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
[. .]
I refuse to think of them as wasted opportunities to save myself, but rather as stages in my careful process of preparation.
[. .]
I am more than ready and willing to take action.
[. .]
I think I have finally come to understand your logic.
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.