Caribbean by James A. Michener
‘Where could I see Dr. Malárie?’ Tessa asked, and the custodian of the records said: ‘Dead, three years ago.’
So back she went to the square where Lalique was still squatting by the pump in a position which would have numbed the legs of an ordinary person. ‘Hello, Lalique.’ No response. ‘Lalique, look at me … I want to help you.’ Not even a glance upward. But then Tessa had a clever idea. ‘Lalique, do you remember when you were dead, in your coffin?’
Very slowly the impassive woman raised her handsome, placid face, dark as ebony, to look at her questioner, and at first her eyes were filled with terror, as if Tessa reminded her of some woman who had abused her during her eleven years of zombie existence, but when she saw in her slow dumb way that this woman was much younger and lacked the brutal sneer of her longtime mistress, terror fled, and she answered: ‘Long time in grave, men come, I rise.’ And with her arms extended upward, she rose to a standing position from which she looked directly into Tessa’s eyes. Then she collapsed again into her squatting position, inaminate as before.
In some agitation Tessa looked about for someone to consult with, and two women moved toward her. ‘What are you going to do with this woman?’ Tessa asked, and one said: ‘Nothing. She is dead. She come back. She live …’ They both made vague gestures with their hands.
‘Where did she sleep last night?’ and she was answered in the same indefinite way: ‘Maybe sleep here. Maybe against that wall.’ When Tessa showed astonishment, one of the women explained: ‘Not good have zombie in village. She come for revenge, maybe. Someone here in bad trouble, maybe.’
‘What will happen?’ and the women both spoke at once: ‘She try to stay, people drive her out.’
‘Where? Where will she go?’ and the women, speaking for their entire village, said: ‘Who knows? Zombies go many places. They not need eat … sleep … think. Missy, they not like you and me.’
Distraught, Tessa left the harsh, practical women and returned to Lalique: ‘I am your friend, Lalique. Can I take you somewhere, help you in any way?’
When the zombie did not even look at her, Tessa had no option but to return to her taxi, but as they neared her home village she thought of all her lonely and outcast days in Québec City when she had first arrived in that cold and seemingly hostile city, and she cried out: ‘Driver! Take me back!’
When she reached the market square she saw that Lalique had not moved from the pump, and running to her as if the zombie were a lost daughter, she reached down, clasped her hands, drew her reluctantly to her feet, and led her toward the taxi: ‘We’re going home, Lalique,’ and when they were in the cab, she hugged the frightened woman to her and began to sing an old Haitian lullaby:
‘Bird over the sea, ho-ho!
You here on my knee, ha-ha!
Bird into the tree, ho-ho!
You stung by the bee, ha-ha!’
And for the first time in many years, Lalique Hébert, the verifiable zombie, clung to another human being and fell asleep.
Early next morning Tessa was called to her village’s public phone, and a man’s voice asked with obvious concern: ‘You the young woman from Harvard? Yes? Is it true that you went to the village of Du Mort and brought a young woman known as a zombie home with you?’ When Tessa said yes to each of his questions, he said: ‘I’m Dr. Briant from St.-Marc. I’ve been specializing in this zombie business for the government and I must see your Lalique right away.’
‘Come over. You know where my village is.’
‘I’ll be right over. Don’t let anyone harm that young woman.’
‘Would that be likely?’
In a short time Dr. Briant arrived, a dark-skinned medical doctor in his fifties, graduate of Howard University in Washington, D.C., and a big, enveloping kind of man: ‘I’m fascinated to hear that after eleven years a woman relatively young made her escape. Tell me—why did you feel it necessary to rescue her from her village? Can she communicate?’
‘No. I think she may be feeble-minded.’
‘Don’t say that,’ Briant snapped. ‘They say that about all these unfortunates,’ and when Tessa led him to Lalique, who had slept in a bed for the first time in years, he was gentle and reassuring: ‘Lalique, I am your friend. Would you like some salt?’
For that brief moment the zombie was much more animated than she had been with Tessa, and when the doctor took from his pocket a little box of salt and sifted some onto his palm, she buried her face in his hand and lapped the salt like a dog.
‘Horrible folk custom. Anyone who gets hold of one of these unfortunates … belief is that if you deprive them of salt, they stay mesmerized. You want some more salt, Lalique?’ and again she gulped down the precious substance which had been denied her for so long.
‘Who’s been keeping her prisoner?’
‘We’re never able to find out. Nor will we ever know who put her in this condition and buried her alive.’ After feeding Lalique a further carefully controlled ration of salt, he asked: ‘Then you saw her grave?’ When Tessa nodded, he said: ‘We must go there at once. Photograph it with the gravedigger, if we can find him. And any witnesses.’
The two young women climbed into Dr. Briant’s wobbly old car, and he drove hurriedly the four miles to Du Mort, where he created a sensation when he stepped out of the car with his camera and quickly issued forceful instructions to the villagers: ‘Take me to the cemetery. Fetch me the gravedigger. Bring me the record book from the church so that I can photograph it in sunlight. And I want everyone who knew this young woman eleven years ago to line up. Mlle. Vaval, please take their names in order.’
And in the next hour he produced, with closeup photographs of each narrator, a compelling visual and oral account of the 1978 zombification of the seventeen-year-old girl Lalique Hébert. Knowing from long experience what questions to ask, he unraveled the story: Lalique had been the second of three daughters, a strong-willed girl who wanted to leave Du Mort and go to Port-au-Prince and become a secretary. In a quarrel over a young man, she incurred the jealousy of her older sister and the downright animosity of her mother. ‘It must have been,’ an old woman confided, ‘her own mother and her sister who had her murdered. I helped dress the body for funeral.’
Dr. Briant did not flinch: ‘I suppose they paid a voodoo bocor to kill her?’ and two women confirmed this guess: ‘They did. He was not from this village but his magic was powerful.’
He then wanted to talk with the gravedigger, who was now an old man but who remembered well the burial of the pretty girl: ‘June … maybe July? No big storms. I dug right where you see the tomb. You can read the name LALIQUE HÉBERT.’
The old man had much more to say, because the return of a zombie to a community in which she had been buried was an exciting matter, but Dr. Briant cut him short: ‘So for this one you dug a very shallow grave … maybe eighteen inches?’
‘Yes. How did you know?’
‘Tell me, did you ever dig eighteen-inch graves before?’
‘Once. For a man nobody liked.’
‘And what happened?’
The gravedigger looked about the cemetery he had served so long, and whispered: ‘You seem to know,’ and Briant said: ‘I do. But I want you to tell her,’ and the man said quietly to Tessa: ‘He became a zombie too.’ Dr. Briant turned to Lalique, standing motionless, expressionless beside her grave, and tried to make her realize what was happening: ‘This is it, Lalique. Can I read your name as I point to the letters?’ Tessa turned Lalique to face her grave and even inclined her head to make her look at the grisly tomb, but she refused to do so. But then, with a gesture so sudden that both Tessa and Dr. Briant were startled, she clasped Tessa in a passionate embrace and cried in a wail that filled the cemetery: ‘Lalique, Lalique!’
On the drive home the two women rode in the back seat, and like before, the shivering zombie recalled from the dead clung to Tessa and fell immediately asleep.
Dr. Briant remained two days at the Vaval place, during whic
During the two days, Briant shared with Tessa his accumulated knowledge on the zombies of Haiti: ‘They’re real. Your Lalique was murdered. In a manner of speaking, she was clinically dead, and the doctor must not be abused for having certified the fact. She was buried, as you have seen, and during the second night she was taken from her grave and brought back to life. She was then sold, by her mother and sister, I’m sure, to someone who kept her in a zombie state and used her as a slave. Somehow she escaped, and with sure instinct found her way back to her home village. And if you hadn’t rescued her when you did, she might now be dead. Murdered for the second time. This time for real.’
‘I’m totally at a loss.’
‘Everything I’ve said is true. Verifiable. She’s the fourth incontrovertible case I’ve had, but never before with such splendid photographs.’
When Tessa asked how all this was possible, he said: ‘Let’s walk along this country road. What I have to say will sound more plausible with the trees and the ancient fields about us.’
There had always been in Haiti, he explained, native necromancers or priests or holy men, or what scientists accurately call shamans and what Haitians call bocors. One found them in many primitive societies, but in Haiti they seemed to have special power, for they inherited from canny old men who had practiced the art in Africa a knowledge of secret and powerful poisons and drugs which in combination had the capacity to induce in targeted human beings a suspension of life functions: ‘Like ether or chloroform, but more powerful and with even stranger consequences. What’s in the mixture? I’ve worked on this for years, but have found only two bocors who would talk honestly with me, and I’m sure they’ve told me only part of their trickery.’
He found a fallen tree and invited Tessa to sit with him: ‘I know they use powder obtained from the desiccated body of a bufo frog. I sent one to the medical laboratories at Johns Hopkins, and they reported: “We’ve known about the bufo for decades. Favorite animal of poisoners, but your Haiti version is incredible. A virtual repository of at least sixteen intricate poisons.” And our bocors also use the blowfish, called by some the poisonous puffer. You may have read about it in Japan, where they call it the fugu. I’m told, but have never had it verified, that the bocors also have a fatal cucumber, plus a kind of pepper from the Orinoco and a particular snake from the Amazon jungles.’
‘Sounds like that mix would kill a horse.’
‘It would. But that’s not the purpose. The bocor becomes highly skilled in administering just the right amount to throw his victim into a kind of suspended animation. The corpse is buried in all solemnity, and two days later, at dead of night, the bocor digs it up, stops feeding it salt, and has himself a zombie.’
‘Are the services of the bocor available to anyone?’
‘That I don’t know. In fact, there’s a great deal I don’t know. How frequently this happens, for example.’ Then his voice firmed, and he said with great resolution: ‘But that it’s happening, in the year 1989, I have no doubt whatever,’ and from his wallet he took photographs of three living zombies who had been declared dead, were buried, and then dug up.
‘They live with me in St.-Marc. Government pays for their keep. And it’s important that your young woman Lalique come home with me. Government will demand it.’
Tessa prodded: ‘I’m interested in the zombie-maker. How does he become one?’
‘Like a bishop in the Catholic church, who can claim a straight line inheritance from Jesus Christ, he’s a straight-line descendant of some notable native doctor in Africa. But he has to be extremely skilled in making nice distinctions. Too much of his magical powder, the target dies. Too little, the target does not pass into perfect suspension, comes awake too soon, suffocates in his grave. Just right,’ and he pointed to Lalique, who was again squatting in her old position against the trunk of a tree.
Apparently word of her discovery and whereabouts had reached the capital, for an urgent message had been delivered to Dr. Briant’s office in St.-Marc and forwarded to Tessa’s village: ACQUIRE GUARDIANSHIP LALIQUE HÉBERT IMMEDIATELY. MINIMUM PUBLICITY.
So that afternoon the bedazed young woman—normal girl for seventeen years, dead for two days, zombie for eleven years, normal again for the rest of her life—left Tessa’s care. ‘It could be three or four years before she returns fully to life,’ Briant said as he helped Lalique into his car. ‘Salt will help. Vitamins will be needed. Contact with others. A human life being reborn.’
When the car disappeared, it left a bewildered Tessa Vaval. At Port-au-Prince she had been dismayed by the political corruption; at the villages to the north, by the unrelieved poverty and despair; and now, by the perpetual mysteries of her homeland. Haiti was an island not to be perceived from a distance nor understood by inquiring young men at Harvard. In fact, she was discovering, even a girl born on the island lost her intuitive comprehension if she moved to a foreign country and alien society: Heavens! I know nothing about Haiti. I’ve lied to others and myself about this island, and my ignorance terrifies me!
It was then that a crazy idea first tangled itself into her brain: Perhaps it would be better if I spent my life here, trying to make things better for others, trying to probe the mysteries of this place and maybe, in the future, writing about Haiti as generations of my family have experienced it.
For two days she wrestled with images that were more writhing and real than those of a boa constrictor: she was tormented by zombies and mountains denuded of trees and hordes of peasants living worse than slaves, for they had no food, and persistently she saw the unanswered question passing before her eyes in flaming red letters: ‘Is this what a black republic after nearly two centuries of self-rule comes to?’ And she was so obsessed by these images that she went to St.-Marc, where she sought Dr. Briant and the three zombies who were domiciled with him. Overjoyed at seeing that Lalique after only these few days in his care was returning from the living dead, she threw herself on Briant’s guidance and said: ‘I have this terrible compulsion to give it all up—appointment at Wellesley … certainly my marriage to the white fellow I’m engaged to. My life is here in the Haiti of my fathers.’ Trembling, she asked: ‘Would there be a place here, working with you on the abiding problems?’
She was fortunate in that she had come to the one man in Haiti best qualified to speak to the precise situation in which she found herself. ‘At about your age,’ he said quietly, ‘I faced the same dilemmas. Passed my medical exams, had a running start at a good job in the States, chucked it all because I was drawn back to Haiti. Wanted to save the world. Tried to open an advanced medical office in Port-au-Prince. Duvalier wouldn’t permit it. His henchman controlled medicine on that level and they wanted no interference with new ideas from anyone like me. But I was filled with whatever it is that fills you when you’re twenty-five. Besides, I knew Haiti needed what I had to give, so I forged ahead.’ He stopped, laughed at himself, and asked ruefully: ‘Dr. Vaval, have you ever been interrogated by the Tontons Macoutes? Seen your office smashed to bits? Been left flat in a corner bleeding and with your case records torn in bits and thrown over you like confetti?’
He led her to a kiosk, where they shared an iced drink as he concluded: ‘The Tontons are still with us. Same men, same mission, different name, and they still interrogate in the same manner. A young woman with your ideas, and your family name … in their hands you’d last ten minutes.’
‘How do you survive?’ for she had seen that he was an exceptional man.
‘I work things out. I have my clinic, pitiful though it is. I write my papers. New England Medical Journal is printing one on tropical diseases.’ He looked about. ‘And I keep taking my notes on zombies, and maybe twenty years from now when the Tontons wouldn’t care, I’ll publish them, probably in Germany.’ As
The hundred and thirty-seven advanced college students who would be enrolling in the ‘Cruise-and-Muse’ seminar had assembled two weeks earlier at classrooms in the University of Miami, where three able young assistant professors from different universities had given intensive instruction on the Caribbean and provided basic outlines and maps. They had now flown to Cap-Haïtien to board the Swedish Galante, and they had one free day for which Tessa was responsible.
When she met them—two-thirds white, one-third black, with representatives from six foreign nations—she experienced that reassuring sensation which good teachers encounter each September when they first see the young people they will be teaching through the coming year: They look so bright! So eager! Oh, if I can only send them forward! She thought that this one could become an editorial writer for The New York Times, that girl a doctor at Mass General, that one a surgeon in Chicago, and that saucy girl a political leader for sure. Then her enthusiasm sobered as she ended her speculation with the truths that have prevailed for millennia: If only they develop character, and use the brains they have, and somehow catch fire.’ Looking at their smiling faces from Colorado and Vermont and Oregon, she promised herself: If there’s any tinder in any of them, I will set it ablaze.
Tessa had arranged for jeeps to carry them inland to that incredible mountain fortress built by one of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s black generals, with whom her ancestor, César Vaval, had often served. Henri Christophe, a fiery individual with no training and assisted by no architect, had built in the early 1800s one of the brooding masterpieces of the world. She had to chuckle when they arrived there, for the local peasants had through the years been successful in stopping all governments from building a jeep road to the top; if you wanted to see Christophe’s magical fortress atop its mountain, you climbed aboard one of their donkeys, and for a hefty fee rode up as their ancestors had done since 1820.