Bay of Souls Page 11

  Roger went and stood where he could see the rutted road that led down to the smoky plain and the sea. He stood watching.

  "You're beautiful, Roger," she said. "If I were greedy I would take you. I would take you by force."

  Roger's father had been a historical novelist, an African American from Boston whose books romanticized the antebellum South and were perennial bestsellers. Their heroes were spurred, booted cavaliers whose gallantry and imagined swordsmanship quickened the pulses of garden club ladies throughout the southern states. Hyde pète's novels had been often filmed by Hollywood, but the author's picture never appeared on the book jackets.

  "And I would surrender," Roger said. He looked worried, but hale enough. His life suited him, she thought.

  Roger's mother was French and the family had lived in Mexico. For a while Roger had tried writing in his father's genre, continuing the formula. After the first few novels it had not worked out. The themes had become embarrassing. So he had come from Mexico City to live with John-Paul at the Bay of Saints Hotel, to write travel pieces and interviews and to help with the daily administration of the place.

  "Look, you should take what you think is yours and go. I'm very serious. It's quite dangerous here."

  "I thought I'd do a little diving. Also, I brought a friend down."

  "Are you joking?" Roger asked her. "You must assure me now. Tell me you're joking."

  She had no assurances for him. She explained that Michael Ahearn would be flying in shortly.

  "You know that Eustace Junot's army is defending the election. He has the Americans. Besides that, it's total disorder. Looting and daylight robbery."

  "It sounds like the ocean is the place to be. I'm going swimming."

  "Lara!"

  "Roger," she said, "this is me. Your friend Lara. John-Paul's twin in the mysteries. I have to be here for the tetitet."

  "I thought you had forgotten all that, sweetheart. Why don't you?"

  She shrugged and smiled. "Not possible."

  "All right," he said after a moment. "I'm seeing the European Union observer late this afternoon. There are things we need to know. Want to come?"

  "After my swim."

  "And you'll get to meet our associates, because they're coming in."

  "Are they like the pilot I flew in with? He was silent the entire time."

  "They're like that," Hyde told her. "Reserved."

  She changed and went down the ancient stone stairs to the water. The shore was rocky and littered, but she had caught the pure morning light, still unmuddied by smoke and the sun. As a little girl, she had been told to throw a stone in the water to honor the god. If she forgot, the girl minding her always threw one in.

  She tossed a clean stone and said the god's name. Agwe.

  Working her way past bristling colonies of sea urchins, she flipped and somersaulted over the edge. She knew the reefs and rips from childhood.

  The water felt good, calming and elating at once. She felt strong and composed, although she missed Michael. The prospect of the rites, though she feared them, excited her.

  Dazzled by the sun, she had headed too far from shore. She treaded water and had a look around. She could feel velvety staghorn beneath her feet—the middle reef. Her brother's secret beach was around the nearest cove; with a businesslike crawl she swam past it. Halfway, she turned over and shifted to a backstroke, pulling herself along handful by handful, navigating by the slow clouds drifting in on the late breeze. Half a mile away, beyond the coral tips and visible only on the outgoing tide, was the wall that descended toward the source of creation, the place the Maroons called Guinee, purgatorial Africa, where death was better than servitude and untended souls awaited visitation, salvation, home. In that place the angry dead danced with Marinette.

  Fishermen and loafers on the shore, mothers and wading children, watched her. Though she had not been to the island for more than a year, she had the feeling they knew who she was and where she was headed. She pushed on. Memory came on the taste of the ocean, the force of the withdrawing tide. Now and then she rested on her back. A diver, she was comfortable on her back, pushing along with a rowing stroke.

  When she was a girl the island was a paradise without a snake, if one was a certain kind of person. Her Royal Highness appeared on the money, and the American State Department took a cheerful view of local graft.

  And she, Lara, was a little white princess (practically, almost entirely), and the island, as the nostalgic saying held, was as safe as your bathtub for such as she. But history prevailed even in Paradise, a term for the island that passed gradually out of use among the most fatuous of flacks, and the ongoing curse began to sound its drums, though the cry in the street was only half heard. At first, la violencia was a new Colombian thing. Nobody owned a Walther—a cutlass sufficed.

  One night at a diplomatic reception in Rodney, a handsome Frenchman approached her. He was a teacher who worked on the island with an educational foundation. In his white dinner jacket, Lara thought he was the most dashing figure she had ever seen, serious but charming. Everything about him seemed dramatic, yet not in the least theatrical.

  "You're not American?" he asked her when they had been introduced.

  "No." She denied it. Why not? How disagreeable to be one.

  "A Creole, like myself?"

  On French and Spanish islands, local white people sometimes called themselves Creoles. On British islands, never.

  "Yes," she said. Curiosity led.

  He turned toward a visiting American, a pleasant middle-aged baldy.

  "See that man, Lara? This happy fellow?"

  Smiling, she turned, expecting to be impressed.

  "With these, their hatred of the darker races is the closest thing they possess to a sense of honor."

  She stood for a moment still smiling, blushing, until she was able to speak.

  "What a horrible thing to say!"

  "Beautiful Lara," the Frenchman said. "Come and see our work in Williamstown. Our school. And I will go on saying horrible things until you believe them."

  Something about him impelled her to forgive his frightening bitterness. She wanted not to come within the compass of his rage, to be forgiven. He claimed to be a Cuban; he had changed his nationality to be one with progressive humanity. She was considering her claims. You could be anything you wanted in Paradise.

  "This term I teach every day at St. Brendan's."

  "We'll find a day," the handsome Frenchman said.

  She had married him and they had gone to Paris. Then she had become, as was said, an agent of influence, a tiny auxiliary of the socialist bloc, under the tutelage of her husband and the great Desmond Jenkins, the wizard of influence agentry in the Third World and at the United Nations. She had met Castro and Graham Greene. She had known their company.

  Then she and her husband had changed sides and been bartered by the French services to the Triptelemos brigade. Bad luck, and now, she thought, it would be remedied, the hotel sold.

  What was most important was that at John-Paul's retirer she might reclaim her soul, which he, her brother, had teasingly given over to the keeping of his own protective spirits. He had done it to punish her for going away to school in Switzerland, and for other things. She was in love, it seemed; she thought of Michael's body with pleasure. But the best thing was that she would be whole again.

  Silvery barracuda darted around her in the inshore water. A pod of brown rays rose from under the sand as she waded out of the mild surf.

  By the time she had showered and changed again, Roger was gone. The house had a floating population of servants and hangers-on, none of whom were anywhere in sight. The telephone was working and she called the hotel. Michael's flight from San Juan had not taken off. No one knew about the bus service to the capital.

  The keys she had brought with her from the States still served their purpose. Checking the garage, she found the old Land Rover with three quarters of a tank of gas, not enough to make it to Ro
dney and back. There were some jerry cans of gas but she was afraid to drive the roads with them. If Michael needed fetching, she decided, she would go. Then, on impulse, she set off along the coast road toward the convent where she had taught school. On the road she passed no one except an elderly woman who was closing her soft-drinks stand, padlocking a battered tin shutter. A few miles farther along, a gang of young boys shouted after her.

  As she pulled up at the gate, she heard the sounds of a football match inside. When the old Haitian servant let her in, she saw the game itself in progress on the parched field: two sets of teenagers playing Gaelic football. One side had been equipped with rugby shirts. Their opponents, playing bare-chested, showed the knotty frames of the poorer island people. Lara parked her machine in front of the two-story school building and watched for a while. On a veranda on the upper story, she saw Sister Margaret Oliver, in dark glasses, apparently absorbed in the game, poised on the edge of her rocking chair. It was so very like her, Lara thought, to set the boys at Gaelic football behind convent walls in the middle of an insurrection.

  Another weight of memory stopped Lara on the way upstairs. The hallways still bore the foreign schoolroom fragrances she recalled from years before. Metal polish and candle wax, ink and cut flowers, ant spray and English soap. When she stepped out on the balcony, the nun was shouting something in Irish to the boys on the pitch. Lara paused before knocking on the frame of the louvered door.

  The sister shouted down to her spalpeens. Her side, Lara thought, must naturally be the shirtless ones. Lara felt herself in a welter of all the crazed, promiscuous forces of her island. Nuns shouting in Gaelic to black children playing Irish games. Cane cutters singing in medieval French patois to the rhythm of their cutlass strokes. Here and there plastic radios running on tractor batteries playing rhythm and blues. From the school balcony, canefields stretched toward the purple ridge of the Morne Chastenet, where the descendants of Haitian Maroons served vodoun loas, African gods and savage Taino spirits in thin Christian disguise.

  Meanwhile at St. Brendan's, for a hundred years the Marist nuns and brothers had been urging black and brown children to prodigies of valor at Gaelic football, shouting encouragement in the auld speech. Of course they had to offer cricket as well—the island passion—along with the sermons of Cardinal Newman and the speeches of Edmund Burke. During the seventies they had somehow obtained Manchild in the Promised Land for the library and a New York gang novel called The Cool World, these beside Winston Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples and devotional pap like The Glories of Mary.

  To go with religiosity and mildly Whiggish history there were manuals of etiquette and forms of address, so that should a St. Brendan's student wish to correspond with a marquess or any person of like degree, the appropriate salutations could be referred to and applied. Lara had ordered her third-form class to read Uncle Tom's Cabin together. It was still popular.

  But during Lara's time as a teacher, the Marists, with the bishop behind them, had struggled to suppress the dread Rastas and their dread hairdos and the trappings of black power, which Sister Margaret Oliver called American rubbish. Eldridge Cleaver and Frantz Fanon had turned up on the library shelves in that period, the Fanon courtesy of Lara herself.

  Noticing Lara's presence in the doorway, Sister Margaret turned and removed her round-framed dark sunglasses, so grotesquely fashionable on an old nun, more than slightly sinister, suggestive of American rubbish.

  "Oh, dear Lara! Oh, bless you, darling girl."

  Lara tried to keep her from standing. On the field there was an outcry; someone had scored.

  "Goal," Lara said under her breath.

  Sister Margaret shook her head in wonder. She called down to the referee.

  "Jack? Can you carry on without my support, do you think?"

  The young black man who was refereeing gave her a thumbs-up sign. The nun ordered tea from the country girl who served in the kitchen. There were no hugs and kisses. Irish Marists and their students refrained from embracing.

  "Do you really think it's safe to have them all in today?" Lara asked. "I mean, shouldn't they be home?"

  "Not at all," the nun said. "Not at all. The junta would be putting rifles in their hands. I'm keeping them here until Junot and the Americans get it under control. Not that I'm cheering, you'll notice."

  "You're not for the junta, surely?"

  Sister Margaret laughed. "What? With us responsible for Colonel Junot's education? He was one of ours, you know. An alumnus."

  "Of course."

  "But I don't want my lads used for target practice, and these walls have faced down as many armies as there are in the Book of Kings." She had a look at Lara. "I suppose you've come back to close the hotel."

  "Yes, I'm saying goodbye to it all, sister. I won't be coming back."

  "Well, you know I'm surely sorry to hear that now," said Sister Margaret. "I thought when I heard you were coming home to us ... I thought what stories she'll have to tell. And there'd be something to do in the evening besides watch American rubbish on telly."

  Tea arrived in its good time, hauled rather than carried upstairs by a petulant and out-of-breath teenager, overweight and surly.

  "I hoped you'd come and teach here again," the sister said. "Now that you'd seen the world."

  "How nice that would be," she said. "No, I've taken a job in the States. Political science."

  They both watched the panting servant girl withdraw.

  "You should have gone to medical school," the nun said. "You might well have done."

  Lara smiled. "You had my life planned."

  "I passed the time planning your life, Lara." She seemed really to be weeping. "Don't worry, it was a good life I planned you." Outside, the boys shouted again. Lara was touched, only for a moment, with grief and regret. It seemed she must be picking up the old woman's mood swings. Grief, regret and fear too. "Well now," said old Sister Margaret, sniffling aside her disappointments in Lara, "political science, is it? And in the States."

  "I wasn't doing anyone any good in Africa."

  "But you were! You were needed."

  "I was a Soviet agent, sister."

  Sister Margaret Oliver looked around to see if they had been overheard.

  "Is that a joke?"

  In fact, Lara couldn't help laughing. "It's true. Desmond Jenkins recruited us. My husband as well."

  "You shouldn't say such things, dear. This government is run by the CIA." Margaret Oliver had a second look around. "Ever since the Yankee intervention. You could get thrown in jail."

  "I'm sure they know all about me, sister. And you too," she said, meanly teasing. Outside, there was another cry of "Goal!"

  "What?" demanded Sister Margaret. "What, me?"

  "I'm joking, sister. They're really not that efficient. People who studied in Cuba are back in the government now."

  "Dr. Desmond Jenkins," Sister Margaret said, "was honored everywhere. All over the Third World. Even in America. I can't believe he was a spy."

  "He wasn't a spy, sister. He was an agent of influence. He helped the Russians to look good in the English-speaking world. He was paid for it. And for exposing the Americans."

  "Exactly," the nun said. "Exposing them, so they called him a Communist, as they always do."

  "Well," Lara said, "Jenkins did better out of it than poor Laurent and I. We were supposed to be agents of influence as well. But we lived on our university salaries. Old Desmond had his tax-free honoraria and lecture fees."

  She told Sister Margaret a bit about her divorce.

  "We were fond of each other," Lara explained. "But half the time Laurent was assigned to the Francophone countries there, and I had the English-speaking ones."

  "He's older than you," Margaret Oliver said equitably.

  "Yes," Lara said, "there was that."

  "How is it," the nun asked after a moment, "how is it, considering, that the Yanks will give you a visa? And a teaching position."

&
nbsp; It was a sly question that involved some compromises and complications. Lara gave her the simplest answer.

  "Mum was American. So am I, sort of. I was born in New Orleans, so I have an American passport. Kept it up-to-date but never traveled on it in Africa. You can use a UN diplomatic passport there if you know how it's done. Desmond taught us."

  In fact they had both defected from Desmond Jenkins's Bolshevik fan club. Her husband had gone to the French secret service, Lara to an American foundation. Jenkins had died teaching in America, a high-living gay deceiver of most uncertain allegiance, passed away with the Cold War. Practically, Lara thought, the week the Wall went down.

  "So," she asked her old teacher, "is history God's will?"

  "God's plan is what we are measured against," said the nun. "History is what we perpetrate, God help us."

  They sat listening to the play outside.

  "Do you believe in les mystères?"

  "That is theirs," Sister Margaret said unhappily. She nodded toward the field where the boys were playing. "It's not for us when we have ... all that we have. Our religion and our knowledge."

  "Only theirs?"

  "They are old—very old things," Sister Margaret said after a moment. "They are left over from Creation. From darkness, almost."

  "Almost? Are they wickedness?"

  "Not wickedness," the nun said. "In the darkness, for them to find their way. Everything leads to light."

  Automatic fire echoed off the range of the Anse Chastenet.

  "The thing is," Lara said, "I'm involved. It was John-Paul. He always felt like a twin to me. He confined my petit bon ange. You know, he had the powers of a houngan. He pledged my soul to Marinette."

  Marinette was a figure of rage and violence. Not a god but a woman who had lived once. A terrible godlike raging woman. She belonged to petro, which her brother had favored, the violent side.

  "Did it change you?" Sister Margaret asked.

  "I feel her. I feel without a soul sometimes."

  "God will help you if you ask. God is stronger than these spirits. They're like the sidh, as we have at home."

  "Anyway," Lara said, "I go to the retirer the next few nights. And I hope that ... it will come back. You know how hard it is to talk about this. You can't explain it to people. I've tried."