“You’ll get better, Maman, I know it,” Lélia said, trying to control herself. “Don’t be afraid to tell me, but believe me, this is only a bad dream.”
Jeanne knew very well that wasn’t true. She waited a moment, then said, “You remember Mina Valpont, your father’s godchild, who used to live with us?”
“How could I forget her? She was my friend. She would be twenty years old by now. Poor Mina!”
“Well, dear, Mina isn’t dead.”
“Not dead? What do you mean, not dead?” Lélia was staring intently at her mother, trying to make sure that the unfortunate woman still had her wits about her.
“Don’t think I’m crazy. Come closer. Quickly.” Jeanne Marais’s voice was fading. “Mina must be delivered. You’ll ask her to forgive me. Promise me.”
Lélia nodded weakly. Her heart was racing. She was losing track of where she was.
“Come closer. Listen. Our old Zanoute will tell you.”
Lélia couldn’t hear the rest. The shock was too strong for her nerves. She collapsed, unconscious, on top of her dying mother.
* * *
Some light was filtering through the lowered blinds when Lélia opened her eyes. She was not immediately aware of what was happening. She was totally numb, had no strength left. She saw herself stretched out on her bed with her clothes unbuttoned. She barely recognized her room.
Aunt Brigitte was putting cool, wet compresses on her forehead and someone was taking her pulse. Someone? Dr. Poytevin, certainly.
Lélia suddenly stood up: “Maman, maman!” she cried. She rushed toward the door. Some arms tried to stop her.
“Easy, girl,” the doctor said in an affectionate tone. “You’ll see your maman a little later. You fainted while she was talking to you. You must rest.”
“How is she?”
“Unfortunately, not better, dear.”
Poytevin did not tell Lélia that her mother had died half an hour earlier, when the girl had fainted on her. He’d had to unclasp the mother’s arms to carry the daughter away. Since Lélia had just then regained consciousness, everyone thought it best to keep the truth from her for now.
* * *
After the funeral and the usual exhausting series of condolences, everyone had gone home. Lélia was waiting for Zanoute, who, overwhelmed by the grim ceremony, was resting.
The old woman was practically family. She’d been with the Maraises for over twenty years, serving them with great devotion. Then she had to go back to the mountains where she came from, to care for her parents who were too old to do without her. Zanoute never came to the city unless she absolutely had to. Still, she had been looking forward to attending Lélia’s wedding one day. She loved her like her own child. Instead, they had invited her to a funeral.
The poor woman couldn’t stop moaning and crying.
On the way back from the cemetery, Lélia had said to her, “Stay with me, Zanoute. I have to talk to you about something very serious.”
Something very serious? What could it be? Zanoute was worried.
* * *
Later, on the terrace, the two women pulled their chairs close. The air was humid. From time to time, lightning flashed silently through the sky. All they could hear were the flapping wings of frightened birds fleeing the looming thunderstorm. Sorrow, fatigue, the crushing heat of that mournful day all seemed to come together to create an unbearable atmosphere.
“Zanoute, what became of Mina?” Lélia finally decided to ask.
The old woman seemed stunned. She looked around fearfully. “Shhh. What if someone hears us?”
“Tell me what happened. Maman wanted you to tell me.”
“You don’t know anything?”
“No, I swear. You have to tell me what happened to Mina. I promised to go see her.”
“See her? How? She’s in France—”
“In France?”
The servant realized she owed this anguished soul the whole truth. “My poor child, your mother was a martyr. She died eaten away by sorrow and fear. May God forgive her silence.” Just as Lélia was about to ask another question, Zanoute lowered her voice and added, “Don’t interrupt me, I need courage to explain it all.”
It was so dark you’d think you were at the bottom of a pit. They couldn’t discern anything around them, but Zanoute bravely made up her mind. She had to reveal the unspeakable.
“Since you insist, here’s the story: Your father secretly possessed a temple. He practiced Vodou there, even though no one thought he would be involved. He was too bourgeois. He had the airs of a good, upstanding Catholic. For his temple, he chose beautiful women who became priestesses as well as his mistresses. He took them younger and younger. That’s how he cast his eyes on little Mina, his pretty orphan godchild who lived in his house. Ten years old! She was only ten! But she would soon be a woman. How could he reserve her for himself? So, this demon—excuse me, but he was the devil incarnate—resorted to spells to put the child to sleep, simulate her death, and turn her into a zombie!”
“Stop, stop it, Zanoute, this is awful!” Lélia felt her heart bursting with pity and shame. There was a long silence, which the young woman finally broke, apprehensively: “Go on. And then?”
“And then Mina grew up with the others in the temple and received the title of guardian. No one knows how, but it so happened that your mother found out about these sinister schemes. She nearly died of indignation and wanted to step in and denounce her husband. But he terrorized her and swore she would have the same fate as Mina if she betrayed him. Racked with fear, the wretched woman kept quiet. Soon she began to wither away. No one knew why.
“One day, you remember, there was that accident. As he was walking up the ravine, your father slipped and smashed his skull against a rock. He was brought back to the house, lifeless. Madame Marais thought she was saved. That’s when she confided these sad things to me. I had never suspected something so horrible. I was ready to do anything I could to help your mother. We had only one thing on our minds—to take Mina back.
“On an evening much like this one, sitting on this same terrace, we were trying to find a way to reach the girl without creating a scandal, when an old man suddenly popped up in front of us—where could he have come from?—and came so close to Madame Marais that she felt his breath on her face. He told her, hammering out his words: ‘You know too much! I am Marais’s successor. Woe to you and yours if you talk.’ I had to help your mother. She was feeling terrible.”
Overwhelmed with all this information, Lélia’s breathing became shallow, though she still managed to keep pushing Zanoute for more information. “But you said Mina was in France.”
“Shhh! Shhh!” Zanoute looked terrified as she peered into the darkness around her. “Without your mother’s knowledge,” she continued in a very soft voice, “I went to see the priest of Port-Vent and told him the story at confession. The good father was appalled. He was so upset that he did all he could to find Mina. After much searching, he discovered the temple and waited for the right moment to get inside. He found himself in the presence of the poor girl, Mina, who had become a complete idiot. She followed him to the presbytery where she was immediately treated by someone familiar with antidotes. Was there any hope for a cure? So many years had passed.
“The next day, at dawn—time was of the essence—Mina, dressed as a nun, boarded a ship for France with her savior. How did our good priest do this? Who had helped him? These things were so serious he couldn’t reveal them to me. He had told me enough already, and he made me promise to keep it all secret. In short, Mina is now in Paris, in the Convent of the Holy Sacrament. She’s a novice, under the name of ‘Sister Louise.’ I’m throwing all caution to the wind to obey the wishes of a dead woman. I’m taking a great risk.”
Lélia was crying uncontrollably. Nonetheless, she regained her courage. “Thank you, Zanoute. I will see Mina again. I promised my mother,” she said in a firm voice, while the storm they had been expecting began raging over
the land.
* * *
“Sister, I would like to see Sister Louise of the Holy Sacrament. Is this possible?” Lélia asked at the convent in Paris.
“Whom should I announce, mademoiselle?”
A second of hesitation, then she said, “Sister Louise won’t remember my name. I’m just a fellow Haitian passing through Paris and I would really like to say hello to her before I leave.”
“Please wait here, mademoiselle, I will inquire.”
Lélia Marais stood there in the parlor for a while without looking at anything around her. Not the gleaming waxed floor, nor the chairs neatly lined up against the wall, nor, on the ebony cross, the great ivory Christ whose emaciated face reflected all the sorrow of the world. She saw none of these things. She just stood there, waiting.
And then the door opened. Very slight in her black novice’s robe, a woman moved toward her. A young woman? No. A strange form of a woman. A livid, ravaged face hardened by a white headdress, her sunken eyes lifeless, that mouth with a frightening grin, and that walk, the walk of an automaton—could all this belong to a living being? The girl of twenty had no age.
Miraculously dragged from her torpor, she had awakened, but did she even belong to this earth? Where was she coming from? What had she seen? What did she really know? Was her body still the prisoner of unknown forces or had it recaptured its soul?
Stunned, Lélia stared at her childhood friend. Mina didn’t seem to recognize her. Lélia held her arms out to her, then, shaking and sobbing, fell to her knees and grabbed both of Mina’s hands, pulling them to her lips.
“Forgive us, Mina,” she said. “Please forgive all of us. Maman. All of us.”
Mina briefly leaned over her. When Lélia looked up, she met two eyes that bored right into her, then, like two flashes of lightning, immediately went out again. And already the door was opening, and Sister Louise was walking away, her steps as stiff and as slow as when she had arrived.
THE ENCHANTED SECOND LIEUTENANT
BY JACQUES-STEPHEN ALEXIS
Bassins-Coquilleaux
(Originally published in 1960)
Translated by Sharon Masingale Bell
I couldn’t have known Second Lieutenant Wheelbarrow—but on the other hand, I wouldn’t swear that I never met him. I can almost see his changeable, rather blue-green eyes, bitter and bloodshot, and his humped nose, curved and worried and aimed at his too-thin lips and undershot chin. And his hair—I see it like a reddish brush, abundant and curly, floating like a halo above a lanky body. Maybe that’s simply the image of some other Yankee soldier encountered some morning of my vagabond childhood; but anyway, I see Lieutenant Wheelbarrow. Arcane mysteries of childhood! Imagination! Fancy! Alluvions and illusions! Memory, that incredible sculptor that gives dimension, form, colors, and life to the entire virtual little world where we frolicked, stretched, and played so long ago!
But don’t conclude from this that Second Lieutenant Wheelbarrow never existed. Everyone knows how close I was to Maréchal Célomme, God rest his soul, and how he loved me. For this old fellow, a bit scolding and fatherly, a pious, severe papa lwa, was actually a great friend of plants, animals, and small children. It was he who entrusted me, long, long ago, with the few yellowed pages where the second lieutenant told his strange, brief story. Maréchal Célomme even showed me the little tomb crowned with basil where the second lieutenant lies, a few steps from the famous La Voûte grotto in the St. Marc highlands—a small sepulchre of bricks, ashes, and conch shell whitening next to the verdant little trail. Considered alone, the manuscript is nothing but the disturbing notation of an inner dream; and without Maréchal Célomme’s narrative—he was a marshal in the rural police force—I would never have been able to reconstruct the harsh poetry, the strange love that enflamed a brief but enchanted life like a Bengal light in the violet, violent mountains of the Bassins-Coquilleaux.
The story takes place around 1913 or 1914, when Earl Wheelbarrow was a noncommissioned cavalry officer in the United States Army. Born in Kentucky, an orphan, poor, and unsure of what could be done with a human life, Earl had vegetated up to that time like mildew without ever truly plumbing the depths of his own heart. Once he’d graduated from the high school where his uncle, a major in the Marines, had had him sent after his parents’ deaths, the youth was very much at a loss. He had no desire to go into the only large business in town—Chattanooga, a typical small Southern town, where he’d always lived. As a matter of fact, it was the metal works where his father had been killed by falling into a rolling mill. Earl wasn’t very good at math, so he couldn’t have made it in a small business or in sales. Being a bookmaker didn’t interest him. Becoming a gangster, a Tennessee terror, didn’t attract him either because it took too much energy; besides, he’d’ve had to recruit his own gang, there being very few racketeers and killers about town. At one point he’d thought of becoming a preacher and founding a new religion, but the Bible bored him. Leave, then? . . . Yes, but . . . He’d had no real friends, no real joys but ice cream sodas, the few parties to which nameless buddies would take him sometimes, Thanksgiving Days, a few deplorable lynchings of Negroes who’d had lustful eyes, and other obscene gesticulations that shook his native Chattanooga. So a carefully thought-out choice was no easy thing for this young man as tall as three days without bread are long. He operated for a while as a campaigner for a Dixiecrat candidate for governor; he tried baseball, joined the Salvation Army, worked on the local paper, pumped gas; nothing worked out. In the end, since his uncle (whom he’d known only through his letters) had often said that the army was a good old gal who relieved a man of the bother of having to think, he let himself be recruited. Not long afterward, without his knowing exactly how, he was promoted to second lieutenant.
In Earl Wheelbarrow’s life there were Rosasharn, Dorothy, and Eleanor, true enough, but he had never been able to make himself choose among them, nor had he let himself fall in love with any one of these Three Graces, so inseparable in his heart, one as essential as the other to the tranquil order of his habits. Between him and Rosasharn, a classmate’s sister, there did exist the seed of adolescent love, but it had never grown and flowered, never even germinated; it had barely put out a shoot, a hesitant, romantic camaraderie. As she grew up, Rosasharn had become a thoroughly sophisticated girl. In their external relationships, in public, Earl liked that, as long as Rosasharn became her old self again in private. However, Earl wouldn’t have wanted a real relationship with this girl for anything on earth. Alone, she’d have been incapable of fulfilling him, for without really knowing it himself, he was a puritan, as monogamous as he was lustful.
He’d made Dorothy his sweetheart. He liked to caress her the way one pets a pretty little animal, bite her cherry-red mouth in movie theaters, snuggle her cat’s body against his while dancing, listen to her insipid babbling, or watch her stuff herself with sweets, but that was all. This Dorothy, daughter of a local businessman, was delightfully stupid, marvelously lovely, shapely, ample of bosom, flat-bottomed, slim-hipped, long and lean of line—in short, a perfect example of the Yankee Venus. Earl couldn’t imagine that their relations could become anything other than what they were. Finally, Eleanor was a deceptive, elusive girl who sought out and fled from the pale officer at the same time. Sometimes she would court him with passionate, gothic novel phrases; other times, with no warning, she’d send him packing, dropping him cold without so much as a by-your-leave for the first man she saw. She would always come back to him, however, without the least embarrassment, like a chronic illness. This child-woman couldn’t stand the idea of anything tying her down and would give herself proof to the contrary as soon as she imagined it. And then, she liked to dabble, tasting everything, for the pleasures of love left her a strange taste of death. It was delightful. Life is short . . .
When his uncle died of apoplexy in Port-au-Prince, where he was something or other in the offices of the military attaché of Uncle Sam’s legation, Earl Wheelbarrow received, as
expected, a meager inheritance, but also a letter in which the major said that he was on the trail of a stupendous treasure. He’d been preparing for the expedition when death struck him. Nevertheless, he’d thought of all contingencies and had included in the sheet addressed to his nephew in case of his death papers indicating the probable location of the treasure. It was supposed to be somewhere in the region of the Bassins-Coquilleaux, in the St. Marc highlands. An unaccustomed energy took hold of the second lieutenant. Since he had no money but his salary, he racked his brain to find funds to complement the small sum his uncle had left him. He had to plan for a systematic search that might last a long time. When he was just about ready to give up, Dorothy, as a last resort, offered to act as Earl’s go-between and ask her father for a loan. This ape doubted the seriousness of the proposition, but he was a betting man. He grumbled, stormed, and thought about it, but as he never refused his daughter anything, he wound up giving in. Anyway, it wasn’t a fabulous sum; Earl was honest and would pay him back out of his salary if need be. And then—you can never tell—suppose Earl came back a multimillionaire?
* * *
The Muslin, a small freight and passenger vessel of three thousand tons, danced in the port of St. Marc. In the smoking room, Second Lieutenant Wheelbarrow stood at the portholes studying the foam-crinkled sea and the lofty mountains that form a bucolic crown around the little town. Along with two or three other passengers, Earl was waiting for the authorities who were expected for the customs formalities, which amounted to very little at that time. Earl looked at the titanic, voracious jaws of this bay, with little beaches of golden sand as teeth, and its immense blue tongue, the sea, greedily licking the shore. Earl let his eyes wander here and there, curious, preoccupied, and pensive at the same time.
He had embarked full of apprehension, wondering if it were possible for him to get used to the unthinkable: a country ruled by Negroes. Earl Wheelbarrow had no malice in his heart, but naturally, his young Southern ego, brought up in racism and imbued with the concepts of apartheid, recoiled at this idea. Up until then, Earl, unlike some others, hadn’t had even the slightest chance at real contact with the Negroes of Chattanooga or of the neighboring plantations. Naïve in his assumptions, ingenuous in his implacable mental cruelty, Earl Wheelbarrow remained indulgent with these bastards of the human race in spite of everything. Strange “happy-go-lucky” creatures whose souls he was sure he knew by dint of having crossed some of them in the street, or from having seen the white eyes and the lips turned back from the pink gums of niggers being stoned or made to dance from the end of a rope. Legitimate son of Jim Crow, contradictory, idealistic, generous, and yet capable of the worst frenzies of crime—what reflexes, what vivid inner sensations Earl Wheelbarrow would have to keep in check, to repulse, to hide, to bury deep inside himself during the time he expected to spend in this country! People said that these Haitian Negroes were unconscious of their innate inferiority, even proud of their race and their legendary past, sensitive to the slightest allusion, subject to take umbrage at the lightest prick, violent, and so familiar!