The Boiling Season (32 page)

I felt drawn to the children, although I could not say why. Perhaps it was simply that I sensed they were the only ones here, other than me, who had no particular place in Dragon Guy's plans. Their caretaker was a young woman with a round, soft face and a delicately pointed chin perched below her mouth like a tiny ebony knob on a jewelry box—features not so much pretty as they were doll-like. Unlike most of the other women here, she looked remarkably unravaged. But the thing that most distinctly set her apart from the others was that she was without question the only person here, besides me, for whom a book was something other than fuel for a fire.

The first day I came upon them, the young woman was sitting on the casino steps, a small hardbound volume balanced upon her tightly clenched knees. Whenever she turned a page, she paused to glance up at the children. It seemed to me to be with genuine fondness that she raised her eyes—and her plump arm to deflect the light—to make sure that all was still well. I was curious to know what the book was, but from where I was standing—among the trees along the path—there was no way I could read the spine.

A long time passed before I heard her speak. “Come, children, come,” she said, kind but firm as she stood up and brushed at the back of her dress. It was blue with a faded pattern of irises across the waistline. “It's time to resume your lessons.”

She stood aside on the steps until the last one had gone inside. Then she closed her book, as if she were folding a delicate handkerchief, and went in after them.

Standing out of sight in the entryway, I listened to her lead them, letter by letter, through the alphabet. It was the only thing they accomplished that afternoon, but in the end each of them could recite it without making a single mistake. This was the most heartening thing I had seen in a long time. And yet how could it not also be bitter, reminding me of those lost afternoons in my office with Hector, watching him study the pages of his book and shape his mouth into words?

I decided this was to be my comfort, that there was at least one responsible person among Dragon Guy's ranks, one person committed to something good in the midst of all of this destruction. And, perhaps, one person who might be willing to help me make them leave.

* * *

Following Dragon Guy's occupation of the manor house, nothing changed for Mona. She remained locked in her kitchen. The dust on the paving stones outside the door showed where numerous sets of feet had stood, trying and failing to gain entrance.

“It's me,” I said one afternoon as I knocked softly, not wanting anyone passing by to overhear. “Open up.”

“Mona.” I knocked more loudly. “It's just me.”

I could hear not even the slightest movement inside.

“Go ahead,” I said, “ask me whatever you wish.” When still there came no response, I began listing the names of the villas. Usually she cut me off midway through, but this time I had to struggle to get all forty-four.

“That's all of them, Mona.” I knocked again. “This is enough. Let me in.” I pounded on the door with my fist. “What's it going to take to convince you?”

“Nothing,” she whispered hoarsely through the crack. “There's nothing you can say to make me open that door.”

T
hat night at dinner I found an empty chair at a table with four other men. Once again I caught the not-so-subtle elbowing and whispering. It was as if a man in a suit were the most exotic creature they had ever seen.

“Good evening,” one of them said as I sat down.

I nodded without looking to see who had spoken, hoping to make it clear I had not come here for conversation.

“She works at the laundry,” one of the younger men was saying. He was thin and frail, with sunken eyes streaked with yellow. There was nothing healthy about him.

The young man beside him scratched his bicep, running his fingernails over a deformed tattoo—a bird, I thought, but the color appeared to have run, making it look like a bloated chicken. His smile was gummy and warm. “What's her name?”

“They call her Lulu.”

The smiling young man smiled even more brightly. “Lulu the laundress.”

“I think I know her,” said a man sitting across the table. His black, scraggly beard hung crookedly from his chin, like some sort of moss from a tree. “She's small and light skinned.”

“No,” said the skinny young man. “She's dark and almost as tall as me.”

The smiling young man clapped his skinny friend on the back, laughing joyously. “Ah, she sounds like a beauty—a beauty!”

The skinny young man looked around the table self-consciously, as if afraid he were being mocked. “She is.”

“Yes,” said Moss Beard. “Too beautiful for
you.
What a girl like that needs is a mature man—one that knows how to take care of her.”

The skinny boy puffed up his chest to little apparent effect. “I've been with plenty of girls.”

“Of course you have,” said the fourth man at the table. He gave the young man a grotesque, squishy wink. As that half of his face folded in on itself, I noticed he was missing most of his left ear.

The smiling young man put his hand on his friend's shoulder and squeezed it enthusiastically. “Have you talked to her?”

“Yes.”

“What did you say?”

The three men watched expectantly as the skinny young man pushed the spoon idly around his bowl, as if he were setting the hands of a clock.

“Well?” the smiling young man said, nodding encouragement.

The skinny young man sighed. “She was carrying a basket of clothes—”

“And?” Moss Beard and One Ear shouted simultaneously.

“—and she dropped a shirt, and I brought it to her.” The young man paused to look at his friend, who nodded for him to continue.

“What did you say?”

“I said, ‘You dropped this.' ”

Moss Beard leaned forward, combing his fingers through his gray whiskers. “And what did she say?”

“She said—” The skinny young man paused to look at us. “She said, ‘Thanks.' But it was
how
she said it,” he added.

The two older men were already laughing. “ ‘Thanks,' ” One Ear lisped, lewdly licking his lips.

At last the old lady with the cart limped to the table, mercifully halting the crudeness before it could degenerate any further.

“Where's your bowl?”

I turned around, and she saw my face.

“You again!”

“I must have lost it,” I said, daring to hope for another act of mercy.

“What do you mean, you ‘must have lost it'?” The ladle fell back into the pot with a suck and a gurgle. “You don't even know? Is eating that small a matter to you? If you lost your pants, would you go wandering around naked until someone pointed it out to you? Or is it your plan to show up here every meal expecting someone else to take care of you? You've got too much to do to keep track of your own bowl, but you expect everyone else to be looking out for you?”

“There are extras in the kitchen,” I said. “There are hundreds of bowls and plates—”

“That's how it is with you?” She folded her arms across her chest. “No reason for you to worry—there's always an extra lying around.”

I began to get up. “I could show you where they are.”

“Oh, no you don't.” She dragged the ladle out of the pot, threatening to thump me on the chest. I tilted back down into the chair.

“Myriam!” she shouted. “Myriam!”

Almost instantly the doors to the kitchen in the far corner of the room sprang open and an immense figure appeared there, glancing around the dining room with pronounced displeasure. Over her significant torso Myriam wore one of Jean's old aprons, streaked with stains of every conceivable color. Never had Jean appeared in the dining room wearing one, and not even in the kitchen would he have worn anything so filthy. Myriam looked as though she had come fresh from a slaughter.

The cart woman waved her ladle, finally catching Myriam's eye. “Our prince here has lost his bowl, and he wants us to give him a new one.”

Without a word—or even a discernible expression—Myriam pushed her way back into the kitchen, and before the doors had stilled she had returned. In her enormous hand, pinched between her meaty thumb and index finger, she held a bone-white china bowl twined with an inlay of gold leaf. It was a lovely pattern, selected by Madame herself, but it had not been designed to be tossed around like a tin cup, and I was not convinced it was going to survive the trip across the room.

Myriam wove around the tables and errant chairs. She did not slow as she reached the table, and I gasped as I saw the bowl leave her hand. When I opened my eyes, it was there in front of me on the table, rocking in a circle like a spun penny. After another half turn it finally came to a rest.

“Here you go, sweetheart.”

I let my breath go.

The cart lady dealt me my slop and limped away.

“At the rate you're going,” Moss Beard said, turning from me to the skinny young man, “the only way you'll get into her drawers is if you trip on them in the street.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

E
ach afternoon, the older children gathered at the tennis courts, two dozen teenage boys in undersize T-shirts wearing the solemn faces of old men. On any given day there were three or four instructors, young men themselves, who all grew beards to make themselves look older. They fashioned lumpy enemy soldiers out of tablecloths and old clothes stuffed with grass. It was difficult to see how the clothes cast aside for this purpose were any worse than what most of these men wore themselves. The boys learned to beat the dummies with sticks and fists. But whenever the instructors' attention was elsewhere the boys turned to pushing and hitting each other, an exercise they appeared to enjoy a great deal more. Somehow the instructors never seemed to notice.

Then came the weapons. At some point each day, one of the instructors brought out to the tennis courts a crate of old guns, which the boys practiced taking apart and reassembling and running around pointing at one another. In lieu of bullets, they made explosive gurgling sounds with their throats as they dodged behind the straw dummies, taking improbable shots. Almost as much as they loved shooting did they enjoy dying, staggering about like drunks, watching imaginary pools of blood trickle through fingers splayed across their chests. Sometimes, after the formal lessons were over, I saw boys practicing their death pirouettes and crumbling to the ground, while others stood off to the side offering tips and critiques.

I never saw the boys fire actual ammunition. I assumed there was none to spare. For target practice they threw rocks. But so easy did they find it to hit the dummies while standing still—even from great distances—that they preferred to throw while weaving and scrambling in unpredictable squibbles; firing sidearm while in midair; diving and tumbling and hurling from their knees. Even so, they rarely missed.

To counter these discouraging sights I found myself more and more often taking walks leading past the casino, where at certain hours I knew the younger children would be outside playing, their teacher reading quietly on the steps. I envied her ability to find peace under circumstances such as these. And I wondered where she had acquired the books. Madame's library, perhaps. If so, was it possible she could read English? I knew without a doubt that she and I were the only two people among the hundreds here who had finished school—perhaps we were the only ones to have attended at all. What could someone with her education and disposition have in common with these people? None of these men could mean anything to her. She must find them repellent. Like me, she had probably spent her whole life trying to get away from them. And yet here we were, surrounded.

But an opportunity to talk to the schoolteacher and ask about her books never arose. Over the course of several weeks I learned little more about her than her name: Mlle Trouvé, which the children sometimes sang out in affection:
Mademoiselle Trouvé, Mademoiselle Trouvé, she sits and reads while the children play.

On Sundays I saw Mlle Trouvé at the pavilion, where a man in a makeshift collar—fashioned, it seemed, from a dinner napkin—led morning services. The pavilion was too small for even a fraction of Dragon Guy's followers, so most of them made do with a seat on the grass. Not all of them came. Still, on no other occasion could I see so many of them in one place—usually well over two hundred. There seemed to be more every week.

I had a favorite spot at the base of a shady tree on the periphery, which the grizzled priest—whose shapeless collar gave him more than a hint of menace—had no trouble reaching with his voice.

The benches inside the pavilion were reserved for Dragon Guy and his inner circle, including his younger brother and Black Max. Although I had come to feel a certain fascination for the services, what had first brought me to them was a realization that it might be my only chance to see Hector.

Despite everything that had happened in the almost two and a half months since Dragon Guy had appeared here, I still could not bring myself to blame Hector. Perhaps he
had
played some part in deceiving me. Perhaps he had been aiding his brother all along. Perhaps he had even been the one to show Dragon Guy the hole in the wall. Perhaps he had done even more than this.

Whatever he had done, he had done out of desperation, and not because deception was the direction toward which his heart inclined. I could believe he had duped me, but I knew better than to imagine his devotion to the estate had ever been anything less than sincere. And that was why I continued to believe that if I could just get rid of Dragon Guy, we would be able to recover the things we had lost.

Each Sunday, from my spot under the tree, I could see the boy sitting beside his older brother. It was remarkable how much he seemed to have aged, all the while wearing the same tattered jersey and flimsy sneakers. The hardest thing of all was seeing the sadness that seemed to overtake him the moment he sat down. It was not just the solemnity of the service. In fact, I had never seen a congregation more prone to outbursts, weeping and laughing, shouting and clapping. But each week Hector sat perfectly still and perfectly silent, sapped of all his former energy. I could not help wondering, as I watched him stare abstractly off toward the trees, if he was sitting there wishing he could take it all back and return to the way it was.

At moments like these it was hard not to think of what it must have been like for my father when I was Hector's age. Those hours he spent in church watching me drift through services, and how much of the time that he would have liked to devote to worshipping he instead had to spend on thinking of ways to keep from losing me. Now here I was in his role, and Hector was in mine. And yet although I had countless reasons to have given up on Hector, to have stopped caring, to have turned against him, I never did. Was it possible that the same was true of my father—that he had continued to love me, even through his disappointment?

Hector was not the only one who had trouble staying attuned to the priest's sermons. His brother was even worse, hopelessly fidgety and impatient. In truth, it always surprised me that Dragon Guy bothered to come at all. Aside from his jewelry, there seemed to be nothing even remotely pious about him. Everything about his restless manner suggested he was here out of some sort of obligation. Perhaps even powerful generals needed to keep up appearances.

On Dragon Guy's other side sat his girlfriend, René-Thérèse, who discreetly touched his arm whenever she saw his attention straying. In those moments she reminded me of Mme Marcus, and how at any social occasion she could be found standing at the Senator's elbow, feeding him the names of every minister's wife and the ages of every one of her children. She had done as much as anyone to make him the man he became. I wondered if the same could be said of René-Thérèse.

At every service Mlle Trouvé sat in the grass, accompanied by several older women. They could have been relations, but I thought it just as likely that they were merely part of the group of women who lived together in the former maids' quarters near the laundry. By chance I had seen Mlle Trouvé coming and going from there on several occasions. To my dismay, among the women she sat with was the limping old lady from the dining room, whose eye I had to be careful never to catch. But there was little chance of that, given the rapt attention she paid the priest.

The women's gazes never wandered; their voices never faded during the hymns. Although I was not myself devout, I found their devotion comforting. It suggested—or so I hoped—that however anarchic things seemed, perhaps some higher principle continued to circulate among the baser currencies.

Much as his appearance suggested, the warrior priest delivered fierce, fiery sermons. His was a scripture I remembered from my childhood, full of bombast about the poor, oppressed masses, and I often thought how much my father would have liked this man, who wielded holiness like a club.

Before this crowd of misfit soldiers, Dragon Guy's priest spoke of hope, of a new day, of God's grace for those of his creatures who followed the path of righteousness—the latter uttered without any trace of irony. Since their arrival it was surely the least trodden path in all of Habitation Louvois.

I was aware that the priest was not their only spiritual guide, nor likely the most popular. From men in the dining room I learned of villas where lazy-eyed seers stinking of rancid herbs read cards by candlelight, hoisting bowls of chicken blood and communing with the dead. Somewhere deep in the preserve they had even built a peristyle, providing a proper place to enact their delirious worship. On nights when the fighting with President Duphay's army was less intense and some of Dragon Guy's followers were able to stay within the walls of the estate, the drums never ceased, and it was all too easy to imagine them tripping over each other as they staggered around in various states of possession, recalling scenes from my childhood of some of our neighbors' more grotesque nocturnal gatherings. There was no way to live on the island without encountering it, but that did not make hosting it in my own home any more bearable.

* * *

Upon taking over the manor house and the guesthouse and the outbuildings, Dragon Guy had also decided it was time to move his people into the two remaining groups of vacant villas—a wide berth being yet another of the privileges I had surrendered. These new additions quickly came to take on the feel of a marketplace. There were barbers and seamstresses and basket makers and rum distillers and knife sharpeners. Bartering was the chief form of payment, but there also seemed to be a great deal they got for free. As in the dining room, where every man was allotted his bowl of slop, there was a villa where one went each day to receive one's quota of charcoal, of which there appeared to be a limitless supply—thanks to the preserve's endless bounty.

So greatly had they expanded the cutting and burning of Madame's trees that virtually the entire forest now wore a permanent shroud of smoke—it seeped up through the turf as though the earth itself were raging in fire. During daylight hours I could barely see Cité Verd from my balcony. I could scarcely see the sky. Watching the smoke was like witnessing my mother's last breaths. The preserve was slipping away, and I could do nothing to save it.

Whatever charcoal they did not use themselves they stuffed into sacks and threw onto their shoulders to carry to the market. They treated the trees like a pestilence, something to be eradicated at any cost. Never mind that the trees were just about the only thing keeping them alive. All they could see was what the trees bought them in exchange, guns above all else.

I could only assume it was also the trees that bought their other supplies, including rice from the coast and coffee from the mountains. The rest of their food they grew here. Before becoming slum dwellers, most of them—like virtually everyone in Cité Verd—had been farmers in the countryside, and the women had been able to turn almost every available patch of ground into garden. I doubted they had ever seen such fertile soil. Swaths of the immense lawns along the drive were now barren of grass, seeded instead with yams and onions and eggplants. The water came free, too, flowing endlessly from the springs. They had discovered ones even I never knew about. Someone had gotten the water flowing again in almost all of the villas, the outbuildings, and the casino.

Now it was their turn to grow accustomed to luxuries.

And yet, despite all of this, it was clear the estate was nearing collapse. By now there must have been nearly three times as many people living here as there had ever been, even at the hotel's peak. Three, four hundred? It was hard to guess. I could measure their numbers only by the devastation they wrought. I wished my father could see what really happened when walls and gates came down and everyone was let in. Was this his utopian dream? Everywhere I looked I saw peeling paint and crumbling walls. Among the outbuildings there were no more paths; the constant trampling of the grass had left nothing but dirt. Everything of value in the manor house—the vases and paintings; all the silver and crystal; even the chandelier—every bit of it had disappeared. Whatever was left that they had no use for—and that could not be sold or burned—they dumped in piles out near the stables, as if its mere presence offended their senses. Their own garbage, however, bothered them not in the least. They left it wherever it happened to fall, sowing fields and pastures of trash.

I often asked myself what reason there was for continuing to stay. What good could I possibly do? Despite the priest's call for faith and hope, I had almost none. And yet, I could not bring myself to leave. Even if I had somewhere to go, I could not abandon a place I had sworn to protect.

Nor could I abandon Hector.

I
t was during one of my daily walks following the midday meal that I encountered Mlle Trouvé on one of the lower paths among the villas. I had just come down the stone stairs beside the guesthouse as she was heading toward them. Mlle Trouvé had a way when she walked of drawing her shoulders and elbows in toward her body, as if trying to make herself smaller and more difficult to see. I wondered where she was coming from, alone and unhurried. As I watched her shrink toward me, a picture came into my head, so vivid it was as if I had been there to see it myself: Mlle Trouvé reading quietly by herself on the bench in the preserve that Madame and I had for so long shared.

A few steps before we met, I stopped. Against her chest she held a small brown book. I knew then that what I had imagined must be true.

“It's beautiful, isn't it?” I said.

She stopped suddenly, as if surprised by the sound of my voice. I realized then that prior to this we had never actually spoken. Did she have no idea who I was?

“The preserve,” I added. “It's my favorite place in the entire estate.”

She glanced at the steps rising before her and then hesitantly back at me. “Is it?”