with the sharp edge of their blade, events that had fixed borders and bounds. Even if Bonal had tried to stop counting, the fragmentation of the land hadn’t stopped. Upon leaving the notary’s office, Bonal, remembering the incident, shook his head from right to left under his floppy straw hat, frayed on the sides, while touching the bills in his right pocket.
All these memories came to weave a web of dark paths in his head, leading nowhere. A light vertigo came over him. And then, above all, there was Anastase Mésidor’s smile. Not clear. Too good to be true. A smile that sent a chill down his spine. A smile that was a sign of nothing good to come. He thought for a moment of the Grand Maître high above, sighing, his throat dry. But God, the Grand Maître, was really too far to quench his thirst, and Bonal, touching the bills again, settled on some good glassfuls of clairin.* Not one of those trempés* with macerated herbs, spices, and bark. No. A good clairin, pure, to scald his tongue, burn his throat, and never says and wake his soul up in the middle of beautiful flames so that, for just a few hours, his life appeared before him like a luminous road without brambles. Without thickets. Without bayahondes. Without Anastase Mésidor. Without a cumbersome family. Agile on his legs with their protruding muscles, chin slightly forward, he advanced with a resolute stride in the direction of Baudelet.
“So many offspring for all these men! So many! Ten, fifteen, twenty, and even more!” sighed Bonal. Nonetheless, this idea of staying flush to the grave reinvigorated him, and he had a sweet and fleeting thought for a young femme-jardin* from Nan Campêche, hard working, soothing, with strong thighs, and who had given him two children. He smiled as he lightly passed his hand over his thick beard and quickened his step, running after visions, despite the yaws that bit at his left heel.
But, in fear of being beaten up by the Marines and forced into one of their dreadful chain gangs or, worse, to be slaughtered with no warning just for being mistaken as one of the cacos* rebels, Bonal changed his mind. Fear in his core, but agile like a wild cat, he preferred to use the steep paths. This fear twisted his guts, which he had to tame, to calm, he knew it all too well. Acid and painful fear. Fear that never loosened its grip. Stuck to us like a second skin. Planted inside us like a heart. Fear, a heart in itself. Beside you to love, share, laugh, cry, or get angry. So, in big strides, Bonal chose to move toward it in solitude. In the bushes and the bayahondes. To advance into the unknown. There where nobody came to look for us. Where the shadows are: in the eyes of beasts, under the bark of trees, in the sighs of the wind, under the leaves, in the stone beneath the dirt. He touched the small blister under his left arm and walked in this strange light of the undergrowth. Where he could merge with breath, the murmur of elements. Where he could be everything and nothing at once. There where Gran Bwa* watches over his children and topples their fear. Where he reduces it to silence. Bonal hummed quietly, several times in a row, without even noticing it:
Gran Bwa o sa w té di m nan?
Mèt Gran Bwa koté ou yé?
Gran Bwa what did you tell me?
Grand Bwa where are you?
And went on with a light step, very light…
5.
Once he was on the path in Baudelet, Bonal slowed down in order to not arouse any suspicion and put on a normal face, the face of the villages, the face of a peasant smiling ear to ear, dazed by hunger and obscure divinities. Who says nothing, sees nothing, laughs, and never says no.
Bonal stopped, like on all the rare occasions when he went to Baudelet, at Frétillon’s store, not far from the market. “The Haitian peasant is a child, I tell you all, a child!” Albert Frétillon liked to repeat as he twirled his thick mustache. And we always agreed, nodding our heads and staring at the ground. Which reassured Albert Frétillon, who stuck his thumbs underneath his suspenders and, to better observe us from above, lifted his head, stretched out his neck, and adjusted his glasses.
Frétillon’s two sons, François and Lucien, and their only sister, Églantine, donning gloves and a hat, had gone to France on one of the large ocean liners that often docked in Badaulet to make a fortune in ports on both sides of the Atlantic. Albert Frétillon’s fortune went back two generations, since an ancestor from La Rochelle had settled in Baudelet and started a lineage of mulattoes in this port town, the bourgeois of the province. In addition to his coffee trade, Albert Frétillon prepared, in a guildive* at the entrance of the town, the best clairin around. Once the brandy was distilled, he spent most of his time on the porch of his house, next to the shop his wife ran. The chief of police, town judge, and director of Baudelet’s only school met there, with some others, to bicker and speak their minds.
That afternoon, Anastase Mésidor, after purchasing Bonal’s lands, joined them in their heated ranting. They hadn’t let go of the events of the past few months. The director of the school in Baudelet brought up, once again, the cities bombed by the American Air Force, the bloody debacle of the leaders: Charlemagne Péralte assassinated, tied up naked to a wooden door and displayed in a public square; and Benoît Batraville, killed some months later. The volume rose. Some of them, like the judge, spoke of their sense of honor, pounding their chests as they went on, of an unbounded love for their homeland. Some of the others, like the chief of police and Anastase Mésidor, vaunted the benefits of this civilizing presence that was finally going to put an end to the fratricidal fights of the savages we were. “Yes, all, we are savages!” In saying the word “savage,” Anastase noticed Bonal standing in front of the store and beckoned him with his finger, with an insistence that didn’t reassure the latter. Albert Frétillon had acquiesced to all of these opinions. Absolutely. The future and prosperity of his business depended on this total absence of opinion, on this conviction that had been planted in him, that we the peasants would never grow up.
Bonal took off his old straw hat and flashed them his biggest smile. He even let himself, as usual, be lulled to the point of vertigo by the subjunctive imperfects and Latin words of these gentlemen—a feeling he’d felt since leaving the notary’s study—and he felt a strange premonition that confirmed this finger pointed at him. Then, addressing this unease, he decided to drown it in the clairin he was dreaming of since the sale of the lands. A real clairin.
At the first sip, just outside of Baudelet, Bonal naturally remembered the offering to make to Legba,* to open the door to family divinities, the offering to Agwé,* so that the ocean would keep feeding them for a long time, and to Zaka,* so that the jardins would be more generous. The earth already seemed lighter to him, suggesting that the sun at its zenith had made a clean world, clear, emptied. He went hurriedly toward the bush, in the direction of Anse Bleue.
Bonal disappeared that same day. Without Zaka, without Agwé, without Legba. Those among us who didn’t want to stand up to the powerful said that drunkenness was the cause of his inexplicable disappearance. Some swore having seen a group of men, riding donkeys, who had, without a doubt, taken Bonal’s money and, then, his life. Others recalled the presence of a goat that stood on the edge of the road and spoke clearly, showing two golden teeth. Some swore they had seen an old woman who, after moving with the light step of young girl, must have disappeared in the gorge at the bottom of the ravine. The whole affair unfolding before the indifferent eyes of two Marines, each with an imposing gun slung over his shoulder.
And each of us added a little more, added a little more…
Trying to clear up all suspicion, Anastase Mésidor sent a messenger by horse to meet Dieula Clémestal, the mother of Bonal’s four children: Orvil, Philogène, Nélius, and Ilménèse. But the anger had already shut Dieula’s jaw shut to the point that she didn’t say a word. Not a single word the whole time the messenger stood before her at the entrance to her hut, awkwardly fidgeting with the hat in his hands.
“Your honor, Madame Bonal! It’s Anastase Mésidor who sends me to tell to you…”
In response, Dieula slowly lit her pipe. Very slowly. Exhaling strongly three times in a row without ever raising her head. Then she spat so loudly and so forcefully that the man left immediately. He did not even