The Boiling Season (10 page)

My father had come to his spiritual awakening relatively late in life, after he was already a grown man. I never asked what drove him to it, and I doubt he would have told me if I had. The most obvious impetus would have been the passing of my mother, but by that point she had already been dead for more than a year. I was nine years old the first time he took me to church. It was not at all what I expected. Instead of one of the glorious stone-and-stained-glass cathedrals in the capital, he chose a place in the neighborhood made of cinder block. It looked like a schoolroom. The altar was constructed of old crates. The priest was a tiny man whose black pants were constantly smeared with chalky handprints. Each Sunday, from his rickety pulpit, he thumbed through his Bible in search of passages promoting the liberation of the poor from unjust social and economic conditions. The priest called it liberation theology, but to me his sermons sounded a lot like the sort of thing my father no longer tolerated from the radio and newspaper. It seemed my father saw it differently. I supposed the crucifix—a wooden monstrosity that appeared to have been hacked into shape with a dull machete—provided the assurance he needed that such inflammatory rhetoric came down with the authority of God himself.

Over time I had come to see that this was how it would always be. When it came to my father, the only choice was to follow where he led. And that meant that if he wanted his support of Paul to be a secret, I would never dare to break it.

“I was outside,” I said, hoping he would not detect my discomfort. “I ran into Paul.”

My father pulled himself up into a sitting position.

“He is starting a shop of his own. Of sorts,” I could not help adding.

My father was still and silent. He seemed to sense there was a point to what I was saying, and he would not commit to anything until I had made it.

“He would like to learn from you how to run a shop.”

My father turned to Paul, as if looking for verification.

“Would it be all right,” I said, “if he stops by every now and then to help out?”

With a groan my father started to get up. Paul reached him before I had a chance, extending his hand. My father took it. “I'm glad at least one of you decided to do something useful.”

Useful?
I wanted to say. Did he really believe that Paul's contribution to mankind was greater than mine? Did he really have such high regard for black-market toiletries? But then I remembered what the man I had met in the street had said, and I realized my father must have decided that any pride he had in me should be kept secret, too.

“You have a good head for business,” my father said to Paul. “I always thought so.”

Had he? I found it difficult to believe he had ever bothered to form any kind of opinion of him at all.

Paul looked at me and smiled. I had gotten what I wanted. What right did I have now to complain that they had taken to each other too well?

“We'll leave you to your rest,” I said.

My father finally let go of Paul's hand. “Come over whenever you want,” he said. “I'll teach you everything I know.”

Never had I been so glad to leave my father's shop. Even the still, dead air outside brought welcome relief.

“Thank you,” I said to Paul. The way things had turned out, perhaps he should have been thanking me.

“Like I told you,” Paul said. “I owe him. I owe more than this. Besides, friends help each other out. They look after one another—”

“I appreciate it.”

“—Friends give each other support,” he continued. “By the way”—he gestured back toward his mother's house—“Did I mention what I got in the other day? A fresh shipment. Some very nice stuff. Quality merchandise. Floor wax. Imported. Expensive stuff. Extremely rare. But since you're a friend. . . .”

I headed back to Habitation Louvois with three cases' worth. At least it was something we could use, even if the supply lasted a lifetime.

* * *

We had estimated it would take a year to complete the renovations to the manor house. As that year stretched into eighteen months and then twenty-four, Madame began to grow impatient. Finally she wrote to give us a new set of orders. We were to begin work on the hillside villa east of the manor house. She reasoned that the villa could be completed more quickly than the manor house, and it would give her a place to stay while we finished the rest.

During this time, I rarely left the estate and very little news reached us, and as a consequence I lost what little grasp I had once possessed of what was happening in the capital. Whether or not the radios and newspapers continued to be shut down I could not say, nor did I have any interest in finding out. The men were satisfied with the morning-to-night merengue on the state-run station, and as long as it inspired them to work, it was good enough for me.

But then one afternoon in mid-September one of the architects arrived in a strangely frantic state. I was on the balcony when I heard his convertible race down the drive, skidding on the loose gravel. M. Laraque was not the sort of man to be so reckless, and I could tell something had happened.

As I reached the front steps, he was springing from the car, his collar loose and necktie askew. The others sensed something, too. They had dropped their tools and gathered around.

I arrived just in time to hear M. Laraque utter—with a hesitancy suggesting that he resented the burden he had been forced to carry here—“an attack on the palace.”

I assumed I must have misheard, but when I looked at the other men, I saw that they were equally bewildered.

“What happened?” asked Joseph, standing at the head of his troupe of carpenters.

“All I know,” M. Laraque said, his voice rising defensively, “is what I heard.” He glanced at the crowd closing in around him as if he were trying to separate friend from foe, but it was impossible to know, and consequently it looked as though he wished we would all go away. He could not risk saying the wrong thing. Men had been killed for less than taking the wrong tone when delivering news of an attempted coup.

With a wave of his hands the architect tried to indicate he would say no more, but he must have realized no one among us would leave until we had heard the rest.

M. Laraque loosened his tie another notch. “They came on a fishing boat,” he said with a sigh.

“Who?”

Again he seemed irritated by our interest. “Three former officers,” he said reluctantly, carefully choosing his words. “And a handful of mercenaries.”

“How many?” someone demanded, not bothering to hide his impatience. Either he had forgotten the man before us was his superior or he was too agitated to care. But M. Laraque appeared not to notice the offense.

“Eight,” he said. And then again with fading breath: “Eight.”

“Eight!” one of the gardeners shouted, and then he quickly held his tongue. It was not clear whether he was disgusted the president could have so many enemies or distraught that he had so few.

“They got past the guards at the garrison,” M. Laraque said quickly, as if hoping to cut off any further questions before they could arise. “Disguised. The officers had the mercenaries cuffed, pretending they were prisoners.”

“That's impossible,” Joseph gasped.

The architect showed no sign of wanting to disagree. “It was late. The rest of the soldiers in the garrison were sleeping.”

“My God,” said one of the masons. “What did they want?”

Disgust was written across M. Laraque's face. “What do you think?”

We knew. All of us knew. We had known from the moment he first opened his mouth. But no one could be blamed for wanting to hear him say it, the forbidden words, that they had come to topple President Mailodet.

“What did
he
do?” one of the older men finally asked. We all knew which
he
he meant, and we were grateful the old man had spared us from having to ask.

M. Laraque sighed. “He thought it was an invasion. After all, they'd taken over the garrison. The president assumed there must be an entire army. He had an airplane ready. I don't know where he thought he'd go, but he knew he couldn't stay.”

High above our heads a woodpecker hammered his way into the upper trunk of a pine tree, relentlessly chasing his lunch. For me—as I could only imagine it was for the other men, too—the sound mirrored the rush of blood to my head as I tried to consider the possibility. I had thought I no longer cared about what happened in the capital, but I realized now that when it came to President Mailodet, I still cared very much.

What if he were gone? What if President Mailodet were really gone? The more I thought about it, the more I hoped no one would ask. I wanted to retain the possibility as long as I could, not letting it be spoiled by the truth.

M. Laraque closed his eyes. When he opened them again, I saw the depths of his regret. A dapper, confident man, he suddenly looked like a miserable child forced to confess to some misdeed. “One of the officers wanted a smoke,” he said, slowly and cautiously. “So he sent a hostage out for cigarettes.”

It was more clear than ever that he wished he had not taken up this task. The way he looked at us, with weary expectancy, he assumed we already knew what came next.

“The hostage told them as soon as he got outside,” M. Laraque sighed. “He told the security forces. He told them there were only eight men. It wasn't an army, just eight men.”

From all the gathered mass of men, who had run from across the grounds in the sodden heat to get here, there was not a single sound. It appeared they would sooner cease to breathe than allow their disappointment to be known.

“They took pictures,” M. Laraque said, his voice nearly breaking. “So everyone would see.” Though he was standing in the sun, he suddenly looked as if he had been struck with a cold fever. “They all died a dozen different ways.”

Even among friends there was no exchange of glances. In silence we drifted away from each other, like shipwrecked castaways clinging to whatever bit of flotsam we could find, knowing we had no choice but to face our common fate alone.

That night at dinner the silence remained. By then the news had trickled down to the rest of the men. Not knowing who was listening, no one was willing to risk so much as whisper. But we did not need to speak to understand we were all thinking the same thing. How could they have come so close and been such fools? If only we ourselves had been one of the eight, I could see the men thinking, everything would have turned out differently.

I
n the following days, we had no choice but to move on, which we accomplished—as if by mutual agreement—by pretending we had never heard the architect's story. President Mailodet was still with us, just as he always had been, just as he always would.

T
hree months after we began work on Madame's villa, we were done. I wrote to let her know, and within a week I received a response. She was coming for a visit, she said, perhaps for as long as a month. She asked that I make arrangements to get her what she would need to plant herself a rose garden.

Chapter Eight

F
or nearly two months we had been without rain, and the relentless sun had reduced the lawns surrounding the manor house to coarse, brittle straw. Even in the parts of the estate protected by dense canopies of trees the ground cover had turned brown and crisp. Not until the evening before Madame's arrival did the rains come again, and then for hours the rain fell without cease.

Just after dinner, as the men were spreading out their mats on the lawn, we saw the black clouds gathering above the mountains at our backs. But at the top of the cliffs they seemed to halt, like an army awaiting orders to advance. The foremen circled around me, and Joseph asked what was to be done. But there was no time to decide; there were no tentative first drops. The clouds fell upon us like a blanket. The only sound louder than the thunder and the pounding of water against the hard earth were the shouts of the men as they gathered their filthy belongings.

“We need shelter,” Joseph shouted.

“The stables,” I said.

“Too small.”

“There is no place else.”

Joseph was looking over my shoulder at the manor house.

“Out of the question,” I said.

But he was already signaling for the men to follow. “We have no choice.”

The men charged inside like cattle into a pen, trampling one another and everything in their path. Beneath their sopping feet and mats the floor took on the texture of mud and manure.

“Be careful,” I yelled.

No one listened. They were already making space for themselves among the piles of rubble. Others had started up the stairs, and I had to run, pushing my way past, to head them off.

“The second floor is off limits,” I yelled, spreading my arms from banister to banister. I could smell them below me, an odor of sweat and wet and hay.

Back down we went, me herding from the rear. But as soon as we reached the lobby, it was clear how little room remained. Everywhere one stepped, one tripped over a man or construction debris. We tried the ballroom, the dining room, the library. Not even in the kitchen was there a spare corner.

We quickly ran out of places to look.

“Very well,” I said. With me at the lead, we headed upstairs again, and I showed them into the room two doors down from mine. “I don't want to hear a sound.”

It was not so much the noise of the men that kept me awake as their physical presence. There was a palpable difference in the air, a compression as if from a single collective breath. If they were making noise, I would not have heard it anyway. The rain fell like stones upon the shutters and the balcony.

I
was still awake when the first drop hit my chest. By the time I understood what was happening and had sprung out of bed, the papers at one corner of my desk were soaked through, heavy as a brick. There was a knock on the door.

“Monsieur,” one of the men shouted, “it's not our fault.”

The leaks sprung slowly at first, slowly enough that we—the men in the other room and I in mine and the three old women next door—were able to keep up with them, running from drip to drip with buckets and pots and cups and gourds. Sleep became impossible. The echoes of hundreds of tiny splashes made my rooms throb and groan.

The leaks multiplied, and soon we ran out of vessels. The water was coming down so heavily there might as well have been no roof at all.

“Downstairs,” I yelled to the others as I rescued the ledgers and other important records.

The men on the first floor were anything but pleased to see us. First aroused from sleep by the commotion, next they were getting kicked and stepped on as we tried to find our way in the dark. As I should have expected, nothing came from the lamps when I pulled the chains.

I do not know where the others ended up. We were all on our own. I finally thought of the perfect place to settle myself in peace, but one of the men had beaten me to it. I saw his dark form as soon as I opened the pantry door.

“Out.”

He opened his eyes, blinking in confusion. “This is off limits.” He spilled out into the corridor, and I barred the door shut with a heavy sack of rice.

W
hen I awoke the next morning, the storm had passed, but everywhere one looked one encountered its grim remains. Every depression in the earth, no matter how shallow, hosted a still, murky pool. Across the grounds it appeared as if the sky had opened up and let loose a hail of kindling. Madame's investment looked like a ravaged swamp.

But then the sun came out and the pools of rainwater turned to steam. By mid-afternoon, even some of the grass had come back to life. Inside the manor house, however, the damage was not so easily erased. We had no choice but to sacrifice the morning's work to drying out the rooms, mopping up with whatever we had at hand, carrying what we could outside to set in the sun.

In the midst of all this disarray, Madame arrived. The car was magnificent, as long and glassy as a sailboat. It even moved like one, bobbing and swaying with each dip and turn in the drive.

As the car came to a stop, I froze, realizing with dread that almost nothing was ready.

Through the window I noted Madame's eyes opened wide and her mouth agape, caught in mid-exclamation. I rushed to her door, wishing to shield her from disappointment.

“It's incredible.” Her eyes swept past the furniture and household goods spread across the lawn as if they were invisible. “I had almost forgotten how breathtaking it is here.”

Two years had passed and she had scarcely changed, though her blond hair had more clearly begun to favor gray. I wondered if she would think I was different. It had been nearly three years since we had first met. I was thirty-one now, no longer a boy, but Senator Marcus's suit still fit as it always had. I seldom had a reason to look in the mirror, but when I did, I sometimes thought I saw a face that had grown leaner and coarser. I hoped the men saw it too, and understood that I was a man to be taken seriously.

Madame wore a yellow dress, the outfit I would come to associate with her visits. She had arrived by ship the day before and had waited out the storm at the Hotel Erdrich. Yet somehow she did not look at all exhausted by the days of travel. “If only you knew how badly I've wanted to come back,” she said. “I never meant to be away this long.”

I said, “I've been looking forward to this day since the moment you left.”

The driver lifted Madame's luggage from the trunk of the car, and I took it from there.

“It's been too long.”

“It's just as well,” I said as we started down the stairs toward her villa. “You would not have had much peace.”

Though they had made little progress anywhere else, the gardeners had managed to attend to the path leading from the stone stairs beside the guesthouse to Madame's villa. After months of careful pruning and weeding and planting, this small stretch of jungle had finally come to resemble a civilized garden.

“Anything would have been better than where I've been,” she said, following along behind me. “Here, at least, at the end of a long day you can go out and breathe fresh air. Do you know that the windows in my office don't even open? And do you know why?”

“No, madame,” I said. “I can't imagine.”

“To stop me from jumping out.”

“You, madame?” I said, genuinely alarmed.

“Everyone. If ever there was a sign of the imminent collapse of civilization, that's it. This is what thousands of years of progress has gotten us: we conquered plague and pestilence only to succumb to the eight-hour workday. Who am I kidding? The twelve-, fourteen-hour workday. For the last two months the sun hasn't risen or set with me not behind my desk. The only rest I have is the twenty or thirty seconds I get every now and then between meetings and phone calls. In my mind I've learned to stretch that into hours. I can take a whole vacation in the time it takes my secretary to announce an appointment and open my door. And do you know where I come for those twenty seconds?”

We had reached the courtyard, and I was about to go on ahead to open the door when I realized she had stopped somewhere behind me.

She was gazing up at the treetops. “I come here. And it gets me through.”

And then her eyes fell back on me, and then on our surroundings, and I heard a sharp intake of breath. “It's beautiful.” She rushed to the door before I had a chance to open it.

Her mouth fell open again as she stepped inside. Gesturing in several directions at once, she seemed unable to decide on what she wanted to look at first: the cream-colored leather settee, the low teak table, the rosewood escritoire.

“My God,” she said, touching the desk, “the grain is like marble.”

And then she turned the corner, stepping into the doorway to the bedroom. Needing to catch her breath, she sat down on the edge of the bed, parting the silk canopy. She kicked off her shoes, stretching out her toes against the hand-glazed terra-cotta tiles. “It's like a cold drink for your feet.”

I felt her euphoria spreading to me, and I looked for more things to show her. I pointed out the tub in its elevated alcove across the room, and then I drew open the curtains, filling the room with daylight.

When I looked again, she was lying flat on her back, horizontally across the mattress, moaning with delight.

“Is there anything I can get you, madame?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Not a thing in the world.”

T
hat evening, following a long rest, Madame came to my office to invite me to dinner.

“I wish I could,” I said. “There's still so much to do.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “I insist.”

With the manor house in no shape for entertaining, the three old women from Saint-Gabriel served us in the villa, a modest meal of roast pork and rice, which Madame savored as if it were a rare delicacy.

“This is exactly what I was hoping for,” she said, pouring herself another glass of wine. “You're going to make it impossible for me ever to go home.”

I said, “I wouldn't be doing my job if you did.”

“What about you?” she said.

“Me?”

“Are you content?”

“Of course, madame,” I said.

“You don't miss the excitement of the city?”

“Not at all. This is a very good life. It's very peaceful.”

“For some people there's such a thing as too much peace.”

I shook my head. “Not for me.”

She squinted at me. “I don't think I've ever known anyone as inscrutable as you.”

“Pardon me?”

“You never show emotion,” she said. “You're never upset. You're never happy. I never know what you're thinking or feeling.”

I felt my face flush. “I am happy. I'm very happy here.”

“Why? Why is this the one thing that makes you happy?”

“It makes
you
happy, doesn't it?”

Her grin was an admission that I had caught her squarely. “It makes me feel I've escaped from the rest of the world.”

I nodded. “As my mother would say, it's like paradise.”

“But you're so young,” she said. “What do you have to escape from?”

I could see no easy way of telling her. How could she possibly understand what it was like to grow up in a place where people were so hungry they sometimes sought sustenance in cakes of mud, where houses were made of things that people such as Mme Freeman routinely threw away?

I said, “I always felt I was meant for something else.”

“Life on the island isn't always easy,” Madame said. “Is it?”

I was surprised she had to ask.

She raised her glass to her lips with grim determination, as if to suggest she would require more than a little wine before she could discuss this any further. “You must think me crazy for buying a place like this.”

“Not at all.” Even knowing the dangers as well as I did, I would have done the same. In fact, knowing what life was like on the island made the estate that much more vital. There was nothing we could do to fix the rest, but this was something we could save.

“I knew it was a risk,” Madame said. “But I like risks. I decided it was a risk worth taking. Don't you agree?”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

Madame picked up her fork and took a small bite, before gently returning the silverware to her plate. Feeling suddenly self-conscious, I looked around my plate and realized I had eaten everything I had been served, like a ravenous dog. I might have escaped the place from which I had come, but I had not yet learned to be someone better.

“We need to believe that paradise is possible,” Madame said with a blot to her lips. “Without that, life would be unbearable.”

It was as if she could read my mind. It was remarkable how wise M. Guinee had been to bring us together. How could it have been otherwise but that we would share this place and all the good it would bring?

The women came to take our dishes away. While we drank our coffee, I told Madame about the storm. The damage from the leaks was substantial, but ultimately inconsequential: the ceilings were going to be torn out anyway, the floors refinished. The roof, however, would need to be inspected immediately. Already the builders had indicated that repairs would be costly. But no amount of bad news could spoil the pleasure Madame felt at being here.

“Better that we discover this now than later,” she said, stifling a yawn.

“You must be tired.”

“I just hope I'm not too excited to sleep.”

I began gathering together our cups and saucers.

“Were you able to make the arrangements I requested?” Madame said, bringing her hands together in anticipation.

I was relieved to be able to say yes. At least one thing had worked out as I had hoped.

“They will be here in the morning.”

She held open the door, beaming at me as I passed through. “I can't thank you enough for everything you've done.”