Dame-Marie

On the morning I was leaving Port-au-Prince for Dame Marie, stopping through Jeremie, a mourning dove paused an instant below my window and when it flew away, it dropped an underbelly feather that descended to the ground calmly like a large snowflake. It was hot in the plane, so small that we had to bend down to get in and take our seats. During all of take-off and a good while afterwards, a red rooster in a cage stacked in the back with luggage kept screaming for glory, for the thrill, for the torment. The pilot smiled each time he heard it.

The singing of the rooster however made me think of the sounding of the bugle that I imagined Gustave heard so strongly in his heart when, in New York, he made the decision to change the course of his life, perhaps he hoped to change that of his countrymen as well, by joining the rebel groups. He must have heard it also when he said farewell to his family, over the phone with some, or over coffee as he did with Uncle Edward who tried to dissuade him. The sound of the bugle must have been present still when he disembarked at night with his companions on the white beach at Petite Rivière de Dame Marie; also present when he saw that they had been abandoned by those who had trained them and that the thirteen others who were to join them with a greater stock of munitions ten days later did not appear either over the water's surface or at the edge of the white sand where they had been expected; and still again present when the winds blowing strongly over the ocean saw him disappear towards the mountains to hide with his companions—one black man and twelve pale-skin mulattoes in a country of black people. And at last, he must have recognized the now familiar sound when he faced death in the mountains of L'Asile with the last survivors of this retreat that was a two-and-a-half-months fight against government forces: finding himself discovered and finally out of munitions, he cried, "if we must die, let us die like brave men!" and, lacking bullets, he started throwing stones.

It is bullets, then, that killed him. I have waited numerous years to learn that, years spent uselessly holding up under this weight lodged in the heart of memory, personal memory and family memory. Years to suffer this image, the emotion, the anxiety over this other death by decapitation that we always thought had been his own because of a gruesome newspaper front-page photograph of his severed head that had publicized his capture.

But he is no less of a martyr—political martyr, for sure. But for me, and of greater importance still, he is a martyr of the faith, of his faith. I long thought of the day when I would stand on the beach at Dame Marie, holding a candle—humble luminary to celebrate the man with a great heart.

If it is true that one can weep eternally for a life that seems wasted, cut off too young, at twenty-three, it is also true that there are hearts whose sensitivity is so great, so vibrant, so intensely impregnated by all of life's experiences, that their life is in fact, in its substance, infinitely richer, denser, more profound and, in a way, longer because it is fuller.

I think of the internal journey that it must have been for Gustave, this last travel going from New York to L'Asile, stopping through Dame Marie. I see it as a rite of passage towards what parcel of divinity he carried in him, a rite that would allow his giving birth to the Jesus of his being.

To come to Dame Marie by the road, leaving from Jeremie, means that one arrives from high up, over the hills. The Church nests in the village, under a vast, clear sky and shines like a pearl, first from afar and minute, then growing more and more...