I dug a small hole at the foot of a coconut tree so the candle would be stable and protected from the winds. I wedged it with sea rocks. I prayed with both the humility and presumption of prayer that requests and hopes for the well-being of the soul of the one we cherish and miss or for continued strength on its journey. But I mostly thanked Gustave for this great gift that he has made to us, his family.
More than of his life, he has made us the gift of his death. He taught us what death can offer life. Since Gustave, we carry in us this grand gesture he made of his death.
I don’t think that either Uncle Edward or anyone else could have convinced him not to embark for his country. A man of great heart is forcibly a man of great dreams. Logic can do nothing against such men. A decision like the one he made does not come from the domain of reason: it comes from the most profound region of who he, Gustave, was; it is born out of a temperament that drags along with him the sensitive image of all that he has lived before he could arrive at that point, at that decision, and that pushed him to make it.
It would not have been possible to tell him, “You can neither avenge your father’s death nor bring him back. Think of him who would not have wanted you to take such a risk. Think of your mother, think of yourself. This makes no sense—a handful of men cannot fight, and win, against a state.”
To reason with him would not have been possible because what he was about to do was more profound than reason, more vast than vengeance, greater than himself: the call from the father was that of his soul. He found a unique moment in time that allowed him to act to the measure of his soul. Like all of us, he came on earth to surpass himself. Like very few of us, the élan in him was so strong that there was no need for a long life of dull repetitions, of meager satisfactions, vain and selfish, of reductive fears erected in the name of common sense, to finally be able to arrive, crawling and out of breath, at the foot of the Almighty.
It was standing up that Gustave presented himself to the Light.
Because he had a hero’s soul.
In his Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis wrote:
You are wrong, you are wrong if you seek anything than to suffer trials; for this whole mortal life is full of miseries and is marked on every side with crosses. The further a man advances in Spirit, so much heavier are the crosses he often finds, because the pain of his exile increases with his love . . . Great fruit and benefit will be his by the bearing of his own cross. For while he willingly submits himself to such trial, then all the burden of tribulation is turned into assurance of divine consolation . . . It is not the virtue of man, but the grace of God that enables a frail man to attempt and love that which by nature he abhors and fears.1
Hard to say how, in his childhood, Gustave knew where to glean examples and life experience that could fill and give shape to a soul with heroic appetite. Grandfather Jules acted as his father, and ours too in a way. I always had the feeling that my own father spent his life trying to live up to the bravery Grandfather showed during the First World War. For my father, no human qualities equaled the courage, loyalty, and righteousness exemplified in the character and lives of great soldiers. There is no doubt in my mind that, for Gustave the child, his grandfather, decorated with the Iron Cross, his father the colonel, and his uncles, even, were at some point the great men, the braves, the example to follow, the way.
One could also say that his grandmother, an ardent Christian, shaped his childhood. It is in his bedroom that she painted the life-size Saint Jude Thaddeus, patron of desperate causes, whose feet and hands I complained were too small while I watched her paint, thus making her laugh without feeling any compulsion to enlarge them. Her laughter cascaded in the air and fell like big water bodies that have unfathomable, unseen repercussions into the rock and deep in the earth; it slid down in waves along her great breasts, softened by age, until it finally went and lost itself in the large cove of her hips and belly, sitting as she was, her small legs opened up, spread out, the flowery blue cloth of her skirt pulled across the chair as is done by legs of old women who have become too fat and indifferent to their physical grace.
Gustave’s laughter, on the other hand, as soon as it was carried out of his throat, which appeared to me then an unshakable column singularly marked at the disturbing point of his Adam’s apple, seemed to be engulfed back down the same throat, descend all the way down his body to his feet, and die down at the earth wherefrom I would receive it, a small child, him so tall, teasing him about trivial things so he would laugh again—a child’s stratagem that reveals the love felt and hides its embarrassment.
Gustave’s bedroom was at the end of the hallway, straight down from the top of the stairs that I would sometimes silently crawl up to, like the Indian I imagined myself to be, in order to spy on our grandmother: she seemed large and anchored while she painted this emaciated Saint Jude whose eyes looked like two black embers in a bearded face. But actually, we were the ones who were being observed, by the gaze emanating from Gustave’s portrait: a photograph hung over the little bed of all of Gustave’s coddled childhood, showing Gustave in a US Army uniform, a man now, standing, his right hand resting on the airplane he flew, but his head and eyes looking toward us.
Grandmother gave away her Saint Jude to the Christ-Roi Church in Bourdon where we grew up. I imagine that someone hurried to put this painting in the oubliette, in a depot, because no one knew of its existence when I inquired about it a few skinny years later.
* * *
Now it is the example of Gustave-the-man that stands before us, before me. His gesture changed us and continues to transform and defy us while it lives within us. Without Gustave, we would have been different: we are who we are because Gustave was.
In his essay “Religion and Poetry,” Paul Claudel wrote:
Religion did not just fill life with drama but it created at the end of it, with Death, the highest form of drama which, for any true disciple of our Divine Master, is found in sacrifice.2
This, Gustave died to teach us. We would not do him justice and we would even be robbing ourselves of a precious gift we were bequeathed if we were not able to recognize this, admire him for it, and if we were afraid to remain as willing witnesses of a life that expressed its greatest dimension.
The town of Jérémie also remembers my cousin and godfather, and it is a face in mourning that it still bears today. Is it possible that it carries in its memory a living remorse that gnaws at and grinds its old walls, and covers them with the gray mood of a coat made from dust and refuse?
However dilapidated it has become, Jérémie still keeps its beautiful cemetery that glows on the hillside like a miniature Rome with its domes, arches, and porticos. The poet Émile Roumer is buried there.
One hears that men from Jérémie have pretensions to a kind of inspired singularity: they often succeed at it. It is one of those who, in the evening, at an Auberge Inn table, told me what he knew of Gustave’s death, and this man, himself looking like a great grasshopper of a man wearing full clothes, and seen to fold his long, dry limbs over a din-maker of a motorcycle which he hangs onto like some insects do onto their wings; his high legs seem to want to make him trip over himself while he comes toward you; his hair is a fleece full of obstinate curls, white hills that start from the top of his forehead and follow one another all the way and out of sight around the curvy horizon of his head; of an eagle, he has the fixed stare: one eye that absorbs you because the man has passion, because he watches, and one eye that is no longer one but that continues to see the last image received, this eye said to have been lost at guerilla warfare of another people than ours.
He also told me about Roland’s death, Gustave’s father—pushed out of a plane above Jérémie’s ocean. I learned about the entire Villedonne family’s death—men, women, children, and the elderly, all of them gathered naked on the airport landing strip and machine-gunned. He showed me the Villedonnes’ family house and talked about his childhood friends—the Sansonne, the Chavigny, the
Drouet, and many more—because Gustave was not the only one whose family came from Jérémie.
In this Haitian country, history is passed orally from one generation to the next, whether it is religious history, familial, or political. At Dame Marie, an eighteen-year-old fisherman showed me the beach where the group of guerilleros had landed. He understood, having only overheard me pronouncing Gustave Villedonne’s name, to which exact spot he needed to take me.
The sea appears to cover all, drag all to engulf all, and forget all. On a night of a full moon at a Grande Anse beach, winds push the waves until they come and topple over each other on the beach. The same sea that delivered Gustave to the shores of Dame Marie continues to edge this island as it did our lives.
Our lives go up high like waves for only a brief moment, and then die down on the littoral. But they don’t get wasted and lost there as we think—the sea takes them back, ebbs, and contains them. In its water’s depth, the sea keeps the world’s memory. This immensity where one would like to be dissolved, that attracts and frightens us, also allows us to touch God with the mind. Mystics say that what is below reflects what is above. In Haiti, popular belief has it that the world under the sea reflects all that is on earth. The journey underwater is a mystical voyage wherefrom one returns transformed and powerful. Sky, earth, and sea: maybe all that is but a single great canvas on which color zones touch each other without interrupting the thread. I do not know in which color zone Gustave now happens to live, but I know that he is nevertheless able to reach, and continues to touch my being in the zone where I find myself captive.
1. Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ, bk. 2, ch. 12 (Zwolle, ca. 1418–1427).
2. Paul Claudel, “Religion et Poésie,” in Réflexions sur la poésie (Paris: Folio Essais, Éditions Gallimard, 1963).
SURRENDER (EXCERPT)
BY MYRIAM J.A. CHANCY
Port-au-Prince Central Prison
(Originally published in 2010)
Early Afternoon, March 7, 2004
The moment of awakening reaches Romulus Pierre in the depths of the dank corner of a jail cell, surrounded by the stink of urine, of human and bestial feces ground into the dirt floors, with only a small square of light streaming in from a brick-sized opening up above that allows the prisoners to know when the sun rises and night falls. Some count off the days by etching lines into the pitted walls of the cell; others, without hope of ever being able to wake from the nightmare of their incarceration, let the days run one into another.
For Romulus, awakening comes in the form of muscle tremors, stomach spasms, and hallucinations. The tissues binding his muscle and cartilage hunger for an infusion of narcotics—cocktails of prescribed and illegal drugs—cocaine, heroin, antidepressants, uppers—anything he can get his hands on.
For one hundred and eighty-six days, his hands have had nothing to grasp in the regular schedule he has grown accustomed to—not the comforting smoothness of a small pink pill or the cool plastic cylinder of a needle case.
His hands roam the puckered and uneven walls next to his cot as he tries to grasp the outline of a face floating there, then they cling to his body frame when the convulsions shake him so hard that he feels the bones of his vertebrae lurch back and forth as if ready to leap from his body and leave the flesh behind.
In the span of the first weeks of his incarceration, once it was known who he was and why he was being held, some heady substances did find their way to the cell like the miracle of rain after a long drought. For a few days he was his old self again, bleary-eyed, smiling, stoned, feet on the ground, elbows on his knees, hands cavorting in the air above his thighs as they animated a story he told of his travels to a prisoner listening at his feet, while others turned away from his suffocating self-importance. They would defecate against the walls in silent protest as Romulus spoke. There wasn’t much room for movement. There wasn’t any room for heroics.
Romulus did not seem to notice the turned backs. He attended only to the face upturned toward his, as he spoke with authority of things he has seen, even as his tongue became thick and unintelligible, even as he lost track of the events in the tale he was telling and grew silent as the drug took over and left him dumb. He seemed only to notice the punctuated indifference of some of the men in the cell when the drugs leached from his system and left him, insomniac, craving more. He would have drunk his urine if there had been any privacy in the cell, in case the drugs were still lurking in the warm liquid. For him, these were desperate times.
When the doors of the cells are broken open, he has been sitting there in doubtful company for one hundred and eighty-six days. He has counted each and every one of these days without pencil and paper, without scratches on the wall. Any drug addict worth his salt needs to keep track of things like an eagle-sharp accountant, to count how many pills, how many possible hits, how many highs, and how many hours between, how many days to the next drop, the next payment, the next OD, the next stomach pumping, the next withdrawal, the next averted death. The minutiae of time becomes a science, a honed sequence of small events toward ecstasy, briefly experienced and furiously repeated over and over again in a frenzied pantomime that provides the necessary illusion of having a worthy goal. It functions like an ill-paid but time-consuming occupation; time, therefore, has to be made an ally. Not other people’s time, mind you, but the time related to the ups and downs of addict life. Time is a relative invention and a good pal in the world of hallucinations and deprivation. It is all that will remain after the wives are gone, taking their children with them, gone with the friends bearing that look of disgust and despair on their righteous faces. Romulus can do without the lot of them. He thinks this even while imprisoned, surrounded by men he is sure have committed heinous acts against humanity and nature.
On the last of those one hundred and eighty-six days, even in the haze of his drug-addled mind, as an empty pocket of time forces him to think about those who once peopled his life, the stadium seats he’d filled with fans, the money he made from records that had gone platinum in the Caribbean and in Europe (he’d never tried to conquer the North American market: it was too vast, too fast, even for his adrenaline-driven life), Romulus has an uncommon realization. He lies there on his cot and grasps that beyond the drugs, beyond the hallucinations and the gripping nature of the loss of time, he has had no life whatsoever for at least twenty years.
It is a sad moment, an empty epiphany that someone of his intelligence should have deciphered earlier had he not been thinking of the next hit, the next score, the little bags of dust floating in his suitcases, many of which had mysteriously gone missing from his last transaction, which was why he found himself penned in between steel bars and an impacted floor of red dirt on his own native ground, a land which, some ten years prior, he had been forbidden by law to reenter. He had somehow forgotten about this pithy detail when he had agreed to smuggle the suitcase of cocaine past international borders.
When the doors are finally flung open by men in military garb, he is too sad to stand and walk out with the others who jubilantly jump up and down in the mucky excrement of the stall in which they have all been kept, brothers in criminal excess, many for longer than one hundred and eighty-six days. Romulus has sat there like a prince amongst his people, the only man with a cot to sleep on while the others slept rolled up in rotting blankets stinking of more than a hundred years of servitude. Romulus thinks that he is unlike the other jailed men. He has had money, position, fame. But, he has come to realize, by the time the doors creak open and the cries of Libere, nou libere go up, that he has thrown away his freedom for little more than year upon year of escape from reality.
Romulus sighs to himself and watches the men throwing themselves into the sunlight, their bodies floating, emblazoned by the light, the darkness they are leaving behind giving them form: dark angels spilling out into a fallen paradise.
Romulus thinks about the faces that have hovered above him throughout his time in the prison. They have been
mostly women’s faces. They speak to him, he is sure of this, but he is often unsure of what, exactly, they are saying. They seem to be as lost as he is, lost to time, in fantastic worlds of their own making. He sometimes wonders if they are the product of women hallucinating elsewhere in the world. He wonders if being in an altered state can make a person fall into another’s dream. He likes this feeling of ambiguity. That and the floating feeling he experiences when taking the drugs make the trips worth it, like traveling without ever having to board a plane.
At times, the faces seems to prophesy great things that he has yet to do, though he is never sure what those things might be. It is just a feeling they give him, as if there are unexpected heights still to achieve, as if he could undo the train wreck that he has made of the last twenty years of his life. Other times, there are children in these hallucinations, but none look like the children he has fathered. All of them are white, or white-appearing.
He isn’t sure that they should be trusted, those faces. After all, they have come to him in the throes of delusion. One apparition has been especially persistent, a woman with a long, pointy face, a white woman who resembles his first love, with skin so translucent beneath her eyes that he can see the filaments of a blue circuitry of veins. She hovers there, right above his head, whispering crazy pronouncements that Romulus does, in fact, understand, much to his surprise, even though she speaks in a language different from his own.
She speaks to him of rivers below the ground and spirit-dwellers who hide in hollowed trees and vales. She speaks of a landscape unfamiliar to his senses but he follows her there to a country so green it makes his Haiti seem like a heap of bones, a cemetery. She wants him to return to this forgotten place, this place of her first beginnings. He wants her to go away from the space above his eyes, a space gouged by many desperate fingers trying to find a way out. Go there, she whispers persistently, ignoring him, in the speech he can’t quite place. They are almost mystical, these drug-induced delusions. Why would he ever stop? The only thing that might make him stop is the fact that he is afraid of this particular apparition. She makes him question his sanity. The more he sees her, the more he feels that he must be nearing his own pivoting point, walking a line he has crossed many times before with the aid of his many hallucinogens, a line between rationality and destruction, between the real and the fantastic.