Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [210]
Baille gathered up the coins and the spur. He beckoned to his guards. Toussaint ignored them as they withdrew.
Nothing could be worse than the humiliation which I received from you today. You have stripped me from top to bottom to search me and see that I have no money, you have finally turned over all my linen and even searched into my pallet. Happily, you have found nothing: the ten quadruples that I turned over to you are mine, and it is I who so declare to you.
Toussaint paused, the quill tip poised over his paper. His ink well was nearly dry. The light was poor, though outside it was day. But day by day the sun was weaker and more distant and the hints of it that penetrated the grille that admitted air to his cell grew fainter, less convincing. He’d resumed his clothing, rebound the yellow cloth around his brow. But still the cold cut through to him, and the pain in his head was much worse. His letters squirmed across the page, awkwardly jammed against each other. He dipped the pen again and kept on scrawling.
You have taken my watch away from me along with twenty-two sols I had in my pocket; I warn you that all those objects belong to me, and you will have to account to me for them on the day they send me to the execution. You will remit the entirety to my wife and to my children.When a man is already unfortunate, one ought not to try to humiliate him or vex him without humanity or charity, without any consideration for him as a servant of the Republic, and they have taken every precaution and machination against me as if I were a great criminal. I have already told you, and I repeat to you again, I am an honest man and if I had no honor, I would not have served my country faithfully as I have done, and I would not be here either by the order of my government. I salute you—
—and Baille let the sheet drop from his hand with a grunt. Toussaint’s crabbed writing went out of focus as it fluttered to the table. The prick of conscience which the commandant had once felt had also lost its sharpness. At any rate, there’d be no more such letters. With this document, Baille had also confiscated Toussaint’s pen and paper. At the same time, he’d supervised another search, fruitless except to derange the prisoner a little further. Let him enjoy his silence as he might.
Toussaint shuddered under his thin blanket. The teeth that had been loosened by that spent cannonball long ago were rattling in his jaws, and the pain in his head was astonishing, a sensation so all-encompassing and pure that it transcended all division between pain and pleasure. Then, and suddenly, it stopped, and a flood of warmth welled up at him. He uncurled his rigid arms and legs and floated on the warm and buoyant surface of the fever. The frost was sparkling on the bare rock wall. Its crystals knitted themselves into a mirror. Toussaint looked toward it tranquilly, through the fog of his own breath. An element of his spirit left his body and went drifting toward the wall, but the reflection that returned to him was not his own.
Moyse, he breathed. But the one-eyed face in the mirror lost the aspect of his adopted nephew and hardened into the stiff gaze of Ghede. Baron Samedi, Baron Cimetière, Baron Lacroix . . . by all these names Toussaint had known him. He relaxed and released himself to follow the dark angel beneath the water of his own death.
Instead he found himself looking out through the tunnel of Ghede’s one eye. He heard the whine of mosquito song as he passed through the vortex. Then on a gust of a warm wind he was flying up and over the cape; he caught a glimpse of Fort Picolet upside down and the waves beating on the seawall below the Batterie Circulaire as his insect body went tumbling toward the windows of the Governor’s house at Le Cap. The mosquito voice hummed in his ear the story of Moyse’s namesake Moses, whom the Lord did not leave to cross the Jordan in his body; never was Moses to enter the land whose promise his life’s labor had realized . . . Then darkness. The room where he emerged