Edwidge Danticat - The Dew Breaker

And yes, I was in love with Auberte too. Sometimes I had dreams of Rosie, Vesta, and Auberte coming into the room I shared with my mother and sending my mother away only to fight one another for the honor of devirginizing me.

My wife stirs in our bed now, trying not to move from the one position she’s able to sleep in these days, on her back. My son, you are also lying on your side, I imagine, resting for your imminent journey to us. (You will have to tell me one day what it is you were really doing.)

Listen to your mother now as she says to me, “Michel, are you still talking into that cassette? Go to sleep. If the baby comes tomorrow I’ll need you rested.”

And listen as I, your father, reply, “Just another minute.” And listen now as your mother says, half jokingly, I hope, “I wish I was one of those women you only dreamed of sleeping with,” then goes back to sleep.

Now we return to Romain.

Romain did not drink the overly sweetened lemonade Auberte brought him. He was jittery, his fingers shaking as he bit into his bread. He put the rest of the bread down, got up and paced around the room, and pressed his face against the wall, coming short of banging his forehead against it. Then he walked over to the large television set on the coffee table, reached over as if to turn it on, then held himself back. Instead he sat down, picked up his lemonade once more, and stared into the glass at the thick layer of brown sugar refusing to melt at the bottom.

“When will your mother be back?” I asked him.

“Couple of days,” he said, raising his eyes from the glass. Then he paraphrased Voltaire the way he always did whenever he was served anything with too much sugar in it.

“C’est à ce prix qu’ils mangent du sucre en Europe,” he recited. That’s the price of their eating sugar in Europe.

While studying for his BAC exams, Romain had become too distracted by the French literature segments, going off to read entire books excerpted in his lessons. He would fall behind in class, while seeking other sources on the same themes until he’d mastered them. In the end, he gave up school entirely to study on his own. By way of explanation for ending his studies, he had simply cited someone else to his mother-I would later learn that it was Socrates-“Know thyself and you will know the world of the gods.”

But just then, when he looked at the sweet juice, which I was enjoying very much myself, saying “C’est à ce prix qu’ils mangent du sucre en Europe,” I replied, “Okay, your majesty,” feeling glad that at least his father wasn’t the only thing on his mind.

“I’m sharing with you Voltaire’s words,” he said. “I tell you that in Europe they eat sugar with our blood in it and you mock me with a colonial title.”

I realized then that it was going to be business as usual, just an ordinary Romain conversation, and so I said, “It seems to me we consume a lot of sugar here too. Does that mean we’re drinking our own blood?”

He laughed and said, “Imbecile, you’re like that baby pig who deigns to ask its mother how come her nose is so big and ugly. Let me be the mother and tell you, ‘Pig, son, one day you’ll find this out for yourself.’ ”

We both laughed. Then his face grew somber and he said, “You know, I’m not listening to the radio or watching television that much. Tante Vesta is, but I’m not.”

“Why watch television or listen to the radio?” I said. “If you want to know what’s happening, hit the béton, the pavement, go out into the streets.”

I was feeling cocky, brazen. I’d ventured out when Romain had not. I’d slipped away from my mother’s grasp to do something she disapproved of, visit with Romain. I felt I had an edge on him. I could now tell him about things he hadn’t yet witnessed, things that were going on out there in our new world.

“I know I shouldn’t be feeling this,” he said, brushing aside my attempted boast by simply ignoring it, “but I can’t help it. I’m a little worried about Regulus. I know the old man isn’t going to sit around waiting for them to get him, but it seems that people like him are going to die very painful deaths.”

“When was the last time you saw Regulus?” I asked.

“Last May eighteenth,” he said. “He was marching in the Flag Day parade on the national palace grounds with all those other macoutes. I went to watch the stupid parade, just to spot him.”

“They probably won’t find him,” was all I could think to say. “He has so many women. One of them will hide him good. Maybe he’ll cross the border, go to the Dominican Republic.”

“Maybe,” Romain said, halfheartedly agreeing to all those possibilities. Maybe Regulus would survive and emerge from all this a new man, repent for all his sins, reclaim all his children, offer them his name-if they still wanted it-beg their forgiveness, both for what he’d done to them and for what he had done to his country.

My mother popped into my head once again. By now she’d probably noticed that I was gone and was furiously looking for me, ordering Rosie and Vaval to join the search. She would think I was out running around with the demonstrators, trying to discover where they would go next, see who they’d find and what they’d do.

“What’s the matter?” Romain asked.

“I’m worried about my mother,” I confessed. “She might be fretting about me.”

“Twelve years old,” he said, “and still Mama’s baby. I’m going to make you a man today. We’re going to do like those guys, like Regulus. We’re going to escape.”

We didn’t tell Vesta where we were going. We simply hurried past her, Romain mumbling that we’d be right back.

“Come back here!” Vesta yelled as we rushed out of the house. “Do you know what’s going on out there? Come back!”

As we sprinted away, I asked Romain, “Where are we going?”

“If we had someplace in mind,” he said, “then we’d be going on a trip, not escaping.”

Most of the shops near Romain’s house were closed even as the streets were growing more and more crowded. On the way to the bus depot, we found ourselves in the middle of a mock funeral procession with a group of “pallbearers” carrying two wooden coffins, one for the president and the other for his wife. Some of the men in the crowd donned priest’s cassocks while young women in black dresses pretended to be sobbing and fainting from inconsolable grief. Among the mock mourners were a few waving blue denim uniforms, which they claimed to have stripped off fleeing macoutes.

We made our way out of the crowd and down an alley into a quieter street, where we found a taxi. Romain jumped in and told the driver, “We’d like to go to La Sensation Hotel.”

“That’s not going to be easy,” the driver said, “with all the people on the streets.”

“Take all the shortcuts you know,” Romain said. “You’ll be paid well.”

The drive to La Sensation confirmed that we couldn’t escape what was going on, short of leaving the city or the country. Everywhere we went, even through the narrowest side streets, byways, back ways, there were people jumping out of corners, waving flags, ripping old posters of the president and his wife, and carrying containers of kerosene, hoping to find a macoute to punish.

When we finally made it to the walled oasis of the hotel, Romain sent me ahead to wait for him in the garden while he settled things with the driver; then we walked over to the front desk together, only to find out that all the rooms were booked, mostly by desperate foreign journalists who were due to arrive within the next twenty-four hours. Romain had been counting on a former classmate who worked as a porter at the hotel to get him a room, where we would hide out until things calmed down. Our escape was going to be financed by Romain’s mother, who left him a big wad of cash whenever she went away.