Edwidge Danticat - Haiti Noir

Charles Morgan, le-dit Charlie Chapo, was a connoisseur of many cultures and had experience of more than one pathway to the trance state that preceded full possession. Tonight he was combining several techniques-a scrap of qi gong, a bit of yoga, a subroutine of self-hypnosis-all in hope of bucking the ego out of his being for a time. He had planed down his consciousness till it was as frail as the weave of his worn-out hat, but he could not get all the way through membrane. Not tonight. A couple of times the thing had happened to him by itself, and while it terrified him then, he still desired and tried for it even though he knew how wrong-headed and futile it was to think that he could get there by trying.

Monkey-mind had a hold on him tonight. He let his monkey watch the show. As it would do before a crisis, the drumming knotted up as the dancers tightened themselves under the drums; the dancers mostly women now, except for one male onsi clad in white, working his way blindly toward the center, holding out a white candle with its yellowish flame and a white enamel cup of water. Charlie let himself sway like a tree in the wind. A respectable-looking woman standing just ahead of him let out a quiet sigh and slumped back into the arms he’d reflexively raised to catch her. As easily as that. It was a peripheral event; the dancing and drumming were still binding tighter. Charlie supported the woman from her armpits; her limp arms spread wide, like the arms of Christ on the cross. Presently others came and bore her away.

Charlie had just been relieved of his burden when the clenched fist of dancing cracked open under the drums. Two women who’d been dancing very close flung back, repelled from each other; one screaming harshly and tearing at her head. Charlie didn’t know what had happened to the onsi with his candle and cup, but between the two possessed women appeared Magloire; the women falling away from him like two halves of a hatching egg. Strangely, Magloire now seemed to be cradling the nub of red candle Charlie had earlier seen him place on the altar. That was Magloire’s body certainly, the deep eyes ringed with red, then white, but the person Charlie knew as Magloire was nowhere behind those eyes, not now. He had gone elsewhere, and Charlie, knowing that he could not follow, swelled up with jealousy and loneliness; at the same time, however, there was a moment of sympathy, for he knew in a backward fashion the same thing Magloire had known of him before, thinking, If only I could see, could be, the face of a living god.

Abandoned, Doctor Oliver sat by the railing above the hotel pool, lapping at a stale beer. There was a three-way discord between the soft konpa playing in the bar, the drumming and chanting and occasionally shrieking from the onfò, and the more aggressive dance music booming from a club at sea level down below. He watched the moon climb higher in the sky above black waves, perfectly round and full and alien and cruel. This moon cared nothing for him or for his predicament. A number of starved dogs quarreled in the dark streets below the battlements of the hotel; he felt sure they would devour him if they could. That man, that man in the square today, had believed that Doctor Oliver was stealing something from him with his eyes.

Behind his eyelids he could feel the pullulating of the marketplace where he had been that day with Magloire, the interminable screaming of need and exchange and over it all that harsh voice crying in its monotone, “Oil, oil, oil.” Grease the wheel. How abjectly everything seemed to cooperate in its own spoliation, quite as Charlie Chapo had said. The scene was miniaturized in his mind’s eye as if he saw it through a backward telescope, and he did appreciate how very small of him it was to imagine that this whole swarming nation existed only to serve his need. Still, they had robbed him. He had been robbed. He’d been robbed and he wanted to kill someone.

The morning Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin turned seven, a rogue wave, measuring, by some visual accounts, between ten and twenty feet high, was seen in the ocean outside of Ville Rose. Claire’s father, Gaspard, was one of a few people to notice the wave as he untied the twin sisal ropes that bound his fishing boat to a large rock on the beach. He first heard a low rumbling, like that of distant thunder, then saw a wall of water rise from the depths of the ocean, a giant blue-green tongue, trying, it seemed, to lick the sky.

Just as quickly as it had swelled, the wave crashed in, collapsing on itself, sending hardly a ripple toward the beach where Gaspard was standing, in shock. Thrust above the crest of the wave then pinned down beneath its trough, a small dinghy vanished. Its owner was a man who for years Gaspard had greeted as they hurried past each other, at dawn, on their way out to sea. In an instant Gaspard’s neighbor and friend was gone and so was any sign that anything out of the ordinary had taken place.

That sweltering morning Gaspard had slept in, contemplating the impossible decision he’d always known he’d one day have to make: to whom, finally, to give his daughter.

“Woke up earlier and I would have been there,” he tearfully told his sweet-faced little girl after watching the boat disappear.

Molasses-toned with bulging penny-colored eyes, Claire was still lying on the foam-board cot in their single-room shack, her thin night dress soaking in the back with sweat, as she dreamed of something she wouldn’t be able to recall when she was fully conscious. Upon waking, she wrapped her long bony arms around her father’s neck, just as she had when she was even littler, pressing her nose against his tear-dampened cheek. Some years before, her father had told her what had happened on her very first day on earth, that giving birth to her, her mother had died. So her birthday was also a day of death, and the rogue wave and the dead fishermen proved that it had never ceased to be. Even so, before her father had spoken that morning, Claire had hoped that he might have come to wish her a happy birthday, but she knew that he might also be saying goodbye.

The day Claire Limyè Lanmè turned six, Ville Rose’s new mayor decided to host a massive victory party in the seaside town. However, before the party, he gave a long and tiresome speech from one of the stone steps of the town hall, which overlooked a flamboyant-filled piazza, where hundreds of residents stood elbow to elbow in the May afternoon sun. The mayor’s speech was badly organized, and even more badly delivered, and the mayor, a tall balding man, soaked, with his sweaty fingers, the nearly twenty typewritten pages the speech was written on, even while occasionally pulling a handkerchief out of the breast pocket of his armpit-stained linen suit to wipe his brows. Claire was wearing her pink muslin birthday dress, her thick, woolly hair neatly plaited and covered with tiny bow-shaped barrettes. She sat on her father’s shoulders while he stood on the edge of the crowd, close to the giant speakers that made Claire feel the mayor’s words rattling through her bones. Still, she could hear a familiar voice shout above it all that it seemed as though the speech had been written by a primary school boy.

“Don’t all political speeches sound like that?” her father replied, inspiring a coy smile from the woman he had snaked through the crowd to stand next to. The woman was in her early thirties but, because she was short and round with an oval girlish face, looked a lot younger. She owned one of Ville Rose’s most popular fabric shops, where Claire’s mother, a seamstress for the town undertaker, used to buy cloth. After Claire’s mother died, whenever Gaspard went in to buy a piece of cloth to have a dress made for his daughter, the woman would always refuse payment by saying, “Fòk youn voye je sou lòt.” We must look after one another.