Her first life had been in the village, seven children in the house and enough money to send one child to school — not her. She had known the smell of the other children as they slept all together in the big bed, their little bodies rubbing hot against each other in the sweaty hut. She had known the river and she had known the hill, and she had known every stump and root and stone on the hill, and she had washed clothes on the bank of the river, and she had known hunger always, and she had learned that when you are hungry, sometimes a song can be like food.
That life came to an end as if she were dead and in her coffin when the man with the mustache came to the village. He had been of the village and he had gone away and he had come back, and now his mustache was thick and waxy and his chest heavy and sweaty and his eyes red. And they took him around to see all the girls of the village, to show him which ones could lift and which ones could sing and which ones could carry, which girl was becoming a woman and had a woman’s high breasts, and when he saw Nadia, the bucket of water on her head, spine erect, singing “Ti kolibri,” he pointed at her.
The negotiations had lasted an afternoon, and Nadia had prayed that her mother would take the cows from the man and let her go, because she knew there was nothing for her there but that high hill and the buckets of water and the hunger and the song. And the man with the mustache told Nadia that if she came with him, she would sing every night and never carry water again and her hands would be soft and she would have long hair like a blan. In the end, the man with the mustache offered her mother five cows. He had never paid so much for a girl before.
Now the story was on the ocean in the little boat, when a storm came up. Even the men began to cry because in the black clouds and pelting rain they saw the Baron. So Nadia sang to La Sirene, Erzulie of the Waters, who was so charmed by this maiden’s song that she implored her lover Agwe to let the boat ride on his back a little longer. Nadia came to the coast of a place that the others called Miami.
This was another life. She didn’t know how much the woman with the belt and the fat man with the golden watch paid for her. Now her story lived in a house with shiny wood floors. She was their restavek, their slave, and they told her that just as soon as she paid off her debt, she could leave: step out the door with no money and no language (who spoke Creole but Haitians?) into the vast white emptiness of America. So she stayed. The house was very large and the floors very shiny, and if the floors were not shiny, the woman beat her with a belt; and if the floors were shiny or if the floors were not shiny, the fat man with the golden watch came to her at night and she heard the golden watch ticking against her ear.
And that life lasted a very long time.
The fat man liked to make music. He liked to invite his friends some evenings to drink rum, and he would wake Nadia up and make her sing. Then she would come downstairs, and all the men would watch her as she sang the songs she remembered from the village, the fat man playing on his guitar. She had been in the house long enough that she knew the seasons of the plants in the garden, when one of the fat man’s friends took her aside. This was Ti Pierre, asking her if she wanted to come with him. She was tired of mopping the floor and the crack of the lady’s belt and the heavy weight of the fat man riding on top of her at the end of the night. So she said, “I don’t know.” And the man with the mustache and Ti Pierre bargained, and she was sold again. That’s how she became Ti Pierre’s. It was Ti Pierre who taught her to sing with the band, and Ti Pierre who had bought her shiny clothes, and Ti Pierre who taught her—
All those lives, thought Johel, and still so young.
* * *
Later, Johel’s mother, worried for her big, sad boy, insisted that he visit the family hougan in Brooklyn. Here was a man with good understanding of the power of the celestial realm. Johel had known Monsieur Etienne since he was taken as a boy by his mother to visit the dark and cavernous hounfort before the great spelling championship. Then the hougan had prescribed for the young Johel as follows: to bathe in five liters of water taken from three different rivers and mixed with two liters of rainwater, two liters of springwater, two liters of seawater, and a dash of consecrated water from the altar of the church. The hougan had been consulted on all matters of significance since; and Johel’s life had been, under Monsieur Etienne’s guidance, a series of triumphs.
Monsieur Etienne was now in his late eighties, and from early morning until first starlight he accepted visitors who gathered in the anteroom to his professional chambers as he counseled, consoled, advised, and cured those in need of change of fortune, those who sought to win love, or those who sought to escape love’s curse. His face was lined, as if by the daily accretion of sorrows his profession obliged him to absorb. His room was lit by precisely forty-three candles. The raw white rum that Monsieur Etienne spilled on the floor to please the various thirsty members of his pantheon burned Johel’s eyes. On the wood floor of the apartment, the two ladies who served as Monsieur Etienne’s acolytes had chalked in intricate swirls the veve of the great lord Damballah, a pair of snakes whose intertwined forms explained the most profound mysteries of the universe, if one had eyes to see and sense to understand.
When he had heard enough of Johel’s sad story to understand it was a matter of love, Monsieur Etienne spoke at length in soft Creole. Monsieur Etienne didn’t have a quorum of teeth left in his mouth, and the words went to mush somewhere between palate and lips. Johel had trouble understanding him in ordinary circumstances, but when Monsieur Etienne’s red eyes fluttered behind his eyelids and his body trembled and the spirit came down to talk through Monsieur Etienne’s dried-out lizard tongue and his thin, drooly lips, it was anyone’s guess, really, just what Ogoun was trying to say. Even the acolytes were confused, the fat lady saying that love was like a blessing, and the other lady, who was thin and seemed to Johel generally more sensible, suggesting that love was like a curse. Johel’s sorrows had not impeded the acuity of his legal mind, and this seemed to him a significant distinction, but both acolytes were agreed that the remedy to Johel’s sorrows could be obtained, Ogoun and the good Lord willing. Johel would be freed of love, Ogoun said, if he could offer Ogoun some trace of her presence.
At first Johel presented the long dark hairs he gathered from his pillow. This proved nearly disastrous because only after the lampe had been lit, only after Monsieur Etienne had implored Saint Jacques, only after the libation had been spilled, did one of the acolytes think to ask Johel about the hair. Elaborate discussion ensued, and soon both acolytes were laughing at the innocence and stupidity of men. They very nearly had united Johel for life with some anonymous impoverished woman who had sold her hair once upon a time to make the extensions that now drifted down Nadia’s back. “That lady, she’s broke and bald!” the fat acolyte said, eliciting from Monsieur Etienne and the thin acolyte choking squawks of dried-out laughter. When Johel presented the long nightgown he had bought for Nadia, the acolytes ran the cloth between their assessing fingers. They knew from the lace and satin and embroidery right to the penny how much such an object costs. But for the magic to be effective, Monsieur Etienne was obliged to pose intimate questions. Had the lady obtained her pleasure in this item? he asked. Johel affirmed that she had, recalling the nightgown slipped up above her slender waist as she ground herself down onto him, her eyes closed. But Monsieur Etienne leaned close to Johel and cautioned him that the power of the celestial realm was infrangible and unforgiving. He spoke to Johel as an older man speaks to a younger man. He told Johel that he was the father of seventeen children and had known more women in his lifetime than waves break on the shore, and still he hardly knew when the pleasure in a woman’s body was genuine or had been feigned — such was the malign trickiness of women. You never knew how fully you had possessed one. Now there could be no mistake.