Hadriana in All My Dreams Read online

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Foreword by Edwidge Danticat

  First movement

  Chapter one: Balthazar and the Seven Loins of Madame Villaret-Joyeuse

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  4

  Chapter Two: The Star that Shined but Once

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  7

  Chapter Three: Hadriana in the Lap of the Gods

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  7

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  9

  Chapter Four: Requiem for a Creole Fairy

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  7

  8

  Second Movement

  Chapter Five: Hadriana-Ache

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  6

  Third Movement

  Chapter Six: Hadriana’s Tale

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  15

  Glossary of Terms

  Translator’s Note

  About René Depestre

  Copyright & Credits

  About Akashic Books

  For Nelly, Paul-Alain, and Stefan.

  In memory of André Breton and Pierre Mabille.

  We have only one recourse in the face of death: make art before it happens.

  —René Char

  Jacmel, folklore, history, and crazy love have inspired the characters of this novel. Any resemblance to individuals currently alive or having ever lived—in reality or in fiction—can only be scandalous coincidence.

  Foreword

  by Edwidge Danticat

  What is it that sends us on a quest to describe what Rene Depestre calls “surréalisme quotidien” or the daily mysteries of life? The misconstrued nature of a subject is certainly a powerful draw. One must be daring, though, to speak for the dead. The real conversation between spirit and flesh most likely takes place in some undefined realm, a place neither here nor there, where the soul pounds into the body—or flees the body—in a way that only some among the living can fully understand.

  Rene Depestre seems to be one of those who understands. In Hadriana in All My Dreams, he makes himself a bridge between the living and the dead and offers us the kind of tale we rarely get in the hundreds of zombie stories featuring Haitians. In Hadriana in All My Dreams we get langaj—the secret language of Haitian Vodou—as well as the type of descriptive, elegiac, erotic, and satirical language, and the artistic license needed, to create this most nuanced and powerful novel. And on top of all that, we also witness one of Haiti’s most popular carnivals in the beautiful southern coastal town of Jacmel, where our story takes place.

  To offer a plot summary here would be to remove from the reader the great pleasure of discovering with fresh eyes this most stimulating and unpredictable novel. I can only assure you that you are in good hands with Depestre. Just as one might at carnival, one must surrender to this story while not being too easily offended or outraged.

  Rene Depestre was born in Jacmel in 1926 and is one of Haiti’s best-known writers. Even though he has been living outside of the country for over half a century, he drew upon his childhood memories of the 1938 carnival season for this novel, first published in French in 1988. Depestre began his writing career as a poet at the young age of nineteen, and his poetic tendencies are on full display here. His fluid use of at times lyrical, at times whimsical, and at times academic language, as well as his inclusion of vivid erotica, shows him also to be a hybrid writer, unafraid to take risks either with word usage or subject matter. The novel occasionally veers into lodyans—a tongue-in-cheek narrative genre meant to provoke laughter, though here perhaps it is intended to provoke other carnal reactions as well.

  When I first read this novel, I was researching a nonfiction book about carnival in Jacmel. I had visited the town many times and was captivated by its colorful history and distinct architecture, some of which is meticulously portrayed here. Hadriana soon became the centerpiece of my book. Quotations from the novel became the epigraph to nearly every chapter. I loved the way this novel bound hyperrealism and magical realism—or, as Alejo Carpentier, one of Depestre’s inspirations, called it, the real maravilloso, or the marvelous real. Also magical and marvelous is how much the southern town of Jacmel itself takes center stage in Hadriana. Depestre is Jacmelian and proud of it; he not only describes a lively town, but also evokes class, color, religion, and gender dynamics, cleverly weaving them into his supernatural plot. He name-drops famous Jacmelians whom locals, and even regular visitors, are likely to recognize.

  The quotidian surrealism is depicted in such precise and exacting detail that human butterflies and zombies on the loose barely startle some folks. Still, Depestre is not one of those writers the narrator critiques. I’m referring to those who fail to realize that we might never fully grasp the intangible, even when we come face to face with some physical manifestation thereof: a person who is not really a person, a spirit who is not really a spirit, but who exists in a gap that few are able to portray without slipping into lazy stereotypes and easy generalizations about Haitian life and the country’s religions and complex, nuanced culture.

  The fact that we continue to be bombarded with the same old pedestrian zombie narratives written by foreigners and featuring Haitians makes this novel even more crucial, and this beautiful and masterful translation by Kaiama L. Glover extremely welcome. Here is how it might be done, Depestre seems to be telling us, within a singular and exceptional community. Still, Depestre does not shy away from showing the ways that a town, or a country, as he has stated in several interviews, can become zombified through repression, desperation, fear, and neglect.

  “Is it possible that my homeland was some sort of collective zombie?” the narrator asks himself. “Behind each mystery,” he concludes, “there were at least a hundred more.”

  You will find at least a hundred more mysteries beyond the obvious story told in Hadriana in All My Dreams. This novel is also a story of migration—the type of migration that many Haitians are forced to make, either by land, air, or sea, when all doors at home are closed to them. Perhaps the part of us that would like to remain with our families, in our own countries, perhaps that part of us must die in order for us to be “reborn” elsewhere. This novel is in many ways reminiscent of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, except in this case Depestre’s white Creole woman refuses to become a prisoner, and the precursor to Depestre’s novel is not another novel, but the wider zombie canon, a genre Depestre subtly tries to both deconstruct and rewrite with this book.

  Our narrator writes:

  In each text I read on Vodou, there was the obligatory chapter on zombies in Haiti. In every instance, the author seemed somehow to be left short of breath, chasing after an elusive ghost. There was a time when the flood of studies on this element of Haitian sorcery constituted a veritable industry, both within and outside the academic world. It went from the most frenzied sensationalism to the most erudite scholarship. I wanted to offer a personal perspective, situated somewhere between a serialized novel and a monograph—some new and well-thought-out, passionate, and organized tribute to my beloved—that I hoped would raise the debate to a higher plane.
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br />   As you will soon discover in the pages of this magnificent novel, both the writer Rene Depestre and Hadriana’s narrator have more than succeeded.

  Edwidge Danticat is the award-winning author of Breath, Eyes, Memory (an Oprah’s Book Club selection), Krik? Krak!, The Dew Breaker, Brother, I’m Dying, and several other books. She is the editor of four anthologies, including Haiti Noir and Haiti Noir 2: The Classics.

  First movement

  Chapter one

  Balthazar and the Seven Loins of Madame Villaret-Joyeuse

  Lord, heap miseries upon us

  yet entwine our arts with laughters low.

  —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 neighbors 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 midafternoon 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 neighborhood 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 pajamas.

  “Forgive me, my dear Germaine!” the prefect shouted at the car. “Bravissimo! 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-colored buildings of the customshouse 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 neighborhood, 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, 19
38 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 neighborhood, 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 mythmaking. 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 son,” she said to Lil’ Jérôme, “drive me to the port. If I should die before we arrive, make sure to place that butterfly mask over my eyes. You know the one I mean. Yes, my dear, the butterfly will be leaving with me. Let him look at the bay in my place. It is fitting that a queen should appear masked before our merciful Christ.”

  Reassured by her own words, Germaine Muzac passed away at that very moment. What was to be done with such a final wish? This was the subject of a brief debate among her family members.

  “Mama was very weak,” said Erica. “In her state, she could just as easily have dreamed of a trip in a hot-air balloon or a hydroplane to lead her to the waters of Saint Pierre. We don’t have to pay her any mind.”