The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (6 page)

Is it a real thing? she asked, and Tom found it somewhat disconcerting, the repellent
pained transparency of need in the way she asked the question.

I’m not sure what you mean.

I mean, it’s a religion, right?

A religion, yes, I suppose. Another way of looking at the universe, a way to try to
understand what’s in God’s mind. If you choose to see it that way.

How do you choose to see it? she said.

With due respect. A way of looking at, and trying to understand, power. Spiritual
power, political power—they’re inseparable anyway, aren’t they?

Which was not to say
vodou,
much like Catholicism, had not burdened many of its practitioners with superstition
and fear, he explained. The potions and powders, some of them anyway, were real; zombies,
however rare, were real; spirit possession, he could assure her, was no joke, unless
you were a species of white fraud hoping to bluff your way into the melodrama of it.
And yet still, in its daily manifestations,
vodou
was a strong, good thing, he told her—it was Haiti’s only strong, good thing, the
expression of the abiding spirit of the people, the expression of survival. Whatever
it was beyond that expression, or beneath it, was not for Tom or any
blan
to say, and existed if at all as a curiosity for educated men and women, the theater
of the African genesis, at best an anthropological pursuit. Or, shamelessly, a type
of neoprimitive entertainment, a game of the occult that whites played with blacks,
perhaps to scare themselves, to flirt with the macabre, perhaps to feel liberated
and unrestrained in their contempt for the answers their own world had provided, or
failed to provide.

To see herself anew—and what was the American dream if not this?—was that what Jacqueline
Scott wanted? Or to find herself in mankind’s ancient past, and see herself clearly,
as she always was and would be? Transcend, or descend, or howl at the magic of the
freaking moon? Tom had no idea. Americans were not built to take these matters seriously
until their faces were rubbed in the awfulness they sometimes made when they were
seized by the exalted passion to remake the world.

Her request, her original request, was predictable, what any tourist might crave in
Haiti if Haiti had tourists—she wanted to meet priests, the
houngans
. Of course he readily agreed and she accepted his proposition of a daylong excursion
out to the countryside, where she had never been, rather than spend their time gagging
in Port-au-Prince’s traffic, crawling over the frying-pan heat of the road to Carrefour
to visit Max Beauvoir—a cyberliterate
houngan
who spent more time on the Internet than in his peristyle—or patrolling the stack
of Bel Air’s sinister maze of neighborhoods, cousin by cousin, trying to track down
Abujah, the video cameraman, a stringer for the networks, who had become the heir
apparent to
vodou
’s throne. Instead Tom suggested a short trip via Route Nationale One to Saint-Marc,
a port an hour and a half up the coast on Gonave Bay, where, on the town’s outskirts,
a temple, padlocked and shuttered during the occupation, had, he noticed on his last
expedition into the northern mountains, raised its flags and repainted its exterior
murals and presumably was back in service, come one come all.

The only tricky detail was they had to leave that minute to be back by dinnertime
but Jackie said,
Let’s go!
Good girl, Tom replied, relieved to have finally inspired her spontaneity. Everything
about her so far, especially her callow questions about
vodou
—he thought she could have read a book, for Christ’s sake, before she got on the plane—had
impressed him as naive and untested, though for the first time she offered him her
smile. Not warmly, though, it was as if mocking his approval of her readiness, her
implicit availability, his little pat on the back.

They hoisted their shoulder bags and moved into the assault of sunlight and he was
already sweating out his half-dozen cups of coffee by the time they descended the
Oloffson’s steps to the car park and his rental. At the end of the driveway Tom pulled
over and collected Gerard from beneath the coconut palms, the happiness draining from
his face when he realized he had been demoted to passenger. He slid stiff-limbed into
the backseat, not his regular place and certainly not his preferred, but he was intuitive
enough to decline when Jackie, who showed no interest in him otherwise, offered to
switch.

By the time Tom had navigated through the wretched chicken coop of a city to its leafy
outskirts and the open road, he had begun to feel joy, the most appropriate response
to escaping Port-au-Prince.

Jackie did not say much, and Tom considered her silence a virtue. He was perfectly
at ease driving for hours without sharing a thought with whoever his companions might
be, and he generally found talkative passengers distracting from the manifold hazards
of the road. Nor did he talk about Jackie to himself—he was not willing anything to
happen between them, but letting things happen as they may. He was little more than
a harmless parasite on her beauty, which seemed so dismayingly separate from her other
traits—a paradox but an irrelevance as well and not so troubling as the wide margin
for error we grant those among us who are beautiful and nothing else.

They drove out into the glare of the barren coast, the mangrove swamps and copses
of thorn acacia of Tintayen sloped uninvitingly toward the bright sea, along the alluvial
plain of a valley funneling upward to the mountains of the interior. She rummaged
with increasing frustration in her camera bag for sunglasses and Tom was glad she
could not find them because already her eyes were inscrutable. Instead she settled
for lemon drops, turning in her seat to pass the bag to Gerard and then pausing for
a short conversation with him that seemed more curt than polite. Did he have a family?
Yes, a wife and two children. Did his wife work? No. How old were the children? Were
the schools satisfactory? Where did he learn English? Tom waited for her to plumb
the angry shadows of Gerard’s feelings, but she did not ask him anything that would
not appear on an application for a visa or a bank loan.

Nor did she offer any comment on the ever more rugged spectacle of the countryside
or the hapless peasants trudging the rut of footpaths following the road, and Tom
wondered if she was overwhelmed by the strangeness of Haiti, or even stunned by its
unexpected though ravaged magnificence. Whatever preoccupied her, she would allow
almost nothing to penetrate its envelope, which made her a rather ideal traveling
companion, accepting without complaint or censure the heat, the roughness of the road,
his hell-bent driving, the fate of the Haitians. Still, she exerted a slight but constant
counterweight against Tom’s own happiness, a humorless neurotic, no more carefree
than a penitent, which he supposed she was, and the trip seemed less and less like
a lark than a task or mission, which was exactly what he had hoped to avoid this day
in Haiti, the outsider’s relentless sense of obligation.

Are you enjoying this? he finally asked, and again it was as if she would not hear
him but seemed to grow more unrelaxed and tense in her seat, fidgeting her body but
staring straight out the windshield at the miles flying before them. They were hurtling
through an arid, corroded landscape, the foothills brambled with cactus and thorny
scrub and above them a tremendous wall of emaciated mountainsides and bone-white peaks
once crowned by forests, mountains like a queue of cancer patients. He thought in
her agitation she might be carsick but she flatly dismissed Tom’s suggestion that
they stop for a moment and stretch their legs.

A few minutes later Tom sensed her attention on him and glanced over to see her studying
his face, her lips pursed but her expression otherwise blank. He looked back at the
road and then back at her and she was still intent on trying to see him, the unflinching
scrutiny of a woman who wants to know if she can trust a man, but if that was the
case he wasn’t pleased she was taking so long to make up her mind.

What is it with you? he said.

I have to ask you something, she said, but as soon as the words left her mouth she
averted her eyes and shook her head, regretting her decision, or perhaps not, perhaps
she intended to be cajoled.

He knew not to say anything and waited but then he gave in and said, Go ahead. Ask.

She was looking at her knees, her head bowed, her hair streaming back from the breeze
of their open windows, her pained face in exquisite profile and just then he slammed
into a pothole that made her grab the dashboard and jerk herself upright, wearing
a new look of determination.

You can’t think I’m silly, Jackie said, not a plea but a cool demand. I don’t want
you to laugh. If you laugh I’m getting out of the car.

What was she going to do—hail a cab? Tom glanced over his shoulder at Gerard to check
his reaction to such a threat coming from such a person in such a place, which was
itself reason to laugh, and they lifted their eyebrows at one another in stone-faced
amusement.

I won’t laugh, Tom promised and instantly her words rushed out into a question that
was a type of falling or jumping, although he did not immediately recognize its nature
because he had never met a woman anywhere in the world who was so defiantly literal
and without irony. Tom wanted her to be cute, a ditz, a sexy ideologue, a glib bitch,
a camera junkie, a news hound, a crusader, anything but this—literal and seemingly
unschooled and tormented and wrapped as tight as you get before you explode.

Do you think it’s possible, she began, and with the drop in her voice Tom leaned over
to hear her better, for someone to lose their soul?

He made a token effort to ponder the question. Sure. What do you think, Gerard?

I don’t know, said Gerard. It’s possible, maybe.

You’re lying. What kind of a Haitian are you? Tom said, grinning into the rearview
mirror and then looking over at Jackie. If there’s anybody in this car who believes
you can lose your soul, it’s the Haitian, not the Americans.

You’re not taking this seriously, she said.

He thought it would only make things infinitely worse between them if he explained
that right now everybody in Haiti was taking this outlandish question quite seriously
indeed—the Green Berets, the
houngans,
the Baptist missionaries, the Catholic priests. Any villager in the hinterlands would
eventually tell you the village’s number-one problem was loup-garous—werewolves—coming
to their huts at night and stealing their babies’ souls, gobbling them up like werewolf
vitamins, and then in the morning of course the baby would be dead and cemented into
the statistical afterlife of Haiti’s horrific infant mortality rate.

Just forget it, said Jackie.

Too late, said Tom. He had suspected she was being frivolous and theatrical about
matters that did not fare well in casual conversation. He thought she was asking about
vodou
again, teasing herself with the undercurrent of its
diabolique,
but again he had misunderstood her. Let’s start over, he said, if you actually want
to have a real conversation. Do I believe in God? I could believe in God in Latin,
or in any other language incomprehensible to me, but I cannot believe in God in English.
English exposed everything wrong about our approach toward a supreme being, the core
platitudes of the institutions behind the ritual, and I’m not even going to tell you
what I think about the politics of religion. So I suppose you might say I believe
in the mystery of God and I don’t appreciate anybody fucking with that mystery or
trying to grease it for me if I’m having trouble swallowing. Do you want me to go
on?

He missed her nod and finally she said quietly, Okay.

Do I believe in the soul? Yes. What is it? I don’t know and neither do you. An eternal
essence within us? Sure, why not? The life force that appears from darkness and reenters
darkness or, here’s the happier scenario, appears from light and reenters light, and
is not flesh and is our single connection to what some of us call the divine or the
infinite or the force behind it all. Do I believe that something like that is in me?
Yes, I choose to believe that. Do I believe I can lose it? I don’t know. If I lose
my shoes at the beach I can go back the next day and find them or just go buy another
pair, but if I’m at the beach and lose my arm to a shark, that arm’s not coming back,
is it? When we say someone has lost his soul, what are we saying? That somehow that
person has been emptied, that a light has been extinguished at the center of his being.
He sold his soul to the devil, we say. What happens to people who lose their souls?
They seem to die and be reborn in order to breed horror and misery in the world. Whether
they are full of hatred or not, they seem to be without love, loveless, emptied of
all love, the enemies of love. Where do those souls go, and are they coming back?
Maybe you can buy a new one, but where, and with what currency? Penance? A life dedicated
to good acts? Am I being serious enough for you, Jackie? And then he sighed loudly
with his own frustration, unhappy with his release of words, unhappy that he had even
bothered to say them, shadows cast by shadows.

She did not shrink from his unfriendly monologue but instead seemed emboldened. It’s
me, she declared. I’ve lost my soul.

Now how in the fuck did you lose your soul? Tom said. This confession was absurd and
bewildering and he did not want to hear it and he did not know what she expected of
him and as far as he was concerned she was in every sense too young and too affluent
to be having a genuine spiritual crisis, something that would pass out of her system
like a kidney stone, naturally although not painlessly, in another year or two, and
even then she would not be thirty.