Free In Darkness by Nick Lake Page A

started to shake, and then we went all stiff and weird; to anyone looking at us it seemed we were possessed. It was a trick we knew how to do.
    Then we chanted back:
     
    — Mwen rele Marassa,
    Mwen engage dans pays-a.
     
    My name is Marassa. I love this country, too.
    Around us, everyone went crazy. They were shouting and singing and throwing the sweets in the air, and I thought, throw one of those sweets over here. And now I could say it cos now I was Marassa, and Marassa could do what Marassa wanted to do. I glanced at Manman. I knew she would be pissed, but I didn’t care.
    — Give us sweets, we said, cos to be sure Marguerite was thinking the same thing.
    — Give us toys.
    People started to scrabble on the floor, picking up all this stuff that the kid had only just thrown there. They brought it to us. And when they put it in our laps, they put money, too, and sometimes they asked questions. It was hard to hear and it was hard to see, with all the people and the smoke. But we did our best.
    — Will I ever have a baby?
    — Yes. Yes, you will. Marassa bless you.
    — Will I see my Nerese again?
    — When the time is right, yes. Marassa bless you.
    — Will my karamel come back to me? Will she leave her husband and come back to me?
    — No.
    — Will Aristide stay in power?
    — Yes.
    Always yes to that one. Always, with no hesitation.
    You had to do the touch, too, of course. A blessing is not a blessing if it’s just words, everyone knows that. Got to be touch with it. So each person who drops money, you hold out your hand and you touch them on the hand, or on the head if they’re kneeling, and they get this dumb expression on their face like they just saw the clouds open and angels fall out, or some shit.
    Some of them, they only wanted the touch. No questions; they just came limping, crawling, even, and they waited there for the touch. I felt kind of bad about those people. You knew them: you knew them cos they had arms missing, or legs, and they stared around with blank eyes, or they had bits of them swollen up like watermelons, or they were just gray and thin – and those were the worst ones. We didn’t like to touch them. But we did it. We did it cos we were told to, but also cos it was all we could do. We always gave them our blessing.
    Well. Almost always.
    And at the end, there we were, with toys and money and sweets in our laps. It was like a damn party, but we couldn’t enjoy it right then cos we had to seem like we were wise and magical and from old Africa. Course, sometimes we had to be rude, or not make any sense, cos that’s what people expect from Marassa – as lwa, the twins are powerful, but they’re kids. They don’t do everything all goody-two-shoes and clean and predictable.
    — Is my husband cheating on me?
    — Of course he is. You’re ugly.
    Sometimes, and this was the nasty thing, you had to turn away from the sick people, too. Marassa are childlike: the twins take against some people, no fault of theirs, no fault of the lwa, either. Me and Marguerite, we hated doing this. We chose before the ceremony – like, every third man, we’ll ignore him, OK?
    Sometimes these people cried. It was fucking terrible.
    So, anyway, all of this was like it always was. Manman, she went over to Dread Wilmè and was talking to him, and people started to file out.
    We began to put the money together. What happened was that we gave this money to Dread Wilmè. The sweets, we could keep. Not the toys. Papa might see the toys and then he might know what we were doing, and even though we didn’t really understand it, we knew that would be bad.
    Daylight always came down from upstairs when the trapdoor was opened, but suddenly there was a solid shaft of light in the basement, like someone had thrown the trapdoor wide open. And in that shaft of light were the rickety stairs from the upstairs world.
    Papa came down the steps. It hadn’t seemed like a strange day till then, but at that moment it did. We