She'd screamed at his dad that she hated him, that Carmine was just like him, that he could get out of her house and take his son with him. So his dad had done just that. The two of them had walked out of the house and gone into Port-au-Prince. There his dad took him to Lucita's house.
He didn't know how long he stayed there it seemed a long time, maybe a month but he was happier than he'd ever been at home with his mother. In fact, looking back, it was the happiest time of his life. His father and Lucita took him out to the beach, to the Dominican Republic, to carnival.
He started playing with other kids his own age which his mother had forbidden him from doing. He never got beaten.
And Lucita used to sing him to sleep some nights, in words he couldn't understand but loved anyway.
It all ended very suddenly one afternoon when a group of armed men came to the house in a long black car. They'd knocked on the door, yelling for his dad to come out or else they'd burn it down. His dad had gone to the door and they'd grabbed him and dragged him into the middle of the
7'
street where they'd forced him to lie face down on the ground. One man put his foot on his dad's head, while another patted him back down and then drew an X on his shirt in red pen and shot him in the spot. Carmine had run out of the house screaming. He'd tried to grab his dad's arms to pick him up off the ground, but he was convulsing, arms and legs slapping at the asphalt like an epileptic swimmer's as foamy blood pumped out from under him. Carmine remembered how his dad had tried to say something, but couldn't get any words out because of the blood filling up his mouth. As Carmine became schooled in the ways of the street and learned about guns, he discovered that one of the most painful places to get shot is through the heart because, in its final panicked moments the brain diverts the blood flow to the open wound to close and heal it, causing brief but absolute agony for the dying victim. His father's convulsions stopped, until the only sign he was still alive was a twitch in the left side of his face, a violent tugging which Carmine had thought at the time was an invisible angel, trying one last time to pull his dad up on his feet before it was too late.
The men bundled Carmine into their car and drove off.
On the way a storm broke. There was nothing like those Haitian storms. They sounded like all the wars in heaven had broken out on earth; lightning lashed at the landscape and thunder roared and boomed, followed by a deluge of rain. His father's killers had pulled over and stopped until it passed. Carmine had looked out of the window, trying to see if the rain would carry his dad's body into the sea. He saw nothing. He concluded his dad had been a good person.
They drove him to his mother's house. She was waiting for him at the doorway and led him to the bathroom. There was a large round grey metal tub in the middle. It was filled with hot water doused with Dettol. She'd never washed him before, it had always been his dad. Carmine's clothes were covered in blood and when she asked him to take them off
72
1 he told her he wanted to keep them on. His mother produced her stick and said, 'Do as I say because there's no one else here for you now. It's just me and you for as long as I say so. Now, take off your clothes and get in the bath.'
And so, reading he had no choice but to surrender for the time being, he did as he was told without further protest or hint of complaint. That was the beginning of their relationship, which had then evolved into one of tyrant and subject, mistress and slave, one growing ever more powerful as the other grew slowly weaker and more insignificant. Or so he let it appear.
They left Haiti for Miami when he was about eight or nine. Memories of his father moved to the back of his mind, to a place he retreated to when things with his mother got real bad. He replayed them there and thought of what might have been and how different his life could have turned out if those men hadn't come and killed his dad; men he knew his mother had sent. He created a fantasy world, a padded panic room he could run to when the humiliation of the real one and the reality of his place in it got too much. In that world he was with his father and Lucita. He himself was still six years old, with everything in front of him and everything to live for. He often thought about Lucita and wondered what had happened to her. He couldn't remember if she'd been there in the road with his father, or if she'd stayed in the house. Had the men killed her too?
It had long bothered him, the not knowing not just about her, but about his father too. He didn't know where he was from originally, what he'd done before he'd met his mother. He didn't even know his name. His mother kept all that from him.
He sliced his fingers through the water in the metal tub.
It was boiling hot and reeked of Dettol, that safe but sour plastic stench he associated with his father's murder. Just like he associated the tub with that day. The tub had come
with them from Haiti - the sides dented, the handles and bolts rusted, a film of lime scale dried into the dull metal, the inside encrusted with greeny-grey grime. It had once been big enough for him to drown in she'd tried once, when he still talked back but now it was too small for him to do more than half crouch.
She always made him take his baths too hot, deliberately, so the water would scald him and the metal would heat up and burn his feet. She'd had a special tap and boiler installed, just for him to fill his tub. He was forbidden from using the main tub. That was for her alone. Normally she'd shower, but whenever she was seeing her lover, she'd have a bath and it would be a real occasion. She'd be in there at least two hours. She'd put candles at the end of her tub and sweet-scented oils in the water; she'd turn off the lights and play tapes of the sea washing up on the beach.
He heard the familiar sound of his mother coming down the stairs, the clippety-ro, dippcty-cop trotting pony rhythm of her feet on the boards, followed by the sound of the two gold lockets she wore around her neck bumping together with a sbhbh-put, shbbb-put as she approached the door.
Thankfully the thunder had stopped a while ago and with it his twitch, so he had no problem putting on his game face - the game being that of the dutiful, loving and admiring twenty-nine-year-old son, happy to see his mother who was coming to give him his bath.
She entered quickly, all 4 feet 9 inches of her, opening and closing the door so fast he could've sworn she'd walked right through it like a ghost. No smile, no nod, no hello, as usual.
Eva Desamours was more striking than she was beautiful.
Her skin was dark and rich, unlined and unmarked, bar a single pockmark beneath her left eye; her forehead was wide, her cheekbones high and prominent, while the lower half of her face tapered down acutely to a pointed, well-defined
chin, accentuating her prominent downturned mouth whose full lips dark brown with a hint of purple for ever reminded Carmine of a drying grape whenever she pursed them. He never looked her in the eye because he was scared to. Marginally slanted and unblinking, cold, near motionless and very very black, her eyes fixed on the world with a merciless detachment, as if she already knew its fate and didn't care to change it. She was also completely bald whether naturally or by choice, Carmine had neither plucked up the courage to ask nor been able to work out. She wore an array of wigs styled in a straight black bob that fitted her so well they looked like her real hair.