The Enchanted Second Lieutenant
After that, no one ever saw Second Lieutenant Wheelbarrow again in his cabin at Bassins-Coquilleaux. His manuscript is quite fragmentary, quite obscure, but in it he speaks with such an accent of joy and fulfillment that he may truly have known happiness. If the scraps of his journal that have come down to me are the work of a madman, then I don't think the happiness all of us look for is far removed from madness. Perhaps his notes are somewhat incoherent, but then I distrust reason that's too cold and rational.
"When she wants to taste a guava," wrote Lieutenant Wheelbarrow, "I immediately feel two, cold, acid streams flowing along my jaws. She doesn't need to speak. Our eyes meet, our hands clasp, and we rush out to the countryside . . ."
It seems that they never rested, and that every night they ran through the mountains. Earl wrote in his journal:
"I hurt myself falling into a deep ravine. She picked me up and carried me into the grotto. My calf is half torn off, but I'm not suffering. She gathers fresh dew to bathe my wound; that's all. She takes care of me, and if by chance she sees a shadow of pain in my eyes, she simply puts her mouth to my wound, and immediately the pain is gone."

Earl Wheelbarrow must have reached the point of human knowledge where one participates in every breath, every vibration, of living matter. He notes:
"Yesterday she told me that she would teach me to laugh like the flowers. For hours she directed my lessons. Then I felt a great peace and our bodies merged . . . "
He relates further:
"Now I can stay for long minutes underwater . . . The fish come and go around us, come close, look at us, rub against us, and leave again with slow strokes . . . I can't make them snuggle into my hand yet the way she can . . . "
Then: "Last night it was cold. I felt chilled. Then she beckoned. I slid behind her into the narrow fault in the grotto that descends almost straight down. We went down into the heart of the earth for perhaps an hour. At a point where the space widened, we stopped and settled in a crevice. There was a soft warmth everywhere. I felt the radiant life of the depths vibrating against my body and the trembling of the great thermal waters dancing under the earth's flesh. Some kind of little golden flies flitted around us. I penetrated her and we slept . . . We went back up when day broke . . . "

If the manuscript is to be believed, life is a brotherhood among the Vien-Viens:
"Life is sometimes hard in the mountains, and it may happen that we're hungry. If I've picked a fruit, a bitter-sweet root, a sugary stalk, she won't eat if I won't bite our find with her, turn by turn . . . Then her eyes are the most loving color I've ever seen."
Never was there a more intimate union than that of Earl Wheelbarrow and the survivor of the gentle Xemi people. I read in his pages:
"The other day, for just a few seconds my spirit wandered far, very far away. She knew it immediately. So she took the musician-bird that lives with us and closed my fingers around this bouquet of living feathers. At that moment, I felt all the vibrancy of her love, her love as large as life, pass through me . . . "
I decipher from another fragment: "She takes my hands, rests her head against my chest, and stays there for long hours listening to my heart beat. I am merged with her . . . Often we play: she's the waterfall, and I bathe in the mad tumble of her blueblack hair . . . "

Earl Wheelbarrow was still young, yet he was constantly anxious about the passage of ever-fleeing time. I can make out these sentences:
"I have no impression of aging or using myself up. I feel sure that I'll go out like a candle some far-off day. May it be as far-off as possible, for she doesn't know what it is to cry! . . . She would tie herself to my remains and hold me tightly against her until death came for her, too. She would let herself starve to death, but she would never let me go . . . That was, she told me, what the wives of the great caciques did in the olden days: they accompanied their mates into the tomb . . ."

Perhaps the enchanted second lieutenant learned all the secrets of the Xemi people, the secrets we would like so much to know. In any case, it seems that several times he was in contact with other Vien-Viens. He relates:
"I saw the great red xemès-god in the immense underground chasm . . . She told me the great samba of the Xemi people and taught me the words of the great, ancient areytos."
I managed to read still more of the old, worn, tattered, ragged document whose letters are often faded by the water of heavy rains and by the sun's burning heat:
"With the rainy season, the great festivals of the sambas arrive. We blow three modulated notes into great conch shells, and our brothers and sisters on the mountains answer us from far away . . . Then we come together, we sing, we dance until the end of the rains . . . The music turns me into a wretched, torn-up thing; even my tearing is melodious and participates in hers . . ."

That's all I can say about the life of the enchanted second lieutenant, about the bitter poetry, the strange love that made it flare up like a Bengal light in the violet, violent mountains of the St. Marc highlands. He would run by night like an elf, drunk with the splendors of the mountains. He would run every night with his companion in the greening of the earth, in the mouth of the wind, in the shimmering of the waters. During the day he lived in the grottoes where lay the treasures amassed by the Cacique of the House of Gold, the formidable Caonabo. He knew all the ancient spells, all the songs, all the dances of Queen Anacaona the Great, the Golden Flower, those songs and those dances that the mistresses-of-the-waters and the mistresses of the mountains keep alive on moon-lit nights.