Krik? Krak!

  She had the patches sewn together on the purple blanket when I woke up that morning. On the floor, scattered around her, were the pictures of her mother.

  "I became a woman last night," she said. "I lost my mother and all my other dreams."

  Her voice was weighed down with pain and fatigue. She picked up the coins from the table, added a dollar from her purse, and pressed the money into my palm.

  "Will you whisper their names in my ear?" she asked. "I will write them down."

  "There is Toto," I said. "He is the one that hit you."

  'And the one who followed us?"

  "That is Raymond who loves leaves shaped like butterflies."

  She jotted their names on the back of one of her mother's pictures and gave it to me.

  "My mother's name was Isabelle," she said, "keep this for posterity."

  Outside, the morning sun was coming out to meet the day. Emilie sat on the porch and watched me go to my grandmother's house. Loosely sewn, the pieces on the purple blanket around her shoulders were coming apart.

  My grandmother was sitting in front of the house waiting for me. She did not move when she saw me. Nor did she make a sound.

  "Today, I want you to call me by another name," I said.

  "Haughty girls don't get far," she said, rising from the chair.

  "I want you to call me by her name," I said.

  She looked pained as she watched me moving closer to her.

  "Marie Magdalene?"

  "Yes, Marie Magdalene," I said. "I want you to call me Marie Magdalene." I liked the sound of that.

  seeing things

  simply

  "Get it! Kill it!"

  The cock fight had just begun. Princesse heard the shouting from the school yard as she came out of class. The rooster that crowed the loudest usually received the first blow. It was often the first to die.

  The cheers burst into a roar. As Princesse crossed the dusty road, she could hear the men shouting. "Take its head off! Go for its throat!"

  At night, closed ceremonies were held around the shady banyan tree that rose from the middle of an open hut. However, during the days the villagers held animal fights there, and sometimes even weddings and funerals. Outside the fight ring, a few women sold iced drinks and tickets to the Dominican lottery.

  There was an old man in front of the yard smoking a badly carved wooden pipe.

  "Let's go home," his wife was saying to him as she balanced a heavy basket on her head.

  "Let me be or I'll make you hush," he shouted at her.

  He dug his foot deep into the brown dusty grass to put a spell on her that would make her mute.

  The wife threw her head back all the way, so far that you could have cut her throat and she wouldn't have felt it. She laughed like she was chortling at the clouds and walked away.

  The man blew his pipe smoke in his wife's direction. He continued to push his foot deep into the grass, cursing his wife as she went on her way, the basket swaying from side to side on her head.

  "What a pretty girl you are." The old man winked as Princesse approached him. The closer Princesse came, the more clearly she could see his face. He was a former schoolteacher from the capital who had moved to Ville Rose, as far as anyone could tell, to get drunk.

  The old man was handsome in an odd kind of way, with a gray streak running through the middle of his hair. He sat outside of the cockfights every day, listening as though it were a kind of music, shooing away his wife with spells that never worked.

  There was talk in the village that he was a very educated man, had studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, France. The word was that such a man would only live with a woman who carried a basket on her head because he himself had taken a big fall in the world. He might be running from the law, or maybe a charm had been placed on him, which would explain why every ordinary hex he tried to put on his wife failed to work.

  "How are you today?" he asked, reaching for the hem of Princesse's dress. Princesse was sixteen but because she was very short and thin could easily pass for twelve. "Do you want to place a wager on the roosters?" he asked her jokingly.

  "No sir," she said as she continued on her way.

  The old man took a gulp from a bottle filled with rum and leaves and limped towards the yard where the fight was taking place.

  The roosters were whimpering. The battle was near its end. There was another loud burst of cheers, this one longer than the last. It was the sound of a cheerful death. One of the roosters had lost the fight.

  Princesse was on her way to keep an appointment with Catherine, a painter from Guadeloupe. A row of houses in Ville Rose was occupied by a group of foreigners. Princesse had met a few of them through the teachers at her school. The students in her class were rewarded for good grades by being introduced to the French-speaking artists and writers who lived in the ginger-bread houses perched on the hills that overlooked Ville Rose's white sand beaches.

  Catherine was reading on the beach when Princesse called down to her from the hill.

  "Madame," Princesse said, calling upon her phonetics lessons in order to sound less native and more French.

  Catherine put down her book and threw a thigh-length robe over her bathing suit as she ran up to the house. There, she kissed Princesse on both cheeks as though they were meeting at a party.

  Catherine was only twenty-seven years old but looked much older. She sunbathed endlessly, but her skin stayed the same copper-tinged shade, even as it became more and more dried out. Of any black person that Princesse knew, Catherine spent the most time in the sun without changing color.

  Catherine already had her canvas and paint set up on the veranda of her house. She liked to paint outdoors in the sun.

  "Relax, chérie," she assured Princesse. "Just take your own time to become comfortable. Heaven and earth will be here long after we're gone. We're in no rush."

  Princesse slowly removed the checkered blouse of her school uniform, followed by a spotless white under-shirt she wore to keep her blouse from getting stained with sweat. She had breasts like mushrooms, big ones that just hadn't spread yet.

  Catherine began to sketch as Princesse took off her skirt. It was always hardest getting Princesse to remove her panties, but once Catherine either turned around or pretended to close her eyes, they were gone in a flash.

  "Now we work," Catherine said to Princesse as the girl reclined on a white sheet that Catherine had laid out for her on the floor of the veranda. Princesse liked to sit beneath the rail of the veranda, hidden from the view of any passersby.

  One day Catherine hoped to get Princesse to roam naked on the beach attempting to make love to the crest of an ocean wave, but for now it was enough for her to make Princesse comfortable with her nudity while safely hidden from the sight of onlookers.

  "It's not so bad," Catherine said, making quick pencil strokes on the sketch pad in her hand to delineate Princesse's naked breasts. "Relax. Pretend that you're in your bed alone and very comfortable."

  It was hard for Princesse to pretend with ease as the sun beamed into her private parts.

  "Remember what I've told you," Catherine said. "I will never use your name and no one who lives in this village will ever see these paintings."

  Princesse relaxed in the glow of this promise.

  "One day your grandchildren will walk into galleries in France," Catherine said, "and there they'll admire your beautiful body."

  There was nothing so beautiful about her body, Princesse thought. She had a body like all the others who lived here except she was willing to be naked. But after she was dead and buried, she wouldn't care who saw her body. It would be up to Catherine and God to decide that. As long as Catherine never showed anyone in Ville Rose the portraits, she would be content.

  Catherine never displayed any intention of sharing her work with Princesse. After she felt that she had painted enough of them, Catherine would pack up her canvases and bring them to either Paris or to Guadeloupe for safekeeping.


  Catherine stopped sketching for a second to get her-self a glass of iced rum. She offered some to Princesse, who shook her head, no. The village would surely smell the rum on her breath when she returned home and would conjecture quickly as to where she had gotten it.

  "I used to pose for classes when I was in France." Catherine leaned back on the rail of the veranda and slowly sipped. "I posed for art students in Paris. That's how I made my living for a while."

  "How was it?" Princesse asked, her eyes closed against the glare of the sun as it bounced off the glass of clear white rum in Catherine's hand.

  "It was very difficult for me," Catherine answered, "just as it is for you. The human form in all its complexity is not the easiest thing to re-create. It is hard to catch a likeness of a person unless the artist knows the person very well. That's why, once you find some-one whose likeness you've mastered, it's hard to let them go."

  Catherine picked up the pad once more. Princesse lay back and said nothing. A wandering fly parked it-self on her nose. She smacked it away. A streak of coconut pomade melting in Princesse's hair fell onto the white sheet stretched out on the veranda floor beneath her. The grease made a stain on the mat like the spots her period often made in the back of her dresses.

  "No two faces are ever the same," Catherine said, her wrist moving quickly back and forth across the pad. The pencil made a slight sweeping noise as though it were grating down the finer, more resistant surfaces of the white page. "The eyes are the most striking and astonishing aspects of the face."

  "What about the mouth?" Princesse asked.

  "That is very crucial too, my dear, because the lips determine the expression of the face."

  Princesse pulled her lips together in an exaggerated pout.

  "You mean like that?" she asked, giggling.

  "Exactly," Catherine said.

  Catherine flipped the cover of her pad when she was done.

  "You can go now, Princesse," she said.

  Princesse dressed quickly. Catherine squeezed two gourdes between her palms, kissing her twice on the cheek.

  Princesse rushed down the steps leading away from the beach house. She kept walking until she reached the hard dirt road that stretched back to the village.

  It was nightfall. In a cloud of dust, an old jeep clattered down the road.

  Someone was playing a drum in the fight yard. The calls of conch shells and hollow cow horns were at-tempting to catch up to the insistent rhythm.

  A man wept as he buried his rooster, which had died in one of the fights that afternoon. 'Ayïbobo," the man said, chanting to the stars as he dropped the bird into a small hole that he had dug along the side of the road. One of the stars answered by plunging down from the sky, landing in a fiery ball behind a hill.

  "You could have eaten that rooster!" the old drunk hollered at him. "I'm going to come and get that bird tonight and eat it with my wife on Sunday. What a waste!

  "I am giving it back to my father!" hollered back the distressed man. "He gave me this bird last year."

  "Your father is dead, you fool!" cried the old drunk.

  "I am giving this bird back to him."

  The old man was still sitting by the fence cradling his leaf-crammed bottle of rum.

  "My great luck, twice in a day, I get to see you," he said to Princesse as she walked by.

  "Twice in a day," Princesse agreed, the wind blowing through her skirt.

  The human body is an extremely complex form. So Princesse was learning. A good painting would not only capture the old man's features but also his moods and personality. This could be done with a lot of fancy brush strokes or with one single flirting line, all depending on the skill of the artist. Each time she went to Catherine's, Princesse would learn something different.

  The next day, Catherine had her sit fully clothed on a rock on the beach as she painted her on canvas. Princesse watched her own skin grow visibly darker as she sat near the open sea, the waves spraying a foam of white sand onto her toes.

  "In the beginning God said, 'Let there be light.'" Catherine's brush attacked the canvas as she spoke, quickly mixing burnished colors to catch the harsh afternoon light. "Without light, there is nothing. We might as well be blind people. No light or colors."

  For the moment, Catherine was painting the rock and the sand beneath Princesse, ignoring the main subject. She was waiting for just the right moment to add Princesse to the canvas. She might even do it later, after the sun had set, when she could paint at her leisure. She might do it the next day when the light would have changed slightly, when the sun was just a little higher or lower in the sky, turning the sea a different shade.

  "It's dazzling how the light filters through your complexion," Catherine assured Princesse. "They say black absorbs all color. It blots and consumes it and gives us nothing back. That's wrong, don't you think?"

  "Of course," Princesse nodded. Catherine was the expert. She was always right.

  "Black skin gives so much to the canvas," Catherine continued. "Do you ever think of how we change things and how they change us?"

  "How?" ventured Princesse.

  "Perhaps the smaller things—like human beings, for example—can also change and affect the bigger things in the universe."

  A few days later, Princesse sat in Catherine's bedroom as Catherine sketched her seated in a rocking chair holding a tall red candle in each hand. Black drapes on the window kept out the light of the afternoon sky. A small mole of melted candle wax grew on Princesse's hand as she sat posing stiffly.

  "When I was just beginning to paint in Paris," Catherine told Princesse in the dark, "I used to live with a man who was already an artist. He told me that if I wanted to be an artist, I would have to wear boots, a pair of his large clunky boots with holes in the soles. That man was my best teacher. He died yesterday."

  "I am sorry," Princesse said, seeing no real strain of loss in Catherine's eyes.

  "It's fine," Catherine said. "He was old and sickly."

  "What was it like, wearing those shoes?" Princesse asked.

  "I see where your interests lie," Catherine said.

  "I am sorry if that was insensitive."

  "I would tell him to go somewhere and per-form obscene acts on himself every time he told me to wear the boots," Catherine said, "but whenever he went on a trip, I would make myself live in those shoes. I wore them every day, everywhere I went. I would wear them on the street, in the park, to the butcher's. I wore them everywhere I could until they felt like mine for a while."

  The next day when Princesse went to see Catherine, she did not paint her. Instead they sat on the veranda while Catherine drank white rum.

  "Let me hear you talk," Catherine said. "Tell me what color do you think the sky is right now?"

  Princesse looked up and saw a color typical of the Haitian sky.

  "I guess it's blue," Princesse said. "Indigo, maybe, like the kind we use in the wash."

  "We have so much here," Catherine said. "Even wash indigo in the sky."

  Catherine was not home when Princesse came the next afternoon. Princesse waited outside on the beach-house steps until it was almost nightfall. Finally, Princesse walked down to the beach and watched the stars line up in random battalions in the evening sky.

  There was a point in the far distance where the sky almost seemed to blend with the sea, stroking the surface the way two people's lips would touch each other's. Standing there, Princesse wished she could paint that. That and all the night skies that she had seen, the full moon and the stars peeking down like tiny gods acting out their will, plunging and sometimes winking in a tease, in a parade ignored by humankind. Princesse thought that she could paint that, giving it light and color, shape and texture, all those things that Catherine spoke of.

  Princesse returned the following day to find Catherine still absent. She walked the perimeter of the deserted house at least three dozen times until her ankles ached. Again Princesse stayed until the evening to watch the sky over the beac
h. As she walked along, she picked up a small conch shell and began to blow a song into it.

  Princesse wanted to paint the sound that came out of the shell, a moan like a call to a distant ship, an SOS with a dissonant melody. She wanted to paint the feel of the sand beneath her toes, the crackling of dry empty crab shells as she popped them between her palms. She wanted to paint herself, but taller and more curvaceous, with a stream of silky black mermaid's hair. She wanted to discover where the sky and the sea meet each other like two old paramours who had been separated for a very long time.

  Princesse carried the conch shell in her hand as she strolled. She dug the sharp tip of the shell into her index finger and drew a few drops of blood. The blood dripped onto the front of her white undershirt, making small blots that sank into the cloth, leaving uneven circles. Princesse sat on the cooling sand on the beach staring at the spots on her otherwise immaculate undershirt, seeing in the blank space all kinds of possibilities.

  Catherine came back a week later. Princesse returned to the beach and found her stretched out in a black robe, in her usual lounging chair, reading a magazine.

  "Madame," Princesse called from the road, rushing eagerly towards Catherine.

  "I am sorry," Catherine said. "I had to go to Paris."

  Catherine folded the magazine and started walking back to the house.

  As Princesse had expected, all the painted canvases were gone. Catherine offered her some iced rum on the veranda. This time Princesse gladly accepted. She would chew some mint leaves before going home.

  Catherine did not notice the blood stains on the undershirt that Princesse' had worn every day since she'd drawn on it with her own blood. Catherine sifted through a portfolio of recent work and pulled out a small painting of Princesse lying naked on the beach rock with a candle in each hand.