Jean-Paul and Papier-Mâché Monsters

Patrick Sylvain

Carnival came to Jacmel the way a drumbeat comes to the ribs—sudden, intimate, impossible to ignore. By the time February rolled over the hills, the town already smelled of frying griot sizzling in black iron pans, sweet plantains caramelizing at roadside stands, Barbancourt rum and cheap homemade cocktails, and the sharp, impatient odor of wet paint. Masks bloomed in every doorway: devils with curling horns lacquered red as fresh peppers, queens with glittering eyes made from bottle caps and mirrors, growling tigers with sharp papier-mâché teeth, and strange beasts stitched from old curtains, chicken feathers, and new dreams. In Jacmel, people took deep pride in what they wore or fabricated for carnival. Families guarded their costume ideas the way others guarded recipes. A costume was not just a disguise. It was a second skin, a declaration to the whole city: This is who I dare to be tonight.

Jean-Paul D’Huile understood this better than most.

He was thirty-four and carried his years lightly, like a man who had never owned more than he could run with. By day he repaired fishing nets near the port, patient as a spider, his fingers moving in small sure knots while the sea slapped lazily against the stone pier. Tourists sometimes mistook him for a poet because of his quiet smile. By night—at least on the nights of Carnival—he became something else entirely. A shadow with polite manners. A ghost who knew which houses would be empty because their owners never missed the parades, which pockets would be loose with festival excitement, which doors trusted too much in their rusty locks. He laughed, drank, and fêted with everyone else, but his enjoyment went deeper than most. Behind his masks he felt taller, braver, almost important. He loved what he became when no one knew his name.

Three Carnivals had passed like that. Three seasons of laughter and rum and careless dancing, and three seasons when Jean-Paul walked away richer than he had been before—sometimes with a thin gold bracelet, sometimes with a wad of American dollars, once even with an apple computer he sold quietly in Cayes-Jacmel. He left behind only puzzled faces and overturned drawers. People spread rumors about a spirit-thief who could slip through walls like smoke. Others swore it was a gang of Ninjas from Port-au-Prince who arrived only during Carnival and vanished before Ash Wednesday. The Evangelicals, armed with loudspeakers and stern pamphlets, went on their conversion missions, preaching against sins and devils and the wickedness of masks, desperate to end what they called pagan festivity. The mysterious thefts, tangled with the wild rumors, galvanized them even more. At night they marched through the streets singing hymns, promising that judgment was near. In the noise of competing stories, no one imagined the quiet net-mender with the courteous smile and the habit of greeting his neighbors by name.

But the town was not as blind as he believed. Jacmel had long memory and patient eyes.

This year the masks were wilder than ever. Papier-mâché monsters with teeth like piano keys. Children dressed as angels whose cardboard wings shed white feathers into the gutters. Women in towering headdresses strutted like walking gardens. Bands marched through the narrow streets, shaking the old French balconies until even the pigeons danced nervously along the rooftops. Vendors shouted prices, whistles screamed, and drums argued with trumpets late into the humid nights. Somewhere beneath all that color and music, a quiet suspicion was also growing—thin as a hairline crack but spreading.

Jean-Paul chose his costume with care: a brilliant blue suit sewn by his cousin Mireille, who stitched sequins along the sleeves while gossiping about the whole neighborhood. The fabric was bright as the sea at noon when the sun stands directly over Jacmel Bay and makes even the poorest boat look rich. The color made him feel clean, forgiven in advance, as if the cloth itself could wash his intentions. He added a tall hat dusted with silver powder that clung to his fingers, and a clouded, phantom-of-the-opera–like mask carved into a calm, forgettable face. No horns, no fangs, nothing that begged for attention. Perfect, he thought as he studied himself in a cracked mirror. No one remembers the sky.

On the first day of Carnival, he tested his luck the way a fisherman tests the tide with one cautious toe. Near the iron market, a gold chain vanished from a distracted tourist busy arguing over the price of a wooden parrot. Later, by the parade route, a fat leather wallet wandered out of the back pocket of a loud diasporic man—perhaps from New York, judging by his accent and his shiny new sneakers. Easy harvests, plucked like ripe mangoes hanging low over a wall. Jean-Paul felt the old confidence return, warm and dangerous, humming pleasantly in his veins.

Still, he sensed something new in the crowd, a small tightness, like a knot pulled a little too hard. The streets felt watchful in a way he did not remember from other years.

At the corner of Rue du Commerce, where the smell of roasted peanuts mixed with the sour breath of spilled Prestige beer, he noticed a woman watching him. Not staring—just watching, the way a cat watches a lizard pretending to be a leaf. She wore a simple black domino mask and carried a wire basket of paint cans that clinked softly when she walked. Street artists were everywhere in Jacmel, painting murals and touching up costumes, but something about her gaze made his shoulders itch, as if she could see straight through the careful blue of his suit.

That evening he slipped into a house near the cathedral while the owners danced in the square beneath strings of blinking lights. The place smelled of incense and furniture polish. He worked quickly, respectfully even, choosing only what could be carried without noise. A wristwatch left carelessly on a bedside table. A handful of gourdes folded inside a Bible. A small silver plate engraved with the name of a long-dead grandmother, light enough to fit beneath his jacket like a sleeping baby.

Outside, the night was a river of music—drums rolling like distant thunder, trumpets laughing, whistles screaming with joy. He joined it, bobbing along in his blue costume, congratulating himself on another flawless evening.

“Bel koulè!” Someone shouted from a balcony. Beautiful color.

Jean-Paul tipped his silver-dusted hat, bowed as politely as a prince, and kept walking—unaware that, a few steps behind him, the woman with the paint cans had paused and was watching him disappear into the crowd.

On the second day the bands grew louder, bolder, as if the music itself had been drinking all night. Drums argued with trumpets, rara horns moaned like stubborn goats, and whistles sliced the hot air into bright, ragged pieces. Children chased men dressed as horned demons through clouds of talcum powder. Old women in straw hats clapped from doorways while teenagers balanced bottles of rum on their heads and pretended not to stumble. By noon the whole town felt slightly tilted, ready to spill over.

Jean-Paul planned a larger prize. He had his eye on the house of a merchant known to hide cash in a flour tin behind his wife’s good china—a man too cautious to trust banks and too proud to trust neighbors. Jean-Paul had listened carefully to gossip at the domino tables, collecting details the way others collected shells. He waited for the parade to swallow the neighborhood in a storm of drums and glitter, then slipped through a back window he had loosened a few days before while pretending to ask for directions.

Inside, the house was cool and smelled faintly of cloves and mothballs. A radio played kompa music in an empty room. He moved through the place with practiced tenderness, careful not to disturb the framed wedding photo on the wall or the neat row of Sunday shoes by the door.

The flour tin was exactly where rumor said it would be.

Bills folded like obedient children. More money than he expected. Jean-Paul allowed himself one small, satisfied breath.

He was climbing out again, heart fluttering pleasantly, already imagining what he might buy with such luck, when a sound stopped him—soft footsteps, unhurried, too deliberate to belong to the festival. He froze halfway through the window, one leg inside the house and one leg in the bright afternoon. The footsteps paused. So did his blood.

But no alarm followed, no shouted name, no angry dog. Only the distant roar of the parade and the lazy creak of a ceiling fan turning in another room. After a long minute, he convinced himself it had been imagination, nerves playing tricks, and he melted back into the streets like a drop of sweat disappearing into cloth.

Yet all afternoon he felt the eyes again. Even while dancing between masked revelers and clouds of confetti, he sensed a quiet thread pulling at his back. The woman with the paint cans appeared and disappeared along his route like punctuation in a sentence he could not finish—standing beside a mural one moment, leaning against a lamppost the next, always calm, always watching, as if she were patiently waiting for him to reach the end of a story only she understood.

On the third day, Jacmel belonged completely to the masks. The air itself seemed painted—thick with color, smoke, perfume, and the sweet rot of overripe fruit thrown into the gutters. Even the sun looked costumed, blurred behind a haze of dust and glitter. Jean-Paul woke with the nervous happiness of a man nearing the end of a long game. He knew it would be his final harvest of the season. One more house, he promised himself, then a year of honest nets and quiet nights, of pretending to be only what the town believed him to be.

He chose a small place near the sea, a modest yellow house whose shutters trembled with the bass from a passing sound truck. The waves slapped lazily against the harbor wall as if keeping lazy time with the drums. The lock sighed open under his practiced hands the way an old man sighs when finally allowed to sit. Inside, the rooms were plain and a little sad: plastic flowers in a cracked vase, a calendar still turned to January, a single photograph of a boy in a school uniform.

He found little worth taking, but habit is a stubborn master. He filled his pockets with a few trinkets—a pair of cheap earrings, a handful of loose coins, a watch that might or might not still work—and turned to leave, already half ashamed of how small the evening’s profit would be.

At the door he heard the footsteps again—this time unmistakable, close enough to feel.

“Carnival is for remembering,” a woman’s voice said behind him, calm as Sunday morning. “Not for forgetting who we are.”

The words seemed to settle on his shoulders like hands.

He spun around. It was her—the painter—standing in the narrow hallway between him and the exit. Up close he saw flecks of dried color on her fingers and a thin scar at the corner of her mouth. Her mask was simple, almost humble, but her eyes were steady as nails. Before he could invent a lie or even open his mouth, she lifted a can and pressed the nozzle.

A bright hiss. A cold splash across his chest.

Neon-green.

The color bloomed over his blue costume like a wound that glowed, running down the sequins in thick, shining tears. The sharp chemical smell filled the hallway, sudden and undeniable.

“You can run,” she said, stepping aside politely as if offering him a chair. “But the night will know you.”

Shocked, stripped of all cleverness, Jean-Paul ran.

He burst into the street, into the laughing, swirling crowd, certain he could disappear as always. For a heartbeat he believed the music would swallow him and make him ordinary again. But people pointed. Children giggled and chased after him as if he were part of the parade. Drummers paused mid-beat to stare at the man painted like a tropical bird escaped from some mad garden. Under the bright lights of Carnival, the mark on his chest burned like a second face.

The color was impossible to ignore.

“Men vòlè a!” Someone cried. There’s the thief!

The shout leapt from mouth to mouth faster than he could run. It bounced off balconies, slid under doorways, rode the backs of the drums. Hands reached for him, not angry at first, only curious, wanting to touch the glowing proof on his chest. Then the curiosity hardened. Faces he half recognized—shopkeepers, neighbors, a woman who had once bought fish from him on credit—began to tighten with understanding. Three years of small losses, unanswered questions, and embarrassed silences gathered into a single patient storm.

They did not beat him. Jacmel was not that kind of town. Instead, they held him gently but firmly, as a family might hold a stubborn child who had finally gone too far. Someone removed his silver-dusted hat so he would not be tempted to hide behind it. Others formed a loose circle around him, protecting him as much as accusing him, until the police arrived pushing politely through the crowd. The neon-green paint shone under the streetlights like a second mask he had not chosen and could not remove.

As they led him away, Jean-Paul saw the painter standing at the edge of the crowd beside a wall freshly covered in new murals. Children fluttered around her like small bright birds. She gave a small nod, neither cruel nor kind—only satisfied, like a woman who had finished a difficult piece of work and set down her brush.

Carnival roared on without him—horns, drums, laughter, the rattle of bottle caps sewn onto dancing skirts. Somewhere a band began a new song as if nothing unusual had happened at all. Yet in the sudden quiet inside himself, Jean-Paul understood at last what he had forgotten. In Jacmel, masks were meant to reveal, not to hide. They told the truth in bright colors so the heart could recognize itself even in the middle of wild music.

From the back of the police truck, its metal floor warm beneath his painted hands, Jean-Paul D’Huile watched the town dance beneath its fearless disguises. He saw devils twirl with angels, monsters bow to queens, children running through clouds of glitter like fish through bright water. And he felt, strangely, lighter than he had in years—emptied of secrets at last.

Caught, yes—yet in some quiet, unsettled way, he wondered if he had at last begun to return to himself.

Image © Europeana

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Patrick Sylvain is a Haitian-American educator, poet, writer, social and literary critic, and translator whose work explores Haiti and the Haitian diaspora’s culture, politics, language, and religion. The author of several poetry collections in English and Haitian, Sylvain’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appear in leading journals including Ploughshares, Callaloo, Transition, Prairie Schooner, Agni, American Poetry Review, SpoKe, The Caribbean Writer, and African American Review. He holds degrees from UMass-Boston, Harvard, Boston University, and Brandeis University, where he was the Shirle Dorothy Robbins Creative Writing Prize Fellow. Sylvain teaches Global, Transnational, and Postcolonial Literature at Simmons University and recently served on Harvard’s History and Literature Tutorial Board. His publications include Education Across Borders (Beacon Press, 2022) and Underworlds (Central Square Press, 2018). Forthcoming works include Scorched Pearl of the Antilles (Palgrave Macmillan) and poetry collections from Central Square, Arrowsmith, and Finishing Line presses (2026).