Hadriana in All My Dreams Read online

  Lil’ Jérôme didn’t agree. Their mother had entrusted him with a sacred mission. He would execute it if it meant burning down the whole house, the town of Jacmel, or the entire island. Before the terrified eyes of his family members, he invited that diabolical winged half-breed, with its skull and crossbones for a head, to come down from its spot on the ceiling and settle upon the eyes of the dead woman. Then, once she had been washed, exfoliated, made up, clothed in her ceremonial dress, and adorned with her jewels, his mother was placed in the backseat of the car and propped up with some cushions.

  Scylla Syllabaire went on to recount the story of that escapade. From the very beginning, his story did not match up with what I had so excitedly seen with my own two eyes and ears along the course of that promenade. According to Scylla, Télébec, the state’s propagandistic parrot, had stood up to the butterfly and exclaimed bravely: “There it is, the unholy beast! Ready, aim, fire!”

  In reality, General Télébec had fallen from his perch and then fled as fast as his wings would carry him, all the while crying out: “Help, help—it’s the end of the world!” Forty years later I can still hear the racket he and the dogs made.

  Scylla similarly distorted the prefect’s words and the actions of the nuns. And it was not true, according to Scylla, that an old woman from Bas des Orangers had screamed: “Zombie car on the loose!” Instead, Scylla claimed to have heard from a local resident on Raquette Street that a little blind girl had been the first person from the slums to sound the alarm, crying out: “Beware the messenger of death!”

  His evocation of Hadriana Siloe’s appearance on the scene was even further from the truth than what I had seen with my own eyes. According to the hairdresser, Lil’ Jérôme had stopped short when he saw André Siloé’s heaven-sent daughter appear at the manor’s window. An instant later, she was at the car, placing a goodbye kiss on her godmother’s forehead. Hadriana was naked from head to toe, marvelously and entirely naked—her virgin flesh, just below the navel, was an absolute wonder! The butterfly was completely dazzled by it, his antennae paralyzed. In all his wanderings around the islands, never before had he seen such a superbly inviting conch between any young girl’s thighs. If you put it up to your ear, you would hear the Caribbean Sea! And so it was that he lost all desire to escort Germaine Muzac to paradise. What would be the point of dying? What the hell was he doing on the sightless eyes of the godmother when there remained such a vibrant light to bask in within the goddaughter’s womb? Wings aquiver, he launched himself on the path to glory.

  In the very same breath, Scylla Syllbaire revealed to us that the butterfly that all of Jacmel had seen laid across the eyes of the dead woman was in fact a human being like you and me. His name was Balthazar Granchiré. Born some twenty years earlier in the mountains of Cap-Rouge, his mother and father unknown, he had been found in the middle of the street just a few hours after his birth. The infamous sorcerer Okil Okilon had adopted the infant. On the day of his twelfth birthday, he had been precociously initiated into the Vlanbindingues, a secret society in southwestern Haiti. From that moment on, a passion for sex turned the adolescent into the most sex-crazed womanizer in the country. At the age of fifteen, he already counted about a hundred women, of all ages, among his conquests. A year later, he seduced his adoptive father’s femme-jardin. Okilon took revenge for this affront: he turned his rival into a butterfly, all the while showering curses on him.

  “You ungrateful, motherless little boy. I condemn you to the category of the most loathsome half-breeds of the Caribbean. Your upper wings will be reddish-brown with blue spots and black streaks. Your posterior wings will have all shades of ochre, their honey-colored outer edges adorned with a thin strip of mauve. Your abdomen will be cylindrical, striped with black and lemon yellow. You’ll have blue-green circles around your eyes and your irises will be perfectly suited for a devil of your kind. Your nine-inch wingspan will be exceptional, even among bizango butterflies. And when you fly, you’ll leave behind a shimmering trail, more twisted and zigzagging than a flash of lightning.

  “On the dorsal part of your thorax, you’ll have violet, eye-shaped circles, a malachite-green mustache, a canary-yellow mouth, a square chin, the overall air of some godless bandit of a white man—a goddamned skull and crossbones! Your phenomenal erect member will continue to grow every time it ejaculates into the cunts it assaults. Curled up into a serrated spiral, your cursed watch-spring will mark the instant of ecstasy on the flesh of its prey, leaving each victim desperate to savor that moment for all eternity. Old grandfather clocks that stopped working years earlier will start ticking again thanks to your machine gun of a dick, but the hands of your clock will move in opposite direction to a woman’s true lunar cycle.

  “You’ll be more bloodthirsty in your vaginal dealings than a praying mantis. You’ll devour them before, during, and after copulation. You’ll take pleasure in quenching your thirst with the tears of virgins and widows. Your antennae will pick up the scent of menstrual blood from a mile away. You’ll waste your sperm chasing after females. You’ll swing uncontrollably from the gentleness of a hummingbird to the ferocity of a Bengal tiger. Unzipping your fly, women will find themselves facing a daunting crankshaft with a nightmare-seeking head for a knob. The most captivating orgasms will wreak havoc on the otherwise pleasant lives that your devil of a phallus will have bent to its mercy. Goddamned satyr—you and your zombifying zozo, get the hell out of Okil Okilon’s garden!”

  3

  Balthazar Granchiré arrived in Jacmel for the first time in November 1936, only eight weeks after the passage of Hurricane Bethsabée, in a town still trying to tend to its wounds. He took up residence in one of the silk-cotton trees on Toussaint Louverture Square. On the night of his arrival, he deflowered the Philisbourg twins during their sleep and Sister Nathalie-des-Anges, one of the nuns from the Saint Rose of Lima School. This was the first time he tested the strategy he would come to perfect over the course of the next few months. He would wait until nightfall to slip into a bedroom and then hide out under the bed. Once his prey had fallen asleep, he would fill the air with his aphrodisiac exhalations. A few minutes later, breasts would be popping the buttons on nightgowns, bottoms bursting the elastic of underwear, enflamed thighs opening wide, vaginas, fascinated, crying out with thirst and, above all, hunger. At that point, all Balthazar would have to do was launch his campaign. Superb adolescents, having gone to bed virgins, safe within the cocoon of the family, would awaken dismayed, with blood everywhere, brutally deflowered. At first, the appalled family members would attribute this rash of domestic despoiling to a delayed effect of the devastating hurricane. (This explanation fizzled out pretty quickly, though.)

  On those mornings, the dreams that permeated the sleep of the victims generally involved an episode of fabulous flight. Everyone remembered having flown in an airplane at a low altitude over the bay of Jacmel in an uninterrupted orgasm, in perfect weather. Each woman spoke of an aerial adventure that left her swooning with joy. But then, at the peak of excitement, the aircraft would transform into a gaping mouth, dramatically splitting open into an arc that snatched up everything in its path.

  Lolita Philisbourg felt as if the folds of her own soft lips, open to the exact size of the skies above the bay, were violently enveloping the rest of her body. Her sister Klariklé felt her love tunnel open up beneath her like a trap door while her own father whispered in her ear that she should not have forgotten her parachute at home. Sister Nathalie-des-Anges saw her very Catholic cavern-of-the-Good-Lord impetuously competing with the frothy waves bubbling on the surface of the sea. Such was the calling card that Balthazar Granchiré left beneath the sheets.

  Hoping to catch the incubus before his assaults, vigilant mothers sat at their daughters’ bedsides, armed with steel mesh. The following morning they would discover to their dismay that they had succumbed, without even putting up a fight, to the same witchcraft as their innocent progeny. They, too, remembered flying just above the
waves, whisked away by an orgasm that could only be described as miraculous.

  Mrs. Eric Jeanjumeau confessed to Father Naélo that she had had six orgasms in one minute. Mrs. Émile Jonassa had come furiously thirteen times in a row. The widow Jastram’s rapture had been a true classic of sensual pleasure: she promised herself to hold onto it beyond the dream so as to include it later in a sex-education manual. Unlike their little girls, instead of being thrown into a pit after the sex act, they had all seen their genitals laid out graciously on a ceremonial table in the midst of all sorts of sumptuously garnished platters. They had heard their own voices cry out: “Monsignor, dinner is served! Come get it while it’s hot!”

  Germaine Villaret-Joyeuse alone experienced an entirely different adventure on the wings of Granchiré. “And do you know why?” Syllabaire asked us, alternately blinking each of his eyes.

  “Because of her loins!” we cried out in unison.

  During my childhood, Germaine Villaret-Joyeuse’s genital apparatus was an inevitable subject of off-color jokes. We talked about it during wakes, banquets, wedding celebrations, baptisms, and First Communions. Popular gossip had it that my godmother possessed a veritable cascade of loins: two in her lower back, two in the front of her body, one to the left of her stomach, and two others, even more demanding, between her breasts. On the night of her first marriage, her spouse had been brought out on a stretcher, felled by a double fracturing of the pelvis. “Poor Anatole was in a condition not unlike someone who’d fallen from the very top of a coconut tree,” confided Dr. Sorapal to my uncle Ferdinand, who was the magistrate called to investigate the damage.

  The second husband, for his part, was admitted to St. Michel Hospital with several broken ribs. Only Archibald Villaret-Joyeuse, her third spouse, succeeded in avoiding these perils. The honeymoon left him safe and sound, ready to return to his flourishing fabric business. He managed to keep up marvelously with Germaine Muzac’s legendary pelvic thrusts. He truly earned his nickname: Sir Archbishop-of-Joy. He gave his companion eight children in six years. And then he died in a manner completely unfamiliar to local doctors: a double bee sting to the testicles did him in within the space of twenty-four hours.

  On the widow’s forty-fifth birthday, in the Southwest Gazette, Maître Népomucène Homaire paid remarkable homage to his childhood friend:

  With her abundant charms and a genital apparatus like that at her disposal, she’ll have no problem lasting to the year 2000. The reproductive power flowing through her body has the cool exuberance of a mountain waterfall. Germaine Muzac’s fertile loins, twinkling with magical sparks, will make sure that male orgasms of the third millennium finish in a blaze of glory.

  “With a power plant like that below the waist,” commented my uncle Ferdinand, “in 2043 our dear Joyeuse will still be capable of taking our great-grandsons onto her aircraft for a trip to paradise!”

  Meanwhile, according to Scylla Syllabaire, it was our old buddy General Granchiré who ended up saying how-do-you-do to the heavens! After each trip, Germaine woke up in perfect form, lit up from the inside by her thirty-six orgasms, and found herself facing her indefatigable butterfly. They swore never to leave one another. Their liaison brought several months of respite to the local families. There was no more talk of mysterious deflowerings, of cruelly interrupted engagements, of honeymoons shamelessly stolen from desperate young spouses, of wedding announcements canceled last minute by Father Naélo.

  Informed of the tragic fate that had left Granchiré lurching about like a drunkenly spinning top, Germaine planned to negotiate secretly with Okil Okilon for the return of her miraculous beast to his human condition. Offered a hefty payment, the sorcerer would consider having Balthazar undergo, in reverse, the metamorphosis that had served to exile him ad vitam aeternam to the kingdom of libertine lepidoptera. Once back in his chrysalis, Balthazar would return to the larval state and then follow the transformation of a caterpillar until finally reclaiming the physique and the freedom of the dashing young man he had once been.

  That is where things stood when cancer in her right breast, having metastasized unbridled, tossed to the wind any other bells that had been tolling in my godmother’s haunted loins. Eventually, the night came when she had only one loin left able to resist—like Leonidas I at the Battle of Thermopylae—both the onslaught of the malignant tumor and the “Persian Army” that was, for her alone, her lover’s animal sensuality. Thoroughly moved by her immense heroism, Balthazar decided to render eternal the party he and Germaine had begun in Jacmel. One evening, he let her see in a dream the space between purgatory and Eden, a bay whose beauty resembled the area carved out by the Caribbean Sea in the Jacmelian coastline. He spread his seer’s wings across the eyes of his immortal beloved, so that the wind would not lead them astray from their maritime path to heaven.

  4

  Scylla Syllabaire’s tale left my friends and me breathless. He had quite a gift for misrepresenting the truth. What a bald-faced rearranging of reality! What was I waiting for—why was I not telling the truth that I had seen with my own eyes? Well, in those days, everyone in Jacmel knew better than to interrupt the gritty eloquence of Scylla Syllabaire’s revelations. The hairdresser’s mystically illuminated version won the day as far as Jacmel’s imagination was concerned. I mean, were we not all perfectly willing to believe that Scylla was keeping three young Egyptian girls hidden away in his bachelor pad? Addressing us from the height of his own legendary sexual exploits, he bent our minds to the will of his fantasies. Nonetheless, I dared to pose, however cautiously, the question that burned on everyone’s lips.

  “If Granchiré had already ‘popped’ Nana Siloé,” I said, “Father Naélo wouldn’t have announced my godsister’s marriage to Hector Danoze at midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. But he posted it right on the door of the church. The wedding is set for January 29.”

  “When it comes to white folks, people know how to keep a secret. Father Naélo and Danoze know nothing about any of this. Hector only knows that ever since losing Germaine’s seven loins, the butterfly has been sniffing around his fiancée, unsuccessfully. And Hector has sworn to kill Balthazar before he ever gets a chance to cut any of Hadriana’s sweet, sweet grass!”

  “So Granchiré has no chance?”

  “Look, he wasn’t born yesterday. Just last Saturday, at dawn, he saw the happy couple walking down Lovers Lane. The young man was wearing a hunting rifle strapped across his chest—a Winchester semiautomatic, from what I’ve heard. He was whispering sweet nothings in his sweetheart’s ear, but he had his eyes on the silk-cotton trees lining the square the whole time. Balthazar hightailed it out of there.”

  “And is that the last anyone’s seen of him?”

  “As of right now, he’s retired to Cap-Rouge. He’s staying in Rosalvo Rosanfer’s sanctuary. Rosanfer is the head of the Brotherhood of the Zobops, and a rival of Okil Okilon; he’s helping Balthazar make his wings resistant to Danoze’s bullets. So he won’t be gone for long. And when he returns, he’ll be supernaturally endowed . . .”

  Chapter Two

  The Star that Shined but Once

  I watched the death of the star that shined but once.

  —Kateb Yacine

  1

  In the January 11, 1938 issue of the Southwest Gazette, the managing editor, Népomucène Homaire, devoted his entire editorial to the marriage of Hadriana Siloé and Hector Danoze:

  We take the upcoming marriage of the young Frenchwoman Hadriana Siloé and our compatriot Hector Danoze to be a capital event. The families of the future spouses have obtained the consent of our city’s fathers to turn these nuptials into a veritable public bacchanalia. After Hurricane Bethsabée, the crash of coffee prices on the world market, the terrorizing of local hymens by a savage woodland butterfly, and the recent death of Germaine Villaret-Joyeuse, the wedding of this mixed couple comes just in time to reunite Jacmel with the rhythms of life through dance and fantasy.

  The religious ceremony at the Saint
Philippe and Saint Jacques Church will be followed by a reception at the Siloé manor. That evening, the young bride and groom and their guests will join the entire population of Jacmel on Place d’Armes to take part in an unprecedented carnival celebration.

  There are a few marriages that have remained famous in our county. Indeed, on more than one occasion we have witnessed two beings, filled with wonder for one another, decide to unite their beauty and their passion in a single destiny. But the wedding that will take place on Saturday, January 29, is sure to stand out in our annals for even more exceptional reasons.

  Hadriana, the only daughter of the brilliant couple Denise and André Siloé, is the princely gift that the French nation of Debussy and Renoir has given to our country. Much more than a young girl of nineteen, the tutelary fairy of Jacmel is a rose plucked from the hat of the good Lord. In the absence of Isabelle Ramonet, residing in Europe these days, Hadriana dizzyingly incarnates the ideal of the femme-jardin that a local poet came up with long ago as a tribute to our Zaza.

  Son of our beloved Priam Danoze, Hector, the chosen one, the most envied man in all of the Caribbean—does he have what it takes to care for the treasure that has been entrusted to him? That is the question this union raises for us all. Let us respond with a resounding yes. Admittedly, aside from his talents as an aviator and his attractive physical features, there is nothing superhuman that might distinguish the Danoze boy from any of Hadriana Siloé’s other suitors. Up to this point, he has slain no dragons in this little city. But I, his godfather, have seen a quality grow within him that puts him head and shoulders above the other young men of his generation.

  My godson’s circle of loved ones extends well beyond his family, his fiancée, and his childhood friends. He has just as much love for the land of Jacmel, so often subjected to the weapons of fate: hurricanes, devastating fires, and Vlanbindingue spirits, not to mention the government scourges who chip away at the freedom of regular folks. Hector Danoze is as rooted in his passion for a woman as he is moved by the condition of his fellow townspeople.