in cash, a big smile on his lips. A meager sum that Bonal had to share with a cohort of claimants whose rights to the land were far from clear. In looking at his ink-stained thumb, Bonal remembered contentions with a long list of brothers and sisters, cousins, from a first marriage, a second, a third, and others. Without forgetting all those who wouldn’t fail to emerge from the surrounding lands with the announcement of this sale. One day, he had wanted to stop counting the interested parties, after a fight between the rival branches had nearly ended in blood drawn by machetes. Each recalling, with the sharp edge of their blade, events that had fixed borders and bounds. Even if Bonal had tried to stop counting, the fragmentation of the land hadn’t stopped. Upon leaving the notary’s office, Bonal, remembering the incident, shook his head from right to left under his floppy straw hat, frayed on the sides, while touching the bills in his right pocket.
All these memories came to weave a web of dark paths in his head, leading nowhere. A light vertigo came over him. And then, above all, there was Anastase Mésidor’s smile. Not clear. Too good to be true. A smile that sent a chill down his spine. A smile that was a sign of nothing good to come. He thought for a moment of the Grand Maître high above, sighing, his throat dry. But God, the Grand Maître, was really too far to quench his thirst, and Bonal, touching the bills again, settled on some good glassfuls of clairin.* Not one of those trempés* with macerated herbs, spices, and bark. No. A good clairin, pure, to scald his tongue, burn his throat, and never says and wake his soul up in the middle of beautiful flames so that, for just a few hours, his life appeared before him like a luminous road without brambles. Without thickets. Without bayahondes. Without Anastase Mésidor. Without a cumbersome family. Agile on his legs with their protruding muscles, chin slightly forward, he advanced with a resolute stride in the direction of Baudelet.
“So many offspring for all these men! So many! Ten, fifteen, twenty, and even more!” sighed Bonal. Nonetheless, this idea of staying flush to the grave reinvigorated him, and he had a sweet and fleeting thought for a young femme-jardin* from Nan Campêche, hard working, soothing, with strong thighs, and who had given him two children. He smiled as he lightly passed his hand over his thick beard and quickened his step, running after visions, despite the yaws that bit at his left heel.
But, in fear of being beaten up by the Marines and forced into one of their dreadful chain gangs or, worse, to be slaughtered with no warning just for being mistaken as one of the cacos* rebels, Bonal changed his mind. Fear in his core, but agile like a wild cat, he preferred to use the steep paths. This fear twisted his guts, which he had to tame, to calm, he knew it all too well. Acid and painful fear. Fear that never loosened its grip. Stuck to us like a second skin. Planted inside us like a heart. Fear, a heart in itself. Beside you to love, share, laugh, cry, or get angry. So, in big strides, Bonal chose to move toward it in solitude. In the bushes and the bayahondes. To advance into the unknown. There where nobody came to look for us. Where the shadows are: in the eyes of beasts, under the bark of trees, in the sighs of the wind, under the leaves, in the stone beneath the dirt. He touched the small blister under his left arm and walked in this strange light of the undergrowth. Where he could merge with breath, the murmur of elements. Where he could be everything and nothing at once. There where Gran Bwa* watches over his children and topples their fear. Where he reduces it to silence. Bonal hummed quietly, several times in a row, without even noticing it:
Gran Bwa o sa w té di m nan?
Mèt Gran Bwa koté ou yé?
Gran Bwa what did you tell me?
Grand Bwa where are you?
And went on with a light step, very light…
5.
Once he was on the path in Baudelet, Bonal slowed down in order to not arouse any suspicion and put on a normal face, the face of the villages, the face of a peasant smiling ear to ear, dazed by hunger and obscure divinities. Who says nothing, sees nothing, laughs, and never says no.
Bonal stopped, like on all the rare occasions when he went to Baudelet, at Frétillon’s store, not far from the market. “The Haitian peasant is a child, I tell you all, a child!” Albert Frétillon liked to repeat as he twirled his thick mustache. And we always agreed, nodding our heads and staring at the ground. Which reassured Albert Frétillon, who stuck his thumbs underneath his suspenders and, to better observe us from above, lifted his head, stretched out his neck, and adjusted his glasses.
Frétillon’s two sons, François and Lucien, and their only sister, Églantine, donning gloves and a hat, had gone to France on one of the large ocean liners that often docked in Badaulet to make a fortune in ports on both sides of the Atlantic. Albert Frétillon’s fortune went back two generations, since an ancestor from La Rochelle had settled in Baudelet and started a lineage of mulattoes in this port town, the bourgeois of the province. In addition to his coffee trade, Albert Frétillon prepared, in a guildive* at the entrance of the town, the best clairin around. Once the brandy was distilled, he spent most of his time on the porch of his house, next to the shop his wife ran. The chief of police, town judge, and director of Baudelet’s only school met there, with some others, to bicker and speak their minds.
That afternoon, Anastase Mésidor, after purchasing Bonal’s lands, joined them in their heated ranting. They
