Dancing in the Baron's Shadow (14 page)

Once his body had begun to paste itself back together, Nicolas attempted to “climb the tree” and see through a second window in the cell that opened onto the courtyard.

“Are you trying to get shot?” Boss hissed after him. “If they see you, you're dead.”

The risk and effort were for nothing. Nicolas couldn't see a thing. There were no trees, no pastel layers of sky, no sunlight. Only the sound of boots approaching.

“Climbing the tree is strictly forbidden,” Boss said. “If the guards in the hall catch you, they beat you. And the guards in the courtyard will just shoot the minute they spot you.”

“There's no hope of seeing outside?” Nicolas fell to his knees.

“The only time we get to see the light of day is when foreign delegations demand to visit,” Boss said. “They've gone so far as
to move us so they can clean the whole prison. If we stink up the hallways too much, they might allow us out for water at the fountain, and they make us empty out the
kin
.”

Nicolas would never again see trees, leaves, roots, rivers, cattle and pigs randomly strolling through traffic. He'd never see children running barefoot on the asphalt of Port-au-Prince, chasing him down and begging for
de gouden
change, their grimy fingers digging into the sleeves of his pressed suit. He now regretted all those times he pushed those kids away and gave them nasty looks.

Nicolas shut his eyes. He wasn't proud of the past. But what good would it do now to remember moments when he'd been insensitive or condescending? In doing his research for the book, he'd presumed he was above it all. Untouchable. Somehow, he had managed to imagine himself and his life a safe, scholarly distance from the miserable souls whose torture and disappearances he'd so carefully documented. The irony was that the guards were as dismissive of him—if only more brutal—as he himself had been toward others.

Now, Nicolas paid attention to the people around him, to the stories relayed from one prisoner to the next, about how they were betrayed or denounced as traitors by people they never suspected: a shoeshine boy, a shop owner, a fruit seller, a barber—all of whom had joined the Macoutes in the hope of rising to something greater, something more important, or for protection. They couldn't beat the system, so they joined it. Those were the Tonton Macoutes: men and women who had long been disenfranchised and neglected, who were filled with rage against the world. Nicolas wondered if Philippe Joseph, the student who had denounced him, was also a Macoute. He found himself clenching his fists when he thought of the student's face, those eyes that never quite met his when he talked, that playful grin on his face, and that limp. Nicolas's eyes opened wide as it struck him.
That limp, my God. Could it be?
Could it have been a result of jumping a gate and falling on the other side? Could
it be that Philippe Joseph was the intruder in his garden that night? Nicolas cursed himself.

How had he not seen this for what it was? How could he have been so stupid? He was going to rot in here, not because of the book, but because of one student. How could he have entertained such madness, speaking his mind so openly in the classroom? He was nothing but a speck, a grain of sand on the shore. He was powerless against the bloody mill of this government, and it was evident now that he was a failure, that his aspiration to save his country with his writing was a joke. He could not win against Papa Doc. The greatest writers of Haiti had tried, and Duvalier had gotten rid of them all, Jacques Stephen Alexis at the top of that list. Even the English author Graham Greene had fled the country two years ago with Papa Doc's spies breathing down his neck. So who was he, Nicolas L'Eveillé, to think that he could change everything?

Nicolas missed the world. He thought of Eve and Amelie every second he wasn't too distracted by his scabs, his bones that hurt at the slightest touch, the hunger pangs in his stomach, and his parched throat. The absence of his wife and child plagued him like a disease, and when he tried not to think of them, he thought of Raymond. Poor Raymond. He had been so hard on his brother, so unforgiving. Now he would never see him again. He would never see anyone again. He prayed they had escaped, made their way to Jean Faustin's relatives in the Dominican Republic. He imagined them starting fresh. He imagined Eve finding someone new.

He would go mad, he realized, if he stayed here much longer. He was already tugging on his beard like Boss did. And if madness was the result of being caged in here, he would prefer immediate execution. The warden had told him, right before he lost consciousness, that this would be his fate in less than three months.

I should have died right there,
he thought.
Oscar should have killed me.

He thought about smashing his head against the prison walls, salvaging what was left of his dignity. Instead, he continued
pulling on the beard that had begun to crawl over his face. He ached for a good shave, tugging at the wiry curls, assessing the growth with disgust.

“Get used to it,” Boss said abruptly, scrawling on his wall calendar and muttering things Nicolas couldn't understand.

The guards patrolled the hallways at odd times, joking around with each other, tapping on the walls with their clubs to mess with the prisoners. Once, Nicolas woke up and found himself looking into the brown face of a young man, a guard, staring directly at him from the slit under the cell door. Nicolas's eyes widened in terror. He didn't know why the guard was there, watching. They made eye contact, and without a word, the guard's face pulled away. He saw boots, and the man was gone.

The regular business of the day, and of the night, was taking prisoners out of cells for interrogation and torture. Nicolas, like everybody else, held his breath when he heard the sound of boots approaching. The chief supervisor sometimes came with the guards if an official was coming to visit, or if delegates from America or the United Nations demanded a report on the condition of the prison system and the “observation of human rights.” He would show up in a crisp uniform and shout orders before disappearing again. If there was a string of executions, he was always present to oversee the proceedings.

More than anything, Nicolas dreaded the banging on the metal doors.

“
Kin la! Kin la!”

Nicolas felt an elbow in his ribs. He turned around and saw Major, the shamed ex-Macoute, leering.

“Your turn!”

Nicolas looked into his eyes. Major was not a learned man. He was from the working class, but he had a thirst for power. He looked like a Macoute, carried himself like one, spoke arrogantly like one, even here, behind bars. Nicolas hadn't liked him from the minute they'd met.

“
Pardon?”
Nicolas said.

“Empty out the shit,” Major retorted, raising his voice. “Go on!”

Nicolas knew there was no sense in arguing. He glanced at Boss, who kept his eyes shut with his head against the wall. He knew the old man was listening. Nicolas got up and tried to pick up the bucket with both hands. He was immediately assaulted with the stink of floating feces. Nicolas turned away, nearly dropping it. The men gasped and shifted aside.

“Hey! Careful!”

Nicolas held his breath and tried to keep his face turned away from the bucket as he followed the guard through the door. The maneuver was nearly impossible. He was forced to hunch over in order to keep both hands on the handle that dug into his fingers. The bucket was spilling, and inevitably, he felt a viscous liquid dripping onto his toes. He coughed. He didn't want to throw up. Not here, not like this, in the hallway. It would make everything worse.

He walked past the break room where two guards were drinking cold fruit sodas. The door was wide open, and Nicolas caught a glimpse of the carbonated gold drinks fizzing inside sweaty glass bottles. He couldn't see the radio as he shuffled past, but he heard snatches of a broadcast the guards were listening to.

“Dominican Republic…U.S. Marines…Operation Power Pack.”

Nicolas wanted to hear more, but he had to keep moving. The room was falling away behind him, and all he heard was Duvalier's fading voice yelling the words “
kamoken”
and “communism.” What was happening in the outside world? How were the Haitian rebels faring? Were they on the right side of the war? Were the Constitutionalists winning? If they were, then there was hope for them to return to Haiti, hope that they might someday overthrow Papa Doc.

Nicolas grew accustomed to the changing light in the hallway, taking in every turn of the corner, every door they passed. Soon he saw a spot of light at the end of the tunnel. It stung his eyes. The light surrounded the guard's frame like a halo, and as they neared the door, Nicolas wanted to raise one hand to shield his
eyes from the sun. How many days had it been since he'd seen sunlight? He couldn't remember, but his head spun and he clung to the bucket, desperate to safeguard its contents.

“Move it!” The guards shoved the prisoners forward. Nicolas blinked repeatedly and followed the others with his head down. Behind him, a prisoner collapsed, but the line kept moving. Nicolas squinted and saw nothing but yellow, sunlit mortar and dust. He was outside. Above him, the sun blazed in a cloudless sky. There was so much to see, and yet he felt blind.

“Faster!” another guard shouted behind him.

Nicolas did as he was told.

Soon his eyes had adjusted enough that he could keep them open. There wasn't much time to let his sight wander around the grounds, to take in the geography of the place. For the first time, through the padlocked gates and the spirals of barbed wire, Nicolas saw the desolation of the savanna, and beyond it, he pictured the blue stretch of the bay. He found himself yearning for the life of the poor men and women and children who roamed Port-au-Prince, hungry, scraping, but not rotting in here. The idea of escaping was more than tempting. But his fellow cellmates had already discouraged it in the first days of his arrival.

“No one escapes from here,” Boss had said. “It's been tried before. That's how we know. Poor devils got shot on the spot.”

“It doesn't matter how fast you run or how far ahead you get,” another prisoner said. “They'll launch Jeeps and guards after you, and they'll kill you. And that's if you make it past the gates and the barbed wire.”

Nicolas picked up his pace and followed the other bucket-toting prisoners. They walked with their heads down, staring at their dusty feet. The sun felt warm on Nicolas's back and bare shoulders. Sun was a healing remedy for ailments of the body and the soul, his mother always said.

The ground burned his feet, and he noticed that the others did not seem to mind, the soles of their feet hardened from years of incarceration. Nicolas had the sudden revelation, as his stomach
churned, that there was a reason for stripping prisoners of clothes and shoes and for starving them. It wasn't just to humiliate them. It was to allow for exposure to slowly kill them, and if that didn't work, at least it meant they couldn't escape. Not without shoes, and not without food in their bellies.
Sak vid pa kanpe,
the proverb said. It was devious, evil, and Nicolas shivered at the realization that his incarcerators were so calculating.

Behind the barracks was a wide expanse of arid desert land. Nothing grew out of the earth aside from sparse bush trees in the distance. The earth was cracked and dry, and the wind blew up tiny dust storms around their bony black bodies. Swarms of flies dove toward the buckets, buzzing around their ears, landing on their hands. Nicolas's nose started to itch. The sulfuric smell of salt and human waste wafted through the air.

“Halt!”

They came to the edge of a ditch and stopped as instructed. Nicolas set his bucket down on the ground, right between his legs. He buried his face in the hollow of his arm, gasping for air. His eyes welled up. The ditch, approximately twenty feet across and another fifteen long, was a giant septic tank. Nicolas had never seen nor smelled anything like it.

Nicolas turned his head away from the hole and caught a glimpse of movement in the corner of his eye. A gesture. Someone was waving at him. Nicolas shielded his eyes from the sun. His mouth fell open. Was he hallucinating?

“Psst! Nicolas!”

“Jean-Jean?”

Jean-Jean stood four prisoners behind him, his long, thin legs bare like yellowed celery stalks, his belly spilling over his briefs. He looked old and pale, like a scrap of torn parchment. Nicolas's heart broke at the sight of the old man with saggy skin and bags under his eyes. It was like seeing his own father naked, and Nicolas trembled under the weight of his guilt. What was his old friend doing here? The two men locked
eyes, and without a word, he read the story on Jean-Jean's face. The government spies and the Macoutes had gotten to him too. Sorrow and shame crashed upon Nicolas.

“You gave me up,” Jean-Jean whispered.

Nicolas shook his head weakly, less in denial than ignorance. The other men in line dumped the foul waste into the ditch. There was a chorus of coughing and retching.

“When did you get here, Jean-Jean?” he hissed.

“A few days ago,” Jean-Jean said, pausing to think. “I'm already losing track. They came for me at work and—”

“Jean-Jean, there was nothing to say about you. I didn't give you up,” Nicolas said, without much conviction.

Jean-Jean shrugged. It didn't matter. After all, even if Nicolas hadn't said anything about his friends during the warden's torture, they were guilty by association. Jean-Jean's voice broke, and he looked down at his bare feet and swollen ankles.

“Here I am,” he said. “Cell two.”

The men between Nicolas and Jean-Jean were listening, but said nothing. They shot nervous glances around as a guard came forward, cradling his weapon against his chest.

“You are not permitted to talk here.”

Others who were standing in line lowered their eyes. Nicolas looked straight ahead and so did Jean-Jean. But they did not dare look back at the guard. The gaze, Nicolas had realized, was everything in prison.