Читать книгу Dancing in the Baron's Shadow - Fabienne Josaphat - Страница 10

FOUR

Since boyhood, Raymond L’Eveillé had accepted that he wasn’t destined to be someone important like his brother. Nicolas was the anointed one and Raymond the worker, the man of humble but practical skills, just another one of the millions of Haitians seeking a modest lavi miyò, a better life, in Port-au-Prince. Still, he’d come to suspect that this “better life” everyone chased after was a lie—and it wasn’t just him. This realization was spreading through the slums like cholera. In fact, he was pretty sure there was nothing “better” than the life he’d left behind when he moved to the city.

Raymond had grown up in a small farmhouse in the valley of L’Artibonite, north of Port-au-Prince, where his parents had spent their lives harvesting rice. The path was paved for Raymond and Nicolas to take over the farm, but their parents had dreams of giving their sons more and put every cent they could wring out of the little farm toward tuition at the neighborhood Catholic school. Raymond was never good at school. The complexities of mathematical formulas eluded him, and language became his enemy on the classroom’s battlefield. He learned to remain quiet instead of raising his hand and risking ridicule for mistaking a feminine pronoun for a masculine one. Pages of text paralyzed him, his tongue tying itself in knots each time he tried to string letters into sentences. The jeers were cruel: “Analphabèt se bèt!” If you can’t read, you’re stupid. Raymond, ashamed, retreated behind his desk, constructing cars out of plastic juice bottles and soda caps.

The friars were efficient at sorting the mediocre students from the best ones. Unlike his brother, Nicolas was eager to please and driven to learn, and he quickly became the friars’ favorite. He had a natural intelligence, a remarkable capacity for memorizing tables and retaining conjugations. “Nicolas est brillant, especially in French and Haitian literature,” the teachers wrote in his report card. “Would make an excellent professor.” Raymond’s report card rarely had any comments on it. The few he got went something like: “Student seems ill suited for academia.”

Creole was comforting to Raymond, whereas Nicolas’s elegant French made the headmaster’s blue eyes shine with pride. While Nicolas devoured books and aced his tests, Raymond, feeling inadequate, spent his time sitting in the shade of orange trees. Their mother, deeply superstitious like so many peasants, had chalked up his deficiencies to the supernatural, convinced that someone had hexed her eldest. “Someone wants to harm my baby,” she said. “I dreamed I found two nickels wrapped in a notebook page inside his pillowcase. Someone’s cursed my boy. But I will find out who the culprit is. They will pay.”

For a while, Raymond wondered if he might really be cursed. Who would want to harm him? It was true that his family’s farm did better than others in the village, but they were still part of the community, and they had their hardships. It didn’t make sense to him, and in the end, it didn’t matter why he struggled in school—just that he did. His mother brewed him special tea in the mornings, placed leaves between the pages of his books, encouraged him to sleep with lessons under his pillow, discouraged him from accepting gifts from strangers or even friends. Still, his grades never improved. Raymond gave up. Perhaps it was God’s will.

As they walked home from school, Nicolas would begin his own brand of teasing. His academic excellence made him feel superior to his embarrassing big brother.

“You’re going to end up growing rice all your life, just like Mother and Father,” he’d say, trailing behind his brother. “Is that what you want?”

Raymond shrugged his shoulders. “At least I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty,” he said. “I can work the field, and I’m pretty good at fixing things. Why does it matter that I can’t read?”

“But you’ll never be important,” Nicolas said. “That’s why you go to school. To become somebody, to get out of this place. Me? I’ll never be a farmer. Never.”

He meant it. On konbit days, when all the villagers rose before dawn to work together, Raymond had to prod Nicolas from his natte and drag him to the rice fields. “Father’s going to be mad if you don’t hurry up,” he’d say.

Nicolas would kick rocks on the way as the sunrise blanketed the rice fields with a soft pink glow; he refused to put his feet in the cold mud while Raymond masterfully wrapped his large brown hands around a bundle of rice. When their father was far in the distance, plowing the ground with his pick, joining in the collective call-and-response song, Nicolas would even pull out a book. He’d find a strong calabash tree root to sit on and forget all about the farmers, the cook who stirred the hot pot for the workers, the cows’ tails whipping flies away in the morning air. When he caught Nicolas reading, their father would beat him. “Are you ashamed of farming?” he’d roar as his belt smacked the boy’s hips. “You’ll get your hands dirty like the rest of us whenever it’s required, you ingrate!” Raymond stayed up many nights tending to welts on his brother’s body.

When Raymond turned fifteen, he dropped out of school and found a job at a mechanic shop in the nearby city of Saint-Marc. “Let’s face it,” he told his parents, “I’ll never be like Nicolas. Don’t waste any more money on that school. If I do good work as an apprentice mechanic, maybe I can open my own shop one day.”

Saint-Marc was known for a neighborhood of graceful, old streets that eased up the hills away from the bay and the parks. It was called La Ville des Bicyclettes, aptly named because its residents’ preferred mode of transportation was bicycles. Raymond’s early work as a mechanic entailed fixing chains and replacing wheels with broken spokes. Over time, he moved on to oiling the engines of trucks that traveled to and from the capital. He learned how to drive, shuttling customers from the shop to wait at a nearby bar. In the evenings, he came home with greasy hands and his pants stained with oil that his mother could never fully wash out. But he came home fulfilled, as if he’d spent the day fixing the entire world with just his wrench. At dinner, his head bowed over his meager bowl of bouyon, Nicolas would keep quiet and pretend to study his large history and geography books before scrunching his nose in disdain. “You smell like car grease. What do you do, bathe in the stuff?” Raymond learned to let his brother’s snotty remarks roll off his back.

Raymond arrived at Nicolas’s house the next day around noon and found Eve in the dining room with their live-in housekeeper, Freda. Freda cooked most of the delicious things in that house, but Eve made some herself, decorating them with sprigs of parsley and orange rinds. “I am a femme à tout faire—a woman of all trades,” she often joked at the stove. “My mother always said a woman must learn to use all ten of her fingers. Here are mine.” And she’d wiggle them in the air.

Today, Raymond watched her hands fly over the utensils. She lifted a serving spoon, topped the rice and beans with a flower-shaped bell pepper, and scooped out a fresh piman bouk pepper studded with cloves. She sliced onions into perfect rings to frame the chunks of beef, as if dinner were an arts and crafts project. It was almost offensive to Raymond, this display of luxury, this fussing over aesthetic details, and yet it made his stomach clench with yearning.

“How’s everything?” Eve asked distractedly. “We haven’t seen you since last week.”

Eve was a tall woman, even taller when she wore her wedge sandals around the house. She had a habit of dousing herself in lavender oil and carried a cloud of the scent wherever she went. She’d never been a thin woman; Eve was curvy, with a little meat on her bones. She had beautiful almond-tinted skin and perfectly pressed hair that framed her face like a smoky halo.

Raymond was holding Amélie, his niece, in his arms. The baby had just turned one, and she was looking more like her mother all the time, her black hair meticulously combed back on her head. She clung to her uncle’s collar. Raymond rubbed the baby’s back gently and admired Eve’s dedication as she went over a place setting that wasn’t up to her standards, switching a silver spoon for a fork here and there. His eyes widened at the sight of lobster, a rarity, bathing in a red Creole sauce. The aroma punched him in the gut and his mouth watered.

“M’ap knee,” Raymond said. “Hanging in there.”

She looked up and cocked her head to the side. Raymond knew instantly that she was reading worry in his eyes.

“You look tired,” she said.

“I’m fine,” he said, turning away from her. He didn’t want her to see him like this, vulnerable. He kissed the baby’s forehead and she giggled, babbling something unintelligible.

“Amélie missed you,” Eve said. “Look at her, she’s beaming. You’re so important to her, you know. When you don’t come around, it breaks her heart.”

Raymond wondered how much the child was aware of. She was still so young. Amélie always smelled divine from the layers of lotion and talcum powder her mother smothered her in. Raymond had never been able to afford those luxuries for his children. All his money had been spent on food and medicine, especially that dreadful night when Enos nearly died of pneumonia. For a long time, the children walked around barefoot, and their first shoes had been a present from Eve.

“Nicolas will join us soon,” she said. “I told him you’re here, but he’s probably working on that book of his…” Eve shook her head longingly and sighed. “I wish you could talk some sense into him.”

Before Raymond could answer, she turned away to pour water into the glass goblets and asked Freda to close the door on her way out. Raymond assumed she was retreating to the help’s quarters in the back of the house.

“He won’t sleep at night, sometimes, always talking on the phone about his notes,” Eve added. “He won’t listen to reason either. I tried talking to him but he won’t hear it. The telephone is no place to talk about those things. You know? After what happened to my family…”

She paused for a brief moment, then continued her work. Raymond knew she was thinking about her father and brothers, who had died with the Jeune Haiti rebels in the southern mountains the year before.

“Trust me, I support him and I want nothing more than to see this regime crumble,” she continued. “There isn’t a place in hell hot enough for Duvalier to roast in. But why take silly risks, right?” She froze and looked hard at her brother-in-law. “The Baron is cunning, Raymond. You never know who’s spying for him. The walls have ears.”

She set the water pitcher at the center of the table, and when she turned her head, her body was still turned toward him. To Raymond, Eve was like the Madonna, a woman of unparalleled beauty who carried herself like royalty. His brother was so lucky. Raymond still loved Yvonne, but he had grown weary of her own weariness over time.

Realizing he’d stared at his sister-in-law too long, Raymond’s ears burned with shame.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Eve continued softly. “I’m preparing myself for the worst.”

Raymond stared at her. He wasn’t sure what she meant.

“What do you think will happen?” Raymond shook his head. “Everything will be fine, Eve.” He knew his brother’s ambitions were foolish, but he couldn’t imagine they’d really ever take off again like when they went into hiding.

“Won’t you talk to him again?” she pleaded. “When I think of what could happen if someone denounced him, it makes my skin crawl. Did you hear what they did to that lawyer downtown?”

Raymond leaned against the kitchen counter, shaking his head. Eve grabbed a newspaper from behind the fruit basket and handed it to him. Raymond unrolled it with his free hand, trying to ignore the smell of bananas and pineapple. He was hungry.

The grainy front-page photograph gripped him in the gut. He was looking at the charred skeleton of a man, the melted remains of a rubber tire clinging to his bones. There was nothing left of the corpse but blackened gristle and two rows of stark white teeth.

“How can you do that to a human being?” she asked, her hand on her hip. She shook her head. “He was a good man, never harmed anyone. Nicolas knew him.”

Her voice wavered, and Raymond realized she was fighting back tears. “Someone denounced him. They said he was plotting against the regime—” She blinked. “I haven’t slept since reading this.”

“I already tried talking to him,” Raymond said, dropping the newspaper back on the counter. “You know that. He won’t listen to you, so what makes you think he would listen to me, a taxi driver from anba lavil?”

Nicolas walked into the kitchen, and they fell silent. Eve stepped away from Raymond. Raymond wondered how much his brother had overheard.

The brothers shook hands with awkward formality, muttered quiet greetings to each other. The resemblance was there, even with their difference in height. Nicolas was younger than Raymond, but he was taller, leaner, while Raymond’s shoulders were broader, his arms and calves more muscular. But the brothers’ jaws and foreheads were of the same squareness, their noses the same width, their skin the same chocolate brown.

Nicolas pulled Amélie away from her uncle. “Come to Papa.”

“Leave him with Raymond,” Eve started. “She hasn’t seen him in a while.”

“She just took a bath,” Nicolas said, finding his way to his chair.

Raymond glanced at Eve, but she avoided his eyes and pretended to wave at Amélie. His brother likewise kept his eyes glued on the baby. Nicolas sat down in his usual place at the head of the table. The insult stung, but Raymond bit his lip. The last time they’d gotten into it, Raymond had stayed away for a month—and it would have been much longer if Eve hadn’t intervened. As they both got older, Raymond found his bitterness deepening, impatient with a life lived in the shadow of his brother’s ego.

Raymond had come here to borrow a bit of money from Nicolas to repaint his car, but the thought of asking his brother for help still pained him. He’d mulled it over all morning as he brushed his teeth and drank his tea. He was going to ask because he had no other choice. He didn’t mention anything to Yvonne, just in case.

For the first time, he started to regret not having taken a job with Faton at the tannery. Perhaps that’s what he should do. Accept the inevitable, that he needed to provide more for his family at any cost, to get a job working for someone, for a company. Accept the stench of decomposing cowhide and lime and dye that seeped through the skin. He’d have to accept the consequences of that stench as well: the icy distance from his wife and children, whose warm embrace he depended on; Amélie, whom he’d never again be allowed to hold; his sister-in-law, who would back away when he entered the kitchen; and Nicolas, who would surely keep him farther away.

Raymond found his place at the table, next to Eve. Who was he fooling? This charade of not believing in anything better, this resignation to a vie de misère, it was a lie. Raymond was intensely aware of this as Eve filled his goblet with passion fruit juice and her gold ring caught the ceiling light. He wanted this, all of it, the luxuries in life: the brushing of the soft tablecloth against his legs, the slam of full cupboards doors, and the humming of an electric refrigerator.

As they ate without saying much, he listened to the ambient noise around him. Utensils scraped differently against ornate porcelain plates than against his cheap aluminum back home. As Raymond reached for a serving spoon, he realized that the apparent inconvenience of having to stand up and reach around the glass candlesticks and crystal water pitcher would always be an extraordinary privilege for someone like him.

Raymond lifted his eyes and saw Eve watching him. Next to her, his brother ate without a word, but with the subtle pout of a man savoring lobster with distinction, knife and fork poised, methodical. Raymond himself chose to forgo the knife, stabbing at his food and simply pressing down on the crustacean’s shell until it gave.

The baby sat on her mother’s lap and Eve attempted to feed her a mouthful of rice. She squinted at Raymond. “Aren’t you hungry?”

He’d been picking at his food, his appetite dulled with the first cold blow from his brother. “I’ll take some of it home, if you don’t mind,” he answered. “For the kids. Yvonne struggles terribly with the cost of food these days.”

“It is outrageous,” Eve said, and nodded. “How can they expect the malheureux to afford a single cup of rice with this inflation? I’ll fix you a plate for them, of course. How are the kids, anyway? Do they have what they need for school?”

Eve bounced the baby on her knee and Raymond nodded politely.

“They’re fine,” he said.

“Good, because I told Yvonne last time I saw her that my friend owns a shoe store downtown. All she has to do is tell the staff that I sent her and they’ll give her a great discount.”

“The man says they’re fine!” Nicolas’s voice cut through the room and Eve lowered her eyes once more.

“Leave him alone and mind your own business,” Nicolas added.

Eve waited for him to begin eating again and glanced at Raymond.

“Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”

“Yes,” Raymond answered. “I’m just a little preoccupied. I have a little problem with my car. I’m going to have to get it fixed up.”

Raymond watched his brother spear a large chunk of beef with his fork and chew it slowly, saw the veins in his temples dance. Finally, he cleared his throat softly, still staring at his plate.

“What’s wrong with it?” Nicolas asked.

“The car?” Raymond said. “Could be the transmission.”

“Could be?”

“I can fix it myself, but I’m going to need to buy the part,” Raymond said. “Could run me about five hundred.”

“Five hundred?”

Nicolas finally looked up and stopped chewing. It was Raymond who avoided eye contact this time. Asking for money was bad enough, but lying wasn’t something that came easily to him. He decided to tell the truth.

“Also, I need to get it repainted. I ran into some trouble with the Tonton Macoutes yesterday.”

Nicolas nearly dropped his knife and fork, and Eve froze. Even the baby stopped fidgeting. Raymond had never seen his brother like this, his black eyes staring at him so fixedly. He’d seen him afraid before, like when he panicked when they got lost together in the fields, or when their father passed away, or when Eve was in labor. But never quite like this.

“What are you saying?” Nicolas said.

“This family asked me for help yesterday evening,” he said. “They were banging on my window. The Macoutes were after them, so I had to do something.”

Amélie banged a spoon on the edge of her mother’s plate, jolting the tense adults.

“Turns out it was Milot Sauveur and his family,” Raymond added, as if this fact would somehow alleviate the gravity of the situation. He looked at them, but Eve and Nicolas were still staring back like a pair of stunned birds.

“Come on, you know—Milot Sauveur?” he repeated. “The journalist from Radio Lakay who went missing?”

Raymond fought the urge to get up and walk out. He hoped his brother might still be reasonable and come through for him. He’d been on edge all morning, looking over his shoulder, praying he wouldn’t be pulled over. He had removed the red ribbon from his rearview mirror so he wouldn’t be pegged as a taxi driver, but the problem with that, of course, was that no one hailed him for a ride. The whole thing was a disaster.

“They had a baby,” Raymond said. “What was I supposed to do?”

“What did you do?” Nicolas asked, his voice hollow.

“I told them to get in and the Macoutes chased me around Cité Simone,” Raymond said. “They thought they could catch me, but they didn’t know who they were dealing with. I know every dark alley in Port-au-Prince, so I stepped on the gas and…”

Eve groaned softly, dropping her head as if she’d been struck.

“Did they get your license plate?” Nicolas asked, his voice burning.

“I don’t think so,” Raymond said. He squeezed the handle of his fork.

“You don’t think so?” Nicolas echoed, nodding repeatedly as he made his point. “What if they did? What if they find you? They could show up any minute. Are you a complete idiot? You’re endangering us just by being here.”

“They didn’t see it, okay?” Raymond dropped his fork.

The table wavered slightly between them. The goblets of fruit juice and ice water sweltered in unison. Raymond took in the raw cotton of Nicolas’s shirt, the stiffness of his collar, the perfectly trimmed Afro, and the elegant sideburns. In the corner of his eye, there were the red nails of this woman he sometimes longed for, the trophy child, the glass and the gold.

“Relax,” Raymond continued. “I know what I’m doing. I always do. You should know that.”

“This isn’t child’s play,” Nicolas spat.

“Do I look like a child to you?” Raymond replied.

“You’re going on and on about knowing your back alleys like it’s something to be proud of,” Nicolas said.

“I’m not ashamed of what I do,” Raymond responded calmly.

Eve gulped some cold water as the brothers stared each other down. Raymond felt his jaw twitch. There was so much he wanted to say to Nicolas, but what was the use? This was his house, after all. Raymond was only a guest who had come to beg. The whole thing was a bad idea in the first place. He didn’t want to fight, but he also didn’t want to put up with this kind of condescension from his brother.

“You don’t see how what you did was wrong?” Nicolas said.

“I saved their lives! Since when is that wrong?”

“Very noble, but what’s wrong is when you jeopardize the lives of others trying to be some kind of hero.”

“I’m sorry you don’t approve of my choices,” Raymond said. “Maybe you’re right. I should have left him and his wife and their baby, younger than Amélie… I should have left them to be slaughtered in the street.”

Nicolas rested his elbows on the table and leaned in closer. “I don’t think you’re hearing me—”

“I’m hearing you,” Raymond retorted. “It’s you who’s not hearing me. You can’t, because we’re speaking different languages.” He pushed his plate away. He regretted the way the utensils clattered aggressively, but his heart was racing with the familiar rush of anger that overpowered him whenever he tried talking to Nicolas.

“You are not a kamoken rebel,” Nicolas said. “You’re just a taxi driver.”

Raymond bristled. “So you keep reminding me. Ever since we were kids. Do you think you could make it through just one day without giving me shit about how I make a living?”

“Please,” Eve said, clearing her throat. “Let’s not get into all this now.”

Raymond pushed on. “I’m just a cabbie. I’m poor. Why does that offend you so much? I do honest work, always have, while you sat around like a prince, like labor was beneath you. Do you seriously think you’re better than everyone else? You and your snobby friends sitting in your study, drinking whiskey, smoking, running your mouth about politics, like you have any idea what it’s like out there.”

Nicolas raised a menacing finger in the air. “If you don’t like my friends, then don’t come to my house.” His eyes bulged out of their sockets.

“I won’t then!” Raymond pushed his chair back.

Eve reached out to grab him by the arm, surely to insist that he didn’t have to leave, that Nicolas never meant what he said, that he was just overly sensitive. She couldn’t stand the way her husband treated his brother. She had grown up in a loving family before she married Nicolas, and she believed in the bond between siblings because she herself once had brothers. It was one of the things Raymond liked about her.

“Raymond,” she pleaded.

“Let him leave, Eve,” Nicolas said.

Raymond didn’t wait for her to finish her sentence. He started down the hallway, but then spun around and walked back to the dining room. He didn’t know why. It was the same instinct that made him drive Milot Sauveur out of Cité Simone.

Nicolas and Eve were still sitting there. Nicolas was chewing furiously on a toothpick, nearly stabbing his gums. Eve held her head low in her hands like she was suffering from a violent migraine. When she saw him return, she implored Raymond with her eyes.

“You know the real difference between you and me, Nicolas?” Raymond asked. “You’re an ass.”

Eve began to protest, but he continued, unfazed.

“No, please. Let me speak my piece or I’ll choke on it tonight. Nicolas needs to hear this.” He paused and looked right at his brother at the head of the table. “Everything I do, I do for my family. I slave away out there, I sweat. Sometimes I only eat once a day. The other day, I had to syphon gas out of a car just to get my car going. My meals, my money, my blood, it’s all to keep my family alive. I always think of them first. But you, Nicolas, you don’t think about anyone but yourself.”

Nicolas stared back, quivering with rage. Raymond sighed. Suddenly, all of this just seemed exhausting.

“You’re selfish,” he said, dropping his voice. “Look at all you have, and you’re risking losing it all.”

“You’re angry because of what I have?” Nicolas roared. “How typical.”

“I’m angry because you don’t cherish it!” Raymond’s mouth filled with spit. “Any man who plays with fire like you do, dancing with the Devil, is bound to burn.” He looked at his brother knowingly. “And what will your family have left except your ashes?”

Nicolas slammed the table with the palm of his hand and Amélie’s face twisted with fear. Eve jumped up as the baby began to cry. Her husband’s eyes glimmered like fiery lumps of coal.

Raymond chuckled, but his laugh was tired, empty. He shook his head.

“You stupid, stubborn little man.”

“Get out!”

“Nicolas!” Eve seized her husband’s arm. She looked to Raymond, but he had already walked away.