Like all of us, Olmène often wondered if God, the Grand Maître, in his great wisdom, had created them, she and hers, with the same clay as the rest. And if he had put as much care into his creation of hers as of theirs. Equally into those who loved the man in the black hat and thick glasses as those who didn’t. She looked at her naked feet, the august assembly of these men, then at Madame Frétillon’s light skin and her husband’s new car. It seemed to her that he hadn’t. To us, too.
Olmène thought of it again in the first shadows of the sunset, after washing her face several times, letting the droplets make her skin glisten like mother of pearl. And again just after scrubbing herself, scrubbing her feet of any trace of mud. She thought of it again at night fall, on the veranda next to the market, when the women, face and feet clean, met around the lampes bobèches* and Man Nosélia’s only stove to sip some tisanes and to talk. To talk as though wresting from the night these words that belonged to it alone. Words that they drew from the light of the day, as though a little darkness was needed to seize them. Olmène loved these voices that seemed to come out of a single great body of shadow. From a sole mouth. The flames danced over these burning, bare words of the night. Olmène could distinguish a profile eaten away by the darkness whenever one of the women bent over to rekindle the fire or pour more of the cinnamon or anise or ginger tisane in her enameled mug. Or when one of their faces rose out of the plumes, nearly blue, from the smoke of a pipe.
They took turns without tiring, stringing together one story after the other. Those of tax collectors and soldiers, always ready to extort them for something. The escapades of concubines, the impertinence of matelotes,* the troubles of children. Those of the jardins, where they would wear themselves out growing vegetables, millet, and corn. The stories of the most precious garden, that they, the women, kept, coiled up between their hips, that belonged only to them. And the men who had stopped there to rekindle their embers and light their fires. Words of women who spoke by the grace of God, the force of the Mysteries, the tribulations and the satisfactions of the chrétiens-vivants. She could have listened for hours to this speech pulled from the thickness of the days. Because the time spent talking like this isn’t time, it’s light. The time spent talking like this, it’s water washing the soul, the bon ange.
Man Nosélia put down her pipe only when she felt the first burning in her mouth and the stinging in her eyes. She laughed one last time before soothing the sores on her tongue, the insides of her cheeks, and her palate with a concoction of lettuce and honey. She did so loudly and then spat out a big stream of saliva, scratched her feet, crotch, and armpits in the manner of a cockroach, and fell asleep, a smile forgotten across her lips.
Ermancia arranged the rags on which slept with her daughter. They went over the sales of the day one last time and reviewed the projects for the future: once fattened, the larger of the two pigs would be sold to allow the purchase of two other younger ones who would be fattened in turn, and the new lands of the State would be opened for cultivation.
“Even if, just between you and me, Olmène, the new cultivation land won’t give much, and if I listened to myself, I would go all the way up there. Where, in great mercy, the coffee grows. Where the veins of the earth are very fragile, but where the sun is still generous.” And then Ermancia sighed: “But that’s how it is.”
Olmène listened to her attentively while straining to see in her mother the vendor in the market, the woman she had discovered. Ermancia noticed and, just before closing her eyes, she whispered to Olmène that one shouldn’t say everything. Especially not to men. “Even if he offers you a roof and takes care of your children.” That silence is the surest friend. The only one who won’t betray you. “Never, you hear me,” she insisted. Olmène snuggled close to her mother and put her head on her belly. To traverse, with her, these quiet lands that man never penetrated, except with the ignorance of a conquerer. Where, however conquering he may be, he doesn’t know how to tread.
Olmène entered into the grand plain of the night swept by the opposing winds, thinking of the meeting at daybreak, of the secret that Ermancia had since seemed to keep, of that conversation at night among the vendors and those last words of her mother. She smiled at the idea of this first secret of women. This first complicity between mother and daughter.
Olmène looked at the stars outside, like nails stuck in the sky. Like us, she knew that God had hammered them there and could take one out whenever it seemed right to send messages to the hougans* or the powerful mambos. Or to put them in their open palms.
Other thoughts came to her, clear because they had no noise, no words. Not demanding anything. A sigh that wasn’t just fatigue escaped through her lips. A sigh that evoked the memory of a man’s gaze. The memory of this man’s eyes weighing on her like hands. A diffuse pleasure radiated from a hot and humid place inside of her. She curled up to hold back this strange wave. A sigh escaped her again, that nobody was to hear. No one. Not even Ermancia.
9.
In the early afternoon, with some other women, two from Roseaux, one from Pointe Sable, and two from Ti Pistache, Olmène and Ermancia went back to Anse Bleue. Splitting up, catching up, splitting up from each other again. Like a flock of migratory birds. A moving stain, never the same, on the paths winding under the sky and sun. Olmène felt more than ever that she belonged with these peasant women. Open to all the winds. Women in the same washed-out, patched-up dresses. Women with speech in tatters. A force sleeping in the swaying of their hips, in their voices too. Like under the dirt, a sheet of running water, a source of a fire.
It was hardly three o’clock when, on the road between Roseaux and Ti Pistache, they passed a young priest, already quite beaten up by the sun, big red patches on his skin. He rode a donkey led by Érilien, the sacristan of the chapel in Roseaux, and carried a collection of miscellaneous objects—a pot, two enameled mugs, books, a blanket. Sweat beaded on his forehead, at times nearly forcing him to close his eyes and marking his white cassock with big halos under his armpits, on his back, and above his navel. The priest breathed like a bull. Two bulging eyes protruded from his fat face. Eyes that were strong-willed and naive. Naive to the point of seeing his entrance into the world of Ti Pistache, Baudelet, and Anse Bleue as both certain and necessary, and that this certainty and necessity were irremediable. “That’s the new priest,” Olmène said to Ermancia. “He is going to the Chapelle Sainte-Antoine-de-Padoue in Roseaux.”
The young priest, a chubby but tired thirty-something, took off his hat to greet them as they approached, wiped his face and neck, introduced himself, and announced that he was the new priest in Roseaux. That he would build a beautiful church there. “I expect you to come and hear the word of God.” Ermancia smiled and acquiesced with a submissive “Yes, mon pè.” Hardly audible. Eyes fixed on the ground. Érilien overrated the piety of the women whom he claimed to have known for a long time. Olmène smiled in turn, examining the man, secretly but with a sharp eye. Their smiles had raised an invisible wall into which Father Bonin—that was his name—collided without even realizing it. A wall that the sacristan had helped them build with his words. Ermancia and Olmène, standing behind this wall, glanced over it for a moment as the Father walked toward Roseaux. Érilien, not wanting to arouse any suspicion from the newcomer, didn’t exchange a single look with the two women and turned away without turning back, his hand firmly squeezing the donkey’s reins. Father Bonin went on, exhausted by the journey but his heart at work, his soul lighter, persuaded that he had brought two new sheep into his flock on its way to salvation.
Between Roseaux and the Peletier Morne, Olmène, Ermancia, and the other women walked along the Mayonne River, bordered by malangas with large violet leaves and watercresses like fuzzy manes, with the same fear in their heart of seeing