Haiti Noir (14 page)
A few drops of rain could be heard tapping the tin roof above them. To him it sounded like a rhythm of Gede, the god of love and death. To her it sounded like thunderclaps, and she imagined each drop as the toll of a bell that might bring help.
“Mademoiselle, I have an offer for you,” the guard said. Rosanna could hear the mild hesitation in his voice. Even though he was the one with the gun and the power and she was blindfolded and helpless, he was addressing her the way men of his class addressed women of hers. He was addressing her the way Davernis would.
“I can let you go unharmed, mademoiselle.” He tried to make his voice sound more forceful. “You are a woman, mademoiselle; you must know what I am trying to tell you. I am a man, and this desire is flowing strongly through my body. The attraction you carry around yourself creates in me the desire to make love to you. And naturally, if you allow your body to slip under mine, maybe I’ll let you escape. I have the power to let you go.” The captor removed the duct tape from Rosanna’s mouth.
“Monsieur, zanmi mwen, I beg you,” Rosanna pleaded, addressing him like someone of her own class. “You’ve already taken my freedom. Please don’t take my …”
The man stood up and abruptly unzipped his pants. He pulled out his penis and pointed it toward her, taking pleasure in knowing that she would not realize what he was doing until he was already upon her.
She heard the unzipping of the pants and the thump of his footsteps when he dropped the gun on the cement. “Tanpri ede mwen!” she cried. Please help!
Her supplications had absolutely no effect on the aggressor. He had shaken off his momentary lapse of judgment in feeling sorry for her and was now saying to himself,
Another crime, why not?
Even though society had placed people like this girl above his stature, his life, his physical prowess, and his gun, would always get him what he wanted. In the end, the begging and praying meant little to him. Physical violence was the only thing those people would respect.
With this in mind, he grabbed Rosanna’s arms and legs and stretched her out on the floor. He threw himself on top of her, stamping his lips roughly on her face. She squirmed out of his grasp and tried to roll away, scraping her skin against pebbles on the floor. She balled her fists and managed to squeeze her wrists free from the duct tape. Then, before he could reach her, she yanked the blindfold off her face.
The room was a gray square with unfinished cement blocks piled on top of one another; the roof was made of rippling tin. Up front was a padlocked black metal door to which this man probably had the key.
While she was contemplating a way out, the man grabbed her by the arm and threw her against a wall. He was using even more force than before. He squeezed her left arm and twisted her right one behind her back, trying to join them, perhaps to tape them together again.
She felt both her shoulders snap, the pain throbbing through her entire body. She had no more to lose. She had to keep fighting. For the first time since the guard had pulled the tape off her mouth, she began screaming. She screamed as loud as she could, and for every scream, every push, every punch she tried to throw, he countered with one of his own. She tried to bite him. He clung to her, pressing his body against her so tight that each of her movements echoed his. He picked her up and slammed her down on the ground, throwing his body’s weight on top of hers, pinning her to the concrete. They started rolling together on the floor, and as she struggled to break away, he took the opportunity to snatch up her skirt with an unsettling rage. Her courage was flagging. She was exhausted. Her screams seemed completely useless. No one was coming.
Rosanna cried out one last time. At that moment he raised her leg, chafed raw from the floor, and she felt something like a hot iron on the outside of her genitals, something like fire between her legs.
She opened her mouth to scream even louder, but this time no sound came out. There was just a feeling of suffocation as the iron attacked her flesh. The man grunted and shrieked with an animalistic joy. The pain grew so unbearable that she could no longer yell. He, however, was laughing as he hammered his hips into hers. Finally, the pain became so intense that she lost consciousness.
At Solange’s house, her cell phone rang again.
“Hello. Madame, it’s me. Is the money ready?” the deep voice snapped sharply.
“Sir,” Solange said in a quavering voice, “I can give you two hundred and fifty thousand U.S. dollars. That’s all we could put together.”
“What! You’re leaving the half-million behind and talking about two hundred thousand? Madame, I’ll call you later.”
Bang!
The same message showed up on the cell phone’s screen:
Private number
.
While Solange waited, it felt to her as though the entire city was in mourning. Above the hills, a series of curling black clouds, sympathy clouds, draped the sky like a flock of bad-omen birds. Her eyes puffy from crying, Solange scolded herself between sobs. She should have never let that girl go to Portail Léogâne. She should have agreed to the halfmillion dollars that the kidnappers were demanding. She should have told Davernis to take Rosanna directly to Les Cayes.
Her philosophical neighbor tried to reason with her: “Madame, if the kidnappers were following your Rosanna, they would have found a way to get to her. Most of these kidnappings are well planned, you know.”
The phone rang again.
“Hello, madame. A quarter-million U.S. dollars will do.”
“Okay,” Solange said, regaining her sang-froid, “but I need proof that she is still alive.”
The afternoon drizzle started again. A smell of doom seemed to hang in the air. Rows of children were making their way home from school. Beggars sat with their hands stretched toward the sky, perhaps waiting for the love of God that had been promised by evangelists of all stripes. Solange had just left Sogebank, the philosopher neighbor at her side and a briefcase full of money on her lap. Davernis was driving. In the car, no one said anything. There was both too much and too little to say.
The booted man walked quickly down the dark alley leading to Rosanna’s prison. He leapt over the piles of trash that littered the narrow alleys. The smell of decomposing flesh lingered in the air. He finally reached the front door of the cement shack.
Tok! Tok! Tok!
Three quick knocks on the black metal door was the signal he had agreed on with the guard who was inside with the girl, but there was no need for this. The door was open and both the guard and the girl were gone.
The briefcase full of money under her arm, and her philosopher neighbor still at her side, Solange had Davernis drive her to the rendezvous spot, a dead-end street not far from her house, which overlooked a crowded cement shack–filled neighborhood below. At the entrance to the labyrinthine neighborhood was a trash heap that was always smoldering.
An hour went by: nothing. No Rosanna, no kidnappers!
Solange felt heartbroken and discouraged. Would everything truly end this way for Rosanna?
Her philosopher friend for once had no words of comfort or enlightenment. Finally her cell phone rang, and Davernis answered it.
“That was Melanie, madame,” Davernis said a moment later from the front seat. “Someone was going by and recognized Mademoiselle Rosanna in the trash heap down there.”
“What do you mean they recognized her?” Solange asked.
“She is dead, madame,” Davernis explained, his eyes filling up with tears, “and her body in such bad condition that only some of her is identifiable.”
“Then how do they even know? How can they even tell it’s her?” Solange pounded her fist on the suitcase full of money, crying like a child. Her mind, her body it seemed, was drifting into the past, back to the Canapé Vert hospital where she’d visited her brother’s wife the day Rosanna was born, back to Rosanna’s baptism where she had promised to take over the parental duties should anything happen to her brother and his wife, back to the night that she’d learned of their death and had felt both agony and elation at the possibility of raising the girl herself.
And now Rosanna was gone. And suddenly the trash heap at the mouth of the slum that she had long ignored, a slum that was as much part of her neighborhood as the hilly houses of her closer neighbors, was much more visible to her. And when she rolled down the window of the Mercedes, she could clearly see in the distance this smoldering garbage heap where Rosanna had been dumped like refuse. The smell of decay in the air suddenly irritated her. Barely able to walk, Solange leaned on her neighbor’s shoulder as she left the car and moved toward the trash heap. Surely there would be an investigation, some press, some sympathy. And then, just as her philosopher neighbor had said, the mystery of Rosanna’s death would remain unsolved, like so many other mysteries in Port-au-Prince, whether in the slums or fancier neighborhoods. She tried to gather what was left of her courage just to keep walking through the mud and piles of trash. Then, all at once, they saw Rosanna.
“Jesus, Marie, Joseph,” she gasped.
Rosanna was as naked as the day she was born. Her body was covered with scratch marks, cuts, even what seemed like burns. Her face was swollen, her eyes gouged out, leaving two fleshy gashes. There were lines of dried blood on both sides of her mouth, which remained open, as though midscream.
Solange crumpled to the ground, her knees digging into the grime that was now cradling her niece, her beautiful niece.
“She fought,” Solange told those who attended Rosanna’s closed-casket funeral a week later. “She fought very hard for her life and her honor. Now it is our turn to fight for our lives and our honor.”
Solange had hoped that her private grief would somehow inspire a different resolution for Rosanna. She had hoped that her pleas to the authorities, to the press, would inspire someone to come forward to either deliver the killer or vow to at least try.
At the funeral, her philosopher neighbor sat discreetly in the back next to Davernis, who was waiting to follow the hearse in the Mercedes and return Solange home after the funeral. He had grown up with Rosanna, yet he could not allow himself to grieve as openly as Solange or even the throng of the girl’s mother’s relatives, who had heard about her death on the radio and had flocked to the funeral in Port-au-Prince to tell the stories about her mother that Rosanna had set out to Les Cayes hoping to hear.
“Ah, fate,” the philosopher neighbor sighed after one such speech from Rosanna’s maternal line.
“Indeed, mesye,” replied Davernis, who would never forgive himself for what had happened. He would also never forgive his collaborator, who had lost him such an important payday simply by lusting over the privileged flesh of some young bourgeois girl. Now they would have no choice but to try again. This time, the aunt.
S
tay up long enough between midnight and three a.m. any day and you will hear Maloulou. But be careful to never run into her. Everyone in Lakou 22 knew this. Noises in the night defined that yard: husbands, young men, and prostitutes who caused old doors to creak while coming in some nights; lougawou, werewolves that turned skin inside out and jumped about loudly on tin ceilings, eyeing little children for future repasts; noise there always was. But the sounds of Maloulou were unique. With precision, many could reproduce the footsteps mixed with a light clinking of chains:
clink, clap, clink, clap, clink-clap
: sometimes coming and sometimes going. It even seemed a mark of honor to wake up and recount hearing Maloulou. Older stories about Maloulou that had been abandoned would resurface some nights when the folktales of Bouki and Malis could not be stretched any further. There was the broad cassava-colored hat over an invisible head, going
clink, clap
a hundred years or so ago after the first African slaves disembarked on the island.
“Don’t worry, Ghislaine, Lakou 22 came with Maloulou,” Destin and Madame Destin, the very first residents to build shacks at the entrance of the yard, told my mother one morning soon after we moved there. Darkness did not worry my mother, but Maloulou would. My mother had braved the dark streets for as long as I could remember before retreating to her own cinder block–mounted bed, hidden behind the paisleyprint curtain to protect me from the parade of visitors whose fees paid for our shack, my school, our food and clothing. In some ways, I was my mother’s daughter; I was never afraid of the dark.
Like the Destins, other residents with nothing to do often gathered, coffee cups in hands, under bright early suns to swap Maloulou stories, as if competing for the most exciting rendition. There were those who laughed in disbelief, others appeared pensive when reports were shared about the mysterious thing that had always lived in their midst but had never been seen. Young ones like me attending to morning chores before hastily preparing for a discounted ride to school with Josaphat, the camionette driver who lived in Lakou 22, used to listen furtively, ears tuned to what was being said, eyes wide with amazement. Where the name Maloulou came from, no one really knew. One version of the story was that Maloulou came from the sea to the island with the name Nkiruka, but it was changed to Maloulou because it rolled easier on the tongue.
Nevertheless, the nomadic and infamous visitor who was said to roam our compound in the ink-blue night enthralled all. One man in particular, it was said, Roland Désir, might have come nose-to-nose with Maloulou.
Roland Désir turned mad one morning, the story went, and folks repeated verbatim the words of the person who saw it happen, his wife Marguerite, who stood in the middle of the yard sobbing, saying that maybe if she hadn’t confronted Roland about the children’s school fees lost in a cockfight the previous night, he might not have lost his head. Years later, Roland was still roaming the streets and corridors, speaking to himself, living under trees, sleeping under the stars, begging for food, throwing rocks at the sea or at the gagè where he used to wage cheer on cockfights.
Lakou 22 people still sought Roland to give him scraps of food. After all, it was on account of this yard that his life changed. Folks remembered how he was a proud nèg nan nò, who had moved here from up north a long time ago with his young family. He provided for all his eight children, transforming abandoned oil drums into coal stoves to sell. Sadly, what he made was insufficient to sustain his avaricious cockfighting addiction; but all agreed that he was a fine member of Lakou 22.
What made matters worse for the Désir clan were the series of unfortunate events that hit the family right on the heels of Roland taking to the streets. Folks were in agreement that it was easy to imagine Kenesou, Roland’s youngest child, not living long. Less than a year had passed between him and Jean, the sibling before him, and Madame Roland’s body had not fully been restored to carry a healthy baby to term. And sure enough, Kenesou was very sickly: fever, bronchitis, diarrhea, you name the parasitic disease and he had it. Many thought the Désirs lucky to have had him alive for so long, but some still believed Maloulou might have been the culprit.
Now, the death of Hermione Désir, the eldest, came as a complete surprise. She was pretty like a rainbow, they say when telling her story. By all accounts, Hermione was angeliclooking. To have seen her walking down the road and not taken special notice would be cause for concern with any man: young or old. Men begged to nestle in her hips. Wives tried to shield their mates. Prostitutes wished she’d move away. Little boys could be heard praying for the gods to send them wives like her when they grow up. Young girls were said to imitate her walks and get their hair done like hers.
The whole neighborhood trembled, they say, the afternoon Hermione Désir started convulsing. Burning cotton under her nose, rubbing alkali on her face and chest, were not enough to bring her back. She did not even wait to have the tea that had been put on the fire for her. All of Lakou 22 mourned her, even crazy Roland Désir, the father she had supposedly lost to Maloulou. He was heard the night of her burial pacing about and lamenting, “This child was too young and pretty to die,” as if her death made him momentarily sane.
Mothers and wives who inherited these stories would evoke the fate of Roland to caution their men of the perils of walking dark corridors after midnight. In my head, though, I had preferred imagining Maloulou like the character Django, from the first spaghetti western film I ever saw. I envisioned Maloulou pulling a machetes-filled coffin in the dead of our nights, looking to rescue me, her own Maria, from renegades like Uncle Solon, who had mutated into a Tonton Macoute.
Mother never told me the familial relations we had with Solon. I suspected we had none. Personally, I had no recollection of his presence prior to the age of twelve or thirteen. We never went to his house; he came to us. My calling him Uncle Solon was just one of those impositions made on Haitian children, an effort at politeness by assigning a familial title to an adult stranger. Along with having to call people who curdled my blood aunties and uncles, I hated my mother for forcing me to kiss people I did not care for, but that was not the only reason I wished Uncle Solon dead. He was mother’s steadiest customer. And I could tell that he was one of the best payers since we seemed to eat a bit better after his passages. He was also short, bow-legged, had a receding hairline, and eyes set too far apart, and an unfriendly face that his small, stubby legs and arms did not help. But this had nothing to do with my disliking him. One night, during an early-evening visit as my mother prepared him some plantain porridge, he came over to the table where I was slumped on my school books, put one hand on my mouth and the other under my dress, and did not stop until he heard my mother returning to the room. That’s how and why my deep hatred for Uncle Solon started; and my passion for Maloulou began. Mother has had to snatch me from endless daydreams where Maloulou slays Uncle Solon and all the members of his nefarious, dungaree-clad gang.
My hatred for Uncle Solon grew deeper when he volunteered to bring me home from school to save mother the camionette fare, just so he could continue searching and playing with my bouboun under the nun’s school uniform during the car rides. That nourished my plan to catch Maloulou and make an offering of Uncle Solon. Yes, I pondered the fact that I too might not survive the encounter. But not surviving was the least of the deterrents, for I was already dying in small bits. All my desires and needs to unearth the Maloulou enigma and find an ally in stopping Uncle Solon took on realness when, for the first time, at the point when night and day mixed and lying wide awake in bed wishing to hear mother turn the key, and thinking of all the bad things Uncle Solon did, I instead heard with my own ears the clinking and clapping. I listened, still as a corpse, to steps moving through the passageway toward the sea, and waited silently until the same footsteps and dangling chains ambled back.
There were a few people who told of having heard Maloulou in the night. I told no one, though I felt a tremendous pleasure for finally belonging to a special cadre of people. After a while, I did grow tired of staying up nights waiting to hear Maloulou go by. But if I wanted to come upon the one who wandered in the hours of darkness, tell on Uncle Solon and have an ally in making him disappear from our lives, I needed to know the exact times when the stroll happened, study the pace, prepare some trappings and paraphernalia, and brace for what may come.
Had mother suspected my crazed plan, she would have made me gulp down daily concoctions of hellebore until I was completely purged of my foolish idea. Curing my folly would become her personal crusade. But I kept my idea and plan in my head, sharing them with not even the wind.
In conversations with myself, however, I pulled all sorts of reasons to give me the heart to go forward. The Bible tells how little David took on the giant Goliath, I recalled. I had two giants in my life and one was going to help me slay the other. Rather than continue to endure the visits and car rides with Uncle Solon or painfully imagine the size of mother’s sorrow when he kissed and hit her like what I saw him do one night behind the green paisley curtain, I was determined to risk everything. I was prepared to know Maloulou just as Roland Désir had, if only in the private confines of my head.
Amassing the items that I needed for my expedition to Maloulou was exhaustive and costly. It ate away at the tiny bit of money I was saving to buy Mother a set of gold eggplantshaped earrings like the ones she often borrowed from her friend Fifi. I knew Mother would never muster the courage to buy them herself, feeling that she’d be wasting hard-earned money intended for rent, food, and school fees on something unneeded for our survival. I was saving those pinched coins extracted here and there to one day appear as her own magi, bearing gold earrings she would love. To protect my meager funds, I did try to get her to pay for the rope for my plan, but it didn’t work. Her response to my request: “You’re too old to be jumping rope! Are you getting the rope to hang the both of us?” I had no comeback. Whatever I could say would be too lame against the disarming image of our lifeless bodies hanging from some tree in the yard or from our ceiling. And a long sisal rope I absolutely needed for my mission: so I dipped in my gold earrings fund.
Collecting salt and black pepper was the easiest. Many of us in the yard put out our salt to dry if it’s not raining. And whenever I came upon a calabash of salt in the sun, I would help myself. Plus, I volunteered often to be sent to market so I could purchase more salt and pepper for my mission. In less than a month, I hid away enough salt to spoil the taste of our water hole, and enough pepper to scatter about and get all of Lakou 22 fighting. Little by little, I pounded and mixed the two spices together to create a peppery powder that I’d be throwing in Maloulou’s face to cause momentary blindness as I roped her arms and legs and dragged her back to our shack.
The night of my operation, I carefully arranged rags on my bed so it looked like I was tucked inside. I prayed that it would not be one of these nights when my mother would fish for me in the dark, as if fearing that I would be sucked through a hole in the ceiling. If I did not carefully plan every move, I could lose money and my quest for Maloulou would fall to the wayside. And both Mother and I would be dying sooner than our Creator intended. I chose a Friday night because that’s usually when mother stayed out dancing and drinking with her clients into the wee hours of the morning. Other days in the week, some clients made quick and short stops for a taste of her on their way home, and she’d be around, going in and out through the night. But the weekends belonged to her clients. I too had taken the habit of staying out later those nights to play with the boys and let them kiss me in the dark, disobeying Mother’s directions to go home once the Pierrette twins, who were known good girls, went in to sleep.
I wore Mother’s faded black dress that she had worn to almost every burial procession, including that of her own mother and countless members of Lakou 22. The dress blended well with the dark. Standing in a corner of the gallery of the tworoom shack recently vacated by a couple named Janine and Jean, the rope and an alfò bag containing my salt-and-pepper mixture strung across my shoulder, I was waiting in a darkness that was as thick and heavy as molasses. I replayed in my head the
clink, clap, clink, clap
of the night promeneur, and knew that I would recognize those steps in a crowd of thousands. How much time went by, I couldn’t tell. Though I knew I had only blinked my heavy lids when suddenly Lakou 22 became a cane field, right under my eyes. The leaves of the cane felt like a thousand crazy red ants attacking my exposed arms, legs, and face, drawing me into a strange state of alertness.
Believing that I could be in a cane plantation wasn’t hard. Léogâne, one of the remaining towns of the Haitian sugarcane empire created by France, was no more than seven or eight kilometers from Lakou 22. I could have sleepwalked to Léogâne. But what followed disturbed the expected order of things. Before I was discovered that morning at the edge of the sea by Madame André, hearing her piercing yell of “Anmwe, vin pote l sekou,” Please help her, I thought myself dead and on the journey to Ginen, through this long underwater passage that Aunt Francine said all Haitians go to when they die. And the idea of dying soothed me. I would never have to speak overtly and with fear of these remembrances, never have to tell another soul of my encounters with Maloulou or be called the girl in Lakou 22 who went mad and spoke nonsense. And Uncle Solon would never touch me again.
When Madame André and Djo picked up my shivering, wet, and seaweed-entangled body from the shore, sensation in my limbs returned before my voice. But it took more than four months, plus the violent death of Uncle Solon after leaving our shack and the side of my convalescent bed one night, to confirm for Mother that I was not crazy. That got her to begin untying my arms and legs from the bed, no longer fearing that I would take off running. I was even allowed to read my old school books after I recited the daily Bible verses with her. Recording my experiences in some unused pages of some old notebook came to me only after Mother had me repeating this verse with the Bible open on my head.
But the servant who did things that deserved a beating without knowing it will receive a light beating. Much will be required from everyone to whom much has been given.