Haunted House

“He had the sensation that the corner of the sheet trembled between his fingers…suddenly entire patches of the white sheet broke away and turned into a rising haze of reluctant moths…the edges of their wings had locked together, linking them to form a heavy sheet that was slowly devouring the corpse underneath” (184).

This quote from Cereus Blooms at Night comes at a climactic moment in the story, when the dead and decaying body of Chandin Ramchandin is found by police in the basement of Mala’s home. Mootoo sets up Mala’s connection to bugs throughout the novel, printing them between paragraphs and sections and showing her love and care for them. The moths covering her father’s corpse are intentionally connected to Mala and her role as protector of the bugs, her sister, and her younger self. They represent her as well as being her friends. Their white color, aside from giving them resemblance to a sheet, could represent the purity of love she has for the insects which they in turn feel for her, and also the childhood innocence that was stolen by her father’s sexual abuse. That stolen innocence is now “slowly devouring” his dead body. In the same way that Mala is both protecting herself and being herself through her projection of Pohpoh, the moths are protecting Mala and representing Mala, stuck with her decaying father while keeping him out of sight and contained under their bodies until they are disrupted by the policeman and forced to abandon their post. Mootoo chooses to keep him preserved underneath the house in an unrealistic way to show how the entire house has been frozen in time, in a bubble isolated from the rest of the town which has moved on since his death, without thinking of Mala.

The fantastical preservation of her father’s corpse, staying recognizable and in continual decay after over 30 years or more is tied to Mala’s own paralysis. Her life has not progressed since the day she killed her father, stuck up on the hill isolated from the town with only the bugs as company. Physically she has not moved on, and mentally a part of her has detached and become a projection of her younger self, further mooring her to the past. The day that Oto disrupts her routine, the day the police come and find her father’s body, breaks the spell that has kept them both frozen in time in the house. Even the smell of his decaying body haunts the property and infects the air just as his rotten desires soured Mala’s childhood. She is still not free of him after all those years, until Oto, the policemen, and the fire break the boundary set between her home on the hill and the rest of the town. For the first time in her life, she is away from her father’s body, free from his rot that blackened his insides even prior to his death, a disgusting disease he projected onto his daughters through sexual abuse. After his body is burned or removed from the home, the cereus blooms sweetly, without masking the scent of decay, for a new generation of love.