The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover Read online

  THE

  WOMAN

  WHO LOST

  HER SOUL

  ALSO BY BOB SHACOCHIS

  Easy in the Islands (short stories)

  The Next New World (short stories)

  Swimming in the Volcano (novel)

  Domesticity (essays)

  The Immaculate Invasion

  THE

  WOMAN

  WHO LOST

  HER SOUL

  BOB SHACOCHIS

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2013 by Bob Shacochis

  Excerpts from this novel have appeared in Artful Dodger, The Darfur Anthology,

  Snake Nation Review, Conjunctions, and Consequence magazines.

  Jacket design by Royce M. Becker; Jacket photograph © Sam Diephuis / Getty images

  The author wishes to thank Florida State University for

  its grant support in the writing of this book.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by

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  Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011

  or [email protected].

  e-book ISBN: 978-0-8021-9309-4

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  For Helen For Liam

  —Meminimus

  I know what it means to beget monsters

  And to recognize them in myself . . .

  Great was the chase with the hounds for the unattainable meaning of the world . . .

  Enter my dreams, love.

  —Czeslaw Milosz

  THE

  WOMAN

  WHO LOST

  HER SOUL

  Book One

  Fuzzing It Up

  Haiti 1998, 1996, 1998

  It is no secret that souls sometimes die in a person and are replaced by others.

  —Fernando Pessoa

  In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

  —Winston Churchill

  During the final days of the occupation, there was an American woman in Haiti, a photojournalist—blonde, young, infuriating—and she became Thomas Harrington’s obsession.

  Why have you never told me the story of this girl? Harrington’s wife asked, dumbfounded but curious. They stood in the kitchen of their gardenia-scented home in South Miami, finishing the vodka cocktails she had mixed to celebrate his reinstallment into her landscaped domain, its calibrated patterns, everything perfectly in its place except her husband. Why have you waited until now? A pained crinkle etched a border of mystification around the brightness of her eyes.

  Expecting an answer, she followed him through the house, upstairs to their sun-scoured bedroom where he began unpacking his filthy clothes. Here, he said with a hopeful trace of enthusiasm, this is for you, and he gave her a gift he had brought from Port-au-Prince, a small but moderately expensive painting by Frantz Zephirin.

  And what should he tell her? That he had become too involved with a woman, and too involved with the greater infidelities of the world? And would rather say nothing of both?

  If he told her everything, he imagined, correctly, she would want to leave him, or she would pray for the salvation of his distant heart, which was the salvation of a man in a time and a place and a country and not the salvation of an immortal self, because when Americans pray, they pray first that history will step aside and leave them alone, they pray for the deafness that comes with a comfortable life. They pray for the soothing blindness of happiness, and why not?

  But history walks on all of us, lashed by time, and sometimes we feel its boot on our backs, and sometimes we are oblivious to its passing, the swing of sorrow and triumph through humanity, sorrow, and then, finally, crippling grief fading to obscurity, which is perhaps why Americans want little to do with history, why perhaps they hate it, why prayer comes easier than remembrance, which is how history knots its endless endings and measures the rise and fall of its breath. And when history swirls around you and passes on and you inhale its aftermath, the bitterness of its ashes and the bygone sweetness of time, and excrete history into memory, you never quite believe you had once heard its thunderous God-like whispering, that you had trembled in the face of its terrible intimacies, and you fell silent.

  Against this silence, Harrington understood it was possible only to speak to other silences. Why would you choose to expose such ugliness, if not in yourself then in the world?

  For two years Tom Harrington did not tell his wife, but now she would hear this story, enough of it anyway, that had so abruptly leaped far, far beyond his ownership, his private collection. And would she know him better afterward? Would she know him as he knew himself? And then what? Would she know him at all?

  His own story of this woman in Haiti was a fragment at best, it’s important to say, but his silence was not meant to spare his wife from a betrayal, at least not of the sort she suspected, but there are many, many betrayals we visit upon one another, their forms infinite, some beyond comprehension, some no more serious than a quick sting. He had kept the story from her simply because he had gotten nowhere with it in his own mind, and did not understand his role in its events, nor the meaning of its elements, and he suspected that somehow this story would always slip and tumble into the hole of self-indictment. Yet what had he done that was so wrong, what had he done that was not justified by the behavior of others? What was his sin? He could not grasp it, but in the recesses of his soul he knew it was there.

  There were things you might say, stories you could tell, that would leave you diminished, that might outrage one’s sense of conscience or morality with their failings and audacities, their reckless disregard for the well-being of others. Perhaps not in every life, though Tom rejected the very nature of innocence. But yes, some stories diminished the teller, or shamed him in the eyes of honorable people, and often these stories were never told���or only half-told, rife with omissions, as Tom’s would be with his wife. They lay quiet yet unpeaceful within the black cave of secrets that was part of anyone’s soul, and perhaps their silence was as it should be, the last asylum for propriety, for decency.

  It’s extraordinary, his wife said, admiring the canvas.

  The gallery on Rue Petion had obtained another Zephirin, larger, more fanciful in its circus of cruelties, that he had wanted to buy for her but never had the chance. Why he told her this he couldn’t say because it wasn’t true, it had simply fallen from his mouth, part of another story
he was making up.

  She looked at him sideways, measuring what she must have imagined to be the careful implication of his voice. Oh. Do you have to go back? she asked, and he knew that because this was a busy time of the year for her at the office she’d be unhappy if he was leaving again.

  I can’t. I seem to have been declared persona non grata.

  Tom? She was absently pulling clothes from his small canvas bag and tossing them into the laundry hamper and she froze, gasping, her eyes wide and a hand raised to her mouth. Oh, my God, she said. What’s on these pants? Is this blood? Her sweet, earnest face, becalmed by the gentle tides of a comfortable life, filled with a look of mortification. Dutiful wife, instinctive mother, she sniffed at a patch of the stains, repulsed. They’re covered with blood! There’s so much of it. Tom, what happened?

  Yes, that. What happened. He would have to tell her something but he did not know where to begin or where to end and he did not know if she should ever, ever know him so well, or how he spent his days when he was away from her.

  CHAPTER ONE

  He had been home a month, after a month’s assignment in the Balkans, and had just begun to reestablish himself in the routines of daily life as husband and father, enjoying the pleasant drudgery of the supermarket, cooking meals for his wife and daughter, exercising the dog at dawn on the beach, afterward the newspaper with coffee in the morning, a novel with cognac at night, videos on the weekend, all of them in the same bed, the dog wedged between like a flatulent pillow, a suburban middle-class tableau repeated endlessly in his life, and endlessly interrupted by his restlessness—the phone rings and Tom Harrington is gone. He and his wife had constructed a life in South Miami that made sense to everyone else but him, though its comforts were undeniable. In fact, they were precious, and at constant risk of going stale, so he had made them exotic novelties, these pleasures, sucked them to near depletion, then ran off to hunt the nearest white whale, that thing we need to do to keep us from our disappointment or lethargy, to jolt ourselves back to feeling. But always, inevitably, he would trudge home, and give himself over to the icing down.

  A month away, a month at home, the whiplashed schedule of a humanitarian yo-yo, a perpetual routine of domestic guess who. Honey? I’m home. Maybe. Hope so. Sorry to have missed the kid’s birthday.

  He was sitting on a bench outside the quad of his daughter’s small private school nestled within a grove of banyan trees and palms, a cigarette in his mouth, waiting for classes to end. The school offered no bus service or, rather, discontinued it when over-involved parents made the convenience superfluous, and it was Tom’s duty to relieve his wife of this chore whenever he was in town. That day he was early; usually he was late. Other parents began arriving.

  I never see you, someone said, a woman’s voice, behind him, and he swiveled around. This woman lived in the neighborhood but worked in an office downtown for a nationwide private security firm, doing what he could not tell. She was tough and brusque and solid and it was strange to see her in a flowery dress and not in the jeans and motorcycle boots and fringed leather jacket she wore when he would bump into her in the South Beach bars. Her daughter had been the first in seventh grade to wear makeup to class; Tom’s wife and daughter were still warring over lip gloss and eye shadow.

  She propped her sunglasses into her streaked hair and squinted. Do you know?—and she named a man, Conrad Dolan.

  Doors banged open and the children came in streams of ones and twos into the courtyard. No, he said. Was he supposed to?

  Without saying why, she explained she had spoken with him a few days back, up in Tampa where he lived. A journalist had been kidnapped last month in Peru. Dolan was the hostage negotiator brought in on the case.

  Harrington’s interest rose. How does one become a hostage negotiator? he asked.

  Twenty-one years with the Feds, fluency in Spanish and Portuguese, she said. He was private sector now, retired from the Bureau of Investigation.

  One of your guys?

  I wish. He works alone.

  Tom had never heard of him. He did not personally know many people like this, although they were always there in the background of his world; their days were different than his, more exclusive, circumscribed by their respective loyalties and institutions. Wherever you encountered them, there was less oxygen in the room for the uninitiated. You see them around, you talk with them when you have to. You stay out of their way—they keep you out of their way.

  What happened to the journalist?

  Dolan got him out.

  Their two daughters marched toward them, pretty faces sullen and pinched as if they had spent the day in court litigating their grievances. His at least knew to mumble a greeting before she slipped past to fling her books into the cab of his truck. The other one narrowed her eyes at them and kept walking toward the parking lot and her mother’s car.

  What do you suppose that’s about?

  Being twelve. Being girls.

  Jingling her keys, she said she had to run. The sunglasses fell and locked back over her eyes. So look, she said. Can I give Dolan your number? He wants to talk to you.

  Their seemingly idle conversation had taken an unexpected turn—Harrington’s working days were often spent seeking out authorities or tracking witnesses, knocking on the doors of strangers in search of the texture of lives under pressure or suddenly inflated into crisis, forming ephemeral intimacies with people never quite sure of his identity beyond the fact that he was in their eyes a foreign representative of a monolithic process. Ah, he has come to find me justice. Ah, he has come to challenge my power. Ah, he has come to help. Ah, he has come to ruin me.

  Why would he want to talk to me? Tom asked.

  The answer was at once familiar and tedious and he thought nothing of it. Dolan loved to follow the news, he had seen Harrington’s work on establishing a Truth Commission in Haiti, he liked to talk. Tom thought to himself, What was there left to talk about? After two hundred years Haiti had remained an infant and still required breast-feeding, but he said, Sure, give him the number, and they separated, each to their spoiled child, for a recitation of the day’s unforgivable crimes of pubescence.

  Three days later Dolan telephoned. Before Tom even had a chance to say hello, the person on the line had announced himself—Dolan here—and for a moment Tom paused, unsure of who this was. I sawr what you said about those bastards in Warshington . . . It was a voice, a type of nasal tone and run-on pattern of speech, that he associated with the cinema, the urban repertoire of the eastern United States, make-believe cops and make-believe robbers, Irish heroes and Italian villains, an accent resonant of both ivy and whiskey, upward mobility and the working-class neighborhoods of South Boston. It was not a voice he could listen to without smiling and if his wife had been in the room he would have cupped the mouthpiece and held out the phone and said, Get a load of this. But the abrupt specificity of his questions made Tom tight and serious: Dolan had connected with the right source. Tom was valuable, Tom had the answers. He knew what Conrad Dolan wanted to know.

  Say, what can you tell me about the condition of the Route Nationale One between Port-au-Prince and that town up the coast, what is it? Saint-Marc?

  In the earliest days of the invasion, weeks before the American military ventured out onto the road they would instantly name the Highway to Hell, Route Nationale One from Port-au-Prince to its terminus on the north shore was a six-hour-long gauntlet of axle-breaking misery, slamming boredom, heat, and fear. The tarmac had been carpet bombed by neglect, its surface so pocked and corroded that only a sharp-edged webbing of the original asphalt remained, so that the highway resembled a hundred-mile strip of Swiss cheese, many of the holes the size of a child’s wading pool. In September of 1994, it was empty except for macoutes and bandits, or impromptu checkpoints that provided the opportunity for extortion to
gangs of boys with machetes. Regardless of its disrepair, you drove Route Nationale One at top speed to reach your destination by nightfall, for it wasn’t a good place to be after the sun went down.

  What else do you want to know? he asked Dolan.

  The section of the road by the big quarry, across from the swamp, what the hell’s the name of it?

  Tintayen.

  There were stretches of the highway, especially outside of the capital along the coast, where if you focused deep and hard on the game you could rocket up to 120 kilometers per hour for five or ten minutes, slaloming around the hazards, making everybody with you carsick and terrified. Graveyards of wrecks dotted these stretches; pedestrians and livestock were occasionally killed by swerving drivers. About nine months into the occupation, a Haitian company was awarded a contract, funded by foreign aid, to resurface the highway. The requisite embezzlements ensued and a thin scab of rotten asphalt was rolled over the newly graded roadbed. Within a month, though, the pavement had festered and bubbled, the holes began to reappear where they had always been, and if you needed a quick metaphor to sketch the trajectory of American involvement in Haiti, Route Nationale One was there for your consideration.

  And this other quarry. There’s supposed to be another one, right?

  That’s right. Up the coast, on the water.

  Good place to run and hide?

  What do you mean?

  If you’re in trouble. Trying to get away from somebody.

  Not really.

  And what about this place on the coast, Moulin Sur Mer? asked Dolan. You ever been there?

  Lovely. Clean. Expensive by any standard. Good restaurant. Ruling-class getaway. Well-connected owners. The only reliable R & R between the capital and the north coast. Are you planning a trip? Tom wondered aloud.

  This Moulin Sur Mer, Dolan said. Would you say it’s a nice place to vacation, you know, take your wife?