Moonbath - Yanick Lahens

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that broke me.

       Even though my eyes are closed, nearly shut, and my left cheek is pushed right up against the wet sand, I still manage, and this gives me some relief, to look over this village built like Anse Bleue. The same narrow huts. All the doors and all the windows shut. The same leprous walls. On both sides of the same muddy road leading to the sea.

      I want to force a cry up from my belly to my throat and make it spurt out from my mouth. Loud and clear. Very loud and very clear until I rip these big dark clouds above my head. Crying for the Grand Maître,* Lasirenn,* and all the saints. How I would love for Lasirenn to take me far, very far, on her long and silky hair, to rest my aching muscles, my open wounds, my skin all wrinkled by so much water and salt. But before she hears my calls, I can only pass the time. And nothing else…

       All that I see.

       All that I hear.

       All that I smell.

       Every thought, fleeting, full, overpowering. Until I understand what happened to me.

       The stranger took out his cell phone from his right pocket: a cheap Nokia like the ones you see more and more at the All Stars Supermarket in Baudelet. But he couldn’t use it. His whole body trembled. So much that the phone flew out of his hands and fell straight on my left temple. A little more and the Nokia would have hit my eye…

       The man backed away abruptly, his eyes terrified. Then, working up the courage, he bent over slowly and stretched out his arm. He grabbed the phone quickly while taking extraordinary care to not touch me.

       I heard him repeat very quietly, three times in a row, his voice choked with emotion: “Lord have mercy, lord have mercy, lord have mercy.” I still hear his voice…It gets mixed up with the sea that writhes in wild sprays upon my back.

       In my head, the images rush. Clash. My memory is like those wreaths of seaweed detached from everything, dancing, panicking on the foam of the waves. I would like to be able to put these scattered pieces back together, to hang them up one by one and reconstruct everything. Everything. The past. The time from long ago, like yesterday. Like three days ago.

       Year after year.

       Hour after hour.

       Second by second.

      To retrace in my mind the route of a schoolgirl. Without brambles, without bayahondes,* without an airplane in the night sky, without fire. To retrace that route as far as the wind that, this night of the storm, enchants me, intoxicates me. And these hands that make me lose my footing. Stumble.

      To piece together the whole sequence of my existence, to understand once and for all…To bring back to life, one by one, my grandfathers and my grandmothers, great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, as far back as my franginen* forefather, to Bonal Lafleur, to Tertulien Mésidor and Anastase, his father. To Ermancia, Orvil, and Olmène, who were like water and fire to each other. Olmène whose face I do not know. Olmène whom I always missed and whom I still miss.

       What a storm! What a tumult! Throughout this story, it will be important to pay attention to the wind, the salt, the water, not just to men and women. The sand was turned around and upside-down in the greatest disorder. Like land waiting to be sowed. Loko* blew for three days in a row and swallowed the sun. Three long days. The sky turned a lighter and lighter gray. Milky in places.

       “Do not do what you might regret,” my mother hammers into me. “Don’t do it.”

       I ramble like an old woman. I rant like a mad woman. My voice breaks at the back of my throat. It’s still because of the wind, the salt, the water.

      2.

      The elusive gazes of the men, the slightly aghast looks from the women, upon the arrival of this rider, all to suggest that he was a dreadful and dreaded being. And it’s true that we all dreaded Tertulien Mésidor.

      Tertulien Mésidor loved to pass through all of the villages, even the most distant, to test his power. To measure the courage of men. To weigh the virtue of women. And to check the innocence of children.

      He had emerged from the candy colored curtains of the devant-jour. At that hour when, behind the mountains, a bright pink rips through shreds of clouds to run flat out over the countryside. Sitting on his ash gray horse, he was dressed as usual in a stately straw hat, the wide brim turned down over two bulging eyes. A cutlass hung from his belt and following his lead were two other riders, who advanced with the same slow and resolute steps as their master.

      Tertulien Mésidor went toward the fish stall that reeked of offal and decomposing flesh. At his approach, we started talking very loudly. Much louder than usual, vaunting the variety of fish, the quality of the vegetables and provisions, but without taking our eyes off the rider. The more we watched him the louder we spoke. Our racket on this dawn was nothing but a mask, another, for our acute awareness. When his horse reared, the procession froze. Tertulien Mésidor bent down to whisper into the horse’s ear and to caress its mane. “Otan, Otan,” he murmured softly. The animal stomped in place and shook its tail. The man with the wide-brimmed hat wanted to go ahead on the rocky path between the stalls. With a gesture of authority, he hit the flanks of the horse with his heels and, squeezing the bridle, forced the animal to trot in that direction.

      He had hardly advanced a few meters when he took the reins to stop himself again. The movement was so abrupt that the two other riders had a hard time holding back their horses, who were also stomping now. Tertulien Mésidor had just glimpsed, sitting among all the women, Olmène Dorival, the daughter of Orvil Clémestal, whose smile split the day in two like the sun and who, without realizing it, had twisted the bottom of her skirt and slid it between her thighs. Two eyes were already undressing her and she didn’t have the slightest suspicion of it.

      By the light trembling of his nostrils, the two other riders knew what to expect. Tertulien Mésidor kept his eyes fixed for a few seconds on this band of fabric that hid Olmène Dorival’s spring and flower. It took his breath away. For a few seconds. Just a few seconds. But long enough to lose himself. Captive to a magic spell with no explanation.

      Tertulien Mésidor’s desire for Olmène Dorival was immediate and brutal, and it sparked within him a longing for entangled legs, furtive fingers, hips taken right between his palms, the scent of ferns and wet grass.

      Tertulien Mésidor must have been fifty-five. Olmène Dorival was barely sixteen.

      He owned three quarters of the lands on the other side of the mountains. He was a don.* A great don.

      More often than not she went barefoot and the only shoes she had ever worn were hewn from rough leather.

      He had made several trips to Port-au-Prince, and had even traveled beyond the seas and danced the son* with the mulattoes of Havana.

      She had only left the limits of Anse Bleue to accompany her mother to the fish market in Ti Pistache, which smelled of rot and offal, and where flies danced wild sarabandes. Or, recently, a little further away, to the big market in Baudelet.

      Unverifiable legends and tenacious truths hatched under the name of Tertulien. They said that he had stolen, killed. That he’d had as many women as there were in our village of peasant women and fishermen. And many other things…

      In the monotony of very ordinary days, Olmène Dorival only escaped by the graces of the gods, who sometimes straddled her in dreams, tempers, colors, and words.

      3.

      Tertulien, taking the reins of his beautiful ash-gray horse, leaned over to caress its mane again. But all of a sudden, not being able

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