The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (21 page)

What is the nature of the problem here? said Dolan. What’s he saying?

He wants to know if you are Baptists, said Gerard.

Tell him I said fuck the Baptists.

Gerard and the peasant spoke and Gerard turned around and told the two white men,
He says okay. The
houngan
is inside the temple. You can speak with him and then we must go. Tom, this man is
very nervous about
blans.
I’m trying to understand why.

They walked across the packed earth of the courtyard toward the center of the compound,
Connie Dolan giving the murals on the whitewashed mud walls his imperious scrutiny.
Look at this shit, he said and Tom ignored him, tugging open the heavy door, and they
dipped their heads under the timbered lintel and went in and paused, letting their
eyes adjust to the dimness, the honeyed light splintering down through the roof thatch
and the crude ribbing of hand-hewn beams. There on the ground between two wooden pillars
on a slatted pallet spread with burlap sacking was a boy, a young man, his nappy head
pillowed with rags, asleep or dozing or perhaps only lying there with his eyes closed
and his mouth open, grubby hands spidered on his bare chest as if he were keying an
accordion, his slender torso sprinkled with the cracked shells of pumpkin seeds he
had eaten, big pink-soled feet poking from grimy trousers with legs too short to reach
his shanks. Who’s this? asked Dolan and Tom said not who we’re looking for and they
withdrew out the door.

A gaggle of shirtless children had appeared outside the compound, toeing the dirt
with an air of expectancy, as if some wonderful form of entertainment would soon be
forthcoming. Gerard had found a bucket to sit on and he and the peasant had retreated
to the shade of the avocado tree. The guard sat with the shotgun across his knees
and tracked the two white men with watchful suspicion as they approached. Tom, there
is a problem, said Gerard, this man is still very worried you have come from the bishop
because he thinks
blans
only come to the
hounfours
when the bishop sends them to make
dechoukaj
.

Ah, said Tom, so that’s what this is about. Dolan asked for a translation and Tom
said this word he used means uproot.
Dechouke
—to tear out by the roots.

The island was experiencing the revival of an internecine conflict that had most recently
surfaced back in 1986, during the ensuing chaos Duvalier
fils
left in his wake when forced to flee the palace for a gilded exile in France. At that
time there had erupted across the countryside what the international press reported
as a voodoo war, the delirium of blood revenge, a spontaneous cleansing of the old
Duvalierist
houngans
who had assisted first Papa and then Baby in their vile romance with darkness. Whether
the spiritual inquisition had piggybacked on the political vendetta Tom could not
quite remember and most probably both were too entwined to be anything but different
sides of the same coin, the wallows of faith being identical in their superstitions
if not their blasphemies. In any event the Catholic church found itself split as well,
into separate camps, each faction equally troubling to Rome, the
ti ilgis
of the liberation theologists and the conservative patriarchs who served the dictatorship’s
status quo. The liberation theologists had a score to settle with the
houngans
serving the Duvaliers, and the hierarchy saw the opportunity to obliterate their
competition from the voodooists. Several notorious Duvalierist bishops found common
cause with the grassroots priests of the
ti iglis
and stirred up their parishioners. In the spirit of ecumenical bloodlust, the Baptist
and Protestant missions joined the fray and soon mobs of Christians armed with machetes
and shovels had bludgeoned and hacked up and beheaded any voodooist in their sight,
on one horrifically memorable occasion pitching a dozen
mambos
and
houngans
into a pit and burying them alive in concrete. Once the worst collaborators had been
dechouked,
and the passions dispensed, the conflict waned to an uneasy calm, and the surviving
houngans
formed an ethnographic society and established international alliances with universities
and folklorists to protect themselves, but no one could realistically expect such
a fundamental struggle for Haiti’s identity to ever be fully or permanently resolved,
the Haitians battling in effect over control of the graveyard, the top-hatted Baron
Samedi squared off against the robed and white-bearded Holy Ghost, both religions
adept in their capacities to comfort and terrify and provide temporary refuge from
the agonies of the fallen world, yet even in their combined force they redeemed little
for the Haitian.

Their presence here was a cause for genuine concern—Tom could see the mistrust unabated
in the peasant’s nervous eyes—and he became solicitous and took the man’s hand in
both of his and held it sympathetically and asked him his name.

Marville.

Marville, my friend, is there fighting again between the Christians and the
houngans
?

Oui.

Marville, we are not part of this problem. We only want to speak with the
houngan
. He is my friend. Where is he?

Marville pulled his hand away and replaced it on the stock of the gun and pointed
with the barrel toward the temple that formed the center of the U-shaped compound.

Inside.

There’s no one there but a boy, said Tom. Where is the
houngan
?

He is the
houngan,
said Marville.

Bòkò St. Jean is the
houngan,
said Tom.

He is not here.

Marville, like most peasants being questioned by a white man, was not generous with
his answers and Tom persisted.

When did he go? he asked the peasant and was told
After the harvest,
and Tom said, My friend, when was that?

Two weeks ago, maybe.

Was that the time the white woman was killed near Tintayen?

I don’t know.

Did Marville know the white woman? Marville said he did not.

You don’t know the white woman who came with a white man and made a sacrifice of two
bulls?

Yes, I remember her.

She was killed on the road two weeks ago.

Yes, I remember.

The night she was killed, was that the night Bòkò St. Jean went away?

Yes, said Marville, it’s possible.

Was Bòkò St. Jean
dechouked
?

It’s possible, monsieur.

Why else would he go away?

I don’t know.

Is he dead?

I don’t know.

Is he coming back?

I don’t know.

Do you know who killed the white woman?

No.

Why do you say the
houngan
is inside?

The boy, according to Marville, was the new
houngan,
a nephew of Bòkò St. Jean who had been trained by his uncle and now replaced him.

Bòkò St. Jean knew he was going away? asked Tom. Is that why he trained the boy?

I don’t know.

What is the new
houngan
’s name?

Toussaint.

We want to go back inside and make an offering to the
lwas
. Is this okay, my friend? Do you trust me?

Yes, said Marville, but Tom saw no trust in his eyes and did not expect it.

Fill me in, said Conrad Dolan.

It’s nothing, said Tom. Let’s go back and wake up that kid.

What for?

Did you ever see Jackie’s exhibit at the gallery in Tampa?

No, said Dolan, I never did, and Tom explained that in all likelihood the boy’s uncle
had been one of Jackie’s favored subjects.

The relevance would be what? asked Dolan.

Tom swung open the door to the
hounfour
and paused before going in, turning back to Dolan. And when Woodrow Singer talks
about the devil, he said, devil worshippers, evil, his implication is clear.

Not to me it isn’t, said Dolan.

The point is this. The voodoo priest we came to see, this guy’s uncle, disappeared
the night the girl was killed.

What about Parmentier? said Dolan. Was he hanging around here too with the boogeyman?

I don’t know, said Tom, stepping into the darkness. You probably want to ask him.

The youth had not moved from his sprawl on the pallet and Tom stooped and tapped his
shoulder, calling his name, staring into his soft face until Toussaint’s crabbed fingers
flattened on his chest and he awoke, bleared eyes swimming in and out of focus, puffed
lips rolling across his teeth, and Harrington guessed the young man had spent the
morning drinking although his breath did not smell of rum and when he swung his legs
in front of him and sat up off balance and looked at them as if they were walruses,
Tom began to feel there was something wrong with the boy more serious than a hangover.
Narcotics? Perhaps the youth was mildly retarded. Whatever it was, Toussaint seemed
glazed with slowness, and he intermittently jerked his head as if trying to shake
it clear from a blow.

Tom asked him where is the
houngan,
and Toussaint said I am the
houn
gan,
with ludicrous self-importance. Tom said I mean your uncle, Bòkò St.
Jean, and Toussaint said,
C’est moi,
it’s me. To every question Tom asked about his uncle or the girl, Toussaint insisted
he must ask the
lwas.

You can summon the
lwas
? asked Tom.

Mais oui.
I am the
houngan
.

Ask him who owns a red motorcycle, said Dolan, restless with skepticism. Did you ask
him that?

Will the
lwas
tell me about your uncle and the white woman?

How should I know? said Toussaint, surprising Tom with his sudden surliness. You must
make an offering and find out.

How much? said Tom and when Toussaint named an absurdly high price Tom said that’s
too much and they settled on one hundred gourdes. Tom told Dolan the
houngan
had agreed to perform a ceremony in Dolan’s honor and Dolan grimaced and said what
a crock of shit.

Bon,
come, said Toussaint and stood up, no taller than Conrad Dolan and, in his slenderness,
only half the detective’s size. He led them to a lightless place in the room, a back
corner sloppily partitioned from the central area by a few lengths of planking to
make an alcove for an altar, which they could begin to see as Toussaint, on his hands
and knees, struck matches to light the candle stubs plugging the necks of green wine
bottles or stuck to the floor, a rough concrete pad where, in the strange dance of
ghoulish shadows, Tom saw a drum and footstool set before the shrine itself and more
dusty bottles, some empty and dribbled with wax, some surfaced with beads or half
filled, he surmised, with herbal potions, an array of tawdry fetishes and talismans,
no suggestion of sacred mystery in their seemingly arbitrary and whimsical selection,
pink baby-doll heads and a surplus human skull, creepy only in its banality, after
the scores of skulls he had witnessed unearthed in Haiti, and a femur looking like
the bone a child might draw. A flag pinned to the wall with the geometric heart and
veve
of Erzulie Mary. Toussaint lowered himself onto the stool, the gleam of candlelight
on his oily black skin, playing across his high nostrils and prominent eyes, and positioned
the drum between his knees and Tom sat cross-legged before him and Connie Dolan stood
back and blessed himself, muttering in a mock-weary voice that if the nuns of his
childhood could see him now, holy mother of God.

The ceremony began and almost immediately Tom determined that the young
houngan
was a fraud. Toussaint’s stammering invocation of the
lwas
amounted to little more than singsong nonsense, and his inept hands slapped the goatskin
head of the drum with random spurts of coherence, the rhythm faltering and re-forming,
the boy lacking the skill or experience to both drum and chant simultaneously. The
charade went on for several interminable minutes until Toussaint seemed suddenly to
have been hit with a cattle prod, an electric charge convulsing his arms, the drum
knocked from between his flailing legs, his spine arching and his eyes rolling back
in his swaying head and spittle flying from his lips.

You enjoying this, Connie, Tom whispered, and Dolan said, You can’t be serious, let’s
get out of here, and Tom said, No, wait.

Perhaps the youth realized he was in danger of losing his audience, or grew bored
with his exertions; at any rate, as abruptly as the convulsions began they now ceased
and here before them was a new Toussaint, composed and effeminate, pantomiming sensuality,
speaking in a high raspy voice of her desire for Tom.

Who is here? asked Tom, and the voice said Erzulie Mary, and Tom asked her about Bòkò
St. Jean and the voice said, he is with me, and refused to elaborate.

I want to know about the white woman who came to Bòkò St. Jean because she lost her
soul, said Tom, beginning to believe, like Dolan, they were wasting their time.

What do you want to know about this woman? said Toussaint, acting out the voice of
the
lwa
.

I want to know if she found it, said Tom. Did she find her soul?

Toussaint’s reaction had, for a few moments, a flash of authenticity that unsettled
Tom, almost convincing him he had been wrong about this masquerade of possession.
The youth’s head shook violently, the veins at his temples throbbed, his hands jittered
in the air, and an alarming stream of alien language gushed from his mouth. But the
spell broke when Toussaint looked directly at Tom and said in his own voice and in
English,
I am sorry for you.