ALBERT
I was born in Cap-Haïtien, in the northern part of Haiti. My grandfather was also born there. You may already know this, but my whole family fought against the Americans during the occupation of 1915. I come from a long line of patriots. My father died never having shaken a white man’s hand. For him, whites were lower than monkeys. Whenever he saw a white man, he used to say, he always wanted to turn him around to see if he had a tail. My grandfather didn’t even go to that much trouble. As far as he was concerned, a white man was an animal, pure and simple. He’d say “the whites,” but he was talking mainly about Americans. Those who dared invade Haitian soil. The supreme insult. A slap in the face to a whole generation. I came to work in Port-au-Prince when I was twenty-two, after my father died, and got a job in this hotel right away. If my grandfather knew that his grandson was serving Americans he would die of shame. This new army of occupation isn’t armed, but it has packed its suitcase with a scourge much worse than cannons: drugs. The Queen of Crimes, and she always comes with her two sidekicks: easy money and sex. There’s nothing here, sir, that hasn’t been touched by one or the other of these plagues. There was a time when we had morals. Now I look around me and I see that everything has come crashing down. I look at our customers, respectable women who twenty years ago, when I first started working here, would have been with their husbands. And what do I see? Lost women, animals lusting after blood and sperm. And whose fault is it? His, the master of desire. He’s seventeen years old, he has eyes like glowing embers, a perfect profile. Legba: the Prince of Storms.
ELLEN
When the police found his body on the beach one morning, they immediately assumed that a drug deal had gone wrong. They didn’t give a shit about the delinquents. Legba was what they call well-known to the police. He sold drugs to everyone on the beach. You don’t think for one minute that the Port-au-Prince police, one of the most corrupt forces in the Caribbean, would waste time investigating the death of a young prostitute, do you? You’ll have to excuse me, I’m used to saying what I think. That’s why I don’t really understand what you’re doing. You say you work for a self-regulating department? Criminal Investigation Services, is that what you called it? I don’t know what good that can do now that Legba is dead. And I also wonder why you are so interested in such intimate details. I know it’s probably none of my business, but you’re going about this inquiry in a very strange way, sir. What else do you want to know?. . Yes, he was a hoodlum, but Lord, was he good looking! What’s more, he knew how to make love to a woman. It’s true, he could have got what he wanted just looking like a young god, and as far as I’m concerned that would have been enough to make me happy. I could have spent hours just looking at him. He could do whatever he wanted with me. And in that he was indefatigable. I mean, think about it: I spent eighteen years in the best universities in the States learning the best ways of improving my quality of life on this planet, and all that time all I really needed was an adolescent here in Port-au-Prince. He played my body like a guitar, and believe me, he knew how to handle his instrument. There were times when I thought I was going to die, I kid you not. My body felt completely drained, as though he’d pumped everything out of it. He could bring me to orgasm almost without touching me. Me, who had always intimidated American men, who are supposed to be the most powerful men in the world, at least in terms of economic and political power, and here I was completely in thrall to a boy in Port-au-Prince. With him I was no longer Ellen the Cynic, I was a little twit who wanted nothing more than to be touched in the right places. And he knew them all, by instinct. The first time I laid eyes on him, down by the hotel, I was afraid of making a fool of myself; after all, I was in my fifties. And I wet myself. I had to go up to my room to change. I stood in front of my mirror and masturbated, thinking about him. He had such an insolent mouth, and my God did I want that mouth. I dreamed about him caressing me with his hands so often that when he finally did touch me it was like we’d always been lovers. But what I wanted most, what gave me the highest orgasms, was to have his long, fine penis in my mouth. I would wake up in a sweat in the middle of the night. By day it was different, I could be Ellen the Cynic, able to thumb my nose at the rest of the world. My punching bag at the time was that fatty, Sue. I didn’t care at all that she was fat, but I could never understand why she would choose Neptune when Legba was available. I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand it now. How could she not get down on her knees before such a black sun? To me, anyone who feels nothing in the presence of such beauty is dangerous. Of course, if she had once dared to look at Legba I would have scratched her eyes out.
ALBERT
One day I came upon them by the stairs. She was hanging on his neck and complaining that he was driving her crazy. You know who I’m talking about? That intellectual from Boston, the one with her nose always up in the air. Legba wasn’t saying a word, as usual. His face was blank. He knew how to drive that kind of woman around the bend. She was crying like a teenager who’d just lost her first love. Yes, sir, as I’ve always said, it’s the cynics who are the hardest hit.
BRENDA
I always try to speak well of people, but since you asked me what I truly think, I have to admit that Ellen isn’t a woman, she’s a bitch in heat playing at being an intellectual. She was lost the moment she first laid eyes on Legba. Really, it was disgusting to watch. People like her don’t know the difference between sex and love.
SUE
It’s true, Brenda is very discreet. She’s not one of those women who show their emotions. Her face is always calm. I would never have known what she was going through if she hadn’t confided in me. That day she seemed totally lost. I’d never seen her like that. She came into my room, which she’d never done before, and she said: “I can’t do it anymore, Sue. I think I’m going to kill him, and then kill myself.” Coming from Brenda, I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t even know who she was talking about. I vaguely thought she was talking about her husband, because I knew they weren’t getting along very well. I thought that that was why she’d come down here on her own this time. That’s what I thought, anyway. Until she admitted to me that she was in love with Legba. How a woman like Brenda, who is so serious, such a devout Christian, could fall in love with a little gigolo like him was beyond me. He acted like a prince because this German woman had given him a gold chain that he wore around his neck like a leash. A pitiful little drug dealer. Surely you know he sold cocaine on the beach? Since his death the other young prostitutes have vanished into the woodwork. I haven’t seen one of them on the beach. Gogo, Chico, not even the handsome one, Mario. All gone off somewhere, like a cloud of flies attracted by the smell of a fresh corpse. Anyway, when Brenda came out and told me point blank that she was in love with the little rat I had the surprise of my life. But there’s no point going on about it. People’s feelings are part of life’s impenetrable mysteries, I must have read that somewhere. Oh, I stopped wondering about life a long time ago. I take things as they come. Brenda told me that Legba had stopped coming to their rendezvous, and she couldn’t stand the pain of it any longer. She couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t eat. All she could think of was him. And he couldn’t care less about her. The only thing he was interested in was money. She spent the whole day in her room, she said, bawling her eyes out under a pillow. She couldn’t go on living like that. She was talking quietly, sometimes so low I couldn’t understand half of what she was saying. Just saying his name, over and over. “Such pain,” I thought. There’s nothing I can do for her. She’s the only one who can control her destiny. That’s just the way it is. I suggested she take some tranquilizers, and she just looked at me in alarm, and I knew she’d already tried that. That’s when I realized that if Brenda was confiding in me it could only mean one thing: she wanted me to stop her from committing a crime. Of that I am certain.