Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [227]
Once, when I knew Guiaou had gone down to the river, I went to that clay case. Merbillay was lying on her mat because it was the hot time of the day, and the baby was asleep beside her. It took some little time for my eyes to see because I was not used to the darkness the clay walls made. At last I could see my banza still hanging from the rooftree like always. Merbillay saw it too, and she got up slowly from the mat—I watched her moving, and her face and arms were shining and slick with sweat, but she was not smiling now. She took down the banza and gave it to me, and even our hands did not touch as I took the banza by the neck. When I went out with the banza in my hand, I thought that I would not be going back to that case any more.
Much higher on the hill I had an ajoupa which was made only of sticks and leaves, not clay, so it was cool and full of wind and sunlight. I hung my banza there, and there I kept my coat of a captain hung on crossed sticks to keep its shape—if I was not wearing it, for every day I went with other officers and the white captains Maillart or Vaublanc to train new men, and keep the old men ready. But in early morning or at evening the officer coat would hang on the crossed sticks, with the watch ticking in the pocket where I could not hear it. I would not wear even a shirt, and the air would run all over my skin, and I would be playing the banza. I played sad tunes that had no words to them, the same few notes repeating. Sometimes Caco came up to my ajoupa by himself as if the tunes had called him—we would listen, or I would hang the banza from the roof and we would go and do some other thing together.
I did not go to look for Caco at that clay case anymore, but only waited for him to come to me. Sometimes for days he would not come. I would walk near the clay case, but it seemed whenever Guiaou was not there then Couachy was somewhere nearby, watching. Guiaou and Couachy had fought against the English together in the Artibonite and after that they walked like brothers together.
And I, Riau, had walked in the same spirit with Guiaou, especially in the fighting around Grande Rivière, when both of us had tried to help the whiteman doctor heal the wounded men. Since then, since Dieudonné was sold, a crack had opened up between us like a crack in the earth opens when it has been too dry. Yet I thought I must not blame Guiaou for Dieudonné when really I was angry about the woman. If I thought more deeply, I knew also that it had been Toussaint’s hidden hand which moved Guiaou in the taking of Dieudonné, but in those weeks at Ennery I did not usually let my thinking go so far in that direction.
Bouquart asked why I did not start with some other woman, and he named women who were ready to come to me. I knew them anyway, there was more than one and some of them were beautiful. One liked me for the captain’s coat, and others for different reasons. I saw their smiles, but my spirit did not draw me to them.
So on an evening I sat alone inside the ajoupa, playing to myself as I would do at that hour, following the voices of the birds outside. I sat on the ground in a corner with my back against a post, but through the space of the doorway I saw the clouds rushing across the sky and all the birds were hurrying too, because of the rain, except the rain would not really come, because the season was past. When I heard footsteps, I thought maybe Caco was coming, but the feet were heavier than his, and I saw through the woven walls of the ajoupa the figure of a woman on the path. Between the cracks and sticks of the wall her face and her form were broken up, though I saw she was wearing a long red cloth wound many times around her