fear and wonder. Wonder sparked by the attention of a man that powerful, and fear by the often harmful consequences of such power over our lives.
7.
The first moment of stupor over, the man whom I do not know, after having retreated, advanced toward me again. He leaned over again, his eyes wide open. And I saw his face twist slowly in a strange grimace, his jaw slacken, his mouth open as his lips trembled. That’s when, all of a sudden, this face curled in on itself and the man started to cry out, with all of the force of his lungs, names that I didn’t know: “Estinvil, Istania, Ménélas, anmwé, osékou, come to me, help me.” At times he screamed words that fear broke, stretched out, distorted, mixed up. It was like a seawall had given way. And he could no longer stop the waves that gushed from his mouth.
I, I wanted to ask him to stop. Tell him that I would explain. And since I couldn’t, of course he continued to scream even more. It was awful!
Then, like he was mustering up the courage, he came even closer to me, his head bent forward, and opened wide his toothless mouth. No way to withdraw from nor escape his breath of night. No way. A breath to turn your stomach.
Wanting to drown myself in sleep. Just for a few minutes. Knees against my chin. Eyes shut. Shut inside of sleep like the inside of an egg. Let the night glide over my skin. With the memory of the coldness of the moon. Of the rippling water that sparkled like sequins.
At the edge of the village, a rooster shouts at the top of his lungs. Another responds to him. Both call forth a day that struggles to make itself seen.
“Do not do what you might regret,” my mother hammered. “Do not do it!”
My blood throbs outside of me in this wind where I hear this muffled breathing, the clinking of a buckle unfastening…And the cold member, straight as a stick…My neck hits the sand. The tearing. My body is lifted off the ground. The pain around my neck…And then the night… the sea…Again the night. Liquid. Black.
No matter what, in this story, you have to pay attention to the wind, its saline breath on our lips, the moon, the sea, Olmène absent…The earth that doesn’t give anymore. The stingy sea. And the foreigners arriving with their faraway customs. Their habits, their American cigarettes, their bodies, their odors, and their shoes that catch our eyes.
And I, who didn’t want to be here anymore, here I am powdered with sand, crowned with seaweed and longing for Anse Bleue.
“Osékou, anmwé.”There now, the cries of the stranger strike strong in my chest. Mixed up uncannily with my brother’s cries from three days ago, in the night.
My brother stops on each of the syllables of my name. He had to put his hands up to his mouth like a megaphone to make them travel. Far, very far. And then the cries of others who with him brave the night, the wind, the water to cry out my name. “Koté ou yé? Where are you? Answer!”
The people of Anse Bleue swam through the night and the water, their eyes open, like whales.
8.
Even though there didn’t remain much for them to sell—Tertulien Mésidor having bought so much from them in the early hours of the morning—Olmène and Ermanica decided to meet the other women at the market in Baudelet, which was bigger and busier than the one in Ti Pistache. The heat was already hanging over the paths leading to the Peletier Morne, weighing down the chrétiens-vivants, animals, and plants. Even the rocks groaned. Yet nothing slowed their course on those paths, cleared by bare hands, hard and polished like brick by the sun and the wind.
On market days, Olmène felt the weight of fatigue more strongly, having gotten up ahead of dawn with the children of the lakou, then climbed and descended the hill, a calabash on her head, another in her hand, in the search of water. But she had already forgotten her painful legs, her bruised feet, and walked straight as an arrow behind Ermanica. She sped up as she went inland toward the towns, leaving the sea to languish in her wake. That world spread out behind her, that great liquid country, could still, at any moment, swallow her in its immense, silent, beastly belly. At times herbal, clear and so reassuring, the world she went toward could also, with no warning, turn her around, freeze her, and knock her over with its cascades of water, its storms, and its cliffs. These worlds had already taken a father, a cousin, a brother, or an uncle from us. Between the first break of light of the devant-jour and the sudden shadows of the afternoon, Olmène put one foot in front of the other, agile and quiet, into the arrogance, extravagance, and power of these worlds.
The trip seemed longer that day to Olmène, because of the silence of her mother, who never mentioned Tertulien Mésidor’s insistence on buying their goods. Ermancia had seen nothing. Heard nothing. Olmène let herself slip into this same ring of silence, following her mother’s lead. Yet Ermanica couldn’t stop herself from thinking of Tertulien Mésidor, who resembled, as two drops of water do each other, his father, Anastase Mésidor, who unceremoniously and without restraint, at the mercy of his will, had taken so many women that he’d forgotten their names as soon as he’d had them. Scattering kilometers of the coast, the surrounding mountains, with children whose first names he didn’t know, whose faces he didn’t recognize. Even the women who were spared his monstrous lust, if they crossed themselves after passing him, it was because they were intrigued by all that power. Olmène and Ermancia had been, too, that morning.
They climbed the mountain, hardly feeling the rough limestone bruise the soles of their feet, cut their heels. Olmène eventually forgot the pain, her mother having told her so many times that feet unable to face the stones and rocks were useless, good for nothing: “God gave you feet so that you could use them!” They left very late that day and sped up their steps so as not to be surprised by too strong a sun. It was already almost unbearable because of the glare spreading out from the sea. As far as the eye could see. It gave off light as though condemning the earth to fire.
At the first turn at the top of the hill, Olmène traced the first dark green trees, which didn’t grow thick but still escaped the vicious dryness of Anse Bleue. Entering Roseaux, she and Ermancia took a break, time to wipe their faces, relieve their bladders, to pick strands of mangue fil and stick them between their teeth. Time also to chat for a few minutes in front of Madame Yvenot’s stand, and she offered them half of an avocado and a kasav*. Olmène couldn’t keep herself from looking at Madame Yvenot’s new shoes, black with a buckle on the side. For the last two months she’d been dreaming of them.
Madame Yvenot, recently returned from the Dominican Republic, showed off her profits from selling provisions and pois Congo. What Ermanica knew of the Dominican Republic had started over meals shared with Josephina, a friend of her mother’s from Duverger, back when there was trade with Pedro, Rafael, and Julio in Bani; it stopped with a death, blood, a scar on her left forearm, and a missing front tooth. She escaped Trujillo’s massacre because her mother covered her up with her body and breathed her last breaths beneath the repeated strikes of the machetes and the heinous sound of the voices that cried: “Malditos Hatianos, malditos.” The events that sometimes disfigured her joys or filled her sleepless nights despite the fatigue of the days. Ermancia didn’t even want to say the name of that part of the island, and settled on listening to Madame Yvenot in silence.
Changing the subject, her eyes insinuating, serpentine, she asked them why they were late. There’s nothing
