Читать книгу Moonbath - Yanick Lahens - Страница 15

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 to quicken the pulse of the slanderous, mal parlante Madame Yvenot more than taking out peoples’ dirty laundry and wallowing in the salt of their tears, the red of their blood, the stickiness of their seed. And sniffing around, celebrating the odor of misfortune. Ermancia told her that Orvil had trouble getting up that morning because of the pain in his back. Madame Yvenot, pleased by this display of confidence, reminded her that she would wind up killing her old man of a husband: “You are going to finish him off, Ermancia!” They both laughed out loud. Ermancia started to tell the story of a woman whom she knew in her hometown and who, one day… She whispered the rest into Madame Yvenot’s ear. And, when they laughed again, Olmène laughed with them, not because of their words, which had been muffled and which she didn’t fully hear, but because of Madame Yvenot’s enormous breasts, which shook all around like two wild horses each time she burst out laughing. That didn’t make her forget Ermancia’s lie, and it only further sharpened her curiosity for this older man who emerged from the fog and who had the power to make her mother lie.

At the market in Baudelet, they sat in their usual spot, under the leaves of one of the rare acacias that stood in the vast space where they exchanged what the lands gave them: mangos, avocados, bananas, plantains, sweet potatoes, breadfruit, greens, millet, and corn—with what the city offered—matches, thick blue cotton, soap, enameled utensils. This corner where she sat with her daughter, Ermancia had won it at the end of a fierce fight. She took hold of it the day after Grann Méphise, an elderly vendor who had taken her under her wing, died without leaving behind a daughter or a niece or a goddaughter to pass it down to. Another crass woman set up her stakes just after her death, while everyone was still in mourning. Ermancia stood before her, hands on hips, her skirt slightly hiked up on one side, and challenged her: “You stay in this place one second longer and I can no longer be held responsible for my actions!” After the usual cursing, the two women were held back from coming to blows, and the dispute was resolved by an improvised tribunal that immediately recognized Ermancia’s right to the spot.

Olmène liked this stubbornness in her mother, who stood up to everything: the day, the night, the chrétiens-vivants, and the animals. The land could burst into the flames, the waters could dry up, she wouldn’t relent. She kept going. She went as far as she could. Every market day, she took a little bit more space. After three months she spread out her goods in peace in one of the most coveted corners of the Baudelet market.

But Ermancia didn’t stop at the market. She managed to win over Madame Frétillon, too, by offering her the most beautiful eggplants, yams, beans, not to mention her tobacco leaves as long as a man’s arm. Very quickly, she became the main supplier for Madame Frétillon, who even went as far as saving her a cup of coffee on market days.

Lucien, one of Albert Frétillon’s sons, unlike his sister Eglantine, who remained in France, or his brother, François, who lived in Port-au-Prince, loved the greed of this trading post in the province where his family had made its fortune. He had married Fatme Békri, a Syro-Lebanese woman. It was a break from convention in those times, for a bourgeois, even in the provinces, to marry a Syro-Lebanese. But Lucien knew that she would have no match in turning goods into cash. He had Fatme Békri Frétillon stand below a caricature of a thin man in rags facing a pot-bellied man in rich clothes. Under the first image, it read: I sold on credit, and under the second: I sold for cash. At every demand for a rebate or credit, Madame Frétillon, the sweet hypocrite, pointed to the caricature and translated it, with big gestures for the peasants, into a sweet Creole tinted with Arabic: “Ti chérrrie, mafifrouz, I cannot, mwen pa kapab.”

Olmène, standing behind her mother, enjoyed, as her grandfather Bonal Lafleur had some forty years earlier, watching the men sitting on the Frétillons’ porch. Always the same: the director of the high school, jet-black; the chief of police, a mulatto from Jacmel; the town judge, a quadroon from Jérémie. She watched everything, listened to everything, and remembered the rare occasions when she had seen Tertulion Mésidor meet with these men to discuss questions that were beyond her comprehension. Just as they had been beyond the comprehension of her grandfather Bonal Lafleur. It was 1960 and Olmène knew almost nothing, no more than we did, that they were talking about a powerful man, a doctor from the countryside who spoke, head down, with the nasally voice of a zombi and wore a black hat and thick glasses. Because he had taken care of peasants in the countryside and treated the yaws, some men, like the director of the high-school, believed in his humility, in his charity, in his infinite compassion. Others, like the police chief and the judge, feeling that their old-world, light-skin caste was under threat, were suspicious of this black peasant who said nothing worthwhile. No, really, nothing worthwhile! “Bakoulou, charlatan,” they repeated as often as they could. Tertulien, he kicked himself for having been convinced by the judge and the police chief to back the rival of the man in the black hat and thick glasses. Others, just how many we’ll never know, were right to believe that it would be difficult from there on out on this island to stand tall as decent men and women.

Like all of us, Olmène often wondered if God, the Grand Maître, in his great wisdom, had created them, she and hers, with the same clay as the rest. And if he had put as much care into his creation of hers as of theirs. Equally into those who loved the man in the black hat and thick glasses as those who didn’t. She looked at her naked feet, the august assembly of these men, then at Madame Frétillon’s light skin and her husband’s new car. It seemed to her that he hadn’t. To us, too.

Olmène thought of it again in the first shadows of the sunset, after washing her face several times, letting the droplets make her skin glisten like mother of pearl. And again just after scrubbing herself, scrubbing her feet of any trace of mud. She thought of it again at night fall, on the veranda next to the market, when the women, face and feet clean, met around the lampes bobèches* and Man Nosélia’s only stove to sip some tisanes and to talk. To talk as though wresting from the night these words that belonged to it alone. Words that they drew from the light of the day, as though a little darkness was needed to seize them. Olmène loved these voices that seemed to come out of a single great body of shadow. From a sole mouth. The flames danced over these burning, bare words of the night. Olmène could distinguish a profile eaten away by the darkness whenever one of the women bent over to rekindle the fire or pour more of the cinnamon or anise or ginger tisane in her enameled mug. Or when one of their faces rose out of the plumes, nearly blue, from the smoke of a pipe.

They took turns without tiring, stringing together one story after the other. Those of tax collectors and soldiers, always ready to extort them for something. The escapades of concubines, the impertinence of matelotes,* the troubles of children. Those of the jardins, where they would wear themselves out growing vegetables, millet, and corn. The stories of the most precious garden, that they, the women, kept, coiled up between their hips, that belonged only to them. And the men who had stopped there to rekindle their embers and light their fires. Words of women who spoke by the grace of God, the force of the Mysteries, the tribulations and the satisfactions of the chrétiens-vivants. She could have listened for hours to this speech pulled from the thickness of the days. Because the time spent talking like this isn’t time, it’s light. The time spent talking like this, it’s water washing the soul, the bon ange.

Man Nosélia put down her pipe only when she felt the first burning in her mouth and the stinging in her eyes. She laughed one last time before soothing the sores on her tongue, the insides of her cheeks, and her palate with a concoction of lettuce and honey. She did so loudly and then spat out a big stream of saliva, scratched her feet, crotch, and armpits in the manner of a cockroach, and fell asleep, a smile forgotten across her lips.

Ermancia arranged the rags on which slept with her daughter. They went over the sales of the day one last time and reviewed the projects for the future: once fattened, the larger of the two pigs would be sold to allow the purchase of two other younger ones who would be fattened in turn, and the new lands of the State would be opened for cultivation.

“Even if, just between you and me, Olmène, the new cultivation land won’t give much, and if I listened to myself, I would go all the way up there. Where, in great mercy, the coffee grows. Where the veins of the earth are very fragile, but where the sun is still generous.” And then Ermancia 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.