The trip seemed longer that day to Olmène, because of the silence of her mother, who never mentioned Tertulien Mésidor’s insistence on buying their goods. Ermancia had seen nothing. Heard nothing. Olmène let herself slip into this same ring of silence, following her mother’s lead. Yet Ermanica couldn’t stop herself from thinking of Tertulien Mésidor, who resembled, as two drops of water do each other, his father, Anastase Mésidor, who unceremoniously and without restraint, at the mercy of his will, had taken so many women that he’d forgotten their names as soon as he’d had them. Scattering kilometers of the coast, the surrounding mountains, with children whose first names he didn’t know, whose faces he didn’t recognize. Even the women who were spared his monstrous lust, if they crossed themselves after passing him, it was because they were intrigued by all that power. Olmène and Ermancia had been, too, that morning.
They climbed the mountain, hardly feeling the rough limestone bruise the soles of their feet, cut their heels. Olmène eventually forgot the pain, her mother having told her so many times that feet unable to face the stones and rocks were useless, good for nothing: “God gave you feet so that you could use them!” They left very late that day and sped up their steps so as not to be surprised by too strong a sun. It was already almost unbearable because of the glare spreading out from the sea. As far as the eye could see. It gave off light as though condemning the earth to fire.
At the first turn at the top of the hill, Olmène traced the first dark green trees, which didn’t grow thick but still escaped the vicious dryness of Anse Bleue. Entering Roseaux, she and Ermancia took a break, time to wipe their faces, relieve their bladders, to pick strands of mangue fil and stick them between their teeth. Time also to chat for a few minutes in front of Madame Yvenot’s stand, and she offered them half of an avocado and a kasav*. Olmène couldn’t keep herself from looking at Madame Yvenot’s new shoes, black with a buckle on the side. For the last two months she’d been dreaming of them.
Madame Yvenot, recently returned from the Dominican Republic, showed off her profits from selling provisions and pois Congo. What Ermanica knew of the Dominican Republic had started over meals shared with Josephina, a friend of her mother’s from Duverger, back when there was trade with Pedro, Rafael, and Julio in Bani; it stopped with a death, blood, a scar on her left forearm, and a missing front tooth. She escaped Trujillo’s massacre because her mother covered her up with her body and breathed her last breaths beneath the repeated strikes of the machetes and the heinous sound of the voices that cried: “Malditos Hatianos, malditos.” The events that sometimes disfigured her joys or filled her sleepless nights despite the fatigue of the days. Ermancia didn’t even want to say the name of that part of the island, and settled on listening to Madame Yvenot in silence.
Changing the subject, her eyes insinuating, serpentine, she asked them why they were late. There’s nothing to quicken the pulse of the slanderous, mal parlante Madame Yvenot more than taking out peoples’ dirty laundry and wallowing in the salt of their tears, the red of their blood, the stickiness of their seed. And sniffing around, celebrating the odor of misfortune. Ermancia told her that Orvil had trouble getting up that morning because of the pain in his back. Madame Yvenot, pleased by this display of confidence, reminded her that she would wind up killing her old man of a husband: “You are going to finish him off, Ermancia!” They both laughed out loud. Ermancia started to tell the story of a woman whom she knew in her hometown and who, one day… She whispered the rest into Madame Yvenot’s ear. And, when they laughed again, Olmène laughed with them, not because of their words, which had been muffled and which she didn’t fully hear, but because of Madame Yvenot’s enormous breasts, which shook all around like two wild horses each time she burst out laughing. That didn’t make her forget Ermancia’s lie, and it only further sharpened her curiosity for this older man who emerged from the fog and who had the power to make her mother lie.
At the market in Baudelet, they sat in their usual spot, under the leaves of one of the rare acacias that stood in the vast space where they exchanged what the lands gave them: mangos, avocados, bananas, plantains, sweet potatoes, breadfruit, greens, millet, and corn—with what the city offered—matches, thick blue cotton, soap, enameled utensils. This corner where she sat with her daughter, Ermancia had won it at the end of a fierce fight. She took hold of it the day after Grann Méphise, an elderly vendor who had taken her under her wing, died without leaving behind a daughter or a niece or a goddaughter to pass it down to. Another crass woman set up her stakes just after her death, while everyone was still in mourning. Ermancia stood before her, hands on hips, her skirt slightly hiked up on one side, and challenged her: “You stay in this place one second longer and I can no longer be held responsible for my actions!” After the usual cursing, the two women were held back from coming to blows, and the dispute was resolved by an improvised tribunal that immediately recognized Ermancia’s right to the spot.
Olmène liked this stubbornness in her mother, who stood up to everything: the day, the night, the chrétiens-vivants, and the animals. The land could burst into the flames, the waters could dry up, she wouldn’t relent. She kept going. She went as far as she could. Every market day, she took a little bit more space. After three months she spread out her goods in peace in one of the most coveted corners of the Baudelet market.
But Ermancia didn’t stop at the market. She managed to win over Madame Frétillon, too, by offering her the most beautiful eggplants, yams, beans, not to mention her tobacco leaves as long as a man’s arm. Very quickly, she became the main supplier for Madame Frétillon, who even went as far as saving her a cup of coffee on market days.
Lucien, one of Albert Frétillon’s sons, unlike his sister Eglantine, who remained in France, or his brother, François, who lived in Port-au-Prince, loved the greed of this trading post in the province where his family had made its fortune. He had married Fatme Békri, a Syro-Lebanese woman. It was a break from convention in those times, for a bourgeois, even in the provinces, to marry a Syro-Lebanese. But Lucien knew that she would have no match in turning goods into cash. He had Fatme Békri Frétillon stand below a caricature of a thin man in rags facing a pot-bellied man in rich clothes. Under the first image, it read: I sold on credit, and under the second: I sold for cash. At every demand for a rebate or credit, Madame Frétillon, the sweet hypocrite, pointed to the caricature and translated it, with big gestures for the peasants, into a sweet Creole tinted with Arabic: “Ti chérrrie, mafifrouz, I cannot, mwen pa kapab.”
Olmène, standing behind her mother, enjoyed, as her grandfather Bonal Lafleur had some forty years earlier, watching the men sitting on the Frétillons’ porch. Always the same: the director of the high school, jet-black; the chief of police, a mulatto from Jacmel; the town judge, a quadroon from Jérémie. She watched everything, listened to everything, and remembered the rare occasions when she had seen Tertulion Mésidor meet with these men to discuss questions that were beyond her comprehension. Just as they had been beyond the comprehension of her grandfather Bonal Lafleur. It was 1960 and Olmène knew almost nothing, no more than we did, that they were talking about a powerful man, a doctor from the countryside who spoke, head down, with the nasally voice of a zombi and wore a black hat and thick glasses. Because he had taken care of peasants in the countryside and treated the yaws, some men, like the director of the high-school, believed in his humility, in his charity, in his infinite compassion. Others, like the police