Haiti Noir (12 page)
Robby stopped in front of the auto parts store Tanya’s uncle owned and saw a group of men lifting pieces of concrete from the caved-in entrance. The cinder-block archway where he always stood waiting for Tanya to emerge from the tiny office in the back of the open yard was buried beneath piles of rubble fallen from adjacent buildings. Tanya’s uncle, according to a spared neighbor, had been seen running back into the office, probably to alert Tanya when the ground started to move.
Robby had no idea where he found the strength to lift a fallen piece of concrete the size of a small child with his bare hands. He thrust his body into a narrow opening that led to the yard. He thought that above the screaming and praying that had become the new background noise of the city, he heard some people cheer. He could not get Tanya out of his mind. If she were under there, he would not leave until he had pulled her out. He blindly moved large chunks of concrete and long strings of rebar aside, estimating with his hands and feet the approximate location of the tiny office where Tanya might be trapped. Finally, he saw what he thought were Tanya’s beautiful legs peeking out from beneath a huge piece of wood from the doorway of the tiny office.
Robby clawed at more concrete and wood and managed to loosen the load on top of Tanya’s chest. Hauling the creaking wood aside allowed him to see an arm, then another. The impact of the fall had torn apart most of her clothes. Her flesh was sunken in places that, as well as he knew her body, he no longer recognized. Her face had been chipped apart by the debris as well, her features, her beautiful nose and mouth, all flattened into one, as though she had been kneaded by some gruesome baker’s hands.
Some more men were crawling on top of the rubble nearby. They were calling for Tanya’s uncle Serge and Manuel, one of the other mechanics.
Neither one answered.
“The building next door might collapse on top of this one,” one of the men said, as he turned around to leave. “You should get out of here.”
“Tanya!” He began calling her name, even though he knew she could not answer.
The screams he was hearing now were from farther away, out in the distance and not in the rubble beneath him.
He quickly went back to digging, lifting more cement from Tanya’s sunken torso. Her entire compressed body was now loose. He grabbed her and tried to lift her up, but she was limp and her body gave way, sinking back into the hole from which he had just plucked her. He tried again, grabbing her harder this time, not being as gentle. He lifted her with all his might over his healthy shoulder. She was soaked with blood and the movement released a cloud of bloody dust over his body and into his face, throwing him into a coughing fit that made his body convulse and nearly forced him to drop her.
He found an opening that both their bodies could fit through and exited the rubble. As he struggled down the crowded and dusty street, a woman holding an open Bible moved up beside him, placing a hand on Tanya’s body. His shoulder ached from Tanya’s weight, his thirst was unbearable from the heat and dust, and he shooed the praying woman away.
He had never thought of it this way before, but he now considered it a good thing that Tanya, Minouche, and Caroline, even with their various societal standings, all lived rather close to each other, and to him. The walk to his house from Tanya’s uncle’s mechanic shop took nearly a half hour with her body over his shoulder—it would’ve been much quicker had she not been so heavy. His house was one of the few on his block that were cracked, but had not fallen. He ignored the long gashes in the cement and headed inside.
It was only after he lay Tanya’s body down on his bed that he allowed himself to focus his full attention on what might have happened to Caroline and Minouche. Had they died as well? Was he the only person in their maddening puzzle who was still alive?
He’d been so cautious all along, trying his best not to fall in love with any of them. But he loved them all and now might lose them all, along with his mother in Léogâne, his city of birth. Who knew how widespread this thing was? It might come again, with the same vengeance, this time in the middle of the night while he was having a one-person wake for Tanya. It would be unfair, Robby thought, that his dear Caroline and Minouche would be out there longing for his embrace, when it was only Tanya that he had saved.
Toni was right. (Oh, had Toni perished too?) It would have been better if he’d never fallen in love with the three women. He was now feeling a stinging pain on the shoulder which had carried Tanya all that way. It was the least of his problems, though. Hell, he knew, was just outside his window.
The screaming and praying continued in the distance as night fell. Tanya was snugly tucked in when he stepped outside. The brokenness of the world around him shocked him for a moment. In the brief time he had spent inside, sitting at Tanya’s side, he had forgotten what it looked like now. How long would it be before he was used to it? Before he would look at it as though it had always been there, a normal part of the new landscape of the city he’d escaped to from the provinces when he was a teenager and had loved ever since? He would look for Minouche first. He imagined her smile and her plump, dimpled cheeks. He imagined her cursing him out for not coming sooner.
He didn’t know whom or what to thank when he spotted Minouche sitting on a plastic crate right in front of her partially collapsed house. She was surrounded by a group of dusty and bloodied women and children, crying. Many of her companions were hurt, others praying and singing. Minouche had her face in her hands, sobbing.
Robby braced himself for a slap in the face, but instead Minouche held both arms in the air toward him, like a child greeting a parent. Her left foot was crushed so badly she could not stand on it. He kissed her dry lips and caressed her dusty face. Even with the smell of blood and death all around, he kissed her neck, pressed his chest against hers.
“Hospital,” she whispered, grinding her teeth in agony. “Robby, please.”
“I’m taking you home,” he said. “With me.”
It now occurred to him that none of these women had ever seen his home. He had been at times ashamed of the cramped space and at times afraid they would take his willingness to bring them there as a sign of total surrender.
His shoulder throbbed with pain, but he allowed Minouche to place an arm around him to brace herself as she hopped on her good foot. When she cursed Robby for not being strong enough to carry her, he hailed down a pickup truck filled with people—some limp, lifeless, others staring blankly into the night air.
Maybe he was crazy for bringing her here, he thought as they entered his and Toni’s room. He could hear more singing and praying through the window that had earlier allowed children’s laughter to wake him. He helped Minouche onto Toni’s bed as she moaned in pain then mumbled something— another curse or demand. The whole world may be wanting a hospital or doctor, but his Minouche was safer here; he could care for her better than any doctor or nurse. He kissed her forehead once more and placed a single finger on her lips. She groaned in pain as he wrapped a towel around her bloody foot. She could barely ask for water.
He found some in the tiny kitchen and put a cup to her lips. She did not sip, she just let the water drip past her lips onto the pillow. He lay next to her for a moment, pulling her body close to his. Then he checked on Tanya, kissing her softly on the forehead as well. She was already cold and clammy, rigor mortis having set in. Both his girls were so peaceful. If indeed the devil had raised the earth, then it was here in his nearly unscathed bedroom that God lived. But Caroline was still out there. Unprotected by him, unsafe.
Minouche squeezed his arm, signaling for him not to go. She didn’t appear to notice Tanya in the next bed. Or maybe she was in too much pain to care. He kissed both their foreheads again. Minouche was getting warm, either from the heat or from an infection. Her body was shivering too. He wondered whether she’d be alive when he returned.
Outside, he managed to climb into a packed tap tap heading up the hill. It was full of people praying, crying, and cursing at their cell phones for not working. There was a body sprawled out on the floor by their feet. Robby avoided their eyes and the arguments about what had happened and thought of only Caroline’s face and how she looked in that dress the night before.
Caroline never stayed in her NGO’s office past two. Robby hoped that she had been safely nestled in her large, sturdy home. He jumped out of the tap tap at the foothill leading up to her minimansion.
Out of habit, he dialed her number on his cell phone, but of course there was no reception. At the still-standing high metal gates, he called out her name, but she did not answer. There were no lights on in the house, or anywhere for that matter, and everyone seemed to be in the streets. Her car was not in the driveway.
He remembered how she’d sometimes call him in the evening. If he didn’t answer because he was with Tanya or Minouche, she wouldn’t care. She’d tell him that he was free to do as he wished. He was more attractive to her, she told him, because she had to compete for him.
If Robby was indeed the ghost he was starting to believe himself to be, then he would have been brought back to life by the lilting sound of Caroline’s voice. Then he turned around to see her running toward him through a crowd of her neighbors gathered in small groups holding bedsheets and pillows, as if preparing to lay down in the middle of the street for the night. She hugged and kissed him, and he picked her up and swung her around.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Come back to my place,” he said immediately, while staring at her made-up face, neatly combed hair, and clean blouse.
“Your place? Robby, I can’t even go back into my own house,” she replied, dusting off his clothes with her hands.
Someone, another man, called her name in the distance.
“I’m coming!” Caroline shouted back to him.
“Who’s that?” Robby asked.
“Victor. He’s a friend,” she said, not looking into his eyes. “Some of us are going to sleep in his yard. It should be safe there.”
Robby pulled her toward him, making sure that this Victor person could see them. She wiggled away from him, and he drew her back to him.
“Robby, what’s wrong with you? You should come to Victor’s with me.”
“No. You should come with me.”
“Stop playing games,” she said.
“I’m not.”
“Then what’s this all about?”
“Please.” He reached for her hand, but she stepped back.
“Listen, Robby, as soon as daylight hits, I am leaving this place.”
“To go where?”
“Dominican Republic, Montreal, Cuba, anywhere but here.”
Many of her neighbors with the blankets and pillows had dispersed, some making their way back up the hill to her friend Victor’s backyard, the others heading across the road to where a local priest and nuns had set up for the night.
“Please, chérie,” Robby pleaded as he pulled her to him again. “Please, Caroline. I need you to be with me tonight. My place is safe, if
any
place is safe on a night like this.”
He held her hand to his lips, kissed it, then placed it at his heart, which melted something inside of her. She kissed him on the cheek, embraced him, and whispered in his ear, “So it is now that you are finally inviting me to your home. This is what it takes to bring out the man in you?” Then she smiled and grabbed his hand. Cars were fewer and farther in between now, and those that went by them as they walked were packed with the dead and nearly dead.
They were both exhausted when they entered his dark bedroom. It was unbearably hot like the rest of the city, and the stagnant air grew sour. The moonlit, foul-smelling room revealed the silhouettes of the two bodies lying there, obviously dead, rendering Caroline as still as they were.
Robby gently took her arm and walked her over to each of them.
“This is Tanya,” he said, then reached down and kissed her on the cheek. “And this is Minouche,” he said, doing the same to her.
He motioned for Caroline’s hand, but she was pulling away, stepping back, trying to make her way out of the room, out of her lover’s house, and possibly out of the shaken, broken country.
But Robby would never let her go, because if the devil stirred again, beckoning the land to rattle and shift beneath them, forcing his little part of the house to collapse like a domino, encasing them all in this love, in this death, then they would truly be inseparable—he and his three lovers, bound for eternity.
R
adios were forecasting a beautiful Friday morning. Not a cloud in the sky over Port-au-Prince. As for the neighborhood roosters, it seemed as if they’d been waiting for this very morning to launch their songs into the world. A multitude of cock-a-doodle-doos echoed through the neighborhood of Pacot.
Ahhhhh!
Rosanna thought, as she slipped into her favorite blue jeans and an airy white cotton shirt.
What a wonderful day for a trip.
Rosanna’s aunt Solange had already put the daily work in motion. The servants were all on their feet. The one responsible for sweeping the front yard was wielding his broom like a soldier answering “Taps.” Dusters in their hands, the cleaning team had started the daily routine aimed at eliminating every particle of grime resting on every surface of the property. Melanie, the cook, whose task it was to make coffee, poured spoonfuls of grainy Rebo onto a piece of muslin cloth that she used as a coffee filter. Soon enough, the aroma of coffee spread throughout the house.
“Chérie,” Aunt Solange called to Rosanna from somewhere on the property, “Melanie has already prepared you some sandwiches for the road. How about a cheese omelet before you go?”
Aunt Solange was the proud owner of two large stores in Port-au-Prince’s commercial district. The first one was a boutique with an assortment of expensive European ladies’ dresses. It was there that the elegant demoiselles of Port-au-Prince shopped for their Pierre Cardin, Escada, or Oscar de la Renta gowns, which automatically bestowed a sign of distinction on any woman who aspired to be a part of the city’s high society. In the second store, one could find a selection of luxurious home furnishings from all over the world. That was where the rich people acquired the sofas, beds, decorative lamps, modern refrigerators, and other ornaments that beautified their homes. Needless to say, Aunt Solange was wealthy. Her primary residence was in the old neighborhood of Pacot, an area full of splendid clustered gingerbreads and terraced villas that looked as though they had been sculpted out of the neighboring hills. Lovely antique furniture filled the house as in a museum. Some rare pieces from Europe and Asia made Aunt Solange’s collection one of the most valuable in the country. Paintings with themes ranging from female nudes to carnival, pieces by famous Haitian artists—including Préfète Duffaut, Bernard Séjourné, and Edouard Duval-Carrié—added the final touches. Parked in her garage were two silver cars: a Mercedes-Benz and a BMW. One would have sworn that these vehicles had never been driven through the streets of Port-au-Prince, since they remained so shiny and clean all the time, thanks in part to Solange’s young driver Da, who treated them as though they were his own.
“Ah! This omelet is so good,” Rosanna declared, sitting across an elaborately carved dining room table where she and her aunt often ate breakfast overlooking a lush hibiscus and azalea garden. “Melanie is the master of omelets.”
“Melanie is the mistress of everything,” her aunt playfully corrected her. Melanie had been cooking for Aunt Solange for more than twenty-five years now, longer than Rosanna has been alive. Melanie had started working for Solange back when Rosanna’s parents had fallen in love while pursuing their studies in engineering at the École des Sciences. They had married soon after and a year before graduation Rosanna was born. One Saturday morning, they’d decided to take a day off from studying and parenting and had left six-month-old Rosanna with Solange, who was also the baby’s godmother. A fine rain was falling on the road as they returned from the beach in the dark. The surviving passengers from the camion that hit them claimed that they never had a chance. The camion driver did not see their small jeep until the last minute; as the justice of the peace report put it, the vehicle was as flat as a communion wafer.
Solange was grateful that her brother and his wife had been wise enough to leave the child with her. Having never married and with no children of her own, she saw it as a sign that she was meant to look after the girl for the rest of her life, which is why Rosanna’s sudden desire to go on a trip alone to Les Cayes to research her mother’s roots alarmed Solange to no end. When Rosanna’s parents died, everyone had agreed that Solange was the best person to raise the girl. But now that she was a stunningly beautiful young woman—as beautiful as the corpulent nudes by Solange’s famous painters—everyone would want to claim her, including her mother’s family, who had barely even visited during the twenty-one years that Solange had been taking care of her.
Simply looking at Rosanna was a pleasure for Solange. The girl had her father’s smooth black skin and her mother’s brown-streaked curly hair, making her what in Haiti they would call a marabou, the kind of dusky beauty who poems are written about. Even when she was just a teenager, grown men would admire her as she strolled down the street, and Solange often got the impression watching her niece that an invisible orchestra was playing just for her. Solange was very proud of the job she had done raising Rosanna. The fact that Rosanna even desired to make this visit to Les Cayes to see family members who had shown little interest in her was proof of it. Very simple pleasures, not Solange’s wealth, were what had always seemed to appeal to Rosanna; she preferred swimming in rivers to swimming in pools, gorging herself on mangoes and avocados to sushi and foie gras. And Solange could tell that even while inhaling her favorite omelet, Rosanna was itching to head to the Portail Léogâne bus station to catch a camion—as she had begged her aunt to let her to do—on her own.
“It’s the best way for me to see the country,” Rosanna had successfully pleaded her case the night before. “I want to travel like the regular people of this country do. That’s what my mom would have done.”
Solange did not want to smother the girl any more than she already had, but she was nonetheless worried about her. Still, she did not want to seem as though she was jealous of Rosanna’s mother’s family and trying to keep the girl for herself.
“Davernis can at least drive you to Portail Léogâne, right?” Solange asked.
“And my mother’s brother and sister will be there to meet the bus,” Rosanna completed what she thought would be her aunt’s next sentence.
For lack of more elaborate stories, Rosanna had invented a whole slew of fantasies about her mother. Everything Rosanna wished she were, she imagined her mother to have been. In reality, her mother was simply a pretty girl from a poor peasant family who, because of her mother’s acquaintance with some powerful henchmen in her area, had been given a scholarship to a fancy university in Port-au-Prince. This is what had put her in the path of Solange’s brother. There was no point in telling that story to the girl, however. She would soon find it out for herself, and from the horse’s relatives’ mouths, so to speak. Besides, in death everyone is equal, and Rosanna’s mother and father certainly were equal now. But Solange could not lie either, so rather than say anything she remained silent, allowing Rosanna to nurture as many illusions as she could muster about her mother.
While Solange and Rosanna wrapped up their breakfast, Davernis made his way into the dining room. He was a tall, muscular young man. He was twenty-one years old, like Rosanna, and in another type of house they might have been raised like brother and sister. Instead, she was the princess of the house, as the servants liked to refer to her, and he was the driver. That morning, he was wearing a simple watch that Rosanna had given him as a gift, hoping that he would take the hint that he no longer had an excuse to be late, as he often was when she needed him to take her to a friend’s house, to a party, or shopping. Davernis also worked as a messenger in Solange’s stores, which sometimes contributed to his lateness.
Before he was promoted to driver, Davernis had been a rèstavèk, an unpaid child laborer at Aunt Solange’s house. Rosanna could still remember the day that Davernis’s mother had brought him to the house. He was twelve years old. Davernis’s mother thought he could be of use around the house, and maybe in return Solange could send him to school and, when he was a grown man, give him a job.
Aunt Solange had resisted at first.
“I am raising a young woman here,” she had told Davernis’s mother, a skinny toothless woman who sold mangoes at the market. “I can’t have some wild young man here.”
“He will be very good,” the woman had insisted. And Davernis had certainly been good. He had been running chores for Solange both at the house and the store since he arrived and had been one of her drivers for two years now. He lived with the other servants on the property, in a big concrete house that Solange had a well-known architect build for her staff. He had never been in an accident, a major feat in Port-au-Prince, and treated the vehicles like they were precious jewels, often cleaning and polishing them in his spare time.
“You know that Davernis is taking you to the station,” Solange repeated.
“Yes, Tatie,” Rosanna answered, considering this a great concession indeed. She had expected her aunt to find some way to thwart her plans, perhaps asking Davernis to go with her to Les Cayes.
“My dear, you must be very careful,” her aunt was saying now. “There are so many thieves on these buses.”
“There are thieves everywhere, Tatie,” she countered.
“Davernis will accompany you to the station and he will help you buy your ticket.”
“Yes, Tatie.” Rosanna reached under the table and, for her aunt’s amusement, pulled out a massive straw hat that she had bought on the street the day before so that she might blend in better on the public transportation. She checked her purse for her camera and the micro tape recorder that she hoped to use to interview her relatives for details about her mother’s life. Her suitcase, a small black roller bag, was waiting by the front door and Davernis grabbed it with one hand and started dragging it away. Rosanna and Solange followed him toward the gravel driveway where the Mercedes was waiting. By the time they reached the car, Davernis was already sitting behind the wheel. Her bag, Rosanna assumed, was in the trunk.
Rosanna kissed her aunt goodbye and Solange hugged the girl tightly, as though she had just dropped her off at college or surrendered her to some young man at the altar. When their embrace grew longer, Davernis stepped out of the car and opened the door, motioning for Rosanna to step in. He waited for her to settle in the back before starting the engine. Then, before she knew it, she found herself waving goodbye to her weeping aunt as the car slowly pulled away.
The moment they left beautiful Pacot, Rosanna and a quiet Davernis entered the real Port-au-Prince. Both sides of the streets were filled with desperate vendors proclaiming in singsong the miraculous virtues of their produce. There were beggars at every intersection, their hands outstretched, pleading, “Please, give what you can! I am dying of hunger!”
Bones barely covered by skin jutted out from holes in their torn clothes. Red eyes peered out from behind the tears streaming down their faces. One of them was holding a halfnaked child in her arms, and through the glass window she bore down on Rosanna with her eyes while shouting, “For the love of God, please, help me!”
The child’s reddish hair was a sure sign that he was suffering from malnutrition. The woman continued pleading with both her eyes and words as they sat stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic leading toward downtown Port-au-Prince.
“God who is in the sky,” the woman was saying, “look at such a beautiful young woman sitting in such a beautiful car. Wouldn’t you ask her to help? Please, God!” The child began to cry then too, and a yellowish liquid flowed from his nostrils. “Beautiful woman, please help me, please! We have no place to stay, no food to eat, and no water to drink! Please, help!” A great sadness emanated from the child’s face. His hollowed eyes touched Rosanna to the core.
“Mademoiselle, the baby hasn’t eaten for three days!” the woman shouted. “Please, help me. Throw a few pennies in my hands, I beg you, mademoiselle!”
Having spent the first twelve years of his life amidst similar poverty, Davernis was accustomed to this kind of blackmail from street beggars. Eager to drown out her voice, he yelled angrily at the woman: “Goddamn, leave us alone!”
The child was seized with fear and began to cry once more.
Rosanna intervened and said, “No, Davernis, at least have some pity for this child!” Then she took a Haitian twenty-dollar bill out of her purse, rolled down the window, and handed it to the woman. As their fingers met, Rosanna could see the layer of grime and mud on the woman’s hands. No matter how often she was part of such a transaction, it never ceased to make her feel guilty for the way she grew up. If Aunt Solange hadn’t taken her in, perhaps she too could have been on the street, hungry, begging.
Rosanna slowly rolled up the window as the woman cried out a loud and jubilant “Mèsi!” Thank you! The child, too, as if connected in every way to the woman, perked up.
“God will reward you,” added the woman, as the car in front of them finally began to crawl forward.
“Mademoiselle Rosanna,” Davernis said once they had cleared the worst of the traffic and were on their way toward Portail Léogâne, “I know you are a good person with a good heart. I’ve told you this many times before but you never want to listen. If you continue like this, people will always try to think of new ways to take money from you.”
At the Portail Léogâne bus station, Davernis lined up the Mercedes behind a swarm of vans, trucks, buses, taxis. A sea of people was waiting to board the buses for the countryside and horns were honking all over. Rosanna’s excitement at the possibilities for the trip was growing.
She waited for Davernis to step out of the car first, then took a deep breath and followed him. Thousands of people were going in all directions, buying last-minute things, corralling large animals, which would share the camion with the human cargo. Dogs were barking right and left. Goats were baying tirelessly, and if you weren’t careful, the cows roaming freely in the streets could poke you with their horns. One had to squeeze and dance like a matador around bulls to avoid being gored. Women held tightly to their handbags to elude pickpockets.