The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [94]
Using broken phrases in various tongues, local boys offered themselves as guides for individual tours through the interior corridors. One of the special guides was a very large Haitian man wearing a long-sleeved white shirt and a black tie. He was leading a group of twelve young white foreigners in beach attire.
With a sweep of his fingers, the man guided his group to the edge of a low wall to show them the ruins of the Palais Sans Souci, the king’s old official residence down below.
Pointing to the goat-grazed hills of reddish grass in the direction where my parents’ house used to stand, he said, “It was not unusual for people to live here, before the constant earthquakes drove most of them away. You could feel even the smallest earthquake in those hills.” I couldn’t recognize anymore any place that resembled where our house had been, nor did I want to. Land is something you care about only when you have heirs. All my heirs would be like my ancestors: revenants, shadows, ghosts.
I wasn’t certain why I had picked that particular group of white foreigners and Haitian guide to follow until I realized that both the guide’s talk and the things that members of the group were whispering to one another were m Spanish.
I trailed them to the open courtyard on one of the top tiers of the citadel. It was a place I had always avoided going as a child. In the middle was a raised block of concrete shaped like a coffin, a place sometimes believed to be the grave of Henry I.
As the group circled the concrete block, the guide told the story of Henry I.
“Henry Christophe was at first a foreigner here,” he said. “He was born a slave in the Windward Islands and during his life made himself a king here.” The large man tugged at the end of his tie as he spoke. Then either to caution his young charges against vainglory—or to be fair to history—he added, “The king was sometimes cruel. He used to march battalions of soldiers off the mountain, ordering them to plunge to their deaths as a disciplinary example to the others. Thousands of our people died constructing what you see here. But this is not singular to him. All monuments of this great size are built with human blood.”
To make clear his sentiment, he tapped the mortar pile with his fists, reminding the group of the most unforgivable weaknesses of the dead: their absence and their silence.
“When the king was fifty-three years old,” he continued, “he had a sudden apoplexy, which left him paralyzed. His enemies organized a revolt against him, and, rather than surrender, he shot himself with what some say was either a silver or a gold bullet. It is said that he was buried in this palace, many believe in this spot, but there is some mystery as to whether or not he is really under here. He could be anywhere in this palace or nowhere here at all.”
As they moved away from the mortar, the man inspected the faces in the group to determine that everyone was still there with him. “Famous men never truly die,” he added. “It is only those nameless and faceless who vanish like smoke into the early morning air.”
40
This past is more like flesh than air; our stories testimonials like the ones never heard by the justice of the peace or the Generalissimo himself.
His name is Sebastien Onius and his story is like a fish with no tail, a dress with no hem, a drop with no fall, a body in the sunlight with no shadow.
His absence is my shadow; his breath my dreams. New dreams seem a waste, needless annoyances, too much to crowd into the tiny space that remains.
Still I think I want to find new manners of filling up my head, new visions for an old life, waterless rivers to cross and real waterfall caves to slip into over a hundred times each day.
His name is Sebastien Onius. Sometimes this is all I know. My back aches now in all those places that he claimed for himself, arches of bare skin that belonged to him, pockets where the flesh remains fragile, seared like unhealed burns where each fallen scab uncovers a deeper wound.
I wish at least that