The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [63]
A childhood zinc deficiency had long ago removed his ability to taste things sweet or sour, hot peppers, confections, even the five-star rum he loved. So he ate things now for their smells and sounds rather than their taste, and he smoked potent cigarettes—Splendides, red.
He was not yet thirty years old, yet his voice was already too hoarse, his windpipe sometimes itching from a place he couldn’t scratch. But he couldn’t do without the smoke and the temporary cloudiness his cigars and cigarettes allowed him. No more than he could do without his five-star Barbancourt, one glass at a time over a game of cards, zo, or checkers with the smartest of the prisoners in the barracks.
Sometimes during his one-on-one “interviews,” he would convince his captives that if they won the hazard games he commanded them to play, they could live, something that gave them a glint of hope unlike anything he’d ever seen in human eyes, except maybe during a fight when someone whose throat he had his hands around was suddenly on top of him squeezing, kicking, biting for life.
The night before, he’d dreamed he was leaving Haiti dressed as a nun after the government had fallen. Perhaps it was a sign from the gods, he told himself, warning him to retreat, and soon. He didn’t want to wait until he was too old to leave. But when the order came about the preacher, he simply could not refuse.
The boy came back with the cigarettes and a withered copy of a history book tucked in his armpit. He pulled out a wad of cash as large as his own hand and let the boy have three gourdes of his change in honor of a past he couldn’t deny.
His own parents were landowning peasants, who’d had him educated at a school run by Belgian priests, a school that was also attended by the children of the cane and vanilla plantation owners in the south, in Léogâne. His family had lost all their land soon after the Sovereign One had come to power in 1957, when a few local army officials decided they wanted to build summer homes there. Consequently his father had gone mad and his mother had simply disappeared. Rumor had it that she’d taken a boat to Jamaica with a neighbor who had been her first love but whom she had chosen not to marry because he’d had only one change of clothes, two pairs of secondhand shoes, no money, no house, no livestock, and no land. The man’s lot had apparently improved even as his father’s had deteriorated, and since the man had vanished at the same time as his mother, it seemed logical to believe that his mother had run off with him.
He had joined the Miliciens, the Volunteers for National Security, at nineteen, after his mother left. It began when the Volunteers came to his town bussing people to a presidential rally in the capital. They needed bodies to listen to one of the president’s Flag Day speeches. People had wanted to go home for their hats and sunbonnets, but there was no time for that. Straw hats with fringed edges had been prepared for them with the president’s name printed on them. There were many solemn faces on the camion that day, but his wasn’t one of them. He was going to the city, where by raising his head and craning his neck he could see the president of his country.
En route to the capital that morning, he smoked his first pipe and drank three cups of homemade moonshine. One of the silent objectors who had been trying to numb himself before the rally had passed the pipe and kleren to him. With that first smoke and the public drinking of what he now considered inferior liquor, he felt himself transformed into an adult.
When he got to the city, he followed the throng of people to the vast, meticulously trimmed lawn of the national palace. He was mesmerized by the procession of humanity, standing before the whitest and biggest building in the whole country. Decorating the palace terraces were men with rifles, men dressed in