Haiti Noir (11 page)
She was gliding away from him to even deeper water. He rowed toward her, now frantically shouting, “Claire, reken, sharks. There could be sharks.”
“There will be if you keep calling them by name,” she said, and laughed a deep, breathless laugh.
As he caught up with her, his face relaxed. Then they saw what she had swum out to see. Surrounding her was a dazzling glow. It was as though her patch of the sea was being lit from below. She was, from her perfectly round breasts down, in the middle of a large school of tiny silver fish, which were ignoring her and feeding on equally gleaming specks floating on the water’s surface.
He stopped rowing and remained outside of it, watching her and pondering the news she had silently delivered to him, in awe. Then it was the sea he was watching. The bioluminescence amazed him. But soon, his panic returning, he started shouting her name again.
“Claire, come in now, Claire!”
She backed away from the fish, splitting the school in half as she paddled toward the boat. And for a moment she reminded him of Lasirèn, the long-haired, long-bodied brown goddess of the sea. With an angelic face like a bronzed Lady of Charity, Lasirèn’s vision was, it was believed, the last thing most fishermen saw before they died at sea, her arms the first thing they slipped into, even before their bodies hit the water. In his dinghy, like many others, he had a mirror and comb, a bugle and conch shell, which comprised a small shrine to attract Lasirèn’s protection.
When his wife reached the boat, he reached over and offered her his hand and she took it and climbed back in, even as the silver fish vanished, returning the sea surface to a charcoal gray.
Wiping the saltwater from her dripping face with her fingers, she whispered, “Limyè Lanmè. Limyè Lanmè.” Sea light. Then she cleared her throat and in a louder voice added, “Claire like me. Limyè Lanmè. Limyè Lanmè.” Claire of the sea light.
“You will not change her name,” Gaspard heard himself tell the fabric vendor.
The fabric vendor shook her head no.
“You will not let her ride moto taxis.”
“Non.” Both the woman’s hands immediately rose to her chest, as though she had been stabbed there. “I would never do that again.”
Even after all these years of wooing the fabric vendor for his daughter, he never expected it to actually happen so fast. But there was no turning back. From now on his Claire would be the fabric vendor’s daughter.
“Before you leave the country, there are papers,” the woman was saying.
Gaspard would later try to figure out where Claire got the courage to raise her skinny arms at that moment. He had underestimated her attachment to her few belongings and had assumed that she wouldn’t want them, but she did, and once her raised hand was acknowledged with a nod from both him and the fabric vendor, she pointed to their home and whispered, “Bagay yo,” the things. Not
her
things, but
the
things, as though nothing in the world was truly hers.
Gaspard understood immediately, but it took the fabric vendor some time to decipher the gesture.
I hope this woman comes to know my daughter’s ways quickly, Gaspard thought, as he watched the girl slowly walk, more like an upward crawl, toward the house. Claire weaved in and out of the groups of other children on the beach, ignoring their calls to play as she moved by, her long arms frozen at her side. Gaspard saw her reach the wobbly door of the shack before she walked inside.
She did not have that many things, Gaspard thought, only two bright green jumpers and two white blouses for school, the birthday dress she was wearing, her night dress which was really an adult T-shirt, her notebook and reading primer, and the foam mattress and patchwork blanket on which she slept. Maybe he should go and help her with them. She wouldn’t be able to carry everything by herself. Certainly not all the way to the fabric vendor’s house. He would have to accompany them. It would be the right thing to do. Maybe the woman wouldn’t even want those things in her house. Maryse. The fabric vendor’s name was Maryse. Now he could think it again. Now he could even say it. He could at least call her Madame Maryse. His daughter was now Madame Maryse’s daughter.
Madame Maryse was fidgeting a bit, shifting the weight of her round frame from one fuzzy red–covered foot to another. She looked at some of the townspeople clustered on the beach, then turned her gaze back to the door where the girl had entered the shack, then glanced back toward the water where many of her neighbors were sitting by the dimming bonfire with the fisherman’s widow who was still sobbing and rocking her face in her hands.
Gaspard followed Madame Maryse’s gaze and remembered how during the first three years of his daughter’s life, he used to dream of his girl, a little baby lying in his arms at night. Then in the morning, while he was on the water, he would imagine seeing her baby face bobbing in and out of the gentle wake of his fishing boat. He would instantly fear that she had joined her mother in death and would anxiously wait for the news of it to make its way to him, but it never did. She remained as alive as he was, and he was even more afraid of the possibility of seeing her in the flesh, as fearful as he was that she might have the face she had inherited, her mother’s. He never dreamed of his wife, though. That part of it, something in him kept locked away out of sadness and guilt. He had been absent when his wife had died and his child was born. He had been hoping to get one last series of catches before his daughter came. He had been at sea.
The crowd on the beach was beginning to thin out. People were slowly drifting away, heading back toward town. He felt sad that he had nothing more to say to this woman who was offering his daughter a new life, this woman who from now on his daughter would call mother. He had once fantasized that he would marry her, but he knew that even with her preferences for questionable men she would still consider him inferior, socially beneath her. And now there she was, growing impatient as his daughter refused to come out of his house.
“How much is she bringing with her?” she asked.
“I’ll get her,” he said.
He felt the woman’s solid and perhaps judgmental gaze on his back as he headed for the house. He was doing his best not to stumble, but each time the soles of his feet dug into the cooling sand, he was certain he would fall over.
Gaspard could immediately tell when he entered the shack that his daughter was not there. Several fast-moving creatures darted into further darkness as he inspected the foam mattress his daughter usually slept on. It was covered with its usual patchwork blanket, untouched since she had carefully pulled it tight and tucked the corners under that morning. Hanging from a wire hanger nailed to the wall were her school uniforms. He picked up the kerosene lamp by the door and, using it to light his way, searched all four corners of the room.
When he didn’t find her, he ran out to the beach and screamed her name. Madame Maryse rushed to his side, saw the look of panic on his face, and joined in the shouting of Claire’s name. Others did too, walking off in different directions until they had searched the entire moonlit stretch of the beach. Some even walked to the edge of the water, calling Claire’s name into the horizon.
When after some time Claire did not surface, many of Gaspard’s neighbors walked over to him and took turns telling him some variation of,
Maybe the girl fell asleep somewhere. She will surely be home by morning.
The fisherman’s widow came to embrace him, her grief momentarily stalled by his. Her face was swollen from crying and the mourning scarf around her coarse black hair slid toward the back of her very long neck. She was his wife’s age, the age his wife would have been now, too young to bear such a burdensome grief, yet too old to start over.
The fisherman’s widow, like many of the others, thought that Claire might have gone to town and encouraged those heading there to continue their search. Gaspard, however, was certain that Claire would return soon and wanted to be at home when she did. Madame Maryse decided to follow those who were headed home. Squeezing Gaspard’s shoulder, she said, “She doesn’t understand, perhaps. She’ll be back.”
Using the boulder his daughter had sat on to rest his drunken and spinning head, Gaspard lay down on the sand and with his eyes glued to the scattered stars, he promised the heavens that he would never try to give her away again.
Most of the townspeople had left, except for a few young men who had nowhere to sleep and were grateful for the company all the commotion had afforded them. They and a few other stragglers set up for the night, arranging their sleeping bags and sisal mats and bedsheets in a protective circle around Gaspard.
Every once in a while, one of them would walk to Gaspard’s shack and peek inside, checking for Claire. They did this without asking Gaspard if they should and timed themselves so that they checked every half hour or so, when it seemed Gaspard might want to go and check himself. The entire night was spent like this, until worry, exhaustion, and drink overcame Gaspard and he finally slept.
The next morning, Gaspard woke up at the usual time that he would have been heading out to sea. The air was gray and growing lighter and the young men were still asleep. Gaspard’s head ached, his temples still throbbing. He staggered to the house and checked all the corners once more. Claire had not returned.
It suddenly occurred to him where his daughter might be. His heart was pounding and he was nearly breathless as he half walked and half ran through town. The early mass was beginning at the cathedral as the bell chimed the six a.m. hour. A large crowd of sick people had already gathered in front of the town hospital, hoping to be seen at the clinic that day. The streets were already crowded with cars and moto taxis ferrying people to and from the outdoor markets. He felt the gazes of people on his face as he raced past them, too quickly for them to say hello and for him to respond. He could barely breathe as he sped by the cane field toward the burial site.
At first he did not see her, lying on her side, coiled up like a baby on the dew-soaked red earth. Her head was resting on a large stone, half leaning against the farthest tip of her mother’s grave. She was still wearing her pink muslin birthday dress and a quarter of her face now seemed buried in the ground, showing that she had been there for some time, possibly all night long. Bending over, he placed his cheek next to her nose. He thought he felt a warm stream of breath against the cool earth, but it was his not hers. Reaching down, he pulled her into his arms and pressed her against his chest.
“Claire Limyè Lanmè?” he said, wanting to finish a thought, but not sure which.
Her eyes were wide open but she was not looking at him. She was looking somewhere off in a distance, past him. He swayed his hand back and forth in front of her face, but she did not blink. Her arms and legs were limp the way they were before she woke up from a very deep sleep.
“Claire Limyè Lanmè?” he said again. He felt her damp dress, and when he saw the blood that ran from the side of her face onto her shoulder, it did not startle him. She had pounded her head against the ground several times, it seemed, before one side of her forehead gave way in the form of a crack that had seeped with blood and further reddened the earth around her.
T
he women called him Robby. A flash of his gorgeous smile, his fake Rolex watch, and a flick of his shoulder-length dreads would get him a phone number. Only after a few date nights, when he’d join them in bed, would they know his full name: Jean-Robert Dieujuste. But he insisted that they mustn’t ever call him that. To most of Pétionville’s young and fabulous, he was Robby, the smoothtalking Haitian sensation whose café-au-lait complexion and designer-looking clothes made the women fight each other, as he would oftentimes relay to his childhood friend, coworker, and roommate Antonio, better known as Toni.
“Ah, you get too involved, Robby,” Toni said to his friend one morning when he came home from an all-night rendezvous. Toni was sprawled out on the bed smoking a joint. He picked up a few pieces of Robby’s dirty clothes from the floor and threw them at him. “These women are not looking for love. It should be easy. But no, you are the one going goo-goo-ga-ga for them.”
Robby sucked his teeth, took a pull from his friend’s joint, and dropped himself on his ever-rumpled and unmade bed. “Did you see Caroline last night? Did you see the way she looked in that dress, man?”
“Yes, and you got to take off that dress and take care of some business, right? I don’t understand why you’re always crying
She doesn’t love me, she makes me leave.
”
“Well, what do you think is wrong with her?” Robby asked. “She doesn’t ask me to stay like Tanya or Minouche.”
“Maybe it’s because she knows you’re loving two, three other women at the same time.”
“You should talk!”
“Believe me, I know I am a vagabond,” said Toni. “That’s the difference between you and me. I admit it. But you don’t. You want to be in love, but this is about sex. If a woman meets you in a club and gives you her number and brings you home, then she just wants sex and everybody’s happy and you can go home. But you want to stay and have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and then marriage and children—with all of them!”
Toni got up, buttoned his shirt, and pulled on a navy blazer. He was headed out to his job at the telephone company, in the same office where Robby worked. Toni clasped his watch, brushed his wavy, close-cropped hair, and splashed some cologne on his face. He took one last look in the mirror between their beds before turning back to Robby. “Going to work today or what?”
“I worked Saturday,” Robby said. “I’m taking two days off.”
“It’s Tuesday, you already took two days off.”
“Sunday we’re closed, so it doesn’t count.”
“What’s the matter, Caroline wore you out?” Toni walked out of their shared bedroom and into the adjacent small kitchen. In an instant he was out the door.
Robby lay down on the bed, exhausted. Caroline had indeed worn him out. He inhaled deeply at the thought of her cocoa skin and long dark hair. Robby would have never approached her if it weren’t for Toni’s encouragement. Caroline was ten years his senior, and she preferred her men young and hip. She had spent her early adult years traveling the world and dating men twice her age. Older suitors now bored her. She’d been promised her own villa in Italy, an apartment in Midtown Manhattan, a beach house in Tobago. But home had summoned her to repair the failing family business and maintain the magnificent chateau that towered over Port-au-Prince. After hours of intense lovemaking, Robby would stand on the second-floor balcony and search for the little two-room house he and Toni shared.
Caroline made love as if she had never made love before, as if she were searching for something buried deep inside her. Robby liked the hair-pulling, the delicate biting, and the throaty calling of his name. But he resented being shooed away afterward as if he were a pest. Once, after an evening together, she even left some money on the table, which made him yell at her.
Tanya showed him a lot more respect, but she was not as passionate as Caroline. She was still young, with a tender body and pliable mind—but courageous nonetheless. It was she who had approached him on the dance floor at a nightclub, turning her back and grinding against his body. After they made love, she would always get him a glass of water, wash herself and comb her hair, and head to her aunt’s makeshift neighborhood restaurant to bring him back a plate of food. She was quiet afterward and let him sleep. She did not badger him with questions. Robby always slept with her warm body pressed against his. With her, he felt comforted and soothed. Not like the hot-headed Minouche.
Minouche would open the door wearing only a tank top and miniskirt and begin cursing him out for not answering his cell phone for three days. He’d promised each of them that he’d never let more than three days go by without seeing them. But he couldn’t promise long conversations on the phone in between those visits.
Whispers of the possibility of marriage were enough to ease Minouche’s suspicions. While he was submissive with Caroline and gentle with Tanya, he was his wildest with Minouche. She would yell and cuss and threaten to leave him and return to her ex-husband, whom she claimed was wooing her again. She’d grab his cell phone and search for other women’s numbers. That’s when Robby would pull her from behind and cup her large breasts in his hand and suck the damp, salty skin of her neck. She’d soften in his arms and cry, and demand that he tell her he loved her. He imagined marriage to Minouche being full of drawn-out arguments, but it would all be worth it for the makeup sex.
Robby turned his face to the warm morning sun beaming from the small window beside his bed. The sounds of the cars and trucks on the busy road outside the house quickly lulled him to sleep. He envisioned the beautiful faces of all three women: Caroline with her long eyelashes, ruby-red lips, perfect white teeth, and dark, distant eyes; Tanya’s smooth brown complexion, close-set eyes, and long, braided hair extensions; Minouche’s dimpled plump cheeks, too-thin eyebrows, and cute button nose.
Robby sighed, rubbing his hands over his crotch while thinking of his night with Caroline. But it was Minouche’s often tense and angry body he longed for. He hadn’t seen her since Friday night and soon she would be calling. For now, he would sleep, resting as if he were in each or all of their arms, with their lips pressed against his ears telling him how much they loved him. But Toni was right, he was the one who most often declared his love. In the end, he could see himself married to all three of them. He loved them all.
Robby awoke from his sleep with a jolt, as if something had yanked him up from the bed. He was sweating; the room was unusually hot. There were sounds of children’s laughter outside the window, letting him know that it was late afternoon and the neighbors’ kids were home from school. He was starving. Unlike Caroline, Tanya would have certainly made sure that he got something to eat the night before. Tanya often told him that she wanted no other woman to feed him. She said this with what seemed like genuine concern and not in the jealous way that Minouche would. She wanted him to eat good meals from either her own kitchen or from her aunt’s restaurant where the stewed cashews and the chicken were legend.
Robby wanted to catch Tanya right when she was leaving work so he wouldn’t be bothered with having to say hello to her uncle, whom she worked for in a small office behind his mechanic’s shop downtown. The old man expected Robby to ask for his niece’s hand in marriage any day.
Sporting a freshly pressed pair of khaki pants, a striped short-sleeve rugby shirt, and Italian leather shoes, Robby strolled down the busy street outside his house in Delmas. He took his sweet time, seductively whistling his favorite konpa tunes at some of the women passing by. Only once did he stop a lady whose breasts were nearly spilling out over the neckline of her T-shirt. She didn’t own a cell phone so Robby gave her his number instead, even though her shoes were cheap and her fingernails were dirty. Robby would never dare bring a woman like that around Toni or his other friends. After being with Tanya and Caroline, his standards were higher. Minouche was the least sophisticated, but at least she took care of herself with weekly manicures and pedicures. Whomever he chose to marry when he was good and ready, he would also have to be able to introduce, with pride, to his mother.
Robby smiled at the thought of his mother. She had called him on New Year’s Day to remind him to come visit her in Léogâne for a big bowl of soup joumou. He got his bowl of soup joumou with nice big chunks of beef and fresh warm bread, but it was from Tanya’s aunt and not from his mother.
It was just past four o’clock and Tanya would certainly be happy to see him. She wouldn’t have to get into her uncle’s jeep as he made all his stops at his friends’ houses. It was noisy as usual in Delmas. The scent of grilling chicken from a new outdoor barbecue place enticed him, but he would wait to eat with Tanya. The air was thick, and unusually still. Not even a subtle breeze blew in from the ocean to remove the daily stench. He looked up at the sky, now a paling blue, the sun a dim yellow. His eyes wandered across the road toward a woman he thought looked like Minouche. He stopped, his brows furrowed. He tied his dreads into a knot, smoothed his beard, adjusted his shirt, and made his way across the street to encounter Minouche’s accusations that he was obviously going to see another woman because he wasn’t at work.
It wasn’t until he was nearly halfway across the street, having been almost run down by a speeding tap tap, that he realized the shapely woman was not Minouche after all. He was still in the middle of the street when the ground began to shift, and it was as if a huge truck or maybe a train, like the ones that used to carry sugarcane from Léogâne to Port-au-Prince during his childhood, was approaching. He looked up and down the street, trying to figure out from which direction the truck or train was coming so he could move. But when the balcony of the nearby auto parts store collapsed onto the pedestrians and merchants below, he stayed put. He crouched down to the ground, not knowing what else to hold on to, because the ground was moving. The cars and trucks stopped. The people ran in every direction. Then the buildings, the cement, maybe even the sky and clouds and sun, were falling!
He knelt, covering his head with both his arms, and clenched fists as a few small things landed on his back. He began to pray, realizing that this must be it—la fin du monde, that final judgment day that the old man who often sat on an overturned bucket down the road from his house was always preaching about to passersby. He’d been to the Protestant church with Tanya, Catholic mass with Minouche, a Sunday luncheon hosted by a foreign missionary organization at a fancy hotel with Caroline, but never in any of those instances did he give his life to Tanya and the old man’s Jesus, take Minouche’s Holy Communion, or give one cent to charity for the peasants in the countryside, as both Caroline and his mother often urged him to.
He sobbed, slowly raising his head and opening his eyes to see a cloud enveloping him. The screaming pierced his ears. He looked up at the sky, still a pale blue with a dim yellow sun, and waited for it to part, for a beam of white light to descend like some sort of ladder—something, anything, to justify the thunderous sounds. But the heavens were too peaceful. Then it must be hell, he thought. Slowly rising to his feet, he was unable to see more than a few inches in front of him. He looked down at the ground and glimpsed a crack in the road. Everything beneath him was too white. Maybe this was heaven, he speculated. But people were screaming and there was still that horrible sound as if the world itself was crumbling.
Tremblement de terre
, he heard the people say after what seemed like hours of walking aimlessly through the streets of Port-au-Prince. It had only been an hour but Robby took slow, calculating steps. He had been coughing and swallowing dust, had felt a stinging pain on his back near his left shoulder and touched it to see that it was bleeding, though not profusely. He kept walking, even when he heard someone screaming to him for help. He just looked at the bodies beneath the fallen rubble, some reaching for anyone or anything, others unmoving.
Toni was at the phone company where they both worked. The top floor housed the office where he, Toni, and the secretary, who was also Toni’s on-and-off girlfriend, worked along with two salesmen, Marlo and Donaldson. As he stood at the intersection where the building should have been, cars and trucks—some speeding, some slow-moving—dodged him and hundreds of other people who were suddenly crammed at every corner of every street. Maybe Toni, Carole, Marlo, and Donaldson had managed to run out. Maybe Toni had stepped away to get something to eat. His friend whom he had known all his life was smart, witty, and quick on his feet. He should have had enough sense to get out.
The building had completely crumbled. Robby searched for the door, a window, any opening he could squeeze through to find his friends. But then the ground shook again and he sped away from the rubble to the middle of the intersection. A woman came running toward him, screaming, grabbing him and burying her head in his chest. He did not hold or comfort her. It surprised him that he had absolutely no desire to press his body against hers, to caress her hair and tell her,
Everything’s going to be okay, chérie.
Instead, he pushed the woman away and turned in the other direction to find Tanya. Had he not kept her tender body and warm smile on his mind, he would’ve never gotten to her. The men shouted at him, demanding that he come help move rubble off a friend, a mother, a child. He moved around the dead on the ground. He walked in the middle of the street where tap taps, cars, trucks either cruised slowly by, surveying the fallen buildings, or sped past to get to a hospital, any hospital.
Had Robby not felt the stinging pain near his shoulder, the slow movement of his legs, he would’ve sworn that this was death. He stopped at an intersection that was barely recognizable. The landmarks, the signs, the stationary street vendors were all gone. He stood, turning in a full circle to survey what had become of this little portion of Port-au-Prince. He peered up toward the hills. The houses in the distance looked like an avalanche of concrete.