Claire of the Sea Light (16 page)

Before heading to the fisherman’s vigil, Gaëlle’s young housemaid, Zette, had left her a plate of fried pork and plantains, which Max Senior had requested as part of his dinner. Gaëlle wolfed down the food while lying in bed, wearing a long silver satin evening gown, which she had intended to wear for dinner with the Ardins, father and son. Her hair, though, was still wrapped in rollers when Max Senior had called. With the wide-paned jalousies of her bedroom windows open, she could see some of the houses lit up on the hill, many of which were occupied only part of the year because their owners lived in the capital or abroad. She could also see the Anthère lighthouse, around which her entire neighborhood had been built.

The lighthouse gallery was filled with young boys, some of whom were fighting with the wind to light hurricane lamps, while others twirled flashlights. Gaëlle’s grandfather, her mother’s father—a mason and engineer—had built that lighthouse with help from a group of fishermen. Some of those fishermen were still alive, but most were living elsewhere or had died. When a fancy neighborhood—Anthère, named after the anther of a rose—sprang up on the hill, there was little need for the lighthouse, the lights from the homes becoming beacons themselves. The mayor and other town officials
had shown no interest in spending to maintain the lighthouse. But it had been constructed so well—with a fifty-foot tower and an equally high focal plane—that it refused to rot.

In the old days, when the lighthouse was functioning, it was painted all white and had a red lamp and a windbreak on top. Her grandfather and the other volunteer light keepers would ensure that the kerosene lamps that fueled the lantern were lit every night at dusk, producing ten flashes per minute. All this she had learned from her grandfather. He would guide her by the hand, up the spiral staircase toward the lighthouse gallery. The air was always damp and stale in the inside chamber, the spaces under the stairs covered with intricate spiderwebs.

Reaching the lighthouse gallery, though, was always her favorite moment. From there, she could see the land, the mountains, and the sea bathed in sun, mist, or fog, depending on the season, or the time of day. Her grandfather would let her pull the lever that would sound the lighthouse foghorn, and she’d scream over the blast, unable to hear her own voice. Every now and then, if she was lucky, they’d see a rainbow. Her grandfather could spot even the faintest band of light in the clouds or distant fog banks.

But now the lighthouse was placed in rescue mode only when someone was missing, or in remembrance mode when someone was dead. The paint on the outside had long since faded, leaving the cement and rocks exposed. The lantern too was long gone. Battered by wayward birds, it had been crashed into so many times that it had collapsed. Before that
the lamp had been infested by bats. The foghorn had also disappeared, removed, she suspected, by someone or a group of someones who’d found a better use for it. She’d not been inside for so long that she didn’t know what shape the staircase was in, but the fact that so many people were always in there meant it must be holding up well.

As she watched the lights flicker from the gallery she’d loved so much, she told herself that she should fix the lighthouse. She should have it repaired and equipped with modern gadgets, a solar panel or something that would make it operate on its own. Placing her empty plate on the nightstand by her bed, she decided that she would offer a lighthouse, restored, to the town as a gift and would officially reopen it with a massive celebration.

She rose from her bed and walked to another room in the house, one that was furnished like all the others, with a canopy bed, an armoire, and a woven rug the same color as the drapes. From there she could see dozens of people pacing from one end of the beach to the other, as though hoping that they would be the ones to find the lost fisherman.

Watching the bonfire from yet another room, the room she’d imagined would be her daughter’s one day, when her daughter stopped sleeping with her, Gaëlle stepped out on the wide terrace that made that room the second-best one in the house. She first felt a chill and wrapped her arms around her body, but soon she forgot about it, concentrating instead on the voices swirling around her in an uninterrupted murmur, some coming from the lighthouse and some from the beach.

Already she was trying to forget her vow to repair the lighthouse. How do you even choose what to mend when so much has already been destroyed? How could she think, she asked herself, that she could revive or save anything?

Her thoughts returned to Max Senior and his son not coming to dinner. She’d been counting on it so much, as a way of filling up a few more hours in this awful day, as a way of making it mean something else, if only for a short while. It helped, after visiting her husband’s and daughter’s graves, to take part in these normal types of activities on this day, to pretend for a few short hours that she was no longer hurting as much as the year before.

Her daughter had been a student at École Ardin, Max Senior’s school. Last year, on the anniversary of her daughter’s death, after attending their friend Albert’s mayoral inauguration, and after a meeting with the fisherman Nozias about his daughter and deciding not to take her, and after Max Senior had grown tired of the Anthère Hill fireworks celebration party, they had spotted each other at Pauline’s, a popular bar with an upstairs brothel on the outskirts of town. The dim, smoke-clouded speakeasy was run by another old friend of theirs, a cross-eyed Canadian bartender in his late fifties. She’d been wearing a white hibiscus behind her left ear. The flower had caressed Max Senior’s cheek when she kissed him hello. The kiss lingered awhile, which seemed to surprise him, and he asked if she was alone. She said yes and he said he was now too, but was only there to have a drink.

When it was time for her to leave, she reached up again
to kiss him, this time on the lips. After their lips parted, he raised his hand to the spot and traced her mouth’s outline on top of his. They became linked by that kiss, and soon he started visiting her at her house.

He was an inconsistent lover, and she even thought he might be sleeping with someone else. She would see him once or twice a week, but never more than that.

“I know today is an infinitely difficult day for you,” he’d said earlier on the phone, just as he had that night a year ago, at the bar.

“Every day is an infinitely difficult day for me,” she’d replied.

That first night after they’d made love, she’d told him that she was going to find a man to marry, that she’d convince that man to take her away, to Port-au-Prince, or even to another country. There were too many memories in this town to bind her and make her want to flee at the same time.

“No one will ever love you more than you love your pain,” he had replied, his words ringing even louder in the dark.

She had not understood what he meant at first, but eventually it occurred to her that he might be right. Her pain, her losses: these were what was keeping her in this town. His grasping this, his understanding of it, made him seem even more appealing, more powerful. This momentary ability to comfort her made them all seem powerful: the Special Forces
policemen, the bartenders, the Max Seniors, these men who seemed able to fully exist in the world, something that she wished she could extract from them.

Looking down at a row of bougainvilleas beneath her terrace, Gaëlle ran her fingers across her lips just as, at the beginning of their affair, Max Senior had so often done. This house, with all its creaking wood and empty spaces, often drove her to desperate gestures. Whenever Zette or the yardman was away, she felt the full weight of being alone. The only children of only children often end up with no kin. This had always been her husband’s argument for the three other children they had intended to have.

Gaëlle stepped into her slippers, then walked out of the house, with every intention of walking down to the beach. But then she saw next to her husband’s rusting old Cabriolet the new, boxy white Mercedes that she had bought, wishing that they’d had something like it when he was alive. With Elie, the genius town mechanic, keeping it going, she had driven the Cabriolet until a year ago, when it, like everything else, had died.

Running back to her room, she grabbed her keys from her purse. She thought of changing out of the evening gown, of removing the rollers from her hair, of exchanging the slippers for shoes, but decided against it.

Pauline’s was nearly empty, except for a few men who’d come to see the girls who were upstairs in the brothel section of the
place. Her bartender friend was at his station, and rather than sit in the restaurant with the waiting men, she sat on one of the wooden stools across from him. He reached over the bar and wrapped her shoulders in a tight alcohol-scented embrace. Someone was watching them from one of the tables on the other side of the empty dance floor, a muscular, olive-skinned man with a full beard. He looked young and sophisticated in spite of his beard, while his expensive shirt, the type with the designer’s name emblazoned in sequined writing on the back, proclaimed that he had money. He was the kind of man the girls would fight over in a place like this, the kind they would assume could detect that they weren’t all common, that some had even been educated, to whatever extent possible, by their families. Some of them had gone as far as university, but for financial reasons had not been able to either finish or find any other type of work.

On her regular visits to the bar at Pauline’s, Gaëlle had seen very pretty girls present themselves in pairs, trios, and quartets to men like this. In her fancy body-hugging evening gown and rollers, she might have been mistaken by the young man for one of the older house girls, or even their madam, on a break.

“Who’s that?” she asked the bartender.

“That’s Yves Moulin,” he said, quickly placing a glass of red wine in front of her and sharing her apparent agony at hearing the name. “With that beard and all the weight he’s been lifting,” he added, “it’s like he’s got a bag over his head.”

Yves Moulin was the young man whose car had hit the
motorcycle her daughter had been riding on. His family owned a popular hotel between Ville Rose and Cité Pendue. Before the accident, Yves Moulin had been a star in the youth soccer league in Ville Rose and everyone thought that he’d be recruited by a team in Europe. But after the accident he gave up playing altogether and stayed mostly in the private residence at the hotel. People said he was unable to get the image of her daughter out of his mind, of her daughter’s body taking off from the back of the motorcycle and seeming to fly. They speculated that he couldn’t separate this image from that of kicking a soccer ball. The ball too was flying. And it was his foot that was refusing to let it rest on the ground.

The way the town gossip mill was able to make his private nightmares public made her wonder what kinds of stories they told about her. What kinds of words had they placed on her lips? No matter what he’d lost, or how much regret he’d shown, no matter that every year on the anniversary of the accident Yves Moulin placed a small bouquet of white roses at her daughter’s gravesite, each rose for one year of the age that her daughter would have been, had she lived, no matter that he had tried to show that he too remembered her daughter, still, she could not forgive him.

Her eyes met his across the empty dance floor. He looked at her, then his eyes wandered toward the front entrance, as though he were searching for an escape.

She hadn’t seen or heard from him since he’d come to her house the day after her daughter’s death to offer to pay the funeral expenses. Her parents, who’d come from Port-au-Prince
for the services, had turned him away at the door, and he kindly had not returned. He had done a good job of making himself scarce, until now. Or it could be that she had seen him and not recognized him. Sometimes she would think she saw him, in a crowd or from a distance, but the next second he would disappear, making her wonder if thinking she saw him was like those times when she thought she saw her daughter too.

“Looks like he wants to say hello to you,” the bartender murmured.

And before Gaëlle could climb down from the stool and flee, Yves Moulin was standing right in front of her, less than an arm’s length away.

“Bonsoir,” he said. His body was large, imposing, his voice deeper.

When she did not answer, he turned around and walked back to the table where he’d been sitting. He downed his half-finished drink in one swift move and left.

Soon after, a few of the girls came downstairs to say good-bye to one customer and greet another. The bartender offered Gaëlle a more potent drink than wine. Mixing portions from the contents of several containers, he slid a tall, colorful concoction toward her. The drink numbed her the way she’d hoped it would, enough to give her enough courage to get back into her car and head to the beach.

Driving the shortcuts and back roads, the épines, as she watched the cloud of insects the car’s headlights were attracting, she couldn’t help but think that had the bartender not told
her who Yves Moulin was, she might have possibly walked over to his table and offered herself to him. On this night, like so many others, he might have ended up being just one more kind face, one more comforting voice, one more set of arms to be wrapped around her body. He wouldn’t have had to say much. What he did say, “Bonsoir,” might have been enough. The sad thing was that she was foolishly thinking it might still be possible. She wondered whether their coming together in this way—to love rather than kill—might resolve everything at last. Might her looking down at his sorrowful face, and his being in her sorrowful bed, help them both take back that moment on the road? She would also judge for herself if what everyone said was true, that he was as wounded as she was.

When she finally made it to the beach, she spotted a group of little girls. They were holding one another’s hands and moving clockwise in a circle, a singing circle, a wonn. She was too far away to hear what they were singing, but she could hear their laughter, each girl, it seemed, trying to outdo the next. They seemed to be the happiest people in Ville Rose, six little brown and black angels skipping around fallen sea hearts and sand dollars.