Crossroads and Unholy Water

Caribbean Corpses

 Caribbean Corpses for Allen Litowitz Midday. The family sits behind Emmanuel’s corpse. His adolescent granddaughters, self-conscious, their bursting nipples squeezed in white Sunday dresses: three child brides for their grandfather’s funeral. Sweat gathers and tickles in the crease behind their knees. A veil of mosquito netting is spread over the body in the open casket. On the wall above the coffin, a porcelain blond Christ points to his own bleeding heart. Green mildew lines swerve down Saint Peter’s whitewashed walls in Pétionville. Lizards copulate behind the old Way of the Cross. One granddaughter wants to keep this last image of her grandfather: nose with folded wings which seemed to guard his face; teeth long and yellowed, some old molars, rotting— it’s almost a relief his lips have now snapped shut. Her eyes make out his hands—fingers like her father’s, who just happened to cast a glance at his mother because his ex-wife—number two—is walking up the aisle, dressed in white lace. Emmanuel’s old bride had already spotted her. Today she must mask her joy at having won her son back since his divorce. When she does not nag about his failed marriages, she complains about his now dead father—she says Emmanuel still masturbated at eighty-eight and it’s his own fault if he died. Oui Maman, her son says; “the doctor thinks I starved him but it is not so.” Oui M’man; “. . . couldn’t come to the table . . . has no strength . . . a hypochondriac! It’s his own damn fault!” Oui M’man.  Mosquitoes buzz in circle formation over sweaty scalps of women smelling of too much Frangipani or Florida cologne. Dressed in lace, satin, taffeta, they fan themselves with one hand, slap flies with the other. Men, in dark suits, repeatedly wipe their foreheads and the back of their necks; so does the government’s representative sent to pay homage to the years Emmanuel worked as a state civil engineer. People searching the ceiling for air vents, wondering who the hell planned this building like that, find Saint Theresa’s eyes are also looking up to heaven while Saint Lucy carries hers on a plate. Late, just off a plane from the U.S., Emmanuel’s daughter arrives at the portal. She enters with a long wail. Her friends turn bored and bloated eyes from either side of the aisle. She runs to bury her face in her father’s veil. Her mother’s jealous displeasure is distracted by a commotion in the next chapel where a new widow screams from the top of her lungs there is black magic in this place, the Priest is a God-damnblack -ass-Zombie-maker-husband-thief! It’s the wrong fucking corpse in the box. Now something new is coming slowly down the aisle: a white three-legged bitch with yellow eyes, its head low, tail tucked close between the hind legs, drooped tits brushing the mosaic floor. It pauses, looks people briefly in the eyes, finally walks up to where Emmanuel lies. A breeze almost lifts the veil, but the dog drops a paw on it just in time, pulls it all off into a pile, thinking Ha! Human beings and their white veils! Give me a break . . . Sits on it, yawns, scratches its fleas with a vengeance. ...