I ingested the blood of the goat at the Temple last night. They said it would clear my vision. I still hear the Banda played by three tanbou calling the lwa down to mount me. It turns me into their horse, rides me into the market where old plump women in straw hats dressed in bright cotton flowers announce their mangos just reduced to one goude a piece, toothpaste for fifty. They sit amid piles of yellow plastic bags, discarded Michelins, red banana peels, mud puddles a foot deep, and pecking hens that clutter the remains of the French colonial streets once the pride of Europe. Yeah, I'm walking, and everyone calls, "Ay, Blanc!" I try to smile at all my new friends who laugh at me because I'm alone in a part of town where none of the other Blancs, the nuns and relief workers, will wander. Barefoot children push discarded bicycle wheels with sticks. Seeing me they stop, thinking I am a ghost. An orange-blue-yellow-red tap-tap zips by with people holding on in its old pick-up bed outfitted with benches and a thatched roof. Men play rummy in a vacant decrepit Victorian gingerbread storefront, rusting fretwork embellishments hanging loose from the eaves above them. The men throw their cards and yell at each other, laughing, dressed in pressed white shirts as if some job awaits them.

The Rada in my head keep repeating the rhythms from Dahomey, as I pass the rows of artists hawking their wares along Champs de Mars. I wish Legba would open up the pathways and let me escape into the forests and desolate villages of the Grande Anse peninsula. But Legba won't listen. The power of Ezili Danto has latched on to my heart and Marie wants me to hide in the downstairs guest quarters and make love all day while her husband is away, the morning sun like a parasite that wrings all semblance of an ordered life out through my pores in sweat. The sores on my arms and back are from bathing in the polluted water, I think. I hope they will go away. I think I got Chagas from the bug that flew into my wattle and daub hut and bit me on the arm; I breathe harder going uphill. It might be tuberculosis. I hate antibiotics so I avoid the doctors at all costs.