The Book of Other People

Lélé by Edwidge Danticat

It was so hot in Léogâne that summer that most of the frogs exploded, scaring not just the children who once chased them into the river at dusk or the parents who hastily pried the threadbare carcasses from their fingers, but also my 39-year old sister Lélé, who was four months pregnant with her first child and feared that, should the temperature continue to rise, she too might burst. The frogs had been dying for a while, but we hadn’t noticed, mostly because they’d been doing it quietly. Perhaps for each that had expired, one had taken its place along the river bank, looking exactly the same as the others and fooling us into thinking that a normal cycle was occurring, that young was replacing old and life replacing death, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly, just as it was for us.

‘This is surely a sign that something terrible is going to happen,’ Lélé said, as we sat on the top-floor verandah of my parents’ house one particularly sweltering evening. Even though my father, the former justice of the peace of the town of Léogâne, had died more than ten years ago, and my mother five years before that, I’ve never been able to stop thinking of the place that I, and now my sister, called home as theirs. The dollhouse façade of our wooden ginger-bread had been meticulously sketched by Papa, who’d spent his nights after work updating and revising each detail as their home was built from the ground up. He and Maman had driven to the capital to purchase the corrugated metal and bordered jalousies, a journey which at the time, before my sister and I were born, took several agonizing hours in an old pick-up truck that they’d inherited from my half-French grandfather, the previous justice of the peace. The shell of the truck was still out there somewhere among the dozens of almond trees that dotted our three hectares, its once thunderous engine rusting into the earth, like the neglected memorial it was.

The air on my verandah was just slightly cooler than it was in either of the two bedrooms where my sister and I slept, just as we had as children, surrounded by shelves lined with leather-bound notebooks filled with the concerns and complaints that had consumed the days, and sometimes nights, of our father and grandfather. Last year, I decided to read all their notebooks before I moved them to the courthouse archive in town. And now, despite her current condition, my sister, who was in the middle of a separation from her husband, was helping me sort through them.

‘In all of their notes,’ Lélé was saying, ‘I’ve not seen one mention of frogs dying like this.’

Before becoming pregnant, Lélé had been a heavy smoker, and sometimes when she made some pronouncement – for she had one of those voices with an air of always seeming to be making a pronouncement – she sounded a bit out of breath. This was further aggravated by the fact that she now had a baby pressing on her lungs, I’m sure, but, come to think of it, she had spoken that way even when she was a child, sometimes purposefully emphasizing a lisp that strangely enough made her sound even more certain.

‘I’ve talked to a few people about it,’ I told her. ‘I even called some doctor friends in Port-au-Prince.’

‘What would doctors know about dead frogs?’ she promptly cut me off. ‘You need world specialists, people who study the earth.’

Throwing her head back, three long plaits bouncing in the evening air, Lélé tapped her palm for emphasis and said, ‘Mark my words. The summer won’t pass before there’s a catastrophe here.’

Living only a kilometer or so from the river, I thought that the eventual smell of rotting frogs might be at least one potential catastrophe, but, in the days that followed, there was no smell at all. As soon as the burnished skins and tiny organs were exposed to the sun, the shredded frogs dried up, vanishing into the river bed.

This was a lucky thing for Lélé, who at this stage of her pregnancy was still willowy and trim, in part because she didn’t have much of an appetite. The smell of most things sent her retching, except the moldy fragrance of ancient ink and dissolving paper, which she relished so much that I frankly suspected her of nibbling away at small fragments of the town’s judicial legacy.

A week after Lélé made her prediction, the frogs were no longer even a problem. A few inches of rain had fallen somewhere up in the mountains, and the river overflowed, drowning the remaining frog population and depositing a tall layer of sandy loam far beyond the river’s banks, crushing, among other things, the field of vetiver that I, like my father and grandfather before me, had faithfully planted at the beginning of every year. Some years I had actually made a profit from my vetiver, which was not only good for the soil but also very much sought after by perfume-company suppliers. Those years, I’d used the money to plant a few more almond trees near the section of our property that nearly merged with the open road. Lélé loved the almond trees, and before she was pregnant, whenever she and her husband Gaspard came to visit, they’d both spend hours crushing the fibrous fruits with river stones to dig out the kernels.

The morning Gaspard came to see Lélé, I had to run off to court. I was a judicial witness in the case of a former priest who was suing for medical expenses for his psychiatric care. The priest claimed that he’d been forced by the police chief to offer extreme unction to some prisoners whom the police chief had then ordered executed before they could appear before a magistrate. I had been called by the priest’s niece, with whom he was living after being expelled from his parish, to take a statement about her perception of the priest’s mental health, and all I planned to do in court was reiterate what was already obvious: that for one reason or another the priest was now insane. The magistrate, who had no patience for cases in which there were no possibilities for bribes, would probably dismiss the case outright. However, since there were two local radio journalists expected, he had no choice but to put on the charade and pretend to listen to all of us before making up his mind.

I have no formal training in the law. All I know I learned by shadowing my father. His approach had always been the same. We are there only to witness, not participate, he’d say, to grant a piece of paper, an affidavit, a notarized statement, which might be helpful to someone in some later legal proceeding or action. If we are required to speak before a judge, we need state only what we’ve seen. We do not conjecture or make guesses. We speak only when asked.

This is the approach I was taking with Lélé and Gaspard. As Gaspard’s four-wheeler pulled up in front of the house, I purposely accelerated mine in the other direction. I would probably have to be in court at their divorce proceeding. There would be enough time to take sides.

Neither the priest nor his niece showed up, so the magistrate dismissed the case. During the ten years I’d been doing this, I’d found that more people don’t show up than do. Many simply wanted the benefit of the initial hearing, in the field or in my office, where I took most of my notes. The rest already knew the likely outcome of their cases or were too scared to present themselves.

Gaspard’s car was still out front when I returned home for lunch. Gaspard was a small man, shorter even than my sister in her bare feet. He was handsome, though, with a dark-brown elfin face and a wide grin that he seemed unable to restrain even when he was angry. He was from a family of tailors and dressed very well, lately favoring airy white embroidered shirts and loose cotton pants.

Lélé and Gaspard were sitting on opposite sides of the living room when I entered, Gaspard on our sixty-year-old fleur-de-lisprint chaise longue and Lélé in a rocking chair by the louvered doors overlooking the now crushed vetiver field.

Marthe, who had been with us long enough to have delivered both my sister and me, sauntered over with a small shiny tray to collect an empty glass from Gaspard. I had an image in my mind of Gaspard having sat there all morning, sipping a single glass of Marthe’s tasty, vanilla-essence flavored lemonade while staring at Lélé’s expressionless profile. Even though I had hired a younger girl to help her, Marthe still preferred to do most of the light work around the house herself, including receiving our guests. Marthe was in her late sixties, about the age that our mother would have been if she were alive. She also had the same moon-shaped face and stocky frame. Growing up, I thought Marthe and my mother were sisters. I’m still not convinced that they weren’t.

I waited for Marthe to leave the room, then, rubbing my hands together, said, ‘So, les amoureux, have we reconciled?’

Gaspard looked up at me, his uncontrollable grin momentarily menacing. For once, while smiling, he almost appeared to be gritting his teeth.

‘She hasn’t told you?’ he asked.

I raised my shoulders and shrugged, looking over at my sister, whose eyes never wandered from the devastated vetiver field.

‘We have to clean up that field,’ she finally said. ‘And we should do it sooner rather than later. There might still be something worth saving there.’

‘Sometimes, there’s nothing to save,’ Gaspard said.

He stood up and quickly breezed past me, but, as he reached the doorway, where he was closest to my sister, he walked back and laid a hand on my shoulder.

‘Sorry, brother,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t have seen that.’

I shook my head, not sure what to say. It seemed like all the cards were in Lélé’s hand. It was her move.

I waited until I heard Gaspard’s car start up. When his tires scratched the driveway gravel, I asked my sister, ‘Are you sure this is the right time for irreconcilable differences?’

She got up from the rocker, pulled the louver doors shut, considerably dimming the room.

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said, plopping herself down on one of the old divans by the closed fireplace.

‘Is he cheating on you?’ I asked. ‘If he is, I can find some way to have him thrown in jail.’

‘He’s not cheating,’ she said.

‘Are you cheating?’

She popped her eyes real wide in response, then pointed at her belly.

‘Is it his baby?’ I said, sitting down on the floor at her feet.

‘You fool,’ she said.

Placing my head on her knee, I felt like I did when I was a boy and would run home, devastated, after going with my father to record a death.

‘You can’t do this type of work if you cry at the scene,’ my father had said, slapping the back of my head in front of his witnesses. Once, even after I had seen the severed body of a beheaded man. The man’s own brother had taken a machete to his neck during a dispute over a plot of land. That night, Lélé had let me sleep in her bed, but most importantly she’d let me cry.

‘You sure you don’t want to tell me?’ I asked.

‘Maybe in good time,’ she said.

‘Have we ever used this fireplace?’ I said, pointing to the only concrete part of the house, a square cave that Lélé had recently filled with giant decorative candles.

‘Marthe would know better,’ she said, ‘but I only remember us using it once, the night you were born. It filled the whole place with smoke and nearly burned down the house.’

The next day I was taking an affidavit for an actual divorce when it began to rain. I was nervous about the river overflowing again, this time pushing past the vetiver fields and the almond trees. Ours was now the only place that close to the river. The others, newer and shabbier, had been taken downstream in flash floods, many with entire families inside. I had been meaning to tell Lélé that we should do something about the house. I had refrained from discussing it with her only because I hadn’t decided myself what to do. Should we sell it to someone to whom we would be passing on the same problem we now faced? Should we destroy it and rebuild on higher ground? Should I move somewhere else and use it only during the dry season? I was sure Lélé would already have a solution, about which she felt a hundred per cent sure, so I wanted to make up my mind before speaking to her. Still, as it continued to rain and more passers-by sought shelter on the front gallery outside my office, I saw myself becoming more and more walled off from Lélé.

For years now, I had been holding quarterly meetings with the peasants in the villages, especially the villages upriver from us, telling them that the river was raging in response to the lack of trees, land erosion, the dying topsoil.

‘What do you want us to do?’ they’d ask me in return. ‘Give us something to replace the charcoal and we’ll stop.’

Sometimes in my attempts to get them to not cut down young trees, I’d reach for the basest metaphors, the most melodramatic pleas. ‘It’s like killing a child,’ I’d say.

‘If I have to kill a tree child to save my own child, I’ll kill the tree child,’ they’d say.

Now, thanks to their stupidity, or rather the stupidity of their needs, our parents’ house might soon be under water. We might wake up floating above our beds and have to climb on top of a roof to wait for the current to die down. My sister might give birth in a tree.

‘Merde,’ I said to the complainant in front of me. ‘Why do you want to divorce your wife anyway?’

‘Because she’s ugly,’ he said, his face looking as deadly serious, though perhaps not as anxious, as mine.

‘When did she get so ugly?’ I was shouting at him, but he didn’t even seem to notice.

‘After the children,’ he said. ‘She lost some teeth and she’s no longer kind.’

‘What type of kindness are you expecting from her?’ I asked.

‘All kinds,’ he said, winking. ‘You know.

‘How many children do you have?’

‘Ten,’ he said.

I lowered my pen and stopped taking notes. I felt like hitting him the way my father had hit me.

‘Be a man,’ I wanted to say. ‘This is your life.’

I wanted to have with him the talk I might soon need to have with my sister, convince him that, in abandoning his family, he was acting like a coward. However, when I looked up, it was perfectly sunny outside again. Those who had sought shelter from the rain on the front gallery outside my office were now making their way back into the street. The cars were circulating again too, splashing muddy water everywhere.

‘Come back tomorrow,’ I told the unhappy husband. I planned to make him come to see me at least ten times before I would type his statement, as the law required me to do, and file it for him.

It turned out that it had not rained near the house and the river had not overflowed. It was rare that it overflowed in the daytime anyway, which made me all the more anxious. All the deadly flash floods had taken place at night. Perhaps my fear was slightly irrational. Yet, the previous summer, the country’s fourth largest city had been submerged under water for weeks. I could no longer chance it.

When I got home, I immediately wanted to approach the question of the house with Lélé. I found her in her old room sitting in the middle of a large mahogany canopy bed that our parents had had constructed for her when she was a teenager. From the house she and Gaspard had shared for the last twenty years, she had brought a large mosquito net, which she’d draped over the canopy, making her appear as though she were trapped in a colorless dream. Our father’s notebooks were spread out, open, all around her. On her lap was her own composition notebook. She was scribbling furiously, flipping through page after page while jotting things down.

I walked out to her terrace, where she kept, among her many potted plants, a wicker chair on which she sat out every morning, draped in one of her bed sheets, watching the sun rise over the mountains. I pulled the chair inside and propped it in front of the armoire across from her. As I sat down, she looked up, momentarily acknowledging me, then turned her attention back to the notebooks.

‘Do you work the same way they did?’ she asked.

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

I was speaking to her through a veil, but neither of us made any effort to change that. If anything, it made me feel a bit more comfortable, braver.

‘Do you keep your notes like Grand-père and Papa did?’ she asked.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘They’re all in the archives in town, which is where these should also be. We kept them much too long. They don’t belong only to us. They belong to Léogâne.’

‘They do belong to us,’ she said. ‘Listen.’

Leaning over, she stretched out her arm and grabbed one of the notebooks by her knees. She must have pressed too far down on her belly, for she snapped her head back, dropped the notebook and began rubbing her stomach.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

‘Give me a minute,’ she said. She went on rubbing her stomach, closing her eyes, whispering to herself.

‘Did you hurt yourself?’ I asked.

‘I’m fine,’ she said, opening her eyes again. ‘Let me read this to you.’

She seemed composed, nearly herself again, when she raised one of my father’s notebooks to her face.

‘Here, he has some notes about the theft of a cow. Livestock stolen, etc… it said, but in the margin, he wrote, “Lélé born today. We named her Léogâne. Hope she doesn’t think entire town belongs to her.” ’

Reaching over, she picked up another notebook. ‘ “Lélé first in school,” ’ she read. ‘ “Told me in my ear after dinner that she wants to follow me in work as justice of the peace.” ’

I wanted to ask her if he had written anything like that, or anything at all, about me, in case I had missed it, hadn’t seen it. But I knew he hadn’t. And she did too.

‘You could have been,’ I told her. ‘We both could have done the job.’

‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘thirty years ago, you couldn’t bring a little girl around with you documenting the ills of the town. Both he and Maman told me as much.’

‘Look,’ I said, trying to cheer her up, ‘they gave you their whole world, which was this town. They gave you its name. They were very proud the day of your marriage. They loved Gaspard. They were sad that you couldn’t have children. They’d be so happy now.’

She turned the notebook pages, closing them all. I thought she was going to raise the mosquito net and crawl out, but she didn’t.

‘Speaking of Gaspard,’ I said.

‘You want to know when I’m going back?’

I felt like I was talking to one of the people who came to file their complaints. I needed specific locations, dates, and times.

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘Because I am thinking of selling the house.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘not the house.’

‘It’s starting to seem foolish to live here so close to the river,’ I said. ‘I’m beginning to feel like it’s a death trap.’

I wanted to climb in there with her and tell her that everything was going to be okay, that it was all right now for us to try to forge our own paths, to move away from the past. Instead she gathered the notebooks in a pile and slid towards the edge of the bed away from them. She raised the mosquito net so fast that in an instant our faces were nearly touching. I was so unprepared for it that I had to slide the chair back a bit.

‘You want to know why I left Gaspard?’ she said. ‘It’s because of the baby.’

‘What about the baby?’ I asked.

‘It’s sick,’ she said.

‘Sick?’

‘Is that how you remember all the things people say to you?’ she asked. ‘Do you simply repeat what they say?’

‘What do you mean the baby’s sick?’ I asked.

Just then, Marthe walked in, announcing lunch. ‘Lélé, you haven’t eaten all day,’ she said, wagging a scolding index finger. ‘You have to eat to keep that baby strong.’

‘We’ll be down soon, chérie,’ Lélé said.

‘Okay,’ said Marthe, ‘but we’re not going to let the food get cold. You know how much I hate cold food.’

‘Do you realize how long she’s been telling us that?’ Lélé said when Marthe left the room.

‘Probably our whole lives,’ I said.

‘Do you realize how astonishing that is?’

‘Tell me about the baby,’ I pressed.

‘I didn’t want to do it,’ she said, ‘but Gaspard insisted because of my age, so we went to the hospital, L’Hôpital Sainte Croix, and had it done.’

I’m not sure I grasped everything she said. There was a test with pictures, an ultrasound. The baby, determined to be a girl, had a large cyst growing from the back of her neck, down her entire spine. If she lived long enough to be born, she would probably die soon after.

‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘What caused that?’

‘A stroke of bad luck,’ she said. ‘No one knows.’

Both the doctor and Gaspard thought she should abort while she still could. She wanted to see the whole thing through, to carry full term.

‘This is your beheading,’ I said.

‘What?’ she said.

‘I’ll do what I can to help,’ I said.

‘There’s nothing to do,’ she said. ‘That’s the point.’

‘Have you thought about the birth?’ I asked.

‘Marthe will do it,’ she said. ‘Marthe will deliver her here, just like she did us.’

That night after dinner, it was too hot to stay inside and we sat out on the verandah again, listening to sounds we had neglected on other evenings: the wailing of cicadas, the crowing of disoriented cocks, the hushed laughter of distant neighbors cutting through our property. Unlike the summers of our childhood, when, in spite of the heat, we would have been running around half dressed, we heard no stirring in the trees around us, no birds settling in for the night. And we heard no croaking frogs splashing in and out of the river. We heard no frogs at all.

Already, my sister’s baby felt like an absence too, something we should grieve while ignoring. Every now and then, I would see her twist her body from side to side. Then she would rise up momentarily from her chair as the baby roused inside her for what seemed to me like a series of first times. Looking down at the gentle crescent curve of her body, she did not touch her stomach, nor did she invite me to touch it or lower my ear to it. And I did not dare ask.

Gaspard came by the house again early the next morning. It was a shockingly beautiful morning. Not yet sultry or overcast, but intensely bright, almost dazzling. It was the type of morning that evaporated all my other fears about living in a river’s path, the type of morning that would probably keep me in Léogâne forever, planting my vetiver and almond trees.

I was leaving for work when I saw Gaspard sitting in his car, his front wheels facing Lélé’s terrace. I tapped on the window, and he reached over and opened the door for me. Sliding into the passenger seat, I gave his shoulder the type of light squeeze he liked to give mine, as a greeting, an apology. Sitting there quietly, we took turns looking down at the gravel pathway leading through the almond trees towards the open road. When we were children, Lélé and I had often raced each other from the house to the road. Our dash had always seemed endless, exhausting, but we were extremely proud of ourselves when we made it to the end, either in front of or behind the other. Looking up at Lélé’s terrace where she sat every morning wrapped in a blanket watching the sun rise, Gaspard and I saw only her feet peeking out over the edge, encased in the lace-shaped clerestory trim.

‘I’m not going to leave her,’ he said. ‘After the baby’s born, we’ll see where we can go.’

He raised his hands as if to wave in Lélé’s direction, but she was looking past us, towards the mountains, framed by a halo of indigo sky.

‘She wants to bury the child here,’ he said. ‘She wants it to have spent its whole life here in your parents’ house. I suppose she feels that if she’d never left, none of this would have happened. She’d be here like you, alone, but safe from the things you document so well.’

‘It’s still questionable how well I do with the documenting,’ I said.

‘She admires you,’ he said, ‘and she thinks you do well.’

When I said nothing else, he added, ‘Among the trees. She wants to bury the child among the almond trees.’

Just then I noticed that he was not speaking to me at all. He was speaking to Lélé. She had turned her gaze away from the mountains and was looking straight at him, at us, her gaze unwavering, almost like a challenge, a dare.

‘It’s a fungus,’ Gaspard said.

‘I thought you didn’t know what caused it,’ I said.

‘Not the baby,’ he said, ‘the frogs.’

The day before, when he’d been visiting with Lélé, she had told him to try to find out for her what could have killed the river frogs. He’d gone back home and telephoned several people including one of his childhood friends, a Haitian-Canadian botanist who had told Gaspard that, given the descriptions and circumstances, he could only imagine that the frogs had probably died from a fungal disease that’s caused by the hotter than usual weather.

‘Is there anything we could have done for them?’ Gaspard had asked his friend.

‘No,’ the friend had said. ‘We all have our paths to tread and this was theirs.’