How to Escape From a Leper Colony Read online

  Advance Praise for How to Escape from a Leper Colony

  “In this Widest of Sargasso Seas Tiphanie Yanique gives us the pan-Caribbean, from the old lepers’ colony on Chacachacare, off the coast of Trinidad, to St. John, Accra, and London. It’s an astonishing debut collection—as brutal, sexual, magical, and seductively disturbing as if Jean Rhys had written it today.”—Robert Antoni

  “How To Escape from a Leper Colony is fiction of the first rank. Tiphanie Yanique explores the ferociously complex terrain of her native Caribbean to show what it means to live in a world where accidents of culture, country, history, race, and place figure so bewilderingly in, as the author puts it, ‘the divine risks of love.’ Every single one of these extraordinary stories delivers a necessary revelation. So few of us can hope to see with any clarity, much less make sense of, this world, but Yanique—and we should be profoundly grateful for this—sees and understands a very great deal indeed.”—Ben Fountain

  “With turns to the wild, clever, and magical that seem at once fantastic and inevitable, Tiphanie Yanique has crafted a beautiful collection of short and not-so-short fiction. This is an exciting new voice.”—Percival Everett

  “This splendid debut collection reveals a storyteller of multiple gifts and ample heart. Yanique’s writing is very fine, her characters are authentic and memorable, and her vision is deeply humane.”—Sigrid Nunez

  “Tiphanie Yanique has written powerful stories, in luminous prose, that reveal a Caribbean beyond tourist brochures, stories that tell of human triumphs and failures. A wonderful read.”—Elizabeth Nunez, author of Anna In-Between

  “These are fiercely original, poetic, and bold stories from a writer who is a force to be reckoned with. I loved every minute of this book and was in awe of nearly every paragraph.”—Cristina Henriquez, author of The World in Half

  “In these powerful, poetic stories set in landscapes real and imagined, Tiphanie Yanique explores beautifully race, family, and the complicated movements of the heart.”—Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, author of Sister of My Heart and The Palace of Illusions

  “Tiphanie Yanique has a gift for writing about physical displacement and the longing for connection that ensues. The unique stories in How to Escape from a Leper Colony meditate on confused expressions of love and spirituality in fresh and surprising ways.”—Emily Raboteau

  “Tiphanie Yanique is a writer to watch. Although How to Escape from a Leper Colony is her debut, she writes with the wisdom and confidence of an old soul. The title story alone is worth the price of admission, but each of these stories contained in this gorgeous collection are clear-eyed, honest while still zinging with emotion. Tiphanie Yanique is blessed with an electric imagination, an expansive heart, and an unflinching gaze. I can’t wait to see what she does next.”—Tayari Jones

  “In How to Escape from a Leper Colony, Tiphanie Yanique takes as her subject the outsider, the immigrant, the uprooted. A boy from Ghana is transplanted to Brixton, trading his palm-wine-drinking friends in Accra for new football-playing mates. A Gambian priest finds friendship in a coffin shop in the Caribbean; a one-time Pentecostal leaves her birthplace and dons a burka in an effort to win back her Muslim husband. The stories of these men and women, and the extraordinary grace and sympathy with which they’re told, serve as urgent, vivid reminders in this age of displacement and migration, of how powerfully and urgently each human heart aches for its home.”—Kathleen Cambor

  HOW TO ESCAPE FROM A LEPER COLONY

  HOW TO ESCAPE FROM A LEPER COLONY

  A Novella and Stories

  Tiphanie Yanique

  Graywolf Press

  Copyright © 2010 by Tiphanie Yanique

  Publication of this volume is made possible in part by a grant provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota; and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art. Significant support has also been provided by Target; the McKnight Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  This book is made possible through a partnership with the College of Saint Benedict, and honors the legacy of S. Mariella Gable, a distinguished teacher at the College. Support has been provided by the Lee and Rose Warner Foundation as part of the Warner Reading Program.

  Special funding for this title has been provided by the Jerome Foundation.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-55597-550-0

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-053-6

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2009933820

  Cover design: Kapo Ng @ A-Men Project

  Cover photo: “Lover’s Tree,” Moses Djeli

  For the Virgin Islands

  “Lead us toward those we are waiting for,

  those who are waiting for us.”

  From the prayer to Saint Raphael,

  patron saint of lovers and travelers

  Contents

  How to Escape from a Leper Colony

  The Bridge Stories

  Street Man

  The Saving Work

  Canoe Sickness

  Where Tourists Don’t Go

  The International Shop of Coffins

  Kill the Rabbits

  HOW TO ESCAPE FROM A LEPER COLONY

  Introduction

  Babalao Chuck said that when they found the gun it was still in the volunteer’s pulsing hands. The child was covered in his mother’s blood and body. Her red sari redder. The volunteers at the leper colonies were young Trinidadian doctors and British journalists and criminals trading time in jail for time among lepers, and sometimes young people who carried tiny Bibles in their pockets. No one ever told me which kind killed Lazaro’s mother. The volunteer was asked to leave and that was to be the end of it.

  What evil thing Lazaro will do later we will forgive him for without remorse, because we know his past and because we know he is one of us. For a leper, many things are impossible, and many other things are easily done. Babalao Chuck said he could fly to the other side of the island and peek at the nuns bathing. And when a man with no hands claims that he can fly, you listen. He would return and tell us about the steam in the nuns’ showers. About how they had soap that lathered. How they had shampoo that smelled like flowers.

  1st Burn the dead

  When I came to Chacachacare it was 1939 and I was only a girl of fourteen. I came for two reasons. The first was to bury my father who had lived there for three years and only just died. The second was because I had become a leper. It was in my arm. The same arm my mother held with her own hands, said a prayer over, before leaving me on the dock. Her cotton sari swishing the ground as she ran back to the junction to catch a wagon that would take her to the train that would take her the whole day to get back to Siparia, way down South in Trinidad. I thought of her sitting for hours, her face against the glass, the hole in her nose empty because she had sold the gold to buy me a used red sari and a bag of sweets as a gift to my new caretakers.

  I also sat that whole day. I was waiting for the nuns to come get me. I pretended I could hear the sounds of the junction where the wagon driver had dropped us off. The junction wasn’t San Fernando or Port of Spain, which we had only rushed by in the train, but it was the biggest loudest place I had ever really been.
It was like a wedding in my village with all the food laid out for me to stare at. Men crowded around a small stand that sold raw oysters. They dipped the shells in hot pepper sauce before slurping the meat down their throats. Women reached up for brightly colored buckets and brooms that hung on display. My mother and I rushed by, avoiding getting close to people. We only stopped once to stare at an automobile that roared by in smoke and shielded an African driver who wore bright white gloves. I could not see his passenger. Besides the big work equipment on the plantation, I had never seen an automobile before.

  Slowly the festivities disappeared. The busy road turned into a dusty path where there were odd crisscross markings in the dirt that my mother said were from an automobile, like the one we had seen. After hours of walking, and my mother telling stories of her young life in Namakkal, we could more than smell the ocean, we could hear it. And then we were walking along a wood dock with the sea beneath us. My mother sat me down with my legs hanging over the side and pointed to the small mound many miles out into the ocean. That would be my new home, she told me, where the nuns would take me in and bless me with the sacrament of Confirmation when I was older. She did not say, if I lived to be older. Instead she kissed me on the mouth and made me promise not to eat the sweets. And she left. And then it was so quiet, with only the waves and the breeze as sounds of life, that I closed my eyes and pretended that I was back in the junction, eating oysters in pepper sauce, putting them in my mouth with my good hand.

  My arm was wrapped and in a sling. When the wagon driver had asked, my mother told him I had broken it and she was taking me to an obeah man. I was ashamed that she had been made to sin, to tell a lie, because of me. Even in my mind I could not forget how my elbow was hurting me in a funny way that wasn’t about pain. Even alone on the dock I was too afraid to touch it, to give that arm the healing power of the other one. I was afraid to touch places on me that weren’t even private. And I was going to die for it. Die for having those places. My mother held my hand, then left.

  It was not a parade of white nuns who came for me. It was a lay volunteer, all wrapped in cloth. Someone doing community service for a crime committed or someone doing penance for a sin confessed. “Get in the boat,” he directed. In his voice I knew that he was a man, for nothing in his gauzed body revealed it. I could not tell if he was Indian or African or French. The skin around his eyes was covered in a dark protective salve. We did not speak as we motored the five miles to Chacachacare.

  At the Chacachacare dock he told me to go, go. I tucked the sweets under my arm and heaved myself—one-handed—out of the boat. The boat sped off to the safer, healthy side of the island. I faced the intake house. It was a welcoming hue. Not the color of sores or withered limbs. The walls were blue, a mother’s color, and the trimmings were green, the color of life. I did not think I would be unhappy here.

  I presented the bag of sweets to the young nun who greeted me. She cradled it with her gloved hands and smiled. Then she sent me to bathe in the sea. “Hurry,” she said. “Before it gets dark.” I did as I was told. I knew that the Caribbean Sea could heal many things. If you have a cold, go bathe in the sea. If you are melancholy, go bathe in the sea. If you are a leper, go bathe in the sea—but on the lepers’ side.

  He was there on the beach when I came out of the water. Lazaro was not the name he was born with. He was given that name because he refused to die. He was sixteen when I met him that first day, older than me by two years but much smaller in size. I stood a head above him. I had some softness in places, chest and cheek, where he seemed hollow. He had been born in the colony and still showed no signs of leprosy and no signs of leaving. The world would not have him. Surely the leprosy would show soon. In truth, he had nowhere to go. His mother, a dougla, had passed on her mixed genes. One could not tell if Lazaro was African or Indian—there was talk that there was French in him, too. That his father was French. That his father was one of the French priests who came over once a week to celebrate the Mass. Who is to know? The dougla, the mixed race, might be a type of chameleon. They can claim any heritage they desire. They can claim all if they like. Though it is true that not all will claim them in return.

  “Is your father they burning tomorrow?” he asked me as he skipped stones into the water.

  The sun was almost down. My sari, a lovely red but frayed in places, clung to me, and I felt cold. He wore only a pair of children’s short pants. I hadn’t thought about my father all day. “I been thinking they would bury him, even though he Indian.”

  “You thinking wrong. Here we all Indian, no matter how much African we have in us.”

  We began to walk back to the surgery, where I would spend the night. The nuns, who were our nurses, hadn’t decided yet on my treatment. I looked over Lazaro’s small body. “Where your leper part?”

  “I all leper.”

  “Where?”

  He tugged at the crotch of his pants. “In my head.” I expected him to pull his thing out and show it to me shriveled. I waited anxiously. “The next head, rude girl.” He laughed loud enough that I grew ashamed I had been staring. He pointed to his temple. “It’s in my mind.”

  On my second day I watched them push my father’s wrapped body into the crematorium. The nun who had sent me to the sea, Sister Theresa, stood with her many replicas. Their white faces pink with the heat, their hair covered in veils with blue bands about the forehead. They were all young enough to be my mother—not like the old dogs at my school in Trinidad who wore huge winglike headdresses. I didn’t understand why they cremated the lepers when they seemed to have so much bare land on the island. When I asked Sister Theresa she told me that this was okay because so many of the lepers are Hindu anyway.

  But it wasn’t okay, not really. Because my mother is a Christian and she told me that if I went to Chacachacare the nuns would feed me better than she could, and give me medicine that she could not, and that I would be buried under a stone like Jesus.

  There were two churches. One for the Catholics where the nuns joined us on Sundays and one for the Protestants—who were thought of as exotic. There wasn’t any place for Hindus. Though my parents were both Indian, only my father had been Hindu. From him I knew that the Hindu god wasn’t so different from the Christian god. One manifestation came in many dozens of forms while the other version came in only three. But the same god. The same jealous god, the same god who fell in love. The Christian god even sometimes fell in love with men, like King David. “God loved King David the way a woman loved a man.” My mother would slap my father in the face when he said things like that. Then she would accept his cuffs as her martyrdom. When he showed the first signs of leprosy in his fingers she told him that it was God’s punishment. But he would not repent. For me, it was easy to chant about Jesus Christ and slip in a Lord Krishna here and there.

  2nd Go to the cinema

  For many days the nuns did not know where to put me. I slept in the surgery where they took blood and logged my wounds into a tablet with only my given name, Deepa, in block letters. One option was an Indian woman who had left her child behind with family when she became a leper. She wanted me, but the nuns thought that this might be bad for us both. I, an Indian child, had left a mother behind. It was too perfect to be healthy. The nuns were not keen on putting me with a young man or even with a man and his wife. I could be temptation. Nuns knew about temptation.

  They put me in a one-room house with an old African woman. “This your bed,” she said. “Yours against the wall and mine besides the door. This so if there is a fire my old leper legs will have less distance to go. Is also so I can keep my eye on your comings and goings. There’s all kind of talk of a cure for the leprosy and if you go back to your mother I don’t want she to think I been raising you poorly.” Her name was Tantie B. I had never known my grandparents, since my mother had sailed over from Madras in southern India before I was born. I knew only southern Trinidad. Tantie B was my grandmother in Chacachacare. And Lazaro was my brother.r />
  For the first months after I arrived Lazaro would take me for walks. The island was green with palm and sea grape trees. It was loud with the howler monkeys that snored all day and mated all night. Lazaro and I often went beyond the fence that kept the lepers to the leper side. We would climb under it, through a gorge deep enough for a body. It had been first dug out by an iguana and now maintained by Lazaro. We would climb trees. We would eat green fruit and spit the seeds out, aim for lizards and fire ants. One day Lazaro took me farther than he had before.

  “There,” he said, pointing down the hill to a clearing with spots of gray. “The nun burial ground. That’s where they put the nuns’ bodies. That’s where I want to be buried.”

  “But you ain a nun.”

  “Who say?”

  “You a boy. You couldn’t be a nun.”

  “Why I can’t be a nun? Didn’t Peter take over the family after Jesus dead, like widows does do? Peter get to be buried under some rock. I want a rock over me.”

  We climbed down the hill to look at the burial site. The grounds were clean but sharp with ankle-high grass. When we walked we made a swishing sound like waves. The stones over the graves were marked: Sister Marie, Lover of the Lord; Sister Margaret, Lover of the Word; Sister Ann, Lover of the poor and the wretched. We sat among the stones. Lazaro patted my arm gently.

  “Soon they going have to chop some of it away.”

  “I know.”

  “You afraid?”

  “Yes.”

  “You brave?”

  “Yes.”

  “What you love?”

  “My mother.”

  “And who she?”

  “She …” I paused. I had not seen or heard from my mother in months. I had not expected her to write because she had had very little schooling. But what was she now? Was she a new wife? Was she going to be someone else’s mother? “She a woman who works in the cane field. She does pray to Saint Anne to send her signs.” I pushed some dirt around with my toe. “Who was your mother?” I already knew of Lazaro’s tragedy from the little things Tantie B had whispered to me at night, and the stories Babalao Chuck told in the clearing when Lazaro was off helping haul in the goods from the delivery boat. I knew, but it still seemed the right thing to ask. I lowered my head so Lazaro would know I did not mean to be bold.