Retribution in Haiti

THE PENCIL OF GOD (204 pp.)--Pierre Marcelin and Philippe Thoby-Marcelin --Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

Diogene Cyprien, prosperous Haitian trader, had only one serious weakness: women. Otherwise, he was a most estimable citizen, honest in business and kind to his children. When his old mother died, he promised her to abide by most of the Christian virtues, but he drew the line at being faithful to his wife. And when he set eyes on the luscious Lourdes, with her full mouth and hypnotic eyes, he knew temptation had struck again. He went on another fling.

Fling and consequences form the action of The Pencil of God, an engrossing novel about the damage wrought by African voodoo on middle-class Haitians. Product of a miniature literary renaissance in Haiti, The Pencil of God gleams with quaint freshness, a strange blend of Haitian folklore and Western sophistication. To many U.S. readers the world of Diogene Cyprien may, in fact, seem almost outlandish: here the symbols of voodoo and Roman Catholicism merge in half-enlightened minds, men are possessed by implacable spirits they cannot control, and the day-to-day world is seen as an acting-out of the imperatives of voodoo mythology.

Sacks & Bats. Though himself a skeptic, Diogene is finally undone by the imperatives. When he uses a variety of tricks to seduce Lourdes, the town of Saint Marc looks on with amused tolerance. After all, he is the local Don Juan. But when he refuses to acknowledge Lourdes's baby, her enraged mother, Zeline, pronounces a curse on him, and Saint Marc knows that trouble is ahead. Sure enough, a few days later, Diogene's wife comes down with a seizure, screaming, "I beg you, please get this sack off my head..." Everyone knows what that means: Zeline has cast a spell on her.

As a practical man, Diogene seeks an ally in God ("His reach is long, and besides, it's never wise to get the Church down on one"). But God does not seem to help much. In the eyes of his friends, Diogene is a marked man. Accepted witnesses see him "in the guise of a werewolf," flapping wings like a giant bat, as a huge hog with seven lighted candles on his head.

Ruin & Flames. In desperation, Diogene resorts to voodoo. He attends the "baptism" of Lourdes's baby, which involves dousing it in a basin of rum and perfume and then passing it over flames. He allows his wife to be treated by a voodoo sorceress who whips her seven times and plunges her into a foul bath prepared from sea water, herbs and asafetida. But even Diogene himself feels it is too late. A few days later his eldest boy dies in a fever. His wife gone mad, Diogene himself is found dead on his boy's grave. Voodoo has done its work--or as Diogene's half-Christian uncle sums everything up, "The pencil of God has no eraser."

Haitians themselves, Authors Pierre and Philippe Marcelin never break into their story with anthropological asides or other pretensions. As novelists first of all, they are content merely to show voodoo's power in the lives of their characters. Thus, though the individual scenes of The Pencil of God are almost all slyly comic, the final impact of the book is one of clean human tragedy. The Marcelin brothers have not beaten Sophocles, but they have written a sound little story of retribution that the Greeks would have understood pretty well.

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