E-Book, Englisch, 216 Seiten
Reihe: Jacaranda
Depestre Hadriana in All My Dreams
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-909762-74-9
Verlag: Jacaranda Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 216 Seiten
Reihe: Jacaranda
ISBN: 978-1-909762-74-9
Verlag: Jacaranda Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
René Depestre, born in 1926, is one of the most important voices of Haitian literature. A peer of seminal figures Aimé Césaire, Pablo Neruda, and André Breton, Depestre has engaged with the politics/aesthetics of negritude, social realism, and surrealism for more than half a century. Having lived through significant moments in Haitian and New World history-from the overthrow of Haitian dictator Élie Lescot in 1946, to the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris in 1956, to a struggle with Haiti's François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier in 1957, to a collaboration with Cuban revo- lutionary Che Guevara and a fraught relationship with Fidel Castro in the 1960s and '70s-Depestre is uniquely positioned to reflect on the extent to which the Americas and Europe are implicated in Haiti's past and present.
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CHAPTER ONE
BALTHAZAR AND THE SEVEN
LOINS OF
MADAME VILLARET-JOYEUSE
—James Joyce
1
THAT YEAR, TOWARD the end of my childhood, I was living in Jacmel, a coastal village in Haiti. When my father died, my mother and I moved from La Gosseline Avenue to go live with my maternal uncle. Thanks to his position as magistrate, he and his wife resided in a bright and spacious dwelling on Bourbon Street, in Bel-Air. On public holidays, during the most blistering hours of the day, I used to take my sorrows out for a little air on the balcony of their wood-frame house. I’d wait for something to catch my eye, to distract me enough for my imagination to wander off into daydreams.
One Sunday in October, in the middle of the afternoon, a car suddenly caught my attention—it was driving slowly down our street, and from my spot on the balcony, I could make out two people inside.
“What do you see there?” asked Mam Diani.
“A convertible.”
“Whose car is it?”
“I’ve never seen it before.”
“Really?... And the passengers?”
“A lady and her driver.”
“A lady out and about in this heat?”
The car came closer, its motor humming gently. On both sides of the road, our neighbours were already out on their verandas or peering out of their windows. Like my mother and me, they too were curious about this new development.
“A cabriolet, a sedan, a coupé?” asked my mother.
“A limousine, pearl-gray, brand new!”
“And the lady, for heaven’s sake, who is she?”
“It’s my godmother, Madame Villaret-Joyeuse. Lil’ Jérôme is at the wheel.”
“Hush your mouth, Patrick! Germaine Muzac is on her death bed!”
My dream car was right there before my eyes. Lil’ Jérôme Villaret-Joyeuse was wearing a beige silk shirt, a pair of navy-blue pants, and a Panama hat. His normally cheerful and boyish Caribbean face had taken on the tragic mask of someone executing a daunting task. His mother was seated in the middle of the backseat, with a large Chinese fan in one hand and a chambray handkerchief in the other. She had on a mauve dress with a lace collar, closed with a silver brooch. The sleeves came to her elbows and had organdy flounces. At her neck, a gold chain held an ivory crucifix, and her earrings and bracelets sparkled. She was bareheaded but carefully coiffed. She had the lips, nose, and cheeks of a perfectly healthy person. But her eyebrows, which she had always kept arched and very full, had grown excessively—right up to the very top of her forehead and all around her eyes. They formed a giant moth; the antennae, body, and delicate silver scales of butterfly wings were clearly visible. It looked sort of like a carnival mask, covering half her face and made of velvet, or satin. To what masked ball could my godmother possibly be headed in this relentless mid afternoon heat?
“Mercy! Have mercy on us!” said my mother, who made the sign of the cross before looking up at me in consternation. “Patrick, get down there and follow them.”
I obeyed without hesitation. The car turned onto Church Street toward the northern side of the town’s central square, Place d’Armes (also known as Toussaint Louverture Square). All of a sudden, everyone on the surrounding balconies was paralyzed with shock. General Télébec, the hundred-year-old parrot that lived in the prefecture, constantly on alert for the latest gossip, fell right off his perch and then took off, screaming: “Help, help—it’s the end of the world!”
The neighbourhood dogs joined the chorus. Brutally awakened from his nap, Jacmel’s prefect, Barnabé Kraft, rushed to the steps of the building, still in his silk pyjamas.
“Forgive me, my dear Germaine!” the prefect shouted at the car. “ You’re in fine shape, aren’t you? Hush, Télébec, you won’t fare well at the court martial!”
At the Star Café, run by Didi Brifas, the regulars who played cards on the terrace just sat there facing their fellow card players, arms dangling and mouths agape.
“Damnation, Lil’ Jérôme!” were the only words Togo Lafalaise managed to utter.
Lil’ Jérôme appeared indifferent to the general panic. It seemed like nothing in the world was more important to him than the curved path he was taking between the square and the Saint Rose of Lima School for nuns. The sisters greeted his car with signs of the cross. Several of them threw themselves to their knees in the establishment’s sunny inner courtyard. One of them cut a flower and threw it over the fence.
Past the trees of Lovers Lane, the car continued on to the Siloé family manor. Built down below the square, the house’s third floor windows were even with the height of the overhanging esplanade, which the car had just begun to pass. So it was Hadriana Siloé, opening the Venetian blinds of her bedroom windows, who found herself with a prime seat from which to watch the passing of the woman who, at an interval of three years, had held both of us over the same baptismal font. My godsister rubbed her eyes before crying out: “Godmother, wait, my love, I’m coming down!”
Upon hearing the young French girl, instead of braking, Lil’ Jérôme accelerated his descent toward Orléans Street, which ran alongside the Siloés’ garden. I took off in a cloud of dust and finally caught up with the car right in front of the prison, where Lil’ Jérôme had slowed down to a funereal pace. At the entrance to the penitentiary, the guard, stunned, presented his Springfield rifle with great ceremony, as if the lovely Villaret-Joyeuse were some high-ranking police official.
At the very bottom of the steep coast, after a corkscrew turn, the warehouses on the docks came into sight. We passed in front of the ochre-coloured buildings of the customs house and the tax offices. We reached a paved platform where on weekdays hundreds of women sang as they sorted the coffee for the Radsen brothers’ export business. Once there, Lil’ Jérôme slowed down even more, as if to allow the living butterfly mask that had taken the place of his mother’s eyes a chance to enjoy the fabulous brilliance of the sun glistening on the coconut trees, the wild grasses and boulders of the coast, and the roiling waves of the bay. The weather was heavenly. In different circumstances, the romantic adolescent that I was back then would have saluted the beauty of the world with unbridled cries, while dancing and rolling on the ground in jubilation. Instead, tears came to my eyes and my knees buckled beneath me as the limousine dragged me along, helpless as I was in the face of death.
Taking Seafront and Réunion streets, Lil’ Jérôme quickly arrived in the Bas des Orangers neighbourhood, located in one of the remote areas of Jacmel. We moved forward among the dilapidated cottages that were piled up helter-skelter along the alleys overrun by weeds and potholes. A few shirtless men played dominoes, while hordes of children followed a paper canoe race in the sewer water. Seated on very low chairs, thighs parted, a few matronly women furiously deloused some howling little girls. Three young women, their six breasts exposed, competed to see who could produce the strongest stream of milk. An old man, using a shard from a broken bottle, shaved a young boy’s head, the glass scraping closely along the scalp. Stacked chaotically in the shade of the verandas, families, dogs, cats, and chickens all killed time Haitian-style on this October Sunday.
Suddenly, a terrified voice rose above the din of Estaing Alley: “Zombie car on the loose!”
It was every man for himself in the courtyard. Panicked, all God’s children somehow lost all sense of time: it could just as easily have been three thirty in the afternoon or three thirty in the morning, 1938 or 38 BC. Five hundred meters farther, completely out of breath, I felt like I had succeeded in making my way back to the month of October—and to the twentieth century—upon reaching the main street that turned onto La Gosseline Avenue where the Villaret-Joyeuse family resided. Lil’ Jérôme sped through the gate, and I found myself terribly alone in the disquiet of a deserted neighbourhood, where the extraordinary had just erupted into all of our lives.
2
JACMEL GAVE GERMAINE Villaret-Joyeuse a funeral worthy of her renown. In the weeks that followed, the strange events of that October weekend gave way to frenetic collective myth-making. One early evening, a bunch of us young people crowded around a bench on Toussaint Louverture Square to listen to the hairdresser Scylla Syllabaire’s detailed account of the events—which ended up being accepted as the official truth.
On the morning of her death, Germaine had gathered together those closest to her to hear her final wishes. She had just had a strikingly prophetic dream in which it had been revealed to her that, up in heaven, purgatory and paradise were separated by a bay exactly like the one in Jacmel. So, she desired only one thing to happen at the moment of her passing: to get a precise sense of the distance that her soul would have to travel in order to access eternal bliss at the end of her earthly trials.
“My darling...
