Counternarratives (20 page)

My other mode of drawing had not made an appearance for
some time before nor once since the last and most egregious set of incidents,
and it struck me that perhaps I was outgrowing my youthful lack of control, that
I might be shedding whatever tether held me to realms which, despite the
otherwise deepening clarity of my perception of the worlds around me, stayed
still so concealed. In terms of my own will and gifts, I had begun to figure out
ever more about how to initiate the night visits with my mother, summoning the
door before my eyes, though I had not yet found the right key, among the many
arrayed before me, that would open it; and as for whatever lay on the other side
of those drawings, with their arsenals of augury and admonition, I had not yet
developed a theory of knowledge by which to understand them. Or rather perhaps I
had, but lacked a language to characterize and describe them. It struck me that
the spells and the drawings themselves might be a language, but this seemed so
exploratory and fantastic, that I set aside further consideration of it, and
instead reflected, when the thought struck me, on the process of my experience
and practice of those episodes.

The air, though cool, was heavy; the room, lacking any
windows, hunkered near to darkness. Sr. François Agnès, having begun to tell me
how “Hell had come to St. Francis,” the “embrace of the tropics had forced the
relaxation of the convent's routines” and that “this was, pains seize St.
Agatha, the sort of liberalization one would never see in the Low Countries,”
had promptly tumbled off to sleep, her snoring gradually filling the room like
water finding its level. I stood and decided to make a round, to see what was
going on, and responding, if I were questioned, that I was on my way to one of
my tasks, which, to be truthful, was the truth. As I often now did when I wanted
to pass unnoticed from one part of the convent to another, I imagined myself the
shadow I had been at Valdoré, where no white person, save Eugénie, had ever
seemed capable of seeing me. Had M. Nicolas de L'Écart ever noticed my presence?
Had M. Olivier? Had his wife? For that matter even the bondspeople had rarely
seemed to register when I stood among them. I wondered where most of them now
were, the ones who had successfully escaped Valdoré's vise, France's visible and
invisible chains.

I glided along the wooden floors without a single creak.
As usual I wore no shoes; my hem floated off the ground; my pace was slow enough
that I might even have gotten behind time itself. The heat seemed to form a
curtain through which I had to press myself, though I did so with a minimum of
effort. In the sewing room all the white girls save Eugénie had stretched out on
cots, and were sound asleep, as was Sr. Charles Thérese, who slumped over the
table, the books arrayed about her like an archipelago. Quiet preceded me down
the hall; near the kitchen, I could hear the gentle snoring of Rochelle, who
had, I imagined, fallen asleep with the soup on boil, its aromas of barley and
sage wafting through the door's slit. I roused her, by means of a thought, and
the snoring ceased. Presently I heard wood against metal, and the beginning of a
soulful melody she routinely sang.

Upstairs, on the main floor, the heat was stronger still,
though I could smell the outdoors blowing in through windows open on the
building's backside. My girls were seated in the refectory, on the floor against
the back wall, their heads nodding in near-silent slumber. I did not want them
to encounter any problems, so I woke them without entering the room, and could
hear them stirring, as if to return to their duties, or at least to the
semblance thereof. Across the hall I peeked in the chapel, where the Mother
Superior, Sr. Alphonse Isabelle, and Sr. Charles Thérèse were curled into their
chairs, the Holy Virgin Mother beaming down upon them, their books in their
laps, their ivory guimpes and dun scapulars undulating rhythmically, their veils
tousled over their shoulders like loose hair. For a second I drew the statue's
gaze to my own, then proceeded on toward the back porch, which led directly onto
the gardens and the fields. There was a low buzz, as if people were talking but
wishing hard not to be heard. Through the open door and through a large pane I
could see Hubert, a kerchief on his head, toiling away with a hoe.

As I approached the doors the voices became more
distinct, but I saw no one in the room. Crossing the threshold, I approached the
window in which Hubert's dark shirtless back and kerchiefed crown bobbed, like a
millpiece, and I paused only when I reached the glass, which gave off heat as if
it were molten. The voices were now clear, and clearly in French, behind me. I
turned around to see the brown, hooded cassock of Fr. Malesvaux hunching over
something fast against the wall. I hid myself beneath the table beside me,
though given his lack of reaction, he evidently had not seen me. He shifted the
angle of his cassock and from behind it emerged Eugénie, her face flushed, her
hair plastered to her head. Both her pinafore and Fr. Malesvaux's gown, I could
now see, were soaked through. The two struggled, in silence, he holding her
wrists tightly and saying without saying
in two weeks in two weeks
while trying to extricate himself, she responding
you don't understand
you don't
, until finally he caressed her face, her hair and hurried out
the door.

Eugénie stood alone, against the wall, looking as
if she wanted scream or cry, but knowing better. I thought of calling attention
to myself, but I decided instead to observe her. For a while she remained in the
same spot, alternatively despondent and elated, occasionally looking toward the
window and the outdoor scene above me, intermittently at the skirt of her
pinafore, which she ruffled and smoothed. Her thoughts were cycling so swiftly
and dully through her head she would not been able to articulate them had she
tried. She bent down and raised a discarded shingle, fanning herself for a
while, until I grew tired of the episode, whose overall meaning had grown clear
to me, and drew her eyes in my direction. She froze. She could not see me, of
course, and peered all around her, as if I had placed my gaze throughout the
room. She glanced at the table behind which I knelt, and after taking one step
in my direction, she wheeled on her heel and fled down the hallway.

I resumed watching Hubert for a while, until he broke to
head to the well, where I spotted Job White Jr. refreshing himself from the
bucket. At this point I also left the closed portico and headed back to the
basement.

A dialogue

Have I ever had a vision of Hell, that place to
which this faith—in whose intimate and suffocating grasp I have passed the last
few years of my life—and to which Eugénie, from our very first days together in
Saint-Domingue, had constantly threatened the Heavenly Father would consign me?
I have not. Or rather I have, but yet never have I devoted more than the bare minimum
of my interest to it. I know the Hell of the Gospels and le catéchisme, the
sermons of Fr. Malesvaux and other priests, the tuition and exams of Srs.
Charles Thérèse and Ambrose Jeanne. I have pictured it, perhaps I have even
drawn versions of it, though it has never meant anything more than the
illustration of an exercise, a foreign mote of knowledge, to me. Have I however
lived a form of Hell, lived in one, or perhaps several? Most certainly, and
perhaps am in one now.

Of course there are Hells and there are hells, which is
really a statement of banalities, for there are degrees of horror, of horrors,
which we all witness and live through, sometimes directly, often indirectly, and
it is the immediacy of horror, its sublimity and our incapacity even to reflect
upon it, though we may indelibly remember it, that shapes our sense of what a
particular hell, or Hell itself, may be.

The word itself had begun to foam, like spittle, on
Eugénie's lips every time she eyed me, though she did not dare utter it, or cast
a single aspersion in my direction. Instead, as the weeks crept forward through
the infernal heat, she crept with utmost care around me, taking care not to
offend me even in the slightest, as if she could tell, though I would not have
deigned to tell her, that the departure of Diejuste and Ayidda, whose
superintendents had finally been fetched home by their parents, opened a hole in
my affections. We had not grown as close as I liked, but we nevertheless passed
increasing amounts of time in each others' company, Diejuste's bright humor and
wit clarifying as we sat and packed crates of pamphlets, Ayidda's skill at
producing seemingly insignificant signs that needed only the right person to
decode them providing me with an intellectual and spiritual workout of the kind
I had not encountered before. I woke one morning, after a troubled sleep, with a
severe headache, a novelty for me, and when I reached the refectory, I saw that
there were two fewer white girls at the table and knew instantly that early that
morning, Josephine and Mary Margaret, with Diejuste and Ayidda in tow, had gone.
That left only Marinette, whose temper was still occassionally a challenge, as a
companion, though we seldom found ourselves together for long.

As we passed in the hallways we would share thoughts,
ideas, dreams: she longed first of being manumitted and going to live in
Washington, where she had relatives and where she had been born, though she'd
been sold off when the first estate to which she had belonged had been divided,
at the death of its owner. Phedra, it turned out, was not her sister by blood,
though they had been raised together as if they were. She had never heard of
Ayiti. She also did not know much French beyond what she had picked up during
her short stay, and no Kreyòl or Latin at all. I tried my best, in the slots of
time alotted to us, to rectify that. Her temper, she realized, was like the wick
of a lamp too often turned to its brightest setting, and though she had cause,
as we all did, she was learning, striving, to lower it. We tried to arrange a
time in which I might show her my drawings, but Annie Lawrie, who like Eugénie
had been left in the nun's care, was now demanding as much of her time, if not
more so, as Eugénie had previously required of me.

One night following a day so hot that it appeared to have
scorched much of the foliage to a brown fur, I woke to hear Eugénie creeping
past my bed. The room was black as the moment before a nightmare. She no longer
bothered to force me to pack her sheets in her absence; everyone in the convent
was usually so drained by the heat that they slept as if drugged. I turned over
on my side, away from her, and tried to go back to my dream, in which Phedra and
I were slowly walking across the river, but I could hear the white girl fumbling
through my papers, so I sat up, as quietly as possible. What was she looking
for? She tossed several things into a cloth sack, replaced the floor stone and
bustled out of the room. When I was sure she was halfway down the hall, I
trailed her.

She advanced through the darkness more quickly than I
would have imagined, but I could still make her out. She was, I knew, going to
meet with Fr. Malesvaux, perhaps to show him my handiwork, though to what
purpose I could not foretell. Perhaps she now bore his child, and she was
planning yet again to run away, this time with him. Let her go with him, I would
not try to stop her, I had plans of my own. I was curious, however, about why
she had taken my art. She made her way not to the first floor's rear portico,
where I had seen them before, but continued upstairs, to the attic, moving
almost soundlessly and without a single stumble, which made me realize that she
probably had practiced and traced this route multiple times. At end of the hall,
however, I could hear a din, almost imperceptible but enough to gain my
attention, coming from the direction of the town. I pulled back one of the
velvet curtains to see what was going on. There were tiny pinpricks of light
flaring from Gethsamane, but intermittently. Nothing, at least from this
distance, was clear.

Pulling myself from the window I went to the attic
staircase and moved as swiftly as I could, catlike, my ears pricked, my eyes
cutting through the murk. Voices, or at least one, issued from the main room
there. The door was cracked and I slid through. To my left Eugénie was telling
her lover that she had all her garments, some coins, sturdy boots, her cape, and
the maps, mine, the ones I had drawn, which she had studied assiduously and was
sure would serve them as well as any others. Her lover did not speak, but I
wondered, given how frequently Fr. Malesvaux had come and gone from west to east
and back why he would need to depend on one of my maps, drawn, in any case, from
my inner vision and not cartographic accuracy. He persisted in not speaking and
it struck me that he might be communicating with her in another way. Papers
rustled in the darkness, until I could tell he was stilling her, calming her.
She asked if the horses were ready, and he conveyed to her that they were. I
stepped out of the way to let them head downstairs; I was not going to betray
her to the nuns, since I was sure she and her popish paramour would not get far,
at least based on the maps I had drawn, and they would find that out soon
enough.

Right near the door, she turned, her shoulder-slung sack
swinging and nearly hitting me in the face, and asked, “How long do you think
it'll be before they discover you took all the money?” I was not surprised at
this bald statement of duplicity and sin, and yet I was. Fr. Malesvaux, whatever
he was or was not, had never seemed to me to be an evil man, let alone a thief.
Even the Haitians at and around Valdoré had recognized this, French and ever
liberal with Christian casuistry though he was.