Claire of the Sea Light

  One way he had delayed accepting Bernard’s invitation to his parents’ restaurant in Cité Pendue was to invite Bernard to the beach. They would go to the lagoons, then dive in and out of the reefs. Every once in a while they’d spot a large flying fish or a sea turtle, which were as mythic as ghost crabs because they were so rare. At night, they would walk up to the Anthère lighthouse, climb the winding staircase, and lie on the gallery floor in the dark to better see the stars.

  He had left Ville Rose the day before Bernard was killed. Flore had told his father that she was pregnant with his child, and his father had sent him to his mother in Miami. He was nineteen, banished from his home for creating a life just at the moment when his friend lay dying. The irony of this was still weighing on him.

  When Max Junior arrived at the beach that evening, he saw a crowd gathered around a large-legged woman who was speaking to everyone with her hands. She was wearing a dark scarf around her head, which nearly swallowed her face.

  Next to her, a fisherman, a man the people were calling Nozias, leaned in. He was interpreting the movements of the woman’s hands. She held both hands toward the crowd, one palm facing the dimming light of the early-evening sky and the other facing the sand, then she reversed them, the sand palm now fixed at the sky and the sky palm aimed at the sand.

  “Mouri,” the man next to her said. “Dead. She thinks he’s dead.”

  Dead. This single word seemed the proper conclusion to Max Junior’s day.

  He spent the rest of the evening under a dense grove of palms that had grown in a curve, their intricate roots spilling over the sand. He bought a bottle of Prestige beer, which he drank before dozing off at the foot of the crescent palms.

  When he woke up, a bonfire had been started and the dead fisherman’s wife was sitting in its glow, in a low sisal chair, receiving well-wishers. Too large for her long white skirt to fully cover, her heavier leg looked like a piece of driftwood waiting to be placed in the fire.

  Watching the dead fisherman’s wife reminded him of a Grimm’s fairy tale his father had told him when he was a boy. The way he remembered it, one day a fisherman pulled a talking flounder out of the sea. Claiming to be an enchanted prince, the flounder begged to be returned to the sea and the fisherman released him. When the fisherman went home, he told his wife what had happened, and she scolded him for asking nothing of the enchanted flounder in return for his release. The fisherman’s wife convinced her husband to return to the sea, find the flounder, and ask him for a cottage to replace the shack in which they were living. The flounder granted the wife’s wish and soon they had a cottage. This was not enough for the wife, who made her husband return several times to ask the flounder for a castle, then to make her an emperor, then a pope, then a god.

  The part that Max Junior remembered best—because it was the part of the story that his father seemed to disapprove of the most—was of the wife wanting the power to make the sun rise.

  What is wrong with wanting that? Max Junior had always thought. Who wouldn’t want the power to make the sun rise at will?

  He now found himself in the somewhat familiar predicament of being a so-called rich boy who was out of money. His head ached. He was hungry again. Where was his enchanted flounder? he wondered.

  He thought of returning home, but how would he explain his having left so abruptly? His father would be angry with him. Jessamine would probably be angry too. Still, they had not come looking for him. They both should have known where he might be.

  Max Junior got up and walked through the small crowd of people still gathered on the beach. Then, just as the fisherman’s wake was drawing to a close, a father began crying out his daughter’s name, and people joined in looking for her. The father of the missing daughter was the fisherman Nozias, the one who had been interpreting the fisherman’s wife’s movements for the others.

  Max drifted in and out of different sections of the crowd, and he did as they did, hollering, “Claire!” the missing girl’s name.

  The name was as buoyant as it sounded. It was the kind of name that you said with love, that you whispered in your woman’s ears the night before your child was born. It was the kind of name you could easily carry in your dreams, in your mouth, the kind of name that made you clasp your hands against your chest when you heard it being shouted out of so many mouths. It was the kind of name you might find in poems or love letters, or songs. It was a love name and not a revenge name. It was the kind of name that you could call out with hope. It was the kind of name that had the power to make the sun rise.

  But soon everyone stopped calling the girl’s name and began to drift away. And when he looked up at the hills, he saw that even the people who had been flashing lights from the lighthouse gallery were also gone.

  When it came to the town’s mores, he was now at a disadvantage, after being away so long. He was no longer aware of who was sleeping with whom, or who was allowed to sleep with whom, without causing a scandal. And yet just then he thought he saw his parents’ old friend Gaëlle Lavaud go into one of the fishermen’s shacks. He had some vague recollection of his father telling him that they were to have dinner at her house one night before he returned to Miami. Was that really her? Was she now his father’s lover or the fisherman Nozias’s lover? Or both?

  In any case, it seemed that Gaëlle Lavaud and the fisherman Nozias would be sleeping apart. For soon after they went in together, the fisherman left the shack and lay down on the sand between two boulders, confident, it seemed, that his daughter would return. Just as his father might also be certain that he too would soon be home.

  Part Two

  Starfish

  Louise George, hostess of the radio program Di Mwen, had been coughing up blood during her periods ever since she began menstruating at age thirteen. Over the years she had seen many specialists and had many tests, but no doctor could satisfactorily explain how blood from her uterus also showed up in her lungs, then in her mouth. What’s worse, no one could tell her why, at fifty-five, she had still not gone through menopause, making it seem as though this could possibly go on forever. And since in Ville Rose all things unexplained were attributed to the spirit world, Louise tried to keep as much to herself as possible when she wasn’t taping her radio program.

  This was not hard to do because the few people who had seen her bloodstained teeth or handkerchiefs had worried that she might be pwatrinè, or have tuberculosis, and so had stayed away. That is all except Max Ardin, Sr., who not only occasionally slept with her, but would now and then invite her to read to the students at his school.

  Max Senior had known Louise long enough to be aware that her condition was rare, but that a certain type of lung surgery or hormone therapy might treat it, though the hormones were extremely expensive and were not yet available in Haiti and the surgery potentially fatal. So Louise got used to tasting her own blood, agonizing about it only on those three or four days a month when she had to completely withdraw from everything and everyone.

  During those days when she was home alone, Louise wrote. She wrote about the people in Ville Rose, tidbits she picked up from the gossip mill, or teledyòl, or what she’d gathered over the years from the interviews on her radio show. Her book had begun as an extension of the show, but had grown into a type of choral piece. She called it to herself a collage à clef.

  A few nights after she’d gone to read to one of his younger classes, Max Senior called to ask her if she would do him the extra favor of teaching one of the school’s adult literacy classes, after he came up with the idea of helping some of the students by teaching their illiterate parents to read. Most of the children who could afford the high tuition at École Ardin had professional parents—public functionaries, business owners—or sponsoring relatives abroad. But there were a few bright students whose parents were indigent, or nearly so. Max Senior had given them scholarships to make their way.

  Louise was still dreading her first moments with these scholarship parents when the time came
. Unlike the children, the parents wouldn’t simply look up at her with glee as she read them some of her favorite stories and poems. But teaching these adults was an opportunity for her not only to use the training she’d gotten as a young woman at the Faculté d’Education in Port-au-Prince, but also to gather potential subjects for her radio show.

  The show had begun six months before one of Radio Zòrèy’s biggest sponsors, Laurent Lavaud, had been shot right outside the station gates. She didn’t know him very well, but she had been one of the last people to see him alive. He’d rushed into the control room to drop off an envelope for the station manager, and she had seen him through the glass during a commercial break.

  The next day, a young newswriter at her station had been arrested for Laurent Lavaud’s murder, then, soon after, had been murdered himself. She had closely followed the investigation (or lack of it). It was like all police investigations in Haiti. At first it was all everyone was talking about, then it went cold, and then for years, whenever it came up, everyone from the chief of police to journalism students would say “L’enquête se poursuit. The investigation continues.” Even though it had not.

  After those deaths and others, she had considered changing the format of the show from one that allowed people to air personal grievances to one that pursued justice. She’d thought of renaming the show Seriatim, the Latin word for “series.” She’d also considered Verbatim or Word for Word, or the legal term that combined both, but she didn’t want the station’s core audience of plain and regular people to be put off. Hearing Latin once or twice a week at Mass was probably all they could bear. So now she found herself doing only confessional, but sometimes accusatory, interviews. The show’s very large audience favored gossipy subjects over true crime, unless there were elements of gossip in the crime. She liked to start the hour by welcoming her guests with the words “Di mwen.” “Tell me,” she would say. “We are ready to hear your story.”

  Before the charity parents showed up at Max Senior’s school that night, Louise suddenly got cold feet. Over the years, her gaunt body had grown even tinier, making her look, in the different shades of purple dresses she always wore, more like a nun than a popular radio personality. She was such a mystery to most people in town that once, while attending Mass in the town cathedral, she heard a man who was sitting behind her say that it was rumored ke li manje chat, that she ate cats, which implied that she was also an alcoholic, a lonely lush who somehow kept herself under control only to tape her show.

  The first parent who arrived for the literacy class was Nozias Faustin, a bald young fisherman. He was dressed in a church-worthy secondhand brown suit with an open-necked white shirt. He was father to Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin, an attentive little girl from one of the primary-school classes at École Ardin. Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin’s hair was always braided in what seemed to be a hundred yarnlike plaits, each individually fastened with a different colored bow-shaped plastic barrette. Aside from the barrettes, which thankfully had not been in vogue when Louise was a girl, Claire was the one child in the classes she read to who reminded her much of herself when she was young. The girl was so quiet that Louise worried that there might be some other frightful things about Claire that would link them. Had she, also like Louise, been born with absolutely nothing, from people who had absolutely nothing? Was she the surviving twin who had lost a sibling at her birth? Had she been born with a sixth finger on each hand, which had been forced to atrophy by having strings tied tightly around them? Did she have a spider-shaped birthmark on her belly?

  The other parent, Odile Désir, was a strapping, scowling woman who, when she showed up, was still wearing her ocher uniform and apron from her job as a server in a restaurant in town. Louise had seen that scowl before and not just on Odile’s face. She saw it whenever she was around certain adults. Was it a scowl of fear or pity? Why did it matter in the end? Why should she even care? But this type of self-questioning made her realize even more that she did care. She cared because, just like the people she interviewed every week, she was floating through her life, looking for some notion of who she was, and in those scowls and rumors she often caught a glimpse, even if a distorted one, of what that might be. But that evening at the literacy class for three, it was very clear what she was to Odile Désir: her sworn enemy.

  Odile’s son, Henri, was by far the worst-behaved student in any class that she had ever read to at Max Senior’s school. Even the shy and quiet Claire was not spared Henri’s taunts and hair pulling. A restless, rambunctious boy, he had, early in the school year, lost two front milk teeth, which still showed no signs of being replaced by adult ones, a gap he often used to spit at the other children.

  “Why me?” Louise had asked Max Senior when he’d first suggested she teach the evening class. “Surely one of your full-time teachers can do this.”

  “Don’t you want the satisfaction of being a miracle worker, of making the blind see?” he’d asked, smiling, his face softening in a way that even after all these years still enchanted her.

  Ever since they had met at the Faculté—where she was a scholarship student—Louise recalled that Max Senior was always researching educational methods that demanded a lot of those around him. Sometimes she was thrilled by those experiments, like his asking her to tell or read her favorite stories to the children. And other times they annoyed her, like the evening literacy class, which she now wished she’d declined. Sometimes, with all his pedagogical lecturing, framed by his sweet-faced smile, she even wanted to hit Max Ardin. Not hard and not often, just one quick slap. But there were also many times when she found herself feeling grateful to him, because even as he was orchestrating his pedagogical schemes, building his career, getting married and divorced, he never forgot her.

  The two parents had only nodded at each other when they arrived that evening. Both looked equally exhausted after long days at physically taxing jobs.

  “Why do you want to learn to read?” Louise asked each one in turn.

  Henri’s mother, Odile, shrugged. “I don’t want people to take me for an imbecile,” she replied, her face a tight mask.

  “For Claire,” Claire’s father, Nozias, said simply, “so I can help her with her lessons.”

  “Those are both very good reasons,” Louise said, leaning back into the same rocking chair she had demanded that Max Senior provide for her to read to the children, in part to connect her reading to them with the porch-style storytelling sessions of their parents’ childhoods.

  “I don’t want either of you to feel ashamed,” she added. “You didn’t have the opportunities that your children now have.”

  Louise had prepared that little speech beforehand, before she’d even known who’d be there. She had also prepared to tell these parents about ancient civilizations whose indigenous populations never knew how to read or write but used hieroglyphs with which it was easy to recognize water as wavy lines, and a man or a bird as a drawing of such. And she reminded them both of the well-known saying “Analfabèt pa bèt,” or “Illiterates are not stupid.” But then she got tired of the whole thing and of herself and told them to go home.

  On their way out, the two parents stopped by Max Senior’s office together to complain, each adding that they had, at Max Senior’s request, gone through a great deal of trouble to get there and that Madame Louise had not properly addressed them.

  “Tant pis,” Louise told Max Senior when he recounted their complaints to her in bed later that night. “Too bad.”

  Louise and Max Senior had been sleeping together on and off since the Faculté. They had stopped while he was married and had picked up again after his divorce. Louise was not in love with him; she did not think herself capable of being in love with anyone. Being alone was simpler, the intermingling of lives too confusing and too messy, a fact confirmed for her on her radio show each week.

  That night in bed, at her house across from Sainte Rose de Lima Cathedral, Max Senior held one of Louise’s hands under the sheets. S
he dangled the other over the side of the bed and, after a sudden rush of blood to her fingertips, felt them go numb. Lying there, she wished that she’d agreed, as he had suggested to her one night, to paint her bedroom ceiling in a glow-in-the-dark shade of fluorescent green. Max Senior had once confided to her how when he was a boy he had been deathly afraid of nights without lights, starless and moonless nights without any electricity, nights that he’d called “Ki moun sa a?” nights, or “Who are you?” nights, because it was hard to recognize anyone. It was so dark that when you opened your eyes, you saw the same inky gloom as when your eyes were closed, he said. At that time, she’d laughed and said no, she didn’t want her bedroom to look like the walls of a kindergarten classroom. But now she thought she might reconsider the glow-in-the-dark paint. If she had a bit of luminescence to stare up at on nights like this, might it be easier to pretend that she was somewhere outside, with blades of grass tickling her cheeks?

  “Je voudrais …” His words interrupted her thoughts. “I would like to talk to you about something,” he was saying.

  He released her fingers to run his hand across her abdomen, tracing, in the dark, the baby spider birthmark that grew into a full-blown black widow when her stomach swelled during those days she was menstruating.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “The school,” he said, moving his face closer to hers in the dark. She wanted to turn away, but instead she pressed her eyelids together so tightly that they made another kind of sky, a sky full of fireflies and tiny torches.

  “You slapped one of my students the other day when you came to read,” he said. “One of the children of the parents who came to the class tonight.”