Dancing in the Baron's Shadow (22 page)

N
icolas wiped his face with a handkerchief that still smelled of Eve. Her lavender perfume clung to the fibers of the embroidered linen and eased his nerves. The crowd he was about to address was smaller than the ones he'd grown accustomed to in Paris. Only twenty-three people were there for his book signing, but this was the Bahamas, after all.

Half the guests were Haitians, migrants who'd fled Haiti and ended up here by accident or by fate. The others were simply curious readers who wanted to see Nicolas L'Eveillé, that man whose name was barely pronounceable in English, that brave soul who'd escaped the neighboring island of nightmares. They sat in wooden chairs in the cramped bookstore, the women fanning themselves, the men listening closely to the manager's introduction.

“Nicolas L'Eveillé's first book,
The Reaping Season,
was published in Paris last year, just two months before the death of Papa Doc. It was recently translated into English, and we are so lucky to have him here in the Bahamas to speak to us about the ordeal of our neighbors.”

Nicolas wasn't comfortable reading in English, but the store manager had found a French speaker to help translate, and the manager would be reading portions in English himself. Still, it was with a pounding heart that Nicolas read. Public speaking
made him immensely uncomfortable now. Plus, he still struggled with cramped spaces and darkness, and the bookstore, which sat on the flank of a hill in Nassau, was so small that he felt trapped inside a matchbox. He replayed his wife's voice in his head. “Just breathe and take your time,” Eve had said. “It will be over quickly. You'll see.”

He looked at the brown faces around him. They looked back eagerly.

“The book is dedicated to Mr. L'Eveillé's brother, Raymond, who valiantly helped him escape and who today has yet to be found.”

Whenever someone spoke of Raymond, Nicolas felt a sharp blow, as if someone were chopping down a great tree. Raymond's disappearance had left a hole in his life that he could not fill. Life abroad, away from Haiti, was hard enough. Since he'd moved to Paris, he'd spent his days trying to conquer his anxieties, souvenirs of his incarceration in Fort Dimanche. It was difficult to step inside the small elevator in his building in the arrondissement of Menilmontant, and his sleep was punctuated by nightmares of Jules Oscar biting his flesh like a rabid beast. When he thought of Raymond, of the last time they saw each other on that beach, Nicolas felt a crushing sadness that sat on his chest.

He was desperate for a drink. They'd offered him water at his table, but he wished he had a glass of whiskey to numb the gnawing pain in his heart.

He began to read. He'd selected the passage about just how many arrests and executions Duvalier had ordered during his presidency. He looked up from time to time and saw how the guests shook their heads in contempt and outrage. What good was this reading doing? Nicolas wondered if it wasn't all a waste of time. These folks would go back home to their families, have dinner, and sleep soundly while Haiti sank deeper into quicksand. When the news of Papa Doc's death from illness was announced, he'd felt so relieved he burst into tears in the middle
of a
supermarché,
a supermarket. The Haitian population in Paris had been frenzied with joy. They'd gathered at local cafes or friends' homes and poured liquor and played music and danced.
“Bawon Samedi mouri! Vive Haiti!”
The laughter had poured out of them uncontrollably. Nicolas twirled Eve in the middle of their living room to the sound of Webert Sicot, while their friends, Haitian immigrants from neighboring apartments, clapped their hands and sang along, engaging in dances of their own, everything bumping against the furniture.

But the celebration was cut short when the news broke the next morning. The Duvalier reign had not ended. Papa Doc's nineteen-year-old son, Jean-Claude, was proclaimed his successor. Nicolas's blood ran cold. Then a neighbor in their building, another migrant from Port-au-Prince, blasted “
Duvalier Pou Tout Tan”
on the radio.
Duvalier for life.
Nicolas felt ill and confused by the absurdity of it all and stopped talking to the man.

“Maybe we shouldn't worry,” Eve said. “He's young, he's not his father. Maybe things will be different now. Maybe we can go back…”

But Nicolas would not consent to returning to Haiti. It was too dangerous.

“
Piti tig se tig,”
he said. “Tigers only birth tigers. We can't risk going back.”

Nicolas looked around him now, in this bookstore, and knew that these Haitians were here for similar reasons. There was no salvation for them. They knew it was unwise to return too quickly. He read to them because he wanted to share his story, but really, this could have been their story. They were all here to escape brutal oppression.

After the applause had died down, the manager invited the audience to ask questions. Nicolas poured himself more water. He couldn't wait to get out. He needed to return to his hotel, to have a drink, to call Eve in Paris and tell her he missed her. Book tours in the Caribbean wore him down, and plus there was the fear, the persistent paranoia that one day, as he spoke, someone would walk in and shoot him in the head, or take him away, abduct
him and kill him in an unknown place where they would dispose of his body. Who knew what young Duvalier's henchmen could do? That very thing had happened to Jules Oscar, after all. He'd heard the news, that the man was found dead in a field, his face half eaten by crows, blood everywhere. Nicolas had felt overwhelming relief at the news, but also a tinge of jealousy. He'd fantasized often about being the one to kill Jules Sylvain Oscar himself.

The questions they asked him at these signings were always the same. How did he do his research for his book? How did he manage to hide the manuscript for so long? Could he speak more about the efforts of others to topple Duvalier? What had happened to the other prisoners in Fort Dimanche? And mostly, what they really wanted to know: What about Raymond? What had happened to him? Nicolas wished he knew.

Raymond had disappeared off the face of the earth. Nicolas spent his nights wondering where his brother was, whether he'd been caught by the Tonton Macoutes. Maybe he'd been killed and thrown into a ditch. Sometimes he grew angry—at Raymond for lying to him and at himself for not doing more.

“I should have insisted he get on that boat with me,” he said to Eve on nights when she tried to console him. “I should have put my foot down. I can't close my eyes without seeing his face, but I'm so afraid I'm going to forget him.”

Nicolas looked into the audience tonight and surprised himself by saying those very words in French. The Haitians in the audience held perfectly still, while the other attendees nodded with assumed empathy, as if it made sense to them.

“My greatest fear is that one day I will wake up and forget,” Nicolas said. “Forget my brother's face, forget his stature. And I fear for my daughter who will grow up not knowing or remembering her uncle, how brave a man he was.”

Nicolas stopped himself. He'd said enough to an audience of strangers. What he didn't say was how often he looked at that photograph from his old office, of him and his brother at his
First Communion. Eve had saved him when she'd grabbed it, along with the research notebook full of clippings. He couldn't have rewritten his book without both of them.

Nicolas signed copies of the book and made small talk. He was tired and his collar was damp with sweat.

“It's very brave of you to write this book,” said a Haitian woman, holding her book open for him to autograph. “I hear Papa Doc was furious when he heard about it.”

Nicolas shrugged.

“My brother was brave,” he said. “All I did was write.”

When the last guests trickled out of the bookstore, Nicolas wiped his forehead and swallowed his last sip of water. The manager said he would call a car to drive him back to his hotel.

“Thank you,” Nicolas said. “I'm much obliged.”

He gave a few copies of the English version to the manager and kept a few for himself. He stacked them on the table and gathered his briefcase, paying no mind to the man who'd approached. He thought longingly of his hotel room, of the hot shower and soft bed.

“
Taxi pour monsieur?”

Nicolas recognized the accent. Haitian. He could smell the man from across the table. He exuded a familiar, warm scent of sweat and leather. Nicolas looked up.

It took him a moment to focus, then another to recognize who it was. Nicolas's knees nearly gave out. A brown face was staring at him, lit with a mischievous smile. The eyebrows and temples were peppered with gray. The frame seemed smaller. But he was the same, he was alive. He was here.

“Raymond!” Nicolas's voice broke and he stepped back, knocking over the chair behind him. This was not possible. Nicolas wondered if he was having a heart attack.

Raymond's eyes were veiled with tears. Words eluded them both as they took each other in, hearts pounding.

“Raymond?” Nicolas repeated. “Brother,
apa se ou vre?
You're really here?”

Nicolas reached forward, squeezing Raymond's warm, dewy flesh in disbelief. This was not a dream. This was not another false alarm, like all those times he thought he'd seen a man who looked like Raymond in odd places, like the subway or in front of Amélie's school. How many times had Nicolas stopped in his tracks and called out his brother's name?

Today, it was really him. Raymond grabbed Nicolas by the wrists and the brothers locked in an embrace. Nicolas dug his fingers into Raymond's shoulders and sobbed without reserve.

Finally, Raymond stepped back and smiled. Nicolas's skin rippled with goose bumps. He watched the tears stream down Raymond's cheeks and began to nod. Now that they'd found each other, he wouldn't let go. Never again.

Raymond's eyes were red and his lashes wet. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and looked over his brother from head to toe.

“Little brother? Is that you? Where have you been?”

Nicolas coughed and tried to swallow the knot in his throat. His head ached with a powerful, joyful migraine. He let Raymond squeeze his biceps and examine him, just like he used to do when they were younger, to make sure Nicolas was unharmed, intact, still strong.

“It's me,” Nicolas managed, wiping his tears away.

“Yes, of course. Of course.”

“I thought…” Nicolas found his voice. “I thought you were dead.”

There was so much to say, but where to begin? He'd been so angry at Raymond for so long, and he had questions. Raymond must as well.

“All these years, and I never heard from you,” Nicolas said.

Raymond nodded. “It's been a long journey, brother.”

He launched into his tale quickly, scrambling to get an explanation out at once.

Life, Raymond told him, had been more than merciful. After losing his family, after Fort Dimanche, after saying good-bye to Nicolas, and after what had happened in the sugarcane fields
that day, he knew life was speaking to him, screaming in his ear: “Live, Raymond. Live.” So he willed himself to live.

He pocketed the warden's money and crossed over the border to find his brother, but Nicolas was long gone. It seemed the Dominican Civil War had frightened off him and Eve, and Raymond thought he'd lost them for good. When the newly elected Dominican president Joaquín Balaguer promised to send Haitian refugees back to Duvalier, and the panicked rebels vanished into thin air, he had to think quickly. What could he do? Return to Haiti? Or go elsewhere?

“I would rather die than risk ever going back to Fort Dimanche,” Raymond said.

So he made the decision he'd never wanted to make: he jumped aboard a tugboat filled with refugees and made it to the Bahamas, where the captain helped him doctor papers and find work. Raymond got a driver's license and a taxi permit. He was now living in Nassau, staying well under the radar of the authorities.

“You're driving taxis,” Nicolas said. Of course.

Raymond nodded. Nicolas sensed the hesitation there. This had always been a point of contention between them, this job that Raymond had done all his life. Nicolas felt his lips part and stretch into a smile.

“You are amazing,” he said.

Raymond asked about his niece and about Eve. It was evening now, and outside the bookstore window, the streets filled with people headed to clubs and restaurants. Nicolas told the manager he didn't need to call a car.

“I have a ride,” Nicolas said.

Nicolas grabbed his briefcase with one hand and his brother's arm with the other.

“I'm very thirsty,” Nicolas said. “We could both use a drink.”

“I know a place,” Raymond replied.

Out on the curb, the air was spiced with sea salt, wild flowers, and notes of perfume from the hair and scarves of tourists strolling by. The brothers walked past blocks of colorful shops
and boutiques like crayons in the dying sunlight.

“Look at this country,” Nicolas muttered. “It's so much like home. The sun, the people. How I miss Haiti.”

Raymond glanced at him. “We can't go back.”

“I know,” Nicolas said. “But sometimes I feel like I'm dying a slow death, dying of a broken heart. Like I've been forbidden to see an old lover.”