The Boiling Season (24 page)

But of course there was no time. I turned him around and led him the other way, down the corridor and past the dining room to the terrace.

“I have another job for you,” I said. “You must clean the leaves out of the pool.”

I showed him the long-handled net for skimming the water.

“Get started,” I said. “I need to prepare the coffee. When I get back, I expect you to be done, and then I will take you to the gate, and you will show me how you got in.”

As I sliced the fruit and brewed the coffee, I worried I had been a fool again to allow the boy to stay a moment longer on the estate. These were dangerous times.

I walked out to the terrace and I could immediately hear splashing.

“What are you doing?” I yelled down to him.

As I leaned over the balustrade, I could see Hector floating in the deep end with a fist full of leaves and petals.

“What you asked.”

“I didn't invite you for a swim,” I said. “There are tools. I meant for you to use them.”

“What's the difference? I'm getting it clean, aren't I?”

“Get out and finish up,” I said. “I'll be back for you in a few minutes.”

Madame's coffee was ready. I assembled a tray, adding one of the lumpen rolls to the plate of fruit.

Upstairs in the corridor, I knocked on the door of Madame's office, and she asked me to come in. She sat behind her desk in her reading glasses. A ledger of some sort was open before her.

I set the tray down on her desk and poured her a cup of coffee.

“Please have a seat,” she said.

After the events of the day before, I felt a sense of failure at this sudden return to formality.

“I'm going to be leaving in two days,” Madame said. “I've been away too long, and as there's no longer business to keep me here, I must attend to business at home.”

There was nothing I could say.

“I need to ask you to do something very important.”

“Anything,” I said.

“I need you to take care of the estate.”

“But madame,” I said, “is that all?”

“This is no small task,” she said. “This time I don't know how long I'll be gone.”

“But you will be coming back?”

“Of course,” she said. “Of course. Just as soon as things return to normal. And as soon as I've taken care of things at home.”

“Madame,” I said, “I consider it my duty.”

“You have no idea what a relief it is,” she said, “to have someone in whom you can put your trust.”

I had not noticed until now the change that had overtaken her, the sadness in her voice. Its effect on me was devastating. I felt as though we were discussing not the management of an estate but the death of an intimate friend.

“You should not think of it that way,” I said. “It would be a privilege. It's always been a privilege.”

“You won't be alone,” she said, straightening up quite suddenly in her seat. The emotion was gone from her face. She was a businesswoman again. “You will need help. The estate is too large for one person to manage. Of course,” she said, “this will be far too little help to maintain the current state. But you must do the best you can. We will close the villas and the casino and whatever else we can.”

“I will keep up your villa, madame,” I said, and I was pleased to have made her smile. “I will trust that responsibility to no one but myself.”

“I have a few things I need to do before I go,” she said.

I stood up and poured her a little more coffee, and then I went downstairs to get rid of Hector once and for all.

Chapter Eighteen

T
he road into Cité Verd had never been paved, and aside from the shacks visible from the main road leading up to Habitation Louvois, almost nothing had ever been painted. From up close it was clear that what had been painted needed to be again.

The scenery, such as it was, consisted of naked cinder block and cardboard and old scraps of rotten wood and corrugated metal. So uniform was the dusty gray below my feet and on all sides that it was as though a fire had rained ash down on everything. About the only other color to be seen was the sloppy spray of red on nearly every available wall spelling “Down with Duphay” and “Duphay Must Go.”

What had once been not even a town, just a couple of desolate shanties attached to meager plots, had exploded during the five years the hotel had been open into a vast slum city of more than a hundred thousand. As I had known it would, the place had become the very ghetto its inhabitants had come here to escape. And there they squatted in seemingly every open doorway, their faded T-shirts advertising products in English that they had never even heard of, let alone purchased. And I felt the eyes of their potbellied children following me, faintly hoping I had brought something—anything—to give them. Little did they know that I had nothing left.

The hotel was gone. Mme Freeman was gone. At last I understood how it must have felt to be Senator Marcus, finding himself stripped of not just money and power, but even dignity.

I had not been in Cité Verd since before the hotel had opened. I had hoped never to have to come back. And yet here I was. Suddenly the world I thought I had escaped proved to be the only world left, and it cared nothing for the things I had lost.

In Cité Verd, everything destroyed by the recent storm had been rebuilt, and just as poorly as it was originally. Every corner was taken up with cement squares topped haphazardly with tin. Trash was everywhere underfoot, as if to substitute for paving stones. Open drains dribbled inconceivably foul waste. The heat did nothing to dampen the smell. The handkerchief I had brought to wipe the sweat from my eyes was drenched. Never had I felt so unclean.

A truck rattling down the road from the opposite direction slowed as it approached, choking in what appeared to be its death throes. All the glass was missing from the windows. Had it been shot out? Or perhaps just stripped? In the bed hunkered three young men in nylon running suits who looked as if they were on their way to the gym. Two of them held rifles pointed at the sky. The other, with a thick, gold chain swinging around his neck, lifted his pistol to aim it at my head.

“Who are you?” They were just three words, yet they somehow managed to cover the full spectrum from menace to boredom.

I considered telling him it was none of his business. “I'm offering work.”

“Good for you.”

With a percussive cough the truck jerked forward, kicking up dust and stones as it sped off, swerving toward a three-legged dog humping its way across the street.

Apparently my interrogation was over.

Was this the resistance, the force that would free us from dictatorship? A gang of idle teenagers harassing people from a crippled truck? As they drove away, I looked around, certain I would find a soldier on patrol or a jeep in pursuit. There was nothing. And if I had found someone, what would I have done? As much as I did not care who among them won, I could not conceive how a force like that could possibly fight back against both the army and the security forces. That they had lasted this long could only mean President Duphay was still exercising restraint.

The market was not far from the turnoff from the main road. It too had grown, from a few women spread out on blankets to a complex of rickety stalls selling everything from millet to radios. The place was both crude and frail, the roofs of the stalls made of cloth and scraps of metal, and many of the tables were nothing more than the limbs of trees lashed together with string. It was a wonder any of it withstood gravity, let alone wind and rain.

A badly creased woman of indeterminate age dressed all in black—her hands and arms and face nevertheless caked with soot—sat in a rough-hewn chair amid a spill of charcoal. She held up a briquette for me to inspect as I passed. Against the wall behind her a dozen black-smudged bags as large as bales of hay lay on their sides. It could just as well have been bodies as trees in those bags, and she would have given them no further thought.

A few meters away, engulfed in a poisonous cloud, a wiry, shirtless man with his pant legs rolled up to his knees shoveled a mound of coal into a blackened wheelbarrow. And then came the hat and basket weavers, a man with a stack of straw mats. Trinkets and icons and dolls carved from wood. None of it even remotely equal to the orange butterfly my mother had adored.

My shoes, which I had just polished that morning, were coated with dust.

A group of men were loitering loudly in the shade at the end of the first row of stalls, determined to share the details of their idleness with everyone around them. When they turned to look at me, it seemed to be my gray suit that most captured their attention. Several of them had responded to the heat by rolling their T-shirts up under their arms, as if they were some sort of flotation device.

“I'm looking for a gardener,” I said, though among this crowd it felt as futile as asking for a brain surgeon. “If you know of anyone, tell him to come to Habitation Louvois.”

On the ground beside the men kneeled a young woman in a torn dress frying scraps of pork and sweet potato in a dented tin skillet. Nearby a shirtless child with streaks of orange in his otherwise black hair watched with deadened eyes as the fat sizzled and popped. It appeared to be the closest he had been to food in days.

“And I need a woman to do the cooking and cleaning,” I said. “She will have the finest kitchen on the island.”

The men stared back at me, and I could see their minds silently weighing their thirst for money against their distaste for work. I needed for only one of them to let his better nature win out.

T
he next morning when I awoke a crowd of at least fifty men and women stood outside the gate. Under the tree where the photographers had once lain in wait for Mlle Miller I set up a chair, and one by one they came over and I asked them about their experience, and most of them offered lies and evasions. In the end I chose the only two I felt I could trust.

Raoul was older than most of the other men. Like my father, he had been a farmer, and he too had lost his land and moved to the city in search of other work. For the last decade he had worked as a gardener for several families, including one in Lyonville the Marcuses had known. His wife had died shortly after he moved to Cité Verd.

Mona had lived in Cité Verd all her life, since long before there even was a Cité Verd. In one of the shacks I had seen on my first visits she had raised her two sons. They were grown now and on their own. Her husband had gone abroad years before, looking for work. Recently the money he had been sending had stopped arriving.

When I introduced them, Mona and Raoul merely nodded, neither saying a word. I gave them a quick tour of the estate, about which they had no questions. They remained silent as I led them to their rooms in the old servants' quarters and accepted without comment what I offered them in pay.

T
hey quickly settled in. During the hotel's final months, as the staff rapidly contracted, we had fallen far behind in our work. Raoul in particular had an enormous amount to catch up on. For Mona the cleaning was simple and straightforward, but the cooking proved to be a problem. On her first day I spent hours showing her how to use the icebox, the oven, and the stove, but that evening I found her in the yard, bent over a mound of charcoal, trying to fashion a platform on which to rest a cooking pot.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

She did not bother looking up. “Cooking.”

“But why are you doing it here?”

If she was aware of my annoyance, she seemed not to care. “Why not?”

I had to squat down beside her to get her to look at me. “What's wrong with the kitchen?”

She shrugged. “I don't like it.”

“It has everything you could possibly need.”

She continued shaping her mound.

All my life I had heard peasant women insist that food cooked over coals tasted better than food cooked over gas. But that was just an excuse. They would rather cut down every last tree and turn their land into desert before going to the trouble of learning something new.

I spent a moment debating what I should do, before concluding that I was in no mood to return to Cité Verd and start all over again.

“Very well,” I said, making no effort to suppress a sigh. “Come with me.”

Between the servants' quarters and the laundry was a long, windowless building with dirt floors. Never having been wired for electricity, the space was lit by oil lamps and a few cloudy skylights. It was always dark and cheerless, resembling a barn more than a kitchen. We had been using it as a second storeroom, but it still contained the original coal stove and brick oven it had been built with, more than a century before. And there was no shortage of fuel here. Nothing would need to be cut down.

Mona stood behind me in the shadows as I opened the door.

“Is this more to your liking?”

I took her silence to mean it was.

A
nd so, after a fashion, we settled into a routine. Dressed in his denims and blue plaid shirt, Raoul stayed busy maintaining the grounds. There never seemed to be enough time for the new projects I wanted him to begin, but at least he kept the trees and gardens from overtaking us. It was one of the many ways in which the scaling back of ambitions became my principal occupation.

Mona tended the kitchen garden and cleaned, never wavering from her schedule. Every morning at six she set out breakfast. At noon came lunch. Dinner was at five in the evening. The food could not compare to Jean's, but it was always filling and always on time. In place of elegance and refinement, we settled for the virtues of consistency.

Hector, the boy who had fetched Madame's coffee and rolls, took care of running errands. He liked to stop by at unexpected hours, banging on the gate with a stone until someone came to let him in. Unlike Mona and Raoul, he did not stay at the estate. Hector's family—or what was left of it—lived in Cité Verd, and that was where he continued to live.

Like me, Hector had lost his mother when he was young. His father had disappeared not long after. He had been raised by an aunt barely ten years older than he was. There were five of them crammed together in her one-room shack. The other three were her own children, each by a different man. Mona told me that all day long and even much of the night they could be found out on the street while their mother entertained inside. It was no wonder the boy spent as much time here as he could.

Despite my unfavorable first impressions, I slowly came around to concluding that Hector was surprisingly trustworthy for a boy his age. And unlike just about everyone else I had met from Cité Verd, he even proved to be rather clever. One afternoon a few weeks after he started working here, he brought me a radio from one of the villas that he had taken upon himself to repair. He had figured it out all by himself, despite having scarcely ever used one before. Such things seemed to come naturally to him.

Hector had been to school no more than a handful of days in his entire life, and he could neither read nor write. But there was no denying his intelligence. However bored he might pretend to be when I issued instructions, he never failed to follow them. That was far more than could be said for Raoul and Mona.

But perhaps the most valuable thing about Hector was the way his high spirits helped to counter the dark clouds that seemed to follow Mona and Raoul everywhere they went. It would never have occurred to me if not for Hector, but the estate benefited from the presence of a child. His energy served as an important reminder of the vitality of the place. More than either Mona or Raoul, he seemed to understand why the work we were doing mattered, why Habitation Louvois itself mattered. And it pleased me to think how much Madame would like him.

For pennies he was willing to get whatever we needed from the market, sparing me those unpleasant trips. When it came to more specialized items, I occasionally sent him on the bus to the capital. With electricity becoming increasingly erratic and the phones once again effectively dead, Hector was my link to the world outside. More than that, he was my one hope that, despite our recent setbacks, all might not be lost.

T
hat summer the rains never came, and the grounds turned brown and brittle. It must have been the same everywhere on the island. The market women's baskets grew meager. I had to have Hector carry buckets of water up from the springs to vulnerable parts of the lawn that we could not reach with hoses. But there was only so much we could do a bucket at a time, and this desperate effort began to feel like a metaphor for our entire undertaking. Here I was with two old fools and one well-meaning boy, trying to sustain one of the most opulent estates in the hemisphere.

At the height of the drought, our biggest problem inside the manor house, ironically, was that the water flowed all too freely. By the time I happened to notice the stain in the ceiling of the library, it was already the size of a serving tray. Water had leached into four of the plaster ceiling panels, and an adjacent piece of crown molding had pulled away from the wall, dislodged as the water coursed past. Down it spilled, over the cornice of the bookcase and into the gap above the glass doors. There the top shelf of leather-bound volumes appeared to have acted as a sort of sponge. It was horrible to see—the pages of Madame's rare first editions swollen like the gills of a suffocating fish. Mona fetched some bowls and we lined them up, lip to lip, but by then the drip seemed to have stopped.