The Dew Breaker

MONKEY TAILS

Mother and I cowered beneath her cot after a small rock pierced the sheet of plastic she’d draped over our bedroom window the week before as extra protection against the alley mosquitoes. She was winded from all the excitement outside, forcing air out of her lungs while trying to contain a sudden bout of hiccups. Keeping her eyes closed, she felt for the rosary around her neck and between hiccups and deep breaths whispered, “Jesus, Mary, Saint Joseph, please watch over Michel and me.”

The sound of a large crowd stomping through the alley between Monsieur Christophe’s water station and our house seemed to be what was making the cot rattle, rather than Mother’s and my shaking bodies. Above the echoes of drums, horns, bamboo flutes, and conch shells, we heard voices shouting, “Come out, macoutes! Come out, macoutes!” daring members of the Volunteers for National Security militia to appear from wherever they were hiding.

Overnight our country had completely changed. We had fallen asleep under a dictatorship headed by a pudgy thirty-four-year-old man and his glamorous wife. During the night they’d sneaked away-I had to see the television images myself before I could believe it-the wife ornately made up, her long brown hair hidden under a white turban, her carefully manicured fingers holding a long cigarette, the husband at the wheel of the family’s BMW, driving his wife and himself to the tarmac of an airport named after his dead father, from whom he’d inherited the country at nineteen, to an American airplane that would carry them to permanent exile in France. The presidential couple’s reign had ended, his having lasted fifteen years and hers the span of their six-year marriage. Their departure, however, orphaned a large number of loyal militiamen, who had guarded the couple’s command with all types of vicious acts. Now the population was going after those militiamen, those macoutes, with the determination of an army in the middle of its biggest battle to date.

My cousin Vaval, who’d left the house at dawn to catch a camion to the provinces but then had postponed his trip to come back and brief us on what was going on, told us how on his way to the bus depot he had seen a group of people tie one of these militiamen to a lamppost, pour gasoline down his throat, and set him on fire. The flock making its way through the alley behind our house was probably on a similar quest for vengeance, most likely looking for a man called Regulus, who lived nearby. Regulus ’ eighteen-year-old son, Romain, was my hero and the person whom at that time I considered my best friend.

It didn’t take long for the crowd to move past our house. I had to remind myself that these men and women, old and young, meant no harm to people like us, people like Mother, Vaval, and me. Vaval was so certain of this that he was standing out in front of the house watching the crowd, as though it was an ordinary parade going by. Mother, however, whose creed in life was something like “It’s harder for trouble to find you under your bed” (yes, I know there are many ways she could have been proven wrong), had thought that it would be best for us to hide. The rock coming through the window reinforced her case. I couldn’t help but be frightened. I was twelve years old, and, according to my mother, three months before my birth I had lost my father to something my mother would only vaguely describe as “political,” making me part of a generation of mostly fatherless boys, though some of our fathers were still living, even if somewhere else-in the provinces, in another country, or across the alley not acknowledging us. A great many of our fathers had also died in the dictatorship’s prisons, and others had abandoned us altogether to serve the regime.

My mother’s hiccups subsided. Judging that the crowd had moved a safe enough distance from our house, she raised a corner of her skirt and used it to wipe the sweat from her forehead, crossed herself several times, then crawled out from under the cot. She waited for me to come out, then sat on the cot’s edge and dusted a film of white grime from her knees.

“I knew that girl was not sweeping all the way under the beds,” my mother said, quickly reverting to her normal griping self, perhaps to erase the image in my mind of her cowering with fear under the cot. The “girl” she was referring to was Rosie, a distant cousin my mother had summoned from the provinces to do such things as cook and wash and sweep under beds, when she’d promised Rosie’s poor peasant parents that she’d be sending her to school. In fact, the only education Rosie was getting was from talking to the people who came to buy colas at a busy intersection where my mother stationed her when Rosie wasn’t inside the house cooking, washing, and not sweeping under the beds. Being madly in love with Rosie-Rosie’s bloodline was separate enough from mine that I could have married her had I been older-I didn’t blame her at all for the dust balls under the cot, but I knew better than to defend her to my mother, who would have turned her anger at Rosie on me.

All the commotion with the departure of our despised leader and his wife and the crowd passing through the neighborhood had made me hungry. But what I wanted most to do was head over to Romain’s house and make sure he was okay. Like us, Romain and his mother had nothing to fear from our angry neighbors. It was Romain’s father, Regulus, they wanted. He’d beaten them up and stolen money and property from most of them and had put many of their relatives in jail or in the grave. In addition to his other crimes, Regulus had abandoned Romain when Romain was a month old. Romain had never called his father Papa but, like everyone else, referred to him as Regulus, his last name, which Romain didn’t even have.

Romain and I had met when I was about eight years old. His mother and mine had become friends, taking turns visiting each other every evening to catch up at the end of the day. I would accompany my mother on her visits to his house, and while our mothers sat inside and chatted, we would play marbles or kick a soccer ball around out front.

Unlike many of the older boys, Romain didn’t have many friends and didn’t seem to resent having to play with a runt like me. In fact, he even appeared to like it and came around to my house most Sunday afternoons to ask my mother if he could take me to a kung fu movie or for a bike ride on Champs de Mars plaza.

Our mothers had a falling-out one day-neither Romain nor I was ever able to find out from either of them what it was about-and I stopped visiting Romain’s house with my mother and he stopped coming around to ask my mother’s permission to take me places. Our outings became less frequent, but every once in a while we’d plot to meet somewhere and then proceed to a karate flick, especially if it was a new Bruce Lee.

Romain knew what it was like to be an only child. And maybe this is why he always watched out for me, stepped in if I was in a scuffle with some other kid from the neighborhood, slipped me some of his mother’s money now and then for candy and ice cream, and invited me over to his house whenever his mother was away. His maid, Auberte, would prepare whatever I wanted to eat, whether it was good for me or not. While we ate Auberte’s delicious fried sweets, I would listen to Romain talk and talk, mostly quoting lines from books I’d never read and writers I’d never heard of. Even though I rarely understood everything he said, I was grateful that he was speaking to me, like a peer, like a man.

Looking back now, I realize how much I needed someone like Romain in my life. He must have felt this too. Come to think of it, aside from Rosie and Vaval, who were always too busy with my mother’s chores to spend much time with me, Romain was my only friend.

When Mother and I finally made our way outside, we found Vaval and Rosie out front, commenting to each other on the procession of marchers that had just gone by. Before she realized that my mother and I were watching her, Rosie bent down and picked up a few sprigs of greenery and flowers that the crowd had strewn along its path. She held them up to her nose and inhaled what was left of their fragrance, even though they were dusty and soiled and had been trampled flat before she’d gotten to them.

Vaval too walked out to the street and collected a few cast-off beer and rum bottles. Putting an end to their contemplation, my mother ordered them both to go back into the house and find something more useful to do. Rosie somehow managed to interrupt Mother long enough to point out that across the alley Monsieur Christophe’s tap station had been dismantled by the passing crowd and his faucets were pumping free water faster than a newly slaughtered pig pumps blood. A different crowd was emerging now, a crowd of maids, menservants, and indentured children, restavèks, carrying all sorts of vessels, including buckets, water jugs, earthen jars, calabashes, and even chamber pots, to gather the precious water. Mother ordered Rosie and Vaval to hurry up and collect as much water as they could for our house.

At my mother’s side, I tried to calculate how much money Monsieur Christophe was losing as each of his six faucets and their missing handles pumped out several gallons of water per minute. Usually, he would sell a bucket of water for twenty centimes, to everyone except my mother, who could get it from him for less. When cassavas and colas, breads or mangoes or straw hats didn’t sell, my mother would buy a bucket of water from Monsieur Christophe and have Rosie walk through the streets downtown, reselling the water by the cup to thirsty people. Now Monsieur Christophe, a scowling, cinnamon-colored man who was only slightly taller than I, was trying to shut off the main valve that would keep any more water from gushing forth. But someone had walked away with the large knob that controlled the water flow, leaving Monsieur Christophe and a group of other men who worked for him with no choice but to try to slide the large knobless tube shut by force.

“Michel, come over here.” Monsieur Christophe spotted me during one of those times when he turned away from the valve in despair. “We need more hands.”

It was a new day, I thought. The number of people marching through the alleys when it wasn’t carnival or Rara season without being shot down by the macoutes had confirmed it. What right did our resident water hoarder have to order me to do anything? Still, I walked over. The big shove from my mother also helped me make up my mind. Besides, there was always the possibility that things could return to the way they’d been the night before-the television could have an image of the presidential couple coming back-and the crowds could ungather. Also, there were people with shops in our neighborhood, people like Monsieur Christophe, who had always been and would always be powerful, maintaining authority through control of water or bread or some other important resource, as Romain might say, no matter what was going on politically.

I hated joining Monsieur Christophe’s valve-shutting operation because it would delay my trip to Romain’s. In any case, I didn’t feel I was helping very much, with so many stronger boys and men already offering ideas, pulling out makeshift tools they always carried in their pockets, enjoying the entire affair much more than I was. I wanted to let the water flow. There was probably so much blood being shed in different parts of the country that morning, the blood of militiamen at the hands of former victims, the blood of former victims at the hand of militiamen battling for their lives. Maybe the water could be a cleansing offering to the gods on behalf of all the dead, no matter what their political leanings had been.

But I wasn’t thinking like this back then. I simply wanted to go off and visit my friend. I only think all this now, as a thirty-year-old man, lying in bed next to my pregnant wife, watching as the clock moves toward midnight, toward her due date.

I reluctantly joined the group of men squatting around stupid Monsieur Christophe’s valve, trying to shut it off, but I spent most of my time watching more and more people arrive to collect the free water, more and more street children slipping beneath the taps for impromptu showers and being shoved aside so the water might be used for more important purposes. My mother was standing across the alley observing me, and each time our eyes met, she would give me a scolding glance for not participating more. Still, I could tell she was proud of me. For once I was surrounded by men, doing men’s work. She seemed happy that Monsieur Christophe had thought to include me and even happier still that he would occasionally single me out for some task, like holding a rag or a screwdriver, a task I would share with Tobin, Monsieur Christophe’s openly acknowledged son.

“Strange how blessings come,” I imagined my mother saying. Strange too how people with means can make the less fortunate feel special by putting them to work. As much as I loved my mother, I would have easily traded that satisfied grin on her face for a word, any word, even an insult, from Romain.

My opportunity for escape came when my mother joined Rosie and Vaval in collecting just a little more water for the house. She had strolled across the alley, carrying two small jugs, and had gone back inside the house to put them away once they were full. I handed Monsieur Christophe’s son Tobin, a pale-skinned fellow twelve-year-old, the screwdriver I was holding. And at a moment when Monsieur Christophe was concentrating on some complicated procedure that required him to be as close to the valve as possible, I ran.

There was a different feel to our neighborhood for sure. People were walking around looking dazed, exchanging bits of information they were gathering from the radio and television and from one another. Like Rosie, many were collecting shrubs from the ground and waving them in the air. Some of the men were wearing red bandannas around their heads and swinging sticks and tree branches while pouring rum and beer on one another. Others were dancing and performing somersaults but stopping occasionally to yell slogans or phrases they had held too long in their chests: “We are free” or “We will never be prisoners again.”

The bells of the nearby cathedral were chiming non-stop even as several people were shouting, through windows and above the loud horns of passing cars, that the tomb of the pudgy dictator’s father, from whom the son had inherited the country, had just been excavated by demonstrators. An early rumor had it that the son had carried the father’s bones with him into exile, but the people who’d opened the father’s crypt believed they had the bones and were parading them downtown, skull and all.

Graffiti were going up everywhere. Down with the departed president and his wife! Down with poverty! Down with suffering! Down with everything you can imagine.

From the radio reports that were being broadcast at the loudest possible volume from every house, I gathered that the homes of former government officials and the abandoned mansions of the president and his wife were being ransacked, with protesters carrying away everything from tiles to toilet bowls to toothbrushes. There was the stench of kerosene and burning tires wafting through the air. It was only a matter of time before the rubber smell would be replaced with that of flesh.

The doors were bolted tight at Romain’s mother’s house. Only when I got there did I remember that Romain’s mother was away on one of her business trips, buying cloth and women’s undergarments in Curaçao for resale. Like my mother, Romain’s was a business-minded woman, even though she was operating on a larger scale than my mother was.

Romain’s aunt Vesta came to the door and opened it a crack to check out my face. I was in love with Vesta too, enraptured by her long neck and legs, which she displayed freely in thigh-stroking skirts. Vesta hastily let me in. She wanted me to give her a detailed account of what was going on out in the streets, and I did. But in the end all she really wanted to know was whether or not Regulus had been caught.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“The old man’s probably far away from here now.” Romain’s voice boomed inside the room where Vesta had her bed, a table, and a radio from which a taped message from the exiled president was being disseminated.

“I have decided to transfer the destiny of the nation into the hands of the military,” the dictator fils declared in a droning nasal voice that sounded almost the same as his father’s, whose daylong speeches were constantly rebroadcast on the radio each year on the anniversary of his death. It was then reported that six rich men, most of them military officers, would take control of the country.

“It will be more of the same,” Vesta said. “Nothing will change.”

Romain, who’d been standing there as still as a rock through the entire announcement, motioned for me to walk through the white lace curtain that separated Vesta’s room from the rest of the house. Romain was slight but limber, like the kung fu masters. It was clear that he hadn’t bathed, combed his hair, or changed his clothes since the last time I’d seen him, three days before. He was unshaven, barefoot, and scratching his thin legs through his imported jeans. His sunken, bloodshot eyes seemed as though they were struggling to blink, showing that he hadn’t slept much either.

Romain’s mother’s beautiful two-story house was her unconditional gift to him, compensation-his word-for his having to take her last name. As we entered the blush-rose living room and settled down on the sofa, Auberte trailed us and asked if we wanted some refreshments.

Romain replied, “Pi ta,” later, and waved Auberte away, but she paid no attention to him and brought us each a glass of freshly squeezed lemonade and a large piece of buttered bread served on a colorful tray covered with images of Curaçao’s beaches, beaches with names like Barbara, Marie, and Jeremi.

And yes, I was in love with Auberte too. Sometimes I had dreams of Rosie, Vesta, and Auberte coming into the room I shared with my mother and sending my mother away only to fight one another for the honor of devirginizing me.

My wife stirs in our bed now, trying not to move from the one position she’s able to sleep in these days, on her back. My son, you are also lying on your side, I imagine, resting for your imminent journey to us. (You will have to tell me one day what it is you were really doing.)

Listen to your mother now as she says to me, “Michel, are you still talking into that cassette? Go to sleep. If the baby comes tomorrow I’ll need you rested.”

And listen as I, your father, reply, “Just another minute.” And listen now as your mother says, half jokingly, I hope, “I wish I was one of those women you only dreamed of sleeping with,” then goes back to sleep.

Now we return to Romain.

Romain did not drink the overly sweetened lemonade Auberte brought him. He was jittery, his fingers shaking as he bit into his bread. He put the rest of the bread down, got up and paced around the room, and pressed his face against the wall, coming short of banging his forehead against it. Then he walked over to the large television set on the coffee table, reached over as if to turn it on, then held himself back. Instead he sat down, picked up his lemonade once more, and stared into the glass at the thick layer of brown sugar refusing to melt at the bottom.

“When will your mother be back?” I asked him.

“Couple of days,” he said, raising his eyes from the glass. Then he paraphrased Voltaire the way he always did whenever he was served anything with too much sugar in it.

“C’est à ce prix qu’ils mangent du sucre en Europe,” he recited. That’s the price of their eating sugar in Europe.

While studying for his BAC exams, Romain had become too distracted by the French literature segments, going off to read entire books excerpted in his lessons. He would fall behind in class, while seeking other sources on the same themes until he’d mastered them. In the end, he gave up school entirely to study on his own. By way of explanation for ending his studies, he had simply cited someone else to his mother-I would later learn that it was Socrates-“Know thyself and you will know the world of the gods.”

But just then, when he looked at the sweet juice, which I was enjoying very much myself, saying “C’est à ce prix qu’ils mangent du sucre en Europe,” I replied, “Okay, your majesty,” feeling glad that at least his father wasn’t the only thing on his mind.

“I’m sharing with you Voltaire’s words,” he said. “I tell you that in Europe they eat sugar with our blood in it and you mock me with a colonial title.”

I realized then that it was going to be business as usual, just an ordinary Romain conversation, and so I said, “It seems to me we consume a lot of sugar here too. Does that mean we’re drinking our own blood?”

He laughed and said, “Imbecile, you’re like that baby pig who deigns to ask its mother how come her nose is so big and ugly. Let me be the mother and tell you, ‘Pig, son, one day you’ll find this out for yourself.’ ”

We both laughed. Then his face grew somber and he said, “You know, I’m not listening to the radio or watching television that much. Tante Vesta is, but I’m not.”

“Why watch television or listen to the radio?” I said. “If you want to know what’s happening, hit the béton, the pavement, go out into the streets.”

I was feeling cocky, brazen. I’d ventured out when Romain had not. I’d slipped away from my mother’s grasp to do something she disapproved of, visit with Romain. I felt I had an edge on him. I could now tell him about things he hadn’t yet witnessed, things that were going on out there in our new world.

“I know I shouldn’t be feeling this,” he said, brushing aside my attempted boast by simply ignoring it, “but I can’t help it. I’m a little worried about Regulus. I know the old man isn’t going to sit around waiting for them to get him, but it seems that people like him are going to die very painful deaths.”

“When was the last time you saw Regulus?” I asked.

“Last May eighteenth,” he said. “He was marching in the Flag Day parade on the national palace grounds with all those other macoutes. I went to watch the stupid parade, just to spot him.”

“They probably won’t find him,” was all I could think to say. “He has so many women. One of them will hide him good. Maybe he’ll cross the border, go to the Dominican Republic.”

“Maybe,” Romain said, halfheartedly agreeing to all those possibilities. Maybe Regulus would survive and emerge from all this a new man, repent for all his sins, reclaim all his children, offer them his name-if they still wanted it-beg their forgiveness, both for what he’d done to them and for what he had done to his country.

My mother popped into my head once again. By now she’d probably noticed that I was gone and was furiously looking for me, ordering Rosie and Vaval to join the search. She would think I was out running around with the demonstrators, trying to discover where they would go next, see who they’d find and what they’d do.

“What’s the matter?” Romain asked.

“I’m worried about my mother,” I confessed. “She might be fretting about me.”

“Twelve years old,” he said, “and still Mama’s baby. I’m going to make you a man today. We’re going to do like those guys, like Regulus. We’re going to escape.”

We didn’t tell Vesta where we were going. We simply hurried past her, Romain mumbling that we’d be right back.

“Come back here!” Vesta yelled as we rushed out of the house. “Do you know what’s going on out there? Come back!”

As we sprinted away, I asked Romain, “Where are we going?”

“If we had someplace in mind,” he said, “then we’d be going on a trip, not escaping.”

Most of the shops near Romain’s house were closed even as the streets were growing more and more crowded. On the way to the bus depot, we found ourselves in the middle of a mock funeral procession with a group of “pallbearers” carrying two wooden coffins, one for the president and the other for his wife. Some of the men in the crowd donned priest’s cassocks while young women in black dresses pretended to be sobbing and fainting from inconsolable grief. Among the mock mourners were a few waving blue denim uniforms, which they claimed to have stripped off fleeing macoutes.

We made our way out of the crowd and down an alley into a quieter street, where we found a taxi. Romain jumped in and told the driver, “We’d like to go to La Sensation Hotel.”

“That’s not going to be easy,” the driver said, “with all the people on the streets.”

“Take all the shortcuts you know,” Romain said. “You’ll be paid well.”

The drive to La Sensation confirmed that we couldn’t escape what was going on, short of leaving the city or the country. Everywhere we went, even through the narrowest side streets, byways, back ways, there were people jumping out of corners, waving flags, ripping old posters of the president and his wife, and carrying containers of kerosene, hoping to find a macoute to punish.

When we finally made it to the walled oasis of the hotel, Romain sent me ahead to wait for him in the garden while he settled things with the driver; then we walked over to the front desk together, only to find out that all the rooms were booked, mostly by desperate foreign journalists who were due to arrive within the next twenty-four hours. Romain had been counting on a former classmate who worked as a porter at the hotel to get him a room, where we would hide out until things calmed down. Our escape was going to be financed by Romain’s mother, who left him a big wad of cash whenever she went away.

Surprising even myself, I suddenly wanted to go home. I was missing my mother. What if she got so worried that she lost her mind, went running down every street in the capital screaming my name? What if she thought I was dead and my body taken to a mass grave?

Romain’s friend was nowhere to be found, and the pretty young woman at the check-in counter gave us such a disdainful look that it seemed she wouldn’t have offered us a room even if one had been available.

There was nothing preventing us from sitting here a while and having a drink, though, was there? Romain said. After that we’d go home.

We walked through the lobby, down a flight of stairs to a table under a large umbrella by the side of the heart-shaped pool. A man wearing a dark suit and a bow tie asked us what we wanted to drink. Romain ordered a Coke and so did I. It seemed like such a stupid thing to come all this way for, a Coke.

Romain looked up toward the steep hills above the hotel, and higher still at the row of mountains in the distance. A cloud was passing over the nearest and most prominent one, Mòn Lopital. Then, just as suddenly, the cloud moved on and the sky was as blue as cornflowers again.

Watching me staring up at the mountains, Romain said, “Imagine, a mountain named Hospital. Maybe we should go there.”

We had already failed at our small adventure. We were certainly doomed to botch a larger escapade, like a complete retreat to Mòn Lopital. Still, I replied, “Okay,” hoping that Romain wouldn’t want to follow through with that particular idea.

While we were sipping our Cokes, watching the fizzy dark liquid rise through the straws, a man about Romain’s age hesitantly wandered over to our table and sat down. Romain seemed relieved to see him. The man was meticulous-looking, clean-shaven, and tense. He shook Romain’s hand, nodded in my direction, then made some guarded remarks about the new political situation, how the hotel was going to lose a lot of its faithful clientele, the call girls, and the macoutes who’d hired them.

Romain casually said, “It must be rough, camarade.”

Then the man looked over at me, then back at Romain as though there was something he wanted to tell Romain but wasn’t sure I should also hear it.

Finally Romain said, “Man, it’s okay.” Then I realized there was a larger purpose to our coming to that particular hotel. As with everything else with Romain, this too was not simple.

“You can tell me in front of the little guy,” Romain said, lowering his head to sip more of his Coke. “Is he here?”

“No, man. I’m sorry,” the man said. And he looked truly regretful, even sympathetic. “He didn’t come here. Maybe he went somewhere else.”

The man’s eyes wandered toward the heart-shaped pool and he shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “It’s pretty busy. Sorry you couldn’t get a room. We’ve got to take advantage while we can.”

With that, he got up and walked away. Romain kept his head down, kept on sipping his Coke. I should have been too young to understand what was going on, but I did. Twelve years for a boy like me, a boy without a father, a boy with a mother who tried to protect me so much that her actions incited me to go out and discover everything myself, was like twenty years for another kind of boy.

“He sometimes brought women here,” Romain said. “I used to follow him here. I thought he might have come here today.”

“Who, your father?” I asked.

I don’t know why, but every now and then I would ask a dumb question like that, demand an explanation for something I already knew.

“No,” Romain snapped, “your father, Christophe.”

I don’t think he even realized why he said it. He was impatient, angry. His nerves were raw. Besides, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t suspected it. Unaware that I was paying attention, people had often whispered things around me, from the girls in the neighborhood who coyly commented how much I looked like Tobin, the child of the wife, the “inside” child, to even Tobin himself, who was sometimes kind to me and sometimes refused to look me in the eye as though we were rivals, to the wife who refused to ever come anywhere near the tap station in order to avoid facing her husband’s indiscretions and their living results. Still, it was too painful for me to be reminded that I had a father who lived and worked so close to me and still didn’t call me his son. I didn’t understand why my mother had to struggle so much to earn money when she could have asked him for it, why she had to force Rosie into virtual slavery to keep us afloat. I didn’t understand why Christophe hadn’t offered my mother money to feed and clothe me, why he only sold her water at a discount and did not offer it to her outright since it was water that I, his son, could also use.

As I sat there with Romain with the straw separated from the Coke bottle yet still hanging out of his mouth, it wasn’t the shock of hearing Christophe declared my father yet again that made me cry. I was simply ashamed to be considered a dishonorable secret.

Romain tried to reach over and stroke my head, but I shoved his hand away. I wanted to grab one of the Coke bottles and smash it against his skull, but I knew he would catch the bottle before it could hurt him.

He had brought me here, he’d said, to make me a man. Was this what he meant? Did he think that seeing his own murderous father hiding out in a low-grade hotel to keep from being burned alive would illustrate what kind of man I ought not to be? Was telling me, reminding me, about Christophe in this blunt, off-the-cuff manner his way of teaching me that I shouldn’t want to be too much like Christophe either? Or was it simply Romain’s way of forcing me to accept what he was about to do?

It was becoming clear to me that Romain was leaving, going off someplace where I couldn’t follow him.

“The taxi’s waiting for you outside,” he told me. “He’ll get you back to your mother.”

I was too angry at him then to ask him where he was going. I didn’t care.

“I’m leaving the country,” he said. “I’m getting out tonight.”

“But you didn’t do anything.” I heard myself sobbing, but I didn’t know whether I was crying for Romain and Regulus or for Christophe and myself.

“I just can’t stay here,” Romain said.

“What about your mother?” I asked. “What about Regulus?”

“I’ll get in touch with my mother when I reach where I’m going,” he said. “As for Regulus, he’s not my problem.”

And then it was very obvious to me, starting with the way his hands were shaking and his frowns were sinking deeper into his sweating forehead, that Regulus had always been his problem, the biggest problem of his life.

“Go on now,” he said. “The taxi’s waiting for you.”

I slowly got up and walked away, counting each step up the staircase leading to the lobby and then down the driveway where the taxi was waiting. I never looked back.

In the taxi, I lay down on the backseat and closed my eyes, shutting out everything, all the noise, the chants, the crowds out on the street. The car moved slowly and the roads were bumpy, but I didn’t care.

Given all that was happening-the looting of homes and businesses of former government allies, the lynching, burning, and stoning of the macoutes, the thousands of bodies that were suddenly being discovered in secret rooms at the city morgues and in mass graves on the outskirts of the capital-it would have been heartless of my mother to punish me, and she didn’t. Instead she yelled at Rosie and Vaval for not watching me closely enough, for letting me wander away.

“Soon after you went off,” my mother said with a severe yet knowing look, an almost kind look, “Monsieur Christophe managed to get his water turned off, but not before everyone in the neighborhood got enough to use for days in case the situation takes a bad turn and we’re all trapped inside our houses, like in the old days before you were born, under the father.”

“The father?” I asked dumbly.

I knew she meant the dictator father of the dictator son, but somehow I wanted to offer her an opening into a conversation that even then I knew we’d never have.

Though it was still light outside, I went to bed, trying to give the impression that it was the country’s political problems that were disturbing me. I’d let my mother keep her secret; I didn’t want her to feel like a liar.

That night we fell asleep to the sound of gunfire, sometimes from around the corner and sometimes in the distance. My mother and I slept on opposite sides of her room, on the floor.

When we woke up the next morning, Vaval had more news to report, this time with Rosie chiming in. A group of young men had spotted Regulus sneaking back into his house in the middle of the night to collect some of his belongings. They had cornered him, and to avoid being taken by them, Regulus had shot himself in the head.

I remained curled on the floor and I listened, hoping that Romain was too far away to ever hear of this. Lying there, I remembered something Romain had told me three days before. Rumors had been circulating that the president and his wife might be fleeing the country. The president had gone on television to deny the rumors, saying he was as “unyielding as a monkey’s tail.”

I didn’t know much about monkeys back then, except for a proverb that said if you teach a monkey how to throw stones, it will throw the first one at your head. So I asked Romain to tell me about monkeys’ tails.

Monkeys with short tails live on the ground, he’d said, and those with longer tails make their homes closer to the sky, in high trees. Some tree monkeys have tails that are longer than their bodies, tails that they use to swing from tree to tree. We’d both laughed, wondering which kind of monkey’s tail our president had imagined himself to be.

“He was a short-tailed one, but now he’s a long-tailed one,” Romain had said. “He’s looking for another tree.”

It had seemed impossible then that after fifteen years, a man who’d inherited a lifelong presidency at age nineteen would ever abandon it. But it also hadn’t seemed possible that Romain too could disappear and never be heard from again.

My mother is dead now. One day she collapsed from what was said to be a heart attack, but what I believe was her heart shattering into little pieces because, unlike me, she had loved Christophe and suffered quietly from his not loving her back. I have no proof of this, of course, for my mother was a stern and guarded woman who never would have taken a young boy, even as he became a man, as a confidant. Soon after my mother died, I left Haiti, at twenty, turning over my mother’s house to Rosie and Vaval.

I don’t know what’s become of Romain. I haven’t seen or heard from him since that day at the hotel. His aunt Vesta moved out of the neighborhood soon after Regulus died, and his mother never returned from her business trip. I don’t even know whether Romain’s still alive or dead.

Monsieur Christophe remains very much alive, Rosie and Vaval tell me when I call now and then to check on them, but he has retired and has turned the tap station and other businesses he’s since acquired over to his son Tobin.

To everyone who asks me about my father, I tell and retell the myth that my mother so carefully crafted and guarded for me, that my father perished before I was born, lost his life to something “political.”

As for you, my son, your myth is this: it’s now past midnight; if you’re born today, on this, the anniversary of the day that everything changed for me, on the day that I became a man, your name will be Romain, after my first true friend.