The Boiling Season Read online

  Chapter Three

  Senator Marcus had lunch each day with one or another of his colleagues, or with one of his many lawyer friends. His favorite restaurant—though I had heard him say it was by no means the best—was at the Hotel Erdrich. At the time, the Erdrich was the finest hotel on the island. Of course, there was little in the way of competition, but the hotel nevertheless took its prestige seriously.

  Despite the relative peace following M. Mailodet’s election, the few visitors the island managed to draw tended to be small-time businessmen who had failed in their own countries and were desperate enough to try their luck in ours. All of them stayed at the Erdrich. Occasionally Senator Marcus lunched with one of them, though always reluctantly. I often heard him complain to Mme Marcus and to his dinner guests about his encounters with these vulgar and pushy “captains of industry,” a phrase he insisted on rendering in English, as though it were a concept foreign to his own language.

  Senator Marcus seldom told me with whom he would be lunching, but I could always tell. If, as I drove him down rue Yvane toward the Erdrich, he asked me to turn on the radio—always merengue, to which he liked to tap his fingernails against the glass—I knew he was going to see a friend. But if he sat silently in the backseat, staring vacantly out the window, I knew he was anticipating unpleasant company. And I knew to adjust my own demeanor accordingly.

  I quickly settled into this new life, and I would be lying if I said I did not enjoy the feeling of importance the work gave me. Each night when I undressed I picked every sliver of lint from my gray suit. Each morning, before putting the suit back on, I checked to make sure the buttons still held fast. In my breast pocket I carefully arranged my handkerchief.

  My father, however, had not changed his mind about my employment. If anything, time made him only more opposed to what I was doing. Each Sunday when I went to his shop before church he greeted me with questions he had spent the week sharpening like knives: What kind of cases does this lawyer take? (All kinds.) How many meals do they feed you each day? (Three.) Are you studying for your exams? (Of course.) When will you take them? (M. Marcus says I should take my time if I want to do well.) What church does he attend? (The Church of the Holy Trinity in Lyonville.)

  Church was an especially fraught topic. The first time I mentioned it, my father retorted bitterly that the Church of the Holy Trinity was a museum of antiquity, not a house of worship. He made me promise never to attend services there. The priests, he said, were more concerned with preserving privilege than promoting good works.

  “But the masses are in Latin,” I said. “I wouldn’t understand what they say anyway.”

  “Exactly,” my father shouted, as if I had made his point for him. “All they care about is collecting golden chalices.”

  But since I spent my Sundays with my father and not with the Marcuses, there was no point in arguing. I promised I would stay away.

  As for the rest, I was lucky that my father knew even less about the law than I did; I was able to get away with the vaguest of answers. But I had no stomach for lies, and treating my father like a gullible child brought me only misery. Sitting beside him in the pew, it was hard not to feel as though the strict moral judgments at the core of each week’s sermon were directed solely at me.

  In truth, the sermons were probably intended for the benefit of Paul, whose vices were far more public than mine, and whose mother knew the priest personally. But though pious in his own way, Paul had no use for lectures. Every Sunday after mass he waited for me at the bottom of the church steps, and each week it was something else, some new shipment he thought I could help him “unload.” Now that I was living on the hill, he assumed I had some sort of influence over the products rich people bought.

  “I have six cases of shoe polish,” he told me one week. “Premium stuff.” He offered me a ten percent commission.

  “Do you expect me to sell it door to door?” I asked.

  “Just bring it up in conversation.”

  “What makes you think I have conversations with these people?”

  “Then you can use it on the senator’s shoes. And when people compliment him, you can tell them where you got it.”

  “Why would anyone compliment his shoes?”

  Paul threw up his hands. “Maybe they would if you did a better job polishing them.”

  I had grown tired of his jokes about my supposedly servile existence. “I do more than polish his shoes.”

  “Of course,” Paul said, grinning viciously. “I meant no offense, Alexandre. It’s important work. Today you chauffeur his car, tomorrow maybe you’ll be collecting bribes and necklacing unionists. Who knows—a few years from now you could be leading your own juntas.”

  “Very funny,” I said.

  Paul stuffed the shoe polish back into his bag. He knew no more about politics than I did, but he had spent enough time around the wrong sort of people to know how to bluff with authority.

  “What makes you think I’m kidding?” he said.

  “Senator Marcus isn’t like that.”

  “They’re all like that.” He tossed the bag over his shoulder and turned to go. “At least the ones that want to survive.”

  “Not anymore,” I insisted. “President Mailodet and Senator Marcus are different. They’re looking out for the people.”

  “Please,” Paul said. “They can look after you, if you want. I’m looking out for myself.”

  * * *

  I first learned of Habitation Louvois from M. Guinee, the assistant manager at the Hotel Erdrich. As Senator Marcus’s valet, I spent a great deal of time sitting by myself in the hotel lobby. I must have been a pitiful sight, every day from at least noon to two, struggling to appear neither bored nor overly interested in what was happening around me. After four years in Senator Marcus’s home, I had learned to comport myself around a new class of people, but never before had I been asked to sit, if not among them, then in their midst.

  It was on one such occasion, early in my time as Senator Marcus’s valet, that I first met M. Guinee. I had seen him several times before. He was impossible to miss, scurrying about the hotel in his red jacket with the Erdrich crest. I knew he had noticed me too, and had perhaps wondered who I was, but we had never spoken. That afternoon he approached me where I sat in the lobby, and with a slight bow he said, “Welcome to the Hotel Erdrich.” Nervously I had watched him come, worrying that I had done something wrong. But his tone was warm, and I sensed he wanted me to know I was not as alone as I thought.

  Every day thereafter, M. Guinee was sure to greet me. Despite being several decades older than me and far more advanced professionally, he was always kind. Soon we were having conversations about our work and about the roads and about prices at the market. Most days we spoke in the lobby, the two of us standing; he was not allowed to sit. Sometimes, when business was particularly slow, I accompanied him as he delivered orders from the hotel manager to the rest of the staff.

  “I’m merely a messenger in a suit,” he often said. But it was a suit that demanded respect. And he was also responsible for seeing to it that the manager’s orders were carried out.

  My admiration for M. Guinee was understandable enough, but I never knew what he saw in me, a young man who had experienced so little of the world. I thought perhaps that I reminded him of his son, who had been killed when he was my age, under circumstances M. Guinee refused to discuss. I did not press. My mother’s passing was something I rarely wished to revisit. Everyone lost someone, and the details were often best forgotten.

  In addition to lunch, meetings also sometimes brought Senator Marcus to the Erdrich. Often the meetings took place during the day, but on more than one occasion I can remember him waking me softly in the middle of the night, telling me only that there was someone he needed to see. Although I never saw this “someone” myself, I always recognized his two enormous companions, wearing their identical mirrored sunglasses in the dark.

  When he could, M. Guinee kept me co
mpany. If it was particularly late, he let me sleep on a pallet on his floor, with orders to the porter to wake me when I was needed. And so it was, one evening I was with M. Guinee in his quarters. It was late, but neither of us was tired. We were playing dominoes, as we sometimes did when M. Guinee’s shift was over. For a change, I was winning. When M. Guinee suddenly asked, apropos of nothing, if I would be interested in going on a trip with him, I suspected he was simply trying to throw me off my game.

  “A trip?”

  “On Sunday,” he said. “I assume you don’t work?”

  “That’s true,” I said, laying out my domino. “But I have other obligations.”

  “ ‘Obligations?’ ”

  I told him about my father. I had spent every Sunday with him since I was a child, attending church and neighborhood gatherings.

  “I see,” he said.

  I asked him where he was going.

  “It’s not important,” he said, “if you have ‘obligations.’ ”

  “Just tell me where,” I said.

  He tapped one of his dominoes on the table, uncertain whether it was the one he should play. He said, “I was only thinking it would be good for you to get away.”

  I sighed. “Just give me a hint.”

  With exaggerated ponderousness he stroked his chin. “I wouldn’t know how. There’s nothing I could say to describe it. You wouldn’t believe me if I tried. . . . But if you’re busy . . .”

  “You’re toying with me.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “But I’m also being honest.” And then he laid a double five on the table. I had just one bone left, but now I had to pick six new ones before I came up with a five of my own. After two more turns, he played his last domino. As always, I was left with a losing pile.

  “I’ll pick you up at eight,” he said, pouring himself a celebratory rum.

  All day Saturday I wondered what kind of trip M. Guinee had in mind. He was not the sort of man to play a joke, but neither could I comprehend his need for such secrecy.

  Early Sunday morning I waited outside the gate. I already regretted having sent word to my father that I was sick. Lying was bad enough; how much worse was it to be both lying and skipping church? And rather than asking for forgiveness, here I was getting picked up in a car in front of Senator Marcus’s house, as if I were a man of leisure.

  At eight exactly, M. Guinee pulled up in a sleek, dark sedan.

  “One of the chauffeurs owed me a favor,” he said with a grin as I got in.

  In silence we wound down through the hills of Lyonville. I found it surprisingly disorienting, having so recently learned to drive, to ride for the first time in the passenger’s seat, compelled to watch the road and yet powerless to affect our course. I did not distrust M. Guinee’s ability, but here his authority seemed greatly diminished, owing more than anything else to his rumpled brown suit, vastly inferior in quality to the red jacket with the Erdrich crest that he wore at work.

  We passed through the capital and south along the coast. Out here in the countryside it was a different world. The farther we drove, the more it felt as if we were going back in time. Soon oxcarts outnumbered cars. I was surprised by how little green there was to see. Along the dusty, disintegrating road, almost entirely free of landmarks, women and children bore their burdens however they could, the lucky ones leading donkeys loaded with heavy packs. There was nothing but brown, parched earth as far as I could see.

  Beyond the bay there was more for living things to cling to in the soil, and the view improved slightly. Small plots dominated the landscape, daggered crowns of sisal and rows of corn and millet interspersed with tufts of vetiver. And then came the great swamps of rice, worked by peasants in wide palm hats, who looked up as we drove by, as if obliged to keep a tally. Yet despite the crops and laborers, this too was an oddly barren landscape. The fields, so lush in their confines, looked as if they had been artificially grafted onto the terrain. In stark contrast, the land left uncultivated seemed unable to support anything more than low, desolate shrubs and rust-colored grasses. There was scarcely a single tree anywhere in sight.

  I had never been so far from the city, and yet there was something familiar about the surroundings. Perhaps I was remembering my father’s stories of his youth, one of six children of poor farmers like these. But they could have been anyone’s stories. The city was full of people who had fled the depleted countryside in hope of finding better lives and had simply found themselves wasting away somewhere else instead.

  I was relieved when, after half an hour, we left the coast on a course due east into the mountains. The road here was rough, and we frequently had to slow so M. Guinee could ease the car over rocks and around holes sluiced out by recent heavy rains.

  “I’m taking you to see a house,” M. Guinee finally volunteered.

  “A house?” I repeated, and I waited for him to smile, to say he was only kidding. Surely he would not have brought me all this way for a house. Every home we had passed so far appeared to have been lashed together from roadside detritus.

  By this time we were halfway to the mountain village of Saint-Gabriel, and suddenly M. Guinee pulled over. I thought at first that something had happened to the car. On roads such as these, axles snapped as easily as bones.

  “Impressive, isn’t it?” M. Guinee said. He was looking past me out the passenger side window, and I turned in that direction. Only then did I notice the immense stone wall running parallel to the road, largely obscured by underbrush. We were parked on a pebbly shoulder that I now realized was the start of a private drive. Just a few meters away I saw a tall wrought-iron gate camouflaged beneath a tangle of weeds and liana.

  The wall was perhaps two and a half meters tall. The sun, just barely filtering through the trees, reflected off dirty shards of glass cemented to the top. As I looked down the road behind us, I realized we had been following the wall for perhaps as long as a kilometer.

  At the time, the area was largely uninhabited, but for a few rustic farms. The sugar plantations that centuries ago had claimed swaths of land all across the island had not extended into these inhospitable hills. And neither had the mango groves nor the bean fields nor the coffee plantations, which survived—however meagerly—at higher altitudes. The land, however, was anything but unspoiled. The only things growing here were things for which no one had any use. Furniture makers in the capital had long ago harvested all the hardwood they could find. Desperate peasants took care of the rest. Lacking electricity, they found other sources of fuel, cutting down anything that would burn, burying it in ditches covered with peat, turning trees into charcoal. One could see sacks of it for sale at the market, stacked in sooty piles. Briquette by briquette, the island turned to ash.

  Everywhere I looked, I saw hilltops resembling the backs of starving dogs, stripped utterly bare.

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  M. Guinee reached into his pocket and pulled out a key.

  At first, the lock refused to move. Flakes of rust crumbled as I forced the key a fraction of a turn. I nearly lost the skin on my thumb and forefinger. Then all at once it gave. M. Guinee had me open the gate and then close it again once he had driven the car through.

  “What is this?” I said.

  “I already told you.”

  Royal palms lined the driveway on both sides like sentries, rising out of the overgrown grasses. Nothing here was any different from what we had seen along the road. But then we turned a bend in the drive, following the faint impressions left long ago by other cars—or perhaps even wagons—and suddenly everything changed. A vast lawn spread out before us. Beyond it on every side rose the densest forest I had ever seen—like onrushing waves of green. All of it—every last leaf—had been hidden from the road.

  It would be impossible to describe what I saw. It was as though everything formerly growing on the now barren hills had found sanctuary here.

  The drive wound downward, bringing us ever closer, and all around us bo
ugainvillea and yarrow and goldenrod and ferns and a thousand other plants I could not name burst outward against a tangle of trees—sabliers and gumbo-limbos, outstretched mapou and swollen tamarinds, all of it coiled with heavy liana vines—as if the jungle were so overstuffed it might at any moment explode. The landscape was so distracting, so overwhelming, I feared turning my head, lest the jungle instantly overtake me.

  Not until we reached the end of the drive did I finally see the house. M. Guinee said it was a house, but it looked more like a fortress, two stories of stone and mortar built in the colonial fashion, wearing the jungle around its shoulders like a stole. Senator Marcus’s house was dwarfed in comparison.

  Suddenly I felt dizzy, and I realized I had been holding my breath.

  The estate was situated in a valley nestled between the bay and the mountains, the same range that ran the length of the island, bald and gray and lifeless. Later I would learn that when viewed from the bluffs above, the grounds formed an enormous triangle, with the manor house at the base, built close to the cliffs behind it. To the west, the land sloped quickly downward, a series of stairs and stone paths connecting the manor house and the guesthouse to the undeveloped forty-five acres of the forest preserve, which formed the estate’s westernmost boundary.

  The house itself was as much a revelation as the grounds. The portico, three high, sweeping arches held up by columns, led directly into the foyer, no door to seal off the interior from the outdoors. Dirt and leaves and twigs coated the floors, dulling the marble’s shine and texture to the point that it looked like concrete. The chandelier and the broad, winding staircase were encased in cobwebs. We had to stop every second step to swipe them away. Yet, even in this deteriorated state it was clear the house might once have pampered kings and queens.

  With the shutters closed, the second floor was almost impenetrable: mahogany-paneled walls, mahogany trim, oak floorboards grown inky with age. The masonry had begun to crumble. M. Guinee explained the place had been unoccupied for nearly thirty years. I would have believed him if he had said a century. I was afraid to touch anything; I did not wish to cause even the most insignificant harm.