There is a Land (A Libète Limyè Mystery) (28 page)

The children turned from this and looked upon the massive form of a float, the
Nèg Mawon
. The symbolic depiction of the former slave had a machete in one hand and a conch shell in the other, ready to call others to take to the hills and rebel. At the level of the truck bed were three young men wearing scandalous dresses and wigs.

— Where’s your dress, Jak? Libète asked.

He grinned.

The bottles were being knocked back too, as important a preparation for many as applying face paint and becoming someone else. Libète pointed. There, coming down in a pack were the costumed
chaloska
, ghoulish military men inspired by a police chief notorious for killing political opponents. Decked in dark uniforms, their faces were obscured by dark sunglasses and massive red lips that reigned in jagged teeth. Their prey was small children.

Their leader wore a tricorner cap and had a fat belly. He was the first to lunge at a group of unwatchful children. These uninitiated ones bolted behind mothers’ skirts and fathers’ thighs, trembling while onlookers laughed, just as onlookers had laughed at them generations before when
they
had been the horrified little ones.

But one small girl stood her ground, a who-do-you-think-
you
-are sneer on her face. She pointed to the lead chaloska:

Chaloska m pa pè w

Se moun ou ye!

“Chaloska, I’m not afraid of you! You’re just a human being!” she screamed.

The leader fell into a fit of shakes and tremors and fled. She yelled it again and again as she pointed a finger at monster after monster until they had all been made to cower and run. She turned back to her awestruck friends and revealed to them that with the same incantation they too could protect themselves. Libète smiled.
A girl after my own heart
.

Jak tugged at the back of her shirt, pulling her out of the way of a shirtless man with snakes draped over his head and shoulders. The man laughed at Jak, who could only stare back at him.

A fight broke out between two floats’ crews after one truck driver slipped into a neutral gear and slid back into the front of the other float, nearly unsettling the massive Nèg Mawon.

— Calm down! someone shouted.

— It’s Kanaval! It’s Kanaval! said another.

— Let it go! Save it for another day!

A police pickup, summoned by the shouting, drove through, and a tense officer barked through a megaphone, threatening to arrest anyone who ruined the day and marred Jacmel’s reputation. The world is watching, he intoned. The world is watching!

Libète hid her face at the sight of the police and withdrew behind a column. The easygoing spell cast over her by growing crowds and increasingly bold costumes was broken.

— Don’t be afraid. No one will recognize us here, Jak said.

— I know, she said, a bit too harshly. She didn’t like being made to fear or feeling the need to hide. In its way, the apprehension was yet another victory for Benoit.

— We can go back, Jak said. If you need. There was disappointment in his voice, faint and feebly hidden.

The walls of the Martinette Villa had kept fear of discovery at bay these past months. Though Benoit of course had no idea of moments like this, when he inflicted paranoia on her, she resolved not to feed her fear.

She wrapped her arm around her friend’s slumped shoulders.

— I need nothing! Today, Jak, we live!

The distant drumming is underway. A call.

Follow it
, the notebook says.

She reads and rereads the scrawled message until the land has been overtaken by darkness.

Whoever stole her writings was literate, as evidenced by the note. He or she knew things about her she had told no one else, not even Magdala. But why was the notebook suddenly returned?

She had been advised by Stephanie and Laurent not to commit too much to the page, and her scribblings were mostly fragmented: lonely stanzas, pieces of speeches, blog posts she’d yet to enflesh. Life in Cité Soleil was a common subject throughout, yet the references were often veiled. Didi was mentioned by name. As was Jak. She couldn’t imagine a soul on this mountaintop who could take in these ramblings and extract fact. But the observant reader might still trap hints.

With fears of discovery allayed, she poured over her words dispassionately and with new eyes. She was struck by the fire in the author’s pen: her beating heart, her passion, her resoluteness.

It saddened her. What had she become these past months, as she let herself live out a fiction? Sophia was not an ideal. She was safe. Weak. Fearful, even. Satisfied with obscurity, others’ ignorance, the status quo, injustice . . .

— Sophia? You there?

Libète jumped. She turned to find Félix standing at the garden gate.

— What do you want? she asked quietly.

He walked toward her, but hesitated. I wanted to ask . . . I wanted to see how you were. If you were feeling better.

She shrugged.

— Where did you learn to breathe life like that?

Libète debated how much to share, but she knew she could trust Félix with this bit of truth. A hospital where I volunteered, she said. The same as where I learned about delivering babies.

He nodded.

— Is that all you came to say, Félix?

He shook his head. Something is happening here, Sophia. There’s a strangeness in the air. I feel it. He clenched something in his hand. Whatever it was made him uneasy.

— Please. I–I have a lot on my mind. He noticed the notebook in her hand.

— Is that . . . yours? She nodded. You found it then?

— Whoever stole it returned it. That’s all I can figure.

— Bondye. What a thing. I wonder why now?

— Must be the ‘strangeness.’ She rolled her eyes. That drumming doesn’t help. What is that anyway? Why isn’t anyone willing to tell me?

— No one knows. His words were instant, unfeeling.

He’s lying.
She rose, stepped toward him, a sharp anger pushing her forward. She searched his face and his eyes and poked his chest. I don’t need shit like this right now, not from you.

He looked like he wanted to tell her everything. She softened. I’m sorry, Félix. I’m sorry. What’s that in your hand?

He nodded twice, opening his hand to reveal a small figurine. It was a rooster.

— That’s–that’s Dorsinus’s work, no? Where’d you get it? From inside the house?

— It’s not yours. I was down at the cemetery today.

— Just hanging around graves?

— Of course not. I was visiting, and this was left on – he paused for dramatic effect –
Dorsinus’s marker
.

Libète’s snorted a laugh. These hills–it’s–it’s
insane!
The nèg is dead.
Dead,
dead.

The drumming grew louder and she inclined her ear. What the hell is that beating? she muttered under her breath.

— I’m telling you, Félix said. Things are going on here. They’re coming. Big things. Bigger than Foche has ever seen.

— I couldn’t care less, Libète said.

— That’s a lie.

Libète waved him off. The dull rhythms accelerated now, growing in volume, impossible to ignore.
Follow it.

She slipped back inside to don her worn sandals and sought out a match and a tallow candle. She forced herself between Félix and the gate. Her candle was now aflame.

— Where are you g-going? Félix stammered.

— The drums.

— Sophia,
ou pa ka fè sa
. They aren’t for you!

— If you know something, tell me.

— I can’t.

She pushed on.

— I can’t follow you there! he shouted, the timbre of his low voice cracking. There will be consequences!

He clasped the wooden bird in his hand and watched a long while, until the light of her candle disappeared behind the mountain’s hard, ominous lines.

The colors swirl and the bodies move, an impenetrable mass of life.

The spectators–those who stand at the sides taking in the bands and demons and slaves and beasts and Indians and dancers and statues–can no longer deny themselves a place. They become the Parade.

And Jak and Libète are there. In the middle of the jubilation, caught up themselves, distant from all the pain that paralyzes them, the accusations that exile them, the fears that bind them.

The Parade is thick. Clammy bodies press up against each other, jumping, laughing, sometimes grinding. Strangers alienated by the challenges of daily life come together to protest against death.

When it was on the very cusp of beginning, Libète had thought she would like to wear a mask and become something altogether different. But now she has banished the thought. Today, she does not want to hide and cower and pretend. She wants to once again
be
–Libète Limye, her very own selfsame self.

Jak is free too, maybe for his own reasons, but maybe because seeing Libète at ease makes him at ease.
Rara
horns blare staccato rhythms that animate the Parade to step and dance. Jak and Libète’s hands grip each other’s tightly, for losing the other in the crowd might mean losing them for good. But their hands are sweaty and slip; they are quick to grasp again to bond them together.

But the bond breaks.

The crowd engorges as it winds around a corner and pushes through a bottleneck. Libète figures Jak will step back into reach, but he’s pulled away.

The fiction falls. The fear, imperfectly tucked away, bursts its top. Her breathing, already fast, becomes hyperventilation. Jak! she chokes out, her voice unable to climb above the horns.
Jak!
she cries.

But she cannot stop. To do so means fighting a surging wave of people.

— Please! Let me pass, please!

Libète pushes toward the side, fighting revelers who treat her fear with dismay as she prays Jak might be spotted and found.

She is nearly out and her eyes are fixed on one post along the colonnaded road.
He’ll do the same. He’ll be there. He’ll be waiting.

She reaches for it, her hands clinging desperately as if to a ship’s strong mast in a storm. She holds tightly–
so tight!
–fighting the winds and water until she–

A hand. It grabs her shoulder from behind and squeezes. Libète spins, her eyes watering with hope.

She is greeted by a mask that–once pulled away–unveils a face she never expected to see.

The drumbeat pulls Libète forward through the night like an invisible lead around her neck. Up, over the peak, down, into the brush and sparse woods. The Moon is out, the stars are out, but they offer no comfort.

She nears the source of the sound. She extinguishes her candle.

Stepping from tree to tree to keep her cover, she takes in the scene.

The colors swirl and the bodies move, masks hiding faces.

Firelight springs from the center of a circle as dancing forms stop and start. Their robes of red and black both glint in the firelight and swallow the light whole. Their masks look like malformed skulls. A ten-foot timber pole stands erect near the flames.

She watches, unblinking, searching for hints of the familiar in the twirling movements, but finds all is transformed by the song, the drum, their beckon. She tries to make out their words, but they’re indistinct.