Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [445]
And so he came to his last letter, which he lifted and placed on top of the stack. Let the reply come soon and be favorable. Amiot felt confidently justified in requesting his relief, because he had accomplished his mission, which had been—had always been, as he certainly knew—to see Toussaint Louverture dead.
Already he was anxious to be gone, though he knew he must endure some days of waiting, he hoped not weeks. What a joy it would be to depart from this place. He had begun to think that there really was something about it which deranged people. Toussaint was far from the only person to have suffered and died in the fort’s oubliettes, but Amiot, as a rational man, refused to believe that the place could be haunted. More likely the air at this altitude was simply too thin, or the cold impeded circulation of the blood, so that the brain, starved of its nourishment, produced these peculiarly plaguing fantasies.
The guardsman Franz was already gone. Amiot would have liked to punish him, but could find no legitimate pretext. So he had simply given him a two-weeks leave to visit his family hovel across the Swiss border. With any luck, he himself would have departed by the time the old soldier returned. He had proposed that Franz needed a leave to rest and recover, on the evidence of the mad thing he had uttered when he and Amiot had discovered Toussaint dead in his cell.
The very sight of Franz had become odious to Amiot, with his deep-set eyes and his war-weary face and the outmoded pigtail he persisted in wearing to remind everyone that he had served the First Consul in a former avatar, when Bonaparte had been a liberator. Even now, when it was late and his office tasks were at last concluded, he was reluctant to lie down and close his eyes, lest the image of Franz should appear before him, kneeling, holding Toussaint’s stiff hand between his, parting his lips to pronounce his queer sentence. It was nonsensical, but Amiot could not elude the phrase. It invaded his head in the night when he woke and could not sleep again, or wormed into moments of the day when he believed his mind was empty: The prisoner has escaped.
Weté Mò anba Dlo Haiti
April 1825
Since Quamba died at Vertières, I, Riau, I keep the hûnfor on the hill at Thibodet. Quamba did not go to the fighting before, but he carried Guiaou’s coutelas to Vertières, and the last of the French blanc soldiers were defeated there, though Quamba was killed too, with others of our people. I, Riau, before that time, had gone to Grande Rivière to fight with Sans-Souci. When Toussaint was taken, I got up from the mud where Maillart’s weight had pressed me, and I turned my back on the blancs forever.
Since Guiaou has gone beneath the waters, Riau does not wander any longer, but stays with Merbillay in the case behind the hûnfor where Quamba lived before. Caco is a man now, and lives with his woman and the children she has given him in the case that once was Merbillay’s, where Riau’s banza still hangs from the roof pole. I, Riau, go there sometimes to play the banza, and see the little children dance and laugh. The letterbox is left there too in Merbillay’s old case, that box where Toussaint hid the tokens of his blanche lovers. I put new paper in the box, and quills with a knife to sharpen them, but no one calls Riau to copy letters now.
Yet sometimes I will open the box and smooth the paper and sharpen the quill and mix water with the dust of the old ink. I write the names of my children and Guiaou’s, and Caco’s children, and the names of the children Yoyo and Marielle will begin to bring. I do not often think of anything more to write