An Untamed State (17 page)

He waved his arm widely. “What about all the children who will never know anything but life here?”

I took a long sip of my drink, wanted to numb myself. “I did not create the problems in this country nor did my family.”

The Commander laughed, reached across the table, took my wrist in his hand, and squeezed, hard. “People like you always choose to absolve yourselves. You are complicit even if you do not actively contribute to the problem because you do nothing to solve it.”

I held his gaze. My rage engulfed my fear. The Commander was just a man, I realized, a small and petty man. “You are complicit too. Don’t think for one second you aren’t.”

A strange expression crossed his face. He released his grip, shrugged, then looked up at the television. An episode of
Judge Judy
was airing. We watched, silently, drank, smoked many cigarettes. I wonder what we must have looked like, me and my battered body, the Commander and his arrogance, the anger hovering between us muted by the sharp counsel of a television judge. The laughter began just beneath my breastbone and soon my shoulders were shaking and finally I gave in, threw my head back and laughed so loudly I am certain they heard me for blocks and blocks.

As we exited the café, the Commander carried me, his arms hooked under mine. I kicked and tried to grab on anything with my feet. I knocked over chairs, a table covered with empty glasses, kicked the doorjamb of the entrance. I would have done anything, absolutely anything, to save myself from returning to the cage, to the men who used my body. There was one moment when I was facing the interior of the café as the Commander struggled to hold on to me. I could feel how frenzied I looked, my hair, flying from my head in every direction, the anger in my eyes, the white heat of it rolling off my body, threatening to burn everything around me. I stared at the woman who betrayed me. I shouted, “How could you? We are both daughters of Dessalines.” She stood perfectly still. She did not blink. She did not look away with her dry eyes.

By the time we made it back to the Commander’s house, I calmed. He would take me to his room filled with the trappings of his lack of imagination. His anger at my attempt to escape would be cold, cruelly measured. I accepted this.

A Jamaican friend, Elsa, once told me of a popular lullaby from her country about a mother with thirteen children. The mother kills one child to feed twelve, and one child to feed eleven, and one child to feed ten until she is left with but one child, whom she also slaughters because she too hungers. Finally, she returns to the middle of a cornfield where she slaughtered her other children, where the bones of their thirteen bodies lay. She slits her own throat because she cannot bear the burden of having done what needed to be done. After telling me this story, Elsa said, “A West Indian woman always faces such choices.”

The Commander closed the door to his bedroom and stood against it, smiling. He is a man who smiles without any change in his eyes. His eyes are dull, uninteresting. There is not one original thing about the man except for the scar on his face. There was a different way to fight. I knew I needed to find it, to live, to make it back to those from whom I had been taken. He pulled his gun from his waistband and began running his fingers along the length of the barrel, over the trigger, the slight curve of the handle, a beautiful affair with pearl inlays. I walked over to him and got on my knees.

I would fight by giving him that which he did not yet want. I feigned surrender. I held his wrist gently, pressed my lips against the underside. I became someone different, a woman who could satisfy a man with his desires. I held his wrist and opened my mouth and swallowed the barrel of his gun, occasionally massaging his arm. The gun was hard. My teeth scraping the metal made me cringe. I did not show my disgust. I was becoming a woman who could be disgusted by nothing. The gun oil was almost sweet in my mouth. It coated my tongue and filled my nose. Even though my throat was swollen, raw, I relaxed as best I could and I took the barrel of that gun into my throat. I looked up at the Commander, who gazed back at me curiously. He leaned against the door, relaxed. I tried to breathe and treated the gun like I would a lover. I choked myself on that weapon, making soft, wet, strangled sounds. I could see how much the Commander appreciated the display, how his breathing changed, the stiff rise of his pants.

I stood and held on to him by the waist of his jeans. At the foot of the bed, I undressed. I did not shrink from the way he looked at me. Though I had little experience with men, I knew I had a nice body or I did before. I took the gun from him, and our eyes met. He was guarded as he loosened his grip. I set the gun on the bed, yearning to be able to pull the trigger. I undressed the Commander the way a woman who could want a man like him might. I began to forget everything I had ever known and anyone I had ever loved. I became no one. I became a woman who wanted to live. That was my fight.

I kissed his chest and the palms of his hands and pressed my cheeks against the palms of his hands. I think he trembled. I lay on his bed and set his gun over my mound. I spread my legs. I offered myself to him. The Commander wrapped himself around my thigh. He traced the bruises and blisters along my inner thighs with the end of his gun. He penetrated me with his gun and I raised my hips. I grabbed his shoulder, squeezing the thick stretch of muscle. I endured the pain. I was no one, so the pain did not matter. He kissed my thigh over and over, drew his fingers around the bone of my knee.

When it was the right time, when I knew he wanted me desperately, I told him he should put his gun away. I told him he had no need for it. I told him he should become his gun. He liked this. He was rough because he is not a man who knows how to be gentle, who knows how to handle precious things. He was not a difficult man to understand. He held my hair in his fist and put his mouth on my neck and put his mouth on my lips. I opened my mouth to him the way I opened my body to him, the body he had already tried to break but could not break. I was silent. I pretended I did not feel pain even though the only thing I felt was pain. My hands were not my hands. My body was not my body. He was loud, made a sound from deep in his chest like a roar and then he was completely spent; his body was heavy and immovable on top of mine. I raged beneath him, staring at the ceiling. In what was left of my mind, I screamed. I was alive.

I made my choice. There is nothing you cannot do when you are no one.

S
ebastien Duval and Fabienne Duval née Georges each had twelve siblings. Their mothers’ wombs were fertile countries unto themselves. Each sibling had at least two children. Several had more. Mireille’s family was oppressive in size.

As news of the kidnapping spread throughout their circle, Mireille’s bloodline began showing up at the Duval house early each morning, impeccably dressed. They were there to hold vigil and support the family. They were there to be seen holding vigil and supporting the family. They were a benevolent pestilence.

The family held court in the large sitting room, barking orders at the maids who held tongues silent and heads high as they brought tea and coffee, sweets and fruit. The family talked loudly, offering wild opinions, making idle threats, demanding change, trying to solve all of Haiti’s problems in one sitting as is the way of Haitians when they gather. Michael hovered on the periphery, struggling to hold on to the conversations. After eight years with Mireille he could follow along when people spoke slowly, but with so many people, all talking so fast and furious, it was hard to make sense of anything. When he tried to interject, his mouth dried and he became overly conscious of his awkward French. When he spoke English, they mostly looked right through him.

Veronique, Mireille’s maternal aunt and godmother, fell to her knees every so often, throwing her hands in the air as she offered up ecstatic prayers. Her sister Vivienne shook her head and rolled her eyes, and surreptitiously sent her own daughter, safe in Miami, text messages keeping her up to date on the spectacle. Lily and Mathieu, twins, sat side by side, whispering to each other about how this was what happened when you left the country of your birth and assumed you could return without consequence. They were Sebastien’s siblings and they resented how few of his blessings he bestowed unto others. He called them the Handouts because their hands were always out.

Three of Sebastien’s brothers, Etienne, Bernard, and Benjamin, were doctors—an internist, a gynecologist, a pediatrician. They liked to make jokes about what would happen if they walked into a bar. They stood in a corner, pretending to look busy so they would not have to hear about all that ailed their siblings and in-laws and on and on.

Emmanuel, Fabienne’s youngest brother, was close to Michael in age. He was the only one who really tried to talk to the American who was largely distracted, his eyes constantly flitting across the room as if waiting for someone else to appear. Emmanuel had a flask of rum he offered to Michael, who drank from it eagerly. He gently jabbed Michael in the ribs with his elbow, said, “We’ll get her back, man. They can’t keep her forever.” Michael took another sip of rum but said nothing.

Fabienne sat on a couch against the wall near the middle of the room, flanked by two of her sisters. She held her hands in her lap, one leg crossed over the other. The conversation around her was a persistent hum that refused to organize itself into distinguishable sounds. Her youngest daughter, her stubborn sweet girl, was out there in a city Fabienne loathed, a city she had sworn she would never return to but for the will of her husband. She knew what the curve of Sebastien’s spine said and what he meant when his eyes wrinkled at the corners. He made her blood rise in ways that still made her warm, everywhere. He was a man who did as he was told when he came to their bed each night and she said, “In this room, you are just a man. You leave the rest of it beyond these walls.”

But now, everything out there was spilling into every last part of their lives. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Sebastien had assured her they were safe. Mireille was an American, mostly. Fabienne smiled, remembering how when Mireille was young, eight or nine, she would always answer her mother in English when they were in public, a spiteful thing all the children did to show their parents they were not like them at all. And then, fifteen years later, Mireille began answering her mother in French, no matter where they were. The petty insurrections were over. She loved all her children. Mona, her wild child, always saying, “But Mom,” and asking, “Why?”—Mona who was still a good girl, as settled as she likely would be with the photographer, and Michel, the adventurer, always in some faraway place, trying to put distance, Fabienne understood, between himself and his father. Still, it was her youngest who took up most of her heart. Fabienne longed for a simple pleasure, all her children in one place, safe, with her.

They didn’t take Americans. That was how Fabienne had slept at night, knowing her daughters would always be safe when they were in Port-au-Prince. And now, she knew her husband had lied to her. So many years, following him to so many places, and he had repaid her with such staggering deceit. If she allowed herself, she would tear his eyes out and spit on his bleeding face. She breathed deeply. She loved him. She tried not to consider the satisfaction of his flesh beneath her fingernails.

Sebastien stood next to the couch, taking slow, careful sips from a small cup of espresso. He had to look calm. He had to be in control. Too many people in the room would be more than happy to see him fall, to plunder all he had built. One thing he had learned in this life—there were always barbarians at both sides of the gate.

He looked up from his reverie, but didn’t dare meet the eyes of the woman who had stood by his side the whole of his life. There Fabienne sat, as beautiful as always, so elegant, her back straight, eyes flashing, dark hair streaked with silver. Her face older, but still, this was the woman he married without ever looking back, always faithful. When he looked at Fabienne, everything was good and quiet. He could step away from the rush of the fire he always felt at his back.

Always, in America, he had to prove himself to the men he worked with, then men he worked for, the men who worked under him, all men he could outthink on his worst day. He hated how they mocked his accent before clapping him on the shoulders, saying, “You don’t mind, do you?” He hated how surprised they were when he did something excellent, and how they never stopped being surprised, even twenty years on. It was not easy to be a man like him in a country where everyone looked upon him with suspicion. Everything he had made of himself and still, these indignities choked him and filled his mouth with bitterness. The easiest decision of his life had been to return to Haiti, where at least, he would always be a man among men.