The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (8 page)

Who’s Mr. Smith? said Tom.

Mr. Smith was the client.

Hold on, said Tom, under the impression that the client’s name was Gardner.

Connie Dolan explained that Gardner was Renee’s surname, not the client’s.

Cute, said Tom, and asked if the client’s name was really Mr. Smith.

No, said Dolan. His name is John Doe.

This is really very aggravating, said Tom. What’s his name?

Don’t ask, said Dolan. The Feds have a gag order on his name. They arraigned him under
John Doe.

Why?

Ask them.

Is that legal?

You’re the lawyer, my friend.

Tom leaned back from the table in exasperation and swung his head toward Monsieur
Frantz, who had removed a cheap fountain pen from his shirt pocket to doodle tiny
precise daisies on the paper placemat in front of him, the side of his hand leaving
a crescent-shaped blotch of moisture behind. You must have seen his passport, Tom
said. What was the name on his passport?

Monsieur Frantz stopped his pen and his eyes seemed to swell with mirth. Mr. Smith,
he said and then proceeded to laugh good-naturedly in response to every question Connie
Dolan asked him. In five minutes it was over and the accountant set sail back to the
ledgers in his office behind the front desk, followed by Dolan, who intended to exchange
dollars for gourdes, ignoring Tom’s suggestion that they could get a better rate on
the black market. Lingering over his fourth cup of coffee, Tom watched the two men
go and thought,
What a waste of time
—Fed or retired Fed, what’s the difference? Even if you stopped working for the government
you didn’t stop thinking like the government. He stood up from the table and bent
down for the shoulder bag that went with him everywhere and happened to notice an
addition to the garland of Monsieur Frantz’s flowery doodles, two names emerging from
the petals, Mr. Smith and Mr. Doe, overlaid with a bar of
X
s, and a third name, Mr. Parmentier, underscored by a row of daisies given improbable
happy faces. Tom walked out toward the car park weighted down by an all too familiar
angst, crossing a line that he could feel strongly but failed to see, struggling to
come to terms with what he was doing here in Haiti with Conrad Dolan, why he wasn’t
at this minute in a taxi on his way to the airport and home.

The truth was, Tom Harrington had no business in Haiti anymore—the graves of the massacred
had been exhumed, the remains—some of them—identified. Tom himself had deposed scores
of witnesses and relatives, the Ministry of Justice was a toddler seesawing between
tantrums and nap time, and the Truth Commission had decayed on the vine of his idealism.
The sly Mr. Dolan’s ability to establish a close association between Jackie and Tom
was pointless and poisonous. He had no answers for Dolan; there was nothing about
his relationship with the girl he wanted to explain, nothing that needed to be explained
for Dolan’s purposes.

But it was not a mystery, after all, was it,
he admitted to himself on his way through the foyer and back into the smash of light
and the tightness in his brow of an approaching headache. He was staying because of
the girl, because of the disease he had contracted, which was the girl, the only woman
he had ever truly hated without first having truly loved. Even in her death he was
without a cure for her, and he began to imagine that he might have always been this
way.

CHAPTER SIX

Voodoo,
vodou
, the ancient religion of Guinée, was transported from Western Africa in the hearts
of slaves to the New World, a rational theocratic view as theocratic views go, despite
the ignorance with which it is commonly judged.
Vodou
is a pair of eyes that sees the divine in everything—trees, oceans, crossroads, rivers,
mountains—and honors that divinity while striving to manipulate it as well. It assigns
every force—love, hate, lust, death, health, success, failure—its guardian spirit,
its
lwa,
saints by any other name, only unlike the saints the
lwas
could be summoned to take possession of mortal beings, to borrow for a few minutes
or a few hours the flesh and the voice of a dancer or petitioner or priest, although
the exact point or purpose of these earthly visitations was lost on Thomas Harrington.
Every force begets a counterforce, and in that sense
vodou
was little different than the other religions of man, and like other men Haitians
lived with the fears bred in and of darkness, and Haiti’s darkness was the darkness
of another, lost world that its people were not yet ready to let fall away, even as
they diluted it with the powdered milk of Christianity.

Tom admired Haitian
vodou
because he admired Haitian culture, the drumming especially and splashy colors, the
exuberant aggression of its rhythms, the beguiling cartoonishness of its imagination,
the bawdy good nature and earthy metaphors of the language and, more seriously, the
strict ethics and commonsense codes of the village, and he saw how the people found
courage and a last reservoir of hope in
vodou
’s animistic rituals, but
beyond this benevolence, he did not actually know much about it, nor did he much care
to, given his fundamental indifference toward all religions and the swaddle of their
illusions. A disciple of anything but the law he was not. He enjoyed
vodou
’s spectacle and creativity and had seen the naked pilgrims in the waterfalls of Eau
Claire, had witnessed the sacrifice of an enormous bull, beheaded with several mighty
swipes of a ceremonial sword, had watched women young and old ridden by the
lwas,
and had been the invited guest of Haiti’s most famous
houngan,
the emperor of the Bizango Society, one of
vodou
’s five secret sects, at a celebration deep in the countryside, three neighborly days
of drinking and tireless dancing and feasting and had come away with the impression
that the event had much in common with the Knights of Columbus holiday weekends his
parents had taken him to as a child.

Don’t expect Hollywood, he told the girl, Jackie, as they parked in the dust alongside
a bend in the road north of Saint-Marc. It’s not like that.

But she either did not hear him or did not care and started up the footpath that traversed
a dirt bank, her camera bag slung over her shoulder and the Nikon with the big lens
in her left hand. Gerard, in a rare mood, said he preferred to remain with the car
but Tom coaxed him to come along by promising to switch seats with him on the way
back, and the two men climbed the bank after the girl, who had disappeared over the
top. Flags tied to hand-cut poles stirred in the breeze above them. Tom asked Gerard
the word for soul and Gerard said it was,
ang
—angel.

Why are you here with this business? Gerard grumbled.

When have I heard you complain about any business? Tom asked.

Houngan
business is different.

The temple compound was modest, built of mud and wattle in the bare packed dirt on
the small plateau above the bank, its three adjoining sections forming an open courtyard
where Jackie stood, surveying without reaction the fabulous murals painted on the
hounfour’
s walls: St. George slaying a dragon from atop his white horse; the braided serpents
of Dumballah, creator of the universe; the three-horned Bosou, the
lwa
of crops and fecundity; and the skull-faced Lord Baron in top hat and tails, the master
of the graveyard and the implicit mascot of Tom and the various teams of forensic
anthropologists he had brought to the island and supervised during the occupation.
The paintings, at least those with human figures, were strikingly Byzantine, and Tom
had expected he and Gerard would have to wait while Jackie photographed the images
but she never raised her camera, not once all day had she raised it, and he had begun
to wonder about her lack of motivation. He could not remember having met a photographer
for whom Haiti had been anything but an endless unwrapping of violent and beautiful
gifts. Yet as he came up next to her he realized she wasn’t looking but listening
and when he stopped walking he heard it as well, the chanting of a single voice, deep
and sonorous but subdued and not close by, coming from somewhere inside the compound.

Where do we go in? said Jackie.

Each of the three rectangular wings of the
hounfour
had its own wooden door but only the central entrance was not chained and Tom opened
it and looked into the darkness beyond at the chamber’s barrenness and its smoke-blackened
beams, Jackie peering over his shoulder, the sudden current of her breath in his ear.
On the center post a leather bullwhip hung from a nail and in the dimness along the
far wall there were several large ax-hewn drums. She wanted to know what this space
was and he told her it was the main ceremonial peristyle, although it seemed no more
suited for ceremony than a livestock pen. The walls muted the chanting, its source
was elsewhere, and they backed away from the door.

Gerard stepped out from around the corner at the front of the courtyard and called
for them to come his way and they circled behind the building toward the chanting,
following him to what appeared at first to be a narrow wattle cook shed attached along
its length to the rear of the compound, its outer walls like coarse cloth woven from
thin branches, its roof a single section of rusted tin, a crooked door frame hung
with a soiled curtain of moss-green satin.

He is here, said Gerard, pointing toward the curtain, and Harrington knew on this
occasion he could depend on Gerard for little more than that.

Bonjour,
Tom said, pulling the curtain aside, his vision glancing off the bright daffodil
yellow of a woman’s skirt and across a dark row of faces, adjusting to the dappled
shadows. Something burned sweetly in the air, an incense of cedar and perhaps herbs.
He was prepared for the awkwardness of his interruption but the people crowded inside
the little shed—five, on old metal folding chairs along the inner wall and, at the
far end facing the doorway, a sixth; the chanting
houngan
on his humble throne, a wooden chair elevated on dusty planks in front of an altar
of burning candles and votives and trashy fetishes—hardly took notice of him. The
priest acknowledged him with an accepting nod and after a moment gestured with his
left hand toward the chair nearest him and the man who occupied it stood up and wedged
himself into the remaining space in the corner.

This generosity could not be refused and Tom left Gerard and the girl behind him in
the doorway, easing forward from the curtain, stepping around a calabash bowl on the
ground with something filthy in it to the seat, which was missing its back support.
He sat quietly with a bow toward the priest and the man he had displaced. Then, without
a word, Jackie handed her bag and camera to Gerard and stunned Tom by slipping forward
onto his lap, the bones of her pelvis rolling into his thighs. His body tightened
with the shock of her weight and the fruity scent of her hair in his face and he tilted
his chest away from her until his back was glued against the cracked mud wall and
he could feel himself sweating into it. Not knowing what to do with his arms he let
them hang down toward the dirt floor and struggled to regain his senses.

He settled into the cadence of the
houngan
’s low voice, a stream of spoken music that began to cohere as Tom concentrated on
the words, his mind slowing into Kreyol, and he and Jackie stared freely at the man,
Tom rapt, the girl curious but unimpressed. Here in the countryside there was nothing
remarkable about the
houngan
’s appearance: he wore chestnut-brown field pants tied at the waist by a length of
hemp rope, the toes of his wide bare feet as gnarled as roots; a clean white short-sleeved
shirt with the tails neatly tucked, and a gold-banded wristwatch, the one overt symbol
of his success in life. His face was the face of an ordinary man, certainly not brutish;
his sweaty cheekbones and brow glinting and striped with blades of sunlight stabbed
through the weave of the walls. He sat erect and looked straight ahead with clear
eyes—no boogeyman droop or blear to them at all—that concentrated on a phantom presence
somewhere in the air before him. Without meeting Tom’s eyes, Jackie leaned her head
back and turned her face as though she might kiss him and he unconsciously held his
breath while she brought her mouth to his ear. Her movement disrupted the balance
of their two bodies perched together and he put a hand on her shoulder to steady her.

What’s this guy doing? she whispered and turned again so her own ear was at his mouth,
his lips accidentally brushing its soft fold, but Tom drew back and could not speak.
He was trying to understand all the words and to hold very still because the friction
of every infinitesimal shift of her hips was having its effect on him and the language
was difficult to comprehend without Gerard’s assistance.

As he listened, though, he understood enough to become amazed—they had walked in on
an exorcism. The priest was addressing a
djab,
demanding that the demon leave but leave what or whom Tom couldn’t make out, and
for this sacred task the
houngan
had summoned a
lwa
for assistance, Erzulie Mary, but apparently she had not yet chosen to attend or
was for some reason resisting his entreaty. The
houngan
seemed to grow impatient with the spirit, his invocation more insistent and coaxing.
His arm dropped to the floor beside his throne and he raised a bottle of
clairin
in the air and spilled an offering into the dirt below his platform and then for
the first time paused in his chanting to take a gulp from the bottle himself and then
the chanting resumed with greater passion. Jackie wiggled in his lap and Tom, who
had all but forgotten the others in the shed, was startled into a broader awareness
as people began to moan like souls in purgatory.

He bobbed his head around Jackie’s and looked to his left, to the four throwaway chairs
and their human cargo. There was furtiveness in the heavy-lidded eyes of the first
three—an old farmer in his straw hat and a middle-aged woman and a younger one—but
it was the woman in the fourth chair, the chair nearest the doorway, that transfixed
him. She wore a housedress with its top half pulled down to her waist and there she
sat, her emaciated torso naked and streaming glittering feverish rivulets of sweat
across the washboard of her ribs, her bare breasts haggish and surreal, withered to
triangular flaps and repulsive, and yet even the agony of her face could not mask
the youth that refused to leave it—Tom guessed thirty, which might well mean twenty;
it was impossible to tell anyone’s age in Haiti—and her hair was pulled into girlish
braids on each side of her head. Clearly the woman was ill and, unlike her companions
who occasionally emitted piteous cries, she herself was seized by panting and her
eyes seemed to float unanchored in the pooled expanse of their sockets.

Yet even as he registered the overwhelming nature of the woman’s suffering he turned
away and again forgot her, his attention reclaimed by the heels of the
houngan
’s pink palms now booming on the goatskin head of a large drum clasped between his
knees, the chant rising to such a pitch of fervor that his eyes bulged and flecks
of spittle clung to his lips. In this squall of primal rhythm that sought to wake
up the gods, the drum made Jackie squirm, the squirm’s inevitable creation a mad pulse
between his legs, and as he hardened beneath her and the drum roared its challenge
to the spirits the squirm modulated into a subtle bounce, a straining thrust downward
and release upward in the tense muscles of her buttocks. There was a scolding voice
in his head —
Hey. Please. Stop this—
but he felt his resistance weakening, felt the need to reach around and cup her breasts
with each hand, felt his mind draining toward blankness and his flesh jolted into
trembling reflex
and he felt himself succumb to the deliciously stuporous possibility of just shoving
himself straight up into the center of her where he would explode.

Her waist twisted again and she readjusted her hips atop his left thigh but still
exerted the faint invisible clutch of press and release that was like a vibrational
echo from the drums into his aching groin, her head rotating her profile into his
line of vision, on her face the look of cool dispassionate attention she directed
at the priest, the entirely credible deception of that gaze, the alert observer, revealing
not the slightest clue of sensuality or the unbearable desire of the man throbbing
beneath her. He looked away down the row at the other faces, compressed and disfigured
by the effort of propitiation, until at the end of the line he looked again at the
woman in the daffodil dress, her lips pulled and turned so tight by disease or hunger
that despite her terror she was already grinning like a dessicated corpse.

Curiosity had gotten the better of Gerard, or perhaps he understood that the ceremony
was about to end, for he came to stand in the chapel’s doorway, half-draped by the
curtain and scowling. And then the drumming stopped and soon the chanting as well,
their urgency replaced by torpid silence, and Jackie relaxed. In only seconds, though,
a new tension swept in and flared along the connection between the ill woman and the
houngan
, who stared at her naked swaying torso with doleful resignation until the other women
in the chapel began to softly weep and the farmer and the man standing in the corner
choked back sobs. The
houngan
lifted the drum from between the vise of his legs and set it aside with a thud of
finality, done, finished, his abandonment of the woman in the daffodil dress as sharply
deliberate as cracking a stick over his knee, and he turned with studied cordiality
to the next order of business, looking past Jackie to Tom.