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THE SOUL SUCKERS
I look up to orient myself: in the L-shaped angle of the house, right above me, the bank of windows along the wall of the library where I’d been sitting just a while ago. Unlike the first floor where colored lights illuminate the party, the mezzanine is dark except for some tall narrow windows glowing red, like gems on black velvet. I make a mental note to go check out that red room sometime before I leave.
With my eyes, I drop a line from the library down to the foot of the palm tree a few yards away, where a solar lamp signals the path. I walk over and bend down to examine the place where I thought I’d seen the joint land after I’d stupidly thrown it out the window earlier. I can’t believe it; right there, on one of the flat stones lacing the path, I find it.
I walk back towards the front of the main house from which escape the sounds of a mini-jazz playing a seductive konpa; the small carriage house to my left lets out a line of white-clad waiters carrying trays of drinks and hors-d’oeuvres. Guests are milling about from one building to the other. I’m crossing the grove of ornamental trees and bushes forming an intermittent screen through which I can admire the scintillating women in their titillating dresses and the men, suited up for the occasion. I have a skewed view of both houses, but I’m still hidden within the L of the courtyard.
A loud POP sucks the air out of my ears and sends me stumbling against a tree; my head feels suspended inside a bubble of silence as if my bell had just gotten rung. I look towards the origin of the sound: a man has caught on fire. He’s one of the tuxedoed dancers who had been on stage when I first arrived. He’s burning altogether, rooted to the spot and everyone around him freezes in mid-gesture, staring, entranced, as he disappears burning, burning down to the ground. POP goes the air vacuumed from my head. The other dancer, who had been standing, petrified, behind the burning man, goes up in flames too and is being consumed just as rapidly as his friend.
People are starting to come out of their paralysis, jumping up, running, punching numbers on their cell phones, the air is buzzing and crackling; it’s a panic. I take a deep breath. Oh my ears, my ears! I know one thing: I don’t want to be around when the police shows up and clamps down on this party; I must vacate the premises now.
Using the trees as cover, I move away from the commotion, almost forgetting the joint in my hand. Legs shaking, I lean against a palm tree to regain some kind of composure and I find myself sliding down its trunk until my ass is sitting on the raised border of the path; I light up and take a small sip, trying to assess the situation.
Seized with laughter, I had followed the girls and their mother down the mezzanine stairs, past the dance floor and the stage, out across the sweep of lawn decorated with lanterns hanging from small trees. At the top of the stone staircase fanning out over the sidewalk, we had said goodbye, shaking hands solemnly. I watched them go down and get into a van on whose sides were painted the words: “THE TORTILLA FACTORY”. I realized then, I’d met these girls at their mother’s restaurant of the same name, a couple of years ago. They had grown so much, I hadn’t recognized them. They had seemed so much more mature tonight, dressed as miniature sambistas to dance with the Brazilian troupe. It was almost impossible to reconcile these glittering fantasy beings with the little girls in flip-flops and cotton skirts who had introduced me to their secret world. What was her name again, the one with the very special eyes? Cinella.
I stood there, perched on the wall bordering the stairs above the street, remembering her eyes. I suddenly understood the meaning of her name; she had cinnamon-colored skin, hair and eyes. Spanish-speaking parents had replaced the first syllable of the Spanish word for the spice, canella, with the English one. I resolved to go see them again to tell them how much I appreciate their gift.
Children’s voices rose from the foot of the staircase; two boys sat on the bottom steps, their words reaching me clearly, their eyes seeking me out.
“In our grandma’s time” said the smaller one “when they had parties like this, the big people from this house used to always send plates of food over to our house and our neighbors’ too. Now they don’t do that anymore”.
“Yes” interjected the taller one “when she was our age, our manman used to go in the small house during the parties and receive plates of food for her household. Now these new people don’t know any of that stuff anymore. They act like they don’t even see us”.
“Hey boys” I interrupted “do your people know you’re out here at this time of night?”
“What time?” answered the younger one impertinently “it’s not even one o’clock in the morning yet, and what about those two girls who just left? They were out too and they made their mother look all over for them. She was asking everyone about them”.
“Maybe, but they were with their mother who made the hors-d’oeuvres and they were part of the entertainment” I explained, “I missed their show, though… Hey do you want me to go get you some food?”
“Oh it’s supposed to be the people throwing the party who distribute the food, not the guests” They giggled, looking at me mischievously. “Anyway don’t think it’s because we’re hungry” the tall one continued, “it’s just that in the old days, it was a custom among neighbors and now it’s been forgotten because those new people here don’t even remember their family spirit”.
“Is that so?” I smiled “Well, I’m going to get you some food all the same, In memory of the old days. Wait for me.”
Inside the old carriage house, where long tables are laid out with all sorts of dishes, I managed to pile as much food as possible on three separate plates. From the tortilla factory: taquitos, shrimp vol-au-vents, tomato-mozzarella bites: the hors-d’oeuvres. Then the main dishes: deep-fried pork, chicken Creole, grilled goat, squashed fried green plantains, green bean and carrot salad, rice and beans ‘kole’ (cooked together). Carefully balancing them, I wove my way back to the kids.
I had arrived at the party fashionably late, dropped off by friends on their way elsewhere, and when I surveyed the scene, I realized that I had very little chance of finding the people who had invited me; Brazilero, one of the percussionists for the samba troupe and his dancer wife Fiya who, during this visit to Haiti, had been invited to join some local talent at this very posh gathering of the beautiful people. I was here by accident and didn’t really know anyone.
By the time I reached the dance floor, the Brazilian troupe had already left the stage. A group of young black guys in white face and wearing tuxedoes on bare torsos were jumping on and starting an enraged tap dance routine. Everyone around me was dancing. The tall, colorful feathers of the sambistas’ headdresses bobbed here and there above the crowd. I let myself be carried by the surge as it propelled me across the large room, until I reached a double staircase leading to a mezzanine. Going up I felt I was being released from a bunch of anchored balloons, and rising, solitary, leaving all the noise behind. From this vantage point, the dancers on stage had taken on the look of a black and white kaleidoscopic amoeba moving with the speed and precision of its individual molecules.
I opened a set of glass doors covered with gauze veils and closed them behind me. The illusion of solitude was complete. I stood in a long narrow room, lined with built-in bookshelves and a bank of wide windows through which I could see the softly moving tops of palms below. To my left loomed a giant
hammock almost entirely hidden under a mountain of coats and wraps. The light from downstairs barely defined the shapes of furniture in silhouette. I walked over to an open window and, sinking into a deep armchair, took a big breath of fresh air.
Below, the palm trees follow each other symmetrically, small solar lamps bordering a path at their feet; beyond that, empty grounds pockmarked by shadowy mounds and even darker shadows. A cottage with its porch light on glows at the periphery of darkness across the expanse. From the little cloth bag slung over my shoulders and across my chest, I fish out a joint and a Bic lighter. I take a puff, blowing the smoke out over the windowsill. Still breathless and sweaty from my journey across the dance floor, I deliberately calm my heartbeats, leaning back against the cushions and take another toke. Lights high at the heart of the palms turn out to be stars blotted by the brightness from the party. The music reaches me faintly.
When I hear the door opening behind me, I instinctively throw the joint out the window and instantly regret it; I follow its trajectory like a falling star and watch it land, in a dream of sparks, at the edge of a white path. A woman’s voice startles me:
“Where are these girls?” she laments, clearly exasperated.
At the corner of my eyes, the pile of clothing on the hammock heaves and breaks open and two girls emerge, rubbing their eyes. They jump down and adjust their headdresses of long, nodding feathers.
“What are you girls doing here?” the woman exclaims, “Didn’t I tell you to wait for me after your show? Didn’t I tell you to wait near the kitchen door where I could find you? I’ve been looking all over for you!”
“Sorry Mommy”, the tallest one answers, “we just couldn’t take it anymore.”
They were both wearing the feathered and glittery costumes of sambistas; almost nude, with sequined strips of fabric strategically placed. They stretched and moved their limbs with the awkward grace of pre-adolescence; mirroring each other faithfully, they started miming for us, the party below. Soon I was splitting my sides, their mother joining in, until we were weak with laughter and still the girls continued their contortions, eye-rolling and hand gestures, mimicking the pointy speech of pretentious society people, the kind who take a trip to Paris and come back home pretending to have forgotten how to speak the Creole language. I couldn’t stop laughing and I fell in step behind them, following them down the stairs and around
the dance floor; I waited for them, leaning against the kitchen door frame, when they stopped to say goodbye to some members of their troupe who had congregated by the stage. The tuxedo guys had finished their number, and the mini-jazz was setting up.
I let those images whirl behind my closed lids as I mold my back to the tree trunk, trying to control the shaking that is threatening to overcome my body. The sparkly girls, their outrageously made up faces, the small boys rising from the steps and carrying off their plates of food, the slick tuxedoed guys furiously tap-dancing to a D.J mix, looking like replicas of each other with their black-lacquered hair against the white grease paint on their dark faces, the sickening POP displacing the air inside my skull, the men burning to ashes. I’m hyperventilating. I shake my head, slowing my breathing.
I have to get out of here. I know this neighborhood; I went to school near here. In my mind, I conjure a bird’s eye view of the property; there must be a back way, a humble gate that opens on the Saint-Antoine slums as surely as the grand stairway in front faces the fashionable avenue John Brown. Yes, a back gate used by servants and workers… I take a puff.
“Are you going to smoke this alone?”
In front of my downcast eyes, a pair of jeweled sandals with bits of topaz and amethyst caught in thin braids of gold leather flash in the feeble glow of the solar lawn-light. The same sandals I’d seen earlier, while catching my breath, still crushed with laughter, from the kitchen door, while waiting for the girls to finish their farewells (their names suddenly come back to me like a children’s rhyme: Luna, Cinella and the youngest, who had probably been left at home with her auntie, Evita). I had admired these sandals on a very young woman whose beautiful feet I had noticed in the brightly lit kitchen, as they tried to twist away from the forceful embrace of a much older man. I saw him from behind: his white skin, shellacked salt and pepper hair, his hunched powerful shoulders, pressing her to him; her face, jammed against his chest, had been hidden from me, but there was no mistaking the violence of his attitude. He was immobilizing her, dominating her, hurting her, whispering fiercely:
“You’re mine and you’ll stop this ridiculous affair now! I’m warning you! I should have known when I saw you in that dive last month, that only a lowlife like him could have taken you to such a sordid place”.
“No, I’m not yours. I don’t belong to you and after tonight, you’ll see…”
“I’ll see you upstairs in the red room as usual, to end this party properly.”
“I swear to you,” her words were being compressed and expelled from her chest “After tonight there will be no more of your parties for me. Your friends are worse low lives than he could ever be.”
Her slightly raspy voice brings the entire scene back to my memory. I can’t make out her features in the half-light, but that spiky dark hair, that lunar skin, seem dimly familiar, as if I’d seen her somewhere else before tonight; could it have been at Big Mama’s? I can’t place her.
“What happened over there?” she asks, pointing towards the brouhaha, “What was that sound?”
“I have no idea,” I answer at least half-truthfully. “It sounded like some kind of firecrackers that got everyone excited. I’m not a big fan, you know. I came to see the samba show and I was about to leave when I just stopped here to smoke this in peace. Sounds like people are getting rowdy. Isn’t there a back way I could take through Saint-Antoine?”
“You don’t know what’s going on?” she insists.
I just shrug my shoulders, passing her the joint.
“Okay,” she says, taking it. “I’ll show you the side gate, but be careful, we’re still planting these full-grown palms and there are giant holes around, so stick to the lit pathways. Oh, first I have to stop by my apartment over there for a few minutes”. She points to the little cottage across the huge yard. I get a prickly feeling at the nape of my neck but I answer casually:
“Good, ‘cause I have to pee.”
The path divides and we follow it leftward to the raised porch. I immediately duck into the bathroom she indicates just right of the entrance. Her phone rings. I leave the door ajar and can hear her answer:
“Yeah… I don’t think she knows anything; she was smoking in the courtyard beyond the grove… When I asked her she said firecrackers… She was just leaving… She couldn’t possibly have seen anything from over there I tell you…Why can’t you just leave it alone? I’m sure she knows nothing…No I don’t think she needs to be rounded up with the others…”
I tiptoe over and flush the toilet, then yell through the door:
“Hey, do you have a safety pin or something? The strap on my dress just broke.”
“I’ll get you one.” she yells back.
I slip out of the bathroom as she exits towards the main part of the cottage; I slide through the open front door and crouch down the three steps, keeping low to the ground, I step off the path and immediately fall into a deep hole.
I can hear them, no feel them, leopard men, jackal men, panting above me, sniffing. I dive into the pile of dirt where I had landed and wallow in it until my face, arms and light grey dress are completely obscured. I roll into a ball, wedged between the dirt pile and the side of the hole. I blank out my
thoughts, concentrating on the delicious smell of damp earth around me. All goes quiet above. I let my spine melt and sink in.
Time goes swinging by with the spatter of stars. I breathe in synch with the suns and planets pricking the air above my hole and stay quiet for a long, long time, my mind riding the stratosphere. When I get up, I’m relieved to discover my body still works in spite of the slight ache in my right shoulder. I raise my dress and gathering it sideways, tie it into a big knot below my hips. I take off my shoes, and, holding them both in one hand, I use their stiletto heels to gouge indentations on the side of the hole. I start climbing, taking advantage of these improvised foot and hand-holds, digging new ones as I go. Instinctively, I start whispering the words I know to make my body one with the earth, putting into practice what I’d learned from the three little dancing girls, remembering Cinella’s eyes and what she had taught me, until I’m not so much climbing as crawling upwards, feeling the snake-like movements of the packed dirt under me echoed through the motion of my muscles. When I reach the top, I’m stuck. I don’t know how to get around the overhang. I shimmy laterally, plunging my fingers and toes in the gouges I’ve made, draping myself over the rounded edge, my feet anchored but my arms not long enough to navigate the lip. I’m almost halfway out but can’t go any further. I continue praying to the earth power.
Hands grab my wrists and pull me through. It’s the two boys from the bottom steps earlier, at the front gate. They whisper urgently and point:
“Do you see that low building over there? Go there to the left side, through the door. Take the ramp leading down, not the steps that go up. You’ll be in a tunnel. Follow it to another door you’ll push open. You’ll be in a small enclosure and across from you will be a bush of Flè Kloch (Bell Flowers). Hide behind it. We’ll meet you there okay? Just wait for us”.
They run off and, still crouching, I run in the opposite direction ‘til I reach the small door in the warehouse. My shoes are in my hand, the little cloth bag slung across my chest; I want to leave nothing behind. Beyond the door, a cement slope disappears into darkness and a flight of steps goes up towards an entryway. I hesitate, unable to make myself take the tunnel as instructed. I feel a disturbance on the other side of the wall across from me and obeying the urge to move, I jump up the stairs into a very narrow room filled with surveillance equipment. All the monitors are off.
On the other side of the room, facing me, a large glass panel shows the top part of another room. To my left, a console stretches all the way to the glass partly obscured by a coat rack holding what seem to be overalls and jackets. I hop to hide behind it and look down into the other room. The group of tuxedoed dancers in white-face, are being herded in. They look panicked as they make ineffectual attempts at evading their armed escorts whose faces are covered by gas masks. Some kind of liquid starts spraying them from vents in the walls. I hear footsteps.
It’s one of the leopard guards, wearing a khaki uniform that matches his blue-spotted skin, he comes forward in ninja position, with a knife in his left hand. Invisible to him, I wait until he’s almost on top of me, then I step out of the shadows, rearing up from below, baring my teeth, grabbing his wrists and pulling him towards me. Sidestepping to his right, I push his back in the direction he was going and slam his hands into the ledge under the glass panel, taking the knife. I square off plunging it into the base of his spine, severing the spinal cord. As he goes down, I put my foot on his ass and kick, leaving me with the knife in my hand and him under the counter. Just then, another jackal arrives and there is no time to hide. I’m already in place; I jump into his arms and slam my body against his, wrapping my arms around him and grinding my pelvis into his. I begin to pant and moan, squirming and sliding my left leg up his right thigh.
“What does this mean?” He quakes and drops his weapon.
With both hands behind his neck, I bury mine between his sixth and seventh cervical vertebrae and he follows his friend under the table. From here, I have a good view of the room below. The tuxedoed dancers are scrambling, still trying to find a way out, but they’re trapped. One of them climbs on another’s shoulders and drives his fist through a high window. His wrist and cuff come out red with blood; leopard men flood the room. My chance to escape while they’re busy quelling the doomed rebellion.
At the foot of the stairwell, I stall. Still can’t make myself go into the tunnel, so I turn away and cross the length of the warehouse on the double, at a low gallop that takes me to a loading dock. I drop down to a construction area and continue on to the top of a retaining wall, looking into a yard below. Tall palm trees are stacked horizontally nearby, their roots wrapped in burlap.
The two boys show up next to me:
“Why didn’t you take the tunnel like we told you to? You could have been caught in there! Now jump and wait for us behind that bush, we’ll see you”.
I let myself fall and land hard on the packed dirt that sends a jolt through my legs and knees; I spot the bell flowers and promptly hide behind them.
I’m leaning against a corrugated iron fence held together by narrow criss-crossed wooden beams. The bush hiding me is Datura Stramonium, a.k.a Bell Flowers, renowned in the world of sorcery. Their fragrance enters my pores: bees in morning, the smell of bees in the morning of childhood. I breathe in deeply, my heart still racing. The flowers are making me drunk; I let the fence hold me up, giggling silently at the memory of the move I used against the second guard. A move we had made up, my friend Maroca and I, when we were sparring with some big gun martial artists at an interdisciplinary dojo in California, called Open Hands. We had been practicing a move named Negativa, a Capoeira defense consisting in dropping down to evade a straight kick. Just for fun, we asked the boys if they knew the opposite of that move, something we invented on the spot and called Positiva: as a defense for a straight kick, instead of going down, you move in laterally into the open side, and jump into your opponent’s arms, surprising him for an instant into losing his cool. The boys were incensed, believing that the master had taught us girls a secret move he was keeping from them and nothing we said subsequently could persuade them that we had not been privy to some occult knowledge, passed on to us because of an imagined sexual relationship with the master in question. My entire body relaxes with laughter; I must have looked really good rearing up in front of him, my skin and dress all smeared with dirt…
The small saviors have returned, peering at me through the branches, and passing me a bottle of water and a plate of food. It’s some of the hors-d’oeuvres I had given them earlier: Taquitos from the tortilla factory, mozzarella-tomato bites, shrimp vol-au-vents; I realize I’m super hungry.
“Our mother sends you this. You wait here until that door in the wall opens. You’ll see a bunch of steers come out with a guy leading them. Hide from him. When the cows pass in front of you, crouch way down and get in between them and when you do this, keep calm. The guy will open this gate over here to herd the animals out; maneuver your body so that when the time comes, you’ll go through the left side of the gate. Just beyond it, you’ll find a woman in front of a house; she’s our mother, you’ll go with her.
I’m left with the food and water. I endeavor to chew slowly and deliberately, consciously trying to unlock the muscles in my jaw. When I’m done, I let my eyes close, feeling as if my soul were a very narrow stick of graphite inside a hugely swollen wooden pencil; the Bell Flowers exude their medicinal smell and I fall into a slumber, standing up, holding on to the plastic plate.
The creak of the door opening jerks me awake and a group of cows fills the small yard. They are all black with white faces, white collars and white bands around their ankles, clearly visible in the darkness. They jostle one another and moo pitifully as I take my position, staying low so my head and shoulders don’t stick out; when we squeeze though the opening, I keep to the left and feel hands grab me around the waist. As the last of the herd passes by, I notice he is limping and a stained bandage is wrapped around one of his front ankles.
I’m pulled inside a tiny house, built like the one next door, against the retaining wall of the big property above us, where the party had taken place eons ago. I stand there, not knowing what to do, too groggy to talk, just looking at the woman who immediately begins to remove my dress. She takes the plate from me, the empty bottle and my shoes and even the little clip that holds up my hair. She returns my cloth bag across my bare chest and leads me outside to a space enclosed between the tall stone wall and the corrugated iron fence. No tunnel entrance interrupts the surface of the wall shining orange from a small fire burning in the center of the yard. A five gallon can is steaming next to it, set on two bricks, and releasing the aroma of good-smelling leaves. An empty burlap sack radiates from it like the spoke of a wheel. Not far from the fire, a shallow hole had recently been dug, its pile of dirt beside it.
The woman takes a burning stick, places it in the hole and puts my things on top. I watch them catch fire. She goes in the house and comes back with a white candle and a glass of water. She hands them to me, saying:
“You see me living here, in the shadow of two malefactors, in this house we inherited from our great grandmother. Believe me my sister, if they could have sucked my soul out they would have. No, nothing can do me here, because I serve frank Guinea, the white-light flower of Vodou, which cannot be defiled. You see you are here? It’s not by accident. You have a good heart, you have the love for other humans the great vodou guard Jesus of Nazareth, the one we sometimes call John the Baptist or Little John Petro, talked about. Anyway, my sister, this cow business, I’m praying God to stop it. It’s a shame, a scandal every year, that kind of party; every year a troupe of cows comes out of the gate next to mine, when no cows ever went in. Those big people up there, the malefactor next door selling that flesh to their high up associates and the foreigners who come buy our power. Those poor performers looking for life in the capital, getting caught in a thing like that, disappearing with no hope of being found. Oh it’s a shame... And a worse shame that we’ll never hear anything about it, as if nothing had ever happened…those poor young men, becoming meat for the owners of the world… Now, my sister, I want you to take everything you’ve seen and done tonight out of your mind and put it in that small hole, to burn with your clothes and get buried with them.”
The boys’ mother prays in hushed tones and when she tells me to light the candle at the fire and pour some water from the glass on the ground, I pray with her. Then she says:
“Now talk.”
I thank the Divine Light in all its forms and ask for what I need. When I’m done, she indicates I should lie down on the burlap cloth. Taking a bundle of leaves from the five-gallon can, she slaps them hard on my back, along my spine, in a kind of pounding massage which empties me of all anxiety and all fatigue. She goes down that way the length of my entire body, then, turning me over, she rubs the herbs all over me as if I were a horse just arrived from a great race, until nothing is left in my memory but the image of the fire before me.
She says that’s good and takes my hands, pulling me upright. She places leaves on top of my head. I feel the fragrant water run down my scalp and neck through my hair. Goose bumps flare across my skin as the night air dries me. I follow her inside where she hands me a dress of white cotton, the kind of plain shirtwaist dress the initiates wear at vodou services, and a white scarf for my head. I take off the little bag and I try to give her some money, placing it on the table by the door, but she puts it back saying I will need it for the taxi ride. She gives me some sandals of thin plaited leather made locally, and often worn by market women down from the mountains. I don’t have time to ask myself how I will find a taxi around here; she takes my hand and looks into my eyes:
“My sons are waiting for you. When you step out, don’t look back. They’ll take you to a cab driver who will bring you where you need to go. Don’t be afraid; just pay him the twenty when you get there. Don’t worry and make sure to leave last night in the fire, you hear me?”
I hug her wordlessly.
THE SOUL SUCKERS
I look up to orient myself: in the L-shaped angle of the house, right above me, the bank of windows along the wall of the library where I’d been sitting just a while ago. Unlike the first floor where colored lights illuminate the party, the mezzanine is dark except for some tall narrow windows glowing red, like gems on black velvet. I make a mental note to go check out that red room sometime before I leave.
With my eyes, I drop a line from the library down to the foot of the palm tree a few yards away, where a solar lamp signals the path. I walk over and bend down to examine the place where I thought I’d seen the joint land after I’d stupidly thrown it out the window earlier. I can’t believe it; right there, on one of the flat stones lacing the path, I find it.
I walk back towards the front of the main house from which escape the sounds of a mini-jazz playing a seductive konpa; the small carriage house to my left lets out a line of white-clad waiters carrying trays of drinks and hors-d’oeuvres. Guests are milling about from one building to the other. I’m crossing the grove of ornamental trees and bushes forming an intermittent screen through which I can admire the scintillating women in their titillating dresses and the men, suited up for the occasion. I have a skewed view of both houses, but I’m still hidden within the L of the courtyard.
A loud POP sucks the air out of my ears and sends me stumbling against a tree; my head feels suspended inside a bubble of silence as if my bell had just gotten rung. I look towards the origin of the sound: a man has caught on fire. He’s one of the tuxedoed dancers who had been on stage when I first arrived. He’s burning altogether, rooted to the spot and everyone around him freezes in mid-gesture, staring, entranced, as he disappears burning, burning down to the ground. POP goes the air vacuumed from my head. The other dancer, who had been standing, petrified, behind the burning man, goes up in flames too and is being consumed just as rapidly as his friend.
People are starting to come out of their paralysis, jumping up, running, punching numbers on their cell phones, the air is buzzing and crackling; it’s a panic. I take a deep breath. Oh my ears, my ears! I know one thing: I don’t want to be around when the police shows up and clamps down on this party; I must vacate the premises now.
Using the trees as cover, I move away from the commotion, almost forgetting the joint in my hand. Legs shaking, I lean against a palm tree to regain some kind of composure and I find myself sliding down its trunk until my ass is sitting on the raised border of the path; I light up and take a small sip, trying to assess the situation.
Seized with laughter, I had followed the girls and their mother down the mezzanine stairs, past the dance floor and the stage, out across the sweep of lawn decorated with lanterns hanging from small trees. At the top of the stone staircase fanning out over the sidewalk, we had said goodbye, shaking hands solemnly. I watched them go down and get into a van on whose sides were painted the words: “THE TORTILLA FACTORY”. I realized then, I’d met these girls at their mother’s restaurant of the same name, a couple of years ago. They had grown so much, I hadn’t recognized them. They had seemed so much more mature tonight, dressed as miniature sambistas to dance with the Brazilian troupe. It was almost impossible to reconcile these glittering fantasy beings with the little girls in flip-flops and cotton skirts who had introduced me to their secret world. What was her name again, the one with the very special eyes? Cinella.
I stood there, perched on the wall bordering the stairs above the street, remembering her eyes. I suddenly understood the meaning of her name; she had cinnamon-colored skin, hair and eyes. Spanish-speaking parents had replaced the first syllable of the Spanish word for the spice, canella, with the English one. I resolved to go see them again to tell them how much I appreciate their gift.
Children’s voices rose from the foot of the staircase; two boys sat on the bottom steps, their words reaching me clearly, their eyes seeking me out.
“In our grandma’s time” said the smaller one “when they had parties like this, the big people from this house used to always send plates of food over to our house and our neighbors’ too. Now they don’t do that anymore”.
“Yes” interjected the taller one “when she was our age, our manman used to go in the small house during the parties and receive plates of food for her household. Now these new people don’t know any of that stuff anymore. They act like they don’t even see us”.
“Hey boys” I interrupted “do your people know you’re out here at this time of night?”
“What time?” answered the younger one impertinently “it’s not even one o’clock in the morning yet, and what about those two girls who just left? They were out too and they made their mother look all over for them. She was asking everyone about them”.
“Maybe, but they were with their mother who made the hors-d’oeuvres and they were part of the entertainment” I explained, “I missed their show, though… Hey do you want me to go get you some food?”
“Oh it’s supposed to be the people throwing the party who distribute the food, not the guests” They giggled, looking at me mischievously. “Anyway don’t think it’s because we’re hungry” the tall one continued, “it’s just that in the old days, it was a custom among neighbors and now it’s been forgotten because those new people here don’t even remember their family spirit”.
“Is that so?” I smiled “Well, I’m going to get you some food all the same, In memory of the old days. Wait for me.”
Inside the old carriage house, where long tables are laid out with all sorts of dishes, I managed to pile as much food as possible on three separate plates. From the tortilla factory: taquitos, shrimp vol-au-vents, tomato-mozzarella bites: the hors-d’oeuvres. Then the main dishes: deep-fried pork, chicken Creole, grilled goat, squashed fried green plantains, green bean and carrot salad, rice and beans ‘kole’ (cooked together). Carefully balancing them, I wove my way back to the kids.
I had arrived at the party fashionably late, dropped off by friends on their way elsewhere, and when I surveyed the scene, I realized that I had very little chance of finding the people who had invited me; Brazilero, one of the percussionists for the samba troupe and his dancer wife Fiya who, during this visit to Haiti, had been invited to join some local talent at this very posh gathering of the beautiful people. I was here by accident and didn’t really know anyone.
By the time I reached the dance floor, the Brazilian troupe had already left the stage. A group of young black guys in white face and wearing tuxedoes on bare torsos were jumping on and starting an enraged tap dance routine. Everyone around me was dancing. The tall, colorful feathers of the sambistas’ headdresses bobbed here and there above the crowd. I let myself be carried by the surge as it propelled me across the large room, until I reached a double staircase leading to a mezzanine. Going up I felt I was being released from a bunch of anchored balloons, and rising, solitary, leaving all the noise behind. From this vantage point, the dancers on stage had taken on the look of a black and white kaleidoscopic amoeba moving with the speed and precision of its individual molecules.
I opened a set of glass doors covered with gauze veils and closed them behind me. The illusion of solitude was complete. I stood in a long narrow room, lined with built-in bookshelves and a bank of wide windows through which I could see the softly moving tops of palms below. To my left loomed a giant
hammock almost entirely hidden under a mountain of coats and wraps. The light from downstairs barely defined the shapes of furniture in silhouette. I walked over to an open window and, sinking into a deep armchair, took a big breath of fresh air.
Below, the palm trees follow each other symmetrically, small solar lamps bordering a path at their feet; beyond that, empty grounds pockmarked by shadowy mounds and even darker shadows. A cottage with its porch light on glows at the periphery of darkness across the expanse. From the little cloth bag slung over my shoulders and across my chest, I fish out a joint and a Bic lighter. I take a puff, blowing the smoke out over the windowsill. Still breathless and sweaty from my journey across the dance floor, I deliberately calm my heartbeats, leaning back against the cushions and take another toke. Lights high at the heart of the palms turn out to be stars blotted by the brightness from the party. The music reaches me faintly.
When I hear the door opening behind me, I instinctively throw the joint out the window and instantly regret it; I follow its trajectory like a falling star and watch it land, in a dream of sparks, at the edge of a white path. A woman’s voice startles me:
“Where are these girls?” she laments, clearly exasperated.
At the corner of my eyes, the pile of clothing on the hammock heaves and breaks open and two girls emerge, rubbing their eyes. They jump down and adjust their headdresses of long, nodding feathers.
“What are you girls doing here?” the woman exclaims, “Didn’t I tell you to wait for me after your show? Didn’t I tell you to wait near the kitchen door where I could find you? I’ve been looking all over for you!”
“Sorry Mommy”, the tallest one answers, “we just couldn’t take it anymore.”
They were both wearing the feathered and glittery costumes of sambistas; almost nude, with sequined strips of fabric strategically placed. They stretched and moved their limbs with the awkward grace of pre-adolescence; mirroring each other faithfully, they started miming for us, the party below. Soon I was splitting my sides, their mother joining in, until we were weak with laughter and still the girls continued their contortions, eye-rolling and hand gestures, mimicking the pointy speech of pretentious society people, the kind who take a trip to Paris and come back home pretending to have forgotten how to speak the Creole language. I couldn’t stop laughing and I fell in step behind them, following them down the stairs and around
the dance floor; I waited for them, leaning against the kitchen door frame, when they stopped to say goodbye to some members of their troupe who had congregated by the stage. The tuxedo guys had finished their number, and the mini-jazz was setting up.
I let those images whirl behind my closed lids as I mold my back to the tree trunk, trying to control the shaking that is threatening to overcome my body. The sparkly girls, their outrageously made up faces, the small boys rising from the steps and carrying off their plates of food, the slick tuxedoed guys furiously tap-dancing to a D.J mix, looking like replicas of each other with their black-lacquered hair against the white grease paint on their dark faces, the sickening POP displacing the air inside my skull, the men burning to ashes. I’m hyperventilating. I shake my head, slowing my breathing.
I have to get out of here. I know this neighborhood; I went to school near here. In my mind, I conjure a bird’s eye view of the property; there must be a back way, a humble gate that opens on the Saint-Antoine slums as surely as the grand stairway in front faces the fashionable avenue John Brown. Yes, a back gate used by servants and workers… I take a puff.
“Are you going to smoke this alone?”
In front of my downcast eyes, a pair of jeweled sandals with bits of topaz and amethyst caught in thin braids of gold leather flash in the feeble glow of the solar lawn-light. The same sandals I’d seen earlier, while catching my breath, still crushed with laughter, from the kitchen door, while waiting for the girls to finish their farewells (their names suddenly come back to me like a children’s rhyme: Luna, Cinella and the youngest, who had probably been left at home with her auntie, Evita). I had admired these sandals on a very young woman whose beautiful feet I had noticed in the brightly lit kitchen, as they tried to twist away from the forceful embrace of a much older man. I saw him from behind: his white skin, shellacked salt and pepper hair, his hunched powerful shoulders, pressing her to him; her face, jammed against his chest, had been hidden from me, but there was no mistaking the violence of his attitude. He was immobilizing her, dominating her, hurting her, whispering fiercely:
“You’re mine and you’ll stop this ridiculous affair now! I’m warning you! I should have known when I saw you in that dive last month, that only a lowlife like him could have taken you to such a sordid place”.
“No, I’m not yours. I don’t belong to you and after tonight, you’ll see…”
“I’ll see you upstairs in the red room as usual, to end this party properly.”
“I swear to you,” her words were being compressed and expelled from her chest “After tonight there will be no more of your parties for me. Your friends are worse low lives than he could ever be.”
Her slightly raspy voice brings the entire scene back to my memory. I can’t make out her features in the half-light, but that spiky dark hair, that lunar skin, seem dimly familiar, as if I’d seen her somewhere else before tonight; could it have been at Big Mama’s? I can’t place her.
“What happened over there?” she asks, pointing towards the brouhaha, “What was that sound?”
“I have no idea,” I answer at least half-truthfully. “It sounded like some kind of firecrackers that got everyone excited. I’m not a big fan, you know. I came to see the samba show and I was about to leave when I just stopped here to smoke this in peace. Sounds like people are getting rowdy. Isn’t there a back way I could take through Saint-Antoine?”
“You don’t know what’s going on?” she insists.
I just shrug my shoulders, passing her the joint.
“Okay,” she says, taking it. “I’ll show you the side gate, but be careful, we’re still planting these full-grown palms and there are giant holes around, so stick to the lit pathways. Oh, first I have to stop by my apartment over there for a few minutes”. She points to the little cottage across the huge yard. I get a prickly feeling at the nape of my neck but I answer casually:
“Good, ‘cause I have to pee.”
The path divides and we follow it leftward to the raised porch. I immediately duck into the bathroom she indicates just right of the entrance. Her phone rings. I leave the door ajar and can hear her answer:
“Yeah… I don’t think she knows anything; she was smoking in the courtyard beyond the grove… When I asked her she said firecrackers… She was just leaving… She couldn’t possibly have seen anything from over there I tell you…Why can’t you just leave it alone? I’m sure she knows nothing…No I don’t think she needs to be rounded up with the others…”
I tiptoe over and flush the toilet, then yell through the door:
“Hey, do you have a safety pin or something? The strap on my dress just broke.”
“I’ll get you one.” she yells back.
I slip out of the bathroom as she exits towards the main part of the cottage; I slide through the open front door and crouch down the three steps, keeping low to the ground, I step off the path and immediately fall into a deep hole.
I can hear them, no feel them, leopard men, jackal men, panting above me, sniffing. I dive into the pile of dirt where I had landed and wallow in it until my face, arms and light grey dress are completely obscured. I roll into a ball, wedged between the dirt pile and the side of the hole. I blank out my
thoughts, concentrating on the delicious smell of damp earth around me. All goes quiet above. I let my spine melt and sink in.
Time goes swinging by with the spatter of stars. I breathe in synch with the suns and planets pricking the air above my hole and stay quiet for a long, long time, my mind riding the stratosphere. When I get up, I’m relieved to discover my body still works in spite of the slight ache in my right shoulder. I raise my dress and gathering it sideways, tie it into a big knot below my hips. I take off my shoes, and, holding them both in one hand, I use their stiletto heels to gouge indentations on the side of the hole. I start climbing, taking advantage of these improvised foot and hand-holds, digging new ones as I go. Instinctively, I start whispering the words I know to make my body one with the earth, putting into practice what I’d learned from the three little dancing girls, remembering Cinella’s eyes and what she had taught me, until I’m not so much climbing as crawling upwards, feeling the snake-like movements of the packed dirt under me echoed through the motion of my muscles. When I reach the top, I’m stuck. I don’t know how to get around the overhang. I shimmy laterally, plunging my fingers and toes in the gouges I’ve made, draping myself over the rounded edge, my feet anchored but my arms not long enough to navigate the lip. I’m almost halfway out but can’t go any further. I continue praying to the earth power.
Hands grab my wrists and pull me through. It’s the two boys from the bottom steps earlier, at the front gate. They whisper urgently and point:
“Do you see that low building over there? Go there to the left side, through the door. Take the ramp leading down, not the steps that go up. You’ll be in a tunnel. Follow it to another door you’ll push open. You’ll be in a small enclosure and across from you will be a bush of Flè Kloch (Bell Flowers). Hide behind it. We’ll meet you there okay? Just wait for us”.
They run off and, still crouching, I run in the opposite direction ‘til I reach the small door in the warehouse. My shoes are in my hand, the little cloth bag slung across my chest; I want to leave nothing behind. Beyond the door, a cement slope disappears into darkness and a flight of steps goes up towards an entryway. I hesitate, unable to make myself take the tunnel as instructed. I feel a disturbance on the other side of the wall across from me and obeying the urge to move, I jump up the stairs into a very narrow room filled with surveillance equipment. All the monitors are off.
On the other side of the room, facing me, a large glass panel shows the top part of another room. To my left, a console stretches all the way to the glass partly obscured by a coat rack holding what seem to be overalls and jackets. I hop to hide behind it and look down into the other room. The group of tuxedoed dancers in white-face, are being herded in. They look panicked as they make ineffectual attempts at evading their armed escorts whose faces are covered by gas masks. Some kind of liquid starts spraying them from vents in the walls. I hear footsteps.
It’s one of the leopard guards, wearing a khaki uniform that matches his blue-spotted skin, he comes forward in ninja position, with a knife in his left hand. Invisible to him, I wait until he’s almost on top of me, then I step out of the shadows, rearing up from below, baring my teeth, grabbing his wrists and pulling him towards me. Sidestepping to his right, I push his back in the direction he was going and slam his hands into the ledge under the glass panel, taking the knife. I square off plunging it into the base of his spine, severing the spinal cord. As he goes down, I put my foot on his ass and kick, leaving me with the knife in my hand and him under the counter. Just then, another jackal arrives and there is no time to hide. I’m already in place; I jump into his arms and slam my body against his, wrapping my arms around him and grinding my pelvis into his. I begin to pant and moan, squirming and sliding my left leg up his right thigh.
“What does this mean?” He quakes and drops his weapon.
With both hands behind his neck, I bury mine between his sixth and seventh cervical vertebrae and he follows his friend under the table. From here, I have a good view of the room below. The tuxedoed dancers are scrambling, still trying to find a way out, but they’re trapped. One of them climbs on another’s shoulders and drives his fist through a high window. His wrist and cuff come out red with blood; leopard men flood the room. My chance to escape while they’re busy quelling the doomed rebellion.
At the foot of the stairwell, I stall. Still can’t make myself go into the tunnel, so I turn away and cross the length of the warehouse on the double, at a low gallop that takes me to a loading dock. I drop down to a construction area and continue on to the top of a retaining wall, looking into a yard below. Tall palm trees are stacked horizontally nearby, their roots wrapped in burlap.
The two boys show up next to me:
“Why didn’t you take the tunnel like we told you to? You could have been caught in there! Now jump and wait for us behind that bush, we’ll see you”.
I let myself fall and land hard on the packed dirt that sends a jolt through my legs and knees; I spot the bell flowers and promptly hide behind them.
I’m leaning against a corrugated iron fence held together by narrow criss-crossed wooden beams. The bush hiding me is Datura Stramonium, a.k.a Bell Flowers, renowned in the world of sorcery. Their fragrance enters my pores: bees in morning, the smell of bees in the morning of childhood. I breathe in deeply, my heart still racing. The flowers are making me drunk; I let the fence hold me up, giggling silently at the memory of the move I used against the second guard. A move we had made up, my friend Maroca and I, when we were sparring with some big gun martial artists at an interdisciplinary dojo in California, called Open Hands. We had been practicing a move named Negativa, a Capoeira defense consisting in dropping down to evade a straight kick. Just for fun, we asked the boys if they knew the opposite of that move, something we invented on the spot and called Positiva: as a defense for a straight kick, instead of going down, you move in laterally into the open side, and jump into your opponent’s arms, surprising him for an instant into losing his cool. The boys were incensed, believing that the master had taught us girls a secret move he was keeping from them and nothing we said subsequently could persuade them that we had not been privy to some occult knowledge, passed on to us because of an imagined sexual relationship with the master in question. My entire body relaxes with laughter; I must have looked really good rearing up in front of him, my skin and dress all smeared with dirt…
The small saviors have returned, peering at me through the branches, and passing me a bottle of water and a plate of food. It’s some of the hors-d’oeuvres I had given them earlier: Taquitos from the tortilla factory, mozzarella-tomato bites, shrimp vol-au-vents; I realize I’m super hungry.
“Our mother sends you this. You wait here until that door in the wall opens. You’ll see a bunch of steers come out with a guy leading them. Hide from him. When the cows pass in front of you, crouch way down and get in between them and when you do this, keep calm. The guy will open this gate over here to herd the animals out; maneuver your body so that when the time comes, you’ll go through the left side of the gate. Just beyond it, you’ll find a woman in front of a house; she’s our mother, you’ll go with her.
I’m left with the food and water. I endeavor to chew slowly and deliberately, consciously trying to unlock the muscles in my jaw. When I’m done, I let my eyes close, feeling as if my soul were a very narrow stick of graphite inside a hugely swollen wooden pencil; the Bell Flowers exude their medicinal smell and I fall into a slumber, standing up, holding on to the plastic plate.
The creak of the door opening jerks me awake and a group of cows fills the small yard. They are all black with white faces, white collars and white bands around their ankles, clearly visible in the darkness. They jostle one another and moo pitifully as I take my position, staying low so my head and shoulders don’t stick out; when we squeeze though the opening, I keep to the left and feel hands grab me around the waist. As the last of the herd passes by, I notice he is limping and a stained bandage is wrapped around one of his front ankles.
I’m pulled inside a tiny house, built like the one next door, against the retaining wall of the big property above us, where the party had taken place eons ago. I stand there, not knowing what to do, too groggy to talk, just looking at the woman who immediately begins to remove my dress. She takes the plate from me, the empty bottle and my shoes and even the little clip that holds up my hair. She returns my cloth bag across my bare chest and leads me outside to a space enclosed between the tall stone wall and the corrugated iron fence. No tunnel entrance interrupts the surface of the wall shining orange from a small fire burning in the center of the yard. A five gallon can is steaming next to it, set on two bricks, and releasing the aroma of good-smelling leaves. An empty burlap sack radiates from it like the spoke of a wheel. Not far from the fire, a shallow hole had recently been dug, its pile of dirt beside it.
The woman takes a burning stick, places it in the hole and puts my things on top. I watch them catch fire. She goes in the house and comes back with a white candle and a glass of water. She hands them to me, saying:
“You see me living here, in the shadow of two malefactors, in this house we inherited from our great grandmother. Believe me my sister, if they could have sucked my soul out they would have. No, nothing can do me here, because I serve frank Guinea, the white-light flower of Vodou, which cannot be defiled. You see you are here? It’s not by accident. You have a good heart, you have the love for other humans the great vodou guard Jesus of Nazareth, the one we sometimes call John the Baptist or Little John Petro, talked about. Anyway, my sister, this cow business, I’m praying God to stop it. It’s a shame, a scandal every year, that kind of party; every year a troupe of cows comes out of the gate next to mine, when no cows ever went in. Those big people up there, the malefactor next door selling that flesh to their high up associates and the foreigners who come buy our power. Those poor performers looking for life in the capital, getting caught in a thing like that, disappearing with no hope of being found. Oh it’s a shame... And a worse shame that we’ll never hear anything about it, as if nothing had ever happened…those poor young men, becoming meat for the owners of the world… Now, my sister, I want you to take everything you’ve seen and done tonight out of your mind and put it in that small hole, to burn with your clothes and get buried with them.”
The boys’ mother prays in hushed tones and when she tells me to light the candle at the fire and pour some water from the glass on the ground, I pray with her. Then she says:
“Now talk.”
I thank the Divine Light in all its forms and ask for what I need. When I’m done, she indicates I should lie down on the burlap cloth. Taking a bundle of leaves from the five-gallon can, she slaps them hard on my back, along my spine, in a kind of pounding massage which empties me of all anxiety and all fatigue. She goes down that way the length of my entire body, then, turning me over, she rubs the herbs all over me as if I were a horse just arrived from a great race, until nothing is left in my memory but the image of the fire before me.
She says that’s good and takes my hands, pulling me upright. She places leaves on top of my head. I feel the fragrant water run down my scalp and neck through my hair. Goose bumps flare across my skin as the night air dries me. I follow her inside where she hands me a dress of white cotton, the kind of plain shirtwaist dress the initiates wear at vodou services, and a white scarf for my head. I take off the little bag and I try to give her some money, placing it on the table by the door, but she puts it back saying I will need it for the taxi ride. She gives me some sandals of thin plaited leather made locally, and often worn by market women down from the mountains. I don’t have time to ask myself how I will find a taxi around here; she takes my hand and looks into my eyes:
“My sons are waiting for you. When you step out, don’t look back. They’ll take you to a cab driver who will bring you where you need to go. Don’t be afraid; just pay him the twenty when you get there. Don’t worry and make sure to leave last night in the fire, you hear me?”
I hug her wordlessly.
