The Boiling Season (28 page)

Down below I saw Mona crossing the drive with rags and a bucket, heading toward the steps to Villa Bardot. I had been so distracted by the dismal figures in the ledger that I had not realized how late it had grown. Dusk had arrived, and Dragon Guy and his companions had not returned. But when Mona reappeared at the top of the stairs no more than five minutes after descending them, I began to fear the mess Dragon Guy had left behind was so severe she would need a mop and bucket as well.

“Monsieur,” Mona said, startling the ledger from my hands. I turned to find her standing in the corridor with the door open before her.

“I left your supper on the stove.” She stepped back to go.

I called after her, and she stopped with what seemed to be irritation. I thought to ask where she was off to in such a hurry, but then I recalled her request for the night off to visit her ailing sister.

“Villa Bardot,” I said, “were you able to put it in order?”

“There was no need.” Her tone suggested I was foolish to ask such a thing. “It was just as I left it. A little dustier. Will that be all?”

If I appeared perplexed at the news, Mona showed neither interest nor concern.

“You had better get going,” I said. “The curfew.”

“I haven't forgotten.”

I turned back to the ledger, thinking she had left, but when I looked over my shoulder a moment later, she was still standing in the doorway.

“Are you writing to your madame?” she said.

I told her I was.

“I wouldn't think what happens here would make for very interesting reading.”

“Madame likes to be kept informed,” I said curtly.

“And what does she say in return?”

“She is still occupied with business. But she is looking forward to coming back.”

“If that's the case,” Mona said, “I wonder all the more what you've been telling her. If she really knew what was happening here, she would know the safest place to be is oceans away.”

“Thank you,” I said with a tone that I hoped conveyed my lack of interest in her opinions. “Please shut the door behind you.”

When she was gone, I once again took up my pen. If Mona could not see for herself why a person would remain forever attached to Habitation Louvois, there was nothing I could say to show her. I knew, Mme Freeman knew, and now Hector knew. As far as I was concerned, that was sufficient. Once the hotel was up and running again, Mona could take her indifference back with her to Cité Verd. There would be nothing more we would need of her.

“This morning,” I wrote, “I discovered a palm tree fallen upon the wall in the vicinity of Villa Moreau, but there is no cause for concern. The wall held fast. It is an indication, I think, of the permanence of this place. The walls have lasted two hundred years, and they will last two hundred more—or at least as long as I am here to watch over them.”

A
t night, of late, the estate had become particularly fertile ground for the superstitious mind. The quiet corridors, the empty offices, the restaurant with the chairs turned upside down on the tables, the club room draped in white sheets, the outbuildings in the courtyard vacant. The bullets only amplified the desolation.

With Mona gone, the kitchen was fully dark except for the faint glow of the fading coals deep within the belly of the charcoal stove. A single pot sat atop the grating. Inside I found a portion of rice and beans. A plate in the oven held two cassava cakes. This was what now passed for dinner.

H
ours later, when the gunfire broke out, I awoke and turned my ear toward the shots. But it was nothing I had not heard a thousand times before, and a moment later I rolled over again to go back to sleep. I was drifting off amidst the clamor, prepared to give it no further thought, when suddenly I shot up in a panic, realizing I had not heard Hector return. It was now long past curfew.

Without bothering to reach for my robe, I rushed out into the hall.

There was no answer to my knock, and when I opened the door I found nothing but a mound of twisted sheets on Hector's bed.

He must have decided to stay with his aunt in Cité Verd. I told myself he would be safe there; I had no reason to worry.

And yet I worried all the same. Stepping out onto his balcony, I heard a squeal of tires and a few more shots beyond the trees. Dawn was an eternity away.

I
did not expect to see Hector the next afternoon. Done properly, the inspection of the wall would take two full days, and since he had not come back during the night, it made sense that he would stay out and finish. But then darkness brought with it another curfew, and still he had not returned. All through the night I fell in and out of sleep, listening for his footsteps in the hall.

In the morning there was still no sign of Hector. Before breakfast I went to the kitchen to see if Mona had heard anything from him. She had not, and neither had either of the market women who had stopped by on their way into Cité Verd. Mona was going through their baskets, reading the face of each vegetable like a blind woman. How sad and meager, I thought, regarding what they had brought us. I could remember a time when women by the dozen had formed a line in the yard, waiting among the pigs and chickens for their turn to offer the provisions they had carried from Saint-Gabriel. With their fresh vegetables and the grains already locked in the pantries and storerooms, we could have fed all of Cité Verd. Now we merely needed enough for the ravenous Hector.

He will be fine, I told myself. He was smart and he was resourceful. No one could take care of himself better than Hector. He would be back at any moment, desperate to resume his lessons.

T
hat night, Hector still did not return. I stayed up as late as I could, finally moving into his room when the tedium of mine began to wear on me. It was there, atop his mess of sheets, that I eventually succumbed to sleep.

Soon after I awoke to what I at first mistook for the pulses of a heavy, unexpected rain. I got up and raised the louvers to the jalousie, but there was no rain. Automatic gunfire was erupting everywhere at once.

I could not see Cité Verd for the trees. The capital was dark too, sporadic muzzle flashes the only light. I was watching the firing in the capital, but hearing the shots nearby in Cité Verd, and the discord between the two made it seem all the more unreal. However commonplace the fighting had become, it had not entirely lost its power to hypnotize.

I remained in the doorway until dawn, neither venturing onto the balcony nor retreating back to the comfort of bed.

F
or the next several nights, there was more of the same. And every morning I came upon Mona and the market women talking about the latest incidents. Cité Verd, they said, was turning to rubble. When, I wanted to know, had it ever been anything different?

Yet another radio station had been burned down. Bodies were piling up along the roadside faster than they could be carted away. And there was still no sign of Hector. He must be lying low, I decided, waiting for the worst to pass. And then he would spring on me at the moment I least expected it. And how he would laugh, delighted to have caught me by surprise.

A
lmost a week into Hector's disappearance, more barricades went up. The smoke of burning tires, a dizzying petroleum stench, wafted across the valley. Finally a sickening smell to complement the sickening sights and sounds.

“Dear Madame,” I wrote, sitting at my desk that night with a cloth to my mouth and nose, only a candle to see by,

I am sorry for the lengthy gap between this letter and the one I sent you a week ago. As you have perhaps read in your newspapers, we are currently experiencing some tension. As a consequence, many of the repairs I mentioned have not yet been completed. There is no reason, however, for you to be concerned. We are safe here, as we have always been. We wait anxiously for peace and for the resumption of business as we knew it.

T
he boys standing along the road glanced at me with indifference as I leaned up against the gate to get a view. I had waited until the sun had risen to come outside. The trees and underbrush along the road—and even the road itself—were slightly wet with dew and looked almost as though they had been washed and left out to dry. The boys, however, appeared not to have washed in weeks.

Perhaps ten meters up the road lay two felled trees and a wall of junk—rickety wooden tables and chairs piled upon one another, legs sticking out in every direction, like the nest of a monstrous bird. Beyond the barricade, a pyramid of molten tires continued to smolder. An odd place for a blockade, I thought. Surely they could not be expecting an invasion from the mountains.

I recognized none of the boys. They were young, many no more than Hector's age. They seemed bored, squatting on stumps discarded at the side of the road, which was everywhere littered with damp, glistening garbage.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

A boy with a gap between his front teeth raised his head. Some sort of rifle hung from a strap over his shoulder. “What does it look like we're doing?”

“But why must you do it here?”

The gap-toothed boy turned back to his friends, sharing with them a crazy-eyed look intended as an imitation of me. I was amazed by the way he moved, as if the rifle were just another appendage, something he had been carrying all his life. He seemed unaware that it was even there; I could think of little else.

“I don't want you here.”

I heard a small rock ping against the metal gate. Across the road a boy who could have been no more than twelve sifted through the dirt and stones in his hand for something else to throw. A pistol poked out of the back of his shorts, dark and grubby, as if it were an abused toy. “What makes you think we care?”

“This is my house,” I said. “I live here.”

The gap-toothed boy planted his feet firmly beneath himself. “This is our road. We live
here
.”

“Besides”—the twelve-year-old paused to wing another pebble off the gate—“that's not your house. That's a white woman's house. You're just her servant.”

To hear them laughing, clutching their stomachs as they rocked forward and back, one would have thought it was the funniest thing they had ever heard. The young one beamed with satisfaction.

I realized now that all of them were armed, in one way or another. More rifles leaned against the barricade, as casual as broomsticks. On top of a boulder balanced someone's machine gun, like a demonic lizard soaking up the sun.

“Will you still be laughing tonight,” I asked, “when I'm asleep in my bed and you're curled up in the gravel?”

“He got you,” the gap-toothed boy cackled with glee, roughing up the younger one's head.

The other boys were silent. I was surprised that not a single one of them made a move toward his weapon. No one's pistol cocked. It was as if the novelty of the guns had already worn off, and they had no interest even in frightening me. Perhaps they figured I was not worth the trouble.

“Do any of you know Hector?” I said. “He works here, at the estate.”

The gap-toothed boy strutted forward, as if suddenly wishing to make it clear he was in charge. “He'll be back tonight.”

“Was he here last night?”

The boy shrugged. Perhaps those were his orders—that he was to say nothing about the defenses, even to the point of revealing who would man them.

“If you see him,” I said, “tell him I've been looking for him. I need to know he's safe.”

* * *

Despite the roadblock, the roofing tiles I had been waiting months for finally arrived. Further proof of how impossible it was to predict what pieces of normalcy would continue amid the chaos. The deliverymen unloaded half of the tiles in the courtyard outside Villa Leigh. The rest they dumped on the garden path running beside Villa Bernhardt.

We could no longer afford to wait for Hector. That afternoon, Raoul and I carried a ladder from the back shed down a dozen flights of stairs overgrown with creeper, the shoots of which grew tangled with the rungs at every turn. For so dirty a job, I had found a set of old clothes folded together on a shelf in the former servants' quarters. I assumed they had belonged to the same person, but I realized I was mistaken as soon as I tried them on. The shirt must have belonged to one of the houseboys, for it was especially tight around the arms, making it difficult for me to hold the ladder high upon my shoulder. The overalls were a different matter; I had rolled them so many times the cuffs hung like weights around my ankles.

The roof of Villa Leigh was only mildly graded, allowing Raoul to move about with ease. He removed the broken tiles, and then together we mixed the mortar. I found a way to raise the bucket to him using the arm of an overhanging calabash tree as a pulley. It worked so well that I used the same method to get him the tiles.

We stopped just once, when Mona brought us lunch. Years had passed since I had last labored like this, but I found I did not mind the soreness in my muscles. By the time we had finished the roof it was evening, and we decided we would have to save the roof of Villa Bernhardt for tomorrow.

As we made our way back up the stairs toward the drive, I thought I heard voices. The commotion grew louder as we neared the guesthouse. A breeze must have picked up just then, because the moment I stepped onto the drive the stench of burning tires forced its thick, coarse fingers down my throat.

The twilight fires—the burning barricades. As constant and dependable as anything in nature. It was as if God himself had decreed this new flame as a stand-in for the setting sun, an essential element of our survival.

“Is that him?” I said, cocking my ear toward the gate. From that distance it was impossible to tell if one of the voices belonged to Hector. When Raoul failed to answer, I turned to find him, and he was gone.

“I think I heard Hector,” I told Mona when I arrived at the kitchen.