Once upon a time, Verdieu Belhomme had been a perfectly gallant farmer. Today, he’s nothing more than a shadow of himself. His first son left him to live a dissolute life in the capital. His wife died that same year. His daughter Célie, a beautiful girl, it’s said, also abandoned him. She packed her things one morning and hopped on the first big truck that went by. Since then, she lives as a prostitute in a brothel in Port-au-Prince, the Royal-Cabaret, where’s she’s all the rage.
Verdieu Belhomme rarely leaves his village. He no longer goes to the capital — it’s been at least ten years. He’s resigned to his life as a field rat. Not hoping for anything better. Just waiting for death. He often regrets his naïveté at having listened to that white preacher who’d advised him to get married. To have only one wife, in accordance with the laws of God and Christian morality. He’d stupidly obeyed the preacher, who knew absolutely nothing about this strange land of Haiti. Who didn’t understand that the strategy of the Haitian peasant is to take as many mistresses or wives as possible to produce multiple clutches of children for him. The great law of accumulation that underlies the rural economy of the family. The supreme solution to the problem of a sufficient workforce. Verdieu Belhomme often asks himself how he’d been so foolish as to break that fundamental law of the Haitian peasantry, and to follow the treacherous advice of that preacher, who left him in a state of misery and confusion. He wouldn’t have ended up where he is today — as a disgraced peasant. He’d be like his neighbor Chérilus, a King Midas with the Golden Touch, with his thirty-seven children. Ah! Children! The wealth of the poor. Sure support for old age.
Today, he’s all alone. Denim pants with holes in the seat in the shape of two hexagonal eyes. A shirt so shredded that it’s as if it had been saved at the last minute from the jaws of a raging bull. Long, thin machete on his right hip. Downcast visage that makes him look older than his fifty years. Verdieu Belhomme walks against the wind, on every pathway, over all the hills of Montrouis, which he knows by heart, just as he knows the dry and rainy seasons of the year.
For some time now, happiness has been elusive. When he goes to or returns from his cursed garden, he looks just like a fighting cock. Beak to the ground. Disconcerted. Bruised by strikes of multiple spurs. Ow! Such stubborn soil! So many trials for one human being! This life, even tougher and heavier than carrying a casket on one’s head. The sterile soil, an old menopausal woman. When he drinks his rum, his fingers tremble, his lips twist into a bitter grimace. Such terrible luck! A narrow passageway holds back his limbs. The wrong paths break his momentum. It’s as if an invisible machine is chewing up his life like stalks of cane in a mill. The gears tighten. But he’s left with neither juice nor molasses. He thinks, with regret, that for a long while now he’s been reduced to a pile of old, dried-up cane stalks, good for burning to repel mosquitoes. His life: ridiculous. Insignificant as that mesquite tree, tilted toward its fatal decline. Covered in moss, a hairy beard. He’s no longer a beautiful tall tree. His flesh, torn apart by blows of the ax. His mouth, crushed. His gums, toothless. His body, laced with scars. Tripped up and tumbling over. Running into tree stumps. His vision barely reaches over the hedge of candelabra cacti that border his little ajoupa. His activities end at the enclosure of his garden, his everyday landscape. Misery on his heels, faithful companion. The desolation corseting his hips in barbed wire. Distress down to the very roots of his being.
Despite everything, Verdieu Belhomme still knows how to get unstuck. To sort himself out so as not to die too quickly. He manages to find a pretty good stock of pistachios for Raynand.
— And the money — when do you think you’ll have it? he asks Raynand.
— As soon as the boat comes to pick up the first loads of pistachios. Maybe in about two weeks.
— You’re sure we can trust this American’s word? says Verdieu Belhomme skeptically.
— Don’t worry. The American will send the boat. With the money, of course. He’s a rich man. He seems to really need these pistachios for his soap and oil factory in Puerto Rico.
— All the same, let’s wait. We’re really counting on this deal.
— It’ll work. There’s no doubt.
— You’re not thinking that it’s the Good Lord of the poor who’s come to help us in the form of some white man. That’s not it, is it, Raynand?
Raynand doesn’t answer. The next day, he returns to Port-au-Prince with his load of pistachios and puts them in an old house on Saint-Martin Street. Waiting for the steamer Mary-Jane.
More than a month goes by. The Mary-Jane still hasn’t pulled into the harbor in Port-au-Prince. Day and night, Raynand walks in circles down at the wharf. In the beginning, visions of bundles of dollar bills danced in his head. He whistled happily from morning to night, humming boleros, rancheras, and all sorts of popular tunes. He’d fall asleep and plunge into a dream of future projects, at the end of which there was always a little car, a pretty house. And, of course, all of his beautiful dreams featured the presence and the finery of an imaginary woman, a marvelous spouse who’d make Solange regret her betrayal.
Some weeks later, he started feeling nervous. An interminable waiting game. Rain falling every night. Unbearably hot days. A sniggering sun, a veritable fire monster. A fire-breathing dragon. And then, in the afternoon, the dry earth split open, becoming chapped. And the next night, rain. A veritable tolalito — a hopeless quest — set to the rhythm of downpours and relentless sun. A constant maïs-l’or,† livened up at times by a slow-turning game of jump rope with either the sun or the moon.
After a month of fruitless waiting, Raynand is devastated to learn that the American was an impostor. A fake industrialist. He’d figured out how to exploit the situation of underdeveloped countries so as to mint money. A crafty bugger who’d put his mind to work at thieving and scheming. He’d been to several islands of the Caribbean where he’d been able to collect immense sums with a mere signature. A white man’s initials — that’s a guarantee! In poor Haiti, he’d managed to squeeze more than a hundred thousand dollars out of his naïve partners. Not to mention the awful trick he’d pulled on those who’d stocked enormous quantities of unsold pistachios.
Overcome, Raynand listens to Paulin tell him about the numerous exploits of this international con man, a thieving artist, a Luciferian monster vomited up by the hell of a decadent American society. Evidence, also, of the naïveté and innocence of the world’s little people. But now, there’d never be a boat, Raynand says to himself. Pulling himself together, he leaves Paulin. He heads directly toward the old house on Saint-Martin Street, where he’d stored his sacks of pistachios. What would he do with them? He doesn’t really know. But he’s worried about what to tell Verdieu Belhomme. For the time being, the main thing would be to save some part of the money by reselling the pistachios on the cheap.
This morning, the weather is just fine. The temperature cool. The sun shines without heating things up too much. The sky a clear blue. Cloudless. The key to the warehouse in his right hand, Raynand begins to think, maybe even to dream. Seated on the narrow concrete-coated step leading up to the depot.
Far away. He falls into a moment of total distraction during which a series of confused images follow one another incoherently. Without paying any particular attention, he crushes all the little ants swarming up his splayed legs. A cockroach passes by and he flattens it with a quick jab of his heel. A sticky, whitish substance surges from the insect’s rear, and he looks at it for a while. Hideous creature, I crushed your foundations, your vile parachute. You won’t do any more damage. Go back to the malodorous gutter you came from. Life is already so difficult. Man can’t even feed himself. There’s not the slightest piece of straw to spare for parasitic beasts. The tender flesh of cats is edible. The drunkards know that all too well. It’s time, long past time that we start eating dogs and rats. Raynand scratches at the dusty ground with the tip of his shoe, covering over the roach, which clearly isn’t completely dead, as its legs are still moving. How to escape, when life is nothing more than a brief parenthesis in the interminable dictation of absences and death? And Man is no good at spelling. The centuries, a long series of exterminations. Raynand ends up burying the insect under clumps of earth. What a marvelous grave digger I’d make! he says to himself, standing up. He fits the key into the lock. He turns it twice to the left. The double doors open instantly onto a marvelous burst of colored wings. An awakening of wriggling, unexpected light. A multicolored flight of butterflies whip Raynand’s face. Confetti of noisy wings. A gentle rain of butterflies — purple, blue, yellow, sequined, striped with black luminescence, green phosphorescence. A swarming, sparkling kaleidoscope.