In any event, it shows a finer nature to be unconsciously vulgar than to be consciously virtuous. But of course S. is very much “in” with the American colony here, and their views, with a few isolated exceptions, are often gray and always severe. Estelle isn’t cherished by any group. “Who gives a damn?” says she. “Listen, egghead, there’s nothing wrong with me but the fact that I’m so almighty good-looking, and when a girl’s as good-looking as me and she won’t let a lot of crumbs crawl all over, well, thumbs down, get it?”
Estelle is one of the tallest girls I’ve ever seen, an easy six feet; her face is strong and bony, in the Swedish manner, her hair rosy, her eyes cat-green: somehow there is always an aura about her which suggests that she has just been tossed about in a hurricane. She is several Estelles, actually. One of them is the heroine of a not-too-good novel: here today—gone tomorrow, hello, you heartache of a world, that school of antics. Another Estelle is a big puppy of a girl dizzy for love: she is always quite sure the most improbable people have the most honorable intentions.
A third Estelle is not so much shady as she is shadowy: who is Estelle? what is she doing here? how long does she intend to stay? what is it that makes her get up in the morning? Now and then this third element of the multiple Miss E. will refer to her “work.” But the nature of her work is never labeled.
Most of the time she sits in a café on the Champ de Mars and, at a cost of ten cents a round, drinks rum punches. The bartender is always asleep, and whenever she wants anything she swaggers over and thumps his head as though it were a ripe watermelon. There is a crazy little lop-eared dog that follows her everywhere, and usually she has some human crony with her, too. Her favorite is a pale, prim man who might be a Bible salesman; as it happens, he is a traveling entertainer who hops from island to island with a suitcase full of puppets and a head full of nonsense.
On clear evenings Estelle sets up headquarters at a table on the sidewalk outside the café; many of the young native girls bring their love problems here to this table: about other people’s love she is serious and sad. Once she herself was married, when or to whom I do not know, she is so altogether vague, but, and even though she is only twenty-five, it must have been a very long time ago. Last night I passed by the café, and as usual she was sitting at her sidewalk table. But there was a difference.
She was wearing make-up, which she seldom does, and a neat, conventional dress; there were two pink carnations burning in her hair, the sort of decoration of which I’d thought her incapable. Also, I’d never seen her really drunk before. “Egghead, hello, is it you? Yesyesyes,” she said, tapping me on the chest, “listen, kid, I’m going to give you proof positive, I’m going to show you it’s a fact, it’s a fact that when you love somebody that somebody can make you eat any goddamn thing. Look now”—and she yanked a carnation from her hair—“he’s nuts about me,” she said, thrusting the flower at the little dog crouched at her feet, “he’ll eat it just because I say to, damn if he won’t.”
But the dog merely sniffed.
The last few weekends here have been devoted to the rahrahs preceding carnival, and carnival, which began yesterday, continues for three days. Rahrahs are miniature previews of carnival itself; Saturday, sometime past noon, the drums commence, separately at first, one high in the hills, another nearer town, back and forth these signals run, insinuating, insistent, until there is established a pervasive vibration which shimmers the surface of silence, ripples like heat waves, and here where I am, alone in this arsenic-colored room, all action seems to stem from their sound: doom die doom, over there, look: light quivers in the water jar, a crystal bubble, set in motion, rolls across a table, shatters on the floor, wind, catching curtains, curling Bible leaves, tells doom die doom.
By dusk the island takes the expanding shape of a sound of drums. Small bands carouse the streets; these are made of family groups, or secret societies, all singing different songs which sound the same; the leader of each band wears feathers in his hair, a spangled crazy-quilt suit, and each has a pair of cheap dark glasses; while the others sing and stamp their feet he spins around, grinds his hips, cocks his head from side to side like an evil parrot: everybody laughs, and some couples join together, dancing with their heads thrown back, their lips ajar, doom die doom, the rhythm rotates their haunches, their eyes are rich moons, doom die doom.
Last night R. took me into the midst of the carnival. We were going to see the ceremony of a young boungan, that is to say, Voodou priest, this one an extraordinary boy whose name I never heard.
It was held at a distance from the city, and so we had to take an autobus, a small wagon which can inconveniently carry ten passengers; but there were almost double that number, some of them in costume, including a dwarf wearing a cap of bells and an old man with a mask like raven wings; R. sat next to the old man, who at one point said, “Do you understand the sky? Yes, I thought you would, but it was I who made it.”
To which R. answered, “I suppose you made the moon, too?”
The man nodded. “And the stars, they are my grandchildren.”
A rowdy woman clapped her hands and announced that the old man was crazy. “But, dear lady,” he replied, “if I am crazy, then how could I have done these beautiful things?”
It was a slow trip; the autobus stalled, crowds surged around, faces concealed behind masks dangled in the dark, archaic light of candle torches showering them like some eccentric yellow rain.
When we reached the boungan’s, which is above the town, a quiet place shrill only with the night noises of insects, the ceremony had already begun, although the boungan himself had not yet appeared. Surrounding the temple, a long thatch-roofed shed with altar rooms at either end (the doors to these rooms were closed, for beyond one the boungan awaited his entrance), were perhaps a hundred silent, solemn Haitians.
In the open clearing between the rooms seven or eight barefoot girls, all dressed in white with white bandannas wrapped around their heads, moved in a snaking circle, smacking their sides and singing a chant that two drummers echoed. A kerosene lamp cast smoky, horizontal shadows of the dancers, and the drummers, both intent, both froglike, wavered on the walls.
Suddenly the drums stopped, the girls made an aisle leading to an altar door. It was so quiet one could almost identify the various species of serenading insects. R. asked for a cigarette, but I would not give it to him: who smokes in church? and Voodou after all is a real, very complex religion, one which is nevertheless frowned on by the Haitian bourgeoisie, who, when they are anything, are Catholics, and that is why, as a compromise you might think, so much Catholicism has seeped into Voodou: a picture of the Virgin Mary, for example, and an image of the Infant Jesus, who is represented sometimes by a homemade doll, will be found adorning the altar of almost any boungan.
And the primary functions of Voodou do not seem to me basically different from those of other religions: appeals to certain gods, symbols, appease the pressures of evil, man is weak but God protects him, there is magic abroad, the gods own it, they can provide a man’s wife with child or allow the sun to burn his crops, steal the breath from his body but reward him with a soul. In Voodou, however, there is no boundary between the countries of the living and the dead; the dead rise and walk among the living.
Now again the drums began, the voices of the girls spacing every slow, dramatic beat, and then the door to the altar opened: three boys came out, each carrying a plate filled with a different substance—ashes, cornmeal, black powder—and candles, like those for a birthday cake, burned in the center of these materials; balancing the plates on a rounded stone, the boys knelt facing the door.
The drums grew softer, there began a nervous rhythmical rattling, this made by a gourd encasing snake vertebrae, and swiftly, like a spirit that has unexpectedly solidified, the boungan glided airy as a bird through the column of girls and around the room, his feet, the ankles tinkling with silver bracelets, seeming not at all to touch the floor, and his loose silk scarlet robes rustling winglike.
There was a caul of red velvet draped around his head, a pearl gleamed in his ear. Here and there he paused, like a hummingbird, and clasped the hands of a worshiper: he took mine, and I looked into his face, an amazing, androgynous face, beautiful, really, a troubling
